Last Tango in Aberystwyth an-2

by Malcolm Pryce

  'Please don't do it, I'll tell you anything you want to know.'

  He waved the flame at my face. 'OK, so where is he?'

  'He's out at the Komedy Kamp. Buried under the floor of chalet 7c,' I said in desperation.

  A look of surprise lit up the cop's face. 'You're kidding? How did he get there?'

  'It's like this,' I began. 'This Dean acted the part of the big holy monk, you know the type - wouldn't know one end of a woman from another. Holier than thou and all that, but it's all for show. Inside he has a special hobby, something he likes to do, something that he is ashamed to even think about but he still likes to do it ...' I looked at the cop. He had put the blowtorch down and was sitting there drinking up the story. This was easier than he'd expected.

  'So what was it then, peeper?'

  'Stiffs.'

  Cop nodded, trying to look businesslike, as if this what he had suspected all along.

  'Of course, he's not the only person around town who likes them a bit cold. It's quite a popular pastime in some quarters, so I'm told. But not many people are in such an excellent position to do something about it. Old men, young girls, you name it, he was into it. And that might have been an end of it. He could have carried on like that and no one would have been any the wiser. But he gets greedy. Maybe he's planning on a retirement and needs a better quality nest egg, or maybe he's just tired of scrimping and saving all his life. Either way he could do with a little extra money. Couldn't we all? He finds himself approached by a couple of guys who want in on the game. They happen to have some clients who also fancy a night of passion in the morgue and they're willing to pay. So these two new guys ask him how about it? Like to share the spoils for a bit of extra cash? And he thinks why not? As long as everyone is discreet about it no one need know and everyone is discreet of course because they are all respectable men in respectable positions. And so it goes on for a while but then the two new guys think of a new angle. A special-request service. You see someone walking around you fancy, have a word with us and we can arrange the death and a subsequent night of passion.'

  The cop whistled. This was worse than anything he'd yet encountered. And if he knew the first thing about the underworld he'd know it was pure invention and not very good at that. But he didn't.

  'Of course this is way out of the Dean's league. Bonking a few corpses, yes, he didn't have a problem with that, and for a man like him for whom death was a way of life, it wasn't a big deal. But this was something else entirely. Murder to order? No way. The trouble was, the two guys had made a mistake. They'd miscalculated and let him in on the plan; that gave them a problem. So they invite him to town to discuss the matter. And they get persuasive. Very persuasive. The Dean's no fool, he realises they are planning to silence him, silence him for good. He tries to run away and hide out in town. But what does he know about the cloak-and-dagger stuff? He's just a crusty old academic fallen in with a bad lot. It was only a matter of time before they got to him.'

  The cop nodded thoughtfully as he took it in. He was deeply disturbed. 'So who are the two guys?'

  'I don't know the names, but one of them is the garage mechanic at Kousin Kevin's Kamp, he's the muscle. The other is the security guy there. He's the brains.'

  The cop made a determined frown. 'That little jerk — I know him!'

  'Of course he'll deny it all,' I said.

  Harri Harries picked up the bag of tools. 'We'll see about that.'

  It was still early evening and sleet was falling as they padlocked the gates and dropped me off at the bus stop. The sort of bus stop that looked like bus arrivals were charted with a calendar rather than a clock. I hobbled over to the red telephone box. The door squeaked like a seagull and the inside stank of urine. Llunos's voice had the tone of one who really didn't want to get up and answer the phone at 8 pm in the evening, knowing full well it wouldn't be anything good. I looked at the distant row of yellow lights from behind sitting-room curtains and I knew what he meant. But this had to be done. I told him briefly about what had happened and told him to get up from his tea, the newspaper and the TV, put on his coat and go and find the two guys from Kousin Kevin's. He didn't say no, he just sighed and said, 'Why me, Louie?'

  'Who else is there?' He knew that was true.

  'You're asking me to arrest a couple of guys who've done nothing wrong.'

  'Well it wouldn't be the first time, would it?'

  'This isn't funny, Louie.'

  'Who's laughing? Look at it this way, you'll probably be saving their lives. Or at the least preventing a serious assault taking place. Just keep them banged-up until we can sort this out. If you keep them under your nose they should be safe.'

  Sometime after midnight I parked outside the Moulin and walked in. It was quieter tonight than the last time, smoky and slightly sleepy, as if all the moods of all the people there had become synchronised and the flavour of the night was dreamy-mellow. I ordered a drink, listened to the singers and let my gaze wonder sleepily around the room. It came to rest on a girl dancing and my eyes stayed there for a while with my thoughts wandered elsewhere. Then slowly those thoughts returned and my attention focused on her. Suddenly I understood how a rabbit feels when it stares transfixed at the headlight of an oncoming car.

  She was tall but not too tall and slim but not skinny. Her figure was voluptuous and statuesque like one of those space-travelling goddesses in newspaper strip-cartoons, the ones whose job it is to save the universe. She wore a tight bodice of soft white lace, partially unbuttoned so that the cups of her brassiere, like the hands of a malevolent dwarf, thrust her breasts forward to taunt the men who watched in awe. The waist-button of her jeans was undone and the button below that too so that the edge of her white panties flashed in the ultraviolet light. Her midriff was bare and taut, and her faded Levi's 501s had been cut off at about the level that her bicycle saddle reached when she was seventeen. A saddle that had, no doubt, been stolen long ago and was now worth ten times more than the bike.

  She danced wonderfully and provocatively with a flowing Polynesian languor, her hair glistening like moonlit water. Occasionally the cascading blonde hair would swamp her soft brown shoulder and the strap of her bodice would be washed away in the flood; and when that happened, her breast remained impossibly in position, mocking and taunting, like a puppet that continues to dance after its strings have been cut. Every time I tried to look away my gaze returned of its own accord, like a compass needle pointing north.

  The boy she was with was one of the camp, symbolist painters who sold their work to the tourists on the Prom. He was wearing a ruffed shirt and stage make-up and no doubt had left a portfolio with the hat-check girl containing five dreary views of the bandstand with the moon hanging behind it like a rotten fruit. Scarcely eighteen or nineteen, hardly old enough to have made an enemy in this world, and yet in the Moulin tonight this boy was despised by every man there. Because we all knew from the expression on the goddess's face - the truculent, savage aristocratic disdain - that she had chosen him purely to demonstrate her contempt for the rest of us. Chosen this effete, cross-dressing, half-grown milksop to show us how she despised us for being such hopeless fools; for surrendering ourselves so abjectly at the sight of her flesh. She had chosen him not as a dance-partner, but as a scalpel with which to expose like an Aztec priest our hearts to the common view and make us see, even though we already knew, what pathetic and feeble objects they were. Our palpitating flesh as craven as that of a guard dog who allows himself to be bought off with a bone and licks the hand of the man come to kill his master. And though our humiliation was already more than complete, she intensified it further by ordering round after round of exotic drinks — flaming black sambucas and B52s — which they knocked back in one, and which she paid for from a wallet stuck in her back pocket. And after that, eyes smouldering with contempt, she pressed her chest hard against the boy's bony ribcage and slid with lugubrious, side-to-side slithers up into his undeserving, pimply face. I stopped a wai
tress and asked the name of this girl in the tones of a shepherd asking about that new star in the east. And she told me without even bothering to look, told me with the air of one sick of explaining the obvious to the ignorant. 'It's Judy Juice, the movie star.'

  She left shortly after and so I paid for my drink and followed at a discreet distance. By the time I got to the street she was gone, and someone else hailed me from just outside the gateway. It was Calamity, leaning against a lamppost. I looked at my watch - it was gone one and I was about to remonstrate with her for being out so late but then I saw the stricken look in her eyes, her complexion the pallor of cigarette ash.

  I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out and she opened hers silently too. Then she collapsed into my arms with the words 'Custard Pie'.

  'It's OK,' I said. 'It's OK.'

  Then she pulled herself away from me and looked up and told me in one long gushing stream, as if the faster she said it, the less damage it would do.

  'He saw the bird seed and begged me for it and I said, "You have to buy it, buster." And so he said, "If you want to find the Dean, ask for the girl called Judy Juice." And so I sneered at him and said, "You expect bird seed for that? I've seen fresher news written on the side of a Babylonian tomb." And then he sort of danced a bit and said I was a cutey and said, "All right, little girl, you want some real news? Tell that smart-arse private eye to stick this in his pipe and smoke it." And then he got all excited and rubbed his hands together and said, "You want to know what the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment is all about? What's been going on at the sanatorium? What this 'thing' is that people keep seeing? You want to know that, little girl?" And I said yes and he said, "Give me the seed." So I made a deal. I gave him a quarter of it and said he'd get the rest when he told me about the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. And so he did.' Then she stopped and said, 'I think you need a drink.'

  'I've just had one.'

  'I think you need another one.'

  But before I could drink or she could speak there was a disturbance in the entrance to the club. Judy Juice walked out in a hurry, putting her coat on as she left. Behind her, arms outstretched in supplication, came Jubal. 'But Baby!' he cried. 'But Poppet!'

  Judy Juice carried on walking and Jubal ran and caught her sleeve. 'Munchkin!' She shrugged off his hand and swept past us without noticing. He tried to grab her sleeve again, shouting, 'Look here, you bitch!' Calamity put a hand out to stop him. 'Lady doesn't want to talk to you, Mac' Jubal pushed her aside and she grabbed his arm. He shoved her roughly again and she kicked him furiously in the shin. Jubal threw out a backhand slap and in the same instant, before even I had time to react, Judy Juice spun round and shoved Jubal crying, 'Leave the little girl alone, you cockroach!'

  Judy Juice was quite a big girl and Jubal fell back in surprise and over into some sacks of refuse left out for the bin men. Calamity made a move towards him but I held her back. He lay there dazed for a second or two as Judy Juice stepped into a taxi, and then he stumbled to his feet, ran towards the car and shouted, 'But Baby I'm sorry! Please, Baby ...' The car sped off and Jubal sank to his knees, shouting 'Baby, I'm sorry, I beg you!' And then, still kneeling, he buried his face in his hands and wept.

  Back at the office, once I'd convinced her I'd had enough rum, Calamity told me what Custard Pie had said. Told me the news that made my heart stop for so long that I sat there listening for the beat to start again like a hundred-metre sprinter listening for the gun.

  'This "thing" out at the sanatorium,' she said. 'It's Herod Jenkins, your old games teacher. He's still alive.'

  Chapter 14

  I tossed and turned all night and cried out in that half-asleep, half-awake state in which the night terrors visit us. And maybe an hour before dawn — the darkest hour — I slipped beneath the membrane of sleep and dreamed of a day in late January many years ago when the whole school was kept in during afternoon break. An eerie hush consumes the old school building, a silence so absolute you can hear the footfall of the spiders in the cupboards where the Latin books are stored. Forbidden to move from our desks, or even look at the window, we hold our breath and strain to hear above the deafening drumbeats of our own hearts ... and then there it is, at first so faint as to be almost imperceptible, but growing and growing, getting louder until there can be no mistake: thwump, thwump, thwump! The sound of choppers. Suddenly, in a cacophony of slamming desklids that drowns out the shouting of the teacher, we all dash to the window. Thwump, thwump, thwump! The dying sun has turned the frosty sky amber like a puma's eye; spread beneath it the iced-over games field sparkles like frozen lemonade... thwump, thwump, thwump! From far in the glowing west, growing all the time, getting bigger and bigger, that small speck that grows and slowly resolves itself into the shape of a helicopter, flying in low over the trees. Realities merge in the way they do in dreams, so that the chopper is now silhouetted against an orange tropical sky, like the film poster to Apocalypse Now, advertising a film about a journey upriver in a coracle to a Cambodian temple, in search of a crazy man in a track suit called Kurtz. Thwump, thwump, thwump! 'Get back to your seats this instant!' Mr Kurtz cries. We look out and gasp. Against the burning sky, almost overhead now, the chopper. And slung beneath the fuselage the bier of Marty, the one who never made it back from the cross-country run.

  *

  Llunos was hunched over a pint in the Castle pub, just inside wooden doors. He looked up, smiled, saw the expression on my face and lost the smile. 'Oh,' he said. 'Looks like you found out. Should have known you would.'

  'All I want to hear from you is it's not true.'

  'It's true. No one in town wants more than me to say it's not. But that doesn't change a thing. It's true.'

  'Didn't we push him out of a plane?'

  He nodded glumly. 'I thought we did.'

  'How long have you known?'

  'Six months or so. At first it was just rumours ...'

  'Why didn't you tell me?'

  He took a while to speak, as if he knew the answer but had forgotten it. 'What good would it have done?'

  'How could this happen? From a plane, for fuck's sake!'

  He picked up his pint and brought it to his lips and then stopped. He spoke over the top. 'It's not that rare to fall out of a plane and survive. Read the Guinness Book of Records. And this was over a lake, and we were flying in low for a bombing run. Work it out.'

  'Wouldn't the concussion kill him?'

  'A normal person, perhaps. But a games teacher ... ?' He stopped and took out a card and wrote an address on the back. 'Look, I can't say any more at the moment. It's better for you to hear the whole story. What you've heard so far is nothing. Meet me tomorrow at this address, at 10 am.'

  He handed me the card and stood up to leave. The address was a room in the old college building. 'In the meantime, keep it under your hat. We don't want to start a panic'

  *

  The old college stretched along the Prom from the pier to the putting-green. With its massive stone walls and conical turrets it looked like a Rhineland castle and had stood up well to the flood. It had originally been built as a hotel and when they found they couldn't make it pay by accommodating folk taking a two-week vacation from the real world they used it instead to house the dons who took one for a lifetime. Inside the main building bronze statues of long-dead and forgotten academics gazed down at me with looks of stern and vague disapproval. An attitude built on the failsafe premise that whatever it was I was doing or thinking they would almost certainly have disapproved of it. The floor squeaked as all floors in buildings devoted to serious study should and the walls were hung with wooden boards gilded with forgotten acts of sporting glory. All from a distant time when athletic prowess for students entailed more than a run from the pie shop to the pub.

  The room looked out over the ocean through arched, leaded lights with panes of stained glass. There were seven people waiting in the room when I arrived, seated around a table on which stood a movie projector. Llunos motioned me t
o take a seat and introduced me to the others. There was professor of some sort from the Clarach Institute. A Tillamook Indian with a face the colour of polished rosewood and wearing a racoon-skin hat. There were also two lab technicians and some men in dark suits who looked like they came from the security services.

  'The first thing you need to know about this meeting', Llunos began, 'is it never took place.' The people round the table nodded grimly. 'We never met, we never spoke, and we're not here now.' More nods. 'I don't wish to make this any longer than it has to be, but not everyone is up to speed here and so I will need to fill in some of the background.' He walked to the front and stood in front of a blackboard.

  'At first it was just a few rumours. Some of the peasant communities in the hinterlands beyond Nant-y-moch started reporting strange sightings. A manlike creature loping through the forest, usually at dusk, a shy creature that shunned human contact and used the cover of twilight to get about. Such reports were easy enough to dismiss at first — especially by people who didn't want to look too closely. Then there were the odd footprints — big ones, and even the deep wide imprint in the mud of a waterhole of his backside.' Llunos gave a signal to the lab technicians who lifted a plaster-of-Paris cast the size of a small card-table. Llunos continued. 'Farmers also reported losses among their livestock, but of course such things are commonplace.' He turned towards the man in the racoon-skin hat. 'Laughing Bear has experience with the sasquatch of North America, popularly known as Bigfoot. Laughing Bear, I imagine the pattern I'm outlining is familiar to you?' The man nodded gravely and lines appeared in the corners of his eyes.

  'As I said, it was easy enough to dismiss at first. But then this happened.' He gave another hand signal and the blackout curtains were drawn. One of the technicians started up the projector and we watched a grainy, ghostly 8mm film of a family horsing around beside a lake at nightfall. They had that awkward jerky movement of people shot with old cine cameras and were laughing and playing tag and pulling faces for the camera the way all families do.