White Trail (5 page)

‘Don't patronise me,' said the nine-year-old girl. ‘I know why you and my mother got married. It's so you can feel better about yourselves, and better about what happened to you.'

‘Well, that's true, but what's also true is that I love your mother very much...'

‘I read about you on the internet. How someone killed your wife and took your baby. It can't have been nice.'

‘It wasn't nice, no,' Cilydd said, wincing. ‘But it was a long time ago. Before you were born. And when something happens before you were born, it doesn't really affect you, does it? So if you think of how little it's affected you, then that is how little it affects me, now, really. I've forgotten all about it. I'm starting a new life, a new family, with you and your mum.'

‘Taking advantage of the fact that my dad's dead, you mean.'

‘Not at all,' he said, wishing there had been less mention of Doged in the wedding speeches. The memory had begun to resurface. Now it was back in his consciousness, and he had to do his very best to keep it at bay. Whenever he thought of him, he'd immediately think of something banal like bananas or sausages, and he'd force the words to come cantering across his brain in various flashing colours, knocking Doged over at every opportunity. His mind was becoming more and more like some educational kids' TV show, as though he were learning how to think, how to remember and forget, all over again. Doged, someone said. Bananas, Cilydd thought.

What kind of stuff did she and her dad do together, he asked her. She looked blankly at him. She said sometimes her father would take her to the Assembly and some of his staff would take her for a walk around the Bay. Once she went on a carousel, a memory that seemed lodged in her mind as one of the most wonderful things they had done together, despite the fact that it was a young intern who was holding her coat at the side and waving at her, while her father was deliberating on the privatisation of hospitals. The more he found out about Doged, the more he thought he was right to do what he'd done. I will not feel guilty about it, he thought. No one will ever know. And then the final consoling thought, which kept him going when nights were dark and the demons of guilt and condemnation wandered up from the depths of his subconscious –
one day everyone who ever knew Doged will be dead and none of it will
matter. Everyone is going to die. Doged, Goleuddydd, his
son, they were going to die anyway.

And this is how Cilydd trundled on, in his makeshift, imperfect existence, believing that the life he was now living was the one he was meant to live. Gwelw and himself tried for more children, but nothing came of it, and in the end it didn't seem to matter. He had helped raise Lleuwen, after all, and that was enough for him. Once she went off to college, he and Gwelw spent their free time going to galleries, drinking elaborate coffees like caramel mochaccinos and soya frappes, having friends round for dinner, and generally being happy. Yes, one day, dare he say it, Cilydd found himself thinking that he had created the best he could out of an unfortunate situation and made a life for himself. People never now referred to him as ‘that guy' – the one who had lost everything – as they did in the early days of his courtship with Gwelw. Now he was merely Gwelw's husband, Lleuwen's father. Life was being lived and he had managed to squeeze Goleuddydd, his son and Doged's unfortunate end into a tiny portal in his brain, whose door only ever opened when he was asleep, and even then, it would only creak its way ajar, and just a small smattering of that startling light would be visible.

Gwelw and himself still dallied in the business of missing persons, attending meetings, giving the odd speech here and there, but it became an increasing burden on them to be intimate with the relatives of missing persons, who reminded them too much of their former, grieving selves. They would rather not think of people in their lives who were still missing (though neither of them truly thought of Doged as a missing person – more as a floating carcass at large in the world), and they almost found it embarrassing to be involved with the network; to be dragged down by it. Gradually, their involvement stopped. Cilydd erased all the files from his computer and passed the baton on to some other poor soul –a man whose wife had gone missing from a routine trip to the dentist's. And he went back to being a loss adjuster – filing claims, and finding the ordinariness, the greyness of his anonymity much easier to bear.

And that was when the phone calls started. A voice, which seemed familiar, in the thick of night which asked if Cilydd was at home and if he was ever going to tell his wife what he'd done to her beloved Doged.

And then a click.

The phone calls would only ever come when he was home alone, as though the caller were careful not to alert his wife or his step-daughter, as though he were being watched closely. The line was unclear – a faint crackling could be heard, obscuring the voice. He began dreading being on his own, to the point where he would insist on accompanying his wife wherever she went, much to her annoyance.

Her evenings in with friends would often be dark-ened by his presence, lurking, in the car or in the hallway, insisting he was fine with his book, to the amusement of her friends, who could not believe a husband could be so possessive. When his daughter came home from college he would drive her to meet her friends in town, and pretend to go back home for the evening whereas in reality he was sitting in his car, in the cold, thinking about a phone ringing in an empty room. And his daughter would nearly always spot him, come out of the pub and ask him what he was doing. He would see her friends at a table in the window; immaculate, confident girls with honeyed hair, hiding their smiles in their pale yellow wines –laughing at him. Both his wife and his daughter tolerated the situation with tight, grimacing smiles because they told themselves that Cilydd was having some sort of relapse – reacting to what happened to him all those years ago. It's a phase, they told themselves.

But then it came – the inevitable weekend when he would be completely, utterly alone. Gwelw was off to an orthopaedic conference; Lleuwen going with her college friends to a spa hotel. There was no question of him going with either of them, though he tried his best to argue a case for it.

‘Orthopaedic conferences are the dryest, most boring things, Cilydd, you just wouldn't have the foggiest what everyone was going on about. Trust me, you wouldn't enjoy it,' Gwelw said, before clipping her briefcase firmly shut, cracking – or so it felt to Cilydd – every one of his bones as she did so.

‘Dad, there's no way you're coming with me. The idea of you lurking around the pool in your bathrobe watching us, it's just... creepy,' Lleuwen said. ‘Mum, tell him it's weird.'

‘Cilydd, she's right, it's weird. This has got to stop now. The girls are in their twenties, they don't need a chaperone. You have to have your own life. Haven't you got any losses to adjust?'

Cilydd could not shake the feeling that something truly terrible was about to happen to him, and that if he let his wife and daughter walk out of the house that weekend, he was unlikely ever to see them again. He resorted to begging them to stay. He found himself on the driveway taking his wife's bags back out of the car.

‘Cilydd, for God's sake, leave them where they are,' she said. Even when she was angry she would not raise her voice; her teeth would form a dam, holding her fury in place with perfect stil ness. ‘People are looking.'

Out of the corner of his eye he saw some brown curtains rustling in the house opposite. He wondered who else was watching them.

‘Back they go. That's it. Good. Thank you. Now, 'she said, as though addressing a small child. ‘You stay here. Have a weekend on your own. Maybe it'll do you good. And don't give Lleuwen any grief when she leaves.'

‘But really now...'

‘
Cariad...
' his wife said, finitely, with a hard-hitting c. You knew when she said
cariad
, an unusual departure from her ivory-solid expressions, she meant business. As she drove away he waved limply at her, noticing that she wasn't even looking in her rear-view mirror at him – she was merely observing the road – in keeping with her correctness, her precision, her attention to rules and regulations. When his daughter left three hours later, he tried to restrain himself from going downstairs. Instead he watched her getting into her friend's car from an upstairs window, and stopped his knuckles from rapping out a desperate farewell.

By the time she'd rounded the corner the phone was ringing.

The first night without them was bearable, just about, though he could not shake the feeling that someone, somewhere, knew all about him and Doged, someone who was waiting for an opportune moment to bring his world crashing down at his feet. In a fit of paranoia he bolted every door in the house, and took the phone off the hook. Then he thought of his wife and Lleuwen, of how they would be trying to get in touch with him, perhaps, to see how he was. He imagined how selfish and stupid he would look if they arrived home, thinking he had done himself harm, only to find him sitting in his chair, watching the television, and so he put the phone back. He sat there, perfectly still, just watching it – as if observing a creature in the wild. The moment he let his shoulders relax and eyes wander, it started ringing. It knew, he thought. The telephone knew and it was going to devour him whole if he moved. And so he held his breath and ignored it. The seventh time it rang he thought it had to be Gwelw, and so he took his chances. It was. She wanted to know why he wasn't answering. ‘Didn't hear it ring,' he lied. ‘A technical fault, the email's down as well, I'll get someone to look at it tomorrow. How are things at the conference?' he added, affecting a jovial tone that was completely at odds with his churning insides. ‘It's OK,' said Gwelw, ‘the same old chitter-chatter about bones.' She launched into something he didn't understand about new research in osteochondritis dissecans, and some peculiarities of the femoral head in recent cases of dislocation. As usual he bumbled his way through the conversation, half-listening, thinking that Femoral Head sounded like a nice place to go for a picnic. All the time she was talking he could only think of what kind of intellectual, informed input Doged would have offered. Doged, from what he could gather, had been a fierce intellect. Good old reliable Doged. The only unreliable thing he had ever done – so everyone though – was kill himself. Thinking about it now, even tumbling upside down in the air he had looked curiously upright.

He poured himself a glass of wine and switched on the television to watch the news. Then he wished he hadn't. A familiar face flashed up on the screen. A body had been found a few miles south – that of a young man in his twenties. It was one of the faces from the network – a face that Cilydd himself had scanned in. He remembered being unnerved by that particular face – the boy had looked troubled. Ffercos son of Poch, flashed the news bulletin. Even the name sounded aggressive, like a pitchfork through the eye. Now he'd been found in a ditch, face down, with bite marks all over his body. It appeared he'd been attacked by some creature; perhaps a wild cat, the reporter speculated. Poch – a man he'd spoken to on several occasions – appeared briefly to read a statement on behalf of the family. It spoke of their relief that their son had been returned to them. But the whole thing made no sense. Ffercos had been missing for years, but the pathologist's report showed that he had only recently been killed.

Cilydd turned off the light and sat in the dark. He breathed deeply, and tried to find stillness within himself. The news item had given him perspective. The telephone, he thought, in itself, had no power to harm him. Even a voice at the other end, he reasoned, was just a voice, a tinny little thing with no authority.

A knock at the window was something else.

This – accompanied by a white hand on a pane of glass, which retreated into the darkness almost as soon as it had appeared – was something he could not very well ignore. The knock came again, then there was the sound of crunching gravel, as the owner of that hand apparently hurried along to the back of the house with stalking, confident footsteps. Next came an eye, pressed to the glass door – seeking him out in the darkness of the hallway. He stood there suspended, frozen, watching the shimmer of a stranger staring in at him.

‘Is it about Doged?' he ventured. ‘It's about Doged, isn't it?'

No one spoke. The figure put a hand on the wall, leaning slightly sideways.

‘It might be,' came the voice. Lighter, more boyish than it had sounded on the phone. Unserious almost. Not a voice to be terrified of, somehow.

There was nothing for it but to get rid of the pane of glass standing between him and his past. He surprised himself by the steadiness of his hands as he unbolted every single lock, letting the door swing open, revealing a figure standing in the white pool of the security light. The boy in front of him, red haired, standing a little askew, perhaps in shyness, perhaps in mockery of him – had a face which unnerved him. The similarity was uncanny.

‘Aren't you going to ask me in, then?' he said, impatiently. ‘Nice picture,' he then added, looking beyond Cilydd to the portait of himself, Gwelw and Lleuwen mounted on the wall. The resentment flickered at the corners of his all-too-familiar mouth.

‘Are you… are you... you can't surely be...' his heart was pounding now, banging out strange rhythms. My heart knows him, he thought – it
is
him.

‘Is it you who's been ringing?' he asked.

‘Can I come in? I can tell you more once I'm inside. I don't like being outside. 'The boy's tone was impossible to detect – one minute it seemed thick with condescension, the next minute, thin with naivety. A little boy who did not like being left outside.