‘I met him at the railway station.’
‘Where else?’
‘We just talked a bit, you know.’
‘It’s not a crime in this shop, sir, as you see. Are you sure it was a friend?’
I ignored the insinuation and carried on, feeling strangely ill at ease. I wished Calamity would hurry up and subtly misdirect him.
‘Nothing extravagant, maybe an 0–0 gauge sheep for his layout or something.’
‘The mockery is never far away, is it?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘My friend, I would say the best gift you or any man could give to this –’ he paused in a way that cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the next word – ‘
‘Which one?’
‘Spotter.’
‘They don’t use that word?’
‘Only those who revile them call them that. Call him a cranker, or a basher, and he will thank you far more sincerely than if you were to buy him a model signal box, which I suspect is what you with your limited understanding had in mind when you came in.’
‘Cranker?’
‘It’s their chosen term.’
‘Do you use it?’
‘I am just the dealer. I supply what my customers desire. I take no sides. I’m not proud of what I do, but neither am I ashamed. A man must make a living in this world and there are worse ways of doing it.’
I began to sweat around the collar.
‘Oh look, Louie!’ Calamity cried in a voice suffused with insincerity – the voice a wife in a farce uses to deny the presence of her lover in the wardrobe. ‘Look at this!’
I allowed my attention to be diverted to a model layout of the Fairbourne railway.
Fairbourne is a small town just below Barmouth on the Mawddach estuary, about thirty or forty miles north of Aberystwyth. The estuary is even more beautiful than the one we have at Aberdovey, if such a thing is possible. But Fairbourne itself is not so interesting, apart from a lovely beach and the little train that runs the entire length of it.
I bent forward to take a better look. ‘This looks very accurate.’
‘It is,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Only the magnificent pointlessness of the journey is missing.’
‘No, not that,’ said Calamity. ‘I meant this.’
It was a scale model of Clip the Sheepdog. I moved across and the shopkeeper dutifully stalked me from behind the counter. If any of this was fooling him he was doing an excellent job of concealing it.
‘We sell a lot of those,’ he said.
‘He must have been an amazing dog.’
‘Yes.’
‘I saw the movie. Quite a famous victory.’
‘Yes, famous,’ he said in a voice that suggested he didn’t think so.
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘Who am I to say? I just sell the little toy soldiers, I don’t comment on the broader historical sweep.’
He gave me the obsequious smile that the private detective in Aberystwyth comes to recognise like the yelp of a faithful dog. The smile that says: my lips are sealed and can only be unlocked by a special pass key, available from all good off licences. I took out a flask of rum and waved it in front of his obsequious face.
‘Why don’t you break the rule of a lifetime and comment on the . . . what was it?’
‘Broad historical sweep.’ He pulled over a teacup. ‘What are rules for if not to be broken?’
I poured a generous measure into his cup and took a gulp from the flask because I hated to see a man drink alone.
‘It’s difficult to know where to begin,’ he said.
I poured another shot into his cup. ‘Does this make it any easier?’
‘A bit of lubrication never hurt.’ He gave a wan smile, full of understanding of human frailty, especially his own.
‘Just so long as we don’t flood the engine. Tell me about the Mission House siege. What happened there?’
‘Wooh!’ He pretended to be startled and rolled his eyes as if the task was beyond the compass of mortals.
‘Look, buddy,’ I said, snatching his cup away from him, ‘I’m not sure if you understand the mechanism at work here. I’m pouring libations into your cup not because you’re a darling of the gods but because I want you to tell me something. Information that in any decent town I would get for nothing.’ He reached for the cup and I held it up by my ear, out of his way. He watched it like a dog watches the butcher.
‘Does that make sense to you?’
He nodded, still staring at the cup.
‘What was the mission about? What was the objective? Surely you can tell me that?’
‘Great mystery surrounded the precise nature of the objective. It seemed to involve a lot of getting shelled; a lot of stealing enemy barbed wire; a lot of walking across open ground towards machine-gun outposts.’
‘How do you steal barbed wire?’
‘Not easily, that is for sure. And not without a terrible loss of life. But General Llanbadarn wanted them to bring some back. No one knows why. He had just come back from Buenos Aires. He kept a woman there, so it was said. Not that that explains it, but there were some who suggested the objective stemmed from a boast he made to his mistress.’
‘Stealing barbed wired seems like a pretty crummy objective,’ said Calamity.
‘It was certainly no Monte Cassino. But it was always the same when he came back from Buenos Aires – he invariably had a new plan, one which was distinguished only by being more completely stupid than the previous one.’
‘Are you saying the men weren’t allowed to run?’
‘They were told to proceed at walking pace so as not to destroy the symmetry of the lines. The cameras were there, you see. Although they did not last long.’
‘I don’t understand why anyone would order his troops to walk into machine-gun fire.’
‘That’s because you aren’t a military man. General Llanbadarn was old school. He learned his tactics by studying the great battles of World War I, particularly the Somme.’
‘Was the Somme great?’
‘In magnitude, yes. The magnitude of the carnage. In terms of troop dispositions there are arguably far better models in the annals of military history: Salamis, Agincourt, Custer’s last stand . . . but the Somme had one factor which made it especially attractive for a strategic thinker of General Llanbadarn’s rare mettle, namely, he had heard of it.’
‘He sounds like an idiot.’
‘Military historians are a disputatious lot but on that point there is unanimity.’ He stopped and pointed at my ear. I put the cup back down in front of him and refilled it.
‘The men were, of course, terrified. They had heard the rumour that the general wanted the barbed wire to give to his mistress as a trophy. There was talk of a rebellion. That’s when they saw the angel. She filled their hearts with the fire of courage and off they went. And this is where the true story parts company with the version portrayed on screen.’
‘They were all slaughtered?’
‘Yes, of course. But there was something else. Something truly terrible happened that day, even worse than the slaughter. But no one knows what. They refuse to speak about it. A handful of men limped back to camp; Clip died in mysterious circumstances; and the chaplain went mad.’
‘How mad?’
