Angel on the Inside (32 page)

‘Oh yes, very popular with the kiddies is the railway.'

‘Let me guess, it's a steam train.'

‘Of course, but a model one, not a real one. The driver sits on the tender to drive it, but it has a real fire and boiler and it runs on coal. You've seen them. They have carriages that are just back-to-back benches on wheels. It takes people once round the race course in between races. Become an annual attraction, has the steam train. Ever since Mr Rees moved into the town.'

‘Mr Rees?'

‘The man who owns the model engine. Built it himself, he did.'

 

This place was a detective's paradise; people told you anything, sometimes without you asking the question. I suspected, though, that if you did ask questions, they would remember you forever.

So I was grateful that I didn't have to ask directions to Ion Jones's place. When Gareth Jones had got his lad Derek to tell me where he'd delivered Ion Jones's newly-purchased lathe, I had made him draw me a map on the back of a piece of corrugated cardboard. It was pretty crude, but with an Ordnance Survey 1:25 detailed map it should be easy enough to find Bryngwyn, which could be a house, a farm, a suburb of Tregaron or a mountain range. Young Derek hadn't been terribly clear, which was why I'd made him draw me a map, and that was fine if I just wanted to pull up and knock on the front door. I would feel a lot happier if I new where the back door was and who the neighbours were. I was in no doubt that Mrs Williams, or John the Beer, or John Petrol could have told me if I had asked, but they would have told everyone they knew that I had asked.

As it was, I got more than I bargained for at the garage when I went to fill up the Freelander.

The garage was near a bridge over a rain-swollen river in the middle of the town, and the garage forecourt seemed to impinge on the road. Judging from the way people parked around here, a queue for the petrol pumps that actually blocked the main through road wouldn't attract any attention.

The pumps did indeed show a price at least 3p a litre higher than I was used to paying in London, but when I plucked the nozzle of its hook, nothing happened.

‘Let me do that; it's not self-service!' somebody shouted.

I turned to the garage, where a man was pulling on an anorak before venturing across the postage-stamp sized forecourt. John Petrol, I presumed.

‘Right, sir,' he said as he took the pump from my hand. ‘Fill her up, is it?'

‘Only if I get the right price.'

‘And what's that then?' he shot back, not waiting but inserting the nozzle and starting the pump.

‘Whatever you'd charge Delith Williams.'

‘Oh, you're staying at Nodfa are you? You should have said.'

I thought I more or less had.

‘Here for the races?'

‘Well, I came to see the Red Kites, but now I've found out about the races, I might have a small flutter, if that's allowed.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't know about that, sir,' he said with a big wink. ‘But watch where the Irish money is going; that's always a good indicator.'

‘Thanks for the advice. Do you sell local maps?'

‘Oh yes, we've got the big scale maps of most of the river and the bog. You know, Cors Caron, the Tregaron bog. Famous it is.'

‘Yes it is. And the river's good for the trout, isn't it?'

I hoped that hadn't come out in a Welsh accent.

‘Mostly it's the tributaries up in the hills, but don't even think about it unless you've got a licence.'

‘Don't worry, fishing's not my scene. How much do I owe you?'

‘Come inside and I'll work out the discount.' He grinned conspiratorially. ‘And I'll get you a map.'

As we walked the few feet to the garage office – in the window of which was a handwritten sign saying ‘No cheques accepted from Morgan (W) and Harding (G)' –

John Petrol looked back over his shoulder at the Freelander.

‘Nice motor, that. You don't see many of them round here.'

‘Really?'

‘Though we had one in the town just like that, same colour and everything, only last week. ‘Course, I really remember it for the girl who was driving it. Dressed to the nines, she was, and a right cracker. Ooh yes, she'd be at the top of my cracker list. Wore these dead sexy red shoes. Real fuck-me shoes, I think you call them.'

He rang up a price on the cash register that was 2p a litre less than the price on the pump. I paid in cash.

‘You get to chat her up?' I said, my mouth suddenly dry.

‘Oh, she was too good for the likes of me. To be truthful, she's the type of woman that scares me a bit. No, she was just asking for directions to Haydn Rees's house.'

I pocketed my change and turned to go.

‘Who's he then?'

‘Our famous local solicitor. They have all the luck, don't they?'

Not if I could help it.

 

 

 

 

 

The rain hadn't actually stopped – I suspected it never did – but it had thinned to a faint mist, or maybe I just didn't notice it anymore. I reparked the Freelander in the public car park near Nodfa and perused the map I had bought.

I used The Talbot to orientate myself, as most roads seemed to start from there; one running north-west towards Aberystwyth, two running south-west towards Lampeter on either side of the Teif river valley and one running north-east to the Cors Caron nature reserve and somewhere called Pontrhydfendigaid, which I didn't attempt to say out loud.

The road I was looking for, which the lad Derek had described, went nowhere. Literally. Well, technically it went up into the mountains to the east and then stopped dead in a conifer plantation. Single track, it followed what looked to be the ridge of another small valley, through which ran the river Berwyn, a tributary of the Teifi. There were half a dozen farms or houses off the road on tracks marked with dotted lines and, sure enough, just as Derek had said, there was one called Bryngwyn. It was less than a mile away up the same road Nodfa was on, to the left of The Talbot as you looked at it, but the road rose steeply up the mountains to about 1300 feet according to the map, and the rain had brought the clouds down, so I couldn't see anything from where I was.

I decided not to take the Freelander. It was a dead-end road going up a mountain and I preferred to go where I knew I had an exit. Plus, it was a vehicle that had already been seen and noted in the town and I didn't want to draw attention to myself. So I opted for a foot patrol and cursed myself for not bringing any hiking boots or waterproofs. There was something in the Freelander that could be useful, though. Amy always kept a pair of Praktica binoculars, with up to x 40 zoom magnification and light enhancing lenses, in the glove compartment. She claimed she used them at large fashion shows to make sure she didn't miss a single pleat, cut or seam in a new item. A likely story, but they were perfect for the idiot bird watcher walking in the rain. I put up the collar of my jacket against the drizzle and set off down the road, hoping my shoes would hold up to the damp and that I wouldn't meet an ornithologist coming out of the trees saying ‘The name's Bond, James Bond', as had happened once to Ian Fleming.

The streets were narrow here, with front doors opening on to the road, and though there was little traffic, what they was seemed to move at 90 mph, and twice I had to take refuge in somebody's doorway to avoid being scraped along the walls.

Then suddenly the houses ended but the road continued to snake its way upward, flanked on one side by two-strand barbed wire fence to stop traffic – or at least sheep – from going down the scree slope to the river. To my right were a series of unmade roads leading off to individual farms or houses, some with their names on wooden arrows or carved into slate blocks: Ty Mawr Farm, Brynteg and Garth Villa and then, finally, Bryngwyn.

I was relieved, because the cloud had come down, or I had gone up to meet it, and I could no longer see the town behind and below me. I was quite prepared to believe the scare stories about mountain walkers getting lost and dying of exposure, and I was less than a mile from an international centre of trot-racing, bagpipe playing birdwatchers and I'd left my emergency bottle of brandy in my bag back with Mrs Williams.

Still, no need to panic yet. It wouldn't be dark officially for about another three and a half hours, though the visibility couldn't get much poorer, but it meant no-one could see me leave the road and follow what was little more than a farm track towards whatever Bryngwyn was.

After about a quarter of a mile, the track dropped away to the right until I lost sight of the road. I reckoned I was heading back on myself around the slope of a hill and if I kept going down and in a circle, according to the map, I would eventually hit the back road to Lampeter, just the other side of The Talbot. I would have felt more confident if I'd had a compass.

Bryngwyn was a ghost house.

It was a low, black stone house with the obligatory slate roof, seemingly crouched down, burying itself into the hill, with a couple of ramshackle outbuildings at the side. There was no sign of life, no sign of a vehicle, and although there were overhead electricity wires running into the house, not a light showed anywhere.

I was pretty sure there was nobody about to see me, but for the benefit of any Red Kites floating above, I walked up to the front door and knocked loudly. There was no answer, and judging by the amount of mould around the door frame, I guessed this wasn't the most-used entrance anyway.

I wandered around the side of the house near one of the outbuildings, which was a garage affair of corrugated iron sheets around a wooden frame. It had been so twisted by the damp that the whole thing leaned to one side as if a giant foot had squashed it. There was a tongue-and-hasp lock on the door, but instead of a padlock, it was held in place by a rusty six-inch nail.

I reached out for the nail, then paused. I had Amy's leather gloves in my back pocket and I put them on, as something was telling me it was better to be safe than sorry. It was only as I pulled them tight that I noticed the dozens of Twm Sion Cati claw holes that had gone through the leather but not the thick furry lining.

The garage contained an old Kawasaki motor-bike that had seen better days, with a helmet and a pair of gauntlets balanced on the seat. I sniffed the exhaust pipe and slipped off a glove to feel the cylinders with the back of my hand. That and the fact that a spider was busy weaving a cobweb over one of the wing mirrors confirmed that it hadn't been run for at least a couple of days.

I continued round to the back of the house, where a flimsy half-glass door, obviously not an original feature of the house, led in to the kitchen.

I looked around nervously but from the back of the house could see only cloud-covered hills. There was no-one watching me, not even a sheep. I turned the knob on the door and prepared to put my shoulder to it, but it opened without any undue pressure. Not locked. Well, they probably didn't get many burglars up here.

I stood there in the kitchen, and only when I was sure I couldn't hear a thing did I breathe out.

Somebody had been here until recently, judging from the dirty plates and cups in the sink and the pan on the Calor Gas stove, which contained the desiccated remains of some tinned ravioli. No great detective work – the empty tin was on the side of the sink.

There was a parlour and two rooms at the front of the house. The first one I tried had a military-issue camp-bed in the middle of the floor, complete with a pillow wrapped in cellophane and a sleeping bag. Apart from a radio cassette player, a copy of
Mayfair
and a magazine called
Big Ones
, which I'd never heard of, there was no other furniture in the room.

The other room was unusual as well. Not everybody has a Boxford lathe in their living room. They probably don't have a metal work bench with a vertical drill either, or a digital calliper gauge, or a tungsten carbide parting tool, or interchangeable drill bits on a speedloader clip; nor, for that matter, a stack of about 20 12-inch mild steel bars by the skirting board in front of a blocked-off fireplace, probably removed and sold at an antiques market down the Portobello Road. These things are for sheds at the bottom of the garden.

The floor was a concrete one and uncarpeted and had been swept by a long-handled broom, which was propped against one wall by a pile of dust and silver metal shavings. I poked around in the pile with a gloved finger until two solid objects surfaced. They were hollow cylinders that had been drilled out of a solid bar of mild steel, less than half an inch long with a rimmed end. They would have been drilled to a set depth and then reamed to the correct width. These two had been trial runs. They looked like newly-ejected cartridge cases from a hand gun. Except these hadn't been ejected from a gun; they were meant to go in one.

I turned on the lathe and it whined into life. I turned it off again at the switch. That proved the house had electricity, nothing else. It didn't tell me when the lathe had last been used. Sherlock Holmes might have done a monograph on the oxidisation rate of freshly cut metal slivers, but I hadn't.