Read 2003 - A Jarful of Angels Online
Authors: Babs Horton
2003 - A Jarful of Angels (5 page)
Will sighed. Weren’t there always such stories when children went missing? Gypsies came in for a lot of unwarranted stick and from what he’d seen they always had enough kids of their own, no need to steal any.
He read on avidly,
The small skeleton had been buried beneath the kitchen floor of the villa. Señor Martinez went on to say that many of the villagers thought the disappearance suspicious at the time, and now more than eighty years later they had been proved right. “Even though the murderer can’t be brought to justice, it shows the truth can’t be buried forever.”
Will drained his cup of chocolate, ate the last morsel of
churros
, licked his fingers and garnered the last grains of sugar from the plate. He folded the newspaper in half and slipped it in his pocket.
Outside the rain had stopped. The dark clouds had moved on and the sun burned fitfully above the church. His mind, abandoning the newspaper story of the skeleton, was roving back over events that had happened nearly forty years ago. He was thinking of a case that he’d been involved in back in the Welsh valleys, the only major case which he’d been unable to solve. And after all these years he realised that it still rankled with him that they’d never had a definite suspect, never been able to bring anyone to book. They had never found the missing child, alive or dead.
He supposed that nowadays it would have been different, with all the DNA tests and scientific methods they might have made more headway. But even then without a body it would have been nigh on impossible to prove anything substantial.
It must have been murder of course. Kids didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth.
Will stepped out of the café and turned into a narrow alleyway, a short cut he’d taken many times since he’d lived in this northern Spanish town.
The dreary houses on either side of the dark alley were crushed up too tightly together. They had blistered paintwork, crumbling masonry and splintered shutters. And yet, as he looked upwards towards the crack of blue sky above, he was taken aback. He’d never really taken much notice of the place before, now he was amazed by the beauty of it.
Despite the fact that sunlight would hardly ever penetrate this dark backwater, high above his head there were glorious splashes of colour everywhere, the rusting balconies were bedecked with vivid scarlet and orange flowers. Startling hues in the dusky gloom. Burgeoning clusters of the deepest purple bougainvillaea, the agonising beauty of damp violets, trailing from pots and jars of all shapes and sizes.
He stood pondering the extraordinary sight for several moments. He’d always considered himself an observant man and yet somehow he’d walked through the alley with tunnel vision, never paused before or looked skywards. It just showed that you could miss things under your nose, or in this case above it. He walked on, stopping in front of a small dusty-windowed junk shop optimistically bearing a faded sign in Spanish, ANTIGUEDAD.
A faded notice on the door read
Cerrado
. Shut.
He’d often walked past this shop, too, without ever giving it a second thought. Now, however, he peered curiously through the bleary window. The shop held little in the way of antique treasures, it was full of worthless old junk, cluttered with piles of rubbish festooned with cobwebs and dead flies. There was a pair of rusted, dented candlesticks, with thick wax encrusted on the twisted stems. Wicker baskets held an assortment of chipped crockery and yellowing table linen, nothing of any historical or aesthetic interest at all.
Except for one thing. Will’s eyes were drawn to something at the back of the haphazard display. He stared in fascination at the statue of a young child. Beneath years of dust and grime the young face stared fearlessly out at the world. The immense skill of the sculptor had imparted a glimpse of unbridled glee about the partly opened lips, an undiminished optimism in the tilt of the head. The dimpled arms were outstretched, palms turned upwards. It was a child with the chubby limbs of a Renaissance cherub. The tiny toes, one of which was broken off, were curled in an ecstasy of delight.
It was the only treasure among the rest of the dross, and whoever had made it had worked with tremendous skill and devotion, with an absolute love of their craft.
Intrigued and wanting to get a closer look, Will tried the handle of the door but it was locked, indeed it looked as though it hadn’t been opened in a very long time. He stared at the statue again, mesmerised. It was quite remarkable! How it came to be among all this rubbish he couldn’t imagine. Then something stirred in his mind. His thoughts were drawn back for the second time that morning to the past. Dear God! It seemed that everything he saw today reminded him of that bloody case!
For a moment he was transported back to the Welsh valleys. A hot afternoon when he’d gone to visit one of the witnesses, one of the last people to see the child alive. She was an elderly woman who had lived in a big house overlooking the river. He’d sat talking to her in the garden, a most beautiful garden. The lawns had been mown to perfection; all around them had been the soothing sound of falling water from a hidden fountain. The humming of contented bees, the sharp heady smell of nettles, and the bitter-sweet smell of the black coal earth. And there in that garden there had been a collection of the most delightful statues, each as breathtakingly beautiful as the one in this dirty old shop.
In his mind’s eye he could picture the old woman quite clearly, but as much as he racked his brains he couldn’t for the life of him remember her name. Damn it! He hated it when his memory failed him. He knew it would plague him all day and probably half the night too. If her name didn’t come to him eventually, he’d have to dig out his old police notebooks and look it up.
The hand of a master had sculpted the statues in that garden, like the one before him now. He remembered that he’d been flabbergasted when she’d told him that she was the artist, the sculptor of all those wonderful figures. She’d told him too, that she’d lived for many years in Spain. And that must be the answer to this mystery before him now. He knew that this statue was without a doubt one of hers. He’d put money on it.
Will checked his watch, he’d have to step on it a bit to get to the clinic on time. He took a last look at the statue and smiled sadly to himself. He would have loved a child of his own. It was the greatest sadness of his life that he and his wife had not been blessed with children, but fate had decided otherwise and nothing could change that.
As he walked on his way to the appointment, his thoughts turned again to home. Home! It was funny how he still thought of it as home even after all these years.
He’d moved away from Wales after he’d retired from the police force. He’d sold his house in Cardiff and travelled around Spain and France for almost a year. Eventually he’d found this town and decided it was a place where he could spend the rest of his days. He’d settled down in a waterfront apartment, learned Spanish, made a few acquaintances and he had never had the urge to go back. Until now. Looking at that chipped statue had for some reason disturbed him. It had evoked such vivid memories of his homeland. For the first time in all the long years away he felt an inexplicable and immense feeling of homesickness.
He couldn’t get the statue out of his mind. Something about it had unnerved him. It had stirred up all kinds of long-buried memories, fragments of half memories, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what significance they held.
After the excitement of the first days of snow, things went downhill fast. Mrs Tudge came out of the Old Bake House and took a tumble.
“Apex over base,” said Bessie Tranter.
“Arse over tit,” said Fatty.
She slid on her big fat bum all the way to the bottom of the hill and knocked over Moany Haddock.
“Sent him flying,” said Bessie.
“Came a right fuckin’ cropper,” said Fatty.
It took two big men and the Brewery horse to get her on her feet and a half pint of brandy to get her moving again. Moany Haddock had to get himself up. Nobody would help the rent man.
The town set to with a vengeance and dug its way out of the snow and struggled to get back to normal. The steps and paths lost their beautiful whiteness, they were spoiled, blackened with warm fire ashes to stop people slipping.
The shops opened again for trade. The smell of hot new bread, doughnuts and custard tarts wafted up from Billy Edwards’ dad’s shop. The caretaker stoked up the school boilers, cleared the playground of ice, and defrosted the bell and the teachers, and the doors, to the children’s dismay, reopened for learning.
Bessie was kept at home for two whole weeks with her chest being bad. They only got to see her through the window. They took turns standing on a bucket mouthing and waving. Mrs Tranter wouldn’t have anyone in giving her germs, especially that filthy Bevan boy.
Behind the window Bessie was like the Queen of Sheba, propped up with fluffy pillows, drowning under comics and colouring books, chocolate and Lucozade.
Each morning Iffy was pushed out of the back door, muffled up against the biting cold. She met up with the boys down at the hump-backed bridge. Iffy and Billy wore balaclavas and itchy woollen mittens, mufflers and horse liniment. Their chapped lips were glued together with Vaseline. Goosefat stuck their vests fast to their aching ribs. Fatty still wore his khaki shorts and sandals, topped off with an old army jacket. The icy winds whipped up the valley and tore at Iffy’s and Billy’s school macs until their bare knees were chapped and sore and tingled all day long in the chalky sour-milk heat of the schoolroom. Chilblains hammered at all their toes and their ears were furnaces of icy pain.
The snow quilts slid down the roofs and were never again as beautiful as they had been that first morning.
The town clock stayed stubbornly silent.
Fatty was right about Mrs Medlicott coming back to the Big House. At night, from the upstairs bedroom window Iffy watched the smoke spiral up from the long-disused chimneys and saw the electric lights burning behind the big arched windows. And Nan, catching her looking, told her to stay right away from there because Mrs Medlicott was a dangerous old woman who couldn’t be trusted where babies and young children were concerned.
The town tipped towards Christmas.
The shops filled up with mountains of sultry tangerines and polished chestnuts, dusty brazil nuts, cob nuts, wrinkled walnuts, almonds, sticky dates, boxes of cheese footballs and Pompadour fans. Selection boxes and comic annuals tantalised them from the newsagents’ windows. The lights in the butcher’s blazed until late into the night. Bleary-eyed rabbits dangled on cold hooks. Goose-pimpled turkeys hung head down in the windows.
In the Penny Bazaar battered boxes of tired-looking crackers were stacked from floor to ceiling. Paper snowmen with concertina’d legs danced in the icy draughts when the door was opened.
The town clock sprouted holly and behind the back of the Mechanics, Dai Full Pelt sold turkeys with three legs.
Georgie Fingers built a grotto in his house and dressed up as Father Christmas. There was no charge to sit on his knee under the mistletoe and take a present from his sack, but no one did. Except Lally Tudge.
Every year Jack Look Up was the first person to put a Christmas tree in the window of his house at the end of Inkerman Terrace.
“God love him,” said Mrs Meredith as she and Iffy passed the house. “I can see him now, as if it was yesterday, lifting up his boy…beautiful little fellow, only a nipper then he was – no mother, she died giving birth to him – his little hand stretching up to put the fairy on the top.”
And every year since Jack had buried his son, he had decorated the tree the same as he’d always done.
After school Iffy and Fatty stood outside his house for ages looking at the tree. It was the most beautiful tree they had ever seen. It was darkly green and mystical. There were tiny red candles in silver holders that Jack lit with a shaking taper as the day turned to dusk.
They watched the bright dancing flames, flickering in the twilight, lighting up the gloom of the damp bailey. Each branch of the tree was draped with tinsel, shimmering silver and gold. There were shiny baubles that reflected their wide-eyed faces. There were lanterns and chocolate decorations wrapped in foil paper. And a fairy on the top with a sparkling wand and no knickers. A fairy whose eyes shone and winked wickedly in the twinkling light of the candles.
It was magic that tree. A wishing tree.
Time after time they stood together on the bailey looking up at Jack’s tree, stamping their feet to keep warm.
“I wish,” Iffy said, “I wish I wasn’t a norfan.”
“I wish I was,” said Fatty.
Iffy stared at him with disbelief. “Fancy saying a thing like that!”
“Well, just half an orphan then.”
“You can’t be half an orphan, Fatty.”
“I’d like it to be just me and my mam…”
He never talked much about his dad. Iffy knew that his dad beat him with a stick, so bad once that his T-shirt stuck to his back with dried blood. She’d seen the marks. Red and purple wheals.
Mrs Bevan was famous for being about the pubs all hours of the day and night. She drank like a fish, only cider not water. Fatty’s dad had never done a full day’s work in his life since he’d left the army.
“Make another wish, Iffy.”
“It’s the same. I just wish I had a mam and dad. I’ve never even seen them only in photographs.”
There wasn’t even a proper photograph of her mother, just a cutting from the newspaper with a blurry picture of a woman who looked as though she’s been startled by the flash of the camera.
“If I can’t wish to be an orphan, then I wish I had a dog,” said Fatty longingly.
“Wishes don’t come true though,” she said.
“They might,” said Fatty, and winked.
The fairy on the tree winked wickedly back.
Will Sloane was dying. Time was running out fast, of that there was no uncertainty, uncertainty lay only in knowing how long he had left. At his appointment at the clinic, the solemn-faced specialist had confirmed what deep down Will had known for many months.
Dr Garcia had shrugged uncomfortably when Will had asked him how long he might expect to live. “Days? Weeks?” Will had asked.
“A twelvemonth at the most,” Dr Garcia had replied quietly, avoiding Will’s eyes.
Will needed to get his life, what was left of his life in order. He had always been an extremely practical man, a logical man with a dislike for disorder of any sort. After seventy-odd years he had little to show in the way of possessions. He was not a sentimental man and he had kept few reminders of the past. He acted swiftly. He put his apartment up for sale. The proceeds would go to his favourite charities for he had no living family.
Looking round the comfortable apartment he decided that the furniture could be easily disposed of. There were a few good-quality pieces that he would offer to neighbours. The rest, along with his clothes, he would leave at the local animal charity shop run by two retired English schoolteachers. His few personal effects he would sort through and dispose of. And then he was going back home to die.
He had always planned to live out his days in Spain but now that he knew those days were numbered, that time was ticking away too quickly, he made other plans. The feeling of homesickness he had experienced that day outside the junk shop had grown and he knew that he had to go back. He had a terrible yearning to see his homeland for the last time, to smell the sweet smell of coal, to feel the incessant soft rain on his skin. To stand in the twilight and watch the green hills turn to violet, to watch the big cold moon rise over those darkened hills.
As Will busied himself with sorting and clearing, despite his efforts to put it from him, the memory of the statue in the dusty antique shop would not leave him. Disconcerting thoughts about the unsolved case were never far from his mind and kept intruding upon his daytime reveries.
The guest bedroom was the last room in the apartment that he had to clear. He found his collection of old case notebooks in a cupboard. He had always been a meticulous taker of notes. These would be of no use to anyone else so he set them aside on the bedside table ready for disposal. On the top shelf of the cupboard, pushed to the back he found an old chocolate box. He lifted it down, sat on the bed and prised open the lid.
He had forgotten all about the box, it must have been years since he’d last opened it. An envelope lay on the top. It had once been dark brown but was faded now with age; there were a couple of photographs inside. He slid them out carefully. A black and white picture of him and his wife taken on their wedding day. Two hopeful young faces looking at the camera. She was laughing, holding tightly onto his arm, a horseshoe on a ribbon dangling from her small hand…
Christ! Within five years of this photograph being taken she was dead and buried. And soon, soon he would be joining her…
The second photograph was one of his wife, taken standing alone on a beach. In the background he could see children playing down at the water’s edge, the funnel of a ship in the distance. At her feet lay an overturned bucket, a spade and a crushed sandcastle. He turned the photograph over. She had written, ‘Alone again. Barry Island 19 – ’ The date had been erased by time. No doubt he’d been too busy on a case to go with her, he’d been busy on too many cases as far as his marriage was concerned. He’d been on a case the night she’d been taken ill.
He threw the photograph down with a violence that surprised him. That was the official line. He’d said it so many times he’d almost come to believe it. He’d been on a case the night she’d been taken ill. It was a lie! A lie he’d grown to believe. He hadn’t been on a case, he’d been with another woman, a woman he hardly knew, and he still hadn’t forgiven himself. And soon, soon he would be laid to rest, if that were the right word, in the black soil on a windy Welsh hillside.
Next he picked up a moth-eaten, faded velvet pouch that his mother had given to him on his tenth birthday. It had once been a glorious scarlet colour. He pulled apart the shrivelled strings that drew it together and tipped it up. Five alley bompers clattered into the palm of his hand.
Alley bompers! These had once been his pride and joy. Five large silver metal marbles, the king of marbles in his youth.
He lifted a sheet of yellowed tissue paper that disintegrated at his touch. Underneath it lay a battered book, the faint gold writing on the spine almost obliterated. He opened it up and the musty smell of bygone years pervaded the room. It was a copy of
Hamlet
. He was quite sure it wasn’t one of his own books. He had boxed those up and they were ready to go to the charity shop. He couldn’t work out how this book had got into the box or where it had come from. He turned a yellowing page. It was a library book and the date stamp declared it to be nearly fifty years overdue. He made a rough mental calculation of the fines due. Well, he made his mind up that as he was going back to Wales, he’d return the book!
He turned it over in his hands. Something was niggling him about it. He closed his eyes for a moment and let his mind wander. He had a vague recollection of standing in a bedroom opening a box. He’d been with Sergeant Rodwell. That was it! They’d been searching the missing child’s bedroom. He’d stood looking down at this book for a long time and wondering, then he’d slipped it into his jacket pocket thinking that it must have some significance, some bearing on the case, only he hadn’t been able to work out what it was.
He laid the book down and lifted out a card. It was a funeral card, the type mourners attached to wreaths and flowers. His hands began to shake as he turned it over and read the smudged words written on it in a childish hand.
Then he picked up another photograph. Four faces looked out at him from across the chasm of many years. Four young faces captured for posterity in a black and white photograph.
He picked up the rolled-up poster from the box. He slid his finger inside the rubber band that held it together and it perished beneath his touch. He unrolled the poster carefully; it had been made by enlarging the original photograph. Thousands of posters like this one had been pinned on lamp posts and in shop windows from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. Three of the faces in the photograph had been deliberately blurred, but the fourth face was ringed in black. Beneath the photograph, the faded writing read, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?
And in almost forty years no one ever had…
Over the past days he had become fixated with this case. He supposed it was because he was a rational man and his mind was trying to tidy up unfinished business before he died.
It was pointless though even thinking about it. It had all happened such a long time ago. It was ancient history. An unsolved crime like hundreds of other unsolved crimes. Dead and buried. Yet he knew he had never really let it go. He supposed he had kept all these things, these sad mementoes of a lost life because it was the one mystery that still intrigued him. He knew – he’d always known – that there was something that he had overlooked. Something that had probably been staring him in the face.
He was going back to Wales, going back to die but, before he did so, he had to go over everything about this case. He was determined that at long last he would try to lay this mystery to rest. He replaced everything carefully in the box, stood up wearily from the bed and picked up his old notebooks from the table.
As the sun went down and coloured the room with an eerie orange light, he sat back on the bed and slowly turned the pages of one of the notebooks, pages that were as thin and crisp as onion skins. Sitting in the growing darkness he became immersed again in the past, a past he couldn’t let go of.