The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (6 page)

‘Really?’

‘Well, he did the pictures – I mean he dug them. Some bloke from the university wrote the book and sent it to him.’

‘Is Mr Meredith your dad?’

‘No, I’m from the Waifery. I don’t have a dad, I was a foundling. But I come here quite a lot and Meredith lets me do what I like. I saw you the other night.’

‘Really?’

‘I was the one who found the locket. I’m sorry about your girlfriend.’

‘That’s nice of you.’

‘You won’t tell Sister Cunégonde you saw me here, will you? She’d be furious.’

‘Do holy sisters get furious?’

Seren looked at me in astonishment. ‘Are you kidding! They never do anything else. Specially old Cunybongy. It’s because I’m a category A Waif. They’re the worst, you see. I need special attention to stop me straying from the path. That’s why I’m not allowed to come here. She says I don’t understand how easy it is for a young girl to stray from the path and be lost. But that’s silly, I could find my way around here with my eyes shut.’

‘Maybe she means it in a different way.’

‘Don’t be daft, what other way could there be?’

Later, as we trudged back to the car and were about to get in, I heard a cry and the sound of someone running.

‘Louie! I’ve got one!’ It was Seren and she was carrying a shoebox. Inside was a sleeping gull.

There was a barrel organ leaning against the wall when we got back and upstairs in the office was a man, a suitcase and a monkey.

‘Just came to see how you were getting on with the investigation,’ said Gabriel Bassett.

Cleopatra was sitting on the desk; she gesticulated and Gabriel added, ‘She says good afternoon.’

We smiled at her and she made an impatient ‘reminder type’ of gesture.

‘And also,’ said Gabriel sheepishly, ‘she asked whether you’ve seen Mr Bojangles.’

‘Tell her, no, but we’re keeping our eyes peeled.’

‘That’s good, she’ll like that.’ He translated and she did, indeed, look pleased.

‘We’ve been working flat out on the case,’ lied Calamity. ‘And we’ve made a lot of progress.’

‘Anything you’d like to share with me?’

We both struggled not to follow his gaze which was directed at the wall bearing nothing but a pinned up tea towel with the words
comes stabuli
. It was fairly clear that we had not been flat
out or making a great deal of progress. I made a mental note to move the incident board into the kitchen.

‘I see you bought the tea towel,’ he said.

Neither of us could think of a suitable response to that and he said, ‘You do understand, don’t you, it is very important to me that you solve this case by the deadline I gave. There can be no question of further payment if you don’t.’

‘We understand.’

He stood up and Cleopatra leaped across from the desk and climbed on to his shoulders. They walked to the door. When he picked up the case I said, ‘Do you really carry that around with you all the time?’

He stopped and looked down as if checking that I meant the case and not the monkey.

‘Oh yes.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘I don’t know.’

THE NEXT MORNING at nine Sospan gave us the result of his forensic analysis of the gull’s gizzard. Nothing. Not a drop of drugged ripple, from which he deduced that the bird had not been anaesthetised but was just taking a lie-in, possibly, although we didn’t particularly need to know this, due to exertion caused by flying around during the storm in the Irish Sea recently.

‘So we wasted our time.’

‘I’m sorry Mr Knight, the technique usually works very well but I think you left it too late. You should have called me in sooner.’

‘There’s a girl’s life at stake here, Sospan.’

‘No one knows that better than me, you know that. I’ve got all Myfanwy’s records just like you. Did you make a list like I told you?’

‘List of what?’

‘Of everything you could remember about the
gelati
man.’

‘But I told you, I was drugged, I couldn’t remember anything.’

Sospan tutted. ‘You’ve drunk from the waters of the Lethe is what you’ve done, Mr Knight. I would recommend you went and saw Mr Evans the Hypnotist at Kousin Kevin’s.’

‘And what good would that do?’

‘Forensic hypnotism is a very powerful weapon in the modern detective’s arsenal. I’m surprised you don’t know that.’

‘I’m not going to see any hypnotist. The weapons in this detective’s arsenal include gumption and shoe leather, not end-of-the-pier chicanery.’

‘It’s not chicanery. It’s a tried-and-trusted technique with a formidable capacity for unlocking the gates of remembrance.’ He put a leaflet on the counter top. ‘I can get you a ticket if you like.’

‘I think it’s a good idea,’ said Calamity.

‘You would.’

‘Well, why not?’

‘Because it’s hocus-pocus.’

‘No it isn’t.’

Sospan tapped a finger on the leaflet for emphasis. ‘Mr Evans does a lot of work for the police, ask Llunos.’

‘Well he’s not doing a lot of work for me.’

The argument was interrupted by the arrival of a straw-scented cloud containing Eeyore. It was the first patrol of the day and none of the donkeys had riders. I think Eeyore preferred it that way. Sospan offered him an ice but he declined with a troubled look on his face.

‘What’s up, Dad?’ I asked.

He nodded towards a donkey in the middle of the line. ‘It’s the Duchess, she’s playing up. She isn’t happy.’

I looked over to the Duchess who had wandered up to the seaside railing and put her head over as if it were a stable door. She was staring out across the sea with a wistful air. Maybe she dimly remembered her home being in Ireland and was wondering if she might see it again before she died.

‘Maybe it’s just old age.’

‘Of course it’s old age. I know that. We’ve been together twelve years. That’s a lot for a donkey.’

I picked a piece of straw off his lapel. ‘Why don’t you rest her for a while?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t. She’s the matriarch of the troop. She’s the one who keeps discipline, keeps the young ones in line and teaches them things.’

‘Teaches them what?’

‘The craft. Things like not to fart when carrying children. Things like that. It’s like the alpha dog on a husky team. Without him those dogs just won’t make a move. Just sit there in the snow and starve to death. People don’t understand. They think you just tie them in a line and pull them along. But I tell you, you won’t get very far doing that. The donkeys have to want to make the trip. That’s where the matriarch comes in. She passes on the old knowledge that the herd has acquired over the years, about the ancient foraging patterns.’

‘I thought you just gave them a bucket of oats.’

‘I do, but they still have the “call” inside them, don’t they? It’s like dogs chasing sticks. Sticks are symbolic prey. Most people feed them from a tin but the dog still has the hunting instinct that needs to be satisfied. With the donkeys, the walk up the Prom is an echo of the old foraging patterns. They start off at the harbour and head towards Constitution Hill seeking better pasture. But of course they don’t have very good memories so by the time they’ve arrived at one end they’ve forgotten what it was like where they started out, so they look around and think, hmmm, not much here is there? And then the matriarch says, I know, why don’t we go and try down the other end of the Prom by the harbour? And off they go. Once you set the pattern in motion you can pretty much let it run itself.’

‘Herd dynamics they call it,’ said Sospan. ‘Every Prom built over the last hundred years has a minimum length determined by the attention span of a donkey.’

‘OK. So what happens if you get a really brainy one, like a donkey Mozart, who can remember further back and tells them what it’s like up the other end?’

Sospan considered and Eeyore said sadly, ‘They call him a prophet and cast him out. I’ve seen it happen.’ And off he and the herd went, continuing their endless traverse, borne on the never-dimming hope of greener pastures.

‘I’ve been thinking about the
Journals of the Proceedings of the
Myfanwy Society
,’ said Calamity through ripple-stained lips. ‘They’d be pretty useful for leads and things, wouldn’t they?’

‘They sure would, but we don’t know anyone who’s got a set.’

‘I think I know a way of getting into the National Library. I saw it in a movie once.’ I stared down at her young face, bright and as undimmed with cynicism as a dandelion. She had changed a lot in the three odd years we’d been together. At the time we first met her face had the sickly pallor of skin hidden from the sun and brought up under the flashing, artificial light of the amusement arcade. She’d been just another hustler, like Poxcrop, and probably still would be now if our paths hadn’t crossed. But the thing that struck me was how quickly the toughened streetwise shell had fallen away, like a discarded chrysalis, to reveal a great kid. It made me wonder whether I was doing the right thing taking her on as a partner in the one occupation that was guaranteed to curdle the milk of youth faster than anything: a gumshoe in Aberystwyth. But equally I knew there would have been no point trying to stop her. This was what she wanted to do. She was pretty good at it, too. And there were few more pointless endeavours in life than giving advice to people who don’t seek it; no task more hopeless than trying to stop a young person making mistakes that struck you as a good idea when you were the same age.

‘This movie,’ I said, ‘it’s not
The Sound of Music
, is it?’

‘
The Day of the Jackal
. Where the guy shoots the prime minister of France.’

‘Did he need to get into a library badly?’

‘He needed a fake identity, so he went to a cemetery and found the grave of a kid who died really young and took down the name. Then he went to that place in London where you go if you want to change your name—’

‘Somerset House.’

‘Right. And applied for a copy of the birth certificate.’

‘And they gave it to him, just like that.’

‘That’s the amazing thing. They do. There’s just a charge for the paperwork.’

‘In books maybe it happens like that, but this is real life, we don’t get the same breaks as the guys in the books.’

‘I thought we’d get one of our associate partners in London to go along to Somerset House for us and then we could apply for a passport in Newport. I could find a grave here in Aber. The passport could come in handy for other jobs as well.’

‘We don’t have any associate partners in London.’

‘It’s about time we did. We can’t grow the organisation without a network of contacts.’

‘I’ve managed OK up till now – associate partners sound expensive.’

‘It’s a business expense, you write it off against tax. We need to get a small operator in London to enter into a preferred partnership with us. Next time we need a tail job done on a party in London we call the guy up. Then one day, when he needs some business transacted in Aberystwyth, he calls us. It’s reciprocal.’

‘When do we ever need to tail someone in London?’

‘It happens all the time. Say we’re doing a surveillance here and the party leaves on the train to Euston, you want someone to follow him but you can’t do it yourself because it wouldn’t be cost-effective. So you arrange to have him intercepted at Euston. That’s how Pinkerton’s started out. The party under surveillance goes to Kansas City so you wire ahead with a description of him. Then two operatives working in relays pick him up when he gets off the train. They follow him for a week and he never even suspects. They watch his every move. At the end of the week he goes to the station and buys a ticket, to say, I don’t know, Tallahassee—’

‘Kansas to Tallahassee?’

‘It doesn’t matter where. The important thing is, one of the Pinkerton guys is standing behind him in the queue and listens to the new destination. Then he wires ahead and two more guys pick him up when he gets off. That’s how they do it.’

‘OK, so what happens if you find some kid’s grave and expropriate his identity and he turns out to be the dead son of someone who works at the library, and we turn up with his library ticket?’

‘Nothing would happen, it would just be a coincidence.’

‘Just a coincidence?’

‘I was going to choose a common name like, I don’t know, Billy Jones, not Amvrosiyevich Shevardnadze.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘What do you think would happen? The woman behind the desk would go, “Oh my God! It’s my son! I thought he was dead and here he is borrowing a book!”’

‘It seems quite a drastic way to get a library ticket.’

‘Can you think of a better way?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can.’

I took out the card Poxcrop had left with me.

When Myfanwy got sick we didn’t notice at first. She escaped from us gradually, evanescently, the way sand passes between the two bulbs of an hourglass. She seemed to be receding from us into a sea of forgetfulness. You can’t blame her, I suppose. There’s a lot in this world worth forgetting. But what about us who were left behind? The people who loved her? It seemed such a cruel trick: to run away and leave us with something that looked like Myfanwy, but where no one was manning the switchboard. Don’t give up hope, the doctors said, although it was hard to see where they got the authority to say that since they did not know what was wrong with her. Sometimes it’s hard not to resent her for this: to abandon her body and leave it in the possession of people obliged by decency to take care of it. Like leaving a parcel at the lost property and never going back. And because we loved her, we accepted the strange burden. We baby-sat for her corpse in the feeble hope that she might return to it. Like we leave a swallow’s nest in the rafters in the hope that one day they will come back.