stopped. She was about to turn back when through a gap between two overfull wheelie bins she noticed a lane, just wide enough for a car. She followed the track as it wound around the side of the houses. Immediately past the narrow back gardens it dipped, then rose slightly into a clump of mature beech trees. Through the rain the lights of windows glowed.
The property was a three-storey Edwardian villa, which looked as if it had been a vicarage or small local manor. It now appeared down at heel. The smells of dampness, rotting wood and compost hit her as she removed her helmet. Most of the front garden bloomed extravagantly, the path edged by flower beds overflowing with salvia and lobelias. Like the house, the garden had once been loved, but now ran amok.
She imagined that the land that had once belonged to the house had been sold to build the council estate. Surrounded by newcomers, the old house seemed to have turned in on itself. Cat climbed off her bike. Her throat was dry and her head buzzed. But this was not withdrawal. It was nerves. From taking one long step into the past to try to free up her present. She stood still, uncertain, undecided.
At the front of the house was a porch crammed with ferns that partially obscured the doorway. The glass of the door was veined with elaborate patterns and clouded over from the heat inside. She could still turn back. Cat stood motionless for a moment. The decision was taken out of her hands, as the door opened.
Cat struggled to trace her old friend in the man stood in front of her. He looked smaller than she remembered, his sad brown eyes circled by black: shadowed water in a well. The black linen suit and white shirt looked crumpled, as if he had just pulled them on. He wasn’t wearing any shoes.
He took Cat’s hand, guided her into the porch where he embraced her fiercely. Unsure at first, she reciprocated. He held her for a few seconds, then pulled back, holding both her hands. She looked past him to a wide staircase with an impressive carved banister, which gave the entrance a feeling of grandeur. Beneath it framed posters for computer games were propped against the wall.
He mumbled greetings, and something about a cup of whatever she wanted, but she held up her hand to show she was all right.
‘She’s gone. My daughter’s gone.’
His voice now was choked, desperate.
She was going to make some answer, but he turned abruptly and went off down a short corridor that led to a family room. Cat followed. On the floor, a home cinema system rested on a rough stone rostrum. The few pieces of art on the walls had clearly been chosen with care. One looked like a Kyffin Williams original. On the left side several muted abstracts hung in an unevenly spaced line.
The room’s modernist theme was contrasted by four mahogany tables, each of which held framed photographs. These scenes had been arranged in chronological order from left to right. Martin in a hospital gown, smiling broadly, presenting a wrinkled, snub-nosed baby wrapped in a towel to the camera. Next to him was a girl with a flushed and beaming face. Martin, in a dark winter coat, pushing a beaming toddler on a swing. Martin in the background, hands in pockets, looking apprehensive as a blurred pre-teen girl on a bicycle rode past him. The final photo of Martin’s missing daughter was a head-and-shoulders photo of her as a teenager. She wore a grey sweatshirt bearing the logo of the Welsh College of Music and Drama, her hair swept back into a complicated chignon, at odds with her casual clothes, and her face was set in a firm smile.
Next to this portrait stood another framed photograph. Cat recognised the scene immediately. It would be a cold day in hell before she forgot her seventeenth birthday. Her mother had insisted that she go out with ‘some friends’. Her only friend from school was Martin. There they were, the odd couple. She looked like a kick boxer after a bout, head hung under her hoodie. His face