Last Tango in Aberystwyth

Last Tango in Aberystwyth

Malcolm Pryce

I would like to thank my editor Mike at Bloomsbury and my agent Rachel for all their tremendous help, support, enthusiasm and lunches.

First published in Great Britain 2003

Copyright © 2003 by Malcolm Pryce

The spinning-wheel that Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on arrived in Aberystwyth around the middle of the seventeenth century. Technically it's known as the Saxon wheel, though no one ever calls it that. There are four main parts: the wheel, the spindle, the distaff and the foot pedal or 'treadle'. This is a story about the treadle. Or, more precisely, about that sorry army of girls who pedalled it during the years after the flood. The girls came mainly from the farms up beyond Talybont — chancers who didn't know a loom from a broom but flocked to the lights of Aberystwyth to make it big modelling on the tops of the fudge boxes they sold to the tourists. They called them treadle trollops but normally they never got to peddle anything except their sweet young bodies down at the druid speakeasies on Harbour Row. You won't find much enchantment in this story. And since it all took place in the shadow of Aberystwyth Castle and not the one described by Hans Christian Andersen there aren't any knights in shining armour. Just me, Louie Knight, Aberystwyth's only private detective and more frog than prince. Not many of the people in it lived happily ever after either. But at least half of them lived, which was a good average for the town in those days ...

Chapter 1

I needed to find a druid, which in Aberystwyth is like trying to find a wasp at a picnic. I wasn't fussy about which one, no more than you care which one lands on your jam sandwich, but Valentine from the Boutique would have been good. In his smart Crimplene safari suit, Terylene tie and three-tone shoes, the druid style-guru should have been the easiest to spot. But tonight he seemed to have gone to ground, along with the rest of his crew; and during my lonely sweep of the Prom I met no one except a couple of pilgrims who asked directions to the spot where Bianca died.

I pulled up my collar against the wind and turned back, and wandered disconsolately down past the old college and on towards Constitution Hill. In the bed-and-breakfast ghetto the shutters squeaked and banged and a chill low-season wind blew old newspapers down the road. There were vacancy signs glowing in all the windows tonight and here at the season's end, as September turned into October, they would be likely to remain that way for another year. Even the optimists knew better than to try their luck now. In this town the promise of an Indian summer often meant the genuine article: a monsoon.

Misplacing Valentine was no great hardship, but the word on the street said he had tickets to Jubal's party and without a ticket there was only one way in: I would have to use the scrap of paper that lay crumpled up in my coat pocket. I'd bought it half an hour earlier from a streetwalker down by Trefechan Bridge and paid a pound for it. She assured me it would open Jubal's front door faster than a fireman's jemmy; but I somehow doubted it. I'd used tricks like this before and either they didn't work at all and you wasted a pound; or they worked so well you ended up getting a sore head. Which would it be tonight?

Jubal Griffiths was the mayor at the time and also head of casting for the 'What the Butler Saw' movie industry. This was about as close as you could get to being a mogul in Aberystwyth and his house was easy to find: one of those stately Georgian piles on North Road, overlooking the bowling-green with a distant prospect of the pier. They were the sort of houses that had high ceilings and real cornices and a bell next to the fireplace to call the servants. In most of them, too, there was an invalid rotting away upstairs who could still remember a time when you rang and someone answered.

I banged on the door and a Judas window slid open. The sound of music drifted out, along with muffled screams and the aroma of smoky bacon crisps. Two eyes peered at me through the slit and before I had time to wonder what sort of mayor needs a fixture like that in his front door a voice said, 'Sorry, mister, members only.' I laughed. It didn't even convince me, but on a night like this it was the best I could do.

'Someone tickling you, pal?'

I chuckled some more and said brightly, 'No I was just thinking, normally to get a drink in this town you just need to be a member of the human race.'

'Yeah, well we've had a lot of trouble with that particular organisation.' The little door slid shut.

I walked down the side of the house to the back door, opened the letterbox and shouted, 'Coo-ey!' Carpet slippers slithered down the hall. The door opened slightly, held by a chain. Two old, grey, watery eyes peered at me.

'Yes?'

'I've come for the speakeasy.'

'The what?'

'The speakeasy. I hear it's a good party.'

The old lady knitted her brows together and said with the sort of acting you get at a school play, 'Oh I'm afraid you must have made a mistake, there's nothing like that here.'

She began to close the door and I wedged my foot in and leaned my shoulder against the wood. It opened a few more inches. She would have been about five foot two in her socks and was wearing a dust-coloured shawl over an indigo wool skirt. She had opaque, flesh-coloured stockings the colour of Elastoplast and on her feet were those felt relaxation boots — trimmed with fake fur at the ankle and a zip up the front. The same outfit worn by a thousand other old spinsters in this town. It fooled no one.

'You're the one who's made the mistake, lady, there's a party going on and I'm invited.'

She switched to Welsh. 'Beth ydych chi eisiau? Dydw I ddim yn siarad Saesneg...'

I could speak in tongues, too. 'Edrychwch Hombrй, agorwch y drws! por favor.'

She tried pushing the door on my foot, switching back to English. 'I can assure you there's nothing like that going on in my house.'

'You must be in the wrong house, then. Just tell Jubal I'm here. Tell him I've got a message ...' I peered at the slip of paper in the palm of my hand, 'from Judy Juice.'

At the mention of the name the old lady's demeanour changed. She stopped pushing the door and considered me through narrowed eyes.

'Miss Judy?'

I nodded.

'Who shall I say is calling?'

I handed her a card. It said, Louie Knight, Gumshoe. She took it and I removed my foot. As she closed the door I bent down and shouted through the letterbox, 'And drop the confused old biddy act, it stinks!'

I waited on the step for a while and thought about the piece of paper. Two words that meant nothing to me but the whole world, apparently, to Jubal. She was, they said, the one girl in town he wanted but couldn't have. And such is the eternal perversity of man's heart that because he couldn't have her he wanted her more than all the others in the world put together. The door opened and two men in rugby shirts with chests the size of wardrobes leered at me. They were the sort of men with no necks, just extra face. They motioned with their heads and we walked down the hall, the sound of the party getting louder. One of the side-doors burst open and an old man in satyr trousers rushed out pursued by an elderly, giggling woman. I peered into the room: a crush of people standing up, talking and drinking; a buffet on the sideboard with vol-au-vents, crisps and those pineapple cheese things impaled on miniature plastic swords. Girls in stovepipe hats and not much else wandered through with trays of punch. Before I could see any more the two tough guys grabbed me and pulled me along.

At the end of the corridor was a study. Inside were three other

muscle men in the same rugby-club shirts; a bored-looking blonde in Welsh national dress and fake leopard-skin coat; and a man sitting behind a desk. The girl stared mesmerised at a light-fitting on the ceiling and chewed cuds of spearmint with regular wet, clickety-clack sounds. The man behind the desk was Jubal. Short and tubby, with a hunchback and a small round head stuck on to the hunch like a pea on a lump of dough. A man with a finger in more pies than Jack Horner. He was holding my card gingerly between his two index fingers, and contemplating it as if it had just scurried out from under his fridge. Then he tore it into two bits, dropped them at his feet, and looked at me myopically through a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles. He blinked. 'I appreciate your candour, Mr Knight. Most of the peepers who come sniffing round my business usually have a card that says they've come to read the meter.'