Say Goodbye to the Boys

by Mari Stead Jones

  ‘It’s a maniac loose,’ Laura declared. ‘That old statue – just imagine – she was sitting on his knee, flowers in her hand. Wild flowers. She collected them. At night.’

  ‘At night?’

  ‘They say she might have been there for days. Nobody ever looks at that old statue anyway. High old time the council pulled it down.’

  ‘There was nobody on his knee on Sunday morning,’ I said.

  The remark silenced her. She stared at me keenly. ‘You won’t have to go to the police station because of her, will you?’ She had hurried back from the shop with the news, her working hat still on her head. Now her cheeks flushed to the same colour – pink. ‘You know what I mean, don’t you? Don’t know if I’m coming or going, I don’t. It’s a maniac loose. We never had that – not even when the troops were here.’

  ‘Did you know her? Mrs Porterhouse?’

  ‘Miss,’ she said with a shake of the head. ‘Mollie Ann says she’s seen her, but nobody seems to know anything about her. She was renting some rooms – that place near the Royal on the front. George Garston’s, they say – got property everywhere that man. She came from a very good family Yorkshire way. Wool, Mollie Ann says. But nobody really knows much about her. Know what they’re like, don’t you? Don’t mix. Just come here to live by themselves and mind their own business. It’s terrible, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s terrible?’

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘It’s true, Philip.’

  ‘She picked wild flowers at night?’

  ‘She was strangled – like – you know.’ Laura sitting down now, settling down too. She had rushed back to tell me. I wondered what she had expected to find. An empty house? The police at the door.

  ‘King Teddy’s lap? Honestly?’

  Now she was embarrassed. ‘I was just like you. Couldn’t believe it, neither.’ Sweat shone on her forehead. ‘I thought I’d let you know.’ She fanned herself with the Daily Mirror. ‘Goodness – isn’t it hot? It’s a heat wave on the way, they say. Even hot in the Market Hall.’ A suspect, that’s what I was.

  ‘Who found her?’

  She gulped. ‘Marshall Edmunds. He was running or something and he happened to look up – and he saw her. Reported it to the police.’

  ‘It’s a fact,’ Emlyn said. ‘It would have to be old Mash, wouldn’t it? He was training, would you believe? Pounding up the prom and he spots this old girl up there. Just goes to show – if you want to hide something then leave it in a prominent place.’

  We were aboard the Ariadne, sitting on some sackcloth because the roof of the cabin was so hot. Mash was giving another coat of red paint to the old boat’s keel. He’d looked up and she was sitting there on the old King’s knee, sea holly in her hand. He was very proud that he had been the one to find her, Emlyn said. But they held him at the police station all morning.

  Emlyn pointed towards the dune ‘Oh God, look what’s coming – anyone for tennis? You can smell the mothballs from here!’

  Amos Ellyott stood on top of the dune, his stick raised like a sword. He was wearing a white shirt with billowing sleeves, a tie and white cricket flannels of stunning tightness. On his head the biggest straw hat. ‘Halloo there,’ he called, ‘it is I, Ellyott!’

  I suggested that we hide, but Emlyn went down to escort him over the mud and heave him, rung by rung, up the ladder. And all of that afternoon under a burning sun the old man talked death from the deck chair. He knew little more than we did about Miss Porterhouse, but he was positive that she had died of strangulation. He found that fascinating. The same method as before. Some sort of strap had been used. Bizarre, the old man said, bizarre and puzzling. No one, as yet, had come forward to claim her, either.

  ‘No one’s claimed Lilian – is that what you mean?’ I said.

  Two ladies of such different backgrounds, he went on. Lilian Ridetski had no relations because of an accident of birth; Miss Porterhouse would probably have outlived hers – and she had never been married to a Polish airman, now officially listed as a deserter. Andrei Ridetski. A very fastidious gentleman. Something of a dandy, and rumoured to be involved in the underworld of Warsaw.

  Had he perhaps taken flight because of the lady’s sexual appetite? ‘That is a possibility, my friends – but I doubt such a reason would instigate him opting for desertion in a foreign land, for leaving a prospering little business, and a warm little nest. The premises were in the lady’s name, but they were purchased by Ridetski, who, we are led to believe is a penniless Polish refugee. Where did the money come from? Was there, perhaps, assistance? There are claims that he has been sighted, he added from behind a white handkerchief which now covered his face.

  ‘Seen here – in Maelgwyn?’ I asked.

  ‘Elsewhere,’ Amos replied. ‘Persons answering to his description.’

  Later he awoke to tell us that George Garston had admitted finally that he had made use of the secret room on the top floor to store unspecified goods.

  ‘George Garston would be involved in the black market, wouldn’t you say? But on the night in question he was attending a concert in the village hall at Brynberth. He was accompanied by his son, he claims. It was an affair that continued well into the night. But there would have been time. There is always time when one is desperate.’ He appeared to have gone to sleep again. We stretched out and surrendered to the heat.

  ‘However,’ he said. We both sat up. Beneath us we could hear the old boat’s timbers shrinking, ‘let us consider some other intriguing factors...’

  ‘Not the day for considering anything,’ Emlyn protested. ‘I think I’ve got heat stroke.’

  Amos Ellyott’s thin, precise voice, rasped on relentlessly. ‘Mrs Ridetski was a lady who loved finery – a gaudy dresser, I am given to understand. Yet, on the night in question, she had not dressed in her usual fashion. We must therefore assume that the summons had been urgent, unexpected and important. Summoned by a familiar, I am led to conclude.’ He gave us a long silent spell to ensure that we thought about it. ‘Well – what d’you say?’

  ‘If you say so,’ Emlyn said. ‘I mean – yes.’ He appealed to me. ‘You take over – the heat’s got me.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Amos said. ‘You are simply refusing to think. Mrs Ridetski had a key. She went in answer to a summons. The same key opened the garage door as well as the door to the lift contraption. She ascended.’ His mottled hands came up and pulled at an imaginary rope. ‘And there was someone waiting, someone who she had hurried to, confidently. Tell me – why have you not confessed to the murder of Miss Porterhouse?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Emlyn said.

  ‘The Inspector will want to know. He will send for you before the day is out. The three of you. Marshall’s parent too. All the confessors. He will want to know why you made a special case of Lilian Ridetski. I trust you have your answers and your alibis?’

  ‘Well, bugger me,’ Emlyn said lightly. ‘I should throw you off my ship. We’re suspects, are we?’

  ‘Only because you have invited suspicion, you foolish, naive young men,’ Amos said before he went to sleep once more.

  At five that evening I was interviewed by Inspector Marks. At six, Emlyn. At seven Mash, and they kept him in for a long time. They had to throw MT out of the police station.

  ‘OK,’ Emlyn said, ‘I know I’m to blame – but you don’t really care what they think in this shitty little town, do you?’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ I said.

  ‘Well – you never used to care. You didn’t give a fuck for anybody. You were famous for it.’

  ‘Me? Famous? When?’

  ‘At school. Ask anybody.’ We had given Mash an escort home and we were standing outside Emlyn’s house in the Crescent. Some women in the King’s Arms had actually pointed the finger at us. ‘Now look – w
hat we’ll have to do is get this bugger caught. I mean, I’m like you. I don’t give a sod what the bloody town thinks. But what we’ll do is we’ll set a trap. He’s local all right and he’s gone off his nut, so once and for all, to stop all this harassing we’re getting because I made a bit of a balls of it, we’ll catch him, preferably in the act!’ He was facing me, standing on his toes, he eyes shining.

  ‘Good night,’ I said. ‘You go to your bo–bo’s and read a comic. Count me out.’ I walked away from him.

  ‘Philip,’ he called after me.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I called back.

  That night Lilian’s shop was burgled. Nothing was taken, nothing much disturbed, except that someone stripped a length of wallpaper off one of the walls in Lilian’s bedroom. ‘Something there behind a picture on the wall,’ Laura said, her eyes quick and wide. ‘Fancy!’

  ‘It’ll be an envelope,’ Emlyn told her with great assurance. ‘Brown manila. With plans for an atomic bomb!’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Laura said, ‘how d’you know?’ Then she laughed. ‘You’re joking. Having me on.’

  Laura, perched on a stool outside the shop, swung out with her rolled up Daily Mirror and caught him across the ear. ‘Get away,’ she said, ‘clear off the both of you!’ Only be back to close the shop for her in case the maniac was lying in wait behind the bookshelves.

  ‘Leave it open,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe he’ll pinch the stock.’

  ‘I should be so lucky,’ she shouted after us.

  We wandered around the hall. ‘Isn’t this great?’ Emlyn said. ‘Messing about – just like when we were kids on those long summer holidays. I remember going up and down like a yo–yo in that old lift – but I thought they’d done away with it too.’

  ‘Second time someone’s broken into Lilian’s place,’ I said. ‘Maybe old man Ridetski’s come home.’

  ‘Could be,’ he agreed, ‘but why pick on Miss Porterhouse?’ He said it to Mollie Ann Fruits, and she, in a voice that came from deep inside said, ‘It’s only the beginning – mark my words!’

  Outside in the sunshine Emlyn said, ‘We are going to give MT a lift? The Jazz Band.’

  ‘Without me,’ I said promptly.

  ‘I want us all in whites. Black bow tie. Dark specs. The wagon’s fixed. Mash on drums. Sid Bates’ll be on piano – I’ve fixed that as well. You on banjo.’

  ‘Look, I’ve no strings on the fucking banjo,’ I said.

  ‘All the fucking better for that,’ he went on smoothly. ‘I knew I could rely on you!’

  MT’s carnival and sports day were fixed for the Friday, and in spite of forecasts of depressions on the way, the days leading up to it blazed, each one hotter than the last.

  ‘Oh – this old heat wave,’ Laura complained, ‘makes all them books sweat in the shop.’ But the whole town came out to rejoice in it, fan itself, and take the air and crowd the pubs. Talk of murders and inquests and funerals went by the board. Heat and sunshine’s deaths and dying antidote.

  I took Ceri out each day and to hell with working on the boat. The town council had officially boycotted the carnival and sports day, she told me. They had even tried, and failed, to secure a police ban on the procession because of the grave happenings in the town. The heat and the sunshine had met a barrier at the walls of the Council Chamber. To hell with grave happenings too, I thought. There was Ceri running out of the sea, Ceri smiling in the sun, Ceri’s voice in my head. I would have to work on keeping her away from David Garston who was sniffing around. It was she who told me that David had failed his exams. It was Amos Ellyott who told me that the police interviewed David every day, and were not happy with his story. But that wasn’t why Mash thumped him in the saloon bar of the King’s Arms. No one knew why he did it. David walked in. Mash threw a punch at him. And afterwards he couldn’t remember doing it.

  The depression arrived the morning of MT’s carnival. A boisterous wind sprang up from the estuary with havoc in mind, a startling dip in temperature, grey clouds obscuring the sun. It made the parade that was assembling in the yard of the Royal Hotel look even thinner that it was.

  ‘Only three entries in the decorated bicycle class,’ MT said, ‘but never mind, never mind. It will look fine once we string along.’ He had decided to stick to the original route in spite of warnings about the wind on the promenade. The newer part of town first, then the old, up to the High Street and back to the Royal. ‘Look at the children,’ he cried out. ‘Aren’t they marvellous?’

  There were four shivering fairies, one with a broken wand; two little girls in Welsh costume who kept chasing their hats and three little boys dressed as ghosts. Numerous soldiers with sooty faces, twenty or more of whom it was difficult to say exactly what they were, and a little girl named Sian Thomas, not in fancy dress at all, who said she was the atomic bomb. Among the adults were John James as Mae West. Emlyn could remember him as Mae West in 1935, and at every subsequent carnival.

  ‘A noble effort all round,’ MT declared. ‘Now – into line everybody.’

  Only three floats had assembled, two of them horse drawn because of the petrol rationing. On one of these were the Women’s Institute as ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, crinolines billowing, wigs, and flower baskets. The other was a small cart covered with flowers, a highly professional job, a trade entry from a new shop in the High Street – ‘Bilton’s for Better Blooms’ in gold lettering on either side of the mound of blossoms, a small pot pixie rising above them all. We followed this on one of MT’s lorries. The Jazz Band. Emlyn was already warming up. Mash banging enthusiastically on the drums, Sid Bates trying to unstick the keys on the old upright that Emlyn had borrowed, and me with my banjo wishing it was all over. Amos Ellyott sat at the rear of the lorry on an ancient cane chair. ‘If anybody asks,’ Emlyn said, ‘tell them he’s the singer.’ MT wouldn’t give us a prize because that would have been favouritism.

  He headed the procession, in front of the Brynbach Silver Band. He was wearing a black jacket, pinstriped trousers, a bowler on his head. And he carried a rolled umbrella, and made of it a drum-major’s stick. He blew his whistle. The Band struck up. We moved off. Very few came to watch us in the new part of town, but faces at windows peered at us. Emlyn gestured at them with his trumpet and curtains fell back into place.

  ‘It’s a cold audience,’ he observed. ‘When that bloody band stops murdering all the men of Harlech, we’ll give them “I Got Rhythm,” OK? After four.’

  Our turn to murder, as we turned the corner on to the promenade.

  It was deserted, ravaged by the wind. The procession leaned against it, broke up to retrieve hats and flowers and strips of tissue paper and the Brynbach Silver Band ran out of puff. Now we were straggled. Blossoms from ‘Bilton’s for Better Blooms’ took to the air. The promenade went on for as long as the Sahara Desert.

  ‘Everybody squat down,’ Emlyn ordered. ‘We’ll hit ’em for six in town.’

  And there the band revived, but now the procession was bruised. Miss Lottie Hughes retired, chilled. But Mae West marched on, and so did the children. There was a state of emergency aboard ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, and one side of the flower cart read ‘Bil or etter looms’.

  ‘Keep it up, you chaps,’ MT told us, and went bounding to take his place at the front.

  But it was worse in the town. There the wind came at us suddenly around corners, and in a more confined space had greater force. It slashed and punched, caught the procession suddenly and unaware, guard down. As we entered the High Street I saw Laura standing with Will Wilkins outside his shop.

  ‘Oh, what a shame,’ she cried, ‘don’t get pneumonia, will you?’ I saw Ceri too, and her hand came up to her mouth and she bit on a knuckle – a familiar gesture – to hide a smile. Then, twenty yards or so down the High Street, where the watchers were two deep on the pavement, we stall
ed.

  I stuck my head inside the cab. The driver was making no effort to re-start. ‘Don’t tell me we have to push this bloody wagon,’ I said. He turned and looked up at me, bloodshot eyes rolling. ‘Bloody hell, man! Thought I saw a hand come up then! In the middle of them flowers! On that bloody cart!’

  I banged my head and heard myself tell him to get on with it, for God’s sake, everybody laughing their heads off at us. He re-started the cab and we set off with such a jerk that the piano nearly fell on Sid Bates. ‘He says he saw a hand come up,’ I said to Emlyn, and he said, ‘Jack’s been at the bottle for years.’ But he came to my side and we rested our elbows on the roof of the cab and stared ahead. Sid Bates stopped thumping on the piano. Amos Ellyott stumbled over to join us. Only Mash kept at it, brushes in his hands, his foot steady on the bass pedal.

  We drew closer to the cart. And she was there, an arm exposed, a shoe pointing at the sky, couched among ‘Bilton’s for Better Blooms’. The drum went swish, swish, thump, swish, swish. Someone at an open window above a shop cried out. We stalled again. The driver yanked the hand brake up and switched off the ignition. He heaved the door open and nearly fell out. He slammed the door shut. ‘That’s me – finished,’ he said, ‘nobody told me it was a fucking funeral!’ And off he went, abandoned us, and we stood and watched the cart’s slow progress all the way down the High Street. And it was deathly quiet, except for Mash going swish, swish, thump, swish, swish on the drums.