Aberystwyth Mon Amour

Malcolm Pryce

Copyright © 2001 by Malcolm Pryce

For Mum and Dad, Andy and Pepys

LET'S BE CLEAR about it then: Aberystwyth in the Eighties was no Babylon. Even when the flood came there was nothing Biblical about the matter, despite what some fools are saying now. I spent the years before the deluge operating out of an office on Canticle Street, above the Orthopaedic Boot shop. And you know what that means: take two lefts outside the door and you were on the Old Prom. That was where it all happened: the bars, the dives, the gambling dens, the 24-hour Whelk Stall, and Sospan's ice-cream kiosk. That's where the tea-cosy shops were, the ones that never sold tea cosies; and the toffee-apple dens, the ones that never sold toffee. And that was where those latter day Canutes, the ladies from the Sweet Jesus League, had their stall. I saw a lot of things along that part of the Prom, but I don't remember seeing any hanging gardens. Just those round concrete tubs of hydrangeas the Council put out so the drunks would have something to throw up in. I also spent a lot of my time at the Druid-run Moulin Club in Patriarch Street and I'm well aware of what the girls got up to there. Sure, you can call it harlotry if it makes you feel better, but I was there the night Bianca died and I'm just as happy with the word prostitution. And as for idolatry, well, if you ask me, the only thing men worshipped on a regular basis in the days before the flood was money. That, and the singer down at the Moulin, Myfanwy Montez. And I know that for certain, because although I never had any money in my office in those days, I did once have Myfanwy Montez ...

Chapter 1

I can't afford friends in this town, I lose too many working days attending the funerals

Sospan, the ice-cream seller

THE THING I remember most about it was walking the entire length of the Prom that morning and not seeing a Druid. Normally when I made my stroll shortly before 9am I would see a few hanging around at Sospan's ice-cream stall, preening themselves in their sharp Swansea suits and teardrop aviator shades. Or they would be standing outside Dai the Custard Pie's joke shop, waiting for him to open so they could buy some more of that soap that makes a person's face go black. But on that day in June there wasn't a bard in sight. It was as if nature had forgotten one of the ingredients of the day and was carrying on in the hope that no one would notice. Looking back, it's hard for people who weren't there to appreciate how strange it felt. In those days, everything in town was controlled by the Druids. Sure, the Bronzinis controlled the ice cream, the tailoring and the haircuts; and the Llewellyns controlled the crazy golf, the toffee apples and the bingo. But we all know who controlled the Bronzinis and the Llewellyns. And, of course, the police got to push a few poets around now and again; but that was just for show. Like those little fish that are allowed to swim around inside the shark's jaw to clean his teeth.

When I arrived at Canticle Street Mrs Llantrisant was already there swabbing the step. She did this every morning as well as tidying up in my office and doing a number of other things, all of which I had forbidden her to do. But she took no notice. Her mother had swabbed this step and so had her mother and her mother before that. There had probably been a Mrs Llantrisant covered in woad soaping the menhirs in the iron-age hill fort south of the town. You just had to accept the fact that she came with the premises like the electricity supply.

'Bore da, Mr Knight!'

'Bore da, Mrs Llantrisant! Lovely day?'

'Oh isn't it just!'

At this point the usual formula was for us to spend a few minutes pinning down exactly how lovely a day it was. We did this by cross-referencing it with its counterparts in previous years, the records of which Mrs Llantrisant kept in her head like those people who know all the FA Cup goal-scorers since 1909. But on this occasion she was distracted by an impatient excitement which made her bob up and down on the spot like a toddler aching to divulge a secret. She placed a white bony finger on my forearm.

'You'll never guess what!' she said excitedly.

'What?' I said.

'You've got a customer!'

Though rare, this wasn't quite the novelty that her excitement suggested.

'You'll never guess in a million years who it is!'

'Well, I'd better go and see then, hadn't I?'

I stepped over the gleaming slate doorstep, but Mrs Llantrisant held on to my arm, her finger digging in like a talon. She glanced furtively up and down the street and then lowered her voice, as if there was a danger someone would steal the client if word got out.

'It's Myfanwy Montez,' she hissed. 'The famous singer!'

Bonfires of excitement burned in her eyes; you'd never guess that Mrs Llantrisant spent three nights a week outside the night club where Myfanwy Montez worked, handing out pamphlets and calling the singer a strumpet.

My office was divided into an outer waiting area and the inner office. But Mrs Llantrisant usually let clients straight into the main room even though I had told her not to. Miss Montez was already sitting in the client's chair with her back to the door; she jumped when I entered then half stood up and half turned round.

'I hope you don't mind, the cleaning lady told me to come in.'

'I know, she does that.'

She looked across to the coat stand in the corner of the room; there was a wide-brimmed straw hat hanging from it.

'I used your hat stand.'

'Did you take a ticket?'

'No.'

'Always insist on a ticket, Miss Montez — it could get confusing if another client turns up.'

She peered at me for a second puzzled, and then giggled.

'Mrs Llantrisant said you would tease me!'

I sat down in the chair opposite her. 'What else did she say when she should have been swabbing my step?'

'Are you angry with her?'

'Who?'

'Mrs Llantrisant.'

I shook my head. 'No point. It doesn't work.'

'How did you know my name?'

'You know as well as I do it's fly-posted on every spare wall between here and the station.'

She smiled at the compliment, if indeed it was one, and leaned forward with her hands placed palms down underneath her thighs. Her luxuriant hair cascaded forward and had the colour and sheen of conkers fresh out of the shell. Yes, I would have recognised her anywhere. Her features were a lot softer than the harsh black and white advertising images that were pasted around town, but there was one thing which marked her out instantly as Aberystwyth's celebrated night-club singer: the mole which sat at the exact point where her lip ended and the cheek began. She was facing the window and squinting so I walked over and closed the blinds. The view looked out across the slate roofs of downtown Aberystwyth towards the iron-age hill fort on Pen Dinas; and beyond that to the four chimneys of the rock factory, now belching out pink smoke.

It didn't usually take long for a client to lay the goods on the table, but Myfanwy seemed in no hurry. She sat in the seat like a child and looked wonderingly around the room. There was not much to look at: a battered chesterfield sofa, a mono record player, and a nineteenth-century sea chest. The connecting door to the outer office had a top half of frosted glass upon which were stencilled the words 'Knight Errant Investigations' and the name 'Louie Knight' in smaller letters. When I set up the practice a few years ago the name had struck me as a clever conceit, but now it made me wince every time I saw it. On the desk there was a pre-war fan with Bakelite knobs; a desk lamp from the Fifties; a modern phone and an answering machine . . . people thought the styling was deliberate and ironic but actually the whole office had been rented from the library and the furniture came as part of the deal; along with Mrs Llantrisant. The bathroom door still had the lock on the outside from the days when the room had been used to house sensitive items like the anatomy books and the Colour Atlas of Eye Surgery. There were two photos on the desk, in cheap stand-up frames. A black and white snap of my mother and father on a windswept promenade in 1950s Llandudno. My father, fresh-faced and Brylcreemed, leaning into the wind and shielding his new wife; and my mother the eternal bride with a smile that held no inkling that she'd be dead in a year. The other picture was a blurred Kodakolor image of Marty, my school friend who was sent on a cross-country run in a blizzard and never came back. The only other photo in the room hung next to the door: great-great-uncle Noel Bartholomew — the Victorian eccentric and romantic whose rogue gene for undertaking daft crusades had been passed on to me. On the walls either side of the door, facing each other and flanking uncle Noel, were two maps: one of Aberystwyth and environs; one of Borneo.

'I've never been in a private detective's office before.'

'Don't expect too much.'

'What's in the trunk?'

'Some charts of the South China Sea, a Burmese tribal headdress and a shrunken head.'

She gasped. 'Really?'

'Really.'

'Is that Caldy Island?' she asked pointing at the map of Borneo.

'No, it's Borneo.'

She paused, bit her lip and said, 'I expect you're wondering why I'm here.'

'It had crossed my mind.'

'They say you're the best private detective in town.'

'Did they tell you about the others?'

'What about them?'

'There aren't any.'

She smiled. 'That must make you the best then. Anyway, I want to hire you.'

'Have you got any job in mind, or do you just want to take me for a walk?'

'I want you to find a missing person.'

I nodded thoughtfully. 'Anyone I know?'

'Evans the Boot.'

I didn't say anything, just raised my eyebrows. Very high. I could have whistled as well, but I decided to stick with the eyebrows.

'Evans the Boot?'

Myfanwy looked at me and fidgeted awkwardly.

'Is he a friend of yours?'

'He's my cousin.'

'And he's gone missing?'

'About a week now.'

'Are you sure you want to find him?'

She sighed. 'Yes, I know he's a bad lad, but his mother doesn't see it that way.'

'That's the great thing about mothers.' I leaned back and folded my arms behind my head. 'Have you been to the police?'

'Yes.'

'What did they say?'

'They said it was the best news they'd had all week.'

I laughed but stopped myself as soon as I noticed her glaring at me.

'It's not funny!'

'No, sorry. I suppose not.'

'Will you help me?'

What was I supposed to say? That she was better off going to the police, who would have the resources and the connections? That with missing persons you need a lot of patience because quite often they don't want to be found? That Evans the Boot was almost certainly dead? Instead I said, 'I don't like Evans the Boot.'

'I'm not asking you to like him, just find him.'

'And I don't like the sort of people he goes round with. If I go poking my nose into their affairs I could go missing too.'

'I see, so you're scared.'

'No, I'm not scared!'

'Sounds like it to me.'

'Well I'm not.'

She shrugged. We glared at each other for a while.

'I'll admit that looking for Evans the Boot is not a healthy way to earn a living,' I said, looking away, unable to hold her stare.

'Fair enough.' Her tone suggested I was a failure.

'I mean, I'm sorry and all that.'

'Don't bother, I know what the real reason is.' She stood up and walked over to the door.

'What is that supposed to mean?'

She picked up her hat. 'You just don't want a girl like me as a client.'

I opened my mouth to speak but she carried on.

'It's OK, you don't need to explain,' she said breezily. 'I'm used to it.'

I scooted across the room to the door. 'What are you talking about?'

She flashed a look of scorn. 'Moulin girls!'

'Moulin girls?'

'That's it, isn't it? You despise us.'

'No I don't!'

'You wouldn't want to be seen with me when you're playing golf with the Grand Wizard.'

'Hey hold on!' I cried. 'You think I play golf with the Druids?'

She stopped at the map of Borneo on her way out and said, as if her previous remarks had been about the weather, 'What do the little red dots mean?'

'Sorry?' I said, still reeling.

'These little red dots on the map?'

'It's the route taken by my great-great-uncle Noel on his expedition.'

'What was he doing?'

'He was looking for an Englishwoman rumoured to be lost in the jungle.'

'Did he fancy her?'

'No, he'd never met her; he'd just read about the case and it fascinated him.'

She traced her finger along the route — up the Rajang river and across the Bungan rapids, covering in two seconds what took Noel six months.

'Where is this place?' she said to the map.

'It's near Australia.'

'He went all the way to Australia to help a woman?'

'Yes. I suppose you could say that.'

She looked up at me and said slyly, 'Are you sure he was your uncle?'

Before I could answer she had skipped through the doorway and was off down the stairs. I ran out and leaned over the balcony to toss a comment down, but I couldn't think of anything to say. The front door slammed.

I walked back, put my feet up on the desk and contemplated the morning. As usual clients were thin on the ground and I had just turned down one whose cheques would probably be honoured by the bank. The framed sepia image of Noel Bartholomew stared down and chided me with an expression that many have described as enigmatic but which has always struck me as supercilious. Starched tropical whites, pith helmet, a dead tiger at his feet and jungle behind him. Even in 1870 the camera was busy lying: the tiger was stuffed, the jungle ferns picked in Danycoed wood and the whole scene composed in a studio before he left Town. I gave a wan smile and thought about Evans the Boot. I knew him of course. An opportunistic thief with an eye for a climbable drainpipe or an easily opened back door. Still in school but broad-shouldered and bearded. Capable of seducing the wives of his school masters and then boasting to them of it afterwards. A violent thug who invoked a tingling, visceral fear. That same fear you feel when in a strange town you enter an underpass and hear from up ahead the primaeval, ritual chanting of football hooligans. Yes, I knew him, we were both creatures of the same nocturnal landscape. But our paths seldom crossed. His evenings would be mapped out by the various intricate routes from pub to pub that characterised the night out in town. While I would be sitting in cold cars, clammy with breath and condensation, watching bedroom curtains. A professional snoop in a world where most people did it as a hobby. I looked again at Noel. It was obvious now what I should have shouted down the stairs to Myfanwy: uncle Noel never came back alive. That's where misplaced chivalry gets you. But the thought didn't comfort me; the morning's peace had been disturbed, and there was only one place to re-establish it.

*

Et in Arcadia ego. The fibreglass ice-cream cone was five feet high and the Latin motto curved around the base in copperplate neon. Sitting on top of Sospan's stall, and visible to the sun-parched fisherman from ten miles out to sea, it was as much an Aberystwyth icon as the Cliff Railway or Myfanwy's mole. I too was in Arcady. I knew what it meant because I had once looked it up at the library; but if you asked Sospan he would shrug and say he found it in a book and thought it had something to do with the amusement arcade. That was his story and he stuck to it. But he knew better than anyone what strange demons brought the troubled souls to his counter.

'Morning, Mr Knight! Usual is it?' 'Make it a double with extra ripple.'

He tut-tutted. 'And not even ten o'clock! Heavy night was it?' 'No, just something on my mind.' 'Well you've come to the right place.'

His hands fluttered like seagull wings at the dispenser while he stared back over his shoulder at me, inscrutable behind that rictus of smarm the ice man calls a smile. A lot of people claimed to find in his face a resemblance to the notorious Nazi Angel of Death, Josef Mengele, but I struggled to see it myself. Although there was about him an air of moral neutrality that could on occasion be quite unnerving. He placed the ice cream down on the counter in front of me and stared edgily at the troubled expression on my face. For some reason the interview in my office had upset me.

'You get that inside you, it'll make you feel a lot better."

'What's it all about, then, Sospan?' I asked as I picked up the cone.

'Search me.'

'Don't you ever think about things?'

'What sort of things would that be then?' he asked guardedly.

'Oh I don't know. What it all means. This town. The things that go on ...'

He sucked in his breath, starting to get alarmed at the way the conversation was heading. I struggled to find the right words.

'Moral things, Sospan, you know! Good and bad and the role you play in it. The sense that by doing nothing, or not enough, you might be a ... a ... I don't know ... an accomplice or something ...'

'I don't have a lot of time for thinking about things,' he said with a defensive edge creeping into his tone. 'I just scatter my hundreds and thousands before the public. Philosophy I leave to the drunks.'

I could see that I had lost him. Or I had led the conversation in a direction which threatened the protocol. People came here to escape their cares, not to relive them. They came to buy his vanilla-soaked tickets back to a world where pain was just a grazed knee and a mother's caring hand was never far away.

* * *

I took a slurp and then turned, leaning my back against the counter and staring out to sea. The surface of the water glittered like the shards of a shattered mirror. It was going to be a scorcher.

'Seen much of Evans the Boot lately?' I asked casually.

'No. And I don't want to.'

'I heard he'd done a bunk.'

'Has he? I don't expect many people will be sorry to hear that.'

'You hear anything about it?'

He scratched his chin in a pantomime of a man struggling to remember.

'Can't say that I have.'

I put a 50p piece on the counter and the smiling ice man removed it with a nonchalance that took years of polishing.

'I didn't hear anything myself, but they do say that the kid at the bingo parlour knows about these things.'

I nodded and walked off, flicking the remainder of the half-finished cone into the bin.

The mangled ironwork of Aberystwyth Pier points out across the waters of Cardigan Bay like a skeletal finger. In happier times it had been a brightly painted boulevard of kiosks and sideshows where the ladies and gentlemen of the day came to enjoy the restorative properties of the seaside air. Parasols were twirled, moustaches waxed and ships bound for Shanghai, Honolulu, Papeete and 'Frisco' could be embarked from the end of the jetty. But the intervening years had seen a sad, slow fall from grace. The ships had all been turned into garden sheds and the Pier now lay stunted and truncated like a bridge to the Promised Land that had run out of funds.

I walked under an arch of flashing, coloured lights past a cobweb-covered RSPCA dog who stood sentinel. He regarded me with a glazed look and a shocked expression on his fibreglass face and I patted him before entering. Inside it was bedlam: a flashing labyrinth of fruit machines at which boys, who should have been in school, stood chewing like cows in the late-afternoon sun and examining the reels with the concentration of chess players. Sullen girls slouched next to them with heavy kohl-rimmed eyes like handmaidens from Egyptian tombs. I walked quickly past to the back and through the fluttering door of plastic strips into Bingoland. Here the same girls, fifty years down the line, could be found wearing dishwater-coloured coats and peering intently at the electro-illuminated screens. Each searching in the depths of the TV tube for the string of numbers that would unlock the doors of the glass-fronted cabinet of prizes. Goblin Teasmades, picnic hampers, sets of wine glasses or, for those granite-hearted ones with the resolve to save up the vouchers, the Colt 45 and Roy Rogers hat. Any line from top to bottom, side to side or from corner to corner.

At the far end of the room, next to a window looking out on to a forlorn ocean, there was a player who differed from the rest. Dressed in school uniform, she looked about fifteen or sixteen years old, and had a turned-up nose, a mass of freckles, spiky blonde hair and a chocolate-rimmed mouth. Although she was sliding the plastic shutters across on her console, she hadn't put any money in. Without the background illumination you couldn't see the numbers, but she didn't look like she needed to. I walked over to her. She gave me a brief glance and then returned her attention to the game.

'Wouldn't it be better if you put some money in?' She answered mechanically without removing her gaze from the screen. 'No point. This machine isn't going to come up for another fifty games. Lady over there in the blue scarf is going to win this one.'

I looked across to the lady in question. She didn't seem the lucky type.

'She'd probably pay a lot of money for a piece of information like that.'

'She already did. Why do you think she's sitting there?'

'How do you work it out?'

'I got a system.'

'Oh.'

'Wanna buy into it?'

'No thanks. I don't believe in systems.'

She shrugged. 'Suit yourself.'

'How old are you?'

'Old enough.'

The lady in the blue scarf shouted, 'House!'

Twenty jaws dropped and the crack of Mintos hitting lower dental plates was like a Mexican firing squad taking aim. The compere walked over and started checking off the numbers as the rest of the room held its breath and watched through rheum-filled eyes of hate. Everyone prayed that there had been a mistake: a wrong number or maybe the lady would turn out to be one of those sickos who drifted in off the street to make hoax calls. The caller gave the 'OK' and the bubble burst. The lady in the blue scarf squealed with glee and twenty handbags snapped open in unison as everyone delved for more coins.

I looked at the kid with renewed respect. 'Pretty good! What's your name?' 'Calamity Jane, what's yours?' 'Louie Knight.'

'What can I do for you, Louie?' 'Evans the Boot.'

The kid pursed her lips and shook her head. 'Sorry, never heard of him.'

I took a 50p piece and laid it on top of the bingo console.

She reconsidered. 'I've got a friend who might.'

I nodded.

Kelly's eye, number one. They were off again.

'I'd like to meet him.'

Calamity Jane tut-tutted at the enormity of the task.

'That might not be easy, boss.'

'Of course.'

'Tough assignment.'

Two fat ladies, eighty-eight.

'You look like a tough kid.'

She considered again.

'Maybe I can arrange something. I'll need some help to cover my bus fare.'

I put a 20p piece down on top of the 50p piece.

'I live in Machynlleth.'

I put another 20p down.

'And sundry expenses.'

'Well, let's just begin with the bus fare.'

Calamity Jane looked at the coins disdainfully.

'Generally, my friend doesn't get out of bed for less than two pound.'

'Must be a big bed.'

'Fills the whole room.'

I put another 50p piece down.

'Always glad to help a man get out of bed.'

'Looks to me like you want him to stay there the whole day.'

I sighed and took out my card. 'I tell you what, why don't you pin this to his teddy bear. If he's got any information about Evans the Boot, we can discuss terms then.'

She picked up the card and examined it.

'You're a gumshoe!' she said, her face lighting up. 'That's what I'm going to be when I grow up.'

'Good for you!'

She slid the card into her breast pocket and slipped off the stool.

'I'll be in touch.'

Two things struck me when I got back to the office in Canticle Street: the light was flashing on the answerphone; and the office had been ransacked.

Chapter 2

THERE WAS NO sign to indicate the presence of Wales's most notorious night club. Just a plain black door, standing quietly amid the Dickensian bow windows of Patriarch Street. On the one side were the shops selling Welsh fudge, slate barometers and paperweights made out of polished fossils from the beach. And on the other, the Salvation Army second-hand clothing store, 'Army Surplice'. The door to the club itself was featureless except for a Judas window and the number six in scarlet and only if you looked closely at the doorbell on the right would you see the simple words: Moulin Goch, Boоte de Nuit. When I arrived shortly after 10pm Mrs Llantrisant and Mrs Abergynolwen from the Sweet Jesus League against Turpitude had just started setting up their stall.

'Evening, Mr Knight!'

'Evening, Mrs Llantrisant! You're looking very glamorous tonight, new hair-do is it?'

'Guess again, Mr Knight, new something else.' She lifted her left heel and did a pirouette to show off her wares. I studied her keenly; what was new?

'Go on! Can't you tell? Honestly, you men!'

'It's those orthopaedic boots, isn't it?'

She beamed and bent forward to look at them. 'Got them this morning; imported from Milan they are: calfskin with sheepskin lining — hypo-allergenic, as well, so's the cat doesn't get a cough.'

Mrs Abergynolwen came over. 'Going into the Club, is it?'

'I thought I might.'

'Like a nice little sedative to put in your drink, Mr Knight? You'll need it.'

'Not with my luck, ladies.'

'Just in case now. Keep the lid on those raging hormones. Better safe than sorry.'

'Honestly, it would be like locking the stable door when you haven't got a horse!'

The Club was a dimly lit basement made up of adjoining cellars knocked into one. The theme was nautical: fishing nets hung from the ceiling and other maritime bric-a-brac littered the room. To one side there was a small dais that acted as the stage. It was edged with sequins that glittered in the spotlights, and an unattended microphone stood in the middle. Nearer to the stage there were closely packed wooden tables, each with an oil lamp on top, while further back there was more elaborate seating made up of coracles and rowing boats sawn in half and padded to form intimate sofas. In the far corner there was an entire fishing boat washed up behind a crimson rope, accessible only to Druids and high-ranking party functionaries. Between the tables a sea of dry ice billowed, dyed blue and turquoise by the luminous plastic fish entangled in the ceiling nets. The effect was wonderful and outshone only by the club's most famous assets of all: the Entertainment Officers, or, as we all affectionately knew them, the Moulin girls. Their job was to keep everybody happy; their uniform, anything to do with the sea that they could dig up from Dai the Custard Pie's fancy dress basement. There were cabin boys and pirates; captains, smugglers and mermaids. And also, inexplicably, a girl in Welsh national dress and two Marie Antoinettes.

I was shown to a table near the front by a door officer in a dinner jacket. Myfanwy was advertised as coming on at 8pm, but never appeared before 11pm, so I ordered a rum and pondered the significance of my ransacked office. The man from the Orthopaedic Boot shop said he'd seen a group of men leaving the premises hurriedly and driving off in a mauve Montego with blacked-out windows. Only one group of people drove cars like that - the Druids. I thought of how completely the tentacles of their organisation now encircled our town; how they reached into every nook and crevice, and controlled all aspects of life - the public affairs and those goings-on that dare not show their face to the sun. How they organised the crime and also those people put in office to stop it; and how they took a cut from both. It was so familiar now it was easy to forget that it hadn't always been like this. There was a time when they just organised the Eisteddfod, licensed the application of spells and judged the poetry. When I was in school we would eagerly push ourselves forward outside assembly to have our hair tousled by the Grand Wizard when he came from the temple to deliver an address. When did it change? When did mothers start pulling their kids into shop doorways as the men of the shroud passed? When did they become gangsters in mistletoe? Was it the time they started wearing the specially tailored surplices? That day when the usual sheets, pillow cases and Wellington boots painted white with emulsion no longer sufficed? Or was it when Lovespoon the messianic Welsh teacher became Grand Wizard? And the high-ranking officers started staining their cloaks red and black to distinguish the hierarchy like the Daleks on TV? Now, of course, they eschewed sheets altogether in favour of sharp Swansea suits and silk handkerchiefs.

I ordered another drink and pondered the damage to my office. What had they been searching for? Did it have something to do with Myfanwy's visit? Nothing had been stolen. Admittedly there wasn't much to steal, but there were a few things in the attic that I didn't want disturbed. The attic still connected to the main building of the public library and I had secreted a store of cash and a disguise up there as an emergency escape route.

* * *

And then there was the message on the answerphone. Short and to the point: a boy with an Italian accent claimed to have information to sell about Evans the Boot and told me to go to the 24-hour Whelk Stall tonight at lam.

The girl in the Welsh national dress appeared in front of me, blocking off the light.

'Hi, handsome!'

I looked up warily. 'Hi.' At close quarters I could see her outfit was only a faint echo of Welsh national dress: a basque, fishnet tights, a shawl and a stovepipe hat sitting at a jaunty angle on a mass of black curls.

She held out her hand. 'I'm Bianca.'

It would have been ungracious not to shake her hand, but I knew that once shook, that arm would act like a drawbridge enabling her to gallop across and sack the citadel of my wallet whenever she pleased. I hesitated which made her wiggle her hand impatiently in front of my face, grinning. Reluctantly I took her hand and shook. There was no resisting these girls, and if you wanted to - went the unvoiced accusation in their mocking smiles — why bother coming in the first place? She grinned and spun round excitedly before seating herself on the empty chair opposite me.

'Myfanwy told me to look after you.'

My heart fluttered unaccountably. 'She did?'

'Mmmm,' she giggled. 'She'll be along later, so she made me her deputy; only she didn't give me a star — boo hoo!'

'Are you sure she meant me?'

'Of course. You're Louie aren't you?'

I opened my mouth to speak but only managed a croak. She reached across and tousled my hair. As she did so, her basque slipped forward and I stared into the shadowy abyss of her cleavage. I groaned unintentionally before finally dragging my eyes back up to the safety zone of her face. But the damage was done: the cheeky expression poised halfway between a grin and a smirk made it clear she had registered the kill.

'Naughty boy!' she said and flicked my nose.

She moved her stool closer so we were sitting side by side, arms touching and her hair spilling out on to my shoulder, tickling my face. Her skin was hot next to mine and the moist animal scent of hair filled my nostrils like incense.

'Mmmm, I can see why she likes you!'

'But how did she know I was coming?' I said weakly.

'I don't know, I suppose you told her.'

'No I didn't.'

A waiter appeared.

'Did you tell her you weren't coming?'

'No.'

'Well, same thing then.' And then looking up at the waiter, 'Brandy-coke and another of whatever he's having.' The waiter nodded and moved off.

In a panic I shouted after him, 'Hey wait a minute!' He stopped and turned, but only slightly.

'What's wrong?' asked Bianca, her brow clouding.

I wanted to ask how much a brandy-coke cost, but thought better of it. Bianca waved the waiter away.

'Don't you want to have a nice time?" she cooed.

'Yes of course, but...' The words were lost as I considered the implications of what Bianca had just said. Myfanwy knew I would come. I hadn't said I was going to, and she hadn't invited me or anything; we hadn't even discussed it. In fact, I didn't even know myself until this afternoon. But she had known. Not just assumed it, which was bad enough, but had been so confident of it she had even appointed a friend to look after me. And damn it, here I was.

As the minutes ticked away after 11.15 the Club filled up quickly. Just before Myfanwy came on, one of the Druids from the roped off section got up and made for the gents and I followed him. I stood next to him in the stall and looked at him, but made no attempt to piss. After a few seconds he looked over. I smiled.

'That your Montego outside?'

'What the fuck's it to you?'

'Some people driving a car that like smashed up my place this afternoon. Wondered if you knew anything about it?'

He shrugged. 'Nothing to do with me.'

'It looked like they were searching for something.'

'You don't say.'

'Well tell your friends if they want anything from me, they should come and ask. It's more polite.'

'Dunno what you're talking about.' He shook his dick and walked out. I went back to my table.

By the time I returned to my seat, a change had come over the room. As if reacting to an unseen signal, the private conversations started to fizzle out, one by one, until in just a few seconds there were only three or four people talking. Then two, then none. We all looked to the stage like children who have scented that Father Christmas is in the building. A wave of restlessness then swept through the gathering like a breeze through a field of corn. A man appeared on the stage, clutching a microphone and holding out a supplicatory arm, admonishing the restless crowd into silence.

'All right, settle down, settle down!'

There was an outbreak of chair-squeaking as people turned their seats to face the stage.

'Settle down. We've got a long show ahead of us tonight, we can't start until you let us.'

The compere paused, as if to leave a respectable gap between his persona and the new one he was about to adopt. He adjusted his bow tie and then spoke in a voice borrowed from the days of Old Time Music Hall.

'My Lords, ladies, gentlemen!' he began to a huge roar of delight. 'Bards and High Priests, it's time once again to welcome our sweet little songstress from St Asaph

The audience went 'Ooooh!'

'The little lamb chop from Lampeter . . . the farmer's favourite and Druid's delight . . .'

The audience went 'Aaah!'

'The babe that makes the bards bubble at the brim with the basest beastliness ..."

The room thundered a delighted 'Whooah!'

'Ladies and gentlemen I give you the cute, the candy-coated, the coracle-sized crackerjack from Cwmtydu! The legendary, leek-scented lovespoon from Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn, the one and only legendary Welsh chanteuse — Myfanwy M-o-n-t-e-z!'

It took a full three minutes for the applause to die down. During that time, the already dim lights were dimmed further, until nothing could be made out in the room except the cigarette ends in the faces of the audience and shadowy movements on the stage. Then, all of a sudden, dawn broke in the form of a single spotlight trained on Myfanwy, shimmering in an evening gown of pale blue silk.

She sang all the old favourites: 'David of White Rock'; the ancient Welsh hymn 'Galon Lan'; 'Una Paloma Blanca'; and, of course, 'Myfanwy', Everyone had heard it a thousand times before, and no one cared. It was a class act and lasted for well over an hour. Towards the end she came down from the stage and wandered like a minstrel among the tables, teasing the men who made good-natured grabs for her. I tried not to catch her eye, but it was impossible. For the final chorus of 'Myfanwy' she came and stood at my table. I looked slowly up from my glass, our gazes locked, and to the everlasting grief of the yearning audience, she delicately plucked the rosebud from her hair and threw it into my lap. Then the lights went out.

Outside, much later, the night had turned cold and the air was full of that moisture that hangs halfway between drizzle and rain. It was about five or so minutes to one and the streets were deserted except for the occasional lone figure lurching drunkenly home. I pulled up my collar and walked along the Prom past the old university building and towards Constitution Hill. Above my head, illuminated cartoon figures shone with electric smiles in the night, and on the other side of the road, high up on the wall of the old college, Father Time sat preserved in a mosaic. His long white beard and hour glass warning everyone who looked up — and in a language they could all understand — that, for every man alive, the hours left before closing time were short.

By the time I reached the Whelk Stall the drizzle had finally made up its mind and turned into rain, driving full and hard off the sea and into my face. The booth was quiet: no one there except the kid in charge - a pimply adolescent in a grubby white coat and a silly cardboard hat. I ordered the special and waited, as the youth kept a wary eye on me; trouble was never far away at this time of night. Some instinct had long ago told me that the kid on the answerphone was not going to turn up, but I had to stay just in case. So I waited, grimly crunching the gritty pickled delicacies. After half an hour, and soaked to the skin, I gave up and left.

When I got home there was someone in the office, standing at the window with his back to me. It was Detective Inspector Llunos. Short and portly with a permanent look of weary sadness.

'You keep late hours,' he said without turning.

'Is that a police matter?'

'Depends what you get up to during them.'

I went into the kitchenette, picked up two glasses from the draining board and poured us both a rum. By the time I returned he was sitting in the client's chair, just like Myfanwy had done earlier in the day. It seemed like last year.

'What did you get up to?'

I waited a few seconds and let the fire of the rum chase out the late-night damp.

'I was at the Moulin.'

'I know. What did you do after that?'

'Went for a walk.'

'A walk?' He pretended to consider my answer. 'That's nice. Anywhere in particular?'

'No, just around.'

I wondered what he was getting at; he wasn't here for a chat.

'With a girl were you?'

I shook my head.

'Or was it little boys?'

I poured another drink and looked at him sleepily.

He sighed. During his years on the Force in Aberystwyth he'd seen everything there was to see and had long ago lost the energy to be offended by it. Just as the man who cleans up after the donkeys on the Prom no longer notices what it is he sweeps up. I'd run into him a number of times before. There was a sort of uneasy truce between us. Like any cop he didn't like having private operatives sniffing around on his turf. I didn't blame him for it; when I was walking the beat in Swansea I didn't like them either. But I had a right to operate, as long as I kept within certain limits; and as long as I did, he tolerated me. The key requirement was that I dealt straight with him; if I did, things ran smoothly enough. But if I played what he called 'silly buggers', he could be very, very hard. Sadly, my instinct was telling me that on this case I was going to be playing silly buggers.

He drank his rum slowly and then started again.

'Did you have an appointment with anyone tonight?'

I shook my head.

'An appointment with Giuseppe Bronzini?'

I paused for a second, and then said, 'Who?'

He laughed. The hesitation had been for the tiniest fraction of a second but the wily cop had seen it. I didn't like where this was heading.

'We spoke to his mother earlier; he told her he was going to meet you this evening. Know anything about that?'

'Llunos, what the fuck do you want?'

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the business card I had given Calamity Jane in the afternoon.

'Recognise this?'

'It looks like one of my cards.'

Llunos examined it as if he'd only just noticed it. 'Yes it does, doesn't it?' He flicked the card with his thumb. 'We found it on Bronzini earlier this evening. I don't suppose you can explain that?'

'Bronzini?'

'Yes. He was dead, by the way.'

I stared at him across the desk, fear starting to flutter in my stomach. He raised one eyebrow, prompting me to explain.

'I went to the Moulin, I left and went for a walk. I had some whelks and came home. I had no meeting arranged. And I've never met this kid.' It was silly buggers time.

'Any idea how he came to have your card?'

'I don't know. Maybe he picked it up off the floor.'

The tired detective stared at the ceiling and considered my reply with an air of sarcastic thoughtfulness.

'I see,' he continued. 'So you've never seen the dead boy. You didn't have any arrangement to see him this evening, you were just out walking. Hmmm.' He examined my story like someone trying on a hat they know doesn't fit, just to be fair to the hat. 'And you say he probably picked your card up off the floor. Hmmm. Any idea why he stuck it up his arse?"

Chapter 3

THE CELL DOOR clanged open and banged shut throughout the night as rhythmically as a pile-driver. I sat in the corner and gazed through red throbbing eyes at the lurid pageant: drunks and punks and pimps and ponces; young farmers and old farmers; pool-hall hustlers and pick pockets; Vimto louts, card sharps and shove ha'penny sharps; sailors and lobster fisherman and hookers from the putting green; the one-armed man from the all-night sweet shop, dandies and dish-washers and drunken school teachers; fire-walkers and whelk-eaters, high priests and low priests; footpads and cut-throats; waifs, strays, vanilla thieves and peat stealers; the clerk from the library, the engineer from the Great Little Train of Wales ... it rolled on without end. At about 2am they brought in the caretaker from the school, Mr Giles, wearing the same tree-coloured tweeds he wore when I had been in school two decades ago. He slumped on to one of the benches lining the wall and held his head in his hands. Everyone was in a bad way here, but he looked more unhappy than most. I went over to him.

'Mr Giles?' I said placing a gentle hand on his broad back. I could feel silent sobs quivering through his large frame.

'Mr Giles?'

He looked up. He was a friend of my father and knew me well.

'Louie!'

'You OK?'

'Oh no, no, no, no I'm not.'

'Did they beat you?'

He shook his head.

'What did they get you for?'

'They haven't told me.'

I nodded. It was the usual way. You wouldn't find the procedure outlined in any of the pamphlets issued by Her Majesty's Stationery Office, but Llunos had his own methods. Most people were picked up, thrown in and thrown out again the following morning without being charged or any sort of paperwork involved. It helped keep the crime figures down.

'I know what he's up to, though,' Mr Giles said. 'It's about that dog.'

'What dog?'

'At the school. He's going to pin it on me. It just isn't fair.' He buried his face in his hands again. It was unusual to see Mr Giles as upset as this. For a man who spent his life stockaded into a potting shed at the corner of the rugby field at St Luddite's, his hoe swapped for a night-stick, fortitude was a way of life. It was probably the drink making him emotional.

'What's this about a dog?'

He answered into the palms of his hands. 'One of the Bronzini boys killed Mrs Morgan's dog and they're blaming me.'

There was a fresh bout of silent sobbing; I patted him gently and moved off, leaving him to his pain.

Just before breakfast, Llunos released me. I stood blinking in the bright morning sunshine on the steps of the jail.

'You're letting me go?'

He nodded. 'You've got friends in high places.'

'News to me.'

He turned to go back inside. 'Not the sort of friends I'd like to have, though.'

I stepped down on to the pavement.

'One thing, Peeper!' he called after me.

I stopped and looked round.

'This Bronzini kid . . . was murder. Serious stuff. No room here for a private operative, you understand?'

'Sure.'

'If I find you sniffing round it, we might have to arrange for you to fall down the police station steps.'

I said nothing and walked away. An awful lot of people in this town had fallen down those steps.

'Kierkegaard or Heidegger, Mr Knight?'

'Sorry, you've got me there, Sospan.'

'It's Existentialist week; my latest promotion.'

'Give me a mint choc chip with a wafer of the Absurd.'

'Coming up.'

A Sospan Special: the only over-the-counter preparation effective against the sarcasm of an Aberystwyth cop.

Sospan pushed my money back across the counter.

'Already paid for; gentleman over there.' He motioned with the ice-cream scoop towards one of the benches near the railings. A man in a white Crimplene safari suit was seated there, incandescent in the early morning sun. It was Valentine from the boutique, the 'fixer' for the Druids. I walked over.

'Nice suit.'

He looked at the material on his arm as if surprised to see it there.

'Quality stuff thith,' he lisped. 'You should come down the thop, I'll do you a nice price.'

'If I ever go on safari, I will.'

'Thit down.'

'I'm OK standing, thanks. What do you want?' He paused for a moment as if weighing each word carefully.

'You have a ... a ... shall we thay an "item" in your possession which is of interest to my organisation.'

I took another lick. 'Is that so?'

'You know what I'm referring to?'

'Maybe.' I had no idea.

'It was given to you by Myfanwy.'

'Oh that!' I still had no idea.

'We'd like to buy it.'

'That's nice.'

'We're nice people, Mr Knight.'

'Is that why you smashed up my office?'

He raised an apologetic hand.

'A mithtake, very regrettable. We'll be more than happy to compenthate you in return, of course, for the item in question.'

I pursed my lips thoughtfully.

'How much?'

Valentine smiled, revealing a gap between the front two teeth.

'We're reasonable men; we wouldn't want to fall out over a few pounds. Thay two grand?'

I considered. 'That won't pay for the broken furniture.'

He laughed and slapped his knees in the action of standing up.

'From what I hear, 50p would be more than enough to pay for the furniture in your office. Two is very generous.'

'Let's say five.'

'I'm afraid not. There are also hidden costs to be taken into account; costs which you would have to bear if we found we could no longer afford to be nice.'

My gaze followed him as he walked briskly up the Prom towards the Bandstand. When I turned round there was a Labrador sitting at my feet, staring up and politely licking his muzzle. I looked at the ice cream.

'You sure? Paid for by the Druids, you know.'

He gave a lick of affirmation and I threw the ice into the air. The dog leaped up and caught it while it was still rising.

* * *

When I got back to the office Calamity Jane was sitting in the client's chair.

'Tough break about the Bronzini kid,' she said nonchalantly.

'So you heard?'

'Was it you?'

'Was it me what?'

'Was it you that killed him? The word is, the police took you in. That makes you a suspect doesn't it?'

I choked for a second. 'Why you little — scallywag!'

'Nothing personal, I just deal in facts.'

'Yeah? Well perhaps you'd like to explain the fact that they found that card I gave you on his body?'

She looked puzzled for a second, then she reached into her pocket and pulled out my card.

'Been with me the whole time; you mention my name to the police?'

'No.'

She gave me a look of deep scrutiny.

'Sure?

'Scout's honour.'

'Hmmm. OK. So who do you reckon did it?'

'I've no idea.'

'It shouldn't take us long to find out.'

'Hang on, kiddo, what's all this "we" business?'

'I thought I'd help you out on this one.'

'Did you now!'

'As a partner.'

'Do I look like I need a partner?'

'From where I'm sitting you do.'

'Oh really!'

'Yep.'

'Shouldn't you be in school?'

She ignored that and slid off the chair; then started pacing around the room.

'I won't ask for much. 50p a day.'

I laughed. 'That's 50p more than I earn most days.'

She walked over to the map of the town.

'We'll need some red pins.'

'What for?'

'To plot all the murders. We'll need bus timetables, witness statements, a computer database and some fresh coffee. Oh yeah,' she said turning from the map, 'if it's OK with you I might need to use your sofa, there's going to be some late nights on this one.'

'What happens if there aren't any more murders?'

She stared at me. 'What are you talking about?'

'Bronzini dead, that's one red pin — I reckon I could find one in the drawer somewhere. No need to waste money on a box. Does it have to be red?'

She took out a pack of cigarettes and said matter-of-factly, 'Boy, you're really good; you've almost got me fooled.'

'Did anyone say you could smoke in here?'

'Don't worry, I'll open a window.'

'I mean you're too young to smoke.'

'How can you be a private dick if you don't smoke?' She rolled her eyes and made a big deal of petulantly putting away the cigarettes. Then she sat down.

For a while neither of us spoke; a mild air of antagonism growing in the silence. We both knew whoever spoke first would lose. She started drumming her fingers on the table-top. I was damned if I was going to speak. I shifted in my seat and rested my elbow on the back of the chair. She copied me, the little minx.

'I mean, come on, kid . . .' I said finally.

She started counting off names on her fingers with exaggerated childishness. 'Bronzini, Brainbocs, Llewellyn and Evans the Boot.'

I stared at her suspiciously. 'What?'

'That's four pins, wouldn't you say?'

'W . . . what's that you're saying?'

'OK I'll admit Evans isn't officially dead. Maybe half a pin, but I'm only saying that to be kind to you. Won't be long before he's a whole pin.'

'Evans the Boot?'

'Probably trying to jemmy open them pearly gates as we speak.'

'Calamity!' I said sharply.

'St Peter better get himself an Alsatian.'

I banged my fist on the table. 'Calamity, stop it! What are you talking about? Who are these other people?'

'I'm sure you must have them on file. The police are keeping a blanket on it, but you being a private dick would have your own sources, wouldn't you?'

She gave me a look of crushing superiority.

Aberystwyth was a great place for a connoisseur of irony. The most underworked man in town was Meirion, the crime reporter on the Gazette: he worked fewer hours in a year than Father Christmas. Not because of a lack of material. There was enough going on to keep an entire department on overtime, but the money that owned the newspaper also owned the seafront hotels and the ghost train and the putting green and various other bits of tourist infrastructure. To read the Gazette you'd think we were a town full of Tibetan monks. We were sitting now on the terrace of the Seaside Rock Cafe, overlooking the crazy golf course.

'So far there have been three dead schoolchildren,' he said sucking thoughtfully on a stick of Blackpool humbug. 'All in the same class at school. Bronzini, Llewellyn and Brainbocs; and Evans the Boot is still missing.'

The waitress appeared and I ordered the assiette.

'It's all being kept under wraps of course. And you didn't hear any of this from me.'

'So how did they die?'

He took the rock out of his mouth. 'Brainbocs fell into one of the slurry vats at the cheese yards. Bronzini and Llewellyn were both given "squirty flowers".'

'Cobra venom?'

'Some sort of neurotoxin.'

I whistled. It was an old trick. Send a kid one of those squirt-water-in-your-eye flowers from the joke shop and fill it with cobra venom.

'Any idea who's doing it?'

'Hard to tell. Three of the kids were all of a bunch. Llewellyn, Bronzini, Evans the Boot were all hooligans. And we know there was no love lost between them and some of those South Aberystwyth gangs — posses or whatever it is they call themselves these days. But Brainbocs doesn't fit in. This kid was a child prodigy. The Cambrian Mozart they called him. Brilliant at history and just about everything else he turned his hand to. He spent last summer transcribing Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu into runes.'

I gasped. 'Wow! I couldn't even manage the cat sat on the mat!'

'Normally Brainbocs wouldn't go near kids like that, not unless he wanted his head kicked in.'

'So Bronzini and Llewellyn would have had plenty of enemies, and Brainbocs wouldn't say boo to a goose?'

'Just about. Although even Brainbocs had a few enemies.'

'Really?'

'Brainbocs got a Saturday job working at the rock factory — helping out in the R&D unit after hours. He became interested in the great age-old puzzle of rock manufacturing, called De Quincey's Theorem. It's very complicated, but basically it concerns the attempt to change the wording of the letters midway through the rock. You know, so it starts off saying Blackpool and then after a few mouthfuls it says Zanzibar or something. It's one of the last great challenges of the rock-maker's art. And he cracked it. Just like that. Sat down with a pen and paper and a set of log tables and worked it out. So then the management make him head of R&D and within a week — and the kid is still in school, don't forget, hasn't even done his O levels — within a week he'd found a way of computer type-setting the letters. Saved a fortune: twenty old-timers were thrown out of work the same afternoon. Entire factory closes down on strike. The Unions say, "Get rid of the kid, or you'll never make another stick of rock in this town." So they fire the kid. His parting shot was forty cases of rock that said "Aberystwyth" and then after two mouthfuls read: "I've pissed in this rock".'

If you walk south past the Pier and the Bandstand you come to Castle Point where the Promenade turns sharply as if on a hinge. After that the town takes on a different character: an exposed, wind-beaten strip leading down to the harbour with a down-at-heel air where life seems a constant battle with discarded newspapers flying in the wind. The buildings are mostly guesthouses or the sad annexes used by the hotels on the main Prom when they are full. The only people you see are beachcombers and dog-walkers in their flapping macs.

It was down this stretch that I found Mr Giles sitting in the harbour-side pub, the Ship's Biscuit.

'Morning Mr Giles!'

He gave me a sheepish look as if embarrassed about the other night.

'Oh hello. Everything OK?'

'Fine, and yourself?'

'Oh, can't complain,' he said stoically in a tone that stabbed the heart. He was a gentle man who had dedicated his years to the nurturing of tender shoots and seedlings, yet now some cruel trick of fate had led to him spending the autumn of his life as caretaker at St Luddite's. Who in the world had a right to complain if he didn't?

I bought him a pint and asked about the Bronzini incident.

After taking a long drink he spoke quietly to his glass.

'Few weeks ago Mrs Morgan went walking with her dog Lucky across the school grounds. You know we've got a sign up, says "Beware of your Dog", but they never read it, do they? You see a sign like that every day, so you read it but you don't really read it, if you know what I mean. You miss the difference in the wording. So she takes Lucky for a walk, and the dog disappears. Can't find him anywhere. All afternoon she's wandering around, shouting "Lucky, Lucky, Lucky!", but he's gone without a trace. Come nightfall, she has to give up. Never mind, she thinks; he'll turn up. But he doesn't. Next week Mrs Morgan's walking past the school and Bronzini appears at the gate and offers to sell her some fur gloves. Said he'd made them himself. Well, she was only too pleased to encourage a bit of industry and self-reliance among the youth, especially after all those terrible things she's been hearing about the school. So she buys the gloves. Nicely made they were, and there's something about the pattern she likes, something familiar, but she can't quite put her finger on it. They say when she got home she put the gloves on the reading table next to the fireplace and goes to make a cup of tea. When she comes back in she finds Sheba — the dog's mother — standing at the foot of the table staring up at the gloves and making this pitiful whining sound, and pawing at the ground. Terrible thing it was.'

I shook my head, appalled at the crime.

'Of course,' the caretaker added, 'the kids have their own theory about the murders.'

'Yes?'

'They think it's the Welsh teacher.'

Chapter 4

I THINK MY great-great-uncle Noel must have been in love with the woman in the jungle, Hermione Wilberforce, even though he had never met her — or at least, if he did, he only met her years after he fell in love with her. Is such a thing possible? I leaned back in the chair and listened as the scratchy strains of Myfanwy Live at the Moulin filled the room. Mrs Llantrisant had brought the LP round that morning. She said she'd found it in her garage but the cover didn't look like it had been gathering dust anywhere. So typical of Mrs Llantrisant to fib like that. After spending months at her stall every night calling the celebrated night-club singer a flibbertigibbet, she couldn't bring herself to admit that she liked her music as much as anyone else. I looked up at the portrait of great-great-uncle Noel, now sadly defaced by a hairline crack in the picture glass - a legacy of the recent ransacking. Those Druid tough guys would never have manhandled him like that if he'd been alive, that was for sure. He was, by all accounts, a man to be reckoned with. A man who liked nothing better than to enter the ring at county fairs to take on the roving pugilist. When friends and family and several members of the Borneo Society condemned his quest to rescue the white woman lost in the jungle as a romantic fool's errand, it just made him more determined. And so on 14 January 1868 he set off from Aberystwyth for Shrewsbury, en route to Singapore. Five years later the bishop's wife traded two brass kettles for his journal which had been found gathering dust under a chandelier of skulls in the corner of a longhouse.

Further contemplation of his fate was halted by the arrival in the office of a man who looked liked he'd just stepped out of an Al Capone movie: double-breasted suit in dark blue pinstripe, baggy parallel seamed trousers, silk tie, fedora hat — it was Tutti-frutti, the eldest Bronzini son. Two muscle-bound henchmen followed him in.

'The boss wants to talk to you,' he said simply.

'Would he like to make an appointment?'

The two henchmen walked round the desk, grabbed my arms, and held me pinned against the back of my seat.

'Just sit down and keep your mouth shut.'

Papa Bronzini walked in, leaning heavily on a cane. Tutti-frutti eased the old man's coat off his shoulders and helped him into the client's chair. He took his time making himself comfortable but did not seem bothered by the fact that a roomful of people was waiting for him. It came naturally to him. Once he'd made himself at ease he looked slowly up at me.

'Buon giorno.'

'Bore da. I'm sorry about your boy.'

He raised a hand as if to indicate my condolences were taken for granted. 'It's been a great shock for the family.'

'I'm sure.'

'Naturally we would like to find out who did this thing.'

'Naturally.'

For a while no one spoke. The Papa seemed to be pondering the right way to broach the subject.

'You will forgive the impertinence, I hear you were a recent guest at the police station?'

'Yes, that's right.'

'May I ask why?'

It was my turn to ponder. What should I tell him? Protecting client confidentiality was a ground rule of the profession. It was true that technically Myfanwy wasn't a client because I wasn't getting paid, but that was only a technicality. Morally I was beholden to protect her interests. I knew, too, that Papa Bronzini was no fool. He had connections; he would already know why Llunos took me in.

'Are you having trouble remembering?' The question was politely put, but the undertone of impatience was clear.

'I can't tell you,' I said.

The thug on my left took out a small rubber cosh and cradled it casually in both hands.

Papa Bronzini looked at me sadly. 'I'm dismayed to hear that.'

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Especially about your boy; but Llunos wanted to speak to me about a different matter.'

'Is that so?' he asked simply. Again there was silence. This time with an edge of tension. 'You should understand Mr Knight, no one is accusing anyone of anything. It's simply a matter of fact-finding. You're a father yourself, you must understand —'

'No I'm not.'

Papa Bronzini looked confused.

'I'm not a father.'

He picked up the photo of Marty.

'He's not my son. He was a school friend of mine; he died when I was fourteen.'

Bronzini put the photo frame back on the desk with exaggerated respect. 'You must have been very close to him, to keep the picture on your desk all these years.'

'I suppose you could say so. Although it's a bit more complicated than that.' I didn't tell him Marty died for starting a mutiny during a PE lesson.

Bronzini raised a hand. 'Even so, someone with such sensitivity would surely understand my feelings as a father. We're talking simple courtesy and decency here —'

'I do understand, Mr Bronzini, but I can't tell you what Llunos wanted to see me about. It's a matter of honour. As a Sicilian you would surely —'

Papa Bronzini banged the desk with his fist. 'You talk of honour and lie to me in the same breath!'

I wondered how long it would be before they used the cosh. Suddenly I became angry; who were these cheap gangsters to force their way into my office and give me a lecture on manners?

'Look, Mr Bronzini!' I snapped. 'I sympathise about your son, but let's not get carried away; we both know what you and your boys get up to round this town, so don't come here preaching to me about courtesy —'

The cosh landed on the side of my head; sparks shot across my field of vision and the room turned on its side. I lay sideways on the floor for a few seconds before the two thugs dragged me back up and put me in the chair.

Tutti-frutti leaped round the desk and shouted into my face as the two brutes held me back.

'Don't disrespect our son, he was a good boy!'

'Oh yeah!' I shouted, anger blowing away the last remnant of good judgment. 'Try telling that to Mrs Morgan whose gloves bark every time she goes past the butcher's!'

The cosh landed again.

Papa Bronzini sighed and then stood up slowly, signalling with a slight waft of his hand that the interview was over.

'You are a fool, Mr Knight,' he said. 'You will regret your insult to our family.'

After they left, I lay on the floor looking at the room sideways, so angry that I didn't notice for quite some time the large tender bump starting to form on the side of my head. The phone rang and I climbed back on to my chair to answer it.

'Yeah?'

'Hey Peeper!'

'Calamity?'

'I thought I'd check if you've changed your mind yet.'

'About what?'

'The partnership.'

I rested the phone against my cheek and said nothing.

'You still there?'

'Look, Calamity —'

'I know you think I'm just a kid and all that, but I think I know who's behind all this.'

'Look, Calamity -

'Police are baffled, but -'

'Calamity!' I said sharply. There was a second's silence on the line. 'This isn't a game. If you know anything about this you should go to the authorities.'

She made a derisory farting sound. 'Police! If we left it to them the whole school would be dead.'

'It's not a game, kid.'

'50p a day. That's all.'

I shook my head. 'No dice.'

'I'll be down the Pier if you change your mind.' The line clicked dead.

After sunset the night got hotter rather than cooler until by ten o'clock the people wandering the Prom were sweating more than they had been in the afternoon. As the heat increased, the paving slabs, like flowers opening at dusk, started to release the distinctive perfume of the summer night. It was a mixture that would have kept a wine-taster happy for days unravelling the different notes. Heavier tones of fried onions, spilled beer and the salty tang of sun-dried sea weed; and on top of that coconut oil, sweat, spilled ice cream, cheap aftershave and dog piss. It was a smell that belonged to the overhead lights just as assuredly as the scent of pine belonged to Christmas-tree lights; a smell which would always be linked in the photo album of the soul with three particular sounds: the muted roar of the sea; the electronic chimes of the amusement arcades; and the demented banshee wail of the police sirens.

At the Moulin I was shown to a table only two rows from the front. It meant nothing to me at the time, it was just a table: in the same way that youth means nothing to those who obliviously possess it. I was unaware then of that forlorn army of Myfanwy-worshippers sitting at the back behind the pillars who would have been craning their necks to follow my progress with envy.

Bianca came over with another girl.

'Hi, this is Pandora.'

'Pandy!' the girl announced holding out her hand to shake. She was very small, probably not much over five foot, cute and dressed as a cabin girl. I shook her hand.

'Pleased to meet you.'

Bianca turned to Pandora. 'Perhaps now we can get some peace at last.'

'Not before time,' said Pandora.

'Why, what's wrong?' I asked.

'You of course,' said Pandora. 'Myfanwy won't stop talking about you.'

'Get away!'

'It's been Louie this and Louie that —'

'We're sick of it.'

'Oh you should listen to her!' Pandora rolled her eyes as she forced herself to remember the tedium of hearing my name mentioned every minute of the day.

'We had to tell her to shut up. "Who cares how handsome he is?" we said.'

I laughed off their nonsense. 'You must think I was born yesterday!'

'It's true!' they chimed in chorus.

Myfanwy arrived. 'OK scram, kids, go and find your own man!'

'Pardon us I'm sure!' Pandora and Bianca minced off through the tables, making an exaggerated show of being put out. Myfanwy watched them go.

'That one's Pandy. All the men fancy her. They like her white socks. You wouldn't think she keeps a flick-knife in the right one, would you?'

She kissed me on the cheek, sat down and said, 'I didn't think you'd be back.'

'Why?'

'I don't know, I just didn't. I suppose because I wanted you to come back.'

'You did?'

'Of course! I'm sorry I was rude to you in your office.'

'You weren't, were you?'

'Wasn't I?'

'I don't think so.'

A waiter appeared.

'I'm on stage in a little while, but we'll have a quick drink. Order something.'

'What do you want?'

'Anything, whatever you're having.'

I ordered two straight rums.

'I mean, I understand why you wouldn't want to take the case and that.'

'Have you heard any more about your cousin?'

She shook her head sadly. 'No, his Mam's going out of her mind.'

'I asked around a bit, to see if anyone has heard anything.'

She looked at me wide-eyed. 'You did?'

'Here and there, nothing special.'

'How much do I owe you?'

'Nothing, of course.'

'But I must give you something.' She picked up her handbag and I put a restraining hand on her forearm.

'There's something I need to ask you. That afternoon you came to see me, the Druids broke into my office - they were looking for something. Something important to them, which they seem to think you gave me. You don't know what it is do you?'

She looked puzzled. 'No, I've no idea.' She tried to open her bag. 'I must give you something.'

'No,' I said again.

A frown furrowed her brow and then she brightened. 'I know, I'll tell them not to charge you for the time.'

Now I looked puzzled. 'What time?'

'For me sitting here.'

My eyes widened. 'You mean you're going to charge me?'

'But of course! I have to!'

'But I thought ... I thought . . .' The words trailed off. What did I think? 'Damn it, Myfanwy, I thought you were sitting here because you wanted to!'

'But I do!'

'And you're going to charge me?'

'Of course . . . Oh Louie . . .' She wrapped her arms around mine and pulled herself close to me. 'Don't be like that. It's my job, don't you see?'

'But -'

'It doesn't mean I don't want to sit here. Look at it this way: imagine I was serving behind a bar. When you turn up I'm really pleased because you're my favourite customer. But I still have to charge you for the drink, don't I?'

'That's completely different.'

'Why?'

'I don't know, it just is. It's not the same.'

'Oh Louie!'

'I can't believe this. I thought . . .'

'What?'

I struggled for the words. What was I supposed to say? I who had only known her a few days thought for some unknown reason that she might actually like me? Because I couldn't find the right words, I said the wrong ones.

'So basically you're just renting yourself out to me, are you? I'm no better than all those other sad losers who come here.'

'Hmmm!' she snorted.

I sighed and stared at the table. 'If that's the case, then I don't want you sitting here.'

'Louie!'

'Go away.'

'Louie! Oooh you!' she stood up and stormed away.

When the two rums came I drank them both down in one and ordered two more. After that I had four more. And then another two. It probably explained what happened later. I was wandering back from the toilet sometime towards the end of the evening, past the roped-off section, as Bianca got into a fight with Pickel, the dwarf. Something was said and she slipped angrily off his knee and sat on the knee of one of the other Druids. More words were exchanged and the dwarf flung a hand out to cuff her. Pickel, who wound the town hall clock, always had large bunches of keys hanging from his belt like a cartoon gaoler and his movement unleashed an eerie jingling sound. Bianca dodged the blow and he took aim to do it again. I stepped over the rope and caught his hand.

'Didn't anyone ever tell you not to hit a lady?' Hate filled his eyes and his orchestra of keys became silent for once, as the passion immobilised him. Even here, in the thick nicotine-heavy fug of the basement bar, I could detect the faint whiff of gin. It was an odour that had oozed out of Pickel all his life, since the days of a childhood spent clinging to his gin-soaked Mam.

'I would tell you to pick on someone your own size,' I quipped, 'but they might not be easy to find.' It was a cheap remark, and showed how drunk I was.

Pickel jumped up but allowed himself to be easily stopped by Valentine's ivory-handled cane which was now resting against his chest.

'Pickel!' snapped Valentine.

Furious, Pickel looked at Valentine, then me, then back to Valentine. 'Who's he think he is, talking to me like that?'

Valentine responded in a cold, businesslike tone. 'The gentleman is right, Pickel. You muthn't mithtreat the ladies.'

Pickel was boiling, but some instinct stopped him from pushing it too far. 'What ladies? They're all slags!'

'Pah!' Bianca stood up and pranced haughtily through the crowd over to the other girls. At that point the manager appeared and interposed himself between me and the argument.

'Sorry sir,' he said politely, 'only Druids allowed in this section.'

It was a watershed. A single wrong syllable here and I would never be allowed back in the Moulin again. Whether or not I paid a visit to the Accident and Emergency department on the way home would depend on the syllable.

'That's OK,' I smiled cheerfully, 'my mistake. Wouldn't want to be mistaken for a Druid.'

I decided to leave. As I retrieved my coat the manager reappeared carrying a silver tray which he proffered to me.

'For you sir.'

There was a mobile phone on it. I picked it up.

'Yes?'

'Now that you have established your credentials ath a gentleman, maybe you will be tho good as to honour our little agreement.' It was Valentine.

'I'm still considering.'

'No, you don't have that luxury. My organisation is getting rather impatient. We've been very fair with you, but time is in very limited thupply in thith matter.'

'Who do you represent?'

'That doesn't concern you.'

'Tell Lovespoon that I'll only deal with him directly.'

'Please, Mithter Knight, you really aren't in a position to make conditions.'

'No meeting with Lovespoon, no deal.'

He sighed. 'You're one man. You know the power of our organisation. Why be tho foolhardy?'

'It's the way I was brought up.'

'You've got until thunthet tomorrow. After that we can forget about being "gentlemanly".'

He hung up.

The next day was Sunday, and as usual I went to meet my father for a pint down at the Ship's Biscuit. I arrived shortly after eleven and Eeyore was already there sitting outside at one of the tables. He was wearing his trademark raincoat and cap despite the warm weather and there was straw on his coat from the donkeys. Another trademark. We looked at each other and nodded; no other greeting was necessary. I went in to fetch two pints and then joined my father in the sun.

'You just missed Mr Giles.'

'I saw him the other day. He wasn't doing too well.'

Eeyore made a sympathetic grimace into his pint glass. 'It's this thing about the dog.'

'I know, but why's he so upset about it? He's seen plenty of worse things up at that school.'

I looked across the harbour and over the rooftops. Aberystwyth was overshadowed by two hills: Pen Dinas with its iron-age hill fort; and Pen-y-Graig with its iron-age school.

Eeyore sighed. 'It's just one thing after another for him, though, isn't it? What do they need a gardener up there for anyway? There's no garden.'

'You seem thirsty today.'

He shrugged.

'Something on your mind?'

'Not really, apart from where the next bale of hay is coming from.'

It was the best time of day to enjoy a drink. The doors were wedged open to allow the fumes of the previous night to escape and in their place was the sharp, reassuring tang of disinfectant. The juke box and fruit machines were silent. The only sounds were the silvery tinkle of someone across the street practising scales on a piano; and the occasional cry of a gull.

Eeyore took a gulp from his pint and then spoke.

'How about you? Got any work?'

I thought about the answer. 'Someone came round on Friday with a case. Missing person. Evans the Boot.'

Eeyore made the sort of hissing sound you make when you burn your finger. 'Did you take it?'

'I'm not sure. I think I turned it down.'

He nodded. 'Probably wisest move.'

I shook my head. 'I don't know. I told the client "no", but I seem to be mixed up in it all the same. I'm not getting paid for it, though; so I don't call that very wise.'

'That's good.'

I looked at him. He was still staring ahead, but talking to me. Which bit did he mean was good?

'What is?'

'If you're helping someone and it's not for money, stands to reason it must be for a reason that's a lot better than money. When I was on the Force we did things because they were right, not because of the money. We'd have been stupid if we'd exposed ourselves to all that danger for money, because they didn't give us any. Not much anyway.'

I took a deep drink. The beer was good.

'The trouble is, I'm not sure if I'm doing it for good motives or just pigheadedness.

'Often there's no difference,' said Eeyore.

On my way back I cut across past the town hall and heard from up ahead the jingling of Pickel and his keys, although it was too far for the smell of gin. He was scurrying with that strange bobbing, bent-over gait reminiscent of the gorillas in the Planet of the Apes movies. Some instinct made me stop halfway across the square and hide behind the slate plinth of Lovespoon's equestrian statue. I waited as Pickel entered the side door to the clock tower. It was a strange life he lived up there in the belfry: washing in an old tin tub that collected rainwater and cooking in a cauldron donated by the Shawl & Sorcery Society. Pickel was in school at the same time as me, but we seldom saw him there. Mostly, he would be playing truant and loafing around the Square, looking up at the clock with a curious love; an emotion that was hard to explain except in the terms of the saloon bar psychologist who saw it as the surrogate for a mother's love. The real commodity had been sold long ago to the sailors down at the harbour. Pickel got the job as clock-keeper when the previous incumbent, Mr Dombey, died after falling into the workings. It was the Aberystwyth version of the Kennedy assassination, and since it took a week to clean all his flesh off the teeth of the clockwork, time really did stand still for a while. There were many in town for whom the prospect of Mr Dombey dying that way seemed as unlikely as a fireman being run over by his own fire engine. But the police were satisfied that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the accident. Yet even they could not deny that there was a strange whiff of gin in the clock tower that day, and Dombey never drank. Still, someone had to wind that clock.

A voice interrupted my chain of thought.

'Hi!' It was Calamity.

'Hi!'

'Where have you been?'

'The pub.'

'You drunk?'

I laughed. 'No!'

She stood beside me twisting her body round to look at my face.

'Have you changed your mind yet?'

'Nope.'

'Aren't you even curious to know who it is?'

'Who what is?'

'The murderer?'

'All right. Who is it?'

By way of answer she looked up, craning her neck and squinting into the bright blue sky.

'Him.'

I followed her gaze up at the leaf-green bronze statue of Lovespoon astride his sturdy cob. Around the hoofs at the base there was a Latin inscription recording the well-known story of how as an infant he refused his mother's teat during Lent.

'The Welsh teacher?'

'Yep.'

'He's murdering his own pupils?'

'You knew him didn't you?'

'Yes,' I sighed, as my thoughts drifted back through the fog of years. 'Yes, he taught me Welsh many years ago.'

'You know what he's like then.'

'I remember he used to hit a lot of people. I don't recall him ever murdering anyone. I could have been away that day, though.'

I could sense the frustration gradually squelching her high spirits.

'Why won't you take me seriously?

But before I could say anything, she started walking away, across the road.

I leaned against the plinth, overcome by an unaccountable weariness. How could I take such a story seriously? It was just a piece of playground nonsense, the sort kids made up all the time. In school we had all been terrified of him, of course. When he appeared in the corridor we used to hurl ourselves aside like Chinese peasants caught by the sudden arrival of the Emperor. Pressed tightly against the wall, we would wait with averted gaze until he swept past, his white hair billowing like the sails of a clipper ship. But apart from dispensing thick ears he never did anything to justify such fear. Now he was Grand Wizard and ran the town from behind a veneer of solid civic respectability. But we all knew how thin the veneer was. Ask the men who mix the concrete in this town — those gaunt-eyed, haunted men who dare not speak of the things secretly added to their concrete during the night. Ask them about the bodies in the foundations. What was it Sospan said? The town is built on honest men. Or ask why Meirion the crime correspondent also covers the fishing industry. Why he reports so assiduously on the foreign objects that frequently snag the nets. Or ask the fishmonger about the human teeth found in the bellies of the fish. Or ask Lovespoon's cousin about his second-hand clothing store 'Dead Men's Shoes'. Ask him where he gets his stock from. Yes, Lovespoon was not a man to be meddled with. And the only reason I or Llunos had not also ended up in a lobster pot was because it suited his purpose to allow us to operate. Like Stalinist show-trials it added a gloss of legitimacy to his regime. All the same. Would he turn on his own pupils? Wouldn't they be sacrosanct? I pressed my cheek against the warm slate of the plinth. Who could say? How do you judge a man, anyway, who commissions an equestrian statue of himself after a pony trekking trip to Tregaron?

Calamity shouted from across the road. 'Would you like to know who the next victim is going to be?'

She grinned and skipped down the street, adding just before she got out of earshot: 'The fireman's son!'

Chapter 5

WHEN I RETURNED from my early-morning stroll the following day, Myfanwy was in the office sitting on a wicker picnic hamper. It squeaked loudly as she stood up.

'Hi! The door was open so —'

I waved away her explanations. We both looked at the hamper.

'It was such a lovely day I thought we could go to Ynyslas; I hope it's OK. Besides, I wanted to apologise.'

'What for?'

She pulled the band from her hair and shook it loose. 'Last night — our little misunderstanding. I didn't want you to think I was after your money.'

'Don't worry about it. I was drunk.'

She lifted the lid to the hamper. 'So I thought I'd treat you.'

My face lit up. 'Wow! Champagne, strawberries, chicken . . . you shouldn't waste your money on me.'

'Oh that's OK, it didn't cost much.'

'Of course it didn't, champagne's really cheap in this town.'

'No, really, it was nothing.'

I looked at her with a stern, schoolmasterly expression. 'Now don't you tell tales like that.'

Myfanwy looked at me awkwardly. 'Honestly, it cost nothing.'

It took a second or two before I understood what she was saying.

'You didn't steal it?'

'No, of course not! I put it on ... on ... a slate.'

'A slate?'

She twisted her hands. 'A slate?' I repeated.

'Yes . . . yours actually,' she said brightly.

'Where?'

'At the Deli.'

'I haven't got one.'

She joined her hands together in front of her, stretched the arms and smiled sheepishly.

'Well, I suppose you have now.'

We wedged the hamper into the back seat of my Wolsely Hornet and drove through town and up Penglais Hill. I suppose I should have been annoyed but really I felt like a kid on a school trip. I didn't need to ask how she managed to get the man at the Deli to put thirty pounds' worth of food on to the slate of someone who never visited his shop. I could picture the scene only too clearly: Mr Griffiths standing there looking awe-struck and imbecilic as if an angel had appeared in front of the counter; his thick-rimmed spectacles misting up and his pink sausagey face, edged on either side by two broom-heads of wiry black hair, turning crimson. I could see him shooing away the assistant and adjusting his tie as he assumed command of the situation. He probably didn't dare look at her, in case he mistakenly looked at the wrong place. She probably told him he was handsome and he probably lost control of his bladder for a second. I could see the shaking of his hands as he put the produce into the hamper, and then the slight pause when she asks for the champagne, and then the shakes getting worse. He was lucky she didn't ask for the deeds to the shop.

At the top of Penglais Hill we turned left and took the old route to Borth. The sun was hot, the windows were open and Myfanwy sang as we drove. It was like sailing a ship over an ocean of grass as the road went up and down over the hills and dales. Every hillside was chequer-boarded with cows. The constant rising and falling of the landscape had a hypnotic regularity and you thought it would never end. But then the car mounted the final hill with that suddenness that never fails to surprise and we were on the roof of the world, staring at nothing but blue: the washed-out blue of the hot sky, and the darker indigo of the cold sea rolling in from the Bay. We pulled into a driveway in front of a five-bar gate and got out. The hillside curved steeply away down to Borth and the wind was fierce, buffeting the car and making the loose cloth of my shirt flap with a sharp sound. Down below us, extending for almost ten miles, was the huge flat expanse of the Dovey estuary and stretched across it in a thin straight line was a straggle of houses. This was the town of Borth: tinselled up with inflatable swimming hoops, buckets and spades in summer; and in winter nothing but dust and creaking shutters. At the far northern extreme, lost in the haze and a desert of sand dunes was Ynyslas, goal of our picnic; and beyond that, on the other side of the estuary, were the dot-sized houses of Aberdovey. From here they looked achingly close, but so formidable a barrier were the estuarial tides, that Aberdovey often seemed like another country.

Myfanwy inserted herself between my arm and my body, to shelter from the wind, and pointed out toward the dunes of Ynyslas.

'That's where Evans the Boot's Mam lives. I thought we could drop in and say hello.'

I looked at her with a mild sensation of having been subtly manipulated.

'That's if you don't mind.'

We parked midway along the main street and climbed on to the high concrete sea wall, which neatly divided town and beach and blocked any prospect of a sea view from the guest houses on the road. On the beach holidaymakers from the Midlands were encamped in three-sided tents made of deck-chair material, but so wide and long were the golden sands, the illusion of being alone was not hard to enjoy. It was a beach created for buckets and spades and sons burying dads.

The land between Borth and Ynyslas is taken up by a golf course and we strolled gently between the rough of the links and the smooth of the ocean. Fifty yards ahead of us a lone figure could be seen tramping through the knee-high grass. His tattered army greatcoat and forlorn demeanour marked him out as one of the veterans from the war in Patagonia in 1961. We stopped walking and watched his slow, dreamy progress. Patagonia: the Welsh Vietnam. Even after a quarter of a century the scars on the collective heart had still not fully healed. Patagonia, a harsh tract of land on the tip of South America, a world of searing beauty and withering cold; difficult to find on an atlas and known only because Welsh settlers went out there in the nineteenth century. A story that began in adversity and ended in tragedy seventy years later when the Indians turned against them. It was a war of independence that soured a generation and left behind the legacy of the Vets: soldiers in a ghost army that haunted the lanes of West Wales. Each carrying in his heart the story of a military adventure that no one wanted to hear.

He was looking for lost golf balls which he could sell for his evening's meal. There was a sudden shout, a sharp crack, and the old soldier spun to the ground; felled by a golf ball. We ran towards him and from the fairway the party responsible for his misfortune came over at a more leisurely pace.

He was sitting up rubbing his head when we arrived.

'Are you OK?' said Myfanwy putting her hand on his shoulder.

'Sure, sure,' the soldier said distantly. 'Not the first time I've been hit by a golf ball.'

As he spoke we looked up to watch the arrival of the golfers. There were five of them, although we could only see four because the fifth was inside a sedan chair. The Druidic crest at the front told us it belonged to Lovespoon. The first of the party to arrive was Pickel who cartwheeled towards us like a circus tumbler. Behind him came Valentine in tartan slacks, three-tone golfing brogues and a sleeveless diamond motif sweater over a floral pattern shirt. He was pulling a squeaking trolley. At the back of the group, standing by the sedan chair, was the school games teacher, Herod Jenkins.

'I think he may be concussed,' I said looking up.

'Bloody idiot!' Valentine spluttered. 'I'll give him thomething to be concuthed about. Tell him to move his arse tho we can get on with the game.'

'He needs to rest a while.'

'Not here he doesn't.'

Myfanwy spoke: 'You should say sorry to him, you could have killed him.'

'You can shut your mouth you little tart!' said Pickel.

'Why don't you try and make me you smelly little piss-pot!'

'OK, OK,' I cried trying to wrest control of the situation. 'This man is injured —'

'Well he shouldn't go jumping in front of golf balls, then, should he?'

'Oh he jumped did he?'

'Of course he did, didn't you thee? He dived, tho he could make an inthurance claim or something.'

'Does he look like the sort of guy who has insurance?'

'Don't you be fooled by him, I know his sort —'

There was a sharp clicking sound and we all looked round to the sedan chair. A hand protruded through the curtains, like that of a Bourbon monarch. The hand waved impatiently and Valentine hurried over and poked his head inside. An uneasy silence ensued, broken occasionally by the sound of Herod Jenkins cracking his knuckles. I found myself unable to resist staring at him. Even after twenty years the sight of the man who sent Marty to his death on that cross-country run sent tremors of fear through my soul.

Valentine returned and spoke to me. 'Mr Lovethpoon extends his compliments and has asked me to remind you of the deadline we agreed for thunthet this evening. He says the thun thets at 21.17.' Then, turning to the rest of the party, 'OK, we'll drop a thtroke and move on.' They sauntered off.

'Ooh they give me the creeps!' shivered Myfanwy.

The soldier sat up and crossed his arms over his knees. His coat was torn and stained and his hair long and matted, splaying out from beneath the famous green beret.

'Thanks for your help. My name's Cadwaladr.'

'Louie and Myfanwy.'

He nodded. 'I know, the singer. I've seen the posters.'

Myfanwy smiled. 'Are you feeling all right now?"

'Oh sure. It was only a little knock.'

'It sounded pretty loud to me,' I laughed.

'No, no. It was nothing. It was the hunger that did it, y'see. I fell over from weakness, not because of the golf ball.'

There was a moment of puzzlement until we realised that the old soldier was staring longingly at the hamper.

'Of course!' I reached inside and broke off a chicken leg and handed it to him.

'No no!' he protested. 'I didn't mean that. I wouldn't dream of taking your picnic.'

'It's all right,' said Myfanwy, 'honestly it is!'

'Yes, please be our guest.'

'Absolutely not,' he insisted, 'I won't hear of it; although if it's all the same to you I wouldn't mind just trying the chicken to remind myself what they taste like. It's been so long you see.'

Myfanwy and I exchanged glances.

'Well, I suppose here is as good a place as anywhere.' We dragged the hamper off the fairway and up to the top of one of the dunes. Then we found a sandy spot with a commanding view of the ocean and began our picnic. Cadwaladr ate with the hunger of one who no longer has to worry about keeping the wolf from his door, because the beast has grown so thin you can fend him off with a stick. Chicken and bread, champagne, strawberries, ice cream and gateaux, it all disappeared.

'That Welsh teacher,' said Myfanwy after she finished eating, 'he really thinks he's something.'

I laughed. 'That's because he is something. Grand Wizard on the Druid council, head-teacher, prize-winning poet, scholar . . . war hero as well, so I hear.'

Cadwaladr spat out a piece of chicken gristle. 'War hero my foot!'

We both looked at him.

'I fought alongside him in '61. I don't remember him being carried around in a sedan chair then. He was just like the rest of us, a scared, skinny kid who just wanted to go home to his Mam.'

'It must have been terrible,' said Myfanwy.

The old soldier nodded. 'I was seventeen at the time, never been further than Swansea before, and then only to see Father Christmas. The thing I remember most is the cold. And the food - all that school potato.' He laughed bitterly. 'As a gesture of solidarity the school kids at home were going without their dinners so they could send them to us. Until we wrote asking them to stop.'

He chuckled and took out a scrap of newspaper and some tobacco and proceeded to roll a cigarette.

'Lovespoon won the Cross of Asaph, didn't he?' said Myfanwy brightly.

The soldier nodded. 'For sitting on his backside the whole war in a plane.'

'He won it for the raid over Rio Caeriog.' A shadow of pain passed across the soldier's face on hearing Myfanwy's words and she added quickly, 'We ... we ... we did it in school.'

Cadwaladr laughed bitterly. 'I bet they didn't teach you my version of it.' He paused, as if about to recall the bitter events of those far-off times, and then thought better of it. He shook his head and said in a tone of remote sadness, 'No, I bet they didn't tell you that one.'

He didn't say any more and concentrated his attention on the cigarette. The rolling paper added a faint rustling to the sighing of the wind in the marram grass. We stared at the old soldier and Myfanwy gave me a helpless look, angry with herself for having mentioned the one battle that no one wanted to talk about. Rio Caeriog, a slowly meandering river in the foothills of the Sierra Machynlleth mountains. The most famous or infamous battle of the conflict. They said it was a great victory and handed out medals like sweets. But no one who came back ever wanted to talk about it.

I started to pack away the remains of the picnic and Cadwaladr stood up.

'Thanks for the meal, it was lovely.'

'Where you going?' I asked. 'Maybe we could give you a lift.'

'Don't see how. Not unless you're going nowhere.'

'Just tell us where you're going, we can drop you off.'

'No, really, I'm going nowhere. As long as I don't reach there too soon, I'll be fine.'

Myfanwy looked at me and I shrugged. 'We'll see you around anyway.'

He nodded and then trudged off. We watched as he walked down the wall of stones to the sand and on to the water's edge.

Then he turned in the direction of Borth and followed the line of the sea; he didn't look back.

Half an hour later we were sitting on the veranda of Evans the Boot's dilapidated wooden bungalow, drinking tea. The garden looked out on to the estuary and was filled with bric-a-brac: a rusting child's swing; an upturned boat with rotten planks; a swampy pond with an old pram in it; and a number of car tyres strewn around the spiky grass. A channel filled with slate-coloured water and a simple piece of wire strung between two concrete posts served as a fence. In the distance across the constantly sliding estuarial waters, was Aberdovey, that Shangri-la of restless Aberystwyth misfits.

Surprisingly, given the temperament of the son she had borne, Ma Evans was a gentle and thoughtful lady: two soft grey eyes, a bun of fine white hair and a face worn with the myriad cares that came from bringing a rebel into the world alone. She shook her head sadly.

'Nope. This time it's different. He's gone before, but this time it's different, I can feel it.'

'You mustn't give up hope, dear,' said Myfanwy.

'You can't fool me. A mother knows. I knew it as soon as the police came round. You know why? They were polite. First time in fifty years they've been polite to me. Called me "Madam". I knew then something bad had happened to the boy.'

Myfanwy picked up the tea pot and refreshed the cups. 'That still doesn't prove anything.'

'They had a special dog with them. Wanted to put it in his bedroom. "What for?" I said, "you'll frighten the cat." They said it was a whiffer dog or something. Had a very delicate sense of smell. "Well, you don't want to be sending him into my boy's room then," I said, "the pong in there!" Well, of course they wouldn't listen to me. I wouldn't let them but they had a warrant, so what could I do? That was a novelty as well, going to the trouble of getting some paperwork. So they send the dog in and he's sick. Wouldn't go back neither, just sat in the garden howling. So then they went themselves. Should have seen them when they came out. Green as Martians, they were.'

She enjoyed a mild snicker and sipped her tea. Then she opened her handbag with a snap and pulled out a scrap of purple cloth.

'They found this under the bed. They put it in a plastic bag and gave me a receipt for it. "Suspected tea cosy", it said. "He's never been involved in anything like that," I said. "That's for the judge to decide," they said. Then they went.'

I took the cloth and looked at it.

It was just a scrap of wool, about the size of a postage stamp.

'I suppose you know your son had a few enemies?'

She snorted. 'Bloomin' millions. If it wasn't for Myfanwy coming round here once in a while, I don't think we'd ever see another human face. We're not a very popular family —'

'Now don't go saying that,' interjected Myfanwy.

'Ha! you don't have to waste any time trying to fool me. I know the things they say.'

'What do they say?' I asked.

'You know very well. Don't you go teasing me. They say I'm a witch.'

Myfanwy gasped and put her hand to her mouth. It fooled no one. Everyone knew Evans the Boot's Mam was a witch.

'Are they right?' I joked.

She pulled a face as if trying to dismiss any significance that might attach to her words. 'Well, as you know, if a young girl's in trouble and she doesn't want her parents to learn of it, she can always come here for some advice, and maybe a few herbs if you know what I mean. But that hardly makes you a witch now does it?'

Myfanwy sympathised. 'Of course not.'

'It's not like I use a knitting needle. Just a few boiled leaves, no harm in that.'

'No different from aromatherapy,' said Myfanwy.

'And then there's the runes. I do a bit of translating, now and again, you know. Nothing fancy of course.'

Myfanwy turned to me. 'Mrs Evans is the best rune-translater for miles around.'

She nodded to the chimney breast where a piece of framed runic script hung decoratively over the mantelpiece. It made my mind wander back to those desolate Friday afternoons in the third year when the double-period of rune composition made the time until 4 o'clock seem like a life sentence.

'She used to translate for the County,' Myfanwy added.

I smiled at Mrs Evans but she waved the compliment aside.

'Or if someone can't sleep,' she continued, taking care not to overlook any piece of evidence against her, 'well I know a few herbs which can be useful there, too, don't I?'

'And they call you a witch just for that!' scoffed Myfanwy.

'And there's the love potions, of course, and the Saturday mornings at the Witches' Co-op. But only on the till.'

Myfanwy scoffed again. 'No different from working in the sweet shop. Mrs Abergynolwen works on the till on Wednesdays, too.'

Ma Evans spat in contempt. 'Mrs Abergynolwen! She doesn't know her mandragora from her henbane!'

'Anyway,' said Myfanwy soothingly, 'you shouldn't let them call you a witch. I'd put a spell on them if I were you.'

'Oh I do! You should see the rash I give 'em! All over - like spotted dick. All I need is a bit of their clothing, or something they've touched. Menstrual fluid and nail clippings work best; or sometimes Julian brings me a vole and I can —'

The cat jumped up from within the house on to the window frame and mewed.

'No not you, I was just talking to Myfanwy.'

Julian mewed again.

'I didn't! I just mentioned your name! I was telling her about the voles.'

The cat made a short exasperated mew and leaped back into the house.

As we walked back along the dunes, the sky in the west became molten and the far-off windows of Borth burned with golden fire. The heat of the day had slipped away, and the rising breeze had a sudden chill edge to it which brought goosebumps to Myfanwy's back. We quickened our step and I reflected on the extra significance that today's sunset had acquired. Why hadn't I just told them I didn't know what they were looking for? I began to regret having been so cocky with them.

'Let's go for a drink,' said Myfanwy.

'Don't you have to work tonight?'

'I phoned in sick this morning.'

'You shouldn't do that.'

'Oh don't be such a misery. Aren't you having fun?'

'Of course I am.'

I led the way across the road to the Schooner Inn. We sat on a sofa in the lounge and drank beer as the setting sun turned the windows to stained glass.

'I've had a really, really, really lovely day,' said Myfanwy simply.

I nodded.

'Later we can have fish and chips.'

I said nothing and Myfanwy put her hand on my arm.

'What's wrong? You've gone all quiet.'

I sighed and took a drink. 'Do you know what has happened to Evans the Boot?'

She shook her head. 'No, of course not.'

'Haven't you any idea at all?'

'Don't you believe me?'

'After you left my office, some Druids came and ransacked it. I don't know what they were looking for but they told me I had until sunset this evening to give it to them.'

'What will they do to you?'

I shrugged. 'You know their methods.'

She twisted a beer mat between her fingers. 'And I've got you into this. I'm such a cow, I should never have involved you.'

'What could they be after?'

'Louie, I really don't know what it could be.'

A glittering drop of rain spattered against the window.

It must have been just after midnight; the rain was sluicing down from the sky in torrents and we took cover beneath a coat from the back of the car and ran across the street to my office. Once inside I went into the kitchen to fetch the bottle of rum and two glasses. When I returned to the office Myfanwy was standing in the doorway to the bedroom.

'Mmmm . . . how many poor girls have you undone in this room?'

'Not many.'

'Don't lie to me you wicked man.'

'No honest.'

'You're a private detective, you must get women throwing themselves at you all the time.'

I laughed. 'In Aberystwyth?'

'You surely don't expect me to believe you?'

'It's up to you.'

She disappeared into the bedroom and I followed her in. She sat down on the bed and ran her hand across the covers, and then stopped with a puzzled look on her face. We both looked across to her hand, which was resting on an odd-looking mound in the duvet. Gingerly she pulled back the covers, her expression deepening from one of puzzlement to fear and then, as she let out a long, shrill, ear-piercing scream, to one of horror. Lying on the pillow, in a dark sticky pool, was the head of a donkey.

Chapter 6

'HERE YOU ARE, Mr Knight, my multi-vitamin special to pick you up.'

I took the ice cream and wandered disconsolately along the Prom in the direction of Eeyore's stable, the donkey's head in a cardboard box under my arm. Sospan had said I looked tired and it was hardly surprising really. Friday night had been spent in the police cell. And last night, after I had calmed Myfanwy down and driven her home, my attempts at catching a few hours' sleep met with little success. And when I did finally manage to fall asleep shortly before dawn, I had slipped into the nightmare which has visited me, on and off, for the past twenty years. A cold, rainswept late Friday afternoon in January, the light fading so fast behind the lowering cloud that it is almost dusk, and there's still half an hour to go before the last school bell. The world is a symphony of greys: slate sky, grass the colour of the sea in winter, the mobile classrooms and metalwork blocks discernible only as black shapes containing yellow postage stamps of warm, yellow light — the light from which we are exiled. Reaching into the sky the white totemic masts of the rugby posts. And walking towards me through a herd of muddy boys in rugby jerseys is Herod Jenkins. I don't know why, among all the many episodes of misery, it is always this one that haunts me. Why, for example, it is not the terrible day when Marty went off on that cross-country run and didn't return. Or why it isn't that time in the summer downpour when Herod ordered the other boys to bowl cricket balls at me and to aim for my nose. But it is always this particular scene: that cold, rainy January afternoon when he walked towards me through the jeering boys and said, 'Come on then, son, do you want some?' And I was faced with the Hobson's choice of trying to take the ball off him and suffering the battering which that would entail, or of disobeying him, which was even worse. 'Come on then, son, do you want some?' As the kids jeered and Herod's face widened with that horizontal crease he called a smile.

*

Eeyore sat on a bale of hay, his head resting in his hands, and stared gloomily at the decapitated head.

'In your bed?'

I nodded.

The early-morning sun made the dust in the stable dance and sparkle.

He shook his head sadly. 'It's Esmeralda.'

'Yes, I know. I recognised the white ear. I'm sorry.'

He made a dismissive expression. 'I thought at first it was one of those gangs, you know, the ones that smuggle them into Holland for those movies they do.'

I picked up a sack and laid it over the donkey's head, silencing the withering gleam of accusation in her eye.

'I don't think she suffered much,' I offered uselessly.

'No, it's us who remain who are fated to suffer.'

'Dad! Don't be like that.'

He rose to his feet with the desperate weariness of the prize fighter who would really prefer to stay down on the canvas.

'Come, I want to give you something.'

He led me through the stable, past the quietly shuffling donkeys and into an outhouse where he removed a brick from the wall and reached inside. He pulled out a key.

'There's not much I can do for you. Too old for that now. But I can give you this.'

He placed the key in my hand.

'It's to a caravan in Ynyslas. A ghost van, built from two sections of crash write-offs welded together. No records exist for it anywhere. Not the police, not the Council, not the Chirpy Caravaners of Britain Association. It's ice-cold. You can't see it from the road, it's hidden behind the Borth Lagoons Holiday Camp sign. Even the caretaker doesn't know about it. If things get too hot for you, you could hang out there for a while. No one would find you.'

I closed my hand around the key.

'There's food and water and a brand new ludo set. It's not much but it might help.'

'Thanks.'

He waved my gratitude impatiently away. 'Now you get out of here and find those guys. I've got a donkey to bury.'

From the harbour I walked up through the Castle to the top of town and turned right just before the market to KnitWits the wool shop. The bell tinkled and I walked through the aisle of displays stacked to the ceiling with wool in every shade and grade that the shepherd could offer. I put the scrap of wool from Evans the Boot's Mam on the counter and waited as Mildred Crickhowell examined it with a jeweller's loupe. It made her look like a Cyclops: one watery jellyfish-sized eye criss-crossed with spidery red veins.

'It's tea cosy all right,' she laughed. 'Funny, you don't look the type!'

'It's . . . it's not mine,' I said lamely.

She laughed again. 'No, it never is! Don't tell me, it belongs to a friend!'

I squirmed. Visitors to the town were often surprised by the amount of shops selling tea cosies, especially as most of them were concentrated down by the harbour. Just when this harmless piece of tea-pot furniture became a front for another form of spout-warming activity was a mystery lost in history.

I picked up the scrap of wool. 'Can you be sure it's cosy? I mean it's just a piece of wool, it could be from a cardigan or something.'

The woman leaned her shoulders back and tilted her head in the sort of look which said: 'What do you mean sure?! This is KnitWits you've come to, you know?'

She handed me the eyepiece. 'See for yourself.'

As I held the cloth up to the light and examined the weave, she explained to me the various features.

'See the fine dust particles in the yarn? That's tea dust. Now look at the way the threads are woven together. See? Like figure-of-eights intertwined with zigzags? That's pretty fancy crocheting. You don't see that sort of thing very often. That's what's known as the Hildegaard Purl after the Hildegaardian Order of the Sisters of Deiniol. They invented it. Now that tells us something very interesting.'

There was a pause as I struggled to see the things she was talking about.

'Very interesting,' she repeated.

'Yeah, why?'

'Dates it, doesn't it. Surer than carbon dating, that is. It's from 1958.'

'How can you tell?'

'Hildegaard Purl was invented that year, and then not long after the sisters abjured the vice of amusement and stopped the knitting. No one else can do it like they could. And there's more. Look at the curved edge with the elaborate stitching. See it?'

'Yes!' I said, amazed at how much the woman had seen through her magnifying glass.

'See how the fibres are shrivelled and discoloured?'

'Yes.'

'That's classic scorching. That's where the spout would have gone. Now see around that rim those funny symbols?'

'Yes! Like hieroglyphics.'

'Ha!' She laughed and smacked me on the back with a force you wouldn't have expected from a lady of her age. 'Not bad for someone who claims not to know anything about tea cosies. They're not hieroglyphics, but you're not far wrong. Early Mayan alphabet. Which means what you've got here is the Mhexuataacahuatcxl. It's from a limited edition set of cosies knitted by the Sisters of Deiniol for Ma Prytherch's Tea Cosy Emporium in 1958. Creation Legends of the World series. This is Mhexuataacahuatcxl, the Mayan fertility god.'

I put the eyepiece down and stared at her in wonder.

She was grinning with delight; it wasn't often she got a chance to show off like this.

She picked up the eyepiece and had another look herself.

'And, if I'm not mistaken, this little crescent shape at the edge is all that remains of his loin cloth. The design is chiefly based on source material uncovered by the 1935 Oxford University Expedition to the Cordillera Oriental. Mhexuataacahuatcxl was the deity responsible for the renewal of vegetation and patron god of the corporation of goldsmiths. Human victims were killed and flayed to honour him twice a year. The loin cloth is a bit of licence. He could assume the form of man or woman, you see. Obviously that was a bit racy for those sisters so they left the precise details to our imaginations.'

She put down the loupe and beamed at me. 'Remarkable people: very accomplished mathematicians, invented the concept of the zero, yet curiously they never discovered the wheel.'

'That is absolutely amazing,' I said.

'Pah!' She waved a contemptuously dismissive hand in front of her face. 'Child's play. If they'd hurry up and send me that replacement part for my scanning electron microscope I'd really be able to tell you something.'

She started tapping the counter top.

'Of course, if it really is Mhexuataacahuatcxl, I ought, by rights, to report you to the police.'

There was a pause. I could tell the woman was observing me keenly, while pretending not to.

'The police?'

'There were only four Mhexuataacahuatcxls.'

'Go on.'

Three of those four are in private collections, and the fourth until fairly recently was in the Museum.'

'And it's not any more?'

'It was stolen a few weeks ago.'

It rained for the rest of the week, and I sat in my office with my feet on the desk and stared up at the picture of Noel Bartholomew. I wondered how the gene for risking one's life on stupid causes could survive in the gene pool. Here I was on the trail of a missing boy and running headlong into a confrontation with the Druids. Evans the Boot wasn't even worth saving. His Mam might think he was, but no one else in town did. I wondered why he stole the tea cosy from the Museum. I couldn't begin to imagine but I knew it wasn't because he liked tea. I was also haunted by Calamity's parting words about the fireman's son. It was stupid, I knew that, but I couldn't get the image of the lady in the bingo hall out of my head, the lady in the blue scarf. That was a pretty damned accurate prediction. What if Calamity really did know who was going to be next? I reached for an umbrella.

Terrace Road was glossy with rain and the pavements thick with holidaymakers forced from their caravans in search of stimulus. In their clear plastic macs they jostled each other and stared with disconsolate, rain-washed faces into shop windows. I shook my head sadly. What sort of life must they have come from, I wondered, if this represented a holiday? On Penglais Hill the cars queued to get into town. Later in the afternoon they would be heading back the other way, to camping-gas meals and long nights of ludo.

At the school I pulled into the lay-by behind the rugby field. Far off in the gloom, on the other side of the pitch, I could see the squat, Neanderthal figure of Herod Jenkins leading a file of small rugby-kitted boys through sheets of rain. The man who sent Marty on the run from which he never returned. The scene had hardly changed at all in twenty years except for a new wooden building that had recently appeared in the south-western corner. I looked at it, a strange skeleton of wood shaped vaguely like an upturned beetle. Seeing Herod again had robbed me of all desire to enter the school grounds. And it occurred to me that if I wanted to see the school secretary I would probably bump into Lovespoon as well. I sat for a while listening to the drumbeat of the rain on the car's roof. Then I drove home and rang the school secretary.

'Fireman's son?' said a puzzled voice on the other end of the line.

'Yes, it's for a jamboree in Oslo. He'd be an honoured guest of Crown Prince Gustav.'

'We've got one in the first year.'

'No, too young. Must be about fifteen or sixteen.'

'What about an ambulance driver's son?'

I hung up. The next day the Cambrian Gazette landed on my doorstep with the front-page news that the Ghost Train would be cancelled for a week. The fireman who shovelled the coal into the boiler had been given compassionate leave: his son had died the previous night in a hit-and-run accident.

*

'"Should I, after tea and cake and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" That's T.S. Eliot, that is, Mr Knight,' said Sospan smiling as he put the two ninety-nines down on the stand. 'From Prufrock!'

Calamity and I picked up the ices and walked over to the railings. She was now my assistant with on-target earnings of 50p a day and an ice-cream allowance.

'OK,' I said after we had shaken on the deal, 'what's the story?'

She looked at me with an insufferably smug grin and said, 'Cartographer's folly.'

'Cartographer's what?'

'Folly.'

I licked the vanilla slowly.

'You see,' continued Calamity, 'everyone knew there had to be a link to all these murders, but no one could see what it was. The kids were chalk and cheese: Evans and Bronzini and Llewellyn on one hand, Brainbocs on the other.'

'Right. So what was the link?'

She paused for effect and took a long slow deliberate slurp. 'The police couldn't see it at all.'

'I know; and you could. Now what is it?'

'Boy, they were all over the place. Not a clue.'

'Are you going to tell me or not?'

She stopped slurping and turned to look at me. 'The school bus.'

'The school bus?'

'It really fooled me for a while. You see, the police were talking a load of nonsense about them all living in the same area. But you only had to look at a map to see that wasn't true. I know, because I did look at a map. In fact, I spent hours looking at one. And the funny thing was, although it was plain the police were barking up the wrong tree, I kept getting this feeling that there was something there. And then I saw it, they were all on the same bus route. Maybe, I thought, the school bus was the link. But then, if it was as simple as that, why not arrange for the bus to crash? That way you get everybody in one hit. Then it struck me.'

I finished my ice and threw the empty cone into the bin. 'Are you going to get to the point before sunset?'

'You have to follow the reasoning behind what I'm telling you. Do you think I'm going through all this for fun?'

'Yes, I do. But go on in your own time.'

'I have to tell you, I was foxed.'

I threw my head back and groaned.

'So I went back to the map a second time, and stared, and stared and stared. And then I had it. "Eureka!" I shouted.'

She looked at me with a mixture of triumph -and the impudent knowledge that I still had no idea what she was talking about.

'You're fired.'

'Aw! Don't be a misery!'

'You've got one minute.'

She tutted and rolled her eyes. 'Do you know how map makers protect their work against illegal copying?'

'No.'

'You've got to understand with a map it's very difficult to prove copyright infringement. If someone wants to publish a map but is too lazy to put on their wellies and go out with a measuring stick, they can just buy someone else's map and copy it. Save themselves a lot of walking around in the mud. After all, the landscape is already there and you're just recording it. So everyone's map should be the same anyway, shouldn't it?'

I nodded, with a puzzled look slowly creeping across my brow.

'So if you are an honest map maker, how do you protect yourself?'

'I give in.'

'I'll tell you. You put things in which don't exist. For example, you make up a hill and call it Louie's Knoll. There's no such thing in real life, so if it appears on someone else's map, the implication is, they copied yours.' She looked at me with the fire of discovery in her eyes. 'It's called a cartographer's folly.'

'I'm still lost. Was Brainbocs a map maker?'

Calamity put a conspiratorial hand on my arm, looked round and then continued in a lowered voice, 'Brainbocs was smarter than Einstein. Normally, he would get 100 per cent for every piece of homework he did. Trouble was, although he had the brains of Einstein, he had the fighting ability of a squirrel. Just about anyone could copy his homework and there was nothing he could do about it. So he would deliberately put in weird errors. The sort which no one who had actually done the homework could possibly make. Then when the same mistakes cropped up in other people's work, the teacher would guess what was going on. It was like his personal watermark.'

'And Evans, Llewellyn and Bronzini copied his homework on the bus to school each morning?'

'That's right. Everyone knows Lovespoon warned Brainbocs to steer clear of whatever it was he was writing about. But Brainbocs wouldn't listen. He must have stumbled on something; something so awful that the Welsh teacher had to kill him. But when he gets three more pieces of homework with Brainbocs's watermark he has to kill the other three as well.'

'And what was it Brainbocs writing about?'

Calamity leaned closer and said in her best cloak-and-daggery voice: 'No idea.'

Chapter 7

NO ONE KNEW what Dai Brainbocs wrote in that essay. Or, at least, if they did they weren't telling. Could a fifth-form kid write something so bad his teacher was obliged to kill him? I didn't know but I didn't have any other angle to work on and I spent the following week asking around. So did Calamity. Meirion sent me some cuttings from the Gazette and I pored over them. Brainbocs had been the first victim; the story went that he handed the essay in just before the 9am bell and disappeared sometime during lunch time. Two weeks later they found his calliper and some of his teeth at the bottom of one of the vats of Cardiganshire Green at the cheese yards. Everything else had been eaten away by the lactic acid. It was a well-known way of disposing of a body. There were two articles on Brainbocs: a factual piece about the discovery of the body and a rather florid essay discussing the remarkable short career of the schoolboy genius. It was signed off by Iolo Davies, the Museum curator, but was almost certainly ghost-written by Meirion. 'With hair the colour of museum dust and one leg that wouldn't bend at the knee, he'd spent so much of his life in the twilight of Aberystwyth public library he'd become translucent, like those grotesque deep sea creatures you see in National Geographic . . .' It was difficult to imagine Iolo Davies writing like that. There were also a few words from his teacher, Lovespoon, who described him as the finest scholar the school had ever produced; a remark that made it sound as if he were part of a proud tradition, rather than a freak that had somehow slipped through the net. Lovespoon had been so upset by the incident that he needed a week's leave and had lost the essay.

* * *

The week after Brainbocs's corpse was found in the cheese, Evans the Boot disappeared from the scene. The date was hard to pinpoint because he was such an elusive character, it took a while before anyone realised he had gone. And even then it was some time before people dared believe it. Not long after that a member of his gang, Llewellyn Morgan, received the 'squirt water in your eye' flower anonymously through the post. He tested it out on the balcony of his council estate flat and was so maddened by the cobra venom that he fell over the edge, digging at his eyes with his fingers in such a frenzy that they later found eyeball jelly under the nails. He fell nineteen floors but according to the pathologist would have been dead by the time he passed the eighth or ninth. Bronzini and the fireman's son — both members of the same gang — were the most recent victims. Whoever killed Bronzini must presumably also have been the one who stuck my business card up his backside, which suggested they already knew I was investigating the case, even before I did. None of the articles mentioned the stolen tea cosy.

I put the newspaper articles down flat on the window ledge of the Tropicana Milk Bar and took a drink from my strawberry milk shake. It was nearing the end and the straw made that loud plug-hole sound, which filled the whole restaurant with a grotesque burbling. Perhaps if Brainbocs had still been alive he could have turned the attention of his genius to solving that one.

The Tropicana was a great place to sit and watch the world go by. Like a lot of cafes round town it hadn't succeeded in making the leap into the last quarter of the twentieth century by acknowledging the existence of cappuccinos and espressos, but the shakes in lurid, primary colours were good and you could also get burgers and hot dogs and the juke box wasn't too loud. There was a set of Formica tables in the centre, with seats screwed to the floor, and along the window where I was sitting there was a shelf at chest height with stools covered in red vinyl. Pandora and Bianca walked past the window and waved when they saw me but they didn't stop. I watched them mincing down the Prom, Bianca with such an exaggeratedly impudent gait it was if she had springs inside her legs. And Pandy the cabin girl with the knife in her sock.

As I watched their two behinds wiggling up the street a hand passed in front of my gaze and waved about as if checking whether I was blind or not.

'Sorry,' said Calamity, 'I thought you'd turned to stone.'

'I was thinking.'

'And I know what about as well.'

She climbed on to a stool and I offered her a shake.

'No thanks, I can't stay, I've got double maths after morning break.'

'You're actually going for once?'

'This one, no choice. He checks.'

'So what have you got for me?'

'Actually, I will have that shake. Strawberry.'

I groaned, but went and fetched it all the same. Calamity unloaded the fruits of her research between sips.

'It's pretty clear the other kids were all done in because they copied Brainbocs's homework,' she began, reminding me of what I already knew.

'I know that.'

'I know you know, I'm just being thorough. Point is,' she continued, 'what was he writing about? The word on the playground is, there's a copy floating around.'

'Copy of what?'

'The essay. It's probably what the Druids were looking for when they turned your place over.'

'He made a copy of it?'

'He always did. It was his modus operandi.'

I looked at her askance and she gave her nose the sort of tilt that suggested she used the expression every day.

'OK, he made a copy. Now what was the essay about?'

Calamity took a long, tension-inducing slurp and then said casually, 'Cantref-y-Gwaelod.'

I said nothing.

'Cantref-y-Gwaelod,' she repeated.

'Cantref-y-Gwaelod?'

'The fabled dark-age kingdom. They say Lovespoon warned him off, told him to write about something else. But Brainbocs wouldn't listen.'

I was so surprised I said nothing for a while. Calamity stared nonchalantly out of the window as if the revelation that the Welsh teacher had killed a pupil for writing about a mythical kingdom was nothing more than you'd expect.

'This is the legendary kingdom that lay between here and Ireland? The one that sank beneath the waves ten thousand years ago?'

'Yes. They say on moonlit nights you can hear ghostly bells ringing across the sea.'

'I know.'

Do you believe that?'

'No.'

'Neither do I.'

'It's just a folk tale.'

'I'm just telling you what I hear.'

'But I can't see what's so bad about it.'

'Me neither. I once painted a picture of Cantref-y-Gwaelod in art. Scary.'

She slipped off the stool as if to leave and put a scrap of paper down on the counter.

'I got this, too. It's the address of Dai Brainbocs's Mam.'

* * *

I put the paper in my pocket and walked down Terrace Road towards the station. Like most kids who went to school in Aberystwyth I was familiar with the Cantref-y-Gwaelod myth. The folk tale version told how the kingdom lying in the lowland to the west had been protected from the sea by dykes and during a feast one night someone had left the sluice gates open. Similar stories were found all round the coast of Britain and seemed to be a folk memory of the land that was lost with the rising seas following the last ice age. A process that would have taken thousands of years, but which was telescoped into an overnight party in the popular version. Ghostly bells pealing across the waters on moonlit nights were also an integral part of the stories. The stories had some basis in fact — at low tide you could see the remains of an ancient forest on Borth Beach. And Mrs Pugh from Ynyslas had once famously won a rent rebate because of the bells keeping her awake at night. But there had never been any suggestion before that writing about it was bad for your health. Out of curiosity I walked through town to the Dragon's Lair on Station Square. A bell tinkled as I entered; it was one of those shops where you had to stoop to look around because there was so much stock, half of it hanging from the ceiling: a mixture of carved slate barometers, fudge and tea towels with recipes and, towards the back, a more serious selection of books. I headed for the tea towel section where I knew I could find a potted history of the kingdom which wouldn't make too many demands on my attention span. Geraint, the owner, came out from the back to greet me and we exchanged bore das.

'Haven't seen you here for a while, Louie! Are you looking for anything in particular?'

I picked up a tea towel depicting a history of the lost kingdom of Cantref-y-Gwaelod.

'Well, now,' said Geraint, 'you DO surprise me!'

'Really?'

'You're the last person I would expect to be asking about that. How many shall I put you down for? Two, three? Or is it just for yourself?'

'Sorry?'

'Tickets?'

'What are you talking about?'

'Tickets for Cantref-y-Gwaelod — that's what you meant isn't it?'

'You're selling tickets?'

'I can't promise anything, I can just put you on the list like everyone else.'

'I thought the place sank ten thousand years ago?'

'Oh yes.'

'Day out on a submarine, is it?'

'Not quite. Exodus.'

'Exodus?'

'Lovespoon is taking his people back.'

'Back where?'

'Back to Cantref-y-Gwaelod of course. Look, if you're not interested, that's fine. I've got plenty who are.'

'But how can he take people back. They don't come from there.'

'They did originally. Everyone did. Don't you know the story? When the place was flooded everyone who escaped went east. We're all descended from them. Even you.'

Geraint was grinning from ear to ear, but he usually did that anyway.

'So Lovespoon is masterminding an Exodus?'

'Take the folks out of servitude, like. Let my people go!'

'Who's in servitude round here?'

'You don't need chains to be in servitude, Louie. You should know that.'

'I suppose not. Won't it be a bit wet?'

'They're going to reclaim the land. Don't worry, it's all worked out. They're going to rebuild the sea defences and drain the land like in Holland.'

'How are they going to get there?'

'Ark.' Geraint crossed his arms with an air of smug satisfaction. 'It's not finished yet of course, but she'll be a real beauty when she is — four stabilisers, two hundred cabins with en suite, global positioning system and four cappuccino machines.'

'And all made out of gopher wood, I suppose.'

'Gopher wood and South American hardwoods from sustainable plantations. And modern high-performance plastics for below the water line.'

'Where's the ship?'

'Up at the school; special woodwork project:'

'And you're selling tickets for it.'

'Me and the other travel agents.'

'Are you going?'

Geraint faltered. 'Er . . . not immediately! Someone has to mind the shop.' He burst out laughing. 'Hey don't be going on at me! I get ten per cent on each ticket, so where's the harm? At worst they'll have a nice day out on Lovespoon's new boat. Come on. I've just put the kettle on.'

Outside the shop I took out the slip of paper Calamity had given me and looked at the address. Clarach. Four miles out of town and I could make a detour past the school on the way. It was lunch break when I arrived but though the playgrounds were full of children the games field was deserted. It was one of those numerous paradoxes that govern school life. Vast stretches of green fields which the municipality had set aside for play were out of bounds during playtime. Armed with the knowledge from Geraint I could see now that the new building, which I had initially thought resembled an upturned beetle, did indeed look like the beginnings of a ship. An Ark. Brainbocs, the finest schoolboy scholar of the century, had written an essay about the lost kingdom of Cantref-y-Gwaelod. Now his teacher Lovespoon was masterminding a scheme to reclaim the land and sail there in an Ark. What did it all mean? And, more to the point, how on earth were they going to get the boat to the sea? It was five miles away.

*

I found Dai Brainbocs's Mam in her cottage overlooking Clarach. It was the side which faced north and, permanently shielded from the sun, lived in sodden perma-gloom like the homeland of the Snow Queen. I parked my Wolsely Hornet in a lay-by set aside for undiscriminating picnickers and walked along the path cut into the side of the hill. The leaves underfoot squelched and the air had the cloying dampness of a tropical rainforest. The stones of the mouldering cottage had a cheesy consistency and water dripped from the eaves; where the drops fell there were malevolent looking white flowers that probably didn't grow anywhere else in Britain outside Kew Botanical Gardens. I knocked and called out, but getting no answer I pushed the door and went in.

Ma Brainbocs sat moving rhythmically back and forth on a rocking chair in the kitchen. She didn't see me, her head had fallen forward on to her chest and as she rocked she intoned the words 'all gone, all gone' softly to herself. I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched, aware as I did of a dark rheumatic chill seeping insistently up my legs from the floor.

'All gone,' she moaned, 'all gone, my lovely boy.'

'Mrs Brainbocs?'

'All gone, all gone.'

I placed a hand gently on her shoulder and she looked up with unfocused eyes.

'All gone, my boy, all gone.'

'Yes,' I said. 'He's gone. I've come to talk to you about him, about David.'

A gleam of comprehension appeared in the waters of her eyes and the mauve iris of her mouth slowly opened like a sea anemone's vagina.

'Dai?'

I nodded.

'He's gone.'

'Yes.'

'They took him.'

I knelt down and looked into her eyes.

'Who took him, Mrs Brainbocs?'

'That teacher.'

'Lovespoon?'

'Yes!'

'Do you know why?'

She looked at me now, her eyes slightly narrowing and whispered, 'Because of what he wrote.'

'About Cantref-y-Gwaelod?'

There was no answer and for a while there was silence in the room except for the sound of her hoarse rasping breath. I looked around. There was not much: a spinning wheel; a festering mattress in the corner; empty sherry bottles. I walked over to the stove to make her a cup of tea. There was no food in the house; instead I picked up a baked beans tin from the floor and washed it out under the tap, then I filled it with rum from my hip flask.

'This will do you good,' I said, holding it under her nose.

Two cold trembling hands gripped mine and drew the tin upwards. As the fiery spirit flowed inside her, she began to speak again with renewed strength.

'It was the Druids.'

'They took your boy?'

'Killed him.'

'Are you sure?'

She nodded and looked up at me, with a new determination.

'Of course I'm sure.'

'What was the essay about, Mrs Brainbocs? Can you remember?'

Her eyes dropped and focused on the hip flask in my coat pocket. I refilled the tin and handed it to her. She snatched at it and drank too greedily. A cough erupted from her throat and the pale warm liquor mixed with her saliva and dribbled down her bearded chin. I patted her on the back as if she were a baby.

'Please try and remember!'

'I don't know,' she said when the coughing subsided, 'I told the police everything I know.'

'Did he make a copy of it?'

This time she looked directly me with the fire of certainty burning in her eyes. 'Of course he did. Boy always did that. Always made a copy. 'Case anything happened.'

'Do you know where he put the copy?'

'Yes.'

My heart leaped. 'Yes!? Where?'

She grabbed my forearm and pressed weakly as if confiding her last secret. 'He hid it in a well-known beauty spot.'

'Well-known beauty spot?'

'Yes.'

'Which one?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know. He didn't say.' She reached out again for the baked beans tin. I refilled it but this time held it out of her reach.

'Which one?'

She shook her head back and forth like a frisky horse.

'I don't know. I don't know . . . !'

I poured some of the rum on to the floor and she gasped in horror.

'No ... no ... please don't!'

'Which beauty spot, Mrs Brainbocs?'

Fear crept into her eyes. 'Please give me a drink. Please!'

I turned the rum flask upside down. The liquid started to gush out. She jerked herself forward and the words tumbled out as she said anything that might stop me wasting the precious rum.

'I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. He couldn't. Boy was so excited he could hardly talk. Wouldn't hardly eat. Then he went away for a whole week. That's when he met her, y'see. That's how he knew for sure. Wouldn't eat at all when he got back.'

'Knew what?'

'Everything. Knew it all then, after he saw her. Knew the lot. She told him, y'see. Told him everything. Why shouldn't she? She didn't care. Bitch. When he got back he was pale as a ghost. Wouldn't sleep or eat or anything. Just walked up and down all night. I told him he'd wear out the hinge on his calliper, but the boy wouldn't listen. Said: Ma if something happens to me in school tomorrow, remember: I want to be buried next to Dad.'

I let her grab the rum and watched in pity as she sucked it down making a noise like water emptying from a bath. She paused for a second.

'Who was this person he met?'

'Gwenno.'

'Gwenno who?'

'Just Gwenno.'

There was another pause; Ma Brainbocs was panting like an athlete now.

I patted her gently on the shoulder. 'Mrs Brainbocs, are you saying this Gwenno told him something? Something Lovespoon didn't like?'

She looked at me, the fire in her eyes declining like an oil lamp being turned down for the night. 'Yes.' For a moment, her forlorn gaze held mine and then her head slumped forward on to her chest. The faint light of understanding had gone out. 'All gone,' she intoned monotonously once more, 'all gone.'

As I started to leave, the rocking began again, rhythmically in accompaniment to the forlorn mantra of a mother's woe: 'All gone, my boy, all gone.'

Chapter 8

DID NOEL FIND her? After the typhoon the family of Hermione Wilberforce was dragged dead from the sea by local fishermen but Hermione was not among them. A search was conducted and nothing was found. And that should have been the end of the matter. If she wasn't dead the pirates infesting the coast off Borneo would soon make her wish she was. But then the strange stories started filtering out of the jungle. Absurd, impossible tales of a white woman seen residing there. No one who knew anything about these things believed them. Not the authorities in Singapore; nor the Rajah in Sarawak. But Bartholomew did - that daft Sir Galahad who soldiered on against all advice, even after all his guides and bearers abandoned him. The journal for which the bishop's wife traded the brass kettles peters out, after six weeks alone, in a fevered, malarial scrawl. 'I have seen her' he wrote in the final week, riddled with sickness and unable to move. I have seen her, and after that the last words, 'faith is to believe what you do not yet see'. Was it just a hallucination brought on by the madness of fever? Of course. There can be no other explanation. The chances that the woman was even there in the jungle in the first place were incalculably small. The possibility that he managed to locate her was zero. There was no real surprise about his fate, no mystery at all. Except for one thing: he took a camera with him.

*

I drove slowly round the large expanse of lawn that fronted the Museum and blinked as the sun flashed off the plexiglass nose of the Lancaster. Acquired in 1961 from the famous 617 'Dambusters' squadron, it had stood on Victory Square since the end of hostilities, its majesty never dimming despite the passage of time. Somewhere beneath the waters of the Rio Caeriog lay her sister plane. I pulled over and switched off the engine and watched a party of school children pair off and climb up the ladder, through the entrance under the dorsal turret and into the fuselage. All through school they told us how the people left Wales in the nineteenth century to settle in Patagonia, but no one ever told us why. A shilling from the end of the Pier to start a new life in a land of milk and honey. What they found wasn't even a land of bread and jam, but a barren, desolate, ice-covered wilderness. I was too young to remember the war of independence, but like everybody else I was familiar with the Pathй news footage of the queues snaking down the street outside the recruitment offices. The initial euphoria. And then the disillusionment. The body bags and policy U-turns; the sobering discovery that the boys weren't the men in white hats as everybody had supposed. Weren't liberators at all. Opinion at home turned against the ill-advised military adventure, people changed their minds. But the troops — entrenched in a war from which it was now impossible to extricate them — were not allowed such a luxury. And then came the famous Rio Caeriog campaign; a turning point and famous victory, in the same way that Dunkirk was a victory.

I found the Museum curator, Rhiannon Jones, in the Combinations and Corsetry section which ran the length of the top floor of a building that was more interesting than the exhibits it housed. The Devil's Bridge Tin & Lead Steam Railway Co. had built it during the middle of the last century, a magnificent neo-Gothic pile filled with cherubs and gargoyles, turrets, archways and crenellations. The lingerie that now shimmered in the prismatic light from the stained glass windows was said to be the largest collection of its kind in Europe and when I was young they employed a man specially to chase away the schoolboys who tried to sneak in. A job that had now gone the same way as workhouses and beadles. Although deserted, it was a pleasant enough place to take a stroll on a summer's day. I wandered through the shafts of late-afternoon sun that streamed in tenderly caressing the exhibits and making the dust dance. The tea-cosy section was at the far end under the Great South Window overlooking the Square. It was not a famous collection — a few shabby pieces in ancient cases that gave not the slightest hint at the infamous goings on of the harbour-side tea-cosy shops. It was easy to see where the Mayan piece had been stolen from. A newly replaced pane of glass and a tea cosy-shaped discolouration on the background paper in the" display cabinet. A new card lay next to it bearing the fib: 'On temporary loan to the Leipziger Staatsgalerie.'

Rhiannon Jones walked over and stood next to me, admiring the cosies.

'Prynhawn da, Mr Knight!'

I turned and smiled. 'Prynhawn da, Mrs Jones, lovely day!' She put on an epiphanic expression. 'Oh isn't it!' I needed to pump her for information but first I had to negotiate my way graciously through the introductory pleasantries. Too much haste here and she might stonewall me later.

'Oh yes, turned out beautiful, it has,' I said. 'Let's hope it stays like this for July.'

The sun slid behind a cloud on Mrs Jones's brow as some long-forgotten trauma from her childhood rose to the surface. 'Ooh you wouldn't say that if you'd seen it in '32! Lovely June that was, then first day of July it rained and didn't stop until August Bank Holiday.' She shuddered. 'I still haven't got over it!' 'Still,' I said consolingly, 'we can't complain about today.' 'Oh no,' she smiled, 'it's turned out nice all right. But then . . .'

She paused and slowly lifted her index finger to the bridge of her nose in a gesture that the women of Aberystwyth absorb at their grandmother's knee. It was a gesture designed to add a courtroom emphasis to a certain caveat that was coming. Coming unavoidably, and with the predestined certainty of a piano falling on to the head of a cartoon cat. I watched mesmerised. Oh yes, it was indeed a lovely day, she conceded, her rib cage filling up with air. 'But!' She wagged her finger in front of my face. 'But .. . but then it was nice yesterday, too, chwarae teg!'

Her eyes sparkled with the fire of victory. It was nice yesterday too. Of course it was. Or was it? To be honest I couldn't remember, but it didn't really matter. We were dealing here with that linguistic get-out-of-jail-free card 'chwarae teg'. It translated as 'fair-play' and if you put one in your sentence there was nothing, no solecism, platitude or canyon-bridging leap of logic you couldn't get away with.

Having verbally checkmated me, Mrs Jones returned her attention to the tea cosies, becoming a model of magnanimity towards her vanquished foe.

'Oh yes, beauties these are,' she said. 'This set was knitted by the Sisters of Deiniol at the Hospice in '61. It was part of the war effort to buy the Lancaster.' She gave a slight nod towards the window that looked out on to Victory Square.

'It was because we didn't have any air cover, you see.' 'Must have taken a lot of knitting to buy a bomber.' 'Oh yes, but those Sisters of Deiniol are nothing if not disciplined. Ever so strict they are. You know Mrs Beynon from the lighthouse? They wouldn't let her work in the gift shop when her monthly courses were on her!'

*

The cream in the cakes was mashed up from margarine and sugar. The tables and chairs came from a school assembly hall. And the high, church-like ceiling was filled with an echoey din, softened by the fug of steam and accumulated minto-flavoured breath that resides in places like this even in the depths of summer. It was the Museum cafe. Red plastic tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser on the table. Polished tea urn on the counter along from the display where canoe-shaped doughnuts bore scars of fake jam. In the corner there was a one-armed bandit for which you had to change money into old pennies at the till.

Mrs Jones wiped her little finger along the rim of her prune-like mouth. Traces of cream still clung stubbornly to the grey moss-like growth on her upper lip.

'You know,' I said, 'I used to come here a lot as a kid.'

'Oh yes, we used to be very popular with the schools.'

'My favourite part', I added with exaggerated casualness, 'was the Cantref-y-Gwaelod section.'

Mrs Jones stopped chewing her doughnut and put it down on the plate. Her hand shook. 'I'm afraid', she said softly, 'that's not one of my specialities.'

'Still over by the section on two-headed calves is it?'

The trembling got worse. 'Y . . . Yes, I 'spect it is.'

'Perhaps we can walk over there, later.'

'I ... I ... I think it's closed'

'Oh what a pity, I've been thinking of doing some research; a sort of twentieth-century reassessment —'

Mrs Jones cut me off sharply. 'I'm sorry, I can't help you.'

'It wouldn't be any bother. Mostly theory. I'd be approaching the subject from a modern oceanographical perspective. I'd need the tide tables for the Dark Ages, of course —'

She put her hands to her ears and whined like a child.

'No, no, please stop, I don't know anything about Cantref-y-Gwaelod, really I don't.'

'What are you scared of?'

'Nothing, nothing ... I ... please, I have to get back.'

She stood up suddenly, the squeal of her stool making the whole room stop talking and look round. Then, lowering her voice to a harsh whisper, she hissed: 'Just fuck off, right?'

I grabbed her arm before she could escape, the dirty white wool coarse under my hand. 'Not until you tell me what you're hiding.' I tightened my grip on her bony arm and she winced in pain. Everyone in the room was watching in astonishment.

'Nothing!' she hissed. 'I'm not hiding anything. I know nothing about Cantref-y-Gwaelod.' Again she tried to struggle free, but I held on grimly.

'Who killed Brainbocs?' It was wild card thrown in to see if it had any effect on her. It did.

She gasped and cast an involuntary glance over to the fireplace by the door. I followed her gaze. There was a rectangle of bright paper above the mantelpiece where a picture which had been hanging a long time had recently been removed.

'You want me to end up like him? Like Mr Davies? Is that it? Is that what you want?'

'The old curator?'

'Yes!'

'Did he help Brainbocs with his essay?'

She whined and struggled like a cat caught in a trap.

'Where is he now? Mr Davies?'

'Just fuck off!'

My grip broke and Mrs Jones rushed through the tables, knocking drinks over as she went. Oblivious to the stares, I sat looking at the fireplace and the spot where Mr Davies's portrait used to hang.

* * *

The next day they re-opened the Ghost Train and Myfanwy rang to tell me she had two tickets. I met her outside the railway station, next to the sign saying 'What is the purpose of your journey to England?' There was something I wanted to ask her, but it was such a stupid question, I kept avoiding it. 'After Myfanwy's next scream,' I told myself. And then when she screamed, I put it off until the next. There was no shortage of screams; this was the only ghost train in the world with real ghosts. Before privatisation it had been the only ghost train operated by British Rail. It started life as an educational project by the Cardiganshire Heritage Foundation. A disused lead working had been turned into a theme ride depicting the history of lead mining in Cardiganshire. Narrow-gauge steam trains hauled holiday-makers and school-trippers up to the mine and then were exchanged for pit ponies which pulled the wagons through the galleries. It even won an award from UNESCO for responsible tourism, but then came the terrible accident. A wheel spun off and hit a pit prop bringing the roof down and killing a party of day-trippers from the Midlands. When the place re-opened two months later funny things started happening. The ponies whinnied eerily from their stables every night and in the morning they shied and refused to enter the mine. Strange sounds were heard and disembodied lights were seen floating inside the tunnels. Soon passenger numbers dwindled and it looked like the train had reached the end of the line. But then word began to spread and a new breed of passenger arrived: not people with an interest in industrial archaeology, but UFO-hunters, megalith lovers, spontaneous human combustion ghouls and lads on stag nights. And so was born the world's only genuine ghost train. In addition to the curtains of fluorescent sea weed, and plastic skeletons through which the electrically driven wagons now trundled, thrill-seekers could also look out for a woman carrying a head under her arm with peroxide blonde hair. Or a man asleep on a bench with a copy of the Daily Mirror over his face. And, in the cafeteria, an ectoplasmic woman breast-feeding her baby.

Myfanwy screamed and buried her head on my chest as we swept round a corner and through a curtain of fluorescent sea weed. I wanted to see if she knew any reason why her cousin Evans should have a piece of tea cosy with a Mayan pattern on it. The train crashed out through the final gate and into the warm sunshine.

'Myfawny?'

'Mmmm?'

'I know this sounds silly, but did your cousin Evans have any interest in the Incas?'

'The who?'

'Or the Aztecs; or anything like that?'

She leaned her head against my chest and looked up, smiling. 'I'm so disappointed, we never saw the woman breast-feeding.'

'You screamed enough, anyway.'

'I know but that was at the fake ghosts.'

'If they were fake, why did you scream?'

The train ground slowly to a halt and the rest of the passengers started taking off the hard hats.

'They were fake screams.' She sat up and started unbuckling the safety belt. 'Next time you can take Pandy.'

I sighed. 'Look, will you stop trying to pair me up with your friends!'

'I'm not, but she wants to go, and she's too frightened as well.'

'What about the knife in her sock?'

She put her arm round my neck and pulled herself on to me. Hair pressed warmly against my face cutting off all the light and filling me with an overwhelming urge to sleep; I pushed her gently back and asked her again.

'Was he into the Aztecs?'

She pursed her lips in a pretence of thinking and then said: 'To tell the truth I don't think he listened to groups much.'

I dropped Myfanwy off at her flat overlooking Tan-y-Bwlch and drove uphill to Southgate and then turned left into the mountainous hinterland beyond. The sun was shining in Aberystwyth but as I climbed it clouded over until soon I was driving through a chilly fog, in a world of drystone walls and cattle grids. Frightened sheep clung to the banks on either side of the road, wondering desperately how they were going to get back into the fields from which they had somehow escaped. As the mist thickened, I drove through sad unenchanted forests of conifers planted in uniform rows by the Forestry Commission, occasionally passing sticks set in the fence, with rubber shovels to beat out fires. From time to time glimpses of Nant-y-moch reservoir glinted in staccato bursts through the trees. And then the trees stopped and I found myself at a crumbling, weed-filled church yard on the slopes overlooking the reservoir. The church where Marty lies buried. I parked and made my way through the crooked slate teeth of the graves.

It was never officially established that he had been consumptive. And so many well-meaning friends have since tried to assure me that he wasn't. But how would they know? Were they there that day in primary school when we had our BCG jabs? When Marty was so terrified of the needle that I took his place in return for a month's supply of Mars bars? Perhaps if he had lived in town things might have been different. But he lived here on this sunless northern hillside overlooking the reservoir. I looked down at the simple headstone and then let my eyes wander across to the placid gunmetal waters pent up behind Nant-y-moch dam. Marty once told me that there was a village lying at the bottom of the lake; he said that it had been flooded when they built the dam and the man who printed the leaflets telling the people to quit their homes had got the dates mixed up and they all drowned. Marty said he never got any wedding invitations to do after that. It still makes me laugh.

The blizzard that took Marty had held Aberystwyth in its grip for three days and for once we had made the tragic mistake of allowing the candle of hope to flicker in our hearts. Experience had taught us, years before we were to go out into the real world to find the lesson confirmed, that the best policy is always to expect the worst. But this time as we watched the TV footage of helicopters air-lifting bales of hay to stranded livestock we thought that this Friday, at least, games would be called off. But Herod Jenkins was not one to be so easily cheated of his sport. In his book the only meteorological conditions severe enough to cancel games were to be found on Saturn. Marty hated rugby. For him it was a pagan game, a modern embodiment of the ritual rape-fest of the Beltane feasts. The goal posts represented the vulva of the fertility goddess Wicca and the ball was a symbolic sperm. It was a compelling thesis but didn't save him from being sacrificed on the altar of Herod's madness.

Nothing could ever have prepared us for the shock of that day. We were used to the fact that the normal laws of the land didn't operate on the games field, but this time the physical laws seemed suspended as well. It was as if we woke up in the morning on the ceiling to find that gravity had been reversed overnight. Marty stood there holding the one talisman known to grant immunity from persecution — the note from your Ma - and Herod rejected it. A bit of running around would be good for a cold he said in words which have gone down in medical history. And so saying he went inside to don his arctic parka. Marty stood there whiter than a ghost and shaking. The inquiry would later find that the note had been forged which meant that Herod was morally absolved. But Marty wasn't fit, even if the note was false. He looked at me, his one friend, for help and I said, 'Marty, we won't go.' Four words that would shape my thoughts and deeds for the rest of my life. 'Marty, we won't go.' What could be simpler? It was plainly madness to go out on the field that day and if we all refused, what could he do? If we all stuck together our will could prevail. We would simply refuse to move. Marty embraced the plan with enthusiasm and managed to unite the whole class behind his mutiny. Herod came back outside with his whistle and Marty stepped forward and said, 'Sir, we're not going.' Herod blinked in astonishment and turned his full attention on the boy: fragile and shivering, awkward and scholastic - all crimes in a games teacher's eyes — and then he smiled and turned to the rest of us. 'Oh really?' he said. 'And who else is too cold to go for a little run?' There followed a split-second's silence and then everyone jeered; it was plain that Marty had been tricked and no one else had had the slightest intention of refusing to play. Not one of them stepped forward. Finally, drunk on the glee of victory, Herod turned his gaze to me, whom he knew to be Marty's confederate, and said, 'Well darling?' And I cringed like a beaten dog and said nothing. We all played rugby that day and Marty was sent on a cross-country run, alone. He looked at me just before he left and in his eye was that unforgettable heart-breaking look. Not of reproach, which would be so much more easy to live with, but of understanding. And also something else: that searing farewell of the prisoner as they apply the blindfold, and his eyes take their last drink of this beautiful world.

Chapter 9

DORIS PUGH SAT in her official tourist information blazer and spat the word across the desk like a cherry stone: 'Semen!'

I gasped.

'On an apricot satin camisole.'

'Old?'

'Flapper years. Of course he said it wasn't his, but then they all say that don't they? Thirty years he'd been there. Two more years and he would have retired on full pension with a gold clock.'

The job of a private detective in Aberystwyth was full of ironies. If you asked people politely for information they would normally clam up and begrudge you even the time of day. But if you stood on the other side of a garden hedge to them you couldn't shut them up. And sometimes the simplest way to find out what you wanted was to ask the lady at the tourist information kiosk.

'Well you can't be too careful,' she continued, 'can you? What with all these overseas students we get now? I mean, look at those girls we get from Brunei, wearing those things over the face that's like looking through a letterbox. Imagine it!'

I thanked her and wandered off down the Prom shaking my head sadly at the cruelty of Lovespoon. All his life Iolo Davies had served at that Museum, with never a blemish on his record. But he helped Brainbocs with his school essay and so he had to be punished. The method chosen was breathtakingly effective: a rogue semen stain found on one of the exhibits in the Combinations and Corsetry section. I didn't need to know the exact details to know how it was done. All very hush-hush, but not quite. Nothing crudely dramatic. Just a minor detail that would do far more damage than any gross slander. Plant the seed — ha! the cruelty of the phrase - and allow the gentle winds of scandal to blow. Everything would follow with a bleak inevitability: allegations of impropriety, rumours of extra-curricular loans of the exhibits . . . and in no time they would be removing the portrait that had hung in the Museum cafe for a generation. And what struck me with the most force was this: the sheer artistry of Lovespoon's evil. Because the truth was, Iolo probably had been involved in something pornographic with the combinations. Such things were commonplace. A select group of trusted high-ranking townsfolk. Envelopes of money passed discreetly under restaurant tables. He'd probably been doing it for years and they probably knew all about it and let him do it. But when they moved against him the allegations would have been impossible to refute.

Where was he now? There was one man in Aberystwyth who would know: Archie Smalls. But of course he wouldn't tell me. Not unless he was forced to. I sighed. To make him squeal I would need to find someone else; someone most people went out of their way to avoid. Her name was Siani-y-Blojob, probably the most unpleasant girl in the whole of Wales. But first I would need to get drunk.

*

It was one of those occasions which strike you as a mistake the moment you walk in. You just don't have the strength to listen to the voice in your heart and turn round and walk away. But I needed to talk to Siani and to do that I needed to go to the Indian, and to do either of those two things I needed to get drunk. So I went to the Moulin.

* * *

Myfanwy was sitting and laughing with the Druids and looked up when I entered and quickly looked away. I was shown to a table further back than previously, squashed up against a pillar with a bad view. I ordered a drink and told the waiter to tell Myfanwy I was here. He gave me a look of scarcely concealed derision. Bianca came and joined me instead.

'Hi, handsome.'

I nodded.

'Don't I even get a little smile?'

I turned to her and smiled weakly.

'Can I have a drink?'

I shrugged.

She stopped a waiter and ordered a drink.

'I bet I know why you're sad. It's Myfanwy. You're angry because she's talking to the Druids.'

'No I'm not.'

'You have to understand, Louie, she really likes you but this is a job.'

'I do understand.'

'I know how you feel. Believe me she'd much rather be here with you.'

'You couldn't even imagine how I feel.'

Bianca shrugged and we both sat in silence for a while. Then she stood up without a word and left. As soon as she went I started to wish she hadn't. I picked up her glass and sniffed it. Genuine rum — no coloured water. In the Moulin that passed as a real compliment.

I ordered more drinks and thought unhappily about Siani-y-Blojob. Every town has its hard cases just as every town has its whore and its bore. They come and go like the bluebells. And if, as some people suggest, there are good and bad years, like wines, then Siani represented one of the finest vintages in the history of the chateaux. A girl about whom people would tell fireside tales to their children in years to come, vainly trying to convey the essence in the same way some fathers try to give their children an appreciation of the glories of Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews.

After a while, Myfanwy came over. I'd been watching her out of the corner of my eye the whole time.

'Hi, Louie!'

'Hi.'

'Sorry, I'm busy with clients.'

I took a drink.

'You don't mind do you?'

'No.'

She looked uncertainly and then offered brightly: 'I tell you what, why don't you take Bianca home with you tonight?'

It was as if she were suggesting I stop off for a takeaway.

'It's on the house.'

I looked up into her face. She was smiling happily.

'How can you say that?'

Her jaw dropped and the happy grin seeped away. 'I mean, I thought. . .' She sat down and interlinked her arm with mine. 'Oh Louie, don't get like all the others.'

'All what others?'

'You'll be calling me a tart next.'

The word hit like a meat hook.

'How can you accuse me of that and in the same breath tell me to go home with Bianca?'

A look of exasperation crossed her face.

'No one's forcing you.'

I've thought about that night many times in the years since. Wondering whether, had I altered certain details of it, certain phrases or order of words, or even if I'd been in a better mood, it might have changed the course of subsequent events. It's an easy trap to fall into — the habit of parcelling up the past into a series of neat turning points; to load incidents with a power to alter the course of events which they never possessed. Not seeing that a moment which appears pivotal in the context of an evening is really only reflecting a process which has been unfolding unseen for many months. Like a heart seizure is just the sudden outward manifestation of a lifestyle. Sometimes I ask myself if I really believe that and I realise I have no choice. The alternative scenario: that my actions that night might have made a difference, is too painful to examine in view of how that evening ended. I took Bianca home.

Maybe it was simply the power of the phrase 'on the house' that did it. Words that initially filled me with contempt, but which became less offensive and more attractive with every drink. Or maybe it was just the drink. My original plan of going on to the Indian to find Siani had lost all appeal. And it didn't have any to start with. What for anyway? I already knew where Evans was: at the bottom of the harbour or somewhere similar. There could be no other explanation. It was just a matter of time before he floated to the surface. I didn't care anyway. Or maybe it was something to do with Bianca. She was a sweet girl. Not just pretty. But something else, which I only really came to understand long after she died. She was more honest than Myfanwy. She wasn't very smart, and that was probably why. But she was a lot nicer for it.

For a long time we sat in my car, parked on the Prom just across from the mosaic of Father Time. The windows were wound down and out in the blackness we could hear the ocean throbbing; roaring and shuddering and gnawing at the boulders of the sea wall. I asked her why she hung around with Pickel and she shrugged. 'It's not like you think.'

'But he's horrible, isn't he?'

'He repairs the clocks for the pensioners for nothing. You wouldn't believe how shy he is about it; they have to leave them on the back step and in the morning they're fixed — like the tooth fairy.'

She shifted in the seat, the shiny black plastic coat crackling as she moved. 'And if they get locked out, he opens their door for them. He can open any lock . . . besides, you don't know what it's like for him.'

'Do you?'

'He spent his childhood waiting for his mum to come home from the pub. I know what that's like.'

In the darkness the glare from the streetlights glistened on the pillar-box red of her lips and the whites of her eyes.

'You make things so difficult.'

'What things?'

'You know I like you?'

'No.'

'Well, I do.'

'Thanks.'

'I didn't mean it like that.'

'Nor did I.'

She looked across at me and smiled weakly. 'I know you're a nice guy.'

'Don't get carried away, I'm not that nice.'

She squeezed my hand in the darkness.

I asked, 'Why did Myfanwy tell you to come home with me?'

'She didn't. I wanted to.'

'I just don't get it.'

'Does everything always have to be something you can get?

I pondered that one for a while. Then she put her hand on my shoulder and said, 'Can we talk about something else?'

But we didn't talk; instead we drove round the block to Canticle Street and climbed the bare wooden stairs to the scrap of destiny which seemed so like a turning point but was probably nothing of the sort.

The following night I stayed home and drank half a bottle of rum and booked a table at the Indian restaurant.

'Do you have a reservation?' Two dark eyes studied me through the Judas hole in the door.

'Yes, Kreuzenfeld.'

The waiter nodded and pulled back the bolts.

'We've been expecting you.'

The door opened and I was shown past a sign saying 'Please guard your artificial limb against theft' and into a lounge packed with tables. The air was foggy with sweat, body odour, beery breath, hot curry spices, vomit and disinfectant. Most of the tables were full; a mixture of locals and nervous tourists. I sat down and the waiter held out a menu, regarding me with a mixture of anxiety and interest. I smiled at him. 'What's good tonight, then?'

He stared at me. 'Good?' he said in a flat Midlands accent.

'Yes, what does the chef recommend?'

'Are you trying to be funny?'

'No. I mean what should I have? What's good?'

It was plainly a request he'd never had to deal with before. He narrowed his eyes and looked at me, suspicion and confusion swimming in his eyes.

'You mean on the menu, like?'

'Yes.'

He laughed.

'Nothing of course, it's all shit.' And then, perhaps feeling a trace of guilt inspired by my guileless expression, he added:

'I mean look at this lot, what's the point?'

I looked round at the screaming hordes and nodded in sympathy.

'No point at all. You might as well open up a few tins of dog food and stir in some curry powder.'

'We do!'

I looked at him startled, and he burst out laughing. 'Just kidding, mate, but it's not a bad idea. They wouldn't know.'

I put the menu down on the table.

'Look, I'll tell you what I can do, mate, I'll ask the chef to do you some egg on toast or something?'

Before I could answer, a fight broke out in the corner of the room and the waiter strode off wearily and -without any sense of urgency to attend to the situation. I looked around. On the table next to me a man lay face down in his curry. And over in the bay window, among a group of bikers, sat the girl I was looking for. Siani-y-Blojob: dirty and frayed sleeveless denim vest over the standard-issue leather jacket; hair like wet straw and a pudgy pasty face.

The fight had developed from shouts and abuse to flailing fists as the two protagonists fell heavily on to a neighbouring table, occupied by a group of lads. Paradoxically, it was one of the few things you could do to someone in this restaurant that wouldn't cause offence. Brush their sleeve, look at their girlfriend, or just stare in the wrong direction for a second and you would be issued with a challenge. But throw a body on to a stranger's food and it was OK, the sort of forgivable mistake that could happen to anyone. The only danger was if you spilled their pint of lager and there was no danger of that because it would have been whipped out of harm's way the moment the fight broke out. It was a spectacle of synchronisation and choreography that put the wonders of the natural world to shame. A shout, a scream, the splintering of glass — and suddenly, to the accompanying shouts of 'incoming!' — thirty right arms shot forward like the tentacles of a sea anemone to remove the pints. What made it even more amazing was this: they all knew the difference, like veterans from the trenches in the First World War, between the real and the false alarms. Only the tourists embarrassed themselves by reaching for their pints at the wrong moment.

The fight rolled off the table and on to the floor and the waiters moved in to disengage the flailing limbs. Another late night in Aberystwyth. Over by the window Siani-y-Blojob, like a human oil rig, lit one of her farts with a plume of flame. As she did so a waiter brought three curries on a tray and scraped them all on to one plate for her. Reckoning that this gave me at least an hour's grace, I stood up and left.

I drove fast through the empty streets, along the one-way system which took me past the station, along to the harbour and over Trefechan Bridge out towards the council estate. Calamity had written down the address for me and I found it easily enough: a semi-detached house in a nondescript row with those metal gates and railings which council houses seem always to have painted either blue, red or yellow. There was a small patch of garden to the side and the underwear hung from one of those merry-go-round washing line contraptions. I put on a gardening glove.

*

I knew I would find Archie Smalls at the all-night diner on Llanbadarn Road. It was situated on a patch of waste ground set away from the road with room for the long-distance lorry drivers to pull up for bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea. The other customers — and there were never many at any one time — were the usual misfits you find in the early hours: burglars and drunks sobering up; night-shift workers going home and early-shift workers on their way. And people like Archie who like to start late in the night, long after the rest of the town has fallen into a drunken sleep. There was one waitress on duty in a stained pink tunic and a cook playing cards at the back. The night was hot and all the windows were open, but there was hardly any movement of air to take the edge off the heat from the kitchen. Archie was sitting morosely, staring into a cold mug of tea at a table just inside the doorway. I sat down opposite him. I could see he didn't want company.

'Morning!'

He looked up sourly, but said nothing.

'Fancy a chat?'

'No.'

'Don't worry, you will.'

He looked up again and stared at me.

'I hear you've been spending a lot of time in this neighbourhood.'

'If I have, it's my business, isn't it?'

'Not now I've made it mine.'

He put a grubby index finger in his mouth and gnawed at it and spoke without taking it out. 'What do you want?'

'I was just wondering what Siani-y-Blojob would say if she caught you stealing her knickers.'

He became convulsed with contempt. 'You think I'm stupid?'

He stood up to leave but stopped halfway when I put the panties down on the table-top.

'They're from her garden.'

'Fuck off!'

'I was there about half an hour ago.'

'She'll tear your bollocks off.'

'Why would she suspect me?'

He sat down, slowly, as if there was an egg on the seat beneath him. I started speaking to no one in particular. 'About an hour ago she was in the curry house; she had three curries. I reckon she'd be on the third by now. Maybe after that she'll go for a few more pints. Maybe she won't, maybe even she has early nights now and again. You've probably got about an hour to put her knickers back. Otherwise, you might as well start packing your suitcase.'

For a while he sat and looked at me without saying anything. I could see he was working it out. I could be lying, but why would I bother? If I wasn't lying, he was in trouble. I hated doing it to him.

'What do you want?' he said finally.

'Iolo Davies, from the Museum.'