Harri Harries sneered. 'No I read it in your file, peeper. I bet you didn't know you had one, did you? So I know all about your little pansy friend freezing to death during games.' He dropped the photo into the bin. 'Tragic. No reason to push your games teacher out of an aeroplane, though.'
'I didn't push him, he fell.'
'What's the difference?'
'Not a lot to you, perhaps. But a lot to me. What happened to him was an accident; but what he did to Marty wasn't.' This was a lie, of course. He fell out when I hit him with a cricket bat. I glanced quickly at the bat which was standing in the corner of my office and then at Llunos who had been in the plane; he didn't seem inclined to contradict me.
Harri Harries sneered, 'Stop breaking my heart, snooper. Kid has a weak heart, dies on a cross-country run, so what? It happens. Doesn't give you the right to charge round town on a white horse all your life and throw mud at the Mayor.'
'And what the hell gives you the right to tell me what to do? You haven't been in town five minutes yet!'
'I'm the law round here, that's all you need to know.'
I walked to the door and opened it. 'Thanks for coming, tough guy.'
He walked through. 'Keep your nose clean, peeper, or I'll clean it for you.'
Llunos stood up and followed him. At the door he stopped and looked at me with the helpless expression of a friend who wants to explain but is struggling for the words. For years there had existed a sharp animosity between the two of us. Like most cops he didn't like private operatives, but since that time we fought side-by-side in the plane a warm bond of friendship had arisen. Strengthened, I liked to think, by his growing awareness that despite the different approaches we were still on the same side. I waved him to go. I knew how much he hated this, he didn't need to say.
As their footsteps receded down the wooden stairs I took the photo of Marty out of the bin and replaced it on the desk. For some time now the colours had been gradually lightening - a slow cinematic fade to white that echoed the moment in the fourth year when he disappeared into the blizzard. Only in my mind is the image still vivid. That day when the games teacher, Herod Jenkins, rejected his medical note and sent him on the cross-country run. Marty the consumptive schoolboy who never stood a chance. I picked up the cricket bat and took a swing, re- enacting the scene from three years ago when I finally avenged his death: when I faced up to Mr Jenkins in the fuselage of the plane and delivered the stroke that knocked him for six and sent that horizontal crease in his face they called a smile spinning out of this world. Since then I had lost count of the number of former pupils who had sidled into my office on account of it. Men who stood there in shabby suits, ill at ease and unsure how to say what they'd come for. They always smiled with relief when I said I understood and, without a word, handed them the bat. Howzat! they would shout as I bowled a piece of crumpled-up paper. Often the only other words they uttered before shaking me solemnly by the hand and leaving down the echoing, bare wooden stairs, were, 'I was there from 70 to '75.'
I poured the untouched drinks back into the bottle, sat down and cradled my own glass and swirled the drink round. And wondered what this other thing was, the one that Harri Harries had mentioned and then didn't want to talk about. The one that was none of my business. I was beginning to get that faint prickly sensation on the back of my neck. The one that said trouble ahead. There weren't many certainties in the job I did. But there was one prediction I could make that was copper-bottomed. When some tough guy told me something was none of my business it always ended up being plenty of my business.
Chapter 4
Considering the number of garden sheds and herbaceous borders that were swept away, how much of the season's jam-making was ruined, there was surprisingly little rancour against the people who bombed the dam. Most people agreed justice had largely been done. Dai the Custard Pie, whose own joke shop had disappeared completely, was now imprisoned in a specially adapted dungeon, deep beneath Aberystwyth Castle. A clown of evil, doomed like a troglodyte never to see the face of the sun again. Mrs Llantrisant, the woman who swabbed my step for so many years, now exiled like Napoleon on Saint Madoc's Rock fifteen miles out to sea. Lovespoon the druid and Welsh teacher, missing presumed drowned. Herod Jenkins, last seen falling from the plane. Only Dai Brainbocs had escaped. The evil schoolboy genius and chief architect of our soaking. Somewhere at large now in South America, the traditional holiday destination of fugitives and renegades: Butch Cassidy and Sundance, the officers of the Third Reich, the Great Train Robbers, and now Brainbocs. And with him also, that most unlikely moll — the girl who should have been mine — Myfanwy.
The cleaner from the Seaman's Mission had hardly been specific. Meet me at the Game. But it was enough. There might be many games in town but only one began with a capital G: 'Mrs Beynon Says', also known as Fishwife's Chess. The contest that depended on knowing more about your neighbour's secret vices and indiscretions than anyone else in the street. It had once been a harmless parlour game played for matches at Christmas, but nowadays an entire week's pension or a dead husband's war medals could be staked on it. I wandered off in search of tonight's game, somewhere in the ghetto. Down some back alley, under a line of washing and through a hole in a fence where the touch of creosote was just a memory, like the scent of an old love letter. But which washing-line and which fence?
I could hear the ghetto long before I reached it. That far-off sound of carousing sailors found in all the world's great ports. And mingling with it, incongruously, the sweeter strains of the Sweet Jesus League out on their own shore patrol, singing hymns and warning the men of the dangers of unbridled fornication. A mixture of sounds that perfectly encapsulated the contradictions of the hour - captured the spiritual divide that the receding waters had left behind. To the puritans, the disaster had been a well-deserved punishment for our ill-defined iniquity. You saw them every night, singing hymns and carrying torches through the streets like columns of monks in a Gothic painting. Sometimes you caught the eye of one, who tried to avoid your gaze, and you'd think to yourself, isn't that our postman? For other people, it was all just a reminder that our tenure here is short and that we should make the most of it. So the people of Aberystwyth gulped their pleasure giddily for a while, like Paris in La Belle Йpoque or Berlin in the Roaring Twenties, dancing like the marionettes on a music box playing at the wrong speed. Sospan capitalised on the mood with that innate understanding of the
As I walked up Bridge Street, the battered old Bentley belonging to the Philanthropist swept past. A cat darted across the road. There was a squeal of tyres quickly followed by a soft furry thud and the sad but comic sight of an inert cat cartwheeling through the air. The car stopped and the chauffeur got out. He picked up the cat by its tail and, with a loud clattering noise, slung it into a rubbish bin. Then he slapped his hands together and drove off. I strolled on and thought of some lonely old lady sitting at her kitchen table tonight, looking round sharply every time the wind blew open the catflap, a saucer of unlapped milk standing on the tiled floor. Or was it a little girl walking down the street with her mum, pinning notices to the trees saying: 'Have you seen Bathsheba?' Aberystwyth could get to you sometimes.
In the old days, of course, if we wanted to gulp our pleasure giddily we just went to the Moulin — Wales's most notorious nightclub. A place that had stood for so much that was good and bad about the town. But they hadn't reopened it, had moved it instead to the end of the pier. I'd never been and I said I never would. The Moulin without Myfanwy was Troy without Helen. The gods obviously thought so too because the swooping new Perspex entrance to the pier funded by the Bucket & Spade Aid concert blew away in a storm. And since then the front had been permanently obscured by builders' plywood.
But tonight I needed only information. The sort that was supposed to be impossible to obtain, but could be bought in any of the pubs in the ghetto. I walked into the Angel.
It was crowded, hot and dark. And reeked of beer. Fishermen and sailors rubbed shoulders with town councillors and ladies of the night. Added to that was the usual haul of holiday-camp impresarios, bingo callers, whalebone dealers, shawl salesmen, out-of-work actresses from the 'What the Butler Saw' movie industry, and here and there, looking even more furtive than most, a few monks from Caldy Island. A typical early-evening crowd in the Angel. I pushed my way to the bar and ordered a rum and went to sit in the corner by the fireplace.
A figure detached itself from the shadows leaning against the wall and sauntered over to me.
'Are you enjoying your holiday, love?'
The voice was soft with a husky rawness, the sort of rawness a voice gets when you see more before you are
