The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (22 page)

‘So why is he sending you books from Shrewsbury library?’

She looked shocked. ‘He isn’t!’

I took the book out of my bag and threw it on the table. ‘He is.’

Her mouth opened and she popped her hand to it.

‘Pope Gregory, whoever he is.’

‘H … how did you get it?’

‘The postman asked me to deliver it. I forgot. Then it fell on the kettle. You know how easily that can happen.’

‘You had no right!’

‘Don’t give me any crap about rights. I had about as much right as you had to read Seren’s letter.’

‘It’s not the same. The girl is sixteen. I’m her guardian.’

‘So what’s so special about Pope Gregory?’

‘Why don’t you ask Frankie Mephisto?’

‘Oh that’s good!’ I laughed in scorn. ‘A minute ago you didn’t know who he was. Which is a bit surprising because I hear he also happens to be your brother, although I can understand why you would want to disown him.’

‘You think you have all the answers, don’t you?’

‘On the contrary, all I have are questions. You’re the one who knows the answers. Why would Frankie Mephisto send you a book on Pope Gregory?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Like hell you don’t!’

‘I don’t.’

‘What’s he got on you? What are you scared of?’

‘Nothing. I’m not scared of anything.’

‘He’s got something on you. I can see it in your eyes. Guy like him doesn’t send people bedside reading. He sends them an Aberystwyth overcoat. You know what that is? It’s made of pine. He’s got something on you, I can smell it.’

There was a stand-off. Sister Cunégonde stared at her lap. And then looked up at me and said quietly, ‘Can I have a rum?’

I walked over to the kitchenette to fetch the bottle and a glass for her and poured us two generous measures. She lifted the glass and looked at me over the rim, her tongue making a slight dart along the dry pale lips.

‘Chin, chin,’ she said and knocked it back.

At that moment she just looked like a sad and broken woman. She hiccupped on the scalding rum and said, ‘I can’t tell you what
he has on me. I can’t. It’s too … too terrible. Please don’t ask. I’ll never say.’

‘So what does he want from you? Normally blackmailers want money, but it can’t be that.’

‘No, he doesn’t want money.’

‘What then?’

‘He wants me to do something. Something for him. Something soon.’

‘Something like what? A favour?’

She turned the glass round in her hands. ‘Yes, a favour. But I don’t know what. He hasn’t told me.’

My eyes narrowed slightly as I took that one in. I hadn’t been expecting it.

‘But he will. Oh, he will. And the only thing I know,’ she added, her voice quivering on the threshold of tears, ‘is that, knowing Frankie Mephisto, it will be something terrible. Something really, really awful. Horrible. And … and … worst of all …’ She looked up at me and the tears were curving down in snail trails either side of her sharp red nose. ‘Worst of all, I know that, whatever it is, I’ll do it.’

THE INCIDENT BOARD was in the bin next morning. Nothing was said about it, and nothing was said about the dossier on Nanteos that had found its way to the top of the cupboard in the kitchen.

I spent the rest of the week walking up and down the Prom. Two or three times a day I would run into Eeyore and ask how the search for Miss Muffet was going. He’d say it was going well and ask about Myfanwy. I’d say the signs were hopeful and I had plenty of leads to chase. But he knew that couldn’t be true because if I did, why wasn’t I chasing them? And I knew things weren’t looking good for Miss Muffet either. Normally when they ran away they turned up again after a few days, dusty and hungry and in need of a good brush. Usually, too, they had a sort of chastened air about them that said the big wide world was not such a great place after all. But when a few days passed without news you tended to fear the worst. You normally didn’t hear anything for a few months and then a friend would tell you how he’d been browsing in a bookshop in the red light district in Amsterdam and saw a donkey on the cover of a magazine that looked like her.

In all that time we didn’t see anything of Gabriel Bassett either but I was glad in a way. On the Monday evening before he was due round I ran into a Cub Scout as I was leaving the office.

‘Bob-a-job, mate?’

Green jumper, green and yellow cap, neckerchief, freshly scrubbed face glowing with youthful idealism. ‘Is it bob-a-job week already?’

‘If you’ve got a bob and a job it is.’

‘Sorry, son, the last Cub Scout I invited in stole the umbrella stand.’

‘You need an umbrella stand? Why didn’t you say, I can supply.’

‘Poxcrop! Is that you?’

‘Doing my duty for God and the Queen. Not necessarily in that order.’

‘How did you get the glow of youthful idealism?’

‘Saddle soap.’

‘Even your own mother wouldn’t recognise you.’

‘That’s truer than you think, Mac, I just washed her dishes for fifty pence.’

‘You did a bob-a-job for your own mum?’

‘I admit she wasn’t wearing her glasses. All the same. Didn’t even know me – her own flesh and blood. She said I should come back later and meet her son, we’d get on well together. Imagine that! As if I were the type to make friends with a lousy Cub Scout. After all these years, that’s how much she knows me.’

‘Bit of a mean trick to play on your own mum.’

‘What about the one she was going to play on me? Me, the little guy who suckled at her breast, she makes wash up for nothing. Some kid in a green and yellow cap turns up and she gives him fifty pence. She doesn’t know him from Adam. Where’s the justice in that? And then she says if only the Lord had sent her a little boy like him. I said, “Woman, behold your son.”’

‘So what have you got for me?’

He pulled out a box of papers from under his arm and held it out. The sheet on the top said,
Llanbadarn Parish Bugle
.

‘I think you must have got your orders crossed.’ He lifted the top paper to reveal a periodical beneath.
Journal of the Proceedings of the Myfanwy Society
.

‘Complete set, pristine condition, all sixty issues including the special commemorative edition to mark the monkeys in space.’
He put the box down and added, before walking off, ‘I’ve also heard a whisper about the singer.’

‘Myfanwy?’

‘Just a whisper.’

‘What is it?’

‘They say a special nurse has been engaged to look after her – Frankie Mephisto’s old
consigliere
.’

‘And who’s that?’

‘No one knows, Mac.’

I left the box with Calamity and arrived at the office next day to find her asleep with her head down on the desk. A flask of coffee was next to her and the periodicals were scattered over the desktop and littering the floor. She flinched when she heard me walk in, jumped slightly and made a soft groan. I nudged her awake.

‘Hi!’ she said, peering at me through eyes gummed up with sleep. ‘I’ve been manning the phone.’

I smiled and gave her shoulder a soft squeeze. ‘That’s good, but you don’t need to do it all night.’

‘You never know. If Myfanwy was trying to ring she might have to wait until a strange hour.’

‘I see you started on the periodicals.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Found anything?’

‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded towards the wall. One of the journals was pinned open. ‘Remember you telling me Frankie Mephisto had a … a … whatchamacallit in prison, that made him go all religious?’

‘An epiphany. The day he walked with Jesus and saw the wonder of his works.’ I walked over to the wall. ‘Maybe we should clear some of this mess up before Bassett comes. Today’s the big day.’

‘He’s not coming.’

‘No? What makes you say that?’

‘Just a hunch.’ She nodded again at the wall.

The periodical was opened to a black and white photo of Myfanwy aged seven or eight, maybe nine, sitting on a man’s knee. She was wearing a party frock and hair in cutey-pie pigtails. The man was wearing prison uniform. He smiled the beatific smile of one who is undergoing an unexpected epiphany. The caption read, ‘Even notorious gangster Frankie Mephisto is not immune to the charms of Myfanwy’s “Good Ship Lollipop”.’ Calamity came over and stood next to me.

‘It’s a Sunday school trip to sing to the prisoners, about fifteen years ago.’

I looked at the face of Frankie Mephisto smiling into the camera and the hairs on my neck prickled as I experienced my own epiphany. I remembered where I had seen him before, why he had struck me as vaguely familiar when I went to visit him at Shrewsbury. He was the granddad parked next to us the day Myfanwy and I ate our last ice creams together at Ynyslas. The man whose beatific smile had misled me and caused me to reflect that the lustre of his forehead was the glow of avuncular philanthropy when in fact it was nothing more than the patina that comes from a lifetime of hitting noses.

‘Look at the guy standing behind him,’ said Calamity.

It was Gabriel Bassett.

Gabriel Bassett was due round at noon but we decided in the light of this new discovery that we couldn’t wait. Instead, we put on our coats and walked down to Harbour Row to pay him a call. The sign in the window said ‘No Vacancies’. I stood on the step and rang the bell. Like all the B&Bs along Harbour Row, the house fronted almost directly on to the street, separated from it by a stretch of yard about a foot wide which meant that I was almost brushing up against the bay window and could clearly see Mrs Gittins sitting in her front parlour, wearing a housecoat. She was warming herself in front of a gas fire, even though it wasn’t
cold out. But, though I could see her, and she could see me, some strange protocol demanded that I pretend not to be able to see her and she pretended not to see me. She was knitting. After we got bored of the charade, I tapped on the window and pointed at the door. Mrs Gittins looked up with an expression of fake surprise, then stood up gingerly as if her joints had grit in them. She padded to the door in fluffy slippers. She opened the door a few inches and said, ‘No vacancies.’

‘Mrs Gittins, we’ve known each other ten or fifteen years. You see me every week somewhere in town. Do you really think I need a room?’

‘That’s what people normally come to a guesthouse for.’

‘I want to talk to you about Gabriel Bassett.’

‘He’s not home.’

‘Can we come in and chat? I’ll pay for the gas.’

Inside the small parlour, the gas fire hissed, and the air was hot and fuggy with stale frying smells and the cloying absence of a husband, now long gone either to his grave or some illusion of a better life in Shrewsbury. Somewhere in the direction of the kitchen there would be a sitting room preserved in silence, as little visited as a sealed pharaoh’s tomb, and reserved for special occasions the like of which never came to anyone who lived on this stretch of the Prom.

‘Is he a friend of yours?’

‘Yes, sort of.’

‘Hmmmm.’ She bid us sit down on the sofa and frowned deeply at the revelation that Gabriel Bassett had a friend. Normally, the lonely human flotsam that passed through her establishment seldom had such luxuries, especially ones that came visiting.

‘Hmmm, I’m not sure.’

I took out a pound coin and let the Queen’s face catch the light. ‘As I said, I’ll be happy to pay for the gas.’

She tilted her head back slightly and looked down her nose at
the coin, nodding methodically as if slowly parsing the thought that my business with Gabriel must be respectable if I was willing to throw money around after it. In truth, the opposite was more likely to be the case. She took the coin.

‘I’m afraid you’re out of luck for all your fancy money, I haven’t seen him for a few days.’

‘How many days?’

‘I couldn’t say for sure because he has his own key, but it must be getting on for a week. I wasn’t too worried because he pays in advance. That’s partly why I let him take the room. Of course, if I’d known the sort of company he would keep I might have thought twice about it.’

‘I would have thought he would make an ideal tenant.’

‘That’s what I thought, too, but anyone can make a mistake. A man is judged by the company he keeps is what my late husband always used to say. Only intelligent thing he ever said.’

I took out another coin. ‘Did he keep company, then, Mrs Gittins?’

‘No women if that’s what you’re thinking. I run a respectable house.’

‘Of course you do.’

She took the coin. ‘If I’d known he was going to receive visits from people like that, I never would have shown him houseroom.’

‘People like what, Mrs Gittins?’

‘That fellah that robbed the Cliff Railway. Frankie Mephisto. They let him out early, didn’t they? Only been in twenty-five years, not much of a price to pay for a young girl’s life is it?’

‘I expect it feels a lot longer on the inside.’