Aberystwyth Mon Amour an-1

by Malcolm Pryce

  'My best friend, Louie! My best friend!'

  'Funny sort of friend!' I shouted.

  'And what's that supposed to mean!?'

  'I don't know, fuck it all, Myfanwy, it was you who told me to do it!'

  'I -' This time it was her turn to stare open-mouthed.

  'At the Club, remember?'

  'But I didn't mean it!' she screeched, and then flung her hands in the air in exasperation, before turning in the doorway and stomping down the stairs. Her last words, thrown over her shoulder were: 'How can anyone be so stupid!'

  I stood rooted to the spot, staring at the empty doorway. Calamity came back in.

  'She needs a slap, boss.'

  'Don't you start,' I warned her.

  'I'm not starting, I'm just observing. She's walking all over you.'

  'Is that any of your concern?'

  'Yes it is as a matter of fact.'

  'Oh really!'

  'Yes. Firstly because you're my friend and I don't like to see you acting the doormat; secondly because things like this can interfere with your professional performance; and thirdly because it affects the bottom line.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'Didn't I just hear you say you weren't charging her for any of this?'

  'That's none of your business.'

  She picked up her school satchel adding nonchalantly, 'Fine, but shoe leather's not free. Second rule of being a private eye.'

  As she skipped through the door I picked up the phone and called Meirion. After the usual round of pleasantries I asked if he'd heard anything about Iolo. Of course he had. He'd heard everything, he just couldn't print it.

  'Most of the injuries seem to have been sustained during the fall from the cliff,' he said.

  'Most of them?'

  'Well some of them don't look like the sort of mark you'd get from falling off a cliff.'

  'What do they look like?'

  'More like the sort of holes a hatpin might make.'

  I sighed. 'Anything else?'

  'Yes, something very strange. Someone's daubed some graffiti on the pavement outside Aberaeron Co-op ... in blood.'

  'Blood?'

  'The victim's blood.'

  I screwed up my brow and held my breath. I could tell Meirion had more.

  'Now I'm no expert,' he laughed, 'but as far as I can see there are only two ways that could happen.'

  'Go on.'

  'Either some idiot went to the foot of the cliff and collected Iolo's blood. Or Iolo wrote it himself.'

  'How could he, he was dead?'

  'Ah!' Meirion laughed. 'Depends when he wrote it, doesn't it?'

  'All right, Meirion, I know you've got a theory. What is it?'

  'If you asked me I'd say he was murdered outside the Co-op and he wrote the graffiti himself. Dipped his finger in his own blood and daubed it on the floor with his dying strength. Then whoever killed him dragged him to the cliff and threw him off to make it look like an accident. Only because it was so dark no one noticed the blood until next morning.'

  I could almost feel him beaming on the other end of the phone. He was obviously right.

  'So what does the graffiti say?'

  'Two words. "Rio Caeriog".'

  *

  The following afternoon Calamity and I drove to the Museum as Iolo Davies's last words drifted through my thoughts. Had he written the words for me? He must have done.' Rio Caeriog. The famous battle from the war in Patagonia. A name once written on the map with the blood of a generation and now inscribed in the Museum curator's blood on the pavements of Aberaeron. Was that the new essay subject Brainbocs had chosen? The one that got him killed? As I parked in the shadow of the Lancaster bomber I mentally reviewed the story of Rio Caeriog. It was well enough known. For months in 1961 the First Expeditionary Force had been taking unsustainable losses in the foothills of the Sierra Machynlleth. Sniped at by day and taunted and ambushed at night by an enemy they couldn't see. And then came the famous raid. A Rolex watch was rigged up by the boffins of Llanelli with a radio beacon inside. The watch was deliberately lost in a card game to one of the bandits in the back room of a cantina. And when the bandit took it home to his base the Lancaster bomber followed. But why did it interest Brainbocs? What was the connection to Cantref-y-Gwaelod? We got out of the car and walked up the steps into a foyer of gilded cherubs and alabaster columns. The Devil's Bridge Tin & Lead Steam Railway Co. had built with a confidence that had long since disappeared from our own age. The grandeur was now sadly defaced by charmless municipal sign boards: Combinations and Corsetry; Two-headed Calves and other Curios; Coelecanths.

  Inside the foyer was another of the success stories of that far-off time. A passport photo booth created by the same boffins of the special operations executive at Llanelli Technical College. It was the world's only micro-dot photo booth and gave you your portrait the size of a currant. To see it, you had to buy a special viewer from the gift shop. Most of the micro-dot camera technology familiar from so many spy movies had been developed during the Patagonian War. An animal clinic had been established in Buenos Aires from which the military intelligence, condensed on to micro-dots, had been smuggled out as eye patches for hamsters with lazy eyes. As kids we had polka-dotted the wall of the art class with our drawings of it. Calamity ran to the photo booth and disappeared inside with a swish of orange curtain. I waited patiently for the flashes wondering idly what obscene gestures she was no doubt making to the camera.

  Upstairs, in the main gallery, two super-enlarged black and white photographs filled the whole of one wall with a grainy ghostly sea of grey. One was a picture of the two Lancasters leaving Milford Haven aerodrome to cheering crowds. And the other showed five aviators standing in a relaxed circle outside some forgotten South American cantina, drinking tequila and clowning about. They were young and fresh-faced and laughing into the camera lens with a gaiety that suggested the picture must have been taken right at the start of the conflict. It was the Rio Caeriog bomber crew. Lovespoon, Dai the Custard Pie and, with a much younger horizontal crease in his face, Herod Jenkins the games teacher. A triumvirate of the current movers and shakers of Aberystwyth. Did Brainbocs discover something about them that might have taken the glint off those famous medals? Some awkward tidbit that would have wiped that horizontal crease off Herod's face? The smiles frozen in Ilford black and white gave nothing away.

  Calamity walked over with the air of one who has made a discovery. I looked up and smiled and she handed me a sheaf of plastic laminated cards bearing the biographies of the airmen. Lovespoon: war hero, school teacher, prize-winning poet and Grand Wizard on the Druid council. Custard Pie: purveyor of fine soaps that make your face go black, and Red Indian arrows that appear to pierce the neck. Herod Jenkins: school games teacher; capped for Wales in his youth and subsequently, although the card did not record this distinction, famous for sending a consumptive schoolboy to his death during a blizzard. The last was Oswald Frobisher. A nobody. One of the handful of English intellectuals who were so dismayed at missing the Spanish Civil War they had signed up for the Patagonian adventure. The card said merely that he died of his wounds when his Lancaster ditched into the Rio Caeriog. There was no clue as to what the wounds were but any schoolkid could tell you: the bandits cut off his John Thomas and stuffed it in his mouth.

  Calamity was still holding one card. I looked at her enquiringly and she passed it across. It contained even fewer details than hapless Frobisher's. None at all in fact, just bare white card, and a name. A name that I had last heard from the lips of Dai Brainbocs's Mam. The name of the woman her son had gone to see in the week before he died. Gwenno Guevara, it said simply, freedom fighter.

  Chapter 12

  BIANCA GINGERLY PULLED out the shards of broken glass from the picture of Noel Bartholomew and wrapped them up in newspaper.

  'If I was lost in the jungle would you come looking for me?'

  'No, it's too dangerous.'

  'Not even to take my pict
ure, like your great-great-uncle?'

  I laughed. 'We don't know for sure that he did.'

  She carried the parcel of jagged glass through to the kitchen, shouting over her shoulder as she went: 'Of course he did.'

  I looked at the portrait. Did he? Did he really find her? Or was it all a hoax played on a gullible American tourist by a wily Chinese shopkeeper? It was Eeyore who gave me the portrait and the chest full of papers and artefacts, back in the days when I believed in common sense and thought the expedition must have ended in failure. But Eeyore had quietly disagreed with a patient conviction he only rarely displayed. It depended on what you considered failure, he said. And added that one day I would understand. But I never really have, even though I return again and again to that diary. Those cracked and yellow pages in which Noel records in a malarial scrawl, growing ever more indecipherable by the day, how she came to see him in his sickness. A passage which ends with the words taken from St Augustine: 'Faith is to believe what you do not yet see.'

  Bianca walked back in to the office.

  'I think he took her picture in Heaven.'

  'He did what?'

  'In Heaven. That's where he took her picture.'

  I grinned and, seeing the expression, Bianca became suddenly cross.

  'You think you know it all, don't you? I suppose you don't believe in ghosts either?'

  'No. Do you?'

  'Of course. I'm going to. be one.'

  On our way out we met Mrs Llantrisant. She looked tired and pale, and swabbed robotically.

  'Prynhawn da, Mr Knight!'

  'Prynhawn da, Mrs Llantrisant! You look worn out.'

  'I'm feeling my age, Mr Knight, that's what I am.'

  'Why not take a few days off and put your feet up?'

  'And who would fold the serviettes for the Ark if I did that?'

  'Is that what you've been doing?'

  She stopped and leaned like a drunkard on her mop. 'I'm glad to be able to play my part.'

  'You believe in all this then, do you? This Ark business?'

  'What's there not to believe?'

  'I mean, you'd like to go, would you?'

  She grabbed a loose strand of hair and tucked it up beneath the hem of her headscarf. Her hand was shaking.

  'It's the kids I'm doing it for. It's too late for us, but the little ones - they deserve it.'

  'With Lovespoon as king?'

  'Social gerontocracy, Mr Knight, just like in ancient Greece.'

  'What's wrong with Aberystwyth?'

  She put the mop in the water.

  'I'm surprised to hear you ask that, Mr Knight. What do you like about it all of a sudden?'

  'It may have its faults but at least it's not currently under ten thousand feet of water.'

  'Not ten thousand, less than twenty fathoms. Scarcely a puddle.'

  Suddenly, Mrs Llantrisant lost her balance and fell into me. I grabbed her arm and held her upright.

  'I'm all right, really I am,' she moaned. 'Just slipped on the wet step, that's all.'

  'You're pushing yourself too hard, you are. We don't want another repeat of Easter do we?'

  Bianca and I walked along the Prom, heading for Sospan's.

  'Silly old bag.'

  'There's no need for that.'

  'Did you see the look she gave me?'

  'She can't help it. She's old and set in her ways.'

  'What happened at Easter?'

  I ordered a round of ice creams. 'She had a funny turn. Said it was the apples in her pie but she took so bad she called a priest to administer the last rites. She's been all right since, though.'

  Bianca leaned her head on my shoulder and said, 'Why didn't you call me?'

  'What about?'

  'What about!' she cried.

  Of course. The last time we met had been the night I took her home.

  'I'm sorry, I -'

  'Don't apologise.'

  I put my palm against the side of her face and ruffled her hair. Sospan handed us the ice creams with the discretion of a brothel madam. We ate them in silence for a while, and then Bianca spoke to the folds of my shirt.

  'I've got something for you. I haven't got it yet, but I can get hold of it. That's if you want.'

  'What is it?' I spoke to the top of her head.

  'Something very, very special.'

  'What?'

  'Something you'd give your right arm for.'

  'There's nothing I'd give my right arm for.'

  'I bet you'd give it to marry Myfanwy.'

  'No I wouldn't.'

  'It's an essay.'

  I breathed in sharply and Bianca giggled.

  'Really?' I said cautiously. 'What sort of essay?'

  'Ooh, just Dai Brainbocs's last essay.' She giggled again.

  I pushed her away and looked into her face. 'What are you talking about?'

  'Dai Brainbocs's last essay. You are looking for it, aren't you?'

  'What makes you think that?'

  'Myfanwy told me.'

  I closed my eyes in pain.

  'It's all right, I won't tell anyone.'

  'She shouldn't have told you.'

  'What do you expect, she's a big mouth.'

  'There's no need for that.'

  'I know you think the sun shines out of her backside, but she's not all sugar and spice you know.'

  'I'm sure she's not. No one is.'

  'So do you want it?'

  I didn't answer for a while, just stared at her. 'Are you being serious? You know where Brainbocs's last essay is?'

  She nodded. 'I know where there's a copy of it.'

  'Where?'

  'Pickel's got one.'

  'Pickel?'

  She nodded again.

  'Lovespoon asked him just after Brainbocs died to design a safety box so good, no one in the world could open it, not even the person who made it. Pickel agreed to do it even though he said there wasn't a lock in the world he couldn't open. He said Lovespoon was a wanker. Lovespoon used the box to keep Brainbocs's original essay in — the one he told the papers he'd lost. Pickel took it out when he wasn't looking and made a copy. His insurance policy he called it.'

  'Pickel told you this?'

  'Yes.'

  'How do you know he's not just making it up?'

  'Why should he? Besides, I know where he hides it — in the belfry. I could get it, if you wanted.'

  I held her head in my hands and stared into her eyes. 'Don't do anything until I've had a chance to think about it.'

  The lightning was already flashing in the sky far out over the western horizon when I left for the Moulin that night. I was too late to get a good table and had to sit. right at the back with a very bad view of the stage. The showgirls didn't normally venture so far back and I was served by a plain Jane of a waitress in a simple black skirt and white blouse. I had to share the table with a group of men who looked like they had just been picked up off a desert island by the air-sea rescue helicopter. Their hair was wild and unkempt, their clothes torn and ragged. One of the men offered me his hand to shake and, not wishing to offend, I took it gingerly.

  'Welcome, brother,' he croaked in the voice of a mariner who hasn't spoken to another soul for ten years. The rest of the group looked at me intently, their gazes playing over my face like searchlights.

  'I'm not your brother.'

  The man giggled in a way that made my flesh crawl and turned to his companions. 'He says he's not our brother!'

  The rest of the group broke into hoarse, wheezing laughter.

  The first man looked at me and said, 'I'm Brother Gilbert. This is Brother Frank, and this is Brother Bill. I'll introduce the rest of us later.'

  'Don't bother.'

  'Oh it's no bother. It's such a pleasure to have you join us. We have so much to talk about.'

  My drink arrived and I drank it down in one and ordered another.

  'I used to be a bank manager,' said Brother Gilbert. He grabbed my arm and added with a strange urgency, 'And
Brother Bill used to be a Justice of the Peace. What do you think of that?'

  'I thought you were all fishermen.'

  They turned to each other and laughed again.

  'We like that,' said Brother Gilbert. 'Fishermen. That's very funny!'

  When the laughter died down Brother Gilbert turned to his brothers and said, 'I suppose in a way we are all hooked!' The laughter erupted once more.

  I waited patiently, and then said, 'Do you come here a lot, then?'

  'Oh yes, every day. Haven't you seen us?'

  'No.'

  'That explains it then.'

  'Explains what?'

  'Why you don't understand.'

  They all stared at me with a wild glimmer of madness in their eyes, expectantly gauging the effect of Brother Gilbert's words on me. A showgirl passed through the tables halfway between our position and the front and for a moment I thought it was Myfanwy. I craned my neck for a better look.

  'She's not here yet,' said Brother Gilbert knowingly.

  'Who isn't?'

  There was a split-second pause and then the brotherhood fell about laughing again. This time the laughter swept them away. Tears streamed down their cheeks and thighs were slapped. Whenever the laughter looked like petering out, one of the brotherhood would repeat the word 'who?' and it would start all over again.

  'You all seem to have a very similar taste in humour.'

  'That's because we're a fraternity.'

  'We're five people with one mind,' added Brother Bill.

  'Like a colony of ants, in a way,' explained Gilbert. 'We're united in suffering.'

  'I'm sorry to hear it.'

  'Oh no!' cried Gilbert, 'we don't need your sympathy; you're one of us now!'

  That took me aback for a second. Again they stared at me like dogs outside a butcher's window display.

  'Me? Why?'

  Gilbert leaned closer and, as he did, the rest followed suit. His voice took on a cloying, conspiratorial air. 'You mean you don't know?'

  I lowered my voice, 'No, what?'

  'We're from Myfanwy Anonymous!'

  The eyes of the brothers as they scrutinised my face were as wide as children's on bonfire night.

  'We used to sit up the front like you,' said Brother Gilbert.

  'But not any more,' added Brother Frank forlornly. 'That was a long time ago. Now it's someone else's turn.'