was squealing at the depravity of it. Once he'd drained the shoe he leered and beat his chest like Tarzan and everybody laughed but when his gaze caught mine he lost some of his sparkle and sat down uncertainly. Never was it more truly said: a man is known by the company he keeps.
My drink arrived and I looked around for Ionawr but couldn't see her; no doubt she would find me easily enough. I watched the stage where there was an unknown starlet singing. A Myfanwy wannabe without the looks or the voice. But she sang all the usual songs and the crowd were pleased. And then Mrs Bligh-Jones took the mike. She made an improbable nightclub singer. She stood rather stiffly, the spotlight glinting on her Sam Browne; her tunic sleeve flapping emptily. One of her spectacle lenses had been taped over to cure a recurrent lazy eye. She spoke into the mike like a schoolgirl addressing assembly and explained that she wished to sing a few hymns to give thanks to her Lord and Saviour for her deliverance from the blizzard on Pumlumon. A murmur of pious approval drifted round the room. During her act Ionawr turned up and led me by the hand to the back.
As we threaded our way through the throng Mrs Bligh-Jones took a bow. Applause erupted like firecrackers and was then cut instantly by the appearance of a man on the dance-floor. It was Jubal, in black tie and burgundy cummerbund. Everyone drew breath in expectation as he passed through them with slow determined steps - a comic pantomime, familiar to everyone, of the man who emerges from the swing doors of the saloon and walks down the dusty street to rescue his kidnapped bride. On the stage, half-blinded by the spotlight, Mrs Bligh-Jones simmered with expectation like a Saxon maid when the Vikings are banging on the door. Ionawr and I halted our progress at the edge of the room and watched. Jubal stopped at the lip of the stage, paused half a beat longer to milk the moment to the full, and then reached into the air and drew a figure of eight with his index finger. A collective sigh came from all the ladies around the floor. Jubal turned his finger into a pistol and fired an imaginary bullet at the bandleader who laughed, clutched good-humouredly at his heart, and in the same instant struck up the band. Mrs Bligh-Jones squealed and jumped down into her lover's arms with the faith of a trapeze artist and was instantly swept away in a giddy tango.
Ionawr tugged at my hand and we pushed our way through the doorway at the back and down the corridor, past the private rooms. The sound of revellers clapping in time to the Latin beat pursued us. But as we trudged deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of the pier the sound faded and gave way to the moan of the sea, a thick intoxicating boom — like blood pounding in our ears — as if the corridor was an artery leading us to a giant heart. At the very end, the entrance guarded by a curtain of clacking wooden beads, was the toffee-and-opium-apple den. We clacked our way through.
The room was filled with hot sickly-sweet smoke and in near-pitch darkness, the only light a few candles and the red glow from the ends of the pipes. There was no music or any sound at all except the noise that recumbent people make when they change position or draw on a pipe; or suck a toffee apple before groaning softly.
Ionawr led me to a man somewhere in the room, I couldn't say where. He lay reclined on a mat on the floor, a tray of toffee apples before him, and next to it an opium pipe. He looked up slowly and the flickering reflections in his eyes said that he was still with us, after a fashion.
'This is the man I was telling you about,' said Ionawr, although it was unclear which of us she was talking to. He reached out a feeble hand and we shook.
'You want to know about the Dean?' His voice was husky and thin but steady.
'Yes,' I said.
'It was all a terrible mistake,' said the monk. 'A terrible, terrible mistake. If the man is dead it will be on my conscience for ever.'
'Tell me what happened.'
The monk took a bite from one of the toffee apples and then said dreamily, 'I just drifted into it, really. For a while I was a monk down at Caldy Island, until I found out how they had lied to me. All the tales about them making Benedictine — it wasn't true. You never get near the stuff. All they sell in the gift shop is home-made mint sauce and scented soap. And the communion wine is piss ... So I ran away and ended up in Aberystwyth at the Seaman's Mission. And before long I became a gofer for the druids, a runner I suppose you'd call it. Doing errands and things, making drops and that. That's how I got the valise. I was supposed to deliver it to a Raven. You know what that is, I suppose?'
'It's the name for a male agent who ensnares a female agent by seducing her.'
'Yes, an assassination technique more properly known as a honey-trap, although it is more usual for the man to be the victim, for him to fall victim to a beautiful girl he unaccountably befriends in a bar. I was told to expect this man and to give him a valise.'
'Who paid you to give him the case?'
'I've no idea. I'm just a link in a chain. I know only the link that comes after me, not the one that comes after him nor the one that preceded me. That's how it works.'
'And you gave the case to the Dean by mistake?'
The man cried out in pain. 'But how the hell was I supposed to know, dammit!? Look out for a dark, cruel, cold-blooded killer, they said. With a feather in his cap. And then this chap turned up and I was having a drink with him that night in the bar and I said, 'What do you do for a living, then?' And he said, 'My trade is death. To me it holds no sting; to me flesh is just meat and the cold impersonal cut of steel as commonplace as the pen is to the clerk.' Well, what would you have done?'
'But he was an undertaker.'
The monk's voice rose in anguish. 'I know, I know! You think I'm not aware of that? It was just a harmless piece of shop talk to him. And the bloody feather he just found on his window-sill that morning. That's pretty, he thought, it's such a lovely day I think I'll put it in my hat. The fucking idiot!'
'And after that, the Raven turned up?'
'That's right. Wearing one of those coats they sell in Peacocks for nineteen ninety-nine. I thought it was a bit corny myself, dressing like that, but who am I to judge?'
'And what was in the valise?'
'How would I know?'
'You mean you didn't look?'
'Are you mad? It was sealed. You think I would be stupid enough to break a seal, like?'
'I would have.'
'That's because you don't know these people like I do.'
I stood up, dizzy and disorientated in the darkness, and made for the glimmer of light that betrayed the outline of a door. Just before I reached it a hand grabbed the edge of my trousers. I looked down and beheld a sight that has haunted me ever since. The wreck of man I had once known: Valentine. He lay there so thin and emaciated his face had become a gargoyle and on his lower arm the flesh had grown so thin you could see the candle shining through. Valentine the former style-guru of the druids, his Crimplene safari suit now filthier than the carpet in a pub toilet. His mouth pulled back in a rictus of pain like a snarling dog. I kneeled down, staring in wide-eyed horror at this shattered piece of humanity.
'Valentine, what happened out there at the sanatorium? What did you see?'
The words kindled a feeble light in the empty pits of his eyes. A tiny, quivering gleam like the stormlamp of a wanderer taking refuge from the tempest in an empty house.
'What did you see out there? What was it, this Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment?'
The grip of his hand on my trouser-leg tightened slightly, like the claw of a wren. Then, slowly, his mouth opened and through teeth the colour of caramel he whispered, 'The horror! The horror!'
Then there was strength inside him for no more. His head fell back to rest on the bench; he closed his mouth, exhausted at the effort of those six syllables. I tugged my trousers away from his childlike grip and left him staring at the ceiling with eyes bigger than saucers, waiting for release of death.
As I left the club I saw the cowgirl's holster hanging up by the door and, making sure no one saw, I slipped the toy gun into my pocket. Outside, the pavements were wet with spray from the sea. Patrons were starting to leave. I kissed Ionawr and pressed some money into her pocket and told her to go. I had things to do that night that it was better she didn't see. But no sooner had she left than I was cheated of my dark design. In a riot of drunken giggling, Mrs Bligh-Jones climbed awkwardly into the back of Jubal's car and stuck her legs through the wound-down window, wiggling them until a shoe fell off into the gutter. And Father Seamus, with whom I had an appointment tonight, got in the front and the car sped off.
The shoe lay in the gutter next to the drain, a tawdry spoor of a Cinderella with size twelve feet. I took a
