‘She was pregnant,’ said the sergeant. ‘And murdered. Held down by her shoulders with her head in the stream. You heard what the constable said. Which one of you?’
‘We found her there, dead.’
‘He found her,’ said the constable, hand fisted, lifted as though he could hardly restrain himself from hitting Christo in the face. ‘Or so he says. But she wasn’t dead, was she—not yet?’
They stood with the big, scrubbed wooden table between them—six, bunched close together, quivering with fear; and The Law. ‘She told me she was in great trouble,’ said Christo, ‘and asked me to come there.’
‘And you’re the one who got her into great trouble.’
‘No, I never touched her.’ He did not know that he straightened up his thin shoulders and spoke out boldly a truth about himself. ‘I wouldn’t harm anyone so helpless and innocent.’
‘So someone else got her pregnant,’ said the sergeant, ‘but it’s you she turns to.’ Tell me another one, his voice insinuated.
‘She thought he was terribly good,’ said Rohan. ‘She thought he was a sort of saint.’
‘She thought he was Jesus Christ,’ said Primmy.
‘For Christ’s sake—Jesus Christ!’
‘Because of his face and his beard,’ said Melisande. ‘And because of himself. It’s true; he would never hurt anything or anyone. She could understand that, she could recognise it. So she turned to him.’
‘And he turned her—over on her face with her head in the water.’
‘You’ve got the note,’ said Rohan.
‘A bit of old printing, all wet. How do we know he didn’t write it himself?’
The girl had been dead some hours, the doctor had said, by the time he saw her. She had left her home at about half past two. If this young man’s story were true, she might well have waited down by the cave for quite a long time before he came along; and after all, these were not the only young men in the valley. They had eliminated most of them, but… Facts stirred uncomfortably in the constable’s mind. Idris Jones, Dai Jones Penbryn’s boy—his name stank not at all sweetly in the nostrils of the local farmers. A man from Llangwyn had gone the rounds last night with brief, routine questions: Idris had said simply that he’d been in the yard all the afternoon, never saw nothing, never moved from the farm. Nothing to confirm that. On the other hand… A bit awkward it was for Constable Evans: Dai Penbryn was a good friend of his and a deacon of the chapel. A better way, he thought, than starting a lot of special enquiries, might be to bring Idris into it as though as an outsider and just keep an eye on his reactions. He suggested: ‘The children from Penbryn—they’re always all over the place, up the mountain, down by the river. They could have seen something: people coming and going.’ He suggested to the sergeant, all innocence: ‘Why not take this lot over there and ask them?’
‘Good idea,’ said the sergeant; not innocent at all of the tortuous methods of conducting police enquiries in isolated communities.
So they all went over to Penbryn and stood in the farmyard like children at a game in the school playground, divided into two vague clumps, confronting one another. Beneath their feet, the cobbles were clean and swept by Idris’s labours yesterday; running down to the stony garden of rough grass, patched with bare earth, ridged where the children’s feet had kicked or drifted along the ground, starting or stopping the swing. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Jones glancing dark and uneasy at the sullen face of his son, Idris, Mrs. Jones darting looks of angry unreason at the Hippies with their beards and long hair, the girls carrying each a small child, in the Welsh fashion, almost weightless, in the folds of a shawl, formed into a sort of sling at the left shoulder, brought round under the right arm and tucked in at the waist. Idris shuffled a little, head bent, scuffing back grit with his feet, like a hen sorting grain; Ianto and his friend Llewellyn stood side by side, serge coat-sleeves touching, twitching hands signalling danger; Blodwen faced uncertainty thankful that chicken-hearted Nancy was not here to give secrets away; Gwennie and the inevitable Boyo Thomas the Post, gazing up with large, scared eyes. The heat hung like a haze, heavy with the scent of the hay, the sour tang of the empty silo pit. The sergeant laid the situation before them briefly. ‘All we want to know is—did any of your family see anything—anything at all, never mind what—yesterday afternoon?’
Everyone waited for everyone else to speak. He prompted: ‘You young ones, for example?’