He looked pleased. I smiled politely and stared at the floor of polished red tiles, spotlessly clean although strewn here and there with bits of straw. I'd never known a time when my father didn't have straw somewhere near him. Even in the sitting room it only added to the feeling of cleanliness, this association with the donkeys. What, after all, could be purer than the soul of a donkey? It's probably why my father had taken it as a second career. After years submerged in the moral grime of the Aberystwyth underworld he had turned to the one industry in town which traded innocence. Sospan tried to in a way, of course. He traded in the essence of the nursery, the sugary, vanilla smell of a mother's breast. But there was nothing innocent about the men who stood at his stall and ate, no matter how much they may have yearned inwardly to turn back the clock. Papa Bronzini continued to drone on about the theatre and at one point a donkey, I think it was Mignon, put her head in through the kitchen window and listened for a while before giving me an uncanny look of sympathy and loping off. Gradually the conversation turned to the old days when Bronzini and my father had worked on the Force together, the days when Bronzini had tried to bust the ESSJAT. For me, Bronzini cut a slightly pathetic figure but I saw that Eeyore was in awe of him and watched in uncritical fascination as Bronzini, now Aberystwyth's foremost mobster, described the workings of the ultra-secret elite known as the ESSJAT. He told how Gwenno Guevara had been a streetwalker before the war and had joined up to earn some extra money with the troops. Once overseas she had discovered a taste for fighting and had been good at it.
'That was the thing about Gwenno, you see, sir,' explained the old policeman. 'Whatever she turned her hand to she excelled at. Great hooker, great soldier and great chief of the ESSJAT.'
After the War Lovespoon rewarded her by offering her any job she wanted, not expecting the former hooker to choose a position in the newly formed League against Turpitude. But true to form she not only took the job but excelled at it, rising through the ranks until eventually she sat the top. At which point she simply disappeared. No one outside the organisation knew who she was, or where, although it seemed likely that Brainbocs had found out. But he of course was dead.
It was about ten to midnight when I made my way through the rows of boats, warehouses and lobster pots that made up Harbour Row. In the distance I could hear the whoop of a police siren and the engine howl of a car being driven at high speed. A chase. I took up a position deep in the shadow of a public shelter across the road from the Chandler's and thought about what I had just done. By locking Llunos up like that I had committed myself to a course from which there seemed no way back; it was as if I had been holding on to the precipice of a normal life in Aberystwyth and the last of my fingers had lost its hold.
A cat mewed at my feet and I jumped, my shoes making a harsh scraping sound which my fear convinced me could be heard across the whole neighbourhood. The racing car was nearer, but the police car seemed to have moved off, the klaxon getting fainter and fainter somewhere in the direction of Penparcau. Suddenly a door opened across the way. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up and I stopped breathing. There was a pause. The beats of my heart louder than kettle-drum notes.
A figure stumbled or was pushed out of the warehouse. A woman's figure. She turned round and looked over to where I was standing. There was no way I could see in the light and with the distance, but I knew it was Bianca. I stepped forward, terrified that a trap was about to be sprung; Lovespoon had given me his word, but what was that worth? Why arrange the meeting at a place and an hour like this? As I walked across Bianca recognised me and opened her mouth to speak, but as she did the car that had been racing through the neighbourhood rounded the corner on two wheels. I darted a glance over — it was a car I'd seen before, very recently. Bianca spun round and a cry erupted in my throat. Confusion and terror swept across Bianca's face, and then there was a bang and Bianca went sailing like a rag doll into the air. Turning, turning, turning, before hitting the ground with a single, sharp crack like an axe hitting a tree. I stood transfixed, unable to move, and watched the car reverse a yard and then slam forwards back into Bianca's broken body. The car door sprang open, a figure leaped out and sprinted round to the other side of the car and down one of the dark alleys between two warehouses. Seconds later I heard from the harbour the sound of an outboard motor being fired up.
I ran over to Bianca's side and knelt down.
She looked up, eyes glazed with pain, and tried to force her mouth to overcome the agony and speak. Far off the banshee wail of the police siren was getting louder. I grasped her shoulders tenderly and ordered her not to speak.
'Louie!'
'It's OK, don't speak.'
She curled the fingers of her hand round my forearm weak as a baby.
'Louie!'
'I'm here, baby.'
And then her index finger detached itself from the rest of her fingers and slowly formed a curl like the finger of the grim reaper; she beckoned slowly towards herself and mouthed a word. I felt myself being pulled down by the finger as if attached by an invisible thread, and when my ear reached so close to her mouth that I could feel the warmth of her breath, she spoke again. Each word making her smashed body quiver like the pangs of childbirth.
'Louie!'
'It's OK, don't speak!'
'I ... love . . . you!'
'There, there . . .'
'The essay . . .'
'No, no! Don't talk!'
And then as if at the exact moment her spirit left her she gripped me with a terrifying new strength.
'The essay . . .' she gasped desperately, 'it's in the stove!'
The grip broke and her head fell with a thud on to the tarmac glistening with her blood.
The police car skidded into view at the far end of the Prom and I looked at the murderer's car, engine still running, and realised where I'd seen it before. It was mine.
Chapter 16
I SIPPED MY coffee and read Meirion's editorial about Bianca:
It is almost a week since the tragic death of Sioned Penmaenmawr, better known to the denizens of our notorious entertainment district as 'Bianca'. A girl who cocked her final snook at the society that cast her out by being buried in her night-club costume. By now most people will already have begun to forget about her; and the rest will never have cared in the first place. More fool them. The photo of the miserable funeral at Llanbadarn Cemetery on Tuesday contains a message for us all. There were four mourners at the sad interment. Her close friend Myfanwy Montez; Detective Inspector Llunos; a photographer from this newspaper; and a solitary figure who passing by felt the touch of pity in his heart. Wearing a dirty old coat tied up with packing string, his face dirty and lined with the years of suffering, it was a man only too familiar with the condition of exile from the hearthside of the Aberystwyth good life: a Patagonian War veteran. His lot it was that afternoon to teach us all not only the meaning of the word 'pity', but also alas, the meaning of shame.
The War veteran with the coat tied up with packing string had been me. Had Meirion known? It was hard to see how he could have done. I went to the funeral in the hope of speaking to Myfanwy, but she stayed too close to Llunos the whole time and rushed off in his car immediately afterwards. Llunos said in the newspaper that he was desperate to talk to me in connection with the death, which they were treating as a tragic hit-and-run, but he didn't mention that I locked him in the toilet.
Ever since the night she died I had been hiding in the caravan. I still didn't know how I survived: standing over her dead body, the car that killed her — my car — parked nearby with the engine still running, the police only seconds away. In a situation like that the only thing to do is make a decision. Any one, it hardly matters. The one I made was to jump in the car with Bianca's blood and tissue still smeared across the grille and drive off. She was dead, I could see that. And if by some miracle she wasn't, the police would be better able to help than I was. So I saved myself. As the police car screeched to a halt I did a U-turn, turned right at the Castle and over Trefechan Bridge; then I pulled off on to the track leading to Tan-y-Bwlch beach. From there I abandoned the car and set off on foot across the darkened fields and over the Iron Age hill fort. The plan was to double back, making a wide arc around the town, and head for the caravan in Ynyslas. It took me four hours, but I did it.
Since then, the weather had closed right in with expanses of dove-grey clouds filling the sky; it was cold and windy and moisture hung in the air ready to occasionally spit at the windows of the caravan. I didn't go out much,
