Aberystwyth Mon Amour

'What will they do to you?'

I shrugged. 'You know their methods.'

She twisted a beer mat between her fingers. 'And I've got you into this. I'm such a cow, I should never have involved you.'

'What could they be after?'

'Louie, I really don't know what it could be.'

A glittering drop of rain spattered against the window.

It must have been just after midnight; the rain was sluicing down from the sky in torrents and we took cover beneath a coat from the back of the car and ran across the street to my office. Once inside I went into the kitchen to fetch the bottle of rum and two glasses. When I returned to the office Myfanwy was standing in the doorway to the bedroom.

'Mmmm . . . how many poor girls have you undone in this room?'

'Not many.'

'Don't lie to me you wicked man.'

'No honest.'

'You're a private detective, you must get women throwing themselves at you all the time.'

I laughed. 'In Aberystwyth?'

'You surely don't expect me to believe you?'

'It's up to you.'

She disappeared into the bedroom and I followed her in. She sat down on the bed and ran her hand across the covers, and then stopped with a puzzled look on her face. We both looked across to her hand, which was resting on an odd-looking mound in the duvet. Gingerly she pulled back the covers, her expression deepening from one of puzzlement to fear and then, as she let out a long, shrill, ear-piercing scream, to one of horror. Lying on the pillow, in a dark sticky pool, was the head of a donkey.

Chapter 6

'HERE YOU ARE, Mr Knight, my multi-vitamin special to pick you up.'

I took the ice cream and wandered disconsolately along the Prom in the direction of Eeyore's stable, the donkey's head in a cardboard box under my arm. Sospan had said I looked tired and it was hardly surprising really. Friday night had been spent in the police cell. And last night, after I had calmed Myfanwy down and driven her home, my attempts at catching a few hours' sleep met with little success. And when I did finally manage to fall asleep shortly before dawn, I had slipped into the nightmare which has visited me, on and off, for the past twenty years. A cold, rainswept late Friday afternoon in January, the light fading so fast behind the lowering cloud that it is almost dusk, and there's still half an hour to go before the last school bell. The world is a symphony of greys: slate sky, grass the colour of the sea in winter, the mobile classrooms and metalwork blocks discernible only as black shapes containing yellow postage stamps of warm, yellow light — the light from which we are exiled. Reaching into the sky the white totemic masts of the rugby posts. And walking towards me through a herd of muddy boys in rugby jerseys is Herod Jenkins. I don't know why, among all the many episodes of misery, it is always this one that haunts me. Why, for example, it is not the terrible day when Marty went off on that cross-country run and didn't return. Or why it isn't that time in the summer downpour when Herod ordered the other boys to bowl cricket balls at me and to aim for my nose. But it is always this particular scene: that cold, rainy January afternoon when he walked towards me through the jeering boys and said, 'Come on then, son, do you want some?' And I was faced with the Hobson's choice of trying to take the ball off him and suffering the battering which that would entail, or of disobeying him, which was even worse. 'Come on then, son, do you want some?' As the kids jeered and Herod's face widened with that horizontal crease he called a smile.

*

Eeyore sat on a bale of hay, his head resting in his hands, and stared gloomily at the decapitated head.

'In your bed?'

I nodded.

The early-morning sun made the dust in the stable dance and sparkle.

He shook his head sadly. 'It's Esmeralda.'

'Yes, I know. I recognised the white ear. I'm sorry.'

He made a dismissive expression. 'I thought at first it was one of those gangs, you know, the ones that smuggle them into Holland for those movies they do.'

I picked up a sack and laid it over the donkey's head, silencing the withering gleam of accusation in her eye.

'I don't think she suffered much,' I offered uselessly.

'No, it's us who remain who are fated to suffer.'

'Dad! Don't be like that.'

He rose to his feet with the desperate weariness of the prize fighter who would really prefer to stay down on the canvas.

'Come, I want to give you something.'

He led me through the stable, past the quietly shuffling donkeys and into an outhouse where he removed a brick from the wall and reached inside. He pulled out a key.

'There's not much I can do for you. Too old for that now. But I can give you this.'

He placed the key in my hand.

'It's to a caravan in Ynyslas. A ghost van, built from two sections of crash write-offs welded together. No records exist for it anywhere. Not the police, not the Council, not the Chirpy Caravaners of Britain Association. It's ice-cold. You can't see it from the road, it's hidden behind the Borth Lagoons Holiday Camp sign. Even the caretaker doesn't know about it. If things get too hot for you, you could hang out there for a while. No one would find you.'

I closed my hand around the key.

'There's food and water and a brand new ludo set. It's not much but it might help.'

'Thanks.'

He waved my gratitude impatiently away. 'Now you get out of here and find those guys. I've got a donkey to bury.'

From the harbour I walked up through the Castle to the top of town and turned right just before the market to KnitWits the wool shop. The bell tinkled and I walked through the aisle of displays stacked to the ceiling with wool in every shade and grade that the shepherd could offer. I put the scrap of wool from Evans the Boot's Mam on the counter and waited as Mildred Crickhowell examined it with a jeweller's loupe. It made her look like a Cyclops: one watery jellyfish-sized eye criss-crossed with spidery red veins.

'It's tea cosy all right,' she laughed. 'Funny, you don't look the type!'

'It's . . . it's not mine,' I said lamely.

She laughed again. 'No, it never is! Don't tell me, it belongs to a friend!'

I squirmed. Visitors to the town were often surprised by the amount of shops selling tea cosies, especially as most of them were concentrated down by the harbour. Just when this harmless piece of tea-pot furniture became a front for another form of spout-warming activity was a mystery lost in history.

I picked up the scrap of wool. 'Can you be sure it's cosy? I mean it's just a piece of wool, it could be from a cardigan or something.'

The woman leaned her shoulders back and tilted her head in the sort of look which said: 'What do you mean sure?! This is KnitWits you've come to, you know?'

She handed me the eyepiece. 'See for yourself.'

As I held the cloth up to the light and examined the weave, she explained to me the various features.

'See the fine dust particles in the yarn? That's tea dust. Now look at the way the threads are woven together. See? Like figure-of-eights intertwined with zigzags? That's pretty fancy crocheting. You don't see that sort of thing very often. That's what's known as the Hildegaard Purl after the Hildegaardian Order of the Sisters of Deiniol. They invented it. Now that tells us something very interesting.'

There was a pause as I struggled to see the things she was talking about.

'Very interesting,' she repeated.

'Yeah, why?'

'Dates it, doesn't it. Surer than carbon dating, that is. It's from 1958.'

'How can you tell?'

'Hildegaard Purl was invented that year, and then not long after the sisters abjured the vice of amusement and stopped the knitting. No one else can do it like they could. And there's more. Look at the curved edge with the elaborate stitching. See it?'