‘Not that close. Maybe five or six miles. We used to live in Abercuawg before they built the dam.’
‘That’s the town that reappeared because of the drought.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Quite eerie, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Meici. ‘It is. Gives me the willies.’
‘Did you know the girl who disappeared?’
‘I wasn’t born then, but mam knew her.’
‘What about the boy they accused of murdering her?’
‘Goldilocks? She knew that family, too. She’ll tell you some stories you wouldn’t believe. The father was a lay preacher, called Ahab; always drunk. The mother ran out one Christmas.’ He turned to me. ‘You know what the father did? He put her shoes in the pig pen and told the children the pigs had eaten her.’
It was a small cottage built from the grey local stone. Meici turned into a rutted farm track and stopped the car. He got out and fetched a bag from the boot. He took off his trousers, rolled them up and put them on the back seat, then took a pair of short trousers out of the bag and put them on.
‘They were cut down from my granddad’s Sunday best,’ he explained. ‘I’ll cop it if I don’t wear them. I’m not allowed to wear long trousers. Mam says maybe next year when I’m thirty-five.’
I took the present out, a gift-wrapped, rectangular slab. ‘Happy birthday!’
Meici looked at me and smiled uncertainly. It was as if the meaning of the ritual escaped him but he did not want to let on. I pushed the present towards him, against his chest. ‘It’s for you.’
‘What is it?’
‘A present, of course.’
He blinked and then a smile began to spread across his face. ‘A present? You mean like in
It was my turn to look puzzled.
‘That’s a book I’m reading. It’s ever so good. It’s about a little girl who always sees the bright side of things. When things go wrong she plays the Glad Game. Like one Christmas she had a present, but it was a pair of crutches. Instead of getting upset she played the Glad Game and said she was glad because she didn’t need crutches. I play it too, sometimes.’ He clutched the present in both hands and stared in wonder. ‘I didn’t think real people got them.’
‘Maybe you should open it.’
He unwrapped the gift with hesitant, unpractised fingers, taking great care not to tear the paper. Finally, he held the box out at arm’s length and admired it. ‘A model plane,’ he said, eyes brimming with tears of joy. ‘I’ve seen them in the shops.’ He paused and then said, softly, in a reverie, ‘Best to keep it in the car. If mam sees it she might . . . she might . . . well, we don’t really have much room for it at home.’
We drove on and pulled into a hole in the hedge and parked in front of the cottage. In the space of a twenty-minute drive from town Meici’s confidence had drained away; now he seemed nervous and unsure. As we approached the cottage his stature diminished, helped perhaps by the short trousers, and he started to tremble like a dog who has fouled the lounge carpet and knows what is coming. He walked past the front door which was clearly only used ‘for best’ and round to a kitchen door that hung on one rusty hinge. Many years ago it had been painted green but almost all trace of that paint had gone. Meici pressed down the latch with his thumb and walked in. I followed. The kitchen smelled of camphor and anthracite smoke, stale bacon fat and unwashed flesh turning sour with age. His mum sat with her back to us, ram-rod straight at a simple kitchen table that had been set for tea. She wore black with her grey hair spread across the shoulders. She made no attempt to turn round. We walked round to one side, still she stared straight ahead. She was thin and bony with sallow skin and a bitter expression on her face. The atmosphere was frosty and even without knowing either of them I could sense something was seriously amiss.
‘Mam,’ said Meici, ‘this is my friend L . . .’ his tongue froze as he noticed something unusual about the supper scene. There was a condom lying with mute accusation on his plate. He gasped.
Meici’s mum articulated her sentence slowly and trembled slightly with repressed fury as she spoke. ‘What is this filth I found in your room?’
Meici opened his mouth to answer but nothing came out but a puff of air, the ghost of a sigh.
‘Answer me directly, boy, or it’ll be the worse for you.’
He stammered the beginnings of a word but could get no further. He pressed his thighs together and thrust his backside backwards in the posture a child adopts to control its bladder, but which I had never seen deployed by an adult before.
‘I’m waiting,’ said his mum.
‘It’s a French letter,’ he said finally.
‘It’s an engine of Satan,’ she corrected him. ‘Explain how this abomination came to be in this house.’
‘I . . . I . . . Louie gave it to me,’ said Meici, ‘I didn’t want it.’
His mum considered. The progress of her cogitations were revealed by a slight clenching of her cheeks. ‘A likely story! Do you remember what I told you would happen if I caught you messing around with harlotry?’
‘Yes,’ said Meici almost inaudibly.
‘Speak up, boy!’
‘Yes.’
‘Bring me my stick.’
‘No, please, Mam. Please.’
‘Fetch me my stick and go into the shed.’
‘Please send me to bed instead.’
‘You’ll go to bed directly.’ She turned and looked at him, her eyes glinted with anger. The look crushed all further protest and Meici went out. His mum gathered herself and rose slowly, and, still affecting not to notice me, walked out. A minute passed and I heard swishing sounds followed by yelps. When Meici came back in he was wiping tears from his cheeks with his sleeve and snivelling. His mum followed and said, ‘Now get to bed, and take Esau with you.’
Meici looked at me with an expression of desolation and took my hand. ‘Come on, Lou. We have to go upstairs.’
I had hoped to ask his mum about Gethsemane and Goldilocks but I found myself instead following him up the dim stairs to a little bedroom at the top. We trooped in and sat on the single bed, covered in a patchwork quilt coverlet. Underneath the window there was a little table covered with a cloth like a small altar. A photo of Arianwen was propped up and next to it were some hair slides.
I wondered what happened next. During my years as Aberystwyth’s only private eye I had been involved in some strange adventures but this was the first time I had been sent to bed without my supper.
‘Bugger,’ said Meici. ‘How on earth did she find it?’
‘Mums have a sixth sense for this sort of thing,’ I said.
‘She thinks you are my brother Esau. He died when I was three. We slept in the same bed. I woke up one day and he was stone cold. They called him Esau because he was born very hairy.’ He slid off the bed and kneeled on the floor. He looked under the bed. ‘Phew!’ he said. ‘At least she hasn’t touched my correspondence course.’ He pulled a book from under the bed and handed it to me. It was a textbook with a cover bearing a photograph of a suave-looking man wearing a jacket and polo-neck sweater, holding court to a group of attractive and admiring ladies. The title said,
‘What did he die of?’
‘Who?’
‘Esau.’
‘He was smothered in the night.’
‘Who by?’
‘I don’t know. A goblin. They never caught him.’
‘A goblin?’
‘Yes. That’s what the policeman said. The front door was locked but goblins have magic keys, you see. They
