‘So?’
‘So years ago, long before he became Mr Big Bollocks, he had a different trade. The sort they don’t paint your picture in oils for and hang up in the Rotary Club.’
‘What was it?’
Archie looked into my eyes and stared long and hard. He knew he was going to tell me, but he still didn’t like it. Eventually he said the three words:
‘Punch and Judy.’
Chapter 10
‘IF THE PIRATES caught you,’ I explained, ‘they chained you to an oar and rubbed chillis in your eyes to keep you awake. Unless you were a woman in which case they sold you into slavery.’
Calamity stood in front of the map of Borneo and studied the route of my great-great-uncle.
‘What makes you so sure she didn’t drown?’
‘She probably did.’
Calamity unwrapped a sugar lolly. ‘So you just sit here staring at your uncle?’
‘It’s the second rule of being a private eye.’
She looked at me with interest. ‘How does it go?’
‘Look after your shoes.’
She frowned.
‘It means don’t waste shoe leather walking around all over the place when a lot of things can be worked out with your head.’
‘What’s the first rule of being a private eye?’
‘Don’t be one.’
She frowned again. ‘And the third?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
‘You mean you haven’t thought of it yet.’
I laughed. ‘Come on, get your coat, it’s time to violate the second rule.’
In Venice a nobleman would arrive at the Duke’s palace in furs and silks and half an hour later would exit the back way over the Bridge of Sighs to prison. With Iolo Davies the way led over Trefechan Bridge but the symbolism was the same. For years he had basked in the warm glow of Aberystwyth respectability. Not a duke or a lord, perhaps, but a man occupying an eminent position, enjoying the esteem of the movers and shakers of his little world. Invited every year to the Golf Club Summer Ball and the Rotary Club Christmas Party; holder of a seat on the St Luddite’s School board of governors; advisor to the examining boards; publisher of several pieces of research into the lost art of whalebone corsetry. A proud man who had his suits tailored in Swansea, and bespoke aftershave mixed to a personal recipe by the perfumers of Gwent. A man of culture now forced to scratch a living putting on marionette performances in the back rooms of pubs.
Aberaeron was the centre of the Punch and Judy circuit and as we drove south along the coast road, we talked more about Hermione Wilberforce. I explained how years later Bartholomew’s journal was found in the jungle. It recorded how his guides and bearers abandoned him one by one, until finally he ploughed on alone; how his last weeks were spent racked by fever and madness. And how in the final delirium before he died he described the day when, alone in the jungle and too ill to move, he was visited by Hermione.
‘The thing is,’ said Calamity, the lolly still in her mouth, ‘that doesn’t prove anything, does it?’
‘Nope.’
‘It could just have been a hallucination.’
‘Of course.’
‘Or an orang-utan. Or he could have just made it up.’
‘Except for one thing.’
There was a slight pause. Calamity looked at me sensing the mild air of melodrama in my voice.
‘What?’
‘He took a camera with him.’
I could sense her interest quicken.
‘It was one of the very first ones – the size of a step-ladder and he lugged it all the way to Borneo and then upriver. He was the first person ever to record images of the headhunting tribes. He once described how he arranged a photo session and had to wait an hour for the women of the tribe to get ready. He said women were the same all over the world.’
Calamity snorted.
‘Most of the film was eaten by insects but a few plates survived.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Sydney University.’
‘You’re not going to tell me he took a picture of Hermione?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the fascinating thing: the camera was never found – they found his journal and other effects but not the camera. Then fifteen years later it turned up, or so the story goes, in a junk shop in Hong Kong. An American merchant bought it and there was a plate still inside. They say he had it developed and although partially ruined you could still make out the ghostly image of a European woman in the midst of the rainforest.’
‘What happened to the picture?’
‘He lost it.’
It was late afternoon when we drove into the fishing village of Aberaeron. I pulled up and parked outside the butcher’s shop on the main street. A fawn Allegro pulled in and parked about thirty yards behind me. It had been following us most of the way from Aberystwyth.
‘How many pubs are there in this town?’ Calamity asked.
‘Loads.’
‘How are we gong to find the right one?’
‘Third rule of being a private eye. When confronted with a mystery, don’t ask what’s the answer, ask what’s the question.’
Calamity considered that one for a second. ‘That’s a good one; better than the first two.’
‘Can you see the fawn Allegro behind us?’
‘It’s been following us since Southgate.’
I squinted at the driver in the rear-view mirror. Trench coat and trilby, beard, dark glasses, newspaper balanced on the steering wheel, it didn’t prove anything, but when did an innocent person ever dress like that?
‘So what’s the question?’
‘The question is: not which pub will he be in tonight, but which of these two butchers’ shops will he be getting his sausages from.’
Calamity considered this new approach to detective work.
I took out the pamphlet on the history of the Museum that I had picked up from the library. ‘Whatever else I know or don’t know, I know you can’t do Punch and Judy without sausages. There’s always a bit where the Chinaman falls into the sausage machine and comes out as a yellow sausage with a pigtail.’
In the list of contributors at the back of the booklet there was a picture of Iolo Davies. They may have removed his portrait from the Museum café but they had done nothing more painstaking than that. Chubby red cheeks, a toothbrush moustache which he may have shaved off and bushy eyebrows which he probably hadn’t.
He turned up shortly before closing time at about 5.20pm, sauntering down the sunlit street with the air of someone who has just woken up. The once-sharply tailored suit was now dirty and torn. Both knees were patched with the sort of big ugly stitching you normally only saw on clown’s trousers; the handmade shoes were scuffed and open to reveal his toes. He walked into the shop and came out a few minutes later with a bag of sausages under his arm. As he walked off down the street, I eased the car out into the traffic and followed. He walked down the High Street, across the pelican crossing and into a pub overlooking the harbour called the Jolly Roger. I drove a couple of blocks and let Calamity out at the lights. The plan was for her to double back and keep an eye on the pub; I would carry on and try to lose the tail. We agreed to rendezvous at 7.30pm. I drove on and parked on an embankment overlooking the harbour; there was time to kill and the way to do it was wind down the window, let the muggy late-afternoon air in, and snooze to the muted cries of the gulls. The Allegro overtook and turned into a side street.
I awoke at the time when the town was poised between the edge of day and the beginning of night. The shopkeepers and office workers had all walked the few minutes it took them to get home and it would be a while before anyone set out for an early-evening pint. The sky in the west was mauve and one or two street lights were beginning to flicker orange and pink. The scent of fried onions drifted through the car window.
It was a five-minute walk down the main road to the pub, but I took a longer route on foot through the harbour. By early ev
ening it was a deserted stretch of nets, lobster pots and boats hoisted out of the water. The air was sharp and stank of dried fish. Midway along the route, I turned a corner and then stepped into a doorway and waited. A figure in a trench coat and trilby appeared walking quietly and furtively. I stepped out and stood in his path without saying anything.
He froze, and then turned to run just as I lunged forwards and grabbed the front of his coat. We struggled and fell against a pile of fish-smelling cages. In the tussle the man’s beard came off. It was a cheap joke-shop one held on with plastic spectacle frames which hooked over the ears. I looked into his face in astonishment. It was a woman. The surprise was enough to give her the split-second she needed. Out of a pocket came a can which she sprayed into my face. Pepper spray. My spine arched backwards with a vicious kick as I struggled to escape the stinging needles of the gas. At the same time, the woman struggled free and ran off, leaving me holding a false beard and the button off the front of her coat.
I couldn’t take Calamity into the pub so I gave her some money for fish and chips and told her to make herself scarce. Then I entered the front bar. It had a pleasant careworn air about it, the round wooden tables were ingrained with years of spilled beer and cigarette stains and the plain wooden chairs were worn smooth. It was tricked out with sailors’ hats and maritime odds and ends and behind the bar there was a ship’s wheel that looked like it had come off a real ship. It was a plain old-fashioned boozer populated by plain old-fashioned people.
I asked the landlord about the Punch and Judy show and he interrupted his polishing of a gleaming pint glass to gesture at a set of double doors leading on to a yard at the back. If it had been slightly less scruffy you could have got away with calling it a terrace. Rows of chairs had already been set and gulls hopped among the seats.
‘Should be quite a show,’ the landlord said, observing my interest.
I nodded.
‘Oh yes, if you like that sort of thing, you should find it most edifying. Very interesting slant it is.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Oh no, don’t get me wrong, sir. It’s very traditional. All the old favourites. Nothing too avant-garde. Regulars wouldn’t stand for those – what do they call them? – “contemporary interpretations” like you get in Swansea.’
I grimaced politely. ‘You can’t beat the old way of doing things.’
‘I see you’re a man after my own heart, sir.’
‘When they throw the baby out of the window I expect a visit from the policeman, not the social services.’
‘And that’s exactly what you’ll get here. Although,’ he added, ‘Mr Davies is no dinosaur either. He does make one or two interpretations of his own, but not in such a way as to ram it down your throat, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
I picked up my pint. ‘I think I’ll go and make sure of a good seat.’
‘Very wise. It’ll be standing room only in another quarter of an hour.’
As I started to walk away he called me back and leaned conspiratorially across the counter and took hold of my lapel. ‘Seeing as you’re a bit of sportsman, sir, you might like to know …’ He pulled my ear closer to his mouth and whispered, ‘We’ve got a bit of a game going on upstairs afterwards. “Mr Chunky”.’
‘Mr what?’
‘Chunky. Mr Chunky says Parsnip – the drinking game.’
I nodded. ‘Ah!’
He looked cautiously from side to side and added, ‘Llanfihangely-Creuddyn rules: vomit once to join the table and twice to leave.’
By 8.15 there were three people in the audience including me. The other two were an old couple, silver-haired and wrinkled and shaking like jelly. The bar man had been lying, of course, but I had known that all along. It was obvious from the state of Davies’s clothes that he wasn’t packing them in every night. Even in Swansea no one ever got rich on the Punch and Judy circuit. The dream of seeing your name in big red type on the wall of the bandstand was just that – a dream from the same tattered rag-bag of empty hopes that had been filling the second-class railway compartments to Shrewsbury for more than a hundred years.
* * *
Davies came on just after 8.30. He made a quick glance at the empty seats, put on a defiant look and went behind the stripey canvas booth. Seconds later the squeaky voices started. I wondered about his life. I wasn’t familiar with ‘Mr Chunky says Parsnip’, but I knew plenty of games like it, and I knew what they did to people. After about ten minutes of the performance the old couple left. Iolo carried on gamely for another fifteen minutes before winding up. It was a very ordinary performance but not as hopeless as it could have been; he had some skill at least. Towards the end he had even indulged in some experimental interpretation with a scene I hadn’t seen before where the policeman plants a piece of trumped-up evidence on Mr Punch. The echoes of Iolo’s own fate were clear if pathetically pointless.
When the show ended I clapped slowly and deliberately. It took Iolo Davies five minutes to gather his things together, put away the puppets, and emerge from behind the booth. I carried on clapping and he looked over at me.
‘You taking the piss?’
‘My name’s Louie.’
‘Did I ask?’
‘I thought you might like to know.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Information about Dai Brainbocs.’
He stopped and looked round. ‘Just leave me alone.’
‘It won’t take long.’
‘What do you want to ask about him for? He’s dead isn’t he?’
‘I want to know why.’
He looked at me through narrowed eyes.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m a relative of Brainbocs.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘I’m a private detective investigating his death.’
He turned to leave again.
‘Look!’ I said hurriedly. ‘It would only take a few minutes, and I might be able to help you.’
He snorted. ‘You’re out of your depth.’
I tried a final gambit. ‘You think it was right what happened to you?’
He laughed bitterly. ‘Does it matter?’
‘All I want is a few minutes.’
Iolo Davies put the last chip in his mouth, scrunched the wrapping paper up and threw it out of the car window. Then he turned to me, the light from the street lamp silvering the edge of his face.
‘How much do you know?’
‘I know Brainbocs was working on Cantref-y-Gwaelod; I know he disappeared shortly after handing his essay in; I know the kids say he stumbled on to something big, something the Welsh teacher didn’t like. I know Lovespoon is planning to reclaim the land of Cantref-y-Gwaelod and take a group of pilgrims there in an Ark. I know three other kids working on the same essay are dead and one is missing. I presume they were killed because they copied Brainbocs’s homework and found out whatever it was he found out. I know you lost your job about the same time as well. And it’s my guess you were punished for helping Brainbocs.’
The old Museum curator wiped his greasy fingers down the thighs of his trousers and shook his head gently in admiration as he recalled Brainbocs’s scholarship. His voice took on a sad and distant quality.
‘The Cantref-y-Gwaelod stuff was genius. No other word for it. He did it all, you know. This whole Exodus project to build the Ark and settle the land – it was all Brainbocs’s idea. He was down the Museum a lot, usually in the archives. He wanted to do things with the school essay that people didn’t even dream could be done. He had this idea that you could somehow shake the world with one. I mean, partly it was some sort of compensation for the bad leg. But still, it was more than that. He once said he could wrestle with destiny and force her to her knees.’ He laughed without mirth. ‘I know, it sounds a load of crap when I say it, but when you listened to him … you just … well it’s funny but it didn’t seem so strange.’
‘But surely he couldn’t really locate this lost iron-ag
e kingdom?’
‘This boy could do anything. You know how he pinpointed where it was? Triangulation. He set up recording devices at points along the coast where people claimed they could hear the ghostly bells; then he analysed the Doppler shift in the frequencies and then did a load of sums I wouldn’t have a clue about and triangulated the source of the bells. Unbelievable. And that was just the start. Then he took echo soundings to map the terrain and draw up the drainage scheme. And to cap it all he designed the Ark.’
‘I don’t get it, what did he do wrong? I thought Lovespoon loved the idea. Was he trying to steal the boy’s glory?’
Iolo shook his head and took a breath. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with Cantref-y-Gwaelod. Of course Lovespoon loved the project; he told me to give Brainbocs all the assistance he needed. Not that he needed any. But then one day the kid changed tack. Just like that. Came in with a gleam in his eye that was even crazier than the usual one. He started working in a different section of the Museum. He said he’d had this new idea and that it was going to be his pièce de résistance.’
‘And the Welsh teacher didn’t approve?’
‘The kid told me not to tell Lovespoon – it was meant to be a surprise. But the teacher found out anyway.’
‘And that’s when they put the stain on the camisole?’
‘It wasn’t a camisole, it was a rare corso-pantaloon in tea rose crêpe de chine.’
‘So what was the new area of research? What did he switch to?’
The chair made a low farting sound as Iolo turned to face me. The light glistening on the two sad puddles of his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you. Only don’t ask me to explain it, because even now –’
He paused.
‘Yes?’
‘Even now I have no idea what was so bad about the new –’
There was a sound from outside the car. The museum curator froze, his jaw agape. I threw my hand across, to grab his arm. To reassure him. But it was too late. He was staring with a wild, transfixed look past the side of my head. I spun round and saw out there in the featureless night, hovering on the threshold of discernibility, dark figures. Like crows or, more accurately, like the woman in the trench coat I had fought with earlier in the day.
Aberystwyth Mon Amour Page 11