Aberystwyth Mon Amour

to KnitWits the wool shop. The bell tinkled and I walked through the aisle of displays stacked to the ceiling with wool in every shade and grade that the shepherd could offer. I put the scrap of wool from Evans the Boot's Mam on the counter and waited as Mildred Crickhowell examined it with a jeweller's loupe. It made her look like a Cyclops: one watery jellyfish-sized eye criss-crossed with spidery red veins.

'It's tea cosy all right,' she laughed. 'Funny, you don't look the type!'

'It's . . . it's not mine,' I said lamely.

She laughed again. 'No, it never is! Don't tell me, it belongs to a friend!'

I squirmed. Visitors to the town were often surprised by the amount of shops selling tea cosies, especially as most of them were concentrated down by the harbour. Just when this harmless piece of tea-pot furniture became a front for another form of spout-warming activity was a mystery lost in history.

I picked up the scrap of wool. 'Can you be sure it's cosy? I mean it's just a piece of wool, it could be from a cardigan or something.'

The woman leaned her shoulders back and tilted her head in the sort of look which said: 'What do you mean sure?! This is KnitWits you've come to, you know?'

She handed me the eyepiece. 'See for yourself.'

As I held the cloth up to the light and examined the weave, she explained to me the various features.

'See the fine dust particles in the yarn? That's tea dust. Now look at the way the threads are woven together. See? Like figure-of-eights intertwined with zigzags? That's pretty fancy crocheting. You don't see that sort of thing very often. That's what's known as the Hildegaard Purl after the Hildegaardian Order of the Sisters of Deiniol. They invented it. Now that tells us something very interesting.'

There was a pause as I struggled to see the things she was talking about.

'Very interesting,' she repeated.

'Yeah, why?'

'Dates it, doesn't it. Surer than carbon dating, that is. It's from 1958.'

'How can you tell?'

'Hildegaard Purl was invented that year, and then not long after the sisters abjured the vice of amusement and stopped the knitting. No one else can do it like they could. And there's more. Look at the curved edge with the elaborate stitching. See it?'

'Yes!' I said, amazed at how much the woman had seen through her magnifying glass.

'See how the fibres are shrivelled and discoloured?'

'Yes.'

'That's classic scorching. That's where the spout would have gone. Now see around that rim those funny symbols?'

'Yes! Like hieroglyphics.'

'Ha!' She laughed and smacked me on the back with a force you wouldn't have expected from a lady of her age. 'Not bad for someone who claims not to know anything about tea cosies. They're not hieroglyphics, but you're not far wrong. Early Mayan alphabet. Which means what you've got here is the Mhexuataacahuatcxl. It's from a limited edition set of cosies knitted by the Sisters of Deiniol for Ma Prytherch's Tea Cosy Emporium in 1958. Creation Legends of the World series. This is Mhexuataacahuatcxl, the Mayan fertility god.'

I put the eyepiece down and stared at her in wonder.

She was grinning with delight; it wasn't often she got a chance to show off like this.

She picked up the eyepiece and had another look herself.

'And, if I'm not mistaken, this little crescent shape at the edge is all that remains of his loin cloth. The design is chiefly based on source material uncovered by the 1935 Oxford University Expedition to the Cordillera Oriental. Mhexuataacahuatcxl was the deity responsible for the renewal of vegetation and patron god of the corporation of goldsmiths. Human victims were killed and flayed to honour him twice a year. The loin cloth is a bit of licence. He could assume the form of man or woman, you see. Obviously that was a bit racy for those sisters so they left the precise details to our imaginations.'

She put down the loupe and beamed at me. 'Remarkable people: very accomplished mathematicians, invented the concept of the zero, yet curiously they never discovered the wheel.'

'That is absolutely amazing,' I said.

'Pah!' She waved a contemptuously dismissive hand in front of her face. 'Child's play. If they'd hurry up and send me that replacement part for my scanning electron microscope I'd really be able to tell you something.'

She started tapping the counter top.

'Of course, if it really is Mhexuataacahuatcxl, I ought, by rights, to report you to the police.'

There was a pause. I could tell the woman was observing me keenly, while pretending not to.

'The police?'

'There were only four Mhexuataacahuatcxls.'

'Go on.'

Three of those four are in private collections, and the fourth until fairly recently was in the Museum.'

'And it's not any more?'

'It was stolen a few weeks ago.'

It rained for the rest of the week, and I sat in my office with my feet on the desk and stared up at the picture of Noel Bartholomew. I wondered how the gene for risking one's life on stupid causes could survive in the gene pool. Here I was on the trail of a missing boy and running headlong into a confrontation with the Druids. Evans the Boot wasn't even worth saving. His Mam might think he was, but no one else in town did. I wondered why he stole the tea cosy from the Museum. I couldn't begin to imagine but I knew it wasn't because he liked tea. I was also haunted by Calamity's parting words about the fireman's son. It was stupid, I knew that, but I couldn't get the image of the lady in the bingo hall out of my head, the lady in the blue scarf. That was a pretty damned accurate prediction. What if Calamity really did know who was going to be next? I reached for an umbrella.

Terrace Road was glossy with rain and the pavements thick with holidaymakers forced from their caravans in search of stimulus. In their clear plastic macs they jostled each other and stared with disconsolate, rain-washed faces into shop windows. I shook my head sadly. What sort of life must they have come from, I wondered, if this represented a holiday? On Penglais Hill the cars queued to get into town. Later in the afternoon they would be heading back the other way, to camping-gas meals and long nights of ludo.

At the school I pulled into the lay-by behind the rugby field. Far off in the gloom, on the other side of the pitch, I could see the squat, Neanderthal figure of Herod Jenkins leading a file of small rugby-kitted boys through sheets of rain. The man who sent Marty on the run from which he never returned. The scene had hardly changed at all in twenty years except for a new wooden building that had recently appeared in the south-western corner. I looked at it, a strange skeleton of wood shaped vaguely like an upturned beetle. Seeing Herod again had robbed me of all desire to enter the school grounds. And it occurred to me that if I wanted to see the school secretary I would probably bump into Lovespoon as well. I sat for a while listening to the drumbeat of the rain on the car's roof. Then I drove home and rang the school secretary.

'Fireman's son?' said a puzzled voice on the other end of the line.

'Yes, it's for a jamboree in Oslo. He'd be an honoured guest of Crown Prince Gustav.'

'We've got one in the first year.'

'No, too young. Must be about fifteen or sixteen.'

'What about an ambulance driver's son?'

I hung up. The next day the Cambrian Gazette landed on my doorstep with the front-page news that the Ghost Train would be cancelled for a week. The fireman who shovelled the coal into the boiler had been given compassionate leave: his son had died the previous night in a hit-and-run accident.

*

''Should I, after tea and cake and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?' That's T.S. Eliot, that is, Mr Knight,' said Sospan smiling as he put the two ninety-nines down on the stand. 'From Prufrock!'

Calamity and I picked up the ices and walked over to the railings. She was now my assistant with on-target earnings of 50p a day and an ice-cream allowance.

'OK,' I said after we had shaken on the deal, 'what's the story?'