flapping of some birds trapped in a net slung across her shoulders.
‘What’s Bishop’s Trumpet?’ asked Calamity.
‘What indeed! You’re from the town, I can see.’ The woman pushed her basket, laden with freshly plucked roots and leaves, towards us. ‘I’ve got me Foxbright and Marly, me Blue-Dog, Purple Trolls-foot, Night-feather, Trollop-me-Bright, Bog-Grail, Prim Willow, My Lady’s Hymen, Fan-white, Silver Milchgrussel and a pinch of Satanicus, but I’m blessed if I can find any Bishop’s Trumpet.’
‘We can help you look, if you like,’ said Calamity.
‘That’s very kind of you, but we won’t find any today; the spirit of the mountain is being grumpy. But you could help me carry my basket back to my cottage, it’s just over the hill. Would you do that?’
I took the basket and we followed her up the hill and then down the other side to a small cottage on the edge of the Forestry Commission plantation. We went through a garden gate and waited while she took the net over to an aviary in which birds of all descriptions fluttered about. The woman released the new birds and took us into her kitchen, where she put the kettle on without asking. ‘You will stay for tea, now.’
‘We wouldn’t want to be any trouble,’ I said.
She looked at me in wonder. ‘Trouble? To make a little cup of tea for the next mayor of Aberystwyth? How strangely you talk!’
I stifled a startled look and said, ‘I think you must be mistaken there. The next mayor of Aberystwyth will probably be Ercwleff.’
‘That’s what you think, is it?’
‘That’s what everybody thinks.’
‘It’s not what my cat thinks.’ She sat down with a groan, her rheumatic limbs clearly aching.
‘I think you must be feeding her too many kippers.’
‘Eightball doesn’t eat fish, and she’s never wrong about the mayoral elections.’
‘What do you do with the birds?’ Calamity asked.
‘Lots of things. I use the feathers for me cardigans, the feet to scratch me back, but mostly I use the croaks to black me hats.’
‘What sort of hats?’ asked Calamity.
‘Stoveys, of course. Best stovepipe-hat blacker in all of Wales I am. You ask them, they’ll tell you, get Auntie Pebim to black your stovey if you want it to stay black.’
‘Is it hard to black them?’ asked Calamity.
Auntie Pebim scoffed politely and rolled her eyes as she recalled the magnitude of the task. ‘It is if you do it properly. The hardest part is not the herbs, of course. If the spirit of the mountain wants to give them to you he will, or if he’s being a pest like today, he won’t. You also need a Bible that’s been used as a pillow on the deathbed of someone who died of meanness, but they are getting harder to find these days. People are turning away from God.’
‘What about the croaks?’ I asked. ‘How do you collect them.’
Auntie Pebim poured the boiling water into the teapot. ‘First you get the birds to build a nest and lay an egg; you can’t hurry that, you just have to make the circumstances right and wait for nature to take its course. Then, when the chick is about to hatch you put a bell jar over mother and egg and wait. Soon the chick hatches and the hen fills the bell jar with croaks of love, caw, caw, caw. Then you remove them and fill the jar with oil and from this you can distil out the caws. That’s not easy. Eventually you end up with a little drop like quicksilver.’ A cloud darkened her brow. ‘Of course, that’s the light way. There’s a darker way, too, where you put a poisonous spider in the jar and it kills the chick. Then you collect the lamentation of the mother, the
‘We were wondering who the house belonged to back there,’ I said.
‘Which house?’
‘Where we first met you.’
Auntie Pebim thought for a second. ‘A house, you say? I suppose it’s possible; but I can’t say I notice things like that, too quick for my old eyes, you see. One minute here, the next gone. I tend to notice slower things like the rise and fall of the mountains, the changing levels of the sea and the ice ages – things like that. Even the growth of trees is a bit quick for me.’
Calamity and I resisted the temptation to exchange glances. ‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘It must have been there quite a while; there’s lots of masonry lying around.’
Auntie Pebim’s voice took on a dismissive tone. ‘Masonry! To me stone is no more substantial than the fluff of a dandelion on a windy day.’
‘Most people find it quite substantial,’ I persisted. ‘Enough, at least, to build houses lasting hundreds of years.’
‘I wouldn’t trust it myself,’ she said.
I looked around at her croft, which seemed to have followed convention in being made from stone.
‘We heard Iestyn Probert used to live there,’ said Calamity.
‘Iestyn Probert? Oh yes, so he did. Nice boy. The family moved after they hanged him.’ She tutted and opened a packet of digestive biscuits, letting the contents fall onto a plate with plinking sounds like sonar.
‘How awful,’ said Calamity.
Auntie Pebim peered at her and considered for a while, then said, ‘If you have a little bird in a cage and you release the bird, does it matter if you damage the cage?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Calamity. ‘Probably not.’
‘There you are, then. Iestyn’s spirit is free now of the prison of the flesh; it has passed on to the real world. His body was just a broken beaker, no longer needed. I don’t imagine he pines too much for a moment’s pain when they stretched his neck and made him free. Would you like some jam to take back with you?’ She stood up and hobbled over to the pantry and brought back a jar of dark-coloured jam.
‘Isn’t this the real world?’ asked Calamity.
Auntie Pebim smiled indulgently at our spiritual impoverishment. ‘Oh Lord, no, who could bear it if it were? The only thing that makes our travail bearable is the knowledge that this – the material world, as you people from the city call it – is a chimera.’
Calamity looked confused. ‘I thought the material world had to exist because it’s made of . . . material.’
‘Is that what they teach you in school these days!’ Auntie Pebim turned to me. ‘You’ll have to do something about these schools when you are mayor.’
‘I really have no intention of becoming mayor.’
Auntie Pebim smiled. It was clear that my thoughts on the matter counted little against the opinion of Eightball. She wrapped the gift of jam in some muslin and showed us out. ‘You know, it’s funny you asking about Iestyn Probert. Some travellers were asking about him last week. They looked Norwegian, with four fingers on each hand. I couldn’t tell you much about them – it was Eightball who answered the door.’
Chapter 5
That evening I went to Jezebels. There was a twinge of melancholy or some other unease in my heart, or wafting on the night breeze, and I struggled to construe it. Spring nights sometimes have this haunting quality, when the brightening day, having promised the joys of summer, still ends shipwrecked on the cold shoals of night. At such times hopes mingle in the soul with old memories of times better forgotten. Unease can stalk the heart. Or perhaps it was just something about this case that seemed out of joint. It appeared to be unfolding according to an unseen script, as if written by somebody who did not have my interests at heart. Two men enter my office and chop up my desk claiming they are punishing me for a case I am about to take on. After they leave, a client turns up with a fantastical story that cannot possibly be true. He offers to pay up front but somehow forgets this vital detail, and it seems to me that his entrance was so neatly timed following the desk-chopping that it seemed part of a double act. He sends me in search of a man called Iestyn Probert, and at Iestyn’s old house I find a business card from Jezebels. Ask for Miaow. I could feel the sharp-cornered card snagging the lining of my pocket as I walked. Two days old and already I did not like the taste of this case. If it transpired that Raspiwtin had put the card there, I would not be surprised.
Sospan was closing up as I arrived at the Prom. A hurricane lamp hung from the ceiling inside the kiosk; the
