'You're fired.'
'Aw! Don't be a misery!'
'You've got one minute.'
She tutted and rolled her eyes. 'Do you know how map makers protect their work against illegal copying?'
'No.'
'You've got to understand with a map it's very difficult to prove copyright infringement. If someone wants to publish a map but is too lazy to put on their wellies and go out with a measuring stick, they can just buy someone else's map and copy it. Save themselves a lot of walking around in the mud. After all, the landscape is already there and you're just recording it. So everyone's map should be the same anyway, shouldn't it?'
I nodded, with a puzzled look slowly creeping across my brow.
'So if you are an honest map maker, how do you protect yourself?'
'I give in.'
'I'll tell you. You put things in which don't exist. For example, you make up a hill and call it Louie's Knoll. There's no such thing in real life, so if it appears on someone else's map, the implication is, they copied yours.' She looked at me with the fire of discovery in her eyes. 'It's called a cartographer's folly.'
'I'm still lost. Was Brainbocs a map maker?'
Calamity put a conspiratorial hand on my arm, looked round and then continued in a lowered voice, 'Brainbocs was smarter than Einstein. Normally, he would get 100 per cent for every piece of homework he did. Trouble was, although he had the brains of Einstein, he had the fighting ability of a squirrel. Just about anyone could copy his homework and there was nothing he could do about it. So he would deliberately put in weird errors. The sort which no one who had actually done the homework could possibly make. Then when the same mistakes cropped up in other people's work, the teacher would guess what was going on. It was like his personal watermark.'
'And Evans, Llewellyn and Bronzini copied his homework on the bus to school each morning?'
'That's right. Everyone knows Lovespoon warned Brainbocs to steer clear of whatever it was he was writing about. But Brainbocs wouldn't listen. He must have stumbled on something; something so awful that the Welsh teacher had to kill him. But when he gets three more pieces of homework with Brainbocs's watermark he has to kill the other three as well.'
'And what was it Brainbocs writing about?'
Calamity leaned closer and said in her best cloak-and-daggery voice: 'No idea.'
Chapter 7
NO ONE KNEW what Dai Brainbocs wrote in that essay. Or, at least, if they did they weren't telling. Could a fifth-form kid write something so bad his teacher was obliged to kill him? I didn't know but I didn't have any other angle to work on and I spent the following week asking around. So did Calamity. Meirion sent me some cuttings from the Gazette and I pored over them. Brainbocs had been the first victim; the story went that he handed the essay in just before the 9am bell and disappeared sometime during lunch time. Two weeks later they found his calliper and some of his teeth at the bottom of one of the vats of Cardiganshire Green at the cheese yards. Everything else had been eaten away by the lactic acid. It was a well-known way of disposing of a body. There were two articles on Brainbocs: a factual piece about the discovery of the body and a rather florid essay discussing the remarkable short career of the schoolboy genius. It was signed off by Iolo Davies, the Museum curator, but was almost certainly ghost-written by Meirion. 'With hair the colour of museum dust and one leg that wouldn't bend at the knee, he'd spent so much of his life in the twilight of Aberystwyth public library he'd become translucent, like those grotesque deep sea creatures you see in National Geographic . . .' It was difficult to imagine Iolo Davies writing like that. There were also a few words from his teacher, Lovespoon, who described him as the finest scholar the school had ever produced; a remark that made it sound as if he were part of a proud tradition, rather than a freak that had somehow slipped through the net. Lovespoon had been so upset by the incident that he needed a week's leave and had lost the essay.
* * *
The week after Brainbocs's corpse was found in the cheese, Evans the Boot disappeared from the scene. The date was hard to pinpoint because he was such an elusive character, it took a while before anyone realised he had gone. And even then it was some time before people dared believe it. Not long after that a member of his gang, Llewellyn Morgan, received the 'squirt water in your eye' flower anonymously through the post. He tested it out on the balcony of his council estate flat and was so maddened by the cobra venom that he fell over the edge, digging at his eyes with his fingers in such a frenzy that they later found eyeball jelly under the nails. He fell nineteen floors but according to the pathologist would have been dead by the time he passed the eighth or ninth. Bronzini and the fireman's son — both members of the same gang — were the most recent victims. Whoever killed Bronzini must presumably also have been the one who stuck my business card up his backside, which suggested they already knew I was investigating the case, even before I did. None of the articles mentioned the stolen tea cosy.
I put the newspaper articles down flat on the window ledge of the Tropicana Milk Bar and took a drink from my strawberry milk shake. It was nearing the end and the straw made that loud plug-hole sound, which filled the whole restaurant with a grotesque burbling. Perhaps if Brainbocs had still been alive he could have turned the attention of his genius to solving that one.
The Tropicana was a great place to sit and watch the world go by. Like a lot of cafes round town it hadn't succeeded in making the leap into the last quarter of the twentieth century by acknowledging the existence of cappuccinos and espressos, but the shakes in lurid, primary colours were good and you could also get burgers and hot dogs and the juke box wasn't too loud. There was a set of Formica tables in the centre, with seats screwed to the floor, and along the window where I was sitting there was a shelf at chest height with stools covered in red vinyl. Pandora and Bianca walked past the window and waved when they saw me but they didn't stop. I watched them mincing down the Prom, Bianca with such an exaggeratedly impudent gait it was if she had springs inside her legs. And Pandy the cabin girl with the knife in her sock.
As I watched their two behinds wiggling up the street a hand passed in front of my gaze and waved about as if checking whether I was blind or not.
'Sorry,' said Calamity, 'I thought you'd turned to stone.'
'I was thinking.'
'And I know what about as well.'
She climbed on to a stool and I offered her a shake.
'No thanks, I can't stay, I've got double maths after morning break.'
'You're actually going for once?'
'This one, no choice. He checks.'
'So what have you got for me?'
'Actually, I will have that shake. Strawberry.'
I groaned, but went and fetched it all the same. Calamity unloaded the fruits of her research between sips.
'It's pretty clear the other kids were all done in because they copied Brainbocs's homework,' she began, reminding me of what I already knew.
'I know that.'
'I know you know, I'm just being thorough. Point is,' she continued, 'what was he writing about? The word on the playground is, there's a copy floating around.'
'Copy of what?'
'The essay. It's probably what the Druids were looking for when they turned your place over.'
'He made a copy of it?'
'He always did. It was his modus operandi.'
I looked at her askance and she gave her nose the sort of tilt that suggested she used the expression every day.
'OK, he made a copy. Now what was the essay about?'
Calamity took a long, tension-inducing slurp and then said casually, 'Cantref-y-Gwaelod.'