Aberystwyth Mon Amour

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘You bastard!’ cried Iolo as he tore free of my hand. ‘You dirty, double-crossing bastard!’ He threw the car door open, and ran out into the night. By the time I too had got out of the car both he and the mysterious figures were gone.

  *

  It was well after eleven when I picked up Calamity and drove back to Aberystwyth. Just outside Llanrhystyd an ambulance streaked past at full pelt in the opposite direction. With the roads so empty it shot through the darkened countryside like a blue flashing arrow. As things turned out, the high speed was in vain. By that time Iolo Davies was already dead.

  Chapter 11

  EEYORE PEERED AT the button through the magnifying glass he used for the ‘spot the ball’ competitions. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘It’s them all right.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus League?’

  He nodded.

  At first glance it looked like any other black plastic button, the sort all old ladies had on their overcoats, but if you looked closely at the holes for the thread you could see they were arranged differently. There were two large round ones, and underneath that a single triangular one, and then beneath that a rectangular one. The shape of the button wasn’t perfectly round, either, but had indentations on either side that made it look vaguely potato-like. Sewn on to a coat these things would be difficult to spot. But hold the button up to the daylight and you saw it straight away: it was a skull. Eeyore handed the button back to me, over the gleaming back of Henrietta. I leaned my arms on her saddle as she stood looking patiently over the railings and out to sea.

  According to the newspaper Iolo Davis had been found at the foot of the cliff. Broken turf high up on the cliff’s edge had indicated where he lost his footing in a tragic accident. His injuries were entirely consistent with a fall and foul play was not suspected. That was the official version anyway.

  ‘Not the old bags who sell pamphlets outside the Moulin,’ Eeyore continued. ‘This belongs to the big girls: the ESSJAT.’

  ‘ESSJAT?’

  ‘It’s a sort of secret commando unit; an elite force drawn from the ranks of the foot soldiers. The name comes from the initial letters of Sweet Jesus against Turpitude.’

  I whistled.

  ‘Officially, they don’t exist.’

  ‘And I led them straight to him.’

  He scoffed. ‘Don’t waste time blaming yourself. They would have got him eventually; they always do.’

  ‘I should have taken more care.’

  ‘No Louie!’ he snapped with an uncharacteristic edge in his voice. ‘Once he was on their list he was dead. It was only a matter of time. You have to accept that.’

  ‘Where do I find them?’

  ‘You don’t. I mean you can’t. Or, you shouldn’t.’

  ‘You know I’ve got to.’

  ‘No one knows who they are or where they are. They make the postman wear a blindfold.’

  ‘Come on, Dad …’

  ‘What business is it of yours, anyway? You think this Evans the Boot chap deserves it?’

  ‘It’s not about him, you know that.’

  ‘What is it about then?’

  ‘Lots of things.’

  He paused and stroked Henrietta’s mane and then said with an air of resignation, ‘Well, I suppose you’re going to go ahead and look for them whatever I say. But don’t go round thinking you killed Davies. If the ESSJAT were after him, he was a dead man walking. It’s that simple.’

  *

  The avuncular white-bearded man kneels at the shore’s edge and stares through narrowed eyes out to sea. Around him children gather. The man speaks.

  ‘That’s our land out there, beneath those constantly shifting waters. A good land, a rich land. A land where our people can reap and sow and our children’s laughter will fill each silver day –’

  Calamity Jane picked up the remote control and turned off the TV. ‘What crap!’

  ‘Now, now! There’s no need for language like that.’

  ‘Who wants to go to Cantref-y-Gwaelod anyway?’

  ‘Quite a lot of people, it seems.’

  ‘Why do they have to do TV commercials then?’ She threw the remote control on to the sofa and started pacing up and down the office, counting off points on her fingers. ‘Item one: Brainbocs masterminded the plan to reclaim Cantref-y-Gwaelod. Lovespoon loved that scheme. Item two: then he starts researching something else. Lovespoon hates that and tells the Museum curator not to help him. Then the curator loses his job and then …’ she paused. ‘And then he fell off a cliff.’

  We exchange glances like guilty children.

  ‘Item three: Brainbocs hid the essay in a well-known beauty spot and was looking for a woman called Gwenno.’

  ‘Item four,’ it was my turn, ‘Evans the Boot had a piece of Mayan tea cosy in his possession.’

  ‘Not Mayan – Welsh, it was just a Mayan design …’

  The words trailed off and she looked over to the door. Myfanwy was standing framed in the doorway and she didn’t look pleased.

  ‘Hey, come in!’

  ‘I’ll stay here, thank you, I’m not staying.’

  ‘Not even for a cup of tea?’

  ‘I just want to tell you to stop investigating my cousin Evans’s disappearance. Send me a bill for what you’ve done up until now.’

  ‘You don’t owe me any money, I turned the case down, remember?’

  ‘Yes, but I talked you into it.’

  I turned to Calamity. ‘Hey, do you think you could put the kettle on for me?’

  ‘She said she didn’t want a cup of tea!’

  ‘Well I do.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Yes, right now!’

  She looked over to Myfanwy in search of an ally, but Myfanwy simply said, ‘Scram, kid.’

  Calamity shuffled across to the kitchen. ‘If it’s about this investigation, it involves me too.’

  I turned to Myfanwy. ‘You look like a walking thunderstorm.’

  ‘That’s hardly surprising, is it?’

  I was puzzled. ‘I don’t know, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t … after … after …’

  ‘After what?’

  ‘After what you did.’

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You mean you have to ask?’

  I raised my hand as if to indicate a temporary truce and walked over to the kitchen. I closed the door with an exaggerated action.

  ‘Myfanwy, please tell me, what have I done?’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘That makes it worse.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said walking over to the desk because I couldn’t think of anything better to do, ‘stop playing games and tell me what I am supposed to have done.’

  She paused and looked at me. I looked back and smiled encouragingly.

  ‘You slept with Bianca.’

  I gaped at her.

  ‘Don’t try and deny it, she told me everything.’

  ‘I’m not trying to deny it, I’m just staggered –’

  ‘You think we don’t talk to each other or something?’

  ‘Myfanwy!’

  ‘I mean of all the cheek – you think you can just jump into bed with my best friend and she won’t tell me?’

  ‘But Myfanwy!’ I howled again.

  ‘My best friend, Louie! My best friend!’

  ‘Funny sort of friend!’ I shouted.

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean!?’

  ‘I don’t know, fuck it all, Myfanwy, it was you who told me to do it!’

  ‘I –’ This time it was her turn to stare open-mouthed.

  ‘At the Club, remember?’

  ‘But I didn’t mean it!’ she screeched, and then flung her hands in the air in exasperation, before turning in the doorway and stomping down the stairs. Her last words, thrown over her shoulder were: ‘How can anyone be so stupid!’

  I stood rooted to the spot, staring at the empty doorway. Calamity came back in.
>
  ‘She needs a slap, boss.’

  ‘Don’t you start,’ I warned her.

  ‘I’m not starting, I’m just observing. She’s walking all over you.’

  ‘Is that any of your concern?’

  ‘Yes it is as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Oh really!’

  ‘Yes. Firstly because you’re my friend and I don’t like to see you acting the doormat; secondly because things like this can interfere with your professional performance; and thirdly because it affects the bottom line.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Didn’t I just hear you say you weren’t charging her for any of this?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  She picked up her school satchel adding nonchalantly, ‘Fine, but shoe leather’s not free. Second rule of being a private eye.’

  As she skipped through the door I picked up the phone and called Meirion. After the usual round of pleasantries I asked if he’d heard anything about Iolo. Of course he had. He’d heard everything, he just couldn’t print it.

  ‘Most of the injuries seem to have been sustained during the fall from the cliff,’ he said.

  ‘Most of them?’

  ‘Well some of them don’t look like the sort of mark you’d get from falling off a cliff.’

  ‘What do they look like?’

  ‘More like the sort of holes a hatpin might make.’

  I sighed. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, something very strange. Someone’s daubed some graffiti on the pavement outside Aberaeron Co-op … in blood.’

  ‘Blood?’

  ‘The victim’s blood.’

  I screwed up my brow and held my breath. I could tell Meirion had more.

  ‘Now I’m no expert,’ he laughed, ‘but as far as I can see there are only two ways that could happen.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Either some idiot went to the foot of the cliff and collected Iolo’s blood. Or Iolo wrote it himself.’

  ‘How could he, he was dead?’

  ‘Ah!’ Meirion laughed. ‘Depends when he wrote it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘All right, Meirion, I know you’ve got a theory. What is it?’

  ‘If you asked me I’d say he was murdered outside the Co-op and he wrote the graffiti himself. Dipped his finger in his own blood and daubed it on the floor with his dying strength. Then whoever killed him dragged him to the cliff and threw him off to make it look like an accident. Only because it was so dark no one noticed the blood until next morning.’

  I could almost feel him beaming on the other end of the phone. He was obviously right.

  ‘So what does the graffiti say?’

  ‘Two words. “Rio Caeriog”.’

  *

  The following afternoon Calamity and I drove to the Museum as Iolo Davies’s last words drifted through my thoughts. Had he written the words for me? He must have done. Rio Caeriog. The famous battle from the war in Patagonia. A name once written on the map with the blood of a generation and now inscribed in the Museum curator’s blood on the pavements of Aberaeron. Was that the new essay subject Brainbocs had chosen? The one that got him killed? As I parked in the shadow of the Lancaster bomber I mentally reviewed the story of Rio Caeriog. It was well enough known. For months in 1961 the First Expeditionary Force had been taking unsustainable losses in the foothills of the Sierra Machynlleth. Sniped at by day and taunted and ambushed at night by an enemy they couldn’t see. And then came the famous raid. A Rolex watch was rigged up by the boffins of Llanelli with a radio beacon inside. The watch was deliberately lost in a card game to one of the bandits in the back room of a cantina. And when the bandit took it home to his base the Lancaster bomber followed. But why did it interest Brainbocs? What was the connection to Cantref-y-Gwaelod? We got out of the car and walked up the steps into a foyer of gilded cherubs and alabaster columns. The Devil’s Bridge Tin & Lead Steam Railway Co. had built with a confidence that had long since disappeared from our own age. The grandeur was now sadly defaced by charmless municipal sign boards: Combinations and Corsetry; Two-headed Calves and other Curios; Coelecanths.

  Inside the foyer was another of the success stories of that far-off time. A passport photo booth created by the same boffins of the special operations executive at Llanelli Technical College. It was the world’s only micro-dot photo booth and gave you your portrait the size of a currant. To see it, you had to buy a special viewer from the gift shop. Most of the micro-dot camera technology familiar from so many spy movies had been developed during the Patagonian War. An animal clinic had been established in Buenos Aires from which the military intelligence, condensed on to micro-dots, had been smuggled out as eye patches for hamsters with lazy eyes. As kids we had polka-dotted the wall of the art class with our drawings of it. Calamity ran to the photo booth and disappeared inside with a swish of orange curtain. I waited patiently for the flashes wondering idly what obscene gestures she was no doubt making to the camera.

  Upstairs, in the main gallery, two super-enlarged black and white photographs filled the whole of one wall with a grainy ghostly sea of grey. One was a picture of the two Lancasters leaving Milford Haven aerodrome to cheering crowds. And the other showed five aviators standing in a relaxed circle outside some forgotten South American cantina, drinking tequila and clowning about. They were young and fresh-faced and laughing into the camera lens with a gaiety that suggested the picture must have been taken right at the start of the conflict. It was the Rio Caeriog bomber crew. Lovespoon, Dai the Custard Pie and, with a much younger horizontal crease in his face, Herod Jenkins the games teacher. A triumvirate of the current movers and shakers of Aberystwyth. Did Brainbocs discover something about them that might have taken the glint off those famous medals? Some awkward tidbit that would have wiped that horizontal crease off Herod’s face? The smiles frozen in Ilford black and white gave nothing away.

  Calamity walked over with the air of one who has made a discovery. I looked up and smiled and she handed me a sheaf of plastic laminated cards bearing the biographies of the airmen. Lovespoon: war hero, school teacher, prize-winning poet and Grand Wizard on the Druid council. Custard Pie: purveyor of fine soaps that make your face go black, and Red Indian arrows that appear to pierce the neck. Herod Jenkins: school games teacher; capped for Wales in his youth and subsequently, although the card did not record this distinction, famous for sending a consumptive schoolboy to his death during a blizzard. The last was Oswald Frobisher. A nobody. One of the handful of English intellectuals who were so dismayed at missing the Spanish Civil War they had signed up for the Patagonian adventure. The card said merely that he died of his wounds when his Lancaster ditched into the Rio Caeriog. There was no clue as to what the wounds were but any schoolkid could tell you: the bandits cut off his John Thomas and stuffed it in his mouth.

  Calamity was still holding one card. I looked at her enquiringly and she passed it across. It contained even fewer details than hapless Frobisher’s. None at all in fact, just bare white card, and a name. A name that I had last heard from the lips of Dai Brainbocs’s Mam. The name of the woman her son had gone to see in the week before he died. Gwenno Guevara, it said simply, freedom fighter.

  Chapter 12

  BIANC A GINGERLY PULLED out the shards of broken glass from the picture of Noel Bartholomew and wrapped them up in newspaper.

  ‘If I was lost in the jungle would you come looking for me?’

  ‘No, it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Not even to take my picture, like your great-great-uncle?’

  I laughed. ‘We don’t know for sure that he did.’

  She carried the parcel of jagged glass through to the kitchen, shouting over her shoulder as she went: ‘Of course he did.’

  I looked at the portrait. Did he? Did he really find her? Or was it all a hoax played on a gullible American tourist by a wily Chinese shopkeeper? It was Eeyore who gave me the portrait and the chest full of papers and artefacts, back in the days when I be
lieved in common sense and thought the expedition must have ended in failure. But Eeyore had quietly disagreed with a patient conviction he only rarely displayed. It depended on what you considered failure, he said. And added that one day I would understand. But I never really have, even though I return again and again to that diary. Those cracked and yellow pages in which Noel records in a malarial scrawl, growing ever more indecipherable by the day, how she came to see him in his sickness. A passage which ends with the words taken from St Augustine: ‘Faith is to believe what you do not yet see.’

  Bianca walked back in to the office.

  ‘I think he took her picture in Heaven.’

  ‘He did what?’

  ‘In Heaven. That’s where he took her picture.’

  I grinned and, seeing the expression, Bianca became suddenly cross.

  ‘You think you know it all, don’t you? I suppose you don’t believe in ghosts either?’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘Of course. I’m going to be one.’

  On our way out we met Mrs Llantrisant. She looked tired and pale, and swabbed robotically.

  ‘Prynhawn da, Mr Knight!’

  ‘Prynhawn da, Mrs Llantrisant! You look worn out.’

  ‘I’m feeling my age, Mr Knight, that’s what I am.’

  ‘Why not take a few days off and put your feet up?’

  ‘And who would fold the serviettes for the Ark if I did that?’

  ‘Is that what you’ve been doing?’

  She stopped and leaned like a drunkard on her mop. ‘I’m glad to be able to play my part.’

  ‘You believe in all this then, do you? This Ark business?’

  ‘What’s there not to believe?’

  ‘I mean, you’d like to go, would you?’

  She grabbed a loose strand of hair and tucked it up beneath the hem of her headscarf. Her hand was shaking.

  ‘It’s the kids I’m doing it for. It’s too late for us, but the little ones – they deserve it.’

  ‘With Lovespoon as king?’

  ‘Social gerontocracy, Mr Knight, just like in ancient Greece.’