Last Tango in Aberystwyth an-2

by Malcolm Pryce

  Could I blame him? Could any of us really be blamed for becoming what we had no power to avoid becoming? Wasn't that what Custard Pie had said? But is it enough to blame the Furies? It was hard to know, but I knew what Eeyore would have said. Think along those lines and there's no point being a detective. Might as well stay in bed all day. Each man makes a decision that moulds his life. And lives with it. No one ever said it was nice. But each man has a choice. Ben Guggenheim did. I looked at Herod. In his eyes were many things, hate, pain, bewilderment, but most of all helplessness. And then something else appeared there: the ghost of a decision.

  'If I come back with you,' he said turning to me, 'will you give me your blessing?'

  For a sliver of a second I was startled. Llunos turned to look at me as if it all now rested on me.

  'Will you give me your blessing?' he repeated.

  I opened my mouth not knowing what I was going to say, when a voice cried out a single word that echoed round the canyon like a ricocheting bullet.

  'No!'

  We all turned and looked up, and standing on the outcrop of rock next to little Onan's grave, her white hair flying wildly in the wind like an avenging Norse goddess, was Mrs Llantrisant. And she was pointing a shotgun at us. We raised our hands and she climbed down the stony path to join us.

  Llunos spoke first. 'Better put the gun down, Mrs Llantrisant.'

  'You must think I'm daft.'

  'You are if you don't put it down. There's nowhere left for you to go.'

  'Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.'

  'I find that a bit hard to believe coming from someone who spent her life swabbing a step.'

  She spat. 'Pah! That was my cover, you stupid fool. If I disguise myself to look like an idiot does that make me an idiot? Or does it make you one for being deceived?'

  'These are lofty-sounding words, Mrs Llantrisant, but the simple truth is you are a fugitive, and you also have bad rheumatism. You need proper medical care. Your fine rhetoric won't help you wade through the snow of this mountain pass and that is all that is left open to you.'

  'After all I've been through you really think I care a fig for the pain in my joints? You may succeed in sweet-talking my man into acting like a cur ...' She jabbed the shotgun at Herod, who was now silently weeping. 'Pull yourself together, man, or I'll take a horsewhip to you!' Herod wiped away the tears on a pelt hanging from his waist.

  'Don't you think you're a bit old to be Bonnie and Clyde?' I asked.

  'Yes,' she sneered. 'You can laugh at me because I'm old, but I've got more balls than you even though I'm twice your age.'

  'No one doubts the strength of your spirit, Mrs Llantrisant —'

  'Not half you don't. You think I don't know? How you despise us old ones because we're in the way. Want to put us in a home where we never see a normal-sized teapot again? Oh I know all about what you think. You see my weak eyes and my thin grey hair stretched across my skull and you want to hide me away from sight. And what you hate most is the idea of me, an old woman, being consumed by the fire of passion. Yes I know. But I tell you I was not always like this. There was a time when my skin was not this wrinkled parchment that you see and my dugs not these dry empty bags, but bursting with milk and fire and love. And I tell you the love I bore to Herod Jenkins was as the Nile to the Rheidol compared to Mrs Bligh-Jones's, and as a hurricane to a fart compared to how Louie Knight here felt about that whore from the nightclub.'

  'We don't doubt it, Mrs Llantrisant, but you must be realistic. This is no weather for you to be out in the wilds living off rabbits. You need some hot caawl inside you.'

  'I didn't see much hot caawl on that island prison you banished me to.'

  'Perhaps we were too harsh. Perhaps we can arrange something more suitable for a lady in your condition.'

  'Don't try and fool me with your tricks. I'm no idiot. You'll lock me up and throw away the key. But I won't let you.'

  'Come home with us, Mrs Llantrisant.'

  'No! It is impossible. I won't go. I'm free and I have my man again and we'd rather die together than live apart in chains.'

  Just then Dai the Custard Pie crawled out of the hut, his one leg bandaged to a splint made from a tree branch. The stomach-churning reek of gangrene flashed in our nostrils.

  'What's going on?' he croaked.

  Mrs Llantrisant took command of the situation. 'We'll leave the shotgun with you. You cover them until we have had time to get away. Then you let them take you, they'll bring you to a hospital where you can get your leg fixed.'

  'We're not going to leave him, are we?' asked Herod.

  'We don't have any choice. The gangrene is bad and he needs to get to a hospital.'

  'It's only a little break,' said Herod. 'He just needs to put his weight on it, that's all. I've sent plenty of boys out with worse injuries than that.'

  'No, Herod, the world has changed. Those things are not possible any more. He'd hold us back.'

  'But I could carry him on my broad back.'

  She shook her head. 'It's the only way.' She handed the shotgun to Custard Pie and the two of them started climbing through the snows of the Pilgrim's Pass, stopping briefly to bid one final farewell at little Onan's grave.

  Chapter 25

  We left Custard Pie on the mountain for the medics to find, put a call through to the mountain rangers in Welshpool to look out for the fugitives, if they ever made it through the pass, and drove back to town. The snow was falling thickly and the gritting lorries were already out.

  'This stuff about the cannibalism up on the mountain,' said Llunos. 'It was crap.'

  'Yeah, I've sort of worked that out. Mrs Llantrisant made it up to smear Mrs Bligh-Jones's name. She knew she'd been seeing Herod and was jealous.

  Llunos nodded. 'Mrs Tolpuddle broke her silence about the mission yesterday. It seems they were out on a routine sweep, and Mrs Bligh-Jones claimed she had received a distress signal. No one else did but they went and had a look. They wanted to turn back, but Bligh-Jones kept pushing them on and on; it was as if she knew what she was looking for. Then up above the snow-line they see the 'Thing'. Which we now know to have been Herod. Or Mr Dippetty-doo. That's when it happened.'

  'When what happened?'

  'The thing that made Mrs Cefnmabws flee in horror. It wasn't cannibalism, it was something else. Mrs Bligh-Jones threw off her clothes and made love to Mr Dippetty-doo in the snow.'

  'I expect that would make me flee, too.'

  'I'm pleased in a way, though,' said Llunos. 'I've never had a lot of time for Mrs Bligh-Jones — always thought she was a bit toffee-nosed; but I could never really picture her as someone who would eat her bowling-partner.'

  'Don't be too sure,' I teased him. 'All this tells us is that she didn't; not that she wouldn't have!'

  He threw me a dark, irritated glance. He was in a sombre, reflective mood and didn't welcome my joking.

  'So Mrs Llantrisant thought up this thing with Calamity just to get back at you?'

  'Looks that way. She obviously thought it was the best way to hurt me, and as usual she was spot on.'

  Llunos shook his head in wonder and disbelief.

  We reached the crest of Penglais Hill and suddenly, as it always did, that familiar sight of Aberystwyth appeared in the valley below like a faithful dog, making the heart glad: skeins of smoke drifting across the slate roofs, the battered old pier and the pointy turrets of the old college, all set against the backdrop of a dove-grey sea.

  'I still can't get my head round it all, you know,' said Llunos. 'Brainbocs coming back and all that. Making a love potion.'

  'I think it will probably take us all a good few years to get used to that one.'

  'I haven't even got my head round the last caper, yet. The flood.'

  'Nor me.'

  'Where do you want me to drop you?'

  'I need to go to Trefechan.' He put his foot down and drove on, past the railway station. I took out the key to my office and put it do
wn next to the gear stick. 'When you get back to the police station, give this to Myfanwy and tell her to go and wait for me at my place. Tell her I'll be about an hour, and I'll explain when I see her.'

  Llunos nodded. 'Don't suppose there would be any point asking what's so important that you have to go to Trefechan at this time of night?'

  'Nope.'

  'Thought not. If it was me, all I would be able to think of right now would be Myfanwy.'

  'It's all I've thought about all day. But I've waited three years. I can wait another hour.'

  We drove past the station and I cast an anxious glance over at the clock. 11.40. Still time. Just.

  'And make sure someone takes Calamity home. Tell her I'll see her at the office tomorrow, business as usual ... This will do fine.'

  He nodded and pulled up just before Trefechan Bridge.

  I opened the door and Llunos put a gently restraining arm on my forearm. 'Imagine if they did succeed in making a love potion like that,' he said with a strangely troubled look. 'That made you fall in love with someone you didn't like. It would be like rape, really, wouldn't it?' He shook his head slowly, pondering the implications. 'We'd have to make a new law against it.' Then he put out his hand and we shook.

  *

  I plodded wearily over Trefechan Bridge and along the river bank to the trailer park. The storm had gone completely now and, in its wake, an air of almost supernatural calm lay on the harbour. Even the odd car sounded distant and not quite real; on the silent air the delicate scent of the sea hung faintly, softer than the memory of rose petals.

  The caravan was dark and still, and gave off the same fetid reek as last time. The door was ajar and I eased it open and crept furtively in, not knowing what to expect but prepared for anything. I tried the light switch inside the door but it wouldn't work.

  'The power's off.' It was a girl's voice, thick with pain and urgency, coming from somewhere in the darkness. 'I suppose the bitch forgot to pay the bill.' My eyes gradually became accustomed to the gloom and I made out the figure of someone standing in the middle of the caravan. It was Gretel. She was wearing something that shimmered even in the dark and enveloped her from knee to shoulder. It seemed to be a dress, perhaps made of taffeta or something.

  'I guess I had you fooled all along with my sackcloth and ashes stuff?' She spoke in staccato gasps as if there was a strangler's hands at her throat, or some deep, desperate pain inside her was squeezing out the last droplets of life.

  'It's not hard to fool me,' I said. 'All you need is a jar of damson jam.'

  Something glinted with a blue white light down by Gretel's wrist. It was my gun, pointing at me. Gretel looked down at it and waggled it slightly.

  'Soon teach her to keep her filthy paws off my man.'

  I nodded and said in the sort of voice you use to coax a frightened animal, 'Yeah, you sure did that.' I took a half-step towards her. Suddenly the words of Eeyore came back to me, about how death when it comes can often strike us as embarrassing, as stupid, even banal. How cruel, after all this time, now that Myfanwy was waiting for me back at my office, after all the myriad ways I could have died recently, for it to happen now. I put my hand out ever so gently. As if to a cat in a tree. 'Come on,' I said. 'It's all right.'

  'Thanks for letting me have the gun.'

  'I didn't. You took it.'

  'How did you guess it was me?'

  'It wasn't hard. That day Calamity asked for a heater, she said it was in the trunk, the key behind the picture. You were standing outside the door.'

  She considered for a second, and said, 'I've sent you a cheque.'

  'For what?'

  'For helping me find her. A deal's a deal.'

  'The agreement was to find the Dean not Judy Juice.'

  'I guess I should have read the small print.' The voice was getting weaker and hoarser with a hint of a whine in it like a homesick dog.

  'I would have got the bitch, too! But the fucking thing jammed.'

  She let out a tiny gasp, and swayed slightly like a felled tree about to collapse. The gun slipped out of her hand and clattered to the floor. It was then that I noticed in the corner of her mouth a thin dark trickle oozing and bubbling with her breathing. Transfixed by the sight I let my gaze drop and saw the handle of the 'Come to Sunny Aberystwyth' knife, stuck to her chest, just below where the heart should be. She let out a strange squeak and slid slowly to her knees, slumped against the cooker and stayed there between the cooker and the cupboard, wedged in by her own enormous weight. The blood in the corner of her mouth stopped frothing.

  I stepped forward and put my finger under her chin and closed the ugly, gaping mouth. I didn't care so much about her eyes, I couldn't really see them. I could tell now that it was a taffeta gown, and she had a set of pearls and a brooch and various other trashy gewgaws. Only the hat was missing.

  There was a rasping sound from the far end of the caravan, the sound of a match on the side of a box. A light hovered pale and gold for a second and then went out, replaced by the steadier flame of a candle. So acute had my senses become now in this near-perfect darkness that I could smell the smoke of the extinguished match. I took out my handkerchief and used it to pick up the gun.

  'It's all right, you won't need it,' a man's voice said. I walked up to him, sitting at the far end where I had sat with Judy Juice. The candle gave off a small halo of flickering gold that occasionally touched the edge of his face. It was Lester, the security guard.

  'Not much use pointing that at me,' he said. 'It's jammed.'

  'It's not jammed,' I said. 'She just didn't know how to shoot.'

  'We both know that's nonsense. But it doesn't matter. I don't intend causing any trouble. After I've smoked my cigarette I'll call the police myself, if you like.'

  'And tell them what?'

  'That I killed that sack of shit down there in the taffeta dress.'

  'You did that for Judy?'

  'I don't expect you to understand. You didn't know her.'

  'Where is she?'

  'She's gone. Where you and the other men in Aberystwyth can't hurt her. Gone far from here to a place where she won't be confronted every day by the terrible reminder of her mother's cruel death.'

  'I thought she was an orphan.'

  'She was. Most of her life. But then she came to Aberystwyth and found a mother. And then saw her gunned down in the street a few months later.'

  I gasped in the darkness. 'Mrs Bligh-Jones was Judy Juice's mother?'

  'You didn't know? Why did you think she came to Aberystwyth in the first place? To live in this stinking caravan? She came to find her mother and I came because I couldn't bear to be away from her. She got me this job, you know. I'd like to think it was because she needed to have me near. But I know it was just pity. All the same, it saved my life.'

  'The Raven never guessed who you were?'

  'I looked him in the eye and he never knew; I even threw him out on his backside.'

  'I thought the baby died on Pumlumon.'

  'That's what Bligh-Jones told Herod. But it wasn't true. No more than it was true that he was the father. It was born in the byre, but it didn't die. She put it on the church steps and it got taken to the orphanage. Judy, my beautiful little Olivia Twist.'

  I put the gun on the table. 'You're really going to tell the police you did it?'

  'Yes.'

  'You'd better wipe Judy's prints off the handle of the knife then.'

  'I already have.'

  I walked back up the caravan and out into the night, closing the door as I left. Behind in the darkness lay the corpse of a fat girl in taffeta, and a man calmly smoking a cigarette. A man known in Lampeter as Dean Morgan, head of the Faculty of Undertaking; the man who once boasted that his trade was death.

  *

  I was too tired to run but time was short. I managed to hail a cab on the main road and told him we had three minutes to get to the railway station. The streets were empty and we made it in two. I jumped out, thrust
ing too much money into his hand, and ran under the stone portal. The concourse was awash with that sharp white fluorescent light that hurts the eyes so much late at night. The lady was closing the buffet but I could see the train hadn't left. The end of the last coach was butted up against the point where the rails stopped, squeezed against the buffers. The diesel far off in the night, panting like a horse, flexing muscle, aching to leave. Along the platform the long awning stretched out into the darkness, ancient ironwork still embossed with the initials of the Great Western region. The filmy panes of glass smeared with the accumulated generations of GWR soot; and coated with that exquisite essence that condenses in the eaves of railway stations: the distilled longings and sadness of all the travellers who have parted and departed, kissed and cried and anointed the spot with their hope. Railway stations at night: as romantic as the names of far-off towns on the long-wave radio dial; magical places dislocated in time that belong to night-wanderers; pilgrims and lovers; the lonely, the hopeful and the damned.

  I searched madly for a coin to put in the platform-ticket machine, and the guard, seeing my plight and the desperation on my face, smiled and opened the gate. I ran down the platform. Beyond lay the lights of the engine sheds and the signal box, the lakes of dirty oil, the maze of lines, criss-crossing and gleaming like mercury spaghetti ... And beyond that in the mauve autumn sky, a tangled necklace of stars.

  A lone old woman in a black shawl walked up the platform pulling a small suitcase behind her. I reached her as she took a step up into the final compartment. She stopped and turned, one foot still in Aberystwyth, one foot in another world. The hat and shawl did little to disguise the liquid loveliness of Judy Juice.