'Not bad eh?' she panted. 'Carbon fibre frame, hollow inside and polypropylene bristles — drag coefficient about the same as a seagull.'
'I'm impressed.'
'I hear Myfanwy left town. I thought you two were an item.'
'So did I but you just never know, do you?'
I took the essay out of my pocket and handed it to her. She held the papers up to her nose, and slowly leafed through them, making soft grunting sounds as she went. Unfortunately, she didn't have her runing glasses with her but agreed that she would start transcribing tonight and send Julian over every half hour with the pages as she finished them. At the mention of his name, the cat looked up again from the microscope, stared long and hard at us, and then reapplied his eye to the eyepiece.
'You're staying in that old caravan aren't you?' Mrs Evans added as I left. 'The one no one knows about?' As I retraced my steps through the whorls and vortices of the car park I thought sourly of Eeyore and his so-called untraceable caravan. I was tempted to curse him, but if you did that in this shop it set off an alarm.
The sun was setting when I got back and the caravans were bathed in golden fire, like an Inca city. I wasn't expecting to see Julian with the translated pages until later in the night and so I slept for a while. When I awoke, the caravan was in darkness. I got up and took down a tin of pilchards from the cupboard as a reward for Julian and went out for a walk. A breathless hush had fallen, the sort sometimes found in the hour or two between the end of a perfect summer's day and the onset of evening. Under a sky darkening to indigo I walked through the caravan park, aware with a tinge of envy that the rest of the inhabitants would be sitting down inside their two-wheeled homes to their homely meals: dinners scooped out of tins, heated over camping-gas burners and served on picnic crockery. Children tingling with the raw memory of swimming in the sea and burning on the hot sands. A nameless sense of foreboding had found its way into my heart. I headed for the dunes that edged the park; there was something eternally beautiful and reassuring about them, the sharp spiky marram grass that stung our knees as children looked soft now, like fur ruffled by the fondling breeze. I climbed and sat down facing the ocean looking out to a world which ten thousand years ago had still been land, and which Dai Brainbocs had persuaded his Welsh teacher to try and reclaim. The scheme seemed no madder than some of the other things that had been happening and I could no longer find the strength to be convinced that it wouldn't work. It was the normal world that was difficult to believe in now. The first stars flickered faintly and from far away the voices of playing children came, weak as ghosts. It was going to be a long night. I took out the hip flask and had a drink of rum, then reached into my pocket for a notepad and pencil. I thought for a few seconds and wrote on the pad: What are the lessons of Noel Bartholomew? I took another drink and savoured the fiery liquor as I contemplated the answer to my question. Never try and save a woman who can't be saved? I stuck the pencil in my mouth and looked at the new sentence. No. I crossed it out. Always try and save a woman who can't be saved? I scratched that one out too. Don't try and save a woman if it's you who needs saving? I put the notepad down and took another drink. Calamity, who thought all private detectives should drink whisky, once asked me what was the difference between the two drinks. I thought at the time it had to do with the taste, but I was wrong. People are wrong about everything. What is the difference? They both taste fiery and get you drunk, they both look the same and cost the same. But one is the distilled essence of cold, wet, miserable Scottish highlands. And one is the succulent ichor made from sugar and the distilled sunshine of far-off places. I knew which one Bartholomew would have chosen. Bartholomew the dreamer, the romantic, travelling upriver against all advice, lured ever further inland by tantalising rumours and contradictory stories . . . All this time I had been telling Calamity to ask the right question and had been asking the wrong one myself. I knew now that he never found Hermione, and it wasn't the Chinese shopkeeper who faked the pictures but he himself before he left Aberystwyth. A few sprigs of foliage from Danycoed Wood, a girl from a harbourside tea- cosy shop paid a farthing to dress up, and a studio in Terrace Road.
And the question was not whether he found her or not but why he went all that way just to die? I looked out over the quiet grey landscape, the colour slowly leeching out. The answer is etched in all the faces you meet in Aberystwyth. No one has the courage to be saved. Not the Moulin girls seeking escape in the one place they'll never find it. Nor Sospan grinning sadly behind the invisible bars of his vanilla prison.
A lone figure came running along the beach from the direction of Berth. One tiny figure running with the arrow-straight desperation of one whose errand might still save the world. I watched her approach, a school satchel swinging at her side, as she ran up the beach over the stones and into the foothills of the dunes. Her pace suddenly halved on the soft sand as her footholds gave way and the air around her turned to treacle. But she just redoubled her efforts, racing against the rumbling mounds of sand and contemptuous of their attempts to thwart her. It was Calamity and the fire of belief within her still burned strong. At the top she ran up to me and threw herself into my arms, she was sobbing uncontrollably.
'He . . . he . . .'
'It's OK.'
Her face was washed over with a silver film of tears and her efforts to speak juddered into nothing as each time a fresh bout of sobbing took her.
'He . . . he . . .'
'What is it?'
'He's going to destroy Aberystwyth!' and at the thought of it she squealed and burst into another fit of weeping.
I reached into my pocket and found a pack of tissues to hand to her. Staring out over Ynyslas sands in the deep calm of this night, I was able to receive the news that someone was going to destroy Aberystwyth with strange detachment. I waited patiently as the sobs slowly subsided. Calamity took out a tissue and blew her nose. She looked up at me, her face wet and glistening.
'He'll destroy everything!'
'Who will?'
'Lovespoon.'
Another sob interrupted but through the tears she said:
'You said you didn't know how he was going to get the Ark to the sea?'
I nodded.
'It was the wrong question. He's going to take the sea to the Ark!'
As we retraced our steps, carefully now as all the light from the world had gone and the paths through the dunes had disappeared, we saw a bonfire burning on the horizon, somewhere in the direction of Tre'ddol. In the dark midsummer night there was something unnervingly ancient and pagan about the sight. We watched for a long time until our reverie was startled by the mewing of a cat at our feet, the sharp scent of burned fur pricking our nostrils. It was Julian, with a badly singed ear. An entire story was contained in that sharp burned cat smell and we apprehended it in an instant. We set off at a run across the hills in the direction of Ma Evans's house, through the caravan park, across the road and out along the bog towards the railway line. I knew what to expect before I got there. Mrs Llantrisant had outwitted me yet again. When we arrived the area was bathed in the familiar flashing blue light. A team of firemen was hosing down the house and some ladies from the St John's Ambulance Brigade were reassuring Ma Evans who sat huddled under a blanket drinking tea. Some yards away stood the makings of an ugly pyre. And beyond that, held back by the police and making angry grumblings, was the mob of disgruntled villagers who had no doubt set the pyre. I didn't know what Mrs Llantrisant had said to them — such a task would have been child's play for an agent of her experience. Sheep not lambing, or cows not calving, or milk going inexplicably sour; any of the myriad natural mishaps of everyday life could have been ascribed to witchery and used against Ma Evans. The pyre had been extinguished but the house, set on fire deliberately but made to look like the work of an accidental spark, was beyond saving. As I surveyed the scene, Ma Evans looked over to me, the tears still glistening on her cheeks, and tried to somehow explain things to me with her expression. I waved it aside; it was me who should be doing the explaining; I had brought all this upon her. A group of men walked over and pointed shotguns at me and I slowly raised my hands. From behind the house came a figure, an old lady who used to be a hunched and bent old spinster but now walked with a back ramrod straight and an authoritative purposeful air. It was Mrs Llantrisant, her sense of having achieved her destiny compromised only by the big black gap in her front dental plate which made her look like a cartoon pirate. Julian the cat ran up to her. A wave of despair and fury hit me as she took a large kipper out of her shopping bag and handed it to the cat. 'You fucking Judas!' I screamed, and ran forwards, lashing out viciously with my foot at the ring of Julian's arse. The cat yelped and jumped out of the way just as the stock of a shotgun smashed into the side of my head. I twisted slightly as I fell and the last
