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

“I can’t love him enough, can I, chicks, if I could do that?”

“You got to love the American soldier pretty quick,” Bea said.

“I don’t love him.”

Then we sat in silence while Bea and I digested another shock: The knowledge that that could happen without love. I didn’t look at Megan, but out of the corner of my eye I could see her hand playing feverishly with her locket. It was very unusual, that locket. Bea and I admired it so much we used to ask to hold it, the small round of gold framed in gold coils with a tiny emerald frog set in its centre. It had been left to Megan by her grandmother, and inside were tiny photos of both her grandparents, which she told us she had had to poke in with a pin, it was so fiddly.

“This is relevant to my story, Chief Inspector.”

Eventually I asked Megan if she would be seeing the American soldier again. Doing that again, I suppose is what I meant.

I remember she took quite a long time to answer, and then said, “Yes. If he wants to see me.”

She didn’t make any excuses, try to soften it. Looking back now, I think there was a sort of nobility about that. And just before we got up and went home, she said, “Two people I do love are you both. That’s easy.” Then she got up off the seat and stood looking down at us, making us meet her big troubled eyes. “Do you both still love me?”

I think I spoke first, but the two of us assured her eagerly that of course we did, and I’m sure Bea meant it as much as I did.

“I wish I could ask her, Chief Inspector. I wish she could be here with me now, she’d probably be more help to you. But she died last year.” And that’s something I shall never get over.

Megan said, “Thank you, chicks. And if I... if maybe you don’t see me anymore, you’ll love me still? You won’t stop?” There was a sob in her voice and I saw her breast heave (it’s astounding, what the catalyst of the bones is telling me I remember) and we were both even more fervent in our assurances of undying love.

But then, alas, we were taken actually to see one of our favourite programmes being recorded, and when we recovered from the excitement of anticipation, event, and aftermath, we discovered that the Americans had moved on, Megan had disappeared, and Gladys Lewis was sitting with Dai Jones in the milk bar.

He didn’t seem to be taking any notice of her — that was our one consolation. So perhaps she had just sat down at his table without being invited. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed her; his head was down in his hands. For the second time we stood still in the doorway, and for the second time we turned without a word and went out, when we saw Dai was allowing Gladys’s extended hand to lie on his without shaking it off.

“As far as I could understand at the time, Chief Inspector, Dai Jones was given a bit of a hard time of it by the police. If Megan had managed to keep her secret from him, he wouldn’t have been able to cite the GIs in his defence, and he had to admit that he and she had broken up against his will because just about everyone in town apart from BBC Light Entertainment knew what had happened, and were concerned for him and Megan both. The police even interviewed Bea and me because of being told how friendly we were with Megan, and when they asked us straight out if she’d perhaps been friendly with an American (like so many of the other pretty local girls) we did say yes, we thought she had, and that she’d sort of suggested to us that she might go away. I honestly can’t tell you whether or not we’d worked it out — that if she’d gone off because of a GI it would take the heat off Dai — but I think that must have been what happened, because they left him alone after a while. And there wasn’t a body, there wasn’t a shred of evidence that Megan Evans was dead. Until now, perhaps?”

Again the DCI didn’t look a yea or a nay, but he asked me if I knew what had happened to Dai.

“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “He married Gladys Lewis. Not right off. When I came back to Bangor at Christmas I didn’t hear anything about it. But by the next Easter holidays they were engaged, and they were married in the summer. My uncle told me... oh, it must have been ten years or more later, that Dai had had a heart attack and died. Chief Inspector, if there was a locket like the one I’ve described among the bones, would you tell me?”

“If there was a locket like the one you described among the bones, Mrs. Anderson, there’d have been a closeup picture of it by now in the national press.”

“Ah... Thank you for telling me.” And for telling me the bones couldn’t be Megan’s.

“And thank you for telling me about the locket, Mrs. Anderson. If your Megan always wore it, you could have given us some useful negative information. Our inquiries would, of course, have dug Miss Evans up eventually... ” The DCI coughed, and asked me to excuse his unfortunate choice of metaphor. “And without what you have told me today we might well have spent time considering her at the expense of other more likely candidates for ownership of the bones. Although we will still, of course, have to retain her on our list of suspects.” And here, for the first time, the young detective chief inspector smiled and then laughed. Which I thought was pretty stoical of him, seeing as it looked like he had just lost the straw which had appeared to be within his grasp. “May I get you a cup of tea?”

I declined, because suddenly, having imparted what information I had, I was eager to acquire more.

The Joneses had been chapel, and I went straight off to the most central one, directed by the PC on the desk.

It was easy. There in the register was the evidence of the marriage of Dai “work of national importance” Jones and Gladys “shop assistant” Lewis in 1943, and the minister told me for good measure that Evan Williams, son of the minister who had solemnised the marriage, was alive and well and living in Penrhyn, just outside the city.

So by five o’clock I was in his immaculate semi, drinking tea, having told him on his doorstep that I was the niece of the jeweller who for a spell during the war had owned J. Welch & Co. in the High Street — the goodwill name over the shop that my uncle had retained and which was still there as I spoke in its original handsome old glass facade.

“What do you know, then?” he responded excitedly when we were sitting down with the tea and his silent, eyes-down wife. “J Welch... It gives on to the steps leading up to Bangor Mountain, don’t it? Where they’ve just found some old bones. You heard about them, lady?”

“Yes, I’ve heard. I was interested because... I used to stay over the shop as a child during the war, and my cousin and I were always going up the mountain.”

“But you didn’t find a body, bach, or we wouldn’t have this mystery now, eh, girl?” This last to his wife, who looked up for a moment, half smiled and nodded, then returned her gaze to her teacup. Perhaps her ebullient husband embarrassed her, but he was just the type I had hoped for.

“You’d have been around during my visits, wouldn’t you, as a very small boy?” He was clearly younger than me, but not all that much. I decided to take the plunge. “When Megan Evans disappeared, it was thought she might have gone with the American soldiers. d’you remember that, Mr. Williams?”

The eager face brightened even further. “Well, I don’t rightly know if I remember it, or if I got told later on. Bit of a legend it became, you know.”

“So you’re thinking, Mrs. Anderson, that she might not have run away after all, Megan Evans, that it might be her bones on the mountain?” Mrs. Williams’s straight question, asked as her head came up and her penetrating gaze was transferred to me, made me jump slightly.