From Aberystwyth with Love Read online

  ‘You should have asked me first.’ He explained to Arianwen: ‘This is my assistant Lou.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve met.’

  ‘I’m sorry if he’s bothering you.’

  ‘Oh there’s nothing to be sorry for.’

  ‘He’s still learning, you see. Lou, get back to the car and write up your report on the call.’

  ‘Oh you’re a spoilsport, sending such a handsome man away to write a boring report.’

  Meici’s face reddened and his eyes misted up. He ploughed on with dogged determination. ‘I bought you this.’

  ‘Not another silly hat! Granny never wears them.’

  ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘Oh. I see. It’s very kind of you.’

  ‘I was a bit surprised you weren’t wearing the dress.’

  ‘I wore it so much it had to go in the wash.’

  I made a slight chivalrous bow to Arianwen, because I knew it would annoy Meici, and walked back. Calamity came out of the kitchen and gave me a wink that said, ‘Tape retrieved, mission accomplished.’ We waited next to the car for Meici to return. When he came back he was miserable and said he wouldn’t be driving us all the way, but would drop us off at the bus stop. I sat in the back with Calamity. Meici kept his eyes fixedly on the road and didn’t speak. As we exited the cottage, we passed a field in which stood a scarecrow wearing a red-and-white polka-dot dress that flapped in the breeze.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Spooky,’ said Calamity. ‘Really spooky.’

  We walked in single file down a narrow track of loose shale through gorse bushes and found ourselves on the lake’s shore. The waters were dark and sombre, and clouds brooded on the surface. Far out, in the centre of the lake, the spire of a church broke the surface. Birds wheeled about the sky, the waters lapped the shore gently. The world was quiet; even the bees had stopped humming. The only other human life came from a group of three artists painting in watercolours.

  ‘Spooky,’ said Calamity. ‘Really spooky.’

  The reservoir lay on the east of the Penpegws massif, north of Devil’s Bridge. We had asked Meici to drop us off on the way back to town; we would get the bus back.

  ‘Spooky,’ said Calamity.

  She was right. Towns that have vanished from the face of the earth, beneath the waves or buried beneath desert sands, are not supposed to reappear. It is disconcerting; a rupture in the fabric of time that undermines the comfortable certainty which helps us get through the succession of days we call a life. Sometimes in periods of drought the outlines of ancient Saxon farms appear in the desiccated ground, visible from the air, like the bone structure of the earth revealed by X-ray photography. It is as if Father Time leaves ajar a door to a room that is normally locked. Such rare glimpses, like the appearance of comets in the heavens, make the skin prickle with primeval feelings for which we struggle to find names but which, no doubt, would be familiar to the Iron Age watcher of the skies.

  It had been thirty years since the sun last warmed the slate tiles of that spire; how different had the world been then! A world of rationing and post-war austerity, of bully-beef and powdered egg, in which a pretty tram conductress caught the eye of Eeyore and beguiled his heart. Together they produced me. A world so different, but the troubles were the same, they never change. A little girl went missing and broke her mother’s heart. For all the differences that divide us from humanity across the sea or down the centuries, it is through suffering that we maintain a common bond.

  We followed the path along the shore for a while, drinking in the strangeness of the view, haunted by the spire. We stopped and stared, lost in thought. Calamity took out an Instamatic camera and took some shots of the shoreline. We were about to turn and return to the car when Calamity spotted something floating in the water at the shore’s edge. She trotted down to the water and bent down. I followed, squinting into the fierce reflected glare. I kneeled down beside her. It was a body: a woman, floating face-up in the shallows like Ophelia, wearing what appeared to be a navy-blue pinafore dress over a white blouse, like a school uniform from long ago. We pulled her on to the sand and she opened her eyes. She giggled and looked at us with impish mischief in her eyes and handed us her hat which she had been holding in one hand. It was a straw boater. Calamity took the hat and said thank you. The woman made an excited gurgling sound, like a baby, suddenly jumped up and ran off along the shore. She ran with the speed and agility of a gazelle. We watched, rooted to the spot, immobilised with astonishment. Calamity bent the hat slightly to read the name tag inside the brim and said, ‘I think we’ve solved the case.’

  The great thing about being Chief of Police in Aberystwyth is nothing shocks you. Being taken by surprise is for the amateurs. I had known Commander Llunos for fifteen or so years, and had worked with and against him at various times in the past. I’d lied to him a lot, often on occasions when we both knew I was lying, and I had told him some strange stories. On more than one occasion he had thrown me down the police station steps which was his homespun method of processing criminals without the need for paperwork. I liked him.

  He stood in the layby holding the hat and pondering. For once he was not wearing the standard police issue weather-stained, pre-crumpled macintosh. Without it he seemed strangely denuded like a freshly plucked hen; he stood instead perspiring in a short-sleeved shirt, wearing the melancholic expression of a bloodhound that has woken up with a hangover.

  ‘We’ll go and see Mrs Mochdre,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Ffanci Llangollen’s sister, Mrs Mochdre. She lives in Bwlchcrwys. We’ll go and see her.’

  Llunos drove a tan Montego with crushed velour upholstery, and tartan fabric panels in the door to add a touch of class. It wasn’t much good in car chases but he had long ago outgrown the need for such vulgar ostentation. Once you passed a certain point in life as a cop in Aber, if you weren’t already dead or invalided out of the force on a tiny pension, you achieved a sort of wisdom and maturity. Cops like Llunos didn’t need to chase, by some paradox the crooks came to him, one way or the other.

  The cottage was on the right as we entered the village. It was built according to the traditional building regulations, which decreed the walls should be the colour of smoke and the smoke that issued from the chimney should be the colour of the roof which should be the same tone as a field at dusk and this should mirror a rainy sky. Mrs Mochdre stood in wellingtons in a pig pen, emptying swill into a trough and booting the pigs away as they crowded round.

  Llunos explained about the hat.

  Mrs Mochdre took it, gave it a cursory examination, her face twisted in a frown of disapproval. ‘Tomfoolery,’ she said and handed it back.

  ‘I guess Ffanci Llangollen is not in town,’ said Llunos. Mrs Mochdre didn’t deem it worthy of an answer, perhaps it was common knowledge. ‘When did you last hear from her?’ he added.

  ‘Never. I never hear from her. She just goes her own way, wandering around the country pushing that wretched shopping trolley, still clinging to the hope that her daughter is alive somewhere. I mean, even if she was, what would be the point of finding her now? They would be strangers. Nothing good would come of it.’

  A sow started trying to sniff Llunos’s shoe; Mrs Mochdre kicked her away.

  ‘So you are not expecting her back any time?’ asked Llunos.

  ‘No, but she’ll turn up now, won’t she? After she reads about the town reappearing in the lake like that. You mark my words, she’ll be back.’

  ‘What’s she like?’ said Calamity.

  Mrs Mochdre stared at Calamity for a while and then spoke over her shoulder, to the middle distance. ‘My sister had so much going for her. Not like me. She was always the pretty one, you see. All the lads used to come round courting her! I never minded, of course. I was happy for her, we had such great hopes . . . Then she threw it all away. Married the balloon-folder. Not much of a job really, is it? Balloon-folding. They practically fold themselves, don’t they?’

  ‘What was
Gethsemane like?’ asked Calamity.

  ‘The child needed a firmer hand, if you ask me, but it was no good me saying anything, no one listened. She knocked my cruet set over once, and scratched it. Her mother wouldn’t pay for it neither. She said it was probably already scratched – as if I didn’t know my own cruet set!’

  ‘I hear you used to be in the Anti-Bearded-Lady League,’ said Calamity.

  ‘Ignore that,’ said Llunos.

  It was late afternoon when we got back. The office felt like a greenhouse without the comforting warm earthy smell of peat and tomatoes. Llunos slumped into the client’s chair. Calamity pulled open the desk drawer and took out the latest issue of Gumshoe and left for the day. I sat down opposite.

  ‘What was that about bearded ladies?’ asked Llunos.

  ‘Calamity’s superseding the paradigm.’

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the latest bee in her bonnet.’

  ‘She’ll get her ears boxed if she carries on like that. You can’t talk to people like that.’

  ‘I’ll have a word with her.’

  He stood up. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  We strode along the Prom towards the Cliff Railway station at the end. As usual the two cars were frozen on the hillside, not moving, like two garden sheds built at the wrong angle. The immobility was an illusion. It was like the brass weights under a cuckoo clock: if you watched long enough you would be aware of a change in position.

  The world was the colour of concrete dust, washed out like an over-exposed transparency. The occasional sharp flashes of light from chrome bumpers or hub-caps, from open windows, or the steel frames of pushchairs made the heart wince with unfocussed longing. Holidaymakers ambled up and down wearing expressions of patient suffering.

  ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he said without preamble, ‘that thing with the hat was a bit strange.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not the only strange thing, either. I’ve been rushed off my feet since that old town reappeared in the lake.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘All sorts of rum things going on, people behaving oddly. Chap who winds the town hall clock lost the key. Men leaving their families and running off to join the French Foreign Legion. I’ve got two members of the town council buying guitars – Fenders, too, not cheap ones.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just the heat.’

  Llunos gave a short sudden shake of the head. ‘It’s the lake. The reappearance of the town has precipitated a spiritual crisis in the town.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘My teacher. He says it’s stirring things up, the repressed memories of the townsfolk, it’s like our collective unconscious.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a teacher.’

  Llunos cast me a sheepish glance. ‘Night school, been doing a course in psychology.’

  ‘I’m surprised to hear that of you.’

  ‘Me too.’

  I could sense he was torn between distaste for the confessional mode, and the need to share these thoughts with someone.

  ‘You have to move on, though, don’t you? Move with the times. The world is changing and you either adapt or get left behind. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’

  Llunos was a lawman in the old-fashioned mould, the sheriff of the frontier town whose methods were rough but reasonably effective. He preferred to beat rather than entreat, he liked the old-fashioned certainties of occasional short-term injustice that through the finely grinding mills of time and God ensured a form of justice not perfect but recognised by all as an acceptable accommodation in an imperfect world.

  ‘These new boys with degrees and stuff, they don’t approve of violence as a means to solving crime, they prefer modern scientific methods, they use psychology.’

  I said nothing. Today I had been invited along to listen.

  ‘Maybe if I can brush up on the textbook stuff I may make a move down to Cardiff, you know, the Bureau.’

  I nodded.

  Llunos adopted a deliberately casual tone: ‘What were you doing out there anyway?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where!’

  ‘Like I told you, we just went to look.’

  ‘Were you on a case?’

  ‘No.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. He didn’t believe me. This was the pantomime we often enacted called Protecting the Client; Vanya’s privacy had been entrusted into my safe-keeping. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded cops asking him his business but most people who walk through my door do and I respect that. Cops, though, they hate it. Llunos knew all this but he still had to ask.

  ‘You just happened to be going for a walk and found the hat.’

  ‘No, we found the girl who was wearing the hat. She ran off. Like I told you.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the girl. I forgot.’

  Chapter 6

  When I arrived at the office the next day there was an overhead projector set up on the desk. I asked Calamity what it was for and a slight air of coyness slipped into her voice. ‘Oh, I’ve been superseding the paradigm.’

  ‘That’s good. How did you do it?’

  She walked over to close the curtains, but it did little to lessen the fierce light from the street outside. ‘I’ve been looking into the bearded lady angle, I think I’ve found something interesting. She flicked a switch on the side of the overhead projector and a wonky square of light illuminated the wall. Dust danced in the well of light above the platen. She placed a transparency down. ‘Take a look at this. This is the area round Abercuawg, this line here is the Devil’s Bridge narrow-gauge railway line.’ She placed another acetate cell over the first. It superimposed a pattern of stars over the map. ‘See these stars? Each one represents the birthplace of a champion on the Pro-Bearded-Lady circuit over the past fifty years. See? Classic clustering pattern. And there’s more—’

  ‘Could be just a statistical anomaly.’

  ‘Maybe, but look at this.’ She put a third acetate over the first two and this time a pattern of skulls was superimposed. The skulls clustered in the same patterns as the stars.

  ‘Same clustering, different occupation. Guess what?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘School games teachers.’

  I laughed.

  ‘You can laugh if you want, but the facts can’t be laughed away. These clustering patterns are mathematically significant. Now look at this.’ She put another acetate down, this time showing a series of dots. ‘Each dot represents a parish museum that has a photo or photos of hairy babies born in the neighbourhood. You see? There’s a clear pattern, this area round Abercuawg has a rogue hairiness gene among the populace. Where did it come from? That’s where it gets interesting. This line here is the working of a spur line to Devil’s Bridge that was suddenly abandoned in 1872 after an accident during blasting. The official history of the railway says they hit a pocket of gas, but the oral histories claim the explosion released a “thing” imprisoned in the belly of the mountain. No one knows exactly what it was, but it was pretty angry and very hairy.’

  ‘So where is all this leading?’

  ‘Folklore also relates stories of village girls being offered to the “thing” over the years as brides, and there is talk of intermarriage between local women and the “thing”; this may explain the hairiness.’

  ‘OK, sleuth, what is the “thing”?’

  Calamity paused for effect, allowing her gaze to linger on me melodramatically. Finally, she said, ‘Trolls.’

  ‘Trolls?’

  ‘Trolls.’

  ‘There’s a troll living in the mountain near Abercuawg?’

  ‘It’s a possibility we have to consider.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘We have to consider it even if only to eliminate it from the inquiry. The investigator doesn’t get to choose what goes into the pot and what doesn’t.’

  ‘This one does. If we don’t admit it into the inquiry, we don’t have to eliminate it.’
/>   Calamity looked flustered. ‘Louie, you don’t get this sort of thing just by chance. Maybe one or two games teachers, and one or two bearded ladies, one or two hairy babies, that I grant you. But not this many.’

  I threw up my hands in mock despair. ‘Maybe the pattern of hairiness is interesting but what does it mean? We’ve already got a suspect, a flesh and blood guy called Goldilocks who was sentenced to hang for the murder. We just need to find out what he did with her. Why bring in the trolls?’

  Calamity’s brow furrowed as she considered the implications. ‘I don’t say I believe it, I do say it has to be checked out and eliminated from the inquiry. I was thinking maybe you could help out on that . . .’

  ‘I’m not talking to my old school games teacher.’

  ‘No, I meant with the bearded ladies. I thought you could speak to a few.’

  ‘Calamity, the world has moved on since those days. We don’t have bearded ladies any more because it’s . . . it’s . . . I don’t know, it’s not right. Competitive bearded ladying went out with all the other freak shows. We don’t laugh at people like that, we try to help them, or at least good people do. I’m not going to remind them of the old days, and if I did they would probably slam the phone down on me. What’s to stop you from talking to them?’

  ‘I tried but they slammed the phone down on me.’

  ‘See!’

  Calamity sighed. ‘We just need to find a way to crack the culture of Omertà surrounding the bearded ladies.’

  ‘When can we hear the séance tape?’

  ‘I’m still trying to get hold of an open reel deck, it should be round later today.’ She opened the curtains again and it was like leaving a darkened cinema for the bright daylit street.

  ‘I guess there’s not much point me asking you to talk to Meici Jones, either,’ she said.

  ‘What’s he got to do with it?’

  ‘Don’t you remember him saying there were four games teachers in his family?’

  I said nothing and stared instead at the innocence and candour that played in her eyes. When she came back at Christmas it was with her tail between her legs. She saw it as a failure but in reality it was nothing of the sort. Winter is a bad time to set up a new venture. Because of this I try to bolster her confidence without letting on. But the trouble is, I too suffered in a different way from her temporary absence. In the time she was away I noticed something in my office that I had never seen before. It was surprising how it had escaped my attention all those years but life is like that sometimes: we fail to see things on the end of our noses and it takes a renewal of perspective brought about by a change to make us see. And what I saw was this: the office was empty.