From Aberystwyth with Love an-5

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘No, no . . .’

  ‘Of course you did, anyone would. It would be the first thing you thought of. It’s only human, Mrs Mochdre. We like to pretend that we don’t have thoughts like that, but we do, we all do. They are the first ones, what’s in it for me? That’s how it was, I know that’s how it was, it had to be. You thought, if I say nothing and she goes away maybe Alfred would come back to me. But he died of a broken heart instead and you ended up handcuffed to that old creaking wooden bed for the next thirty years shuddering beneath a man wearing a goat outfit. Tough break.’

  Llunos stormed out of the interview room and left the two of us. After a pause I followed him. Outside, the three of us stood watching her through the window. She picked up the paper and glanced at it, then put it down and waited. Llunos put his arm on Calamity’s shoulder. ‘I have to hand it to you, kid,’ he said. ‘This is genius.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Calamity.

  ‘Forty years in the force and never seen anything like it. I wasn’t sure if she would fall for it, but she did. What’s it called again?’

  ‘Superseding the paradigm,’ she answered with pride.

  ‘Amazing!’ Llunos took me by the arm and pulled me to one side. He beckoned me to follow him. We walked up the corridor out of earshot of Calamity.

  ‘It will never work,’ he said simply.

  ‘No?’

  ‘She won’t sign. What do you make of the pig-pen story?’

  ‘It must be true. I can’t believe she would invent it. Gethsemane must have escaped from the pig pen and left a shoe behind in the mud. We need to find out who put her in the dresser.’

  ‘Maybe Gethsemane just hid,’ said Llunos.

  ‘With a tin of corned beef? Only an adult would put something like that in. If a kid was packing stuff to take with her she wouldn’t think of that.’ I smiled. ‘Don’t they teach you anything on your psychology course?’

  Llunos looked puzzled for a second until he realised what I was talking about. ‘I stopped all that.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘It wasn’t me. It was the detective version of mutton dressed up as lamb. I prefer the old ways, the ones I feel comfortable with.’

  ‘Abercuawg isn’t the repressed unconscious of Aberystwyth then?’

  ‘It’s just a lake filled with old prams. Come, I want to show you something.’ He beckoned again and I followed.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Someone’s confessed to killing Arianwen Eglwys Fach – in the interview room at the end.’

  My skin prickled. ‘The Witchfinder?’

  ‘Why him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t like him.’

  ‘You would make a good cop.’

  It was difficult to know whether he was being ironic or sincere. Most of the cops round here worked on a similar principle to the one I had outlined.

  ‘It wasn’t him,’ said Llunos. ‘Look.’

  I peered through another two-way mirror into the interview goldfish bowl. Meici Jones was sitting at the table across from two cops.

  ‘He says it was his mum,’ said Llunos. ‘Smashed the girl’s head in with a rounders bat.’ He paused for a second and said, ‘Your name was mentioned. Again.’

  A grisly image of Arianwen lying bloodied and face-down in the gutter flashed through my mind. My voice was thick with passion: ‘The guy is in his thirties and wears short trousers; he lives with his mum and she hates him because he smothered his little brother to death when he was three. He’s never had a girl in his life or even a friend and because he took a shine to Arianwen and saw me talking to her this is what happened. He saw me talking to her. Imagine how it makes me feel. She was a lovely kid.’

  Llunos put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Sorry, Louie. If you want to go in there and sort him out I’ll turn off the sound.’

  ‘Back to the old-fashioned ways, huh?’

  ‘Murder is a pretty old-fashioned sort of crime, isn’t it?’

  I went back to Mrs Mochdre and chose another song for the jukebox.

  When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie

  That’s amore . . .

  I sang along softly, Mrs Mochdre stared disconsolately at the table, occasionally looking up at me with the hostility of a cornered beast. I stopped singing and spoke. ‘Who killed the students?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘I think it was the Witchfinder, but what I want to know is why.’

  ‘If you’re such a clever dick I’m sure you’ll think of something.’

  When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool

  That’s amore . . .

  ‘I can help you, Mrs Mochdre, but you have to help me.’

  She gave me a look that symbolised a silent snort.

  ‘What would you say if I told you Gethsemane didn’t get eaten by the pigs? If I told you she climbed out of that pig pen and walked away alive?’

  Mrs Mochdre forced herself to stare down at the table but it cost her a lot of effort.

  ‘What would you say if I told you I have proof, that I am the only one who knows? If I say nothing, Llunos throws the book at you. But if you help me, I produce my evidence. You’re a free woman.’

  ‘You must think I was born yesterday falling for a trick like that. I know how it works, good cop, bad cop; my husband does it too when he’s interviewing witches. Llunos will be out there watching through the mirror.’

  ‘You watch too many cop shows.’

  ‘Just don’t try and take me for a fool.’

  ‘OK, I’ll level with you. This is the truth. I don’t know whether Gethsemane is alive now, but she was back then. She didn’t die. The pigs didn’t eat her and your husband the Witchfinder knew it all along. I’m not saying the pigs wouldn’t eat a human given half the chance but it would take a damn sight longer than—’

  She looked up slowly and I sensed in that motion the dropping of a penny. Thirty years of conjugal beastliness and pent-up hatred gleamed as sharp twin points of fire in her eyes.

  ‘That’s right, Mrs Mochdre, he knew. Of course he knew.’

  ‘H . . . h . . . how do you know?’

  ‘Anybody would have known. You were terrified of what they would say if they found out you locked her in with the pigs. My guess is, it wasn’t the first time you had mistreated her. You were worried about what would happen if they found out, so you panicked. You didn’t think clearly. If you had, you would have worked it out too. There wasn’t enough time for them to eat her. Gethsemane just climbed out and the mud caught her shoes. That’s all. The second shoe is probably still there. The Witchfinder just—’

  ‘He knew? He knew!’ Her jaw gaped and her eyes became wide as saucers as the full implications of his trickery settled in. ‘The bastard!’

  ‘He just played along to entrap you into marrying him.’

  She bit her knuckle.

  ‘I’m not here to make you suffer. I don’t approve of what you did to your sister, but I can see you’ve paid a price in your own way. I just want to know who killed the students. You tell me that and I promise to tell Llunos what I know.’

  ‘The Witchfinder killed the students of course. To stop nosey parkers. When they paid that actress to impersonate Gethsemane it got him worried. He thought if he killed them and made it look like what happened to Gomer Barnaby people would think Goldilocks had come back and would be too frightened to start digging up the past.’ When she stopped speaking she collapsed in on herself slightly, as if she had been punctured.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  She looked up at me. ‘He really knew?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She nodded as if only now fully understanding. She spoke in a dream, ‘All those years . . . that bed . . . You know, sometimes he liked to dress up as a wolf; Heaven knows what for. And all along he knew.’

  ‘If I go and get Llunos you can sign the statement and then go. I don’t think he’ll keep you here.’

  Mrs Mochdre pul
led herself up and sat erect once more, the flame inside her visibly rekindling. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be signing anything today, Mr Knight. I don’t have time. There is an urgent matter I need to attend to.’ She pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘It concerns my husband.’ For a second, before turning away, her eyes bored into me and I saw a repressed fury so intense it made me wince. For most of his adult life the Witchfinder had been exorcising and casting out demons; he had summoned and beaten, so they said, the finest champions of hell. His c.v. listed victories over Belial and Leviathan and Belphegor and Beelzebub and Asmodeus and probably Lucifer too. But that look in his wife’s eye told me nothing in his professional life would have prepared him for what was coming when he got home for tea that evening.

  Chapter 24

  The real question was, who put her in the cupboard? Who put the corned beef, the dandelion and burdock and the colouring book there? Why go to such trouble? Vanya had worked it out. He had guessed it all because he was smarter than me, worked it all out that day I saw him sitting on the beach with Clip the sheepdog. That’s when he decided there was no purpose carrying on. He found out that there never was a spirit possessing his daughter, no imaginary friend, he found out it was a real girl who had replaced the one he had loved. He worked it out on the same afternoon that he saved Gomer Barnaby’s life. Who did he see? Who told him? Sometimes it takes us a long time to see the obvious. Who would you go and see after saving the young Barnaby’s life? Who would give you a phial of Ampersandium in recognition of your brave deed? Who else but Old Barnaby?

  The old lag at the rock foundry told me Ephraim Barnaby was expecting me. He showed me up the stone stairs to the first landing and then to a door in the corner. It led into a tower inside which was a spiral staircase. I climbed; the inside of the tower was dark and cold, almost damp. I wondered if it was like this for Sleeping Beauty. There was a door slightly ajar at the top. I hesitated on the threshold and a voice from inside bade me enter.

  He sat in an armchair next to an electric bar fire, toasting muffins on a long brass fork. An arched window behind him looked out over the rooftops of the town and beyond to the deep blue sea. I sat in the other chair, next to the fire, flesh prickling with sweat.

  ‘Vanya told me everything,’ I said.

  Barnaby skewered another muffin on the end of the fork. ‘You wouldn’t be here if he had.’ He held the muffin out to toast. I undid the button of my collar. ‘Sometimes at night I wander the streets dressed as a tramp, asking people for the price of a cup of tea,’ said Old Barnaby. ‘You gave me a fiver once outside the Spar.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I admire you.’

  ‘You know who put Gethsemane in the cupboard that ended up in Hughesovka, don’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t know where it had ended up until Vanya came to see me.’

  ‘How did he guess?’

  ‘He didn’t. He saved my boy from drowning, and so naturally I invited him up here for a drink. He told me his life story and what had been so baffling to him – the peculiar story of the imaginary friend, the diphtheria outbreak while he was in prison – it all seemed so obvious to me. So I told him. Your child died of diphtheria, and your wife, anxious not to break your heart while in that prison camp, adopted Gethsemane and made up the story of the imaginary friend.’

  ‘Who put her in the cupboard?’

  ‘Goldilocks’s sister. She came to see me after she had been to visit her brother in prison. While on death row Goldilocks had asked to see a priest; they sent the Witchfinder. Goldilocks told him the truth about what had happened; about how Gethsemane had stumbled on the Slaughterhouse Mob torturing my son, how he had never harmed so much as a hair of her head but had been reluctant to speak out for fear of getting his comrades in the gang into trouble. The Witchfinder promised he would do everything in his power to get the conviction quashed. But he did nothing, he was happy to let Goldilocks hang. That’s when the sister came to see me. She offered me a deal. If I agreed to help her brother escape she would tell me what happened to my son. So I agreed. I arranged the escape and helped them leave town, Goldilocks and the girl; they are still alive.’

  ‘What did the Slaughterhouse Mob do to your son?’

  Barnaby stood up and walked over to a cupboard. He opened it and took out something that looked like a hedge clipper. He brought it over and placed it in my hands. The handles were insulated with thick rubber tubes, and at the ends instead of blades there were spikes with electrical contacts.

  ‘It’s an electric cattle-stunner,’ he explained.

  ‘From the slaughterhouse?’

  ‘Yes. The two prongs are applied to the temples and render the beast unconscious before it has its throat cut.’

  ‘It breaks your teeth?’

  ‘Convulsions. In the early days, when they gave patients electro-shock therapy in psychiatric hospitals they often made the voltage too high, it used to give the patients convulsions so strong they would break their own teeth. Goldilocks was familiar with electro-convulsive therapy because they administered it to his brother at the asylum. He must have told the mob about it and given them the idea. It’s called a slaughterman’s lobotomy.’

  ‘They did it to your son? Applied this to his head?’

  ‘Yes. All afternoon. He wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to know, and so they just carried on. Lost his teeth and his wits, made his hair stand on end.’

  ‘Is this how the Witchfinder killed the students?’

  ‘I have no information about that, but my guess is, yes. He probably wanted to make people think Goldilocks had come back, frighten them a bit.’

  ‘They tortured him for the secret formula of your rock?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just tell them?’

  ‘He did tell them, but they wouldn’t believe him. He told them and told them, he screamed and shouted, but they refused to believe him.’ He picked up an envelope and handed it to me. ‘This is the secret formula. If you take a look you will understand.’

  I reached inside and pulled out a piece of paper. There was nothing written on it. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. My great-grandfather discovered one of the most fundamental and strange proclivities of the human mind, and inadvertently stumbled upon the essence of branding. It was like the ampersand in the company name and the bogus partner name, Merlin. What do these things add? Nothing, except in the psyche, to which they bring an indefinable magic. The people heard about the secret formula and the ritual on top of Constitution Hill and convinced themselves they could taste the difference. For over a century we have made exactly the same rock as everyone else and the whole world has been willing to swear that ours tasted superior.’

  ‘Where does Gethsemane fit in?’

  ‘She stumbled on them in the barn when they were torturing my son. She escaped from the sty and wandered into the barn. She saw them at work, saw too much. While they were deliberating what to do with her, Goldilocks’s sister stole her away and hid her in the cupboard. She gave her some food and drink. She had no idea the cupboard was due to be collected by Mooncalf. She told me all this, sitting in that chair many years ago.’

  I stood up and thanked him for his time. I had one final question. ‘What did you do with the bodies?’

  He hesitated, his smile shrank a fraction. ‘What bodies?’

  ‘The bodies of Goldilocks and his sister. You wouldn’t have done all this and let them get away.’

  ‘Oh, but I did! We had a deal. I told you: they started a new life somewhere safe and far away.’

  ‘Maybe. Over the years every member of the Slaughterhouse Mob, except the typographer downstairs, has been murdered or died violently in obscure circumstances. Most people reckon you had a hand in their deaths and I tend to agree. My guess is, if your intention was to hunt them all down, there was no way you would have allowed Goldilocks and his sister to live. Maybe they are safe, but probably not far away. Maybe they’re asleep
in the dam.’

  ‘Well if they are you will have a devil of a job finding them, won’t you?’ He reached out a hand to shake. I ignored it and turned to leave. As I reached the door he stopped me in my tracks. ‘Of course, you know what Vanya’s real purpose was in coming to Aberystwyth, don’t you?’

  I paused in the doorway, teetering on the threshold of leaving.

  ‘Murder,’ said Ephraim Barnaby.

  I half turned, unable to restrain myself.

  ‘He came to find Gethsemane’s murderer and kill him. During those long years in the gulag after he killed his wife he reflected deeply on the litany of pain that had comprised his life. And, as any man would, he brooded intensely on the short period of happiness he had once enjoyed with his wife and little daughter. A happiness that was destroyed when, he supposed, the wandering spirit of a murdered girl took up residence in the soul of his own little Ninotchka. In those dark bitter winters he came to the conclusion that the man who had murdered Gethsemane was the cause, albeit indirectly, of all his woe. The murderer had shattered the only episode of bliss Vanya had known in this world and for that had to be punished. This thought alone, this burning desire for revenge, was what sustained him during those prison years. But, as we know, there was no murder, no wandering spirit. No one was responsible for the tragedy, apart from Vanya’s wife. When he learned this bitter truth sitting here in that chair there was nothing left to sustain him. His spirit was extinguished like a snuffed candle. The rest you know.’

  I nodded slowly, stared bleakly at Ephraim Barnaby for a second or two and walked out.

  Eeyore was sitting on a deckchair overlooking the harbour. There was a spare folding chair and a cool-box full of beer. He looked up and smiled. ‘Good to see you back, son.’ He reached down and drew out a beer and pulled back the ring. I took the can and we knocked them together and drank. We stayed that way for a long while, watching the golden light fill the sky in the west. I took out the copy of the Cambrian News from Hughesovka and unfolded it. I handed it to Eeyore. He chuckled. ‘I thought I’d cut out all these pictures.’