Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth an-4

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘Doesn’t his posture strike you as unusual?’

  ‘He’s been brutally murdered.’

  ‘Even so, it doesn’t look natural.’

  ‘He fell awkwardly.’

  ‘That’s my point: you can’t fall like that. Look.’

  She did a slow, dignified collapse onto the floor, roughly in the same attitude as the corpse.

  ‘Draw round me.’

  I took the cap off the pen and drew her outline.

  She got up and looked down. ‘See? His foot’s facing the wrong way. He’s lying on his left side, his right knee is touching the ground on top of his left leg. There’s no way you can get the right foot to face backwards like that unless you break the leg.’

  ‘So maybe he broke it.’

  ‘The report doesn’t say anything about a broken leg.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just a mistake in the drawing.’

  ‘Mrs Dinorwic-Jones has been teaching life study classes all her life. She wouldn’t get something like that wrong. There’s only one explanation.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘He did it deliberately. He took his leg out of the trousers and stuffed his hat in the trouser leg and boot, then twisted it round to face the wrong way.’

  ‘Where’s his real leg, then?’

  ‘It’s pulled back and up, inside the thigh, like actors who play Long John Silver.’

  ‘Why would he do a thing like that?’

  ‘It’s a signal. He was dying. He had just a few minutes left to live. So what does he do? He writes “Hoffmann” in his own blood. Who’s Hoffmann? Good question. My hunch is, either he recognised his assailant, who happened to be called Hoffmann, or it’s a message written to an accomplice called Hoffmann or about a subject of mutual interest to them both which is connected with someone called Hoffmann. So the accomplice reads about the murder and the word “Hoffmann” and realises that Santa has hidden something in the alley for him and has used the phoney leg routine to point to it.’ She started to gather up the sheets on the floor.

  ‘You mean, he’s hidden something in the alley?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And pointed to it with his leg?’

  ‘Phoney leg.’

  I laughed. ‘OK, we check the alley. Do we have anything else to go on? I’m not saying the phoney-leg routine isn’t promising or anything, but it would be nice if we – you know – had something else.’

  Calamity took out a notebook and flicked it open. ‘The DOA is called Absalom. Arrived in town two or three weeks ago; no one is exactly sure when. Kept himself to himself. Took a job as Father Christmas even though he was Jewish. There’s mention of a woman.’ She opened the Cambrian News to the scandal pages. There was a picture of a mousey-looking Welsh woman in a stovepipe hat, in her early twenties probably, beneath a lurid headline: ‘SANTA SLASH MOLL IN STOVEPIPE HAT MOOLAH MYSTERY’.

  I skimmed the first paragraph. It was a feeble attempt to insinuate a sinister explanation of where the girl got the money for her hats.

  ‘She’s the harp player out at Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp,’ explained Calamity with a slight air of hesitation.

  We swapped knowing glances. The holiday camp at Borth was not one of our favourite haunts, in contrast to most holiday camps they had a strictly enforced ‘No Dicks and Sleuths’ policy. They were good at spotting disguises, too.

  ‘We’ll take a ride out there,’ I said.

  ‘We also need to get some knitting needles.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Ballistics.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  ‘Been reading about it in the Pinkerton book. What you do is you stick the needle in the bullet holes in the wall and shine a flashlight along the line of the needle. That way you find out the trajectory, and you can work out where the firing came from.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Calamity assumed a nonchalant air. ‘Fairly standard scene-of-crime m.o.’

  ‘I’ve never come across it before.’

  ‘If Jack Ruby’s lawyer had tried it he probably wouldn’t have fried.’

  ‘Jack Ruby didn’t go to the chair. He died in hospital while awaiting a retrial. Embolism, I think.’

  ‘Same difference.’

  ‘And he shot Lee Harvey Oswald from three feet away. You wouldn’t need to stick a knitting needle into Lee Harvey Oswald to find out where the firing came from.’

  ‘It was just a . . . a . . .’ She consulted the Pinkerton book. ‘An illustrative example.’

  ‘That’s all right, then.’

  ‘I thought we could check the alley, see if the scene-of-crime boys missed anything.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘Of course it is. They only see what they’re expecting to see, because they arrive loaded with preconceptions. You have to empty your mind of the obvious and just see what turns up.’

  ‘And I bet that’s in the book, too.’

  ‘It’s all in the book, Louie.’

  Outside the Chungking Express a police car with out-of-town plates was parked. We pushed through the door into the main parlour. It was the usual cuckoo’s nest of oriental bric-a-brac: lanterns, vases, model junks, silk dragons, a lacquered cabinet, Buddha and Confucius . . . objects side by side that would have occupied separate wings in a museum.

  It was still early and the dining room empty except for a man eating an early lunch. A white napkin was stuffed a touch flamboyantly into his shirt collar. He wore a crumpled and stained suit that might once have been well cut and had an air that suggested the tailors of Swansea or Llanelli. Even without seeing the car outside I could smell cop. He looked up as we walked in, cast a glance and returned to the task of spooning the last drops of sauce from his plate into his mouth. We sat at an adjacent table. After deciding that no more could be scraped off the dish he threw it down with a rough clatter and dabbed his chin with the napkin. He shouted in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Hey, chop chop!’

  I grimaced and he noted it from the corner of his eye. And I noted that he noted.

  A waitress appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen and at the same time the door to the Gents opened and a police constable walked out drying his hands on the thighs of his trousers. He looked at me and made a strangled scoffing sound that implied he knew who I was. I didn’t recognise him. He walked over and joined the cop, who turned to the girl and said, ‘Hey, stop staring and clear away this shit.’

  She was in her early twenties, slender in a scarlet cheongsam embroidered with golden flowers; her face was as smooth and expressionless as alabaster. She began to clear. The slit in her cheongsam opened over the thigh and the two cops stared with no attempt to conceal their lust.

  ‘No thanks, we haven’t got time for dessert,’ said the big cop. The deputy guffawed dutifully. Or maybe he genuinely thought it was funny.

  The girl flinched and moved her leg to let the parted fabric fall back. I winced again.

  This time the cop looked over. ‘Something wrong with your eye?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Every time I look round, I find you looking at me like you got soap in your eye.’

  ‘It’s conjunctivitis.’

  ‘My auntie had that, too – purgatory it was. She never looked like she had soap in her eye, though. I reckon it’s something else. Maybe you can see something on our table we got that you haven’t?’

  ‘You mean apart from that inimitable Swansea sophistication?’

  ‘Ah!’ The cop nodded as if all had become clear. ‘Now I get it. I get it. It appears that quite by chance this fine Aberystwyth morning I have stumbled on someone purveying an item I greatly disdain. Namely the wisecrack.’

  ‘The wisecrack?’

  ‘I disdain it. Always have, always will.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘I would recommend that you do. Because to crack wise in my presence is not wise at all. It’s stupid. I call it cra
cking stupid.’

  He picked up the corners of the napkin and wiped his mouth again, unnecessarily.

  The deputy chuckled with a sycophantic air. ‘Oh, he just loves to crack wise, this one does, he’s famous for it.’

  ‘You know this man?’

  ‘He’s a peeper. He’s working the Santa case,’ said the deputy. ‘He’s got an ad in the paper.’

  The cop put on that smile you get to recognise after a while, the one they wear just before they hit you. ‘Must be getting slow in my old age. Normally I can spot a shamus two blocks away.’ He furrowed his brow as he contemplated the seemingly paradoxical nature of what he was witnessing. ‘A shamus working a murder case. That’s kind of hard to believe.’ He leaned towards me. ‘Didn’t they tell you peepers are not allowed to poke their snouts into murder investigations? I’m sure they must have told you that.’

  ‘I thought maybe we could work together as a team.’

  The deputy chuckled again. The cop’s smile deepened. It was clear I was asking for trouble and that was his favourite request. But also it was clear he was a connoisseur of situations like this, and preferred to savour them rather than rush things.

  ‘Oh yes, a purveyor of the dumbcrack.’

  He stood up, threw the napkin down, and walked to the door. The deputy followed.

  The sour cop continued to talk to himself, shaking his head in mock incredulity. ‘A peeper who likes to crack stupid, and he’s working a murder case. It must be Christmas.’

  The girl began clearing the table.

  I said, ‘I guess he must be the new community policeman.’

  The girl looked at me, but said nothing. Carried on clearing.

  ‘Know his name?’

  She paused. ‘Erw Watcyns. He’s from Swansea. He likes the food and hates the people. Our favourite type of customer.’

  ‘Were you working the night the guy got killed in your alley?’

  It was as if she hadn’t heard.

  ‘Yes, I know. No one saw or heard anything. Could have happened in your kitchen and no one would have seen anything.’

  ‘Why should we care? The affairs of the round-eye are no concern of ours. You’ll be wasting your time asking round here. Even with your Kierkegaard.’

  ‘I know. I can understand why you don’t want to talk to the cops. I wouldn’t, either.’

  She said nothing.

  I took out a business card and put it on the table. ‘An old man killed in an alley at Christmas, that’s a terrible thing. All we’re doing is trying to find out why. It’s not a lot to ask. You can find us at this address if you hear anything that might help.’

  ‘We won’t say anything to the police,’ added Calamity.

  ‘In fact, if you want to get up the nose of the cop who was sitting at that table, talking to us might be a grand idea.’

  The girl stopped clearing and stared at us. Calamity smiled at her.

  ‘We’ve nothing to say.’

  ‘Mind if we look in your alley?’

  ‘It leads to the street, it’s not ours.’

  ‘We’re polite people, we always ask first.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s not our alley.’

  The alley led nowhere unless you considered a yard full of bins a place worth going to. It smelled of stagnant drains, hot laundry water, soy sauce and barbecued pork. There didn’t seem much reason to go down there and you wondered why the Father Christmas had. Maybe he was dragged there. It wasn’t a great place to die; or to spend much time while alive. I waited patiently in the entrance while Calamity held the newspaper in front of her and tried to match the image with the layout of the alley.

  Finally she found it, nodded, put the newspaper down and followed the direction of the wrong-ways-round leg. She turned to face a wall. There were drainpipes, and a bricked-up window. She started scrabbling around the window ledge and I walked over.

  ‘Are you going to do the ballistics thing with the knitting needles as well?’

  ‘I thought I’d wait until after dark.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to be much here, just litter.’

  Maybe the litter is what we’re looking for.’

  She ran her finger along the ledge, pushing through a wedge of dirty, rain-sodden paper. Sweet wrappers, a scrap of something, coloured chits . . . it didn’t seem like much. The sort of detritus that gathered on ledges in alleys everywhere.

  ‘You have to look for the Gestalt,’ said Calamity.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I think it’s something about looking at something but not seeing it. Like not seeing the wood for the trees.’ She picked up a red chit of paper with a number on it.

  ‘You think that’s it?’

  She looked at me with a glint of excitement in her eyes. ‘It’s a receipt from the Pier cloakroom.’

  I was about to say that didn’t prove anything. It could have just blown there. No reason to suppose the dead man hid it here and did the phoney leg routine to point it out. I was about to say that but then I noticed a man standing at the end of the alley watching us. He wore a black hat with a wide brim, and a long black coat. His beard was long and grey and wispy like candy-floss spun from cobwebs. Calamity put the chit in her pocket and we walked back along the alley towards the man, feeling strangely guilty. When we reached the street we avoided his gaze and walked to Pier Street and then right towards the sea front. The man in the black coat followed. We walked some more and I glanced over my shoulder.

  ‘Is he still following us?’ asked Calamity.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe we should go to the hat-check office a bit later.’

  I agreed. At the Prom we stopped and stood by the sea railings, watching the nothing that was going on out at sea. The man took a few hurried steps and put a hand gently on my shoulder. I turned to face him.

  Seen close up, he was strangely indistinct, wrapped in layers of smeared greyness like a wet sky, or watercolour washes on wet paper. Only the thin darker line of the brim of his hat against the knobbled cloudscape had a discernible edge. There were holes in his coat.

  ‘My name is Elijah,’ he said. ‘I represent the government and people of Israel. I can arrange to provide bona fides if you require it.’

  ‘How can we help you?’

  ‘Your little girl has an item belonging to the people of Israel. I must insist you surrender it to my safekeeping.’

  I looked at Calamity, who feigned surprise.

  ‘Do you have an item belonging to the people of Israel?’ I asked.

  ‘Not me, boss.’

  ‘She says she doesn’t have it. She’s an honest kid.’

  A weary look passed across his face, which seemed already deeply lined with the imprint of a life spent upon a thankless quest.

  ‘Of course she says that.’ He removed his hat and then replaced it. He seemed to be perspiring in the cold morning. ‘She says that, even though she knows I stood in the alley and watched her take it.’

  ‘Supposing she did find something in this alley you mention, what was it doing there if it belonged to you?’

  ‘Did I say it belonged to me? I recall saying it belonged to the nation of Israel. I have the honour to represent them, I do not aggrandise to myself the notion that I embody them.’

  ‘That’s a fair point, but it’s still hard to understand how a nation can lose something in an alley.’

  ‘To you, perhaps, but my people have lost many things in their sad history . . .’

  ‘Not in alleys.’

  ‘Did I say it was lost? I do not recall saying it was lost.’

  ‘You implied it.’

  ‘We didn’t find it,’ said Calamity.

  ‘No, how could you find that which was not lost? You stole it. That much is clear.’

  ‘Tell us what you are looking for and maybe we can help you look for it.’

  ‘I have been working in the shadows of this world and with the spectres who inhabit it for over forty years. Do
you not think I might by now have tired of people feigning ignorance?’

  ‘Maybe I’m not feigning.’

  ‘Feigning ignorance is a difficult stratagem to employ, perhaps the most difficult of all. There are very few people who can do it convincingly. You are not one of them. Time is running out. Mr Knight, please surrender the item and go in peace.’

  ‘What item?’

  He sighed. It was a phoney sigh. Feigning a sigh is a difficult stratagem.

  ‘Tell us how an item belonging to the people of Israel happened to be in an alley belonging to the Corporation of Aberystwyth.’

  ‘As if you didn’t already know.’

  ‘Humour me.’

  ‘A man was recently cruelly slain in the alley and mutilated in a fashion which shocks even a people whose name has become a byword for suffering.’

  ‘A man called Absalom.’

  ‘Perhaps. He has had many names, as indeed I suspect have you.’

  ‘My name has always been Louie.’

  ‘It is inevitable that you say that. But have you always been a private detective? My information is that you have not. Your current occupation is a tactic, a brilliant one, to cover your investigation into this man you call Absalom.’

  ‘How come you know him?’

  ‘He was my brother. The item he hid in the alley was meant for me. He placed it on the window ledge and with the last of his dying strength wrote “Hoffmann”, confident that the shocking manner of his death would be reported in the world press and that the word “Hoffmann” would agitate an elaborate and sophisticated series of tripwires which would cause a bell to ring in the offices of the organisation for which I work. He knew as surely as if he had sent it by registered mail that his message scrawled in blood would reach the awareness of me, his brother. And to help his brother in his search he inserted a rudimentary signal of incoherence in the arrangement of his scene of death such that a policeman would overlook it but one with trained eyes, one who knew there was something there to look for, would not.’

  He made a summing-up gesture with his hands. ‘And thus we arrive at the scene in the alley, where your little girl – your very smart little girl – decoded the signal and found the hidden item.’