The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

Chapter 8

Refugees from caravan sites shuffled through the town, glistening and torpid in the wet, not so much a drizzle as a tingling miasma of rain. The damp seeped up through my bones and made the climb up the stairs to the office feel more difficult, as if gravity had increased.

The window had been left ajar and rain formed a pool on the windowsill. Calamity had put newspaper down to soak up the puddle. The rooftops of the town looked like they had been varnished. The phone had been replaced and was ringing as I entered. I picked it up.

‘This is Mrs Lewis.’

‘Hello Mrs Lewis.’

‘You remember me? From Laura Place.’

‘The doctor’s housekeeper! How is he today?’

‘Never mind that. I have something that might interest you.’

‘Really?’

‘Information that might be useful to your case.’

‘What case is this?’

‘Don’t get fresh with me, Mr Knight. The whole town knows you are a private detective.’

‘I expect they do; it’s not a secret.’

‘I haven’t got much time; the doctor is taking his afternoon nap but he is easily roused. Listen very carefully. The price will be £25. Cash would be preferable, but I will accept a personal cheque drawn on an account bearing your name.’

‘What about a postal order?’

She hesitated. ‘That’s a bit troublesome, but I expect . . . oh I see. That was a wisecrack, wasn’t it? I was warned to expect this sort of flippancy.’

‘I’m not sure if it counts as a wisecrack.’

‘Mr Knight, do you want the information or not?’

‘Tell me what it is.’

‘You must think I’m daft. If I tell you what it is you won’t have to pay for it.’

‘But how can I pay for it if I don’t know what it is?’

I could sense a growing exasperation. ‘B . . . but you . . . you always pay for your information, don’t you?’

‘Not always. Sometimes people give it to me for free, although that happens less and less these days. Usually when I pay it’s for something I want and I know the party has but doesn’t want to give me.’

‘But that’s me.’

‘Yes, but I don’t know what you’ve got.’

‘It’s about the matter you were discussing with the doctor.’

‘And what was that?’

‘As if you didn’t know.’

‘Oh, I know all right; I was just wondering how you knew. You weren’t there.’

‘It’s possible I may have overheard some of your conversation with your girl while I was waiting for the kettle to boil.’

‘That can happen.’

‘Sometimes words carry –’

‘I’ve noticed that. Especially through keyholes. It’s something to do with the acoustics in old houses . . . Aberystwyth is famous for it.’

‘Such impertinence!’

‘Just tell me what you’ve got, and I can warn you now it won’t be worth £25. Maybe a tenner if it’s really good.’

‘Fifteen pounds is my final offer.’

‘OK, twelve if I really like it. That’s my final offer.’

‘It’s about someone called Iestyn Probert.’

‘What about him?’

‘He came to see the doctor the night the boys robbed the Coliseum cinema.’

I tightened my grip on the phone; it was almost as if she had sent an electric jolt along the line. Mrs Lewis cackled like a witch discussing holiday plans with her familiar. ‘Ha ha! You’re not so cocky now, are you, Mr Big Shot Wise-Cracking Snooper.’

I said nothing, waited for the moment of cheap triumphalism to pass. It took a while.

‘Oh yes, not so cocky now, are we?’

‘That’s very interesting.’

‘More than interesting, I’d say, wouldn’t you? I was surprised, you see, they never mentioned it in the papers.’

‘Yes, I can see why that would surprise you.’

‘Fifteen pound.’

‘It’s not that interesting,’ I lied.

‘Don’t play games with me, Mr Knight, I heard you gasp from here. And that was just the starter, that’s nothing compared to what else I know.’

‘Mrs Lewis –’

‘I’ve got to go, I can hear him stirring. Meet me at the community singing at Castle Point tonight at 9.00.’

There was a pause.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘I was just waiting for you to say, “No police and no funny stuff”.’

‘I won’t rise to your bait. Bring £15 and make sure you are not followed. Castle Point community singing, at the back.’ She hung up.

Calamity having divined that the call had taken me aback, stared at my face for clues.

‘Whose turn is it to make the tea?’ I asked.

Before she could answer there came the sound of singing from the stairwell, a strange mixture of giggling and wailing. A man appeared in the doorway, dressed – except for a white shirt – entirely in black. Black suit, black tie, black silk handkerchief peeping out of his jacket pocket, black pigskin gloves, black shoes. He carried a charcoal fedora with a black band and wore a black flower in his buttonhole. He also carried a folded newspaper. His face was old and wrinkled like a prune but surmounted by a perfectly smooth bald dome of a head which was entirely clear of wrinkles. It made him look ancient and alien like a goblin foetus. His eyes were piercing arctic blue and he smiled.

‘I’ve come about the car,’ he said.

Calamity and I glanced at each other.

He held out the newspaper. ‘Black 1947 Buick, one careful lady owner.’

‘Oh!’ said Calamity. ‘They put the advert in a week early. Oh no.’

The man looked up and around at the room. ‘Wow, a real private detective’s office. I wasn’t lucky enough to see one on my last visit to Earth. My sister was so disappointed.’ A tiny frown flitted across his face and a look of concentration formed. ‘But there is a feature, common to all such places, that is missing.’ He looked up and clicked his fingers. ‘The desk!’

I clicked my fingers too. ‘Why don’t you take a seat, Mr . . .’

‘Joe, my name’s Joe. With an H.’

‘Where does the H go?’

‘Where do they usually go?’

‘Usually they don’t go anywhere; most people spell Joe without an H.’

His face fell. ‘Really?’

‘It’s an old Earth custom.’

‘After the J is probably best,’ said Calamity.

‘After the J, yes, that sounds like a good place.’

‘Jhoe it is then,’ I said.

‘So you’ve come about the car,’ said Calamity.

‘Yes, can I see it now?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Calamity. ‘It’s still stuck at Customs.’

‘Oh, I see. Maybe in that case you can tell me the price; your newspaper advertisement failed to mention it.’

‘We were thinking of offers in the region of £25,000 weren’t we, Louie?’

I avoided her gaze and stared instead at my shoes.

Jhoe looked surprised. ‘They’ve gone up. My last one was $126.42.’

‘That must have been some time ago,’ said Calamity.

‘Yes, it was. My first was in 1947, my second in 1965. I drove the length of Route 66, Chicago to LA. I remember all the Burma-Shave signs.’

Don’t stick your elbow out so far

It might go home in another car

Burma-Shave

‘That’s very good,’ said Calamity.

My job is keeping faces clean

And nobody knows de stubble I’ve seen

Burma-Shave

‘Yes, well, these cars are collectors’ items now,’ I said. ‘They command a premium price.’

‘Oh dear. This news ingroks me terribly.’ It was as if a light behind his cheeks had been switched off.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Calamity.

‘Perhaps we could trade,’ said Jhoe. ‘I could give you my hat.’

Calamity threw me a look of appeal.

‘Hats on Earth don’t generally fetch more than £75,’ I said.

‘Oh, I see. On Noö they are worth more.’

‘So it’s a Noö hat? Why didn’t you say! On Earth a Noö hat generally goes for about a hundred.’

‘But not £25,000,’ said Calamity. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘How are things on Noö these days?’

‘Much the same as ever, really,’ said Jhoe. He looked glum. ‘Still raining.’

‘Does it have to be a Buick?’ Calamity asked.

Jhoe seemed thrown by the question. He frowned.

‘I mean,’ she said hurriedly, ‘how would it be if you bought a car that . . . that wasn’t a black ’47 Buick?’

Jhoe looked baffled, like one of those hunter-gatherers who have no word for numbers greater than three when the TV interviewer asks what two and two make. He pulled his forearms close in front of his chest and hid his face behind his fists. ‘This question completely ingroks me,’ he said.

‘Please don’t be ingrokked,’ said Calamity.

‘Now look what you’ve done with your horseplay,’ I said. ‘She was just joking.’

Jhoe pulled his hands away. ‘Really?’

‘Of course!’ said Calamity.

‘I am relieved,’ said Jhoe. ‘Your bizarre question came close to expressing the thing which is not. And yet you seem such a lovely girl, I couldn’t believe you would say the thing which is not.’

Calamity looked pleased.

‘She used to skip school,’ I said, ‘but she never says the thing which is not.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Calamity.

He gave her a querying look.

‘She means the hot infusion of oriental leaves, not the letter of the alphabet.’

Jhoe brightened. ‘A cup of tea.’

‘It’s made with water,’ added Calamity. She fetched a cup of water from the kitchenette and held it out. He looked at it in wonder. ‘I am honoured. You offer me the water ritual.’ He dipped the tip of his index finger on the surface and then licked his finger in solemn reverence. He looked at Calamity and she did the same. She brought the cup over to me and I followed suit.

‘Now we are water brothers,’ said Jhoe.

I left Calamity to give Jhoe a tour of Aberystwyth and help him send some postcards back to the folks on Noö. I decided to drive home for lunch at my caravan in Ynyslas and perhaps take a swim. The drizzle had stopped and the sky had become blue again with that hard mineral clarity of a spring sky after rain; the few white dots were those a fawn loses before the end of summer. As I left the office someone ran into me. It was Chastity, the girl I had last seen on the Prom casting admiring glances at Meici Jones. Not many girls had ever done that, just as not many had forsaken Shawbury for Clarach in the hope that it would be quieter. ‘I have to go and tell my aunt,’ she said in a breathless rush. ‘He’s bought me a handkerchief, can you believe it!’ She waved the handkerchief. It was a small, white cotton thing with some mauve and pale green stitching at each corner and the initial C. ‘Am I blushing? I’m blushing, aren’t I? Don’t deny it, I know I am.’

‘Maybe a little,’ I said.

‘Goodness knows I’ve never had anything like this before. He says he got it from a catalogue.’ She made a shocked expression. ‘He’s such a scoundrel!’

I gave her a lift to Clarach and she spent the time extolling the quality of the handkerchief’s workmanship. ‘I think it’s Egyptian cotton, but I’m not 100 per cent. I expect so, that’s the best isn’t it, Egyptian?’

I pursed my lips to indicate that I really couldn’t say.

‘It’s certainly very fine. I haven’t seen one as good as this for a long while.’ She held the little square up to the light and then painstakingly folded it. She placed the neatly folded hanky on her knee and leaned back in the seat to admire it. After a while she exclaimed, ‘My word it’s hot today!’ She picked up the hanky and dabbed the sweat from her brow.

‘Open a window,’ I said.

‘No, no! There’s no need, really.’

We passed a farmer and his dog walking along the side of the road. Chastity waved the handkerchief at them, perhaps the first person ever to do such a thing along that road.

‘Be careful you don’t wear it out,’ I said.

She look concerned. ‘Do you think I might?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘Yes, you are right. I’ll put it away . . . no I’ll just put it down here where it’s still handy in case I need it.’

We passed over the hump-backed bridge by the church and turned left. As we pulled into Clarach an ice-cream van was turning on the stones above the beach, preparing to leave. Streams of children radiated outwards like the crowd dispersing after a football match. Chastity gasped, ‘Quick! Let me out, he’s leaving.’ I pulled up sharply. She leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, then jumped out and darted towards the van, waving to the driver to make him wait. I drove back to the junction and turned left onto the slow road to Borth, with an exultation in my heart like a dog who hears his master fetch the lead. The track rises and dips, rises and dips, and the bonnet of the car points skyward for a while, like the prow of a fishing boat, before plunging into the enveloping abyss of green. The succession of hills and dales across which cows wander like currants in a cake acquires a rhythm, and like a musical passage it builds with a sense of expectancy until reaching a crescendo. Everyone who knows this road knows the crescendo: that moment when you clear the brow of the final hill and the coast for the next 50 miles flashes into view. It doesn’t matter how often you have seen it, you are always taken aback by the piercing, glittering beauty. I pulled over onto the verge and leant across to get some sunglasses from the glove compartment. As I did, I noticed Chastity’s handkerchief lying in the footwell. I put it in the glove compartment and made a note to return it before the day was out.

My caravan was on the landward side of the dunes and enjoyed a view over the top of the other caravans through the netting of TV aerials to the Dovey Estuary. When you die, if you have enough clout to get in the VIP seats, this estuary is what you look at. I turned into the main compound and passed a giant silver sweet wrapper discarded at the side of the road, as if a fairy-tale ogre had been dropping litter. When I rounded the bend by the shop and my caravan came into view I realised the giant was Ercwleff and the sweet wrapper was my door.

I climbed wearily out of the car. Ercwleff and Preseli were sitting at my camping table on my folding chairs drinking tea from my pot, invigorated with rum from my bottle. They were eating sandwiches made from bread that looked like it was mine, spread with my Shipham’s crab paste, and drinking straight from my carton of homogenised milk. They weren’t wearing my pyjamas but probably because it wasn’t time yet.

They squinted up at me as I approached. ‘We started without you,’ said Preseli. Ercwleff smiled and lifted the sandwich upwards in the way people do to convey appreciation when their mouths are too full.

‘You didn’t have to break the door. The key is under the mat.’

‘Where’s the fun in that?’ asked Preseli.

‘Looks like I’ll have to replace the door now.’

‘Looks like it,’ said Preseli with a full mouth.

‘Doors are expensive.’

‘Good ones are.’

‘To tell you the truth, I’m getting tired of you destroying my property.’

‘Your problem, peeper, is, you don’t listen. I told you not to go poking your nose in my affairs but you carried on anyway. That desk was a gentle warning, a way of telling you this is what happens to your face when you cross paths with Preseli Watkins. I hear you went to see Doc Digwyl. What for?’

‘Chilblains.’

‘Always cracking wise, eh?’

‘What business is it of yours what I go to see a doctor about?’

‘If you want time off sick I can arrange that.’

‘Is that what you did to Iestyn Probert?’

He carried on chomping nonchalantly, giving no indication of recognising the name. ‘There is no such person.’

‘Maybe not any more.’

‘And there was no such person. There was never anyone by that name.’

‘I heard he took part in the raid on the Coliseum cinema; I heard you were the cop who arrested him.’

‘I arrested the two Richards brothers, who each did a twenty-five year stretch. There was no one else.’

‘That’s not what I heard.’

‘Your informant is delusional.’

‘My informant was Doc Digwyl.’

He gave a fake laugh. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. Apart from the fact that Iestyn Probert never existed, I happen to know that the old doc would never tell you a damn thing about him if he did exist. He’s too busy moping about that woman who walked out on him.’ He threw a crust over his shoulder. ‘I also hear you’ve been friendly with Meici Jones, my new human cannonball. That has to stop, too.’

‘Why would you care about these people?’

‘If I told you that, you wouldn’t have to go round bothering them.’

‘So tell me.’

‘No need because you’re not going to go round bothering them anyway.’ He peeled a triangle of processed cheese and smeared it on a cream cracker. ‘Your food really stinks. Get some Stilton in next time.’

I said nothing but thought about ways to make him go; I let my gaze wander to the shovel lying discarded under the caravan. It wasn’t far away.

Preseli picked up a red triangle of paper napkin and dabbed his fat lips. ‘I don’t want you talking about me or my affairs to the doctor, butcher, baker or candlestick maker, or for that matter my human cannonball. Otherwise I might have to take that job away from him. He likes that job.’

‘None of that means a damn to me. I don’t care about Meici.’

‘So maybe I need to have a conversation with someone you do care about, that little girl for example, the one who works with you. I could give her to Ercwleff to play with; he likes little girls.’

Ercwleff smiled and chomped like the fat kid at your seventh birthday party.

‘I hear he likes rabbits, too.’

Ercwleff beamed. ‘I like rabbits.’

The mayor looked irritated.

‘Hugged one so hard it couldn’t breathe, is that right? Spent the rest of term in a dog kennel?’ It was my turn to smile, the smile of a man pulling the tiger’s tail.

‘That’s not a subject I care to have aired,’ said Preseli. ‘It’s painful for my brother.’

‘Those are the sorts of subject I make my living from.’

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ said Preseli with mounting anger. ‘You’re just too stupid. You’d think having your desk chopped up might be a clue, but it just wasn’t obvious enough for you.’

The breeze whispered past the caravans; the sun flashed on the chrome bumpers and aluminium trim of the caravan and the tubes of the deckchairs. It was beautiful. I kicked the picnic table and it slammed against the side of the caravan spilling sandwiches over the laps of them both. Preseli jumped up; Ercwleff bent down to retrieve the sandwich he had been eating. I picked up the shovel and brought the thin edge of the blade down the back of his skull. It sounded like a stonemason chiselling rock. Preseli stared at me in astonishment and fear as I raised the shovel again. Ercwleff was frozen on the ground, his rear end jutting like a badger in trousers.

‘That’s what will happen to you if you ever touch Calamity. Your tame bear won’t be enough to protect you. Now get out.’

The blow would have killed most men, but Ercwleff just looked drunk. He climbed unsteadily to his feet and Preseli helped him back to the car. As they drove off, he said through the window, ‘You’ve just started something you can’t finish.’

I knew he was right.

I put the door inside the caravan, removed my shoes and socks, and headed towards the sea. I climbed the mane of marram grass to the crest where the breeze was stronger and made the sharp stalks of grass quiver and spin; as I stumbled down the face of the dune the world became silent except for the soft pat of bare sole on hot, dry sand. And then I found a gap in the wall of dune and was assailed by the distant rumble of the sea. The tide was out, and the sea far off, separated by a long walk across ribbed sand that held quivering pools of hot, sparkling water. Across the sea, the peaceful town of Aberdovey glinted; little white specks signified houses like teeth in the smile of a cartoon giant. Five minutes by boat, but an hour or more by car or train. The estuarial waters moved back and forth, like waters to and from the heart. Glass flashed on the hillside, and the train to Pwllheli moved slowly across the green backdrop with the speed of a bubble rising in a glass of water or a satellite moving across the night sky. Given the choice, it was a wonder anybody opted for burial on land, dropped into a muddy hole, soil in your nostrils and worms in your mouth, to engage in decomposition, a word uncomfortably close to compost. In the sea, down on the ocean floor among impervious fish, you didn’t disintegrate into mulch for the garden, you were purified. You became part of the heartbeat that draws the waters back and forth; you dissolved into that main, the constantly self-renewing, gleaming, pulsing body of salty loveliness.