From Aberystwyth with Love an-5 Page 9

  ‘It would be different if it was your house.’

  ‘That’s right, the first thing I would think about would be the rent. You’re a saint, Mrs Crogau.’

  ‘I was banking on that money. Where will I get it from now?’

  ‘I’ll have a word with the coroner. Maybe we can let you have the pennies from their eyes.’

  Mrs Crogau folded her arms under her bosom. ‘I was just observing that the rent was due. There’s no law against it.’

  ‘No, but there is one against going through the pockets of dead students and stealing.’

  ‘Who says I did that?’

  ‘Nobody yet.’

  She sniffed and began to walk downstairs, adding, ‘I’d offer you a cup of tea if I didn’t think you’d plant some cocaine in the sugar bowl.’

  Llunos turned his attention to me. ‘How come you forgot to mention the students?’

  ‘Old age. My memory’s not what it used to be.’

  He scowled. It was a stupid thing to say, using sarcasm with Llunos invariably ends in tears and seldom his.

  ‘What were you doing out there, again?’

  ‘We just went to see the church spire.’

  ‘Are you concealing anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you tell me if you were?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t know why I bothered, of course you are concealing something. It’s habitual. If I asked you the time you’d lie.’

  ‘What made you fetch me?’

  He walked over to a chest of drawers and picked up a sandwich bag from the top. There was a Polaroid photo inside. ‘Looks like they were into photography as well as painting,’ he said. The photo showed me and Calamity dragging the girl from the lake. ‘What was the name of your client again?’

  ‘What client?’

  He turned away. ‘All right, you can go now. Don’t leave town without telling me and don’t walk away with the idea that I believe you.’

  Mrs Crogau was standing on the doorstep which fronted directly on to the road. Her arms were folded in a defiant air that suggested Fate sending her two corpses who hadn’t paid the rent was just the latest in a long series of trials. I stopped at the occasional table and looked at the photos. I picked up one that caught my eye. It was a wedding photo.

  ‘Like weddings, do you?’ she said.

  ‘This looks like Ffanci Llangollen’s sister, Mrs Mochdre.’

  ‘That’s right; married the Witchfinder. I was a bridesmaid.’

  I considered the scene.

  ‘Bit of a strange do that was,’ she said.

  ‘Strange? In what way?’

  She pursed her lips. ‘It’s all so long ago now, of course . . . my memory, you see. Very strange it was.’

  I took out a pound coin and made it appear and disappear between my fingers the way magicians do. ‘Tough break, that,’ I said. ‘Two kids dying on you just before the rent is due. Guess it will be hard making the bingo payments this month.’

  ‘I won’t be shooting craps in Las Vegas, that’s for sure,’ said Mrs Crogau.

  ‘Maybe I can help.’

  She looked greedily at the coin. ‘We all need help from time to time.’

  ‘That’s right. You scratch my back, I give you a shilling for the meter.’ I let the sun’s reflection catch the coin and play over her face.

  ‘Where exactly is the itch?’

  ‘I love strange stories, tell me about the wedding.’

  ‘That coin looks awful lonely.’

  ‘Not really, he has three brothers right in my pocket.’ I put the coin on the window ledge. ‘Tell me about the wedding.’

  ‘I do seem to remember how surprised everyone was about the announcement; it was less than a week after Gethsemane Walters went missing. It seemed a bit improper really, what with her mum beside herself and that. And then there was the other thing . . . Three brothers you say?’

  ‘That’s right, three big strapping brothers who work for the bank.’ I took another coin out and put it on the ledge next to the first.

  ‘Not a very big family, is it? Are there any cousins?’

  I took out a third coin and held it poised over the other two. ‘What was the other thing?’

  She licked her lips. ‘We were all a bit surprised her marrying the Witchfinder because she couldn’t stand the chap. Mrs Mochdre had always had a candle for Gethsemane’s father, the balloon-folder. The funny thing was, he’d been courting them both: Ffanci and Mrs Mochdre. He couldn’t make up his mind. Then Ffanci Llangollen got pregnant with Gethsemane and it sort of made up his mind for him. Some people think it was a bit convenient Mrs Walters falling pregnant like that, almost as if she trapped him on purpose, but I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘So Mrs Mochdre married the Witchfinder on the rebound?’

  ‘Not really, it was nine years later, just after Gethsemane went missing. That was why it was so strange. He had always been sweet on her, but she would never have anything to do with him. Then all of a sudden we hear they are getting married.’

  ‘Was she expecting?’ I put the third coin down.

  ‘That’s what we all thought, but they’ve never had children.’ She took the coins and dropped them in her pocket. ‘Well, she’s had plenty of time to repent her haste, hasn’t she?’

  ‘They’re not happy?’

  ‘Who could be happy married to him? That wedding bed is a torture rack, so they say.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘The usual way, only worse. He has “tastes”, you see.’ She gave a swift glance up and down the street and said softly, ‘Conjugal beastliness. She’s been a martyr to it. I won’t say any more but there are those who say he only joined the ecclesiastical cops for the handcuffs.’

  I wandered down through the castle grounds, past the Crazy Golf which isn’t any more crazy than the way most of us spend our lives. Instinct drew me towards the ocean. The hangover had sharpened in the fierce sun and in my head a goblin beat a putting-green-sized gong with the insistent regularity of a metronome. The sun overhead pulsed in time with the rhythm. I hoped that there might be a cooling movement of air at the seafront but the water just shimmered and sighed with exhaustion. The Pier drooped.

  Every case is different on the surface but underneath it every case is the same. Whatever problems bring the people of Aberystwyth to my client’s chair they are all driven by the same deeply held conviction that when things go wrong they have a right of redress. Those for whom life has been a long series of misfortunes know this childish belief to be false. But others are puzzled and shocked when Life eventually knocks on the door with a bill. Carefree days have to be paid for. They are indignant, as if Life has no right to do this to them, although all the evidence suggests it is what Life does best.

  Feeling unaccountably glum, I walked towards the bandstand in search of Eeyore. Was this the spiritual crisis Llunos mentioned? Did the lake really represent the collective unconscious of Aberystwyth into which, over the years, we have thrown our repressed memories along with old prams and shopping trolleys? Or maybe there is a more humdrum explanation: the reappearing spire of the church reminds the townspeople of the years of modest achievement that have passed since the last time they saw it; reminds them with sharp poignancy of the desolation that is their fate.

  I found him sitting on a bench near the children’s paddling pool, staring out to sea. I joined him. He pointed to the junction with Terrace Road. ‘There used to be a stop over there, the number one tram. From Constitution Hill to the railway station. That’s where it turned. Your mother used to be the conductress.’

  ‘Did you ride for free?’

  Eeyore looked aghast. ‘Of course not! Your mum was brought up respectable.’ He looked genuinely indignant for a while and then smiled and looked thoughtful. ‘There would have been terrible consequences for the town if I had done that.’

  ‘Really? What sort?’

  ‘There would have been no Louie Knight.’
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br />   ‘That sounds pretty bad.’

  ‘Her father was a policeman, you see, before the war I mean. He fell at Dunkirk. Well, if I’d taken to travelling without paying I don’t think she would have thought much of me. You might never have become a twinkle in my eye.’ He shook his head in mock horror at the very idea. ‘Oh no, I couldn’t go riding without a ticket.’

  ‘What made you go up north to Llandudno?’

  ‘Oh things. Can’t remember now, to tell the truth.’

  ‘That was the same summer that Gethsemane Walters went missing.’

  Eeyore hesitated. ‘Er . . . yes, we went the month before. As I said, I wasn’t here when that fuss was happening.’

  As far as I knew, Eeyore never lied to me except for the little white lies that all parents tell, about Father Christmas and the tooth fairy and all the other little hints that behind everything there is a benevolent and all-powerful hand directing the events of our lives. But last time we spoke about this I was sure he said he went up north after the affair.

  ‘How come you never talk about mum, Dad?’

  He shifted position awkwardly. ‘Never know what to say. And, besides, thought it might unsettle you.’

  ‘I don’t think it would.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But it might have once.’

  ‘I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Bogart: In a Lonely Place. We went to see it together.’

  Mrs Mochdre walked past and moved towards the railings, pretending not to see us. I waved and, forced to acknowledge us, she gave a curt grimace in response.

  ‘Ffanci Llangollen’s sister,’ I said. ‘Last to see Gethsemane alive.’

  We watched her walk briskly down the Prom, hugging the railings as if they would spare her the obligation to be sociable.

  ‘You wouldn’t think so now,’ said Eeyore. ‘But I arrested that woman once.’

  ‘What for? Gossiping without due care and attention?’

  He laughed. ‘Some daft incident at the Pier. She took a hammer to the mechanical gypsy fortune-teller.’

  ‘Didn’t she like her future?’

  ‘You couldn’t blame her if she didn’t. She said the Devil had spoken to her out of its mouth. She was always hearing voices in those days; Satan, she said. Although why he spent so much time talking to her I’ve no idea.’ He pressed the back of his hand gently against my shoulder. ‘Anything wrong? You seem mellow.’

  ‘Hangover.’

  ‘Yes, I could smell the booze even before I saw you, but there’s more.’

  I sat for a while, contemplating the gong ringing in my head.

  ‘You don’t have to say if you don’t want,’ said Eeyore.

  ‘I think I might be spooked by the lake. Either that or Calamity going away at Christmas. It was only for a week or so but it made me think about things. Now I keep getting this dream, I’m sitting at the bottom of a well looking up at the world. There’s a steam train and some elm trees. And a woman.’

  Eeyore nodded. ‘Is it Myfanwy?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Do you hear from her?’

  ‘Not for a while.’

  ‘She’s probably busy,’ said Eeyore.

  ‘Sometimes I think I’m a physician treating the symptoms of an incurable disease.’

  ‘I used to feel like that when I was a cop. It’s natural. You still have to do it though.’

  ‘Make the patient feel comfortable?’

  ‘As best you can. Call it pain management.’

  ‘It’s always fatal eventually.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where does the witch doctor go when he gets sick?’

  ‘That’s why it is hard being a witch doctor, son.’ Eeyore looked thoughtful. ‘What you are feeling, it’s not new. It’s as old as the hills. It’s like monks in the old days who went out into the wilderness to commune with God. Sometimes it happened that being alone there all that time they became afflicted with a disease of the soul; a terrible malaise that filled their hearts with blackness, with bleak despair. They called it the noonday demon or sometimes it goes by the name acedia. The private detective can get a similar sort of malaise, called Client’s Chair Acedia. I’ve seen it before.’

  Chapter 9

  Sometimes in life the only sensible thing to do is sit under a tree wearing a sombrero and sleep until the sun is lower in the sky and the shadows lengthen. I didn’t have a sombrero but I had an office and a fan. I leaned back in my chair and yawned. Calamity had set up an open-reel tape deck with the séance tape. There was also an astrolabe, some tarot cards and an archive edition of the Cambrian News from 1955 lying on the desk. It carried the story of a bank holiday battle between cops and Teddy boys from which someone had cut out the main photo. The Slaughterhouse Mob had been involved in the fight.

  ‘Where’s the picture?’ I asked sleepily.

  ‘I don’t know, it was like that when I got it.’

  ‘What’s the astrolabe for?’

  ‘Reverse horoscopy.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s like a horoscope done backwards. Normally you use the positions of the planets to predict someone’s future, but it’s just as easy to work out what their horoscope would have been, say, last month. I thought I would run a check on this Goldilocks boy to see what he was up to the day Gethsemane disappeared. According to the news reports he refused to provide an alibi. The Feds use it a lot to check the stories of the perps.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it before.’

  ‘Well they don’t like to shout about it, you know, it’s a pretty powerful technique. You get a guy in the interview room who claims he was nowhere near the crime scene on the night in question, he says he was with his auntie in Wichita the whole time, and the grumpy cop throws down the horoscope and says, “Oh yeah? That’s not what The Mighty Zoroaster says: he’s got you down two blocks away from the robbery on Friday between ten and twelve. And that’s not all. Next day he says it’s a good day financially and you could come into a little windfall. Explain that one to me, Einstein. Or do I have to check out the horoscope for your sweet little auntie in Wichita, too?” That’s usually the point where the perps give it up.’

  ‘This is daft.’

  ‘The Feds don’t think so.’

  ‘If you believe in that sort of stuff you might as well do a reverse horoscopy for Gethsemane’s dog, after all he disappeared, too.’

  ‘That’s not such a bad idea.’

  ‘Let’s listen to the tape.’

  Calamity pressed down on a clunky Bakelite knob and the reels warbled up to speed. ‘You have to listen hard,’ she said.

  Room acoustic, shuffling, whispers inaudible. Then a woman’s voice, ‘Is there someone there?’

  A child whispering, ‘Hello, Mummy.’

  ‘Yes? Speak, spirit.’

  ‘Hello, Mummy.’

  ‘Who are we talking to?’

  ‘This is Gethsemane. It’s nice here. I’m having a lovely time. Happy birthday, Mummy. Bye-bye, Mummy.’

  Silence, unidentifiable noises. More inaudible muttering, shuffling. Then the tape ends in a riot of knocking, clunking, banging and white noise. Calamity stopped and rewound.

  ‘You have to listen two or three times to get the detail.’ She played it again. At the end, after Gethsemane had spoken, she turned the volume up full. The hiss sounded like a swarm of angry cicadas. In amid the symphony of noise other sounds emerged, soft but distinct, a collection of tantalising sounds: high-pitched squealing, demonic laughter, a clattering sound together with a bell; and a muffled voice saying something indistinct. Calamity pressed stop with an air of triumph, we looked at each other. Her eyes gleamed.

  ‘Any idea what the voice is saying?’ I asked.

  ‘It sounds like quelle ee something. I think it might be French.’ She ticked off items on the fingers of her hand. ‘Squealing, de
monic laughter and bloke saying something in French. That’s a sound signature, Louie, it’s a watermark, every one of those sounds helps us identify the place where that recording was made.’

  I didn’t really think so, but maybe she was right. Since Christmas when her own venture failed I had been taking extra care not to dampen her enthusiasm for things. I was scared she might notice. ‘Pretty tough job working it out,’ I said.

  ‘It looks like it now, I agree, but you wait till we start unpicking it. The perp. has left his muddy footprints all over this one. Those noises are a key which will help us unravel the mystery.’

  ‘What’s the next step?’

  ‘The envelope was postmarked Aberaeron. There is only one medium listed in the phone book for Aberaeron. The chances of it being the same one are slim, but it’s a good starting point. We can play it to her and ask her to tell us where the recording was made. I’ve booked us in for a sitting tomorrow morning. Her name’s Madame Sosostris.’

  ‘You’ll need to make a copy of the tape, I promised to return it to Arianwen.’ I picked up the envelope and tore the stamps off. ‘Take these and send them and the tape round to Grimalkin’s.’ I put the envelope back into the drawer.

  ‘Why are you keeping that?’

  ‘It’s got a smell that puzzles me. They won’t mind, they only care about the stamps. What if the spiritualist won’t co-operate?’

  ‘We lean on her using the Ehrich Weiss manoeuvre.’

  Calamity gave me a nonchalant look, the one that said, I know you don’t know what that is but first you have to ask.

  I laughed. ‘Oh, the old Eric Weiss manoeuvre!’

  ‘Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s when someone gets something stuck in their throat.’

  ‘That’s the Heimlich manoeuvre.’

  ‘OK then, I don’t know.’

  ‘Ehrich Weiss was the original name of Harry Houdini. He used to expose Victorian charlatans. He had this particular trick where he would turn up at a séance under an assumed name with a letter addressed to that name in his pocket. The letter would contain all sorts of bogus personal details and he would hand the coat in when he arrived. And lo! Even though he had made it all up, the spirits would start quoting it.’