‘What about that phoney leg routine? That was a piece of detective genius. It cracked the case wide open. Because of that we found out about the Butch Cassidy angle, and about Elijah and the people from Mossad. And now we’ve found the key to the whole thing because of your ballistics thing with the knitting needle. Remember Jack Ruby?’
‘It didn’t work.’ She blinked in surprise. ‘Did it?’
‘Llunos had a complaint from Dinorwic-Jones about your torch beam. We went round to see her and she sang like a canary.’
Calamity’s eyes sparkled. ‘Wow! I thought I was a hopeless bungler.’
‘You’ve still got plenty to learn.’
She smiled. ‘What was it you wanted to see me about?’
From inside came the climax of Tadpole’s introduction. ‘Your redeemer and mine. Please give a big hand . . .’
The band struck up, the crowd roared.
‘The saviour of saviours, the most sacred, most blessed truly holiest of holies. Hoffmann!’
More roars. And then, from the hall came the sound of five hundred drunken revellers booing. We walked to the door. Herod Jenkins, wearing his circus strongman’s leotard, was on stage, glowering at the mob. Someone threw a bread roll and it hit Herod on the chest. ‘Who threw that?’ he thundered. He cast an accusing eye at the front row; they cowered. ‘Was it you?’ he pointed indiscriminately. ‘If I catch anyone throwing anything again you won’t get redeemed.’
‘What a shame!’ someone cried.
‘Who said that?’ The years had evaporated, he was back haranguing the school assembly. ‘Come on, own up, or I’ll keep you all behind after this concert.’
‘Get off!’
‘Any more of this cheek and no one gets baptised in the river tonight.’
‘In this weather?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Too bloody cold.’
‘You namby-pambys!’
‘Woooh!’
‘Right, that’s it.’ He pointed at a man in the second row. ‘I’m not redeeming you for a start.’
‘I don’t want you to.’
‘What the are you here for, then?’
An old woman in the third row stood up and pointed at Herod. ‘You can’t be Hoffmann, Herod Jenkins. You’re a troll.’
That went down well with the audience.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Your father came out of the mountain at Devil’s Bridge and your mother coupled with him. I was there. We threw her out of the village.’
‘It’s a lie!’ shouted Herod.
Someone else cried out, ‘All right, then, how come you’re so strong and hairy?’
The crowd roared and demanded to be answered.
‘If you must know,’ said Herod, ‘I owe my tremendous upper body strength to an accident when I was little.’ He stared defiantly at the crowd and waited for quiet. ‘I fell into a vat of special strength-development liquid, like Obelisk in the Asterisk cartoons.’
This time the laughter was cut short by the entrance of a new player. It was the Army chaplain, the man I had seen preaching on an orange box at the shelter, the man who they say lost his wits in Patagonia after seeing something terrible at the Mission House siege. He walked onto the stage and took the microphone off Herod. Quiet suddenly descended as the mob sensed something even better than the Obelisk story.
Tinker, tailor, teacher, preacher, doily salesman, war veteran, misery-guts, rocking-chair maker . . .
‘You’re all completely mad!’ shouted the priest. ‘And this girl . . .’ – he pointed at Tadpole – ‘would made the maddest of you look sane. You want to know the truth?’
The crowd cheered.
‘There was no angel. It was a hoax made up by General Llanbadarn because it was the only way he could get the troops to go on his suicide mission.’
‘It’s not true!’ shouted Tadpole. ‘Of course there was an angel! Don’t listen to him.’
The priest ignored her. ‘Oh yes! The angel was just a silly girl in fancy dress, riding through a crowd of fools. God isn’t punishing us for that. He doesn’t give a damn. He probably thinks it was funny. I do.’
‘We don’t believe you!’ cried Tadpole.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing,’ he shouted with glee. ‘This thing about the secret passage that only Clip knew about, el pasadizo secreto. There was no secret passage; that was code for something else. You want to know what it was? I’ll give you a clue. They also called it la entrada trasera. That’s Spanish for ‘the back entrance.’ It was code for sending a despatch by secure channels. You know where they put the secret despatch? Up Clip’s anus.’
There was a riot. The people abandoned the tables and tried to storm the stage. A column of bouncers filed out of side doors. The priest continued, undismayed. ‘Clip was a turncoat, you see. They used to tie messages to his collar, but the enemy put sausages out for him and he let them read the secret messages. He was a turncoat. A hand-licker. The Lord Haw-Haw of dogs. That’s why they had to use the secure channel.’
The bouncers fought furiously with the mob. I grabbed Calamity and dragged her towards the rear fire exit. The towns-people were almost out of control and very angry. The disappointment at finding their redeemer was Herod Jenkins the school games teacher was bad enough. But this slander to the sacred memory of Clip was too much for any human heart.
Tadpole turned on Herod Jenkins and shouted, ‘Say it isn’t true! Say you never did that!’ Herod looked round in bewilderment. Tadpole picked up a mop handle and advanced on him, the fury in her eyes flashing like bolts of lightning. ‘Say it isn’t true,’ she demanded. ‘Say you never did that to Clip.’
The auditorium erupted; men and women picked up their chairs and used them as weapons in the manner of the saloon-bar brawl familiar from old cowboy films. I watched, temporarily immobilised by astonishment. The priest slipped out through the upstage curtains; and a shepherd, whom I took to be the Pinkerton, helped Eeyore and the donkey out by the same route. The mayhem spread through the crowd like fire in a fireworks factory. I grabbed Calamity by the hand and we ran for the exit as the fighting crowd surged towards the stage. The thin black line of bouncers fought heroically until, on the point of being overwhelmed, they bowed graciously to the inevitable and joined in. We slammed the fire door behind us and wedged it shut with a wooden chair. The last image I saw within was that of Tadpole raising the mop handle high over the head of the cowering games teacher and demanding to be satisfied. ‘Say it isn’t true!’ she cried. ‘Say you never did that to Clip.’ Herod looked up at her in terror and then appealed to the howling brawling mob for understanding. ‘But we all did it,’ he wailed. ‘We had to! Don’t you see? We had to . . .’ And then came the time-honoured plea for exculpation, the last refuge of all moral pygmies: ‘I was only following orders.’
Chapter 24
THE SNOW WAS falling thickly now, and softly; slowly transfiguring the sea front. It gathered silently on ledges; formed a little conical hat on the fibreglass boy soliciting for charity; and melted wetly on the black muzzle of Abishag. Her eyes shone, her flanks trembled with fear. No one had told her it would be like this. There was no riot at the stable the first time round in Bethlehem. Eeyore ran a comforting hand down her neck. Joe Winckelmann, wearing a dressing gown and a fedora hat, held the halter. Two police vans pulled up and officers piled out with truncheons gleaming and raised like kendo swords.
Calamity and I stood and watched the cops pile in. The snow formed leopard spots on the dark fabric of her parka.
‘So what did you need to see me about?’ she asked.
‘Oh, I was going to ask you to help me find a new assistant.’