The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

Chapter 11

I slept badly and arrived late at the office next morning. The new desk had been delivered. It was already installed, and a man, who probably hadn’t been delivered with it, sat on the client’s chair with his feet on the desk. His shoes were black leather, badly scuffed, his trousers turned up and shiny with age. He wore a mackintosh that looked like it had spent six months tightly rolled up at the bottom of a packing case; his thin brown hair was congealed in a slick of police-issue hair cream. It was the cop who had sat sneering in the interrogation room the night I was taken to see the Aviary. He was eating an ice cream.

I slapped his feet off the desk. They fell to the floor with a thump.

He grinned. ‘I knew I wasn’t wrong about you.’

‘I like to be introduced before I let a man put his feet on my desk.’

The grin widened. ‘You can call me Sauerkopp.’ He raised a foot and crossed his leg. ‘They say the chief of police has a good relationship with you. That’s always a mistake in my book.’

‘Mistake for who?’

‘Everyone.’

‘And what makes you think I give a damn what’s in your book?’

The phone rang. The visitor picked up the phone, listened and said, ‘It’s a girl, wants you to find her lost handkerchief.’ He spoke to the receiver. ‘Sorry lady, he’s a dick, not a Boy Scout.’ He hung up and smiled. ‘Another big case slips through your fingers.’

‘Did you come for a reason or were you just passing?’

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a Polaroid. He threw it towards me. I picked it up. It was the corpse of a woman, hair wet, face bloated.

‘Recognise the party?’

‘It’s Mrs Lewis.’

‘Someone tied her to one of the supports under the pier night before last, just before the tide came in. Ain’t that a shame!’

Something clenched in my loins, it was like an angry baby kicking against the wall of its womb; I didn’t let evidence of it reach my face. ‘She should have known better, the tide tables are clearly posted. Where did you get the snap?’

‘From my camera.’

‘Am I a suspect?’

‘I would say so, wouldn’t you?’

‘Are you arresting me?’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘You look the type that might enjoy it.’

He made a sour grin. ‘Not really. Arresting people is boring. It looks fun in the TV cop shows, but in real life it’s just paperwork and spending a lot of what the Americans call quality time with people who don’t wash very often. Sometimes they try and bite you. They never show that on TV, but that’s what it often comes down to. Being bitten by a fully grown man is a very unpleasant experience. Sometimes they struggle in such a way that they threaten to injure themselves. That’s not necessarily a big deal, but it means more paperwork, so you have to spray a little something in their eyes; nothing calms a man down faster than a little something in his eyes. Trouble is, it makes them produce a lot of mucus – from their eyes, their nose, out of the mouth. You’d be surprised how much the body can pump out in a situation like that. Believe me, grappling with a man producing loads of mucus isn’t fun. I don’t arrest people, I get the flatfoots to do it.’

‘You can arrest me, I wash every day.’

He smiled. ‘You are forgetting one thing: I like you. How are you getting on with Raspiwtin? Anything you want to tell me?’

‘There’s nothing I want to tell you.’

He threw another photo down on top of the first. It showed me and Mrs Lewis talking on the Prom. ‘Looks like you had a date the night she died. As far as I can tell, the cops don’t know about it. They’re not as quick on their feet or as well informed as old Sauerkopp. But it could change. If something happens that might interest us and you are tempted to forget to tell us, I could forget not to show them the photo.’

I picked up the photo and stared at it while my heart tumbled slowly down the stairs.

‘Don’t look so sad, it’s not as bad as it seems. I know what you are thinking: you don’t photograph too well these days. It’s the light; sodium lighting is very harsh; it gives a greenish cast. I should have used a filter but I can never remember which one to use. Orange, I think.’ He took the photo out of my hand and walked out, saying, ‘Pack a toothbrush just in case.’

I loosened my tie, leant back and closed my eyes. Cops and ex-cops have a routine disdain for private operatives, and I don’t blame them. I would feel the same too if I were a cop. They know if they want to use testimony in court it helps if it comes voluntarily. When they arrive at a crime scene the first thing they have to do is seal it off, record everything in detail and take great care not to contaminate it with stuff from somewhere else. Not because they care about justice and fairness and due process but because they have learned through bitter experience that all their hard work will end up wasted if they don’t follow the rules. The first thing a private operative does when arriving at the scene of a crime is walk all over it looking for significant stuff before the cops come. He doesn’t care about contaminating it; let someone else worry, he doesn’t have the time. On occasion he will rearrange it, sometimes to eliminate his own presence, at others to try and effect a rough natural justice he has no right attempting but he does anyway. Sometimes he will wipe a murder weapon of prints or put someone else’s on it. Sometime he simply takes a key piece of evidence and throws it in the river, leaving a crime scene like a jigsaw puzzle missing a piece. I know the private operative does all these things because I have done them, and the cops know it too. In fact, if they know someone like me is sniffing around they assume the worst right from the start, and this often results in the private operative taking a tumble down the police-station steps.

I made a call to Meirion, a friend of mine on the crime desk at the Cambrian News. I asked him what he knew about the Mrs Lewis case. He didn’t know anything and so I told him to forget I’d even asked. Calamity walked in and I told her what had happened.

She put on a deep frown. ‘Who do you think did it?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The mayor, maybe.’

‘Or the doctor.’

I nodded.

‘Do you think it’s connected to us?’

‘What do you think?’

She thought for a while. ‘Iestyn and Skweeple turn up at the doctor’s surgery. They call Preseli. When he comes, Iestyn escapes, so he takes Skweeple away. That’s the last we hear of him. A week later Iestyn is caught and hanged. The papers don’t mention Skweeple. Something must have happened to him while in Preseli’s custody. The doc knows about it too. They’re both in on it.’

‘Why kill Mrs Lewis; she doesn’t know what happened.’

‘Maybe she does know, or maybe they think she knows. Or maybe just knowing that Preseli took him is enough.’ She stood up. ‘I think it is definitely time to try the Barney and Betty Hill routine.’

‘I’ll probably regret this, but what is that?’

‘Barney and Betty Hill are one of the most famous contactee cases of all time, from 1961. They were driving home through New Hampshire after a vacation in Quebec and they saw a bright light in the sky . . .’ She stopped.

I looked at her sourly. ‘You might as well go on, although try and keep in mind that someone I spoke to the day before yesterday has been murdered and I was probably one of the last to see her. Presumably it won’t be long before the cops find out.’

‘Fine,’ said Calamity. ‘We don’t do the Barney and Betty Hill.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘You might as well finish it.’

‘What’s the point, you are going to think it’s dumb.’

‘OK. I promise to try not to. Tell me in the car.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Remember James the Less and his son the forensic linguist?’

‘The kid who knows more types of duck than you’ve had hot dinners.’

‘I thought we could go and show him the letter Raspiwtin gave me.’

We set off for Cwmnewidion Isaf and Calamity told me about Barney and Betty Hill.

‘They were driving home one night,’ she began, ‘and they saw a bright light. They stopped and got out to take a look. Then somehow they found themselves at home and six hours had passed which they couldn’t account for. After that they started getting nightmares. Eventually they were questioned by the military and offered hypnotism, and it all came out. How they’d been abducted aboard the saucer and given medical examinations and stuff. The aliens were baffled by Barney’s false teeth.’

‘This was 1961?’

‘Yes. In America.’

‘Were they Greys or Nordics?’

‘Greys.’

We drove south out of town and turned off the main road at Rhydyfelin.

‘Mrs Bwlchgwallter from the gingerbread shop does hypnotism. I thought we could get her to hypnotise the farmer.’

‘What do you expect to learn?’

‘I don’t know. My hunch is they are looking for Skweeple. They asked for Iestyn because they think he can tell them what happened to Skweeple. What do you make of Jhoe?’

‘Three possibilities,’ I said.

‘Number one,’ said Calamity, ‘he’s from the star system Noö.’

‘That’s number three. Between number two and number three there is a wide gap.’

‘What’s number two, then?’

‘He could be an actor sent by the Aviary, or some other body, to bamboozle us.’

‘I thought about that, but why?’

‘I really don’t know. Disinfo, I suppose.’

‘Buying a Buick is disinfo?’

‘He’s not really buying it, is he? You haven’t got one to sell. He’s just posing as a buyer. Maybe whichever organisation he works for wants to sound you out, see what your game is. Who knows? Did Barney and Betty Hill drive a Buick?’

‘No, a ’57 Chevrolet Bel Air. Do you really think he works for an organisation?’

‘The alternative is . . .’

‘Number one: he’s a loony.’

‘That’s not an expression I would use. But I think we should consider the possibility that he may, I don’t know, he may have absented himself from the secure wing of a psychiatric hospital.’

‘Mmm.’

‘In fact, I think you should ring a few when we get back and make some discreet enquiries, see if someone who sounds like Jhoe has gone missing.’

‘You really think so?’

‘It’s up to you, but you did place the ad, and I think that gives you a certain responsibility.’

‘Thing is, I think I like Jhoe.’

‘All the more reason.’

Cwmnewidion Isaf was a small village where the inhabitants took refuge from the twentieth century, preferring to hearken back to a lost idyll in that land of the golden past that probably never existed. They still fetched water from the well and farmed using only the natural fertiliser their animals provided; theirs was one of the few communities left in West Wales where they preserved the ancient custom according to which you could ask people directions without having to pay them. We did this, and were pointed in the direction of a barn, but first we stopped off at the village shop and bought a bottle of dandelion and burdock. It was carbonated, which technically made it proscribed technology, but the shopkeeper explained with a wink that if the carbonation process took place a long way away where you couldn’t see it, one could turn a blind eye. As bribes go, it was a lot cheaper than the ones used in Aberystwyth. James the Less and his son were grooming a horse inside the barn and beamed with pleasure to see us. Their eyes locked on to the fizzy drink with barely concealed lust.

‘We thought you might like a little drink,’ said Calamity. ‘It must be thirsty work living in a world without machines.’

‘How thoughtful of you,’ said James the Less. ‘Samson, go and fetch some cups. It is so nice of you to come and visit. Most people shun us for our alien ways, even though our lives are not so very different from the ones their forebears would have lived.’

‘That’s very true,’ I said.

‘If they only cared to wish us good day or engage us in conversation, they would discover the same heart beats in our breasts as in everyone else’s.’ He sat on a bale of hay. ‘Yes, it is so nice of you to come out all this way just to say hello to some strangers you met on the train.’

‘To be honest,’ I said, prickling with guilt, ‘it would be wrong of us to mislead you into the belief that we came here solely to say hello.’

Samson returned with some unglazed earthernware mugs. Calamity poured the drinks. We raised mugs and wished each other good health. But instead of drinking, James the Less hesitated, then said, ‘You . . . you haven’t got anything stronger, have you?’

A glance of complicity passed between us.

‘Does a still count as a machine?’ I asked.

James the Less smiled sheepishly. ‘On this particular issue the scriptures are far from clear.’

I took out my hip flask of rum and unscrewed the cap. ‘In that case, at least until the scholars reach a consensus, it would be best to proceed on the assumption that a still is not a machine.’

Like a dog who keeps dancing and jumping up to your hands while you’re still opening the tin of dog food, James the Less struggled to maintain a dignified reserve in the face of mounting excitement. ‘It would be impertinent to argue with such a learned man,’ he said and threw the dandelion and burdock onto the floor with a surprising lack of ceremony. He held out his mug. I gave him a generous measure and took one for myself. James the Less took a deep gulp, coughed, swallowed, coughed, swallowed harder and finally looked up with the air of one electrocuted. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘That hit the spot! Now, what was it you wanted to see us about?’

I handed him the top-secret Aviary document. As I did so, a chit of paper fell out and James the Less picked it up and gave it to me. It was a newspaper cutting, a report, a few lines amounting to a fragment of column space that detailed an atrocity on the Thai–Burmese border. It was one of those stories that are terrible but not deemed newsworthy and serve only to provide copy to fill an empty inch. I wondered: did the story describe the tragedy in which Raspiwtin had been involved? Or did he just read about it and pretend it had happened to him?

James the Less gave the Aviary document to Samson, much like a proud parent cajoles his son to play the recorder for a visitor.

‘Interesting case,’ the boy said earnestly. ‘The story about the alien woman buying the cadaver of Iestyn Probert is widely circulated. I’d never paid much attention to it and had assumed it to be the invention of superstitious fools. This puts a different complexion on the matter.’ He brought out a jeweller’s loupe and screwed it into his eye. We all held our breath as he pored over the document. He began to mutter to himself as if not pleased with what he was seeing. Calamity looked at me and pointedly rolled her eyes. Finally the boy looked up and removed the loupe.

‘The Documents appear to be of dubious provenance,’ he said. ‘The stamp TOP SECRET/AVIARY EYES ONLY appears to be one of those stamps with changeable letters – see, the V and the Y are slightly out of line – this is wrong; official Aviary stamps have always been solid rubber specific to the purpose. Similarly, there are references to the necessity to conceal events from the media; in 1965 this word would not have been current, and the more usual “press” would have been used, or “newspapers”. By the same token, the document refers to extraterrestrials instead of aliens, again not current in the 1960s. The typefaces are anachronistic – Helvetica subheads and Times for the body – these would not have been used in Aviary documents until the late ’70s and the advent of IBM Golfball electronic typewriters. In the ’60s all such documentation would have been produced on Smith Coronas with Prestige Elite fonts. And this is a carbon copy but has been folded. This is unusual: carbon copies were for filing only. I regret to say that my initial examination forces me to conclude that the item is a forgery. Although do not discount the possibility that the source of the forgery may, paradoxically, be the Aviary itself. Sometimes they forge the truth in order to discredit it.’

James the Less clapped his hands. ‘Bravo!’

‘Could you repeat the last bit?’ I asked.

‘These people are not acquainted with your advanced theories,’ said James the Less. ‘You must be patient.’

The boy made a great play of summoning patience.

‘As you know,’ he said loftily, ‘the Aviary exists in the main to suppress truth and keep the masses docile and unsuspecting, happy with their lives of meaningless and unending tedium. No doubt you have observed them yourself: walking up and down Aberystwyth Prom each day, dispensing the requisite oohs and ahs at the sunset each evening, unaware that it is not significantly different from the one they praised the evening before. Taking an ice cream and exchanging tittle-tattle with the lowly stall-holder . . .’

I saw myself doing exactly as the boy described. Admiring the sunset, taking an ice cream at Sospan’s the same time each day. Was it unendingly tedious? I quite liked it.

The boy continued. ‘A time-honoured technique for suppressing the truth, for getting the self-satisfied burghers of Aberystwyth to ignore the truth before their eyes, is to discredit that truth, to make a mockery of it. It is my belief, derived from my researches into the works of those cunning artificers of invented testimony the Aberystwyth police, that many of the more bizarre accounts of alien contact reveal the hand of the authorities at work. By inventing a story that contains the truth but which is demonstrably absurd, they in effect undermine any credence that might attach to it. The famous flying-saucer abduction account of Barney and Betty Hill from 1961 is a case in point. Most of it came out under hypnotism. We must ask ourselves who supplied the hypnotist. The answer? The military supplied the hypnotist. I leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.’

A rain cloud followed us back to town. It was roughly puma-shaped and had the same deep, lustrous colouring of blue-black silk that glistened and glinted.

‘It’s gaining on us,’ said Calamity, who had her own small cloud left in place by the boy’s speech.

‘Cheer up,’ I said.

‘I’m fine, really I am. The kid obviously doesn’t know the first thing about the Barney and Betty Hill case.’

It sounded to me like he knew quite a lot about it, but sometimes you need to help your partner just as there will be times when your partner needs to raise you from the trough. That’s what partners are for.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He was talking through his hat. We’ll definitely go and see Mrs Bwlchgwallter and get her to hypnotise the farmer.’

Calamity grinned.

The cloud overtook us on the long straight down into town at Penparcau and was already in place on the Prom when we reached the bandstand. Mrs Bwlchgwallter moonlighted here in the afternoons from her rôle as official maker of gingerbread to the town. She stood on stage, clutching the mike and backed by her three cousins, the Gingernutjobs. The arrival of the rain threatened to bring an end to the gig. The audience consisted of a coach party of pensioners who moved and acted as a single organism, like a colony of bees or a shoal of fish responding to some unseen, unvoiced communication, telepathic perhaps, or pheromonic. As soon as the first raindrop registered its presence on the spectacle lens of one person, this information was communicated to the colony. They leapt up in unison from their deckchairs, perfectly synchronised, and began the intricate reverse-origami of unpacking pac-a-mac coats. We stood entranced by the spectacle. Their hands worked feverishly like the mandibles of leaf-cutter ants sawing away at a cellophane rose. All of a sudden the bond which held the rose closed was broken, whereupon something even more extraordinary happened: a huge science-fiction dragonfly of polythene squirted upwards and attacked them. Gauzy wings caught the breeze and fanned out enveloping the pensioners in plumes of gossamer. Mrs Bwlchgwallter, in a bid to win back the crowd’s attention, launched into a rousing version of her trademark song, ‘Blue Suede Orthopaedic Boots’:

You can burn my house, you can steal my car

Drink my liquor from an old fruit jar

But don’t you step on my blue suede ’paedies . . .

The pensioners completed their pac-a-mac dance and the crisis passed as soon as it had begun. A shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud and spattered the Prom with molten solder. The audience turned once again towards the stage, everything was as it had been, and yet they were all now mummified, side by side like giant moth pupae, shimmering with iridescent colour from the blue end of the spectrum: cobalt, ultramarine, mauve, electric blue. On their wet faces the spectacles glinted like slices of cucumber.

We caught up with Mrs Bwlchgwallter in the dressing room after the performance. She sat before the horseshoe of light bulbs around the mirror, pulled off a wig to reveal her own hair matted down underneath a close-fitting net. She tore off the fake eyebrows and picked up a tissue to wipe away the caked-on greasepaint. ‘If you want me to sign something, you’ll have to wait a mo,’ she said to our reflections in the mirror. We had already decided to give her the good agent/bad agent treatment. It was Calamity’s turn to be bad.

‘The only thing we want to sign is your contract for the Shrewsbury Palladium,’ I said.

She stopped wiping her face. ‘What was that?’

‘That’s if you want to be famous. Not everyone does.’

‘Forget it, boss,’ said Calamity speaking through the side of her mouth. ‘I told you we were wasting our time. We should have gone for the squeaker in Penrhyncoch.’

‘What’s a squeaker?’ asked Mrs Bwlchgwallter.

‘Squeaker. That’s what they call balloon-twisters –’

‘As if she didn’t know,’ scoffed Calamity.

‘W . . . who are you?’

‘This is the Shirley Temple Kid, you remember her, don’t you? Course you do. Best child star Cardiganshire ever produced. She’s retired now, wants to give something back.’

‘What about you?’

‘All you need to know is who I work for.’

‘Who do you work for?’

‘The Man.’

Calamity picked up a tin ashtray and examined it with distaste. She chucked it down with a clatter. ‘Hmm, un problema muy grande,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t look like this lady likes nice things.’

‘Not everyone likes money, you should know that.’

‘I like money,’ said Mrs Bwlchgwallter.

‘So why spend your life making stinking gingerbread?’ asked Calamity.

For a moment, the slur upon the gingerbread-making trade, in particular her little shop, stirred the spirit of rebellion in Mrs Bwlchgwallter. ‘I’ll have you know that shop has been in my family three generations . . .’

‘How much do you make in a month?’ said Calamity. ‘Four-fifty? Four-ninety? Five maybe? I’d say five-ten tops.’

‘But that’s not the point is it?’

‘Isn’t it? You tell me, then, what is the point of spending your life turning sugar, eggs and flour into little brown homunculi? Because I’m damned if I can see it.’

‘It’s a service to the town . . .’

‘It’s a higher calling, isn’t that right?’ I asked.

‘In a pig’s valise,’ said Calamity.

I gave her a puzzled look and she returned a scowl that said, That’s what they say in Chicago; how come you don’t know that?

‘Mrs Bwlchgwallter,’ I said, ‘I’ll be straight with you. I’ve seen your act. It’s top drawer. I’ve seen a lot of acts, but it’s not often I meet someone as gifted as you. At the moment you are burying it beneath all that crowd-pleasing blancmange. It’s time to take the gloves off. The Kid here doesn’t always express herself very nicely. That can happen. You spend too long in Acapulco, it can happen. Maybe to you as well. Tell her how many millions you made last year.’

‘You know I can’t count higher than nine,’ said Calamity.

‘That’s what happens when you take them out of school to put them on the stage. She made fourteen million but only because of the three-month holiday in Acapulco. You ever been to Acapulco?’

‘No, I –’

‘Cancun is better. But how many months at a time can you spend in Cancun? Acapulco is the fall-back option. We can get you there.’

‘But first you got to go Shrewsbury,’ said Calamity.

‘And before that you have to go to Ynys Greigiog. Just for an hour.’

‘But what for?’

‘Exposure. I need some newspaper headlines I can take to the Big Kahuna.’

‘The deal is so simple, even you can do it,’ said the Shirley Temple Kid. ‘You know the farmer who saw the flying saucer? We want you to hypnotise him.’

‘That used to be your thing didn’t it? Part of your act back in the old days. Yes, I know all about you, I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the reviews: Borth Holiday Camp, Pwllheli Butlins, Barry Island . . . they say you were good. They say you were the best. The Kid says you’re washed up, I’ve got five bucks that says you’re not. First you have to go and speak to the farmer. Put him under and find out his story, then report back to us. We get you in the paper and from there it’s a short step to the Shrewsbury Palladium. What do you say?’

‘Well . . .’

I grabbed her hand and pumped. ‘I knew I wasn’t wrong about you. Throw the boots away, you don’t need the props any more.’ I handed her a business card, blank except for a telephone number. ‘If you need to get in touch, call this number and ask for Louie Knight. The Kid will write down the farmer’s address and give you the bus fare.’

We walked to the door.

‘One more thing,’ said Calamity. ‘You need a better name. Something that won’t make the neon sign-writer want to stick a gun in his mouth.’