Aberystwyth Mon Amour

by Malcolm Pryce

‘Take your time, won’t you?’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘It’s freezing out there, like the middle of winter.’

  ‘It’s all right, I’ve made coffee, that will warm you up.’

  She took off her anorak and walked over to the table. ‘I’ve made some progress.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘It could be the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.’

  She opened her school satchel and pulled out three books. I picked them up and read the titles. ‘On Pools of Love by Joyce Moonweather; Governing a Sloop by Captain Marcus Trelawney; Towards a New Pathology of Slovenliness by Dr Heinz X. Nuesslin.’ I put the books down.

  ‘I got them from the school library. You won’t believe who was the last person to borrow them.’

  ‘Brainbocs?’

  ‘No. Guess again.’

  ‘Sorry, chum, that’s my best effort.’

  ‘You won’t believe it.’

  ‘Amaze me.’

  ‘Evans the Boot!’

  I picked up the New Pathology of Slovenliness and examined the flyleaf. ‘Maybe we misjudged him all along.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Look at the title page.’

  Obediently I opened the book. Letters were missing from the title page, crudely cut out with scissors leaving jagged edges.

  ‘He got into trouble for it, you see. That’s how I knew. I remember hearing this story ages ago about how he turned up at the library one day and borrowed all these weird books. And then when he returned them he’d cut them up. So I checked on his record which ones they were.’

  I opened the other two books; each one had been vandalised in the same way.

  ‘OK, clever-clogs, what does it mean?’

  As if impatiently waiting for this question she took out a piece of paper and unfolded it.

  ‘These are the letters he cut out: O.V.E.N.L.O.O.P.S.’

  ‘You still got me.’

  ‘Rearrange them.’

  I stared at the paper for a second and then it hit me. ‘Lovespoon!’

  ‘That’s right!’

  ‘So what does it all mean?’

  ‘What do people use cut-out letters for?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Blackmail notes of course. He was blackmailing the Welsh teacher. No wonder they did him in.’

  I thought about the significance of it for a few seconds but it did little to lift my depression.

  ‘Don’t get carried away with excitement will you?’

  ‘Sorry, Calamity, I’m sitting here wanted for the murder of a prostitute. It’s difficult to get excited about things.’

  ‘But this is the way we’re going to clear your name.’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘Evans was blackmailing Lovespoon. Why? Because he copied Brainbocs’s homework and found out something incriminating about the teacher. What else do we know about Evans? He stole a rare tea cosy from the Museum. Now it’s my guess these two facts are related.’

  ‘Sure, but what’s the link?’

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t got all the pieces of the jigsaw yet.’

  ‘But it doesn’t really take us forwards. We already know why Lovespoon killed Evans.’

  She looked at me, the frustration bringing tears to her eyes. ‘We have to explore every angle, Louie. We have to be thorough, we’re building a case, sod it!’

  ‘OK. What else have you got?’

  She pushed the books away and placed her palms flat down on the table. ‘Operation “stove-search” not so good. Bianca could have hidden the essay in any number of stoves. I tried yours but Mrs Llantrisant wouldn’t let me into the kitchen. She said you wouldn’t be needing a stove, clean or otherwise, where you were going. It would be bread and water down at Cwmtydu Prison for you from now on.’

  ‘I’m touched she has so much confidence in me.’

  ‘She said, “You never really know anyone, do you?” Then I went to Bianca’s flat and tried there but it was cordoned off and the policeman wouldn’t let me in. I said I’d come to clean the stove and he said he’d never heard such a load of codswallop in all his life. I waited till he was replaced by another policeman. Then I tried again and this time I said I wanted to go and see my auntie who lived above Bianca and was ninety years old and very frail and I had to check up on her now and again just to make sure she wasn’t dead.’

  My eyes widened at that one, but I said nothing.

  ‘So he let me in and I sneaked into Bianca’s flat and just as I was checking the stove the first policeman turned up and caught me. He drags me downstairs saying he’s going to give me a good hiding and down at the bottom when we got to the gate the other policeman looks up and says, “Sarge, I’ve heard it all now, there’s a woman here who wants to clean the stove!” And do you know who it was? It was Mrs Llantrisant!’

  This time we both looked at each other and stared.

  ‘Mrs Llantrisant?’

  She nodded

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that. Not at all.’

  ‘Not much chance of it being coincidence is there?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. So then what happened?’

  ‘I bit the policeman’s hand and ran for it.’ She paused and then said, ‘Are you angry?’

  I blinked in puzzlement. ‘Angry? What for?’

  ‘Because I gave the game away.’

  ‘No you didn’t!’

  ‘I did. Because of me she found out we were looking in stoves. I screwed up.’

  I punched her playfully in the arm. ‘Kid you did a brilliant job. I really take my hat off to you and one day – maybe next week – you are going to be a famous private eye.’

  Her face brightened. ‘Well I’d better get back to them stoves.’

  I raised a hand. ‘Don’t worry about the stoves.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘By my reckoning, counting out my stove and Bianca’s which you have checked, there must be about 3,998 left in town. It’s hopeless.’

  She blew a raspberry. ‘What sort of talk is that?’

  ‘Look, the way my luck is going, it will start snowing soon and then every stove in town will be lit up anyway.’

  She picked up her coat. ‘We don’t need to check every stove in town. We just have to work out what her movements were and check the ones she would have had access to. It’s simple.’

  Later that afternoon I decided to go out. It was not a clever thing to do with half the countryside looking for me, but I decided, what the hell. I might as well be arrested as sit in the caravan doing nothing. I tied the old coat on with the packing string and covered my hands and face with soil. It was bitterly cold out so I stuffed crumpled-up newspaper inside my coat as insulation. Lastly, and this was something I hated most of all, I smeared myself with a liquid I had prepared from rotting fish, boiled cabbage and mouldy cheese. It was the nearest I could get to that sour unwashed cheesy smell that the vagrants seemed to have.

  From Ynyslas I walked across the bog to the railway track, climbed on to a goods train, and jumped off a mile before Aberystwyth station. From there I walked through town to the sea front. And then I climbed up to the camera obscura on the top of Constitution Hill. At the café at the top I bought a tea and a bag of old sixpences for the telescope mounted in the corner overlooking the town. The town astronomy society met here twice a month to use the little sixpenny telescope but there was no one here now. I turned it away from the sky and trained it on Sospan’s stall. There was no one there apart from Sospan and so I sat down and drank my tea. After five minutes I looked again and this time found what I was looking for. Llunos enjoying his regular afternoon ice cream. I walked over to the phone.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘Louie?’

  ‘I’m just calling to tell you it wasn’t me. And you
know it.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Run a girl down in cold blood?’

  ‘It was your car.’

  ‘But I wasn’t in it.’

  ‘We found your fingerprints on it.’

  ‘Of course you did, it was my bloody car!’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There was a short silence. Llunos was obviously taken aback by the honesty in the reply.

  Then he remembered:

  ‘You locked me in the toilet, you bastard!’

  ‘Look, forget about that now, it’s not important –’

  ‘You won’t say that when I get hold of you!’

  ‘I mean we can discuss it later; right now I want you to know it wasn’t me.’

  ‘All right, Louie, if you’re innocent why did you skip town the same night?’

  ‘That doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘It doesn’t prove it, but it doesn’t look very good, does it?’

  ‘If I hadn’t run away I would be locked up by now.’

  ‘You think you won’t be when we find you?’

  I sighed in exasperation. ‘It wasn’t me, Llunos.’

  ‘Look, say you weren’t involved. Say someone else took your car and ran her over. Just say that for a moment. And you were safely home in bed at the time, why then would you leave town? You wouldn’t even know she’d been killed. First thing you would have known was when we came knocking on your door.’

  ‘I didn’t do it, Llunos, and you know it.’

  ‘You got an alibi?’

  ‘Not a very good one.’

  ‘Where were you on the night in question?’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Between eleven and midnight.’

  I paused.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I was at the harbour.’

  ‘That’s a great alibi!’

  My eyes smarted as I took in the mess I was in. It was hopeless.

  ‘Fuck it all, Llunos, why would I want to kill Bianca?’

  ‘Who did it then?’

  ‘One of Pickel’s mob.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’

  ‘He was with her that night.’

  ‘He’s with her every night.’

  ‘He stole something from Lovespoon and kept it hidden. He shouldn’t have had it, but he did. He boasted to Bianca about it, so she stole it. If Lovespoon had found out, he would have killed Pickel so he told him first. The Druids took her and tortured her to find out what she had done with the thing she had stolen. They must have gone too far. Beaten her too much. She was probably going to die. So they arrange a car crash and use my car. Kill two birds with one stone.’

  I could tell he was listening hard. It was troubling him, this murder. He probably had enough evidence to send me down. But he knew in his heart I didn’t do it.

  ‘What did she steal?’

  ‘Some important papers belonging to Lovespoon.’

  ‘Papers? Why would the girl care about papers? She couldn’t hardly read.’

  ‘She did it for me. She thought I wanted them.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Not like that. Not for her to get involved.’

  ‘What was so special about the papers?’

  ‘They could prove that Lovespoon killed those schoolboys.’

  There was silence. Had I got him? My heart started to beat a little faster.

  ‘You know where the so-called papers are now?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What do you mean not really? You’re hanging by a thread, Louie. You tell me this cock-and-bull story –’

  ‘Look, all I know is she hid them in the stove.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Look, I know it’s a big job, but a team of men could probably –’

  ‘Louie!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look up at the sky.’

  I leaned back and looked out of the café window. It looked like someone had burst a feather pillow in the sky.

  ‘See that white cold stuff?’

  I held the phone cradled against my cheek for a few seconds and then hung up.

  Snow in June. Five minutes from now, every stove in Aberystwyth would be lit.

  Chapter 17

  THE SNOW FELL all afternoon but didn’t stick, it just turned to a dirty grey slime on the pavement, and soon it was gone. I hung around the deserted town all day, dressed as a veteran and forced to live the life of one, which meant no life at all. There was no bar or café which would allow me in, and eventually I took refuge in Eeyore’s stable where I could find warmth among the donkeys. I stayed there until evening and then I wandered over to the south side of Trefechan Bridge and waited in the shadows behind the bus stop. After half an hour I heard Myfanwy clip-clopping down the wet pavement in her high heels. In my veteran’s outfit she didn’t give me a second glance and came and stood right in front of me.

  ‘Myfanwy,’ I whispered.

  She ignored me.

  ‘Myfanwy!’

  She moved up to the other end of the bus shelter.

  ‘Myfanwy, please!’

  She looked round. ‘You leave me alone, mister, do you hear?’

  ‘Myfanwy, it’s me, Louie.’

  She peered at me and then gasped.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Don’t come any closer.’

  ‘Do you think I would hurt you?’

  ‘Is that what you said to Bianca?’

  I sighed. This was all wrong.

  ‘Myfanwy!’ I begged. ‘Please. I didn’t kill Bianca, it’s all wrong what they are printing in the paper. It was the Druids. I can prove –’

  She looked back up the street as the green bus trundled up to the lights. They were on red. The yellow electric glow from the interior of the bus looked warm and inviting in the chill evening gloom.

  ‘That’s my bus.’

  ‘Get the next one.’

  ‘I can’t, I’m already late.’

  Without being able to stop myself, I made a move towards her lifting my arm out to touch her shoulder. She started backwards, raising her arms, but then stopped. We both stood frozen in our respective positions. She looked at me and our eyes met.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ I said simply.

  She nodded. ‘Promise?’

  ‘I loved Bianca. You know that.’

  She rushed over and I took her in my arms. ‘But not as much as me, right?’

  I hugged her.

  ‘You smell.’

  ‘I know.’

  She breathed deeply and pressed her head into my chest. ‘Louie, take me away.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘OK.’

  She pulled away and looked up into my face. ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When can we go? Tonight?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, not tonight.’

  The lights changed and the bus eased forwards.

  ‘Please, Louie, it has to be tonight.’

  ‘A few days won’t make any difference.’

  ‘They will, oh they will, Louie, if only you knew.’

  The bus approached.

  ‘It has to be now.’

  ‘If I go now, they will track me down. I’ll go to prison.’

  ‘We’ll go somewhere where they won’t find us.’

  I shook my head sadly. ‘I locked Llunos in a toilet, he’ll find me.’

  The bus stopped and the doors swished open. Myfanwy broke away and took a step towards the bus, looking back over her shoulder. As she stepped aboard she bit her lip and her face became disfigured with grief.

  I walked the seven miles back to the caravan; on the beach between Borth and Ynyslas there was a bonfire surrounded by a group of War veterans. They were cooking rabbits and drinking from cans of strong lager. One of them had a guitar on which he strummed tuneless ditt
ies. I skirted round them, not anxious to come into contact with a group of people who would quickly see through my disguise. But I was too late, they called out to me. I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard and carried on walking, but one of the tramps stood up and came towards me.

  ‘Hey, friend, come and share some supper.’

  I twisted on the spot, uncertain what to do. Could I convince them I was a real veteran? Almost certainly not. How would they react to an impersonator? Laugh? Or get angry? If they got angry, what would they do? When you’re on the lowest rung of society’s ladder you don’t have a lot to lose. Damn. The soldier walked up to me.

  ‘Come and have some supper. I owe you a dinner, remember?’

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong person, my friend.’

  He chuckled. ‘I don’t think so. It’s not every day I get to eat strawberries and Black Forest Gateau. Especially in the company of a famous night-club singer.’

  He laughed at the expression on my face. ‘Do you think you can go round dressed like that and we won’t notice?’

  * * *

  The rabbit was good, and so was the company. There was an easy informality about it and genuine sense of brotherhood. No one asked me the first thing I expected to be asked: what I was doing pretending to be a vet. It seemed to be understood that I must be in dire straits. And these were men with an instinctive understanding for suffering. They could sense my plight and knew better than to make it worse by asking stupid questions. For the first time in weeks I felt good. We sat there until late in the night, sucking the hot juicy goodness out of the roast rabbit and swapping stories; War stories mostly and sometimes stories from that life, impossibly distant to most of these men now, before the War. A life which was distinguished by a boredom and normality for which they could only ache. I’d never understood until now how beautiful a normal life could appear to those who can never possess it. For eight years I had been a private detective in Aberystwyth, never making any money and seldom getting a case that was remotely interesting; certainly never fighting off the hordes of beautiful female clients that Myfanwy was convinced from watching TV were a staple part of my routine. Every day I had bantered with Sospan, wandered up and down the Prom, stroking my father’s donkeys and drinking pints in silence with him, a silence which I now recognised could only be enjoyed between two people whose love has gone beyond the artifice of words. And of course I had exchanged the most excruciatingly banal platitudes with Mrs Llantrisant about the weather. And now I was an outcast, wanted for the murder of one of my own friends, and the thought of being able to discuss the weather again with Mrs Llantrisant appeared to me as a distant dream.