Eeyore paused for a second and nodded to himself as if making sure he had got that right. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, son, I know, it’s just a story …’ He turned and smiled at the girl from the take-away. ‘And if it had been a Chinese ship we probably never would have heard of him. But so often when I see you, Louie, doing what you do here in Aberystwyth, risking your life and getting knocked on the bonce once a week by some piece of dirt who’s not fit to wipe your shoes … well I see it and you know what I think? And you’ll laugh, I know, because it’s daft, but I don’t care. I see it and I think to myself, there goes Ben Guggenheim!
He walked over and put a tired old hand on my shoulder, a hand that had fingered the collars of multitudes of villains in its time. ‘I don’t know what you are going to do about Calamity, son,’ he said. ‘But I know you’ll think of something … Because my son has never let anyone down yet.’
Chapter 20
THE NEXT MORNING the storm had passed, leaving the town damp and steaming and fanned by the dregs of the gale. Llunos was already waiting for me when I got back to the office. One of his men had hauled Harries in that morning, or whoever it was pretending to be him. He was waiting down at the station. I didn’t bother to wash or shave, just made coffee and picked up the Colt 45. I took out the cartridges, fetched a Ziploc bag from the kitchen and gave it all to Llunos.
Harri Harries was in Llunos’s office, with a policeman standing watch outside. As he opened the door, Llunos put his arm in front of me and barred my way. ‘I need five minutes with him alone first.’
I nodded.
He went in and closed the door, saying, ‘Teach him to make a monkey out of me on my own patch.’
There followed a couple of minutes of loud banging from the room. The sort you might get if you swung a sack of potatoes from wall to wall. Then the door opened and Llunos ushered me in, mopping a sweaty brow as he did. What little furniture there was in the room was upturned, a notice-board disarranged on the wall; a broken table lamp flashing uncertainly. Harri Harries sat in the chair, blood coming out of his nose and mouth. One eye puffed up. His shirt torn and spattered with bright red berries of blood.
‘You’ve got him, now,’ said Llunos. He walked to a cupboard and took out a dusty old scuba gear bag and emptied its contents. A rusty tank, an equaliser, some lead weights, a mask … all smelling mildly of the ocean floor. He held the bag up.
‘Do you think he’ll fit in it?’
I gave it an appraising look. ‘Well, it’s roughly maggot-shaped and about his size.’
Harri Harries looked on with fear and uncertainty. Llunos took out the Ziploc bag and slid it across the desk to me. Inside was the gun.
‘It’s as cold as they come. No way of tracing it.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Make sure you wipe it off afterwards.’
I took the cartridges out of my pocket and started wiping them methodically with a handkerchief and then setting them up like toy soldiers in a row along the desk-top.
‘Look,’ said Harri Harries. ‘I know –’
‘I haven’t asked you anything yet,’ I said in a voice colder than ice. ‘So shut up.’
When the cartridges were all free of prints I slid one into the chamber and gave it a spin. Llunos walked towards the door. ‘I’ll be in the next room, use one of the cushions to muffle the sound.’
Then he closed the door and we both looked at each other. I slowly levelled the barrel at his face and said, ‘Where is she?’
He took a breath and said, ‘You’ve got to believe –’
The rest of it never came. I rammed the gun forward so the end of the barrel smacked into his mouth and then, as he gasped at the pain, the barrel was in his mouth. I’d seen this done once in a movie and it seemed to work. I don’t know what difference it makes really, gun in or gun out, if it fires you’re not going to know much about it. But it certainly frightened me to watch it. I pulled the trigger and it clicked on an empty chamber. His whole body stiffened like a cat electrocuted in a cartoon and his face went purple.
‘You were lucky.’ I took the gun out of his mouth, wiped the blood and spittle off on his shirt and then slid in two more cartridges. Then I pressed it against that other favourite spot, between the eyes, and spun the chamber.
‘Where have they taken her?’
He spoke quickly, trying to get as much explanation in before I shot him. ‘She didn’t turn up, I was supposed to meet her, Custard Pie arranged it, but she never came … please it’s the truth –’
‘Like fuck it is!’ I pulled the trigger. It clicked and this time Harri made the sound of a scream done with the mouth closed. Then he wept. I almost felt sorry for him.
‘Please, please, please …’ he gasped. ‘I’m telling you the truth …’
I picked up the remaining bullets and slid them all in. There was no point spinning the chamber now but I did anyway just for effect. ‘Full house,’ I said and aimed squarely at his face.
‘Now where is she?’
‘I … please … please …’
I squeezed and the hammer pulled slowly back like a striking snake in slow motion.
His face was the colour of green milk, his eyes bulging and he said, ‘I don’t know. You must believe me!’
‘Make me believe you. Tell me something worth not shooting you for.’
He pressed his eyes tightly shut and pleaded with me. ‘Please, I don’t know any –’
I pulled the trigger all the way and as I did Llunos slipped quietly back into the room and banged the door the moment the trigger slammed home. Harri Harries screamed and jerked forwards, landing heavily on the floor.
Llunos walked over and hoisted him back into the chair. ‘OK, you’ve had your fun. As far as I can see there are only two possible reasons you haven’t told us where she is: either you don’t know, or you knew the gun was a replica. And I don’t believe you don’t know. So we’re going to play a little game of mine. It’s called Welsh roulette.’
He took out his truncheon and put it down on the desk. ‘You can think of it as a variation on blackjack.’
He walked over to a filing-cabinet, took out some keys, and opened a drawer. He brought out two things and put them down in front of Harri Harries. There was a truncheon that had been painted red. And a kid’s roulette wheel.
‘The rules are simple so you won’t have any trouble picking them up. We spin the wheel. If the ball lands on black seven, I hit you seven times with the blackjack. If it lands on red two, I hit you two times with the redjack. The game is over when you tell us where Calamity is.’
He spun the wheel and dropped the ball. Red three. Llunos turned to me. ‘You see! I told you he was lucky.’ Then he hit him three times with the red truncheon. The next one was black four. He hit him four times. He spun the wheel, dropped the ball. Red thirty-six. ‘Bingo!’ shouted Llunos and picked up the cosh. I turned away in dread. And Harri Harries confessed.
‘OK, OK, OK!’ he cried. ‘I’ll talk, I’ll talk. It doesn’t matter now anyway. We had a rendezvous arranged last night – Custard Pie set it up. He told the girl if she went there she would find out the identity of the Raven. But of course it was a trap for her. I got there at midnight but no one came. Neither the girl nor Jubal. I waited and waited and finally, at about three, Jubal turns up. But he’s out of his mind. Raving and screaming and crying. He was all like dressed as if for a wedding or something, you know a flowery shirt and a suit and tie, and wearing a flower in his buttonhole, but he’d slashed his clothes and covered himself in ashes. And he had a suitcase with him, said he was getting out of town. And I said, why? And he said if they caught him they would kill him, and I said, who? He said, them, Custard Pie or Herod or Mrs Llantrisant. He’d betrayed them. Everything was ruined, he said. And I said, what the hell have you done? And he cried out like … like … I don’t know … like … a … an elephant giving birth or something, and said he’d been a total idiot and fallen into his own trap. And I said,
what about the girl? And he said, she won’t come now, you idiot, we’re ruined, it’s finished, we’re all dead … don’t worry about her, save yourself.’ He stopped and gasped for breath, ‘Honest, it’s the truth.’
*
I didn’t know what Ben Guggenheim would have done this morning, but one thing was clear from Eeyore’s story. He knew how to keep a cool head. The very opposite of what I had done. Chasing out to Mrs Llantrisant’s island and torturing Harri Harries and generally running around not thinking. And that was the whole point really. Thinking. All along I had known about the one man who knew where Herod would have his base, the man who had studied his psyche and made a map of it. Dr Faustus, whoever he was. He must know the answer. And now he was going to give it to me.
I took the Llanbadarn Road out towards the mountains of Pumlumon, along the course of the Rheidol for a while. And then cut south at Ponterwyd on the A4120 towards Ysbyty Cynfyn. A sign told me I was taking the Pont Ysbyty Cynfyn over the Nant Ysbyty Cynfyn and that was reassuring to know. Before too long, if my car didn’t give out, I would be heading towards Ysbyty Ystwyth. The world was full of Ysbytys today and I wondered what it meant. Not knowing the answer in Lovespoon’s classes would have resulted in the board-rubber exploding next to one’s ear like flak. Ysbyty Ystwyth – the map gave it a black cross for a place of worship and a black box underneath meaning one with a tower rather than spire, minaret or dome. It also had a little symbol to say there was a public telephone. Compared to Ysbyty Cynfyn, which had none of these, it was Las Vegas. But I wouldn’t be able to go and ask what it all meant, Ysbyty Ystwyth would have to wait for a brighter day. At Hafod Wood I turned off.
I pulled up in the lane a quarter of a mile from the perimeter wall and put on my old mac and hat – a standard-issue sleuth traipsing across rain-spattered, mist-smothered soggy Welsh hills. Up ahead was the sanatorium, the soft mist effacing all detail like gentle amnesia. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get in. In my pocket I still had the Colt 45. Maybe I would use that. Or maybe I would just go and ask for help. Giving succour to strangers is the job of a philanthropist after all. It was easy. Just go and ring the bell. Hi, I’m looking for my partner, Calamity. She’s a detective although you might not think so because she’s only sixteen and really should be in school. In fact you might think I’m a louse for letting her get mixed up in all this, and you’re probably right. But actually I didn’t want her to, but you just can’t stop her. You know Calamity, or perhaps you don’t. But if you could keep an eye open. We’re working on a case … there’s a gang of them – Dai the Custard Pie, Mrs Llantrisant and Herod Jenkins. I think you know Herod Jenkins? You cured him of his lost memory, but somehow a lot of people wish you hadn’t. Right now they are holding out somewhere in the hills up by Nant-y-moch. They say there’s a sacred place up there, something sacred to Herod. I thought you might know where they were, you being a special friend of Herod and all that. In fact, I understand you’ve made a map of his psyche. What does it say? ‘Here be dragons’?
A dog barked in the distance, and then someone shouted. ‘There he is!’ A shot rang out and a bullet zipped through the foliage of a nearby tree. I turned round in amazement and heard someone else shout, ‘Quick after him!’ They were about half a mile away, a group of them. It looked like a hunting-party. I started running as another shot rang out.
Downhill, over the stream and uphill, keeping south of the thin, ruler-straight line of forestry plantation trees and heading for a copse of normal trees. More shots were fired but they were too far away. I ran fast and the hunters didn’t manage to gain on me. Maybe they didn’t relish the prospect of tackling me close-up. I reached the trees and climbed over the wire fence and jumped and ran on. I came to a clearing, jumped a stream and landed on the other side, and as I did so two metal shark jaws clashed shut on my shin and I leaped forward as if diving off a board and hit a tree with my head. My leg was caught in a mantrap.
I lay there on a floor of moist dead autumnal leaves, the sweet, wet reek of peat filling my nostrils. I panted and twisted in pain and succeeded only in making the teeth bite deeper and the jaws ratchet tighter on my leg. The sharp metal was rusty and had cut through the cloth of my trousers and deep into the flesh. The trap was chained to a tree and was impossible to move. Or break. I started to sweat with cold panic. You could lose a leg like this. And how ridiculous would that be? What if I called out? Would they shoot me in cold blood? What did they want with me anyway? I heard the barking of dogs and suddenly I could hear them scampering through the undergrowth. The barking got closer and now I could hear the louder sound of a man running. Then I heard him cry out in triumph and start sprinting. The dog was on me, licking my face and wagging his tail in joy at the new discovery under the leaves. And then the man appeared. He was wearing a coat that looked like the ones the Beefeaters in the Tower wear, only black instead of red. I’d seen a garment like it a long time ago, a thousand years or so, in Aberystwyth when a man came to buy some Myfanwy memorabilia.
‘Oh you poor dear sir,’ he said. ‘Oh you poor man! What have they done to you! I don’t know how many times we’ve told those farmers about their traps, but they never listen.’ He turned and shouted something in Welsh to a man further down the slope. ‘We were told to keep a lookout. They say that games teacher is loose in these woods. Some of the men thought it was you. I’m afraid I’ll need help to release you from this trap, sir. You might like to take a sip of this to take the edge off the pain.’ He produced a hip-flask and poured some Cognac into my mouth. I drank it greedily. The scalding spirit felt good. ‘Is that better, sir?’ I nodded but strangely the action was proving more difficult than I had expected. My head had become enlarged to the size of a small moon, and moving it was an enormous task. I tried to thank him but my tongue had been replaced with an iguana who refused to budge. My eyelids also seemed to have become alarmingly heavy. I looked up at my benefactor but he was in the sky, and his voice seemed to be coming from the next valley. The scalding spirit had felt good but now I realised there was a sharp metallic edge to the taste, a chemical taste that didn’t belong there. I reached out into the sky to grab my benefactor but my hand didn’t move and then someone switched the lights off.
Chapter 21
I WAS IN a room. I was wearing a canvas nightshirt. It had a big black number stencilled on the front. 43. My new name. A nurse was folding my trousers over a hanger. The wound on my leg had been dressed with a white bandage. Nice job. But some idiot had left a team of roadmenders with jackhammers behind in the wound. I was going to tell the nurse, but she probably knew. It must have been a road for the dynamite trucks. Something to do with the quarry they were excavating in my head. I had a smart metal belt on to go with my canvas pyjamas. It didn’t have a buckle. There was a bulge at one side. It was something electrical. Better not touch. You can get hurt if you don’t know what you are doing. Better go back to sleep.
The nurse appeared in my dream. I told her to go away but she didn’t seem to understand. I told her to give me my trousers back. It was hard getting through to her because she was on dry land. I was swimming at the bottom of the lake. I spoke to her in a series of soft plopping bubbles but they got lost in translation. I looked around for a fish who could help. And then I realised you need an amphibian for this job. At home on land and in water. I looked for a frog. Typical, there’s never one when you need one.
I decided to go to sleep again only this time a different sleep so they couldn’t find me.
It worked for a while but then the nurse came along. She was bending down towards the surface of the water and holding my wrist. That was nice. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all. I tried to groan. Nothing too ambitious. They still hadn’t done anything about that iguana.
The nurse looked at me and shrugged. ‘Dydw I ddim yn siarad Saesneg.’
Oh so that’s the problem.
She smiled and shrugged again.
I wasn’t sure if I could remember any Welsh, but
the iguana did. ‘Edrychwch! Dyna’r Archdderwydd!’ he said.
The nurse giggled.
Not bad, great the way he got the ‘wch’ sound. Try another one, pal.
‘Rydw I eisiau stafell ddwbwl!’
You’re better than I thought. You’ve even got the ‘ll’ sound. I could never do that. Still I suppose if you can catch flies with your tongue this should be a piece of cake. Try again. The nurse ran out and locked the door.
I lay back for a while and hoped the people would down tools in the quarry. I looked at my watch, almost noon. The lizard had gone. I waited. And after a while, I found I could sit up. And look around. I checked the belt round my waist. It was impossible to remove and had electric solenoids welded to it. I didn’t like it. An hour passed and then the door opened and the butler walked in pushing a wheelchair. ‘You’ll probably be a bit shaky on your feet for a while, sir, so I’ve brought you this. The master has instructed that you are to take lunch with him. He also asked me, sir, to advise you not to make any attempts at escape until he has had a chance to demonstrate the workings of the belt.’
It all seemed like a good idea. The butler chatted to me as he wheeled me down a long corridor lined with doors. ‘This is the old sanatorium, sir, quite a ghoulish place if you ask me. We thought it best to put you here while you recovered. I expect, though, the master will want to move you into the main house as soon as you are strong enough.’ We came to some double doors and the butler pushed them open with my feet and wheeled me out into hazy sunshine. We were on a lawn some way from the main house. The cold air blew the clouds out of my head.
Last Tango in Aberystwyth Page 19
