Last Tango in Aberystwyth

Malcolm Pryce

I would like to thank my editor Mike at Bloomsbury and my agent Rachel for all their tremendous help, support, enthusiasm and lunches.

First published in Great Britain 2003

Copyright © 2003 by Malcolm Pryce

The spinning-wheel that Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on arrived in Aberystwyth around the middle of the seventeenth century. Technically it's known as the Saxon wheel, though no one ever calls it that. There are four main parts: the wheel, the spindle, the distaff and the foot pedal or 'treadle'. This is a story about the treadle. Or, more precisely, about that sorry army of girls who pedalled it during the years after the flood. The girls came mainly from the farms up beyond Talybont — chancers who didn't know a loom from a broom but flocked to the lights of Aberystwyth to make it big modelling on the tops of the fudge boxes they sold to the tourists. They called them treadle trollops but normally they never got to peddle anything except their sweet young bodies down at the druid speakeasies on Harbour Row. You won't find much enchantment in this story. And since it all took place in the shadow of Aberystwyth Castle and not the one described by Hans Christian Andersen there aren't any knights in shining armour. Just me, Louie Knight, Aberystwyth's only private detective and more frog than prince. Not many of the people in it lived happily ever after either. But at least half of them lived, which was a good average for the town in those days ...

Chapter 1

I needed to find a druid, which in Aberystwyth is like trying to find a wasp at a picnic. I wasn't fussy about which one, no more than you care which one lands on your jam sandwich, but Valentine from the Boutique would have been good. In his smart Crimplene safari suit, Terylene tie and three-tone shoes, the druid style-guru should have been the easiest to spot. But tonight he seemed to have gone to ground, along with the rest of his crew; and during my lonely sweep of the Prom I met no one except a couple of pilgrims who asked directions to the spot where Bianca died.

I pulled up my collar against the wind and turned back, and wandered disconsolately down past the old college and on towards Constitution Hill. In the bed-and-breakfast ghetto the shutters squeaked and banged and a chill low-season wind blew old newspapers down the road. There were vacancy signs glowing in all the windows tonight and here at the season's end, as September turned into October, they would be likely to remain that way for another year. Even the optimists knew better than to try their luck now. In this town the promise of an Indian summer often meant the genuine article: a monsoon.

Misplacing Valentine was no great hardship, but the word on the street said he had tickets to Jubal's party and without a ticket there was only one way in: I would have to use the scrap of paper that lay crumpled up in my coat pocket. I'd bought it half an hour earlier from a streetwalker down by Trefechan Bridge and paid a pound for it. She assured me it would open Jubal's front door faster than a fireman's jemmy; but I somehow doubted it. I'd used tricks like this before and either they didn't work at all and you wasted a pound; or they worked so well you ended up getting a sore head. Which would it be tonight?

Jubal Griffiths was the mayor at the time and also head of casting for the 'What the Butler Saw' movie industry. This was about as close as you could get to being a mogul in Aberystwyth and his house was easy to find: one of those stately Georgian piles on North Road, overlooking the bowling-green with a distant prospect of the pier. They were the sort of houses that had high ceilings and real cornices and a bell next to the fireplace to call the servants. In most of them, too, there was an invalid rotting away upstairs who could still remember a time when you rang and someone answered.

I banged on the door and a Judas window slid open. The sound of music drifted out, along with muffled screams and the aroma of smoky bacon crisps. Two eyes peered at me through the slit and before I had time to wonder what sort of mayor needs a fixture like that in his front door a voice said, 'Sorry, mister, members only.' I laughed. It didn't even convince me, but on a night like this it was the best I could do.

'Someone tickling you, pal?'

I chuckled some more and said brightly, 'No I was just thinking, normally to get a drink in this town you just need to be a member of the human race.'

'Yeah, well we've had a lot of trouble with that particular organisation.' The little door slid shut.

I walked down the side of the house to the back door, opened the letterbox and shouted, 'Coo-ey!' Carpet slippers slithered down the hall. The door opened slightly, held by a chain. Two old, grey, watery eyes peered at me.

'Yes?'

'I've come for the speakeasy.'

'The what?'

'The speakeasy. I hear it's a good party.'

The old lady knitted her brows together and said with the sort of acting you get at a school play, 'Oh I'm afraid you must have made a mistake, there's nothing like that here.'

She began to close the door and I wedged my foot in and leaned my shoulder against the wood. It opened a few more inches. She would have been about five foot two in her socks and was wearing a dust-coloured shawl over an indigo wool skirt. She had opaque, flesh-coloured stockings the colour of Elastoplast and on her feet were those felt relaxation boots — trimmed with fake fur at the ankle and a zip up the front. The same outfit worn by a thousand other old spinsters in this town. It fooled no one.

'You're the one who's made the mistake, lady, there's a party going on and I'm invited.'

She switched to Welsh. 'Beth ydych chi eisiau? Dydw I ddim yn siarad Saesneg...'

I could speak in tongues, too. 'Edrychwch Hombrй, agorwch y drws! por favor.'

She tried pushing the door on my foot, switching back to English. 'I can assure you there's nothing like that going on in my house.'

'You must be in the wrong house, then. Just tell Jubal I'm here. Tell him I've got a message ...' I peered at the slip of paper in the palm of my hand, 'from Judy Juice.'

At the mention of the name the old lady's demeanour changed. She stopped pushing the door and considered me through narrowed eyes.

'Miss Judy?'

I nodded.

'Who shall I say is calling?'

I handed her a card. It said, Louie Knight, Gumshoe. She took it and I removed my foot. As she closed the door I bent down and shouted through the letterbox, 'And drop the confused old biddy act, it stinks!'

I waited on the step for a while and thought about the piece of paper. Two words that meant nothing to me but the whole world, apparently, to Jubal. She was, they said, the one girl in town he wanted but couldn't have. And such is the eternal perversity of man's heart that because he couldn't have her he wanted her more than all the others in the world put together. The door opened and two men in rugby shirts with chests the size of wardrobes leered at me. They were the sort of men with no necks, just extra face. They motioned with their heads and we walked down the hall, the sound of the party getting louder. One of the side-doors burst open and an old man in satyr trousers rushed out pursued by an elderly, giggling woman. I peered into the room: a crush of people standing up, talking and drinking; a buffet on the sideboard with vol-au-vents, crisps and those pineapple cheese things impaled on miniature plastic swords. Girls in stovepipe hats and not much else wandered through with trays of punch. Before I could see any more the two tough guys grabbed me and pulled me along.

At the end of the corridor was a study. Inside were three other

muscle men in the same rugby-club shirts; a bored-looking blonde in Welsh national dress and fake leopard-skin coat; and a man sitting behind a desk. The girl stared mesmerised at a light-fitting on the ceiling and chewed cuds of spearmint with regular wet, clickety-clack sounds. The man behind the desk was Jubal. Short and tubby, with a hunchback and a small round head stuck on to the hunch like a pea on a lump of dough. A man with a finger in more pies than Jack Horner. He was holding my card gingerly between his two index fingers, and contemplating it as if it had just scurried out from under his fridge. Then he tore it into two bits, dropped them at his feet, and looked at me myopically through a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles. He blinked. 'I appreciate your candour, Mr Knight. Most of the peepers who come sniffing round my business usually have a card that says they've come to read the meter.'

I smiled at him.

'Unfortunately that's the only thing about you I appreciate. Would you care to give me the message you claim to have.'

'No.' It was just one tiny syllable but it produced a synchronised gasp from everyone in the room. Jubal stared at me inquisitorially.

'I hope you've got something good up your sleeve, snooper ... for your sake.'

'I'm not willing to give you the message, but I might exchange it ... For information.'

'What sort?'

'I'm looking for a man called Morgan.'

'And?'

'Dean Morgan. This is the bit where you say you haven't heard of him.' Just to spite me he said nothing, so I filled in the silence. 'He went missing as people often do in Aberystwyth. And, as people often do, someone asked me to find him.'

'I'm struggling to see the connection to me. It's going to be very painful for you if you don't have one.'

'He was last seen at one of your parties.'

Jubal removed his spectacles and polished them on the girl's leopard-skin coat. 'Is that it?' he spluttered, his gorge rising. 'He came to one of my parties? You bust your way into a private gathering, drop some old tart's name at the door as a calling card and that's all you've got?'

'Who says she's a tart?'

'They're the only sort of girls I associate with.' He slapped the knee of the blonde. 'Ain't that right, Toots?'

The girl dragged her gaze away from the ceiling and treated him to a smile that came and went faster than a flash from the lighthouse. 'Sure, honey.' Then she pressed her head against his chest and cooed. Jubal spoke across the top of her head.

'She wants to be in one of my pictures; they all do.'

'It's probably more fun than watching them.'

He flinched slightly and said, 'Tell me what you really want, peeper, is it money? And please dispense with the witty dialogue, it's tiresome.'

I didn't know what I was doing there, really; just looking to see if the Dean's name induced any reaction. So far it hadn't produced even a flicker. So I said, 'I've come to ask why your boys threw Dean Morgan in the sea.'

He addressed the rugby-shirt crew. 'Have any of you boys thrown a man called Dean Morgan into the sea recently?'

They exchanged questioning looks among themselves and then said in unison, 'Not us, Boss.'

'Looks like there's been a mistake,' said Jubal.

'Your boys are probably confused. His name's not actually Dean, that's his title. He teaches at the college in Lampeter. He was found last night floating face-down in the harbour.'

'How tragic, I hear the tides can be very strong.'

'They must have been, they broke his neck.'

There was a slight heightening of tension, and an air of mild surprise at the news of his death, which was understandable because I had just made it up. The people in the room turned their attention to Jubal. All except the girl, who was rubbing her cheek against his chest and making a long drawn-out 'Mmmmm' sound. Jubal laughed. Not the hammed-up stage-laugh of someone trying to conceal something. But the carefree laugh of someone who knows you've thrown in your wild card and you couldn't have been further from the truth if you tried.

'Well, shamus, he seems to have made an excellent recovery from his broken neck. He telephoned me five minutes ago.'

I thought for a second about an appropriate expression. He could have been lying and probably was. But then again so was I and he knew it; just as I knew that he was, and he knew that I knew that he was, and I knew that he knew that I was. I put on the bright wide grin of an idiot.

Jubal said, 'Tell me, peeper, do you really have a message from Judy?'

'Of course.'

'Why would she give it to you?'

'She's a friend of mine.'

'Is that right! A close friend?'

'Oh so-so.'

'This is really interesting. What does she look like?'

I hesitated, caught in the headlights of an oncoming train.

Jubal laughed. 'Go on describe her.'

'Er ... well, you know ...'

'Come, come, shamus! It shouldn't be too difficult, I'll give you a clue: tonight she's wearing a leopard-skin coat ...'

The girl turned and gave me a sickly-sweet smile. And then everyone in the room except me laughed. As the tears slid down his reddening face, Jubal waved a hand at me and said to one of the tough guys. 'Throw this trash into the sea.'

That was the signal for them to take out their blackjacks, put a hood over my face, and play a tune on my head.

When I regained consciousness I was lying at the base of Constitution Hill, a cold tongue of sea-water licking my face like a faithful dog. Dawn was breaking through thick woolly cloud and my head was throbbing. They had dumped me just above the high-water mark which meant that, all things considered, they must have liked me.

Chapter 2

The battered, green Crossville bus pulled up with a sigh of brakes and disgorged an old man in a cheap suit. He put two suitcases down on the floor and then squinted at the morning sun glittering on the sea. From the bus shelter, a mother and a little girl eyed him suspiciously. The man took a breath and said, 'Smell that, Seсor Rodrigo?'

A voice answered from the suitcase, 'Back in Aberystwyth. Same old smell.'

The man looked down at the case. 'Yes, the same old smell.'

"We said we'd never come back.'

'We always say we'll never come back.'

'But here we are again.'

The woman grabbed her little girl by the arm and dragged her briskly up the Prom, casting doubtful looks behind as they went. The old man watched them go for a while, his face lined with the wistful sadness that is the lot of the lifelong outcast. Then he bent down, the whole world on his shoulders, and picked up the cases. They were covered in faded stickers and the most faded of all said, 'The Amazing Mr Marmalade'.

'Need any help?' I offered.

He shook his head. 'Been carrying them for forty years.'

'I could take the small one.'

He jerked slightly. 'Yeah, I know, and throw Seсor Rodrigo in the sea.' He strode off, crossed the road, and entered the Seaman's Mission.

I remained standing there for a while and then walked up the rest of the Prom to the wooden jetty by the harbour. The autumn wind was warm and blustery and held in it the promise of a season about to change. At the end of the jetty, I turned, and contemplated the vista of the town steaming in the morning sun as if still damp from its soaking three years ago.

Looking back, it was surprising how well the old place had stood up to the great flood. The waters had passed over Aberystwyth like a giant car-wash and picked it cleaner than an alley-cat does the bones of a kipper. But not much had actually been knocked down. We all held our breath that fateful night, closed our eyes, and when we opened them again most of the town was still there. True, most things that could be moved had gone. All the tables, chairs, spinning-wheels and grandfather clocks; all the Coronation mugs with their hoarded sixpences; all the tea cosies, the dioramas and stereoscopic views of Llandudno; all the ointment from the backs of drawers, and the lengths of orthopaedic hosiery; the china figurines, brass elephants and hairbrushes with four generations of matted hair. And, from the their picture frames atop the steam radios, a sepia generation of young men from the Great War were lost again, only this time at sea. It was all sucked out into the insatiable drain of the ocean. Even the seaside rock disappeared in a lurid pink slick before slowly sinking to rot the teeth of the bottom-dwelling fish.

But the buildings remained, by and large. Here and there — like missing teeth — there were gaps in the rows of shops on Terrace Road and Great Darkgate Street. Little squares of rubble, filled with oily puddles, flapping polythene and broken dressers housing families of rats. And bounded on each side by the image familiar from the photos of the Blitz — sides of houses torn away to reveal the contents, floor by floor, like dolls' houses open to view.

The city fathers from Dresden who came to advise on the rebuilding found little to advise upon. You call this a moonscape? they said. This is a walk in the park! Just do what we did in 1945. Gather together all the Old Master oil paintings with views of the town; all the watercolours and prints of the main civic buildings; all the etchings and lithographs and work from that; rebuild. Roll your sleeves up. Don't dwell on it, move on. And so we did. In the absence of canvases by Canaletto and engravings by Dьrer we resorted instead to something more modest: a nationwide appeal for old holiday snaps and postcards of Aberystwyth. Predictably it produced its fair share of pictures of the Sphinx and the leaning tower of Pisa because, as anyone who's ever been stopped by a traffic cop knows, everyone's a comedian these days. But the steady stream of ash-trays, salt and pepper shakers, and souvenir barometers with views of the town were enough to get us started.

We were also helped enormously by the Bucket & Spade Aid concert put on by the end-of-the-pier performers. From all round the coasts of Britain they came - birdsong impressionists, organ-grinders, ventriloquists, stand-up comedians, skiffle practitioners - all joining in to raise funds under the slogan, 'I say, I say, I say, my dog's got no nose!'

By the time I returned to the bus stop my partner Calamity Jane was there waiting for me. She was wearing a shiny black leather coat and a black beret and looked ready to assassinate someone. Not even seventeen and so well versed in the ways of the street, a girl who in many ways knew more about it than me, who always got to hear the word, whatever it was, long before I did and always paid a lot less for it. An hour late and holding a new camera with a strangely furtive air.

'Calamity!'

'Hiya! Where've you been?'

'Where have you been, more like, we've missed the bus.'

'I've been testing my new camera. Do you like it?'

She pushed it towards me.

'Will it squirt water in my eye?'

'Nope.'

'Then I like it a lot better than the old one.'

She grinned. No matter how hard she tried to act the wised-up bingo-hall hustler, the imp in her always bubbled through. I couldn't resist smiling when I saw it. The sly cunning that mingled strangely with that charming innocence, the look of bright wonder and belief that the tarnished streets couldn't cloud. That look in her eye that Eeyore said made putting on a silver star still worthwhile.

We'd been partners now for three years, and I'd done my best to look out for her, to stand in for the father she didn't have and keep her on the right track. It wasn't always easy, as the newly acquired camera proved. The black market that sprang up in the aftermath of the flood had proved an irresistible lure to a girl like Calamity.

I looked sceptically at the camera. 'That looks like quite an expensive bit of machinery.'

She gave it an appraising look. 'From one of my debtors.'

'What do you need it for?'

Calamity moved half a step closer and took a quick look up and down the Prom.

'I'm taking Aunt Minnies.'

'That's good.'

She nodded in agreement. 'I think so too.' She pointed the camera upwards. 'It's got an East German lens. They're the best for this sort of thing.'

'Aunt Marjories, eh?'

'Minnies.'

'Aunt Minnies?'

'Yep.'

'I was just thinking we should probably get some more of those.'

'I'm going to put them on file.'

'You're just dying for me to ask, aren't you?'

'What?'

'You know what.'

The next bus was over an hour away so we went to the Cabin coffee bar in Pier Street and sat in one of the booths looking out on to the street. After extracting as much mileage as she could from my ignorance on the subject, Calamity explained what an Aunt Minnie was.

'It's a word the spies use; it means pictures that tourists take that then become of interest to the intelligence community because they accidentally include something top secret in the background. Like a Russian missile or a defector.'

'And who's Aunt Minnie?'

'They call them that because there's always someone's aunt in the foreground.'

'It's a bit of a long shot, isn't it?'

'You never know. Some of this stuff will prove useful one day, take my word for it.'

1 handed her a photo of Dean Morgan that had arrived in the post. 'We'll just have to hope no one defects this afternoon, we've got a real job. If we're lucky, we might even get paid.'

Calamity scrutinised the photo. 'Preacher man, huh? How boring.'

'This is the sort of preacher man who would be right up your street. He's from the Faculty of Undertaking.'

'They teach that?'

'You have to learn somehow.'

'So what did he do?'

'He's been teaching the Undertaking course out at Lampeter for thirty years. Then one day he decides to visit Aberystwyth.

He hasn't been heard of since. The worry is, he might have become part of the curriculum. The client is a girl called Gretel. She's one of his students.'

'You'd think she'd be pleased her teacher had done a bunk.'

'They're not like that out at Lampeter.'

*

Gretel had called three days ago. I told her to come to town, my office was on Canticle Street, but she giggled at the very idea and said, 'Oh but I couldn't!' as if Canticle Street was in Gomorrah. So I agreed to go to Lampeter and asked her for a description. She said she would be wearing a brown Mother Hubbard, a black headscarf and big wooden beads. And she was quite fat. I thought that shouldn't be too difficult but when our bus turned into a main street lined with dreamy old sandstone colleges, I saw six other girls just like it.

The pub on the high street was easy to find. The Jolly Ferryman, two doors down from the souvenir shop selling bonsai yew trees. A pub with olde worlde bow windows and panes of glass like the bottom of a milk bottle — the sort that make your vision go bleary even before you've taken a drink. When I walked in a fat girl in a Mother Hubbard waved from the window alcove.

Gretel introduced herself and her friend Morgana and asked us what we wanted to drink. Morgana said amiably, 'You and your daughter must be tired after your long journey from the city.'

'I'm not his daughter,' said Calamity. 'I'm his partner, I'm a detective.'

'What city?' I said.

The girls broke into a peal of giggles like silvery bells, and covered their mouths with their hands.

'Why, Aberystwyth of course!'

A number of people in the pub looked round sternly at the mention of the name. I ordered a rum and Calamity ordered a whisky sour which I changed to a ginger beer. When the drinks arrived we chinked glasses and I said, 'So why undertaking?' The girls paused politely as if allowing the other to go first. Gretel said, 'Strictly speaking, I'm not doing "undertaking" as such. I'm doing media studies.'

'Are you hoping to write for the parish magazine?'

'Oh no! Not that sort of media. I mean I'm studying to be a medium.'

I said, 'Ah.' And then after I'd thought some more, added, 'I didn't know you could do that.'

Gretel smiled and looked down at her clogs. 'You don't believe, I can tell.'

'I didn't say that, I've got an open mind.'

Morgana nudged her friend. 'Make some ectoplasm, that'll shut him up.'

There was another peal of giggles and this time they both laughed so much the wooden beads clacked.

'Oh I couldn't!' squealed Gretel. 'Not after what happened the last time.'

The barman threw a suspicious look in our direction as if he'd read our thoughts and didn't need any reminding about the last time. Gretel added, 'Besides, it takes me half an hour just to get an eggcupful!'

'I expect a little goes a long way,' I said helpfully. 'Tell me about the Dean.'

Gretel picked up her beads, fingered them for inspiration and, prompted by subtle but insistent nudges from Morgana, gave me the background. He'd been at the college for many years and in all that time hadn't said boo to a goose. There wasn't any record of him ever having said anything to a goose, in fact, but if he had you could be sure it would have been more polite than boo. Then one day, out of the blue, he astonished everyone by announcing his intention to go away for a few days.

This revelation led to looks of disbelief being exchanged between the two girls. I was about to say it didn't seem like such a big deal when we were interrupted by raised voices at the next table.

A young man put down his glass sharply. 'Oh really, Jeremy, next you'll be telling me, like, Osiris never happened or something!'

'I'm just saying -'

'Perfumed unguents, wax, spices ... you know all that goo they make balm out of. Alexander the Great preserved in honey ...'

'Oh sure, spare me the O level stuff please! All I'm saying is wrapping in cloth and burying in dry sand was accidental and wasn't a chief mortuary concern ...'

'And I suppose the settlements at Abu Qir don't exist either?'

'Sssh, you two, keep it down!' said some of the other students at the table. 'You'll disturb the other drinkers.'

There was a murmur of approval round the table. 'Yeah, it's getting late anyway, we'd better go back and study.' They began to finish off their drinks.

We turned back to our own conversation.

'Maybe the Dean just felt like a holiday,' said Calamity.

Gretel blinked in disbelief. 'But Dean Morgan would never do anything as frivolous as that! And besides, he didn't say he was going to Aberystwyth, that's the funny part. It was Gwladys Parry the cleaner who saw him just by coincidence on the Prom, coming out of the Excelsior Hotel. Well, we couldn't believe it. The Dean in Aberystwyth! I rang the Excelsior Hotel straightaway and they said he had already checked out. Then a few days after that he rang me from that number I gave you —'

'The speakeasy?'

'Yes. But when I called him back it was really strange, I could hear the sounds of ... well ... a party or something in the background and the man who answered said ...' She half-closed her eyes as she tried to remember the exact formulation, '"It is the club policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of any patrons on the premises." But I knew it must have been a wrong number because the Dean would never go to a party.'

'It's unheard of,' said Morgana.

'What did he call you about?'

'Oh, he said to cancel his milk and I was to take his cat and the litter of kittens she'd just had and drown them.'

I took out the photo. It was just a stiffly posed shot of a priest in a dog-collar, taken for some yearbook or catalogue and obviously cut out of one.

'That's the best I could find.'

'Maybe he just wanted to go and play bingo or something,' suggested Calamity.

'But why would he want to do that?'

'For some light relief. Must be pretty spooky looking at stiffs every day.'

Gretel gave an understanding sigh. 'Yes, I know what you think — we must be really boring because we do what we do, not like those students in Aberystwyth. Everyone thinks the same.'

'Or they think we're really ghoulish,' said Morgana. 'Just because we do experiments with worms and flesh.'

Gretel nudged her friend. 'They're disappointed because we're not like the Bad Girl.'

They giggled again.

'Who's the Bad Girl?'

'Oh,' said Gretel throwing her nose up. 'We don't talk about her.'

'And you're wrong anyway,' added Morgana. 'Undertaking's a lot more exciting than you think. Do you know...' she exchanged a conspiratorial glance with Gretel, 'we each get a cadaver at the beginning of term to practise on, just like being a real doctor. Fancy that!'

'Yeah,' said Gretel. 'And some of the ones from Aberystwyth have died violently. I found a bullet hole in mine.'

'And mine had a crushed larynx!'

'And we get to go on some great field trips — the catacombs or crypts ... at Easter we're going to Golgotha.'

'All the same, none of this is any reason to think he's in trouble.'

Morgana nudged Gretel. 'Tell him about the other thing.'

Gretel took a breath and leaned closer in. 'A week after he went, a man came looking for him. A really strange man.'

'You mean strange for Lampeter,' asked Calamity, 'or strange for a normal town?'

I kicked her under the table.

'He was dressed funny and was unfriendly,' said Gretel.

'Rude,' added Morgana.

'What did he look like?'

'We couldn't see his face,' said Gretel, 'because he wore a muffler and had a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low —'

'With a black feather stuck in it.'

'And he wore a long black coat like the ones the medieval Jews wore - you know, like the ones they sell in Peacocks for nineteen ninety-nine.'

'The gaberdine ones.'

'Then a few days later the Dean called again, and I told him that a man in a Peacocks' coat was looking for him and he sort of cried out and said, "Oh my God, I'm doomed!"'

'What I don't get,' said Calamity, 'is why he contacts you and not a secretary or something?'

'Because', said Gretel, 'we're his friends, we do voluntary work for him and things.'

'What sort?'

She shrugged. 'Oh nothing special, alms-giving mostly. Just like students anywhere, really.'

I let that one pass.

They paused and then said together, 'And of course we do his laying out.'

I fought the reflex to choke. 'You do that for the Dean?'

'Well, you can't expect him to do it himself, can you?' said Morgana huffily.

'And he pays us for it,' said Gretel. 'We're lucky to get it. I mean, how else are you supposed to survive on a grant these days?'

As the bus drove up the main street to turn at the top we saw through the back window a fracas on the neatly trimmed lawns of the college. The two students who had been arguing earlier in the pub were trading blows, surrounded by the rest of their group who were excitedly egging them on. From the cloisters on either side of the lawn, scholars and tutors poured forth in a flapping black gale of academic gowns, like starlings or startled bats, running like the wind and shouting dizzily with excitement, 'Scrap! Scrap! Scrap!'

Chapter 3

The Excelsior was one of those crumbling, fading hotels that stood in a gently curving row on Aberystwyth Prom facing the sea. It was a hotel that spent the summer dreaming of better days, and wore its four stars on either side of the main door like combat medals. Like the motoring organisation that awarded the stars, it was a refugee from the world of A and B roads and button B telephones. A world in which a lift was considered an American contrivance and shared bathrooms at the end of the corridor were the norm. People still wore jackets and ties here and took luncheon and, perhaps most damning of all, it was the world that gave us Brown Windsor soup. Inside the hotel the floors creaked as you walked, like the innards of a wooden ship. It was an old, rickety dowager of a hotel and if it were possible for a building to get arthritis and walk with a stick this one would. I knew all this because once, for a season many years ago, I had worked there as the house John. An underpaid sleuth with a cubby-hole and a nightstick and a remit to keep one eye on the shifty characters who walked in off the street and an even beadier eye on the dodgy ones who worked there.

In the old days, as with all hotels with pretensions to grandeur, the door had been opened by a man dressed as a cavalry officer from the Napoleonic wars. But he had long since gone and today I had to push the heavy brass and glass door open myself. Inside the lounge, little had changed. The swirly carpet, the antimacassars; the horse brasses ... And the same cast of characters: the greasy manager's son at the bar in a tatty white shirt and bow tie, eternally polishing a pint glass; in the bay windows sat members of that travelling band of spinsters and widows who spent their lives wandering from hotel to hotel in a predetermined route round the coast of Britain. Shrivelled old women who appeared at the same time each year with the predictability of migrating salmon and who insisted on the same room and ordered the same food. And every day at dawn they crept downstairs to place their knitting on the vacant armchairs signifying possession for the day like the flag on Iwo Jima.

The only other residents were the travelling shawl salesmen and the doily traders. There were two sitting at a table near the bar, talking doily shop in the impenetrable slang of their trade. Strange words and familiar ones used in strange ways. The weave, the whorl, the matrix, the paradigm; a disc, a galaxy, a web, a Black Widow and White Widow; a Queen Anne and a Squire's Strumpet ... I listened to them talk for a while. These were the strange, forlorn men you sometimes passed when you went for a drive - parked in a lay-by and crouched over a map. Next to it, a local newspaper opened to the death announcements with one of them circled in ballpoint. A grubby life lived according to the simple credo that with doilies, like snowflakes, there were never two alike.

I walked over and spoke to an old lady in the bay window. She was sitting in the chair with the exaggerated erectness of posture that no one knows how to do any more, just as no one can do algebra or decline a Latin verb. Her nose had a slight but permanent snooty tilt and she was peering through a lorgnette at the people walking past, trying to get as much disapproval in before her nap.

'I bet you get a good view from here,' I said.

She turned her gaze to me with painfully deliberate slowness. Her mouth was gathered together and clamped so tightly shut it distorted the rest of her face.

'I mean, you can see everyone who comes in and everyone who goes out.'

I waited and waited, the smile slowly withering on my face, until after an eternity she finally opened her mouth and said, 'Maybe.' Then she returned her gaze to the street.

The detective's cubby-hole was on the second floor in the same place it had been fifteen years ago. There was no one there but the soft sigh of steam from the recently boiled kettle told me he couldn't be far away. I stepped in from the corridor. The room had been designed originally as a utility room and was mostly filled by a wooden desk. Pictures of nude women torn out of the tabloids were pinned to the wall, and on the desk, next to the kettle and chipped china mug, was a set of keys. I walked round the desk and opened the drawer. There were a few knitting patterns in there, no doubt left behind by guests, a sock, a cheese sandwich and an ice pick. The floor outside creaked and I looked round and found him staring at me with an air that suggested he'd been doing it for quite some time.

He was dressed in a dirty vest covered in dried egg, had four days' growth on his glistening mauve jowls and his trouser flies were half-undone. His face was gummed up with sleep and he was so fat his hips almost touched both walls of the corridor. The cosh in his hand swung gently with an exaggerated casualness that suggested this was the sort of hotel where you could get coshed just for complaining about the soup.

'You looking for something?'

I smiled bashfully. 'I was just checking the fire escape.'

He sniffed the air. 'Is there a fire? I can't smell anything.'

'Not at the moment but there could be — it happens in the best establishments.'

'We should be pretty safe here then.'

'You've got four stars outside the front door, that means you're good enough to burn down.'

He lifted the blackjack and scratched his cheek with it. 'Fire escape, huh? Mmmmm.' He gave the matter some deep thought and then brightened, saying, 'The mistake you made was to look for it in the drawer of my desk. We don't keep it there.' He squeezed into the room and threw some cleaning rags off the only other stool and motioned me to sit. I obeyed and he went to sit in his chair, giving the desk drawer a slam as he did. 'I've been in this business twenty years now, and in my experience the place to look for the fire escape is outside the window.'

'That was the first place I tried but I couldn't see it.'

'That's because it isn't there yet. Special arrangement with the fire brigade - if there's a fire they'll come and put a ladder against the wall.'

'That's reassuring to know.'

'All part of the service.' He pointed the blackjack at me. 'Now we've sorted the fire escape out, perhaps you'll tell me if there's anything else I can help you with.'

I took out a hip-flask. 'Do I look like I need your help?'

'You look like a peeper to me.'

I nodded. 'Well I guess you would know. Drink?'

He pushed his teacup across and I filled it and poured a shot into the cap for myself. He took a gulp and then nodded appreciatively. I took the photo of the Dean out and slid it across the desk. The John made no effort to look, just took another gulp of the rum, and another until it was empty and pushed the cup back towards me. I filled it. He took another drink and then picked up the photo, took one look, put it down and said, 'Yeah, I've seen him.'

I put a pound coin on the tabletop and he picked it up and examined it as if it were a foreign coin he hadn't seen before. 'Funny, you're not the first person to ask about him.'

I waited for him to carry on but he didn't. Instead he smiled. I put another coin down.

'After he checked out a man came round dressed in a long black coat like they sell in Peacocks. Had a black feather in his cap. Wasn't as polite as you.'

I nodded. 'Did the Dean leave any forwarding address?'

'Not strictly speaking.'

I put another coin down which met a similar fate to the other two. 'What about speaking unstrictly?'

He scratched his chin again with the blackjack. 'He didn't say where he was going but the funny thing was he was dressed differently when he left. Completely different, almost as if he was trying to leave in a new identity — we often get idiots like that. Now once you know what he was dressed like, you can guess where he was going.' He stopped and looked at me blankly.

I put my last coin down. He shook his head. 'This one I have to charge by the syllable.'

'How many words is it?'

'Just the one.'

I sighed. 'OK, surprise me.'

'Ventriloquist.'

*

I walked up Great Darkgate Street and through the castle grounds towards the bed-and-breakfast ghetto down by the harbour. This was where the ventriloquists tended to stay, along with the out-of-work clowns, the washed-up impresarios and the men who ran away from the bank to join the circus. At the castle, I wandered through the piles of shattered stone and climbed up on to the hill by the war memorial. The sky was filled with bulbous shiny clouds hinting of a storm to come and churning the sea into soapy dishwater. Down below I could see Sospan's new kiosk — repositioned and re-established after the short-lived fool's errand of selling designer coffee to a town that hungered only for vanilla. And south towards the harbour, but moving north towards Sospan's stall, with the slow but inexorable tread of a glacier, was my father, Eeyore, and the donkeys. Every day he would be there, even in the depths of winter when there were no tourists, plodding up and down the Prom, from Constitution Hill to the harbour and back. A pendulum of fur, wound by a key of straw.

I walked down and Sospan hailed me.

"Bore da! Louie. Usual, is it?'

'No, give me something I haven't tried before.'

He wagged his index finger at me. 'Got just the thing for you.' He turned to the dispenser and I turned too, placing my back against the counter, and stared out to sea. Down below, etched into the slimed rocks, were the remains of an Edwardian sea-water bathing-pool. Less than a hundred years old and already there was almost nothing left: just an outline in the rocks like the bones of a fossil; proof that the poison that did for Nineveh and Troy had no intention of sparing Aberystwyth. Sospan handed me a pale green ice cream. 'You'll like this!'

I licked. It was like nothing I'd ever tasted before. 'What is it, frog?'

'Absinthe.'

'You're kidding!'

'Lick it slowly now!'

He made one for himself and leaned forward to join me.

I said, 'I thought we'd lost you for a while — given up on the ice-cream trade.'

He pulled a wan face. 'You never really can, though, can you? It was like running off with a dizzy blonde. You know, fun for a while but she can't cook and after a time you find all you really want is a nice bowl of caawl and someone to wash your socks.'

'I don't think I've ever had a woman wash my socks for me since my mother died when I was a baby.'

'You've missed out on a fine feeling there, Louie; washing a man's socks, it's what love's all about in the end.'

'I'll slurp to that.'

'You've just missed Father Seamus. He was asking after you.'

'That's nice of him.'

'He loves the new absinthe - of course I don't tell him what's in it. I say it's green tea.'

I looked at the faint, impenetrable smile that Sospan wore to meet all occasions. The same smile worn by the undertaker and the brothel-keeper and others with a professional understanding of the hearts of men and a policy not to interfere.. It was good to have him back in business, we'd felt his absence keenly, just as we still miss the song of Myfanwy that no longer echoes down the streets at night.

'I thought Father Seamus liked to take his ice down the other end of the Prom,' I said.

'Oh very sad, that is,' said Sospan, hissing softly in sympathy. 'It's on account of this rejection of the teachings of the Church you find nowadays. A lot of the other kiosks refuse to serve men of the cloth.'

'That seems a bit drastic, doesn't it? It wasn't the Christians who started this flood, it was the druids.'

'I know, but they're upset, aren't they? Because there was no rainbow this time as a mark of His covenant. A lot of people are angry about that. "What's wrong with us," they say. "Why don't we get one?"'

'He probably just doesn't want to waste a good rainbow.'

'That's what I tell them.'

'Still, it's nice of you not to go along with the rest of them.'

'You know me, Louie, I never take sides.'

'Your kiosk is a moral Switzerland.'

'Everyone's welcome, you know that. It's an understanding I have with Evans the magistrate: I won't judge you and he won't serve ice cream in court.'

I looked at him. It was the first time I'd heard him attempt a joke and for once his smile almost became warm.

Eeyore arrived and ordered a 99. We nodded to each other and I patted the flank of Sugarpie and tied her halter to the lamppost. Eeyore had worked for the police for years before retiring to the gentler company of the donkeys. The only animals in the world, he once told me, with absolutely no agenda. In his time his fingers had been worn smooth from fingering the collars of the local hoodlums and he still had an encyclopaedic knowledge of their ways. I asked him if he knew anything about men in ankle-length Peacocks' coats, with black feathers in the cap. He nodded and a troubled look stole over his old, lined face.

'Yeah,' he said with a heaviness in his voice. 'I've seen something like that, once, a long time ago. He was a druid assassin called the Raven. The feather was his badge of office. Ravens were special agents, skilled philanderers, trained to seduce female agents and then kill them.'

'Do you think this could be the same guy?'

Eeyore shook his head wearily, the memory was obviously painful. 'No the Raven I arrested got five terms of life and died seventeen years ago in a knife fight in the maximum-security wing of Cwmtydu Pen. But these are a class of agent, a type. There are always more. For most of the time they live among us as sleepers. Lying dormant, in a sort of hibernation — going about their everyday business like you and me. Sospan here could be one and we wouldn't know.' He indicated the ice-cream man with his half-eaten cornet. I looked at Sospan who was polishing the Mr Whippy dispenser and pretending not to be listening. He smiled. Somehow I couldn't see him as a sleeper, except in the ordinary sense of the word.

'Then someone activates one and you can rely on some pretty unpleasant things happening. These men don't get activated for commonplace jobs.'

'They sound grim,' I said.

Eeyore nodded. 'They are. The worst thing is, once you set one loose, they can't be recalled. The mission can't be aborted. Even the person who activates them can't do it.'

The Seaman's Mission had been built by the church in the last century with a non-specific Episcopal architecture of bare stone arches and dark stained wood. The word 'seaman' had widened in scope since those days and now referred to any of the human flotsam shipwrecked by life and washed up on the shore of Aberystwyth. Vagrants and veterans of the Patagonian War; sea captains and stokers lost in a world where there is nothing left to stoke; monks on the run from their order at Caldy Island; lighthouse men whose lights had been doused or automated; and always there was a smattering of unemployable ventriloquists.

Downstairs there was an empty room with a notice-board and some hard seats set against a wall. Behind, towards the kitchen from which there came the strong odour of boiling cabbage, was a refectory-style dining-room. Five pence for a meal and don't forget to help with the washing-up. Upstairs there were dormitories and private rooms for those with modest means; and in the corridor outside was a lady in a housecoat and headscarf mopping the tiled floor. I asked after Father Seamus who ran the place but she said he was out. She also said the Amazing Mr Marmalade was in Room 3 at the top of the stairs.

The door at the top was slightly ajar and the sound of soft sobbing came from within. I hesitated. I could also just hear the squeaky voice that I'd heard coming from the case.

'There, there, Mister Marmalade. Everything will be all right, just you watch.'

'It's finished Seсor Rodrigo, I tell you. All gone.'

'Say not the struggle nought availeth, Mister Marmalade!'

'Where did the years go, my dear friend?'

'For a while we held them in our fist, Mister Marmalade, we held them close to our hearts, we did!'

There was a half-chuckle of remembrance. 'Yes, we certainly did! But we couldn't stop them, we couldn't hold them for long.'

'They fled like the pages of a torn-up programme blowing down the street.'

'Yes, that's exactly it, blowing down the street ... staining the cold north wind with ... with ...'

'With the shadow of our passing.'

'Oh the shadow, yes!' He chuckled again.

'Happy days, Mister Marmalade.'

They chinked glasses.

'We've been through a lot, Seсor Rodrigo.'

'We've seen them all, we have, we've seen them come and seen them take their bow.'

A floorboard creaked beneath my feet. Mr Marmalade and Seсor Rodrigo suddenly stopped talking.

'Who's there? Who's that?'

'It's a peeping Tom!'

I pushed the door open. 'I heard a cry, so ...'

Mr Marmalade squinted at me and then put on his glasses. 'Oh, it's you.'

I walked in. They were seated on either side of a cheap coffee table with spindly legs sharing a tea. Next to the table was an electric bar-fire, but only the flame-effect bulbs were switched on and the bars were cold and grey like rods of ash. Mr Marmalade was in his undershirt and trousers, braces hanging loose by his sides. Opposite him sat his dummy, Seсor Rodrigo. He was wearing a pair of toreador trousers and a little matching jacket was folded neatly over the arm of his chair. He was also in his undershirt, thin wooden arms sticking out. They were sharing a tin of Spam, although Seсor Rodrigo had not touched his.

Mr Marmalade spoke, 'Heard a cry, did you say? No one crying in here. Did you hear anything, Seсor Rodrigo?'

'Must have been when you got that speck of dirt in your eye.'

'Oh yes! That would be it. I got a speck of dirt in my eye.' And then he added uncertainly, 'Honest I did.'

I took out the photo of Dean Morgan and held it out. 'I don't want to interrupt your party, I'm looking for this man.'

Mr Marmalade lifted up his specs to rest them on his forehead and brought the photo up to within five inches of his eyes.

'I don't think I know him. Is he your friend?'

'I'm investigating his disappearance. I'm a private detective.'

'I told you it was a peeping Tom,' said Seсor Rodrigo.

'Now, now,' admonished Mr Marmalade, 'there's no need for that.' And then, lowering the photo, 'I don't know him — is he in trouble?'

'He might be. He's just a harmless old man who might be mixed up in some trouble, the sort he probably doesn't know how to handle. I think he might be disguised as a ventriloquist.'

Mr Marmalade pulled a face. 'An impostor! We don't like them do we, Seсor Rodrigo?'

'They always mean us harm.'

I took out my card and picked up the photo. 'If you should see him, or if you know anyone who might know something, you can reach me at this address.'

On my way out the cleaner brushed past me and pressed a piece of crumpled paper into my hand. I waited until I had turned the corner at the end of the street and then read it. It said: 'Meet me tonight at the Game if you want to find out about your friend.' And then the inevitable Aberystwyth afterthought: 'Bring plenty of money.'

When I got back to the office, there was an empty police car parked outside. The two occupants were already waiting for me in my office. One was Police Chief Llunos, and the other I didn't recognise. Llunos reached out and shook my hand as usual, although maybe there was a strained air about him. The other cop just watched with a look on his face that suggested there was a bad smell in the room. I gave him a curt nod and without a word fetched three glasses from the kitchenette and poured out three rums on the desk. Neither of them made a move.

'Thirsty?' I asked.

The new cop said, 'It won't help you.'

I took a sip from mine and then said to Llunos, 'Who's the tough guy?'

He winced. 'This is DI Harri Harries from Llanelli. He's up here on attachment to ... er ...'

'To wipe your nose?'

'They said I'd have trouble with you,' Harri Harries said sourly.

'It looks like they were right.'

'No.' He walked up to me and positioned his face six inches away from mine and looked up. He was about seven or eight inches shorter than me and wearing the standard-issue CID crumpled suit and shabby raincoat. And he had been eating salami. 'No, pal, they were wrong. I told them no shamus ever gives me problems. Not twice anyway.'

Llunos sat on the client's chair. 'Detective Harri Harries will be helping me out for a while. I'd appreciate it if you'd give him all the co-operation you can.'

I ducked out of the way of the salami breath. 'He won't get anything out of me until he improves his manners.'

'Go on, cross my path, snooper, you'll be doing me a favour. I'm already bored of this dump, I could do with some entertainment.'

I looked at Llunos. 'Do they learn this dialogue in Llanelli?'

He shrugged. Harri Harries took a half-step to me until his coat was brushing lightly against my wrist. I could feel the heat from his body and detect the faint sour reek of Boots aftershave and unwashed ears.

'Llanelli, Carmarthen, Pontypridd ... fine towns. You want to know why? Because there are no peepers in any of them. There used to be, but I cleaned them all out.'

I turned to Llunos. 'What do you need him to help you for? You seem to be doing a fine job all on your own.'

Llunos didn't answer but the discomfort was evident on his face. Something had happened to make them send this monkey to sit on his back.

'Getting the whole town washed away in a flood is doing all right in your book, is it?' sneered Harri Harries.

'That's history.'

'Oh, you don't like history? How about something hot off the press? Like some cheap shamus busting into a private party and trying to put the frighteners on the Mayor?'

'Or what about the Mayor ordering his men to beat up the shamus and chuck him unconscious into the sea?'

Harri Harries paused for a second. It seemed Jubal had omitted to mention this aspect of the night's entertainment. I could see Harri Harries didn't like that. Didn't like the fact that the Mayor was handing out unauthorised beatings, or that he had pulled the wool over his eyes. He didn't like it, but he didn't like it less than he didn't like me being at the party.

'Shouldn't have been there in the first place, should you?' he snarled.

'Nor should the Mayor. They sent you all the way up here just for that?'

'No, there's this other thing.'

'What other thing?'

He stopped and looked at Llunos who stared solidly at his shoe.

'None of your business. Although I don't suppose you know what that phrase means, do you?'

'I could learn.'

'Oh you'll learn all right!'

He walked to the window. At the desk he picked up the photo of Marty.

'Who's this, your wife?'

I said nothing and Llunos jumped slightly. 'Hey, that's ... er ...'

The new cop held the picture close to his face and then turned it round and read the back. 'Hey, I know who this is, it's the schoolkid isn't? The one that died on the cross-country run -

I looked at Llunos who said simply, 'He didn't get that from me.'

Harri Harries sneered. 'No I read it in your file, peeper. I bet you didn't know you had one, did you? So I know all about your little pansy friend freezing to death during games.' He dropped the photo into the bin. 'Tragic. No reason to push your games teacher out of an aeroplane, though.'

'I didn't push him, he fell.'

'What's the difference?'

'Not a lot to you, perhaps. But a lot to me. What happened to him was an accident; but what he did to Marty wasn't.' This was a lie, of course. He fell out when I hit him with a cricket bat. I glanced quickly at the bat which was standing in the corner of my office and then at Llunos who had been in the plane; he didn't seem inclined to contradict me.

Harri Harries sneered, 'Stop breaking my heart, snooper. Kid has a weak heart, dies on a cross-country run, so what? It happens. Doesn't give you the right to charge round town on a white horse all your life and throw mud at the Mayor.'

'And what the hell gives you the right to tell me what to do? You haven't been in town five minutes yet!'

'I'm the law round here, that's all you need to know.'

I walked to the door and opened it. 'Thanks for coming, tough guy.'

He walked through. 'Keep your nose clean, peeper, or I'll clean it for you.'

Llunos stood up and followed him. At the door he stopped and looked at me with the helpless expression of a friend who wants to explain but is struggling for the words. For years there had existed a sharp animosity between the two of us. Like most cops he didn't like private operatives, but since that time we fought side-by-side in the plane a warm bond of friendship had arisen. Strengthened, I liked to think, by his growing awareness that despite the different approaches we were still on the same side. I waved him to go. I knew how much he hated this, he didn't need to say.

As their footsteps receded down the wooden stairs I took the photo of Marty out of the bin and replaced it on the desk. For some time now the colours had been gradually lightening - a slow cinematic fade to white that echoed the moment in the fourth year when he disappeared into the blizzard. Only in my mind is the image still vivid. That day when the games teacher, Herod Jenkins, rejected his medical note and sent him on the cross-country run. Marty the consumptive schoolboy who never stood a chance. I picked up the cricket bat and took a swing, re-enacting the scene from three years ago when I finally avenged his death: when I faced up to Mr Jenkins in the fuselage of the plane and delivered the stroke that knocked him for six and sent that horizontal crease in his face they called a smile spinning out of this world. Since then I had lost count of the number of former pupils who had sidled into my office on account of it. Men who stood there in shabby suits, ill at ease and unsure how to say what they'd come for. They always smiled with relief when I said I understood and, without a word, handed them the bat. Howzat! they would shout as I bowled a piece of crumpled-up paper. Often the only other words they uttered before shaking me solemnly by the hand and leaving down the echoing, bare wooden stairs, were, 'I was there from 70 to '75.'

I poured the untouched drinks back into the bottle, sat down and cradled my own glass and swirled the drink round. And wondered what this other thing was, the one that Harri Harries had mentioned and then didn't want to talk about. The one that was none of my business. I was beginning to get that faint prickly sensation on the back of my neck. The one that said trouble ahead. There weren't many certainties in the job I did. But there was one prediction I could make that was copper-bottomed. When some tough guy told me something was none of my business it always ended up being plenty of my business.

Chapter 4

Considering the number of garden sheds and herbaceous borders that were swept away, how much of the season's jam-making was ruined, there was surprisingly little rancour against the people who bombed the dam. Most people agreed justice had largely been done. Dai the Custard Pie, whose own joke shop had disappeared completely, was now imprisoned in a specially adapted dungeon, deep beneath Aberystwyth Castle. A clown of evil, doomed like a troglodyte never to see the face of the sun again. Mrs Llantrisant, the woman who swabbed my step for so many years, now exiled like Napoleon on Saint Madoc's Rock fifteen miles out to sea. Lovespoon the druid and Welsh teacher, missing presumed drowned. Herod Jenkins, last seen falling from the plane. Only Dai Brainbocs had escaped. The evil schoolboy genius and chief architect of our soaking. Somewhere at large now in South America, the traditional holiday destination of fugitives and renegades: Butch Cassidy and Sundance, the officers of the Third Reich, the Great Train Robbers, and now Brainbocs. And with him also, that most unlikely moll — the girl who should have been mine — Myfanwy.

The cleaner from the Seaman's Mission had hardly been specific. Meet me at the Game. But it was enough. There might be many games in town but only one began with a capital G: 'Mrs Beynon Says', also known as Fishwife's Chess. The contest that depended on knowing more about your neighbour's secret vices and indiscretions than anyone else in the street. It had once been a harmless parlour game played for matches at Christmas, but nowadays an entire week's pension or a dead husband's war medals could be staked on it. I wandered off in search of tonight's game, somewhere in the ghetto. Down some back alley, under a line of washing and through a hole in a fence where the touch of creosote was just a memory, like the scent of an old love letter. But which washing-line and which fence?

I could hear the ghetto long before I reached it. That far-off sound of carousing sailors found in all the world's great ports. And mingling with it, incongruously, the sweeter strains of the Sweet Jesus League out on their own shore patrol, singing hymns and warning the men of the dangers of unbridled fornication. A mixture of sounds that perfectly encapsulated the contradictions of the hour - captured the spiritual divide that the receding waters had left behind. To the puritans, the disaster had been a well-deserved punishment for our ill-defined iniquity. You saw them every night, singing hymns and carrying torches through the streets like columns of monks in a Gothic painting. Sometimes you caught the eye of one, who tried to avoid your gaze, and you'd think to yourself, isn't that our postman? For other people, it was all just a reminder that our tenure here is short and that we should make the most of it. So the people of Aberystwyth gulped their pleasure giddily for a while, like Paris in La Belle Йpoque or Berlin in the Roaring Twenties, dancing like the marionettes on a music box playing at the wrong speed. Sospan capitalised on the mood with that innate understanding of the Zeitgeist by creating new recipes based on a suggestion that life is precious and fleeting: Dance of the Mayfly, Gossamer Happiness, and the ever popular Lost Eden. Or the saucy one that caused all the trouble with the Sweet Jesus League, Hornucopia. This was also the time when the Chief of Police had to confiscate a lot of large-print pornography.

As I walked up Bridge Street, the battered old Bentley belonging to the Philanthropist swept past. A cat darted across the road. There was a squeal of tyres quickly followed by a soft furry thud and the sad but comic sight of an inert cat cartwheeling through the air. The car stopped and the chauffeur got out. He picked up the cat by its tail and, with a loud clattering noise, slung it into a rubbish bin. Then he slapped his hands together and drove off. I strolled on and thought of some lonely old lady sitting at her kitchen table tonight, looking round sharply every time the wind blew open the catflap, a saucer of unlapped milk standing on the tiled floor. Or was it a little girl walking down the street with her mum, pinning notices to the trees saying: 'Have you seen Bathsheba?' Aberystwyth could get to you sometimes.

In the old days, of course, if we wanted to gulp our pleasure giddily we just went to the Moulin — Wales's most notorious nightclub. A place that had stood for so much that was good and bad about the town. But they hadn't reopened it, had moved it instead to the end of the pier. I'd never been and I said I never would. The Moulin without Myfanwy was Troy without Helen. The gods obviously thought so too because the swooping new Perspex entrance to the pier funded by the Bucket & Spade Aid concert blew away in a storm. And since then the front had been permanently obscured by builders' plywood.

But tonight I needed only information. The sort that was supposed to be impossible to obtain, but could be bought in any of the pubs in the ghetto. I walked into the Angel.

It was crowded, hot and dark. And reeked of beer. Fishermen and sailors rubbed shoulders with town councillors and ladies of the night. Added to that was the usual haul of holiday-camp impresarios, bingo callers, whalebone dealers, shawl salesmen, out-of-work actresses from the 'What the Butler Saw' movie industry, and here and there, looking even more furtive than most, a few monks from Caldy Island. A typical early-evening crowd in the Angel. I pushed my way to the bar and ordered a rum and went to sit in the corner by the fireplace.

A figure detached itself from the shadows leaning against the wall and sauntered over to me.

'Are you enjoying your holiday, love?'

The voice was soft with a husky rawness, the sort of rawness a voice gets when you see more before you are nineteen than most people see in a lifetime. The girl was wrapped up in a fur coat. The silky brush against my wrist suggested it was real, though probably full of moth-holes.

'Like that, huh?' she said when I didn't answer, and sat down next to me. A syrupy thud filled the room as someone, somewhere, clumsily dropped a needle on to a record, and after a few seconds Jim Reeves struggled to raise his voice above the bacon-frying hiss and sing, 'Welcome to My Home'.

'It's not a lot of fun, really, I know,' said the girl. 'The summer's much better and that's not a lot of fun either.'

I smiled. There seemed something familiar about her, although there was almost nothing physical to see in the darkness. Reflections of flames dancing in her eyes, an edge of gold outlining her cheek, giving her the air of a wench in a Rembrandt painting. It wasn't her voice that was familiar and since I couldn't see her face I couldn't put it down to that, but still there was something. And when you work as a private eye in Aberystwyth you learn not to worry too much about where your hunches come from.

'I could show you round if you like ... show you things.'

'So you're a tour guide, are you?'

"Well not exactly ... no ... well yeah, in a way.'

'Is there much to see?'

'There's the castle. I could show you that.'

'And I bet you know all about it, don't you?'

'Yeah, of course.'

'Who built it, then?'

'The Romans.'

'The Romans!'

'Yeah, I s'pose. Or Robin Hood or someone. I don't know — who cares?'

She took out a cigarette and a lighter and the flame gave her young features a tender wash of light. When the cigarette was alight she nicked the lighter again and held it up to my face. Through the harsh hot glare I could see the glints of her eyes as she scrutinised me. The flame went out.

'You're Louie, aren't you?'

'Yes, how did you know?'

'I've seen you about. I'm Ionawr.' She grabbed my hand in the darkness and shook it gently. 'Nice to meet you.' The hand was cold and smooth like a pebble on a beach.

'Do I know you?'

'We haven't met, but I know you through my sister.'

'Is she here?'

'She's dead.'

I peered at her intently through the blackness.

'My sister was Bianca.'

We found the game in a cellar on Prospect Street. Ionawr, who had sold me the information for the price of a drink, insisted on coming with me, saying I wouldn't get in otherwise, which was hard to believe. But she refused to come in herself, knowing better than me what sort of reception a girl like her would get in this crossroads for the world's gossips, shrews, scolds and harpies. Inside, the air was fetid and moist, filled with the gamy fug of wet hair drying, infused with cellar smells of old stored potatoes, and Mintos, and camphor, cheap scent from grandsons at Christmas, ointment ... and everywhere the air tingled with an intense, feverish mood of anticipation. It was partly the buzz you get at any big fight but also there was the build-up of static brought on by the rustling of pacamacs, and which had on occasion, so they said, given rise to the appearance of ball-lightning at these events.

The two contestants sat at a small kitchen table either side of a pot of tea. The audience was gathered round in rows of seats. We sat down as the umpire clumsily shuffled a pack of very big cards and called on a woman in the front row to draw. These were the Pleasantry cards and carried bonus points. The woman took three and the umpire read them out. 'Well, that's what I heard, anyway' (murmur of disapproval from the crowd and shouts of 'easy'). 'Well you can't be too careful now, can you?' (more grumbling). And, finally, one that drew a ripple of applause: "E'd have bloody flattened her if he'd found out, wouldn't he!'

The bell dinged and the lady in the red scarf started.

'Well, anyway, Mrs Beynon was just saying that it's not her first one that Mrs Jenkins was talking about. It's the elder one — she's got two, hasn't she? — the youngest one is still in Penweddig, isn't it? And the eldest is out at Talybont married to the chap whose father ran the garage that was knocked down, anyway it wasn't him it was his brother whose two boys were in the same class as the daughter of the one from the woman who lives above the bakers in Llanfarian —'

There were cries of 'Logic! Logic!' from the blue corner and after a quick conference among the judges the charge was upheld and points were deducted for logic. The woman in the red scarf picked herself up off the canvas and came out fighting: 'Anyway, it was her niece what made the jam for the "bring and buy" after her husband came back from the mines with emphysema -

There was a roar of delight from one section of the crowd and the other section looked on stony-faced. Two ladies in front of me turned to each other and swapped disapproving nods. Another lady in front of them turned round and said, 'It wasn't emphysema at all — it was nothing to do with the aureoles as such —'

'I heard it was viral,' said another spectator, 'but they weren't quite sure what.'

'You'd think she'd test her weak spot with mumps and measles or something first, wouldn't you!'

'Or maybe sciatica, that's always a good one, that is.'

'You watch!' the first one scoffed. 'Mrs Jenkins will trump her now with the pneumoconiosis.'

People in the other rows turned round and told them to hush and I saw the cleaner from the Seaman's Mission waving to me from the adjoining room.

I walked in and bought two paper cups of beer served warm from a party-sized can and handed one to the woman. She took a drink and let out a satisfied 'Ha!' as she patted her chest.

'Needed that, I did.' She nodded towards the next room. 'Just the warm-ups, the real stuff isn't until after eleven. Hang around a bit and ...' Her words trailed off as her attention was caught by the entrance of another woman. A very old, shrunken woman who carried herself with the regal air of an abdicated queen. Her face was bony and almost skull-like, with fine white strands of hair stretched with painful tightness across the dome of her head. The woman serving at the bar instantly poured out a gin and put it on the counter for her, saying 'Evening, Champ!'

The cleaner nudged me. 'It's Smokey G. Jones. Won the treble in '62. Fifty-eight bouts and never lost.'

I tried to look impressed and then asked her about the Dean. Tearing her admiring gaze away from the Champ, she licked her lips. 'Well,' she said, switching instantly into disapproval mode, 'I knew straightaway there was something funny about him, like. He wasn't like the usual ones you get at all. Always giving himself airs he was and saying the bathroom was dirty and moaning about the breakfast and he never wanted to watch the same TV programmes as everybody else. Well, I could see he wasn't going to last long. "I didn't know we had a member of the royal family staying with us," I said to Mrs Jenkins so he could hear. But he didn't take the hint of course. Them type never do. I mean if he was so high and mighty, why wasn't he staying at one of the posh hotels down by Consti?'

I yawned. 'You expect me to pay for stuff like this?'

She jerked her head back indignantly. 'Well I'm not doing for me health now, am I?'

'This isn't gossip, it's ancient history.'

'I should hope so too, I'm not one to gossip.' She leaned closer and whispered, 'I haven't got to the best bit yet.'

I forced another yawn. 'Don't tell me, let me guess: some man in a long back coat turned up asking questions about him.'

'Yes,' she hissed. 'But the point is, what did he want to know?'

I shrugged.

'The valise! He wanted to know what had happened to the valise.'

'What's a valise?'

'A case, you idiot!'

'Why didn't you say that?'

'I thought you were a private dick, that's how they speak.'

'Where?'

'In LA.'

'This is Aberystwyth.'

She snorted. 'Fat lot of good you are.'

'So tell me about the valise.'

'It belonged to the monk.'

'What monk?'

She leaned back slightly and beamed at me. Her eyes were making dramatic downward movements and, following her gaze, I spotted her left hand tucked in tightly to her side, palm up, and making fluttering motions with the fingers as if she was trying to tickle a trout. I put a pound coin on her palm and the hand disappeared into the pocket of her pinny.

'I knew straightaway he was a monk,' she continued seamlessly. 'Even though he was pretending not to be. We've had his type before. Up from the monastery on Caldy Island for a good time. They were room-mates, you see.'

'So what was in the valise?'

'How should I know, I don't go looking in other people's cases.'

'Not much you don't!'

She flushed. 'Well of all the ... any more of that and I won't tell you the rest.'

I nodded her to go on.

She held out her hand and tickled another trout.

I shook my head and turned to go. 'Sorry, I can't afford it.'

'But don't you want to know what happened to the valise, it's the best bit.'

'What was inside it was the best bit, but you say you don't know. I don't believe you, by the way. I don't believe there's a single bag, case, coat or drawer in that crummy hovel you haven't stuck your nosey beak into. But if it makes you feel better to deny it, that's up to you.'

'Oooh you dirty rotten chiseller!' She sniffed forcibly. 'I should have known what to expect from the son of a donkey-man. Well suit yourself. Now you'll never know what happened to the valise.'

'I already know. There's only one thing that could have happened to it.' I walked out and threw over my shoulder as I left, 'The Dean must have taken it, otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned it.'

As I left the house I bumped into someone arriving in a hurry. It was the old lady from the bay window at the Excelsior. She was heavily wrapped-up to disguise herself and pretended not to know me, but it was her all right. I could feel the hot smothering shame that, underneath all the finery, the lorgnette and the etiquette, she was the same as the rest of them. Borne in on a floodtide of longing that she could no more defy than the beaver can stop himself from building a dam. That eternal drive to gather round the village well and pour scorn on her neighbours for failing to live up to a code that no one else had ever managed to live up to either.

I walked out into the street as the room behind me thundered with the explosive percussion of five hundred orthopaedic boots stamping on the boards, accompanied by shrill Red Indian whoops. Above the tumult, a voice rose exultantly, crying, 'E'd have bloody flattened her if he'd found out, wouldn't he!'

Out in the street Ionawr came up to me from the shadows and put her hand in mine. I could see now in the yellow streetlight she was dressed much like any other kid of her age. Faded jeans flared at the bottom over absurd platform shoes, too much make-up and too little on underneath the fur coat: a skimpy halter-neck top that didn't reach down as far as her navel. You saw girls like this all the time walking down the street hand in hand with men old enough to be their fathers or even grandfathers. And they really could be were it not for that furtive air that marks them out and gives the game away: that strange awkwardness that comes from having to concentrate on the simple task of walking; and from the insane overwhelming belief that everyone in the street that night can read your thoughts. The walk of shame that only dissolves when the bedroom door slams gratefully shut.

The cold had deepened and stung our cheeks like the kiss of a jellyfish. We cut through the castle and headed for Pier Street. There weren't many dining options at this time of night — if you discounted the 24-hour whelk stalls on the Prom.

'We could go to the Indian,' Ionawr said hesitantly, reading my face to gauge my reaction.

'That's not the sort of place to take a lady, even one ...'

'One what?'

'Oh nothing.'

'I know what you were going to say. Even one like me.'

'No I wasn't.'

'Yes you were. Don't deny it, it doesn't matter. I know what I want to eat: something traditional Welsh like my grandmother used to make when I was a kid.'

'That's a bit of a tall order.'

'They do caawl at the Chinese.' She took my hand and pulled me. 'Come on.'

I hesitated.

'What's wrong?'

'Did you hear that?'

'What?'

I thought for a moment and then said, 'Oh nothing.' We carried on. And then I stopped again.

'We're being followed.'

'Are you sure? I can't see anyone.'

'I've felt it since we left the game.'

I sent Ionawr on ahead and slunk into a doorway and waited. The footsteps got louder and louder. When the guy passed I grabbed him and threw him into the doorway.

'Oh my Lord!' said a voice. It was Smokey G. Jones, her tiny head projecting from the collar in her coat like a light bulb. 'Don't kill me, please!'

'Mrs Jones! What are you doing? I thought you were following me.'

'I was. Only I didn't mean any harm. I just wanted to ask you. No harm at all.'

'Ask me what?'

'If you'd have a word with her, please, Mr Knight, just a word. This arthritis is something terrible. It's all them cups of tea in me fighting days.'

'Have a word with who?'

'Miss Calamity. She's cut me supply down. I need me placebo, Mr Knight, I can't get through a day without it. But she's gone and cut me supply.'

Just then Ionawr reappeared and Mrs Jones stopped and looked at her. 'Hmm.' She sniffed. 'What baggage.' She walked off.

It was often mayhem in the small take-away but tonight it was quiet. A few students, a few locals sitting on the hard-backed chairs, stupefied by drink into a morose silence, killing time softly like holidaymakers at a strike-bound airport. At the counter a Chinese girl in her mid-teens was doing her homework, a curtain of silky black hair falling forward to protect her from the gaze of the customers, falling in a delicate curl like the clef on a musical score.

I coughed and she looked up.

'Can I help you, sir?'

'I hear you sell caawl now.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Would you like some?'

'Is it good?'

'People who know about these things say it is. Personally I've never tried it.'

'Quite an unusual dish to find in a Chinese restaurant.'

'We Chinese have to adapt.' She wrote down the order and handed it through the serving-hatch. 'And it brings in the crowds.'

'Isn't it a bit dishonest?'

She shrugged. 'I don't know, is it? In my grandmother's province they have a tree that gets pollinated by bats, so the tree gives off a perfume of dead mice. No one complains about that.'

'Except maybe the cats.'

She smiled and took our money. 'Anyway, lamb stew with lumps of cheese - it's not so very hard to make.'

'Ah! but the cheese has to be added with love,' I said.

Someone by the door farted and his mates burst into crude guffaws of laughter. I fought the urge to look round and waited for the prickle of shame to subside.

The girl said, 'We add all our ingredients with love, our customers deserve nothing less.' She took the cartons of caawl and placed them carefully in the paper bag. 'I've seen you before somewhere, but you're not a regular.'

'With my father, maybe, on the Prom. He's the donkey-man.'

'Ah of course!' She handed me the food. 'You round-eye are so sentimental about your animals. Bon appetit!'

On the Prom the wind roared past our ears like a tube train rushing out of a tunnel. The tide had risen and each time the water thundered into the base of the sea-wall, spray flared up like a series of jack-in-the-box ghosts. I had one arm over Ionawr's shoulders, clutching her against me for warmth, and I held the brown paper bag with its cargo of hot caawl at arm's length like a lantern — two wayfarers lost in the night.

'Do you know what she was talking about?' I said. 'Asking Calamity for some placebo?'

'No idea, but if she's getting it from Calamity, who knows what it is.'

Electro-illuminated dwarves danced drunkenly on the swinging cable overhead, and down by the bandstand we heard the sound of youths jeering. We walked on and as we got closer the jeering of the youths became punctuated by faint Spanish cries, 'No, please leave us alone, Seсores!'

The lads were dancing round in a circle, and in the centre there lay a man. Next to the man, on the floor, was a ripped-open suitcase.

'Hey!' I shouted. Slightly wrong-footed by the intrusion, they stopped and turned to face us. There was silence for a while, except for the sea exploding like distant artillery, and then I heard the Spaniard again, squeaking above the muffled roar. 'Please, sir, we are just humble peasants!' It was the dummy, Seсor Rodrigo, and lying on the floor, battered and kicked and covered in cement grime, was Mr Marmalade. Ionawr gasped. One of the youths was holding Seсor Rodrigo by his ankles, upside down over the railings. His eyes had rolled upward in their sockets and in the garish mix of bright lights and shadows thrown by the streetlamps and the overhead illuminations, his wooden face had acquired a cast of terror.

The youth gave him a shake and the other lads cheered. Mr Marmalade was making desperate attempts to get up, but every time he half-raised himself one of the lads would shove him back down with the sole of his boot.

'Gottle of fucking geer!' they shouted. Mr Marmalade was clutching his chest above the heart and gasping.

'Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!' wailed the dummy.

'You leave him alone, you bullies!' shouted Ionawr. The leader of the youths shouted, 'What the fuck do you want?'

'Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!'

'And shut that fuckin' dummy up!'

The kid smashed the dummy's head twice against the metal of the railings. One of the eyes came out. Ionawr screamed. Mr Marmalade was now making obscene sucking sounds and holding his chest, his eyes bulging as if something was pushing them out of his head from the inside.

'Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!'

I stepped forward and punched the lead yob. Despite the swagger and posturing, he was probably not much more than eighteen or nineteen and slightly built. He fell sprawling on to the pavement. I kicked him viciously in the stomach and he grunted in pain. Across the road a casement window screeched open and a woman in a nightie leaned out and cried, 'I've called the police, you bastards, they're on the way!' And as if in confirmation we heard the distant wail of a siren starting up. None of the lads had the guts to make a move on me. The leader got to his feet and, seeing the distant blue flash of the approaching prowl car, took to his heels, followed by his gang.

We kneeled down by Mr Marmalade. Over by the railings, like the dummy that continues talking as his master drinks a glass of milk, the shattered mannikin continued to plead for their lives. 'Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!' Maybe it was the wind plucking strange notes from the musical stave of the seaside railings. Or maybe the terror of the night, working on our own dark fears and imaginings, had somehow transformed the voices of the approaching cops. Or maybe we just dreamed it. Because as we kneeled in the grime and Ionawr cradled Mr Marmalade's head it was clear that the old ventriloquist's heart had already given out and instead of milk he had drained the cup of life.

' Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!'

Chapter 5

IT WOULD BE naive to say Aberystwyth ever had much innocence left to lose, but the death of the Amazing Mr Marmalade struck many people as a watershed. Old man kicked to death on the Prom, they said, never thought I'd live to see that. Perhaps it was all those fresh graves on the side of Pen Dinas dug in the wake of the flood that contributed to the mood, or maybe just the casual brutality of the attack. Or perhaps it was the recognition that the optimism that many people felt after the flood had deceived us. As a town we had stared death in the face and prided ourselves on the fact that death had blinked first. But the murder of Mr Marmalade confirmed what we secretly suspected all along: it was all at best a reprieve, a stay of execution. The optimism was snake oil.

Walking home after the attack, I kept thinking about what a senseless act it was, and how easily it could have been avoided. What was an old man like Marmalade doing there at that time of night? Where did he think he was going? It didn't make sense. When I got home I found the answer. It turned out he had been going to see me. There was a note from him saying he had called and that he had information. And I had to wonder, was this a coincidence, a motiveless attack of the sort that could happen to anyone? Or did it have something to do with me? As far as I knew, the police didn't know about his visit but they soon would, and once that happened they'd haul me in for questioning. The smart thing to do was tell them before they found out, that way they would know I wasn't holding out on them. Trouble was, holding out on them was what I did for a living. It was part of the unwritten code: protecting the client's privacy. But I could only go so far and murder was definitely beyond the line in the sand. Not that the new broom at the police station would be much for fine distinctions anyway. His type were always itching to revoke your licence. And they generally had a preferred technique for doing it: making it fall out from your pocket as you tumbled down the police station steps.

I let Ionawr take my bed and I took the sofa. And then I put Myfanwy's LP on the turntable, unscrewed the cap on my friend Captain Morgan, and tried to beat back the louche imaginings that all men feel in the presence of a girl who sells herself for a living. The look of reproach in her eyes didn't help. That sweet, sharp pang and slight surprise that you maybe don't find her attractive ... ah if only she knew! As if any man would not ache and burn inside for such a lovely girl. But you cannot say it, because the act of protecting her has no meaning if you say the words. I'd love to but ... it's not that I don't want to but ... But what? Your sister died in my arms once? To speak the words is to ask to be absolved. To disavow your cake on moral grounds and then eat it anyway. Bianca's sister, probably not much more than eighteen. The same age as Bianca when she walked into my life and almost immediately out of her own. A waif from the Moulin who, they said, never did anything from a pure motive, but who tried to help me on a case without any motive at all other than kindness. A quality so rare in those days most people didn't recognise it when they saw it. I couldn't save her — had to watch helplessly instead as they ran her over down at the harbour. And of all the cars in town they could have chosen to kill her with, they chose mine. So sleep alone, Ionawr, and don't ask why; in case the answer you get is the simplest one: that three years ago I shared the same pillow with your sister. Captain Morgan stared at me. I didn't know who he was but I could guess what he would be doing right now in my shoes. He winked and I turned the bottle round and forced my thoughts elsewhere, far away from Aberystwyth Prom, to Myfanwy, stuck with the creep Brainbocs in some cockroach-infested cantina in Patagonia. Singing those bitter-sweet ballads of love and loss to the half-Welsh half-Indian mestizos. On the front of the record cover, for no apparent reason, the characters were spaced out: M.Y.F.A.N.W.Y. Seven scarlet letters running through the seaside rock of my heart.

*

Next morning I put a call through to Gretel's hall of residence. It was a bit early to expect students to be up but they were made of different mettle in Lampeter and the porter told me she was out giving alms. I left a message for her to call me before evensong at the latest. Then I made some coffee and called Meirion, the crime reporter at the Gazette. He'd heard about the attack on Marmalade but no one knew what the story was. The police were just treating it as routine. He promised to let me know if he heard anything. I asked him about the man in the Peacocks' coat. Did it ring any bells? He chuckled. We both knew that on matters like this he had a whole cathedral belfry at his disposal.

'I seem to remember some sort of incident out at Ysbyty Ystwyth a while back,' he said. 'Something to do with the military, called the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment or something. Apparently some civilians saw something they shouldn't have and afterwards they got a visit from someone dressed the way you describe. I didn't cover the story so I don't know much but I'll dig up what I can.'

I thanked him and went downstairs to fetch the post. There was a card from Mrs Llantrisant. If ever there was a demonstration of the fact that we never really know anyone, she was it. Ten years swabbing my step and general cleaning and all along she had been planning to blow up the dam at Nant-y-moch. She'd been on Saint Madoc's Rock for eighteen months now, standing, they said, all day long on the cliff-top like a statue from Easter Island, staring out towards Aberystwyth. On fine days you could charter a boat from the harbour and look at her through binoculars. She must have earned some privileges through good behaviour to be allowed to send mail. This was the second in four months.

A pair of puffins have taken up residence in the eaves of the old wool shed. I have called them Gertie and Bertie. They dote on each other madly. Their cooing and billing fills me with joy in the gleam of the morning sun. But when evening falls and a gentle melancholy descends upon their preening a fear creeps into my heart and I have to close the shutters and banish them. Ah yes! love, that beautiful demon that devours us all in the end. I think of you and all that has passed between us and I forgive you freely with my heart because only love —for that harlot whose name I will not utter — could have made you betray me the way you did. Banished from the hearths of those I love and confronted daily with the rubble of my life, this is the truth I publish abroad: love will corrupt us more assuredly than sin.

Yours

Gertrude Ophelia Llantrisant

I dropped the card on to the table and said to the empty room, 'Wow!' Despite all that had happened I found no hatred in my heart for her. Only pity. Was her middle name really Ophelia? I put on my hat and coat, left Ionawr sleeping, and walked out.

It was a grey, damp morning and the light on the end of the harbour jetty winked sleepily. I walked to the very end of the Prom and then doubled back, my steps taking me unwittingly, or perhaps because they knew better than me where they wanted to go, to the place on Harbour Row where Bianca had died: the stigmatic stain in the tarmac that commemorated the short blasted life of an Aberystwyth harlot. The mark had faded now but the faith that her outline would return was strong among the pilgrims. The nearby guest-houses were already booked out for the week of the anniversary next summer and it didn't matter how much Domestos the ladies from the Sweet Jesus League poured on the tarmac. There was a man standing at the spot, staring down and deep in thought. It was Father Seamus. He bent down and picked up a wreath, one of the donation from the Abergavenny Rotary Club, and put it in the bin. He looked slightly embarrassed to find himself observed.

'Best place for it,' he said lamely.

'You think so?'

'We could do without this sort of nonsense.'

I nodded. 'You're a sceptic, then?'

'Don't tell me you're not, Louie?'

I shrugged. 'I am, of course, but it really did look like her, you know. And this is the exact spot where it happened.'

'It's just a stain. You could probably find one on your toilet floor that reminded you of someone if you screwed up your eyes and stared long enough. And had enough to drink.'

'True, but no one has been murdered on my toilet floor.'

Father Seamus took my arm and led me away. 'This sort of thing doesn't help, Louie. I really don't think so. These people have very pressing needs, real problems of squalor and sickness and hunger and overcrowding. Dickensian problems even ..." We walked along towards the Seaman's Mission, Father Seamus still holding my arm, although I didn't feel comfortable with him doing it.

'These people need concrete solutions. Looking to ghosts for their deliverance won't help them.'

'I'm sure you're right, Father.'

'I know it's hard, but sometimes we have to face facts, no matter how unpalatable.'

'But what are the facts, Father?'

He raised his hand and put it on my shoulder and leaned in, faking a look of deep, pained seriousness. 'Sometimes when a prostitute dies in brutal tragic circumstances, it doesn't make her a Mary Magdalene, it just makes her a dead whore.'

I winced and in that moment I hated Father Seamus. No one who knew Bianca could have used words like that about her. But I said nothing because forcing a smile on to a face that sees little reason to smile and getting on with it is all part of the job.

After Father Seamus disappeared from view I walked down the alley between the two buildings to the Rock Wholesaler fronting the harbour. The door was ajar and I entered, my nostrils filling instantly with an intense suffocating sweetness. It was an Aladdin's Cave of confectionery: millions of pink crystalline rods, neatly stacked and rising to the ceiling like alabaster columns in a mosque. The light had a soft pink translucency, almost hypnotic, like you get from staring at the bright sun through an eyelid, spidery red veins showing through like the scarlet letters a.b.e.r.y.s.t.w.y.t.h.

After the flood the stockpile had been replenished with the same urgency that they rebuild stocks of coal at a power station following a strike. And now, all around, men scurried like ants with sugar, toiling to keep it topped up. I passed through another door into an antechamber where I came upon the same scene except for a minor difference. A door was open at the back and men were lifting crates on to a lorry. Off to one side, with a Biro stuck behind her ear, Calamity was sitting on an upturned crate, punching numbers into an adding machine.

'What do I do with the Blackpool, Miss Calamity?' said a warehouseman.

'Stack it behind the rainbow-coloured ones,' she said without looking up.

I took a step forward, my shadow falling across her gaze.

'Oh hi, Louie! How's it going?'

'What's this, contraband seaside rock?'

'Just skimming off some surplus production.'

'Didn't I tell you to stop all this wheeling and dealing?'

She sighed. 'I know, you did, Louie, but it's just not that simple.'

'Where's the hard part?'

'You can't roll an empire up overnight. I've got people relying on me.'

'One of these days you'll get into trouble.'

'Everyone's paid off, don't worry. They're all looking the other way.'

'And what's all this about Smokey G. Jones and some placebo?'

'I'm trying to cut her down — she's getting through three bottles a week.'

'That's not what I meant.'

She shrugged. 'You know how it is. She took part in a trial at the hospital for some new drug and they gave her the placebo. She said it worked a treat. Placebos are the —

'I know what they are.'

'Faith can move mountains, Louie.'

'But you can't go round prescribing drugs.'

'It's only vitamin C. And anyway, she's hooked now, I can't stop it.'

The sound of a man unconvincingly barking like a dog cut through the air. The noise set off a frenzy of activity. The men stopped unloading and scurried hither and thither, slamming doors and flinging tarpaulins over crates. Shouts of 'police' and 'stop' came from the other room. Calamity grabbed her stuff and fled to the far side of the hall. In less than two seconds I was alone. Calamity rushed back, grabbed my arm and dragged me to the cupboards where they stored the protective clothing and pulled me inside.

We stood in the dark cupboard and held our breath, listening intently to the sounds from outside. Footsteps approached. Stopped. The door was pushed slightly, teasingly. And then opened. It was Llunos. He made a soft gulping sound as he recognised us, his eyes jumping in their orbits. We smiled. He closed the door. Five minutes later, a piece of paper was slipped through. It said, 'Not you as well!'

Chapter 6

The death of one of the ventriloquists had shaken the others quite badly and some had agreed to talk. I was shown into a room upstairs at the Seaman's Mission in which sat two very old men, with fine wisps of white hair on their shiny pates, and old suits that had stayed the same size for years as they both gradually shrank. They were drinking tea and still chewing their breakfast with grizzled unshaven jowls and false teeth that suggested the necessary lip control to be a working vent was no more than a distant memory for them. They were twins, Bill and Ben.

'Few years ago he probably performed at their birthday parties,' said Ben. 'Their little faces glowing with excitement.'

'All pink and freshly scrubbed, their hair neatly combed and everyone smelling of vanilla,' said Bill. Then he turned to me again as if just remembering something.

'Are you sure the confrere spoke after Mr Marmalade was dead?'

'The what?'

'His confrere, Seсor Rodrigo.'

'You mean his dummy?'

"We never use that word, it's insulting. Are you sure he carried on speaking?'

'No, I'm not sure, I'm just saying that's how it seemed. It was probably the wind.'

'How could it be the wind, the wind doesn't speak Spanish!'

'No I know, but it's like -'

The old man stamped his foot in a strangely uncalled-for state of agitation. 'But that's a stupid thing to say, the wind goes: Woooooooaaahhh-ooooo ... !'

'Or: Phweeeeeeeeeee!' added Ben.

'Not like Spanish at all,' said Bill.

' OK, you win.' I raised my hands. 'It couldn't have been the wind.'

The two old-timers looked at each other with an air of intense earnest. Bill hissed the words, 'It's the Quietus! The Quietus!'

Ben punched his fist feebly into his palm. 'It's ... it's not possible, no it cannot be -'

'And yet it must ... this man has seen it ... with his own eyes!'

'Are we to believe a ... a ... an outsider ... one who has no love for the Art?'

'Must we reject him because of his obscurity?'

'But if... if... no it cannot be. Not to such a lowly one as ... as ... a private detective, who ever heard of such a thing?'

'And yet did not the Good Lord reveal himself to a mere shepherd?'

'If it is true we must put a call through to St Petersburg.'

'But we have to be sure, we have to be certain.'

They stopped their conference and turned to me. 'It is the Quietus.'

'I don't know what that is.'

'No, you wouldn't. If you did you wouldn't be here, you would be on the train to St Petersburg.'

'If I promise not to go to St Petersburg, will you tell me what it is?'

'The Dying Swan Quietus. It's a legend ... no! It's much more than that ... it's the elephants' graveyard of ventriloquism ... no! It's much more than that, more than that, it's ...'

His brother interjected. 'You know the trick they always do at kids' parties where the vent makes his confrere speak while he drinks a glass of milk?'

I nodded, 'I've seen it a couple of times.'

'It's like that, only you do it when you die. Like a dying swan. It's ... it's very sacred to us.'

'You get a prize if you report one.'

'But there's only ever been one. Enoch Ishmael in 1785. There was a plaque to him on the harbour wall for many years.'

'But the druids melted it down to spite us.'

'One day we are going to have a day-care centre and it will be called the Enoch Ishmael Day-Care Centre.'

The double-handed conversation had started to resemble a vaudeville act. I raised my hand. 'Whoa! Enough about the Quietus. I want to know about this man who shared the room with the monk, Dean Morgan.'

They stopped speaking and fidgeted. 'We ... we ... don't know about him.'

'Please, it's very important that I find him.'

'No, we don't know him. We've never heard of him.' Their faces became disfigured with disgust. 'He's not our friend, we hated him. Tell us about the Quietus ...'

I stood up, walked to the door and said, 'What Quietus? I didn't see any Quietus.'

Gretel turned up in the office later that afternoon, wearing a fawn Spanish inquisitor's cowl over her Mother Hubbard. Her face shone with the mild intoxication that comes from a day-trip to Gomorrah. She sat in the client's chair and spun round like a child before steadying herself by grabbing the edge of the desk. 'I can't stay long I've got a haunting tutorial at six.'

'Sure.'

'And I've got three pairs of pants on so don't even think of trying to take advantage of me.'

'And I bet they're really big pants, aren't they?'

She nodded. 'They were my gran's.'

'Ah well, just my luck. I'll have to ask you about Dean Morgan instead.'

'Have you found him yet?' she asked breezily, as if we were talking about a lost hamster.

'Funnily enough, no, I've been a bit slow this week. But I've found out a few things. It seems he only spent a couple of days at the Excelsior before checking out. According to the hotel detective he checked out in disguise.'

'What do you mean?'

'A new identity. He checked in as a professor and left as a ventriloquist.'

I said the word slowly and scrutinised Gretel's expression for any sort of reaction. Clients invariably know a lot more than they tell you.

'How strange. Are you sure it was him?'

I shook my head. 'No but I think the detective was telling the truth and he wouldn't have been mistaken, I doubt the Dean was very accomplished at the cloak-and-dagger stuff.'

'He must be in trouble, then.'

'It's a possibility. But not the only one. It's always possible he just wanted to let his hair down.'

'But he hasn't got any — well hardly any.'

'You know what I mean. Make whoopy.'

'Don't be daft!'

'People do it, you know, even in Lampeter. It's a quite popular pastime, drinking and carousing and ... and ... well, you know.'

She flushed, from anger or embarrassment. 'Yes I think I do. You're suggesting his disappearance might have something to do with a woman, aren't you!'

'It happens.'

'Not to Professor Morgan it doesn't! He's a respectable man.'

She was looking agitated. I made a submissive gesture with my hands. 'Try not to get upset and at least consider it. You get some starchy old fossil spending years in some creaky old college ...'

She shot up from her chair. 'That's it, I'm leaving!'

'What's wrong?'

Tears of indignation were watering her eyes. 'How dare you call Professor Morgan a fossil!'

I jumped round to the other side of the desk and grabbed her arm. She let herself be guided gently back to the seat. She said, 'Dean Morgan isn't the sort of person to do something like that.'

'People like the Dean are exactly the sort of people who do things like that.'

'Whose side are you on?'

I sighed. 'If you hire me I'm on your side. But only so long as you are hiring me to find out the truth and not to ignore evidence that might damage someone's reputation. You have to understand where I stand. This is a dangerous town and if you send me out there to do your business you owe it to me to tell me everything you know. I'll do my best for you, I'll even put myself in danger if I think the case merits it, but all the same you have to do your best by me. That's fair, isn't it?' It was an old, old spiel and I'd used it a thousand times before. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, but I don't think I'd had a client yet who told me everything she knew and the bits they forgot to mention were always the ones that caused all the trouble.

'Do you really think he's gone off with a woman?'

'I don't think anything at the moment. Tell me about the Bad Girl.'

Gretel flinched. 'H ... h ... how did you know about her?'

'You mentioned her, remember?'

'Oh.'

'Yes. Oh.'

'She was bad!'

'Yes, I know, and you are good and so was the Dean.'

Gretel leaned forward across the desk as if there might be someone listening behind the door. 'We hated her really and none of us would speak to her. She was an orphan, you see, they found her on the church steps — no really! They really did! We couldn't stop laughing when we heard, we thought it only happened in nineteenth-century novels. And there she was on a Sunday-school scholarship! But that's ridiculous, isn't it, because they are only supposed to be for holy people but who knows where she came from? For all we knew her father could have been a dirty old donkey-man like yours!' She stopped and leaned back. 'But we don't talk about her.'

'Yeah I can see how hard it is for you.'

'And she had no sense of humour, either! After we laughed at her she wouldn't talk to us. I mean, just imagine it! Putting on airs like that and thinking you're a somebody when you don't even have a mum or dad! So then Clarissa — that's me and Morgana's friend - called her a chimney sweep and, dear Lord! Do you know what she did? She punched Clarissa in the mouth. Unbelievable! So of course we had to report her. It was for her own good, wasn't it? That's when she made the allegations.'

'What allegations?'

'Well ... you know!'

'About the Dean?'

'She was a lying bitch.'

'What did he do? Make a pass at her?'

'Not only him, quite a few of them. Men! I don't know. See a girl in a short skirt and they can't control themselves, worse than goats, aren't they? But it wasn't true of course.'

'Oh of course.'

'No really!'

'How do you know?'

She rolled her eyes as if the answer was obvious. 'Oh come on, Dean Morgan wasn't like that!'

'So you keep saying. What did this girl look like?'

'Oh I don't know. Tall I suppose, with long blonde hair, and ... and ...'

"Was she pretty?'

She sniffed. 'She might have been, I suppose, in a cheap, slatternly sort of way —'

'Very pretty? Sexy even?'

'Some people said so but I could never see it myself.'

'But she wore a short skirt?'

'How do I know what she wore! I can't remember.'

'You just told me she did.'

'No I didn't.'

'OK, forget it, what was her figure like?'

She flushed. 'Oh please!'

'Come on, you're a grown-up, aren't you? Tell me what she was like!'

'But ... but I don't ... how am I supposed

'She had a figure like an hour-glass, didn't she?'

'See, you're just like all the rest, typical!'

'All the rest of what?'

'Men.'

'Which men? The ones at the college?'

She didn't answer.

'Look you might as well tell me, I'll find out anyway. She was blonde and cute and had curves in all the right places, yes? And she was a bit wild and all those dusty pieces of human parchment at Lampeter in their silly black hats drooled like dogs at a butcher's window whenever she appeared, isn't that right?'

Gretel banged her fist on the desk. 'No it wasn't like that! It wasn't, it wasn't!'

'And all the rest of you girls were jealous and so you ganged up on her —'

'No! We didn't! She was a horrid, low-class orphan and she had to leave and we all said good riddance!' And with that, Gretel stormed out.

About half an hour after Gretel left for her haunting tutorial the Philanthropist's butler turned up. I was sitting staring at the ceiling doing a rough piece of mental arithmetic — it's an exercise I frequently do with my clients and involves guessing certain building dimensions then working out the approximate size of the client's belfry and then computing the amount of bats in it. Then I put clients in order of bat population. Gretel had just gone straight into the charts at number one.

The butler wore an old-fashioned coat, a bit like the ones worn by the Beefeaters in the Tower of London but black in colour as opposed to red. He also wore a stubby top-hat like a sawn-off stovepipe. He had mutton-chop whiskers, reading specs perpetually in his hands, a face that managed to be intelligent, obsequious and calculating all at the same time, and he spoke with an artificial plum in his mouth in a language that was vaguely reminiscent of Jeeves and yet which couldn't quite disguise, for all the exaggerated English country manor of it, his Welsh origins. If I'd ordered a Welsh butler straight from a catalogue he would have been it.

We shook hands and he told me he represented the Philanthropist who had recently purchased the old sanatorium and he had come on an errand on his behalf. I offered him some rum and he accepted and I duly filled up two glasses.

'The Philanthropist is a great collector of various things — ornaments, antiques, knick-knacks and memorabilia ...'

'How charming.'

'Indeed. In particular he is an avid collector of all sorts of memorabilia concerning a certain nightclub singer, one known to you, I'm sure. Myfanwy Montez.'

I managed to keep almost all trace of a reaction at bay but there was the slight narrowing of the eyelids and the tightening of my grip upon the rum tumbler. I don't know which one he noticed. It hardly mattered.

His voice had a wheedling, insinuating tone that I took exception to. 'Yes I see the name is not without an effect on you.'

'What do you want?'

'My master has bought up a lot of the usual stuff on the market. Signed record covers, posters, programmes, evening gowns, etcetera. But he finds his hunger undiminished. He is looking for something more intimate and personal, evidence of the private Myfanwy rather than the public persona. It is known that you had an affair with her

I stood up and walked around the desk and took hold of his glass and pulled it out of his hand.

'Don't get me wrong, Mister Knight —'

'I'm getting you wrong so loud it's making my ears hurt.'

'The Philanthropist would pay handsomely. Perhaps an item of clothing left behind such as a T-shirt or a sock ... or even something more evocative ... shall we say, moist and intensely fragrant —'

I grabbed his coat collar and dragged him upwards from his chair offering him the choice of leaving under his own steam or under mine. He chose his own, but I gave him some help from my foot anyway.

Ten minutes later Bill and Ben turned up. It was a busy afternoon. All I needed now was a new client and I'd have full house. They'd brought me a Quietus witness form to sign.

'OK,' I said, 'you know what the deal is. Tell me about the Dean.'

The two old men swapped glances and then Bill spoke, 'If we tell you, you sign the form, right?'

'If I like what you tell me.'

They looked confused. 'But you saw it, you saw the Quietus!'

'Some days I think I saw it, some days I think it was just the wind whistling, amigo. Which day it is today is up to you, but get on with it, I'm bored of talking to you.' They both drew themselves up and said defiantly, 'He went to join the Johnnys.'

'He did what?'

'He went to be a Johnny — a Clown's Johnny,' explained Ben.

'He wanted to join the circus, you see.'

'Just like them all. They all want to do that. We see them, don't we?'

Bill nodded. 'All the time. Everyone wants to be a lion tamer.'

'Or walk a tightrope.'

'Or eat fire.'

'Or even just balance balls on the sea-lion's nose.'

'But all they get to do is be the lousy Johnny.'

'But of course, what they don't realise is, there's only one way into the circus

'Oh yeah, and what's that?'

They hesitated. Some strange force was holding them back.

'Go on! What is it?'

'We can't say.'

'You want the prize for reporting the Quietus, don't you?'

'Of course we do, but we can't say, it's rude!'

' OK, suit yourselves. I've got three other ventriloquists coming round later on. I'll sign their Quietus forms instead.'

Bill leaped up and shouted, 'No! You big swine! We got there first!'

'So what's the only way of getting into the circus?'

'OK then, you asked for it,' said Bill. 'It's ... it's ... it's through a lady's thingummy!'

'A lady's thingummy?'

'We don't know the proper name,' said Ben. 'It's Latin.'

I took out my pen and signed the form.

Chapter 7

Meici Moondust laughed. 'Basically,' he said, 'the only route into the circus is through the birth canal. You have to be born into it, you see, born to a family of maniacs. A family so fucked-up they have you on the tightrope as soon as you can crawl. People who buy you sequins for your birthday and a safety net for Christmas.' He lifted the cornet above his head and adroitly licked the globules of melted vanilla as they ran down before they reached his knuckles. 'If you can't do the act, whatever it is, absolutely perfectly by the time you are four you'll never be good enough for the circus. But you'll always be good enough to be Mr Johnny. He's the stooge, you see. All he does is have pies put in his face or ladders swung round at him, or he gets slapsticked on his arse all season. The only reason the job even exists is because after years of taking it themselves the clowns decided they'd had enough and created the post of Mr Johnny. And people queue up for it.' Meici Moondust turned aside and spat. 'When I was a compere out at the Kamp I saw five or six get off the train from Shrewsbury every month. Accountants and clerks and insurance salesmen ... you name it.' He spat again. 'Clown's Johnny. If you see one look the other way.'

*

Calamity and I stepped over the remains of the demolished wall and on to the field of cleared debris that had once been Woolie's. A thriving market had grown up in the rubble.

'I just can't believe it's gone,' said a confused old lady.

'Neither can any of us,' said the woman from the Saint John's Ambulance Brigade.

'It's been a terrible blow for everyone.'

'We used to come to Woolie's every year. Used to drive all the way from Walsall.'

'A lot of people did.'

'They said I was daft because I work in Woolie's in Walsall. But it's nice to have a change, isn't it? And now it's been washed away.'

'Drink your Bovril love, drink your Bovril — you'll be all right.'

We ordered some tea from a stall and Calamity took out her list. 'Bucket, spade, mess-tin ...'

'We need a mess-tin?'

'That's what it says in the brochure.'

'This is scarier than I thought.' As a sleuth in Aberystwyth I generally went undercover a lot less than people imagined. And when I did it was usually to dress as someone come to read the meter or something. Not as a means to go and stay at Kousin Kevin's Krazy Komedy Kamp in Borth. The brochure was specific on this point: Children and pets welcome. No private investigators.

'Why can't we just go and talk to the Johnnys down at the pub in the village?' asked Calamity glumly, even though she knew the answer.

'They don't allow them out. You know that.'

The first spots of rain fell from the dim, grey sky.

She tutted with resignation. 'I suppose we'd better learn our catchphrases then. The first one's "Bore da! How's your pa!"'

I winced. Calamity dug me in the ribs. 'Go on, say it.'

' OK, then, here goes,' I said as if about to swallow medicine. 'Bore da! How's your pa!'

'Yeah not bad,' said Calamity, 'but try and sound more as if you mean it.'

The windscreen wipers made a gloomy whine and our spirits sank lower and lower as Aberystwyth receded in the rear-view mirror. We drove over Penglais Hill and down through Bow Street, turning left at the garage for Borth. Calamity skimmed through the brochure.

'Do you believe the stories about this place?'

'Which ones?'

'The one about the zoo?'

'I've heard a few about the zoo.'

'They say an animal charity donated some toys and the monkeys gave them to the holidaymakers out of pity.'

'I heard last winter all the animals got eaten.'

'What about the one about the birds not singing?'

Before I could answer we rounded the bend and saw the outline of the Kamp up ahead. Suddenly, unaccountably, we stopped talking, as if we had just walked into the room in a haunted house where once, long ago, someone had been walled up alive.

'Gulp!' said Calamity.

A guard checked our reservation at the first checkpoint and then raised the red-and-white painted bar and waved us on. A quarter of a mile further on we were at the main Kamp perimeter. We parked and, as thousands of holidaymakers before us must have done, looked up at the grim wrought-iron gates and above them, written in the same black iron, the words, 'Welcome to Kevin's'.

After we'd checked in and spread the straw out in our room we went for a walk round. The place was quiet, maybe because it was low season or because most of the inmates were off on a work party. The enamel hot dog sign squeaking in the wind, the doors banging and the newspapers gusting across the cheap concrete crazy paving lent a strange unsettling air to the place. Like a ghost town, or ... or ... Calamity put her finger on it: 'Everyone's been abducted aboard a UFO.' We walked into a store selling milk and newspapers to ask directions. It was open but empty, no customers and no one behind the counter. We moved across to the amusement arcade. It seemed even emptier, the bingo section shrouded in a gloom that suggested it had been many years since the lights flashed and a river of prizes fell into the excited laps of chip-guzzling families from the Midlands.

In the centre of the Kamp we found a darkened entertainment complex. Rows of seats set in clusters round tables in arrangements intended to disguise the fact that the seats had been bought wholesale from a cinema. There was also a stage with the curtain down. Finally in an adjoining saloon we found some human beings. A clown sat hunched over the bar guzzling glasses of vodka. The barman in a tatty magenta blazer filled it up each time without asking. We sat at the bar, a couple of stools down. They both looked at us with a glare of hostility before returning to their drinks.

'Can I get you men a drink?' I asked cheerily.

The clown halted his glass midway to his mouth and looked inquiringly at the barman. The barman gave a tiny almost imperceptible shrug. The clown slowly turned to me. He wore a filthy lime-green jacket with orange patches crudely stitched on. Underneath there was no shirt, just a grubby vest, with food stains on it. His face had a U-bend of a laughing mouth painted on in bright red, but his real mouth was set in a bitter sneer that went in the opposite direction, as if one of the mouths was a reflection in water of the other.

I gestured to the barman to give the clown a drink. 'And one for yourself — that's if you drink while you're on duty.'

Wordlessly the barman poured the clown a drink, then himself one, knocked it back and washed the glass.

Finally the clown spoke. 'Just because I take your drink doesn't make you my friend.'

I shrugged.

'It doesn't mean I like you.'

'Of course! it means you like to drink.'

'Exactly. If I said no, I would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. You wouldn't want me to do that, would you?'

'You never know, it might be an improvement.'

Calamity nudged me and pointed at a woman passing the window. She walked, almost marched, with military stiffness and wore a Prussian-blue tunic and matching skirt set off by a well-polished Sam Browne belt. The left sleeve of her tunic swung emptily. I said to the barman, 'Isn't that Mrs Bligh-Jones from the Meals on Wheels?'

He pretended to glance over his shoulder and without even looking said, 'No that's Mrs Parker from Mansfield.'

I screwed up my eyes. 'No I'm sure it's Mrs Bligh-Jones. You can tell because she's only got one arm.'

'No you're wrong, mate.'

'But you didn't look.'

'Yes I did.'

She walked up to a chalet and the door opened. A man stood in the doorway in a dressing-gown. It was Jubal.

'Doesn't half look like Mrs Bligh-Jones to me; and that's Jubal isn't it?'

The barman leaned across and grabbed my chin in the vice of his index finger and thumb, jerked my face towards his and said in a cold, bitter voice, 'Are you calling me a liar?'

I snatched my face free and signalled with my eyes to Calamity that it was time to try somewhere else. We walked out and carried on walking into the centre of the dreary Kamp.

We passed a small collection of fairground rides, the horses and miniature spaceships covered with dusty tarpaulins. There was a flash of movement from behind the centre of the carousel. It was a little girl, grubby and bedraggled, her hair long and wild and matted; she must have been one of the feral children said to live on the fringes of the Kamp. On seeing us she darted behind one of the cars. We stopped and I crouched down and called to her. Slowly she moved forward and peered at us from behind a prancing pony.

'Are your mummy and daddy around?' I asked.

She shook her head.

'Are you on your own?'

She nodded.

'We're looking for the clown's Johnny. Do you know what that is?'

She nodded.

'Will you take us to him?'

She considered.

'I'll give you some money to buy a hot dog.'

She nodded and scampered off, assuming without even bothering to check that we would follow. We did.

The colony of Johnnys was located towards the back of the Kamp, in the cages that had formerly housed the animals. There were four of them, sitting idly about on upturned boxes and staring boredly into space. None of them wanted to talk to us, but eventually a man who said I could call him Bert came to the bars. I showed him the picture of the Dean and he confirmed that he had been a Johnny for a while.

'But he had no interest in learning the art,' said Bert morosely. 'He was just a dilettante. Kept going on about the fact that he was a professor and deserved better. I mean, big deal! I used to be an actuary but I don't ram it down your throat —' The man stopped suddenly, his attention distracted. I heard the sound of feet scraping deliberately on the pavement behind me and the miasma of cheap aftershave enveloped me. I turned and found myself face to face with a thin bony man in a black tie and dinner jacket. Next to him stood two Kamp security guards twirling their nightsticks. One of them went up to the bars and ran the truncheon along like a child rattling a stick along some railings. Bert leaped back and joined his friends.

The man in the dinner jacket spoke. 'I'm awfully sorry to interrupt your fun, sir, but it appears your holiday has come to an abrupt end.'

'Really? It's a bit sudden isn't it?'

'That's often the way of it on holiday; it seems like you've only just arrived and already it's time to go home.'

'We have only just arrived.'

'As I say it can often seem like that. It's a trick the mind plays.'

'And we were having such a nice time. I can't believe it's over.'

'You're not the first, sir, to remark on the fleeting nature of human happiness. If I may be permitted the observation.'

I looked at Calamity and she responded by dramatically stretching her eyebrows and chin in opposite directions. I turned back to the manager. 'Nice aftershave.'

'Thank you, sir, I mix it myself. Nothing fancy, just a few things I find in the garden.'

'Next time go easy on the slugs.'

He winced slightly. 'Most comedic, sir. Now if you would care to make your way to the carpark.'

'Couldn't we just extend our stay by half a day?'

He shook his head in bogus melancholy. 'Sadly not, we're fully booked. No room for any more guests and alas, although you would be highly suitable for the role, we are already supplied with a clown.'

'And if he goes sick you could always recite your aftershave recipe, couldn't you?'

He winced again.

'I want to see the manager.'

The security guard answered. 'You're looking at him, pal, this is Kousin Kevin, he owns the Kamp.'

'Don't sound so impressed, he can't even spell!'

Kousin Kevin took hold of my cuff. 'If you wouldn't mind, sir.'

'What if I do?'

The security guard waved his nightstick. 'Actually, bigmouth, we'd prefer it if you did. We don't like snoopers in our camp.'

We filed our way back in the direction of the car, guards on either side marching in step. No one spoke and the silence was lightened only by the soft strains of a dance tune from the swing era drifting over the eaves. As we cleared the last of the chalets we stopped involuntarily and stared before the guards urged us on. In the auditorium — deserted only a few minutes before — the ellipse of a single spotlight could now be seen bobbing across the darkened dance-floor like a drunken moon. And stepping jauntily through it, as if their shoes were glued to the light, were Jubal and Mrs Bligh-Jones, dancing to the 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo'.

On the drive back to town I pondered the significance of what I had just seen. Mrs Bligh-Jones was the Commander-in-Chief of the Meals on Wheels, which made her a pretty powerful person in town. But it hadn't always been so. Two years ago she was just another bit player ladling anaemic gravy over sprouts that had been boiled to death.

Her rise to prominence neatly illustrated one of the many ironies of the flood: so often the chief casualty had not been bricks and mortar, but things more intangible, like reputation. In this case the credibility of the druids. For as long as anyone could remember, they had been the town's official gangsters: running the girls, the gambling, the protection, and sending so many of their enemies to 'sleep with the fishes' it made the sea snore. But it all came to an end with Lovespoon's vainglorious Exodus aboard his ark. They lost a lot of good men on that boat and the ones left behind, their credibility shot, were never quite able to compete. This was when the carpetbagger gangsters moved in and no one had a bigger carpet-bag than Bligh-Jones. She alone had been the one to recognise the simple truth: in the moonscape of rubble and potato soup kitchens that followed the receding waters there was a new weapon abroad. Hunger. And the casually issued threat of a withheld bowl of gruel could be far more effective than any blow from a druid's blackjack.

We might never have heard of her, either, if it wasn't for the tragedy on Pumlumon mountain. A story that has since become one of the defining legends of the rubble years. It started out as just a routine sweep in the Meals on Wheels van, the sort they often made into the foothills, looking for wayfarers to succour. But then a storm blew up and they received a mayday from high up on the mountain. Common sense told them to turn back, but they pressed on and before long they had passed the Bickerstaff line, that imaginary line that demarcates the point beyond which a safe return is no longer possible. Morale soon snapped in the sub-zero temperatures and the leader, Mrs Cefnmabws, lost her grip completely and ran off ranting into the storm. Then as the women argued in the fierce blizzard with icicles hanging off their eyebrow ridges it was the ruthless will of Mrs Bligh-Jones that forced them on, forced their rebelling sinews and surrendering flesh to scorn the pain. They were stranded for three months on that cruel mountain. Two of them died from pneumonia and Mrs Cefnmabws turned up the following spring preserved in a block of ice like a mammoth. The only ones to make it down were Mrs Tolpuddle, who refused to talk about it; and Bligh-Jones, who lost an arm to frostbite. It didn't hold her back, though. She returned to town a heroine and promptly began carving it up into mini-fiefdoms for her lieutenants.

The only things she didn't contest were the girls and the drinking-clubs. Either out of an inherent puritanical streak or maybe out of a respect for tradition: because everyone knew that getting drunk was essentially a pagan activity and thus the birthright of the druids. And, no matter what else had changed, Bacchus was still the most popular god in town.

We drove slowly up towards Waunfawr in a slow file of traffic stuck behind a caravan. The windscreen wipers droned hypnotically, the rain sluiced down, and the sky above Aberystwyth turned the colour of bluebottles. Perfect weather for a day at Kousin Kevin's. I thought again of what I had seen. Jubal, the man with a finger in all the pies in town, dancing with the woman who baked them.

Chapter 8

I walked down the dimly lit, green-tiled corridor in a pair of paper socks given me at the door and a one-piece paper suit that rustled softly as I went. I had no keys and no watch and no coins and nothing made of metal nor any material that could be filed to an edge or moulded into something that could be used to bludgeon with. If the guards could have taken my fillings they would have done. I was thirty feet beneath ground level, under the castle, in a suite of rooms designed by Owain Glyndwr for people he didn't like. I was on my way to see Dai the Custard Pie.

It felt more like a hospital than a prison, the faint smell of disinfectant and a distant generator hum emphasising the otherwise total silence. Only the elaborate electronic locking of the huge steel doors made it clear that it was a prison. But perhaps at this end of the spectrum of penal incarceration there was no real difference. The psychologists might spend their lives trying to disentangle the Gordian knot of hate, insanity, malice, neurosis, psychosis, intent and irresistibility, genes and environment that made up the peculiar evil of men like Custard Pie, but whatever their conclusions you still needed a strong door on the room.

Thirty feet beneath the town; a tomb of steel and concrete that was fitted out like an ICBM silo and manned by guards who underwent the same psychological testing to get the job. Going to see a man whom I was responsible for putting here and who I knew would never talk to me. But all the same, for the sake of the Dean — way out of his depth in the maelstrom of Aberystwyth and maybe already dead — I had to ask.

The Dean, like thousands of misguided fools before him, had dreamed of becoming a clown and then leaped into the abyss in an act that suggested that he already was one. And there was no one in all of Wales who knew more about the psychopathology of the clown's mind than Custard Pie.

I don't know what I expected, but I was shocked when I saw him. He stood just a couple of feet away from me, a wall of bars from floor to ceiling separating us. He stared with eyes glittering crazily above the leather muzzle they had forced him to wear. He wore a bright orange prison-issue boiler suit and underneath it a knitted tank-top over a paisley pattern shirt. He smelled sour and unwashed; his fingernails were a couple of inches long and had started to turn yellow and curl. Most upsetting of all, the floor of his cell was littered with excrement. I turned in disgust to one of the guards who sat a few feet away playing Solitaire.

'It's OK, mate,' the guard said. 'They're not real. They're fake ones, like in a joke shop.'

'You allow people to give him things like this?'

'He makes them himself.'

'But the regulations?'

'Regulations against most things but there's not one against making fake poo.' He returned his attention to the cards and I looked at Custard Pie. The last time we had met we had been dropping through the incandescent white clouds, flying in low towards the lake of Nant-y-moch.

'I know why you're here,' he said in cold monotone devoid of any inflection or feeling. 'You're looking for the Dean.'

'You're well-informed.'

'There's nothing that happens in this town I don't know about. The only thing I don't know, in fact, is why you think I will help you.'

'He may have gone to join the clowns.'

'Of course he's gone to join the clowns. But why should I help you? The man who took away my liberty?'

I looked at him and considered. 'He threw away forty years of scholarship to go and get his arse slapsticked all day in front of a jeering crowd. Most people wouldn't understand what drives a man to do something like that. I certainly wouldn't. But you would.'

'So?'

'So you could probably find him. You could predict his next move better than anyone else in the whole world. It would be a feat of such audacious brilliance that I thought an egotist like you wouldn't be able to resist.'

A contemplative look appeared in his eyes. 'As a project it would not be without interest. I might even enjoy it, but what of it? I have passed the stage of doing things for the sake of enjoyment.'

'With your genius for understanding the comic mind —'

'Or even the deranged comic mind —'

'If you say so.'

'Tell me, Louie, do you think I am mad?'

I hesitated.

'Or are you smart enough to see the sadness where others see madness or badness?'

'All I see are good guys and crooks. I don't need it any more complicated than that.'

'Oh but you do, Louie. You do.' His voice took on an insinuating quality that suggested that he had thoroughly examined my psyche and found it wanting. 'You do. That's your curse. I know you, Louie. I know that sometimes you lie awake at night and try to fight off this monstrous thought that just won't be driven away. How can we really be held responsible for our actions? Whether it is nature or nurture that fashions us it makes little difference, does it not? Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man. Can I be blamed for becoming what I became? For what I had no power to avoid becoming? And if not, how can you justify punishing me?'

I smiled. 'Maybe. And maybe not. But if you helped save the Dean no one could argue about the Tightness of that.'

'Are you really such a fool that you think he can be saved? Yes, I can find him and send him back to his college to spend another twenty years marking essays, but do you really call that saving? Some people might call it the opposite. They might say only now is he truly saved.'

'Except that his new world won't make him happy. It may even kill him.'

'You're right. There is no happiness for him now. He has entered the world of the clown and discovered to his dismay that, laugh as he might, there is nothing funny about it. Nothing at all. We huddle round the camp fire and laugh merely to drown out the howl that comes in the night. Save the Dean? Louie, I can't even save myself.'

I waved to the guard; the interview was over and had accomplished about as much as I imagined. As I walked away the prisoner hissed a word. I stopped and he hissed it again. Three words, or four. I turned and he said, 'The girl! Suffer the girl to come to me!'

My brow furrowed. 'Which girl?'

And then he flung himself at the bars like a furious caged beast and rattled and kicked them and screamed, 'Calamity! Calamity! Calamity!'

As I climbed the steps up to the street level I could hear far off from the depths of the dungeon the sound of a wolf howling.

There was a message waiting for me when I got back, from Llunos asking me to go down and bail Calamity. I groaned. This was the third time in six weeks, and I knew I'd just about run out of favours. It had taken me ages to explain to his satisfaction how I came to be in that cupboard at the Rock Wholesaler's.

A little hole had appeared in the threadbare woollen jersey of cloud, and a disc of light bathed the length of the Prom from the castle to the harbour. The railings and chrome bumpers of the cars sparkled. Eeyore was leaning against the kiosk, reading to Sospan from a book. He closed it when I arrived and greeted me.

'He's been telling me about Sitting Bull,' said Sospan. 'Very interesting man. What'll you have?'

'What's good this week?'

Eeyore held up his ice.

'Flavour of the month,' said Sospan.

'Looks like chocolate.'

'But it sure doesn't taste like it. It's Xocolatl. The original Aztec recipe. That flavour dispensed elsewhere on the Prom under the name of chocolate is but a vulgar abasement.'

'What's in it?'

'Cocoa, pepper, chillies, vanilla, honey and dried flowers. They used to drink it out of a golden beaker that was used once and then thrown in the lake.'

'Are you going to introduce that system?'

'I've no objection so long as you bring your own cup.'

I ordered and when it arrived Eeyore and I chinked cornets like they were mugs of beer.

'So what's with the book, Pop?'

Eeyore placed his hand on it and said, 'Medicine Line.'

'Oh yeah, what's that?'

'It's a concept from the Old West, you see. From the old days when there weren't any frontiers and things. Apparently they had this team of men who crossed the continent surveying the boundary between America and Canada and marking it with little cairns of stones. When the Red Indians asked them what they were doing they said they were making medicine for Queen Victoria, the Great Mother across the Ocean. That's what I was reading about.'

'So what's so interesting about it?'

'Well, the funny thing was, them Indians weren't all that impressed at the time - little piles of stones ... it didn't seem like powerful medicine at all. But when they went horse-stealing south of the border the following spring, they made an amazing discovery. They found that when the sheriff and his men chased them the posse stopped up short at the piles of stone and couldn't pass. It was as if there was a glass wall there or something. For the life of them, those Indians couldn't see what was stopping the lawmen, but they had to admit the Great Mother across the Water had heap big powerful medicine. They called it the Medicine Line. That's where Sitting Bull took them after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Up beyond the Medicine Line to Canada where they'd be safe.'

'That's a nice story, Dad.'

'I was just saying to Sospan, I reckon a lot of people in this town have medicine lines inside their heads.'

'I don't get you.'

'You know, they live their lives penned in by fear — never get to know more than a tiny part of who they are ... never realise the things that distinguish a man in this life lie wrapped in danger and wonder in the continent beyond the line.'

'I've never really thought about it like that,' I said. And added, 'But I wish someone would put a medicine line round Calamity!' I put some money down, gave Eeyore's shoulder a squeeze, and walked off in the direction of the town lock-up.

It was still only late afternoon but the cell was full with the usual smattering of drunks, handbag thieves, black marketeers and an old lady who looked out of place. Calamity sat at a small table playing cards with a stoker. He was sitting in a singlet, anchors tattooed on each bicep, and, neatly folded on Calamity's side of the table, was his shirt. Calamity dealt with a stern businesslike mien and he stared at the cards, mesmerised like a child being shown a conjuring trick. It was five-card Ludo which meant he would soon be losing his ship as well, because although he was cheating there was no way on earth he could cheat better than Calamity. No one could.

The warder jangled the keys and let her out.

'Thanks for bailing me! Where did you get the money?'

'Out of your salary for next month.'

'Hmm. Maybe it's better if I stay inside.'

'Do that and you don't get a salary at all. And give the man his shirt back.'

'But I won it fair and square! By the rules.'

'You don't even know what the rules are! What do you want with a dirty old sailor's shirt anyway?'

'Merchandise, Louie. For every object there's a buyer, it's just a case of bringing them together.'

I smiled and said, 'Go home and arrange a deal between your head and the pillow. We've got an early start tomorrow.'

Chapter 9

The train rolled gently to a halt at Borth station. The platform was empty except for a lone figure standing in the dawn mist. The figure of a man with a suitcase, a man who had once been a clown's Johnny. Calamity, eyes bleary with sleep, yawned like a small hippo.

The man walked down the platform and climbed aboard, the clunk of the door the only sound disturbing the early morning stillness. The guard shouted and the diesel grunted and strained and slowly pulled us out of Borth towards the bright sky in the east.

Bert spotted us and sat down in the seat in front. 'This isn't what we agreed on the phone,' he said over his shoulder. 'I thought I said come alone.'

'Calamity's my partner.'

He turned to look, his face creased with suspicion. 'It'll cost extra, another person and all that.'

'No it won't,' I snapped. 'Just stop moaning.'

He made a half-hearted attempt to rise and leave but it convinced no one. 'I don't have to do this, you know.'

'Who does? Just get on with it.'

The train picked up speed and glided soundlessly through the wide watery silence. Condensation dripped in icy streams down the inside of the window and, outside, the world seemed to be taking a lie-in. The sun glimmered through the lemon mist above the estuary like a nightwatchman's lantern. Patches of water in the peat glistened and looked as if they had been cut out of the sodden turf with a giant pastry cutter. To the west beyond the dunes the sea was silent. At times like this the sight of the estuary in all its beauty made the heart gasp and long to turn back, a last final coquettish trick from that old whore Aberystwyth. Like a lover who catches you with a packed bag, tiptoeing down the stairs before sunrise, and calls to you from the landing, looking like she used to all those years ago when you first met at the Borth Carnival dance.

The rickety, tar-stained wooden bridge appeared out of the mist. We were approaching Dovey Junction, the great fork in the road for British Rail caravans. One route led north, hugging the rocky, castle-studded coast, the other went over the mountains to Shrewsbury. Bert pressed his face against the cold glass, straining his eyes to make out features in the soft misty world. 'Never thought I'd finally do it,' he said. 'Never, thought I'd leave like this, never in a million years ...'

'Get used to it, pal,' I said, already tired of his moping. 'It's Aberystwyth not Monte Carlo.'

At Dovey Junction we all stepped out on to the deserted platform and faced each other in a huddled group.

'You got the money?'

I nodded. 'You got the name?'

He grimaced. 'No I don't have the name. I told you. All I got is the box-top.'

'That's an expensive box of chocolates. Twenty quid.'

'If you didn't like the deal you shouldn't have got on the train. You want to go and find her yourself, be my guest. There are only about ten thousand girls like her.'

I took out the four crumpled-up fivers and straightened them out. He pulled out a piece of cardboard from his bag. We exchanged them. The cardboard had once been the top of a fudge box. And on the front, as always, a girl at a spinning-wheel in Welsh national dress. We all looked at it.

'I don't go for that type, myself, mind. But there are plenty that do. The old professor couldn't get over her. Always staring at her and begging me to give him the box. "Isn't she a beauty?" he would say. Soon as he left I knew where he was heading. I've seen it before.'

In the distance we heard the feeble lowing of the train from Machynlleth. The clown's Johnny shuffled his bag over to the edge of the adjacent platform, ready to jump aboard and swing north over the bridge to a better life. He turned to face us.

'Well, so long then.'

'Good luck.'

One lone, broken man against the huge clear backdrop of mountains and sky.

We caught the train back to Borth and took the bus outside the station, down the arrow-straight road that bisects the golf course, towards Ynyslas. On Calamity's lap was a bag from Peacocks containing the sort of coat that used to be popular with medieval Jews and that had now come back into fashion with druid assassins. Meirion said he thought it had something to do with the military. And in West Wales there is only one military. The Welsh Foreign Legion, famous or notorious depending on the way you looked at it, for the campaign to liberate the former Welsh colony of Patagonia in 1961.

It was all more than a quarter of a century ago now, but for the army of broken ghosts that haunted the fields and lanes of West Wales the memory burned as fiercely as ever. Five minutes in a recruiting office above Boots was all it took to seal their fate — farm boys who'd never been further than Builth Wells rubbing shoulders with a rag-bag of foreign intellectuals, artists and soldiers of fortune. Five minutes to think of a nom de guerre that hadn't already been taken and sign your cross on the dotted line and head off to the Welsh Vietnam. Sorry there's no kйpi blanc — that famous white pillbox hat worn by the heroes of Beau Geste — but here's a free knapsack of woe to carry for the rest of your life.

For two miles the scene was the same, a long line of rolling dunes, unending and unchanging, fringed with tufted marram grass like a lion's mane. The eternal dunes that were really nothing of the sort. Under the coat of scrubby grass the sands were shifting and moving even as we spoke. Come back in a year and if you had a photographic memory you would be shocked at how much everything had changed. Compared to the geological slowness with which mountains altered their shape, the dunes of Ynyslas shifted at high speed: bubbling and boiling like the cloudscapes in time-lapse photography, or like the rippling sinews of a well-fed lion.

When we reached the end we got off and walked past the man in the kiosk on to the wide flat sands of the estuary. A few cars were parked here and there was an ice-cream van with no one to serve. We spotted Cadwaladr outlined against the sky like a Red Indian on the ridge of the dunes; behind him the houses of Aberdovey across the estuary glinted like milk teeth left on a blue-green pillow.

Calamity and I fetched some ice creams from the van and then walked to the top of the dune. Cadwaladr raised an arm in greeting and we sat down on the sandy top.

'You live up here all the time?' I asked.

'Until it gets too cold. Then I spend the winter being chased out of barns by angry farmers.'

'Where do you sleep?' said Calamity.

'Just a bivvy bag. That's all I need.'

'But where do you keep your things?'

'I haven't got any.'

The ice-cream man had smothered the ices in a home-made raspberry sauce that scented the wind with a pungent tang.

Cadwaladr sniffed. 'There's a smell that takes me back,' he said. 'Wild raspberries. It's the smell of spring in Patagonia. They used to grow everywhere.' His eyes misted over. 'Beautiful sight. At a time like that, even when you're a skinny seventeen-year-old, you don't half wonder about the point of travelling round the world to die in such a beautiful place.'

'And then you come home and there's not even a bed for you to sleep in.'

'They promised us a land fit for heroes but when we got back from Patagonia the only work they'd give us was building all these horrible holiday camps and caravan parks. All we got was a land fit for Noddy. But how can a man forget what he has seen when surrounded by such tawdry things?'

He looked at me with an urgency that suggested I might have the answer.

'How can he forget? A lifetime is not enough time, but ... but ... a lifetime is all we are given.'

Calamity slowly drew the coat out of the bag, taking care not to let the paper disturb the moment with a rustle.

'You know,' said Cadwaladr, still lost in thought, 'sometimes, when you stick a blade into a man, you can feel it grating on the bone like a spade hitting the pavement when you shovel snow.' He clenched his fists tightly and added, 'Now when I look out over this beautiful estuary in November and see snow-clouds forming over Barmouth, my heart fills with winter.'

There was a pause and Calamity looked at me. I nodded and she slowly unfolded the coat on the dunes, saying, 'Have you ever seen something like this before?'

Cadwaladr glanced at it and his face darkened. He made a clicking sound deep in his throat as if this coat confirmed all the bad things he had ever thought or suspected about the world. 'Yes, I've seen one like it.'

'We're looking for a man who is being followed by someone wearing a coat like this. We were told it's something to do with the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. Do you know what that is?'

He didn't answer immediately and we waited patiently. Then he said, 'I don't know too much about it.' His words sighed out of him more wistfully than the sand sifting in the wind. There was always an air of soft, otherworldly melancholy about Cadwaladr but today he seemed even more remote.

'The people who know a lot can't tell you.'

'Why not,' I asked. 'Are they scared?'

'Possibly. Terror can do that, so I've heard. But who knows? They can't speak about it. They can't speak about anything really, just like babies before they learn to say Dad.'

'So what was the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment?'

The old soldier took out a scrap of newspaper and a polythene bag filled with salvaged cigarette ends. I wondered where he got them from — ash-trays in buses, the cinema floor ... or maybe the maternity waiting-room where the fathers sit and wait for news.

'Officially it doesn't exist. And never did. Which is strange because I know some men who volunteered for it. It was some sort of military psychological experiment. In Patagonia we called that sort of thing "Psyops". It was based at the old sanatorium out at Ysbyty Ystwyth.'

'The old sanatorium was bought by the Philanthropist,' said Calamity. 'He's the new owner.'

'Is he anything to do with this experiment?' I asked.

'Maybe,' said Cadwaladr. 'Maybe not. I don't know. All I know for sure is the guys who came back were not the same as the ones who went.'

'In what way?'

'They were just different. Quiet, and brooding, and when you looked into their eyes you saw a sort of emptiness — as if all the life had been sucked out of them and all that remained was a husk of a man ... That druid chap from the clothes shop was one of them, what was his name?'

'Valentine?'

Cadwaladr nodded. 'Yeah, him. They say he went cuckoo after it. And there was Waldo, of course. Poor Waldo.'

For a second or two he said nothing more, staring beyond our little group to the infinite ocean.

'Who was Waldo?' asked Calamity.

Cadwaladr pressed his eyes closed with a deep weariness of the soul. 'Waldo was the saddest man ever to serve in that war. His road to Calvary began on Christmas Day when we organised a game of football in no-man's-land with the enemy. Ah! What a day that was! I remember it as if it was yesterday. When the shelling stopped and the silence rang in our ears so loud it almost hurt. Meeting our enemies face to face and clasping them in the embrace of true brotherhood. The smell of sherry and cinnamon and mince pies, mingling with the wild heather, the fresh sharp tang of distant snow. The sweet strains of 'Stille Nacht' drifting across to us ... And then the football. What a glorious kick-about it was. Four all after ninety minutes, both sides evenly matched, you couldn't separate them. And then, alas, in injury time one of their guys dived in the box - typical South American player. The ref awarded a penalty and they scored and that was it. They'd won. We didn't say anything, of course, because it was Christmas but a lot of guys were not happy about it. And the incident became the cancer that ate away at Waldo's soul. Waldo was the goalie, you see.'

Cadwaladr shuddered and violently lofted his cornet, jerking back his head like a penguin catching a fish. He crunched off the pointy base with the venom of a wolf cracking a thigh-bone with its chops, and then sucked greedily on the vanilla marrow. 'One day I will tell you the rest of it,' he said, the ice cream bubbling in his mouth like lava from a fissure on the ocean floor. 'But not today, my heart is too full.'

Chapter 10

Once upon a time you just went mad and gave everyone a good laugh. They created a special position for you - the village idiot. You didn't mind too much because you were mad and being a buffoon was probably no worse than tilling the squire's fields for a living. Later when the world got more enlightened they got rid of the job and called you a fool or an idiot or an imbecile. And it was still OK to laugh. They weren't squeamish about where they put you either, or what they called it. Asylums for criminal lunatics, asylums for incurable lunatics, hospitals for the insane, pauper asylums, workhouses for lunatics ... If you were rich you might end up in a chancery asylum, but it was still a madhouse. Then someone had the bright idea of charging for the privilege of laughing at you. It was quite a popular pastime for a while, even more than the zoo. By the outbreak of the Great War and the new age of science they had managed to discern four grades of madness: idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded people and moral defectives. And nowadays, of course, there are hospitals for the mentally ill, and no one is mad any more. Although when you walk down the streets of Aberystwyth on Saturday night you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

After we left Cadwaladr we picked up the car and drove out to Ysbyty Ystwyth to take a look at the old sanatorium. You might have called the Georgian country house with its ivy-covered redbrick exterior handsome if you didn't know the history. But there wasn't anyone for miles around who didn't. It's a taint by association that a house can never shake off.

It hadn't always specialised in the insane. After 1918 the house was taken over by a charity set up to treat victims of shellshock. And after that, when that particular malady lost its fashionable appeal, even though the victims didn't lose their shock, it became a sanatorium treating TB patients who couldn't afford to go to Switzerland. Later still, in the fifties and sixties it reverted to treatment of the mentally ill, and especially the fashionable new cure for depression — electro-convulsive therapy. People living nearby claim the lights in their sitting-rooms used to flicker during a busy day.

The grim, forbidding prospect instantly squashed the mood in the car. It was only a building, of course, just bricks and mortar and ivy and joists of dry wood and crumbling plaster. And yet it seemed impregnated like a sponge with all the woe that had been spilled there. The windows were dark and filled with an emptiness like the eye sockets in a skull. The deserted grounds seemed still alive with broken men from the trenches being wheeled around in bath chairs by nurses in funny uniforms. Cadwaladr's especial distaste for the place was understandable: many of the soldiers from the Patagonian conflict had been brought here and left to rot. The perimeter was enclosed by a stone wall, green with ivy and lichen and topped by newly installed rolls of razor-wire. Signs were placed at evenly spaced intervals along the wall warning us of various dire things. Private. Keep Out. Guard-dog patrols. And one sign said chillingly: 'Trespassers will be shot. By Order The Philanthropist'.

I dropped Calamity off in town and spent the rest of the afternoon flashing the top of the fudge box round places where the girl might be recognised. There was nothing remarkable about the picture. A young girl sitting at a spinning-wheel in an old cottage. Dressed in a shawl, coarse woollen skirt and of course the stovepipe hat. The girl was pretty, they always were. Might even have been beautiful but you couldn't tell with all the make-up. For a man whose only contact with female company was theology students she might have been attractive, bewitching even.

The same pattern of polite boredom was repeated everywhere I went. One swift uninterested glance at the picture and then a shrug. Sure they'd seen girls like this before, hundreds of them, but they couldn't say if they'd seen this one. They were ten a penny. No, make that a hundred. Stick around in Aberystwyth and you'll see a busload every week. Simple unlettered farm girls from up beyond Talybont, playing the one half-decent card life had dealt them - their looks. Nothing spectacular, but good enough. Girls who dreamed of making it big as a model, maybe featuring in the ads for the tourist board or on the cover of the Cliff Railway brochure, but all they ever got were the knitting patterns and the fudge boxes. But of course you can't make a living out of modelling fudge boxes no matter how frugal you are, but a pretty girl in a stovepipe hat can always make a bit extra on the side in the druid speakeasies down by the harbour.

The men from the cheese yards were bent over the counter of Sospan's even further than usual, huddling together for the collective warmth. As if the inside was a brazier and they were watchmen sick of watching. I dropped by and mentioned the Philanthropist, but even Sospan, for once, had little to say on the subject. Everyone agreed that only a foreigner would have bought the haunted house. But they couldn't agree on where he came from. Some said he was a Texan and others a Saudi prince. All agreed he had made his money in oil. Or white slave trafficking. 'I heard he's got an idiot wife locked away there,' said one man. 'Who hasn't?' answered another, and someone else added, 'He can have mine if he wants!'

I passed round the picture of the girl and again it was the same response. Why get upset about a particular one when you can get any number down at the harbour and they all look the same anyway don't they? Once they've got the hat on and the make-up and the wig. Then someone wishing to be helpful suggested I try Spin Doctors on Chalybeate Street, and wishing to be polite I said I would. 'You mind she doesn't put a spell on you!' someone shouted after me as I left.

The shop smelled of must and dry cardboard. It could have been an ironmonger's or a bike shop but the frames in the window and hanging from the ceiling had one wheel and four legs. A bell tinkled in the back as I walked in, ducking under the foliage of hanging spinning-wheels. In the centre of the shop there was a space cleared among the bric-a-brac and a wheel stood on a podium. Even knowing nothing about them I could see this one was special. The frame was a modern carbon fibre composite, fitted with a derailleur gear-change made by Shimano of Japan. There was a racing-style aluminium footgrip on the treadle, and an alloy hub on the wheel. An enamel logo on the main frame tube said 'The Sleeping Beauty'.

'She's a beauty that one, sir!'

I looked down and saw the old lady, no bigger than Mrs Pepperpot, four feet nothing perhaps, clad in the traditional witches' livery of black: ebony puritan shoes with shiny buckles; charcoal stockings and black skirt, blouse, bodice, shawl and fingerless mittens; obsidian beads and studs in her ears and a sable knitting needle through a bun of hair now silver but that no doubt had once been black. She stroked the Sleeping Beauty lovingly. 'Handcrafted titanium distaff. None of your injection-moulded tat. Last for ever this one will.'

'That's good, I hate it when they fall apart halfway through a spin.'

'Is it for yourself, or are you looking for a gift?'

I took out the fudge-box top. 'I was actually looking for a driver.' I pushed the lid under her nose and she cast an eye over. Her face fell slightly.

'I'm afraid we don't sell girls. It's too much trouble feeding them up.'

'Yeah I know, they leave a trail of your best bread all the way home; tell me about the wheel.'

'Cheap plastic wood, probably Taiwanese. You wouldn't get very far spinning on it but then the people who take these sort of snaps don't care too much about that, do they?'

'You ever sell one like this?'

'I'm afraid we don't handle that end of the market.'

'What about the girl?'

'What about her? She's no spinner, that's for sure. Her seating position's all crooked, and her hands are in the wrong place. The way she's clutching the distaff like that you'd think it was a man's "you know what". Still, you can hardly blame her, I suppose, it's probably what she's used to, isn't it! Treadle trollops we call them.' And then added, 'I've just put the cauldron on, if you'd like a cup of tea?'

'No thanks,' I said turning to go. 'I'm in a hurry.'

'Well, would you like to sign the petition?'

'Petition for what?'

'Mrs Llantrisant. We're hoping to get her sentence reduced.'

'But I'm the one who put her there.'

'Oh I know, but you couldn't have known they would stick her on that cold damp island. It's giving her all sorts of problems with her joints.'

'I'm sorry,' I said, 'I don't think I can sign it. I mean, what if she starts another flood?'

She followed me to the door and held it open. 'Are you sure I can't interest you in the Sleeping Beauty? We do hire purchase.'

'I'll let you know, I still need to look at a few others first.'

She smiled knowingly, and shouted after me, 'Good luck with your search. If you bring me a piece of the girl's hair I can probably ask the spirits for you.'

If the girl was selling herself down by the harbour, the best man to ask was the one who had a professional interest in fallen women - Father Seamus. I strolled with renewed sense of purpose up Great Darkgate Street towards the ghetto in the shadow of the castle. I bumped into him coming out of one of the houses where he made pastoral visits. Like many of the houses that had managed to withstand the flood, it now had five or six families instead of two or three. He greeted me and we shook hands. The problems he had to deal with were not that different from the ones his medieval forebears had faced and had the same cause: too many families living in one room, the clothes drying on one radiator, the horrible thick unhealthy fug poisoning the air. But he soldiered on.

'Still fighting the good fight, are we, Father?' I asked cheerfully.

'Oh struggling on, struggling on,' he said, the words delivered with the affected soul-weariness of the man who dons the cloak of the martyr and finds he likes the fit so much he gets a matching pair of gloves made.

'How about yourself, Louie?'

'Struggling on, struggling on.'

He put a fraternal arm on my shoulder and led me down the street. 'Don't give up now, we need men like you.'

'Do we, Father? Do we really?'

He stopped and took a closer look at me, his finely attuned antenna warning him of an impending loss of faith. 'Are you all right, Louie?'

'Of course.' I showed him the photo. 'I'm looking for this girl.'

He took it wordlessly, peered at it and then handed it back. 'Sorry, Louie. You know how it is. I've seen loads like this.'

'Yeah I know how it is.'

'Sorry I can't be more help. Is she in trouble?'

'I don't know. Probably. Isn't everybody?'

'That's why we need men like you, Louie. Men who scorn the comforts of the hearth and the softness of straw beneath their heads. Men who stand guard so weaker men can sleep. Men who climb the cold stone steps to the battlement and stand watch, blasted by the icy wind, their eyes unvisited by sleep and smarting in the winter frost. Silent centurions, Mr Knight, to hold out their shield. Men like you and Mr Cefnmabws at the lighthouse flashing his light to guide the ships safely home.'

'Amen,' I said.

We stopped at the street corner and prepared to part.

'And don't forget to include yourself in that list, Father,' I added.

He smiled wanly. 'I do what I can with the strength God gives me. It isn't much.'

I said goodbye and walked through the churchyard behind the old college. As I walked the words of his sermon echoed in my mind. It was a pretty speech, but it didn't really ring true. Was I really a silent centurion, scorning the soft straw to climb up the icy battlement? I didn't think so. I certainly didn't feel like one. But one thing I was pretty certain of. When I showed him the picture of the girl and he said he didn't know her, he had been lying.

I reached the bit of the Prom where it bent like an elbow jutting out into the frothing water. There was a girl standing on the D-shaped buttress, staring out to sea, wearing an old fur coat from the Salvation Army shop. It was Ionawr. I touched her gently on the shoulder so as not to make her start. But she did anyway and looked round. Then she squealed and hugged me and when we broke off she still held one of my hands in hers.

'I've been looking for you everywhere,' she said.

'I was out at Ynyslas.'

'I've got someone who wants to meet you. Well, he doesn't really want to but I told him he had to.'

'Who is it?'

'Remember after Mrs Beynon's you told me about that monk with the suitcase?'

I nodded.

'I know who it is, it's one of my regular ... er ... you know ...'

'Friends?'

'Yes. He'll be in the new Moulin tonight.' She jerked her head back slightly to indicate the pier behind her where the replacement for the famous old club in Patriarch Street had recently sprung up. 'You don't go there much, do you?'

'Not really, too many memories, I suppose.' I showed her the fudge-box top and this time I got a reaction.

'I don't know who the girl is,' she said, 'but I recognise the location. I've done some work there myself. It's the Heritage Folk Museum.'

I went to the Cabin in Pier Street and met Calamity. Her expression told me straightaway that she had something on her mind.

'Why didn't you tell me?' she said when I sat down.

'Tell you what?'

'About Custard Pie.'

I breathed in sharply.

'He asked to see me, didn't he?'

'Yes.'

'So why didn't you tell me?'

'You know damn well why I didn't. Because if I had, the next minute you would be down there visiting him.'

'And what's wrong with that?'

'Everything's wrong.'

'That's not an answer.'

'I don't want you having anything to do with him. It's too dangerous.'

'I'm not a kid, you know.'

'So you keep telling me. You're sixteen and three quarters. It may seem a lot to you but, believe me, it isn't.'

'What happened to us being partners?'

'The first job of a partner is to take care of the other one.'

'But what can he do, he's behind bars?'

'I don't know what he can do. I'm not smart enough to think of anything, but he is.'

'Louie, you know I have to go, we're on a case.'

'There's no point going anyway.'

'No point?'

'Of course not. You think he's going to tell you something that will help us?'

'No point?'

'Not even a microscopic one.'

'Well you're a crap detective then,' she said, eyes watering with resentment and confusion.

My eyes widened in surprise. 'What's that all about?'

'Well, you went to see him, didn't you? Why did you waste your time if there was no point?'

'I ... er ... It was only after I went that I realised that there was no point.'

She blew a raspberry.

'How did you find out anyway?'

'I'm a detective.'

I sighed and Calamity stood up. 'I'm going.'

'I forbid you!' I said as she left, knowing full well that nothing I said would make any difference. But I said it all the same. 'I forbid you.' It was an old trick I'd learned from King Canute.

I sat there staring at my tea for a while and then ran out and down Pier Street towards the sea. I could see Calamity just about to turn left on to the Prom, so I turned into King Street behind the old college and cut through the Crazy Golf. From there I walked across the road and turned towards the pier. A few steps and she almost bumped into me. She turned and started to walk away but I caught her arm and pulled her over to the railings. She stood there not struggling but keeping her gaze stolidly averted, finding something improbably fascinating in the side of the pier.

Neither of us spoke and finally she said, 'What do you want?'

'I just want to tell you to be careful.'

She turned and looked at me, her eyes wet and gleaming. 'So I can go then?'

'What's the point of stopping you, you were going to go anyway, weren't you?'

'No, I wasn't. You forbade me.'

I put my arm over her shoulder, 'Just be careful and keep away from the bars, and whatever you do, don't believe a word he says. OK?'

She nodded.

*

Meirion was enjoying his usual early-evening aperitif at the Rock Cafe, his big belly wedged in between the immovable plastic seat and the edge of the table. Spread out before him a gazette of English and Welsh seaside towns preserved in pink sugar: Blackpool, Llandudno, Tenby, Brighton. I sat down and ordered the aniseed one with black and white stripes.

He had just finished a piece for the morning edition on the death of Mr Marmalade. It was, he said, a typical Meirion piece — hard-hitting, authoritative, tough but fair, and like all Meirion's hard-hitting, authoritative, tough and fair pieces it would never be published for fear of upsetting all the bigshots who owned the town. Still, he had to write them if he wanted to collect his salary.

He told me what he had managed to dig up on the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. 'I spoke to the chap who covered the story,' he began. 'It seems to have been some advanced neuroscientific research conducted by the military at the sanatorium. They chose that place because folk were already scared of it so they would keep away. Then something went badly wrong and the project was wound up in a hurry. It's all officially denied, of course.'

'So where does this Philanthropist fit in, the one who bought the place?'

'Dr Faustus? He was in charge. No one knows much about him, he's supposed to be some sort of experimental neuroscientist who had some pretty far-out theories about false memory syndrome. Apparently he was thrown out of the scientific establishment for being too crazy. After the thing was wound up the folks living out there started seeing things. Well a "thing" actually. A monster they said, or a ghost or something, living in the woods. The most celebrated case was a family out at Pontrhydygroes who saw something while on a picnic. They were making a home-movie. Didn't notice anything at the time but when the film came back they saw something in the trees behind them, something moving. That's what they say, anyway. The whole family disappeared not long after that. Their breakfast half-eaten on the table, the tea still warm in the pot. Never seen again. No sign of the film either. A lot of people who made statements to the police were later by questioned by a strange otherworldly man, dressed in medieval dress. He sounds a bit like this chap you mentioned in the Peacocks' coat. They didn't say what he wanted but after that they all withdrew their statements.' 'So there's a time-traveller walking around in the woods.' Meirion tore off a piece of bread to scrape up the last bits of rock from his plate. 'That's what they say. Of course, I prefer rational explanations myself. It may be possible that the military have been experimenting with some sort of time-travel device, and now there's a sixteenth-century Jew haunting the woods of Ysbyty Ystwyth; but if you ask me, it is far more likely to be a prowler wearing one of those coats they sell in Peacocks.'

The Heritage Folk Museum was housed in an old whalebone godown overlooking the harbour. In a series of rooms various scenes from seventeenth- or nineteenth-century rural life were acted out by the sort of people who couldn't hold down the type of jobs the twentieth century had to offer. Sitting at a spinning-wheel, lying on a bed pretending to die in childbirth, or with a face covered in fake smallpox weals ... It wasn't very demanding so long as you didn't have to say anything.

In the entrance hall there was an artist in dungarees putting the finishing touches to a mural of Mrs Bligh-Jones. It was done in that heroic style you get in Warsaw Pact town halls, where the worker holds aloft a hammer and leads forward the proletariat to a Socialist promised land. The artist had chosen to depict the moment just after the fateful decision to abandon the van: Mrs Bligh-Jones, Mrs Gorseinon, Mrs Tolpuddle and Mrs Montgomery strung out against the backdrop of the mountain; roped together at the waist, and wearing bowling shoes instead of crampons. I smiled politely at the artist but, to be honest, it was pretty crap.

Someone touched my arm lightly and I looked round. It was Marty's mum.

'Hello, Louie. How are you? Haven't seen you for so long.'

'I know, I've been meaning to visit, but ...'

She squeezed my arm. 'It's O K. I understand how busy you must be.'

We stood side by side and looked at the picture and when the artist went out for a cigarette Marty's mum glared at her. 'I would never say anything but, if you ask me, it's wrong. It didn't ought to be allowed.'

'What didn't?'

'What they've done to Mrs Cefnmabws! She's not there.'

She nodded indignantly at the mural. She was right, there should have been five figures in the landscape, not four.

'I know she lost her bottle,' Marty's mum continued, 'and ran off raving into the blizzard, but that didn't happen until later, did it? When they left the van she was still in charge. Mrs Bligh-Jones should be at the back, not the front.'

'Maybe it's something to do with perspective or something.'

'Perspective my foot! They've airbrushed her out of history, that's what they've done. That Mrs Bligh-Jones is such a busybody!'

I took her for a cup of tea and in the cafe she told me what brought her to the museum.

'There's been some fresh evidence about Marty.'

I turned and looked more closely at her. 'Fresh in what way?'

'They've released some of the official papers from the inquiry. The statute of limitations is up, isn't it? I finally found out the answer to a mystery that has haunted me ever since that morning he left for school and never came back.' She leaned closer and lowered her voice. 'That night before the cross-country run, he was out in the frosty woods collecting kindling for his granny. Away for hours he was. When he got back home he was half-starved with cold and his new coat was torn in half. I wasn't half angry with him, the perisher, but he wouldn't say how he did it. But now I know, don't I?'

'So what was it?'

'Apparently there was this piece of evidence at the inquiry that they didn't release for fear of embarrassing the Church. It was the testimony of a friar — one of them mendicant ones — and he had been lost in the woods that same night. Blue with cold he was, because he didn't have a proper coat. Well, they're not supposed to, are they? It's all part of the mortification. It seems when Marty saw him he tore his own coat in two and gave half to the friar.'

I patted her hand. 'He was a fine boy.'

'They kept quiet about it so as not to upset the poor chap. He was embarrassed, you see, because he thought all the other mendicants would laugh at him for taking charity from a little schoolboy.'

'I expect he would have been mortified.'

Marty's mum nodded without understanding and then carried on excitedly, 'Anyway, I've just been speaking to the people who run this place and they're thinking of making a tableau of it -to illustrate the theme of suffering and charity through the ages. I've just been giving them some of his old clothes.'

After Marty's mum left with my promise to visit her soon I wandered into the exhibit hall. I showed the pictures of the Dean and the girl to the doctor carrying a jar of leeches. He recognised them, and said he seemed to vaguely remember them working there for a while, drifting in and drifting out as people tended to do. Workers seldom stayed long — life there was hard and the working conditions primitive. The girl had been spinning and the man had mended coracles. The last he'd heard the Dean had got a job working as a satyr in the Beltane speakeasy.

Chapter 11

As I sat in the office that evening I felt my spirits sinking with the barometer and then a phone call from Llunos sent them lower still. One of his men had pulled in some junior tough guy who had been boasting about the hit on Marmalade. He said it had been pre-planned and meant to scare him off talking to me. The kid wouldn't say who paid for it. Of course, it would be stupid to blame myself but that didn't stop me doing it. The actual cause of death might have been a weak heart, but he was an old man who would still be alive today if I hadn't gone to see him. If I wasn't to blame, who was? I put on my hat and coat and then the phone rang again. I snatched the receiver and barked into it and then listened. The line was awful: hissing and squawking faded in and out as if I was tuning a short-wave radio and a girl's faint voice said, 'Louie, it's me.'

'Who's me?' I said as the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention.

'It's me, oh Louie, it's me.' A voice so faint, drowning in a sea of static.

'Who?' I tried again.

'Me, Louie, it's me. Myfanwy.'

'What?!' I shouted. 'I can't hear you!'

'Myfanwy. Oh, Louie, help me!'

Then the line clicked dead. I sat frozen, immobile for a split second, and then jabbed my fingers uselessly on to the prongs of the telephone the way they do in the movies but that never works in real life.

Out on the Prom the breeze was moist and heavy with the tang of salt, and laced in tantalising bursts with another smell almost as primal: hot dogs. That oh so heartbreaking smell, the pure essential oil of night falling on the Prom, gathered long ago in those lost days when you were small, and on holiday with your mum and dad. Gathered in the magical falling dusk when the seagulls have gone to roost beneath the ironwork of the pier; and you all take a stroll after dinner, way past your normal bedtime, towards an amusement arcade that flashes and chimes and dings. Out at sea angry rumblings light up the clouds in distant flashes, like celestial pinball. You watch it all in awe, and little know that nothing in your life will ever be as good as this again.

The smell of onions frying ... a scent that years later still unleashes a craving — like the snatch of an unknown melody — for a lost Eden that has no gate. That has never had a gate. Because the truth about hot dogs is this: no smell in the world promises so much and delivers so little. Even as a kid when you buy it you find it tastes of nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. The biggest zero ever. A warm, bland mush as far removed from the perfume it adds to the night air as the lotus flower from the slime that spawns it.

It's as if some master perfumer and necromancer had foreseen all the broken promises of your life to come, all the pangs of unrequited love and unreturned letters; the torment of watching a phone that never rings; the bright expectancy of fresh hope at breakfast, in ruins by sunset ... it was as if he took all these things and blended them into a single fragrance and called it whatever the French is for Disappointment — Dйsolй or Chagrin or something. The smell of hot dogs on the Prom at night. The scent of pure Chagrin.

*

There was a consternation at the pier. Police 'scene-of-crime' tape, a flashing blue light and Father Seamus taking charge. I worked it all out in the blink of an eye. The workmen rebuilding the pier had moved the entrance to the bingo parlour two feet to the left. A swarm of confused grannies were there now, buzzing around like bees who come home at the end of the day to find the hive has gone. The priest offering comfort. The ambulance just arriving. Down on the green slimy rocks, exactly below the point where the old entrance had been for fifty years, an old lady face-down and not moving. The sea washing over her, stained pink.

I didn't give a damn. There were a lot worse ways to go in this town. I just shrugged and walked under the arch of coloured lights, down the wooden tunnel that ran along the side of the pier, to the new Moulin at the end. Behind in the distance I could still hear Father Seamus giving comfort, could almost hear his two fingers swishing up, down, left, right — drawing crosses in the air as cheaply as a washed-up actress gives out air-kisses. I smiled grimly to myself. I had an appointment with him tonight but he didn't know it yet. Tonight he would discover that wearing a brown dress with a rope round the belly didn't guarantee immunity in this world. He wouldn't like it, but I didn't give a damn. There were plenty of things that I didn't like too. And it wasn't because he was a liar, or had spoken earlier with such unchristian contempt over the spot where Bianca died in my arms; and it wasn't because I was heading down the corridor now to a club I had vowed never to visit. And it wasn't because somewhere out there tonight, probably smelling the same fried onions, was a man in trouble called Dean Morgan, because I didn't really give a damn about him either. Just as the lifeboatman doesn't give a damn about the stupid fool he fishes from the sea. It wasn't because of any of this, although it all helped. It was just because tonight I didn't give a damn, the way sometimes you don't. So I walked down the tunnel towards the new Moulin and squeezed my fingers into a fist in anticipation of the priest's soft pink jaw.

What makes a club? If it's the spirit of the people who gather there, then the new Moulin was very much like the old. The decor was cheaper and more makeshift than the original; and perhaps there wasn't quite the same panache about it; but it still had the most important ingredients: darkness and a mix of people from every walk of Aberystwyth life, all unified by the common desire to leave their scruples at the door. And most importantly there were the Moulin Girls lolling about in their stovepipe hats and shawls and not much else. Sweet soft things who for a little money would do sweet soft things.

Just like in the old club, tough guys in penguin suits stood at the door, and once inside it was hot, crowded, loud and sweaty. Waitresses walked round with trays of food, others took drink orders or ushered you to a table. In the centre of the room there was a space cleared for dancing, and set around it were tables with flickering candles, and hanging from the ceiling were twirling disco balls. Towards the back was a stage and in front of this a private table for Jubal and his guests. I felt a rush of cool air over the top of my head and looked up to see two men in satyr trousers sitting on giant swings, arcing slowly and gracefully above the crowd. They were Bill and Ben. A cowgirl walked past lighting cigarettes with a cigarette-lighter pistol, and another girl took my hand and led me through the throng to a table. I sat down and ordered a rum as a squeal alerted me to the high jinks over at Jubal's table. Father Seamus had arrived and by way of a welcome drink was drinking Vimto out of Mrs Bligh-Jones's shoe. She was squealing at the depravity of it. Once he'd drained the shoe he leered and beat his chest like Tarzan and everybody laughed but when his gaze caught mine he lost some of his sparkle and sat down uncertainly. Never was it more truly said: a man is known by the company he keeps.

My drink arrived and I looked around for Ionawr but couldn't see her; no doubt she would find me easily enough. I watched the stage where there was an unknown starlet singing. A Myfanwy wannabe without the looks or the voice. But she sang all the usual songs and the crowd were pleased. And then Mrs Bligh-Jones took the mike. She made an improbable nightclub singer. She stood rather stiffly, the spotlight glinting on her Sam Browne; her tunic sleeve flapping emptily. One of her spectacle lenses had been taped over to cure a recurrent lazy eye. She spoke into the mike like a schoolgirl addressing assembly and explained that she wished to sing a few hymns to give thanks to her Lord and Saviour for her deliverance from the blizzard on Pumlumon. A murmur of pious approval drifted round the room. During her act Ionawr turned up and led me by the hand to the back.

As we threaded our way through the throng Mrs Bligh-Jones took a bow. Applause erupted like firecrackers and was then cut instantly by the appearance of a man on the dance-floor. It was Jubal, in black tie and burgundy cummerbund. Everyone drew breath in expectation as he passed through them with slow determined steps - a comic pantomime, familiar to everyone, of the man who emerges from the swing doors of the saloon and walks down the dusty street to rescue his kidnapped bride. On the stage, half-blinded by the spotlight, Mrs Bligh-Jones simmered with expectation like a Saxon maid when the Vikings are banging on the door. Ionawr and I halted our progress at the edge of the room and watched. Jubal stopped at the lip of the stage, paused half a beat longer to milk the moment to the full, and then reached into the air and drew a figure of eight with his index finger. A collective sigh came from all the ladies around the floor. Jubal turned his finger into a pistol and fired an imaginary bullet at the bandleader who laughed, clutched good-humouredly at his heart, and in the same instant struck up the band. Mrs Bligh-Jones squealed and jumped down into her lover's arms with the faith of a trapeze artist and was instantly swept away in a giddy tango.

Ionawr tugged at my hand and we pushed our way through the doorway at the back and down the corridor, past the private rooms. The sound of revellers clapping in time to the Latin beat pursued us. But as we trudged deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of the pier the sound faded and gave way to the moan of the sea, a thick intoxicating boom — like blood pounding in our ears — as if the corridor was an artery leading us to a giant heart. At the very end, the entrance guarded by a curtain of clacking wooden beads, was the toffee-and-opium-apple den. We clacked our way through.

The room was filled with hot sickly-sweet smoke and in near-pitch darkness, the only light a few candles and the red glow from the ends of the pipes. There was no music or any sound at all except the noise that recumbent people make when they change position or draw on a pipe; or suck a toffee apple before groaning softly.

Ionawr led me to a man somewhere in the room, I couldn't say where. He lay reclined on a mat on the floor, a tray of toffee apples before him, and next to it an opium pipe. He looked up slowly and the flickering reflections in his eyes said that he was still with us, after a fashion.

'This is the man I was telling you about,' said Ionawr, although it was unclear which of us she was talking to. He reached out a feeble hand and we shook.

'You want to know about the Dean?' His voice was husky and thin but steady.

'Yes,' I said.

'It was all a terrible mistake,' said the monk. 'A terrible, terrible mistake. If the man is dead it will be on my conscience for ever.'

'Tell me what happened.'

The monk took a bite from one of the toffee apples and then said dreamily, 'I just drifted into it, really. For a while I was a monk down at Caldy Island, until I found out how they had lied to me. All the tales about them making Benedictine — it wasn't true. You never get near the stuff. All they sell in the gift shop is home-made mint sauce and scented soap. And the communion wine is piss ... So I ran away and ended up in Aberystwyth at the Seaman's Mission. And before long I became a gofer for the druids, a runner I suppose you'd call it. Doing errands and things, making drops and that. That's how I got the valise. I was supposed to deliver it to a Raven. You know what that is, I suppose?'

'It's the name for a male agent who ensnares a female agent by seducing her.'

'Yes, an assassination technique more properly known as a honey-trap, although it is more usual for the man to be the victim, for him to fall victim to a beautiful girl he unaccountably befriends in a bar. I was told to expect this man and to give him a valise.'

'Who paid you to give him the case?'

'I've no idea. I'm just a link in a chain. I know only the link that comes after me, not the one that comes after him nor the one that preceded me. That's how it works.'

'And you gave the case to the Dean by mistake?'

The man cried out in pain. 'But how the hell was I supposed to know, dammit!? Look out for a dark, cruel, cold-blooded killer, they said. With a feather in his cap. And then this chap turned up and I was having a drink with him that night in the bar and I said, 'What do you do for a living, then?' And he said, 'My trade is death. To me it holds no sting; to me flesh is just meat and the cold impersonal cut of steel as commonplace as the pen is to the clerk.' Well, what would you have done?'

'But he was an undertaker.'

The monk's voice rose in anguish. 'I know, I know! You think I'm not aware of that? It was just a harmless piece of shop talk to him. And the bloody feather he just found on his window-sill that morning. That's pretty, he thought, it's such a lovely day I think I'll put it in my hat. The fucking idiot!'

'And after that, the Raven turned up?'

'That's right. Wearing one of those coats they sell in Peacocks for nineteen ninety-nine. I thought it was a bit corny myself, dressing like that, but who am I to judge?'

'And what was in the valise?'

'How would I know?'

'You mean you didn't look?'

'Are you mad? It was sealed. You think I would be stupid enough to break a seal, like?'

'I would have.'

'That's because you don't know these people like I do.'

I stood up, dizzy and disorientated in the darkness, and made for the glimmer of light that betrayed the outline of a door. Just before I reached it a hand grabbed the edge of my trousers. I looked down and beheld a sight that has haunted me ever since. The wreck of man I had once known: Valentine. He lay there so thin and emaciated his face had become a gargoyle and on his lower arm the flesh had grown so thin you could see the candle shining through. Valentine the former style-guru of the druids, his Crimplene safari suit now filthier than the carpet in a pub toilet. His mouth pulled back in a rictus of pain like a snarling dog. I kneeled down, staring in wide-eyed horror at this shattered piece of humanity.

'Valentine, what happened out there at the sanatorium? What did you see?'

The words kindled a feeble light in the empty pits of his eyes. A tiny, quivering gleam like the stormlamp of a wanderer taking refuge from the tempest in an empty house.

'What did you see out there? What was it, this Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment?'

The grip of his hand on my trouser-leg tightened slightly, like the claw of a wren. Then, slowly, his mouth opened and through teeth the colour of caramel he whispered, 'The horror! The horror!'