From Aberystwyth with Love

Chapter 2

The sky was as blue as a cockatoo’s eye. If they have blue eyes, I wasn’t sure. The sickly pallor of dawn had evaporated. The sand was still damp from the receding tide, still reeking of brine. Individual crystals of mica glittered and sparkled with pink flashes, and every little stone and pebble cast a shadow, like the rocks on the surface of the moon. The larger stones sunk into the sand were a yellow bone colour, worn smooth with indentations that collected clear water, like molars in the gum of the shore.

Fencing the sock was the second priority of the day. First was a visit to Sospan’s ice-cream kiosk. We went there at the start of each new case. Just as ships are baptised with champagne, so each case is launched with vanilla, and occasionally a Flake, although my instinct warned that the value of the sock would not run to such luxuries on this occasion. Sospan was the secular confessor of the town who absolved freely from his blue-and-white wooden box situated on the Prom midway between the bandstand and Constitution Hill. On the roof stood a fibreglass cone adorned with the motto Et in Arcadia ego, ‘I too am in Arcady.’ The exact meaning of the phrase was the source of dispute among scholars and also among the townsfolk of Aberystwyth. Some claimed it referred to classical Arcadia, the idyllic pastoral homeland of nymphs and swains, and birthplace of Zeus. According to this interpretation the words were spoken by Death and served as a bitter-sweet counterpoint to our heedless revels. Others insisted it was an oblique reference to a long-lost period in Sospan’s life when he worked on a cruise liner called the Arcadia.

He was reading a letter and looked up at the noise of our approach. He folded the letter and put it back in the envelope but instead of putting it away he laid it carefully down on the counter. He had the air of someone who wanted to talk about its contents, but would prefer to be asked rather than bring the subject up himself.

I nodded towards the letter. ‘Good news?’

‘Very good actually, Mr Knight, since you ask. Usual is it?’

Without waiting for the answer he turned to the ice cream dispenser, held a cornet under the Mr Whippy nozzle and laid a gentle hand on the tiller.

‘Is it a girlfriend?’

‘You know very well my vocation forbids such pleasures. Since you enquire, I can tell you my letter is from a publishing firm in London who have expressed interest in my treatise on the role of ice cream as analgesic of the soul.’

‘You’ve written a book?’

‘My life’s work; not finished, of course.’

‘What’s it called?’ asked Calamity.

‘The Primal Ice Cream.’

‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

‘It is difficult to sum up in a few words, but it concerns the nature of vanilla as the spiritual keyhole to paradise.’

There was a slight pause in which we strove to formulate the obvious reply, but there wasn’t one.

‘Got any good flavours coming up?’ said Calamity.

Sospan brightened. ‘Autumn season starts in September, it’s going to be a humdinger. I think you’ll be impressed. Lot of cutting-edge stuff, flavours that haven’t been seen before in ice cream.’

‘I expect it’s still all under wraps for now,’ I said.

Sospan considered. ‘Well, seeing it’s you, Mr Knight, and Calamity, I might just give you a little peek.’ He pulled a notebook from the breast pocket of his white ice man’s coat and flipped it open. ‘You’ll like these.’ He put on a pair of reading glasses and read from his notes. ‘Rose water.’

‘Mmm,’ said Calamity, ‘that sounds good.’

‘Although I’m not sure whether to call it that or something more evocative such as Scheherazade.’

‘I think Rose water is better, if you call it that other name no one round here will know what it is,’ said Calamity.

‘Does it matter? They can always taste it, can’t they?’

‘But they’ll say, hey, tastes a bit like roses.’

Sospan looked a trifle flustered. One of the continuing struggles of his life was the disconnect that seemed to exist between his role, as he saw it, and the way the townspeople viewed it. To Sospan, to classify his vocation as dispensing ice cream was like saying the priest who administered the sacrament handed out biscuits.

‘Tell us another one,’ I said.

‘Ginkgo Biloba.’

This time he read the puzzled expressions on our faces and continued quickly, ‘That’s a sacred tree, much prized in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. It was the only tree in Hiroshima to survive the atom bomb.’

‘I’m not sure about that one,’ said Calamity.

Sospan consulted his notes again. ‘Then we’ve got Sea Cucumber, Ambergris, Spanish Fly, and Potato.’

Calamity looked glum. ‘Potato sounds a bit boring.’

Sospan acquired that look of infinite patience that the artist who paddles in the wilder experimental shores learns to assume. ‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘try this: it’s the centrepiece of the autumn collection. I have high hopes for it; it intertwines a variety of approachable themes that even the day-trippers can enjoy while at the same time it contains within it notes of complexity that will satisfy the educated palette.’ He pulled out a tub from the fridge that was marked only with a code as if the exact identity must remain a secret for a while. He scooped out two small testing samples and laid them on mini wafers like canapés. We popped the morsels into our mouths and savoured. It was very fishy and sharp, even seaweedy.

‘I haven’t decided on a name yet,’ he explained, ‘but I was thinking of Mermaid’s Boudoir.’

‘It’s very fishy,’ said Calamity. ‘What’s in it?’

‘Fish milt,’ said Sospan with evident pride at his ingenuity.

I choked.

‘Fish what?’ said Calamity.

‘Milt.’

‘What’s that?’

The ice-cream man turned pink. ‘Well . . . not sure if I should . . . you know . . .’

‘It’s OK, Sospan, she’s seventeen now, she’s grown-up.’

‘I saw a corpse last year,’ added Calamity as further illustration of her maturity.

Sospan rubbed his neck with the palm of one hand. ‘It’s, you know, well . . .’

I tried to help him out. ‘When daddy fish and mummy fish want to start a little shoal . . .’

‘Yes?’ said Calamity.

‘Daddy fish sprays something on to mummy fish’s eggs,’ said Sospan.

‘Oh that,’ said Calamity, as if it was a substance one encountered every day.

‘They eat a lot of it in Russia. You needn’t pull a face, it’s quite a delicacy.’

‘Your new flavours are certainly . . . brave,’ I said.

‘Brave?’

‘Avant-garde.’

‘I know what you are trying to say, the people round here will hate them. Of course they will, do you think I don’t know that? Do you think a man could remain sane making ice cream for the people of Aberystwyth all his life? What do they care about art? All they want is chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. Not just in their cornet but in everything. Louie, I’m not doing this for them, it’s for me. For my self-respect, to assuage the yearning . . .’

‘But if no one eats it, won’t it upset you?’

‘The only people who I need to care about are the reviewers for The Iceman Cometh. I don’t need to make a lot, just a few scoops, that’s all.’

‘Any others on your list.’

‘Just one, Tempura.’

‘Mmm!’ We both chorused bogus enthusiasm to soothe his wounded pride.

‘How do they collect the fish milt?’ asked Calamity.

Sospan blushed.

Fortunately, before he could reveal this particular trade secret we were distracted by the sharp cry of a gull swooping low over the kiosk. It was followed by a short intense bray of joy, and the smell of donkey wafted across signalling the arrival of my father, Eeyore, leading the donkeys on the morning’s first traverse. In contrast to the rest of the townspeople that hot August morning he was wearing a suit, with bits of straw stuck to it. He greeted us with a sprightly cheer that belied his age and slung the halters loosely on to the emergency-exit door bar at the back of the kiosk. Sospan put down a washing-up bowl of water for the donkeys and they lapped happily. There were seven that morning: Escobar, Spinnaker, Uncle Ho, Squirrel, Invincitatus, Anwen and Piper. There were no riders. Eeyore had long ago relinquished all pretence that the job of the donkey man had anything to do with giving rides to children. Partly because he did not like the modern variety of children very much, and partly because the job had a deeper significance. Or so he thought. Years ago, Eeyore had been a cop. When he retired, a community grateful for all the crooks he had removed from their midst presented him not with a gold watch but a different sort of time-keeper: a pendulum made of donkeys. And every day he led the caravan of mute and obliging beasts along the perimeter of the town with a rhythm that was as reassuring and predictable as the bright star that traces across the screen of an oscilloscope on a heart monitor.

Each pulse across the dark green dial proved that Aberystwyth was still hale and the fathomless oceans that lay before the cradle and beyond the grave were being held in check by the thin brown line of beasts measuring out their metronomic dung-beat.

He ran a gentle hand of greeting down Calamity’s cheeks and said, ‘What’s up?’

‘We’re looking for a ghost called Gethsemane from Abercuawg,’ she answered indiscreetly.

Eeyore’s face darkened. ‘You shouldn’t joke about such things.’

Sospan tut-tutted in rebuke.

Calamity looked from face to face in search of an explanation. ‘We shouldn’t?’

‘Gethsemane Walters,’ said Eeyore. ‘That was a terrible case.’

‘You mean,’ said Calamity, ‘you’ve heard of her?’

‘Happened in 1955. I remember it well because I was courting Louie’s mum at the time, before we moved to Llandudno. The little girl was eight or nine years old, I think. Disappeared when they were building the dam.’

Calamity stared at him, eyes wide and shining. ‘So what happened to her? Did someone do her in?’

Eeyore pulled a face as if such bluntness was inappropriate. He sighed. ‘They convicted a boy for it, young chap called Goldilocks. I was never convinced about it to tell the truth, he was no angel, used to hang out with the mob who worked at the slaughterhouse, but it never felt right to me. He was due to hang that autumn but he escaped. Hasn’t been seen since. They never found Gethsemane’s body.’

‘The girl’s mother was Ffanci Llangollen the singer,’ said Sospan. ‘She was pretty big in the forties. That was her stage name of course.’

‘That’s right,’ said Eeyore. ‘She used to run the village school. After Gethsemane went missing she left town, and set off to look for her. Far as I know, she is still looking – comes back from time to time. But the really strange thing about the case, as I remember, came the following year. On Ffanci Llangollen’s birthday a spiritualist sent her a tape recording she had made at a séance, apparently it was the voice of Gethsemane. Of course, that’s a bit hard to believe but Ffanci swore it was her and the father killed himself on account of it. Said now he knew for sure she was in heaven there was nothing worth living for.’

‘Where’s the tape now?’ I asked.

‘Stolen,’ said Eeyore. ‘They reckon it was the work of snuff philatelists.’

We bought two vanilla cornets and walked along the beach in the direction of the Pier. There was no breeze and the surface of the sea was the colour and lustre of mother-of-pearl; it was so hot the air zinged. The heat was tangible, audible . . . it quivered and made the air tingle as if it had been struck by a giant tuning fork.

‘Boy!’ said Calamity. ‘If we were in a movie we would be walking across the desert and they would be playing that violin sound they always play, the one that goes Eeeeeeeeeeee!’

‘That’s right, and then one of us would look directly at the sun and they’d play an organ chord to show that we were going to die out there and be left as bleached bones with rattlesnakes living in the breast cage.’

‘Rattlesnakes die in the direct sun, they have to keep in the shade. That’s why you have to check your boots before you put them on.’

‘I know that, it’s the movie makers who get it wrong.’

‘It’s best to move about at night. If you want to shelter in a cave during the day you throw a rock in to see if there are any rattlers in there.’

I stopped for a second; it was surprisingly difficult walking across the carpet of pebbles. Calamity paused and looked up at me. Her face was washed with honey by the early morning sun. I smiled.

She had been thirteen when we first met, with spiky hair and jeans and a scruffy parka coat, chocolate-rimmed mouth set into a permanent downturn of sullenness. You don’t need to be much of an amateur psychologist to know that the sullen resentment and aggression is mostly just a defence to hide the confusion which swirls beneath the waters of the teenage heart. It seldom goes deep. Within hours of becoming my junior partner a smile had begun to tug at the corners of her mouth which she struggled to suppress with no more success than a man on a park bench trying to read his newspaper in a gale. Like most kids she takes life at face value. This can be a disadvantage in a crime fighter but this is counter-balanced by the certainty which it gives her. Her heart is not gnawed by doubt. She has the bright unsullied soul of a puppy, and the same propensity to make innocent mistakes. But there is also an air of street wisdom about her, a suggestion of savvy that contrasts with the dizzy confusion bubbling inside her young heart. In many ways she is the daughter I never had. Only once during our years fighting crime together has the fire that dances in her eyes been dimmed. It was when she returned after her ill-fated attempt to set up on her own. We were looking into the murder of a department store Santa at the time, and unusually for us it turned out to be a case with international ramifications. Calamity ended up liaising with the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency in Los Angeles. They made a fuss of her and suggested the possibility of a preferred associative relationship, whatever that is. So Calamity made a go of it on her own. She thought the business from the Pinkertons would see her through. I was sceptical: how much business does a West Coast American operation do in Aberystwyth? But, at the same time, I was worried that my objections sprang from the selfish desire to hold on to her. I didn’t want to see her go but I felt at the time I had no right to stand in her way; if you love someone, they say, let them go. It took me a while to understand that this motto, though widely quoted, is not true. If you love someone, you’d be nuts to let them go. The whole venture only lasted a couple of weeks, just long enough for the tumbleweed of fate to pile up outside her door. I don’t think she even had a client. It was painful to watch, but I could see it taught her an important lesson about life, the one that says: in this world, people like the Pinkertons never call twice.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘To see Mooncalf.’

‘Right. We could ask if he does tickets.’

‘What sort of tickets?’

‘Travel ones. To Hughesovka.’

‘Who wants to go to Hughesovka?’

‘We do . . . might. To take a witness statement from the imaginary friend and stuff like that.’

‘What will we use for money?’

‘We’ll use part of what we get for the sock.’

‘Oh of course, I forgot. We’ll use the change left after buying the marble palace.’

Calamity’s brow clouded. ‘You don’t think it’s going to be worth much?’

‘My feeling is, this sock is going to bounce.’

The thought that the Yuri Gagarin sock might not be a source of great wealth silenced Calamity for a while, at least as far as the Pier.

We stopped in its shadow, and looked up. It was little more than a shed on stilts in which two tribes co-existed: the adolescent girls from whose numbers I had extracted Calamity, and the grannies. Invisible to each other, they occupy the same space without ever meeting like wanderers in those Escher engravings where staircases interlock along the planes of incompatible dimensions.

It was cool in the shadow, like the glade of a forest. Cool and damp and reeking of seaweed and guano. This was the real wonder. Not the tawdry scene up above but the bit underneath: the vast intricate criss-crossing web of ironmongery that held the whole thing suspended at the same level as the Prom. People claim the death of British manufacturing came when the last car factory was sold into foreign hands, but the real death was in 1980 when they stopped making Meccano in Liverpool. When the Pier finally falls down, no one will have the know-how to fix the ironwork. Until that time, uncountable starlings roost there and emerge at dusk in twittering skeins, endlessly, like a string of black handkerchiefs drawn from a magician’s pocket.

We climbed the steps that curved up the buttress of the sea wall, on to the Prom and back into the light.

‘How come Gethsemane’s spirit ended up in Hughesovka?’ Calamity asked.

‘Maybe if you are a spirit you don’t have much control over who you end up possessing.’

‘Yes, it could be like hiring a car, you just have to take what they give you.’

‘That’s if it is her spirit.’

‘What else could it be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We need to get hold of that séance tape,’ said Calamity, and then added, ‘What do you think the chances are of us solving the case?’

‘I’d say no chance whatsoever.’

‘We can’t really fence the sock unless we make at least a token effort, can we?’

‘No, it wouldn’t be right. Although I have a terrible suspicion that the man-minutes we just used up in our brief conversation have already exceeded the value of the sock.’

‘Yuri Gagarin socks must be worth more than that.’

We walked through town to Chalybeate Street where Mooncalf & Sons had, according to the silver copperplate shop sign, been dealing in antiques since 1834. I wasn’t sure there had even been a street here back then. The Mooncalfs were originally brothers and two of West Wales’s most respected fencers of stolen goods. The shop in Chalybeate Street handled antiques and ‘special requests’. The other branch had operated out of a caravan in Clarach and dealt with stolen religious icons. This branch had stopped trading a while back when mobster Frankie Mephisto had incinerated the caravan with one Mooncalf brother still in it.

Mooncalf was a small man, and the counter behind which he stood reached up to his chest. He was amiable with a wizened, sharply pointed look common to men in fairy tales who are prematurely aged by evil witches, but which can also arise from spending too many hours late at night scheming. In former times he would have made a living operating a string of child pickpockets, or chimney sweeps whom he would have discouraged from dawdling on the job by lighting a fire in the grate while they were halfway up the chimney.

He threw his arms out in delighted greeting. ‘Mr Knight and Calamity! What a lovely surprise. Welcome to Mooncalf & Sons.’

‘Since 1834, eh?’ I answered.

‘The brand has been around since then, Mr Knight. Mooncalf & Sons is the soul, the actual premises are merely the physical body that houses it.’

‘How’s business?’

‘Slow, but the long-term prospects seem assured.’

‘I suppose there is always a market for stolen goods.’

Mooncalf winced. ‘Stolen goods! Who deals in stolen goods? If that is what you have in mind you would appear to have come to the wrong shop. Mooncalf & Sons is a respectable business with a spotless reputation.’

‘Not according to the police.’

‘Mr Knight, you walk into my shop and make these . . . these insinuations. You remind me, if I may be permitted an indelicate turn of phrase, of a man who engages the services of a prostitute for the night and spends the whole time berating her for the shameful way she makes her living.’

‘Do you do tickets?’ said Calamity.

He paused and reassumed the look of Buddhist serenity with which he had originally greeted us. ‘What sort of tickets?’

‘Travel ones. We need to go to Hughesovka.’

‘No, we don’t,’ I said.

‘We might do.’

‘It’s really not likely.’

‘Hughesovka!’ exclaimed Mooncalf as if it were the name of a favourite son. ‘What a noble goal! And what a wise choice in coming here to make your travel arrangements.’

‘Is it expensive?’ asked Calamity.

‘Ordinarily the cost of a ticket – like that of a virtuous woman – is priced above rubies, since it is impossible to get there by conventional means. Hughesovka is, as you know, a closed city along with Gorki and numerous others.’

‘What’s a closed city?’ said Calamity.

‘One that is closed to Western tourists. As such you will find no travel agent in town will be able to help you, but since Mooncalf & Sons is no ordinary travel agent, you are in luck. When would you like to go?’

‘We’re just enquiring at the moment,’ said Calamity. ‘How much does it cost?’

‘That depends on a number of factors. Whether you are reasonably flexible about dates and routes, and whether you would like to delegate to me the delicate business of travel visas and aliases. This is highly recommended.’

‘What are the aliases?’ asked Calamity.

‘Normally you need two, I always recommend a belt-and-braces approach since we are talking about quite a high cost of failure here, including potential loss of liberty for a considerable length of time and possibly torture using psychotropic drugs. Thus I would urge you to go for two aliases. The first is to get in and the second is a form of insurance should the first alias cause you to run into difficulties – say your alias describes you as a spinning-wheel mechanic and by some terrible fluke of fate you are called on while you are there to repair a wheel, and your ignorance is thus laid bare—’

‘Or you go as an obstetrician and a lady goes into labour at the back of the number 15 tram,’ I said.

‘An all too frequent occurrence,’ said Mooncalf. ‘Never go as an obstetrician. Fortunately, Mooncalf & Sons protects its clients against such cruel exigencies of fate by virtue of our unique, patent-pending, double-ID indemnity procedure. Once the first alias becomes corrupted, you can still invoke, as a form of reserve parachute, the second and return safe and sound, albeit a touch chastened by experience, to the comforting embrace of the Aberystwyth bosom. I’ll arrange for you both to have a day on the road with Meici Jones.’

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘He’s the spinning-wheel salesman. A great and trusted associate of the firm Mooncalf & Sons. It will be a great help with your alias: spinning-wheel salesman is a superb disguise.’

‘Wow!’ said Calamity. ‘How much will all this cost?’

‘I’ll need to make a few enquiries, so give me a few days to put a proposal together. You might need to join the Communist Party.’

‘We also need you to put us in touch with some snuff philatelists,’ I said.

Mooncalf laughed unconvincingly. ‘There’s no such thing.’

‘Yes, we know, but just pretend there is. We have a rich client interested in buying the séance tape sent to Ffanci Llangollen in 1956.’

Mooncalf removed his glasses and polished them with the tail of his shirt. ‘I’ll see what I can do, very difficult, very difficult.’

I put the sock down on the counter. ‘And we’d like to talk to you about this.’

Mooncalf put on a neutral expression, the sort a man assumes in order not to give too much away at the start of a negotiation. Or maybe he just thought it was a sock.

‘It’s a sock,’ said Calamity. ‘It was worn by Yuri Gagarin.’

Mooncalf made a small ‘ah’ sound indicating the arousal of his professional interest. He pulled a jeweller’s loupe from under the counter and screwed it into his eye socket. He held the sock up and examined it.

‘We were hoping it was worth something,’ said Calamity.

I spluttered, ‘Worth something! Of course it’s worth something, it’s one of the most famous socks in the world. It’s worth . . . lots.’

‘Yeah, that’s one valuable sock,’ said Calamity.

It was clear to all that in the manner of driving a hard bargain we were both newborn babes; in the souk they would be fighting over the chance to sell us a used camel. Mooncalf sucked air between his teeth to suggest the prospects were not good. ‘It seems to be genuine, no doubt about that, the weave of the asbestos is definitely Soviet and the style of sock was popular in the artistic and scientific communities of Moscow during the late fifties. The problem is, the market for Yuri Gagarin socks is very slow at the moment.’

He lowered the sock from his eye and a photo fell out. It was the picture Uncle Vanya had left with us. Mooncalf picked it up. ‘What’s holding the dog up?’

‘An imaginary friend,’ said Calamity.

Mooncalf nodded as if to indicate this was a reasonable hypothesis, although one among many. ‘Might be wires,’ he added. He held the photo up to his loupe. ‘Difficult to say without the negatives. It looks like one of those schools for remote viewing and associated paranormal investigation, which lends credence to your levitation claim. But it could be an ectoplasmic projection.’ He laid the photo down on the counter. ‘Not really my line.’

‘We came about the sock,’ I said. ‘We’d like to fence it.’

Mooncalf contorted his features into a look of fake shock. ‘Fence? We don’t deal in stolen goods here, Mr Knight, and I would thank you to remember it.’

‘What do you call it then?’

‘Facilitation. We help the police. We help them by bypassing them.’

‘OK, if we decided we wanted to be of assistance to the police in the way you describe, how does it work?’

‘I would be able to let you have a modest, non-refundable deposit on the sock while I made enquiries about the best way to return it.’ He pulled open a drawer and removed a thick paper-bound catalogue; it looked like the sort stamp collectors use as a reference. It had Cyrillic script on the front and assorted Cold War memorabilia, such as medals, hammer and sickle lapel pins, stamps, currency. He flicked through the pages and, finding the one he was looking for, scanned it with an unhappy mien, intended to lower our expectations of his first offer. Then he stopped and his eyebrows shot up, he peered closer at the page in the time-honoured manner of someone doubting the evidence of his senses. He stood transfixed for a second before slamming the book back in the drawer, and turning the key. ‘As I thought, the market is very slow. I’ll give you five hundred in cash.’

And he did.