Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

honorary citizen of my country. We take attacks on our citizens very seriously. You see where I’m heading?’

I said a picture was beginning to emerge.

‘I would like you to investigate the murder. I’ve put a small advertisement in the classified section of yesterday’s Cambrian News giving details of a reward for significant information which helps you crack the case. It’s a signed first edition of the complete works of Soren Kierkegaard. As you know, Kierkegaard first editions are hard to come by.’

‘I’ve never heard of him – the ‘K’ section in my school library got burned down.’

‘A great man, he wrote about despair.’

‘I’ve heard of that.’

‘I leave it to your discretion how to disburse the reward. It’s spelled S, O, R, E, N with a little dash on the O like a lopsided Saturn. Good luck!’

She hung up and I looked at Calamity. She said, ‘It was a pay phone.’

In books the PI would probably treat a call from the Queen of Denmark, especially when made from a pay phone, with a degree of scepticism; but in books they don’t have to eat whereas in Aberystwyth it is a daily necessity. And I’d been in the game long enough not to care too greatly about my clients’ bona fides since they seldom had any. An hour later a messenger arrived with a postal order for five hundred pounds.

We banked it and wandered down to Sospan’s ice-cream kiosk for a small celebration. Hard currency upfront without even needing to beg was a rare occurrence for us. Sospan was sitting in his box, huddled in front of a brazier of coals, his normal expression of wan insouciance getting ever bleaker as the flesh of his cheeks melted away. They never cover it in National Geographic but the life cycle of the ice-cream man is a fascinating spectacle. Towards the end of summer Sospan overeats like a bear laying in a store of fat for winter. From dawn to dusk he grazes, dipping into the rich takings of summer, and for a few brief weeks his white coat balloons out until the buttons pop. Then business drops off, he starts to live off his fat, and around the end of November he swaps his summer coat for a thick white quilted winter one. It does little to disguise the fact that he is shrinking like a wraith. Just after Christmas, with the last of his ebbing strength, he closes the box and goes to sleep for three months, generally emerging again around the same time as the snowdrops.

‘Sospan, have you heard of a man called Soren Kierkegaard?’

‘The one who writes his name with an O that looks like a wobbly Saturn? ’Course I have. Teleological suppression of the ethical. Fear and Trembling, Despair and The Sickness unto Death. And don’t bother offering me the signed first edition, I’ve already got one. My grandfather left me it in his will.’

‘You’ve seen the ad, then?’

He pulled out a copy of the Cambrian News from under the counter and began rummaging around inside for the classified ad. I stopped him, closed the paper to the front page and read the report on the Father Christmas slaying. He’d been found in a Chinatown alley a few nights back, lying in a pool of blood. He’d been shot twice, and while he lay dying the assailant had chopped off his manhood and put it in his mouth. Mrs Dinorwic-Jones, the art teacher who regularly drew the chalk outline round the freshly slain, was said to be in a state of shock. The final detail was the most intriguing. With his dying strength Father Christmas had dipped his finger in his own blood and written on the pavement the word ‘Hoffmann’.

Chapter 2

CALAMITY ARRIVED at the office next morning carrying a bundle of butcher’s paper and a copy of the Cambrian News. She spread the butcher’s paper on the floor and handed me a marker pen.

‘What’s going on?’

‘JDLR,’ said Calamity.

‘I’m still no wiser.’

‘JDLR. It’s what the Pinkertons say. It means Just Doesn’t Look Right.’

‘What doesn’t?’

She pointed to the front page of the paper. It carried a photo of the celebrated chalk outline.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘Doesn’t his posture strike you as unusual?’

‘He’s been brutally murdered.’

‘Even so, it doesn’t look natural.’

‘He fell awkwardly.’

‘That’s my point: you can’t fall like that. Look.’

She did a slow, dignified collapse onto the floor, roughly in the same attitude as the corpse.

‘Draw round me.’

I took the cap off the pen and drew her outline.

She got up and looked down. ‘See? His foot’s facing the wrong way. He’s lying on his left side, his right knee is touching the ground on top of his left leg. There’s no way you can get the right foot to face backwards like that unless you break the leg.’

‘So maybe he broke it.’

‘The report doesn’t say anything about a broken leg.’

‘Maybe it’s just a mistake in the drawing.’

‘Mrs Dinorwic-Jones has been teaching life study classes all her life. She wouldn’t get something like that wrong. There’s only one explanation.’

‘Which is?’

‘He did it deliberately. He took his leg out of the trousers and stuffed his hat in the trouser leg and boot, then twisted it round to face the wrong way.’

‘Where’s his real leg, then?’

‘It’s pulled back and up, inside the thigh, like actors who play Long John Silver.’

‘Why would he do a thing like that?’

‘It’s a signal. He was dying. He had just a few minutes left to live. So what does he do? He writes “Hoffmann” in his own blood. Who’s Hoffmann? Good question. My hunch is, either he recognised his assailant, who happened to be called Hoffmann, or it’s a message written to an accomplice called Hoffmann or about a subject of mutual interest to them both which is connected with someone called Hoffmann. So the accomplice reads about the murder and the word “Hoffmann” and realises that Santa has hidden something in the alley for him and has used the phoney leg routine to point to it.’ She started to gather up the sheets on the floor.

‘You mean, he’s hidden something in the alley?’

‘Yes.’

‘And pointed to it with his leg?’

‘Phoney leg.’

I laughed. ‘OK, we check the alley. Do we have anything else to go on? I’m not saying the phoney-leg routine isn’t promising or anything, but it would be nice if we – you know – had something else.’

Calamity took out a notebook and flicked it open. ‘The DOA is called Absalom. Arrived in town two or three weeks ago; no one is exactly sure when. Kept himself to himself. Took a job as Father Christmas even though he was Jewish. There’s mention of a woman.’ She opened the Cambrian News to the scandal pages. There was a picture of a mousey-looking Welsh woman in a stovepipe hat, in her early twenties probably, beneath a lurid headline: ‘SANTA SLASH MOLL IN STOVEPIPE HAT MOOLAH MYSTERY’.

I skimmed the first paragraph. It was a feeble attempt to insinuate a sinister explanation of where the girl got the money for her hats.

‘She’s the harp player out at Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp,’ explained Calamity with a slight air of hesitation.

We swapped knowing glances. The holiday camp at Borth was not one of our favourite haunts, in contrast to