Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth an-4

by Malcolm Pryce

  I said, ‘Sorry, of course you know.’

  ‘Where can I find her?’

  ‘Copenhagen.’

  He paused to reflect, made a slight nod, and wrote it down in his book. ‘And what does Margaret do?’

  ‘She opens shopping malls.’

  He nodded again and enunciated the sentence as he wrote it down. ‘. . . shop . . . ping . . . malls. Excellent. We’re almost finished. You’ve been very cooperative. Now, just one more question, merely routine. ‘Opening shopping malls isn’t really a job, is it?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘If it was, I wouldn’t mind doing it myself. But the thing is, normally they get important people to do it; do you see where I’m heading? So be a sport, tell me who she really is.’

  ‘She’s the Queen of Denmark.’

  ‘Wonderful.’ He wrote it down. ‘Queen of Denmark. I think that covers all the formalities.’ He snapped the notebook shut and handed it to a deputy. ‘Get that typed up.’ He watched the deputy depart, then turned back to me. We were alone now, just the three of us.

  ‘Speaking off the record, I have a little problem. I don’t like your Queen of Denmark story. You know? Somehow it doesn’t ring true. When you’ve been a policeman as long as I have you get a sort of instinct for these things . . .’

  ‘A hunch?’

  ‘Exactly. A hunch. And mine tells me the Queen of Denmark story is all poo. Do you feel like changing or adding to it?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Not feeling talkative? That’s OK. In my experience peepers are never the most chatty of people, but I have a way of dealing with that.’ He walked over to a cupboard and brought out a monkey wrench. A big one. The sort mechanics use to loosen the wheel nuts on giant earth-moving machinery. He waved it in front of me and rattled the bars with it. The muscles of my groin tightened and I took an involuntary step back from the bars. He laughed and walked over to the radiator. He put the wrench on the valve and began twisting it shut. After he had finished he did the three others along the corridor. Then he brought out a long hooked pole and opened all the skylights. The cold, damp air swirled in and the temperature plunged.

  ‘Brrrr!’ he said.

  Miss Evangeline began to shiver violently.

  ‘Oh yes, I do so like to hear people chattering.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘this is between you and me. Let Miss Evangeline go, or take her to a warm cell. She doesn’t have to suffer this.’

  ‘Tell me who your client is, you asshole peeper, and we can all go home, including . . . Miss Evangeline.’ He put on a silly accent to say her name and I knew then that it was hopeless. There was no point appealing to his better side: he didn’t have one. He was made from the same stuff as Tadpole: industrial waste from the arsenic factory. He walked to the wall and unhooked the fire hose.

  ‘OK, I’ll tell you,’ I said.

  He grinned and aimed the fire hose at me. ‘Shoot!’

  ‘She’s . . . er . . . he’s . . . it’s . . . oh, what’s the point? You won’t believe me.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It’s someone – I don’t know his name, we meet in secret – but it’s someone from the police, undercover, some sort of secret investigation.’

  He laughed. I would have laughed, too; it was pathetic.

  He brought the fire hose up and said, ‘Yeah, well, I’ll check that out. In the meantime we’re going to play a party game called Pass the Pneumonia. You can tell me in the morning who your client is.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Knight, I’m so cold!’

  I took my jacket off and slipped it over Miss Evangeline’s shoulders. It was the stupidest thing I ever did.

  It took him the bat of an eyelid to work out the implications of my chivalry. Longer than most people would have taken, because he couldn’t understand from personal experience why anyone would want to comfort another person like that. But he knew an opportunity to twist the knife when he saw one. You could trace the progress of the penny dropping by the speed of the grin stealing over his face. He turned the hose from me to Miss Evangeline and turned it on. It knocked her off the bed, and by the time I reached her and tried to shield her she was drenched. He turned out the lights and left. I shouted after him: obscenities, and threats, vile insults to wound his manhood, to goad him into returning; but it was no use. He was wise to that one, too. So I shouted at the skylight; shouted until my voice gave out; hoping to alert someone passing by. But the sound of a man’s cries coming from the police station window is not unusual. Only when it goes suddenly quiet is it really scary.

  I read somewhere that an Eskimo who falls through the ice into the water in Greenland has only one chance of survival. He has to run; anywhere will do as long as he runs. If you stand still you freeze to death in under a minute. I didn’t know if it was true; I would have to ask the Queen of Denmark next time she called. I looked at Miss Evangeline shivering and knew she wouldn’t want to run anywhere. At such times you realise how many simple facts about this world there are that you should know but don’t. Is it better to keep your cold wet clothes on or take them off? But the point was academic, I knew she wasn’t going to be taking them off; so I did my best to hold her and keep her warm. She soon lapsed into delirium. She spoke about the horse in the paddock for a while, and gained more lucidity and spoke of the child they took away from her.

  ‘It was a little girl,’ she said.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘I wonder how she’s doing.’ And then: ‘You could find her, couldn’t you? You’re a detective.’ She paused to collect her breath and control the shivering, as if summoning up the strength for one last important task. ‘Couldn’t you?’

  ‘I suppose . . .’

  ‘Find her for me, please, Louie. Tell her that her mum didn’t want to give her away, tell her there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about her. Will you tell her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be now. Not tomorrow. But one day.’

  ‘Yes. One day I will find her and tell her.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  It was about 2 a.m. when she died.

  The next day Calamity bailed me. It was a bright sunny day: the sky as pellucid and blue as a china doll’s eyes. We stood at the sea railings, leaning against them, hair ruffled by a soft sea breeze, our faces gilded by the watery sunlight. On such days it was a joy to wake up. Sometimes you had to wonder what the gods were playing at.

  ‘You shouldn’t be worrying about me, you’ve got your own business to run now.’

  ‘We go back a long way, Louie.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘No way I could have left you there. You wouldn’t have left me.’

  ‘No, but I don’t want you . . . you know, to let things slip. You need to work hard to build a business up. How’s it going?’

  ‘Oh, pretty slow. Still waiting to hear back from the Pinkertons; can’t really do much until then. Sorry I wasn’t in when you came round.’

  ‘I haven’t been round.’

  ‘Oh. Someone told me they’d seen you knocking on my door.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Must have been someone else.’

  There was a pause and we were distracted by a man in a sandwich board walking past. ‘HOFFMANN IS COMING,’ it said. The End was, it seemed, no longer nigh. The Apocalypse had been postponed. Calamity made a slight, embarrassed shrug, as if the world had gone to pot during my night in jail and she was somehow to blame.

  ‘There are a lot of rumours going about,’ she said. ‘They reckon he’s coming. Some say he’ll turn up at the carol concert.’

  ‘Pure craziness.’

  ‘I know. Who would fall for a thing like that?’

  ‘Who?’ Who indeed, I thought. Tinker, tailor, Soldier for Jesus, gaoler . . . Take your pick. The people in the client’s chair have one more stop on the run from the wishing well to the priest.

  ‘Where did you get the money for a bail?’ I said. />
  ‘It was only fifty quid.’

  ‘I know. Where did you—’

  ‘Oh! Before I forget,’ said Calamity, ‘I need to tell you . . . I did something . . . I did a tail job on the boy who collects the pies. He takes the empties to Erw Watcyns.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s very interesting. Where did you get the fifty quid?’

  Silence.

  ‘Calamity?’

  ‘Oh, you know . . .’

  ‘Oh, no! You didn’t . . . Not the book . . . ?’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘You haven’t sold it?’

  ‘I pawned it. I can get it back if you don’t jump bail.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m going to jump bail.’

  ‘I know.’

  * * *

  It’s the one thing they never tell you about in the movies: the hard manual labour. You see people walking around all the time – shaking martinis, playing tennis, clutching long cigarette holders – but they never tell you about the problems you get when you kill one of them, when you take away their means of self-propulsion. It’s a can of worms. It’s like having a dead cow in the living room. And then there’s the mess. That’s another thing they don’t talk about. When people can still move about they have a thing called delicacy. They go to secret places to empty themselves. It’s not the same when they’re dead. They don’t care any more. They’re just offal. They spill themselves all over your carpet. You can spend all morning mopping up the blood, but a lifetime is not enough. The forensic boys will come along and laugh at you. They spray the room with special chemicals and turn on an ultraviolet light and hey presto! the stains are back, shining in glorious Technicolor. The floor is as clean as a new pin and guess what? Something red seeped through the gaps in the floorboards. All you did was give him a little bang on the head; you put newspaper down; there was no mess. But it forms an invisible aerosol cloud and floats around unseen like a thought bubble; ten million microscopic droplets. They only need to find one and you’re off to the chair. The forensic boys laugh at you; they love you; they eat you for breakfast.

  What are you going to do with all that meat, anyway? All that gristle and cartilage, and bone, a stomach full of undigested food and an arse full of shit? Where are you going to put it? What are you going to use? Kitchen utensils? It’s like demolishing a piano with a pair of scissors. The only one that’s any good is the ice-cream scoop to take out the eyes. And even then one of them rolls under the sofa and won’t turn up again for years. And boy, do they struggle! They flail and scratch and gurgle; they bite and kick; they stick a finger in your eye and pull your hair . . . Those poor crazed African dictators couldn’t take it any more. Just couldn’t watch. They came up with a better idea: put two people in a cell with a sledgehammer and tell them to sort it out between themselves. One of you goes free. You decide. And hose the place down afterwards.

  It’s the one thing they never mention in the movies. We’re too effete these days: we don’t have the strength. Just ask old Doc Sawbones in his frock coat and blood-spattered top hat how hard it is to remove a limb: he’ll tell you. Try using an axe. Chop, chop, chop . . . They’ll still get you. You’ll run out of bin bags. Or a bit of bone goes in your eye and turns sceptic. The surgeon who takes it out is an amateur sleuth. The worst sort. Sticks it under the microscope and knows it all: it’s amazing what they can see. Young female, early twenties, five foot six in her socks, blonde hair, blue eyes, twenty-six-inch waist, had cornflakes for breakfast. All from a splinter. OK, Louie, let’s go through it again, and this time skip the fairy stories. How did you get DOA’s thigh bone in your eye? I don’t know, I keep telling you, I was chopping wood and I must have slipped. How do you explain the cornflake? It’s from your packet, the lab boys gave us a perfect match . . . Yes, it’s the one thing they never mention in the movies. You can’t burn them, you can’t hide them, you can’t cut them up; you can’t do anything with them. They’re made from the toughest substance known to man: man. In case you’re wondering, it’s why I will never kill Erw Watcyns.

  Chapter 16

  BESIDES THE CHAPLAIN there were four mourners at Miss Evangeline’s funeral: the director of the nursing home, one of the patients, a woman from the social services, and, standing some distance away, Lorelei, the one-eyed street-walker who used to visit Miss Evangeline. A small lane runs through Llanbadarn cemetery, and in the late afternoon gloom the streetlamp was already lit. She stood like a sentinel under the lamp, surrounded by swirling white moths of snow; her mouth a scarlet fissure across the powdery moonscape of her face. It was as if she was reluctant to get too close, as if a life being made to feel unwelcome at any sort of respectable gathering had led to ingrained habits that were hard to dissolve, even for the funeral of an old friend. We stood together and listened to the drone of the chaplain’s words. Watched them lower the coffin into the ground. Listened to the thud of dirt on hollow wood. When there was nothing more to watch we walked down Elm Tree Avenue together and on down Queen’s Road to the Prom.

  We went to the Cliff Railway station café and ordered two teas just as they were closing. Teas served with sullen ill-will because the appearance of two customers at this hour would make the woman late closing. Lorelei took out a metal flask and poured shots of whisky into the tea. The woman closing up with unnecessary bangs and accusatory crashes threw a look of disapproval. This was an unlicensed café, I could lose my licence. The last train of the evening clanked down to rest on the buffers. No one got off, no one got on. On a night like tonight there was no point trying to escape. Better to drink. To wassail.

  ‘Not much of a turn-out,’ said Lorelei.

  From the radio in the kitchen came the haunting anthem of all troubled Christmases: Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright. The simple ditty that made the soldiers in the Great War lay down their arms and play football. Then pick them up and start shooting each other again. There is no better cameo in all the annals of human history for demonstrating the futile insanity of war.

  ‘Mind you, I’ll be lucky to get four turn up when I go.’

  I squeezed her hand in an attempt to reassure. ‘Does it really matter, once you’ve gone, who turns up to the funeral?’ I said.

  Lorelei considered. ‘We were quite close in school. Then we lost touch.’

  ‘How long have – had you been visiting her at the nursing home?’

  ‘About ten years. I left town for a while, then when I came back I heard about her from someone, so I started going to see her.’

  ‘She kept talking about a child.’

  ‘Yes. I never knew about it at the time.’

  ‘I promised her I’d try and find it.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Was I wrong, do you think?’

  ‘It’s not for me to say.’

  ‘A dying woman’s wish. I could hardly say no.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. That Erw Watcyns . . . Someone should do something.’

  I asked her if she had heard of a soldier called Caleb Penpegws, because all boys who fought in that war, as in all wars, must have passed on their way to the front through the arms of someone like Lorelei.

  ‘There were so many boys,’ she said. ‘I never remembered the names. But there’s a man at the Pier, Eifion. He might know.’

  I paid for the teas and just before we stood up to leave Lorelei said, ‘Will you kill Erw Watcyns?’

  I looked at her in surprise, unsure whether she was asking me to do it or asking if I planned to. She saw the look on my face and nodded and said, ‘It’s all right. I know. I’m sorry I said that.’

  We walked out into the falling snow; the Prom was hushed and filled with a soft luminescence. Light was a thing you had to be very wary of. In summer it flashed in strange, haunting fashion off the hot chrome bumpers of distant cars turning at Castle Point. All cars have chrome, so why should a flash like that stop y
ou and make you long for things you cannot name? We stood at the brim of the Wishing Well, maintained by the Round Table, and heavily padlocked against wish-thieves.

  ‘Make a wish,’ I said.

  ‘I could do with some shoes that don’t pinch.’ She looked down at her feet, clad in old grey vinyl trainers, the ones put out by one of the high-street chains in a forlorn attempt to imitate a famous brand.

  ‘That Salvation Army shop has plenty on display.’

  ‘Army Surplice? They always charge me double.’

  ‘You never find charity where they advertise it.’

  ‘Oxfam are nice enough.’

  I threw in a 50p piece and made a wish about Myfanwy and Christmas and snow.

  Son of God, love’s pure light, and then the line I liked best: Sleep in Heavenly peace. But only children know the secret of how to do that. It’s a different country when you grow up.

  An old man approached the Wishing Well and stopped when he noticed us. I could understand; being caught making a wish is undignified, like reading pornography. It was Elijah and he was crying. Instinct or tact made Lorelei step away into the shadows.

  Elijah said, ‘I am sorry about your little girl, what I did: pulling the gun.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘I am astounded at what has become of me.’

  ‘You just got carried away.’

  ‘That is what astounds me most. All my life I have made it a point of principle not to get carried away. Giving in to passion is for fools.’

  ‘And for human beings.’

  ‘This, you see, is the poison of Hoffmann. May the ever-merciful Lord blight and curse that fiend.’

  ‘They say he is coming. They say the name means Hopeman.’

  Elijah scoffed. ‘They! Who are they? The peasants of Aberystwyth? What do they know, the poor ignorant fools? They see a word painted in blood and they think their troubles are over.’