Aberystwyth Mon Amour (8 page)

She enjoyed a mild snicker and sipped her tea. Then she opened her handbag with a snap and pulled out a scrap of purple cloth.

‘They found this under the bed. They put it in a plastic bag and gave me a receipt for it. “Suspected tea cosy”, it said. “He’s never been involved in anything like that,” I said. “That’s for the judge to decide,” they said. Then they went.’

I took the cloth and looked at it.

It was just a scrap of wool, about the size of a postage stamp.

‘I suppose you know your son had a few enemies?’

She snorted. ‘Bloomin’ millions. If it wasn’t for Myfanwy coming round here once in a while, I don’t think we’d ever see another human face. We’re not a very popular family –’

‘Now don’t go saying that,’ interjected Myfanwy.

‘Ha! you don’t have to waste any time trying to fool me. I know the things they say.’

‘What do they say?’ I asked.

‘You know very well. Don’t you go teasing me. They say I’m a witch.’

Myfanwy gasped and put her hand to her mouth. It fooled no one. Everyone knew Evans the Boot’s Mam was a witch.

‘Are they right?’ I joked.

She pulled a face as if trying to dismiss any significance that might attach to her words. ‘Well, as you know, if a young girl’s in trouble and she doesn’t want her parents to learn of it, she can always come here for some advice, and maybe a few herbs if you know what I mean. But that hardly makes you a witch now does it?’

Myfanwy sympathised. ‘Of course not.’

‘It’s not like I use a knitting needle. Just a few boiled leaves, no harm in that.’

‘No different from aromatherapy,’ said Myfanwy.

‘And then there’s the runes. I do a bit of translating, now and again, you know. Nothing fancy of course.’

Myfanwy turned to me. ‘Mrs Evans is the best rune-translater for miles around.’

She nodded to the chimney breast where a piece of framed runic script hung decoratively over the mantelpiece. It made my mind wander back to those desolate Friday afternoons in the third year when the double-period of rune composition made the time until 4 o’clock seem like a life sentence.

‘She used to translate for the County,’ Myfanwy added.

I smiled at Mrs Evans but she waved the compliment aside.

‘Or if someone can’t sleep,’ she continued, taking care not to overlook any piece of evidence against her, ‘well I know a few herbs which can be useful there, too, don’t I?’

‘And they call you a witch just for that!’ scoffed Myfanwy.

‘And there’s the love potions, of course, and the Saturday mornings at the Witches’ Co-op. But only on the till.’

Myfanwy scoffed again. ‘No different from working in the sweet shop. Mrs Abergynolwen works on the till on Wednesdays, too.’

Ma Evans spat in contempt. ‘Mrs Abergynolwen! She doesn’t know her mandragora from her henbane!’

‘Anyway,’ said Myfanwy soothingly, ‘you shouldn’t let them call you a witch. I’d put a spell on them if I were you.’

‘Oh I do! You should see the rash I give ’em! All over – like spotted dick. All I need is a bit of their clothing, or something they’ve touched. Menstrual fluid and nail clippings work best; or sometimes Julian brings me a vole and I can –’

The cat jumped up from within the house on to the window frame and mewed.

‘No not you, I was just talking to Myfanwy.’

Julian mewed again.

‘I didn’t! I just mentioned your name! I was telling her about the voles.’

The cat made a short exasperated mew and leaped back into the house.

As we walked back along the dunes, the sky in the west became molten and the far-off windows of Borth burned with golden fire. The heat of the day had slipped away, and the rising breeze had a sudden chill edge to it which brought goosebumps to Myfanwy’s back. We quickened our step and I reflected on the extra significance that today’s sunset had acquired. Why hadn’t I just told them I didn’t know what they were looking for? I began to regret having been so cocky with them.

‘Let’s go for a drink,’ said Myfanwy.

‘Don’t you have to work tonight?’

‘I phoned in sick this morning.’

‘You shouldn’t do that.’

‘Oh don’t be such a misery. Aren’t you having fun?’

‘Of course I am.’

I led the way across the road to the Schooner Inn. We sat on a sofa in the lounge and drank beer as the setting sun turned the windows to stained glass.

‘I’ve had a really, really, really lovely day,’ said Myfanwy simply.

I nodded.

‘Later we can have fish and chips.’

I said nothing and Myfanwy put her hand on my arm.

‘What’s wrong? You’ve gone all quiet.’

I sighed and took a drink. ‘Do you know what has happened to Evans the Boot?’

She shook her head. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Haven’t you any idea at all?’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘After you left my office, some Druids came and ransacked it. I don’t know what they were looking for but they told me I had until sunset this evening to give it to them.’

‘What will they do to you?’

I shrugged. ‘You know their methods.’

She twisted a beer mat between her fingers. ‘And I’ve got you into this. I’m such a cow, I should never have involved you.’

‘What could they be after?’

‘Louie, I really don’t know what it could be.’

A glittering drop of rain spattered against the window.

It must have been just after midnight; the rain was sluicing down from the sky in torrents and we took cover beneath a coat from the back of the car and ran across the street to my office. Once inside I went into the kitchen to fetch the bottle of rum and two glasses. When I returned to the office Myfanwy was standing in the doorway to the bedroom.

‘Mmmm … how many poor girls have you undone in this room?’

‘Not many.’

‘Don’t lie to me you wicked man.’

‘No honest.’

‘You’re a private detective, you must get women throwing themselves at you all the time.’

I laughed. ‘In Aberystwyth?’

‘You surely don’t expect me to believe you?’

‘It’s up to you.’

She disappeared into the bedroom and I followed her in. She sat down on the bed and ran her hand across the covers, and then stopped with a puzzled look on her face. We both looked across to her hand, which was resting on an odd-looking mound in the duvet. Gingerly she pulled back the covers, her expression deepening from one of puzzlement to fear and then, as she let out a long, shrill, ear-piercing scream, to one of horror. Lying on the pillow, in a dark sticky pool, was the head of a donkey.

Chapter 6

‘HERE YOU ARE, Mr Knight, my multi-vitamin special to pick you up.’

I took the ice cream and wandered disconsolately along the Prom in the direction of Eeyore’s stable, the donkey’s head in a cardboard box under my arm. Sospan had said I looked tired and it was hardly surprising really. Friday night had been spent in the police cell. And last night, after I had calmed Myfanwy down and driven her home, my attempts at catching a few hours’ sleep met with little success. And when I did finally manage to fall asleep shortly before dawn, I had slipped into the nightmare which has visited me, on and off, for the past twenty years. A cold, rainswept late Friday afternoon in January, the light fading so fast behind the lowering cloud that it is almost dusk, and there’s still half an hour to go before the last school bell. The world is a symphony of greys: slate sky, grass the colour of the sea in winter, the mobile classrooms and metalwork blocks discernible only as black shapes containing yellow postage stamps of warm, yellow light – the light from which we are exiled. Reaching into the sky the white totemic masts of the rugby posts. And walking towards me through a herd of muddy boys in rugby jerseys is Herod Jenkins. I don’t know why, among all the many episodes of misery, it is always this one that haunts me. Why, for example, it is not the terrible day when Marty went off on that cross-country run and didn’t return. Or why it isn’t that time in the summer downpour when Herod ordered the other boys to bowl cricket balls at me and to aim for my nose. But it is always this particular scene: that cold, rainy January afternoon when he walked towards me through the jeering boys and said, ‘Come on then, son, do you want some?’ And I was faced with the Hobson’s choice of trying to take the ball off him and suffering the battering which that would entail, or of disobeying him, which was even worse. ‘Come on then, son, do you want some?’ As the kids jeered and Herod’s face widened with that horizontal crease he called a smile.

*

Eeyore sat on a bale of hay, his head resting in his hands, and stared gloomily at the decapitated head.

‘In your bed?’

I nodded.

The early-morning sun made the dust in the stable dance and sparkle.

He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s Esmeralda.’

‘Yes, I know. I recognised the white ear. I’m sorry.’

He made a dismissive expression. ‘I thought at first it was one of those gangs, you know, the ones that smuggle them into Holland for those movies they do.’

I picked up a sack and laid it over the donkey’s head, silencing the withering gleam of accusation in her eye.

‘I don’t think she suffered much,’ I offered uselessly.

‘No, it’s us who remain who are fated to suffer.’

‘Dad! Don’t be like that.’

He rose to his feet with the desperate weariness of the prize fighter who would really prefer to stay down on the canvas.

‘Come, I want to give you something.’

He led me through the stable, past the quietly shuffling donkeys and into an outhouse where he removed a brick from the wall and reached inside. He pulled out a key.

‘There’s not much I can do for you. Too old for that now. But I can give you this.’

He placed the key in my hand.

‘It’s to a caravan in Ynyslas. A ghost van, built from two sections of crash write-offs welded together. No records exist for it anywhere. Not the police, not the Council, not the Chirpy Caravaners of Britain Association. It’s ice-cold. You can’t see it from the road, it’s hidden behind the Borth Lagoons Holiday Camp sign. Even the caretaker doesn’t know about it. If things get too hot for you, you could hang out there for a while. No one would find you.’

I closed my hand around the key.

‘There’s food and water and a brand new ludo set. It’s not much but it might help.’

‘Thanks.’

He waved my gratitude impatiently away. ‘Now you get out of here and find those guys. I’ve got a donkey to bury.’

From the harbour I walked up through the Castle to the top of town and turned right just before the market to KnitWits the wool shop. The bell tinkled and I walked through the aisle of displays stacked to the ceiling with wool in every shade and grade that the shepherd could offer. I put the scrap of wool from Evans the Boot’s Mam on the counter and waited as Mildred Crickhowell examined it with a jeweller’s loupe. It made her look like a Cyclops: one watery jellyfish-sized eye criss-crossed with spidery red veins.

‘It’s tea cosy all right,’ she laughed. ‘Funny, you don’t look the type!’

‘It’s … it’s not mine,’ I said lamely.

She laughed again. ‘No, it never is! Don’t tell me, it belongs to a friend!’

I squirmed. Visitors to the town were often surprised by the amount of shops selling tea cosies, especially as most of them were concentrated down by the harbour. Just when this harmless piece of tea-pot furniture became a front for another form of spout-warming activity was a mystery lost in history.

I picked up the scrap of wool. ‘Can you be sure it’s cosy? I mean it’s just a piece of wool, it could be from a cardigan or something.’

The woman leaned her shoulders back and tilted her head in the sort of look which said: ‘What do you mean sure?! This is KnitWits you’ve come to, you know?’

She handed me the eyepiece. ‘See for yourself.’

As I held the cloth up to the light and examined the weave, she explained to me the various features.

‘See the fine dust particles in the yarn? That’s tea dust. Now look at the way the threads are woven together. See? Like figure-of-eights intertwined with zigzags? That’s pretty fancy crocheting. You don’t see that sort of thing very often. That’s what’s known as the Hildegaard Purl after the Hildegaardian Order of the Sisters of Deiniol. They invented it. Now that tells us something very interesting.’

There was a pause as I struggled to see the things she was talking about.

‘Very interesting,’ she repeated.

‘Yeah, why?’

‘Dates it, doesn’t it. Surer than carbon dating, that is. It’s from 1958.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Hildegaard Purl was invented that year, and then not long after the sisters abjured the vice of amusement and stopped the knitting. No one else can do it like they could. And there’s more. Look at the curved edge with the elaborate stitching. See it?’

‘Yes!’ I said, amazed at how much the woman had seen through her magnifying glass.

‘See how the fibres are shrivelled and discoloured?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s classic scorching. That’s where the spout would have gone. Now see around that rim those funny symbols?’

‘Yes! Like hieroglyphics.’

‘Ha!’ She laughed and smacked me on the back with a force you wouldn’t have expected from a lady of her age. ‘Not bad for someone who claims not to know anything about tea cosies. They’re not hieroglyphics, but you’re not far wrong. Early Mayan alphabet. Which means what you’ve got here is the
Mhexuataacahuatcxl
. It’s from a limited edition set of cosies knitted by the Sisters of Deiniol for Ma Prytherch’s Tea Cosy Emporium in 1958. Creation Legends of the World series. This is
Mhexuataacahuatcxl
, the Mayan fertility god.’

I put the eyepiece down and stared at her in wonder.

She was grinning with delight; it wasn’t often she got a chance to show off like this.

She picked up the eyepiece and had another look herself.

‘And, if I’m not mistaken, this little crescent shape at the edge is all that remains of his loin cloth. The design is chiefly based on source material uncovered by the 1935 Oxford University Expedition to the Cordillera Oriental.
Mhexuataacahuatcxl
was the deity responsible for the renewal of vegetation and patron god of the corporation of goldsmiths. Human victims were killed and flayed to honour him twice a year. The loin cloth is a bit of licence. He could assume the form of man or woman, you see. Obviously that was a bit racy for those sisters so they left the precise details to our imaginations.’