‘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
