We wandered out into the night to look at the summer lightning, a phenomenon for which long ago God had got top marks. We walked through the darkened castle past St Michael’s church and on into the castle grounds. At the war memorial we stopped and sat on the steps. The breeze was warm and salty, summer lightning pulsed in the sky. Sometimes it flickers like a faulty neon tube, and sometimes it is like pinball in the sky, but tonight it had a soft creamy quality. There was no thunder and, unheralded by any noise, different parts of the sky would flare up, bright as the moon, and for a split second invisible thunderclouds would become incandescent like heads of spectral coral swimming in the ocean above us. I looked up at the statue: a naked girl in bronze reaching into the sky above us. Her breasts were full and uncovered, her hair wild and luxuriant like the figurehead of a windjammer; everything about her bespoke vigour and lusty sinews and glory; a cruel falsehood cast in bronze. They should have a statue of a mother holding a telegram from the War Office and weeping.
God stared up at the statue for a while, lost in melancholy, his kind old features creased with a pain that might have been guilt. Then, as if overcome by a sudden weariness, he rested his head against the stone. ‘You know, it’s part of my essence to be forgiving, but sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes the ingratitude really . . . I mean, I don’t expect “thank you” letters or bouquets of roses or anything, but some basic appreciation . . . an understanding of . . . of . . . what I did would be nice. Have you any idea how chuffed I was about the horse?’
‘Which one?’
‘Any one, all of them . . . just horses. Of all the beasts, don’t you think they are possibly the most lovely?’
‘Off the top of my head I couldn’t think of a more wonderful creature.’
‘Don’t you just love the way they take apples from the palm of your hand? The way their big black noses peel back to unveil those big choppers, and so gentle . . . they could bite your arm off but they never do. And those big dark lake-sized eyes. I worked for ever on the detail. Horses were my special gift to man. And what did he do with them? Sent them to the Somme. It’s the little things that haunt me, you see. Not the poison gas nor the stupidity of the generals, but the whinnies of the horses as the shells landed among them.’ He closed his eyes and whispered, ‘My lovely horses.’ The wind blew strands of white hair softly across his brow as he rested his head against the stone column. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when the fighting finished and the troops went home, the War Office was too cheap to buy return tickets for the horses and sold them all to French butchers.’
We both sat in silence for a while, listening to the wind. I said, ‘I read, in a magazine, an article about Hiroshima. There was this little girl, would have been about two or three at the time, I forget her name.’
‘Sadako, her name was Sadako. It means chaste.’
‘Ten years later she got leukaemia. They called it the atom bomb disease, and they knew they couldn’t save her. But she got it into her head that if she somehow managed to fold a thousand origami cranes she would be saved. So she spent the last months of her life in hospital folding cranes.’
‘Yes,’ said God quietly.
‘Folding, folding, folding.’
‘Yes.’
‘Even used the labels off her medicine bottles for paper. She reached the target, and went past it, and then she died.’
God nodded.
‘I mean, what were you thinking?’
‘It’s difficult to describe.’
‘You must have known, right? When she was doing it, you must have known it wouldn’t work?’
‘It’s not as simple as that.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘What would you have done, Louie?’
‘If it wasn’t going to work I wouldn’t have let her have the idea in the first place.’
‘How do you know it wasn’t going to work?’
‘What does that mean? Did it depend on the cranes? She just didn’t make them nice enough?’
‘No, not like that.’
‘Could it have worked?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘A thousand and fifty cranes.’
‘One thousand two hundred and seventy three. I counted every one. They were beautiful.’ He paused and said softly, ‘Louie, I must leave you now. Try and . . . have faith.’
‘But I don’t believe in You.’
‘I know. It’s the ones who don’t believe who need faith; it’s easy for others. Goodbye, Louie, I’ll be watching over you.’
I held his hand. ‘Why did you come to Aberystwyth?’
‘I came to collect Vanya.’
Chapter 17
Llunos came round to my caravan next morning to tell me the news. Vanya had been fished out of the harbour shortly after midnight, dripping brine and vodka with some barbiturates in his head. On the shore, in the shadow of the Pier, they found a stuffed dog, a neatly folded museum curator’s uniform and, in case the barbiturates failed to do their work, an old revolver, loaded but not fired.
When I got to the office it smelled strongly of rum. There was a witchfinder sitting in the client’s chair. He was smiling and the rum – which was usually kept in the desk drawer – was now slipping down the U-bend of the sink in the kitchenette. The empty bottle was standing up-ended in the bin.
He was an old man, in his seventies, with long grey greasy hair down to his collar and a bald pate. His nose was sharp and in his eyes there burned the flames of zealotry and on his lips there played that particular smile of moral rectitude possessed by religious fanatics and the criminally insane. He wore the customary outfit of the ecclesiastical cops: a dark blue serge policeman’s tunic over a plain shirt and dog collar. Ecclesiastical cops have disappeared from the towns but still exist in the country in a state of uneasy truce with the regular police, their jurisdictions overlap with unclear boundaries and conflicts of interest. They deal with social problems that blight village life in the hinterlands beyond Aberystwyth, chastising strumpets, loose-tongued women and common scolds.
I nodded as if I had been expecting a bad start to the day and here was confirmation. ‘My two least favourite people in one: cop and holy man.’
‘The servants of the Devil abhor the sight of blessedness twice over.’
I picked the empty bottle out of the bin and put it on the desk for no good reason. ‘I hope you’ve got a warrant for this.’
‘No warrant is needed in commission of the Lord’s work.’
‘I bet they said that at Nuremberg, too.’
‘Alcohol is an abomination unto God.’
‘You’ve obviously never tried it.’
I slumped down in the chair opposite and scowled. He had also saved me the trouble of opening the morning mail. He threw a letter across the desk. It was from Vanya. ‘As his last act upon this earth,’ said the Witchfinder, ‘your friend sends you a sock. The Lord will cure him of his levity.’
The envelope contained the matching half of the Yuri Gagarin sock and a note explaining it was to cover the funeral expenses. ‘The truth about Gethsemane Walters is more terrible than even I could have imagined,’ he had written. ‘There is no point going on. Goodbye, Louie. Your dear friend, Vanya.’
I read the letter and looked up. ‘Talking of God, I spoke to Him the other day, he was in Aberystwyth . . .’
The smile on his lips expanded a fraction. ‘That really is an unwise way to begin a sentence.’
‘Is it a crime to talk to God?’
‘I will enjoy humbling you.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I have information that you recently visited Grimalkin’s in Chalybeate Street and placed an order for some
