Aberystwyth Mon Amour (14 page)

‘Mr what?’

‘Chunky. Mr Chunky says Parsnip – the drinking game.’

I nodded. ‘Ah!’

He looked cautiously from side to side and added, ‘Llanfihangely-Creuddyn rules: vomit once to join the table and twice to leave.’

By 8.15 there were three people in the audience including me. The other two were an old couple, silver-haired and wrinkled and shaking like jelly. The bar man had been lying, of course, but I had known that all along. It was obvious from the state of Davies’s clothes that he wasn’t packing them in every night. Even in Swansea no one ever got rich on the Punch and Judy circuit. The dream of seeing your name in big red type on the wall of the bandstand was just that – a dream from the same tattered rag-bag of empty hopes that had been filling the second-class railway compartments to Shrewsbury for more than a hundred years.

*       *       *

Davies came on just after 8.30. He made a quick glance at the empty seats, put on a defiant look and went behind the stripey canvas booth. Seconds later the squeaky voices started. I wondered about his life. I wasn’t familiar with ‘Mr Chunky says Parsnip’, but I knew plenty of games like it, and I knew what they did to people. After about ten minutes of the performance the old couple left. Iolo carried on gamely for another fifteen minutes before winding up. It was a very ordinary performance but not as hopeless as it could have been; he had some skill at least. Towards the end he had even indulged in some experimental interpretation with a scene I hadn’t seen before where the policeman plants a piece of trumped-up evidence on Mr Punch. The echoes of Iolo’s own fate were clear if pathetically pointless.

When the show ended I clapped slowly and deliberately. It took Iolo Davies five minutes to gather his things together, put away the puppets, and emerge from behind the booth. I carried on clapping and he looked over at me.

‘You taking the piss?’

‘My name’s Louie.’

‘Did I ask?’

‘I thought you might like to know.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Information about Dai Brainbocs.’

He stopped and looked round. ‘Just leave me alone.’

‘It won’t take long.’

‘What do you want to ask about him for? He’s dead isn’t he?’

‘I want to know why.’

He looked at me through narrowed eyes.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m a relative of Brainbocs.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘I’m a private detective investigating his death.’

He turned to leave again.

‘Look!’ I said hurriedly. ‘It would only take a few minutes, and I might be able to help you.’

He snorted. ‘You’re out of your depth.’

I tried a final gambit. ‘You think it was right what happened to you?’

He laughed bitterly. ‘Does it matter?’

‘All I want is a few minutes.’

Iolo Davies put the last chip in his mouth, scrunched the wrapping paper up and threw it out of the car window. Then he turned to me, the light from the street lamp silvering the edge of his face.

‘How much do you know?’

‘I know Brainbocs was working on Cantref-y-Gwaelod; I know he disappeared shortly after handing his essay in; I know the kids say he stumbled on to something big, something the Welsh teacher didn’t like. I know Lovespoon is planning to reclaim the land of Cantref-y-Gwaelod and take a group of pilgrims there in an Ark. I know three other kids working on the same essay are dead and one is missing. I presume they were killed because they copied Brainbocs’s homework and found out whatever it was he found out. I know you lost your job about the same time as well. And it’s my guess you were punished for helping Brainbocs.’

The old Museum curator wiped his greasy fingers down the thighs of his trousers and shook his head gently in admiration as he recalled Brainbocs’s scholarship. His voice took on a sad and distant quality.

‘The Cantref-y-Gwaelod stuff was genius. No other word for it. He did it all, you know. This whole Exodus project to build the Ark and settle the land – it was all Brainbocs’s idea. He was down the Museum a lot, usually in the archives. He wanted to do things with the school essay that people didn’t even dream could be done. He had this idea that you could somehow shake the world with one. I mean, partly it was some sort of compensation for the bad leg. But still, it was more than that. He once said he could wrestle with destiny and force her to her knees.’ He laughed without mirth. ‘I know, it sounds a load of crap when I say it, but when you listened to him … you just … well it’s funny but it didn’t seem so strange.’

‘But surely he couldn’t really locate this lost iron-age kingdom?’

‘This boy could do anything. You know how he pinpointed where it was? Triangulation. He set up recording devices at points along the coast where people claimed they could hear the ghostly bells; then he analysed the Doppler shift in the frequencies and then did a load of sums I wouldn’t have a clue about and triangulated the source of the bells. Unbelievable. And that was just the start. Then he took echo soundings to map the terrain and draw up the drainage scheme. And to cap it all he designed the Ark.’

‘I don’t get it, what did he do wrong? I thought Lovespoon loved the idea. Was he trying to steal the boy’s glory?’

Iolo shook his head and took a breath. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with Cantref-y-Gwaelod. Of course Lovespoon loved the project; he told me to give Brainbocs all the assistance he needed. Not that he needed any. But then one day the kid changed tack. Just like that. Came in with a gleam in his eye that was even crazier than the usual one. He started working in a different section of the Museum. He said he’d had this new idea and that it was going to be his
pièce de résistance
.’

‘And the Welsh teacher didn’t approve?’

‘The kid told me not to tell Lovespoon – it was meant to be a surprise. But the teacher found out anyway.’

‘And that’s when they put the stain on the camisole?’

‘It wasn’t a camisole, it was a rare corso-pantaloon in tea rose crêpe de chine.’

‘So what was the new area of research? What did he switch to?’

The chair made a low farting sound as Iolo turned to face me. The light glistening on the two sad puddles of his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you. Only don’t ask me to explain it, because even now –’

He paused.

‘Yes?’

‘Even now I have no idea what was so bad about the new –’

There was a sound from outside the car. The museum curator froze, his jaw agape. I threw my hand across, to grab his arm. To reassure him. But it was too late. He was staring with a wild, transfixed look past the side of my head. I spun round and saw out there in the featureless night, hovering on the threshold of discernibility, dark figures. Like crows or, more accurately, like the woman in the trench coat I had fought with earlier in the day.

‘You bastard!’ cried Iolo as he tore free of my hand. ‘You dirty, double-crossing bastard!’ He threw the car door open, and ran out into the night. By the time I too had got out of the car both he and the mysterious figures were gone.

*

It was well after eleven when I picked up Calamity and drove back to Aberystwyth. Just outside Llanrhystyd an ambulance streaked past at full pelt in the opposite direction. With the roads so empty it shot through the darkened countryside like a blue flashing arrow. As things turned out, the high speed was in vain. By that time Iolo Davies was already dead.

Chapter 11

EEYORE PEERED AT the button through the magnifying glass he used for the ‘spot the ball’ competitions. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘It’s them all right.’

‘Sweet Jesus League?’

He nodded.

At first glance it looked like any other black plastic button, the sort all old ladies had on their overcoats, but if you looked closely at the holes for the thread you could see they were arranged differently. There were two large round ones, and underneath that a single triangular one, and then beneath that a rectangular one. The shape of the button wasn’t perfectly round, either, but had indentations on either side that made it look vaguely potato-like. Sewn on to a coat these things would be difficult to spot. But hold the button up to the daylight and you saw it straight away: it was a skull. Eeyore handed the button back to me, over the gleaming back of Henrietta. I leaned my arms on her saddle as she stood looking patiently over the railings and out to sea.

According to the newspaper Iolo Davis had been found at the foot of the cliff. Broken turf high up on the cliff’s edge had indicated where he lost his footing in a tragic accident. His injuries were entirely consistent with a fall and foul play was not suspected. That was the official version anyway.

‘Not the old bags who sell pamphlets outside the Moulin,’ Eeyore continued. ‘This belongs to the big girls: the ESSJAT.’

‘ESSJAT?’

‘It’s a sort of secret commando unit; an elite force drawn from the ranks of the foot soldiers. The name comes from the initial letters of Sweet Jesus against Turpitude.’

I whistled.

‘Officially, they don’t exist.’

‘And I led them straight to him.’

He scoffed. ‘Don’t waste time blaming yourself. They would have got him eventually; they always do.’

‘I should have taken more care.’

‘No Louie!’ he snapped with an uncharacteristic edge in his voice. ‘Once he was on their list he was dead. It was only a matter of time. You have to accept that.’

‘Where do I find them?’

‘You don’t. I mean you can’t. Or, you shouldn’t.’

‘You know I’ve got to.’

‘No one knows who they are or where they are. They make the postman wear a blindfold.’

‘Come on, Dad …’

‘What business is it of yours, anyway? You think this Evans the Boot chap deserves it?’

‘It’s not about him, you know that.’

‘What is it about then?’

‘Lots of things.’

He paused and stroked Henrietta’s mane and then said with an air of resignation, ‘Well, I suppose you’re going to go ahead and look for them whatever I say. But don’t go round thinking you killed Davies. If the ESSJAT were after him, he was a dead man walking. It’s that simple.’

*

The avuncular white-bearded man kneels at the shore’s edge and stares through narrowed eyes out to sea. Around him children gather. The man speaks.

‘That’s our land out there, beneath those constantly shifting waters. A good land, a rich land. A land where our people can reap and sow and our children’s laughter will fill each silver day –’

Calamity Jane picked up the remote control and turned off the TV. ‘What crap!’

‘Now, now! There’s no need for language like that.’

‘Who wants to go to Cantref-y-Gwaelod anyway?’

‘Quite a lot of people, it seems.’

‘Why do they have to do TV commercials then?’ She threw the remote control on to the sofa and started pacing up and down the office, counting off points on her fingers. ‘Item one: Brainbocs masterminded the plan to reclaim Cantref-y-Gwaelod. Lovespoon loved that scheme. Item two: then he starts researching something else. Lovespoon hates that and tells the Museum curator not to help him. Then the curator loses his job and then …’ she paused. ‘And then he fell off a cliff.’

We exchange glances like guilty children.

‘Item three: Brainbocs hid the essay in a well-known beauty spot and was looking for a woman called Gwenno.’

‘Item four,’ it was my turn, ‘Evans the Boot had a piece of Mayan tea cosy in his possession.’

‘Not Mayan – Welsh, it was just a Mayan design …’

The words trailed off and she looked over to the door. Myfanwy was standing framed in the doorway and she didn’t look pleased.

‘Hey, come in!’

‘I’ll stay here, thank you, I’m not staying.’

‘Not even for a cup of tea?’

‘I just want to tell you to stop investigating my cousin Evans’s disappearance. Send me a bill for what you’ve done up until now.’

‘You don’t owe me any money, I turned the case down, remember?’

‘Yes, but I talked you into it.’

I turned to Calamity. ‘Hey, do you think you could put the kettle on for me?’

‘She said she didn’t want a cup of tea!’

‘Well I do.’

‘Right now?’

‘Yes, right now!’

She looked over to Myfanwy in search of an ally, but Myfanwy simply said, ‘Scram, kid.’

Calamity shuffled across to the kitchen. ‘If it’s about this investigation, it involves me too.’

I turned to Myfanwy. ‘You look like a walking thunderstorm.’

‘That’s hardly surprising, is it?’

I was puzzled. ‘I don’t know, isn’t it?’

‘No, it isn’t … after … after …’

‘After what?’

‘After what you did.’

‘What did I do?’

‘You mean you have to ask?’

I raised my hand as if to indicate a temporary truce and walked over to the kitchen. I closed the door with an exaggerated action.

‘Myfanwy, please tell me, what have I done?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘No!’

‘That makes it worse.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said walking over to the desk because I couldn’t think of anything better to do, ‘stop playing games and tell me what I am supposed to have done.’

She paused and looked at me. I looked back and smiled encouragingly.

‘You slept with Bianca.’

I gaped at her.

‘Don’t try and deny it, she told me everything.’

‘I’m not trying to deny it, I’m just staggered –’

‘You think we don’t talk to each other or something?’

‘Myfanwy!’

‘I mean of all the cheek – you think you can just jump into bed with my best friend and she won’t tell me?’

‘But Myfanwy!’ I howled again.

‘My best friend, Louie! My best friend!’

‘Funny sort of friend!’ I shouted.

‘And what’s that supposed to mean!?’

‘I don’t know, fuck it all, Myfanwy, it was you who told me to do it!’

‘I –’ This time it was her turn to stare open-mouthed.

‘At the Club, remember?’

‘But I didn’t mean it!’ she screeched, and then flung her hands in the air in exasperation, before turning in the doorway and stomping down the stairs. Her last words, thrown over her shoulder were: ‘How can anyone be so stupid!’