Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

A few doors up there was no trace of Dai Jones’ the newspapers, and when I went the short walk to Dean Street I discovered that the County Cinema building had become an unsavoury-looking nightspot called the Octagon.

So it was in a queasy mood of mingled nostalgia, sorrow, and apprehension that I went into the police station, announced my maiden and married names, and asked if I could speak to a senior member of the CID.

“May I inquire what about, Mrs. Anderson?”

“About the female skeleton that’s just been discovered on Bangor Mountain. I was in Bangor during the war; my uncle was a jeweller in the High Street. The shop’s still there. Nearly sixty years on.” So, surely, there was no one left I could hurt. “If you haven’t been able to identify the skeleton, I just might have some helpful information.”

A young-looking detective chief inspector was there within minutes, and took me into an interview room.

“A young woman?” I asked him, as we sat down. “About five foot six? Blond hair, though I don’t suppose there are any of those still around.”

He didn’t say yea or nay, but he looked cautiously interested and asked me to go on.

“It’s a long story, and it may have nothing to do with the skeleton.”

“Of course. But I’d like to hear it.”

I recalled it as I told it. The story of Megan and Dai and Gladys Lewis and the American soldiers.

But I began with the BBC Light Entertainment department, in order to lament aloud the less-than-complete attention my cousin and I had given the real-life drama.

“Perhaps you can imagine the excitement of one’s radio heroes suddenly there in the flesh. I mean, my uncle actually got to know the cast of Happidrome, and invited them home. My cousin and I used to go to sleep with the live sounds of their signature tune floating up from the sitting room. Even the American soldiers couldn’t compete with that!”

“American soldiers?”

“That’s right. I’m afraid I can’t remember precise dates, how long they were there, or how many of them, but they were there that summer — nineteen forty-two, it must have been — when Megan Evans disappeared.”

I can see Megan now, her health glowing through her pancake makeup, her enhanced blond hair piled high in the front and flowing down the sides of her lovely, animated face à la Veronica Lake (I had to explain that reference to the DCI), the beloved locket she always wore bouncing between her big breasts as she leaned over to kiss us in succession in greeting or farewell. I once heard the word blousy under my grandmother’s breath (I remember it because neither Bea nor I knew what it meant and long pondered it together), but she was no more immune to Megan’s charm than anybody else, and after all (my grandmother said), she had been chosen by that lovely boy from the newsagent’s to be his girl.

And whatever happened in the end, Megan and Dai did have a lovely relationship for a while, the sort that at one and the same time included other people in their laughing affection and proclaimed them exclusive to each other. The only jarring note was the frequent presence of Gladys Lewis, another local girl, but as lumpen and unattractive as Megan was sexy and charismatic. (Neither of those words was current in 1942, but I used them because the DCI seemed so young.) Gladys nursed an unrequited passion for Dai, which used to amuse Bea and me as much as it made us uncomfortable, the way her large mournful eyes scarcely ever left his face. But neither Dai nor Megan was put out by Gladys’s devotion, they were so secure in each other.

Until the arrival of the American soldiers. And we had no idea they had affected that happy relationship until Bea and I, finding our indoor occupations suddenly grown stale, disobeyed our grandmother one warm early evening when she was out, and went defiantly up Bangor Mountain in the face of her injunction to keep away.

And came upon the beast with two backs.

And saw that half of it was Megan.

It was what modern politicians might call a double whammy — the beast itself, and half of it being so familiar to us. If it hadn’t been Megan, I think the beast itself would have troubled us more than it did in the aftermath of our shock. We knew, of course, in theory, what it would probably look like, but in those days there were no magazines or TV programmes or movies to fill out our timorous imaginings, and to find out the truth of it so totally unprepared had to be a trauma.

But one immediately on the back burner as the man tumbled sideways and we saw who the woman was.

She must have had plenty of sangfroid, our beloved Megan, because even in that horrendous situation — her legs apart and what was between them hidden by her crumpled skirt through luck rather than management — she put a finger to her lips as she stared gravely from one to the other of us. I remember we both nodded violently before we turned and fled.

Neither of us spoke until we had skittered almost to the foot of the mountain, and then Bea muttered, “Grandma has to have done that!”

“Only twice,” I reassured her. “Once for your father, and once for my mother.”

“So why should Megan... ?”

“I don’t know.”

Although we had managed to pick up the technicalities, we had no concept of desire, of sex for its own sake.

“Girls of ten and twelve, which my cousin and I were, were too young in those days to get excited about men in real life; it was our dream heroes that absorbed us. Which is why we didn’t pay all that much attention to the GIs. Until we found one of them with Megan on Bangor Mountain. And then... well, it was too awful for us to be able to think or talk about and we threw ourselves even more enthusiastically into the arms of our radio heroes. Metaphorically, of course.”

“Of course. I presume it was so awful because you caught them in flagrante delicto?”

“Yes. And it was awful too because of Megan going steady with Dai and Dai expecting to marry her.”

“Dai wasn’t in the forces?”

“No. He was a bit of a wizard with gadgetry — I suppose today it would be electronics — and although he worked at a local RAF station, he was a civilian in what was called a reserved occupation. If you were in one of those, you weren’t called up.”

The next day, in silent apprehensive accord, we’d taken ourselves off to the milk bar.

At first it was a relief to see that they were there, and on their own, but we were still in the doorway when we realized all was not well between them: There were no smiles, no movements towards one another of the hands. No conversation, just Megan with downcast eyes, and Dai’s eyes pleading as he gazed at her.

So although she’d told him something, she hadn’t told him that. And he hadn’t found out.

Without a word between us we crept out of the milk bar and slunk home. But I remember that on the way we passed Ronnie Waldman, the head of BBC Light Entertainment, and his glamorous wife Lana Morris, and were distracted from our concern for Megan and Dai.

“This is interesting, Mrs. Anderson, but how are we moving towards the old bones?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s so much coming back to me... That evening Megan came to the flat and asked our grandmother if she could take us for a walk.”

Sometimes the three of us had gone up Bangor Mountain together, but that night Megan led us another way, into a little local park. None of us said anything until we were lined up on a seat with Megan in the middle. I’ve just remembered that the sun was in my eyes and I was glad I couldn’t see Megan properly when I turned towards her. As soon as we were settled, she began to speak. She thanked us in a soft, sad voice we’d never heard from her before for not having said anything about what we’d seen, then told us she and Dai had broken up.