Calamity and I watched the two men dip their brooms in watery wallpaper paste and sweep them rhythmically across the paper. The long, slow arcs, like windscreen wipers, smoothing out the horizontal crease in the paper, but doing nothing for the one in Herod Jenkins’s face. According to the poster Herod Jenkins had found work at the circus: ‘Samson Agonistes, half man, half bear!’ It was a role created bespoke by the tailors of fate. Circus strongman, the last refuge for a renegade games teacher who has run out of options. The circus was parked about twenty miles outside town, at Ponterwyd. They didn’t dare cross the county line and come any closer to town because Herod was a wanted man in Aberystwyth. Although wanted only in the technical legal sense. I shivered.
‘What do you reckon?’ said Calamity.
I put a fatherly arm across her shoulders. ‘If he was telling the truth, and he really doesn’t know what the item you found is, he doesn’t know it’s a hat-check receipt, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So there’s no reason why we should tell him. We’ll come back and pick it up another time.’
‘I’m aching to know what it is.’
‘Me too, but sometimes you just have to be patient about these things.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘We’ll go to the Kamp and then talk to Father Christmas’s girlfriend.’
We drove out to Borth with heavy hearts. We hated going to Kousin Kevin’s Kamp; we always got thrown out. It was only a matter of how far we got inside the perimeter gate before it happened.
After the turning at Rhydypennau we bade farewell to the sun. The world was grey. It was just one of those accidents of geography. All the rocks found along this coast are grey, buff, beige or dirty mauve. In other parts of the world the hills are quarried for bright, shining Carrara marble. Just a little accident of geography, that’s all, but it is surprising how much it can affect the contents of the human heart. Try as you may, you can’t imagine people lolling about in togas and sandals, drinking wine, in buildings made of slate. Just as it’s hard to imagine them beneath the bright hills of Liguria, in their halls of white marble, sitting in crow-black rags, stirring cauldrons and tending spinning wheels like they do in Talybont.
We drove in through the perimeter fence and past the guard house, under a bleak wrought-iron sign, and on to the car park. The snow that had fallen a few days ago still remained here on the north-facing slope. Against the whiteness the buildings looked darker and more sombre, a world of two tones which reminded of those arty photography exhibitions they sometimes held up at the Arts Centre on campus. The sort of blurred, out-of-focus snaps that normal people threw away but that won prizes if you exhibited them.
‘You can get rickets if you stay at this place too long,’ said Calamity.
‘How do you know?’
‘I read about it in the paper. They recommend you to eat mackerel while you’re here because it’s high in vitamin D.’
I reversed into a parking space and butted the rear of the Wolseley Hornet up against a wire-netting fence on which was stapled a metal sign showing an Alsatian dog in silhouette attached to a leash held by a clown.
‘Judging by past experience we won’t be here more than ten minutes so you should be OK. If you start feeling dizzy, let me know.’
I was wrong. We were there less than six minutes.
Any time after mid-October was low season at the Kamp and it would get lower and lower until about late March. The only blip was around New Year when a few people turned up who had won weekends away in the works’ raffle. But it was too early for that, and as we wandered through the lines of dark brooding barracks we saw almost no one except the odd Klown slouched in a doorway, and up by the perimeter a party with buckets and spades digging in the kitchen garden. We headed straight down the rows and followed the smell of frying to the refectory.
It was warm and stuffy inside and reeked of fried bacon and tea that had been stewing in a big silver urn since the days of Noah. A few families sat eating from meal trays at long trestle tables. Nearer the door a man sat alone, scooping soup from a wooden bowl. We sat at his table.
‘Mind if we join you?’
He paused and looked and said nothing.
‘Great place isn’t it?’
His eyes narrowed but he kept on eating as if there was a time limit and he was up against it. It was probably true.
‘You been here long?’ I beamed at him.
He put the spoon down and said, ‘Why you asking? I’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘Just being friendly.’
‘We were looking for the harp player,’ said Calamity.
‘The one in the stovepipe hat,’ I added. As if there were any other type.
The man narrowed his eyes and regarded us for a second; then, having decided it was safe to divulge this piece of information, said: ‘She doesn’t come on till the evening.’
We feigned disappointment.
‘Did you know she was seeing the Father Christmas who got whacked?’ said Calamity.
The man choked on his gruel. He picked up his bowl and spoon and scurried over to one of the Klowns. He spoke to him, turning and pointing to us as he did. The Klown took out a notebook, wrote something down, and then left the room. We decided to leave, too.
‘What are we going to say to the stovepipe hat girl when we find her,’ said Calamity.
‘Well, we could always try the subtle approach you just used there; that seemed to work quite well.’
‘Yes, I goofed. We need to be more oblique.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘The Pinkertons wouldn’t have done it like that.’
‘What would they have done?’
‘Psychology. That’s what they’d have used.’
‘I’m all for that.’
‘If we go straight in and ask the party about her relationship with the DOA, she’ll clam up, right? We have to find a way to make her drop her guard. We achieve that objective by enlisting her sympathy.’
‘How do we do that? Say our dog’s got a thorn in its paw?’
‘No, but you could pretend to be sick and we could knock on the door.’
‘I’ve got a better idea. You pretend to be sick and we knock on the door.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because they will feel more sorry for you, especially as you will look so sweet with those ribbons in your hair.’
‘What ribbons?’
‘The ones we will buy on the way.’
‘I’m not wearing ribbons.’
‘Think of it as going undercover.’
We were interrupted by the sound of an explosion somewhere towards the car park. Calamity and I exchanged glances and without needing to discuss it turned our steps in that direction.
A man wearing chef’s whites rushed out of the kitchen and came up to us. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘No, we’re just going over to the car.’
‘Your car?’
‘Yes, we heard something over there, sounded like a crash.’
‘Wouldn’t you prefer to go to the bus stop? There’s one due any minute.’
‘Bus stop?’
‘It’s a wonderful service, sir, truly wonderful. You really shouldn’t listen to those idiots who disparage it. Really you shouldn’t.’ He looked at me with a beseeching expression and watery eyes filled with imploring anguish. His voice was thin and had the whine that a regularly beaten dog gets. ‘Please, sir, it really is a wonderful bus.’ He grabbed my sleeve. ‘I wish I had time to take it myself.’