The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  Sospan considered and Eeyore said sadly, ‘They call him a prophet and cast him out. I’ve seen it happen.’ And off he and the herd went, continuing their endless traverse, borne on the never-dimming hope of greener pastures.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the Journals of the Proceedings of the Myfanwy Society,’ said Calamity through ripple-stained lips. ‘They’d be pretty useful for leads and things, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘They sure would, but we don’t know anyone who’s got a set.’

  ‘I think I know a way of getting into the National Library. I saw it in a movie once.’ I stared down at her young face, bright and as undimmed with cynicism as a dandelion. She had changed a lot in the three odd years we’d been together. At the time we first met her face had the sickly pallor of skin hidden from the sun and brought up under the flashing, artificial light of the amusement arcade. She’d been just another hustler, like Poxcrop, and probably still would be now if our paths hadn’t crossed. But the thing that struck me was how quickly the toughened streetwise shell had fallen away, like a discarded chrysalis, to reveal a great kid. It made me wonder whether I was doing the right thing taking her on as a partner in the one occupation that was guaranteed to curdle the milk of youth faster than anything: a gumshoe in Aberystwyth. But equally I knew there would have been no point trying to stop her. This was what she wanted to do. She was pretty good at it, too. And there were few more pointless endeavours in life than giving advice to people who don’t seek it; no task more hopeless than trying to stop a young person making mistakes that struck you as a good idea when you were the same age.

  ‘This movie,’ I said, ‘it’s not The Sound of Music, is it?’

  ‘The Day of the Jackal. Where the guy shoots the prime minister of France.’

  ‘Did he need to get into a library badly?’

  ‘He needed a fake identity, so he went to a cemetery and found the grave of a kid who died really young and took down the name. Then he went to that place in London where you go if you want to change your name—’

  ‘Somerset House.’

  ‘Right. And applied for a copy of the birth certificate.’

  ‘And they gave it to him, just like that.’

  ‘That’s the amazing thing. They do. There’s just a charge for the paperwork.’

  ‘In books maybe it happens like that, but this is real life, we don’t get the same breaks as the guys in the books.’

  ‘I thought we’d get one of our associate partners in London to go along to Somerset House for us and then we could apply for a passport in Newport. I could find a grave here in Aber. The passport could come in handy for other jobs as well.’

  ‘We don’t have any associate partners in London.’

  ‘It’s about time we did. We can’t grow the organisation without a network of contacts.’

  ‘I’ve managed OK up till now – associate partners sound expensive.’

  ‘It’s a business expense, you write it off against tax. We need to get a small operator in London to enter into a preferred partnership with us. Next time we need a tail job done on a party in London we call the guy up. Then one day, when he needs some business transacted in Aberystwyth, he calls us. It’s reciprocal.’

  ‘When do we ever need to tail someone in London?’

  ‘It happens all the time. Say we’re doing a surveillance here and the party leaves on the train to Euston, you want someone to follow him but you can’t do it yourself because it wouldn’t be cost-effective. So you arrange to have him intercepted at Euston. That’s how Pinkerton’s started out. The party under surveillance goes to Kansas City so you wire ahead with a description of him. Then two operatives working in relays pick him up when he gets off the train. They follow him for a week and he never even suspects. They watch his every move. At the end of the week he goes to the station and buys a ticket, to say, I don’t know, Tallahassee—’

  ‘Kansas to Tallahassee?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter where. The important thing is, one of the Pinkerton guys is standing behind him in the queue and listens to the new destination. Then he wires ahead and two more guys pick him up when he gets off. That’s how they do it.’

  ‘OK, so what happens if you find some kid’s grave and expropriate his identity and he turns out to be the dead son of someone who works at the library, and we turn up with his library ticket?’

  ‘Nothing would happen, it would just be a coincidence.’

  ‘Just a coincidence?’

  ‘I was going to choose a common name like, I don’t know, Billy Jones, not Amvrosiyevich Shevardnadze.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  ‘What do you think would happen? The woman behind the desk would go, “Oh my God! It’s my son! I thought he was dead and here he is borrowing a book!”’

  ‘It seems quite a drastic way to get a library ticket.’

  ‘Can you think of a better way?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can.’

  I took out the card Poxcrop had left with me.

  When Myfanwy got sick we didn’t notice at first. She escaped from us gradually, evanescently, the way sand passes between the two bulbs of an hourglass. She seemed to be receding from us into a sea of forgetfulness. You can’t blame her, I suppose. There’s a lot in this world worth forgetting. But what about us who were left behind? The people who loved her? It seemed such a cruel trick: to run away and leave us with something that looked like Myfanwy, but where no one was manning the switchboard. Don’t give up hope, the doctors said, although it was hard to see where they got the authority to say that since they did not know what was wrong with her. Sometimes it’s hard not to resent her for this: to abandon her body and leave it in the possession of people obliged by decency to take care of it. Like leaving a parcel at the lost property and never going back. And because we loved her, we accepted the strange burden. We baby-sat for her corpse in the feeble hope that she might return to it. Like we leave a swallow’s nest in the rafters in the hope that one day they will come back.

  Llunos stood looking out of the window of my office and said, ‘I’ve been talking to the people at the nursing home. They say it’s not looking too rosy for Myfanwy if they don’t find her soon.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t like to say it, but we have to face facts. We might be looking at a murder inquiry.’

  ‘I know that too. And I know you’re going to tell me a murder inquiry is no place for a private operative.’

  ‘Just so you know.’

  ‘I’ll keep my nose out of it.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet you will.’

  He reached out and picked up a paperweight that lay on top of a pile of unpacked ring-binders. It was a scene of Aberystwyth in winter; he shook and snow fell. For many years relations between the two of us had been similarly frozen; because that was the natural state of affairs between a chief of police and a private operative. A snooper generally being regarded in the eyes of the law as someone who makes his living by getting to evidence before the police and then not telling them about it. But Llunos was not too worried about evidence since he could always invent what he lacked. And with time we had come to understand we were both fighting for the same thing. The only difference was one of approach – mine was more law-abiding.

  I took a bottle of rum out of the cabinet under the desk and fetched two glasses from the kitchenette. He glanced at his watch.

  ‘Bit early.’

  ‘Get a new watch.’ I poured the drinks

  ‘I’m just telling you, that’s all,’ continued Llunos. ‘For the record. Then when I have to charge you for obstruction or withholding evidence you won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘I know nothing I say will make a darned bit of difference.’

  ‘It’s nothing personal.’

  He nodded. ‘If it was me and someone took Myfanwy I’d be the same.’ He drained the glass and I refilled.

  ‘Bit smaller th
an the old office.’ He gave the room a look of appraisal. ‘What’s the tea towel for?’

  I paused for a second wondering how much I should tell him. He noticed; he always did.

  ‘Calamity is applying for her badge. She has to do a project so she’s writing a report on the case of the Nanteos fire.’

  ‘She won’t find much to look at.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘Impeccable bit of coppering work that. Best the county’s ever seen.’

  I laughed. ‘Let’s hope not. I need something to keep her quiet.’

  ‘The guy in charge was my great-grandfather, Syracuse Obadiah Griffiths. First peeler in the county.’

  I looked at Llunos as if I was seeing him for the first time. ‘I wasn’t aware of that.’

  ‘It was an experiment, you see. Sir Robert Peel had introduced this idea of peelers in London but they weren’t sure whether to roll them out across the country. So they tested them out in a few places. Syracuse was the first in Wales. The mansion fire was his finest case: established the model for policing in Cardiganshire for the next 150 years. He was a great man.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  We raised glasses.

  ‘I’ll tell Calamity to call you if she needs any help.’

  He grunted a sort of sound that might have been agreement and said, ‘Reason I dropped by was to let you know: we’ve found the gelati van.’

  ‘That was quick work.’

  ‘Yeah, quick.’

  ‘Then again, can’t be easy to hide an ice-cream van.’

  ‘They found it in a deep freeze. Quite appropriate really.’

  ‘Are we talking about those big freezers at the meat-packing plant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One of the hotels then?’

  ‘No it was an ordinary domestic deep freeze. In a scrap yard.’

  ‘So what am I missing?’

  ‘The van had been in a car crusher.’

  I nodded. It made sense.

  ‘Some guy walking his dog saw it being crushed last night.’

  ‘And I suppose because it was done outside office hours there was no paperwork and no one working there knows anything about it.’

  ‘That’s pretty much how it looks. But we might still be able to find something useful in the chassis. We’re waiting for the heavy uncrumpling gear to be sent up from Cardiff.’

  ‘I suppose there’s no sign of the driver.’

  ‘On the contrary: there’s every sign of him. Judging from the pink stuff oozing out, I’d say he’s still at his post.’

  ‘Went down with his ship?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  ‘I also found out something else. I took the car registration numbers from the kiosk guy and traced the people who were there that day. We found a family staying in town, they gave us the film they shot that afternoon.’

  He handed me a photo. It was landscape taken pointing inland towards Ynyshir. My car was in the foreground. And standing next to it, seeming to be leaning in as if talking to the passenger, was a man. It looked like one of the old soldiers from the Patagonian War.

  ‘He’s been on the run for a few weeks now,’ said Llunos. ‘You might have heard it mentioned on the radio. You can keep the photo.’

  * * *

  There were seven people sitting in the auditorium waiting for the Great Osiris’s show. And one private eye sitting on stage staring into the dazzle of a spotlight. He was the sort of gumshoe who had been taught by life to be sceptical of occasions like this; he knew all about the sorry extent of people’s credulity, and about the charlatans who made their living exploiting it. But his partner, Calamity, had asked what was the prospect of a little humiliation set against the chance that he might be able to retrieve a telling detail from his memory of the day Myfanwy disappeared. It was a fair point and hard to answer. Even though he knew she was saying it because she wasn’t the one who had to sit in the chair.

  The Great Osiris took out a fob watch and let it dangle in front of my face, commanding me in a voice that dripped syrup to keep my eyes on the watch. It was such a familiar routine I could have recited it myself. Soon you will begin to feel sleepy, veerrry sleeeeeepy … I tried to play ball. The watch glittered and flashed in the light like a salmon jumping a waterfall and evading the paw of a grizzly bear. Then it flashed like a lighthouse at night, and then slid across the sky like a full moon behind rags of scudding cloud. Then it slowed down – I don’t know how he did it, but I had to admit it was a good trick. The air through which the watch described its arc congealed and turned to aspic. Now the watch was hardly moving, rising, rising, rising with agonising slowness and then remained poised at the acme as if the chain had turned into a solid rod of brass. Suddenly, as if a trapdoor had opened, it fell and swooped and my eyes followed the motion, swivelling from side to side. And then the watch stopped again, and turned into a setting sun; the world grew dim and night came on and the first few stars came out, muffled by the autumn fog that seeped up from the heath, and the golden pale orb of light flickered and pulsated on the end of the stick that I seemed to have acquired. An owl hooted and my breath steamed in the frosty fog. The gas lamp seemed to be safely alight and so I moved on to the next: another fifty and I could go home. Horses whinnied and I leaped aside as a carriage sped past with a silvery jingling of harness and clopping of hooves. I raised my fist but the carriage had already disappeared into the murk. Stupid nobs, I thought, think they own the turnpike. I moved on to the next streetlamp. And then the world was filled with blinding light and I was staring out at eight people who were standing up and applauding.

  As we threaded our way back through the buildings of Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp, Calamity explained with eyes sparkling with awe what she had witnessed. ‘It was unbelievable! He said he knew all about hypnotic regression so I told him to take you back to the day in Ynyslas but he sort of overdid it and you went back too far. He said it’s a bit like tuning a radio – sometimes you sort of overshoot, and sometimes you undershoot. After a while you started talking in the voice of a little boy and the Great Osiris tried to make you come back, but you just carried on and on. Soon you were crying like a baby and then all of a sudden you were talking in a strange voice and the Great Osiris asked you what the date was and you said it was 1065. And he said, “Oh, so just before the Norman Conquest” and you said, “What Norman Conquest?” And then he brought you forward a bit and you said you couldn’t stop to talk because there was plague in Talybont. And then he brought you forward a bit more, and guess what?’

  ‘I turned into Francis Drake.’

  ‘No, you were a lamplighter in 1849. And I asked you if you’d heard about the fire at the mansion and you said yes and what a terrible thing it was and I said, “Do you think the stable boy did it?” And you said, “Of course not, he was fitted up by the peelers.” Calamity stopped and then added, ‘Amazing eh?’

  ‘Lamplighter,’ I said quietly.

  ‘With a long pole to light the gas.’

  ‘I thought we were supposed to find out what happened at Ynyslas.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Calamity, slightly deflated. ‘You didn’t really say much about that, except you mentioned seeing an old soldier, and he had a tattoo on his forearm that said “Deeper than the love”.’

  Chapter 5

  THERE WAS A police tent erected over the spot from which Myfanwy disappeared and beyond that, at the shore of the estuary, was Cadwaladr. He was loading things into a boat. We walked towards him with a slight reluctance since he appeared to be engaged on an unusual activity – gainful employment. Cadwaladr was one of the veterans of the war fought in 1961 to defend the Welsh colony in Patagonia. You often saw these men in their tattered greatcoats drifting from town to town, riding the boxcars, or just wandering; searching the land for an answer that no one seemed to have to the question, why Patagonia?

  Since the beginning of time, men have looke
d across the sea and imagined a land beyond the horizon where life would be easier. As boys, we stood on the shore and looked at Aberdovey, imagining that the girls over there were sweeter. And from time to time we met men from Aberdovey in the pubs of Borth with strange looks of disappointment on their faces. But why did the settlers in the last century, with all the world to choose from, opt for the southern tip of South America? What blinded them to the golden rule of colonisation? That ancient wisdom which says, it’s hard to grow crops in a land where they have penguins.

  The historians are silent on the subject, but I suspect it has to do with that great unsuspected dictator of human affairs, the smart aleck. The man who stands on the dockside as you leave for the promised land and scoffs. The Great Smirker. There’s always one, and he was probably already there in Africa when the apes came down from the trees and decided to walk to Europe.

  Men will put up with almost anything rather than face the derision of the Smirker. And so the Welsh settlers did what all pioneers do when they arrive and find that the brochure lied. They shivered in crofts made with bricks of turf and wrote home saying how great everything was. It’s another California. Salmon jump from the river into your hand. Birds lay their eggs straight into the frying pan. The rivers are lemon-curded with gold.

  When the soldiers arrived in 1961 and wrote home saying it was crap, they weren’t believed. Their complaints dismissed as the customary ball-aching that soldiers at the Front have always done. Of course they are not happy, what soldier sitting in a trench ever is? Of course they say the place stinks, when did a soldier ever admire the scenery?

  Still to this day they are not believed. Cast out as ungrateful moaners, lacking in gratitude for the unique chance given them to die in South America. Lost souls who perished in the service of the unacknowledged dictator. Their only epitaph: they died that he might smirk.

  The boat was big enough for four or five people and bore the name Persephone. Cadwaladr was loading tins of creosote. He stopped and looked up, nodded slightly, and reached out a hand. We shook.