Prologue
Ten Minutes to Midnight
Every day seemed the same to Peter Price. He would wake up after a night in which he had not needed much sleep and spend most of the day in a house in which the lights were always off and windows boarded up. He looked forward to the time in the day when he could go outside. There was never much to do in the back garden, but digging the soil made a change from episodes of Andy Pandy and Camberwick Green. He was eleven, but childhood already seemed like a memory.
It had been a long time since he had been out beyond the front door. His parents told him that he lived in Cardiff now, but he could never remember moving house. They just started talking about how they lived in Cardiff now, and there was never a moment of explanation. He wasn’t sure what to believe. He had never seen anything that told him that he was in Cardiff, but then he had no idea what Cardiff looked like. For all he knew, they had moved across town, and Cardiff was their cover story for being in London and avoiding all the sickness and death they kept talking about.
He never dared to go out. The world had been a scary place even before all the talk of sickness and death. His mother was always fearful of other people, to the point where she would cross the street at the sight of an elderly woman. There was never a need to go out into an unfamiliar town with fewer people, she said. The more important thing, if a war broke out, was that Cardiff was unimportant enough not to be a target for the first nuclear bombs.
If it wasn’t the threat of a nuclear bomb, it was sickness and death. His grandmother lived in Cardiff and visited London every Christmas. Since moving to ‘Cardiff’, however, he had not seen her for two winters. His mother said that the other grandparents had died, but he couldn’t remember attending a funeral. It was just like moving from London to Cardiff. One day they were alive, and the next day they weren’t. There was never the moment to feel sad, no matter how long time stood still.
He never saw his parents’ faces after they started talking of ‘H3N2’. When he asked his parents why they were wearing gas masks and insisted that he also do so, they told him that it was for safety. Nobody could say where sickness and death hid, or when a nuclear bomb might hit. They were ready for it, whatever it might be. It was perfectly normal, they said. Soldiers did the same thing in wars, after all.
On the few occasions he remembered his father spending a day at home, their only time together was spent digging up the back garden. All the digging was for a hiding house that appeared one morning as if by magic. It was like a rabbit burrow full of food he wasn’t allowed to eat and beds he could play on but not sleep in. There may have been games, but it wasn’t much fun to play against himself. Even when he won, he lost. There was a list of additions and alterations for the hiding house, but Peter never found the list. His father never made the changes, though the urgency to reinforce the walls or dig a deeper floor never went away.
In the darkness, it was easier for his imagination to make real the worlds in stories. At one end of the scale, the Yellow Brick Road and the Emerald City shone with dazzling brilliance. At the other, groans and crashes of metal and the shrieks of doomed humanity seemed confronting and visceral. His mother read The Wizard of Oz as a way of marking time. She would get to the end of the story, then go back to the start. She did it so often that the story came to make sense as an infinite cycle. Soon, its predictability became as reassuring as the thought that there really was no place like home.
Peter soon forgot his early revulsion at the thought of disasters. They began to fascinate him because they seemed so unreal. One moment, a ship would be cruising at full speed on a calm and clear night. The next, one small thing resulted in almost everybody freezing to death or drowning. A balloon would breeze across an ocean, only to burn up in seconds. It proved endlessly fascinating to think that the best ideas and inventions could be undone by so little. The sense that nowhere was safe was as chilling as it was thrilling.
At the same time, Peter found a strong urge to live and the equally strong desire to avoid death. His more sensible mind would take over in between those moments. Important and intelligent adults believed that the world was coming to an end. It was ten minutes to midnight, after all. They had moved to ‘Cardiff’ not long after the important people had said that it was seven minutes to midnight. Peter didn’t know who those people were or where the clock was. It was a strange clock that was always near midnight and could go backwards. Midnight sounded bad, however, and three extra minutes seemed like no time at all. Sometimes, he tried not to think about it. He tried, but it was hard to avoid the thought that the world was so close to imploding, and even less comforting to think that he had no answers.
After a while, he found it hard to remember life in London. He could remember his mother, though he needed longer to think of her eyes. On the other hand, he had never seen much of his father and had only the fuzziest picture of a man with dark hair and piercing ice-blue eyes. It showed how little attention he had paid to his surroundings that he had difficulty remembering what most of the old back garden looked like.
The only thing Peter missed about London was being able to visit his friend from time to time. He had no memory of the bright lights and famous landmarks, but he could remember being friends with a boy called Sam Prosser. If his family really had moved to Cardiff, he wanted to see Sam again. He called Sam but only sometimes got through. One time, Sam told him where his new home in Cardiff was but couldn’t provide directions. Even though he was limited to the confines of his house, Peter decided to investigate. He searched high and low, but he couldn’t find a map of Cardiff.
The last time Peter called, Sam came up with a plan. Peter needed to find his way to Roath Park. It would be easier to find the way to the Prosser household from there, Sam said. The idea of finding the park stirred in Peter’s mind night after night. He had no idea where ‘Roath Park’ was, let alone whether it was near or far away. The desire to escape grew stronger despite his fears of his parents’ reaction if he said anything suspicious. Fortunately, it was never his place to talk. His ideas were unimportant compared to all the talk of nuclear war and deadly diseases.
Eventually, a strange thought occurred. If little children should be seen and not heard, what would it matter if he was there or not?
Chapter 1
A Routine Matter
Saturday, 27 December 1969
On the third day of Christmas, Police Constable Geraint Gruffydd went to work. The first two days had been the busiest Christmas he could remember. Carols and presents reminded him why Christmas was a happy occasion, of course, but his parents-in-law still took getting used to. They were amazed at the sight of their only child being eight months pregnant, even though they had known that they were going to be grandparents for the same eight months. Matching their excitement had exhausted him more than travelling up to their place at Aberdare for Boxing Day. Even so, Geraint decided after returning that he needed his usual life, as much as life could be normal for a man who had left school only two years ago.
He found it when he marched into the brutalist concrete of Cardiff’s central police station.
Not even Sergeant Jones’s inability to sing ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ put Geraint off believing that he needed to walk his usual beat around Cardiff. Nobody else in the briefing room seemed to care that the station sergeant always started too high and had to squawk the top notes. The police station had been newly built as an unsightly concrete pillbox with cold and echoing walls. Older bobbies joked that this was because of that time Sergeant Jones led the relief in singing the national anthem. Despite the concrete walls, however, the neighbourhood dogs still howled whenever the sergeant sang. Moreover, letters to the Western Mail from students at the University College next door became increasingly amusing in their complaints about the police’s answer to Florence Foster Jenkins. Geraint imagined writing such a letter until Sergeant Jones crashed through the door with the plate of gingerbread he was singing about.
Geraint sat back and watched the other bobbies shout ‘wheyyyy!’ and dive in like a flock of pigeons. Even the Women Police Constables lost the veneer of civility and jostled for a slice of the sugary treat. Amidst the chaos, he was the only one who noticed how Sergeant Jones hurried through assigning duties for the day. The station sergeant was usually in a rush to get to the front desk so he could begin reading the day’s paper. Nothing was amiss until Geraint saw a vacant expression take over Sergeant Jones’s face while he was checking the constables’ appointments. ‘Yes, they’re fine, Griff,’ he said, tapping Geraint’s handcuffs before absenting himself from the briefing room.
Geraint tiptoed to the front desk to see the station sergeant on the phone. Sergeant Jones spent the longest moments ducking and weaving in his chair as if he were under attack. Whoever was at the other end of the line must have had the vocal equivalent of a hot poker. The station sergeant didn’t get beyond saying her name with the sort of broken repetition one heard from a scratched record. When Geraint stepped closer, he could hear the sharp screech of the caller’s voice.
‘He’s eleven, you s … Peter … When did he …? How? Where? Penyl … Don’t worry, Mrs P … I’ve got just the officer.’
Geraint wondered whether he ought to worry. Sergeant Jones had only managed the full sentence after looking at him. The moon-faced sergeant sighed and slumped when he hung up. His blond wisps could have thinned to baldness while taking that call. They looked threadbare after he scratched his head, wrote a name and an address, then handed the slip of paper to Geraint. ‘How are you with missing people, Griff?’
‘I’ve never missed one yet,’ said Geraint without blinking.
‘At the rifle range or …’ Sergeant Jones started before coughing himself back to sense. ‘We’ve got a report of a missing child in Penylan. Just get the details.’
‘Penylan?’ said Geraint. ‘Surely the Roath station could handle that.’
‘Yeah …’ Sergeant Jones trailed away before shrugging and unfolding his newspaper. ‘Dunno. Mrs Price called us directly. Roath must be busy.’
‘Just the details?’ said Geraint.
‘You know the drill,’ said Sergeant Jones. ‘Most children return home in a day. We just need to be notified and reassuring.’
‘I’m supposed to be on the beat, sergeant.’
Jones smiled diplomatically. ‘You can do that after, Gruffydd. This is your kind of job.’
‘Is it? Why?’
‘It’s an entirely routine matter,’ said Sergeant Jones, who handed him the address. ‘Take a WPC. PC Morris can handle the middle of town on his own for a while, that’s all. What’s the worst that can happen at Christmas?’
Geraint shrugged. ‘Ask King Herod, sergeant.’
Sergeant Jones’s voice bounced off the bare concrete walls. ‘Happy Christmas to you, too, Griff!’
The briefing room had emptied, so Geraint made his way to the WPC offices. The only person he found there was WPC 68, who was adjusting her bowler hat and cravat while she sang about putting on her makeup. He wasn’t convinced by what he saw. Despite missing the briefing, she didn’t seem bothered by her tardiness. Her chaotic cravat, wrinkled uniform and unathletic shape inspired no confidence. The only thing about her that looked tidy was her bob haircut.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
She flew across the room with a gasp of surprise. ‘Bloody hell!’ she exclaimed. ‘Could you at least knock?’
‘The door was open,’ Geraint said. ‘Have you been assigned to anything?’
‘I just got yur,’ said WPC 68. ‘Why?’
‘You’re working with me,’ Geraint said. ‘There’s a missing child in Penylan.’
‘Penylan? Isn’t that Roath’s patch?’
Geraint shrugged his eyebrows. ‘Ours not to reason why.’
WPC 68 squinted at him. ‘What?’
‘Charge of the Light Brigade.’
WPC 68’s squint intensified before she nodded slowly in recognition. ‘Oh. You’re PC Gruffydd!’
‘Yes?’ said Geraint, who didn’t see how quoting Tennyson was any cause for puzzlement.
‘I’m Lowri Lloyd, while we’re on the subject,’ said WPC Lloyd. ‘Thanks for asking.’
‘Yes,’ said Geraint. ‘Can you drive?’
‘Hhhhh-all right, then,’ WPC Lloyd said through a sigh. ‘I’ll sign the key out when I’m signing in.’
Geraint was sure that there were better WPCs at the station. WPC Evans, for instance, always seemed keen to leave the local intelligence office and do some work on the street. WPC Lloyd, on the other hand, looked as though she would much rather be anywhere but work. It was Christmas, he supposed. At least he wouldn’t have to work with her for long.
Sergeant Jones looked up from the front page of the newspaper. ‘Found someone to work with, Griff?’
‘WPC Lloyd,’ said Geraint.
‘Lloyd?’ mused the station sergeant. ‘I didn’t know she was in. Lucky you. Don’t get the flu while you’re out there.’
‘The flu?’
‘It’s a serious issue, Griff. Five of the relief are down with it at the moment. Edwards has had it for weeks.’
‘He’s not dead, is he?’
Sergeant Jones rummaged through the paper for the obituaries. ‘No,’ he said after running his finger up and down the whole page. ‘Seriously, though, the AA in London is missing a third of its switchboard staff.’
Geraint was about to suggest that the newspapers were getting to Sergeant Jones’s head, but he was distracted by the sound of jangling keys. There was an obvious joke he might have made about the AA’s understaffed switchboard being all the more reason why he was with the RAC, but the moment had passed. WPC Lloyd had begun single-handedly juggling the car keys on her way past the front desk. When Geraint looked, she was still juggling the keys and looking at him impatiently.
‘Coming, Griff?’ she said.
‘Of course. How hard can it be?’
Chapter 2
The Quiet Neighbourhood
Driving to one of the wealthiest parts of Cardiff to follow up details of a missing child was a punishment, in Lowri Lloyd’s mind. Without having to do anything official, Sergeant Jones was giving her what-for after yet another morning of hitting the alarm clock and sleeping in. The portly old station sergeant had probably picked her and PC Gruffydd because he wanted to look good. The police needed to look as though they cared, so they sent a WPC for the parents to gain that impression, and PC Gruffydd so the top brass could think they had done all they could.
The bobby who sat in the passenger seat had barely been on the job for six months. He wore his new uniform with such ease, however, as though he had been on the beat for years. His clean-shaven face and unfashionable military haircut, which was shorter even than those of aging constables and senior officers, made him look older than he was. The other policemen called him ‘the expert’, which had something to do with his ability to spot a crime where nobody else suspected anything. Lowri, on the other hand, assumed that it was more to do with that PC Gruffydd was an inch or two taller than the others, with a bulky lower jaw and hook-shaped nose that made his face look as stereotypically Welsh as his name. He was just another tall, beefy man who probably fancied himself only slightly less than Miss July from the Flower of the Valley calendar.
After a few years on the job, Lowri recognised that the policemen saw their work as some sort of boys’ club. The men all thought so highly of PC Gruffydd, she guessed, because they knew him from the rugby pitch. He might have stood more upright than the others, but he walked with the same swagger that suggested that the corridors were an extension of the rugby club dressing room. Some of her friends joked about how she wanted to join the police because she wanted to be around fit and athletic men. They shrugged off anything she said about how the bobbies saw her as a glorified typist and tea lady. Being the driver for a boy who quoted poetry as if he were reading for his English A-levels was only a small step up.
