would be in for a battering tonight. He stopped and pointed with his pipe towards the horizon. Saint Madoc's Rock.
It was still more than half a mile away, but we could see Mrs Llantrisant. She stood like a heron on the cliff looking out to sea. Ianto handed me his binoculars and I trained them on her for a while. She remained there buffeted by the fierce wind, unmoving like a grim statue, her face expressionless and impassive, seemingly impervious to the constant beating of the gales off the Atlantic.
Ianto said she stood there every day, from dawn till sunset. And then added, 'I wouldn't like to be on that island tonight.'
Ianto beached the boat on the pebbles and pointed to the path, then took out a flask of tea and his newspaper and prepared to wait. He had no interest in seeing the island. To an old seadog like him, a featureless rock outcrop meant nothing, and to him Mrs Llantrisant was nothing too, just some sad, mad old woman who had somehow managed to start a flood three years ago that washed away his garden shed.
At the top of the cliff I walked towards Mrs Llantrisant. She took no notice of me, even though it was clear she could see me. It was typical of her, by which I meant not the shrivelled old gossip who swabbed my step for all those years but the other one, the secret one who lived inside her and used her charming stupidity as a perfect piece of camouflage. Lieutenant Llantrisant, or Gwenno Guevara as she once was in her freedom-fighting days. She would easily have found the discipline to stand still as stone on a mountain-top if it suited her purpose; would just as easily have had the mental discipline to force her features to betray no surprise at my sudden arrival, to force herself even to pretend I was not there. I shook my head in reluctant admiration and as I did a man appeared at the top of the path, wearing rouge and dressed in a ruffed shirt. He walked up behind Mrs Llantrisant and put his arms round her waist. Then he hoisted her into the air, put her under one arm, and started walking down the path. Still she remained ramrod straight — as stiff and erect as a toy soldier - but as she became outlined against the bright grey of the sky, I could see that instead of feet she had a metal stand like the base of a tailor's dummy. The man who picked her up whistled cheerfully and then stopped about two yards in front of me. His eyes shot open but, to his credit, surprised as he was, he didn't drop Mrs Llantrisant.
'Do you need a hand with that?' I asked cheerily.
'W ... who are you? What are you doing here? This is private property. What do you want?'
I eyed him coldly and said, 'Two men meet for the first time on a cliff-top. One of them is carrying a straw effigy of Mrs Llantrisant. We are in uncharted waters here. All the same, I can't help thinking it's not you who gets to ask the questions.' I smiled and he considered my point. Then having considered it he threw Mrs Llantrisant aside and started running.
I chased him up the path to the top of the island and the disused crofter's cottage that had been Mrs Llantrisant's home. Inside I found him frantically searching round for a weapon but he didn't have one and even if he had he didn't look like he had the guts to use it. It wasn't the same boy I had seen dancing with Judy Juice, but he was from the same mould, hired for the job, no doubt, from the back seat of a blacked-out car somewhere along the south bank of the Rheidol. I made a rush for him and he tried to dart to one side and I caught him. He was a skinny, effete, effeminate youth who looked like he should have been twirling his hanky as an extra in a Shakespeare love comedy. He bit my hand like a girl and I grabbed his hair, pulled his face back and smashed it into the desk-top. Then I let him go and he crawled over into a corner and cowered. I looked at him and he looked at me.
'What do you want?'
I took a step towards him. 'Remember what I said about who asks the questions?'
'I don't know nothing.'
'No of course you don't, you just rented the cottage for two weeks by the sea.'
The desk was covered in scraps of writing and half-finished postcards. I picked up one of the scraps. It was a piece of floral, limping verse. 'This yours?'
He looked at me through eyes bright with suspicion and then said, 'What if it is, there's no law against it.'
'You write it yourself?'
He nodded sullenly.
'It's good.'
'You think so?'
'Yeah, I love it.'
'It's not my best. But it's in the genre. That's how I got this job, you see. I used to be a greeting-card writer.'
'I've seen some of your work before.'
'Yeah, where?'
'In a fucking Christmas cracker.' I took another step and he cringed backwards against the wall.
'Who gave you the job?'
'I don't know his name. He said all I had to do was sit here writing sentimental postcards filled with melancholy and plangent regret.'
'Plus taking Mrs Llantrisant in and out of the rain.'
He shrugged.
'And of course you haven't a clue where Mrs Llantrisant is, have you? In fact, you're going to insist on that until I get the electric bar-fire from the boat, plug it into the generator and tape it to your face. And even then you'll swear you don't know where she is. But then when I switch the fire on, well, I reckon you'll last about four seconds before you remember. What do you think?'
'Honestly, mister, I swear I don't know where she is. Do you think they'd be stupid enough to tell me?'
I started walking to the door. 'No I don't. And anything you told me with or without an electric fire strapped to your face wouldn't be worth birdshit. Which means it's your lucky day.
As I returned to the boat I stopped for a second by the straw effigy of Mrs Llantrisant. There really was no point questioning the boy. He was just a piece of cheap druid cannon fodder. Whoever arranged all this would have told him nothing or a pack of nonsense designed to send me the wrong way. And to beat him simply for the pleasure of it would just have wasted time. Time I should be spending hunting for my partner, Calamity. I looked down at Mrs Llantrisant, lying like a toppled statue in the thorny grass, her face a blank of straw, a nose sketched in with marker pen, and on top of that the blue translucent frames of her NHS specs. As usual I had managed to underestimate her in a spectacular fashion. But how could you avoid doing that?
I picked up the straw dummy and put it back on its perch at the cliff's edge. As we motored back to Aberystwyth, I sat in the bow and stared at her — a dark sentinel maintaining a vigil over her rock. And meanwhile, the sky behind her turned the colour of basalt and spray flew across our bows, as we butted our way home through the threatening sea.
Judy Juice was sitting in the client's chair when I got back. There was a look of horror on her face and she seemed to have aged ten years since I last saw her.
'I've seen the Dean,' she said, eyes wide with fear.
I slumped down into my chair and reached for the bottle of rum. 'Great,' I said.
'He was in a bad way. Drunk and terrible, and out of his mind ...'
I tried to make myself care but I couldn't. Calamity was missing and there wasn't room in my head for the stupid Dean.
'I had to come and see you, I have to tell you ... have to tell you ...'
I forced my concentration back to Judy Juice.
'Tell me what?'
'About the case ... He had it with him and showed me inside. It wasn't just a death warrant, there were other things as well. There was a red hood in it, and he said the hood is worn by the sacrificial victim. And there was an almanac with the phases of the moon. And there was a movie-script. And there were detailed instructions for the Raven about how to do it — how to perform the execution. They were his orders, you see. For the Raven's eyes only.' She put her hand up to her face and wiped tears away. 'Oh my God.'
I poured her a drink and walked round to her side of the desk and held it under her mouth. She grabbed my hands and drew up the glass and drank. Then she collapsed into me, her head resting against my stomach, and I gently held it there.
