Aberystwyth Mon Amour (21 page)

After he finished, I didn’t know what to say. No one did. There was silence for a long while and then one by one people stood up and drifted away. I thanked the veterans for their hospitality and rose to my feet. As I left, Johnny the storyteller gave me a sort of salute of farewell. At the same time, a branch on the fire cracked in the heat sending a flare up that illuminated the whole of one side of his body. And then I knew why of all the assembled people that night, only he could have told me the true story of Rio Caeriog. His left arm was missing below the elbow.

When I got back to the caravan, the one that had been welded together from two crash write-offs and couldn’t be traced, the one that couldn’t be seen from the road and about which not even the caretaker knew anything, I found a police car parked outside.

Chapter 18

‘YOU THINK I didn’t know about this crappy caravan? I could have picked you up any time I wanted.’

I put a plastic mug filled with instant soup down in front of Llunos. It seemed like years since I had done the same for Myfanwy. But it was just over a week. The ludo set was still out on the table.

‘So why didn’t you?’

He ran a pudgy hand through his hair. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week; and there was something else about him: the air of weary self-assurance was gone. Now he just seemed weary. He looked at me as if appealing for help. ‘I don’t think I’ll have a job by the end of the week.’

I blinked.

‘There’s a new commissioner of police.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘Herod Jenkins.’

‘The games teacher?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Soon you won’t be able to sneeze in this town without a note from your Mam.’

I topped up the mugs of soup with rum.

‘The man’s a nutcase.’

Llunos gave me a ‘tell me about it’ look. He pulled out a bag from under his chair and slid it across the table to me. It was a child’s school satchel.

‘We took this from Brainbocs’s house just after he disappeared.’

I looked at the policeman and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat as if he couldn’t believe what he was doing. He was helping me.

‘It’s no fucking use so don’t get all excited.’

I undid the buckles and opened the satchel. There were four objects inside and I laid them side by side next to the ludo set: a field guide to edible mushrooms; Job Gorseinon’s
Roses of Charon
; an invoice from Dai the Custard Pie’s fancy-dress basement; and, perhaps most curiously of all, a nineteenth-century nautical primer:
Corruption of the Deep: The Captain’s Guide to Last Rites and Burials at Sea
.

I picked each one up in turn, examined it briefly and then put it down in its original place.

No one spoke.

Llunos stood up to leave. ‘I told you it wouldn’t help.’

I followed him to the door and for a while we stood there facing each other awkwardly on the step. It was as if the components of our universe had shifted like fragments in a kaleidoscope and we now found ourselves fighting on the same side. He stuck out his hand and we shook.

‘If I was you,’ he said, ‘I’d leave town.’ And then, through the wound-down window of his car, ‘Did you hear about Ma Brainbocs?’

‘No, what?’

‘She was spotted at Cardiff airport yesterday boarding an Aerolineas Argentina flight.’

When I awoke late next morning, one thing was clear to me: it was time to get out of town. If Llunos had known all about my hiding hole plenty of other people probably did as well. And I’d had enough of skulking around disguised as a War veteran. With the games teacher running the police force we were all in the shit. I threw a few things into a zip-up hold-all and put the veteran’s disguise on for what I hoped was the last time. Maybe Myfanwy and I could get the train to Shrewsbury.

At Myfanwy’s flat the door was ajar and the place deserted. Not empty with the atmosphere of a room from which the tenant has nipped out to buy milk, but with air of a nest in which the eggs are cold and the parent birds have been frightened away. There was nothing concrete to suggest it, but sometimes you know these things without needing evidence. Bras and panties were left drying on cold radiators. T-shirts and inside-out jeans were strewn across the floor. Mugs of instant coffee covered in green fur cluttered every surface next to wine bottles and beer cans filled with cigarette ends all glued down with sticky rings of stale beer. There were half-eaten take-away meals and tins of tuna stuck to the carpet, with forks sticking out of the jaggedly opened tops. Clothes draped on hangers hooked over door handles, Schwarzenegger and Stallone videos, Lady Di souvenirs, posters of Bon Jovi, shiny vinyl cases from which make-up bottles spilled out on to the floor. Birth-control pills and tampons. And everywhere the air was rank with the smell of old beer, candles and stale farts. It was as if a butterfly had emerged from a chrysalis on a dung heap. But the butterfly had flown.

I almost didn’t care. Like a regularly beaten dog I was too tired to yelp. The fall of the stick had become routine. Myfanwy had pleaded with me to take her away and I had been too stubborn and now it was too late. What did I expect? Everyone knew you don’t get two bites at a cherry like that. With her gone I no longer had any desire to leave, or to stay, or in fact to do anything. Maybe, I thought, I should just go back to my old flat and wait for Herod’s men to arrive. I wandered down to the harbour and then on down past the castle and stood for an hour on the Prom leaning on the sugar-white railings and staring emptily out to sea. The waters were a chill unwelcoming gunmetal colour and the breeze stiff and salty. Above my head the Noddy illumination swayed and creaked eerily and I thought grimly of the likely consequences if a man turned up in this town wearing a red hat with bells. Eventually I headed for the only suitable place for a man whose world has collapsed: the Whelk Stall.

The boy was reading the newspaper on the counter when I arrived and gave no sign of stopping. I stood pointedly in front of him for a while but still he ignored me. This was not a wise policy. I slammed my hand down on the page he was reading.

He looked up with hatred in his eyes. ‘Sorry, Smelly, we don’t serve tramps.’

I gasped in disbelief. Didn’t he know what I had been through recently? Didn’t he know that I was an outcast, wanted for murder? That this filthy coat was just a disguise? Didn’t he know I had lost Myfanwy? Didn’t he know how dangerous that made me? Didn’t he know any of this? Of course he didn’t but that was just tough. There comes a time when someone has to pay and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the wrong bill or not. Someone has to pay.

‘What did you say, Sonny Jim?’

‘I said, fuck off, granddad, and stop stinking up my stall.’

I nodded slowly and thoughtfully. And then I hit him. He flew backwards more from surprise than from the force of the punch and fell heavily into a pile of saucepans. Before he could recover, I jumped over the counter, paused for a second while I recovered my balance, took aim, and kicked him in the stomach. He grunted and struggled desperately to escape on all fours, unable to get to his feet. I picked up a frying pan and swung it against the side of his head. I could feel the cartilage in his ear cracking and vibrating through the handle of the pan. ‘No, please, no mister, please,’ he cried. But it was too late. Two weeks too late; the invoice was in his in-tray and he was going to pay it. He scuttled away still on all fours and the sight of his desperation served only to increase my fury. I ran forwards and grabbed the scruff of his neck, pulled him backwards and slammed the frying pan full into his face. Blood from his nose spattered on his dirty white chef’s tunic. ‘Please, mister!’ he cried, and I pushed him into a pile of cardboard boxes and waste bins. Trapped, with nowhere left to go, he turned to face me, cowering and pulling back at the same time. I picked up a knife with a long blade from the counter and advanced another step. This time he was too frightened even to speak. I could smell urine as his hands clutched at his groin.

‘Right then,’ I hissed. ‘Are you going to serve me some fucking whelks or not?’ The knife pointed at the end of his nose and he stared at it in cross-eyed fascination. He nodded.

‘Yes sir,’ he whispered. ‘It’ll be a pleasure.’

While he prepared the evening special which we had agreed would be on the house I read the newspaper. Back page first. Then I turned to the front; the main story was Herod’s appointment, complete with a photo of the games teacher smiling through that familiar horizontal crease in his face. The same teacher who had sent a consumptive schoolboy out on a run in the worst blizzard to hit Cardiganshire in more than seventy years. The only other story was a small one-column piece on the right under the headline
VICE GIRL GRAVE DESECRATED.
I turned the page angrily. Then stopped like a cartoon animal that has just run over the edge of a cliff. I turned the page back and re-read the headline, my eyes wide open with shock. It was about Bianca’s grave. Feverishly I skimmed the article. Two nights ago someone had dug the coffin up at Llanbadarn Cemetery and broken open the lid in what the paper described as a sick and motiveless crime. The attackers had used a power saw to open up a rectangle eighteen inches long and ten wide in the lid covering Bianca’s face. Nothing had been taken, and the corpse hadn’t, as they put it, been interfered with. I pushed the paper away and sat there stunned. Aberystwyth was shocked and baffled by the crime. No one could imagine who could do such a thing. But I could. It was the same person that killed the Punch and Judy man.

Chapter 19

TO THINK OF all the millions of useless, pointless, empty, cruel, vain, proud, mean, obscene and utterly valueless words we spit out during our lives; to think of all those words and all those syllables, more syllables than grains of sand on Borth Beach. Oh Bianca, all you needed was just one more. What evil jinni stood on your shoulder and robbed you of that last, crucial puff of air? To think of all the nonsense you talked. All the lies and flatteries you spent your nights pouring into the ears of pink-faced Druids! All those empty, wasted words. If only you could have bitten your tongue just once: withheld a word and kept it on credit for that rainy day when an extra syllable could have changed the world. One syllable, perhaps the only one in your whole life, that could have made anything better. The essay is in the stove, you gasped. Oh no! You didn’t put it in the stove. You who cocked a final snook at society by wearing your night-club costume in the coffin. You put it in your stovepipe hat!

Chapter 20

THE DOORSTEP WAS smeared with dust, cats’ piss and muddy boot prints. And someone had daubed ‘murderer’ on the wall. I climbed the stairs. The door to my office was ajar and I could see Mrs Llantrisant sitting with her feet on the desk eating peanuts. So lost in her own world, she didn’t notice me. Mechanically she reached into the brown paper bag, withdrew a handful of nuts, cracked them between her fingers and threw the shells willy-nilly across the floor, cackling to herself as they spattered against the portrait of Noel Bartholomew. The smell of peanutty breath was overpowering even out in the stairwell. I pushed the door open and she let out a gasp.

‘You!’

I stared at her through narrowing eyes.

She cast a furtive glance across the desk to the phone, silently judging the distance and deciding against it. She recomposed her features and forced them into a beam of joy.

‘You’re back!’

‘Got tired of swabbing, did you?’ I said in a cold monotone.

The beam of joy became a pantomime of anxious concern.

‘Oh, Mr Knight, it breaks my heart it does to see the step like that, it really does. It was the police, you see, told me not to touch anything – not that I think for one moment that you … I mean, all those things they’re saying … never heard such …’ The words trailed gently off into the ether. She cast another look at the phone and smiled at me with less conviction this time.

‘Still, it’s nice to see you back. Will you be staying long?’

I walked across to the desk. She moved back unconsciously pressing herself against the back of the chair.

‘I don’t know. How long does it take to beat the crap out of an old lady?’

I yanked out the phone cable. Her pupils flashed open.

I sat on the edge of the desk and leaned across. ‘Where is it?’

‘Where is –’

The words stopped as I raised my index finger.

‘Please don’t say “where is what”.’

She looked at me without saying a word.

‘I have to hand it to you,’ I said, ‘you’re a real dark horse.’ I started flicking the broken telephone cable against the desk. ‘I mean, you give the impression that you haven’t got two brain cells to rub together, but you certainly worked the stovepipe hat out a lot quicker than me.’

She said nothing, just continued staring at me wondering how much I knew and what I was going to do.

‘But then you don’t get into the upper echelons of the Sweet Jesus League without being smart, do you? Not into the ESSJAT you don’t.’

‘I’m not in it, Mr Knight.’

‘Not in what?’

‘In … in what you said.’

‘What did I say?’

She looked at me uncertainly. ‘That organisation you mentioned; I’m not in it.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘Er … I don’t know.’

‘Then how do you know you’re not in it?’

‘I … I …’

‘You’re a lieutenant in the ESSJAT, Mrs Llantrisant.’

She shook her head in desperation. ‘No … no … no I’m not, I’m not!’

‘All these years you’ve been swabbing my step and all the time you’ve been listening at the keyhole.’

‘No, Mr Knight, no!’

‘That’s how you found out about the Punch and Judy man.’

She shook her head and put her hands to her ears. ‘No!’

I leaned closer until my face was only inches away from hers. I could smell the musty reek of Eau de Maesteg.

‘You killed him, didn’t you?’