He laughed again. ‘They’re both me. It’s a trick, you see, we used to play in those days. To get the whole school in the shot, the camera moves, on a clockwork drive, and the shutter moves too, slowly across the plate. It means a naughty boy can jump down from the left end, run behind the chairs faster than the camera and then stand on a stool at the other end. You get in the same picture twice.’ He grinned with pleasure at the recollection of the ancient transgression. ‘I met a chap yesterday who asked about you,’ he said.
I looked at him with interest.
‘A felon from the old times. He mentioned you specifically.’
‘Who was it, Dad?’
‘One of the Richards brothers – the ones who took part in the raid on the Coliseum cinema. There’s only one surviving now. The other died in a knife fight, I think.’
My interest quickened, but I knew it did no good to hurry Eeyore. He would get there at his own pace.
‘He lives out at Taliesin.’
‘How exactly did he mention me?’
‘He heard you’d been asking about Iestyn. He wants to talk to you. That’s all. Most mornings he sits alone in the pub at Taliesin, the one on the right as you drive past the water wheel.’
‘I’ll find him.’
‘He’ll ask you about Frankie. Frankie was some gangland boss he crossed in Swansea once who took a dislike to him many years ago. He’s dead now, but that old fellah out at Taliesin won’t accept it. He thinks it’s a trick to catch him off his guard. Like those old Jap soldiers who refuse to come out of the jungle. Just thought I’d let you know.’
I took the road out of town and pondered the case. In one respect, it was baffling in a straightforward way. The Richards brothers raided the cinema and made their getaway. Somewhere out near Ystrad Meurig they ran someone over. Iestyn was kicked out of the car. He went to the aid of whoever it was they ran over and took him to the doctor’s. Preseli turned up and Iestyn escaped. Preseli took the other boy away. He was never heard of again. Now, twenty-five years later, Preseli’s brother is standing for mayor and he doesn’t want any one looking too closely into certain incidents buried in the past. The doc probably knows more than he is letting on. Simple. All straightforward except for one thing: the kid was wearing a silver suit that they couldn’t get off him. They say he was from a crashed saucer. Phooey.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of aliens visiting us. The universe is either empty and we are just an astonishing accident, unintended, unlikely, pointless and terrifyingly unnecessary. Or we’re not, in which case the place must be teeming with life. It doesn’t really beggar my belief that they might pop over for a look. I just can’t believe they crash. That’s the trouble with these sorts of stories; the technology seems remarkably prone to the same problems that bedevil us. You’d think a being from another world would be in a position to tell us things that we had never seen before, things that we had never heard of, that we couldn’t even begin to imagine. In the same way a man from Currys would appear as a demi-god to the first caveman. But it never works out like that. They always report things that seem straight out of a sci-fi B-movie: silver suits, goldfish-bowl helmets, consoles with flashing lights, dying races who, most improbably of all, need the seed of an earth-man to get them going again. And crashes. Prangs. Fender-benders.
So where did the kid in the silver suit come from? What is a silver suit, anyway? Do they mean like tinfoil? Or covered in sequins like the singer at Jezebels? Or a one-piece job made from one of those great alloys not found on Earth, the ones that were all the rage on Mars last spring? Did he have a goldfish-bowl helmet? Or was our atmosphere breathable for him? The odds are against it, but you sometimes get these lucky breaks when travelling in space. The same way sometimes the gravity is just right, like Goldilocks’s porridge. A few extra clicks on the dial in either direction and it makes things really difficult. Either you are too jumpy, like a gazelle with spring-loaded hooves; or you carry a few hundred pounds on your shoulders making it hard just to stop imploding.
When you think of the endless variety of life on Earth, the mind-boggling permutations, you have to reflect that there’s nothing special about the bipedal model; in fact it seems to be inferior in just about every department to other animals. Losing the fur was clearly a dubious idea; it means you have to get a job to pay for an inferior replacement made from stuff that isn’t as warm, isn’t as waterproof, doesn’t fit so well or wear so well. We’re covered in hide that cuts too easily and leaves purple welts where the cops interrogate you. Even on Earth our ascendancy seems to have been the fluke result of a pretty rare combination of circumstances. And yet the people from space seem to have followed the same improbable evolutionary path. They are bipedal and furless too, more or less. The areas in which they depart from the paradigm – pointy ears, slightly different eyes or different number of fingers . . . these things testify to the poverty of imagination of the beholder. Having hallucinated an alien that bears a remarkable resemblance to us, they add a few differences for good measure, but they take the first ones they think of. In the ’50s, Beings from Outer Space came from Mars and had dials and knobs on their consoles. Nowadays, the term ‘Outer Space’ has fallen into disuse; it’s passé and bespeaks a feeble grasp of the infinite possibilities of what lies beyond our planet. If we ask the farmer I’m sure he’ll say the aliens had liquid-crystal displays. When we get something more advanced, they’ll get it too. It seems in terms of technology we are always one step ahead of the aliens.
When Mrs Pugh opened the door to the farmhouse, her face was white and she was trembling. She looked at me with relief, but I don’t know why.
‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she said. She led me into the sitting room, past a hall table on which the business card I had given to Mrs Bwlchgwallter stood propped against the phone. Huw Pugh was crouching in a foetal position on the floor in front of the fireplace. He was sobbing.
‘There was a terrible scream,’ said Mrs Pugh. ‘And then Mrs Bwlchgwallter ran out past me into the garden. I found him like this. He’s been like it ever since. What should I do?’
I walked back to the phone in the hall and called an ambulance. At the same time, I slipped the business card into my pocket.
‘They’ll be here in a minute,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing more I can do here. I’ll go and look for Mrs Bwlchgwallter.’
She wasn’t in the garden and wasn’t on either of the main roads, the one that led to Ynyslas or the one that led to Tre’r-ddol, which meant she could have been anywhere. I decided the best option was to assume she would find her way home and look for her there. I drove to Borth to see Calamity and tell her what had transpired.
The ancient forest once belonged to the Iron Age kingdom of Cantref-y-Gwaelod, which, legend says, sank beneath the waters of Cardigan Bay. Geologists blame the Ice Age but folklore claims it was all down to some chap who got drunk at a party and left the gates to the dyke open. That was the end of the Welsh Atlantis. But we still have the tree stumps on the beach at Borth to remind us of the lost golden age. Even as I parked the car I could see Calamity and Jhoe at the water’s edge.