I walked back to the office. At the stairwell to my office I smelt the Parma Violets once more. He was sitting in the client’s chair much as he had done the day he’d first walked into my life. He smiled. ‘She left you. It serves you right, really, for betraying me.’
‘I didn’t betray you. There was nothing in our arrangement about her.’
‘It looks to me like you gave her your heart. That wasn’t what we agreed. I should dock some funds for that.’
‘Since you haven’t paid me a bean, that won’t be easy.’
‘Why should I pay you? You haven’t produced Iestyn. Our arrangement –’
‘The arrangement was two hundred up front, and two hundred if I succeeded. I admit I never found him. For that I apologise, but you still owe me the first two hundred.’
He raised an upturned palm to the heavens. ‘He slipped through your fingers. You are not a very good private detective.’
I shrugged in what I hoped was a convincing show of contrition. ‘No, I’m not a very good detective.’
Raspiwtin smiled the smile of a man who sees through your lies. ‘No, no, I happen to believe you are a very good detective. Iestyn did not slip through your fingers at all. You just fell in love with the girl and now you pretend you couldn’t find him. That is what I believe. However, it no longer matters. I wanted you to find Iestyn so that I could find Skweeple. I have been making some inquiries of my own. It appears police frogmen are at this very moment searching Tal-y-Llyn Lake.’
‘For Meici Jones.’
‘Yes, but my information is that there may be someone else down in those bitter-cold depths: Skweeple.’
‘Humanity may yet be saved. Give me the letter.’
‘There was no letter.’
‘Sure, and there was no Jack Daniels either.’
He reached into his jacket and took something out. ‘There was no letter, just this. A photo. She left this for you on the table. That’s why I came round – to give it to you.’ He slid it across the table. ‘And now I shall write you a cheque for the £200. The church is a poor institution, but I am a man of integrity.’
‘Both of those statements are false.’ I picked up the photograph.
‘Ah yes, my friend,’ said Raspiwtin. ‘What exquisite agony it is to look at a photograph of someone we loved and who is now lost to us. The photo is a record of a now that is past, a now that is then, like all nows; but what is a now? Who can say? It is impossible to grasp the fish of now, because even as we try it has slipped away. They rush past us so fast, these nows, they contain such detail, that we miss so much, alas! We dip our cup into the Niagara Falls of time and bring it up empty except for a few meagre droplets of memory. But a photograph! Ah that is different! A photograph is a net in which we catch it, that slippery fish of now, a record of a truth that eluded us at the time it was made. A photograph is a slide under the microscope of time, a grain of the past recovered from the bottom of the hourglass.’
I looked up and stared at him over the photo. ‘Why don’t you catch the slippery fish of now and write the cheque.’
‘Perhaps if we were to bait the hook,’ he said slyly.
I shook my head. ‘You drank a whole bottle of bait at the caravan. There’s no more.’
‘A small libation to toast your ascendancy to the post of mayor. You will make a very fine mayor, I am sure.’
I gave in, fetched two glasses from the drainer and filled them from my hip flask. ‘Don’t think for one moment I have forgotten how you turned the mob on me at the boxing match.’
He ignored that and returned his attention to the photo and the vivisection of my former joy. ‘Two lovers sit under a tree and squint into the bright sky, the shadow of the man holding the camera rakes the ground. I have many such photos myself . . . The wind blows her hair across her face, the man’s leg moves, becomes a slight blur . . . There are plates and somewhere too the ants maybe, yes, there are always ants on such occasions. You don’t notice them at the time, but later when you take out your photograph . . . my advice to you is secrete it well in a drawer you never intend to open. Then one day it will ambush your heart with such a torrent of sweet remembrance that you will be slain by the exquisiteness.’ He took out a chequebook and scribbled me a cheque; he pushed it across the desk. I put the flat of my hand down on it. He drained the glass in one gulp, wished me luck and left without another word.
Chapter 20
Up beyond the summit of Constitution Hill, past the place where the Cliff Railway ends and past the wooden hut that serves teas, past the post embedded in concrete that holds the coin-operated telescope that ends as suddenly as life, there’s a track that leads across the cliffs to Clarach. And up there too is a small radar station, unmanned but with a small place for parking off a track that leads past the many farms that dot the hills overlooking Aberystwyth. The wind never stops blowing up there, even in the depths of summer, and the grass is yellow and spiked and long and never stops dancing. This was where Sauerkopp had parked his car one afternoon at the end of May.
The old wooden carriage of the Cliff Railway creaked and groaned. From under my feet the trundle of the cable vibrated through the wooden floor. Like the brass weights of a clock, the two cars swapped places six times a day. This was the heartbeat of Aberystwyth. The up car ticks, the down car tocks . . . The town fanned out in the rear window, tiny and remote; the respiration of the sea was suspended. The car shuddered and groaned, emitting a bellow like a cow at dusk to signal arrival at the summit. I clambered out onto the inclined platform and struggled into the wind. Up here you could discern the curvature of the earth so clearly; one big circle, a globe, a planet.
Sauerkopp was sitting at the wooden picnic table outside the café, drinking tea from a styrofoam cup. There was one there for me too. He was dressed in black: black suit, black tie, black silk handkerchief peeping out of his jacket pocket, black pigskin gloves and black shoes. He had a charcoal fedora with a black band on the table and wore a black flower in his buttonhole.
I sat down.
He looked up and smiled. ‘I bought a tea for the new mayor.’
I picked up the styrofoam cup slowly, twirled it between my palms and enjoyed the stinging heat.
‘So Jhoe is Iestyn,’ I said. ‘We finally find him and are still none the wiser because he can’t tell us anything apart from weather reports from Noö. Apparently the rain has stopped.’
Sauerkopp chuckled. ‘It looks like the rainy season is over, at least for another three hundred years.’
‘Yes, now would be a good time to visit.’
Sauerkopp stared out to sea; in the wind his eyes narrowed and glittered.
‘So, is it true?’ I asked. ‘The revelation that drove Mrs Bwlchgwallter nuts? Did Ercwleff violate Skweeple?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Preseli left Ercwleff to watch over him and he got the silver suit off with a tin opener. Maybe he was just being friendly. Either way it looks like Skweeple didn’t survive the ordeal, so they threw him in the lake.’
‘So he never made it back to Noö.’
‘I don’t know that either. The aliens came back and resurrected Iestyn to ask him what happened. I don’t know if they found Skweeple again. Maybe they did: if they could resurrect Iestyn then I don’t see why they couldn’t do the same for their own kind. Unless too much time had passed. Maybe he’s still in the lake. Who knows?’
I bowed my head into the steamy warmth of the tea. ‘Calamity believes it all happened just like you say, but I’m not so sure.’