The Retreat

  I was glad to get out of that room, but Julia was more reluctant.

  ‘She said Lily’s with Michael,’ Julia said. ‘And Jesus.’

  Ursula half-smiled. ‘Did she? I didn’t hear what was said. I was in another place.’

  ‘Come on, Julia,’ I said, guiding her from the room. We left the cottage and stepped into the garden. Julia was in a daze. I tried to put my arm around her, but she pushed me away.

  ‘Please, I want to be on my own for a minute.’

  ‘You can’t believe that was real, surely?’

  ‘She knew where to find your phone, didn’t she?’

  I could feel all the warmth between us draining away. I was convinced what Ursula had done was an act. Perhaps she was insane and thought it was real, but the idea that someone could channel a spirit who would talk through them was nonsense. I knew Julia was desperate to believe it, but it was so frustrating. I was surrounded by superstition and irrational beliefs. What next? Was Ursula going to claim that a woodland spirit knocked Max and me over the head with a rock and chucked us in the river?

  ‘She probably hid my phone in the first place so she could set this up. Next she’ll be asking you for money in exchange for messages from Lily.’

  Julia started towards the house but stopped and whirled round. She jabbed a finger towards me. ‘You don’t get it, do you? How it feels.’

  She thumped her chest with a flat hand.

  ‘You tell me I’m “amazing”.’ She made air quotes with her fingers. ‘For what? Being strong? Holding it together? You have no idea . . .’

  Ursula had come out of the cottage and was watching us. Julia ignored her.

  ‘You don’t know how much it hurts, Lucas. No idea how many times I’ve been down to that river and thought about throwing myself in, knowing I’d drown because I’m so weak I can’t even swim. If someone showed me proof that Lily was dead, then maybe I’d do it. There’d be nothing to stop me any more. No hope left to keep me alive.’ She waved an arm at the house. ‘I thought when I opened the retreat it would give me some new purpose. A business to run. Something for me. What a mistake!’ She began to laugh, on the edge of hysteria. ‘I should have gone with my original idea and opened a boarding kennel. Dogs might be needy and difficult, but my God they’re not half as needy as you writers.’

  She turned her attention to Ursula, who still loitered by the door of the cottage.

  ‘So what should I do, huh? Are you telling me Lily is dead, one hundred per cent? Should I give up hope? Should I go and throw myself in the river?’

  ‘Julia—’

  She cut me dead with a glare and took a step towards the cottage. ‘Come on, Ursula. What does your spirit guide say? Does Lily want me with her, now?’

  Ursula clung to the door frame. It was scary how much she’d aged almost overnight. ‘No, Julia. She doesn’t want you to join her. I expect she wants you to find the person who did it to her. The person who killed her.’

  Julia and I both stared at her.

  ‘And did your guide give you any clues?’ Julia asked, her voice hard and cynical. At least, I thought, she doesn’t seem to believe Ursula now. Her anger had burned away the belief.

  ‘Not yet,’ Ursula said.

  ‘Well, give me a call if she does. I want you to go. Pack your bag and go home.’

  I couldn’t help but smile, until Julia whirled round to point at me. ‘You too. All of you.’

  She gestured to Suzi, who had appeared by the front door of the house. She looked a mess, pale and shaky. She seemed almost relieved to be given her marching orders. She hung her head and went back inside.

  ‘The police told me I needed to stay nearby,’ I said after Suzi had gone, aware of how pathetic that sounded.

  ‘Get a room in town then,’ Julia snapped.

  She stormed back to the house, leaving Ursula and I alone.

  ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Ursula said. ‘She’ll calm down. She’s had a shock, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah, and whose fault is that?’ I said, as she followed Julia into the house.

  I walked down to the fence and looked out at the surrounding countryside. I touched the bandage on the back of my head. A few hours ago, Julia and I had been in each other’s arms. Now she was kicking me out. Maybe, despite the police’s instructions not to leave town, I should do as she asked. Go back to London, forget about Julia and Lily and all the rest. Try to forget that someone had attempted to kill me. Finish my novel. Get on with my life.

  But I was in too deep now.

  My mobile rang in my pocket. It was Olly.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Are you busy? Do you want to pop over?’

  I was confused. ‘To look at your dad’s books?’

  ‘No. Well, kind of. It’s just . . . I found something that’s related to what we were talking about yesterday. I think you should come and take a look.’

  Malcolm Jones had lived alone, since his wife died, in a large stone house on the other side of town. It stood alone halfway down a narrow lane. There was an empty pond out front, and vines snaked up the facade, all the way to the guttering on the roof.

  Olly let me in. He had the air of someone who hadn’t slept much, and the faint whiff of body odour emanated from him. He led me into the kitchen.

  Heledd turned around from the sink, where she was washing up. She wore a white T-shirt and her rose tattoo was on display again.

  She dried her hands on a tea towel and came over to me. Like Olly, she seemed strained, nervous energy radiating from her. Grief. I recognised it well.

  ‘It was you who found my mum,’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘How are you?’

  Olly put his arm around her shoulders. ‘We’re supporting each other, aren’t we?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She touched a cross that hung around her neck and I realised it was the necklace Shirley had worn. I looked from Heledd to Olly and back. I was still certain both their parents had been murdered. And that I was partly responsible.

  I was groping for something to say – I was wondering if it would be insensitive to ask about the dog – when Olly said, ‘Come on, mate, let me show you what I found.’

  He led me up to Malcolm’s study, leaving his girlfriend in the kitchen. The hallway was full of cardboard boxes where Olly had begun to pack his father’s belongings. I squeezed past them into an unexpectedly spacious room dominated by an enormous desk and lined with sturdy bookshelves. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of books in the study, crammed into every space – ramming the shelves, stacked on the floor and the surface of the desk. A shiny iMac was incongruous among the many dusty volumes.

  ‘This is just the tip of the iceberg,’ Olly said. ‘There are thousands more downstairs. You’d think he’d get sick of seeing books after spending his working day with them, but I think he was actually addicted to acquiring them. My mum was always moaning at him. “You’ve got a six-foot pile of books by our bed that you haven’t read yet – why do you need to buy more?”’

  A section of books on a shelf to my left caught my eye. They were dedicated to folklore, fairy tales and urban legends. One of them was Folk Tales and Urban Myths, the book that Lily had owned and that I’d also seen in Megan’s house. It was clearly a bestseller around these parts. Beside these were a number of volumes about the history of North Wales and the local area. A Clean Slate: An Oral History of Quarrying and Mining in Wales. Hardly the catchiest title. I leafed through it quickly, checking the index for Beddmawr, wondering if there was anything about the former mine on which Julia’s house stood. Yes, there it was. The mine had been at the heart of the local community, I read, until it closed in 1946. There were stories that the wife of a miner who was killed at work placed a curse on the town. I knew that already, and the book didn’t offer any new information.

  ‘What did you want to show me?’ I asked.

  He hesitated for a second. ‘Heledd said I shouldn’t tell you, that you’d probably put it in
a book or something. But I can trust you, right?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Good. Because it would be crap if you gave her the opportunity to say “I told you so”. There’s some stuff about her in there, so she’s a bit sensitive about it.’

  I still wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but said, ‘Okay.’

  Olly picked up a holdall from the desk chair. ‘Let’s go downstairs. There’s nowhere to sit here.’

  Once we were seated in the living room, he said, ‘My dad kept a journal. There’s one for each year, going back to 1965. They were all on a shelf, in date order. I started to look through them. There’s all this stuff about how he met my mum; their early courtship, as he called it. Their wedding. Having me. Loads of stuff about work too, and his colleagues. Plus there are reviews of books he read and films he watched. Quite interesting, if only to me.’ He licked his dry lips. ‘But I noticed 1980 was missing. And that got me thinking about what he said to me the day he died, about keeping a terrible secret.’

  1980. I had been six at the time. It was the year before we left this town and moved to Birmingham. My mum had mentioned 1980 when she told me about the little girl who’d gone missing from the children’s home.

  Heledd came into the room carrying two mugs of coffee for us. She sat down next to Olly.

  He went on. ‘You know, it looked like someone had been in there, in his study. The desk drawers were in a mess, like they’d been rifled through. There were books scattered all over the floor. Dad would never have done that. He was obsessed with things being filed correctly. So at first I thought someone must have been in there and taken 1980. Then I remembered.’

  I was desperate for him to get to the end of the story.

  ‘Dad had a hidey-hole. It’s under the carpet in his bedroom. A loose floorboard. He didn’t know that anyone knew about it, but I discovered it when I was a kid, after I peeped in on him once and saw him messing around with the carpet. He used to hide money in there. Other stuff too. A girlie mag.’ He laughed. ‘I found it when I was nine or ten. I’ll never forget it. Those bushes!’

  Heledd rolled her eyes.

  ‘Anyway, it was in there, 1980.’ He held the book out to me. As I was about to take it, he pulled it back.

  ‘You’re the first person who’s seen this, apart from me. Even Heledd hasn’t read it yet, though I’ve told her the important stuff. I’m only showing it to you because I think you will be able to help us figure this out. Also . . . well, you’ll see in a minute.’

  He passed the journal to me, open at a page near the back. I began to read.

  Chapter 35

  Something dreadful has happened, Malcolm wrote. The date was Thursday, 8 May 1980. It frightens me to put it down here, but I have to get it on paper. If the knowledge remains confined to my head for another moment, my skull might burst.

  I haven’t written in here for a few days, so I need to recap. Let’s go back to Monday. The 5th. The Society met, as we always do on a Monday night. We met at the Miners Arms. It was quiet as usual and we took our table in the back.

  Glynn had brought Shirley Roberts along, to take notes. I have long suspected that Glynn is the father of Shirley’s illegitimate daughter, Heledd. It was a minor scandal when Heledd was born. We don’t “do” unmarried mothers around here, and people gossiped and whispered and called Shirley a slut and many other names besides. I admire Shirley for holding her head high. The little girl is six now and Shirley sometimes brings her into the library. A sweet little thing who gravitates towards grown men as if searching for a father. If Glynn is her dad then God help her.

  I glanced up at Heledd, wondering if Olly had told her what his dad had written about her. It was awkward, to say the least, reading this speculation in her presence.

  I turned the page.

  Glynn had an old newspaper with him, yellow and dog-eared. He explained he’d found it when laying a carpet in a house he was doing up. Old newspaper had been put down beneath the underlay. It was dated 1945. The local paper. There would be a copy in the library, stored on microfiche.

  Glynn laid it out for us all to see the headline.

  POLICE ABANDON SEARCH FOR MISSING GIRL, AGED 5, IN BEDDMAWR.

  The report told how the five-year-old daughter of a couple who had recently moved to the area had vanished two weeks before. She was out playing with friends who had ridden off on their bikes, leaving her behind on the edge of the woods. Her name was Glenys Williams. A grainy photo accompanied the report. Little Glenys, on a beach in Llandudno, licking an ice cream on her last family holiday. The police had carried out a search of the woods, with dogs, but were unable to find her.

  ‘This is the interesting part,’ Glynn said. ‘Listen . . . “Police reported that they had received little help from locals, who seemed resigned to what had happened. A local woman who refused to be named said that it was clear that little Glenys had been sacrificed to keep the other children of the town safe. Police believe the girl must have wandered towards the nearby River Dee and fallen in, although no body has been recovered.”’

  ‘I showed it to my mother,’ Glynn went on. ‘She remembered it happening. And guess what she told me? Thirty-five years before, in 1910, the same thing had happened. She remembered because her own mother, my gran, told her about it. She said it happened every thirty-five years. A child had to be given to the Red Widow, or she would come and take one.’

  Glynn went on to tell us that his mother told him the sacrificed child was always one who would be ‘less missed’ in the community. The witch didn’t like sick children – they taste bad – so the local people couldn’t give up a child who was likely to die anyway (he said this as if this was a terrible shame). Instead, they chose a child who had been orphaned, or whose parents were new to the area, or a bastard. The Widow particularly liked children with sin in their blood. It was not worth the risk, said Glynn’s mother, that the witch would come and take a child from an important family, a son and heir, a child whose death would rock the community.

  ‘Thirty-five years,’ Glynn said, looking around the table. ‘Nineteen forty-five was thirty-five years ago.’

  As if we hadn’t all already worked that out.

  ‘It’s lucky nobody believes in such superstitious nonsense any more, isn’t it?’ I said.

  I looked around the table at the faces staring back at me.

  Glynn. Shirley. Albert. David. All of us in our mid-thirties now, but we’ve known each other all our lives. We went to the same school. David and I were the studious ones, Albert somewhere near the bottom of the class, Shirley a nervous little thing who followed Glynn around like his pet lamb. Glynn, of course, was the class bully.

  Now, Glynn pointed at me.

  ‘How would you feel, Malcolm, if little Olly was taken by the Widow? Shirley, what if Heledd was taken? And you, David, what if the witch came and took away Lucas?’

  I gasped and stopped reading, looking up at Olly.

  ‘My dad was there,’ I said. ‘That’s why you wanted me to see this.’

  He nodded.

  My mouth was dry, fingers trembling as I turned the page.

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to risk her coming for Wendy,’ Glynn said.

  I could hardly believe how serious they all looked. As if they believed Glynn and his crazy old mother. As if they actually believed a witch might come into the town in the dead of night and steal their precious children away.

  Only Albert, who didn’t have any children, looked less afraid.

  I banged on the table, startling them from their stupor. ‘This is madness,’ I said. ‘Perhaps, a long time ago, this crime – the crime of taking children into the woods and leaving them to be taken by a non-existent being – happened. Maybe, just maybe, it happened in 1945 too, though I find that hard to believe. It’s far more likely that Glenys got lost and fell into the river. An accident, that’s all.’

  ‘Except,’ Shirley said, speaking for the first time in that mee
ting. ‘All it would take was for one person to believe in the Widow. One person willing to murder little Glenys so there was no risk of their own child being taken.’

  I called an end to the meeting. I needed to get out of there, away from the atmosphere that hung over that table. The others lingered behind. I heard them murmuring. Glynn’s booming laugh rang out as I left the pub.

  I glanced up at Olly and Heledd. We’d each had a parent at that meeting – at least one, in Heledd’s case. It felt strange, like a reunion. Glynn’s daughter Wendy was the only person missing.

  I read on.

  Malcolm’s journal entry was broken in two. There was a space on the page before the next section began.

  I’ve been staring at this page for fifteen minutes, trying to decide what to write, how to tell the rest of this tale. A large part of me is shouting at me to leave it, that it’s too dangerous to record. There will be repercussions. But I have to do it. Damn the consequences.

  How brave I sound within the pages of my journal. How brave the coward sounds.

  The facts.

  Last night, a four-year-old girl went missing from St Mary’s children’s home. The girl’s name is Carys Driscoll. It’s all over the radio and local news, and the police are combing the area, trying to find her. Details are patchy, but rumours are running like wildfire through the town. It was all anyone could talk about at the library today, including a young woman who works at the home. She came in to return some books then hung around, a group gathering as she told the tale. I loitered on the edge of the group, the blood in my veins turning to ice as I listened.

  Carys Driscoll was put into the care system after her mother, a heroin-addicted punk, died of an overdose when her daughter was three. There has never been a father on the scene. Nobody knows who he is, and the grandparents wanted nothing to do with the child. They have been trying to place her in a foster home or find someone to adopt her but, so far, without luck.

  She was last seen at teatime, yesterday evening. Apparently, the children were then allowed outside to play for a little while. A member of staff was supervising them, but one of the children hurt himself and had to be taken inside for first aid. Then the children were called inside.