We both sat in silence for a while, listening to the wind. I said, ‘I read, in a magazine, an article about Hiroshima. There was this little girl, would have been about two or three at the time, I forget her name.’
‘Sadako, her name was Sadako. It means chaste.’
‘Ten years later she got leukaemia. They called it the atom bomb disease, and they knew they couldn’t save her. But she got it into her head that if she somehow managed to fold a thousand origami cranes she would be saved. So she spent the last months of her life in hospital folding cranes.’
‘Yes,’ said God quietly.
‘Folding, folding, folding.’
‘Yes.’
‘Even used the labels off her medicine bottles for paper. She reached the target, and went past it, and then she died.’
God nodded.
‘I mean, what were you thinking?’
‘It’s difficult to describe.’
‘You must have known, right? When she was doing it, you must have known it wouldn’t work?’
‘It’s not as simple as that.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘What would you have done, Louie?’
‘If it wasn’t going to work I wouldn’t have let her have the idea in the first place.’
‘How do you know it wasn’t going to work?’
‘What does that mean? Did it depend on the cranes? She just didn’t make them nice enough?’
‘No, not like that.’
‘Could it have worked?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘A thousand and fifty cranes.’
‘One thousand two hundred and seventy three. I counted every one. They were beautiful.’ He paused and said softly, ‘Louie, I must leave you now. Try and . . . have faith.’
‘But I don’t believe in You.’
‘I know. It’s the ones who don’t believe who need faith; it’s easy for others. Goodbye, Louie, I’ll be watching over you.’
I held his hand. ‘Why did you come to Aberystwyth?’
‘I came to collect Vanya.’
Chapter 17
Llunos came round to my caravan next morning to tell me the news. Vanya had been fished out of the harbour shortly after midnight, dripping brine and vodka with some barbiturates in his head. On the shore, in the shadow of the Pier, they found a stuffed dog, a neatly folded museum curator’s uniform and, in case the barbiturates failed to do their work, an old revolver, loaded but not fired.
When I got to the office it smelled strongly of rum. There was a witchfinder sitting in the client’s chair. He was smiling and the rum – which was usually kept in the desk drawer – was now slipping down the U-bend of the sink in the kitchenette. The empty bottle was standing up-ended in the bin.
He was an old man, in his seventies, with long grey greasy hair down to his collar and a bald pate. His nose was sharp and in his eyes there burned the flames of zealotry and on his lips there played that particular smile of moral rectitude possessed by religious fanatics and the criminally insane. He wore the customary outfit of the ecclesiastical cops: a dark blue serge policeman’s tunic over a plain shirt and dog collar. Ecclesiastical cops have disappeared from the towns but still exist in the country in a state of uneasy truce with the regular police, their jurisdictions overlap with unclear boundaries and conflicts of interest. They deal with social problems that blight village life in the hinterlands beyond Aberystwyth, chastising strumpets, loose-tongued women and common scolds.
I nodded as if I had been expecting a bad start to the day and here was confirmation. ‘My two least favourite people in one: cop and holy man.’
‘The servants of the Devil abhor the sight of blessedness twice over.’
I picked the empty bottle out of the bin and put it on the desk for no good reason. ‘I hope you’ve got a warrant for this.’
‘No warrant is needed in commission of the Lord’s work.’
‘I bet they said that at Nuremberg, too.’
‘Alcohol is an abomination unto God.’
‘You’ve obviously never tried it.’
I slumped down in the chair opposite and scowled. He had also saved me the trouble of opening the morning mail. He threw a letter across the desk. It was from Vanya. ‘As his last act upon this earth,’ said the Witchfinder, ‘your friend sends you a sock. The Lord will cure him of his levity.’
The envelope contained the matching half of the Yuri Gagarin sock and a note explaining it was to cover the funeral expenses. ‘The truth about Gethsemane Walters is more terrible than even I could have imagined,’ he had written. ‘There is no point going on. Goodbye, Louie. Your dear friend, Vanya.’
I read the letter and looked up. ‘Talking of God, I spoke to Him the other day, he was in Aberystwyth . . .’
The smile on his lips expanded a fraction. ‘That really is an unwise way to begin a sentence.’
‘Is it a crime to talk to God?’
‘I will enjoy humbling you.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I have information that you recently visited Grimalkin’s in Chalybeate Street and placed an order for some “flesh of brigand”.’
‘I was going to make a sandwich.’
‘Ah! The wisecrack, the favoured artifice of the snooper and reprobate.’
‘Or maybe I was going to use it as fish bait.’
He raised a polite eyebrow. ‘Or Devil’s bait?’
‘He certainly turned up.’
The smile faded.
I said, ‘Actually I was hoping you’d come round, I needed to see your face when I asked you how much they paid you to set Goldilocks up.’
‘I don’t remember doing that.’
‘You probably repressed the memory. That’s known as psychology.’
‘Who are these people who allegedly paid me?’
‘The villagers at Abercuawg.’
He smiled the smile of a man who knows you’ve got nothing on him. ‘My memory is shocking.’
‘The way I see it is this: Goldilocks would have been insane to bury Gethsemane Walters’s shoe in his garden, even if he did kill her. But someone who wanted to see him hang might have done it. That someone was you. The villagers wanted to get rid of him and you buried the shoe and got one of them to report seeing Goldilocks doing it.’
‘Please go on,’ said the Witchfinder. ‘I’m really enjoying this. Why do you think I set Goldilocks up, as you put it? I tried to help him. I went to see him in prison.’
‘Yes, wasn’t that an act of pure Christian charity! In that sacred communion between a priest and a condemned man when each man tells the truth of his heart he told you that he had never laid hands on Gethsemane Walters and he begged you to intervene on his behalf. And you said yes, of course you would, but really you had no such intention. You already knew he was innocent because you knew what had happened to the girl. And you knew the buried shoe was a phoney because you buried it.’
‘And what did happen to her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why did they want to get rid of Goldilocks?’
‘He found out.’
The Witchfinder looked genuinely intrigued. But not worried. ‘Found out what?’
I didn’t know. I knew nothing. I didn’t know who did it and I didn’t know what it was I didn’t know they did. I just knew he was mixed up somehow in something that wasn’t nice.