It began with an audacious illegal act of theft that rocked the very foundations of Pembrokeshire life. The investigation slowly picked up momentum and began immediately, which is to say, as soon as it could in Pembrokeshire, that bleak, rain-swept peninsular in west Wales. Aboard the Dyfed-Powys Police Rapid-Response Coracle Unit vessel moored in Fishguard Harbour, the Sergeant, aided by his crew, The Parrot, sprang into action. In counterpoint, Megan and Bronwen, content to make their home in the crypt beneath Crymych Cathedral, continued life as before, as did other members of that underground organisation, Machlud y Wawr. In the following weeks and months, the investigation progressed at a natural pace before reaching an unexpected conclusion. Then, more reports of disappearances came in and the staff of the DPPRRCU quickly realised they had a crime spree on their hands the magnitude and repercussions of which had never been seen before anywhere in the world.
*****
Writer's log.
The scribbling got under way on the evening of the tenth day of September 2010 at approximately 20:00 hours. A Friday as I recall. The temperature outside lingered at 17 degrees centigrade, a light early evening breeze reached Fishguard from the southwest, visibility was good. Humidity was at 79%, the barometer attached to the wall next to the cuckoo clock read 1011 millibars. I turned the sandglass then struck the bell to indicate the end of the last dog watch. It was eight bells. As the sound diminished and the bell fell silent two fingers moved unseen to caress the keyboard.
Soon, rain began to fall. Not that I noticed, for I was inside in the spare room of the house slumped in front of a computer, plonking feverishly, two fingers hitting the keys, beating an unsteady rhythm. That fateful evening, the beginning of a novel appeared on the screen in front of me, and when the delirium subsided I gazed in astonishment at several paragraphs that filled a page and a half of a WORD document. For those of a technical bent, the font size was 12, comic sans. Several weeks prior to this writing marathon a single sentence appeared in the author's mind, a sentence that was recognised immediately as being the first line of a novel. It all followed from that.
When the writer began that fateful evening, there was no thought of an end. There was no plan, and no plot. Gradually, through a long, weary decade a story appeared. Six years in, the plot arrived, as if from nowhere. Sometime during the ninth year, an ending appeared, uninvited. A year later it was finished. Twelve months of editing and proof reading followed. It was several years into the process before a title tiptoed into the writer's mind. The novel is set in Pembrokeshire, west Wales with a brief, yet vital, one chapter sojourn in Wadebridge, north Cornwall, in the aptly named An Chaptra Kernewek in which some Cornish is spoken.
Eleven years have passed since that apocalyptic evening, each one seeing the book increase a little in length. Progress was relentless, the undertaking unstoppable, the outcome inevitable. For ten years two fingers, one on each hand, fought the keyboard. They remained unyielding in their task, unwavering, moving relentlessly forward into the future towards a preordained conclusion. Yes, literary chaos has borne fruit in the form of one of the twenty first century's greatest Pembrokeshire crime stories.
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