Aberystwyth Mon Amour

breathing. Gradually Brainbocs gathered himself together again.

'There were five of them in the bomber. Mrs Llantrisant, Dai the Custard Pie, Herod Jenkins, Lovespoon and Frobisher. Lovespoon is actually Frobisher.'

'The English volunteer?'

'Yes. The real Lovespoon died when the Lancaster ditched in the Rio Caeriog after the mission. Or rather, he died soon after it. Apparently he wasn't going to make it anyway, so they all helped him along a bit. They were all in it. They hit on the plan to finish him off and Frobisher would take his identity. Then after the war they would share the money. The real Lovespoon was rich, you see. As the icing on the cake, they cut off his John Thomas and stuffed it in his mouth to make it look like the work of Indians.'

'Don't tell me, it was Herod who did that.'

'Gwenno ... er ... Mrs Llantrisant actually.'

I nodded gently as I slowly absorbed the enormity of what he was telling me.

'This is what Mrs Llantrisant told me during her deathbed confession. It might still have been OK. But I was so staggered by what I heard that right in the middle of the confession I cried out 'fucking hell!'' He smiled sadly. 'I'll say one thing for Mrs Llantrisant: she's a smart woman. She knew instantly what was up. That was when I made my first mistake: my only one, in fact. I should have killed her right there in the bedroom.' He looked at me. 'I could, you know. I know how.'

I nodded and Brainbocs continued.

'But instead I ran away. From that moment on it was only a matter of time before Lovespoon came to hear about it.'

'So what was all this stuff about the tea cosy?' '

Despite his gloom, Brainbocs chuckled. 'The tea cosy depicted Mhexuataacahuatcxl, the Mayan shape-shifter. He was supposed to represent Frobisher because he had taken the form of a man who had had his John Thomas cut off. It wasn't a serious blackmail attempt. But you get the idea. I needed to find out how Lovespoon would react to his secret being out. So I led him to think Evans and his cronies had copied my essay and were trying to blackmail him — test the waters sort of thing. When he killed all four of them I knew the water was pretty hot. So what was I supposed to do? You can imagine my problem. The police couldn't be trusted - I was sure they would hand me straight over to the Druids. That's why I thought of you. And now I just wanted to thank you.'

'But I haven't done anything — I failed. Didn't I?'

He smiled, stood up and walked over to the door. 'Actually, you're playing your part very well. Even if you don't know what it is.'

As the guard let him out, I called out:

'So when does the plane take off?'

'Tonight.'

'And Aberystwyth gets destroyed?'

'They'll build another one. Don't worry.'

Chapter 23

GETTING A MESSAGE to Llunos proved to be easier than I expected. He was lying on the floor of my cell when I got back, his face bruised and swollen. It looked like he'd finally fallen down his own police station stairs. I bathed his cuts and waited while he gradually recovered consciousness. When he did I explained the situation to him and he went to the door and banged on it to bring a guard. After ten minutes he gave up. No one came for the rest of the day. And so the hours passed. Every half hour or so, Llunos would look over and ask the time. I would tell him and he would bang his fist into his palm and say, 'There must be some way.' But neither of us could think of one. At the end of the day we went to the window to watch the sunset. And as the sky turned pink we heard the clatter of propeller engines starting up from the fields of the Ystwyth flood plain.

Llunos looked at me. 'That will be the Lancaster then?'

'Yes.'

'Do you think it will work?'

'What?'

'Their plan.'

'Which part of it?

The old policeman considered. 'The bit about blowing up the dam.'

'I don't know. If they get the plane to take off, then they can probably do it. I mean with things like that Brainbocs is pretty good. Making the bombs would be a piece of cake for him and the rest, getting the right flight approach and trajectory and all that, is just mathematics.'

'Do you think the water will come this way?'

'Where else can it go?'

He thought about that one and didn't say anything more for a while.

'I suppose there's a lot of water behind that dam.'

'Eight cubic kilometres.'

'How much is that?'

'It's about the size of a small mountain.'

He nodded as if I was confirming his own calculations. 'That's a lot of water to be released all at once isn't it?'

'Yes, a lot.'

'A fuck of a lot actually.'

'Yes.'

'A hell of a fuck of a lot.'

'Yes.'

'What do you think it will do to Aberystwyth?'

It wasn't an easy question to answer. How do you describe something no one has ever seen before? Even Brainbocs would have struggled. I looked at Llunos. He was never a particularly jovial man but tonight he looked especially dejected. Maybe he was taking the whole thing as a personal failure. I struggled to find an analogy that he would understand.

'Well?'

Suddenly an image popped into my head.

'Imagine Aberystwyth is your testicles and the water is a rugby boot.'

The first street lights in town were starting to flicker into life when we heard a key in the lock. We both spun round, cursing ourselves that we hadn't made a contingency plan to overpower the guards or something. Anything no matter how foolhardy would have been better than standing looking out of the window admiring the view. The keys jangled harshly in the lock and the door opened emitting a faint, familiar whiff of gin. It was Pickel and Calamity. Pickel was holding an elaborately bent coat hanger he'd used to pick the lock; he looked from me to Llunos and then back at me.

'Ere! This girl says Lovespoon is going to knock me fucking clock down with a tidal wave!'

We drove to Plascrug recreation field on the back of Pickel's pick-up truck, arriving just as the plane began to taxi. Calamity and Pickel sat in the cab. The runway had been marked out with oil drums and flashing amber lights stolen from council road works. Pickel drove at full speed into the car park and then straight over the kerb on to the grass. We could see the plane at the opposite end of the field lumbering towards us, and Pickel drove straight at it. Half a minute later and we would have been too late; the Lancaster bomber would have picked up enough speed to take off before we reached it. Instead we hurtled towards each other in a head-on face-off. The giant bomber lurched and bumped across the turf, gradually gaining speed, torn between two conflicting forces: the drag of gravity on its lumbering frame and an invisible force sucking it up into the night sky. The gap between us rapidly shrank until it was only a matter of yards, the plane jumped violently and the wheels left the ground for seconds at a time before crunching back on to the turf. There were three possibilities: the plane would leave the turf at the last moment, there would be a head-on collision, or one side would veer off at the last minute. It turned out that both sides veered off at the last minute.

The manoeuvre worked in our favour. After the plane and truck had performed two unwieldy circles on the field Pickel managed to bring us alongside the fuselage and match the speed of the plane. We stood in the back of