The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (2 page)

‘Who’s Frankie Mephisto? Or am I being cute again?’

He hung up.

When I put the phone down, Calamity was in the room and she and the monkey were regarding me with a look of inquiry.

‘Just someone from the library,’ I said.

A loud, semi-musical clanging noise came from downstairs. The sort of sound you might get on a fairground ride if someone jammed on the brakes, or if you dropped a piano down a flight of stairs. Or, alternatively, the sort of sound you might get if you leant an old barrel organ up against the wall outside a private detective’s office. It was followed by the slamming of a door and footsteps that echoed up the wooden stairwell. The door to the office was ajar and soon there was a man standing in it with a suitcase in his hand. I guessed he had to be Eli but he said his name was Gabriel Bassett, and since that didn’t sound anything like Eli I didn’t tell him what Frankie Mephisto said about the book. I wasn’t sure why since it was obviously a book of some significance and Frankie Mephisto didn’t sound like the sort who read many books.

Gabriel Bassett looked over to the monkey and then raised his hand in a little wave and the monkey responded by mimicking it. Then he spoke to me. ‘This is Cleopatra, she’s always early.’ He let his gaze wander around the small office, appraising the packing cases, and said, ‘Looks like we came too late.’

‘We’re going to Stryd-y-Popty, across from the library. It’s not far,’ said Calamity.

‘You’re not closing down then?’

‘Nope.’

No, I thought. But if things got much worse we might have to. The new office wasn’t all that much smaller than this one, it was just in a less desirable neighbourhood. In the past few years Canticle Street had become increasingly gentrified since the Orthopaedic Bootery started specialising in Italian designs and the Rock Café started adding fluoride to some of the lines. There were no living quarters in the new place, just an inner and an outer office and small kitchenette for the tea and a fridge for the rum. For the time being I had taken a caravan out at Ynyslas which I had mixed feelings about. It would be a beautiful place at times but there was something about the all-pervasiveness of the taste of homogenised milk that depressed the heart. Still, the money we saved would be able to make a dent in the cost of keeping Myfanwy at the nursing home and that was an overhead that no private detective’s salary was ever meant to meet. Even one of the fancy ones from Swansea.

Gabriel Bassett looked down at his suitcase and then looked round the room for a suitable place to park it. I pointed to the hat stand.

‘You leaving town or just arriving?’ I said.

‘Neither. I always carry my suitcase around.’ He put it down by the hat stand, took a cup of tea and sat on a crate. He said he had a case for us to solve and we both gave him a look of polite inquiry but instead of continuing he sat on the crate making tongue movements against the wall of his cheek as if he was
trying to dislodge a piece of gristle. I hadn’t seen this approach before and if it was meant to heighten tension it was good.

‘Is there anything more you think we should know about it?’ I asked.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bundle of notes held together by an elastic band. It was the biggest bundle of notes I’d ever seen, but that probably didn’t make it all that big. He put it down on the table and it rolled back and forth under its own weight like a rocking chair.

‘I need it solved by a fortnight today. That gives you fifteen days if you count today. But since I’ll come round about noon it probably only means fourteen and a half. The roll on the table is five hundred in fives, twenties and fifties. Consider it a down payment. There’s another five hundred if you solve it. If you don’t, there isn’t.’

Calamity flicked open a notebook and picked up a pen. ‘What’s the job?’

‘Investigate a burglary. At Nanteos Mansion, end of May. A necklace was taken – it was in all the papers.’

‘We didn’t see it.’

‘Of course you didn’t. It was May 1849.’

I opened my mouth to say something but couldn’t think of anything. The monkey interjected. She did that by raising her hand and when Bassett looked at her she brought the left hand towards the right and there followed a little dance of fingers tapping palms and wrapping themselves round other fingers.

He turned to me. ‘She wants to know if you’ve seen Mr Bojangles.’

I paused for a second. ‘That looked like sign language.’

‘Yes. Have you seen him?’

‘Mr Bojangles?’

‘It’s her son, disappeared fifteen years ago. I’m sorry, I would have got to it but she always jumps the gun. Always jumps the damn gun she does.’

‘Tell her we haven’t seen him.’

‘What does he look like?’ said Calamity.

‘What do you think he looks like?’ snapped Bassett. ‘He looks like her, only smaller.’ He turned to Cleopatra and did some more signs. She gave a sort of deflated nod as if to say, ‘Well it was just a long shot.’

‘It’s pretty unusual for a monkey to use sign language,’ I said unnecessarily.

‘She used to work at the university, the department of linguistics. You know those research projects they do into primate language, see if they can get monkeys to talk and things? She used to be in one. I got her cheap after they stopped the funding.’

I picked up the bundle of notes and weighed it in my hand. It was about as heavy as a cricket ball. ‘Tell us about the necklace.’

‘Oval, flat-cut garnets set in gold with close-backed foil collets, concealed clasp and pear-shaped garnet drop. It belonged to Cranogwen Phrys-Griffiths from Nanteos. She was the squire’s daughter. Coming of age present. You know Nanteos mansion out by Capel Seion?’

‘I’ve driven past it a few times.’

‘Tell me what you know about it.’

‘Georgian country house, covered in ivy, nice-looking. There’s a ghost and a fragment of a wooden medieval drinking bowl called the Nanteos Cup – some people say it’s the Holy Grail.’

‘Do you believe that?’

I shrugged. ‘I keep an open mind.’

‘The ghost is real. It’s Cranogwen. She died in a fire, May 1849. They hanged the stable boy for it. It was a miscarriage of justice.’

‘You saying they got the wrong guy?’

‘The ghost says it was the stable boy. I say she’s a lying bitch. They found the kid halfway up the ivy. He said he saw smoke and was on his way up to rescue her. The peelers said
he ravished her and knocked the bedside lamp over in the struggle.’

‘Maybe that’s how it happened,’ I said.

‘Whose side are you on?’

‘Nobody’s yet.’

‘It’s true the stable boy was sweet on Cranogwen, but he never laid a finger on her. It was all circumstantial. They found the necklace later in his stable, and a bridle under the girl’s bed. But what does that prove? And then this ghostly handwriting appeared on the wall above the bed saying, “
comes stabuli
”. It’s Latin, means “keeper of the stable”. That clinched it: the kid had to swing. And not even seventeen.’

‘So where do we come in?’

‘I need to clear his name.’

‘By a fortnight today,’ said Calamity with the matter-of-fact air of one crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a bit unorthodox,’ I said.

‘So is five hundred in cash up front.’

He had a good point there.

I saw them both out to the street. Gabriel Bassett loaded the suitcase on to the barrel organ, Cleopatra jumped up on top of that and they made ready to wheel away. I said to Basset, ‘Does the name Frankie Mephisto mean anything to you?’

And without a flicker of reaction he said, ‘No, not a thing.’

I walked over to the car and fetched the Michelin guide to Welsh country houses from the glove compartment. I looked up Nanteos Mansion. The ghost appeared periodically in the Cranogwen Suite, accompanied by moans and the smell of burning. There was also the ghost-writing,
comes stabuli
– keeper of the stable. Since they hanged him you had to wonder why she bothered. Maybe she was just mean. I could never quite make up my mind about ghosts. Most of the time I didn’t believe in them but I
found them harder not to believe in when alone late at night in rambling old houses with ivy on the wall where the wind banged doors shut in empty rooms. Maybe, maybe not. Of one thing I was certain: if you own a country house and want to run it as a hotel then a ghost is about as essential as a kitchen. As for the Grail, it was the genuine article. No doubt about it. Just like the fragments of the True Cross you used to be able to buy in the Middle Ages, and the clay God had used to fashion Adam from, and that little bag of bones from the donkey that Jesus rode on Palm Sunday. All 100 per cent genuine.

There was no way I could take a case like this, but also no way I could turn down the money. I solved my dilemma by giving it to Calamity as her first solo case. She could use it to support her application for her detective’s badge. I dropped her off in the gravel forecourt of Nanteos and then drove to the nursing home to pick up Myfanwy and see which of her faces she would be wearing for our drive to Ynyslas. Usually it was the wooden one in which the features were carved and immobile, and in her eyes an uncomprehending stare. But on occasion whoever it was or used to be – or perhaps really just the shadow of whoever it was – would reappear in her eyes for a while, like a ghost in an upstairs window. On days like that Myfanwy could still smile and in the waters of her eyes something stirred from time to time, recognition or remembrance – like a fish flashing through a forest pool.

The nurse who helped get her into the front seat finished adjusting the seat belt and then took out a little scent bottle and put a dab on Myfanwy’s wrists. It was the stuff they sold in the gift shop out at the Waifery, made from the bluebells in Danycoed Wood. She could have saved herself the effort. By that time I already knew: no ghost was going to appear at the upstairs window today.

The absence of conversation hung heavily in the car as we drove and I turned on the radio. They were running a report of
an escaped fugitive being sought by the police in the Aberystwyth area. He was a veteran of the old war in Patagonia and the public were warned not to approach him. That made me laugh. When was the last time anyone approached a Patagonian vet except to chase him off the land?

We drove on to the wide flat sands of Ynyslas and pulled up alongside a party of day-trippers. They were sitting in an old black Morris Minor, the doors wide open and the interior exuding a smell of hot engine, pipe smoke and children’s vomit. It looked like they had just arrived and were still drinking the first cup of tea, the one that always tastes of the inside of a flask. Mum and Gran were sorting out the picnic. Dad was stretching his legs after the drive. Two kids were already squabbling. And Granddad sat in the front passenger seat wearing the beatific smile of one whose demands on life are so modest that a day driving for three hours in the company of his grandchildren to stare at the water for a while and drink tea was a source of joy. And one that would never lose its savour. The old man looked across as we arrived and raised his hand in greeting, just a simple movement of the hand, like the Queen, because he hailed from a world where not to have done so would have been impolite. And I returned the greeting because I didn’t want him to know that world had passed. And because he reminded me of my dad, Eeyore, sitting there amid the clamour as calm as a castle moat on a moonlit night. Another half an hour and he would probably loosen his tie.

Myfanwy stared vacantly ahead across the estuary and beyond to the hills of Aberdovey. Away to the left were the dunes across which she had run once with such happiness and which now no longer possessed the power to enter the world into which she was slowly withdrawing. Somewhere from behind us, towards the entrance, came the tinkling xylophonic sound of an ice-cream van and I walked off to fetch two ices.

When I returned with two cornets smothered with ripple the family of day-trippers was now struggling to raise that three-sided
wind-breaker of stripy canvas that people from the Midlands find such comfort in. I reclined Myfanwy’s seat and mine and lay back to stare through the windshield at the grey cloud-filled sky. It was knobbled with the texture and colour of kneaded dough. Clouds too heavy and too low in the sky, inducing a heaviness like a hand pressing down on one’s forehead, the lugubrious weight muffling all sound. The wind came in a soft roar with too much heat as if emerging from the baker’s oven, and blew across the open door of the car as if over a giant mollusc. The warm hot air and the distant cries of children, combined with the diffuse brightness of the light, tugged down on my eyelids and even as I licked my ice cream I could feel the lids lowering as if the weight of the day were too heavy to sustain.

When I awoke it must have been about three hours later. The sun was setting, still hidden by cloud but betrayed by the lengthening shadows. Granddad and family had packed up and left. My ice cream lay in my lap, melted and sticky. I had a thumping headache. A hint of bluebells hung on the air like a dying echo. And Myfanwy was gone.

IT WAS WAY past their bedtime but Sister Cunégonde insisted on letting us have some waifs for the search. I stood and waited in a corridor. Feeble forty-watt light bulbs hung from the ceiling and were rendered insignificant by the moon outside. A row of doors led off with brass handles that rattled loosely in their sockets, like the hip joints of the mistresses who sat in the offices behind. Each door bore a name and a rank to indicate the degree of fear that should reside in the heart of whichever girl was sent to wait outside. At the end of the corridor, the assembly hall lay in darkness pierced by slabs of waxen moonlight. At the other end was another hall with a gallery where girls now ran to fetch gabardine macs and torches from bedside cabinets.