Aberystwyth Mon Amour

Chapter 9

DORIS PUGH SAT in her official tourist information blazer and spat the word across the desk like a cherry stone: 'Semen!'

I gasped.

'On an apricot satin camisole.'

'Old?'

'Flapper years. Of course he said it wasn't his, but then they all say that don't they? Thirty years he'd been there. Two more years and he would have retired on full pension with a gold clock.'

The job of a private detective in Aberystwyth was full of ironies. If you asked people politely for information they would normally clam up and begrudge you even the time of day. But if you stood on the other side of a garden hedge to them you couldn't shut them up. And sometimes the simplest way to find out what you wanted was to ask the lady at the tourist information kiosk.

'Well you can't be too careful,' she continued, 'can you? What with all these overseas students we get now? I mean, look at those girls we get from Brunei, wearing those things over the face that's like looking through a letterbox. Imagine it!'

I thanked her and wandered off down the Prom shaking my head sadly at the cruelty of Lovespoon. All his life Iolo Davies had served at that Museum, with never a blemish on his record. But he helped Brainbocs with his school essay and so he had to be punished. The method chosen was breathtakingly effective: a rogue semen stain found on one of the exhibits in the Combinations and Corsetry section. I didn't need to know the exact details to know how it was done. All very hush-hush, but not quite. Nothing crudely dramatic. Just a minor detail that would do far more damage than any gross slander. Plant the seed — ha! the cruelty of the phrase - and allow the gentle winds of scandal to blow. Everything would follow with a bleak inevitability: allegations of impropriety, rumours of extra-curricular loans of the exhibits . . . and in no time they would be removing the portrait that had hung in the Museum cafe for a generation. And what struck me with the most force was this: the sheer artistry of Lovespoon's evil. Because the truth was, Iolo probably had been involved in something pornographic with the combinations. Such things were commonplace. A select group of trusted high-ranking townsfolk. Envelopes of money passed discreetly under restaurant tables. He'd probably been doing it for years and they probably knew all about it and let him do it. But when they moved against him the allegations would have been impossible to refute.

Where was he now? There was one man in Aberystwyth who would know: Archie Smalls. But of course he wouldn't tell me. Not unless he was forced to. I sighed. To make him squeal I would need to find someone else; someone most people went out of their way to avoid. Her name was Siani-y-Blojob, probably the most unpleasant girl in the whole of Wales. But first I would need to get drunk.

*

It was one of those occasions which strike you as a mistake the moment you walk in. You just don't have the strength to listen to the voice in your heart and turn round and walk away. But I needed to talk to Siani and to do that I needed to go to the Indian, and to do either of those two things I needed to get drunk. So I went to the Moulin.

* * *

Myfanwy was sitting and laughing with the Druids and looked up when I entered and quickly looked away. I was shown to a table further back than previously, squashed up against a pillar with a bad view. I ordered a drink and told the waiter to tell Myfanwy I was here. He gave me a look of scarcely concealed derision. Bianca came and joined me instead.

'Hi, handsome.'

I nodded.

'Don't I even get a little smile?'

I turned to her and smiled weakly.

'Can I have a drink?'

I shrugged.

She stopped a waiter and ordered a drink.

'I bet I know why you're sad. It's Myfanwy. You're angry because she's talking to the Druids.'

'No I'm not.'

'You have to understand, Louie, she really likes you but this is a job.'

'I do understand.'

'I know how you feel. Believe me she'd much rather be here with you.'

'You couldn't even imagine how I feel.'

Bianca shrugged and we both sat in silence for a while. Then she stood up without a word and left. As soon as she went I started to wish she hadn't. I picked up her glass and sniffed it. Genuine rum — no coloured water. In the Moulin that passed as a real compliment.

I ordered more drinks and thought unhappily about Siani-y-Blojob. Every town has its hard cases just as every town has its whore and its bore. They come and go like the bluebells. And if, as some people suggest, there are good and bad years, like wines, then Siani represented one of the finest vintages in the history of the chateaux. A girl about whom people would tell fireside tales to their children in years to come, vainly trying to convey the essence in the same way some fathers try to give their children an appreciation of the glories of Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews.

After a while, Myfanwy came over. I'd been watching her out of the corner of my eye the whole time.

'Hi, Louie!'

'Hi.'

'Sorry, I'm busy with clients.'

I took a drink.

'You don't mind do you?'

'No.'

She looked uncertainly and then offered brightly: 'I tell you what, why don't you take Bianca home with you tonight?'

It was as if she were suggesting I stop off for a takeaway.

'It's on the house.'

I looked up into her face. She was smiling happily.

'How can you say that?'

Her jaw dropped and the happy grin seeped away. 'I mean, I thought. . .' She sat down and interlinked her arm with mine. 'Oh Louie, don't get like all the others.'

'All what others?'

'You'll be calling me a tart next.'

The word hit like a meat hook.

'How can you accuse me of that and in the same breath tell me to go home with Bianca?'

A look of exasperation crossed her face.

'No one's forcing you.'

I've thought about that night many times in the years since. Wondering whether, had I altered certain details of it, certain phrases or order of words, or even if I'd been in a better mood, it might have changed the course of subsequent events. It's an easy trap to fall into — the habit of parcelling up the past into a series of neat turning points; to load incidents with a power to alter the course of events which they never possessed. Not seeing that a moment which appears pivotal in the context of an evening is really only reflecting a process which has been unfolding unseen for many months. Like a heart seizure is just the sudden outward manifestation of a lifestyle. Sometimes I ask myself if I really believe that and I realise I have no choice. The alternative scenario: that my actions that night might have made a difference, is too painful to examine in view of how that evening ended. I took Bianca home.

Maybe it was simply the power of the phrase 'on the house' that did it. Words that initially filled me with contempt, but which became less offensive and more attractive with every drink. Or maybe it was just the drink. My original plan of going on to the Indian to find Siani had lost all appeal. And it didn't have any to start with. What for anyway? I already knew where Evans was: at the bottom of the harbour or somewhere similar. There could be no other explanation. It was just a matter of time before he floated to the surface. I didn't care anyway. Or maybe it was something to do with Bianca. She was a sweet girl. Not just pretty. But something else, which I only really came to understand long after she died. She was more honest than Myfanwy. She wasn't very smart, and that was probably why. But she was a lot nicer for it.

For a long time we sat in my car, parked on the Prom just across from the mosaic of Father Time. The windows were wound down and out in the blackness we could hear the ocean throbbing; roaring and shuddering and gnawing at the boulders of the sea wall. I asked her why she hung around with Pickel and she shrugged. 'It's not like you think.'