‘Louie, sometimes an investigator finds the normal channels are blocked. In such cases she is grateful for whatever leads and scraps of information she can find.’
‘Yeah but the investigator draws the line at the supernatural.’
‘Just give it a go. One of the contacts is quite promising. His name’s Arwel Gluebone.’
‘Arwel Gluebone.’
‘I thought you could help me lean on him a bit. You know: good cop, bad cop.’
I slipped down into the chair and watched as Calamity spread out the cards, turned a tumbler upside down, and then went across to close the curtains. She sat down and we put our fingers on top of the tumbler.
‘Am I the good or the bad cop?’ I asked.
‘Bad. Shhh now.’ Calamity closed her eyes and adopted a sort of spooky expression.
‘Gluebone, are you there?’
The tumbler slid over to the Y.
‘You moved it on purpose,’ I said.
‘I didn’t,’ protested Calamity.
‘You must have done.’
‘Sshhh! OK, Gluebone, I just want to go over a few things we discussed last time. You say you were taken in for questioning two days after the fire, right?’
The tumbler acquired a life of its own and slid across the table, doing a complicated arabesque from card to card. I didn’t know how Calamity was doing it, but it was good. She wrote down the letters as they came. It said:
I stole candlesticks and stuck up toffs on the turnpike; I never done no kinky stuff like that.
‘Why did they take you in then, Gluebone?’
I didn’t do nuffin’ I swear! It was the peelers. They were trying to fit me up. They needed to lock someone up quick y’see …
Calamity kicked me gently under the table. I looked at her.
She mouthed the words, ‘Tough cop.’ I pulled a face and she flashed an impatient frown at me.
I heaved a heavy sigh and said, ‘OK, Gluebone, you bucket of shit, let’s cut the fairy stories and start singing, shall we? You ravished her didn’t you?’
I never I never!
‘Thought you’d get one back on the old rich bastard in the fancy carriage, huh?!’
I tell you it wasn’t like that.
‘Tell us who did it then.’
I can’t!
‘You mean you won’t!’
No I can’t, it’s more than my life is worth.
‘I thought you were dead?’
I am! It’s just a figure of speech – we still use it over here.
‘Over where?’
The Shadow-Aberystwyth.
‘What do you do down on the estate, anyway, feed the ducks?’
‘He’s a gardener’s assistant,’ whispered Calamity.
‘I know your sort: all those lonely nights on your own in the potting shed, made you feel a bit frisky, didn’t they? And there she is every night changing in full view of everyone in the bedroom window, all that fancy French lace and finery—’
She was a penny-farthing, I wouldn’t touch her with a martingale.
‘Tell it to the fairies, Gluebone, you did her in and tried to pin it on the stable boy—’
Says who?
‘The lamplighter.’
You mean Pigmallow? That swill-pouch? Ha that’s a laugh!
‘He’s no swill-pouch.’
I say he is.
‘He’s worth ten of you Gluebone …’
There was a pause, and then:
Oh I get it – the old soft peeler, hard peeler routine …
There was no more movement from the tumbler.
‘Guess I must have leaned on him a bit too hard.’ I smiled and Calamity frowned as if she thought I’d done it on purpose but couldn’t say so. She gathered the cards together.
‘We just need to work him a bit more. I reckon he’s almost ready to give up the goods.’
I leant back in my chair, laced my fingers behind my head, and stared out of the window. The sound of traffic throbbed in the distance hypnotically, and slowly my eyelids slid down and I fell asleep. I awoke about ten minutes later to the sound of the phone ringing. Calamity answered. ‘Knight Errant Investigations … Yes … Yes … Oh hi! … Fine and you? … Yeah we’re fine … She what? … Oh. No … sorry not yet. But we’re looking. Yeah, I can imagine. Tell her we’re sorry. OK. Yeah and you too. Bye.’ She stared at the phone for a second, lost in thought, and then looked up. ‘That was Gabriel Bassett. Cleopatra was asking if we’d seen Mr Bojangles.’
‘The air out at Ynyslas certainly tires you out, doesn’t it?’
‘You can say that again, we had a complaint from the coastguard about your snoring. They couldn’t hear the helicopter.’
She took a card over to the incident board and pinned it on.
‘What’s that?’
‘Just some stuff about one of my witnesses.’
‘Which one?’
‘Oh, you know, just background.’
Chapter 6
EEYORE LEANT HIS head against the wall of cheap Formica and viewed the world through that lozenge of grey the railway company call a window. Normally, trying to hold a conversation in these old diesel multiple units was like trying to talk in the engine room of a ship, but it was always eerily silent when the train slowed down as it approached Borth. We glided to a halt. One person got on, one got off. It never changed, as if they only sold one ticket per train. Eeyore peered out. ‘Always looks like the town has got its shirt on back to front, doesn’t it?’
I knew what he meant. Borth had length but no width. It was like a fake Dodge City constructed by a movie studio in which all the buildings were frontages and the train line was built on the wrong side.
We pulled out of Borth and continued gliding silently, hardly picking up speed, towards Ynyslas and Dovey Junction. The morning sun had just cleared the horizon above the flat watery world and threw a horizontal beam that made us squint and duck the dust particles that appeared from nowhere like swarms of gnats. The light had the colour of lemonade – not the stuff from the sweetshop, but the homemade drink, chilled and left on the sideboard in a glass pitcher and craved by children in the Famous Five books with the desperation of cocaine addicts. It filled the carriage with warm pale honey and gilded the golf course and beach and sea, and turned the marram grass on the dunes to golden stubble along the chin of the sky.
The track curved gently to the right and the carriage leaned slightly to accommodate the centrifugal forces, and we leaned, too, stiff as insects preserved in our cell of pale amber, and I thought of Myfanwy.
Whenever I look back it is always a particular afternoon that I recall. A summer’s day when we ate strawberries and went swimming and lay back on hot sand and stared at the impossible blueness of the sky. Just a nice afternoon which has since acquired a freight of significance it never possessed at the time. Maybe that’s what happiness is. Something beautiful we can only see from a distance, like the end of the rainbow. Silver plate added later by memory to days we have lost.
I remembered the man who had been in my office earlier that morning. He was the sort you get from time to time. Came to report a missing person – that great mainstay of the snooper’s profession.
‘I can’t live without her,’ he said.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘How did you manage in the years before you met her?
He didn’t have an answer to that, he just whined. I told him to pull himself together. And get a shave. I said, ‘My partner, Calamity, will be along in a second, do you want her to see you in that state, you great big lump?’ He said he didn’t know what to do, and I said he could start by being a man. He asked, what good that would do. I was going to throw him out. Then Calamity arrived, looked round the empty room and said, ‘Who were you talking to?’
‘Just voices on the radio.’
Even in midsummer, when the sun’s fire smelted the Prom, Eeyore would insist on wearing a jacket and tie to lead the donkeys. It wasn’t a great suit, and usually came f
rom the charity shop, but it was a suit. But today he had his Sunday one on, which was a little better but had less straw. Eeyore hailed from an era when to make a journey in anything more auspicious than a bus necessitated dressing for the occasion, even if, as today, that journey was off to see two men in prison. One in a tower of bars, and one in a self-constructed tower of Babel.
‘Last time I went to Shrewsbury,’ said Eeyore, ‘the train had proper carriages. With a corridor.’ He knocked the plastic wall with a knuckle. ‘They sell this stuff in Woolies. You wouldn’t want it in your bathroom, would you?’
‘Maybe they think if they make it cheap enough no one will rob it.’
‘They’re right. Frankie Mephisto would never have sullied his hands on a train made out of plastic wood veneer. A real train has proper upholstery, and a guard with a flag, and the name of the company written along the side in gold letters.’ He warmed to his theme. ‘Same with police cars, you see. What are they now? British School of Motoring cast-offs with an American siren. No self-respecting crook is going to be chased by that. It’s degrading. In the old days we had Jags with bells. With real bells you’ve got a proper chase. The young don’t understand these things. They think a siren is easier to maintain, same as these awful trains, and maybe they are, but why does everything have to be easy? Polishing your shoes isn’t easy either but I could never respect a man who didn’t do it.’
The last few words trailed off as he returned a wistful gaze to the world outside. Eeyore was troubled. Since the matriarch had fallen sick, discipline in the herd had broken down. Last night Sugarpie bit Erlkönig on the flank and this morning Miss Muffet was gone.
‘She’ll be back, Dad, don’t worry.’
‘I know.’
‘Couple of days, give her time to get a bit hungry, she’ll come back. They always do.’
‘I know son. I wasn’t even thinking about her.’ He continued looking out, lost in thought, across the landscape crawling by, and added, ‘Just can’t think where she could have got to.’
Mrs Prestatyn had visited Eeyore a week ago, and that was the reason he was here today and not searching for a wayward donkey. She’d received a letter from Frankie Mephisto in Shrewsbury prison. It wasn’t the first time he’d written to her, she said. He’d been sending her letters on and off for the past few years. And she’d never told anyone. But he was due out this month and that changed things. Mrs Prestatyn’s daughter had been seventeen when she disappeared. It was just after the Great Cliff Railway Robbery, of which Frankie was the mastermind. She left one morning to go fishing in the estuary, as she normally did in summer, and never came back. A few weeks later they found out that the gang had used the Loothouse to count the money and in the cellar they found the missing girl’s shoe. It didn’t prove anything. She could have gone there herself, for any number of reasons, but the coincidence was too great for most folk. Eeyore had worked the case. Every old cop has a case like this: the one that stays with him long after he leaves the force. It binds him to Mrs Prestatyn in a way neither of them quite understands. Like a secret shared between two lovers from long ago. Once a month he walks past her house on the Prom and waves at her in the window, airing a room that has lain empty for twenty-five years.
The letters from Frankie were always the same. He said he had been visited by the Holy Ghost. That he had changed. And he asked for Mrs Prestatyn’s blessing.
‘It was never proved that Frankie’s mob killed Mrs Prestatyn’s girl,’ said Eeyore. ‘We never found a body or anything. Just the shoe. Frankie always said they had nothing to do with it.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he’s likely to change his tune now?’
‘Not really, but I feel as if I owe it to Mrs Prestatyn to try.’
‘Surely he’s not serious?’
‘It’s hard to say. I’ve seen cases like this before. It’s always damned difficult because people like Frankie devote a lifetime to the art of counterfeiting honesty and sincerity. So how can you tell? And yet you can’t dismiss it, because twenty-five years in prison is a long time. It changes a man. Except for the irredeemable psychopaths, they all mellow to some extent; it’s not unknown for them to find the Lord. Or He finds them. If Frankie would just tell Mrs Prestatyn where her girl is buried, so her soul could find peace, that would be a Christian act about which there could be no dispute. And what would it cost him now? After all this time? Nothing as far as I can see.’
‘Asking for her blessing strikes me as a tall order.’
‘That’s because you only see her as she is now. You don’t see what a good woman she was before she lost her daughter. She used to be a lifeguard, did you know that?’
I shook my head.
‘Long ago, when she was a young woman. Saved a couple of drowning holiday-makers, gave them the kiss of life. We tried to give her a commendation, once, civic honour or something. But she spurned it; scorned the very idea of receiving a prize for saving a life.’ He nodded to himself. ‘I admire that.’
The train slowed down at the approach to Shrewsbury station and glided between the eleventh-century Abbey and the stadium of Shrewsbury Town Football Club. Two sacred arenas where men chanted and waited for a miracle that never came.
A group of hard-looking men stood at the platform’s end; men with shaven heads, and flattened noses that reminded me of the boxer at the funfair who takes on all-comers. And never loses. Crude, homemade tattoos adorned the backs of their hands. We walked up to them and Eeyore made a slight nod in recognition to the lead man and he returned the nod.
‘Archie.’
‘Eeyore.’
‘Long time no see.’
‘You’re looking well.’
‘You too.’
It was the highly deferential exchange of men who respect but do not particularly like each other. The head man, Archie, was shadowed by two men who were obviously the muscle of the group. They stared at us through narrowed eyes, wary of trickery.
‘Frankie sends his regards,’ said Archie. ‘You’ll forgive me for asking, but are either of you carrying?’
We shook our heads and one of the tough guys ran practised fingers through my coat checking for ironware. He was about to start on Eeyore and Archie stopped him. ‘The old man’s OK.’
We were blindfolded and helped into the back of a car that smelt of old leather.
‘Are the blindfolds necessary?’ I said. ‘I thought Frankie was serving the remainder doing community service.’
‘His whole life has been a service to the community, only some sections of it don’t see it that way.’
After a short drive, the car stopped and we were ushered into a building in which everybody spoke in whispers and people’s feet made loud squeaking sounds. There was also a rustle of newspaper. We climbed some stairs and went through a spring-loaded door that smelt of brass polish and then the blindfolds were removed. I found myself looking into the eyes of an owl. A stuffed one, in a dusty case.
Frankie Mephisto came out from behind the case and reached out a hand in greeting to Eeyore. He was smaller than I expected, thin and wiry, but slightly rounded around the belly in the way old people sometimes get when they lose their flesh but still put it on around the waist. He was wearing a pale green paisley-pattern shirt and matching tie with a sleeveless maroon v-necked sweater. The sort that comes as a set in a cellophane-wrapped ensemble from British Home Stores. His face seemed amiable enough, and had that vague familiarity that notorious criminals share with celebrities. His pate shone with the patina that foreheads get from a lifetime of hitting noses.
‘Good to see you, Eeyore.’
‘Frankie.’
‘My boys been looking after you?’
‘Can’t complain.’
‘Come, we’ll go to my little cubbyhole and a have a cuppa.’ He led us through a room of glass cases, covered in dust, a natural history section that had been closed for a decade or more. His cubbyhole wa
s piled high with papers and books. There were seats and a desk, a kettle and a jar of instant coffee.
‘You were lucky to be sent to a prison overlooking the station, given how you feel about trains,’ said Eeyore in a weak attempt at pleasantries.
‘Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s Home Office policy. It’s like a baby’s dummy.’
‘I thought maybe they would try and wean you off.’
‘No point; it goes too deep. Ask the Jesuits.’
‘The Jesuits?’ I asked politely.
‘It was them, wasn’t it? They said, “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”’
I slid my gaze across to Eeyore who hardened his features with that expression meant to convey the instruction, ‘Humour him!’
‘Seventh birthday, that’s when it happens. That’s the day a crook discovers his vocation in life – banks or trains.’ Frankie poured the boiling water into the cups and stirred the instant coffee. ‘Rightly speaking, he doesn’t actually choose – that’s done for him by his aunt. Wouldn’t you agree? She’s the one who chooses the birthday card.’ He turned to Eeyore for confirmation, and Eeyore nodded as if it was kitchen table wisdom.
‘She’s the one.’ He stirred the coffees loudly with a dessert spoon. ‘You remember that card – all boys get it – either a racing car on the front, or – ah sweet memory – a puffing billy! And those gold embossed letters, Now you are Seven. And inside, the postal order for five shillings. That’s when the love is born.’
‘And you never lose it.’
He laughed wistfully, ‘No you never lose it. What was it Oscar Wilde said? “Each man robs the thing he loves.”’
I let my gaze wander across the glass cases that were piled higgledy-piggledy outside the room.
‘Why are you tormenting Mrs Prestatyn, Frankie?’ asked Eeyore. ‘Don’t you think she’s suffered enough?’
Frankie looked serious. ‘We’ve all suffered, Eeyore. All of us. She doesn’t have a monopoly on it.’
‘You took away her girl.’
‘So they say.’
‘Everyone knows it was you, Frankie.’
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth Page 7
