war in Patagonia in 1961, the Welsh Lassie. In moments like this, when a ghost from our past resurfaced, we struggled to recall whether the case had turned out well or not. There was one key criterion for deciding: did the client die? But we never actually met the client in the Clip case; she was, or claimed to be, the Queen of Denmark and our business was conducted over the phone. But since her head is still on the postage stamps we take it as a positive sign. And none of the postal orders she sent bounced. Calamity, remembering this vital fact, continued.
‘Goldilocks was a local hoodlum attached to the Slaughterhouse Mob – a bunch of tearaways who worked at the slaughterhouse and hung out at the Pier ballroom. They were into the usual small-time stuff: robbery, extortion, violence. The evening after Gethsemane disappeared someone saw Goldilocks burying something in his garden, it turned out to be one of her shoes. He couldn’t account for it and wouldn’t say where he had been on the day in question. He was convicted of her murder and escaped from Aberystwyth gaol the following November.’ She slid another photo across the desk. ‘This is him.’
He had an angelic face with tight blond curls. He didn’t smile and didn’t look like he understood the purpose of the expression. His eyes were dead, like those of a mackerel in the fishmonger’s. They were the eyes of a man whose heart is cold as a fireless grate, one who never takes pleasure or mirth from his passage through this world and is irritated and bewildered by those who do. You can tell a lot about the soul from a photograph. Or at least you think you can. Maybe I was just projecting into the image what I already knew. If I had been told this was a photo of a boy who had rescued a baby from a burning building I might have been touched by his gentle aspect and said he looked a little angel.
‘The only member of the Slaughterhouse Mob still alive is the chief typographer down at the rock foundry. We can go and see him.’ Calamity took out another cutting. ‘This is the only photo the newspaper could find of Gethsemane.’
It was a school nativity play: shepherds in dressing gowns and tea towels on their heads; a Roman centurion; a crib; Mary and Joseph; angels.
‘Gethsemane is the robin redbreast.’
She had bird’s feet made out of rope, a dark cloak and a cardboard beak. In her eyes there was a certain wistful awareness: staring out across the years from the grey fog of a tattered old photo, it betokened the early understanding of what life held in store for a misfit doomed to wear a cardboard beak when others among her peers were centurions or angels.
‘The guy playing Joseph is Rwpert Valentino, the star of the TV soap
‘How did you find that out?’
‘It’s in the scandal pages in the
‘OK, that’s good stuff. Anything else?’
Calamity slapped the back of her hand against one of the news reports for emphasis. ‘This lady, Mrs Mochdre, interests me. Gethsemane’s aunt, the one who took her to the Pier that morning. Last one to see her alive, that’s always a red flag.’
‘Not always.’
Calamity scowled at me and carried on. ‘She’s married to the Witchfinder, keeps pigs, used to be pretty big in the ABLL.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The Anti-Bearded-Lady League.’
I blinked. It seemed like an appropriate reaction.
‘A lot of the champs on the Pro-Bearded-Lady circuit from the forties and fifties used to come from the area around Abercuawg,’ Calamity explained. ‘Mrs Mochdre used to campaign against it on grounds of idolatry or something. I thought we could talk to a few.’
‘A few what?’
‘Bearded ladies, get them to dish the dirt – there can’t be much love lost between them and Mrs Mochdre.’
I looked at her through narrowed eyes. Calamity inspires a curious mix of emotions in me: pride and a desperate desire to protect her from the bad things in this world; I want to stop her from even knowing about them, even though she probably already does. Maybe this is how fathers feel all the time. Is this how Eeyore feels when he sees me?
There are certain subjects we never discuss. Her father is one. He does not live in Aberystwyth; according to her mother he lives at the racetrack, but no fixed racetrack, in England, or sometimes the Republic of Ireland. The other subject is boyfriends. I do not think Calamity has a boyfriend, and her behaviour and dress do not betray any interest in that direction. I know how painful it would be for her if I mentioned it, with that clumsy well-meaning insensitivity of adults who have forgotten the grief of their own youth.
She wears jeans and T-shirts and arranges her hair in an untidy spiky pile that is somehow arranged in its lack of arrangement. She is not a tomboy but she has a slight fear of girly things. On occasion I have seen her wearing eyeshadow but so little the lack of confidence shone through.
Calamity tilted her head to one side to express mild puzzlement at the reverie that had caused me to be silent.
‘Talking to former bearded ladies seems like a . . . a . . . a very left-of-field way to begin a case,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said Calamity. She paused and said with a casual air that was slightly forced, ‘I thought we could use it as an example of superseding the paradigm.’
‘That sounds like a good idea.’
‘I think so too.’
‘What does it mean?’
Calamity pulled a piece of paper from her back pocket, and unfolded it. ‘I saw it in this month’s
‘We’ve managed well enough without superseding it so far but I’m always open to new ideas.’
Calamity began to read. ‘Traditional detective methods which rely on deductive reasoning are premised on the belief that life makes sense. This is a mistake. Normally, life only makes sense in novels and movies where events are shaped by the hand of a creative artist. In the real world events are born of contingency and are frequently shaped by the hands of people who are often clinically insane. Thus, because no rational process can be discerned behind the events of life, deductive reasoning is not best suited for unravelling its mysteries. In the past one means of countering this problem was the frequent use of the policeman’s hunch which proceeds by non-linear and counter-intuitive methods and aims to break the straitjacket of conventional thinking. Deployed successfully the hunch often re-arranges the pieces of the jigsaw in such a way that old paradigms are superseded. Though a reliable method of unravelling stubborn mysteries, the hunch suffers from the drawback that it occurs but rarely and, crucially, is not subject to conscious control. The advanced detective seeks to summon up the paradigm- busting thinking that hallmarks the hunch by deliberately entertaining hypotheses that are absurd.’ She put the article down and looked across.
Before I could think of something to say, the phone rang. Calamity answered. She wrote something down, thanked the caller and hung up. ‘That was Mooncalf. He’s arranged for us to spend tomorrow morning with Meici Jones the spinning-wheel salesman. This is his address.’
‘Did we ask him to arrange that?’
‘I don’t think we told him not to.’
That night the sky over the beach at Ynyslas had the translucence of a cathedral window on a moonlit night. I opened the door of my caravan to air the inside and went to sit on the brow of the dune behind. For the first time in days, the night was cool. The heat had gone with the setting of the sun, and a soft breeze wafted in off the sea and raised goosebumps on grateful flesh. The beach was dark, the tide far out, you sensed it rather than saw it. On the horizon there was a thin band of lighter blue, the same shade as the neon letters on the ‘Eats’ signs that flash above so many diners down this coast. I lay back on the sand, felt the rasp under my hair, the sharp ends of the marram grass spiking my cheek. I kicked my shoes and socks off and buried my toes in sand that was still hot. In the morning the same sand would feel as cold as bathroom linoleum on a winter’s morn. There was no sound, not
