She imagined that the land that had once belonged to the house had been sold to build the council estate. Surrounded by newcomers, the old house seemed to have turned in on itself. Cat climbed off her bike. Her throat was dry and her head buzzed. But this was not withdrawal. It was nerves. From taking one long step into the past to try to free up her present. She stood still, uncertain, undecided.
At the front of the house was a porch crammed with ferns that partially obscured the doorway. The glass of the door was veined with elaborate patterns and clouded over from the heat inside. She could still turn back. Cat stood motionless for a moment. The decision was taken out of her hands, as the door opened.
Cat struggled to trace her old friend in the man stood in front of her. He looked smaller than she remembered, his sad brown eyes circled by black: shadowed water in a well. The black linen suit and white shirt looked crumpled, as if he had just pulled them on. He wasn’t wearing any shoes.
He took Cat’s hand, guided her into the porch where he embraced her fiercely. Unsure at first, she reciprocated. He held her for a few seconds, then pulled back, holding both her hands. She looked past him to a wide staircase with an impressive carved banister, which gave the entrance a feeling of grandeur. Beneath it framed posters for computer games were propped against the wall.
He mumbled greetings, and something about a cup of whatever she wanted, but she held up her hand to show she was all right.
‘She’s gone. My daughter’s gone.’
His voice now was choked, desperate.
She was going to make some answer, but he turned abruptly and went off down a short corridor that led to a family room. Cat followed. On the floor, a home cinema system rested on a rough stone rostrum. The few pieces of art on the walls had clearly been chosen with care. One looked like a Kyffin Williams original. On the left side several muted abstracts hung in an unevenly spaced line.
The room’s modernist theme was contrasted by four mahogany tables, each of which held framed photographs. These scenes had been arranged in chronological order from left to right. Martin in a hospital gown, smiling broadly, presenting a wrinkled, snub-nosed baby wrapped in a towel to the camera. Next to him was a girl with a flushed and beaming face. Martin, in a dark winter coat, pushing a beaming toddler on a swing. Martin in the background, hands in pockets, looking apprehensive as a blurred pre-teen girl on a bicycle rode past him. The final photo of Martin’s missing daughter was a head-and-shoulders photo of her as a teenager. She wore a grey sweatshirt bearing the logo of the Welsh College of Music and Drama, her hair swept back into a complicated chignon, at odds with her casual clothes, and her face was set in a firm smile.
Next to this portrait stood another framed photograph. Cat recognised the scene immediately. It would be a cold day in hell before she forgot her seventeenth birthday. Her mother had insisted that she go out with ‘some friends’. Her only friend from school was Martin. There they were, the odd couple. She looked like a kick boxer after a bout, head hung under her hoodie. His face was covered with his shades and bushy hair. The two of them were standing outside Screamers, a club with a justified reputation for admitting the underage, and one that had long since closed. Captured on the edge of the photo that a passer-by had taken at Martin’s insistence, were some girls from school in pelmet skirts and lurex tops, who had just run past, shouting abuse at them.
The night is freezing. They join the queue, the bouncer at the door playing the usual power game of ‘who’s hot, who’s not’. Downstairs the walls sweat a mixture of body odour, smoke and alcohol. They push into the scrum at the bar, three deep, every punter for himself. They buy their drinks – a pint of Felinfoel for Cat, a weak-as-water screwdriver for Martin, the classic choice of the reluctant drinker.
Then leaning her back against a pillar to watch the action on the dancefloor, she turns around to see one of the boys from school. He is a year older, had a reputation for trouble. She doesn’t need him to speak to her to know the evening is ruined. He goes to find his friends. She goes to find Martin. The pack of boys are following her around the club, making the sign of the cross and hissing like cats.
‘Witch’s bitch. Witch’s bitch.’
Outside the club, the boys follow them back to the station. She had seen farm dogs working sheep in the same way. They board the train while the boys press their noses against the windows, running their fingers over their throats to tell them they are both dead meat.
Cat glanced at the picture and then grimaced at Martin. He grimaced back, as far as his grief-stricken face allowed. She tried to recall the last time she’d seen her own copy of the picture. Tried and failed. Martin’s determination to cling on to their shared history acted as a gentle rebuke. Was this memento usually on display or had it been put there specifically for her visit?
Martin led her through to a conservatory. This was a shadowy space, the large panes of glass covered by blinds that further muted the dullness of the day. There was a small iron table, a folded paper lying in the centre, two matching chairs pulled up close. Martin gestured to the chairs and Cat took a seat.
‘Cat.’ He tried to be polite. ‘How have you been?’
He nodded, acknowledging the futility of his question.
‘I still don’t travel on trains too much, Martin.’
He smiled at that, and so did she. She didn’t ask Martin how he had been. He pushed the newspaper on the table towards her. ‘You’ve probably seen this already.’
His voice faltered. He put a hand in front of his mouth as if about to vomit. The front page of the Echo was again dominated by the story of Nia Hopkins’s disappearance. The girl was the same, but the picture was different; a close-up shot, but still with the same black eyes, white skin and straggly black hair. Again Cat thought that it could almost have been herself. She pushed the paper back to Martin.
‘I’ve seen it.’
Martin swallowed, removed his hand from his mouth. ‘I just thought. Esyllt …’
‘Facts, Martin. I need facts.’
His face had turned in on itself, a man in the grip of deep emotion. ‘I’d hoped you’d come straight away.’
‘You shoved a bit of paper under my garage door. Lost under about two hundred flyers for pizza delivery. You didn’t even use my letterbox. Didn’t leave your name on your messages. Didn’t pick up your phone. How the fuck was I to know it was you? Or where to find you, if it comes to that?’
Cat was angry because those phone calls had scared her. Angry because the withdrawal was playing devil with her emotions. Because of the headache that never fully left. But most of all, because her friend had allowed a whole week of investigation to get lost. The first week. The most precious week.
‘Sorry, I didn’t know. I assumed you’d got the note.’
‘Why not call the police? I’ve just spoken to the station. DI Thomas. He knew fuck all about your daughter. You shove a note under my garage door and you don’t even call the local police.’
‘I know. But I was in a panic, Cat.’
She felt her anger fading. There was nothing phoney about Tilkian’s reactions. He was a man overwhelmed by his own loss. Or, more accurately, his fears about a possible loss.
‘Facts, Martin. Start with the facts.’ Cat’s voice was gentle. She had a notebook and pen stowed on her bike, but there’d be time for all that later. She’d start this as a friend. See how to take it later. Tilkian nodded, gathering himself.
‘Esyllt’s been away at college in Cardiff, but her college room is only for term times. She broke up weeks ago, she’s been here most of the time since.’
He was about to rush forward in the story, but Cat raised a hand to stop him.
‘She sees her friends when she’s here, presumably? Everything seemed normal?’
‘She doesn’t really have friends here. She thinks the locals are, well, a bit rough and ready.’
‘She leaves here when?’
He named a date. Cat counted backwards. It was two
days before he’d shoved the note under her garage door.
‘Leaves for Cardiff?’
‘Yes. I drove her. Left her at her college dorm block. Apparently, she’d sorted out a way to get access to her room. She was fed up here. You know. Teenage girls. You can’t fence them in too much. The way to lose them.’
Cat nodded. It must be hard being a single dad. Maybe it was a bad move of his coming out here to Tregaron. You keep them safe for a while, but they feel the safety and want to fly from it. Cat knew the feeling.
‘OK. So you drop her in Cardiff. By car?’
A nod.
‘Everything fine? No hint of a problem?’
‘No, it all seemed, well, fine.’
‘And?’
‘It was fine. For a while. She was texting, calling. Just like normal. We spoke every day. Always do.’
Cat frowned. This wasn’t heading the way she’d been expecting. She asked the key question. ‘When was the last time you spoke to her by phone?’
‘Four days ago.’ His voice a whisper. ‘Her phone has been switched off ever since.’
‘And before then, everything was normal?’
A nod.
‘But you wrote to me a week ago. You left a note under my garage door. Started calling not long after that. That was before she went missing.’
‘I had this awful feeling. I was worried.’ He shrugged. ‘Dad’s intuition, call it.’
Cat stared at him. The silence pooled in the room for a second or two.
‘There was a guy.’
‘A guy?’
‘Weird-looking. White streak in his hair.’
‘Approximate age?’
‘I don’t know. Forty, maybe.’
‘Description? Fuck, Martin, work with me. I’m on your side.’
He seemed to pull himself together. ‘White guy. Pale. Jeans, I think. Dark jacket. Nothing so unusual. Black hair, or dark anyway.’
‘And you saw him where?’
‘He was around here. I saw him twice in Tregaron.’
‘So? What made you suspicious?’
‘Nothing really. Not then. He was in town, just glancing at her from a distance. I noticed him – because that white streak in his hair made him look like a badger.’
‘So then you take Esyllt into Cardiff, drop her back there. Everything’s OK.’
‘Yes. Then she tells me she saw that guy again. The badger. She didn’t think it was a big deal. Just a coincidence.’
‘And that’s when you get scared. When you start trying to contact me.’
‘Right.’
‘Why me, not the police?’
‘You are the police.’
Cat looked hard at Martin’s face. He looked resigned to the worst but part of him was still praying for a reprieve. It was a reaction she had seen before. Denial, fear, hope. She knew she didn’t have the full story yet, but you often didn’t. Not straight-away, not ever.
‘What about her friends? You’ve contacted them?’
Martin nodded, sort of. ‘Nothing. They’re all abroad on holiday, know nothing.’
‘She knew the other Tregaron girl who’s gone? Nia Hopkins?’
‘I don’t think so. But it’s a small town.’
Cat knew that most teenage runaways came home of their own accord after a few days. She imagined the two girls up in London somewhere, staying with a friend, talking about how adults didn’t understand them. She’d been there, done that.
Martin nodded, to himself as much as anything. He looked down into his lap trying to compose himself. ‘She wouldn’t go missing of her own accord; she was going to appear on that talent show on S4C.’ He glanced towards the home cinema next door.
‘Talent show?’
‘It was a big deal for her. What she lived for, really.’
‘Maybe she changed her mind. Didn’t want the pressure.’
‘It was all her idea. She’s been rehearsing all her audition pieces with her tutors at the college. You must have seen her on TV?’
Cat shook her head. Martin rose, moved next door. He motioned for her to sit, picked up the remote from the coffee table. Esyllt appeared on the screen, a younger version of her teenage self in the photo on the table.
‘It’s from the Urdd Eisteddfod a few years ago. She came first in her category.’
Esyllt’s voice had a depth and a richness that singers of that age rarely possessed. Cat could detect a slight nervous tremor in the first few bars, but Esyllt soon settled down. Although ‘Ar Lân y Mor’ had been a regular feature of Cat’s own days in the Urdd, this was as good as hearing it for the first time. Throughout, the girl’s eyes were bright and wide, as if watching the sounds descending to her from somewhere above. Martin was holding his hand over his face as if he could barely watch. On the screen, Esyllt stopped singing, stood back from the microphone, accepted the applause with a small bow of her head. Her face was closed, showing nothing.
Martin concentrated on wiping his eyes. Cat noticed that the set of his mouth looked just like Esyllt’s when she had finished her performance.
‘Don’t you think that she might have been friends with this Nia? Maybe they met up and went off somewhere together?’
Martin shook his head again, more vigorously this time. She noticed the skin on his neck was raw and scaly, just as it was as a teenager. As if aware of her eyes on him, he tugged his shirt at the collar.
‘No, that copper’s right. She might have known her to say hi to, but they weren’t friends. I’d have known.’
Cat was about to ask something further, when she felt a vibration against her leg, pulled her iPhone out. The screen flashed Thomas’s private number.
‘Thomas?’
‘Price, we’ve found something and it’s not pretty.’
From Thomas’s end came a dry, hacking sound. Cat wondered whether he’d been sick.
‘You got a name?’
‘We’re trying to ID her right now.’
Cat glanced sideways at Martin. His face looked calm. His hands were so tightly interlinked that fingernails were digging into flesh. He was trying to follow the gist of the call. Cat turned her head slightly to the right, spoke quietly into the phone. ‘Get me a picture now. Take one on your mobile and send it to me.’
‘You know that’s against the rules.’
‘Get me photographic. Just pretend you’re looking for a number and press capture.’
‘You know any magic words, Price?’
‘Please.’
There was silence for several seconds, finally a theatrical sigh from Thomas. ‘You owe me one, Price. This time I’ll be calling in my marker.’
She ended the call. Martin’s mouth was so tight with tension the words had to fight their way out of him.
‘What is it?’
‘Probably nothing that you need to worry about.’
Cat’s phone beeped, alerting her to a new message. She hesitated, brought up the picture. She spied Martin from the corner of her eye. Be strong for him. Her feelings were not the most important in this. She forced herself to look at the phone. Thomas was no photographer and the body seemed to lie quite far off, in some kind of pit, but she could see enough to know that the face on her screen wasn’t Esyllt Tilkian’s.
‘It’s not her,’ she whispered to Martin. As he released the breath he had held for too long, he slumped down, his eyes obscured by the palm of his hand.
Cat pulled the newspaper towards her, glanced again at the picture of Nia Hopkins. It looked as though she had dyed her hair again before her death. Apart from that, the facial features looked the same. Her head was tilted to the side, pushed out of position by whatever force had struck it. The rest was blurred by the poor quality of the camera on Thomas’s phone.
Cat looked up at her friend. ‘We need to make this official. Report Esyllt as a Misper case. Do it right.’
Martin was bent over in his chair, index and second finger of his right hand now pressed to his eyes as though expecting a migr
aine. He nodded. Good enough.
‘I’d like to see Esyllt’s room,’ Cat said.
Martin sat up, got hold of himself. He stood and walked out of the conservatory. Cat followed him up the staircase. Esyllt’s room was at the start of a corridor leading to the back. Martin pushed open the door, stood aside. Tidiness was the room’s most obvious feature. It looked the opposite of teenage. Either Martin made sure that it was clean and clear at all times or his daughter had developed a housework mania.
A single bed was pushed up against the left wall. The duvet was cream and grown-up, no patterns or girlie frills. Esyllt had arranged her work area along the back wall, a long desk containing a line of reference books and classic novels.
‘Nothing like your old room,’ said Cat, trying for levity, regretting it as the words left her mouth.
‘No,’ Martin managed in reply.
The wall behind the work space was taken up with an enormous poster of the Stereophonics, Kelly Jones swamped by a Welsh flag, the other band members slouching around him. The only personal touch was a framed picture of Esyllt herself, posing at a party with an enormous cocktail glass containing an orange liquid, decorated with a miniature umbrella and pieces of fruit. She wore a Hawaiian-style outfit, a tissue paper lei around her neck, and was smiling broadly.
‘No computer?’
‘She had a laptop. Took it with her.’
Cat edged to the wardrobe and opened it. The clothes inside looked plain, serious, like the room itself. She felt she had no real sense of the girl from the place nor from the TV appearance. The room was anodyne, Vulcan almost. It was puzzling.
‘Did you clean this room after she left, Martin?’
‘No. It’s how she was. Spic and span.’
Cat stood back, tried to take in the room as a whole.
‘That picture – it was Nia Hopkins, wasn’t it?’ Martin said.
The identification wasn’t official. She shouldn’t let him know yet, but the personal outweighed the professional on this one, had done since she had disobeyed Kyle.