Aberystwyth Mon Amour

by Malcolm Pryce

  For a while there was silence except our breathing. Lovespoon stared up at me and I stared down at him and in between were the scissors. Finally he said: ‘I’ll make a deal.’

  ‘You’re not in a position to.’

  ‘Herod has the girl; I don’t know where. We’ll bring her to you tomorrow.’

  ‘Why should I trust you?’

  ‘Because you haven’t got the fucking balls to use those scissors, have you?’

  Chapter 15

  HE WAS RIGHT, of course. Maybe in the heat of a fight I could have used them but not like that in cold blood. Perhaps if I had paid more attention during Herod Jenkins’s games lessons I could have done it, but I was, as he said, too much of a milksop.

  There was nothing to be done. I left the school and drove aimlessly inland, through Commins Coch and on to Penrhyncogh, and then began a long sweep west towards Borth. As I drove, the words of Lovespoon echoed through my thoughts. Since when did I give a damn about Bianca? I thought of the night I took her home. To perform that act – the one that along with money was responsible for most of the trouble that came in through my door. For years I had sat and watched them all squirming on the client’s chair, gored by the suspicion that their partners were cheating on them. Each one thinking that the disaster that befell them was unique, thinking that paying me to confirm it would somehow make them feel better. I had heard it all a thousand times before, like a priest taking confession – me with my phoney absolution. That act that so twisted the heart. Which the newspapers called sexual intercourse, and Lovespoon called sexual congress, and the man in the pub called bonking and Bianca called, paradoxically, making love, and which Mrs Llantrisant didn’t even have a name for which she felt comfortable with. That act of cold animal coupling that so often in this town was nothing more than simple rutting. I didn’t know why I had done it. Lonely and frightened, and drunk, perhaps. I hadn’t given it any thought. Why? Because she was a Moulin girl and we all knew they had no feelings, or the ones they had were invented to suit the occasion. As men we warned each other with smug pride at our worldliness to steer clear of their treacherous hearts. And then this happens. She risked her life to help me; and might now be dead, or worse. A course of action that could only have been prompted by tenderness or love or some feeling she wasn’t supposed to be capable of. And I thought of Myfanwy, so much more wise and versed in the ways of the Aberystwyth street, and I tried to imagine her sacrificing herself for me like that. And even as I tried to picture it, I knew with iron certainty that it was out of the question.

  The first light was filtering through a veil of grey clouds when I reached Borth. I drove through the golf course and parked at the foot of the dunes and got out. I had intended going for a swim but when I reached the top of the dune, I thought better of it. Instead I sat on the sand and watched the slow, endless advance of the cleansing waves. My eyelids dropped lower and lower, until I slept. It was Cadwaladr who woke me. The war veteran Myfanwy and I had shared our picnic with. He offered me a drink from his can of Special Brew and I took it despite the waves of nausea brought on by the high-alcohol lager hitting an empty stomach. For a while we didn’t speak, just stared out at the eternity of the ocean and I asked him the same question that I had asked Lovespoon. Who was Gwenno Guevara? This mysterious soldier Brainbocs had met in the week before he died.

  Cadwaladr didn’t answer immediately, and when he did he said simply, ‘She was a whore.’

  ‘Is that it? Just a whore?’

  ‘Before the war she was a whore. A tea-cosy girl. Then she went to Patagonia and became a fighter. After the war – who knows? She disappeared.’

  The old soldier stood up to leave and I called after him.

  ‘You remember what you said about Rio Caeriog?’

  He paused.

  ‘You said they didn’t teach your version of it in school. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me your version? The true story of Rio Caeriog?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you were there, weren’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, I was there.’

  He shook his head and added before tramping off: ‘But I can’t tell you that story. It’s not mine to tell.’

  When I got back to the office, there was a note from Eeyore to call him, and Llunos was once again sitting in my chair. He was picking bits of dirt from underneath his fingernails, and spoke without looking up, ‘Have a nice swim?’

  ‘Not bad; you should get out in the sunshine a bit more yourself.’

  He continued to talk to his fingernails. ‘You’re probably right.’

  I slumped down into the client’s chair across the desk from him and waited for him to say what he had to say. Nothing came. We sat in silence like that for a while. The phone rang.

  ‘Louie Knight Investigations.’

  ‘If you want to see the girl, come to the harbour tonight at midnight. Outside the Chandler’s.’

  ‘Who is this please?’

  ‘Come alone or we’ll slice her up.’ The caller hung up and I put the receiver down while trying to keep the look on my face neutral.

  Llunos seemed too bored to even ask about the call. When he finally spoke it was about palaeoanthropology.

  ‘Fascinating discipline,’ he said looking up from his fingernails.

  ‘If you’ve come to borrow a book on it I gave my last one to Mrs Llantrisant.’

  ‘It’s quite a hobby of mine, actually.’

  I wondered why he was here. Had they found Bianca?

  ‘Chap at the University specialises in it. He’s got this wonderful 3D modelling software for his computer. He takes the skulls of stone-age men and scans them in and then slowly builds up the tissue and muscle and things until eventually presto! he gets to find out what Stone Age men looked like.’

  ‘Why bother? We all know they looked like you.’

  He flinched, but persevered with the air of studied detachment he’d adopted for the occasion. ‘We found some fibres under Evans the Boot’s fingernails. Hardly any really, but we gave them to this chap and he put them in his computer and he managed to recreate the knitting pattern. It was a tea cosy. Then we got two speedknitters up from the Bureau in Cardiff and they knocked us out a copy of the original cosy.’

  I knew what was coming next.

  ‘I just took it down to Mrs Crickhowell at KnitWits. She said it was the same as that South American cosy that was stolen from the Museum. Funnily enough, she said seen it quite recently – in your hands.’

  He stood up and walked over to the toilet. He put his hand on the door handle and added, ‘There are police officers posted downstairs in case you don’t feel like waiting.’ He went in and I dashed across and turned the key.

  ‘I’m sorry about this, Llunos, really I am!’ I shouted to the door. Then I walked over to the window and peeked carefully out. He wasn’t lying. A police officer looked up and waved. It was time to use the escape route through the attic. It was clear that this time I would be in the cell for a lot longer than overnight, and I was desperate to stay free long enough to see Bianca tonight. Locking Llunos in the bathroom was a high price to pay, though. He wouldn’t forgive me for that so easily.

  *

  Eeyore opened the door, took one look at the man in shaggy blond wig, dark glasses and false moustache and said, ‘Oh it’s you.’ He led me into the kitchen where the smell of recently fried bacon hung heavily in the air.

  ‘I’ve got someone here who wants to see you,’ he said as he filled the old whistle kettle and placed it on the gas oven. ‘It’s an old friend of mine, from my days in the Force. He knows something about the ESSJAT.’ Eeyore pulled up a chair and I sat down.

  ‘He was given the task of breaking the organisation a long time ago; but his cover was blown and they had to give him a completely new identity.’ He walked out and a few seconds later came back in with the former agent. A look of surprise consumed my face. It was Papa Bronzini.

  �
��Buon giorno!’ I gasped.

  He smiled sadly and said in a voice filled with pathos, ‘It’s OK, sir, we can dispense with the arrivedercis.’

  ‘So you’re not Italian, then?’ I said obviously.

  He shook his head. ‘Alas no.’

  An awkward moment followed as I waited for him to explain, but he didn’t.

  ‘Well you had me fooled,’ I said finally.

  ‘I used to be a bit of an actor in those days – amateur dramatics. I expect you’re quite familiar with that sort of thing?’

  ‘I’ve seen a few plays.’

  ‘Oh really, sir? Which ones?’

  ‘Er … Lady Windermere’s Fan,’ I said desperately.

  ‘Tennessee Williams?’

  ‘Er … yes!’

  He nodded. ‘I was into method acting – eat, drink, live and sleep the part – that’s the trick.’ His eyes misted as he thought back to those days of greasepaint and footlights. ‘Ah yes, I used to do a lot of that – Richard II … “I wasted Time, and now doth Time waste me.” Are you familiar with that one, sir?’

  ‘Yes, it’s one of my favourites.’

  He looked pleased. I smiled politely and stared at the floor of polished red tiles, spotlessly clean although strewn here and there with bits of straw. I’d never known a time when my father didn’t have straw somewhere near him. Even in the sitting room it only added to the feeling of cleanliness, this association with the donkeys. What, after all, could be purer than the soul of a donkey? It’s probably why my father had taken it as a second career. After years submerged in the moral grime of the Aberystwyth underworld he had turned to the one industry in town which traded innocence. Sospan tried to in a way, of course. He traded in the essence of the nursery, the sugary, vanilla smell of a mother’s breast. But there was nothing innocent about the men who stood at his stall and ate, no matter how much they may have yearned inwardly to turn back the clock. Papa Bronzini continued to drone on about the theatre and at one point a donkey, I think it was Mignon, put her head in through the kitchen window and listened for a while before giving me an uncanny look of sympathy and loping off. Gradually the conversation turned to the old days when Bronzini and my father had worked on the Force together, the days when Bronzini had tried to bust the ESSJAT. For me, Bronzini cut a slightly pathetic figure but I saw that Eeyore was in awe of him and watched in uncritical fascination as Bronzini, now Aberystwyth’s foremost mobster, described the workings of the ultra-secret elite known as the ESSJAT. He told how Gwenno Guevara had been a streetwalker before the war and had joined up to earn some extra money with the troops. Once overseas she had discovered a taste for fighting and had been good at it.

  ‘That was the thing about Gwenno, you see, sir,’ explained the old policeman. ‘Whatever she turned her hand to she excelled at. Great hooker, great soldier and great chief of the ESSJAT.’

  After the War Lovespoon rewarded her by offering her any job she wanted, not expecting the former hooker to choose a position in the newly formed League against Turpitude. But true to form she not only took the job but excelled at it, rising through the ranks until eventually she sat the top. At which point she simply disappeared. No one outside the organisation knew who she was, or where, although it seemed likely that Brainbocs had found out. But he of course was dead.

  It was about ten to midnight when I made my way through the rows of boats, warehouses and lobster pots that made up Harbour Row. In the distance I could hear the whoop of a police siren and the engine howl of a car being driven at high speed. A chase. I took up a position deep in the shadow of a public shelter across the road from the Chandler’s and thought about what I had just done. By locking Llunos up like that I had committed myself to a course from which there seemed no way back; it was as if I had been holding on to the precipice of a normal life in Aberystwyth and the last of my fingers had lost its hold.

  A cat mewed at my feet and I jumped, my shoes making a harsh scraping sound which my fear convinced me could be heard across the whole neighbourhood. The racing car was nearer, but the police car seemed to have moved off, the klaxon getting fainter and fainter somewhere in the direction of Penparcau. Suddenly a door opened across the way. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up and I stopped breathing. There was a pause. The beats of my heart louder than kettle-drum notes.

  A figure stumbled or was pushed out of the warehouse. A woman’s figure. She turned round and looked over to where I was standing. There was no way I could see in the light and with the distance, but I knew it was Bianca. I stepped forward, terrified that a trap was about to be sprung; Lovespoon had given me his word, but what was that worth? Why arrange the meeting at a place and an hour like this? As I walked across Bianca recognised me and opened her mouth to speak, but as she did the car that had been racing through the neighbourhood rounded the corner on two wheels. I darted a glance over – it was a car I’d seen before, very recently. Bianca spun round and a cry erupted in my throat. Confusion and terror swept across Bianca’s face, and then there was a bang and Bianca went sailing like a rag doll into the air. Turning, turning, turning, before hitting the ground with a single, sharp crack like an axe hitting a tree. I stood transfixed, unable to move, and watched the car reverse a yard and then slam forwards back into Bianca’s broken body. The car door sprang open, a figure leaped out and sprinted round to the other side of the car and down one of the dark alleys between two warehouses. Seconds later I heard from the harbour the sound of an outboard motor being fired up.

  I ran over to Bianca’s side and knelt down.

  She looked up, eyes glazed with pain, and tried to force her mouth to overcome the agony and speak. Far off the banshee wail of the police siren was getting louder. I grasped her shoulders tenderly and ordered her not to speak.

  ‘Louie!’

  ‘It’s OK, don’t speak.’

  She curled the fingers of her hand round my forearm weak as a baby.

  ‘Louie!’

  ‘I’m here, baby.’

  And then her index finger detached itself from the rest of her fingers and slowly formed a curl like the finger of the grim reaper; she beckoned slowly towards herself and mouthed a word. I felt myself being pulled down by the finger as if attached by an invisible thread, and when my ear reached so close to her mouth that I could feel the warmth of her breath, she spoke again. Each word making her smashed body quiver like the pangs of childbirth.

  ‘Louie!’

  ‘It’s OK, don’t speak!’

  ‘I … love … you!’

  ‘There, there …’

  ‘The essay …’

  ‘No, no! Don’t talk!’

  And then as if at the exact moment her spirit left her she gripped me with a terrifying new strength.

  ‘The essay …’ she gasped desperately, ‘it’s in the stove!’

  The grip broke and her head fell with a thud on to the tarmac glistening with her blood.

  The police car skidded into view at the far end of the Prom and I looked at the murderer’s car, engine still running, and realised where I’d seen it before. It was mine.

  Chapter 16

  I SIPPED MY coffee and read Meirion’s editorial about Bianca:

  It is almost a week since the tragic death of Sioned Penmaenmawr, better known to the denizens of our notorious entertainment district as ‘Bianca’. A girl who cocked her final snook at the society that cast her out by being buried in her night-club costume. By now most people will already have begun to forget about her; and the rest will never have cared in the first place. More fool them. The photo of the miserable funeral at Llanbadarn Cemetery on Tuesday contains a message for us all. There were four mourners at the sad interment. Her close friend Myfanwy Montez; Detective Inspector Llunos; a photographer from this newspaper; and a solitary figure who passing by felt the touch of pity in his heart. Wearing a dirty old coat tied up with packing string, his face dirty and lined with the years of suffering, it was a man only too familiar with the condition of e
xile from the hearthside of the Aberystwyth good life: a Patagonian War veteran. His lot it was that afternoon to teach us all not only the meaning of the word ‘pity’, but also alas, the meaning of shame.

  The War veteran with the coat tied up with packing string had been me. Had Meirion known? It was hard to see how he could have done. I went to the funeral in the hope of speaking to Myfanwy, but she stayed too close to Llunos the whole time and rushed off in his car immediately afterwards. Llunos said in the newspaper that he was desperate to talk to me in connection with the death, which they were treating as a tragic hit-and-run, but he didn’t mention that I locked him in the toilet.

  Ever since the night she died I had been hiding in the caravan. I still didn’t know how I survived: standing over her dead body, the car that killed her – my car – parked nearby with the engine still running, the police only seconds away. In a situation like that the only thing to do is make a decision. Any one, it hardly matters. The one I made was to jump in the car with Bianca’s blood and tissue still smeared across the grille and drive off. She was dead, I could see that. And if by some miracle she wasn’t, the police would be better able to help than I was. So I saved myself. As the police car screeched to a halt I did a U-turn, turned right at the Castle and over Trefechan Bridge; then I pulled off on to the track leading to Tan-y-Bwlch beach. From there I abandoned the car and set off on foot across the darkened fields and over the Iron Age hill fort. The plan was to double back, making a wide arc around the town, and head for the caravan in Ynyslas. It took me four hours, but I did it.

  Since then, the weather had closed right in with expanses of dove-grey clouds filling the sky; it was cold and windy and moisture hung in the air ready to occasionally spit at the windows of the caravan. I didn’t go out much, but when I did, the disguise as a War veteran worked well. Such was the stigma, most folk simply averted their gaze when they saw one.

  There was a knock on the caravan door. I opened it and Calamity burst in.