My darling wife was cooking that evening, which was sometimes a bit of a lottery. While I love her to distraction, her culinary skills are a moveable feast. By that, I mean that there are times when she gets overambitious, and we have to move said feast from our dining room to a local pub or takeaway. One thing she does do well, though, because she was taught by experts, is a decent barbecue. There are local issues on that score, however, geographical ones related to typical precipitation patterns and being resident in North Wales.

When it rains, it rains. When it doesn’t, to paraphrase a local joke, it’s because it’s just getting ready to start. My dearest, however, has altered our tiny back garden/patio/bit of space behind the back door, with a sort of combined awning and plastic roof, so that we can actually do our meat-burning in the open even when half the Irish Sea seems to be making an effort to annex Bangor.

Wind is different, of course, which is why Alys made the thing foldable and packable. It was a calm day, no rain forecast, and so I had stuffed two small sacks of charcoal into my throwovers and a selection of chops and sausages into the top box along with some peppers, courgettes, mushrooms and aubergines. The weather being nice to us also lowered the chances of a Shout from Glan Dena, but I had let the team know that I was intending a fully marital evening. With guests.

They were early, sitting in their car a couple of doors up from ours, but they’d already started unloading. I gave them the tiny fart of a toot that was all my bike’s horn was capable of, and they both turned in their seats to wave. They were quickly out for a hug, though, as soon as they spotted my arrival. Warm hugs, smiles; not a hint of nastiness, because they didn’t know the full depth of what Alys and I had learned. Yet.

Eight weeks earlier, the weather had been dreadful, but we hadn’t cared, as we had visitors from the other side of the world, and it had been my, our, wonderful Uncle Mike and his son. Unlike his previous visit, I had actually been warned they were coming. Alys was still at work when I set off, so she would drive up. I took the bike.

He was outside the house, for some odd reason, Ish clearly having more sense than his father, so I locked the Honda up outside the bunkhouse and pulled off my sopping gloves, handing them to him.

“Hiya. Just returning the favour, but I’ll keep the lid on till I’m indoors”

He rumbled a laugh and took the wet leather from me before ushering me into the house.

“We thought Alys was a bit self-assured, love, but you, well, two of a kind!”

“Opposites don’t always attract, do they?”

“Nope. Speaking of opposites, when are we getting a visit from you?”

I laughed.

“When we win the lottery is when! I won’t ask if you know the price of tickets, because you obviously do, so take it as an unasked rhetorical question”

Another laugh.

“You’re even starting to talk like her now! Come on in; dry out and get ready for the club”

“I am ready”

“You’re going in those?”

“My cagtrousers? Er, maybe not”

He put on a mock croaky voice.

“Tell me what you’re wearing”

Before I could answer, he turned to face the other way and squeaked out “RonHills, like I always do, ah!”

I slapped his shoulder.

“I do NOT sound like that!”

“But you DO wear RonHills every day”

I couldn’t argue with that one, so I followed him to the lounge after shedding my bike jacket and boots and wriggling out of said cagtrousers. I waved to the figure on the sofa.

“Hiya Ish! Alys is on her way, so hang onto your tentacles”

The evening proceeded as abnormally as I had expected, and I took serious pleasure in describing my wife’s culinary shortcomings, largely so that she could return the favour in kind.

To be honest, a lot of it was posturing. The two of us knew exactly who we were, and how we saw the world, and each other, so the pisstaking was without malice. Anyway, she had driven my harp up, in a manner of speaking. Steph’n’Geoff had cycled down from their usual campsite to sleep in the Bunkhouse, and Old Pat’s friend Debbie brought a busload of her girls down from the same place. I had never quite worked out how she knew Steph, but they were almost a double act on their own. Never mind; beer was drunk, songs were sung and harp and fiddle played, and we got a naughty supper from Colin’s place.

I sometimes felt a little out of things living in Bangor, but each time we made the journey I would always consider as ‘going home’, it was like we’d never been away. It was, however, a bloody good thing that Alys had her little car, because one or more of our parents would always be recovering from a ‘Saw this and thought of you’ moment, where the ‘this’ in question was all too often far too bulky for the bike.

Uncle Mike, though, seemed a little off-key, as if he was trying to ignore an itch he dearly wanted to scratch but couldn’t. He also kept sneaking little glances at Alys and myself, which made we worry about him even more. When we left Colin’s, a bag of chips being ingested by each of us, he muttered to the two of us to hang back.

“Alys, I need a little chat with both of you”

She was nodding, almost as if she had expected it. Mike turned to smile at me.

“Alys and I have already spoken, Enfys. While she was staying with us in Perth”

My lover took my free hand, which slowed my chip-eating. I looked at her, wondering where this was going. Mike sat down on a garden wall, bringing him down to our level, and I recognised it as a conflict-defusing technique.

“Enfys, you might not have the funds to come over and see us, but we do get visitors. One of them’s Neil Strachan. He…”

It seemed that the conflict he wanted to defuse was with himself, for he struggled to get the words out, making several false starts. Then, voice faint, he found his way in.

“Alys knows the background, because I told her, and I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t… It would have been Maz’s birthday. It was something that tied both of us, me and her, to each other and to Neil, love. Bereavement. Maz lost her husband, Neil his wife, me, well, what’s that Oscar Wilde quote about losing both parents? Whatever.”

I looked at Alys, then back at my uncle.

“I didn’t know Neil had been married”

They both nodded, and Uncle Mike grimaced.

“Now, I really need to talk to you and Alys, but this is what we used to call really heavy shit. Ish doesn’t know, but he does know that when… When his mother disappeared, when we’d realised we were never, ever going to get any real answer, we held a sort of wake, me, him, all our friends. Neil was there for me. Did I tell you about our wedding?”

“In what way? I remember you saying something about King’s Park”

“Yup. Neil did the photos for that. He was at our wedding. Being Neil, he simply bought his tickets two or three days before travel, along with a lightweight suit off the internet. Anyway, I wasn’t in a good place, that birthday. Maz’s birthday”

I sat down with him for a hug.

“Not surprising, that. I mean, if Alys… Shit. It was bad enough when she was snatched. You’ve coped better than I would have been able to”

“Yes, well. I had Ish, and the Butts, and Neil was there for me. Same as our wedding, he just left his staff to run his business and flew straight out. There are reasons, and those reasons are what I need to discuss with you. He’s due here the day after tomorrow, so I want to make sure you know the necessary. This weather isn’t for climbing, so I’d like to go somewhere touristy, just us, or at least say we are. We need privacy”

I squeezed him again to let him know I was there.

“What about Ish?”

“Ish has some knowledge of what’s going on, Enfys, just a little. He wants to dig around that music shop in Bangor”

Alys squeezed my hand again, my chips having been dumped into a rubbish bin.

“Cob, love. That place Annie likes”

I thought quickly.

“Cuppa at home, then? Leave Ish to shop?”

Uncle Mike hugged me back, fiercely.

“Sounds like a plan, girls. This is all on the Q-T for now, okay? Shall we climb that hill, then, get some kip?”

I nodded, and made a show of helping him up, before we started the walk back up to my family home, my mind arguing with itself over where exactly my ‘home’ was. I had lived almost my entire life in the old terraced house, but the two of us now had our own, and as I tossed a mental coin, the answer was there at my side. ‘Home’ for me was wherever she was. Simple as could be.

I didn’t sleep much that night, despite her presence beside me. After breakfast, she drove the four of us to the ‘big city’, Uncle Mike riding in front due to his height, and after dropping the lad off we parked at our place. I went straight to the kitchen as Alys sorted some junk mail, and once the tea was brewed, I did Mother. I could see the tension in Mike’s posture, and after a sip of his tea, he muttered something about ripping plasters, and began his story.

“Going to make this as clinical as I can, you two. Neil was married, she died, and it was… It wasn’t an accident, and nobody else was involved”

Alys whispered “Hunanladdiad”. Suicide. Shit. Mike continued his brutally terse story.

“Neil was out of the country at the time… Go back, Rhodes. Neil’s wife was on the same bus as you, Alys, and that is one of the reasons he got so upset when you had that trouble. He feels that he failed his wife, and you were a sort of atonement. Neil is, well, he gets fixed ideas”

I reached across for my uncle’s hand, as my wife already had my other.

“He’s on the spectrum, isn’t he? Mild, but still there?”

A slow nod.

“Yup. He explained it to me years ago. Thing is, the way he describes it, he was a lot worse before he met his wife. I think he’s slipping back a bit. It’s probably easier for me to spot, and his friends down under, because of the gaps between visits. Possibly not so much, when he’s a regular. Anyway, this is the confidential stuff, and I am not going into the details, as I said. They’re pretty nasty. Maddy… Maddy was his wife. From the way Neil described her, she was a very straight woman, but a romantic”

Alys said, “Prince on a white horse stuff?”, and Mike shook his head.

“Not exactly. More of a woman with, um, healthy appetites, as Steph puts it; her dreaming was more of being normal, part of a couple. Until she met Neil, she hadn’t had the best of experiences. Not like yours, Alys: this was what they call ‘chasers’, and she’d had some really nasty ones”

I didn’t feel my fist clamping down on my wife’s hand, but she let out a grunt of pain.

“Sorry, love. Uncle Mike, are we talking about beatings?”

“Yes. And worse”

I watched his face shift through several expressions one of them deeply disturbing, and then he shook his head.

“Keep it simple, Rhodes. One of her former, um, encounters, one who was more nasty words then physical violence, he spotted her one day. Found out where she worked and started sending notes, waiting outside till she closed up. When Neil had to go abroad, cuntface--- sorry. The man ramped up his stalking, and Neil lost Maddy. He sees it as all being his fault, while still blaming the real culprit. You are his atonement, Alys”

She was weeping, and my uncle tried to apologise, but she waved it away.

“No. Don’t. I understand him a lot better now, I think. I needed to know this. What did the police say?”

His mouth twisted for a minute or two as he fought off what looked like being a real outburst of rage, then found his centre again.

“There was an inquest. The official response was ‘Well, Mr Strachan, those people are like that, all depression and suicide’, and that was it”

I couldn’t get my head around it.

“Uncle Mike, wasn’t that sort of thing just as bloody illegal back then as it is right now?”

He nodded, eyes hard, as Alys wiped her own.

“Ladies, the simplest way of saying this is that the local plod didn’t care. I don’t know if her chaser was one of their friends, or even a copper himself, but nobody gave a shit about her, apart from Neil. I mean, she had friends, but as Neil put it, they were shocked and saddened because she had died, whereas Neil was shocked, grief-stricken and angry because, in his eyes, she’d been killed”

Alys spat out “She had been!”, and yet again, my uncle gave that slow nod. I was left with one obvious question, though.

“Uncle Mike?”

“Yes?”

“Why tell us this now?”

“Ah. That’s the important question, love. Neil has dropped a few hints over the years, usually by saying something unguarded. The man in question is called Nigel something or other, and Neil’s been stalking him, sort of returning the fucking favour. I gather he had quite a pile of evidence for the police to ignore, back then, and he’s been adding to it”

“And?”

“And I came across something, not saying how, that makes me think he’s run out of patience”

“You suspect he’s going to pick a fight with this Nigel?”

“Neil’s a big lad, Enfys, but he couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding. I think it will end up with Neil getting hurt, one way or the other, and none of us wants that. If Nigel does have some connections, then it could be an absolute disaster”

I rose from the sofa and settled myself onto his lap for a hug.

“What can we do, me and Alys? For Neil?”

He shook his head.

“I have absolutely no idea, girls. I was just hoping there might be something, three heads together, sort of thing?”

Alys came over to join us.

“Micawber time, then. Something will come up. It has to