The Retreat(70)

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.