Aberystwyth Mon Amour

'I just took it down to Mrs Crickhowell at KnitWits. She said it was the same as that South American cosy that was stolen from the Museum. Funnily enough, she said seen it quite recently — in your hands.'

He stood up and walked over to the toilet. He put his hand on the door handle and added, 'There are police officers posted downstairs in case you don't feel like waiting.' He went in and I dashed across and turned the key.

'I'm sorry about this, Llunos, really I am!' I shouted to the door. Then I walked over to the window and peeked carefully out. He wasn't lying. A police officer looked up and waved. It was time to use the escape route through the attic. It was clear that this time I would be in the cell for a lot longer than overnight, and I was desperate to stay free long enough to see Bianca tonight. Locking Llunos in the bathroom was a high price to pay, though. He wouldn't forgive me for that so easily.

*

Eeyore opened the door, took one look at the man in shaggy blond wig, dark glasses and false moustache and said, 'Oh it's you.' He led me into the kitchen where the smell of recently fried bacon hung heavily in the air.

'I've got someone here who wants to see you,' he said as he filled the old whistle kettle and placed it on the gas oven. 'It's an old friend of mine, from my days in the Force. He knows something about the ESSJAT.' Eeyore pulled up a chair and I sat down.

'He was given the task of breaking the organisation a long time ago; but his cover was blown and they had to give him a completely new identity.' He walked out and a few seconds later came back in with the former agent. A look of surprise consumed my face. It was Papa Bronzini.

'Buon giorno!' I gasped.

He smiled sadly and said in a voice filled with pathos, 'It's OK, sir, we can dispense with the arrivedercis.'

'So you're not Italian, then?" I said obviously.

He shook his head. 'Alas no.'

An awkward moment followed as I waited for him to explain, but he didn't.

'Well you had me fooled,' I said finally.

'I used to be a bit of an actor in those days — amateur dramatics. I expect you're quite familiar with that sort of thing?'

'I've seen a few plays."

'Oh really, sir? Which ones?'

'Er . . . Lady Windermere's Fan,' I said desperately.

'Tennessee Williams?'

'Er . . . yes!'

He nodded. 'I was into method acting — eat, drink, live and sleep the part - that's the trick.' His eyes misted as he thought back to those days of greasepaint and footlights. 'Ah yes, I used to do a lot of that — Richard II... "I wasted Time, and now doth Time waste me." Are you familiar with that one, sir?'

'Yes, it's one of my favourites.'

He looked pleased. I smiled politely and stared at the floor of polished red tiles, spotlessly clean although strewn here and there with bits of straw. I'd never known a time when my father didn't have straw somewhere near him. Even in the sitting room it only added to the feeling of cleanliness, this association with the donkeys. What, after all, could be purer than the soul of a donkey? It's probably why my father had taken it as a second career. After years submerged in the moral grime of the Aberystwyth underworld he had turned to the one industry in town which traded innocence. Sospan tried to in a way, of course. He traded in the essence of the nursery, the sugary, vanilla smell of a mother's breast. But there was nothing innocent about the men who stood at his stall and ate, no matter how much they may have yearned inwardly to turn back the clock. Papa Bronzini continued to drone on about the theatre and at one point a donkey, I think it was Mignon, put her head in through the kitchen window and listened for a while before giving me an uncanny look of sympathy and loping off. Gradually the conversation turned to the old days when Bronzini and my father had worked on the Force together, the days when Bronzini had tried to bust the ESSJAT. For me, Bronzini cut a slightly pathetic figure but I saw that Eeyore was in awe of him and watched in uncritical fascination as Bronzini, now Aberystwyth's foremost mobster, described the workings of the ultra-secret elite known as the ESSJAT. He told how Gwenno Guevara had been a streetwalker before the war and had joined up to earn some extra money with the troops. Once overseas she had discovered a taste for fighting and had been good at it.

'That was the thing about Gwenno, you see, sir,' explained the old policeman. 'Whatever she turned her hand to she excelled at. Great hooker, great soldier and great chief of the ESSJAT.'

After the War Lovespoon rewarded her by offering her any job she wanted, not expecting the former hooker to choose a position in the newly formed League against Turpitude. But true to form she not only took the job but excelled at it, rising through the ranks until eventually she sat the top. At which point she simply disappeared. No one outside the organisation knew who she was, or where, although it seemed likely that Brainbocs had found out. But he of course was dead.

It was about ten to midnight when I made my way through the rows of boats, warehouses and lobster pots that made up Harbour Row. In the distance I could hear the whoop of a police siren and the engine howl of a car being driven at high speed. A chase. I took up a position deep in the shadow of a public shelter across the road from the Chandler's and thought about what I had just done. By locking Llunos up like that I had committed myself to a course from which there seemed no way back; it was as if I had been holding on to the precipice of a normal life in Aberystwyth and the last of my fingers had lost its hold.

A cat mewed at my feet and I jumped, my shoes making a harsh scraping sound which my fear convinced me could be heard across the whole neighbourhood. The racing car was nearer, but the police car seemed to have moved off, the klaxon getting fainter and fainter somewhere in the direction of Penparcau. Suddenly a door opened across the way. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up and I stopped breathing. There was a pause. The beats of my heart louder than kettle-drum notes.

A figure stumbled or was pushed out of the warehouse. A woman's figure. She turned round and looked over to where I was standing. There was no way I could see in the light and with the distance, but I knew it was Bianca. I stepped forward, terrified that a trap was about to be sprung; Lovespoon had given me his word, but what was that worth? Why arrange the meeting at a place and an hour like this? As I walked across Bianca recognised me and opened her mouth to speak, but as she did the car that had been racing through the neighbourhood rounded the corner on two wheels. I darted a glance over — it was a car I'd seen before, very recently. Bianca spun round and a cry erupted in my throat. Confusion and terror swept across Bianca's face, and then there was a bang and Bianca went sailing like a rag doll into the air. Turning, turning, turning, before hitting the ground with a single, sharp crack like an axe hitting a tree. I stood transfixed, unable to move, and watched the car reverse a yard and then slam forwards back into Bianca's broken body. The car door sprang open, a figure leaped out and sprinted round to the other side of the car and down one of the dark alleys between two warehouses. Seconds later I heard from the harbour the sound of an outboard motor being fired up.

I ran over to Bianca's side and knelt down.

She looked up, eyes glazed with pain, and tried to force her mouth to overcome the agony and speak. Far off the banshee wail of the police siren was getting louder. I grasped her shoulders tenderly and ordered her not to speak.

'Louie!'

'It's OK, don't speak.'

She curled the fingers of her hand round my forearm weak as a baby.

'Louie!'

'I'm here, baby.'

And then her index finger detached itself from the rest of her fingers and slowly formed a curl like the finger of the grim reaper; she beckoned slowly towards herself and mouthed a word. I felt myself being pulled down by the finger as if attached by an invisible thread, and when my ear reached so close to her mouth that I could feel the warmth of her breath, she spoke again. Each word making her smashed body quiver like the pangs of childbirth.

'Louie!'

'It's OK, don't speak!'

'I ... love . . . you!'

'There, there . . .'

'The essay . . .'

'No, no! Don't talk!'

And then as if at the exact moment her spirit left her she gripped me with a terrifying new strength.

'The essay . . .' she gasped desperately, 'it's in the stove!'

The grip broke and her head fell with a thud on to the tarmac glistening with her blood.

The police car skidded into view at the far end of the Prom and I looked at the murderer's car, engine still running, and realised where I'd seen it before. It was mine.

Chapter 16

I SIPPED MY coffee and read Meirion's editorial about Bianca:

It is almost a week since the tragic death of Sioned Penmaenmawr, better known to the denizens of our notorious entertainment district as 'Bianca'. A girl who cocked her final snook at the society that cast her out by being buried in her night-club costume. By now most people will already have begun to forget about her; and the rest will never have cared in the first place. More fool them. The photo of the miserable funeral at Llanbadarn Cemetery on Tuesday contains a message for us all. There were four mourners at the sad interment. Her close friend Myfanwy Montez; Detective Inspector Llunos; a photographer from this newspaper; and a solitary figure who passing by felt the touch of pity in his heart. Wearing a dirty old coat tied up with packing string, his face dirty and lined with the years of suffering, it was a man only too familiar with the condition of exile from the hearthside of the Aberystwyth good life: a Patagonian War veteran. His lot it was that afternoon to teach us all not only the meaning of the word 'pity', but also alas, the meaning of shame.

The War veteran with the coat tied up with packing string had been me. Had Meirion known? It was hard to see how he could have done. I went to the funeral in the hope of speaking to Myfanwy, but she stayed too close to Llunos the whole time and rushed off in his car immediately afterwards. Llunos said in the newspaper that he was desperate to talk to me in connection with the death, which they were treating as a tragic hit-and-run, but he didn't mention that I locked him in the toilet.

Ever since the night she died I had been hiding in the caravan. I still didn't know how I survived: standing over her dead body, the car that killed her — my car — parked nearby with the engine still running, the police only seconds away. In a situation like that the only thing to do is make a decision. Any one, it hardly matters. The one I made was to jump in the car with Bianca's blood and tissue still smeared across the grille and drive off. She was dead, I could see that. And if by some miracle she wasn't, the police would be better able to help than I was. So I saved myself. As the police car screeched to a halt I did a U-turn, turned right at the Castle and over Trefechan Bridge; then I pulled off on to the track leading to Tan-y-Bwlch beach. From there I abandoned the car and set off on foot across the darkened fields and over the Iron Age hill fort. The plan was to double back, making a wide arc around the town, and head for the caravan in Ynyslas. It took me four hours, but I did it.

Since then, the weather had closed right in with expanses of dove-grey clouds filling the sky; it was cold and windy and moisture hung in the air ready to occasionally spit at the windows of the caravan. I didn't go out much, but when I did, the disguise as a War veteran worked well. Such was the stigma, most folk simply averted their gaze when they saw one.

There was a knock on the caravan door. I opened it and Calamity burst in.

'Take your time, won't you?'

'Sorry, I didn't hear you.'

'It's freezing out there, like the middle of winter.'

'It's all right, I've made coffee, that will warm you up.'

She took off her anorak and walked over to the table. 'I've made some progress.'

'Oh yeah?'

'It could be the breakthrough we've been waiting for.'

She opened her school satchel and pulled out three books. I picked them up and read the titles. 'On Pools of Love by Joyce Moonweather; Governing a Sloop by Captain Marcus Trelawney; Towards a New Pathology of Slovenliness by Dr Heinz X. Nuesslin.' I put the books down.

'I got them from the school library. You won't believe who was the last person to borrow them.'

'Brainbocs?'

'No. Guess again.'

'Sorry, chum, that's my best effort.'

'You won't believe it.'

'Amaze me.'

'Evans the Boot!'

I picked up the New Pathology of Slovenliness and examined the flyleaf. 'Maybe we misjudged him all along.'

'I don't think so. Look at the title page.'

Obediently I opened the book. Letters were missing from the title page, crudely cut out with scissors leaving jagged edges.

'He got into trouble for it, you see. That's how I knew. I remember hearing this story ages ago about how he turned up at the library one day and borrowed all these weird books. And then when he returned them he'd cut them up. So I checked on his record which ones they were.'

I opened the other two books; each one had been vandalised in the same way.

'OK, clever-clogs, what does it mean?'

As if impatiently waiting for this question she took out a piece of paper and unfolded it.

'These are the letters he cut out: O.V.E.N.L.O.O.P.S.'

'You still got me.'

'Rearrange them.'

I stared at the paper for a second and then it hit me. 'Lovespoon!'

'That's right!'

'So what does it all mean?'

'What do people use cut-out letters for?'

I shrugged.

'Blackmail notes of course. He was blackmailing the Welsh teacher. No wonder they did him in.'

I thought about the significance of it for a few seconds but it did little to lift my depression.

'Don't get carried away with excitement will you?'

'Sorry, Calamity, I'm sitting here wanted for the murder of a prostitute. It's difficult to get excited about things.'

'But this is the way we're going to clear your name.'

'I don't see how.'

'Evans was blackmailing Lovespoon. Why? Because he copied Brainbocs's homework and found out something incriminating about the teacher. What else do we know about Evans? He stole a rare tea cosy from the Museum. Now it's my guess these two facts are related.'

'Sure, but what's the link?'

'I don't know. We haven't got all the pieces of the jigsaw yet.'

'But it doesn't really take us forwards. We already know why Lovespoon killed Evans.'

She looked at me, the frustration bringing tears to her eyes. 'We have to explore every angle, Louie. We have to be thorough, we're building a case, sod it!'

'OK. What else have you got?'

She pushed the books away and placed her palms flat down on the table. 'Operation "stove-search" not so good. Bianca could have hidden the essay in any number of stoves. I tried yours but Mrs Llantrisant wouldn't let me into the kitchen. She said you wouldn't be needing a stove, clean or otherwise, where you were going. It would be bread and water down at Cwmtydu Prison for you from now on.'

'I'm touched she has so much confidence in me.'

'She said, "You never really know anyone, do you?" Then I went to Bianca's flat and tried there but it was cordoned off and the policeman wouldn't let me in. I said I'd come to clean the stove and he said he'd never heard such a load of codswallop in all his life. I waited till he was replaced by another policeman. Then I tried again and this time I said I wanted to go and see my auntie who lived above Bianca and was ninety years old and very frail and I had to check up on her now and again just to make sure she wasn't dead.'

My eyes widened at that one, but I said nothing.

'So he let me in and I sneaked into Bianca's flat and just as I was checking the stove the first policeman turned up and caught me. He drags me downstairs saying he's going to give me a good hiding and down at the bottom when we got to the gate the other policeman looks up and says, "Sarge, I've heard it all now, there's a woman here who wants to clean the stove!" And do you know who it was? It was Mrs Llantrisant!'

This time we both looked at each other and stared.

'Mrs Llantrisant?'

She nodded

'I don't like the sound of that. Not at all.'

'Not much chance of it being coincidence is there?'

'I'm afraid not. So then what happened?'

'I bit the policeman's hand and ran for it.' She paused and then said, 'Are you angry?'

I blinked in puzzlement. 'Angry? What for?'

'Because I gave the game away.'

'No you didn't!'

'I did. Because of me she found out we were looking in stoves. I screwed up."

I punched her playfully in the arm. 'Kid you did a brilliant job. I really take my hat off to you and one day — maybe next week — you are going to be a famous private eye.'

Her face brightened. 'Well I'd better get back to them stoves.'

I raised a hand. 'Don't worry about the stoves.'

'No?'

'By my reckoning, counting out my stove and Bianca's which you have checked, there must be about 3,998 left in town. It's hopeless.'

She blew a raspberry. 'What sort of talk is that?'

'Look, the way my luck is going, it will start snowing soon and then every stove in town will be lit up anyway.'

She picked up her coat. 'We don't need to check every stove in town. We just have to work out what her movements were and check the ones she would have had access to. It's simple.'

Later that afternoon I decided to go out. It was not a clever thing to do with half the countryside looking for me, but I decided, what the hell. I might as well be arrested as sit in the caravan doing nothing. I tied the old coat on with the packing string and covered my hands and face with soil. It was bitterly cold out so I stuffed crumpled-up newspaper inside my coat as insulation. Lastly, and this was something I hated most of all, I smeared myself with a liquid I had prepared from rotting fish, boiled cabbage and mouldy cheese. It was the nearest I could get to that sour unwashed cheesy smell that the vagrants seemed to have.

From Ynyslas I walked across the bog to the railway track, climbed on to a goods train, and jumped off a mile before Aberystwyth station. From there I walked through town to the sea front. And then I climbed up to the camera obscura on the top of Constitution Hill. At the cafe at the top I bought a tea and a bag of old sixpences for the telescope mounted in the corner overlooking the town. The town astronomy society met here twice a month to use the little sixpenny telescope but there was no one here now. I turned it away from the sky and trained it on Sospan's stall. There was no one there apart from Sospan and so I sat down and drank my tea. After five minutes I looked again and this time found what I was looking for. Llunos enjoying his regular afternoon ice cream. I walked over to the phone.

'Yeah?'

'I didn't do it.'

'Sorry?'

'I said I didn't do it.'

'Who is this?'

'Can't you guess?'

'Louie?'

'I'm just calling to tell you it wasn't me. And you know it.'

'Do I?'

'Run a girl down in cold blood?'

'It was your car.'

'But I wasn't in it.'

'We found your fingerprints on it.'

'Of course you did, it was my bloody car!'

'What do you want?'

'I don't know.'

There was a short silence. Llunos was obviously taken aback by the honesty in the reply.

Then he remembered:

'You locked me in the toilet, you bastard!'

'Look, forget about that now, it's not important —'

'You won't say that when I get hold of you!'

'I mean we can discuss it later; right now I want you to know it wasn't me.'

'All right, Louie, if you're innocent why did you skip town the same night?'

'That doesn't prove anything.'

'It doesn't prove it, but it doesn't look very good, does it?'

'If I hadn't run away I would be locked up by now.'

'You think you won't be when we find you?'

I sighed in exasperation. 'It wasn't me, Llunos.'

'Look, say you weren't involved. Say someone else took your car and ran her over. Just say that for a moment. And you were safely home in bed at the time, why then would you leave town? You wouldn't even know she'd been killed. First thing you would have known was when we came knocking on your door.'

'I didn't do it, Llunos, and you know it.'

'You got an alibi?'

'Not a very good one.'

'Where were you on the night in question?'

'What time?'

'Between eleven and midnight.'

I paused.

'Well?'

'I was at the harbour.'

'That's a great alibi!'

My eyes smarted as I took in the mess I was in. It was hopeless.

'Fuck it all, Llunos, why would I want to kill Bianca?'

'Who did it then?'

'One of Pickel's mob.'

'Why?'

'Ask him.'

'You'll have to do better than that.'

'He was with her that night.'

'He's with her every night.'

'He stole something from Lovespoon and kept it hidden. He shouldn't have had it, but he did. He boasted to Bianca about it, so she stole it. If Lovespoon had found out, he would have killed Pickel so he told him first. The Druids took her and tortured her to find out what she had done with the thing she had stolen. They must have gone too far. Beaten her too much. She was probably going to die. So they arrange a car crash and use my car. Kill two birds with one stone.'

I could tell he was listening hard. It was troubling him, this murder. He probably had enough evidence to send me down. But he knew in his heart I didn't do it.

'What did she steal?'

'Some important papers belonging to Lovespoon.'

'Papers? Why would the girl care about papers? She couldn't hardly read.'

'She did it for me. She thought I wanted them.'

'Did you?'

'Not like that. Not for her to get involved.'

'What was so special about the papers?'

'They could prove that Lovespoon killed those schoolboys.'

There was silence. Had I got him? My heart started to beat a little faster.

'You know where the so-called papers are now?'

'Not really.'

'What do you mean not really? You're hanging by a thread, Louie. You tell me this cock-and-bull story —'

'Look, all I know is she hid them in the stove.'

'Which one?'

'Look, I know it's a big job, but a team of men could probably —'

'Louie!'

'What?'

'Look up at the sky.'

I leaned back and looked out of the cafe window. It looked like someone had burst a feather pillow in the sky.

'See that white cold stuff?'

I held the phone cradled against my cheek for a few seconds and then hung up.

Snow in June. Five minutes from now, every stove in Aberystwyth would be lit.

Chapter 17

THE SNOW FELL all afternoon but didn't stick, it just turned to a dirty grey slime on the pavement, and soon it was gone. I hung around the deserted town all day, dressed as a veteran and forced to live the life of one, which meant no life at all. There was no bar or cafe which would allow me in, and eventually I took refuge in Eeyore's stable where I could find warmth among the donkeys. I stayed there until evening and then I wandered over to the south side of Trefechan Bridge and waited in the shadows behind the bus stop. After half an hour I heard Myfanwy clip-clopping down the wet pavement in her high heels. In my veteran's outfit she didn't give me a second glance and came and stood right in front of me.

'Myfanwy,' I whispered.

She ignored me.

'Myfanwy!'

She moved up to the other end of the bus shelter.

'Myfanwy, please!'

She looked round. 'You leave me alone, mister, do you hear?'

'Myfanwy, it's me, Louie.'

She peered at me and then gasped.

'I need to talk to you.'

'Don't come any closer.'

'Do you think I would hurt you?'

'Is that what you said to Bianca?'

I sighed. This was all wrong.

'Myfanwy!' I begged. 'Please. I didn't kill Bianca, it's all wrong what they are printing in the paper. It was the Druids. I can prove -'

She looked back up the street as the green bus trundled up to the lights. They were on red. The yellow electric glow from the interior of the bus looked warm and inviting in the chill evening gloom.

'That's my bus.'

'Get the next one.'

'I can't, I'm already late.'

Without being able to stop myself, I made a move towards her lifting my arm out to touch her shoulder. She started backwards, raising her arms, but then stopped. We both stood frozen in our respective positions. She looked at me and our eyes met.

'I didn't do it,' I said simply.

She nodded. 'Promise?'

'I loved Bianca. You know that.'

She rushed over and I took her in my arms. 'But not as much as me, right?'

I hugged her.

'You smell.'

'I know.'

She breathed deeply and pressed her head into my chest. 'Louie, take me away.'

'Where?'

'Anywhere.'

'OK.'

She pulled away and looked up into my face. 'You mean it?'

'Yes.'

'When can we go? Tonight?'

I shook my head. 'No, not tonight.'

The lights changed and the bus eased forwards.

'Please, Louie, it has to be tonight.'

'A few days won't make any difference.'

'They will, oh they will, Louie, if only you knew.'

The bus approached.

'It has to be now.'

'If I go now, they will track me down. I'll go to prison.'

'We'll go somewhere where they won't find us.'

I shook my head sadly. 'I locked Llunos in a toilet, he'll

find me.'

The bus stopped and the doors swished open. Myfanwy broke

away and took a step towards the bus, looking back over her

shoulder. As she stepped aboard she bit her lip and her face

became disfigured with grief.

I walked the seven miles back to the caravan; on the beach between Borth and Ynyslas there was a bonfire surrounded by a group of War veterans. They were cooking rabbits and drinking from cans of strong lager. One of them had a guitar on which he strummed tuneless ditties. I skirted round them, not anxious to come into contact with a group of people who would quickly see through my disguise. But I was too late, they called out to me. I tried to pretend I hadn't heard and carried on walking, but one of the tramps stood up and came towards me.

'Hey, friend, come and share some supper.' I twisted on the spot, uncertain what to do. Could I convince them I was a real veteran? Almost certainly not. How would they react to an impersonator? Laugh? Or get angry? If they got angry, what would they do? When you're on the lowest rung of society's ladder you don't have a lot to lose. Damn. The soldier walked up to me.

'Come and have some supper. I owe you a dinner, remember?' 'I think you've got the wrong person, my friend.' He chuckled. 'I don't think so. It's not every day I get to eat strawberries and Black Forest Gateau. Especially in the company of a famous night-club singer.'

He laughed at the expression on my face. 'Do you think you can go round dressed like that and we won't notice?'

* * *

The rabbit was good, and so was the company. There was an easy informality about it and genuine sense of brotherhood. No one asked me the first thing I expected to be asked: what I was doing pretending to be a vet. It seemed to be understood that I must be in dire straits. And these were men with an instinctive understanding for suffering. They could sense my plight and knew better than to make it worse by asking stupid questions. For the first time in weeks I felt good. We sat there until late in the night, sucking the hot juicy goodness out of the roast rabbit and swapping stories; War stories mostly and sometimes stories from that life, impossibly distant to most of these men now, before the War. A life which was distinguished by a boredom and normality for which they could only ache. I'd never understood until now how beautiful a normal life could appear to those who can never possess it. For eight years I had been a private detective in Aberystwyth, never making any money and seldom getting a case that was remotely interesting; certainly never fighting off the hordes of beautiful female clients that Myfanwy was convinced from watching TV were a staple part of my routine. Every day I had bantered with Sospan, wandered up and down the Prom, stroking my father's donkeys and drinking pints in silence with him, a silence which I now recognised could only be enjoyed between two people whose love has gone beyond the artifice of words. And of course I had exchanged the most excruciatingly banal platitudes with Mrs Llantrisant about the weather. And now I was an outcast, wanted for the murder of one of my own friends, and the thought of being able to discuss the weather again with Mrs Llantrisant appeared to me as a distant dream.

I thought about the circumstances which had brought me to this pass, and when finally the conversation died slowly down and the only sound was the crackling of the fire and the distant sighing of the sea I turned to Cadwaladr.

'Remember what you once told me about Rio Caeriog? About the version of events they never tell anyone?'

Cadwaladr threw a bone into the fire, sending bright sparks up into the night sky.

'Yes, I remember.'

'Would you tell me that story now? The true story of Rio Caeriog?'

There was a murmur around the fire. Cadwaladr laughed softly and said, 'By rights there's only one man who should tell that story.' His words hung in the air and were followed by a rustling around the fire as the men shifted their positions and turned their gazes to a man sitting in the shadows next to the guitarist. He eased himself forward into the glow from the fire; an air of expectancy spread round the circle.

'You ask about Rio Caeriog?'

'Yes.'

'Tell me what you know about it.'

'I know what the history books say, that it was a great military victory -

Scoffing sounds erupted from all sides of the circle.

'Oh yes,' the man laughed bitterly, 'a great military victory. That's why there's no statue of General Prhys outside the museum, and why you never find him mentioned in any of the history books.'

There were more scoffing sounds.

'And what else do you know?'

'I know that they put a radio beacon inside a Rolex watch, that the watch was lost in a rigged card game to one of the bandits who then took it back to the rebel base and then the Legion sent in the Lancaster bomber to home in on the radio beacon.'

The man nodded. 'In these history books you talk of, do they tell you where the card game took place?'

'It was a place called San Isadora, in the foothills of the Sierra Machynlleth mountains.'

'That was a hundred miles behind the lines in hostile territory. Do you know how we got there?'

'Marched, I suppose.'

The man spat. 'Marched.' His voice rose in anger. 'You think you can just walk a hundred miles in hostile territory and no one will notice?'

The guitarist placed a mollifying hand on his shoulder. 'It's OK, Johnny, take it easy. It's not this man's fault.'

Johnny turned sharply towards the man. 'Were you there? Were you there, huh?'

'No, Johnny, I wasn't. I wasn't there.'

'Don't you think I have the right to be angry?'

Cadwaladr answered. 'Yes, Johnny, you have a right to be angry. We all know that. But this man is a guest. He isn't the one responsible for your pain.'

'Tell him the story, Johnny.'

'And us too; tell us about Rio Caeriog.'

'Yes tell it, Johnny!'

Johnny sat back and resumed his story in a calmer voice. 'I'll tell you how we got there; General Prhys made us march those hundred miles disguised as United Nations peace-keepers. He gave us all a tin of blue paint and made us paint our helmets. That's how we did it.'

I whistled, not sure whether I was supposed to be impressed or shocked. Then there was a pause, and as the fire died down to a glow, and with the far-off lights of Aberdovey gleaming behind him, Johnny told the story of Rio Caeriog.

'When we got to San Isadora we billeted and went to the cantina. A young private by the name of Pantycelyn was chosen to play the card game. There was nothing special about him. He was like most of the other kids there. Young and frightened and wishing he could go back to his parents' farm in the shadow of Cader Idris. But he was chosen.' Johhny paused. 'Or maybe he was chosen because he was sober and reliable. The sort of person who could be trusted not to get the watches mixed up. Because everyone had Rolexes in those days, cheap from the PX store.' He stopped again and sighed sadly. 'Yes maybe that was why they chose him.' Johnny stopped and took a sip from his can. 'Do they tell you any of this in your books?'

'Yes, this much I have heard.'

He nodded. 'Everything went well at first. Losing the watch was easy - the only hard part was not making it look too obvious. As soon as they won the Rolex, the bandits rode out of town, shooting their pistols in the air as they went. A Rolex watch was worth ten years' salary in those parts. Then after the game Pantycelyn went to join the rest of the platoon. They were listening to the radio in the front bar. It was the semi-final of the Copa Americana and Brazil were playing Argentina. The entire town was there. When the kid walked in, something funny happened. The radio reception went haywire. The peasants hooted and threw enchiladas at him. And the kid starts to get scared. He realises that he must have got the watches mixed up. The bandits had got the genuine Rolex and he was wearing a radio beacon on his wrist with a Lancaster bomber heading directly for him. So he tries to get the thing off, but he's so clumsy in his terror that he breaks the catch. Well, as you know, a Rolex is made to last: try as he might he can't get the damned watch off. So his mates take him outside to work out what to do. There's about an hour to go and everyone is getting jumpy. Someone suggests to the kid he does the noble thing and get on a mule and ride out of town for five miles. And, of course, he's getting really jittery now and says, "Fuck off, why don't you all ride out of town on a mule?" And they say, "So we can save all these innocent people here," and he says, "Do I give a fuck? I'm dead anyway." So then the medic pipes up and says, "Why don't we amputate his arm?" This strikes everybody as a good idea, except Pantycelyn who's now only too pleased to ride out of town for five miles, in fact, he's begging to do it. But no one trusts him. So he makes a break for it, and they chase after him. All around the town he runs, with the platoon on his trail. Eventually they catch him. They hold him down, give him a shot of morphine, and amputate the arm — just below the elbow. Then they strap the arm to a mule and fire a gun behind it. Wham! The mule covers the first mile in less than a minute. Leaving Pantycelyn to sleep off his anaesthetic they go back into the cantina. Soon they hear the far-off drone of the bomber approaching above the clouds. By now it's the last five minutes of the game and Argentina are one-nil up. The peasants are on the edge of their seats. They're all betting like crazy on the outcome and the tables are all piled high with money. Well, what do you know! As soon as the soldiers walk in, the radio goes haywire again. Turns out it's just something to do with the radio waves reflecting off the helmets. It means they cut the kid's arm off for nothing. Of course, they're pretty upset, but they agree among themselves not to tell the kid when he wakes up. After all, if there was nothing wrong with the watch on the arm they amputated, then the bandits must have taken the one with the radio transmitter all along. So as the sound of the plane gets louder, everyone goes outside to watch the fireworks. And from the roof of the cantina they watch as the bomber drops 14,0001bs of high explosive and phosphorus on to the orphanage. It seems the bandit had donated the watch to the one of the holy sisters. Twenty-seven children killed. Within hours every hoe, axe, hammer and shovel for two hundred square miles was raised against us. As we started our retreat, the rain came and washed the blue paint off our helmets.'

After he finished, I didn't know what to say. No one did. There was silence for a long while and then one by one people stood up and drifted away. I thanked the veterans for their hospitality and rose to my feet. As I left, Johnny the storyteller gave me a sort of salute of farewell. At the same time, a branch on the fire cracked in the heat sending a flare up that illuminated the whole of one side of his body. And then I knew why of all the assembled people that night, only he could have told me the true story of Rio Caeriog. His left arm was missing below the elbow.

When I got back to the caravan, the one that had been welded together from two crash write-offs and couldn't be traced, the one that couldn't be seen from the road and about which not even the caretaker knew anything, I found a police car parked outside.

Chapter 18

'YOU THINK I didn't know about this crappy caravan? I

could have picked you up any time I wanted.'

I put a plastic mug filled with instant soup down in front of Llunos. It seemed like years since I had done the same for Myfanwy. But it was just over a week. The ludo set was still out on the table.

'So why didn't you?'

He ran a pudgy hand through his hair. He looked as if he hadn't slept for a week; and there was something else about him: the air of weary self-assurance was gone. Now he just seemed weary. He looked at me as if appealing for help. 'I don't think I'll have a job by the end of the week.'

I blinked.

'There's a new commissioner of police.'

'Anyone I know?'

'Herod Jenkins.'

'The games teacher?'

'Yes.'

'Fuck.'

'Soon you won't be able to sneeze in this town without a note from your Mam.'

I topped up the mugs of soup with rum.

'The man's a nutcase.'

Llunos gave me a 'tell me about it' look. He pulled out a bag from under his chair and slid it across the table to me. It was a child's school satchel.

'We took this from Brainbocs's house just after he disappeared.'

I looked at the policeman and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat as if he couldn't believe what he was doing. He was helping me.

'It's no fucking use so don't get all excited.'

I undid the buckles and opened the satchel. There were four objects inside and I laid them side by side next to the ludo set: a field guide to edible mushrooms; Job Gorseinon's Roses of Charon; an invoice from Dai the Custard Pie's fancy-dress basement; and, perhaps most curiously of all, a nineteenth-century nautical primer: Corruption of the Deep: The Captain's Guide to Last Rites and Burials at Sea.

I picked each one up in turn, examined it briefly and then put it down in its original place.

No one spoke.

Llunos stood up to leave. 'I told you it wouldn't help.'

I followed him to the door and for a while we stood there facing each other awkwardly on the step. It was as if the components of our universe had shifted like fragments in a kaleidoscope and we now found ourselves fighting on the same,side. He stuck out his hand and we shook.

'If I was you,' he said, 'I'd leave town.' And then, through the wound-down window of his car, 'Did you hear about Ma Brainbocs?'

'No, what?'

'She was spotted at Cardiff airport yesterday boarding an Aerolineas Argentina flight.'

When I awoke late next morning, one thing was clear to me: it was time to get out of town. If Llunos had known all about my hiding hole plenty of other people probably did as well. And I'd had enough of skulking around disguised as a War veteran. With the games teacher running the police force we were all in the shit. I threw a few things into a zip-up hold-all and put the veteran's disguise on for what I hoped was the last time. Maybe Myfanwy and I could get the train to Shrewsbury.

At Myfanwy's flat the door was ajar and the place deserted. Not empty with the atmosphere of a room from which the tenant has nipped out to buy milk, but with air of a nest in which the eggs are cold and the parent birds have been frightened away. There was nothing concrete to suggest it, but sometimes you know these things without needing evidence. Bras and panties were left drying on cold radiators. T-shirts and inside-out jeans were strewn across the floor. Mugs of instant coffee covered in green fur cluttered every surface next to wine bottles and beer cans filled with cigarette ends all glued down with sticky rings of stale beer. There were half-eaten take-away meals and tins of tuna stuck to the carpet, with forks sticking out of the jaggedly opened tops. Clothes draped on hangers hooked over door handles, Schwarzenegger and Stallone videos, Lady Di souvenirs, posters of Bon Jovi, shiny vinyl cases from which make-up bottles spilled out on to the floor. Birth-control pills and tampons. And everywhere the air was rank with the smell of old beer, candles and stale farts. It was as if a butterfly had emerged from a chrysalis on a dung heap. But the butterfly had flown.

I almost didn't care. Like a regularly beaten dog I was too tired to yelp. The fall of the stick had become routine. Myfanwy had pleaded with me to take her away and I had been too stubborn and now it was too late. What did I expect? Everyone knew you don't get two bites at a cherry like that. With her gone I no longer had any desire to leave, or to stay, or in fact to do anything. Maybe, I thought, I should just go back to my old flat and wait for Herod's men to arrive. I wandered down to the harbour and then on down past the castle and stood for an hour on the Prom leaning on the sugar-white railings and staring emptily out to sea. The waters were a chill unwelcoming gunmetal colour and the breeze stiff and salty. Above my head the Noddy illumination swayed and creaked eerily and I thought grimly of the likely consequences if a man turned up in this town wearing a red hat with bells. Eventually I headed for the only suitable place for a man whose world has collapsed: the Whelk Stall.

The boy was reading the newspaper on the counter when I arrived and gave no sign of stopping. I stood pointedly in front of him for a while but still he ignored me. This was not a wise policy. I slammed my hand down on the page he was reading.

He looked up with hatred in his eyes. 'Sorry, Smelly, we don't serve tramps.'

I gasped in disbelief. Didn't he know what I had been through recently? Didn't he know that I was an outcast, wanted for murder? That this filthy coat was just a disguise? Didn't he know I had lost Myfanwy? Didn't he know how dangerous that made me? Didn't he know any of this? Of course he didn't but that was just tough. There comes a time when someone has to pay and it doesn't matter whether it's the wrong bill or not. Someone has to pay.

'What did you say, Sonny Jim?'

'I said, fuck off, granddad, and stop stinking up my stall.'

I nodded slowly and thoughtfully. And then I hit him. He flew backwards more from surprise than from the force of the punch and fell heavily into a pile of saucepans. Before he could recover, I jumped over the counter, paused for a second while I recovered my balance, took aim, and kicked him in the stomach. He grunted and struggled desperately to escape on all fours, unable to get to his feet. I picked up a frying pan and swung it against the side of his head. I could feel the cartilage in his ear cracking and vibrating through the handle of the pan. 'No, please, no mister, please,' he cried. But it was too late. Two weeks too late; the invoice was in his in-tray and he was going to pay it. He scuttled away still on all fours and the sight of his desperation served only to increase my fury. I ran forwards and grabbed the scruff of his neck, pulled him backwards and slammed the frying pan full into his face. Blood from his nose spattered on his dirty white chef's tunic. 'Please, mister!' he cried, and I pushed him into a pile of cardboard boxes and waste bins. .Trapped, with nowhere left to go, he turned to face me, cowering and pulling back at the same time. I picked up a knife with a long blade from the counter and advanced another step. This time he was too frightened even to speak. I could smell urine as his hands clutched at his groin.

'Right then,' I hissed. 'Are you going to serve me some fucking whelks or not?' The knife pointed at the end of his nose and he stared at it in cross-eyed fascination. He nodded.

'Yes sir,' he whispered. 'It'll be a pleasure.'

While he prepared the evening special which we had agreed would be on the house I read the newspaper. Back page first. Then I turned to the front; the main story was Herod's appointment, complete with a photo of the games teacher smiling through that familiar horizontal crease in his face. The same teacher who had sent a consumptive schoolboy out on a run in the worst blizzard to hit Cardiganshire in more than seventy years. The only other story was a small one-column piece on the right under the headline VICE GIRL GRAVE DESECRATED. I turned the page angrily. Then stopped like a cartoon animal that has just run over the edge of a cliff. I turned the page back and re-read the headline, my eyes wide open with shock. It was about Bianca's grave. Feverishly I skimmed the article. Two nights ago someone had dug the coffin up at Llanbadarn Cemetery and broken open the lid in what the paper described as a sick and motiveless crime. The attackers had used a power saw to open up a rectangle eighteen inches long and ten wide in the lid covering Bianca's face. Nothing had been taken, and the corpse hadn't, as they put it, been interfered with.

I pushed the paper away and sat there stunned. Aberystwyth was shocked and baffled by the crime. No one could imagine who could do such a thing. But I could. It was the same person that killed the Punch and Judy man.

Chapter 19

TO THINK OF all the millions of useless, pointless, empty, cruel, vain, proud, mean, obscene and utterly valueless words we spit out during our lives; to think of all those words and all those syllables, more syllables than grains of sand on Borth Beach. Oh Bianca, all you needed was just one more. What evil jinni stood on your shoulder and robbed you of that last, crucial puff of air? To think of all the nonsense you talked. All the lies and flatteries you spent your nights pouring into the ears of pink-faced Druids! All those empty, wasted words. If only you could have bitten your tongue just once: withheld a word and kept it on credit for that rainy day when an extra syllable could have changed the world. One syllable, perhaps the only one in your whole life, that could have made anything better. The essay is in the stove, you gasped. Oh no! You didn't put it in the stove. You who cocked a final snook at society by wearing your night-club costume in the coffin. You put it in your stovepipe hat!

Chapter 20

THE DOORSTEP WAS smeared with dust, cats' piss and muddy boot prints. And someone had daubed 'murderer' on the wall. I climbed the stairs. The door to my office was ajar and I could see Mrs Llantrisant sitting with her feet on the desk eating peanuts. So lost in her own world, she didn't notice me. Mechanically she reached into the brown paper bag, withdrew a handful of nuts, cracked them between her fingers and threw the shells willy-nilly across the floor, cackling to herself as they spattered against the portrait of Noel Bartholomew. The smell of peanutty breath was overpowering even out in the stairwell. I pushed the door open and she let out a gasp.

'You!'

I stared at her through narrowing eyes.

She cast a furtive glance across the desk to the phone, silently judging the distance and deciding against it. She recomposed her features and forced them into a beam of joy.

'You're back!'

'Got tired of swabbing, did you?' I said in a cold monotone.

The beam of joy became a pantomime of anxious concern.

'Oh, Mr Knight, it breaks my heart it does to see the step like that, it really does. It was the police, you see, told me not to touch anything - not that I think for one moment that you ... I mean, all those things they're saying. . . never heard such . . .' The words trailed gently off into the ether. She cast another look at the phone and smiled at me with less conviction this time.

'Still, it's nice to see you back. Will you be staying long?'

I walked across to the desk. She moved back unconsciously pressing herself against the back of the chair.

'I don't know. How long does it take to beat the crap out of an old lady?'

I yanked out the phone cable. Her pupils flashed open.

I sat on the edge of the desk and leaned across. 'Where is it?'

'Where is -'

The words stopped as I raised my index finger.

'Please don't say "where is what".'

She looked at me without saying a word.

'I have to hand it to you,' I said, 'you're a real dark horse.' I started flicking the broken telephone cable against the desk. 'I mean, you give the impression that you haven't got two brain cells to rub together, but you certainly worked the stovepipe hat out a lot quicker than me.'

She said nothing, just continued staring at me wondering how much I knew and what I was going to do.

'But then you don't get into the upper echelons of the Sweet Jesus League without being smart, do you? Not into the ESSJAT you don't.'

'I'm not in it, Mr Knight.'

'Not in what?'

'In ... in what you said.'

'What did I say?'

She looked at me uncertainly. 'That organisation you mentioned; I'm not in it.'

'What's it called?'

'Er . . . I don't know.'

'Then how do you know you're not in it?'

'I ... I ...'

'You're a lieutenant in the ESSJAT, Mrs Llantrisant.'

She shook her head in desperation. 'No ... no ... no I'm not, I'm not!'

'All these years you've been swabbing my step and all the time you've been listening at the keyhole.'

'No, Mr Knight, no!'

'That's how you found out about the Punch and Judy man.'

She shook her head and put her hands to her ears. 'No!'

I leaned closer until my face was only inches away from hers. I could smell the musty reek of Eau de Maesteg.

'You killed him, didn't you?'

'Who?' she whined. 'I haven't killed anybody, Mr Knight. Honest I haven't. I'm just a step-swabber. I'm sorry about the peanuts —'

I whipped the end of the phone cord across her face and the words stopped in mid-sentence. A fine pink groove appeared in the thickly plastered foundation cream.

'It wasn't enough for you to destroy his life:' knock him off the pedestal he stood on for thirty years and force him to scratch a living in the Punch and Judy tents of Aberaeron. You had to throw the poor man off a cliff.'

'No, Mr Knight, not me, not me!'

'It was you I fought with that night down at the harbour, wasn't it?'

'No, please, Mr Knight. You've got it all wrong.'

'Have I? Have I?' I shouted. 'I don't think so.' I paused, breathing heavily, and waited for myself to become calm again. I needed to stay in control.

'Tell me, Mrs Llantrisant. Are you familiar with the works of Job Gorseinon?'

She looked at me blankly.

'Brainbocs was. They found a copy of Gorseinon's Roses of Charon in his satchel. It's an enquiry into the darker side of Greco-Roman horticulture. Have you ever read it?'

She watched me, confused and suspicious. 'I don't think I have. Good book is it?'

'Ooh, curate's egg really. But there's one nice bit where Gorseinon describes how Livia is alleged to have murdered Augustus. He was a wily old bird, you see, Augustus. A bit like you if you don't mind me saying so. And he was paranoid about being poisoned. With good reason as it turned out. It got to the point where he wouldn't eat anything except fruit he had picked from his own orchard. So Livia smeared the figs on the tree with deadly nightshade. Ring any bells does it?'

She looked at me with an empty face like a poker player.

'The story reminded me of that occasion just before Easter when you were taken ill all of a sudden from eating that apple pie. Remember how you called the priest? How he took your deathbed confession? It's funny because we also found in Brainbocs's satchel a book on how to perform the last rites and a fancy-dress hire ticket from Dai the Custard Pie's. It doesn't say what costume he borrowed but I bet if I went down and looked at Custard Pie's ledger I'd find it was a Catholic priest's outfit. What do you say?'

Slowly a change came over Mrs Llantrisant. As if she had decided that the time had come to drop the mask. She brought her hands down from her ears and looked me in the eye. The silly, frivolous old gossip faded away and in its place there sat a different woman. Self-possessed and steely with an expression of stone. Suddenly she darted sideways out of the chair. I leaped after her grabbing at the tails of her housecoat but she moved like a cat and was almost at the door when I managed to grab her ankle. She was strong and fast and would have got away, but my nails caught on her old varicose vein scars. The sharp pain pulled her up for a split-second and made her gasp. It was all I needed. I reached higher and took a firmer grip on her coat. Then her training took over, banishing pain, and focusing every sinew on the task in hand, she turned and sized me up in one cold, robotic look. She lowered one knee, transferred her weight and then spun round driving a backhand smash into my face. I reeled and fell backwards and she moved in with cold precision.

In came the elbow, ramming into my head above the ear and I started to go down. The room swirled and birds sang inside my head. I could see the knee moving up now, the confusion in my brain slowing its hideous progress down to a crawl. A crawl that I felt powerless to avoid. I remember seeing insignificant details with a strange detachment: how the housecoat parted and revealed the elasticised bottom of the bloomer, slightly above the knee. The knee, fish-white and blue-veined like Gorgonzola cheese, slamming upwards like a ramrod. At the last second I jerked to the side and the knee crashed into the filing cabinet. I could see, almost feel myself, the fireworks of pain that shot through her. A deep gash appeared, blood splattered, and she fell to the floor.

I bent over her and suddenly jumped backwards as she jabbed at me with a hatpin which she had pulled from her boot; the hypo-allergenic calfskin boot made in Milan. I dodged the pin and she tried again, but crippled by the wound to her knee she could only lunge and crawl dementedly. I stepped clear of her range of action. Took a careful look round the room and spotted what I wanted. Among the fire irons in the grate was a big cast-iron poker. I picked it up and walked over to where Mrs Llantrisant lay. She looked up at me too convulsed with hate to display any fear. With bitter deliberation I smashed the iron down on her knee. She screamed like a wolf, her spit-covered dentures jettisoning out on to the carpet. Then she blacked out.

When she came round she was sitting in the client's chair, bound at the ankles and wrists with the flex from the TV. I threw a washing-up bowl of cold water with ice cubes into her face. She lifted her head and looked at me, her face still twisted and contorted with misery. I smiled. Then kicked her in the knee; she jerked and writhed, straining at the flex with a power that looked as if it might break the back of the wooden chair.

'That was for killing the Punch and Judy man.'

She spat blood on to the carpet but said nothing.

'Now when you're ready I have some questions I'd like to ask you.'

'Bugumph a dwonba frum ga fum paschtad!'

I screwed up my face 'What!?'

'Ga fhaard bu mon get aggyfun oumpa me ga frunbin pash schtern!'

I picked up the dentures and shoved them back into her mouth.

She started manipulating them furiously with her tongue, making obscene gob-stopper mounds in alternate cheeks. When they were in place she shrieked at me, 'I said you won't get a fucking word out of me, you bastard!'

I kicked her in the knee and she squealed in agony. I spoke to her in a soft bedside manner.

'You know, something puzzles me.' She looked up, interested despite her attempts not to be. 'You're always whingeing to me about the amount of time your friends have to wait at the hospital to get their hips done, and here I am fucking up your knee and you don't seem bothered. Why is that?'

She looked at me coldly and said, 'Your threats are useless. I spit on them.'

'Why did you kill him?'

'Who?'

'Iolo Davies — the Museum curator.'

'My orders were to remove him and so I removed him. He meant nothing to me. It was just a job.'

'Like swabbing the step?'

'He was just a filthy semen-squirting little toad.'

'So where's the essay?'

'Fuck off!'

'OK,' I smiled.

I walked to the kitchen and filled the kettle. I was troubled. What if she had been trained to withstand pain? You heard of such things. My resolve would soon give way. I had already shown that with Lovespoon. My gaze wandered round the kitchen and I was struck at how totally she had made the place her own. Four new housecoats hung up, doubtless paid for out of my petty-cash tin. Groceries from Safeway littered the side. There was even a trunk containing her orthopaedic-boot collection. And then it struck me: even Mrs Llantrisant had an Achilles heel.

I picked up the industrial-size meat mincer which had lain in the corner gathering dust since the time when Mrs Llantrisant and Mrs Abergynolwen had made the sausage rolls for the Eisteddfod. I dragged it into the office and placed it down a few feet in front of Mrs Llantrisant. She looked at me with a look of withering contempt.

'Gonna mince me leg off, are you now, Mr Knight? Or is it me arm? Mince away for all I care, I shall just laugh at you.'

'It's not your leg you should be worried about, Mrs Llantrisant.' I bent down and started unlacing her orthopaedic boot. The brash confidence disappeared and a look of naked terror swept into her cold, pitiless eyes. She struggled like a fish on a hook but the TV flex held her firmly bound to the chair. I took off the boot and stuffed it into the top of the mincer where the chopped meat usually goes and grabbed the handle.

'Better start singing, Mrs Llantrisant, or your boot will be mincemeat.'

'You wouldn't dare! They cost eighty quid they did!'

'You're Gwenno Guevara, aren't you?'

'Fuck off!'

I gave the handle a slight turn. The teeth of the mincing mechanism made contact with the leather. Mrs Llantrisant gasped. I stopped turning the handle and peered to look at the damage to the boot.

'They're just a bit scuffed at the moment; bit of shoe polish would get that off. It's your last chance.'

She started struggling to break free of the flex which bound her to the chair and I gave the handle a full heave. There was a sickening crunching, gristly sort of noise as the spiral teeth cut into the solid wall of the boot. Mrs Llantrisant let out a long, blood-curdling howl, like a tortured wolf.

'You're Gwenno Guevara, aren't you?!' I shouted.

'Yes! Yes! Yes!' she screamed.

'The supreme commander of the ESSJAT?'

'Yes!'

'Is that why Brainbocs came to see you? Why he took your deathbed confession?'

'Yes!'

'Why was he so interested in you?'

She just shook her head sadly and gasped for breath. 'I don't know. I really don't know. All I know is the boy was trying to reunite Lovespoon's bomber crew. Lovespoon, Herod, Dai the Custard Pie . . .'

'And Frobisher?'

'He was dead. He didn't matter. But Brainbocs was trying to track down the remaining survivors from the Rio Caeriog mission. I was the only one he couldn't find.'

'So where's the essay?'

'It's in my handbag on the chair in the kitchen.'

I looked over to the kitchen and then back at her. This was all a bit too easy.

'If you're lying, your boot's fucked.'

She shook her head.

'I mean it! I'll do every single fucking one of them!'

'In my bag, go and see.'

I went to the kitchen and opened her handbag. Inside was a manila envelope. I pulled it out. It was marked on the front in ball-point pen: 'David Brainbocs, spring term assignment, Cantref-y-Gwaelod'. Next to that was a date and the St Luddite's school stamp, initialled by Lovespoon. I tore it open and pulled out the essay. There were about thirty pages of A4 filled with a closely packed schoolboy hand, interspersed here and there with technical-looking diagrams. It was perfect. The essay that half of Aberystwyth had been looking for. There was just one thing wrong. As I leafed through the pages I could hear from the other room a horrible raucous cackling that went straight through me like a graveyard wind. Mrs Llantrisant was laughing. I could mince up every orthopaedic boot in Aberystwyth and it wouldn't make a hap'orth of difference this time. The essay was written in runes.

Chapter 21

WEARILY, I SET off on the half-hour walk across town to the light industrial estate on the site of the old engine sheds. That was where the new Witches' Co-op could be found next to the DIY emporium, the computer superstore and the frozen-food wholesalers. It was a far cry from the cubby hole the shop had formerly occupied in the side of the castle ramparts next to the Coronation Muggery. The shop itself was an uneasy mix of traditional and modern. In front of the warehouse-like building of corrugated iron and sand-coloured brick was a car park in which the parking bays were marked out in whorls and vortices corresponding to the lines of power beneath the tarmac. The staff wore bright cotton overalls covered in half moons and stars like Hallowe'en costumes, but the security guard had a wolf on a leash. The lighting was mainly fluorescent, except for torches burning at the ends of the aisles.

At my approach, the glass double doors opened as if by magic and one of the assistants pointed me in the direction of the R&D facility at the back. The door was marked 'authorised personnel only' but I walked through regardless and found myself in a laboratory. It was empty except for Julian, the cat, who was peering into the eyepiece of a microscope, his paws balancing on the knurled focusing wheel. He looked up and gave me the usual look of disdain and then, intimidated perhaps by the expression of determination on my face, flicked an ear back towards the far side of the room. My gaze followed the direction of his ear to a large glass window set in the wall and through the glass I could see Evans the Boot's Mam sitting on a broomstick in what appeared to be a wind tunnel. Julian returned his gaze to the eyepiece of the microscope. The door to the wind tunnel had a red light above it and, not wishing to compromise the research, I went up to the window and waved. Mrs Evans saw me, signalled to one of the white-coated technicians in the room, and dismounted. She came out carrying the broomstick and took off the helmet which looked like one of those worn by Olympic racing cyclists. Then, struggling to get her breath back, she tossed me the broomstick; it was lighter than a feather.

'Not bad eh?' she panted. 'Carbon fibre frame, hollow inside and polypropylene bristles — drag coefficient about the same as a seagull.'

'I'm impressed.'

'I hear Myfanwy left town. I thought you two were an item.'

'So did I but you just never know, do you?'

I took the essay out of my pocket and handed it to her. She held the papers up to her nose, and slowly leafed through them, making soft grunting sounds as she went. Unfortunately, she didn't have her runing glasses with her but agreed that she would start transcribing tonight and send Julian over every half hour with the pages as she finished them. At the mention of his name, the cat looked up again from the microscope, stared long and hard at us, and then reapplied his eye to the eyepiece.

'You're staying in that old caravan aren't you?' Mrs Evans added as I left. 'The one no one knows about?' As I retraced my steps through the whorls and vortices of the car park I thought sourly of Eeyore and his so-called untraceable caravan. I was tempted to curse him, but if you did that in this shop it set off an alarm.

The sun was setting when I got back and the caravans were bathed in golden fire, like an Inca city. I wasn't expecting to see Julian with the translated pages until later in the night and so I slept for a while. When I awoke, the caravan was in darkness. I got up and took down a tin of pilchards from the cupboard as a reward for Julian and went out for a walk. A breathless hush had fallen, the sort sometimes found in the hour or two between the end of a perfect summer's day and the onset of evening. Under a sky darkening to indigo I walked through the caravan park, aware with a tinge of envy that the rest of the inhabitants would be sitting down inside their two-wheeled homes to their homely meals: dinners scooped out of tins, heated over camping-gas burners and served on picnic crockery. Children tingling with the raw memory of swimming in the sea and burning on the hot sands. A nameless sense of foreboding had found its way into my heart. I headed for the dunes that edged the park; there was something eternally beautiful and reassuring about them, the sharp spiky marram grass that stung our knees as children looked soft now, like fur ruffled by the fondling breeze. I climbed and sat down facing the ocean looking out to a world which ten thousand years ago had still been land, and which Dai Brainbocs had persuaded his Welsh teacher to try and reclaim. The scheme seemed no madder than some of the other things that had been happening and I could no longer find the strength to be convinced that it wouldn't work. It was the normal world that was difficult to believe in now. The first stars flickered faintly and from far away the voices of playing children came, weak as ghosts. It was going to be a long night. I took out the hip flask and had a drink of rum, then reached into my pocket for a notepad and pencil. I thought for a few seconds and wrote on the pad: What are the lessons of Noel Bartholomew? I took another drink and savoured the fiery liquor as I contemplated the answer to my question. Never try and save a woman who can't be saved? I stuck the pencil in my mouth and looked at the new sentence. No. I crossed it out. Always try and save a woman who can't be saved? I scratched that one out too. Don't try and save a woman if it's you who needs saving? I put the notepad down and took another drink. Calamity, who thought all private detectives should drink whisky, once asked me what was the difference between the two drinks. I thought at the time it had to do with the taste, but I was wrong. People are wrong about everything. What is the difference? They both taste fiery and get you drunk, they both look the same and cost the same. But one is the distilled essence of cold, wet, miserable Scottish highlands. And one is the succulent ichor made from sugar and the distilled sunshine of far-off places. I knew which one Bartholomew would have chosen. Bartholomew the dreamer, the romantic, travelling upriver against all advice, lured ever further inland by tantalising rumours and contradictory stories . . . All this time I had been telling Calamity to ask the right question and had been asking the wrong one myself. I knew now that he never found Hermione, and it wasn't the Chinese shopkeeper who faked the pictures but he himself before he left Aberystwyth. A few sprigs of foliage from Danycoed Wood, a girl from a harbourside tea-cosy shop paid a farthing to dress up, and a studio in Terrace Road.

And the question was not whether he found her or not but why he went all that way just to die? I looked out over the quiet grey landscape, the colour slowly leeching out. The answer is etched in all the faces you meet in Aberystwyth. No one has the courage to be saved. Not the Moulin girls seeking escape in the one place they'll never find it. Nor Sospan grinning sadly behind the invisible bars of his vanilla prison.

A lone figure came running along the beach from the direction of Berth. One tiny figure running with the arrow-straight desperation of one whose errand might still save the world. I watched her approach, a school satchel swinging at her side, as she ran up the beach over the stones and into the foothills of the dunes. Her pace suddenly halved on the soft sand as her footholds gave way and the air around her turned to treacle. But she just redoubled her efforts, racing against the rumbling mounds of sand and contemptuous of their attempts to thwart her. It was Calamity and the fire of belief within her still burned strong. At the top she ran up to me and threw herself into my arms, she was sobbing uncontrollably.

'He . . . he . . .'

'It's OK.'

Her face was washed over with a silver film of tears and her efforts to speak juddered into nothing as each time a fresh bout of sobbing took her.

'He . . . he . . .'

'What is it?'

'He's going to destroy Aberystwyth!' and at the thought of it she squealed and burst into another fit of weeping.

I reached into my pocket and found a pack of tissues to hand to her. Staring out over Ynyslas sands in the deep calm of this night, I was able to receive the news that someone was going to destroy Aberystwyth with strange detachment. I waited patiently as the sobs slowly subsided. Calamity took out a tissue and blew her nose. She looked up at me, her face wet and glistening.

'He'll destroy everything!'

'Who will?'

'Lovespoon.'

Another sob interrupted but through the tears she said:

'You said you didn't know how he was going to get the Ark to the sea?'

I nodded.

'It was the wrong question. He's going to take the sea to the Ark!'

As we retraced our steps, carefully now as all the light from the world had gone and the paths through the dunes had disappeared, we saw a bonfire burning on the horizon, somewhere in the direction of Tre'ddol. In the dark midsummer night there was something unnervingly ancient and pagan about the sight. We watched for a long time until our reverie was startled by the mewing of a cat at our feet, the sharp scent of burned fur pricking our nostrils. It was Julian, with a badly singed ear. An entire story was contained in that sharp burned cat smell and we apprehended it in an instant. We set off at a run across the hills in the direction of Ma Evans's house, through the caravan park, across the road and out along the bog towards the railway line. I knew what to expect before I got there. Mrs Llantrisant had outwitted me yet again. When we arrived the area was bathed in the familiar flashing blue light. A team of firemen was hosing down the house and some ladies from the St John's Ambulance Brigade were reassuring Ma Evans who sat huddled under a blanket drinking tea. Some yards away stood the makings of an ugly pyre. And beyond that, held back by the police and making angry grumblings, was the mob of disgruntled villagers who had no doubt set the pyre. I didn't know what Mrs Llantrisant had said to them — such a task would have been child's play for an agent of her experience. Sheep not lambing, or cows not calving, or milk going inexplicably sour; any of the myriad natural mishaps of everyday life could have been ascribed to witchery and used against Ma Evans. The pyre had been extinguished but the house, set on fire deliberately but made to look like the work of an accidental spark, was beyond saving. As I surveyed the scene, Ma Evans looked over to me, the tears still glistening on her cheeks, and tried to somehow explain things to me with her expression. I waved it aside; it was me who should be doing the explaining; I had brought all this upon her. A group of men walked over and pointed shotguns at me and I slowly raised my hands. From behind the house came a figure, an old lady who used to be a hunched and bent old spinster but now walked with a back ramrod straight and an authoritative purposeful air. It was Mrs Llantrisant, her sense of having achieved her destiny compromised only by the big black gap in her front dental plate which made her look like a cartoon pirate. Julian the cat ran up to her. A wave of despair and fury hit me as she took a large kipper out of her shopping bag and handed it to the cat. 'You fucking Judas!' I screamed, and ran forwards, lashing out viciously with my foot at the ring of Julian's arse. The cat yelped and jumped out of the way just as the stock of a shotgun smashed into the side of my head. I twisted slightly as I fell and the last thing I saw before losing consciousness, as I looked up, was Herod Jenkins and that horizontal crease in his face they called a smile.

Chapter 22

I OPENED MY eyes in a dark room, my cheek pressed against a cold, gritty concrete floor. Three stripes of light ran down the wall from a barred window and my head and ribs throbbed. I drifted back into unconsciousness. When I woke again the shadow of the bars was fainter as the first pale glimmer of dawn filled the room. I dragged myself to my feet, wincing at the shooting pains from my ribs and shuffled to the window. The view was from the side of Pen Dinas overlooking the harbour towards the station. It was Blaenplwyf prison. I felt the ribs with my fingers — they didn't appear to be broken, but someone had given me a good kicking. From my vantage point I could see Victory Square between the station and the museum and I could see what it was that had so upset Calamity. The Lancaster bomber was gone. Finally, when it was too late to do anything about it, I understood. That dramatic change of course in Brainbocs's research that started all the trouble. It could mean only one thing. All along we had been puzzled how they were going to get the Ark to the sea. And Calamity had worked it out. They were going to take the sea to the Ark. After all, everyone knows you need a deluge to launch an Ark. And Brainbocs's Promethean ego was going to supply one. Brainbocs was going to reunite Lovespoon's old bomber crew, the one that flew the mission over Rio Caeriog, and blow up the dam at Nant-y-moch.

The sounds of a prison slowly coming to life filled the air. Iron doors clanged open and shut, and harsh voices echoed down the hard corridors; keys jangled; men moaned. Calamity had worked it out as well. And it had been too much for her. She didn't need to be a Dai Brainbocs to know what the mountain of water released with the destruction of the dam would do to the town. I had sent her off in search of Llunos in the faint hope that he might have some officers still loyal to him. Maybe they could do something. Stop the plane or devise a plan to get the townspeople to higher ground. If they commandeered the Cliff Railway, it might be possible. But it was all beyond my control now. Shortly before 8am the door opened and a tray with bread and a brown drink in a plastic beaker was placed inside. The drink was sweet and warm but I couldn't tell whether it was coffee or hot chocolate. Maybe it was neither. The beaker had chew marks all along the rim. Some time after that the door opened again and the guard told me my lawyer was here to see me.

I followed the guard down a long corridor through a series of barred doors, until eventually I was shown into another cell at the end, smaller than mine and with a simple wooden desk in the middle. A little man with a boyish face sat at the table. He was smartly dressed in a well-cut three-piece suit and was resting his two small hands, both gloved, on top of a malacca cane. A mauve handkerchief billowed out of his top pocket. He stood up as I entered and pointed to the chair.

'Please, sit down.' His voice was thin and weaselly. 'Smoke?' He took out a packet of cigarettes and held them aloft. I shook my head and he threw the pack down on the table. 'Neither do I; beastly habit. Still didn't quite know what else to take a man in prison. Not much practice at this sort of thing.'

I said nothing, just stared at him. There was something unpleasant, almost otherworldly about him, like those pictures of aliens said to be living in Area 51.

He looked at me and smiled weakly. 'Do you know who I am?'

'I know you're no lawyer.'

He chuckled. 'We've never been introduced, of course.'

The side of my head where I was hit with the shotgun was sore and pounding, but my mind was becoming clear. A suspicion slowly took concrete shape in my mind, a suspicion that had been floating there like fog for some time now. I had no reason to know he was, but I did. It was simple really.

'You're Dai Brainbocs.'

He giggled.

'I suppose it was a spare calliper you threw in the vat at the cheese factory?'

'No. I just made a replacement - out of Meccano — quite an improvement on the original design actually; much better articulation. I might apply for a patent.'

'And the teeth?'

'They were real too; milk teeth. Shows you what a wanker that police pathologist was.'

I nodded as I slowly took it in.

'Why go to all that bother of pretending to be dead?'

'Because Lovespoon was going to kill me.'

He walked over to the window and looked out. 'You should get a good view of his Ark from here, that's one of the reasons I chose this place.'

There was something in his tone that made my skin crawl. A sort of wheedling, taunting, smugness that suggested he had planned everything right down to what shirt I wore this morning.

'Eight cubic kilometres of water. I calculate it will take about twenty minutes to reach Aberystwyth. A very respectable effort for one's first deluge, don't you think?'

'It'll destroy everything.'

'No great loss to architecture.'

'Why are you here?' I said bluntly.

He paused. I knew the answer already: he was here to boast.

He looked at me and tapped the top of his cane.

'I wanted to thank you.'

'What for?'

'For saving my life.'

'I thought you were already dead.'

'Ah! But for how much longer would I have been allowed to rest in peace?'

I shook my head. 'I thought Lovespoon adored you.'

He began talking to the air, as if rehearsing his defence in case St Peter ever asked.

'Herod Jenkins, Custard Pie, Zachariah Lovespoon and Arthur Frobisher. One dead; the other three respectable members of Aberystwyth society. Each one well known. Each one in the phone book. But where was the fifth member of the crew, where was Gwenno?' He turned to face me and wagged his finger. 'If only I hadn't asked that question. If only.'

I said nothing but watched him intently. Impressed despite my disgust that this tiny fragment of humanity, a boy with the physical presence of a grasshopper, could have created such a whirlwind in the affairs of men through brain power alone. I was conscious of despising him, not for the evil that he wrought, but for his pale, sickly decrepitude. I who had automatically taken the side of such people against the steamroller insensitivity of Herod. Was this how Herod felt about me?

Brainbocs continued. The wistful tone in his voice suggesting that he was already addressing posterity rather than me.

'When I found out it was Mrs Llantrisant, I couldn't believe it. It was impossible. That daft, weather-obsessed, step-swabbing moron? The leader of the ESSJAT? How could it be? That's why I devised the poisoned apples and the deathbed confession: I needed to be certain. All I wanted was her to say yes or no. But the silly old bag had other ideas. She was convinced she was going to die and said she had this terrible secret on her conscience which she didn't want to take to the grave. I tried to shut her up but she wouldn't listen. I suppose she saw it as her big moment and wasn't going to be cheated of it.'

'And you found out that Rio Caeriog wasn't a military triumph after all?'

Brainbocs shook his head sadly. 'Oh no, far worse than that. I already knew it was a military disaster. That much I could have come to terms with. No, I found out something far worse. Something that spelled death for the whole project. The land reclamation, the beautiful boat, the whole Exodus — kaput!'

It was as if the air was slowly drained out of him. He leaned forward, put an elbow on the table and placed his chin softly into his cupped hand. The messianic fervour was gone and he looked at me; almost as if he was appealing for help.

'Lovespoon is English.'

I gasped. Brainbocs nodded his head slowly and closed his eyes.

'Imagine how I felt? The man to whom I had devoted my life, for whose glory I had created my masterpiece, the Cantref-y-Gwaelod reclamation scheme, was an impostor. From Slough.'

For a while neither of us spoke. A quiet so absolute filled the room that I could hear the sound of each of us breathing. Gradually Brainbocs gathered himself together again.

'There were five of them in the bomber. Mrs Llantrisant, Dai the Custard Pie, Herod Jenkins, Lovespoon and Frobisher. Lovespoon is actually Frobisher.'

'The English volunteer?'

'Yes. The real Lovespoon died when the Lancaster ditched in the Rio Caeriog after the mission. Or rather, he died soon after it. Apparently he wasn't going to make it anyway, so they all helped him along a bit. They were all in it. They hit on the plan to finish him off and Frobisher would take his identity. Then after the war they would share the money. The real Lovespoon was rich, you see. As the icing on the cake, they cut off his John Thomas and stuffed it in his mouth to make it look like the work of Indians.'

'Don't tell me, it was Herod who did that.'

'Gwenno ... er ... Mrs Llantrisant actually.'

I nodded gently as I slowly absorbed the enormity of what he was telling me.

'This is what Mrs Llantrisant told me during her deathbed confession. It might still have been OK. But I was so staggered by what I heard that right in the middle of the confession I cried out "fucking hell!"' He smiled sadly. 'I'll say one thing for Mrs Llantrisant: she's a smart woman. She knew instantly what was up. That was when I made my first mistake: my only one, in fact. I should have killed her right there in the bedroom.' He looked at me. 'I could, you know. I know how.'

I nodded and Brainbocs continued.

'But instead I ran away. From that moment on it was only a matter of time before Lovespoon came to hear about it.'

'So what was all this stuff about the tea cosy?' '

Despite his gloom, Brainbocs chuckled. 'The tea cosy depicted Mhexuataacahuatcxl, the Mayan shape-shifter. He was supposed to represent Frobisher because he had taken the form of a man who had had his John Thomas cut off. It wasn't a serious blackmail attempt. But you get the idea. I needed to find out how Lovespoon would react to his secret being out. So I led him to think Evans and his cronies had copied my essay and were trying to blackmail him — test the waters sort of thing. When he killed all four of them I knew the water was pretty hot. So what was I supposed to do? You can imagine my problem. The police couldn't be trusted - I was sure they would hand me straight over to the Druids. That's why I thought of you. And now I just wanted to thank you.'

'But I haven't done anything — I failed. Didn't I?'

He smiled, stood up and walked over to the door. 'Actually, you're playing your part very well. Even if you don't know what it is.'

As the guard let him out, I called out:

'So when does the plane take off?'

'Tonight.'

'And Aberystwyth gets destroyed?'

'They'll build another one. Don't worry.'

Chapter 23

GETTING A MESSAGE to Llunos proved to be easier than I expected. He was lying on the floor of my cell when I got back, his face bruised and swollen. It looked like he'd finally fallen down his own police station stairs. I bathed his cuts and waited while he gradually recovered consciousness. When he did I explained the situation to him and he went to the door and banged on it to bring a guard. After ten minutes he gave up. No one came for the rest of the day. And so the hours passed. Every half hour or so, Llunos would look over and ask the time. I would tell him and he would bang his fist into his palm and say, 'There must be some way.' But neither of us could think of one. At the end of the day we went to the window to watch the sunset. And as the sky turned pink we heard the clatter of propeller engines starting up from the fields of the Ystwyth flood plain.

Llunos looked at me. 'That will be the Lancaster then?'

'Yes.'

'Do you think it will work?'

'What?'

'Their plan.'

'Which part of it?

The old policeman considered. 'The bit about blowing up the dam.'

'I don't know. If they get the plane to take off, then they can probably do it. I mean with things like that Brainbocs is pretty good. Making the bombs would be a piece of cake for him and the rest, getting the right flight approach and trajectory and all that, is just mathematics.'

'Do you think the water will come this way?'

'Where else can it go?'

He thought about that one and didn't say anything more for a while.

'I suppose there's a lot of water behind that dam.'

'Eight cubic kilometres.'

'How much is that?'

'It's about the size of a small mountain.'

He nodded as if I was confirming his own calculations. 'That's a lot of water to be released all at once isn't it?'

'Yes, a lot.'

'A fuck of a lot actually.'

'Yes.'

'A hell of a fuck of a lot.'

'Yes.'

'What do you think it will do to Aberystwyth?'

It wasn't an easy question to answer. How do you describe something no one has ever seen before? Even Brainbocs would have struggled. I looked at Llunos. He was never a particularly jovial man but tonight he looked especially dejected. Maybe he was taking the whole thing as a personal failure. I struggled to find an analogy that he would understand.

'Well?'

Suddenly an image popped into my head.

'Imagine Aberystwyth is your testicles and the water is a rugby boot.'

The first street lights in town were starting to flicker into life when we heard a key in the lock. We both spun round, cursing ourselves that we hadn't made a contingency plan to overpower the guards or something. Anything no matter how foolhardy would have been better than standing looking out of the window admiring the view. The keys jangled harshly in the lock and the door opened emitting a faint, familiar whiff of gin. It was Pickel and Calamity. Pickel was holding an elaborately bent coat hanger he'd used to pick the lock; he looked from me to Llunos and then back at me.

"Ere! This girl says Lovespoon is going to knock me fucking clock down with a tidal wave!'

We drove to Plascrug recreation field on the back of Pickel's pick-up truck, arriving just as the plane began to taxi. Calamity and Pickel sat in the cab. The runway had been marked out with oil drums and flashing amber lights stolen from council road works. Pickel drove at full speed into the car park and then straight over the kerb on to the grass. We could see the plane at the opposite end of the field lumbering towards us, and Pickel drove straight at it. Half a minute later and we would have been too late; the Lancaster bomber would have picked up enough speed to take off before we reached it. Instead we hurtled towards each other in a head-on face-off. The giant bomber lurched and bumped across the turf, gradually gaining speed, torn between two conflicting forces: the drag of gravity on its lumbering frame and an invisible force sucking it up into the night sky. The gap between us rapidly shrank until it was only a matter of yards, the plane jumped violently and the wheels left the ground for seconds at a time before crunching back on to the turf. There were three possibilities: the plane would leave the turf at the last moment, there would be a head-on collision, or one side would veer off at the last minute. It turned out that both sides veered off at the last minute.

The manoeuvre worked in our favour. After the plane and truck had performed two unwieldy circles on the field Pickel managed to bring us alongside the fuselage and match the speed of the plane. We stood in the back of the pick-up opposite the entrance in the fuselage beneath the dorsal turret used by the Museum visitors. We could have clambered aboard but Hades had lent the aviators one of its gatekeepers. Herod Jenkins, dressed in his track suit and holding a cricket bat, stood in the entrance and grimaced with hate as he recognised us. A shudder ran through my loins; even after twenty years I was still scared of him. Slowly, as he realised the predicament we were in, that familiar horizontal crease spread across his face. Herod was smiling, just like he did the day Marty died; but this time, for once, he had miscalculated. The wheels hit a lump in the turf and the plane bounced violently. Herod flew backwards into the plane and didn't reappear. Llunos and I jumped in just as the wheels left the turf and this time there was no bump back down to earth. We found ourselves rapidly rising; the pick-up truck getting smaller and smaller. The last I saw of it was Calamity Jane leaning out of the window waving.

We stood up in the cramped tunnel of metal beams and girders and stumbled to get our balance like drunkards. Herod Jenkins lay slouched against the side of the plane, unconscious, a red smear on the fuselage wall indicating where he had hit the back of his head. The policeman gave me a brief glance, I nodded. He picked up the cricket bat and smashed the games teacher on the head. Then we turned our attention to the front of the plane. Through the hatch at the front we could see the shoulders of the crew, their two faces peering at us through the doorway. The pilot was Dai the Custard Pie and the bombardier, Mrs Llantrisant. There was a split-second of mutual recognition and then the thunder roared and we were hurled against the cold hard metal as the plane crashed into turbulence.

It was the fairground ride to end them all. The plane leaped and jumped and plummeted as the ferocious summer storm pounded upon the aluminium skin with giant anvil bows of thunder. Forks of lightning danced on the wings and we were hurled from side to side inside our tin box. We hit our heads, our knees and our elbows on the sharp metal innards of the plane, but we didn't stop. We had come too far and suffered too much. This was our moment. I stood up and moved forwards. Suddenly a huge hand grabbed me by the collar and pulled me backwards. It was Herod again. I wriggled free just as the plane hit another bank of turbulence and we all lost our footing and were rocketed into the ceiling. When I clambered to my feet, Llunos was behind me and Herod stood between us and the cockpit. The lightning flashed, filling the inside of the cabin with a ghostly incandescence. Herod, maddened by the blows to his head and looking for someone to blame, roared above the din like a space monster in a B-grade movie. He took a step towards me.

There are many defining moments in a life. In all our lives. Like rivers and mountain ranges they stretch across the topography of growing up. There is the day we discover that our parents - those twin repositories of all our trust — lied about Father Christmas. Or the moment we realise our father didn't really drive a tank in the war. Nor play for Manchester United. And later there is the time when a process that has been gathering force for many years quietly slips into focus like the image in a telescope and we realise that we have eclipsed our father. That stern, towering embodiment of manhood and authority, the unassailable protector, who always knew everything there was to know, and whose inner resources were a match for any of the contingencies that life could throw, has fallen. Has become a frail and flawed old man.

And then there is that other final oedipal Rubicon beyond which lies the territory of manhood: the day a boy faces down his games teacher. As the thunder roared and blinding blue-white flashes filled the sky, I squared my shoulders and looked into his eyes, that track-suited Minotaur who dwelled in the labyrinth of my heart.

'Come on then, son, do you want some?'

The plane disappeared. In its place was the swirling, murky vision of the games field from long ago: that patch of turf where all the rules we learned in school were overturned, where might was right and intellect a curse. A field where it was death to be clever and where the only cleverness lay in being invisible. The field where Marty fell on his sword for us, and then ran off into the clouds and never came back.

'Come on then, son, want to rumble, do you?'

I looked and sized him up. He was older, of course, but not frail. Not by a long chalk. He was maybe more squat, and fatter, and greyer, but he was still a formidable opponent and he knew it. And he still thought I was a poofter. Like the commando officer who makes it a point of principle to be harder than any of the younger men in his outfit, so the games teacher never relinquishes the belief that he can beat up any of his former pupils.

'Come on then, darling, show us what you're made of.' He grinned through that sour crease in the face.

I looked over my shoulder to Llunos who watched transfixed. He could have intervened, could have rushed forward to take my place. But some primordial instinct held him back. Some knowledge that this was my battle, felt rather than understood, which perhaps men have possessed throughout history, from the streets of Troy to the streets of Dodge City and Aberystwyth. Even though he was only a few yards away, the core truth of the scene excluded Llunos. Wordlessly, he handed me the bat. I took it with one hand and Herod laughed. He took a step towards me, still grinning. Lightning flashed again.

'Move out of the way, Mr Jenkins.'

'Why don't you make me?'

'If I have to, I will.'

He took another, careful step forward.

I cried, 'Out of the way now!'

'You won't do it.'

'By God I will.'

Herod paused, just outside the range of the bat and the universe held its breath. He looked at me, and I at him, and we stared into each other's eyes. Probably the only time he had looked at a pupil that way. Unfamiliar emotions skimmed across the waters of his eyes and when he spoke it was in a soft, hoarse tone that I had never heard him use before. 'You never forgave me, did you? All these years, you and the rest of them.'

I tightened my grip and Herod reached out a hand towards me.

'How do you think I felt? Did you ever stop to consider that?'

'It was your fault.'

'The Inquiry didn't think so — that note from his Ma was a fake. He forged it. He always did. You know that.'

'What does that prove?'

'He was fit to run.'

'Because of a piece of crappy paper? Is that it? Is that what you think?'

'There have to be rules, boy!'

'Fuck you, Herod!' I cried and lifted the bat. Herod dropped the placatory pose and darted forwards and as he did another scene from long ago swam into my mind. A vision of a small frightened boy in cricket pads being harangued by a man ten times his size. 'Not like that, like this, you stupid little boy! Hold it like this. No! Higher up! Now swing! Not like that, like this!' The words like the lyrics of a hymn sung every morning in assembly came to me across the years. And I thought of Marty and Bianca, and also of Noel Bartholomew, the man who took a picture of a tuppenny whore all the way to Borneo in the back of his camera. Suddenly, I knew he must have died laughing and the rogue gene he had passed on to me wasn't for madness or failure but balls. Herod took a final irrevocable step towards me and, using his own medicine against him, I did as he had commanded all those years ago. I strengthened my grip, spread out my feet and swung. Swung, swung with all the synchronised and focused strength in my body. And the slab of willow, anointed with linseed oil, slammed into the side of the games teacher's head. Astonishment flashed across his face as he found himself knocked for six. I watched in shock and with a creeping sense of pride at my late-developed athletic prowess as he cartwheeled sideways out of the door and the last words I heard him say before he disappeared into the void were: 'Good shot, boy!' I ran to the door and looked out as, still smiling, he spiralled down through the misty shreds of cloud, getting fainter and fainter, wispier and wispier until the tendrils of steam like the waters of the ocean covered that horizontal crease in his face they once called a smile.

For an instant I stood transfixed by the enormity of what I had done, then Llunos gave me a thumbs-up sign and the spell broke; we rushed forward. A sheet of lightning lit up the valley and for a second the vast, metallic sheen of Nant-y-moch reservoir lay illuminated below us in such awesome majesty that we were all struck dumb. Then the flickering electric discharge from the clouds went out and darkness consumed the vista again. A darkness broken only by two spotlights slung beneath the Plexiglas nose of the plane which were trained on the surface of the water. I knew without needing to ask that Brainbocs had rigged them up after watching The Dambusters. They were to indicate the correct altitude for dropping the bomb. When the two lights merged on the surface of the water, the plane would be at the correct height and they could release the payload. They were now only yards apart, skimming across the surface of the reservoir, getting closer and closer, as Custard Pie levelled the plane for the final approach. The vast concrete wall of the dam loomed up ahead and Bombardier Llantrisant - her eyes buried in the bombsight — screamed out above the din.

'Six seconds! Five seconds! Four seconds!'

And Llunos and I stood in the entrance to the cockpit and exchanged glances of disbelief.

'Three seconds!'

Mrs Llantrisant's hand, oblivious to us and everything else except those twin pools of light on the surface of the lake which were now less than a second or two apart, moved forward to the lever which would release the bomb. The hour had come. We only needed to retard the moment of release by a second or so and the angle would be wrong, the bomb would drop harmlessly and sink.

'Two seconds!' Ma Llantrisant screeched. Custard Pie held the joystick steady in a grip of iron, just as he must have done so many times all those years ago in Patagonia; just as he must have done, in fact, on that infamous approach over the clouds above San Isadora when they dropped the bombs on to the orphanage. The twin pools of light converged and became one, the hand hovered over the lever, waiting to deal the final blow to Aberystwyth, that once-lovely town by the sea.

'One second' shouted Mrs Llantrisant and then in an orgasm of triumph, 'Go! Go! Go!' as Llunos and I shot our hands forward to hold the release lever and stop the bomb.

Chapter 24

THE POLICE HORSE stamps and whinnies as the wind driving in from the sea makes the windcheaters crackle like fireworks. Dogs howl and babies cry as the townspeople mill around the Cliff Railway base station, pushing in confusion and shoving to board the trains. 'Keep back, at the barrier!' the policeman shouts. 'Women and children first! Able-bodied men take the footpath! No season tickets!' Then a mighty lamentation goes up as the outriders rushing in from the outskirts bring their tales of the advancing wall of water. Tales of tree trunks being tossed about on the surface of the raging foam like matchsticks; of caravans shaken along like dice in a ludo cup; of trains being catapulted down the main street of Borth; of the apocalypse at Talybont, where the waters hit the mill wheel with such fury that the mill building itself had started to spin. Panic spreads and the police horses rear up, neighing in terror and foaming at the bridle as the funicular trains creak and groan under the strain. Each carriage is weighed down with a cargo that spills out of the windows like bunches of human grapes. Never in the entire history of funicular railways has there been such an imbalance between the up and down cars. The hawser joining the two counterbalancing carriages stretches thinner than piano wire and the rails glow so hot in the night that the people down the coast in Aberaeron think Jacob's Ladder has returned to Earth above Aberystwyth.

As the credits began to roll I followed Calamity out of the cinema, blinking into the bright afternoon sunshine.

'I don't know why we keep going to see it,' I laughed.

'It's rubbish!' Calamity agreed. We exchanged guilty glances — we both knew why we went: we loved it. The warm July wind blew a curtain of blonde hair across her face. The spiky hair was gone now, and the tomboy had given way to a burgeoning air of sophistication and self-possession. She punched me on the arm. 'I'd better get moving, don't want to keep him waiting.' I nodded and she strode off, adding, 'See you at the harbour!'

I looked at my watch; there was still just enough time for a coffee at Sospan's before the meeting at the harbour with the Vatican envoy. I ordered a cappuccino and carried it over to one of the new tables set before the kiosk. Above my head a seagull wheeled in a lazy arc before floating down to land on the railings. He was a big bird, old and fat, almost as big as a cat, and probably remembered the days when Sospan's was a little wooden booth that sold ice cream. I proffered a piece of almond biscotti but he seemed unimpressed. 'Yes, old bird,' I said, 'we all remember those days. But these plastic tables with the central parasols are an improvement, aren't they? Progress isn't always a bad thing.' In the old days, of course, there was no room for such frippery; there was just the ice-cream booth, a few yards of pavement and then the railings. But that was the old days. I wasn't sure whether they had moved the road back or extended the sea wall but the new Prom - or 'Esplanade', as we would have to learn to call it, was much wider and airier. Noddy had gone, too, but he wouldn't be missed. Cartoon characters had no place illuminating the espressos and ristrettos of Sospan's terrace cafe. Nor indeed at the 24-hour Moules Mariniиre booth which had replaced the Whelk Stall at the foot of Constitution Hill.

A voice intruded on my thoughts and I looked up to see Llunos, now Commissioner, walk up to my table. He took a seat and gave his order to the waitress.

'Skinny double decaf' latte please.' He looked at me. 'Afternoon!'

I nodded. 'How's the new police station coming along?' 'Almost finished. Still a few teething problems with the central locking for the cells; and the mural, what a pain that is!' He rolled his eyes. 'Should have been finished by now. But he's flattened the perspective too much for my liking; the bit where the ocean divides.'

'You wouldn't want it too photographic, though.' 'That's what he says. He says he's done it deliberately to compress the narrative focus. I mean, that's all very well, but to Joe Bloggs it just looks like a mistake. We'll get there eventually.'

The waitress brought the coffee and Llunos took a thirsty gulp that left his mouth edged with foam.

We sat in silence for a while like a couple of Darby and Joans and enjoyed the shimmering tranquillity of the afternoon. Llunos was in no hurry to return to work, and I could afford to relax. Calamity took care of the day-to-day stuff and she was a lot better at it than I had been. It was only a matter of time before she took over entirely. I watched Llunos from the corner of my eye and felt an upsurge of warmth towards him. It had been a long journey that we had undertaken together but we had emerged as firm friends. Sospan, moving among the tables near the cafe, raised a hand in greeting and I smiled. He was a busy man these days, checking on his chain of bistros, or meeting with EU officials to discuss grants. We seldom saw much of him. There was still so much to do.

From where I was sitting I could see a tattered poster of Myfanwy Montez, the Legendary Welsh Chanteuse, still pasted to the wall of the old Bandstand. It made me think of that peculiar blemish in the new tarmac down at the harbour and Father Renaldo who had come to see it.

* * *

Llunos interrupted my reverie again. 'It's been a rum two years hasn't it?'

I grinned. 'You can say that again.'

'Do you think Brainbocs intended to sell the movie rights like that?'

I shook my head. 'I think he was just lucky. The newspaper serialisation rights were always part of the plan. But not Hollywood.'

Llunos wiped away the beard of milk with the back of his hand.

'I hear one of the dealers in Cardiff has bought the original essay. Half a million pound.'

'Lot of money for a schoolboy's homework.'

'Bloody madness. I mean, how do you know it's real?'

I allowed myself a secretive smile. Llunos wasn't wrong, but strangely this time, after all the red herrings and false trails, I suspected that the real essay had surfaced. In fact, I was willing to bet on it. 'I think this time it could be for real.'

He looked at me sceptically. 'You think so?'

'I've got this funny feeling.'

He snorted. 'Fake Brainbocs essays coming out of the woodwork for months. What's different about this one?'

I reached into my trouser pocket and handed him the letter that had arrived for me last month from Argentina. It was from Myfanwy and inside there was a photograph of her taken after one of the concerts at the Estada della Caeriog.

The policeman examined it. 'Brainbocs looks well.'

'Yes. That's what the Florida sunshine does for you. He went there to get his leg straightened by one of those fancy Miami surgeons.'

'And who's this in the big hat?'

'Ma Brainbocs. Looks quite the part doesn't she?'

He let the photo fall to his lap and looked at me. 'I don't see that this proves anything.'

'Look at Myfanwy.'

He peered once more at the picture and then looked up. 'What about her?'

'Notice anything different?'

'Seems the same as ever.'

I chuckled and Llunos started to get irritated. 'What are you driving at?'

I pointed at the picture of Myfanwy pasted to the Bandstand wall. Though old and faded, it was still recognisable. It contained a detail that was missing from the photo in the letter. But you needed sharp eyes to see it.

'Do you remember where Brainbocs said he'd hidden the essay?' I prompted.

'A well-known beauty spot,' he said, snorting at the stupidity of such a hiding place and looking at me for support; all he saw was a big wide grin. His brow screwed up and I grinned wider and wider as he looked at the picture in his hand and at the picture on the Bandstand and then finally, the penny dropping so loudly it almost frightened away the seagull, he cried out: 'My God!' And then, running his hand through his hair in disbelief, 'My God!'

He looked up, eyes shining and I nodded encouragement at him. 'The mole!' he cried. 'It's gone! Myfanwy's mole has gone!'

He stared at me open-mouthed as saliva dribbled down his chin, and I held my breath watching the cogs whirr and the truth slowly come to light.

'Well bugger me!' His face was one of pure astonishment. 'He hid the fucking essay in a micro-dot!'

I laughed. 'The cheeky bastard!'

'All that time we were checking out the picnic spots and lovers' leaps and things!'

'I must have walked past that fucking micro-dot photo booth at the museum a hundred times. And never even considered it.'

'And all the time,' said Llunos, 'the answer was staring us in the face.'

And so we both laughed. What else was there to do? Brainbocs hadn't just outwitted us, he had waltzed around us and danced the Charleston on our heads. The essay had been in front of us all along — right under Myfanwy's nose. And we sat in the Moulin every night staring at it, and never knew. Llunos looked at me and I returned the gaze and we both burst out laughing again.

I left him still laughing into his latte and made a leisurely stroll along the Esplanade to my appointment. Father Renaldo had flown all the way from Rome and I didn't want to keep him waiting. It was a beautiful day and as I passed the audacious architectural hybrid of Edwardian ironwork and swooping Perspex that was the new Pier I struggled with the tumult of emotion in my breast. It was at moments like this that I continually returned to the same question: did it really happen the way I think it did? That night two years ago aboard a plane where a terrible secret was born? The secret that joins with unbreakable glue Llunos and me in friendship but about which, paradoxically, neither of us dare speak? Did it really happen the way I think it did? 'Five seconds! Four seconds! Three seconds!' the bombardier had shouted as lightning forked off the wing and the shining waters of Nant-y-moch loomed up before us in the Plexiglas nose. 'Two seconds, one second! Go! Go! Go!' And in that second our hands shot forward to stop the release of the bomb and save the Town. Yet as they did, they came together with a touch as soft as the beating of butterfly wings and there was that hesitancy - I'm sure it was there and that we both felt it — that strange feeling almost of telepathy between us as we became aware of the god-like power that had been given to us in that twinkling of an eye. We looked at each other and saw in a moment of shared vision the unleashed fury of the waters racing down Great Darkgate Street; saw the proud white horses of the waves crashing their hooves down on to the fudge shops and the slate paperweight shops; saw the windows of the Moulin explode and the tea-cosy shops on Harbour Row washed into the sea; we saw the end of the amusement arcades and toffee-apple dens. And in that scintilla of time we thought of everything that had been, and of all the things that might be, or might not be, and that look passed between us, and we sort of said 'fuck it' and withdrew our hands. And the bomb fell. It's a scene you won't find in the movie.

I'll never be certain. The world is full of mysteries. No trace of the Ark has been found, for example, if you discount the odd bits of gopher wood that wash up now and again. And then there is this other matter. The blemish that keeps appearing in the tarmac down at the harbour and which Meirion has called municipal stigmata. This is the fourth time they've laid down a new surface — those pragmatic bare-torsoed men from the Council with their cauldron of bubbling tar and stripy canvas hut. And once again it has appeared; as if the blood that was spilled that night had contained photographic fixative. Normally I would have no trouble dismissing the whole affair as the prattle of superstitious fools. And I certainly don't believe in ghosts; I even told her that, damn it! But as I push my way impatiently past the pilgrims and stalls selling relics, as I take my place among the ranks of the credulous and stare down at the stain in the tarmac, I have to wonder. Because no matter how hard I try, there are two things I find impossible to deny: the mark really is on the exact spot where Bianca died. And if you screw your eyes up tight you really can make out the outline of a girl in a basque wearing a stovepipe hat.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

After a brief career as the world's worst aluminium salesman, Malcolm Pryce worked as an advertising copywriter, in London and later in Singapore. During this time he created campaigns for the famous Singapore Girl, and also wrote tourist promotional advertising for the former headhunting tribes of Borneo — a group of people he describes as the most civilised clients he ever dealt with. In August 1998 he quit his job, booked a passage on a cargo ship bound for South America, and set to work writing Aberystwyth Mon Amour. The first draft was completed somewhere off the coast of Guyana. He now lives in Bangkok.