The Retreat(29)

‘I will. Soon. You look pale. Are you eating properly?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

She worried about me, especially since Priya’s death. ‘Where are you? That doesn’t look like your flat.’

‘I’m in Beddmawr.’

The look on her face was priceless. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Just outside Beddmawr, actually. A place called Nyth Bran.’

‘Where the old mine used to be?’

‘Yes. It’s a writers’ retreat now. I’m here trying to finish my new book. “Trying” being the operative word.’

I had expected her to be pleased that I had returned to the place where I was born, especially as it was her home town, but she frowned. ‘Well. I never expected you to go back there.’

‘Why not?’

She seemed flustered, which was unusual for her. In that moment, she seemed older, giving me a glimpse of what she might be like in a decade or two. ‘You were so young when we left there, I didn’t think you’d remember it. Not properly, anyway. As soon as we moved to Birmingham, it was as if Beddmawr never existed.’

‘That’s the thing. I don’t remember it. Hardly any of it. I have the occasional flash of memory. But most of it’s lost.’

She sipped from a glass of water. ‘That’s normal. I don’t remember the first six or seven years of my life either. And Beddmawr is hardly the most memorable place.’

Keen to get the conversation back on track, I said, ‘There’s a guy here, a handyman, who remembers you. Rhodri Wallace.’

‘Wallace? It doesn’t ring a bell. But it was a long time ago, Lucas. All I remember of those days is looking after you. Oh, you were a difficult child. Did I tell you that you used to come into our bed every night till you were five?’

‘Only about a thousand times.’

‘I was so exhausted all the time, it’s a miracle I can remember anything about that period. It’s a great fuzzy blur.’ She took another sip of water. ‘My goodness, it’s hot here today. You should come over, treat this place as a writing retreat, get some vitamin D while you’re here . . .’

Was I imagining it, or was she deliberately trying to change the subject from her home town? Thinking about it, she hardly ever mentioned the place. She never had done. Apart from the paintings of Wales that hung on her wall, and her lingering accent, she hardly acknowledged the old country. Why had I never noticed that before?

I was trying to think of a way of broaching this topic when she said, ‘I wonder if they ever found that little girl?’

Shocked, I said, ‘What little girl?’

‘I can’t remember her name but I saw it on the news a couple of years ago. They thought she fell into the Dee.’

‘Lily Marsh.’

Now it was her turn to look surprised. ‘Oh, you heard about it too.’

I lowered my voice, worried that Julia might overhear. ‘Yes, I know about it. And no, she hasn’t been found.’

Mum shook her head. ‘Terrible. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it had happened again.’

‘What?’

The picture was growing fuzzier, the connection breaking up. My mother’s face was pixelated. I wished I could pull her through the screen so I could talk to her properly.

‘You won’t remember. You were too little. A little girl went missing in Beddmawr when we still lived there.’

‘When did this happen?’ I asked.

‘Shortly before we moved away. Around 1980?’

I made a note in the pad on my desk.

‘It was terrible,’ she went on. ‘They never found her or the person who took her.’ The picture was really breaking up now.

‘What was her name?’

‘I can’t remember. Oh, what was it? I’m sure she lived in the children’s home, didn’t have any parents . . .’

The picture froze, my mother on-screen with her mouth half-open.

‘Mum, can you still hear me?’

Bad connection appeared on screen and the call ended. I tried to reconnect but it rang out. This happened sometimes. The Internet in Mum’s villa was painfully unreliable.

I went to Google and typed in ‘missing child Beddmawr 1980’. There were no results, presumably because news websites hadn’t existed in those days. Some newspapers have searchable archives online, but a lot of them are hidden behind paywalls and aren’t indexed by search engines.

Still, I thought it shouldn’t be too hard to find out.

I called Zara’s mobile. It rang half a dozen times, then went to voicemail. I left a brief message asking her to call me back, but as I did so I wondered if all this was a distraction. Surely the disappearance of a child over thirty years ago couldn’t be connected to what had happened to Lily? If there was a serial child abductor or murderer out there, there certainly wouldn’t be such a long gap between his crimes.

Even so, I felt uneasy, and it took me a minute to realise why. I had written a book about children going missing, and the landscape in that book was eerily similar to the landscape of Beddmawr. I had been six in 1980. The adults around me must have talked about a child going missing. They had probably said something about it at school too. I had no memory of it, but it was feasible that my subconscious had retained and – eventually – leaked this information into my novel.