'Better start singing, Mrs Llantrisant, or your boot will be mincemeat.'
'You wouldn't dare! They cost eighty quid they did!'
'You're Gwenno Guevara, aren't you?'
'Fuck off!'
I gave the handle a slight turn. The teeth of the mincing mechanism made contact with the leather. Mrs Llantrisant gasped. I stopped turning the handle and peered to look at the damage to the boot.
'They're just a bit scuffed at the moment; bit of shoe polish would get that off. It's your last chance.'
She started struggling to break free of the flex which bound her to the chair and I gave the handle a full heave. There was a sickening crunching, gristly sort of noise as the spiral teeth cut into the solid wall of the boot. Mrs Llantrisant let out a long, blood-curdling howl, like a tortured wolf.
'You're Gwenno Guevara, aren't you?!' I shouted.
'Yes! Yes! Yes!' she screamed.
'The supreme commander of the ESSJAT?'
'Yes!'
'Is that why Brainbocs came to see you? Why he took your deathbed confession?'
'Yes!'
'Why was he so interested in you?'
She just shook her head sadly and gasped for breath. 'I don't know. I really don't know. All I know is the boy was trying to reunite Lovespoon's bomber crew. Lovespoon, Herod, Dai the Custard Pie . . .'
'And Frobisher?'
'He was dead. He didn't matter. But Brainbocs was trying to track down the remaining survivors from the Rio Caeriog mission. I was the only one he couldn't find.'
'So where's the essay?'
'It's in my handbag on the chair in the kitchen.'
I looked over to the kitchen and then back at her. This was all a bit too easy.
'If you're lying, your boot's fucked.'
She shook her head.
'I mean it! I'll do every single fucking one of them!'
'In my bag, go and see.'
I went to the kitchen and opened her handbag. Inside was a manila envelope. I pulled it out. It was marked on the front in ball-point pen: 'David Brainbocs, spring term assignment, Cantref-y-Gwaelod'. Next to that was a date and the St Luddite's school stamp, initialled by Lovespoon. I tore it open and pulled out the essay. There were about thirty pages of A4 filled with a closely packed schoolboy hand, interspersed here and there with technical-looking diagrams. It was perfect. The essay that half of Aberystwyth had been looking for. There was just one thing wrong. As I leafed through the pages I could hear from the other room a horrible raucous cackling that went straight through me like a graveyard wind. Mrs Llantrisant was laughing. I could mince up every orthopaedic boot in Aberystwyth and it wouldn't make a hap'orth of difference this time. The essay was written in runes.
Chapter 21
WEARILY, I SET off on the half-hour walk across town to the light industrial estate on the site of the old engine sheds. That was where the new Witches' Co-op could be found next to the DIY emporium, the computer superstore and the frozen-food wholesalers. It was a far cry from the cubby hole the shop had formerly occupied in the side of the castle ramparts next to the Coronation Muggery. The shop itself was an uneasy mix of traditional and modern. In front of the warehouse-like building of corrugated iron and sand-coloured brick was a car park in which the parking bays were marked out in whorls and vortices corresponding to the lines of power beneath the tarmac. The staff wore bright cotton overalls covered in half moons and stars like Hallowe'en costumes, but the security guard had a wolf on a leash. The lighting was mainly fluorescent, except for torches burning at the ends of the aisles.
At my approach, the glass double doors opened as if by magic and one of the assistants pointed me in the direction of the R&D facility at the back. The door was marked 'authorised personnel only' but I walked through regardless and found myself in a laboratory. It was empty except for Julian, the cat, who was peering into the eyepiece of a microscope, his paws balancing on the knurled focusing wheel. He looked up and gave me the usual look of disdain and then, intimidated perhaps by the expression of determination on my face, flicked an ear back towards the far side of the room. My gaze followed the direction of his ear to a large glass window set in the wall and through the glass I could see Evans the Boot's Mam sitting on a broomstick in what appeared to be a wind tunnel. Julian returned his gaze to the eyepiece of the microscope. The door to the wind tunnel had a red light above it and, not wishing to compromise the research, I went up to the window and waved. Mrs Evans saw me, signalled to one of the white-coated technicians in the room, and dismounted. She came out carrying the broomstick and took off the helmet which looked like one of those worn by Olympic racing cyclists. Then, struggling to get her breath back, she tossed me the broomstick; it was lighter than a feather.
'Not bad eh?' she panted. 'Carbon fibre frame, hollow inside and polypropylene bristles — drag coefficient about the same as a seagull.'
'I'm impressed.'
'I hear Myfanwy left town. I thought you two were an item.'
'So did I but you just never know, do you?'
I took the essay out of my pocket and handed it to her. She held the papers up to her nose, and slowly leafed through them, making soft grunting sounds as she went. Unfortunately, she didn't have her runing glasses with her but agreed that she would start transcribing tonight and send Julian over every half hour with the pages as she finished them. At the mention of his name, the cat looked up again from the microscope, stared long and hard at us, and then reapplied his eye to the eyepiece.
'You're staying in that old caravan aren't you?' Mrs Evans added as I left. 'The one no one knows about?' As I retraced my steps through the whorls and vortices of the car park I thought sourly of Eeyore and his so-called untraceable caravan. I was tempted to curse him, but if you did that in this shop it set off an alarm.
The sun was setting when I got back and the caravans were bathed in golden fire, like an Inca city. I wasn't expecting to see Julian with the translated pages until later in the night and so I slept for a while. When I awoke, the caravan was in darkness. I got up and took down a tin of pilchards from the cupboard as a reward for Julian and went out for a walk. A breathless hush had fallen, the sort sometimes found in the hour or two between the end of a perfect summer's day and the onset of evening. Under a sky darkening to indigo I walked through the caravan park, aware with a tinge of envy that the rest of the inhabitants would be sitting down inside their two-wheeled homes to their homely meals: dinners scooped out of tins, heated over camping-gas burners and served on picnic crockery. Children tingling with the raw memory of swimming in the sea and burning on the hot sands. A nameless sense of foreboding had found its way into my heart. I headed for the dunes that edged the park; there was something eternally beautiful and reassuring about them, the sharp spiky marram grass that stung our knees as children looked soft now, like fur ruffled by the fondling breeze. I climbed and sat down facing the ocean looking out to a world which ten thousand years ago had still been land, and which Dai Brainbocs had persuaded his Welsh teacher to try and reclaim. The scheme seemed no madder than some of the other things that had been happening and I could no longer find the strength to be convinced that it wouldn't work. It was the normal world that was difficult to believe in now. The first stars flickered faintly and from far away the voices of playing children came, weak as ghosts. It was going to be a long night. I took out the hip flask and had a drink of rum, then reached into my pocket for a notepad and pencil. I thought for a few seconds and wrote on the pad: What are the lessons of Noel Bartholomew? I took another drink and savoured the fiery liquor as I contemplated the answer to my question. Never try and save a woman who can't be saved? I stuck the pencil in my mouth and looked at the new sentence. No. I crossed it out. Always try and save a woman who can't be saved? I scratched that one out too. Don't try and save a woman if it's you who needs saving? I put the notepad down and took another drink. Calamity, who thought all private detectives should drink whisky, once asked me what was the differen
ce between the two drinks. I thought at the time it had to do with the taste, but I was wrong. People are wrong about everything. What is the difference? They both taste fiery and get you drunk, they both look the same and cost the same. But one is the distilled essence of cold, wet, miserable Scottish highlands. And one is the succulent ichor made from sugar and the distilled sunshine of far-off places. I knew which one Bartholomew would have chosen. Bartholomew the dreamer, the romantic, travelling upriver against all advice, lured ever further inland by tantalising rumours and contradictory stories . . . All this time I had been telling Calamity to ask the right question and had been asking the wrong one myself. I knew now that he never found Hermione, and it wasn't the Chinese shopkeeper who faked the pictures but he himself before he left Aberystwyth. A few sprigs of foliage from Danycoed Wood, a girl from a harbourside tea-cosy shop paid a farthing to dress up, and a studio in Terrace Road.
And the question was not whether he found her or not but why he went all that way just to die? I looked out over the quiet grey landscape, the colour slowly leeching out. The answer is etched in all the faces you meet in Aberystwyth. No one has the courage to be saved. Not the Moulin girls seeking escape in the one place they'll never find it. Nor Sospan grinning sadly behind the invisible bars of his vanilla prison.
A lone figure came running along the beach from the direction of Berth. One tiny figure running with the arrow-straight desperation of one whose errand might still save the world. I watched her approach, a school satchel swinging at her side, as she ran up the beach over the stones and into the foothills of the dunes. Her pace suddenly halved on the soft sand as her footholds gave way and the air around her turned to treacle. But she just redoubled her efforts, racing against the rumbling mounds of sand and contemptuous of their attempts to thwart her. It was Calamity and the fire of belief within her still burned strong. At the top she ran up to me and threw herself into my arms, she was sobbing uncontrollably.
'He . . . he . . .'
'It's OK.'
Her face was washed over with a silver film of tears and her efforts to speak juddered into nothing as each time a fresh bout of sobbing took her.
'He . . . he . . .'
'What is it?'
'He's going to destroy Aberystwyth!' and at the thought of it she squealed and burst into another fit of weeping.
I reached into my pocket and found a pack of tissues to hand to her. Staring out over Ynyslas sands in the deep calm of this night, I was able to receive the news that someone was going to destroy Aberystwyth with strange detachment. I waited patiently as the sobs slowly subsided. Calamity took out a tissue and blew her nose. She looked up at me, her face wet and glistening.
'He'll destroy everything!'
'Who will?'
'Lovespoon.'
Another sob interrupted but through the tears she said:
'You said you didn't know how he was going to get the Ark to the sea?'
I nodded.
'It was the wrong question. He's going to take the sea to the Ark!'
As we retraced our steps, carefully now as all the light from the world had gone and the paths through the dunes had disappeared, we saw a bonfire burning on the horizon, somewhere in the direction of Tre'ddol. In the dark midsummer night there was something unnervingly ancient and pagan about the sight. We watched for a long time until our reverie was startled by the mewing of a cat at our feet, the sharp scent of burned fur pricking our nostrils. It was Julian, with a badly singed ear. An entire story was contained in that sharp burned cat smell and we apprehended it in an instant. We set off at a run across the hills in the direction of Ma Evans's house, through the caravan park, across the road and out along the bog towards the railway line. I knew what to expect before I got there. Mrs Llantrisant had outwitted me yet again. When we arrived the area was bathed in the familiar flashing blue light. A team of firemen was hosing down the house and some ladies from the St John's Ambulance Brigade were reassuring Ma Evans who sat huddled under a blanket drinking tea. Some yards away stood the makings of an ugly pyre. And beyond that, held back by the police and making angry grumblings, was the mob of disgruntled villagers who had no doubt set the pyre. I didn't know what Mrs Llantrisant had said to them — such a task would have been child's play for an agent of her experience. Sheep not lambing, or cows not calving, or milk going inexplicably sour; any of the myriad natural mishaps of everyday life could have been ascribed to witchery and used against Ma Evans. The pyre had been extinguished but the house, set on fire deliberately but made to look like the work of an accidental spark, was beyond saving. As I surveyed the scene, Ma Evans looked over to me, the tears still glistening on her cheeks, and tried to somehow explain things to me with her expression. I waved it aside; it was me who should be doing the explaining; I had brought all this upon her. A group of men walked over and pointed shotguns at me and I slowly raised my hands. From behind the house came a figure, an old lady who used to be a hunched and bent old spinster but now walked with a back ramrod straight and an authoritative purposeful air. It was Mrs Llantrisant, her sense of having achieved her destiny compromised only by the big black gap in her front dental plate which made her look like a cartoon pirate. Julian the cat ran up to her. A wave of despair and fury hit me as she took a large kipper out of her shopping bag and handed it to the cat. 'You fucking Judas!' I screamed, and ran forwards, lashing out viciously with my foot at the ring of Julian's arse. The cat yelped and jumped out of the way just as the stock of a shotgun smashed into the side of my head. I twisted slightly as I fell and the last thing I saw before losing consciousness, as I looked up, was Herod Jenkins and that horizontal crease in his face they called a smile.
Chapter 22
I OPENED MY eyes in a dark room, my cheek pressed against a cold, gritty concrete floor. Three stripes of light ran down the wall from a barred window and my head and ribs throbbed. I drifted back into unconsciousness. When I woke again the shadow of the bars was fainter as the first pale glimmer of dawn filled the room. I dragged myself to my feet, wincing at the shooting pains from my ribs and shuffled to the window. The view was from the side of Pen Dinas overlooking the harbour towards the station. It was Blaenplwyf prison. I felt the ribs with my fingers — they didn't appear to be broken, but someone had given me a good kicking. From my vantage point I could see Victory Square between the station and the museum and I could see what it was that had so upset Calamity. The Lancaster bomber was gone. Finally, when it was too late to do anything about it, I understood. That dramatic change of course in Brainbocs's research that started all the trouble. It could mean only one thing. All along we had been puzzled how they were going to get the Ark to the sea. And Calamity had worked it out. They were going to take the sea to the Ark. After all, everyone knows you need a deluge to launch an Ark. And Brainbocs's Promethean ego was going to supply one. Brainbocs was going to reunite Lovespoon's old bomber crew, the one that flew the mission over Rio Caeriog, and blow up the dam at Nant-y-moch.
The sounds of a prison slowly coming to life filled the air. Iron doors clanged open and shut, and harsh voices echoed down the hard corridors; keys jangled; men moaned. Calamity had worked it out as well. And it had been too much for her. She didn't need to be a Dai Brainbocs to know what the mountain of water released with the destruction of the dam would do to the town. I had sent her off in search of Llunos in the faint hope that he might have some officers still loyal to him. Maybe they could do something. Stop the plane or devise a plan to get the townspeople to higher ground. If they commandeered the Cliff Railway, it might be possible. But it was all beyond my control now. Shortly before 8am the door opened and a tray with bread and a brown drink in a plastic beaker was placed inside. The drink was sweet and warm but I couldn't tell whether it was coffee or hot chocolate. Maybe it was neither. The beaker had chew marks all along the rim. Some time after that the door opened again and the guard told me my lawyer was here to see me.
I followed the guard down a long corridor t
hrough a series of barred doors, until eventually I was shown into another cell at the end, smaller than mine and with a simple wooden desk in the middle. A little man with a boyish face sat at the table. He was smartly dressed in a well-cut three-piece suit and was resting his two small hands, both gloved, on top of a malacca cane. A mauve handkerchief billowed out of his top pocket. He stood up as I entered and pointed to the chair.
'Please, sit down.' His voice was thin and weaselly. 'Smoke?' He took out a packet of cigarettes and held them aloft. I shook my head and he threw the pack down on the table. 'Neither do I; beastly habit. Still didn't quite know what else to take a man in prison. Not much practice at this sort of thing.'
I said nothing, just stared at him. There was something unpleasant, almost otherworldly about him, like those pictures of aliens said to be living in Area 51.
He looked at me and smiled weakly. 'Do you know who I am?'
'I know you're no lawyer.'
He chuckled. 'We've never been introduced, of course.'
The side of my head where I was hit with the shotgun was sore and pounding, but my mind was becoming clear. A suspicion slowly took concrete shape in my mind, a suspicion that had been floating there like fog for some time now. I had no reason to know he was, but I did. It was simple really.
'You're Dai Brainbocs.'
He giggled.
'I suppose it was a spare calliper you threw in the vat at the cheese factory?'
'No. I just made a replacement - out of Meccano — quite an improvement on the original design actually; much better articulation. I might apply for a patent.'
'And the teeth?'
'They were real too; milk teeth. Shows you what a wanker that police pathologist was.'
I nodded as I slowly took it in.
'Why go to all that bother of pretending to be dead?'
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