we were going to die out there and be left as bleached bones with rattlesnakes living in the breast cage.’
‘Rattlesnakes die in the direct sun, they have to keep in the shade. That’s why you have to check your boots before you put them on.’
‘I know that, it’s the movie makers who get it wrong.’
‘It’s best to move about at night. If you want to shelter in a cave during the day you throw a rock in to see if there are any rattlers in there.’
I stopped for a second; it was surprisingly difficult walking across the carpet of pebbles. Calamity paused and looked up at me. Her face was washed with honey by the early morning sun. I smiled.
She had been thirteen when we first met, with spiky hair and jeans and a scruffy parka coat, chocolate- rimmed mouth set into a permanent downturn of sullenness. You don’t need to be much of an amateur psychologist to know that the sullen resentment and aggression is mostly just a defence to hide the confusion which swirls beneath the waters of the teenage heart. It seldom goes deep. Within hours of becoming my junior partner a smile had begun to tug at the corners of her mouth which she struggled to suppress with no more success than a man on a park bench trying to read his newspaper in a gale. Like most kids she takes life at face value. This can be a disadvantage in a crime fighter but this is counter-balanced by the certainty which it gives her. Her heart is not gnawed by doubt. She has the bright unsullied soul of a puppy, and the same propensity to make innocent mistakes. But there is also an air of street wisdom about her, a suggestion of savvy that contrasts with the dizzy confusion bubbling inside her young heart. In many ways she is the daughter I never had. Only once during our years fighting crime together has the fire that dances in her eyes been dimmed. It was when she returned after her ill-fated attempt to set up on her own. We were looking into the murder of a department store Santa at the time, and unusually for us it turned out to be a case with international ramifications. Calamity ended up liaising with the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency in Los Angeles. They made a fuss of her and suggested the possibility of a preferred associative relationship, whatever that is. So Calamity made a go of it on her own. She thought the business from the Pinkertons would see her through. I was sceptical: how much business does a West Coast American operation do in Aberystwyth? But, at the same time, I was worried that my objections sprang from the selfish desire to hold on to her. I didn’t want to see her go but I felt at the time I had no right to stand in her way; if you love someone, they say, let them go. It took me a while to understand that this motto, though widely quoted, is not true. If you love someone, you’d be nuts to let them go. The whole venture only lasted a couple of weeks, just long enough for the tumbleweed of fate to pile up outside her door. I don’t think she even had a client. It was painful to watch, but I could see it taught her an important lesson about life, the one that says: in this world, people like the Pinkertons never call twice.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘To see Mooncalf.’
‘Right. We could ask if he does tickets.’
‘What sort of tickets?’
‘Travel ones. To Hughesovka.’
‘Who wants to go to Hughesovka?’
‘We do . . . might. To take a witness statement from the imaginary friend and stuff like that.’
‘What will we use for money?’
‘We’ll use part of what we get for the sock.’
‘Oh of course, I forgot. We’ll use the change left after buying the marble palace.’
Calamity’s brow clouded. ‘You don’t think it’s going to be worth much?’
‘My feeling is, this sock is going to bounce.’
The thought that the Yuri Gagarin sock might not be a source of great wealth silenced Calamity for a while, at least as far as the Pier.
We stopped in its shadow, and looked up. It was little more than a shed on stilts in which two tribes co- existed: the adolescent girls from whose numbers I had extracted Calamity, and the grannies. Invisible to each other, they occupy the same space without ever meeting like wanderers in those Escher engravings where staircases interlock along the planes of incompatible dimensions.
It was cool in the shadow, like the glade of a forest. Cool and damp and reeking of seaweed and guano. This was the real wonder. Not the tawdry scene up above but the bit underneath: the vast intricate criss-crossing web of ironmongery that held the whole thing suspended at the same level as the Prom. People claim the death of British manufacturing came when the last car factory was sold into foreign hands, but the real death was in 1980 when they stopped making Meccano in Liverpool. When the Pier finally falls down, no one will have the know-how to fix the ironwork. Until that time, uncountable starlings roost there and emerge at dusk in twittering skeins, endlessly, like a string of black handkerchiefs drawn from a magician’s pocket.
We climbed the steps that curved up the buttress of the sea wall, on to the Prom and back into the light.
‘How come Gethsemane’s spirit ended up in Hughesovka?’ Calamity asked.
‘Maybe if you are a spirit you don’t have much control over who you end up possessing.’
‘Yes, it could be like hiring a car, you just have to take what they give you.’
‘That’s if it is her spirit.’
‘What else could it be?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We need to get hold of that seance tape,’ said Calamity, and then added, ‘What do you think the chances are of us solving the case?’
‘I’d say no chance whatsoever.’
‘We can’t really fence the sock unless we make at least a token effort, can we?’
‘No, it wouldn’t be right. Although I have a terrible suspicion that the man-minutes we just used up in our brief conversation have already exceeded the value of the sock.’
‘Yuri Gagarin socks must be worth more than that.’
We walked through town to Chalybeate Street where Mooncalf & Sons had, according to the silver copperplate shop sign, been dealing in antiques since 1834. I wasn’t sure there had even been a street here back then. The Mooncalfs were originally brothers and two of West Wales’s most respected fencers of stolen goods. The shop in Chalybeate Street handled antiques and ‘special requests’. The other branch had operated out of a caravan in Clarach and dealt with stolen religious icons. This branch had stopped trading a while back when mobster Frankie Mephisto had incinerated the caravan with one Mooncalf brother still in it.
Mooncalf was a small man, and the counter behind which he stood reached up to his chest. He was amiable with a wizened, sharply pointed look common to men in fairy tales who are prematurely aged by evil witches, but which can also arise from spending too many hours late at night scheming. In former times he would have made a living operating a string of child pickpockets, or chimney sweeps whom he would have discouraged from dawdling on the job by lighting a fire in the grate while they were halfway up the chimney.
He threw his arms out in delighted greeting. ‘Mr Knight and Calamity! What a lovely surprise. Welcome to Mooncalf & Sons.’
‘Since 1834, eh?’ I answered.
‘The brand has been around since then, Mr Knight. Mooncalf & Sons is the soul, the actual premises are merely the physical body that houses it.’
‘How’s business?’
‘Slow, but the long-term prospects seem assured.’
‘I suppose there is always a market for stolen goods.’
Mooncalf winced. ‘Stolen goods! Who deals in stolen goods? If that is what you have in mind you would appear to have come to the wrong shop. Mooncalf & Sons is a respectable business with a spotless reputation.’
‘Not according to the police.’
‘Mr Knight, you walk into my shop and make these . . . these insinuations. You remind me, if I may be permitted an indelicate turn of phrase, of a man who engages the services of a prostitute for the night and spends the whole time berating her for the shameful way she makes her living.’
‘Do you do tickets?’ said Calamity.
He paused and reassumed the look of Buddhist serenity with which he had originally greeted us. ‘What sort of
