Aberystwyth Mon Amour

by Malcolm Pryce

  *

  Eeyore sat on a bale of hay, his head resting in his hands, and stared gloomily at the decapitated head.

  ‘In your bed?’

  I nodded.

  The early-morning sun made the dust in the stable dance and sparkle.

  He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s Esmeralda.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I recognised the white ear. I’m sorry.’

  He made a dismissive expression. ‘I thought at first it was one of those gangs, you know, the ones that smuggle them into Holland for those movies they do.’

  I picked up a sack and laid it over the donkey’s head, silencing the withering gleam of accusation in her eye.

  ‘I don’t think she suffered much,’ I offered uselessly.

  ‘No, it’s us who remain who are fated to suffer.’

  ‘Dad! Don’t be like that.’

  He rose to his feet with the desperate weariness of the prize fighter who would really prefer to stay down on the canvas.

  ‘Come, I want to give you something.’

  He led me through the stable, past the quietly shuffling donkeys and into an outhouse where he removed a brick from the wall and reached inside. He pulled out a key.

  ‘There’s not much I can do for you. Too old for that now. But I can give you this.’

  He placed the key in my hand.

  ‘It’s to a caravan in Ynyslas. A ghost van, built from two sections of crash write-offs welded together. No records exist for it anywhere. Not the police, not the Council, not the Chirpy Caravaners of Britain Association. It’s ice-cold. You can’t see it from the road, it’s hidden behind the Borth Lagoons Holiday Camp sign. Even the caretaker doesn’t know about it. If things get too hot for you, you could hang out there for a while. No one would find you.’

  I closed my hand around the key.

  ‘There’s food and water and a brand new ludo set. It’s not much but it might help.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He waved my gratitude impatiently away. ‘Now you get out of here and find those guys. I’ve got a donkey to bury.’

  From the harbour I walked up through the Castle to the top of town and turned right just before the market to KnitWits the wool shop. The bell tinkled and I walked through the aisle of displays stacked to the ceiling with wool in every shade and grade that the shepherd could offer. I put the scrap of wool from Evans the Boot’s Mam on the counter and waited as Mildred Crickhowell examined it with a jeweller’s loupe. It made her look like a Cyclops: one watery jellyfish-sized eye criss-crossed with spidery red veins.

  ‘It’s tea cosy all right,’ she laughed. ‘Funny, you don’t look the type!’

  ‘It’s … it’s not mine,’ I said lamely.

  She laughed again. ‘No, it never is! Don’t tell me, it belongs to a friend!’

  I squirmed. Visitors to the town were often surprised by the amount of shops selling tea cosies, especially as most of them were concentrated down by the harbour. Just when this harmless piece of tea-pot furniture became a front for another form of spout-warming activity was a mystery lost in history.

  I picked up the scrap of wool. ‘Can you be sure it’s cosy? I mean it’s just a piece of wool, it could be from a cardigan or something.’

  The woman leaned her shoulders back and tilted her head in the sort of look which said: ‘What do you mean sure?! This is KnitWits you’ve come to, you know?’

  She handed me the eyepiece. ‘See for yourself.’

  As I held the cloth up to the light and examined the weave, she explained to me the various features.

  ‘See the fine dust particles in the yarn? That’s tea dust. Now look at the way the threads are woven together. See? Like figure-of-eights intertwined with zigzags? That’s pretty fancy crocheting. You don’t see that sort of thing very often. That’s what’s known as the Hildegaard Purl after the Hildegaardian Order of the Sisters of Deiniol. They invented it. Now that tells us something very interesting.’

  There was a pause as I struggled to see the things she was talking about.

  ‘Very interesting,’ she repeated.

  ‘Yeah, why?’

  ‘Dates it, doesn’t it. Surer than carbon dating, that is. It’s from 1958.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Hildegaard Purl was invented that year, and then not long after the sisters abjured the vice of amusement and stopped the knitting. No one else can do it like they could. And there’s more. Look at the curved edge with the elaborate stitching. See it?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said, amazed at how much the woman had seen through her magnifying glass.

  ‘See how the fibres are shrivelled and discoloured?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s classic scorching. That’s where the spout would have gone. Now see around that rim those funny symbols?’

  ‘Yes! Like hieroglyphics.’

  ‘Ha!’ She laughed and smacked me on the back with a force you wouldn’t have expected from a lady of her age. ‘Not bad for someone who claims not to know anything about tea cosies. They’re not hieroglyphics, but you’re not far wrong. Early Mayan alphabet. Which means what you’ve got here is the Mhexuataacahuatcxl. It’s from a limited edition set of cosies knitted by the Sisters of Deiniol for Ma Prytherch’s Tea Cosy Emporium in 1958. Creation Legends of the World series. This is Mhexuataacahuatcxl, the Mayan fertility god.’

  I put the eyepiece down and stared at her in wonder.

  She was grinning with delight; it wasn’t often she got a chance to show off like this.

  She picked up the eyepiece and had another look herself.

  ‘And, if I’m not mistaken, this little crescent shape at the edge is all that remains of his loin cloth. The design is chiefly based on source material uncovered by the 1935 Oxford University Expedition to the Cordillera Oriental. Mhexuataacahuatcxl was the deity responsible for the renewal of vegetation and patron god of the corporation of goldsmiths. Human victims were killed and flayed to honour him twice a year. The loin cloth is a bit of licence. He could assume the form of man or woman, you see. Obviously that was a bit racy for those sisters so they left the precise details to our imaginations.’

  She put down the loupe and beamed at me. ‘Remarkable people: very accomplished mathematicians, invented the concept of the zero, yet curiously they never discovered the wheel.’

  ‘That is absolutely amazing,’ I said.

  ‘Pah!’ She waved a contemptuously dismissive hand in front of her face. ‘Child’s play. If they’d hurry up and send me that replacement part for my scanning electron microscope I’d really be able to tell you something.’

  She started tapping the counter top.

  ‘Of course, if it really is Mhexuataacahuatcxl, I ought, by rights, to report you to the police.’

  There was a pause. I could tell the woman was observing me keenly, while pretending not to.

  ‘The police?’

  ‘There were only four Mhexuataacahuatcxls.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Three of those four are in private collections, and the fourth until fairly recently was in the Museum.’

  ‘And it’s not any more?’

  ‘It was stolen a few weeks ago.’

  It rained for the rest of the week, and I sat in my office with my feet on the desk and stared up at the picture of Noel Bartholomew. I wondered how the gene for risking one’s life on stupid causes could survive in the gene pool. Here I was on the trail of a missing boy and running headlong into a confrontation with the Druids. Evans the Boot wasn’t even worth saving. His Mam might think he was, but no one else in town did. I wondered why he stole the tea cosy from the Museum. I couldn’t begin to imagine but I knew it wasn’t because he liked tea. I was also haunted by Calamity’s parting words about the fireman’s son. It was stupid, I knew that, but I couldn’t get the image of the lady in the bingo hall out of my head, the lady in the blue scarf. That was a pretty damned accurate prediction. What if Calamity really did know who was going to be next? I reached
for an umbrella.

  Terrace Road was glossy with rain and the pavements thick with holidaymakers forced from their caravans in search of stimulus. In their clear plastic macs they jostled each other and stared with disconsolate, rain-washed faces into shop windows. I shook my head sadly. What sort of life must they have come from, I wondered, if this represented a holiday? On Penglais Hill the cars queued to get into town. Later in the afternoon they would be heading back the other way, to camping-gas meals and long nights of ludo.

  At the school I pulled into the lay-by behind the rugby field. Far off in the gloom, on the other side of the pitch, I could see the squat, Neanderthal figure of Herod Jenkins leading a file of small rugby-kitted boys through sheets of rain. The man who sent Marty on the run from which he never returned. The scene had hardly changed at all in twenty years except for a new wooden building that had recently appeared in the south-western corner. I looked at it, a strange skeleton of wood shaped vaguely like an upturned beetle. Seeing Herod again had robbed me of all desire to enter the school grounds. And it occurred to me that if I wanted to see the school secretary I would probably bump into Lovespoon as well. I sat for a while listening to the drumbeat of the rain on the car’s roof. Then I drove home and rang the school secretary.

  ‘Fireman’s son?’ said a puzzled voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Yes, it’s for a jamboree in Oslo. He’d be an honoured guest of Crown Prince Gustav.’

  ‘We’ve got one in the first year.’

  ‘No, too young. Must be about fifteen or sixteen.’

  ‘What about an ambulance driver’s son?’

  I hung up. The next day the Cambrian Gazette landed on my doorstep with the front-page news that the Ghost Train would be cancelled for a week. The fireman who shovelled the coal into the boiler had been given compassionate leave: his son had died the previous night in a hit-and-run accident.

  *

  ‘“Should I, after tea and cake and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” That’s T.S. Eliot, that is, Mr Knight,’ said Sospan smiling as he put the two ninety-nines down on the stand. ‘From Prufrock!’

  Calamity and I picked up the ices and walked over to the railings. She was now my assistant with on-target earnings of 50p a day and an ice-cream allowance.

  ‘OK,’ I said after we had shaken on the deal, ‘what’s the story?’

  She looked at me with an insufferably smug grin and said, ‘Cartographer’s folly.’

  ‘Cartographer’s what?’

  ‘Folly.’

  I licked the vanilla slowly.

  ‘You see,’ continued Calamity, ‘everyone knew there had to be a link to all these murders, but no one could see what it was. The kids were chalk and cheese: Evans and Bronzini and Llewellyn on one hand, Brainbocs on the other.’

  ‘Right. So what was the link?’

  She paused for effect and took a long slow deliberate slurp. ‘The police couldn’t see it at all.’

  ‘I know; and you could. Now what is it?’

  ‘Boy, they were all over the place. Not a clue.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me or not?’

  She stopped slurping and turned to look at me. ‘The school bus.’

  ‘The school bus?’

  ‘It really fooled me for a while. You see, the police were talking a load of nonsense about them all living in the same area. But you only had to look at a map to see that wasn’t true. I know, because I did look at a map. In fact, I spent hours looking at one. And the funny thing was, although it was plain the police were barking up the wrong tree, I kept getting this feeling that there was something there. And then I saw it, they were all on the same bus route. Maybe, I thought, the school bus was the link. But then, if it was as simple as that, why not arrange for the bus to crash? That way you get everybody in one hit. Then it struck me.’

  I finished my ice and threw the empty cone into the bin. ‘Are you going to get to the point before sunset?’

  ‘You have to follow the reasoning behind what I’m telling you. Do you think I’m going through all this for fun?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But go on in your own time.’

  ‘I have to tell you, I was foxed.’

  I threw my head back and groaned.

  ‘So I went back to the map a second time, and stared, and stared and stared. And then I had it. “Eureka!” I shouted.’

  She looked at me with a mixture of triumph and the impudent knowledge that I still had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘You’re fired.’

  ‘Aw! Don’t be a misery!’

  ‘You’ve got one minute.’

  She tutted and rolled her eyes. ‘Do you know how map makers protect their work against illegal copying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve got to understand with a map it’s very difficult to prove copyright infringement. If someone wants to publish a map but is too lazy to put on their wellies and go out with a measuring stick, they can just buy someone else’s map and copy it. Save themselves a lot of walking around in the mud. After all, the landscape is already there and you’re just recording it. So everyone’s map should be the same anyway, shouldn’t it?’

  I nodded, with a puzzled look slowly creeping across my brow.

  ‘So if you are an honest map maker, how do you protect yourself?’

  ‘I give in.’

  ‘I’ll tell you. You put things in which don’t exist. For example, you make up a hill and call it Louie’s Knoll. There’s no such thing in real life, so if it appears on someone else’s map, the implication is, they copied yours.’ She looked at me with the fire of discovery in her eyes. ‘It’s called a cartographer’s folly.’

  ‘I’m still lost. Was Brainbocs a map maker?’

  Calamity put a conspiratorial hand on my arm, looked round and then continued in a lowered voice, ‘Brainbocs was smarter than Einstein. Normally, he would get 100 per cent for every piece of homework he did. Trouble was, although he had the brains of Einstein, he had the fighting ability of a squirrel. Just about anyone could copy his homework and there was nothing he could do about it. So he would deliberately put in weird errors. The sort which no one who had actually done the homework could possibly make. Then when the same mistakes cropped up in other people’s work, the teacher would guess what was going on. It was like his personal watermark.’

  ‘And Evans, Llewellyn and Bronzini copied his homework on the bus to school each morning?’

  ‘That’s right. Everyone knows Lovespoon warned Brainbocs to steer clear of whatever it was he was writing about. But Brainbocs wouldn’t listen. He must have stumbled on something; something so awful that the Welsh teacher had to kill him. But when he gets three more pieces of homework with Brainbocs’s watermark he has to kill the other three as well.’

  ‘And what was it Brainbocs writing about?’

  Calamity leaned closer and said in her best cloak-and-daggery voice: ‘No idea.’

  Chapter 7

  NO ONE KNEW what Dai Brainbocs wrote in that essay. Or, at least, if they did they weren’t telling. Could a fifth-form kid write something so bad his teacher was obliged to kill him? I didn’t know but I didn’t have any other angle to work on and I spent the following week asking around. So did Calamity. Meirion sent me some cuttings from the Gazette and I pored over them. Brainbocs had been the first victim; the story went that he handed the essay in just before the 9am bell and disappeared sometime during lunch time. Two weeks later they found his calliper and some of his teeth at the bottom of one of the vats of Cardiganshire Green at the cheese yards. Everything else had been eaten away by the lactic acid. It was a well-known way of disposing of a body. There were two articles on Brainbocs: a factual piece about the discovery of the body and a rather florid essay discussing the remarkable short career of the schoolboy genius. It was signed off by Iolo Davies, the Museum curator, but was almost certainly ghost-written by Meirion. ‘With hair the colour of museum dust and one leg that wouldn
’t bend at the knee, he’d spent so much of his life in the twilight of Aberystwyth public library he’d become translucent, like those grotesque deep sea creatures you see in National Geographic …’ It was difficult to imagine Iolo Davies writing like that. There were also a few words from his teacher, Lovespoon, who described him as the finest scholar the school had ever produced; a remark that made it sound as if he were part of a proud tradition, rather than a freak that had somehow slipped through the net. Lovespoon had been so upset by the incident that he needed a week’s leave and had lost the essay.

  * * *

  The week after Brainbocs’s corpse was found in the cheese, Evans the Boot disappeared from the scene. The date was hard to pinpoint because he was such an elusive character, it took a while before anyone realised he had gone. And even then it was some time before people dared believe it. Not long after that a member of his gang, Llewellyn Morgan, received the ‘squirt water in your eye’ flower anonymously through the post. He tested it out on the balcony of his council estate flat and was so maddened by the cobra venom that he fell over the edge, digging at his eyes with his fingers in such a frenzy that they later found eyeball jelly under the nails. He fell nineteen floors but according to the pathologist would have been dead by the time he passed the eighth or ninth. Bronzini and the fireman’s son – both members of the same gang – were the most recent victims. Whoever killed Bronzini must presumably also have been the one who stuck my business card up his backside, which suggested they already knew I was investigating the case, even before I did. None of the articles mentioned the stolen tea cosy.