Aberystwyth Mon Amour (22 page)

‘Who?’ she whined. ‘I haven’t killed anybody, Mr Knight. Honest I haven’t. I’m just a step-swabber. I’m sorry about the peanuts –’

I whipped the end of the phone cord across her face and the words stopped in mid-sentence. A fine pink groove appeared in the thickly plastered foundation cream.

‘It wasn’t enough for you to destroy his life: knock him off the pedestal he stood on for thirty years and force him to scratch a living in the Punch and Judy tents of Aberaeron. You had to throw the poor man off a cliff.’

‘No, Mr Knight, not me, not me!’

‘It was you I fought with that night down at the harbour, wasn’t it?’

‘No, please, Mr Knight. You’ve got it all wrong.’

‘Have I? Have I?’ I shouted. ‘I don’t think so.’ I paused, breathing heavily, and waited for myself to become calm again. I needed to stay in control.

‘Tell me, Mrs Llantrisant. Are you familiar with the works of Job Gorseinon?’

She looked at me blankly.

‘Brainbocs was. They found a copy of Gorseinon’s
Roses of Charon
in his satchel. It’s an enquiry into the darker side of Greco-Roman horticulture. Have you ever read it?’

She watched me, confused and suspicious. ‘I don’t think I have. Good book is it?’

‘Ooh, curate’s egg really. But there’s one nice bit where Gorseinon describes how Livia is alleged to have murdered Augustus. He was a wily old bird, you see, Augustus. A bit like you if you don’t mind me saying so. And he was paranoid about being poisoned. With good reason as it turned out. It got to the point where he wouldn’t eat anything except fruit he had picked from his own orchard. So Livia smeared the figs on the tree with deadly nightshade. Ring any bells does it?’

She looked at me with an empty face like a poker player.

‘The story reminded me of that occasion just before Easter when you were taken ill all of a sudden from eating that apple pie. Remember how you called the priest? How he took your deathbed confession? It’s funny because we also found in Brainbocs’s satchel a book on how to perform the last rites and a fancy-dress hire ticket from Dai the Custard Pie’s. It doesn’t say what costume he borrowed but I bet if I went down and looked at Custard Pie’s ledger I’d find it was a Catholic priest’s outfit. What do you say?’

Slowly a change came over Mrs Llantrisant. As if she had decided that the time had come to drop the mask. She brought her hands down from her ears and looked me in the eye. The silly, frivolous old gossip faded away and in its place there sat a different woman. Self-possessed and steely with an expression of stone. Suddenly she darted sideways out of the chair. I leaped after her grabbing at the tails of her housecoat but she moved like a cat and was almost at the door when I managed to grab her ankle. She was strong and fast and would have got away, but my nails caught on her old varicose vein scars. The sharp pain pulled her up for a split-second and made her gasp. It was all I needed. I reached higher and took a firmer grip on her coat. Then her training took over, banishing pain, and focusing every sinew on the task in hand, she turned and sized me up in one cold, robotic look. She lowered one knee, transferred her weight and then spun round driving a backhand smash into my face. I reeled and fell backwards and she moved in with cold precision. In came the elbow, ramming into my head above the ear and I started to go down. The room swirled and birds sang inside my head. I could see the knee moving up now, the confusion in my brain slowing its hideous progress down to a crawl. A crawl that I felt powerless to avoid. I remember seeing insignificant details with a strange detachment: how the housecoat parted and revealed the elasticised bottom of the bloomer, slightly above the knee. The knee, fish-white and blue-veined like Gorgonzola cheese, slamming upwards like a ramrod. At the last second I jerked to the side and the knee crashed into the filing cabinet. I could see, almost feel myself, the fireworks of pain that shot through her. A deep gash appeared, blood splattered, and she fell to the floor.

I bent over her and suddenly jumped backwards as she jabbed at me with a hatpin which she had pulled from her boot; the hypo-allergenic calfskin boot made in Milan. I dodged the pin and she tried again, but crippled by the wound to her knee she could only lunge and crawl dementedly. I stepped clear of her range of action. Took a careful look round the room and spotted what I wanted. Among the fire irons in the grate was a big cast-iron poker. I picked it up and walked over to where Mrs Llantrisant lay. She looked up at me too convulsed with hate to display any fear. With bitter deliberation I smashed the iron down on her knee. She screamed like a wolf, her spit-covered dentures jettisoning out on to the carpet. Then she blacked out.

When she came round she was sitting in the client’s chair, bound at the ankles and wrists with the flex from the TV. I threw a washing-up bowl of cold water with ice cubes into her face. She lifted her head and looked at me, her face still twisted and contorted with misery. I smiled. Then kicked her in the knee; she jerked and writhed, straining at the flex with a power that looked as if it might break the back of the wooden chair.

‘That was for killing the Punch and Judy man.’

She spat blood on to the carpet but said nothing.

‘Now when you’re ready I have some questions I’d like to ask you.’

‘Bugumph a dwonba frum ga fum paschtad!’

I screwed up my face ‘What!?’

‘Ga fhaard bu mon get aggyfun oumpa me ga frunbin pash schtern!’

I picked up the dentures and shoved them back into her mouth.

She started manipulating them furiously with her tongue, making obscene gob-stopper mounds in alternate cheeks. When they were in place she shrieked at me, ‘I said you won’t get a fucking word out of me, you bastard!’

I kicked her in the knee and she squealed in agony. I spoke to her in a soft bedside manner.

‘You know, something puzzles me.’ She looked up, interested despite her attempts not to be. ‘You’re always whingeing to me about the amount of time your friends have to wait at the hospital to get their hips done, and here I am fucking up your knee and you don’t seem bothered. Why is that?’

She looked at me coldly and said, ‘Your threats are useless. I spit on them.’

‘Why did you kill him?’

‘Who?’

‘Iolo Davies – the Museum curator.’

‘My orders were to remove him and so I removed him. He meant nothing to me. It was just a job.’

‘Like swabbing the step?’

‘He was just a filthy semen-squirting little toad.’

‘So where’s the essay?’

‘Fuck off!’

‘OK,’ I smiled.

I walked to the kitchen and filled the kettle. I was troubled. What if she had been trained to withstand pain? You heard of such things. My resolve would soon give way. I had already shown that with Lovespoon. My gaze wandered round the kitchen and I was struck at how totally she had made the place her own. Four new housecoats hung up, doubtless paid for out of my petty-cash tin. Groceries from Safeway littered the side. There was even a trunk containing her orthopaedic-boot collection. And then it struck me: even Mrs Llantrisant had an Achilles heel.

I picked up the industrial-size meat mincer which had lain in the corner gathering dust since the time when Mrs Llantrisant and Mrs Abergynolwen had made the sausage rolls for the Eisteddfod. I dragged it into the office and placed it down a few feet in front of Mrs Llantrisant. She looked at me with a look of withering contempt.

‘Gonna mince me leg off, are you now, Mr Knight? Or is it me arm? Mince away for all I care, I shall just laugh at you.’

‘It’s not your leg you should be worried about, Mrs Llantrisant.’ I bent down and started unlacing her orthopaedic boot. The brash confidence disappeared and a look of naked terror swept into her cold, pitiless eyes. She struggled like a fish on a hook but the TV flex held her firmly bound to the chair. I took off the boot and stuffed it into the top of the mincer where the chopped meat usually goes and grabbed the handle.

‘Better start singing, Mrs Llantrisant, or your boot will be mincemeat.’

‘You wouldn’t dare! They cost eighty quid they did!’

‘You’re Gwenno Guevara, aren’t you?’

‘Fuck off!’

I gave the handle a slight turn. The teeth of the mincing mechanism made contact with the leather. Mrs Llantrisant gasped. I stopped turning the handle and peered to look at the damage to the boot.

‘They’re just a bit scuffed at the moment; bit of shoe polish would get that off. It’s your last chance.’

She started struggling to break free of the flex which bound her to the chair and I gave the handle a full heave. There was a sickening crunching, gristly sort of noise as the spiral teeth cut into the solid wall of the boot. Mrs Llantrisant let out a long, blood-curdling howl, like a tortured wolf.

‘You’re Gwenno Guevara, aren’t you?!’ I shouted.

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ she screamed.

‘The supreme commander of the ESSJAT?’

‘Yes!’

‘Is that why Brainbocs came to see you? Why he took your deathbed confession?’

‘Yes!’

‘Why was he so interested in you?’

She just shook her head sadly and gasped for breath. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. All I know is the boy was trying to reunite Lovespoon’s bomber crew. Lovespoon, Herod, Dai the Custard Pie …’

‘And Frobisher?’

‘He was dead. He didn’t matter. But Brainbocs was trying to track down the remaining survivors from the Rio Caeriog mission. I was the only one he couldn’t find.’

‘So where’s the essay?’

‘It’s in my handbag on the chair in the kitchen.’

I looked over to the kitchen and then back at her. This was all a bit too easy.

‘If you’re lying, your boot’s fucked.’

She shook her head.

‘I mean it! I’ll do every single fucking one of them!’

‘In my bag, go and see.’

I went to the kitchen and opened her handbag. Inside was a manila envelope. I pulled it out. It was marked on the front in ball-point pen: ‘David Brainbocs, spring term assignment, Cantref-y-Gwaelod’. Next to that was a date and the St Luddite’s school stamp, initialled by Lovespoon. I tore it open and pulled out the essay. There were about thirty pages of A4 filled with a closely packed schoolboy hand, interspersed here and there with technical-looking diagrams. It was perfect. The essay that half of Aberystwyth had been looking for. There was just one thing wrong. As I leafed through the pages I could hear from the other room a horrible raucous cackling that went straight through me like a graveyard wind. Mrs Llantrisant was laughing. I could mince up every orthopaedic boot in Aberystwyth and it wouldn’t make a hap’orth of difference this time. The essay was written in runes.

Chapter 21

WEARILY, I SET off on the half-hour walk across town to the light industrial estate on the site of the old engine sheds. That was where the new Witches’ Co-op could be found next to the DIY emporium, the computer superstore and the frozen-food wholesalers. It was a far cry from the cubby hole the shop had formerly occupied in the side of the castle ramparts next to the Coronation Muggery. The shop itself was an uneasy mix of traditional and modern. In front of the warehouse-like building of corrugated iron and sand-coloured brick was a car park in which the parking bays were marked out in whorls and vortices corresponding to the lines of power beneath the tarmac. The staff wore bright cotton overalls covered in half moons and stars like Hallowe’en costumes, but the security guard had a wolf on a leash. The lighting was mainly fluorescent, except for torches burning at the ends of the aisles.

At my approach, the glass double doors opened as if by magic and one of the assistants pointed me in the direction of the R&D facility at the back. The door was marked ‘authorised personnel only’ but I walked through regardless and found myself in a laboratory. It was empty except for Julian, the cat, who was peering into the eyepiece of a microscope, his paws balancing on the knurled focusing wheel. He looked up and gave me the usual look of disdain and then, intimidated perhaps by the expression of determination on my face, flicked an ear back towards the far side of the room. My gaze followed the direction of his ear to a large glass window set in the wall and through the glass I could see Evans the Boot’s Mam sitting on a broomstick in what appeared to be a wind tunnel. Julian returned his gaze to the eyepiece of the microscope. The door to the wind tunnel had a red light above it and, not wishing to compromise the research, I went up to the window and waved. Mrs Evans saw me, signalled to one of the white-coated technicians in the room, and dismounted. She came out carrying the broomstick and took off the helmet which looked like one of those worn by Olympic racing cyclists. Then, struggling to get her breath back, she tossed me the broomstick; it was lighter than a feather.

‘Not bad eh?’ she panted. ‘Carbon fibre frame, hollow inside and polypropylene bristles – drag coefficient about the same as a seagull.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘I hear Myfanwy left town. I thought you two were an item.’

‘So did I but you just never know, do you?’

I took the essay out of my pocket and handed it to her. She held the papers up to her nose, and slowly leafed through them, making soft grunting sounds as she went. Unfortunately, she didn’t have her runing glasses with her but agreed that she would start transcribing tonight and send Julian over every half hour with the pages as she finished them. At the mention of his name, the cat looked up again from the microscope, stared long and hard at us, and then reapplied his eye to the eyepiece.

‘You’re staying in that old caravan aren’t you?’ Mrs Evans added as I left. ‘The one no one knows about?’ As I retraced my steps through the whorls and vortices of the car park I thought sourly of Eeyore and his so-called untraceable caravan. I was tempted to curse him, but if you did that in this shop it set off an alarm.

The sun was setting when I got back and the caravans were bathed in golden fire, like an Inca city. I wasn’t expecting to see Julian with the translated pages until later in the night and so I slept for a while. When I awoke, the caravan was in darkness. I got up and took down a tin of pilchards from the cupboard as a reward for Julian and went out for a walk. A breathless hush had fallen, the sort sometimes found in the hour or two between the end of a perfect summer’s day and the onset of evening. Under a sky darkening to indigo I walked through the caravan park, aware with a tinge of envy that the rest of the inhabitants would be sitting down inside their two-wheeled homes to their homely meals: dinners scooped out of tins, heated over camping-gas burners and served on picnic crockery. Children tingling with the raw memory of swimming in the sea and burning on the hot sands. A nameless sense of foreboding had found its way into my heart. I headed for the dunes that edged the park; there was something eternally beautiful and reassuring about them, the sharp spiky marram grass that stung our knees as children looked soft now, like fur ruffled by the fondling breeze. I climbed and sat down facing the ocean looking out to a world which ten thousand years ago had still been land, and which Dai Brainbocs had persuaded his Welsh teacher to try and reclaim. The scheme seemed no madder than some of the other things that had been happening and I could no longer find the strength to be convinced that it wouldn’t work. It was the normal world that was difficult to believe in now. The first stars flickered faintly and from far away the voices of playing children came, weak as ghosts. It was going to be a long night. I took out the hip flask and had a drink of rum, then reached into my pocket for a notepad and pencil. I thought for a few seconds and wrote on the pad: What are the lessons of Noel Bartholomew? I took another drink and savoured the fiery liquor as I contemplated the answer to my question. Never try and save a woman who can’t be saved? I stuck the pencil in my mouth and looked at the new sentence. No. I crossed it out. Always try and save a woman who can’t be saved? I scratched that one out too. Don’t try and save a woman if it’s you who needs saving? I put the notepad down and took another drink. Calamity, who thought all private detectives should drink whisky, once asked me what was the difference between the two drinks. I thought at the time it had to do with the taste, but I was wrong. People are wrong about everything. What is the difference? They both taste fiery and get you drunk, they both look the same and cost the same. But one is the distilled essence of cold, wet, miserable Scottish highlands. And one is the succulent ichor made from sugar and the distilled sunshine of far-off places. I knew which one Bartholomew would have chosen. Bartholomew the dreamer, the romantic, travelling upriver against all advice, lured ever further inland by tantalising rumours and contradictory stories … All this time I had been telling Calamity to ask the right question and had been asking the wrong one myself. I knew now that he never found Hermione, and it wasn’t the Chinese shopkeeper who faked the pictures but he himself before he left Aberystwyth. A few sprigs of foliage from Danycoed Wood, a girl from a harbourside tea-cosy shop paid a farthing to dress up, and a studio in Terrace Road.