The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgements

  The Louie Knight Series

  Copyright

  To all those who were there during the Jasper House years

  Let the lamp affix its beam

  The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

  Wallace Stevens

  Praise for The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth:

  ‘This is the third in Pryce’s series of Welsh-set, ironic black comedies packed with witty and original writing … Everyday life takes on extreme and absurd qualities, yet the bit of truth is never far from the surface … The quality of writing is to be relished on every page’ Irish Times

  ‘A baroque plot sees Knight struggling to find his missing girlfriend, who vanished after eating drugged raspberry ripple, while also trying to solve a 100-year-old mystery for an organ grinder and his monkey. Pryce has a talent for eerie, evocative prose’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Welcome to Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth, where the only preparation for reading is to expect the unexpected … this latest novel offers a deeper delve into the devilish imagination of this extraordinary writer. Sharpening the picture with every page, Pryce creates an Aberystwyth in which nothing is what it seems and even the nuns could be out to get you. A master of dry delivery he has an impressive ability to transpose the ordinary with the extraordinary, sweeping you away into a funfair mirror world of grotesque characters and absurd situations which keep you glued to the page at every turn. Inventive, funny and dark, Pryce packs more style into a sentence than most authors could hope for in volumes’ Big Issue

  ‘Pryce’s Aberystwyth is populated by the same hoods, crooks, heavies, conmen, liars, informers, dealers and bureaucrats that prop up the street corners of Raymond Chandler’s LA, Louie himself possessing the same unshakable idealism and acid tongue as Philip Marlowe. With a droll aphorism or astute observation never more than a sentence away, it’s the vivid characters which make Pryce’s world so intriguing’ Time Out

  On the day Dai Brainbocs arrived in Shrewsbury prison, Frankie Mephisto sent for him and explained the situation. He told him they didn’t like bookworms and eggheads in prison and that without protection the frail schoolboy genius would be dead within months. And Frankie was the only man who could provide the necessary protection. That’s when he made the offer. He told Brainbocs he had one dream left in life, and that was to visit Aberystwyth before he died and hear Myfanwy sing at the Bandstand. But, as everyone knew, Myfanwy was dying and would never sing again. You must make her well, he said. You will be put in a cell at the top of the tower overlooking the railway station. You will not be disturbed. But neither, in accordance with a paradigm established by Rumpelstiltskin, will you be allowed to leave the cell until you have found a cure. Whatever books or scientific equipment you require will be made available.

  Brainbocs accepted the proposal. He said the offer of scientific equipment would not at that stage be necessary. It was his opinion that in the matter of probing the ineffable mysteries of life, disease and death there existed no finer scientific measuring scope than a gentleman at stool. And so he ordered a new chamber pot – size seven – and went to his tower.

  Chapter 1

  ‘HEY MISTER, wanna buy my sister?’

  I stopped and turned. The kid was about twelve or thirteen years old and standing next to a discarded lobster pot, a tray of postcards slung from his neck. There were no shoes on his feet and his patched-up trousers stopped four inches below his knee in a comic zigzag hem. The sort of zigzag that never arises from wear and tear and must have been put there by his mum to elicit pity from the bank holiday tourists. Fat chance of that. He could have been standing there on fire and they wouldn’t have cared.

  ‘I’ll give you a special price. Wanna buy? She’s pretty.’

  ‘How do you get the boot polish off your cheeks when you go home at night?’

  ‘Who says it’s boot polish?’

  ‘It sure isn’t the sort of grime you get from honest toil. Or are they shooting a Dickens movie in Aberystwyth today?’

  ‘Never mock a man for being poor, mister. What are you looking for anyway? Maybe I can supply it.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m looking for something?’

  ‘In my experience there are only two reasons a man comes down the harbour wearing a face like yours. To throw himself in or because he’s looking for something he shouldn’t be looking for.’

  ‘I could do with a few clients.’

  ‘Me too. The time is out of joint, Jack. Here, take my card.’

  It said, ‘Dewi Poxcrop. Facilitator. Reasonable rates. Discretion assured.’

  I put a fifty-pence piece on top of the card tray and moved away. He placed his grimy hand on the cuff of my coat.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t interest you in my sister?’

  ‘Sorry, son,’ I said as I pulled free, ‘there’s nothing lonelier than the bought smile of a harlot.’

  He stood still for a while and stared at me as I trudged down the avenue of lobster pots drying in the sun. And then he shouted just as I reached the main road, ‘Wash your mouth out, Mac, that’s my sister you’re talking about.’

  During my years as Aberystwyth’s only private eye the client’s chair had seen just about every type of backside there was. Fat ones and bony ones; proud ones and pious; some clenched tightly in fear and others trembling with anger; some hot with indignation and some cold with hate. But only one had a tail.

  She was a small monkey, and very old, with fur turning white around the muzzle and deep sad dark eyes, like two wishing wells that hadn’t seen a penny in years. She wore an airmail-blue waistcoat and a collarless grandpa shirt with dark rims of grime around the collar and cuffs – the sort of ill-kempt appearance that you get when you have been sleeping rough for a few days, and these are the first days. Inside the collar, loosely knotted into the fur of her throat, was an Ardwyn school tie. She jumped nervously as I walked in the room and flinched a few more times at the banging sounds coming from the kitchenette. I was no zoologist, but she looked like one scared old monkey to me.

  I said good morning but she didn’t answer, just watched me closely and followed me round the room with her eyes. I took off my hat and coat and placed them with more than the usual amount of care on the hat stand. Entertaining monkeys was a new one on me but in one respect, at least, I was pretty sure they didn’t differ greatly from the other women of Aberystwyth and so I walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on. My partner, Calamity Jane, was already there, packing my belongings with an exuberance that accounted for the bangs I’d heard as I arrived. The noises made me flinch in sympathy with the ape who I sensed was still being spooked in the room next door.

  I tousled Calamity’s hair in a good morning sort of greeting and said with as little surprise as I could muster, ‘We’ve got a monkey sitting on the client’s chair.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw that.’ She carried on packing. N
ormally, you are supposed to wrap the crockery in newspaper but Calamity was putting it straight into a box.

  ‘It’s quite unusual, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You don’t have to be so cool about it,’ I said.

  When the kettle boiled I put teapot, cups, sugar and milk on to a tray and walked back into the office.

  When she saw me walking in with the tray, the monkey curled the fingers of her right hand as if holding an invisible mug and then moved it up and down in front of her mouth. I nodded in encouragement. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she smiled – she was a capuchin monkey and they generally keep their cards close to their chest – but a look of heightened interest was evident. She changed position and made a squeaking sound because she was sitting on top of a pile of bubblewrap that had been left on the chair. The few other sticks of furniture I possessed were due to be wrapped in newspaper but the client’s chair, as source of all our income, was a totem that demanded a special reverence. We didn’t have any Gainsboroughs but we had the client’s chair. Although you could say that since we were moving because it had failed to perform the duties of a client’s chair it was a moot point whether it deserved to be propitiated like that.

  I poured the tea. The phone rang and I sat down in the chair facing our visitor. Lying on the desk in front of me was the application form for the private detective’s provisional licence from the Bureau in Swansea. Calamity would soon be eighteen and was keen to get her badge: a big bright metal buzzer that she could stick in her wallet and flick out under the noses of the Aberystwyth villains. If that didn’t frighten them she could always go and buy one of those plastic pin-on sheriff stars from Woolworths. They were equally effective.

  I pushed the papers aside, drew the phone over and picked up the receiver.

  The voice on the other end had that Chicago-Welsh hybrid that the small-time hoodlums had perfected in this town: ‘What did the monkey say?’

  ‘What monkey?’

  ‘Don’t get cute. What did she say?’

  ‘That information is protected by client privilege.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s very good, just tell that to Frankie and see where it gets you. When Eli arrives tell him Frankie Mephisto says don’t forget about the book, the one Frankie Mephisto read from cover to cover and threw away because it was bollocks.’

  ‘Who’s Frankie Mephisto? Or am I being cute again?’

  He hung up.

  When I put the phone down, Calamity was in the room and she and the monkey were regarding me with a look of inquiry.

  ‘Just someone from the library,’ I said.

  A loud, semi-musical clanging noise came from downstairs. The sort of sound you might get on a fairground ride if someone jammed on the brakes, or if you dropped a piano down a flight of stairs. Or, alternatively, the sort of sound you might get if you leant an old barrel organ up against the wall outside a private detective’s office. It was followed by the slamming of a door and footsteps that echoed up the wooden stairwell. The door to the office was ajar and soon there was a man standing in it with a suitcase in his hand. I guessed he had to be Eli but he said his name was Gabriel Bassett, and since that didn’t sound anything like Eli I didn’t tell him what Frankie Mephisto said about the book. I wasn’t sure why since it was obviously a book of some significance and Frankie Mephisto didn’t sound like the sort who read many books.

  Gabriel Bassett looked over to the monkey and then raised his hand in a little wave and the monkey responded by mimicking it. Then he spoke to me. ‘This is Cleopatra, she’s always early.’ He let his gaze wander around the small office, appraising the packing cases, and said, ‘Looks like we came too late.’

  ‘We’re going to Stryd-y-Popty, across from the library. It’s not far,’ said Calamity.

  ‘You’re not closing down then?’

  ‘Nope.’

  No, I thought. But if things got much worse we might have to. The new office wasn’t all that much smaller than this one, it was just in a less desirable neighbourhood. In the past few years Canticle Street had become increasingly gentrified since the Orthopaedic Bootery started specialising in Italian designs and the Rock Café started adding fluoride to some of the lines. There were no living quarters in the new place, just an inner and an outer office and small kitchenette for the tea and a fridge for the rum. For the time being I had taken a caravan out at Ynyslas which I had mixed feelings about. It would be a beautiful place at times but there was something about the all-pervasiveness of the taste of homogenised milk that depressed the heart. Still, the money we saved would be able to make a dent in the cost of keeping Myfanwy at the nursing home and that was an overhead that no private detective’s salary was ever meant to meet. Even one of the fancy ones from Swansea.

  Gabriel Bassett looked down at his suitcase and then looked round the room for a suitable place to park it. I pointed to the hat stand.

  ‘You leaving town or just arriving?’ I said.

  ‘Neither. I always carry my suitcase around.’ He put it down by the hat stand, took a cup of tea and sat on a crate. He said he had a case for us to solve and we both gave him a look of polite inquiry but instead of continuing he sat on the crate making tongue movements against the wall of his cheek as if he was trying to dislodge a piece of gristle. I hadn’t seen this approach before and if it was meant to heighten tension it was good.

  ‘Is there anything more you think we should know about it?’ I asked.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bundle of notes held together by an elastic band. It was the biggest bundle of notes I’d ever seen, but that probably didn’t make it all that big. He put it down on the table and it rolled back and forth under its own weight like a rocking chair.

  ‘I need it solved by a fortnight today. That gives you fifteen days if you count today. But since I’ll come round about noon it probably only means fourteen and a half. The roll on the table is five hundred in fives, twenties and fifties. Consider it a down payment. There’s another five hundred if you solve it. If you don’t, there isn’t.’

  Calamity flicked open a notebook and picked up a pen. ‘What’s the job?’

  ‘Investigate a burglary. At Nanteos Mansion, end of May. A necklace was taken – it was in all the papers.’

  ‘We didn’t see it.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. It was May 1849.’

  I opened my mouth to say something but couldn’t think of anything. The monkey interjected. She did that by raising her hand and when Bassett looked at her she brought the left hand towards the right and there followed a little dance of fingers tapping palms and wrapping themselves round other fingers.

  He turned to me. ‘She wants to know if you’ve seen Mr Bojangles.’

  I paused for a second. ‘That looked like sign language.’

  ‘Yes. Have you seen him?’

  ‘Mr Bojangles?’

  ‘It’s her son, disappeared fifteen years ago. I’m sorry, I would have got to it but she always jumps the gun. Always jumps the damn gun she does.’

  ‘Tell her we haven’t seen him.’

  ‘What does he look like?’ said Calamity.

  ‘What do you think he looks like?’ snapped Bassett. ‘He looks like her, only smaller.’ He turned to Cleopatra and did some more signs. She gave a sort of deflated nod as if to say, ‘Well it was just a long shot.’

  ‘It’s pretty unusual for a monkey to use sign language,’ I said unnecessarily.

  ‘She used to work at the university, the department of linguistics. You know those research projects they do into primate language, see if they can get monkeys to talk and things? She used to be in one. I got her cheap after they stopped the funding.’

  I picked up the bundle of notes and weighed it in my hand. It was about as heavy as a cricket ball. ‘Tell us about the necklace.’

  ‘Oval, flat-cut garnets set in gold with close-backed foil collets, concealed clasp and pear-shaped garnet drop. It belonged t
o Cranogwen Phrys-Griffiths from Nanteos. She was the squire’s daughter. Coming of age present. You know Nanteos mansion out by Capel Seion?’

  ‘I’ve driven past it a few times.’

  ‘Tell me what you know about it.’

  ‘Georgian country house, covered in ivy, nice-looking. There’s a ghost and a fragment of a wooden medieval drinking bowl called the Nanteos Cup – some people say it’s the Holy Grail.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  I shrugged. ‘I keep an open mind.’

  ‘The ghost is real. It’s Cranogwen. She died in a fire, May 1849. They hanged the stable boy for it. It was a miscarriage of justice.’

  ‘You saying they got the wrong guy?’

  ‘The ghost says it was the stable boy. I say she’s a lying bitch. They found the kid halfway up the ivy. He said he saw smoke and was on his way up to rescue her. The peelers said he ravished her and knocked the bedside lamp over in the struggle.’

  ‘Maybe that’s how it happened,’ I said.

  ‘Whose side are you on?’

  ‘Nobody’s yet.’

  ‘It’s true the stable boy was sweet on Cranogwen, but he never laid a finger on her. It was all circumstantial. They found the necklace later in his stable, and a bridle under the girl’s bed. But what does that prove? And then this ghostly handwriting appeared on the wall above the bed saying, “comes stabuli”. It’s Latin, means “keeper of the stable”. That clinched it: the kid had to swing. And not even seventeen.’

  ‘So where do we come in?’

  ‘I need to clear his name.’

  ‘By a fortnight today,’ said Calamity with the matter-of-fact air of one crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a bit unorthodox,’ I said.

  ‘So is five hundred in cash up front.’

  He had a good point there.

  I saw them both out to the street. Gabriel Bassett loaded the suitcase on to the barrel organ, Cleopatra jumped up on top of that and they made ready to wheel away. I said to Basset, ‘Does the name Frankie Mephisto mean anything to you?’