Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

Chapter 8

NEXT MORNING Calamity bought a copy of the newspaper and read it as we walked up the Prom.

‘It’s Emily Bishop,’ she said. ‘The girl who rang about the ad. The fan of Kierkegaard.’ She handed me the paper. ‘Do you think there’s a jinx on us?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘She was from the college in Lampeter. The last student we had from there didn’t last long, either.’

‘At least we got to shake hands with that one. I’m not even sure if this one counts. All she did was ring.’

‘Still a bit spooky, though.’

‘Maybe they’re accident prone in Lampeter.’

‘Or maybe we are.’

I crossed the road at the junction with Pier Street and Calamity followed.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me where we’re going?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘The Cabin isn’t open yet.’

‘We’re not going there, we’re going to the hobby shop.’

‘What for?’

‘If you want to find out about a man’s secret weaknesses, those shameful vices he would rather conceal from the light of day, where do you go?’

‘Lots of places. Depends on the vices.’

‘Yes, but as a guiding principle you talk to the madam, the procuress, whoever it is who supplies his shameful lusts.’

‘OK. That’s good, that’s psychology. I approve of that.’

‘You see, there’s something puzzling me about Bark of the Covenant. It tells the story of the Mission House siege. Now, on the odd occasion when you actually turned up in school, you must have done the history of the Patagonian War, right?’

‘Yes, although my memory of it is a bit cloudy.’

‘What did they teach you about the Mission House siege?’

‘I don’t think we did it.’

‘That’s right, nor did we. No one did, because everyone knows it was a military disaster. None of the veterans from that war will talk about. it And yet in the movie it’s a famous victory. The murdered Father Christmas goes to see it and says his life has been fulfilled. You don’t normally say that after to seeing a film, do you?’

‘Not normally.’

‘As he lies dying he writes “Hoffmann” in his own blood. According to Tadpole, she used to nurse a soldier who fought in the Mission House siege and who cried out “Hoffmann” in his nightmares. Are you following me?’

‘I think so.’

‘So maybe we should try and find out what really happened at the Mission House siege. The version that didn’t make it to the big screen.’

‘OK.’

‘We’ll talk to the man in the hobby shop.’

‘Is he the madam?’

‘Yes, sort of. He supplies people who come in for stuff to make models of battles and stuff. He’s bound to know.’

‘Uh-huh. Maybe we should try one of the techniques from my Pinkerton book to get him to talk.’

‘Yes. We could buy some rubber hose off him for our submarine model, and then hit him with it.’

‘They don’t do that. They use psychology. It’s called Interrogative Misdirection.’

‘How does that work?’

‘Tell me how you were going to handle the interview.’

‘I was going to walk in and ask him if he’s seen the Clip movie.’

‘That’s your first mistake. You shouldn’t let him know what you’re after. You’ve got to use subtlety, like the Pinkertons. You start by asking him about something you’re not interested in. It’s like a conjuror, you see, you have to use misdirection. You divert his attention to this something else and then casually slip in the real thing. We’ll share it. You ask about something you’re not interested in, and I’ll use one of the techniques to steer the conversation round to Patagonia. Agreed?’

I considered for a second and then laughed. ‘OK, we’ll let the Pinkertons handle this interview.’

We walked up Pier Street and Calamity, having chalked up a small victory for the Pinkertons, became expansive. ‘Yes, there’s definitely room in this game for a more systematic and scientific approach in line with the precepts and methodology established by the Pinkertons.’

‘Did you read that in the preface?’

‘It’s empirical.’

‘I bet you read that, too.’

‘What if I did? It’s true, isn’t it? We rely too much on outdated methods.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Take the Butch Cassidy case, for instance.’

‘There is no Butch Cassidy case.’

‘How do you know? There might be. If we just contacted the Pinkertons—’

‘Calamity!’ I said sharply as we reached the doorway to the shop. ‘There is no Butch Cassidy case. It may be the most celebrated case of the Pinkerton organisation but it’s not our case. Ours is the celebrated Hoffmann case.’

‘But they’re linked.’

‘No, they’re not.

I opened the door and we walked in, entering a world in which the real one had been miniaturised and rendered claustrophobic and obsessive. There were flocks of miniature sheep on papiermâché hillsides arrayed alongside armies of footsoldiers from Lilliput; kits to build Aberystwyth Castle scaled down to fit on the dining-room table; kits to make fishing boats and the brigs that took the settlers to the New World in the last century; replica spinning wheels . . . Pride of place went to a scale model of Aberystwyth Pier as it was in the days before the sea chopped off the end and left a vestibule leading to nowhere – although that was a popular destination in the town. The detail was impressive: it even had a miniature fibreglass boy with a calliper on his leg, standing at the entrance, for ever soliciting charity from the stony hearts of the townspeople.

‘Can I help you?’ The voice belonged to a man behind the counter; a small greasy man with an obsequious air, a shiny bald pate, a pair of tortoiseshell-framed glasses that had been repaired with sticky tape, and that cloying look of deep understanding which is shared by the ice man and the brothel keeper. He smiled, an invitation to me to unburden myself and a reassurance that, whatever it was I was after, he would probably have it and in such quantities that I need not worry that I was alone in my obsession.

‘I’m looking for a gift . . . for a friend.’

The man nodded and smiled but made little attempt to conceal the fact that he didn’t believe me. No one ever came into this shop and admitted he was shopping for himself.

‘He’s a trainspotter.’

The man nodded again and said, ‘And you’d like to buy him a little something?’

‘He’s not a close friend.’

‘No?’

‘Really an acquaintance.’

‘Mmmmm.’

‘I met him at the railway station.’

‘Where else?’

‘We just talked a bit, you know.’

‘It’s not a crime in this shop, sir, as you see. Are you sure it was a friend?’

I ignored the insinuation and carried on, feeling strangely ill at ease. I wished Calamity would hurry up and subtly misdirect him.

‘Nothing extravagant, maybe an 0–0 gauge sheep for his layout or something.’

‘The mockery is never far away, is it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘My friend, I would say the best gift you or any man could give to this –’ he paused in a way that cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the next word – ‘friend, as you call him, would be to stop classifying him by that disgusting epithet.’

‘Which one?’

‘Spotter.’

‘They don’t use that word?’

‘Only those who revile them call them that. Call him a cranker, or a basher, and he will thank you far more sincerely than if you were to buy him a model signal box, which I suspect is what you with your limited understanding had in mind when you came in.’

‘Cranker?’

‘It’s their chosen term.’

‘Do you use it?’

‘I am just the dealer. I supply what my customers desire. I take no sides. I’m not proud of what I do, but neither am I ashamed. A man must make a living in this world and there are worse ways of doing it.’

I began to sweat around the collar.

‘Oh look, Louie!’ Calamity cried in a voice suffused with insincerity – the voice a wife in a farce uses to deny the presence of her lover in the wardrobe. ‘Look at this!’

I allowed my attention to be diverted to a model layout of the Fairbourne railway.

Fairbourne is a small town just below Barmouth on the Mawddach estuary, about thirty or forty miles north of Aberystwyth. The estuary is even more beautiful than the one we have at Aberdovey, if such a thing is possible. But Fairbourne itself is not so interesting, apart from a lovely beach and the little train that runs the entire length of it.

I bent forward to take a better look. ‘This looks very accurate.’

‘It is,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Only the magnificent pointlessness of the journey is missing.’

‘No, not that,’ said Calamity. ‘I meant this.’

It was a scale model of Clip the Sheepdog. I moved across and the shopkeeper dutifully stalked me from behind the counter. If any of this was fooling him he was doing an excellent job of concealing it.

‘We sell a lot of those,’ he said.

‘He must have been an amazing dog.’

‘Yes.’

‘I saw the movie. Quite a famous victory.’

‘Yes, famous,’ he said in a voice that suggested he didn’t think so.

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘Who am I to say? I just sell the little toy soldiers, I don’t comment on the broader historical sweep.’

He gave me the obsequious smile that the private detective in Aberystwyth comes to recognise like the yelp of a faithful dog. The smile that says: my lips are sealed and can only be unlocked by a special pass key, available from all good off licences. I took out a flask of rum and waved it in front of his obsequious face.

‘Why don’t you break the rule of a lifetime and comment on the . . . what was it?’

‘Broad historical sweep.’ He pulled over a teacup. ‘What are rules for if not to be broken?’

I poured a generous measure into his cup and took a gulp from the flask because I hated to see a man drink alone.

‘It’s difficult to know where to begin,’ he said.

I poured another shot into his cup. ‘Does this make it any easier?’

‘A bit of lubrication never hurt.’ He gave a wan smile, full of understanding of human frailty, especially his own.

‘Just so long as we don’t flood the engine. Tell me about the Mission House siege. What happened there?’

‘Wooh!’ He pretended to be startled and rolled his eyes as if the task was beyond the compass of mortals.

‘Look, buddy,’ I said, snatching his cup away from him, ‘I’m not sure if you understand the mechanism at work here. I’m pouring libations into your cup not because you’re a darling of the gods but because I want you to tell me something. Information that in any decent town I would get for nothing.’ He reached for the cup and I held it up by my ear, out of his way. He watched it like a dog watches the butcher.

‘Does that make sense to you?’

He nodded, still staring at the cup.

‘What was the mission about? What was the objective? Surely you can tell me that?’

‘Great mystery surrounded the precise nature of the objective. It seemed to involve a lot of getting shelled; a lot of stealing enemy barbed wire; a lot of walking across open ground towards machine-gun outposts.’

‘How do you steal barbed wire?’

‘Not easily, that is for sure. And not without a terrible loss of life. But General Llanbadarn wanted them to bring some back. No one knows why. He had just come back from Buenos Aires. He kept a woman there, so it was said. Not that that explains it, but there were some who suggested the objective stemmed from a boast he made to his mistress.’

‘Stealing barbed wired seems like a pretty crummy objective,’ said Calamity.

‘It was certainly no Monte Cassino. But it was always the same when he came back from Buenos Aires – he invariably had a new plan, one which was distinguished only by being more completely stupid than the previous one.’

‘Are you saying the men weren’t allowed to run?’

‘They were told to proceed at walking pace so as not to destroy the symmetry of the lines. The cameras were there, you see. Although they did not last long.’

‘I don’t understand why anyone would order his troops to walk into machine-gun fire.’

‘That’s because you aren’t a military man. General Llanbadarn was old school. He learned his tactics by studying the great battles of World War I, particularly the Somme.’

‘Was the Somme great?’

‘In magnitude, yes. The magnitude of the carnage. In terms of troop dispositions there are arguably far better models in the annals of military history: Salamis, Agincourt, Custer’s last stand . . . but the Somme had one factor which made it especially attractive for a strategic thinker of General Llanbadarn’s rare mettle, namely, he had heard of it.’

‘He sounds like an idiot.’

‘Military historians are a disputatious lot but on that point there is unanimity.’ He stopped and pointed at my ear. I put the cup back down in front of him and refilled it.

‘The men were, of course, terrified. They had heard the rumour that the general wanted the barbed wire to give to his mistress as a trophy. There was talk of a rebellion. That’s when they saw the angel. She filled their hearts with the fire of courage and off they went. And this is where the true story parts company with the version portrayed on screen.’

‘They were all slaughtered?’

‘Yes, of course. But there was something else. Something truly terrible happened that day, even worse than the slaughter. But no one knows what. They refuse to speak about it. A handful of men limped back to camp; Clip died in mysterious circumstances; and the chaplain went mad.’

‘How mad?’

‘Oh, utterly, utterly bonkers. The neurobiological equivalent of a man’s hair turning white overnight.’

‘But you don’t know what happened?’

‘It’s a military secret. You could ask the chaplain; he preaches at the community shelter by the war memorial; but, as I say, he lost his marbles and has never recovered them.’

I held the flask in front of his face and waggled it. ‘You sure you don’t know?’

‘Sincerely I don’t. As I say, no one will talk about it. Is there anything else I can help you with? If you’re thinking of modelling the battle you’ll need some of these.’ He placed a curatorial hand on some toy soldiers. The label said, ‘32nd Airbourne’.

‘Is that how you spell airborne?’

‘Alas, no, they were not really the airborne – they had no planes. They were from Fairbourne. Dropped the “F” in a hopelessly misguided attempt to big themselves up.’

I walked to the door and he held it open with a cloying smile.

‘What makes you think I want to model it, anyway?’

‘All that stuff about the trainspotters was a smokescreen. I knew as soon as you walked in what you were after. Goodbye. Oh, and if you do want to make a model of the Mission House siege, don’t forget this.’

He handed me a small plastic figurine of an angel.

Outside the door Calamity looked peeved and said, ‘It’s not supposed to work like that.’

‘I guess he must have read the Pinkerton manual before you. You can’t win them all.’

She gave me a sour look. I sent her off to check up on the dead student, Emily Bishop, to see if she had a roommate who might talk. I had an appointment with Myfanwy.

* * *

Something about the way the date with Tadpole ended last night had made me uneasy about leaving Myfanwy in her care. I went back to the office, picked up her LPs and made the climb up to the top of the hill. Everything seemed fine when I arrived. Myfanwy was asleep again and Tadpole was combing her hair and spreading it out over the pillow. It seemed to me to be an unwarranted invasion of the patient’s privacy, and not really within her remit, but I wasn’t sure whether I should say so. She looked up at my entrance and we locked glances. It was one of those moments, the first meeting after a quarrel or something like it.

She beamed at me. ‘Louie, I’m so glad you’re here, I was so worried. About what happened, you know, last night. I was horrible, I don’t know how you will ever forgive me.’

‘It’s OK, don’t worry about it.’

‘But how can I not? I cheated you. I said I’d give you the man’s name and then I didn’t. No wonder you hate me.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Look, here it is, I’ve written it down for you.’ She handed me a slip of paper on which was written, ‘Caleb Penpegws. Corporal or something. In the army. The one that went to Patagonia’.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know all the details.’

‘This is fine.’

‘What have you got under your arm? Looks like records.’

‘The doctor told me to bring them in. They might cheer Myfanwy up.’

‘Oh, how lovely! Let me help you.’ She took the records and put them down on a table. ‘I’ll see if we can find a record player.’ She walked up to me and looked into my face. ‘Do you forgive me, then?’

‘There’s nothing to forgive.’

‘But I was horrible last night.’

I waved the slip of paper and put it in my pocket. ‘This more than makes up for it.’

‘You forgive me, then?’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh, Louie! You are so wonderful!’ She threw her arms round me and pulled me in and kissed me on the lips. I tried to struggle free but they obviously do a lot of press-ups at the Soldiers for Jesus boot camp and I found her grip hard to break. She continued pressing her lips on mine, making a long drawn out “Mmmm” sound. I found myself staring over her shoulder at the sleeping face of Myfanwy. And Myfanwy was staring, eyes wide open, at me.