After Brock (28 page)

‘Morning, young man!' the latter said, with the play of a smile (rather than an actual one) on his round, red-cheeked face, ‘unusual sort of time to be taking a walk!'

His face expressed only too readably the unsuitability, the sheer unlikelihood of Pete's gear for a pre-dawn Welsh mountain road. ‘Well, it's not a walk,' Pete answered, breezily all things considered, ‘I'm just heading home after a night out.'

‘Quite a night out too, by the looks of you,' said the man. To Pete's discomfiture he now switched off his car engine, ‘did you enjoy yourself?'

‘Well… I found a good place to kip down,' and that was no more than the truth, was it now? ‘which was all I was wanting by then.'

‘After your fight with your mate over a girl? You lost, I suppose – and took yourself way up here to lick your wounds?'

‘Sort of!' A little less than the truth, but on the right lines, more or less, ‘in a way!'

‘Perhaps you gave as good as you got? Let's hope his wounds are crying out for a good chunk of beefsteak on 'em as much as yours?'

‘I'm not sure,' answered Pete, his hand involuntarily going to his face which indeed felt a mess still, whatever the overnight improvement, ‘I don't know how he is now.' The man's interpretation of his condition flattered him more than somewhat, made him feel he'd come of man's estate, at least in the world's eyes. But he didn't want to hear any more of it. He could not suppress a violent shiver. Just after six on a January morning in mountain country doesn't make for comfortable loitering in talk, and temperature was certainly below zero.

‘Buried his body somewhere nearby, have you? Your mate's?'

‘No, of course I haven't!' said Pete, realising as soon as he'd spoken that his indignation was not wise. Also it made him sound as if he really had disposed of Sam, along with his own shit-soaked underpants, somewhere on the waterfall road. Anyway, his tone impressed the man unfavourably enough for him to slip a hand into his jacket breast-pocket and take out a printed card. This he flashed at Pete with a professional's expert gesture, following it by enunciating himself the all-important words on it: ‘Jim Maddox, CID. Hop in, young sir, if you will be so obliging!'

Pete was too bemused, and too grateful for the warmth of the Volvo's interior, not to be obliging, though he also appreciated he couldn't very well not comply. He felt curiously light-headed, what's more. His whole body was now telling him that he hadn't slept long enough to be properly ready for any challenges the day might bring. ‘Jim's my dad's name,' he heard himself say, to his own surprise, as the guy started the car up again.

‘That's nice to know? A Tanat Valley man, I presume?'

‘No, he's not!'

‘Know you're out here? And not in your bed about to get up for breakfast and school?'

‘No! Not at all!'

‘I reckoned not! Probably doesn't even know you and your buddy go out with flash girls and then brawl about them?'

This was true. ‘No, he doesn't know that. He's a well-respected accountant in Leominster.'

‘I can well believe it,' said the CID man, ‘and I expect he'll be very far from pleased to find out what his son has been up to behind his back miles away from where he should be. What will please him, I've no doubt, is seeing you at home in one piece. If that's what you can be said to be. You look a right dog's dinner to me!'

‘Yes, he'll be relieved to see me!' Pete agreed. He could see lights ahead of, as well as below, the road: the town that had been last night's destination, home of the mysterious Don Parry. Fires were now being lit in households to start the morning, fathers would be polishing shoes and boots, mums setting out breakfast things on kitchen tables, maybe even frying mushrooms and sausages. And, of course, making tea (he could use a cup of that himself, right now). Newspaper boys might be starting their rounds, bringing tidings of ‘Aliens Have Landed in…' Well, very possibly right here or as near here as damn-it – here in – the lightness in his head made him, uncharacteristically, hesitate over the little town's name. But Jim Maddox was telling him something…

‘You're aware, are you, that all behind us, between Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant and Llanarmon, and on all roads over to Corwen, there are scores – bloody scores – of my colleagues, plain-clothes and otherwise, plus a few of our military friends just for good measure.'

Fear stirred in Pete's stomach.

‘Thought not! The road I've just come down is chocker with the force. Thanks to our efforts no one's allowed to stray onto Cadair Berwyn or Cadair Bronwen at all. Not so very far from where you had your kip, I'd reckon… Any idea why there's all this fuss?' His tone was the light casual one he must have used, with success, on many a dubious-looking character on many a chase. Pete fell for it.

‘The sightings?'

Jim Maddox gave him a quick, interested, appraising glance. ‘To coin a phrase!' Jim Maddox said, ‘but then everyone else has been bloody coining it since about…'

‘Half past eight yesterday evening?' ventured Pete. The man mustn't think him (that favourite term of Sam's) a moron.

Another dart from the assessing eyes. ‘Exactly! Do you know I wouldn't be surprised if, along with the lassies, news of aliens arriving here didn't play a part in your nocturnal fun so far from home base? I didn't arrive here myself till gone half past bloody midnight. None too pleased at having been summoned out here either… These godforsaken mountains are, at this very moment in time, as big a hive of activity as anywhere in Britain. Probably as anywhere on the bloody globe, since we all seem to be thinking in inter-planetary terms…'

‘And have you,' Pete struggled to sound calm, mature, and what he thought of as ‘natural', ‘have you actually found any…' What word would it be most dignified to use here? Well, why not the one Detective Inspector Maddox had himself employed? ‘aliens?'

‘Just a few of the blighters. Here and there, you know. Usual types. Green skin, blue hair, three horns growing out of their foreheads, forked tails.'

‘In other words – nobody?' Was he disappointed or relieved? Or just hearing what he'd have expected all along.

‘Sod all as yet. Not that I'd be allowed to tell you owt about it if we had found 'em. Anyway it's not been for want of trying, or for want of time,' he glanced at his watch, ‘or money, come to that. What's being spent on this bloody lark, at a time of national financial crisis, is anyone's guess!' He snorted with derision. ‘Now in a moment we'll be in the main street of the metropolis that goes by the outlandish name of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant. Me, I'm heading onto Llanfyllin. Can that be of any use to you?'

‘It could be a lot of use,' Pete said with a rush of enthusiasm he couldn't control, ‘though Sam may still be down right here.'

‘Sam? The lad you've been fighting with?'

‘Yeah!'

‘Well, I think we might leave him to steam in his own belliger-ent juice down here in Llanrhaeadr. It'd certainly be against my professional instincts to liberate you just so's you can have another set-to with this local Sonny Robinson… I didn't quite catch your name, I'm afraid.'

Best not to give his real one. But he didn't feel like telling a complete lie either. This was a decent man he was lucky enough to have encountered. Well, Mrs Richards, at
The Mikado
, had confused him with one of the Brats, the one who in the past had irritated him most, so why didn't he give the name of the other one? ‘Robin,' he said, and then added, ‘Price'. Practically every other person in The Marches (not only Trevor, Susan and Sam) was called Price, so he would be believed.

Enshadowed houses, still wrapped in the night's cold, with roof-tiles whitened by frost, showed themselves on either side of the street… ‘Well, Robin, on to Llanfyllin, where I am going to meet up with reinforcements for this madcap operation, but where I'm told there's an excellent café, serving its own bread, famous for miles. We might grab ourselves a bit of makeshift breakfast, and I'll try to grab you a lift back to Leominster. It is still Leominster, isn't it?' He implied that someone as patently shifty as Pete might well have changed his destination already.

‘Yes, of course, Jim!' Bit forward to use a first name to an inspector from Scotland Yard perhaps, but Pete had warmed to him. And the man himself didn't appear to mind, seemed pleased rather than otherwise. Clearly he resented at having been sent all the way out here – on what he thought a fool's errand which would devour already ill-stretched funds.

Several times on the way to Llanfyllin, Jim Maddox slowed down to talk to fellow-cops in cars travelling in the opposite direction, to cheer them on, or inquire if they'd had any fresh news from Bala or Llandrillo in what he called the ‘night's shenanigans'. Pete found it difficult to construct any clear picture of these. Often the operations mounted sounded as complex as for a Soviet invasion: men sent to Bala, men sent to Corwen, men just arriving in Llangollen, men who hadn't turned up in Llanderfel, but others well in place in Llangynog and Llandrillo, ‘and a bloody tough bunch too, thank the Lord. Unlike some of the other wankers they've chosen to send along!' Perhaps the arrival of non-human beings, the very sight and sound of whom were total unknowns, made more demanding and alarming task than facing any number of Russians. To deal with whom you could at least have found interpreters.

But then after Annwn this whole business – though a true schoolboy's dream, and full of matter to arouse the curiosity – felt less important than Pete would ever have guessed it could.

By the time they got to Llanfyllin, the morning was beginning, in stripes of green and orange at the base of the sky to the east of the little town, in the direction of Oswestry and the North Shropshire plain.

The café-cum-bakery, for which, after parking the Volvo, Jim made a beeline, assailed the two visitors warmly and wonderfully with its smell of yeast, sugar and coffee, and was already quite full, its clientele at this hour entirely male. Even with so much else to worry about, Pete was possessed by a child-like fear that the delectable-looking doughnuts would have all been snapped up before their turn came round. Jim Maddox, with his manly manner, vocabulary, neat, dark (if cheapo) suit and telltale badge, commanded immediate respect, and while Pete kept a place for them in the queue, he stepped out of the line to exchange words with men who seemed positively honoured by his doing so. Only two customers away from the counter at which a young man and woman were frantically meeting the orders, Pete caught his own name in one of these exchanges, well, not his own name exactly but ‘Robin'; he'd be heartily pleased to see little old Robs again after this weird time away! He glanced to his right, and saw two heads, Jim's and another man's, jerking forward. Good old Jim, he must be finding him a lift. Doubtless too was telling the possible driver, who'd clearly already noted Pete's facial scars, that he'd suffered in a punch-up over a lassie last night, as all lads will. The new man grinned – in fellow-feeling, Pete thought. He was maybe thirty, dark wavy hair, broad-shoulders, black beard of the short-haired kind fringing the face from ear to ear, and slightly too much of a tummy for his years. Probably a rugby player who didn't always keep himself in trim as he should, and enjoyed celebratory or commiserative rounds of drinks a bit too well. Pete liked the look of him, hoped that he would be the man taking him at least part of the way home.

It turned out he was actually going all the way to Leominster itself. ‘You've found yourself a guardian angel, Robin,' Jim Maddox said, ‘isn't that right, Joe?'

‘Don't think I quite deserve to be called that,' said this Joe, ‘but I'm happy to play the part for the duration!'

So there it was: the two of them travelled down to Herefordshire for an hour and a half, in Joe's cream-coloured van with the words Watkinson Poultry and Fish and a horrible little picture of a chicken, done in red and black, on its sides. ‘It's not my own vehicle, actually, but a good mate's,' Joe apologised, ‘it's got far more space for my goods today than my own old banger would have!' He was noticeably disinclined to talk, had nothing of the bluff friendliness of Det. Insp. Maddox. Rather he appeared sunk in reflections that periodically he had to haul himself out of, and with some effort, to give necessary attention to his duties as a driver. For his part Pete felt overcome by an exhaustion greater than any he'd ever known.

Only when the van had got onto that old friend of Marches folk, the A49, did this van driver rouse Pete with words… ‘Well, Robin, you look a bit readier for the civilised world than when I took you on to please that plain-clothes dick friend of yours,' he said, on entering the rail-and-ribbon-development that is Craven Arms, ‘and I reckon you've well earned all the snoozes you've been having. But you're not going to feel too much better, are you now, till you've hit the bathroom and bed at your home. And my advice to you, pal, especially after hearing you speak – you've a nice, honest, frank sort of voice, you could go on a radio show with it – is this: Don't, please don't, not any more! Give it up!'

He himself had a nice voice, lively, rich, recognizably Welsh.

‘Don't what?'

‘Go chasing after girls you have to brawl for! You think all that's your passport to manhood, don't you, but it's no such thing. It's giving in to the weaker side of you, if truth be told.'

In all the many errors of Pete's vision of life so far the notion that Joe was repudiating had never figured. But he wasn't going to say so.

‘Some of us,' Joe went on, giving him a meaningful sideways glance, ‘and I say “us” as probably shouldn't, are cut out to be virtuous. And if we are, then it's virtuous we should be. No matter what this rotten modern culture of ours says.'