Last Tango in Aberystwyth Page 13

  He squirmed awkwardly round to face me over the passenger seat. ‘You’ll like this place better. It’s remote and it’s quiet. Far from the hurly-burly, and from the madding crowd. It’s a place where two men can unwind and get to know each other. And, best of all, it’s the sort of place where if you hurt yourself you can die safe in the knowledge that your whimpers won’t disturb anybody’s peace.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t hold the odd whimper against a dying man.’

  ‘Every man has a right to whimper, peeper. Even you. Especially you.’

  A few miles down the road we pulled off and drove up a rough dirt track. The car’s suspension was not good and we jumped and jerked around like drunken puppets. But the driver seemed not to care and Harri Harries sat up front with a smile on his face that didn’t reach his eyes which were cold and intense.

  We skidded to a stone-splattering halt outside a building that looked like an electricity substation, surrounded by a chain-wire fence, topped with barbed-wire. The twin gates were chained with thick anchor chain and a padlock the size of a sporran. A mournful electric hum filled the air. We passed through the gate and Harri Harries pointed to the sign that read: ‘Danger. Keep Out.’ ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned, shamus.’

  I decided I’d seen enough and as soon as they pulled me out of the car I made a run for it. But they had been expecting this … They were both on me within seconds, and with my hands cuffed behind me ruining my balance I was soon sprawling and eating cinders. A blackjack rained down a few times and I was groggily dragged or pushed towards the building. Crudely painted slabs of concrete cemented together to make a wall. Steel-frame window, the panes filthy and broken and replaced with cardboard. Dirty green paint that had all flaked off to reveal the desiccated wooded subframe. Signs showing stick figure people in attitudes of pain being hit with z-shaped electric rays coming down from the sky. A building whose rough brick architecture seemed to be designed solely to make lonely places in which to beat up the innocent. The deputy opened the second door and they shoved me through. The space inside was taken up with piled-up boxes and packing-cases, overflowing files and sacks of paper. There was a cleared space with a workbench and a chair that looked like it had been borrowed from a pre-war dentist’s. It had leather restraining straps. There were dark stains of splattered liquid on the cement floor, stains that could have been blood, and over in the corner was a table covered in fancy-dress clothing. A wolf ‘s outfit and a little girl’s dress – a dirndl, the sort that Heidi used to wear. They pushed me into the chair and fastened the straps. The nausea of fear began to well up inside from the pit of my stomach, up and up to my throat. I swallowed hard.

  ‘Like the chair? We got it from the sanatorium. They’re not allowed to use them any more – illegal.’

  I was too scared to answer.

  Harri dragged up a chair and sat, legs astride it, facing me from the side. I nodded towards the table in the corner. ‘Are we going to have a party?’

  He gave a quick glance and said, ‘Yeah but you’re not on the guest list.’

  He took out a pack of cigarettes, gave it a rapid shake, and grabbed a protruding cigarette between his lips. Then he lit it and spoke through clenched lips the way they do in the movies. Why didn’t he just take the cigarette out for a minute if he wanted to speak? The same reason he did everything: just one long trailer for a movie I’d seen a hundred times before.

  The deputy brought over a canvas bag and dumped it with a loud metal clang on the table. There were a lot of iron things inside and my heart froze. How crazy were they? I had no idea. Harri Harries was new here. Maybe they really did keep law and order like this in Llanelli. Where was the deputy from? He was dressed like a constable but I noticed now the numbers on his arm were all zeros. I’d never seen him before and something told me if I survived this night I probably wouldn’t be seeing him again. Not unless Harri Harries needed to do some more special policing.

  Harri put his hand inside the bag and performed the pantomime of someone doing a lucky dip. He pulled out a monkey-wrench. Lucky old me. I put a foot on the tabletop. Harri turned the wrench in his hand and then let the flat side fall on to the exposed bone of my shin. Tears of pain filled my eyes. It was just a lazy slap but the message it conveyed was clear: if this is the hors d’oeuvre, just imagine the banquet to come.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said through gritted teeth.

  He rested his elbow on the back of the chair, rested his chin on the palm of his hand and said simply, ‘I want to ask you a few things about Dean Morgan. Principally, where the fuck he is.’ He puffed smoke gently out towards the ceiling.

  ‘But I don’t know where he is.’

  He made a thoughtful face. ‘I thought you might say that. That’s why you’ll notice a slight departure here from formal police-interview procedure. It’s not an easy one to spot, quite subtle, but someone with your enormous experience should be able to get it. Any ideas?’

  ‘The fancy dress?’

  He glanced again at the clothing in the corner and shook his head. He pulled the pen out of his breast pocket and held it out to me. ‘You see? It’s this. I’m not taking any notes.’

  Again I said nothing, just wished he’d cut the comedy.

  ‘Now there’s a good reason for that. My experience with interviewing peepers is that they generally know a good deal of information that would be useful to the police but that they are reluctant to release it, either because they are selfish or because of something that is called protecting client confidentiality. They usually lay great store by this which is an area where they differ greatly from me because I don’t give a fuck about it. And that, my friend, is the reason that in contrast to established procedure I’m not taking notes. Because the first ten minutes of any interview is usually bollocks. And then after I have used some of the plumbing tools in the bag here interviewees start to open up a bit. A bit like unblocking a drain.’

  The deputy snorted in appreciation.

  ‘You just love to hear yourself talk, don’t you?’

  ‘Wrong, peeper. I love to make other people talk; shy retiring people like you.’

  ‘What is it you want to know?’ I said.

  ‘I want to know where the Dean is.’

  ‘I’ve been looking for him for two weeks. I don’t know where he is. No one does.’

  ‘You see what I mean? You’re just like all the rest. They start off saying they know nothing and by the end of the interview I’ve got an aching wrist from taking notes.’

  ‘Why are you looking for him?’

  A sudden flash of anger seized him and he smacked the wrench against my shin again. ‘Don’t you fucking start interviewing me! I’m not the one tied to a chair.’ He stuck his face up close to mine, so close I could feel the heat of his anger burning on his skin. ‘You creepy little snoopers never stop, do you? Always poking your dirty little snouts into where they don’t belong, prying and snooping and spying … isn’t that right? You’d just love to put your eye to my keyhole, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t need to, Harries. I wouldn’t see anything I hadn’t seen a thousand times before.’

  ‘Oh is that so!’

  ‘You’re just another two-bit Sunday-school teacher that took a wrong turning, Harries; brought up in some quagmire of a valley above Ebbw Vale, in the shadow of the chapel, living in a grey house beneath a dripping grey sky drinking grey spoons of gruel fed to you by your grey mam and singing grey songs of thanks every grey Sunday for the shitty grey life the good grey Lord so kindly gave you. The highlight of your week was getting beaten with a leather strap to make you good and the only girl you ever kissed went “Baaa!” –’

  The wrench smashed down again. I gagged like a sobbing child and screwed my eyes up as the tears squelched out of the corners. As I groaned he brought his face up close and hissed in a cloud of nicotine, ‘It may help your memory to know that the wrench is the friendliest tool in the bag. Five minutes from now and you’ll be
begging me to use that nice old wrench. Do you understand?’

  I nodded. I was no tough guy. I was ready to tell him anything. The trouble was, I didn’t know anything. A few scraps of nothing that would only serve to convince him I was holding out on him and make him madder, because I was sure now that when he got mad like he just did it wasn’t an act. Make him madder and introduce me to the whole range of his DIY plumbing skills. He reached into the bag and pulled out an electric sander. The deputy’s face lit up and Harri looked around for a plug. He found one on the wall behind the bench.

  ‘Would you ’effin’ believe it!’ he cursed. ‘It’s a round-pin.’ He held the flex of the sander and let the plug that he couldn’t plug in dangle uselessly just to help me realise how close I’d come. He threw the sander back into the bag and did another lucky dip. This time he pulled out a blowtorch. His mood brightened. ‘That’s better! Old-tech, can’t go wrong.’ He pumped the plunger to build up the pressure and lit the gas, then adjusted it until he got a perfect spear-blade of hot blue flame. He held it next to his ear. ‘They say that the worst part about being burned with one of these is after it stops, when the flesh cooks itself slowly like a leg of lamb in the oven.’

  ‘Please don’t do it, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

  He waved the flame at my face. ‘OK, so where is he?’

  ‘He’s out at the Komedy Kamp. Buried under the floor of chalet 7c,’ I said in desperation.

  A look of surprise lit up the cop’s face. ‘You’re kidding? How did he get there?’

  ‘It’s like this,’ I began. ‘This Dean acted the part of the big holy monk, you know the type – wouldn’t know one end of a woman from another. Holier than thou and all that, but it’s all for show. Inside he has a special hobby, something he likes to do, something that he is ashamed to even think about but he still likes to do it …’ I looked at the cop. He had put the blowtorch down and was sitting there drinking up the story. This was easier than he’d expected.

  ‘So what was it then, peeper?’

  ‘Stiffs.’

  Cop nodded, trying to look businesslike, as if this what he had suspected all along.

  ‘Of course, he’s not the only person around town who likes them a bit cold. It’s quite a popular pastime in some quarters, so I’m told. But not many people are in such an excellent position to do something about it. Old men, young girls, you name it, he was into it. And that might have been an end of it. He could have carried on like that and no one would have been any the wiser. But he gets greedy. Maybe he’s planning on a retirement and needs a better quality nest egg, or maybe he’s just tired of scrimping and saving all his life. Either way he could do with a little extra money. Couldn’t we all? He finds himself approached by a couple of guys who want in on the game. They happen to have some clients who also fancy a night of passion in the morgue and they’re willing to pay. So these two new guys ask him how about it? Like to share the spoils for a bit of extra cash? And he thinks why not? As long as everyone is discreet about it no one need know and everyone is discreet of course because they are all respectable men in respectable positions. And so it goes on for a while but then the two new guys think of a new angle. A special-request service. You see someone walking around you fancy, have a word with us and we can arrange the death and a subsequent night of passion.’

  The cop whistled. This was worse than anything he’d yet encountered. And if he knew the first thing about the underworld he’d know it was pure invention and not very good at that. But he didn’t.

  ‘Of course this is way out of the Dean’s league. Bonking a few corpses, yes, he didn’t have a problem with that, and for a man like him for whom death was a way of life, it wasn’t a big deal. But this was something else entirely. Murder to order? No way. The trouble was, the two guys had made a mistake. They’d miscalculated and let him in on the plan; that gave them a problem. So they invite him to town to discuss the matter. And they get persuasive. Very persuasive. The Dean’s no fool, he realises they are planning to silence him, silence him for good. He tries to run away and hide out in town. But what does he know about the cloak-and-dagger stuff? He’s just a crusty old academic fallen in with a bad lot. It was only a matter of time before they got to him.’

  The cop nodded thoughtfully as he took it in. He was deeply disturbed. ‘So who are the two guys?’

  ‘I don’t know the names, but one of them is the garage mechanic at Kousin Kevin’s Kamp, he’s the muscle. The other is the security guy there. He’s the brains.’

  The cop made a determined frown. ‘That little jerk – I know him!’

  ‘Of course he’ll deny it all,’ I said.

  Harri Harries picked up the bag of tools. ‘We’ll see about that.’

  It was still early evening and sleet was falling as they padlocked the gates and dropped me off at the bus stop. The sort of bus stop that looked like bus arrivals were charted with a calendar rather than a clock. I hobbled over to the red telephone box. The door squeaked like a seagull and the inside stank of urine. Llunos’s voice had the tone of one who really didn’t want to get up and answer the phone at 8 pm in the evening, knowing full well it wouldn’t be anything good. I looked at the distant row of yellow lights from behind sitting-room curtains and I knew what he meant. But this had to be done. I told him briefly about what had happened and told him to get up from his tea, the newspaper and the TV, put on his coat and go and find the two guys from Kousin Kevin’s. He didn’t say no, he just sighed and said, ‘Why me, Louie?’

  ‘Who else is there?’ He knew that was true.

  ‘You’re asking me to arrest a couple of guys who’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘Well it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’

  ‘This isn’t funny, Louie.’

  ‘Who’s laughing? Look at it this way, you’ll probably be saving their lives. Or at the least preventing a serious assault taking place. Just keep them banged-up until we can sort this out. If you keep them under your nose they should be safe.’

  Sometime after midnight I parked outside the Moulin and walked in. It was quieter tonight than the last time, smoky and slightly sleepy, as if all the moods of all the people there had become synchronised and the flavour of the night was dreamy-mellow. I ordered a drink, listened to the singers and let my gaze wonder sleepily around the room. It came to rest on a girl dancing and my eyes stayed there for a while with my thoughts wandered elsewhere. Then slowly those thoughts returned and my attention focused on her. Suddenly I understood how a rabbit feels when it stares transfixed at the headlight of an oncoming car.

  She was tall but not too tall and slim but not skinny. Her figure was voluptuous and statuesque like one of those space-travelling goddesses in newspaper strip-cartoons, the ones whose job it is to save the universe. She wore a tight bodice of soft white lace, partially unbuttoned so that the cups of her brassiere, like the hands of a malevolent dwarf, thrust her breasts forward to taunt the men who watched in awe. The waist-button of her jeans was undone and the button below that too so that the edge of her white panties flashed in the ultraviolet light. Her midriff was bare and taut, and her faded Levi’s 501s had been cut off at about the level that her bicycle saddle reached when she was seventeen. A saddle that had, no doubt, been stolen long ago and was now worth ten times more than the bike.

  She danced wonderfully and provocatively with a flowing Polynesian languor, her hair glistening like moonlit water. Occasionally the cascading blonde hair would swamp her soft brown shoulder and the strap of her bodice would be washed away in the flood; and when that happened, her breast remained impossibly in position, mocking and taunting, like a puppet that continues to dance after its strings have been cut. Every time I tried to look away my gaze returned of its own accord, like a compass needle pointing north.

  The boy she was with was one of the camp, symbolist painters who sold their work to the tourists on the Prom. He was wearing a ruffed shirt and stage make-up and no doubt had l
eft a portfolio with the hat-check girl containing five dreary views of the bandstand with the moon hanging behind it like a rotten fruit. Scarcely eighteen or nineteen, hardly old enough to have made an enemy in this world, and yet in the Moulin tonight this boy was despised by every man there. Because we all knew from the expression on the goddess’s face – the truculent, savage aristocratic disdain – that she had chosen him purely to demonstrate her contempt for the rest of us. Chosen this effete, cross-dressing, half-grown milksop to show us how she despised us for being such hopeless fools; for surrendering ourselves so abjectly at the sight of her flesh. She had chosen him not as a dance-partner, but as a scalpel with which to expose like an Aztec priest our hearts to the common view and make us see, even though we already knew, what pathetic and feeble objects they were. Our palpitating flesh as craven as that of a guard dog who allows himself to be bought off with a bone and licks the hand of the man come to kill his master. And though our humiliation was already more than complete, she intensified it further by ordering round after round of exotic drinks – flaming black sambucas and B52s – which they knocked back in one, and which she paid for from a wallet stuck in her back pocket. And after that, eyes smouldering with contempt, she pressed her chest hard against the boy’s bony ribcage and slid with lugubrious, side-to-side slithers up into his undeserving, pimply face. I stopped a waitress and asked the name of this girl in the tones of a shepherd asking about that new star in the east. And she told me without even bothering to look, told me with the air of one sick of explaining the obvious to the ignorant. ‘It’s Judy Juice, the movie star.’

  She left shortly after and so I paid for my drink and followed at a discreet distance. By the time I got to the street she was gone, and someone else hailed me from just outside the gateway. It was Calamity, leaning against a lamppost. I looked at my watch – it was gone one and I was about to remonstrate with her for being out so late but then I saw the stricken look in her eyes, her complexion the pallor of cigarette ash.