Aberystwyth Mon Amour (2 page)

I laughed but stopped myself as soon as I noticed her glaring at me.

‘It’s not funny!’

‘No, sorry. I suppose not.’

‘Will you help me?’

What was I supposed to say? That she was better off going to the police, who would have the resources and the connections? That with missing persons you need a lot of patience because quite often they don’t want to be found? That Evans the Boot was almost certainly dead? Instead I said, ‘I don’t like Evans the Boot.’

‘I’m not asking you to like him, just find him.’

‘And I don’t like the sort of people he goes round with. If I go poking my nose into their affairs I could go missing too.’

‘I see, so you’re scared.’

‘No, I’m not scared!’

‘Sounds like it to me.’

‘Well I’m not.’

She shrugged. We glared at each other for a while.

‘I’ll admit that looking for Evans the Boot is not a healthy way to earn a living,’ I said, looking away, unable to hold her stare.

‘Fair enough.’ Her tone suggested I was a failure.

‘I mean, I’m sorry and all that.’

‘Don’t bother, I know what the real reason is.’ She stood up and walked over to the door.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

She picked up her hat. ‘You just don’t want a girl like me as a client.’

I opened my mouth to speak but she carried on.

‘It’s OK, you don’t need to explain,’ she said breezily. ‘I’m used to it.’

I scooted across the room to the door. ‘What are you talking about?’

She flashed a look of scorn. ‘Moulin girls!’

‘Moulin girls?’

‘That’s it, isn’t it? You despise us.’

‘No I don’t!’

‘You wouldn’t want to be seen with me when you’re playing golf with the Grand Wizard.’

‘Hey hold on!’ I cried. ‘You think I play golf with the Druids?’

She stopped at the map of Borneo on her way out and said, as if her previous remarks had been about the weather, ‘What do the little red dots mean?’

‘Sorry?’ I said, still reeling.

‘These little red dots on the map?’

‘It’s the route taken by my great-great-uncle Noel on his expedition.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘He was looking for an Englishwoman rumoured to be lost in the jungle.’

‘Did he fancy her?’

‘No, he’d never met her; he’d just read about the case and it fascinated him.’

She traced her finger along the route – up the Rajang river and across the Bungan rapids, covering in two seconds what took Noel six months.

‘Where is this place?’ she said to the map.

‘It’s near Australia.’

‘He went all the way to Australia to help a woman?’

‘Yes. I suppose you could say that.’

She looked up at me and said slyly, ‘Are you sure he was your uncle?’

Before I could answer she had skipped through the doorway and was off down the stairs. I ran out and leaned over the balcony to toss a comment down, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. The front door slammed.

I walked back, put my feet up on the desk and contemplated the morning. As usual clients were thin on the ground and I had just turned down one whose cheques would probably be honoured by the bank. The framed sepia image of Noel Bartholomew stared down and chided me with an expression that many have described as enigmatic but which has always struck me as supercilious. Starched tropical whites, pith helmet, a dead tiger at his feet and jungle behind him. Even in 1870 the camera was busy lying: the tiger was stuffed, the jungle ferns picked in Danycoed wood and the whole scene composed in a studio before he left Town. I gave a wan smile and thought about Evans the Boot. I knew him of course. An opportunistic thief with an eye for a climbable drainpipe or an easily opened back door. Still in school but broad-shouldered and bearded. Capable of seducing the wives of his school masters and then boasting to them of it afterwards. A violent thug who invoked a tingling, visceral fear. That same fear you feel when in a strange town you enter an underpass and hear from up ahead the primaeval, ritual chanting of football hooligans. Yes, I knew him, we were both creatures of the same nocturnal landscape. But our paths seldom crossed. His evenings would be mapped out by the various intricate routes from pub to pub that characterised the night out in town. While I would be sitting in cold cars, clammy with breath and condensation, watching bedroom curtains. A professional snoop in a world where most people did it as a hobby. I looked again at Noel. It was obvious now what I should have shouted down the stairs to Myfanwy: uncle Noel never came back alive. That’s where misplaced chivalry gets you. But the thought didn’t comfort me; the morning’s peace had been disturbed, and there was only one place to re-establish it.

*

Et in Arcadia ego. The fibreglass ice-cream cone was five feet high and the Latin motto curved around the base in copperplate neon. Sitting on top of Sospan’s stall, and visible to the sun-parched fisherman from ten miles out to sea, it was as much an Aberystwyth icon as the Cliff Railway or Myfanwy’s mole. I too was in Arcady. I knew what it meant because I had once looked it up at the library; but if you asked Sospan he would shrug and say he found it in a book and thought it had something to do with the amusement arcade. That was his story and he stuck to it. But he knew better than anyone what strange demons brought the troubled souls to his counter.

‘Morning, Mr Knight! Usual is it?’

‘Make it a double with extra ripple.’

He tut-tutted. ‘And not even ten o’clock! Heavy night was it?’

‘No, just something on my mind.’

‘Well you’ve come to the right place.’

His hands fluttered like seagull wings at the dispenser while he stared back over his shoulder at me, inscrutable behind that rictus of smarm the ice man calls a smile. A lot of people claimed to find in his face a resemblance to the notorious Nazi Angel of Death, Josef Mengele, but I struggled to see it myself. Although there was about him an air of moral neutrality that could on occasion be quite unnerving. He placed the ice cream down on the counter in front of me and stared edgily at the troubled expression on my face. For some reason the interview in my office had upset me.

‘You get that inside you, it’ll make you feel a lot better.’

‘What’s it all about, then, Sospan?’ I asked as I picked up the cone.

‘Search me.’

‘Don’t you ever think about things?’

‘What sort of things would that be then?’ he asked guardedly.

‘Oh I don’t know. What it all means. This town. The things that go on …’

He sucked in his breath, starting to get alarmed at the way the conversation was heading. I struggled to find the right words.

‘Moral things, Sospan, you know! Good and bad and the rôle you play in it. The sense that by doing nothing, or not enough, you might be a … a … I don’t know … an accomplice or something …’

‘I don’t have a lot of time for thinking about things,’ he said with a defensive edge creeping into his tone. ‘I just scatter my hundreds and thousands before the public. Philosophy I leave to the drunks.’

I could see that I had lost him. Or I had led the conversation in a direction which threatened the protocol. People came here to escape their cares, not to relive them. They came to buy his vanilla-soaked tickets back to a world where pain was just a grazed knee and a mother’s caring hand was never far away.

*       *       *

I took a slurp and then turned, leaning my back against the counter and staring out to sea. The surface of the water glittered like the shards of a shattered mirror. It was going to be a scorcher.

‘Seen much of Evans the Boot lately?’ I asked casually.

‘No. And I don’t want to.’

‘I heard he’d done a bunk.’

‘Has he? I don’t expect many people will be sorry to hear that.’

‘You hear anything about it?’

He scratched his chin in a pantomime of a man struggling to remember.

‘Can’t say that I have.’

I put a 50p piece on the counter and the smiling ice man removed it with a nonchalance that took years of polishing.

‘I didn’t hear anything myself, but they do say that the kid at the bingo parlour knows about these things.’

I nodded and walked off, flicking the remainder of the half-finished cone into the bin.

The mangled ironwork of Aberystwyth Pier points out across the waters of Cardigan Bay like a skeletal finger. In happier times it had been a brightly painted boulevard of kiosks and sideshows where the ladies and gentlemen of the day came to enjoy the restorative properties of the seaside air. Parasols were twirled, moustaches waxed and ships bound for Shanghai, Honolulu, Papeete and ‘Frisco’ could be embarked from the end of the jetty. But the intervening years had seen a sad, slow fall from grace. The ships had all been turned into garden sheds and the Pier now lay stunted and truncated like a bridge to the Promised Land that had run out of funds.

I walked under an arch of flashing, coloured lights past a cobweb-covered RSPCA dog who stood sentinel. He regarded me with a glazed look and a shocked expression on his fibreglass face and I patted him before entering. Inside it was bedlam: a flashing labyrinth of fruit machines at which boys, who should have been in school, stood chewing like cows in the late-afternoon sun and examining the reels with the concentration of chess players. Sullen girls slouched next to them with heavy kohl-rimmed eyes like handmaidens from Egyptian tombs. I walked quickly past to the back and through the fluttering door of plastic strips into Bingoland. Here the same girls, fifty years down the line, could be found wearing dishwater-coloured coats and peering intently at the electro-illuminated screens. Each searching in the depths of the TV tube for the string of numbers that would unlock the doors of the glass-fronted cabinet of prizes. Goblin Teasmades, picnic hampers, sets of wine glasses or, for those granite-hearted ones with the resolve to save up the vouchers, the Colt 45 and Roy Rogers hat. Any line from top to bottom, side to side or from corner to corner.

At the far end of the room, next to a window looking out on to a forlorn ocean, there was a player who differed from the rest. Dressed in school uniform, she looked about fifteen or sixteen years old, and had a turned-up nose, a mass of freckles, spiky blonde hair and a chocolate-rimmed mouth. Although she was sliding the plastic shutters across on her console, she hadn’t put any money in. Without the background illumination you couldn’t see the numbers, but she didn’t look like she needed to. I walked over to her. She gave me a brief glance and then returned her attention to the game.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if you put some money in?’

She answered mechanically without removing her gaze from the screen. ‘No point. This machine isn’t going to come up for another fifty games. Lady over there in the blue scarf is going to win this one.’

I looked across to the lady in question. She didn’t seem the lucky type.

‘She’d probably pay a lot of money for a piece of information like that.’

‘She already did. Why do you think she’s sitting there?’

‘How do you work it out?’

‘I got a system.’

‘Oh.’

‘Wanna buy into it?’

‘No thanks. I don’t believe in systems.’

She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Old enough.’

The lady in the blue scarf shouted, ‘House!’

Twenty jaws dropped and the crack of Mintos hitting lower dental plates was like a Mexican firing squad taking aim. The compère walked over and started checking off the numbers as the rest of the room held its breath and watched through rheum-filled eyes of hate. Everyone prayed that there had been a mistake: a wrong number or maybe the lady would turn out to be one of those sickos who drifted in off the street to make hoax calls. The caller gave the ‘OK’ and the bubble burst. The lady in the blue scarf squealed with glee and twenty handbags snapped open in unison as everyone delved for more coins.

I looked at the kid with renewed respect.

‘Pretty good! What’s your name?’

‘Calamity Jane, what’s yours?’

‘Louie Knight.’

‘What can I do for you, Louie?’

‘Evans the Boot.’

The kid pursed her lips and shook her head.

‘Sorry, never heard of him.’

I took a 50p piece and laid it on top of the bingo console.

She reconsidered. ‘I’ve got a friend who might.’

I nodded.

Kelly’s eye, number one. They were off again.

‘I’d like to meet him.’

Calamity Jane tut-tutted at the enormity of the task.

‘That might not be easy, boss.’

‘Of course.’

‘Tough assignment.’

Two fat ladies, eighty-eight.

‘You look like a tough kid.’

She considered again.

‘Maybe I can arrange something. I’ll need some help to cover my bus fare.’

I put a 20p piece down on top of the 50p piece.

‘I live in Machynlleth.’

I put another 20p down.

‘And sundry expenses.’

‘Well, let’s just begin with the bus fare.’

Calamity Jane looked at the coins disdainfully.

‘Generally, my friend doesn’t get out of bed for less than two pound.’

‘Must be a big bed.’

‘Fills the whole room.’

I put another 50p piece down.

‘Always glad to help a man get out of bed.’

‘Looks to me like you want him to stay there the whole day.’

I sighed and took out my card. ‘I tell you what, why don’t you pin this to his teddy bear. If he’s got any information about Evans the Boot, we can discuss terms then.’

She picked up the card and examined it.

‘You’re a gumshoe!’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up.’

‘Good for you!’

She slid the card into her breast pocket and slipped off the stool.

‘I’ll be in touch.’

Two things struck me when I got back to the office in Canticle Street: the light was flashing on the answerphone; and the office had been ransacked.

Chapter 2

THERE WAS NO sign to indicate the presence of Wales’s most notorious night club. Just a plain black door, standing quietly amid the Dickensian bow windows of Patriarch Street. On the one side were the shops selling Welsh fudge, slate barometers and paperweights made out of polished fossils from the beach. And on the other, the Salvation Army second-hand clothing store, ‘Army Surplice’. The door to the club itself was featureless except for a Judas window and the number six in scarlet and only if you looked closely at the doorbell on the right would you see the simple words: Moulin Goch, Boîte de Nuit. When I arrived shortly after 10pm Mrs Llantrisant and Mrs Abergynolwen from the Sweet Jesus League against Turpitude had just started setting up their stall.