From Aberystwyth with Love an-5 Read online

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘To see Mooncalf.’

  ‘Right. We could ask if he does tickets.’

  ‘What sort of tickets?’

  ‘Travel ones. To Hughesovka.’

  ‘Who wants to go to Hughesovka?’

  ‘We do . . . might. To take a witness statement from the imaginary friend and stuff like that.’

  ‘What will we use for money?’

  ‘We’ll use part of what we get for the sock.’

  ‘Oh of course, I forgot. We’ll use the change left after buying the marble palace.’

  Calamity’s brow clouded. ‘You don’t think it’s going to be worth much?’

  ‘My feeling is, this sock is going to bounce.’

  The thought that the Yuri Gagarin sock might not be a source of great wealth silenced Calamity for a while, at least as far as the Pier.

  We stopped in its shadow, and looked up. It was little more than a shed on stilts in which two tribes co-existed: the adolescent girls from whose numbers I had extracted Calamity, and the grannies. Invisible to each other, they occupy the same space without ever meeting like wanderers in those Escher engravings where staircases interlock along the planes of incompatible dimensions.

  It was cool in the shadow, like the glade of a forest. Cool and damp and reeking of seaweed and guano. This was the real wonder. Not the tawdry scene up above but the bit underneath: the vast intricate criss-crossing web of ironmongery that held the whole thing suspended at the same level as the Prom. People claim the death of British manufacturing came when the last car factory was sold into foreign hands, but the real death was in 1980 when they stopped making Meccano in Liverpool. When the Pier finally falls down, no one will have the know-how to fix the ironwork. Until that time, uncountable starlings roost there and emerge at dusk in twittering skeins, endlessly, like a string of black handkerchiefs drawn from a magician’s pocket.

  We climbed the steps that curved up the buttress of the sea wall, on to the Prom and back into the light.

  ‘How come Gethsemane’s spirit ended up in Hughesovka?’ Calamity asked.

  ‘Maybe if you are a spirit you don’t have much control over who you end up possessing.’

  ‘Yes, it could be like hiring a car, you just have to take what they give you.’

  ‘That’s if it is her spirit.’

  ‘What else could it be?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We need to get hold of that séance tape,’ said Calamity, and then added, ‘What do you think the chances are of us solving the case?’

  ‘I’d say no chance whatsoever.’

  ‘We can’t really fence the sock unless we make at least a token effort, can we?’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t be right. Although I have a terrible suspicion that the man-minutes we just used up in our brief conversation have already exceeded the value of the sock.’

  ‘Yuri Gagarin socks must be worth more than that.’

  We walked through town to Chalybeate Street where Mooncalf & Sons had, according to the silver copperplate shop sign, been dealing in antiques since 1834. I wasn’t sure there had even been a street here back then. The Mooncalfs were originally brothers and two of West Wales’s most respected fencers of stolen goods. The shop in Chalybeate Street handled antiques and ‘special requests’. The other branch had operated out of a caravan in Clarach and dealt with stolen religious icons. This branch had stopped trading a while back when mobster Frankie Mephisto had incinerated the caravan with one Mooncalf brother still in it.

  Mooncalf was a small man, and the counter behind which he stood reached up to his chest. He was amiable with a wizened, sharply pointed look common to men in fairy tales who are prematurely aged by evil witches, but which can also arise from spending too many hours late at night scheming. In former times he would have made a living operating a string of child pickpockets, or chimney sweeps whom he would have discouraged from dawdling on the job by lighting a fire in the grate while they were halfway up the chimney.

  He threw his arms out in delighted greeting. ‘Mr Knight and Calamity! What a lovely surprise. Welcome to Mooncalf & Sons.’

  ‘Since 1834, eh?’ I answered.

  ‘The brand has been around since then, Mr Knight. Mooncalf & Sons is the soul, the actual premises are merely the physical body that houses it.’

  ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Slow, but the long-term prospects seem assured.’

  ‘I suppose there is always a market for stolen goods.’

  Mooncalf winced. ‘Stolen goods! Who deals in stolen goods? If that is what you have in mind you would appear to have come to the wrong shop. Mooncalf & Sons is a respectable business with a spotless reputation.’

  ‘Not according to the police.’

  ‘Mr Knight, you walk into my shop and make these . . . these insinuations. You remind me, if I may be permitted an indelicate turn of phrase, of a man who engages the services of a prostitute for the night and spends the whole time berating her for the shameful way she makes her living.’

  ‘Do you do tickets?’ said Calamity.

  He paused and reassumed the look of Buddhist serenity with which he had originally greeted us. ‘What sort of tickets?’

  ‘Travel ones. We need to go to Hughesovka.’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ I said.

  ‘We might do.’

  ‘It’s really not likely.’

  ‘Hughesovka!’ exclaimed Mooncalf as if it were the name of a favourite son. ‘What a noble goal! And what a wise choice in coming here to make your travel arrangements.’

  ‘Is it expensive?’ asked Calamity.

  ‘Ordinarily the cost of a ticket – like that of a virtuous woman – is priced above rubies, since it is impossible to get there by conventional means. Hughesovka is, as you know, a closed city along with Gorki and numerous others.’

  ‘What’s a closed city?’ said Calamity.

  ‘One that is closed to Western tourists. As such you will find no travel agent in town will be able to help you, but since Mooncalf & Sons is no ordinary travel agent, you are in luck. When would you like to go?’

  ‘We’re just enquiring at the moment,’ said Calamity. ‘How much does it cost?’

  ‘That depends on a number of factors. Whether you are reasonably flexible about dates and routes, and whether you would like to delegate to me the delicate business of travel visas and aliases. This is highly recommended.’

  ‘What are the aliases?’ asked Calamity.

  ‘Normally you need two, I always recommend a belt-and-braces approach since we are talking about quite a high cost of failure here, including potential loss of liberty for a considerable length of time and possibly torture using psychotropic drugs. Thus I would urge you to go for two aliases. The first is to get in and the second is a form of insurance should the first alias cause you to run into difficulties – say your alias describes you as a spinning-wheel mechanic and by some terrible fluke of fate you are called on while you are there to repair a wheel, and your ignorance is thus laid bare—’

  ‘Or you go as an obstetrician and a lady goes into labour at the back of the number 15 tram,’ I said.

  ‘An all too frequent occurrence,’ said Mooncalf. ‘Never go as an obstetrician. Fortunately, Mooncalf & Sons protects its clients against such cruel exigencies of fate by virtue of our unique, patent-pending, double-ID indemnity procedure. Once the first alias becomes corrupted, you can still invoke, as a form of reserve parachute, the second and return safe and sound, albeit a touch chastened by experience, to the comforting embrace of the Aberystwyth bosom. I’ll arrange for you both to have a day on the road with Meici Jones.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s the spinning-wheel salesman. A great and trusted associate of the firm Mooncalf & Sons. It will be a great help with your alias: spinning-wheel salesman is a superb disguise.’

  ‘Wow!’ said Calamity. ‘How much will all this cost?’
/>   ‘I’ll need to make a few enquiries, so give me a few days to put a proposal together. You might need to join the Communist Party.’

  ‘We also need you to put us in touch with some snuff philatelists,’ I said.

  Mooncalf laughed unconvincingly. ‘There’s no such thing.’

  ‘Yes, we know, but just pretend there is. We have a rich client interested in buying the séance tape sent to Ffanci Llangollen in 1956.’

  Mooncalf removed his glasses and polished them with the tail of his shirt. ‘I’ll see what I can do, very difficult, very difficult.’

  I put the sock down on the counter. ‘And we’d like to talk to you about this.’

  Mooncalf put on a neutral expression, the sort a man assumes in order not to give too much away at the start of a negotiation. Or maybe he just thought it was a sock.

  ‘It’s a sock,’ said Calamity. ‘It was worn by Yuri Gagarin.’

  Mooncalf made a small ‘ah’ sound indicating the arousal of his professional interest. He pulled a jeweller’s loupe from under the counter and screwed it into his eye socket. He held the sock up and examined it.

  ‘We were hoping it was worth something,’ said Calamity.

  I spluttered, ‘Worth something! Of course it’s worth something, it’s one of the most famous socks in the world. It’s worth . . . lots.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s one valuable sock,’ said Calamity.

  It was clear to all that in the manner of driving a hard bargain we were both newborn babes; in the souk they would be fighting over the chance to sell us a used camel. Mooncalf sucked air between his teeth to suggest the prospects were not good. ‘It seems to be genuine, no doubt about that, the weave of the asbestos is definitely Soviet and the style of sock was popular in the artistic and scientific communities of Moscow during the late fifties. The problem is, the market for Yuri Gagarin socks is very slow at the moment.’

  He lowered the sock from his eye and a photo fell out. It was the picture Uncle Vanya had left with us. Mooncalf picked it up. ‘What’s holding the dog up?’

  ‘An imaginary friend,’ said Calamity.

  Mooncalf nodded as if to indicate this was a reasonable hypothesis, although one among many. ‘Might be wires,’ he added. He held the photo up to his loupe. ‘Difficult to say without the negatives. It looks like one of those schools for remote viewing and associated paranormal investigation, which lends credence to your levitation claim. But it could be an ectoplasmic projection.’ He laid the photo down on the counter. ‘Not really my line.’

  ‘We came about the sock,’ I said. ‘We’d like to fence it.’

  Mooncalf contorted his features into a look of fake shock. ‘Fence? We don’t deal in stolen goods here, Mr Knight, and I would thank you to remember it.’

  ‘What do you call it then?’

  ‘Facilitation. We help the police. We help them by bypassing them.’

  ‘OK, if we decided we wanted to be of assistance to the police in the way you describe, how does it work?’

  ‘I would be able to let you have a modest, non-refundable deposit on the sock while I made enquiries about the best way to return it.’ He pulled open a drawer and removed a thick paper-bound catalogue; it looked like the sort stamp collectors use as a reference. It had Cyrillic script on the front and assorted Cold War memorabilia, such as medals, hammer and sickle lapel pins, stamps, currency. He flicked through the pages and, finding the one he was looking for, scanned it with an unhappy mien, intended to lower our expectations of his first offer. Then he stopped and his eyebrows shot up, he peered closer at the page in the time-honoured manner of someone doubting the evidence of his senses. He stood transfixed for a second before slamming the book back in the drawer, and turning the key. ‘As I thought, the market is very slow. I’ll give you five hundred in cash.’

  And he did.

  Chapter 3

  I arrived at the office later and found Calamity leafing through a pile of press cuttings that she had retrieved from the Cambrian News clipping archive. There was a cardboard box full of items relating to the case of the missing girl, dutifully collated over the years and filed away without much expectation that anyone would ever want them. She greeted my arrival with the pleasure of one who has a story to share and has been waiting for the audience to turn up. I leafed through the cuttings as she ran through the background to the case.

  ‘Gethsemane spent the morning in town with her auntie, Mrs Mochdre, buying a present for her mother’s birthday the following week. They went to the Pier amusement arcade as a treat, then returned to Abercuawg around lunchtime. Gethsemane went out to play with the neighbour’s dog, Bingo. The dog came back on its own later that afternoon. They used him as a sort of bloodhound, sent him off to search for her with the whole village following. They lost his trail and the dog was never seen again.’ She pulled a photo out of the box and slid it across the table. ‘This is Bingo, sired by the famous Clip—’

  She broke off and gave me a look of guilty complicity. Clip had featured in one of our previous cases. He could now be found stuffed with sawdust sitting in a glass case in the museum on Terrace Road, one ear permanently cocked for the whistle of the Great Shepherd in the Sky. In his heyday he had been a star of the newsreels from the war in Patagonia in 1961, the Welsh Lassie. In moments like this, when a ghost from our past resurfaced, we struggled to recall whether the case had turned out well or not. There was one key criterion for deciding: did the client die? But we never actually met the client in the Clip case; she was, or claimed to be, the Queen of Denmark and our business was conducted over the phone. But since her head is still on the postage stamps we take it as a positive sign. And none of the postal orders she sent bounced. Calamity, remembering this vital fact, continued.

  ‘Goldilocks was a local hoodlum attached to the Slaughterhouse Mob – a bunch of tearaways who worked at the slaughterhouse and hung out at the Pier ballroom. They were into the usual small-time stuff: robbery, extortion, violence. The evening after Gethsemane disappeared someone saw Goldilocks burying something in his garden, it turned out to be one of her shoes. He couldn’t account for it and wouldn’t say where he had been on the day in question. He was convicted of her murder and escaped from Aberystwyth gaol the following November.’ She slid another photo across the desk. ‘This is him.’

  He had an angelic face with tight blond curls. He didn’t smile and didn’t look like he understood the purpose of the expression. His eyes were dead, like those of a mackerel in the fishmonger’s. They were the eyes of a man whose heart is cold as a fireless grate, one who never takes pleasure or mirth from his passage through this world and is irritated and bewildered by those who do. You can tell a lot about the soul from a photograph. Or at least you think you can. Maybe I was just projecting into the image what I already knew. If I had been told this was a photo of a boy who had rescued a baby from a burning building I might have been touched by his gentle aspect and said he looked a little angel.

  ‘The only member of the Slaughterhouse Mob still alive is the chief typographer down at the rock foundry. We can go and see him.’ Calamity took out another cutting. ‘This is the only photo the newspaper could find of Gethsemane.’

  It was a school nativity play: shepherds in dressing gowns and tea towels on their heads; a Roman centurion; a crib; Mary and Joseph; angels.

  ‘Gethsemane is the robin redbreast.’

  She had bird’s feet made out of rope, a dark cloak and a cardboard beak. In her eyes there was a certain wistful awareness: staring out across the years from the grey fog of a tattered old photo, it betokened the early understanding of what life held in store for a misfit doomed to wear a cardboard beak when others among her peers were centurions or angels.

  ‘The guy playing Joseph is Rwpert Valentino, the star of the TV soap North Road. We can check him out, he hangs out every night after the show at the railway station buffet.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’

  ‘It’s in the scandal pa
ges in the Cambrian News. He’s got a girl who works there.’

  ‘OK, that’s good stuff. Anything else?’

  Calamity slapped the back of her hand against one of the news reports for emphasis. ‘This lady, Mrs Mochdre, interests me. Gethsemane’s aunt, the one who took her to the Pier that morning. Last one to see her alive, that’s always a red flag.’