The Retreat(69)

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.’