From Aberystwyth with Love (24 page)

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’.

‘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.