put his arm in front of me and barred my way. 'I need five minutes with him alone first.'
I nodded.
He went in and closed the door, saying, 'Teach him to make a monkey out of me on my own patch.'
There followed a couple of minutes of loud banging from the room. The sort you might get if you swung a sack of potatoes from wall to wall. Then the door opened and Llunos ushered me in, mopping a sweaty brow as he did. What little furniture there was in the room was upturned, a notice-board disarranged on the wall; a broken table lamp flashing uncertainly. Harri Harries sat in the chair, blood coming out of his nose and mouth. One eye puffed up. His shirt torn and spattered with bright red berries of blood.
'You've got him, now,' said Llunos. He walked to a cupboard and took out a dusty old scuba gear bag and emptied its contents. A rusty tank, an equaliser, some lead weights, a mask ... all smelling mildly of the ocean floor. He held the bag up.
'Do you think he'll fit in it?'
I gave it an appraising look. 'Well, it's roughly maggot-shaped and about his size.'
Harri Harries looked on with fear and uncertainty. Llunos took out the Ziploc bag and slid it across the desk to me. Inside was the gun.
'It's as cold as they come. No way of tracing it.'
'Thanks.'
'Make sure you wipe it off afterwards.'
I took the cartridges out of my pocket and started wiping them methodically with a handkerchief and then setting them up like toy soldiers in a row along the desk-top.
'Look,' said Harri Harries. 'I know —'
'I haven't asked you anything yet,' I said in a voice colder than ice. 'So shut up.'
When the cartridges were all free of prints I slid one into the chamber and gave it a spin. Llunos walked towards the door. 'I'll be in the next room, use one of the cushions to muffle the sound.'
Then he closed the door and we both looked at each other. I slowly levelled the barrel at his face and said, 'Where is she?'
He took a breath and said, 'You've got to believe —'
The rest of it never came. I rammed the gun forward so the end of the barrel smacked into his mouth and then, as he gasped at the pain, the barrel was in his mouth. I'd seen this done once in a movie and it seemed to work. I don't know what difference it makes really, gun in or gun out, if it fires you're not going to know much about it. But it certainly frightened me to watch it. I pulled the trigger and it clicked on an empty chamber. His whole body stiffened like a cat electrocuted in a cartoon and his face went purple.
'You were lucky.' I took the gun out of his mouth, wiped the blood and spittle off on his shirt and then slid in two more cartridges. Then I pressed it against that other favourite spot, between the eyes, and spun the chamber.
'Where have they taken her?'
He spoke quickly, trying to get as much explanation in before I shot him. 'She didn't turn up, I was supposed to meet her, Custard Pie arranged it, but she never came ... please it's the truth -
'Like fuck it is!' I pulled the trigger. It clicked and this time Harri made the sound of a scream done with the mouth closed. Then he wept. I almost felt sorry for him.
'Please, please, please ...' he gasped. 'I'm telling you the truth
I picked up the remaining bullets and slid them all in. There was no point spinning the chamber now but I did anyway just for effect. 'Full house,' I said and aimed squarely at his face.
'Now where is she?'
'I ... please ... please ...'
I squeezed and the hammer pulled slowly back like a striking snake in slow motion.
His face was the colour of green milk, his eyes bulging and he said, 'I don't know. You must believe me!'
'Make me believe you. Tell me something worth not shooting you for.'
He pressed his eyes tightly shut and pleaded with me. 'Please, I don't know any —'
I pulled the trigger all the way and as I did Llunos slipped quietly back into the room and banged the door the moment the trigger slammed home. Harri Harries screamed and jerked forwards, landing heavily on the floor.
Llunos walked over and hoisted him back into the chair. ' OK, you've had your fun. As far as I can see there are only two possible reasons you haven't told us where she is: either you don't know, or you knew the gun was a replica. And I don't believe you don't know. So we're going to play a little game of mine. It's called Welsh roulette.'
He took out his truncheon and put it down on the desk. 'You can think of it as a variation on blackjack.'
He walked over to a filing-cabinet, took out some keys, and opened a drawer. He brought out two things and put them down in front of Harri Harries. There was a truncheon that had been painted red. And a kid's roulette wheel.
'The rules are simple so you won't have any trouble picking them up. We spin the wheel. If the ball lands on black seven, I hit you seven times with the blackjack. If it lands on red two, I hit you two times with the redjack. The game is over when you tell us where Calamity is.'
He spun the wheel and dropped the ball. Red three. Llunos turned to me. 'You see! I told you he was lucky.' Then he hit him three times with the red truncheon. The next one was black four. He hit him four times. He spun the wheel, dropped the ball. Red thirty-six. 'Bingo!' shouted Llunos and picked up the cosh. I turned away in dread. And Harri Harries confessed.
'OK, OK, OK!' he cried. 'I'll talk, I'll talk. It doesn't matter now anyway. We had a rendezvous arranged last night - Custard Pie set it up. He told the girl if she went there she would find out the identity of the Raven. But of course it was a trap for her. I got there at midnight but no one came. Neither the girl nor Jubal. I waited and waited and finally, at about three, Jubal turns up. But he's out of his mind. Raving and screaming and crying. He was all like dressed as if for a wedding or something, you know a flowery shirt and a suit and tie, and wearing a flower in his buttonhole, but he'd slashed his clothes and covered himself in ashes. And he had a suitcase with him, said he was getting out of town. And I said, why? And he said if they caught him they would kill him, and I said, who? He said, them, Custard Pie or Herod or Mrs Llantrisant. He'd betrayed them. Everything was ruined, he said. And I said, what the hell have you done? And he cried out like ... like ... I don't know ... like ... a ... an elephant giving birth or something, and said he'd been a total idiot and fallen into his own trap. And I said, what about the girl? And he said, she won't come now, you idiot, we're ruined, it's finished, we're all dead ... don't worry about her, save yourself.' He stopped and gasped for breath, 'Honest, it's the truth.'
*
I didn't know what Ben Guggenheim would have done this morning, but one thing was clear from Eeyore's story. He knew how to keep a cool head. The very opposite of what I had done. Chasing out to Mrs Llantrisant's island and torturing Harri Harries and generally running around not thinking. And that was the whole point really. Thinking. All along I had known about the one man who knew where Herod would have his base, the man who had studied his psyche and made a map of it. Dr Faustus, whoever he was. He must know the answer. And now he was going to give it to me.
I took the Llanbadarn Road out towards the mountains of Pumlumon, along the course of the Rheidol for a while. And then cut south at Ponterwyd on the A4120 towards Ysbyty Cynfyn. A sign told me I was taking the Pont Ysbyty Cynfyn over the Nant Ysbyty Cynfyn and that was reassuring to know. Before too long, if my car didn't give out, I would be heading towards Ysbyty Ystwyth. The world was full of Ysbytys today and I wondered what it meant. Not knowing the answer in Lovespoon's classes would have resulted in the board-rubber exploding next to one's ear like flak. Ysbyty Ystwyth — the map gave it a black cross for a place of worship and a black box underneath meaning one with a tower rather than spire, minaret or dome. It also had a little symbol to say there was a public telephone. Compared to Ysbyty Cynfyn, which had none of these, it was Las Vegas. But I wouldn't be able to go and ask what it all meant, Ysbyty Ystwyth would have to wait for a brighter day. At Hafod Wood I turned off.
I pulled up in the lane a quarter of a mile from the perimeter wall and put on my old mac and hat — a standard-issue sleuth traipsing across rain-spattered, mist-smothered soggy Welsh hills. Up ahead was the sanatorium, the soft mist effacing all detail like gentle amnesia. I wasn't sure how I was going to get in. In my pocket I still had the Colt 45. Maybe I would use that. Or maybe I would just go and ask for help. Giving succour to
