The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (9 page)

‘You’d be out of luck if you were, Mac, these are props. Not for sale.’

I recognised the voice and stopped. ‘Poxcrop!’

‘Keep walking if you don’t mind.’

I started walking again.

‘Why the newspapers?’

‘Man in my position can’t hang around the station without any business being there.’

‘You could have come to the office.’

‘Nothing personal, but I wouldn’t like to be seen coming out of your office. I’m taking a risk as it is.’

‘You must know some scary people.’

‘Don’t joke about it. I got your message. What can I do for you?’

‘Does the name Myfanwy Montez mean anything to you?’

‘Sure, the night club singer. Disappeared from Ynyslas three days ago. You like night club singers? My sister can sing. Like a nightingale.’

‘The word is someone is trying to sell some stolen memorabilia – do you know what that is?’

‘Photos, signed albums, concert programmes … sure I’ve handled merchandise like that before.’

‘See what you can find out about it. I also need a ticket for the library, the big one on the hill.’

‘You want books? I’ve got plenty.’

‘These are special.’

‘Tell me what you need, maybe I can arrange something. Getting an actual ticket isn’t easy. Best way is to go to the cemetery and find the grave of someone who—’

‘Yeah I know. That’s too drastic. I’m looking for the
Journals of the Proceedings of the Myfanwy Society
. Years 1970 to present day.’

‘I’ll need some dough.’

‘How much?’

‘Ten pounds should get me started.’

‘You could buy a bakery with that. Try this.’

I put a fiver on top of the card tray.

‘Consider that as a down payment.’

The office was filled with an intoxicating cloud of acetate fumes and Calamity sat in the middle of it, writing capital letters in marker pen on pieces of white card. Her tongue protruded from her mouth in the manner of one totally absorbed.

‘What are you doing?’

She jumped slightly. ‘Er … hi! How’re you doing?’

‘I’m doing fine. Thanks. Now what are you doing?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘Calamity.’

‘Last night after I got back from Ynyslas I … er … went to see a medium.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Just doing some background checks, you know.’

‘Not really.’

‘She gave me the names of a few underworld contacts.’

‘Do you mean the criminal underworld or the one where Beelzebub lives?’

‘Well, both really. Small-time hoods who were active at the time of the Nanteos fire. I’m making an ouija board. Thought we could take some witness statements.’

‘That’s silly.’

‘I knew you’d say that.’

I walked into the kitchenette to put the kettle on and spoke as I worked.

‘I don’t approve of this.’

‘I thought you said it was my case.’

‘It is but I still have to keep an eye on you.’

‘You can’t stop me following my hunches, that’s what the job is all about.’

‘Following hunches is fine, but you can’t take witness statements using a ouija board. You’ll never get your badge if you do things like that.’

‘Louie, sometimes an investigator finds the normal channels are blocked. In such cases she is grateful for whatever leads and scraps of information she can find.’

‘Yeah but the investigator draws the line at the supernatural.’

‘Just give it a go. One of the contacts is quite promising. His name’s Arwel Gluebone.’

‘Arwel Gluebone.’

‘I thought you could help me lean on him a bit. You know: good cop, bad cop.’

I slipped down into the chair and watched as Calamity spread out the cards, turned a tumbler upside down, and then went across to close the curtains. She sat down and we put our fingers on top of the tumbler.

‘Am I the good or the bad cop?’ I asked.

‘Bad. Shhh now.’ Calamity closed her eyes and adopted a sort of spooky expression.

‘Gluebone, are you there?’

The tumbler slid over to the Y.

‘You moved it on purpose,’ I said.

‘I didn’t,’ protested Calamity.

‘You must have done.’

‘Sshhh! OK, Gluebone, I just want to go over a few things we discussed last time. You say you were taken in for questioning two days after the fire, right?’

The tumbler acquired a life of its own and slid across the table, doing a complicated arabesque from card to card. I didn’t know how Calamity was doing it, but it was good. She wrote down the letters as they came. It said:

I stole candlesticks and stuck up toffs on the turnpike; I never done no kinky stuff like that
.

‘Why did they take you in then, Gluebone?’

I didn’t do nuffin’ I swear! It was the peelers. They were trying to fit me up. They needed to lock someone up quick y’see …

Calamity kicked me gently under the table. I looked at her.

She mouthed the words, ‘Tough cop.’ I pulled a face and she flashed an impatient frown at me.

I heaved a heavy sigh and said, ‘OK, Gluebone, you bucket of shit, let’s cut the fairy stories and start singing, shall we? You ravished her didn’t you?’

I never I never!

‘Thought you’d get one back on the old rich bastard in the fancy carriage, huh?!’

I tell you it wasn’t like that
.

‘Tell us who did it then.’

I can’t!

‘You mean you won’t!’

No I can’t, it’s more than my life is worth
.

‘I thought you were dead?’

I am! It’s just a figure of speech – we still use it over here
.

‘Over where?’

The Shadow-Aberystwyth
.

‘What do you do down on the estate, anyway, feed the ducks?’

‘He’s a gardener’s assistant,’ whispered Calamity.

‘I know your sort: all those lonely nights on your own in the potting shed, made you feel a bit frisky, didn’t they? And there she is every night changing in full view of everyone in the bedroom window, all that fancy French lace and finery—’

She was a penny-farthing, I wouldn’t touch her with a martingale
.

‘Tell it to the fairies, Gluebone, you did her in and tried to pin it on the stable boy—’

Says who?

‘The lamplighter.’

You mean Pigmallow? That swill-pouch? Ha that’s a laugh!

‘He’s no swill-pouch.’

I say he is
.

‘He’s worth ten of you Gluebone …’

There was a pause, and then:

Oh I get it – the old soft peeler, hard peeler routine …

There was no more movement from the tumbler.

‘Guess I must have leaned on him a bit too hard.’ I smiled and Calamity frowned as if she thought I’d done it on purpose but couldn’t say so. She gathered the cards together.

‘We just need to work him a bit more. I reckon he’s almost ready to give up the goods.’

I leant back in my chair, laced my fingers behind my head, and stared out of the window. The sound of traffic throbbed in the distance hypnotically, and slowly my eyelids slid down and I
fell asleep. I awoke about ten minutes later to the sound of the phone ringing. Calamity answered. ‘Knight Errant Investigations … Yes … Yes … Oh hi! … Fine and you? … Yeah we’re fine … She what? … Oh. No … sorry not yet. But we’re looking. Yeah, I can imagine. Tell her we’re sorry. OK. Yeah and you too. Bye.’ She stared at the phone for a second, lost in thought, and then looked up. ‘That was Gabriel Bassett. Cleopatra was asking if we’d seen Mr Bojangles.’

‘The air out at Ynyslas certainly tires you out, doesn’t it?’

‘You can say that again, we had a complaint from the coastguard about your snoring. They couldn’t hear the helicopter.’

She took a card over to the incident board and pinned it on.

‘What’s that?’

‘Just some stuff about one of my witnesses.’

‘Which one?’

‘Oh, you know, just background.’

EEYORE LEANT HIS head against the wall of cheap Formica and viewed the world through that lozenge of grey the railway company call a window. Normally, trying to hold a conversation in these old diesel multiple units was like trying to talk in the engine room of a ship, but it was always eerily silent when the train slowed down as it approached Borth. We glided to a halt. One person got on, one got off. It never changed, as if they only sold one ticket per train. Eeyore peered out. ‘Always looks like the town has got its shirt on back to front, doesn’t it?’

I knew what he meant. Borth had length but no width. It was like a fake Dodge City constructed by a movie studio in which all the buildings were frontages and the train line was built on the wrong side.

We pulled out of Borth and continued gliding silently, hardly picking up speed, towards Ynyslas and Dovey Junction. The morning sun had just cleared the horizon above the flat watery world and threw a horizontal beam that made us squint and duck the dust particles that appeared from nowhere like swarms of gnats. The light had the colour of lemonade – not the stuff from the sweetshop, but the homemade drink, chilled and left on the sideboard in a glass pitcher and craved by children in the Famous Five books with the desperation of cocaine addicts. It filled the carriage with warm pale honey and gilded the golf course and beach and sea, and turned the marram grass on the dunes to golden stubble along the chin of the sky.

The track curved gently to the right and the carriage leaned slightly to accommodate the centrifugal forces, and we leaned,
too, stiff as insects preserved in our cell of pale amber, and I thought of Myfanwy.

Whenever I look back it is always a particular afternoon that I recall. A summer’s day when we ate strawberries and went swimming and lay back on hot sand and stared at the impossible blueness of the sky. Just a nice afternoon which has since acquired a freight of significance it never possessed at the time. Maybe that’s what happiness is. Something beautiful we can only see from a distance, like the end of the rainbow. Silver plate added later by memory to days we have lost.

I remembered the man who had been in my office earlier that morning. He was the sort you get from time to time. Came to report a missing person – that great mainstay of the snooper’s profession.

‘I can’t live without her,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘How did you manage in the years before you met her?

He didn’t have an answer to that, he just whined. I told him to pull himself together. And get a shave. I said, ‘My partner, Calamity, will be along in a second, do you want her to see you in that state, you great big lump?’ He said he didn’t know what to do, and I said he could start by being a man. He asked, what good that would do. I was going to throw him out. Then Calamity arrived, looked round the empty room and said, ‘Who were you talking to?’

‘Just voices on the radio.’

Even in midsummer, when the sun’s fire smelted the Prom, Eeyore would insist on wearing a jacket and tie to lead the donkeys. It wasn’t a great suit, and usually came from the charity shop, but it was a suit. But today he had his Sunday one on, which was a little better but had less straw. Eeyore hailed from an era when to make a journey in anything more auspicious than a bus necessitated dressing for the occasion, even if, as today, that journey was off to see two men in prison. One in a tower of bars, and one in a self-constructed tower of Babel.

‘Last time I went to Shrewsbury,’ said Eeyore, ‘the train had proper carriages. With a corridor.’ He knocked the plastic wall with a knuckle. ‘They sell this stuff in Woolies. You wouldn’t want it in your bathroom, would you?’

‘Maybe they think if they make it cheap enough no one will rob it.’

‘They’re right. Frankie Mephisto would never have sullied his hands on a train made out of plastic wood veneer. A real train has proper upholstery, and a guard with a flag, and the name of the company written along the side in gold letters.’ He warmed to his theme. ‘Same with police cars, you see. What are they now? British School of Motoring cast-offs with an American siren. No self-respecting crook is going to be chased by that. It’s degrading. In the old days we had Jags with bells. With real bells you’ve got a proper chase. The young don’t understand these things. They think a siren is easier to maintain, same as these awful trains, and maybe they are, but why does everything have to be easy? Polishing your shoes isn’t easy either but I could never respect a man who didn’t do it.’

The last few words trailed off as he returned a wistful gaze to the world outside. Eeyore was troubled. Since the matriarch had fallen sick, discipline in the herd had broken down. Last night Sugarpie bit Erlkönig on the flank and this morning Miss Muffet was gone.