‘I know you’re pretty excited about it, but really you can’t just dance off with a fresh piece of evidence and spill the beans – even to the Pinkertons.’
‘It’s all right. I understand.’
‘I mean, it’s not like they’re going to be interested or anything.’
‘It’s all right, Louie.’
‘I don’t like to stop you, but . . .’
‘Can we drop it?’
‘As long as you’re OK about it.’
‘You’re the boss, right or wrong.’
‘Honestly, Calamity, this time I’m not wrong. Who’s Emily, anyway?’
‘She rang earlier when you were visiting Myfanwy. She’s a student at the theology college in Lampeter. Apparently, everyone out there is pretty excited about the Kierkegaard books. She says she’s got information on the Father Christmas case.’
‘Really?’
‘He went to see her last week.’
‘Did you tell her the last student we had from Lampeter ended up with a “Come to Sunny Aberystwyth” knife between the ribs?’
‘I thought it better to gloss over that bit. Anyway, she’s not from the Faculty of Undertaking. She’s from Jezebel College.’
‘I don’t know that one.’
She consulted her notebook and said without understanding, ‘Comparative ethnography of the icon of the fallen woman in Cardiganshire.’
‘They study that?’
‘Seems so.’
‘Kids of today, eh? We never had the opportunities when I was young. What’s that roll of celluloid in the corner?’
‘Acetate film. Anti-glare coating for the incident board. A guy dropped it off here earlier.’
‘What sort of guy?’
‘Just a guy. He was a salesman. Left it as a free sample. He said it would work well on our incident board.’
‘In case you get snow blindness from staring at it.’
‘It was free, what are you worried about?’
I called Meirion at the Cambrian News and we arranged to meet at the museum in half an hour. I arrived early and stood for a while pondering in the gloom and enjoying the calm that fills the soul in a world of musty linen, penny-farthings, and whalebone corsetry. Clip the Sheepdog stood mutely in his glass tomb, ear permanently cocked for the Great Farmer’s whistle. The dead Santa had been to see him and afterwards said his life was fulfilled. That had to mean something. Was it something about the dog or the war? The casual visitor could visit the town and leave without ever knowing about the war that had been fought in 1961 for the colony of Patagonia. It was one of those things kept hidden from view, a war no one wanted to talk about – the Welsh Vietnam.
The settlers left Wales in the middle of the nineteenth century to start a new life. They sent letters home complaining how hard and unforgiving the land was; wresting potatoes from the soil was like wrenching coins from a miser’s hand. And yet, paradoxically, when the war of independence erupted they spent three years irrigating the land with their blood, rather than surrender the colony. Some people saw it all as a monument to an essential truth about the human condition: to contrariness, or man’s deep-seated need to moan. But not me. For all the names of obscure battles we memorised in school, the campaigns and mountain ranges, the lamas and lamentation, the one image that has remained with me across the years is the strange story of their arrival on those far off shores. The story of the first day. The good ship Mimosa was anchored out in the bay, men were wading ashore; and one man – the perennial early bird – ran ahead and climbed a nearby hill to view the promised land. What happened next must surely have crushed their spirits and made them want to turn back. But emigrating in those days was a life sentence against which there was no appeal. Everything you had was sold to buy the dream, the one-way ticket; there was no surplus and no returning. You had to admire their guts; or their desperation . . .
What did the man see, that first Welshman on the top of that hill? The Welsh Cortez? He saw the cruel wisdom which had been available to him at his grandmother’s knee, but which he had scorned because of her simple ways; and because knowledge only becomes wisdom once you have paid a high price, and traversed oceans for it. He saw a simple truth: that a man who arrives in the marketplace to sell dreams from atop a hastily upturned crate, and who casts anxious looks around every now and again as if in fear of arrest, is not to be trusted. He saw that a man who claims to have the cure for all known ills in his small bottle of cordial and wears clothes covered in patches is not to be believed. He saw that a man who has found what all men since the beginning of time have sought, a promised land, might reasonably be expected to go and live there himself; not sell tickets with an air of furtive desperation in the marketplace.
But hope, like love, is a powerful drug that subverts all calls to reason. Patagonia! Where the soil was so rich you could cook and baste with it; rivers so full of gold it took two people to carry a bucket of water; lambs which made the ground tremble as they walked, and arrived ready-seasoned from grazing in the vales of mint. A blessed grove where troubles were unknown; but which, strangely, only Magellan had heard of. A far-off land named after a race of Indians who had vanished from this world and whose only imprint in the sands of time seemed to have been – and oh, the cruel irony of it – the fact that they had big feet. What did he see from the top of that hill? The Welsh Cortez? No one knows. He disappeared into thin air. The very first settler: climbed to the top of the hill and was never seen again. Don’t tell me that isn’t an omen.
Meirion had said he’d bring the paper’s film critic along, but when he arrived there was only him. Then I saw he was wearing a different hat and I understood. He greeted me with a warm smile and took a stick of rock out of his pocket and went through the slow ritual of removing the cellophane. He pointed at Clip. ‘They say it’s the second most enigmatic smile in the history of art.’
‘After the Mona Lisa?’
‘That’s right, but without the guile.’
‘I didn’t know they used dogs in war.’
‘They used loads, they just don’t like to talk about it too much. They’re ashamed, you see.’
‘What of?’
‘Of what you have to do to get a dog to disobey his natural instinct and run headlong into machine-gun fire.’
‘What do you have to do? Throw a stick?’
Meirion smiled. ‘No. You have to use the dog’s deep love and devotion, his loyalty to and trust in his master. There’s nothing else on earth quite like a dog’s love for his master. And it’s freely given. A bit of food, a bit of kindness, a few soothing words and a pat on the head, some slippers to fetch, that’s all it takes. Then, once you’ve got it, once the dog loves you so much he will trust you absolutely and do anything you say, you can send him into the minefield.’
I grimaced at the picture Meirion had painted. ‘So what’s the story about the new movie, Bark of the Covenant?’
‘Technically it’s not new. It’s just been re-cut. The director’s cut, I suppose you’d call it – he’s dead now, but he left detailed instructions on how he wanted it. Clip was a kind of Lassie, you see. He used to star in the newsreels shot in the What the Butler Saw format. At first it was all factual stuff, but because the news was rarely good they started to embellish it a bit. Before long Clip became so popular back home no one wanted to hear about the war unless Clip was in the story. So they blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. In fact, they didn’t so much blur them as blow them away. They started producing full-length features masquerading as newsreels. Bark of the Covenant and Through a Dog Darkly are the most famous. Last spring some workmen rebuilding the Pier found a walled-up room with a runic inscription above the door. Inside they found an archive of lost Clip footage. Some enthusiasts restored the movie and transferred the print to 70mm.’