A voice intruded on my thoughts and I looked up to see Llunos, now Commissioner, walk up to my table. He took a seat and gave his order to the waitress.
‘Skinny double decaf’ latte please.’ He looked at me. ‘Afternoon!’
I nodded. ‘How’s the new police station coming along?’
‘Almost finished. Still a few teething problems with the central locking for the cells; and the mural, what a pain that is!’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Should have been finished by now. But he’s flattened the perspective too much for my liking; the bit where the ocean divides.’
‘You wouldn’t want it too photographic, though.’
‘That’s what he says. He says he’s done it deliberately to compress the narrative focus. I mean, that’s all very well, but to Joe Bloggs it just looks like a mistake. We’ll get there eventually.’
The waitress brought the coffee and Llunos took a thirsty gulp that left his mouth edged with foam.
We sat in silence for a while like a couple of Darby and Joans and enjoyed the shimmering tranquillity of the afternoon. Llunos was in no hurry to return to work, and I could afford to relax. Calamity took care of the day-to-day stuff and she was a lot better at it than I had been. It was only a matter of time before she took over entirely. I watched Llunos from the corner of my eye and felt an upsurge of warmth towards him. It had been a long journey that we had undertaken together but we had emerged as firm friends. Sospan, moving among the tables near the café, raised a hand in greeting and I smiled. He was a busy man these days, checking on his chain of bistros, or meeting with EU officials to discuss grants. We seldom saw much of him. There was still so much to do.
From where I was sitting I could see a tattered poster of Myfanwy Montez, the Legendary Welsh Chanteuse, still pasted to the wall of the old Bandstand. It made me think of that peculiar blemish in the new tarmac down at the harbour and Father Renaldo who had come to see it.
* * *
Llunos interrupted my reverie again. ‘It’s been a rum two years hasn’t it?’
I grinned. ‘You can say that again.’
‘Do you think Brainbocs intended to sell the movie rights like that?’
I shook my head. ‘I think he was just lucky. The newspaper serialisation rights were always part of the plan. But not Hollywood.’
Llunos wiped away the beard of milk with the back of his hand.
‘I hear one of the dealers in Cardiff has bought the original essay. Half a million pound.’
‘Lot of money for a schoolboy’s homework.’
‘Bloody madness. I mean, how do you know it’s real?’
I allowed myself a secretive smile. Llunos wasn’t wrong, but strangely this time, after all the red herrings and false trails, I suspected that the real essay had surfaced. In fact, I was willing to bet on it. ‘I think this time it could be for real.’
He looked at me sceptically. ‘You think so?’
‘I’ve got this funny feeling.’
He snorted. ‘Fake Brainbocs essays coming out of the woodwork for months. What’s different about this one?’
I reached into my trouser pocket and handed him the letter that had arrived for me last month from Argentina. It was from Myfanwy and inside there was a photograph of her taken after one of the concerts at the Estada della Caeriog.
The policeman examined it. ‘Brainbocs looks well.’
‘Yes. That’s what the Florida sunshine does for you. He went there to get his leg straightened by one of those fancy Miami surgeons.’
‘And who’s this in the big hat?’
‘Ma Brainbocs. Looks quite the part doesn’t she?’
He let the photo fall to his lap and looked at me. ‘I don’t see that this proves anything.’
‘Look at Myfanwy.’
He peered once more at the picture and then looked up. ‘What about her?’
‘Notice anything different?’
‘Seems the same as ever.’
I chuckled and Llunos started to get irritated. ‘What are you driving at?’
I pointed at the picture of Myfanwy pasted to the Bandstand wall. Though old and faded, it was still recognisable. It contained a detail that was missing from the photo in the letter. But you needed sharp eyes to see it.
‘Do you remember where Brainbocs said he’d hidden the essay?’ I prompted.
‘A well-known beauty spot,’ he said, snorting at the stupidity of such a hiding place and looking at me for support; all he saw was a big wide grin. His brow screwed up and I grinned wider and wider as he looked at the picture in his hand and at the picture on the Bandstand and then finally, the penny dropping so loudly it almost frightened away the seagull, he cried out: ‘My God!’ And then, running his hand through his hair in disbelief, ‘My God!’
He looked up, eyes shining and I nodded encouragement at him. ‘The mole!’ he cried. ‘It’s gone! Myfanwy’s mole has gone!’
He stared at me open-mouthed as saliva dribbled down his chin, and I held my breath watching the cogs whirr and the truth slowly come to light.
‘Well bugger me!’ His face was one of pure astonishment. ‘He hid the fucking essay in a micro-dot!’
I laughed. ‘The cheeky bastard!’
‘All that time we were checking out the picnic spots and lovers’ leaps and things!’
‘I must have walked past that fucking micro-dot photo booth at the museum a hundred times. And never even considered it.’
‘And all the time,’ said Llunos, ‘the answer was staring us in the face.’
And so we both laughed. What else was there to do? Brainbocs hadn’t just outwitted us, he had waltzed around us and danced the Charleston on our heads. The essay had been in front of us all along – right under Myfanwy’s nose. And we sat in the Moulin every night staring at it, and never knew. Llunos looked at me and I returned the gaze and we both burst out laughing again.
I left him still laughing into his latte and made a leisurely stroll along the Esplanade to my appointment. Father Renaldo had flown all the way from Rome and I didn’t want to keep him waiting. It was a beautiful day and as I passed the audacious architectural hybrid of Edwardian ironwork and swooping Perspex that was the new Pier I struggled with the tumult of emotion in my breast. It was at moments like this that I continually returned to the same question: did it really happen the way I think it did? That night two years ago aboard a plane where a terrible secret was born? The secret that joins with unbreakable glue Llunos and me in friendship but about which, paradoxically, neither of us dare speak? Did it really happen the way I think it did? ‘Five seconds! Four seconds! Three seconds!’ the bombardier had shouted as lightning forked off the wing and the shining waters of Nant-y-moch loomed up before us in the Plexiglas nose. ‘Two seconds, one second! Go! Go! Go!’ And in that second our hands shot forward to stop the release of the bomb and save the Town. Yet as they did, they came together with a touch as soft as the beating of butterfly wings and there was that hesitancy – I’m sure it was there and that we both felt it – that strange feeling almost of telepathy between us as we became aware of the god-like power that had been given to us in that twinkling of an eye. We looked at each other and saw in a moment of shared vision the unleashed fury of the waters racing down Great Darkgate Street; saw the proud white horses of the waves crashing their hooves down on to the fudge shops and the slate paperweight shops; saw the windows of the Moulin explode and the tea-cosy shops on Harbour Row washed into the sea; we saw the end of the amusement arcades and toffee-apple dens. And in that scintilla of time we thought of everything that had been, and of all the things that might be, or might not be, and that look passed between us, and we sort of said ‘fuck it’ and withdrew our hands. And the bomb fell. It’s a scene you won’t find in the movie.
I’ll never be certain. The world is full of mysteries. No trace of the Ark has been found, for example, if you discount the odd bits of gopher wood that wash up now and again. And then there is this other matter. The blemish that ke
eps appearing in the tarmac down at the harbour and which Meirion has called municipal stigmata. This is the fourth time they’ve laid down a new surface – those pragmatic bare-torsoed men from the Council with their cauldron of bubbling tar and stripy canvas hut. And once again it has appeared; as if the blood that was spilled that night had contained photographic fixative. Normally I would have no trouble dismissing the whole affair as the prattle of superstitious fools. And I certainly don’t believe in ghosts; I even told her that, damn it! But as I push my way impatiently past the pilgrims and stalls selling relics, as I take my place among the ranks of the credulous and stare down at the stain in the tarmac, I have to wonder. Because no matter how hard I try, there are two things I find impossible to deny: the mark really is on the exact spot where Bianca died. And if you screw your eyes up tight you really can make out the outline of a girl in a basque wearing a stovepipe hat.
BLOOMSBURY
Also available by Malcolm Pryce:
From Aberystwyth with Love
The latest instalment in the wickedly funny Aberystwyth series sees Louie Knight, Aberystwyth’s only private detective, swapping the train to Dovey Junction for the Orient Express and trying to unravel a murder mystery that is bizarre, even by his own exceptional standards …
It is a sweltering August in Aberystwyth: the bandstand melts, the Pier droops, and Sospan the ice-cream seller experiments with some dangerously avant-garde new flavours. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator’s uniform walks into Louie Knight’s office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love, death, madness and betrayal.
Sure, Louie had heard about Hughesovka, the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century Czar. But he hadn’t believed that it really existed until he met Uncle Vanya. Now the old man’s story catapults him into the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom in search of a girl who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. His life imperilled by snuff philatelists and a renegade spinning wheel salesman, Louie finds his fate depending on two most unlikely talismans – a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut’s sock.
ISBN: 9781408801024 / Paperback / £7.99
(Published May 2009)
Aberystwyth Mon Amour
MALCOLM PRYCE was born in the UK and has spent much of his life working and travelling abroad. He has been, at various times, a BMW assembly-line worker, a hotel washer-up, a deck hand on a yacht sailing the South Seas, an advertising copywriter and the world’s worst aluminium salesman. In 1998 he gave up his day job and booked a passage on a banana boat bound for South America in order to write Aberystwyth Mon Amour. He spent the next seven years living in Bangkok, where he wrote three more novels in the series, Last Tango in Aberystwyth, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth and Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth. In 2007 he moved back to the UK and now lives in Oxford.
THE LOUIE KNIGHT SERIES:
Aberystwyth Mon Amour
Last Tango in Aberystwyth
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth
Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth
First published in Great Britain 2001
This electronic edition published in September 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
Copyright © 2001 by Malcolm Pryce
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
A CIP catalogue record is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781408809044
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
About the Author
The Louie Knight Series
Copyright
Aberystwyth Mon Amour Page 21