Aberystwyth Mon Amour

'The pub.'

'You drunk?'

I laughed. 'No!'

She stood beside me twisting her body round to look at my face.

'Have you changed your mind yet?'

'Nope.'

'Aren't you even curious to know who it is?'

'Who what is?'

'The murderer?'

'All right. Who is it?'

By way of answer she looked up, craning her neck and squinting into the bright blue sky.

'Him.'

I followed her gaze up at the leaf-green bronze statue of Lovespoon astride his sturdy cob. Around the hoofs at the base there was a Latin inscription recording the well-known story of how as an infant he refused his mother's teat during Lent.

'The Welsh teacher?'

'Yep.'

'He's murdering his own pupils?'

'You knew him didn't you?'

'Yes,' I sighed, as my thoughts drifted back through the fog of years. 'Yes, he taught me Welsh many years ago.'

'You know what he's like then.'

'I remember he used to hit a lot of people. I don't recall him ever murdering anyone. I could have been away that day, though.'

I could sense the frustration gradually squelching her high spirits.

'Why won't you take me seriously?

But before I could say anything, she started walking away, across the road.

I leaned against the plinth, overcome by an unaccountable weariness. How could I take such a story seriously? It was just a piece of playground nonsense, the sort kids made up all the time. In school we had all been terrified of him, of course. When he appeared in the corridor we used to hurl ourselves aside like Chinese peasants caught by the sudden arrival of the Emperor. Pressed tightly against the wall, we would wait with averted gaze until he swept past, his white hair billowing like the sails of a clipper ship. But apart from dispensing thick ears he never did anything to justify such fear. Now he was Grand Wizard and ran the town from behind a veneer of solid civic respectability. But we all knew how thin the veneer was. Ask the men who mix the concrete in this town — those gaunt-eyed, haunted men who dare not speak of the things secretly added to their concrete during the night. Ask them about the bodies in the foundations. What was it Sospan said? The town is built on honest men. Or ask why Meirion the crime correspondent also covers the fishing industry. Why he reports so assiduously on the foreign objects that frequently snag the nets. Or ask the fishmonger about the human teeth found in the bellies of the fish. Or ask Lovespoon's cousin about his second-hand clothing store 'Dead Men's Shoes'. Ask him where he gets his stock from. Yes, Lovespoon was not a man to be meddled with. And the only reason I or Llunos had not also ended up in a lobster pot was because it suited his purpose to allow us to operate. Like Stalinist show-trials it added a gloss of legitimacy to his regime. All the same. Would he turn on his own pupils? Wouldn't they be sacrosanct? I pressed my cheek against the warm slate of the plinth. Who could say? How do you judge a man, anyway, who commissions an equestrian statue of himself after a pony trekking trip to Tregaron?

Calamity shouted from across the road. 'Would you like to know who the next victim is going to be?'

She grinned and skipped down the street, adding just before she got out of earshot: 'The fireman's son!'

Chapter 5

WHEN I RETURNED from my early-morning stroll the following day, Myfanwy was in the office sitting on a wicker picnic hamper. It squeaked loudly as she stood up.

'Hi! The door was open so —'

I waved away her explanations. We both looked at the hamper.

'It was such a lovely day I thought we could go to Ynyslas; I hope it's OK. Besides, I wanted to apologise.'

'What for?'

She pulled the band from her hair and shook it loose. 'Last night — our little misunderstanding. I didn't want you to think I was after your money.'

'Don't worry about it. I was drunk.'

She lifted the lid to the hamper. 'So I thought I'd treat you.'

My face lit up. 'Wow! Champagne, strawberries, chicken . . . you shouldn't waste your money on me.'

'Oh that's OK, it didn't cost much.'

'Of course it didn't, champagne's really cheap in this town.'

'No, really, it was nothing.'

I looked at her with a stern, schoolmasterly expression. 'Now don't you tell tales like that.'

Myfanwy looked at me awkwardly. 'Honestly, it cost nothing.'

It took a second or two before I understood what she was saying.

'You didn't steal it?'

'No, of course not! I put it on ... on ... a slate.'

'A slate?'

She twisted her hands. 'A slate?' I repeated.

'Yes . . . yours actually,' she said brightly.

'Where?'

'At the Deli.'

'I haven't got one.'

She joined her hands together in front of her, stretched the arms and smiled sheepishly.

'Well, I suppose you have now.'

We wedged the hamper into the back seat of my Wolsely Hornet and drove through town and up Penglais Hill. I suppose I should have been annoyed but really I felt like a kid on a school trip. I didn't need to ask how she managed to get the man at the Deli to put thirty pounds' worth of food on to the slate of someone who never visited his shop. I could picture the scene only too clearly: Mr Griffiths standing there looking awe-struck and imbecilic as if an angel had appeared in front of the counter; his thick-rimmed spectacles misting up and his pink sausagey face, edged on either side by two broom-heads of wiry black hair, turning crimson. I could see him shooing away the assistant and adjusting his tie as he assumed command of the situation. He probably didn't dare look at her, in case he mistakenly looked at the wrong place. She probably told him he was handsome and he probably lost control of his bladder for a second. I could see the shaking of his hands as he put the produce into the hamper, and then the slight pause when she asks for the champagne, and then the shakes getting worse. He was lucky she didn't ask for the deeds to the shop.

At the top of Penglais Hill we turned left and took the old route to Borth. The sun was hot, the windows were open and Myfanwy sang as we drove. It was like sailing a ship over an ocean of grass as the road went up and down over the hills and dales. Every hillside was chequer-boarded with cows. The constant rising and falling of the landscape had a hypnotic regularity and you thought it would never end. But then the car mounted the final hill with that suddenness that never fails to surprise and we were on the roof of the world, staring at nothing but blue: the washed-out blue of the hot sky, and the darker indigo of the cold sea rolling in from the Bay. We pulled into a driveway in front of a five-bar gate and got out. The hillside curved steeply away down to Borth and the wind was fierce, buffeting the car and making the loose cloth of my shirt flap with a sharp sound. Down below us, extending for almost ten miles, was the huge flat expanse of the Dovey estuary and stretched across it in a thin straight line was a straggle of houses. This was the town of Borth: tinselled up with inflatable swimming hoops, buckets and spades in summer; and in winter nothing but dust and creaking shutters. At the far northern extreme, lost in the haze and a desert of sand dunes was Ynyslas, goal of our picnic; and beyond that, on the other side of the estuary, were the dot-sized houses of Aberdovey. From here they looked achingly close, but so formidable a barrier were the estuarial tides, that Aberdovey often seemed like another country.

Myfanwy inserted herself between my arm and my body, to shelter from the wind, and pointed out toward the dunes of Ynyslas.

'That's where Evans the Boot's Mam lives. I thought we could drop in and say hello.'

I looked at her with a mild sensation of having been subtly manipulated.

'That's if you don't mind.'

We parked midway along the main street and climbed on to the high concrete sea wall, which neatly divided town and beach and blocked any prospect of a sea view from the guest houses on the road. On the beach holidaymakers from the Midlands were encamped in three-sided tents made of deck-chair material, but so wide and long were the golden sands, the illusion of being alone was not hard to enjoy. It was a beach created for buckets and spades and sons burying dads.