Last Tango in Aberystwyth Read online

  ‘Yes,’ said Llunos sadly. ‘It’s something.’

  Chapter 15

  MARTY’S MUM’S HOUSE was a two-mile walk off the main road up a country lane. There were no streetlights but the wet drizzly sky gave off a soft luminescence and provided more than enough light for eyes that had got used to the dark. Despite the cold and wet it was strangely pleasant, calm and peaceful so far away from the frenetic activity of Aberystwyth. The only sound was the occasional bark of a distant dog and even that was comforting. You could tell without seeing that these were wholesome well-fed dogs who would run up to you and nuzzle your hand, not the snarling, half-starved packs of curs that slunk through the rubble of town at night. After a while I began to make out the orange light from the house, glowing through the swaying black filigree of the trees.

  The door was on a chain, Marty’s mum lived alone, and peered at me from inside as a wave of hot firelit air hit me. Air filled with cinnamon and baking smells and that indefinable but not unpleasant aroma that the insides of other people’s houses have. Recognition took only a fraction of a second and she let out a gasp before closing the door slightly to release the chain.

  Once I was inside she stood facing me looking up and grasped my face in her hands. We didn’t speak, she just beamed at me, her old watery eyes sparkling and then her face darkened as a thought occurred to her. ‘I knew you’d come when I heard.’

  I nodded.

  ‘So it’s true then? He’s alive?’

  ‘Yes. I came as soon as I could.’

  She touched my cheek. ‘You’re a good man, Louie.’ Then she turned and I followed her down the corridor to the kitchen at the back.

  ‘It’s funny, I always suspected it. I had a feeling … they say a mother always knows. Mind you, it’s always good to see you, Louie, whatever the occasion.’

  The kitchen was filled with warmth and I sat down at the table while Marty’s mum stirred some stew on the stove. There was a rifle on the table, halfway through being cleaned. We both looked at it at the same time and then our eyes met.

  ‘It’s no good you looking at me like that.’

  ‘Bit late in the year to be hunting rabbits, isn’t it?’

  ‘Bit late in life, too, that’s what you’re thinking, I know.’

  ‘Or perhaps you’re hunting something a bit bigger?’

  ‘This one’s no bunny rabbit, that’s for sure.’

  I put my hand on the gleaming oily barrel. ‘This isn’t the way.’

  She stopped stirring and stood motionless at the stove and then said, ‘He took my son, Louie. Sent him off on a cross-country run in weather that even the SAS on the Brecon Beacons don’t go out in.’

  She brought over the stew and I ate hungrily. Through the steam swirling up from the spoon I could see the smiling picture of Marty on the mantelpiece above the fire. It was a washed-out colour snap of him on a beach at some south-coast English resort, seven or eight years old.

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘you should leave it to the experts. I hear there’s going to be a posse.’

  She scoffed. ‘Bank tellers, postmen, ironmongers, filing-clerks … They’ll try and take him alive, the fools.’

  ‘A hunt is no place for you. It’s not right.’

  ‘Right or not right, I don’t care any more, Louie. I’m getting old now and I’ve got no one here to comfort me. I lost a good husband to the mines and a good son to the games teacher. It’s time to even the score.’

  ‘You’ll be wasting your time, he could be anywhere between here and Welshpool.’

  ‘It’s not so difficult if you know where to look. He’ll make for somewhere sacred. No different from a wounded fox. Somewhere that means something special to him, from long ago. Some place he cherishes, that he holds dear from a happy time before everything got ruined.’

  ‘Sure, I said. ‘But no one knows where that is.’

  After supper we talked until late. I told Marty’s mum about what I’d seen, about the fall of Valentine, and how the Meals on Wheels had eclipsed the druids. She scoffed and warned me not to pay too much attention to outward appearances. Druids or the Meals on Wheels, underneath they were all the same. Like shoots growing in different parts of a garden that come from the same tree. The one to really watch out for, she said, was Mrs Llantrisant, even though she was still in prison.

  At midnight, the clock chimed and Marty’s mum looked slightly startled.

  ‘Oh my word!’ she said. ‘Almost forgot. Come! we must be quick, he usually starts at midnight.’

  Ignoring the puzzled look on my face she beckoned to me to follow her. She doused all the lights in the house and switched on a torch and led me up to the attic bedroom, a small garret that looked out over the hills south of Aberystwyth. The night was dark and featureless, even the lights of the scattered cottages having been extinguished, and only the ceaseless blink of the lighthouse beyond Cwmtydu reminding us that there were other people alive tonight.

  ‘Wait for it now,’ she whispered.

  We stared out, holding our breath, waiting and watching for I knew not what, the lighthouse the only point of focus in the darkness. And then it happened.

  ‘Oooh! Here we go,’ hissed Marty’s mum.

  Something happened to the light from the lighthouse. Something that I had seen only once before in my life, that I struggled to find words for, seen once many moons ago at a meeting of children whose purpose was now lost to me. A shadow temporarily obscured the light, like a cloud sliding across the face of the moon. And then it passed and was followed by another smaller shadow. And then a bigger one. Marty’s mum nudged me and pointed further to the south where the object that had temporarily eclipsed the sun of the lighthouse threw a shadow, one huge and measured in miles across the face of the darkened hills and all at once I realised in astonishment what it was. It was a bunny.

  ‘It’s Mr Cefnmabws,’ explained Marty’s mum in a hushed voice. ‘The lighthouse keeper. He’s a dissident.’

  The county-sized rabbit waggled its ears across the benighted hamlets above Llanfarian, and for a moment I was transported back to my seventh birthday party where a conjuror had done a similar thing with the shadow of his hand on the kitchen wall.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ I asked in disbelief, as the rabbit was joined by three others who chased it.

  ‘It’s his way of publishing the truth,’ she said. ‘About the death of Mrs Cefnmabws on Pumlumon.’

  A shadow-chase ensued across the hills south towards Llanrhystud.

  ‘He had a printing-press and a radio station but they closed it down. This is his only way.’

  The three rabbits caught up with the first and started beating him. Then the shadows disappeared and the light returned to its usual steady blinking.

  ‘That’s your lot for tonight, he’ll be on again tomorrow. Doesn’t do it for long in case someone notices.’

  We stayed there staring out into the night even though Mr Cefnmabws’s passion play had ended.

  ‘What’s he trying to say?’

  ‘He wants an inquiry, doesn’t he? He wants them to ask Mrs Bligh-Jones the question, the one they dare not ask.’

  *

  The caravans were strung out like plastic diamonds on the cheap necklace of the River Rheidol. I sat in the car for a while, listening to the radio, and waited for her to go to whichever caravan she lived in. And then I waited some more and got out.

  Dew was forming on the bonnet of the car and the town was asleep. I walked up to her trailer and a man appeared out of the shadows in a way that suggested he had been watching me.

  ‘Do you want something, mate?’

  I looked at him. He didn’t look the type to be accosting strangers at this time of night. He looked about sixty, with a scared face and old, tired eyes.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’m the security. You don’t live here, what do you want?’

  I walked up to the caravan and knocked. ‘Just visiting a friend.’
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br />   ‘Miss Judy doesn’t accept visitors after midnight.’

  ‘That’s funny, last time I came here you said you hadn’t seen her for weeks. Why don’t you shove off home before you get hurt.’

  The man reached out to grab my coat and I shoved him back viciously. ‘Look, old man, whatever they’re paying you, it’s not worth it.’

  The door opened and Judy Juice stood there in a silk dressing-gown.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Someone snooping, Miss Judy.’

  I turned to Judy Juice. ‘Sorry to trouble you, miss, but I was wondering if I could talk to you about Dean Morgan –’

  Her eyes flashed scorn. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Yes I’m sorry, miss, but it really is important. Someone’s life could depend on it …’

  She narrowed her eyes and considered me. ‘Cops?’

  I shook my head, said, ‘Private investigator,’ and held out a card.

  She took it and read and then looked at me again, this time with a sense of recognition. ‘You’re the guy with the little girl.’

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s OK, Lester. Thanks.’ Then she pulled open the door and let me in.

  The place had a cloying, sour smell of unwashed bedclothes and not enough air and what little air there was had been burned up by the camping-gas stove. The floor was littered with discarded clothes and so many foil take-away trays they were ankle-deep like silver ingots on the floor of a vault. On one wall was a makeshift dressing-table before a mirror with a halo of light bulbs set around it. And at the far end a three-piece suite was angled into the space beneath the big window. She waded through the silver sea of ingots and sat on the sofa and poured herself a gin with a shaking hand and drunk it in one go. She didn’t offer me one. I sat down opposite her.

  She took a deep drag on a cigarette and screwed up her eyes with what might have been pleasure.

  ‘Was he a friend of yours?’

  ‘No. I’ve been hired to find him.’

  ‘But you said no cops, right?’

  ‘No cops.’

  ‘I’m sick of cops. They either want to lock you up or fuck you up.’

  ‘Usually both.’

  ‘What makes you come here?’

  ‘The Dean used to have one of your fudge-box tops – he lit a candle to it every night.’

  She refilled the gin glass, took a violent swig, and a drag on her cigarette. ‘Yeah, he was sweet like that.’ She took another life-saving drag. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Well, there’s not much I can tell you. I haven’t seen him for weeks. Met him at the Heritage Museum. I was spinning and he got the part as the coracle man for a while. But he didn’t stay long, they never do. He was different from the others, though. I wondered what he was doing there, and then I realised it was because of me. I meet plenty of guys like that.’

  ‘Anything going on between you two?’

  She looked slightly puzzled for a second and then let out a laugh. ‘Me and him?! Are you nuts?! What do I want with a man?’

  I waited while she refilled the gin glass and then lit another cigarette. Between puffs she asked me, ‘Is it true he was a professor?’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘I’d rustle something up from the fridge for you but they took it away.’

  ‘We could go out, if you’re hungry.’

  ‘I haven’t got the energy to dress, but thanks anyway.’

  ‘I could get a take-away. Chinese.’

  She smiled. ‘You worked out I like Chinese food all on your own?’

  ‘It was a hunch.’

  I returned to the trailer half an hour later laden with a set meal for two that was so good the girl at the take-away assured me even a real Chinese person might have eaten it. Judy Juice peeled away the lids and threw them on the floor. Then she picked up a knife with a ‘Come to Sunny Aberystwyth’ handle and used it to scrape the rice on to some plates.

  ‘The girl at the Chinese knows you, says you eat there every day.’

  ‘It’s all I eat. You ever been there?’

  ‘The take-away?’

  ‘No, China.’

  ‘Do I look like I can afford to go to China?’

  ‘How would I know how much it costs? Someone told me the other day, when they open this tunnel to France you’ll be able to get a train all the way from Aberystwyth to Peking. Is that right?’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  She nodded, somehow relieved. ‘One day I’ll go there; get on that night train to Shrewsbury and never get off. Yes sir!’ The bright look faded and she said, ‘You know, some other guy came asking about the Dean.’

  ‘Was he wearing a Peacocks’ coat?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where he bought it, but it was long and black and he was a bit creepy. He wasn’t sweet like you so I told him to sling his hook.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Oh, you know, asking about the Dean and when I last saw him. And then he said the Dean had taken a case that belonged to him and asked me for it. And I said why would I have it, and he said he knew the Dean had left it here. I said shows you how much you know, buster, and then he said, “Don’t give me the runaround, you tart.” So I called Lester the guard here and he threw him out. Lester looks out for me because I get quite a few cranks turning up.’

  ‘Did the Dean ever mention this case?’

  She sighed at the memory. ‘Yeah, he mentioned it. He was always going on about “them”, how they were after him because he had something that belonged to them. He once said they would kill him if they caught him. Then one day I got tired of hearing it and I told him to prove it. So he showed me some papers. One of them was official-looking and written in runes. I couldn’t understand it, but he could. I said, so what is it? And he said it was an official druid death warrant. And I said, who’s it for? And he said, if I told you that, you’d be on it too.’

  She reached for the gin bottle again. ‘To tell you the truth, it all went in one ear and out the other. He was always full of crap. They all are.’

  *

  From Judy Juice’s I drove down to the harbour and parked by the railings, facing out to sea. The favourite spot for people from the Midlands to eat their chips; people who drive for three hours for this view and never get out of the car to take a closer look. But tonight neither did I. It was raining again and I sat there, the wipers humming, and stared at the light on the end of the jetty, thinking about what Marty’s mum had said. About the question the dissident lighthouseman dared to ask, but no one dared answer. About the suspicion that had haunted him every day since that moment when they found his wife preserved in a block of ice, frozen in time like a fly in amber, and Mr Cefnmabws peered into the sarcophagus of ice and saw that expression on her face. Was that terrible frozen snarl on her face simply the agony of her death-mask? The cruel hand of hunger and cold? Or did it hint at a different explanation for her death than the official version? Something else, something altogether darker? Was it a look of horror? The terror of someone who fled down that mountain because she saw something up there no decent person should be forced to witness? The question that Mr Cefnmabws wanted answered was a simple one. They had survived for three months up above the snow-line, alone with the bodies of their dead comrades, stranded in a world where not even the birds could survive. So what did they eat?

  Chapter 16

  WHEN I OPENED up shop the next morning, Llunos was standing on the doorstep. He walked straight past me and up the stairs without a word. He threw his hat on the desk and slumped into the client’s chair and said, ‘Is the girl here?’

  ‘Calamity? Not yet.’

  ‘What time are you expecting her?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know, some time this morning. You know Calamity.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said in a voice without warmth or inflexion. ‘I know Calamity.’

  His tone began to worry me. ‘What’s up?’

 
He grimaced. ‘They’ve sprung Custard Pie.’

  I jerked back slightly as if he’d held smelling-salts out to me. ‘Sprung him, who has?’

  He ran tired fingers through his thinning hair. ‘I don’t know, someone, some people … I mean, who gives a fuck, he’s out!’

  ‘I can’t believe it – a Triple-A-category prisoner in a maximum-security dungeon …’

  His face became flushed with anger and he shouted at me in a way I hadn’t seen since the old days when we were adversaries.

  ‘Now don’t you start on me,’ he shouted. ‘I’m the one who put him away, remember? How do you think I feel? I’m not the one who’s been giving him bird seed.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I ought to have your licence for this.’

  ‘You telling me he used the bird seed to escape?’

  He picked up his hat and thrashed it down on the tabletop.

  ‘Yes I’m telling you he used the bird seed to escape. The Birdman of Aberystwyth. How stupid can you get? How on earth could you fall for a stupid trick like that?’

  ‘So what did he do, dress up as a seagull and fly away?’

  He didn’t answer but gave me a cold stare.

  I went and fetched some glasses from the draining-board and poured two glasses of cold water.

  There was a knock on the door and Llunos shouted, ‘Enter.’ One of the guards from Custard Pie’s prison came in looking pretty much as you’d expect for a man charged with the task of standing guard over a single prisoner who had now escaped. He look hesitantly from Llunos to me and back again.

  ‘Just tell it, officer,’ said Llunos.

  The guard fidgeted and wrung his hands. ‘Well it’s not … I don’t know where … I mean the point …’

  ‘I said tell it, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘He … he …’ And then it all came out in a rush. ‘He kept asking us to cook his eggs extra runny, said his stomach couldn’t take cooked eggs. Every day raw eggs … I mean, how were we supposed to know?’

  Llunos gave him a scowl of thunder.

  The guard hopped from foot to foot. He knew he was for the high jump for this.