and we soon came to know, that this was Herod Jenkins. And that he had survived his fall from the plane.' No one said anything and the film ran out, filling the silent room with the repeated clack, clack, clack of the revolving celluloid whipping the tabletop.
The man in the racoon-skin hat was invited to take the stand. I half-expected him to speak with the heap-big Hollywood accent used to accuse us of speaking with forked tongue. But he just sounded like any other well- educated Canadian.
'This is the point where I was called in,' he began. 'I spent some weeks in the Nant-y-moch badlands tracking the creature. I found out that although the adults were scared of him, the children knew him well. They called him Mr Dippetty-doo — a helpless happy old fool eating dirt and wearing clothes of woven twigs. In stark contrast to his former persona, about which you are all better informed than me, Dippetty-doo would happily tousle the hair of the village urchins, or pull out pennies from behind their ears ... even the farmyard dogs would no longer bark at his passing but would scamper up and lick his hand ... in short, gentlemen, it became clear to me that the fall from the plane had caused him to lose his memory and no trace of it remained. He was in fact harmless.'
The woodsman sat down and there was a mild ripple of table-rapping in applause, although I didn't see what for.
Llunos stood up and cut the applause with his hand. 'This left us with a serious problem. What guarantee was there that at some point he wouldn't recover his memory? The prospect was alarming and in order to allay our fears we contacted Doctor Pritchard who is an expert on neurophysiology at the Clarach Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience. What he told us hardly put our fears at rest. Doctor.'
The man in the white lab-coat stood up and smiled thinly. 'I'll try and do this in lay terms as far as I am able. No doubt you are all familiar with the TV-soap version of memory loss. The patient lies on a hospital bed and his family sit around him showing him old photos and playing the records that were once his favourites in the hope that some emotionally charged event will somehow turn the key that opens the gates of memory. It's actually not as fanciful as it seems and is a well-proven clinical technique. But have you ever wondered what would happen if the family sitting round the hospital bed were impostors? And the lost memories they patiently tried to coax back were bogus? All those old songs he never sang and the specially doctored photos showing cherished childhood moments that never took place? That in essence was what we did.' There was a subdued gasp round the table at the audacity of what the doctor was telling us. He continued unabashed as if used to such a reception and perhaps slightly proud. 'The project was conducted under the supervision of Doctor Faustus from the sanatorium — a very brilliant and unconventional neuroscientist who has done some pioneering work on false-memory syndrome and who kindly agreed to undertake the mapping of Herod's psyche.'
One of men in dark suits asked a question. 'How did you get him to the sanatorium?'
The scientist smiled in acknowledgment, pleased at being given another opportunity to show off.
'Good question! Actually, it wasn't too difficult, we used a technique suggested to us by our friend here from the Tillamook Indians. Basically the same used for trapping mink. Laughing Bear told us that during his observation of Dippetty-doo he noticed his quarry was secretly engaging in an occasional lover's tryst with a local woman. We approached her and outlined to her out desire to make Herod well again and she was happy to assist us in our efforts by acting as a form of bait. I believe some of you may know this woman, Mrs Bligh-Jones from the Meals on Wheels.'
This was greeted with snorts from around the table of the sort that suggested 'rather you than me, mate'.
There were no further questions so Doctor Pritchard carried on. 'Once we had successfully installed the subject in the sanatorium we invented a new past for him and hired a group of actors to sit round his bedside from dawn till dusk pretending to be his family. They were called the Flying Laszlofis — a troupe of Magyar circus performers. Day by day they sat there drip-feeding him the sweet balm of memory of all those lost tender cherished moments — hunting the black bears of the Carpathian Hills with his grandfather, Vadas; learning to dance the polka in the rustic parlour at the age of six; his old dog Цcsi, and that first sweet kiss with the seventeen-year-old Ninбcscska. It was an audacious undertaking but, amazingly, it started to produce results. Before long Herod took up the violin and soon mastered the rudiments of a number of Hungarian folk songs. He began to express pangs of homesickness for those far-off Carpathian Hills. He refused to eat the hospital food and insisted on goulash and pickled cabbage.
In short, the experiment had been an astonishing success; or to put it another way, gentlemen, Herod Jenkins had gone from this world, and in his place stood Zsigбcska Melles.' He paused and fought down a half-smile that was twitching the edges of his mouth. 'Er ... those of you who think us scientists are a rather cold-blooded, humourless lot might be amused to learn that Melles is the Magyar term for big-chested.' There was a ripple of chuckling, and he continued, 'It was an epoch-making moment in the annals of neuroscience; until, that is, the morning when the nurse went to his room and found him gone.' The doctor made an apologetic gesture with his hands and walked to the window and spoke to the sea and the sky: 'Since then there have been rumours and the occasional reports of him standing at the edge of the woods at sunset, staring, so they say, with a strange yearning at the rugby on TV in the darkened houses ...'
*
I walked with Llunos down Pier Street and accompanied him to his office. As we strolled he told me about Harri Harries. The two men from the Kamp were currently in protective custody, down at the station.
'They thought it was a trick,' said Llunos. 'And Harries hasn't reported to work. Don't know where he is. I've sent a fax to Cardiff about it.'
'Why did they send him here in the first place?'
'It's because certain people down in Cardiff are not happy with me.'
'I thought you were doing fine.'
His step unconsciously followed time with mine. 'First the flood and now Herod ... black marks against my name ... it all adds up.'
'They surely can't blame you for ... for all this?'
'It happened on my watch. Plus they think I've gone soft. Got old. They say I don't run a tight ship any more, all this aggro between the druids and the Meals on Wheels. They can't see, it's a different world after the flood, all the old certainties have gone ... time was you knew who was bad and who was good, even if you could never prove it you still knew it. But now, life being such a struggle, the line is blurred. And then there's the problem of you.'
'Me?'
'They see me having coffee with you and generally ... fraternising they call it, and they say that proves it. Once upon a time I would have run you out of town every now and again just to keep you on your toes.'
'It's true, you would have.'
'I know. But after a while ...' He stopped at the corner and looked at me. 'I mean, what's the point?'
When we got to his office we sat in contemplative silence. 'We're going to make a posse, if you're interested,' said Llunos after a while. 'The boffins say he'll probably make for some place sacred to him.'
I tried to look hopeful. 'I suppose that's something.'
'Yes,' said Llunos sadly. 'It's something.'
Chapter 15
Marty's mum's house was a two-mile walk off the main road up a country lane. There were no streetlights but the wet drizzly sky gave off a soft luminescence and provided more than enough light for eyes that had got used to the dark. Despite the cold and wet it was strangely pleasant, calm and peaceful so far away from the frenetic activity of Aberystwyth. The only sound was the occasional bark of a distant dog and even that was comforting. You could tell without seeing that these were wholesome well-fed dogs who would run up to you and nuzzle your hand, not the snarling, half-starved packs of curs that slunk through the rubble of town at night. After a while I began to make out the orange light from the house, glowing through the swaying black filigree of the trees.
The door was on a chain, Marty's mum lived alone, and peered at me from inside as a wave of hot firelit air hit me. Air filled with cinnamon and baking smells and that indefinable but not unpleasant aroma that the insides of other people's houses have. Recognition took only a fraction of a second and she let out a gasp before closing the door slightly to release the chain.
Once I was inside she stood facing me looking up and grasped my face in her hands. We didn't speak, she just beamed at me, her old watery eyes sparkling and then her face darkened as a thought occurred to her. 'I knew you'd come when I heard.'
