I took her for a cup of tea and in the cafe she told me what brought her to the museum.
'There's been some fresh evidence about Marty.'
I turned and looked more closely at her. 'Fresh in what way?'
'They've released some of the official papers from the inquiry. The statute of limitations is up, isn't it? I finally found out the answer to a mystery that has haunted me ever since that morning he left for school and never came back.' She leaned closer and lowered her voice. 'That night before the cross-country run, he was out in the frosty woods collecting kindling for his granny. Away for hours he was. When he got back home he was half-starved with cold and his new coat was torn in half. I wasn't half angry with him, the perisher, but he wouldn't say how he did it. But now I know, don't I?'
'So what was it?'
'Apparently there was this piece of evidence at the inquiry that they didn't release for fear of embarrassing the Church. It was the testimony of a friar — one of them mendicant ones — and he had been lost in the woods that same night. Blue with cold he was, because he didn't have a proper coat. Well, they're not supposed to, are they? It's all part of the mortification. It seems when Marty saw him he tore his own coat in two and gave half to the friar.'
I patted her hand. 'He was a fine boy.'
'They kept quiet about it so as not to upset the poor chap. He was embarrassed, you see, because he thought all the other mendicants would laugh at him for taking charity from a little schoolboy.'
'I expect he would have been mortified.'
Marty's mum nodded without understanding and then carried on excitedly, 'Anyway, I've just been speaking to the people who run this place and they're thinking of making a tableau of it -to illustrate the theme of suffering and charity through the ages. I've just been giving them some of his old clothes.'
After Marty's mum left with my promise to visit her soon I wandered into the exhibit hall. I showed the pictures of the Dean and the girl to the doctor carrying a jar of leeches. He recognised them, and said he seemed to vaguely remember them working there for a while, drifting in and drifting out as people tended to do. Workers seldom stayed long — life there was hard and the working conditions primitive. The girl had been spinning and the man had mended coracles. The last he'd heard the Dean had got a job working as a satyr in the Beltane speakeasy.
Chapter 11
As I sat in the office that evening I felt my spirits sinking with the barometer and then a phone call from Llunos sent them lower still. One of his men had pulled in some junior tough guy who had been boasting about the hit on Marmalade. He said it had been pre-planned and meant to scare him off talking to me. The kid wouldn't say who paid for it. Of course, it would be stupid to blame myself but that didn't stop me doing it. The actual cause of death might have been a weak heart, but he was an old man who would still be alive today if I hadn't gone to see him. If I wasn't to blame, who was? I put on my hat and coat and then the phone rang again. I snatched the receiver and barked into it and then listened. The line was awful: hissing and squawking faded in and out as if I was tuning a short-wave radio and a girl's faint voice said, 'Louie, it's me.'
'Who's me?' I said as the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention.
'It's me, oh Louie, it's me.' A voice so faint, drowning in a sea of static.
'Who?' I tried again.
'Me, Louie, it's me. Myfanwy.'
'What?!' I shouted. 'I can't hear you!'
'Myfanwy. Oh, Louie, help me!'
Then the line clicked dead. I sat frozen, immobile for a split second, and then jabbed my fingers uselessly on to the prongs of the telephone the way they do in the movies but that never works in real life.
Out on the Prom the breeze was moist and heavy with the tang of salt, and laced in tantalising bursts with another smell almost as primal: hot dogs. That oh so heartbreaking smell, the pure essential oil of night falling on the Prom, gathered long ago in those lost days when you were small, and on holiday with your mum and dad. Gathered in the magical falling dusk when the seagulls have gone to roost beneath the ironwork of the pier; and you all take a stroll after dinner, way past your normal bedtime, towards an amusement arcade that flashes and chimes and dings. Out at sea angry rumblings light up the clouds in distant flashes, like celestial pinball. You watch it all in awe, and little know that nothing in your life will ever be as good as this again.
The smell of onions frying ... a scent that years later still unleashes a craving — like the snatch of an unknown melody — for a lost Eden that has no gate. That has never had a gate. Because the truth about hot dogs is this: no smell in the world promises so much and delivers so little. Even as a kid when you buy it you find it tastes of nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. The biggest zero ever. A warm, bland mush as far removed from the perfume it adds to the night air as the lotus flower from the slime that spawns it.
It's as if some master perfumer and necromancer had foreseen all the broken promises of your life to come, all the pangs of unrequited love and unreturned letters; the torment of watching a phone that never rings; the bright expectancy of fresh hope at breakfast, in ruins by sunset ... it was as if he took all these things and blended them into a single fragrance and called it whatever the French is for Disappointment —
*
There was a consternation at the pier. Police 'scene-of-crime' tape, a flashing blue light and Father Seamus taking charge. I worked it all out in the blink of an eye. The workmen rebuilding the pier had moved the entrance to the bingo parlour two feet to the left. A swarm of confused grannies were there now, buzzing around like bees who come home at the end of the day to find the hive has gone. The priest offering comfort. The ambulance just arriving. Down on the green slimy rocks, exactly below the point where the old entrance had been for fifty years, an old lady face-down and not moving. The sea washing over her, stained pink.
I didn't give a damn. There were a lot worse ways to go in this town. I just shrugged and walked under the arch of coloured lights, down the wooden tunnel that ran along the side of the pier, to the new Moulin at the end. Behind in the distance I could still hear Father Seamus giving comfort, could almost hear his two fingers swishing up, down, left, right — drawing crosses in the air as cheaply as a washed-up actress gives out air-kisses. I smiled grimly to myself. I had an appointment with him tonight but he didn't know it yet. Tonight he would discover that wearing a brown dress with a rope round the belly didn't guarantee immunity in this world. He wouldn't like it, but I didn't give a damn. There were plenty of things that I didn't like too. And it wasn't because he was a liar, or had spoken earlier with such unchristian contempt over the spot where Bianca died in my arms; and it wasn't because I was heading down the corridor now to a club I had vowed never to visit. And it wasn't because somewhere out there tonight, probably smelling the same fried onions, was a man in trouble called Dean Morgan, because I didn't really give a damn about him either. Just as the lifeboatman doesn't give a damn about the stupid fool he fishes from the sea. It wasn't because of any of this, although it all helped. It was just because tonight I didn't give a damn, the way sometimes you don't. So I walked down the tunnel towards the new Moulin and squeezed my fingers into a fist in anticipation of the priest's soft pink jaw.
What makes a club? If it's the spirit of the people who gather there, then the new Moulin was very much like the old. The decor was cheaper and more makeshift than the original; and perhaps there wasn't quite the same panache about it; but it still had the most important ingredients: darkness and a mix of people from every walk of Aberystwyth life, all unified by the common desire to leave their scruples at the door. And most importantly there were the Moulin Girls lolling about in their stovepipe hats and shawls and not much else. Sweet soft things who for a little money would do sweet soft things.
Just like in the old club, tough guys in penguin suits stood at the door, and once inside it was hot, crowded, loud and sweaty. Waitresses walked round with trays of food, others took drink orders or ushered you to a table. In the centre of the room there was a space cleared for dancing, and set around it were tables with flickering candles, and hanging from the ceiling were twirling disco balls. Towards the back was a stage and in front of this a private table for Jubal and his guests. I felt a rush of cool air over the top of my head and looked up to see two men in satyr trousers sitting on giant swings, arcing slowly and gracefully above the crowd. They were Bill and Ben. A cowgirl walked past lighting cigarettes with a cigarette-lighter pistol, and another girl took my hand and led me through the throng to a table. I sat down and ordered a rum as a squeal alerted me to the high jinks over at Jubal's table. Father Seamus had arrived and by way of a welcome drink was drinking Vimto out of Mrs Bligh-Jones's shoe. She
