Aberystwyth Mon Amour

'Did anyone say you could smoke in here?'

'Don't worry, I'll open a window.'

'I mean you're too young to smoke.'

'How can you be a private dick if you don't smoke?' She rolled her eyes and made a big deal of petulantly putting away the cigarettes. Then she sat down.

For a while neither of us spoke; a mild air of antagonism growing in the silence. We both knew whoever spoke first would lose. She started drumming her fingers on the table-top. I was damned if I was going to speak. I shifted in my seat and rested my elbow on the back of the chair. She copied me, the little minx.

'I mean, come on, kid . . .' I said finally.

She started counting off names on her fingers with exaggerated childishness. 'Bronzini, Brainbocs, Llewellyn and Evans the Boot.'

I stared at her suspiciously. 'What?'

'That's four pins, wouldn't you say?'

'W . . . what's that you're saying?'

'OK I'll admit Evans isn't officially dead. Maybe half a pin, but I'm only saying that to be kind to you. Won't be long before he's a whole pin.'

'Evans the Boot?'

'Probably trying to jemmy open them pearly gates as we speak.'

'Calamity!' I said sharply.

'St Peter better get himself an Alsatian.'

I banged my fist on the table. 'Calamity, stop it! What are you talking about? Who are these other people?'

'I'm sure you must have them on file. The police are keeping a blanket on it, but you being a private dick would have your own sources, wouldn't you?'

She gave me a look of crushing superiority.

Aberystwyth was a great place for a connoisseur of irony. The most underworked man in town was Meirion, the crime reporter on the Gazette: he worked fewer hours in a year than Father Christmas. Not because of a lack of material. There was enough going on to keep an entire department on overtime, but the money that owned the newspaper also owned the seafront hotels and the ghost train and the putting green and various other bits of tourist infrastructure. To read the Gazette you'd think we were a town full of Tibetan monks. We were sitting now on the terrace of the Seaside Rock Cafe, overlooking the crazy golf course.

'So far there have been three dead schoolchildren,' he said sucking thoughtfully on a stick of Blackpool humbug. 'All in the same class at school. Bronzini, Llewellyn and Brainbocs; and Evans the Boot is still missing.'

The waitress appeared and I ordered the assiette.

'It's all being kept under wraps of course. And you didn't hear any of this from me.'

'So how did they die?'

He took the rock out of his mouth. 'Brainbocs fell into one of the slurry vats at the cheese yards. Bronzini and Llewellyn were both given 'squirty flowers'.'

'Cobra venom?'

'Some sort of neurotoxin.'

I whistled. It was an old trick. Send a kid one of those squirt-water-in-your-eye flowers from the joke shop and fill it with cobra venom.

'Any idea who's doing it?'

'Hard to tell. Three of the kids were all of a bunch. Llewellyn, Bronzini, Evans the Boot were all hooligans. And we know there was no love lost between them and some of those South Aberystwyth gangs — posses or whatever it is they call themselves these days. But Brainbocs doesn't fit in. This kid was a child prodigy. The Cambrian Mozart they called him. Brilliant at history and just about everything else he turned his hand to. He spent last summer transcribing Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu into runes.'

I gasped. 'Wow! I couldn't even manage the cat sat on the mat!'

'Normally Brainbocs wouldn't go near kids like that, not unless he wanted his head kicked in.'

'So Bronzini and Llewellyn would have had plenty of enemies, and Brainbocs wouldn't say boo to a goose?'

'Just about. Although even Brainbocs had a few enemies.'

'Really?'

'Brainbocs got a Saturday job working at the rock factory — helping out in the R&D unit after hours. He became interested in the great age-old puzzle of rock manufacturing, called De Quincey's Theorem. It's very complicated, but basically it concerns the attempt to change the wording of the letters midway through the rock. You know, so it starts off saying Blackpool and then after a few mouthfuls it says Zanzibar or something. It's one of the last great challenges of the rock-maker's art. And he cracked it. Just like that. Sat down with a pen and paper and a set of log tables and worked it out. So then the management make him head of R&D and within a week — and the kid is still in school, don't forget, hasn't even done his O levels — within a week he'd found a way of computer type-setting the letters. Saved a fortune: twenty old-timers were thrown out of work the same afternoon. Entire factory closes down on strike. The Unions say, 'Get rid of the kid, or you'll never make another stick of rock in this town.' So they fire the kid. His parting shot was forty cases of rock that said 'Aberystwyth' and then after two mouthfuls read: 'I've pissed in this rock'.'

If you walk south past the Pier and the Bandstand you come to Castle Point where the Promenade turns sharply as if on a hinge. After that the town takes on a different character: an exposed, wind-beaten strip leading down to the harbour with a down-at-heel air where life seems a constant battle with discarded newspapers flying in the wind. The buildings are mostly guesthouses or the sad annexes used by the hotels on the main Prom when they are full. The only people you see are beachcombers and dog-walkers in their flapping macs.

It was down this stretch that I found Mr Giles sitting in the harbour-side pub, the Ship's Biscuit.

'Morning Mr Giles!'

He gave me a sheepish look as if embarrassed about the other night.

'Oh hello. Everything OK?'

'Fine, and yourself?'

'Oh, can't complain,' he said stoically in a tone that stabbed the heart. He was a gentle man who had dedicated his years to the nurturing of tender shoots and seedlings, yet now some cruel trick of fate had led to him spending the autumn of his life as caretaker at St Luddite's. Who in the world had a right to complain if he didn't?

I bought him a pint and asked about the Bronzini incident.

After taking a long drink he spoke quietly to his glass.

'Few weeks ago Mrs Morgan went walking with her dog Lucky across the school grounds. You know we've got a sign up, says 'Beware of your Dog', but they never read it, do they? You see a sign like that every day, so you read it but you don't really read it, if you know what I mean. You miss the difference in the wording. So she takes Lucky for a walk, and the dog disappears. Can't find him anywhere. All afternoon she's wandering around, shouting 'Lucky, Lucky, Lucky!', but he's gone without a trace. Come nightfall, she has to give up. Never mind, she thinks; he'll turn up. But he doesn't. Next week Mrs Morgan's walking past the school and Bronzini appears at the gate and offers to sell her some fur gloves. Said he'd made them himself. Well, she was only too pleased to encourage a bit of industry and self-reliance among the youth, especially after all those terrible things she's been hearing about the school. So she buys the gloves. Nicely made they were, and there's something about the pattern she likes, something familiar, but she can't quite put her finger on it. They say when she got home she put the gloves on the reading table next to the fireplace and goes to make a cup of tea. When she comes back in she finds Sheba — the dog's mother — standing at the foot of the table staring up at the gloves and making this pitiful whining sound, and pawing at the ground. Terrible thing it was.'

I shook my head, appalled at the crime.

'Of course,' the caretaker added, 'the kids have their own theory about the murders.'

'Yes?'