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next to the car for Meici to return. When he came back he was miserable and said he wouldn’t be driving us all the way, but would drop us off at the bus stop. I sat in the back with Calamity. Meici kept his eyes fixedly on the road and didn’t speak. As we exited the cottage, we passed a field in which stood a scarecrow wearing a red-and-white polka-dot dress that flapped in the breeze.

Chapter 5
     
    ‘Spooky,’ said Calamity. ‘Really spooky.’
    We walked in single file down a narrow track of loose shale through gorse bushes and found ourselves on the lake’s shore. The waters were dark and sombre, and clouds brooded on the surface. Far out, in the centre of the lake, the spire of a church broke the surface. Birds wheeled about the sky, the waters lapped the shore gently. The world was quiet; even the bees had stopped humming. The only other human life came from a group of three artists painting in watercolours.
    ‘Spooky,’ said Calamity. ‘Really spooky.’
    The reservoir lay on the east of the Penpegws massif, north of Devil’s Bridge. We had asked Meici to drop us off on the way back to town; we would get the bus back.
    ‘Spooky,’ said Calamity.
    She was right. Towns that have vanished from the face of the earth, beneath the waves or buried beneath desert sands, are not supposed to reappear. It is disconcerting; a rupture in the fabric of time that undermines the comfortable certainty which helps us get through the succession of days we call a life. Sometimes in periods of drought the outlines of ancient Saxon farms appear in the desiccated ground, visible from the air, like the bone structure of the earth revealed by X-ray photography. It is as if Father Time leaves ajar a door to a room that is normally locked. Such rare glimpses, like the appearance of comets in the heavens, make the skin prickle with primeval feelings for which we struggle to find names but which, no doubt, would be familiar to the Iron Age watcher of the skies.
    It had been thirty years since the sun last warmed the slate tiles of that spire; how different had the world been then! A world of rationing and post-war austerity, of bully-beef and powdered egg, in which a pretty tram conductress caught the eye of Eeyore and beguiled his heart. Together they produced me. A world so different, but the troubles were the same, they never change. A little girl went missing and broke her mother’s heart. For all the differences that divide us from humanity across the sea or down the centuries, it is through suffering that we maintain a common bond.
    We followed the path along the shore for a while, drinking in the strangeness of the view, haunted by the spire. We stopped and stared, lost in thought. Calamity took out an Instamatic camera and took some shots of the shoreline. We were about to turn and return to the car when Calamity spotted something floating in the water at the shore’s edge. She trotted down to the water and bent down. I followed, squinting into the fierce reflected glare. I kneeled down beside her. It was a body: a woman, floating face-up in the shallows like Ophelia, wearing what appeared to be a navy-blue pinafore dress over a white blouse, like a school uniform from long ago. We pulled her on to the sand and she opened her eyes. She giggled and looked at us with impish mischief in her eyes and handed us her hat which she had been holding in one hand. It was a straw boater. Calamity took the hat and said thank you. The woman made an excited gurgling sound, like a baby, suddenly jumped up and ran off along the shore. She ran with the speed and agility of a gazelle. We watched, rooted to the spot, immobilised with astonishment. Calamity bent the hat slightly to read the name tag inside the brim and said, ‘I think we’ve solved the case.’
     
    The great thing about being Chief of Police in Aberystwyth is nothing shocks you. Being taken by surprise is for the amateurs. I had known Commander Llunos for fifteen or so