From Aberystwyth with Love an-5

by Malcolm Pryce

  I held his hand. ‘Why did you come to Aberystwyth?’

  ‘I came to collect Vanya.’

  Chapter 17

  Llunos came round to my caravan next morning to tell me the news. Vanya had been fished out of the harbour shortly after midnight, dripping brine and vodka with some barbiturates in his head. On the shore, in the shadow of the Pier, they found a stuffed dog, a neatly folded museum curator’s uniform and, in case the barbiturates failed to do their work, an old revolver, loaded but not fired.

  When I got to the office it smelled strongly of rum. There was a witchfinder sitting in the client’s chair. He was smiling and the rum – which was usually kept in the desk drawer – was now slipping down the U-bend of the sink in the kitchenette. The empty bottle was standing up-ended in the bin.

  He was an old man, in his seventies, with long grey greasy hair down to his collar and a bald pate. His nose was sharp and in his eyes there burned the flames of zealotry and on his lips there played that particular smile of moral rectitude possessed by religious fanatics and the criminally insane. He wore the customary outfit of the ecclesiastical cops: a dark blue serge policeman’s tunic over a plain shirt and dog collar. Ecclesiastical cops have disappeared from the towns but still exist in the country in a state of uneasy truce with the regular police, their jurisdictions overlap with unclear boundaries and conflicts of interest. They deal with social problems that blight village life in the hinterlands beyond Aberystwyth, chastising strumpets, loose-tongued women and common scolds.

  I nodded as if I had been expecting a bad start to the day and here was confirmation. ‘My two least favourite people in one: cop and holy man.’

  ‘The servants of the Devil abhor the sight of blessedness twice over.’

  I picked the empty bottle out of the bin and put it on the desk for no good reason. ‘I hope you’ve got a warrant for this.’

  ‘No warrant is needed in commission of the Lord’s work.’

  ‘I bet they said that at Nuremberg, too.’

  ‘Alcohol is an abomination unto God.’

  ‘You’ve obviously never tried it.’

  I slumped down in the chair opposite and scowled. He had also saved me the trouble of opening the morning mail. He threw a letter across the desk. It was from Vanya. ‘As his last act upon this earth,’ said the Witchfinder, ‘your friend sends you a sock. The Lord will cure him of his levity.’

  The envelope contained the matching half of the Yuri Gagarin sock and a note explaining it was to cover the funeral expenses. ‘The truth about Gethsemane Walters is more terrible than even I could have imagined,’ he had written. ‘There is no point going on. Goodbye, Louie. Your dear friend, Vanya.’

  I read the letter and looked up. ‘Talking of God, I spoke to Him the other day, he was in Aberystwyth . . .’

  The smile on his lips expanded a fraction. ‘That really is an unwise way to begin a sentence.’

  ‘Is it a crime to talk to God?’

  ‘I will enjoy humbling you.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I have information that you recently visited Grimalkin’s in Chalybeate Street and placed an order for some “flesh of brigand”.’

  ‘I was going to make a sandwich.’

  ‘Ah! The wisecrack, the favoured artifice of the snooper and reprobate.’

  ‘Or maybe I was going to use it as fish bait.’

  He raised a polite eyebrow. ‘Or Devil’s bait?’

  ‘He certainly turned up.’

  The smile faded.

  I said, ‘Actually I was hoping you’d come round, I needed to see your face when I asked you how much they paid you to set Goldilocks up.’

  ‘I don’t remember doing that.’

  ‘You probably repressed the memory. That’s known as psychology.’

  ‘Who are these people who allegedly paid me?’

  ‘The villagers at Abercuawg.’

  He smiled the smile of a man who knows you’ve got nothing on him. ‘My memory is shocking.’

  ‘The way I see it is this: Goldilocks would have been insane to bury Gethsemane Walters’s shoe in his garden, even if he did kill her. But someone who wanted to see him hang might have done it. That someone was you. The villagers wanted to get rid of him and you buried the shoe and got one of them to report seeing Goldilocks doing it.’

  ‘Please go on,’ said the Witchfinder. ‘I’m really enjoying this. Why do you think I set Goldilocks up, as you put it? I tried to help him. I went to see him in prison.’

  ‘Yes, wasn’t that an act of pure Christian charity! In that sacred communion between a priest and a condemned man when each man tells the truth of his heart he told you that he had never laid hands on Gethsemane Walters and he begged you to intervene on his behalf. And you said yes, of course you would, but really you had no such intention. You already knew he was innocent because you knew what had happened to the girl. And you knew the buried shoe was a phoney because you buried it.’

  ‘And what did happen to her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why did they want to get rid of Goldilocks?’

  ‘He found out.’

  The Witchfinder looked genuinely intrigued. But not worried. ‘Found out what?’

  I didn’t know. I knew nothing. I didn’t know who did it and I didn’t know what it was I didn’t know they did. I just knew he was mixed up somehow in something that wasn’t nice.

  ‘He found out that his mum didn’t get eaten by the pigs. She disappeared because Ahab the father sold her off as a troll bride and you arranged it.’

  Like most shots in the dark it hit nothing. The smile returned. ‘These are grave charges,’ he said. ‘Selling women to trolls, you should pass all the evidence you have on to the police. You do have evidence, I presume?’

  I gave him a steely stare, one that attempted to convey smug self-confidence but which really said I was a busted flush. I knew it and I knew that he knew it. He rested his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. ‘I’ve been reading up on you. Your mother was a trollop, a common tram conductress. Did you know your parents never married?’

  I picked up the phone and dialled the hospital. ‘Yes, 22/1B Stryd-y-Popty, can you send an ambulance, an old man is about to fall down the stairs.’ He stood up hurriedly and walked out and left me wondering about the reason for his visit. There could be only one: he wanted to find out how much I knew. No wonder he left with a spring in his step.

  I put my feet on the desk. There was another, quarter, bottle of rum in the drawer that the Witchfinder had overlooked. It seemed a pity to waste it. I leaned back and closed my eyes, drinking languorously from the bottle. First thing in the morning is not generally a good time to drink hard liquor but it’s not every day you receive a sock from your dead client. I understood now the nature of the strange bond that had been forged between us: it was the story he told of his lifelong quest to find his mother. I knew now what the scent was on the envelope. It was the scent of my mother. How did I know this? I just did. And the image that had appeared to me of the world seen from the bottom of a well was really the world viewed from the pram. The long-buried memory of a time suffused with unfathomable contentment gathered like honey from the months spent floating serenely through the world. I now understood the nature of this sweetness: it is a residue of God’s original purpose, of how he intended life to be for us, and would be in those other, brighter, more perfect universes he worked on in his later years. They say artists frequently produce their greatest masterpieces late on, those who understand these things say Beethoven’s late string quartets were the sublime pinnacle of artistic achievement, and so it must have been with the later worlds. The one we inhabit is the work of the young God, a piece of audacious but flawed genius, showing early promise, but which would come to be disregarded by scholars as juvenilia.

  Sospan’s kiosk was closed and a scrappy sign, hastily hand-written, was Sellotaped to the outside: ‘Closed until further notice’.

&n
bsp; ‘Sospan has left town,’ said Calamity who was leaning against the empty kiosk. There were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Calamity, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I killed him, didn’t I?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Uncle Vanya.’

  I gasped. ‘No, sweetheart, you didn’t!’

  Sobs engulfed her. ‘I did. If it hadn’t been for me superseding the stupid paradigm . . .’

  ‘But Calamity, it was nothing to do with that.’

  ‘It was. He saw the cuttings about troll brides, that’s why he killed himself.’

  I took Calamity in my arms and hugged her. I said nothing for a while, just let the weeping subside. When finally it did, I said softly, ‘Calamity, Uncle Vanya’s death had nothing to do with you. I think . . . I think he always meant to do it, I don’t know why. I just never got the impression he intended . . . I mean, I think he always knew he would die in Aberystwyth.’ I eased her away and held her face in my hands. ‘OK?’

  She snivelled and nodded.

  ‘Where did Sospan go?’ I asked.

  Calamity shrugged. ‘No one knows.’

  The abandoned box stood sadly, like the shell of a crab that has moved on. Already seagull droppings disfigured the illuminated fibreglass cone on the roof. A piece of newspaper gusted against the padlocked door.

  ‘I think now is definitely the time to go to Hughesovka,’ said Calamity. ‘We could use the money left over from the sock.’

  ‘And what would we find when we got there?’

  ‘The solution to . . . to . . . everything. Why Vanya killed himself, what happened to Gethsemane. They are linked. He virtually said it, didn’t he? Told you the answer to the mystery could be found in the museum. Something he saw in those cuttings about troll brides broke his heart. If we go to the museum there we can find out . . . I don’t know . . . something.’

  I leaned back wearily against the box. I twisted my head round to face Calamity. ‘You really want to go, don’t you?’

  ‘I loved Uncle Vanya,’ she said simply.

  ‘I did too.’

  ‘Don’t you remember, Mooncalf said we could go cheaply if we agreed to act as couriers and take something to his client in Romania. It’s not like we don’t have a few days to spare, is it? I think we owe it to him.’

  The voice of the paper boy drifted down the Prom. He was shouting something about a girl and Talybont and murder. Calamity ran up to the boy and bought a paper. She glanced at the front page and returned, handing it to me without a word, her face ashen. A girl had been found in an alley behind Woolies. She had been bludgeoned to death. It was Arianwen.

  I peered at the story with unfocussed eyes. Beneath the article there was an ad for a gift shop in Pier Street that showed one of those glistening plasma globes. I’ve stared at them in the shop window. Tender filaments of lightning dance and fork like animated trees, retracting and exploding softly against the Perspex like the spume crashing against the sea wall, or the violet tentacles of jellyfish shimmering in the sea. This vital dance, these concatenations, is what we are; it crushes the heart to think of how precarious it is, how frail. The dance only has to pause for a second and everything goes dark. Concatenations smeared on the sole of a shoe.

  ‘Call Mooncalf,’ I said. ‘Tell him we need two tickets to Hughesovka.’

  Two days later I stood across his counter. He handed me a smart travel folder printed with a montage of old travel posters and suitcase stamps: The Grand Hotel, Luxor. The Eastern & Oriental, Penang. Raffles.

  ‘The route is straightforward: Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul, with a small detour to deliver this letter to my esteemed client Mr Vlad Tepes in Romania.’ He handed me an envelope marked simply Mr V. Tepes, Sighisoara. ‘You will take the local train from Brasov to Sighisoara where Mr Tepes, or someone representing him, will meet you at the station. You will stay for dinner and overnight as a guest and in the morning you will catch the train to Bucharest and continue with your journey to Hughesovka. At your destination you will be met by a member of the Welsh Underground who will make all necessary arrangements.’

  ‘They have a Welsh Underground?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s just a formal expression, nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Something in your voice tells me there will be plenty to worry about by the time we reach our journey’s end.’

  ‘You jump the gun, Mr Knight. Did I say there was nothing to worry about? In respect of your errand to Mr Tepes, there is nothing to worry about, but with regard to the journey on the whole there is plenty. Hughesovka is not a typical tourist destination. In fact, in the fifty years that Mooncalf Travel has been operating we have only ever sent one party of tourists there, the Talybont and Environs Ladies bowls team.’

  ‘And how did they enjoy themselves?’

  ‘I have no idea. They never came back and all efforts to inquire about their fate via the British Consulate in Kiev were rebuffed on grounds of State security. But I am sure you will not go wrong so long as you remember to observe the two cardinal rules of travellers to Hughesovka, to wit: never utter a syllable in disparagement of its revered founder John Hughes, whose tomb and mausoleum you must as a matter of unavoidable courtesy pay homage to at your earliest convenience; and, secondly, on your way to Hughesovka, beware of honey-traps.’ Mooncalf finished his sermon and looked at me enquiringly, as if there might be any part of it that was not clear.

  ‘Why would I need to beware of honey-traps?’

  ‘Because every traveller to the Ukraine does. It’s not a personal thing, it’s like telling someone not to drink the water or to take precautions with regard to mosquitoes.’

  ‘But what reason would they have to entrap me?’

  ‘They don’t need a reason, they do it as a matter of routine in order to compromise you at a future date should it prove necessary.’ He took out a small pamphlet and put it on to the desk. It was a cheaply printed A5 booklet bearing an image on the cover of a lady in silhouette unpeeling a stocking in a hotel bedroom together with a skull and crossbones warning symbol such as you get on bottles of poison in cartoons.

  ‘Everything you need to know is in here, familiarise yourself. The only other point to cover is the matter of your incognitos. I presume you would be happy to go as a spinning-wheel salesman?’

  That night Calamity and I caught the midnight train to Shrewsbury.

  Chapter 18

  A light summer breeze blew across the rooftops of Montmartre, around the eaves and garrets from where candlelit artists mailed off ears to ungrateful lovers. It blew through the iron trelliswork and removed someone’s hat and sent it rolling along the platform to stop at my feet. It was a stovepipe hat. I bent down to pick it up and straightened up to look into the face of a pretty young girl of about seventeen with blonde ringlets and high Slavic cheekbones. She was wearing Welsh national dress. She smiled, took the hat with a ‘Merci, monsieur’, curtsied and ran back to her suitcase that was being held by the porter. I checked my watch, and waited for Calamity to return with her postcards. I thought it was a little too early in the journey to send them but Calamity had never been further than Shrewsbury before and my words were useless.

  With a few minutes to spare she arrived and we walked in the direction of the train. Lights began to flicker on and the braids of intertwisting track out beyond the platform’s end turned gold in the setting sun. The carriage was a deep lustrous midnight blue, imprinted in gilt with the world’s most romantic stencil: Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. At the carriage end, next to the door, there was a smaller removable enamel sign that said: Orient Express: Paris–Munich–Vienna–Budapest–Bucharest–Istanbul (with connections to the twice-weekly steam packet to Hughesovka). The last sentence was written in tiny print like the bottom line of an optician’s chart.

  We climbed aboard and found the guard sitting in a little office next to the shower and WC. It was no more than a cubby hole with a small desk, a lamp giving off a yellow glow and suffu
sed with a smell of Pernod. He examined our travel documents and his face lit up with pleasure or surprise, or some emotion that suggested few people ever ventured as far as this fabled Shangri-la. A faraway look glimmered in his Pernod-stained eyes as he said, ‘Hughesovka. Ah yes! There was a time . . . a time long ago . . . when I too might have . . . ah! But whatever became of those years? Kept in the same place as the snow from last winter, no?’ He handed the tickets back with a melancholic smile. ‘Light-fingered life steals the dreams from our pockets while we are busy watching the parade, is it not so?’

  ‘That’s exactly how it is.’

  ‘Compartment 4a, and 4b for Mademoiselle Calamity. Bon voyage! ’ And then he added, ‘Monsieur Mooncalf is a great man.’

  The door to my compartment was ajar, a man stood with his back to the door, peering into a mirror inset in the aged wood veneer of the compartment. He seemed to be taking his own pulse but once my eyes became accustomed to the light given off by the dim bulbs in blue-velvet, tasselled lampshades I saw that he was in fact adjusting his cufflink. Opened on a small shelf beneath the mirror was a gentleman’s travelling kit containing brushes, combs and manicure devices. From this he took out a set square and checked the precision with which his cuff was aligned to the central axis of his shirt. I coughed politely and he turned round and said, ‘If you are looking for Edgbaston he’s gone. Killed himself. Good riddance, too, he was a liar. He deserves no pity from the likes of us.’

  ‘I don’t know Mr Edgbaston.’

  ‘You’re looking at him now, or rather at the husk that once contained the impostor known as Edgbaston.’ He reached out a hand to shake. ‘Stanley. Stanley Edgbaston. I would give you one of my cards but I burned them all.’

  ‘Louie Knight.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I sell spinning wheels.’

  ‘I was in extruded aluminium. Hard to believe, isn’t it?’

  ‘What are you in now?’

  ‘Now? Now I inhabit a different world, one where a man scorns to have his soul bend to the crude arbitrage of such labels. The man who for thirty years submitted to that yoke is gone.’