I nodded.
'So it's true then? He's alive?'
'Yes. I came as soon as I could.'
She touched my cheek. 'You're a good man, Louie.' Then she turned and I followed her down the corridor to the kitchen at the back.
'It's funny, I always suspected it. I had a feeling ... they say a mother always knows. Mind you, it's always good to see you, Louie, whatever the occasion.'
The kitchen was filled with warmth and I sat down at the table while Marty's mum stirred some stew on the stove. There was a rifle on the table, half-way through being cleaned. We both looked at it at the same time and then our eyes met.
'It's no good you looking at me like that.'
'Bit late in the year to be hunting rabbits, isn't it?'
'Bit late in life, too, that's what you're thinking, I know.'
'Or perhaps you're hunting something a bit bigger?'
'This one's no bunny rabbit, that's for sure.'
I put my hand on the gleaming oily barrel. 'This isn't the way.'
She stopped stirring and stood motionless at the stove and then said, 'He took my son, Louie. Sent him off on a cross-country run in weather that even the SAS on the Brecon Beacons don't go out in.'
She brought over the stew and I ate hungrily. Through the steam swirling up from the spoon I could see the smiling picture of Marty on the mantelpiece above the fire. It was a washed-out colour snap of him on a beach at some south-coast English resort, seven or eight years old.
'All the same,' I said, 'you should leave it to the experts. I hear there's going to be a posse.'
She scoffed. 'Bank tellers, postmen, ironmongers, filing-clerks ... They'll try and take him alive, the fools.'
'A hunt is no place for you. It's not right.'
'Right or not right, I don't care any more, Louie. I'm getting old now and I've got no one here to comfort me. I lost a good husband to the mines and a good son to the games teacher. It's lime to even the score.'
'You'll be wasting your time, he could be anywhere between here and Welshpool.'
'It's not so difficult if you know where to look. He'll make for somewhere sacred. No different from a wounded fox. Somewhere that means something special to him, from long ago. Some place he cherishes, that he holds dear from a happy time before everything got ruined.'
'Sure, I said. 'But no one knows where that is.'
After supper we talked until late. I told Marty's mum about what I'd seen, about the fall of Valentine, and how the Meals on Wheels had eclipsed the druids. She scoffed and warned me not to pay too much attention to outward appearances. Druids or the Meals on Wheels, underneath they were all the same. Like shoots growing in different parts of a garden that come from the same tree. The one to really watch out for, she said, was Mrs Llantrisant, even though she was still in prison.
At midnight, the clock chimed and Marty's mum looked slightly startled.
'Oh my word!' she said. 'Almost forgot. Come! we must be quick, he usually starts at midnight.'
Ignoring the puzzled look on my face she beckoned to me to follow her. She doused all the lights in the house and switched on a torch and led me up to the attic bedroom, a small garret that looked out over the hills south of Aberystwyth. The night was dark and featureless, even the lights of the scattered cottages having been extinguished, and only the ceaseless blink of the lighthouse beyond Cwmtydu reminding us that there were other people alive tonight.
'Wait for it now,' she whispered.
We stared out, holding our breath, waiting and watching for I knew not what, the lighthouse the only point of focus in the darkness. And then it happened.
'Oooh! Here we go,' hissed Marty's mum.
Something happened to the light from the lighthouse. Something that I had seen only once before in my life, that I struggled to find words for, seen once many moons ago at a meeting of children whose purpose was now lost to me. A shadow temporarily obscured the light, like a cloud sliding across the face of the moon. And then it passed and was followed by another smaller shadow. And then a bigger one. Marty's mum nudged me and pointed further to the south where the object that had temporarily eclipsed the sun of the lighthouse threw a shadow, one huge and measured in miles across the face of the darkened hills and all at once I realised in astonishment what it was. It was a bunny.
'It's Mr Cefnmabws,' explained Marty's mum in a hushed voice. 'The lighthouse keeper. He's a dissident.'
The county-sized rabbit waggled its ears across the benighted hamlets above Llanfarian, and for a moment I was transported back to my seventh birthday party where a conjuror had done a similar thing with the shadow of his hand on the kitchen wall.
'What's it all about?' I asked in disbelief, as the rabbit was joined by three others who chased it.
'It's his way of publishing the truth,' she said. 'About the death of Mrs Cefnmabws on Pumlumon.'
A shadow-chase ensued across the hills south towards Llanrhystud.
'He had a printing-press and a radio station but they closed it down. This is his only way.'
The three rabbits caught up with the first and started beating him. Then the shadows disappeared and the light returned to its usual steady blinking.
'That's your lot for tonight, he'll be on again tomorrow. Doesn't do it for long in case someone notices.'
We stayed there staring out into the night even though Mr Cefnmabws's passion play had ended.
'What's he trying to say?'
'He wants an inquiry, doesn't he? He wants them to ask Mrs Bligh-Jones the question, the one they dare not ask.'
*
The caravans were strung out like plastic diamonds on the cheap necklace of the River Rheidol. I sat in the car for a while, listening to the radio, and waited for her to go to whichever caravan she lived in. And then I waited some more and got out.
Dew was forming on the bonnet of the car and the town was asleep. I walked up to her trailer and a man appeared out of the shadows in a way that suggested he had been watching me.
'Do you want something, mate?'
I looked at him. He didn't look the type to be accosting strangers at this time of night. He looked about sixty, with a scared face and old, tired eyes.
'What's it to you?'
'I'm the security. You don't live here, what do you want?'
I walked up to the caravan and knocked. 'Just visiting a friend.'
'Miss Judy doesn't accept visitors after midnight.'
'That's funny, last time I came here you said you hadn't seen her for weeks. Why don't you shove off home before you get hurt.'
The man reached out to grab my coat and I shoved him back viciously. 'Look, old man, whatever they're paying you, it's not worth it.'
The door opened and Judy Juice stood there in a silk dressing-gown.
'What's going on?'
'Someone snooping, Miss Judy.'
I turned to Judy Juice. 'Sorry to trouble you, miss, but I was wondering if I could talk to you about Dean Morgan —'
Her eyes flashed scorn. 'Do you know what time it is?'
'Yes I'm sorry, miss, but it really is important. Someone's life could depend on it ...'
She narrowed her eyes and considered me. 'Cops?'
I shook my head, said, 'Private investigator,' and held out a card.
She took it and read and then looked at me again, this time with a sense of recognition. 'You're the guy with the little girl.'
