They paused and then said together, 'And of course we do his laying out.'
I fought the reflex to choke. 'You do that for the Dean?'
'Well, you can't expect him to do it himself, can you?' said Morgana huffily.
'And he pays us for it,' said Gretel. 'We're lucky to get it. I mean, how else are you supposed to survive on a grant these days?'
As the bus drove up the main street to turn at the top we saw through the back window a fracas on the neatly trimmed lawns of the college. The two students who had been arguing earlier in the pub were trading blows, surrounded by the rest of their group who were excitedly egging them on. From the cloisters on either side of the lawn, scholars and tutors poured forth in a flapping black gale of academic gowns, like starlings or startled bats, running like the wind and shouting dizzily with excitement, 'Scrap! Scrap! Scrap!'
Chapter 3
The Excelsior was one of those crumbling, fading hotels that stood in a gently curving row on Aberystwyth Prom facing the sea. It was a hotel that spent the summer dreaming of better days, and wore its four stars on either side of the main door like combat medals. Like the motoring organisation that awarded the stars, it was a refugee from the world of A and B roads and button B telephones. A world in which a lift was considered an American contrivance and shared bathrooms at the end of the corridor were the norm. People still wore jackets and ties here and took luncheon and, perhaps most damning of all, it was the world that gave us Brown Windsor soup. Inside the hotel the floors creaked as you walked, like the innards of a wooden ship. It was an old, rickety dowager of a hotel and if it were possible for a building to get arthritis and walk with a stick this one would. I knew all this because once, for a season many years ago, I had worked there as the house John. An underpaid sleuth with a cubby-hole and a nightstick and a remit to keep one eye on the shifty characters who walked in off the street and an even beadier eye on the dodgy ones who worked there.
In the old days, as with all hotels with pretensions to grandeur, the door had been opened by a man dressed as a cavalry officer from the Napoleonic wars. But he had long since gone and today I had to push the heavy brass and glass door open myself. Inside the lounge, little had changed. The swirly carpet, the antimacassars; the horse brasses ... And the same cast of characters: the greasy manager's son at the bar in a tatty white shirt and bow tie, eternally polishing a pint glass; in the bay windows sat members of that travelling band of spinsters and widows who spent their lives wandering from hotel to hotel in a predetermined route round the coast of Britain. Shrivelled old women who appeared at the same time each year with the predictability of migrating salmon and who insisted on the same room and ordered the same food. And every day at dawn they crept downstairs to place their knitting on the vacant armchairs signifying possession for the day like the flag on Iwo Jima.
The only other residents were the travelling shawl salesmen and the doily traders. There were two sitting at a table near the bar, talking doily shop in the impenetrable slang of their trade. Strange words and familiar ones used in strange ways. The weave, the whorl, the matrix, the paradigm; a disc, a galaxy, a web, a Black Widow and White Widow; a Queen Anne and a Squire's Strumpet ... I listened to them talk for a while. These were the strange, forlorn men you sometimes passed when you went for a drive - parked in a lay-by and crouched over a map. Next to it, a local newspaper opened to the death announcements with one of them circled in ballpoint. A grubby life lived according to the simple credo that with doilies, like snowflakes, there were never two alike.
I walked over and spoke to an old lady in the bay window. She was sitting in the chair with the exaggerated erectness of posture that no one knows how to do any more, just as no one can do algebra or decline a Latin verb. Her nose had a slight but permanent snooty tilt and she was peering through a lorgnette at the people walking past, trying to get as much disapproval in before her nap.
'I bet you get a good view from here,' I said.
She turned her gaze to me with painfully deliberate slowness. Her mouth was gathered together and clamped so tightly shut it distorted the rest of her face.
'I mean, you can see everyone who comes in and everyone who goes out.'
I waited and waited, the smile slowly withering on my face, until after an eternity she finally opened her mouth and said, 'Maybe.' Then she returned her gaze to the street.
The detective's cubby-hole was on the second floor in the same place it had been fifteen years ago. There was no one there but the soft sigh of steam from the recently boiled kettle told me he couldn't be far away. I stepped in from the corridor. The room had been designed originally as a utility room and was mostly filled by a wooden desk. Pictures of nude women torn out of the tabloids were pinned to the wall, and on the desk, next to the kettle and chipped china mug, was a set of keys. I walked round the desk and opened the drawer. There were a few knitting patterns in there, no doubt left behind by guests, a sock, a cheese sandwich and an ice pick. The floor outside creaked and I looked round and found him staring at me with an air that suggested he'd been doing it for quite some time.
He was dressed in a dirty vest covered in dried egg, had four days' growth on his glistening mauve jowls and his trouser flies were half-undone. His face was gummed up with sleep and he was so fat his hips almost touched both walls of the corridor. The cosh in his hand swung gently with an exaggerated casualness that suggested this was the sort of hotel where you could get coshed just for complaining about the soup.
'You looking for something?'
I smiled bashfully. 'I was just checking the fire escape.'
He sniffed the air. 'Is there a fire? I can't smell anything.'
'Not at the moment but there could be — it happens in the best establishments.'
'We should be pretty safe here then.'
'You've got four stars outside the front door, that means you're good enough to burn down.'
He lifted the blackjack and scratched his cheek with it. 'Fire escape, huh? Mmmmm.' He gave the matter some deep thought and then brightened, saying, 'The mistake you made was to look for it in the drawer of my desk. We don't keep it there.' He squeezed into the room and threw some cleaning rags off the only other stool and motioned me to sit. I obeyed and he went to sit in his chair, giving the desk drawer a slam as he did. 'I've been in this business twenty years now, and in my experience the place to look for the fire escape is outside the window.'
'That was the first place I tried but I couldn't see it.'
'That's because it isn't there yet. Special arrangement with the fire brigade - if there's a fire they'll come and put a ladder against the wall.'
'That's reassuring to know.'
'All part of the service.' He pointed the blackjack at me. 'Now we've sorted the fire escape out, perhaps you'll tell me if there's anything else I can help you with.'
I took out a hip-flask. 'Do I look like I need your help?'
'You look like a peeper to me.'
I nodded. 'Well I guess you would know. Drink?'
He pushed his teacup across and I filled it and poured a shot into the cap for myself. He took a gulp and then nodded appreciatively. I took the photo of the Dean out and slid it across the desk. The John made no effort to look, just took another gulp of the rum, and another until it was empty and pushed the cup back towards me. I filled it. He took another drink and then picked up the photo, took one look, put it down and said, 'Yeah, I've seen him.'
I put a pound coin on the tabletop and he picked it up and examined it as if it were a foreign coin he hadn't seen before. 'Funny, you're not the first person to ask about him.'
I waited for him to carry on but he didn't. Instead he smiled. I put another coin down.
'After he checked out a man came round dressed in a long black coat like they sell in Peacocks. Had a black feather in his cap. Wasn't as polite as you.'
I nodded. 'Did the Dean leave any forwarding address?'
'Not strictly speaking.'
I put another coin down which met a similar fate to the other two. 'What about speaking unstrictly?'
He scratched his chin again with the blackjack. 'He didn't say where he was going but the funny thing was he was dressed differently when he left. Completely different, almost as if he was trying to leave in a new identity — we often get idiots like that. Now once you know what he was dressed like, you can guess where he was going.' He stopped and looked at me blankly.
I put my last coin down. He shook his head. 'This one I have to charge by the syllable.'
'How many words is it?'
