Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

little girl – your very smart little girl – decoded the signal and found the hidden item.’

‘I’m not his little girl, I’m his partner.’

‘What’s the item?’

‘That I do not know; there you have the advantage of me.’

‘Who is Hoffmann?’

He looked annoyed at what he perceived to be my amateurish play-acting. ‘It is time to stop fooling, Mr Knight. Or there will be more unnecessary deaths.’

‘We’re not fooling, we really don’t know who Hoffmann is.’

‘So you say, but how can that be?’ He tilted his head and regarded us quizzically. ‘You know, I am still trying to guess who you work for.’

‘I can tell you that. It’s the person who put the ad in the Cambrian News.’

‘Ah, yes. The Queen of Denmark. I forgot.’ He stepped away from the railing and paused in the motion of turning away. A look of gnomic purpose crept across his features.

‘Mr Knight, if you are indeed who you say you are, if you are really a nobody, a . . . a . . . a nothing, just a scrap of newspaper blown along in the wind of the Hoffmann case, I must ask you to reconsider your position.’

‘Who is Hoffmann?’

‘Indeed! Who is he? How many men over the years have uttered that deceptively simple phrase? How many times have those syllables quivered on the lips of a dying man? Who is Hoffmann? I myself have sought the answer to this riddle. In Moscow, in Warsaw, in Buenos Aires, in Jerusalem, in Zurich and London and Washington; in Peking and Kamchatka, in Berlin and Ljubljana. . . Who is he? An enigma for sure. A myth perhaps. A riddle, yes. Perhaps the greatest spy of the late twentieth century. Maybe the greatest who ever lived.’

He paused and stared up the Prom towards the Pier, as if the answer to this the deepest of mysteries, the riddle of Hoffmann’s identity, could be found up there somewhere amid the rusting ironwork that was a home to a thousand seagulls and pigeons.

‘I see that we will make no more progress today. Perhaps after another innocent person has been killed you will begin to appreciate the gravity of this situation. And it is indeed most grave. You see, Mr Knight, you and I and your little girl are standing before a unique fissure in the topography of the epoch. Hoffmann has decided to come in from the cold.’

Chapter 3

THE OLD JEW wandered off in the direction of the kids’ paddling pool and sat down on a bench. He stared out to sea but it was clear he was still observing us. Two workmen in overalls were pasting posters to boards attached to the sea railings. Two posters that represented in many ways the twin poles of love and terror to be found in the collective Aberystwyth heart.

One advertised a new movie, Bark of the Covenant, featuring Clip the Sheepdog. Clip had been the canine hero of the war in Patagonia at the end of the ’50s; a beloved star of the What the Butler Saw newsreels, the Welsh Lassie. After the end of that insane conflict the dog had been stuffed and now sat obediently in a glass case in the museum on Terrace Road, his muzzle permanently fixed in the bright smile that they said was a high-water mark of the taxidermist’s art. The movie was a re-release, the director’s cut. The other poster bore a different sort of smile, the grin of a man less beloved than Clip: it was the face of my old games teacher, Herod Jenkins. The bogey man who haunted all our nightmares. Years ago in school I had watched him send my consumptive schoolmate Marty off on a cross-country run into a blizzard from which he never returned. In later years Herod had tried to blow up the dam and drown our town. His face, too, was famous for its smile, or rather the horizontal crease across his face that he called a smile.

Calamity and I watched the two men dip their brooms in watery wallpaper paste and sweep them rhythmically across the paper. The long, slow arcs, like windscreen wipers, smoothing out the horizontal crease in the paper, but doing nothing for the one in Herod Jenkins’s face. According to the poster Herod Jenkins had found work at the circus: ‘Samson Agonistes, half man, half bear!’ It was a role created bespoke by the tailors of fate. Circus strongman, the last refuge for a renegade games teacher who has run out of options. The circus was parked about twenty miles outside town, at Ponterwyd. They didn’t dare cross the county line and come any closer to town because Herod was a wanted man in Aberystwyth. Although wanted only in the technical legal sense. I shivered.

‘What do you reckon?’ said Calamity.

I put a fatherly arm across her shoulders. ‘If he was telling the truth, and he really doesn’t know what the item you found is, he doesn’t know it’s a hat-check receipt, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So there’s no reason why we should tell him. We’ll come back and pick it up another time.’

‘I’m aching to know what it is.’

‘Me too, but sometimes you just have to be patient about these things.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We’ll go to the Kamp and then talk to Father Christmas’s girlfriend.’

We drove out to Borth with heavy hearts. We hated going to Kousin Kevin’s Kamp; we always got thrown out. It was only a matter of how far we got inside the perimeter gate before it happened.

After the turning at Rhydypennau we bade farewell to the sun. The world was grey. It was just one of those accidents of geography. All the rocks found along this coast are grey, buff, beige or dirty mauve. In other parts of the world the hills are quarried for bright, shining Carrara marble. Just a little accident of geography, that’s all, but it is surprising how much it can affect the contents of the human heart. Try as you may, you can’t imagine people lolling about in togas and sandals, drinking wine, in buildings made of slate. Just as it’s hard to imagine them beneath the bright hills of Liguria, in their halls of white marble, sitting in crow-black rags, stirring cauldrons and tending spinning wheels like they do in Talybont.

We drove in through the perimeter fence and past the guard house, under a bleak wrought-iron sign, and on to the car park. The snow that had fallen a few days ago still remained here on the north-facing slope. Against the whiteness the buildings looked darker and more sombre, a world of two tones which reminded of those arty photography exhibitions they sometimes held up at the Arts Centre on campus. The sort of blurred, out-of-focus snaps that normal people threw away but that won prizes if you exhibited them.

‘You can get rickets if you stay at this place too long,’ said Calamity.

‘How do you know?’

‘I read about it in the paper. They recommend you to eat mackerel while you’re here because it’s high in vitamin D.’

I reversed into a parking space and butted the rear of the Wolseley Hornet up against a wire-netting fence on which was stapled a metal sign showing an Alsatian dog in silhouette attached to a leash held by a clown.

‘Judging by past experience we won’t be here more than ten minutes so you should be OK. If you start feeling dizzy, let me know.’

I was wrong. We were there less than six minutes.

Any time after mid-October was low season at the Kamp and it would get lower and lower until about late March. The only blip was around New Year when a few people turned up who had won weekends away in the works’ raffle. But it was too early for that, and as we wandered through the lines of dark brooding barracks we saw almost no one except the odd Klown slouched in a doorway, and up by the perimeter a party with buckets and spades digging in the kitchen garden. We headed straight down the rows and followed the smell of frying to the refectory.

It was warm and stuffy inside and reeked of fried bacon and tea that had been stewing in a big silver urn since the days of Noah. A few families sat eating from meal trays at long trestle tables. Nearer the door a man sat alone, scooping soup from a wooden bowl. We sat at his table.

‘Mind if we join you?’

He paused and looked and said nothing.