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  Against the walls the dog continued to howl, the sound of it entering his head, giving actual pain with the piercing quality of the note. He forced himself to concentrate on his find, hoping it was the object for which he had been searching.

  At first he thought he had found a necklace of large white beads then he gave a low growl of horror and fell back onto the grass. It was a hand. A skeletal hand.

  Holding a hand to his mouth as sickness threatened, he backed away then turned and ran to where he had entered. His back felt unbelievably chilled, as if it were illuminated in ice ready for an assailant to use as a target. Scrambling, uncaring about being seen, he almost fell out of the ruin and staggered drunkenly down the slope.

  * * *

  As Lydia picked up the dog again, she heard the noise of someone or something crashing through the bushes and she gripped the dog tightly as it struggled to escape from her. For the second time she couldn’t hold it and it jumped from her arms and ran to the wall and pressed its small body against the stones, shivering in terror. Wanting to run but determinedly brave, she ran back towards the crashing sounds, intending to grab the dog before making her escape from whatever was about to appear.

  The shadow bursting out of the trees was not unexpected, yet when it happened it was terrifying. She had almost arrived at the place where the dog sat shivering, still pressed against the stone wall, aware that whatever it was had almost reached her. The sounds increased in volume, the trees and bushes began to sway and then the apparition was upon her, huge, looming up suddenly out of the darkness and pushing her aside before running around, past the castle gates and down the slope in the direction of the sea.

  Lydia was disorientated by the man’s appearance and the push he had given as he passed that had swung her round. Staggering, she fell into the undergrowth, her feet slipping on the steep slope. Down and down she slithered, her arms reaching out to grasp something to slow her fall, branches tearing cruelly at her skin. When she came to a stop she lay there afraid to move and it was a while before she could pull herself up. She saw that she had landed at the exact spot where Molly had fallen.

  Defying her fears, convinced that the terrifying apparition was up there waiting for her, imagining she could hear his breathing, she climbed painfully up to where the dog now lay, staring wildly into the darkness. She picked it up and listened. There wasn’t a sound. Slowly she walked to the castle entrance and stood, staring through the darkness towards the castle mound and the distant sea, but everywhere was silent. The man, whoever he was, had been swallowed up in the darkness leaving a silence that was more frightening than the crashing of his footsteps through the bushes as he ran towards her.

  Lydia forced herself to stay calm, soothing herself by soothing the dog, and walked quickly but without running, down the slope to the gate where her aunt was anxiously waiting.

  ‘What happened, fach? I thought I saw somone running away.’

  ‘There was a man and he pushed me down the slope,’ Lydia began.

  ‘Not hurt are you?’

  ‘No, just scratched. I don’t think he was trying to frighten me away. I don’t think I was in danger, big as he was. It was he who was frightened. He was running blindly, escaping from something that had terrified him.’ She handed the shivering animal to her aunt and said slowly, ‘Auntie Stella, I think I should go and see what it was that frightened him. I’m sure it wasn’t the dog howling, or me wandering up there.’

  They jumped as footsteps came around the corner and for a moment they froze, Stella hugging the still trembling dog, wanting to run, but unable to move.

  ‘What are you two doing out this time of night?’

  The two women looked at each other and sighed with relief. It was Glyn’s voice.

  ‘Thank goodness you’ve come, bach,’ Stella said, ‘Lydia is talking of going up to the castle, now, this minute, mind. Looking to see what frightened that man into knocking her over.’

  The disjointed explanations were begun again and, when he understood Lydia’s determination to go, Glyn willingly agreed to go with her. ‘But I wish you’d let me go alone,’ he pleaded. ‘You two stand here and I’ll whistle to let you know I’m all right.’

  ‘No, Glyn. I’m going in. There’s something going on up there and I want to see what it is.’

  ‘Not Molly and our Tomos this time then?’

  ‘A man it was. Big, and running away from something he’d seen.’

  ‘Or done!’ Glyn warned. ‘You can’t take chances. Lydia. Heaven alone knows what had frightened him.’

  ‘I’m going to look,’ Lydia insisted.

  Stella found a second torch and Glyn and Lydia set off up the slope and, finding the man’s rope still hanging up and in through the window, climbed inside. The torches, creating strange shapes and making the walls appear to move, added to Lydia’s fear, but she refused to show Glyn how afraid she was.

  She walked a distance away from him, shining her torch on the grassy ground, briefly penetrating the darkness of the silent rooms, hardly looking and certainly not pausing to identify anything the beam revealed. She was so scared she wouldn’t have recognised a group of terrorists armed with machetes and machine guns if the wavering light had revealed them.

  ‘Come over here,’ Glyn whispered.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Lydia said defiantly.

  ‘Come with me,’ Glyn insisted. ‘We ought to stay together.’

  She walked to where he was waiting at the entrance to a barrel-vaulted store room, and he took her hand. A cursory look into the store room with its grille-enforced window, then they walked through the open corridor towards the entrance, where once guards had stood and forbade entrance to all but chosen visitors. In front of them, a little to the right of the entrance were the irregular remains of the kitchen walls.

  Looking through the broken stonework, Glyn’s torch beam exposed the disturbed earth and slowly, and with some trepidation, they moved closer to investigate. Although the room was open to the sky, and only a partial shell of what had once been the large kitchen with its three fireplaces, Lydia felt something close to claustrophobia as they stepped through the entrance. She could have jumped the lower areas of the walls with ease, yet it was like walking into a trap. She knew that if Glyn had not been with her she would not have had the nerve to do more than approach that doorway and wave her torch about.

  Like the man who had been digging, they did not comprehend at first. Neither could ever have imagined finding a body, and their minds refused to accept that this was what they were looking at. For seconds neither spoke.

  ‘It has to be a joke,’ Glyn whispered hoarsely. He reached out to hold her. ‘But I don’t think it is.’

  Lydia instinctively moved closer to him, pressing herself against him, grateful for the warmth of his body close to her own. ‘Glyn, who can it be?’

  ‘We have to get back and phone the police. It’s up to them to find out.’

  Without words of intent between them they both knelt on the damp ground and offered a prayer for the dead person that he might find peace at last, now his secret death was known.

  Slowly, no longer afraid, they turned to leave. Lydia’s torch swung around the scene, wondering about the person whose life had ended in such an unlikely spot. That it had been a tragic end was certain, but whether the truth would be revealed was doubtful. She didn’t know how long it took for a body to reach the state of this one, but guessed that it must be many years.

  Some need for respect forbade her looking again at the body. Yet she no longer had the sensation of menace. With the disturbed turf and the small piles of earth surrounding the partially open grave, it was no longer a place of danger and shadows, fear no longer crackled in the air. The place was filled with poignancy, and sadness.

  A spade had fallen to the ground and beside it a garden fork, its tines still sticky with soil, and near its handle, as if fallen from it, was a man’s knitted hat. The torchlight reflected a pom-pom, green and unac
countably gay in the gradually weakening beam. Still in shock, and again hardly aware of what she was looking at, Lydia swung the beam back to the direction they would take and, with Glyn’s hand in hers, returned to where her aunt and the now calm dog were waiting.

  When Stella was told of their discovery, she wept. ‘Poor, poor man, all alone up there and with no one to mourn him,’ she sobbed. She put the dog down to hug her niece, and it at once scuttled through a hole in a hedge and ran up the path and disappeared. ‘It wasn’t lost at all,’ Stella said in amazement, ‘he was just making sure that poor man was found.’

  Once the police were called, the night passed in complete confusion. Questions bombarded them, none of which had answers, and it was dawn before Lydia wearily made her way home.

  Telling her parents was somehow less exciting that she might have imagined. She had intruded on someone’s life and death and it was not a story to enjoy or make into some sensational news. Telling Molly was even less so.

  ‘I feel so sad, that lonely dark place hiding such a tragedy. And only a few weeks ago, before the castle was closed for repairs, people were wandering around, peering and prying into all the corners, joking, laughing, admiring the magnificent views, while all the time that poor man lay undiscovered and unrevenged.’

  ‘Perhaps whoever killed him had returned, but why? What could he be wanting to dig him up for?’ Molly queried.

  ‘It didn’t look like that to me. I think someone was searching for something else and just happened upon the body and made a run for it.’

  ‘That man, the one running from the castle and who knocked you into the bushes, any idea who it was?’

  ‘None. It happened too quickly. There was a rush of sound as he pushed through the trees, running along the path, then he was on me, in such urgency to pass, grappling, knocking me over in his haste to get away.’

  ‘You’re sure it was no one you recognised?’

  ‘How could I? I was bending down trying to catch the dog.’

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as a strange coincidence that Glyn was there so quick?’

  ‘Out for a walk he was.’

  ‘Often goes for walks at night, does he? Past your auntie’s house? Nothing down there but a lane leading to the quarry.’

  ‘Molly! You aren’t suggesting it was Glyn who was digging up there, are you? He was just as shocked as I was when we found it.’

  ‘He didn’t lead you to it then?’

  ‘No, of course he didn’t!’ Lydia said firmly. ‘We found it together.’ But doubts crept in as she relived the scene: her wandering off and Glyn calling, insisting they stayed together, waiting for her before walking through the open corridor past the storerooms and down towards the kitchen block. Could it have been he? ‘Of course it wasn’t Glyn!’ she repeated vehemently. But whether she was trying to convince Molly or herself she was no longer sure.

  All that day and several following, the police were to be seen going to and from the castle. The high gates at the entrance had been opened and crowds gathered around the gate leading into the grounds, opposite Stella’s house. The police were digging up the whole of the kitchen floor in the hope of finding further clues to the tragedy. Lydia learned from the newspaper reports, that all they found was an old oiled jacket and a box containing money and a few oddments of jewellery which, it transpired, were part of the haul from a series of robberies committed several years before.

  * * *

  Two days after the body was discovered it was identified as that of Rosie Hiatt, Matthew’s sister. By a coincidence, Lydia had a letter from Matthew that same day. He was walking in the Brecon Beacons, the letter posted in Brecon itself. The date written on the letter was the day before the body was found and it began with apologies.

  ‘Dear Lydia,

  Please forgive me for going off so suddenly, but I had an appointment to see someone and, well, the weather was so mild and winter seemed postponed so I couldn’t resist spending a few days up here. I’ll be back on Thursday and will call then to make my apology a personal one. I’ll book for us to eat at the Chelsea Parlour, shall I?

  Please forgive my rudeness and be ready for me when I call at seven-thirty on Thursday.’

  He had signed it,

  ‘affectionately yours,

  Matthew.’

  ‘How will I tell him?’ she said to Molly. ‘How can you break such news gently?’

  ‘What makes you think you’ll have to tell him?’ Molly queried. ‘That’s for the police to do surely? They’ll want to see his reaction for sure.’

  ‘Molly! You aren’t saying he killed his own sister? First it’s Glyn, now its Matthew. What about me? I was only five at the time, mind, so I’d have had a job to hit her over the head.’

  ‘Was that how she died? Being hit over the head?’

  Lydia shrugged. ‘The police haven’t said.’

  Molly was right and when Lydia showed Matthew’s letter to the police they arranged to see him first and break the terrible news. ‘If by any chance you do see him before we find him,’ Detective Superintendent Richards said, ‘please don’t tell him anything. Just tell him the police want to see him.’

  The Detective Superintendent stayed and talked to Lydia for some time, ‘I’m trying to help you get the horror of it out of your mind by discussing it fully,’ he explained kindly. ‘Tell me everything you remember about that night, who you saw, what you remember about the man.’ He touched her hand reassuringly. ‘It’s best, believe me. If you can clear your mind of any details that might return and force you to relive the scene, you will soon be free of it.’

  He came again later the same day and admitted he was off duty but anxious to help her.

  ‘Is there anything you can talk about regarding the days before the discovery of Rosie Hiatt’s body? Did you see anyone hanging around the castle? Hear anything?’

  Lydia shook her head. She hadn’t mentioned Molly’s thoughts on the convenient arrival of Glyn, although Richards mentioned that himself.

  ‘I think I’d have known if Glyn had been digging at the castle. The smell of disturbed earth is quite strong. It would have been on his clothes, like when my father has been working on the allotments,’ she explained.

  ‘An allotment? Perhaps he saw something up there,’ the policeman frowned. ‘I think I’d better have another word. Now don’t forget,’ he said as he stood to leave. ‘If you think of anything further that you haven’t told us, call me, Detective Superindendent Richards, speak to me personally, that way you won’t have to keep repeating everything to half a dozen people, right?’ He patted her shoulder. ‘Now don’t worry about it. Happened many years ago it did. Rosie Hiatt was a prostitute, did you know? Attract violence some of them, easy to choose the wrong client it is.’

  Lydia’s thoughts went out to Matthew. Surely he wasn’t aware of his sister’s reputation? With this revelation, the discovery of her body, probably murdered, would be a double blow.

  * * *

  When Matthew alighted from the bus near the sea, the wind was blowing the tops off the waves, scattering litter along the streets and making people rush for cover. The sky was full of small clouds that hurried along bustled impatiently by a fierce wind. On the horizon, darker clouds threatened rain. He went to the hotel where he had phoned to retain a room, and when he asked for his key, the landlady said he should go first to the police station.

  ‘What for?’ Matthew smiled.

  ‘I don’t know, I was just told to tell you to go straight there as soon as you arrived.’

  ‘A cup of tea first?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Best you go straight away,’ she smiled sadly. ‘They’ll get you a cup of tea up there for sure.’

  Matthew frowned, but leaving his rucksack near the desk he went to the police station, where he was interviewed by Richards.

  Two other policemen were present and, after a few questions about his whereabouts during the past days, they told him that a body had been found which they belie
ved to be that of his sister, Rosie.

  ‘Rosie? My sister, Rosie? But she went off with someone, how could it be her? Where was she found? What happened to her?’ he asked, as he stared white-faced at the policeman. He collapsed into a chair and covered his face with his hands. ‘Rosie? It can’t be. There has to be a mistake.’ He looked up, his face ashen. ‘She disappeared and with no news of where she went. Where has she been living?’

  ‘We have reason to believe she never left, sir. It seems likely she died at the time she disappeared. Your sister didn’t go anywhere, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But if she had an accident, why wasn’t she found until now?’ Matthew was shocked and his hands and forearms shook as he took the cup of tea they provided.

  The policemen looked at each other. His reaction was no act. News of his sister’s death had been a complete surprise and his grief too seemed genuine.

  ‘Your sister’s body was found buried inside the ruined castle.’

  ‘What?’ There was pain in Matthew’s eyes as he stared up at the superintendent.

  ‘Someone appeared to be trying to dig up her remains, but we think he was disturbed, possibly by a dog howling outside. Anyway for whatever reason, he ran away and it was two people who went to investigate who made the sad discovery.’

  As realisation that she had been murdered dawned, Matthew was filled with grief. ‘Murdered? But – what happened?’ he wanted to know, asking the question over and over as the policemen pressed him about things that seemed to him, irrelevant.

  ‘We aren’t certain what happened to cause her death. That will take a few more days,’ he was told. ‘But there’s no way she could have buried herself, so we are naturally suspecting foul play. Your sister’s death was probably murder.’

  ‘Who found her?’ he asked. ‘The two people, who were they?’