From Aberystwyth with Love

tickets?’

‘Travel ones. We need to go to Hughesovka.’

‘No, we don’t,’ I said.

‘We might do.’

‘It’s really not likely.’

‘Hughesovka!’ exclaimed Mooncalf as if it were the name of a favourite son. ‘What a noble goal! And what a wise choice in coming here to make your travel arrangements.’

‘Is it expensive?’ asked Calamity.

‘Ordinarily the cost of a ticket – like that of a virtuous woman – is priced above rubies, since it is impossible to get there by conventional means. Hughesovka is, as you know, a closed city along with Gorki and numerous others.’

‘What’s a closed city?’ said Calamity.

‘One that is closed to Western tourists. As such you will find no travel agent in town will be able to help you, but since Mooncalf & Sons is no ordinary travel agent, you are in luck. When would you like to go?’

‘We’re just enquiring at the moment,’ said Calamity. ‘How much does it cost?’

‘That depends on a number of factors. Whether you are reasonably flexible about dates and routes, and whether you would like to delegate to me the delicate business of travel visas and aliases. This is highly recommended.’

‘What are the aliases?’ asked Calamity.

‘Normally you need two, I always recommend a belt-and-braces approach since we are talking about quite a high cost of failure here, including potential loss of liberty for a considerable length of time and possibly torture using psychotropic drugs. Thus I would urge you to go for two aliases. The first is to get in and the second is a form of insurance should the first alias cause you to run into difficulties – say your alias describes you as a spinning- wheel mechanic and by some terrible fluke of fate you are called on while you are there to repair a wheel, and your ignorance is thus laid bare—’

‘Or you go as an obstetrician and a lady goes into labour at the back of the number 15 tram,’ I said.

‘An all too frequent occurrence,’ said Mooncalf. ‘Never go as an obstetrician. Fortunately, Mooncalf & Sons protects its clients against such cruel exigencies of fate by virtue of our unique, patent-pending, double-ID indemnity procedure. Once the first alias becomes corrupted, you can still invoke, as a form of reserve parachute, the second and return safe and sound, albeit a touch chastened by experience, to the comforting embrace of the Aberystwyth bosom. I’ll arrange for you both to have a day on the road with Meici Jones.’

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘He’s the spinning-wheel salesman. A great and trusted associate of the firm Mooncalf & Sons. It will be a great help with your alias: spinning-wheel salesman is a superb disguise.’

‘Wow!’ said Calamity. ‘How much will all this cost?’

‘I’ll need to make a few enquiries, so give me a few days to put a proposal together. You might need to join the Communist Party.’

‘We also need you to put us in touch with some snuff philatelists,’ I said.

Mooncalf laughed unconvincingly. ‘There’s no such thing.’

‘Yes, we know, but just pretend there is. We have a rich client interested in buying the seance tape sent to Ffanci Llangollen in 1956.’

Mooncalf removed his glasses and polished them with the tail of his shirt. ‘I’ll see what I can do, very difficult, very difficult.’

I put the sock down on the counter. ‘And we’d like to talk to you about this.’

Mooncalf put on a neutral expression, the sort a man assumes in order not to give too much away at the start of a negotiation. Or maybe he just thought it was a sock.

‘It’s a sock,’ said Calamity. ‘It was worn by Yuri Gagarin.’

Mooncalf made a small ‘ah’ sound indicating the arousal of his professional interest. He pulled a jeweller’s loupe from under the counter and screwed it into his eye socket. He held the sock up and examined it.

‘We were hoping it was worth something,’ said Calamity.

I spluttered, ‘Worth something! Of course it’s worth something, it’s one of the most famous socks in the world. It’s worth . . . lots.’

‘Yeah, that’s one valuable sock,’ said Calamity.

It was clear to all that in the manner of driving a hard bargain we were both newborn babes; in the souk they would be fighting over the chance to sell us a used camel. Mooncalf sucked air between his teeth to suggest the prospects were not good. ‘It seems to be genuine, no doubt about that, the weave of the asbestos is definitely Soviet and the style of sock was popular in the artistic and scientific communities of Moscow during the late fifties. The problem is, the market for Yuri Gagarin socks is very slow at the moment.’

He lowered the sock from his eye and a photo fell out. It was the picture Uncle Vanya had left with us. Mooncalf picked it up. ‘What’s holding the dog up?’

‘An imaginary friend,’ said Calamity.

Mooncalf nodded as if to indicate this was a reasonable hypothesis, although one among many. ‘Might be wires,’ he added. He held the photo up to his loupe. ‘Difficult to say without the negatives. It looks like one of those schools for remote viewing and associated paranormal investigation, which lends credence to your levitation claim. But it could be an ectoplasmic projection.’ He laid the photo down on the counter. ‘Not really my line.’

‘We came about the sock,’ I said. ‘We’d like to fence it.’

Mooncalf contorted his features into a look of fake shock. ‘Fence? We don’t deal in stolen goods here, Mr Knight, and I would thank you to remember it.’

‘What do you call it then?’

‘Facilitation. We help the police. We help them by bypassing them.’

‘OK, if we decided we wanted to be of assistance to the police in the way you describe, how does it work?’

‘I would be able to let you have a modest, non-refundable deposit on the sock while I made enquiries about the best way to return it.’ He pulled open a drawer and removed a thick paper-bound catalogue; it looked like the sort stamp collectors use as a reference. It had Cyrillic script on the front and assorted Cold War memorabilia, such as medals, hammer and sickle lapel pins, stamps, currency. He flicked through the pages and, finding the one he was looking for, scanned it with an unhappy mien, intended to lower our expectations of his first offer. Then he stopped and his eyebrows shot up, he peered closer at the page in the time-honoured manner of someone doubting the evidence of his senses. He stood transfixed for a second before slamming the book back in the drawer, and turning the key. ‘As I thought, the market is very slow. I’ll give you five hundred in cash.’

And he did.

Chapter 3

I arrived at the office later and found Calamity leafing through a pile of press cuttings that she had retrieved from the Cambrian News clipping archive. There was a cardboard box full of items relating to the case of the missing girl, dutifully collated over the years and filed away without much expectation that anyone would ever want them. She greeted my arrival with the pleasure of one who has a story to share and has been waiting for the audience to turn up. I leafed through the cuttings as she ran through the background to the case.

‘Gethsemane spent the morning in town with her auntie, Mrs Mochdre, buying a present for her mother’s birthday the following week. They went to the Pier amusement arcade as a treat, then returned to Abercuawg around lunchtime. Gethsemane went out to play with the neighbour’s dog, Bingo. The dog came back on its own later that afternoon. They used him as a sort of bloodhound, sent him off to search for her with the whole village following. They lost his trail and the dog was never seen again.’ She pulled a photo out of the box and slid it across the table. ‘This is Bingo, sired by the famous Clip—’

She broke off and gave me a look of guilty complicity. Clip had featured in one of our previous cases. He could now be found stuffed with sawdust sitting in a glass case in the museum on Terrace Road, one ear permanently cocked for the whistle of the Great Shepherd in the Sky. In his heyday he had been a star of the newsreels from the