THE EXCELSIOR WAS one of those crumbling, fading hotels that stood in a gently curving row on Aberystwyth Prom facing the sea. It was a hotel that spent the summer dreaming of better days, and wore its four stars on either side of the main door like combat medals. Like the motoring organisation that awarded the stars, it was a refugee from the world of A and B roads and button B telephones. A world in which a lift was considered an American contrivance and shared bathrooms at the end of the corridor were the norm. People still wore jackets and ties here and took luncheon and, perhaps most damning of all, it was the world that gave us Brown Windsor soup. Inside the hotel the floors creaked as you walked, like the innards of a wooden ship. It was an old, rickety dowager of a hotel and if it were possible for a building to get arthritis and walk with a stick this one would. I knew all this because once, for a season many years ago, I had worked there as the house John. An underpaid sleuth with a cubby-hole and a nightstick and a remit to keep one eye on the shifty characters who walked in off the street and an even beadier eye on the dodgy ones who worked there.
In the old days, as with all hotels with pretensions to grandeur, the door had been opened by a man dressed as a cavalry officer from the Napoleonic wars. But he had long since gone and today I had to push the heavy brass and glass door open myself. Inside the lounge, little had changed. The swirly carpet, the antimacassars; the horse brasses … And the same cast of characters: the greasy manager’s son at the bar in a tatty white shirt and bow tie, eternally polishing a pint glass; in the bay windows sat members of that travelling band of spinsters and widows who spent their lives wandering from hotel to hotel in a predetermined route round the coast of Britain. Shrivelled old women who appeared at the same time each year with the predictability of migrating salmon and who insisted on the same room and ordered the same food. And every day at dawn they crept downstairs to place their knitting on the vacant armchairs signifying possession for the day like the flag on Iwo Jima.
The only other residents were the travelling shawl salesmen and the doily traders. There were two sitting at a table near the bar, talking doily shop in the impenetrable slang of their trade. Strange words and familiar ones used in strange ways. The weave, the whorl, the matrix, the paradigm; a disc, a galaxy, a web, a Black Widow and White Widow; a Queen Anne and a Squire’s Strumpet … I listened to them talk for a while. These were the strange, forlorn men you sometimes passed when you went for a drive – parked in a lay-by and crouched over a map. Next to it, a local newspaper opened to the death announcements with one of them circled in ballpoint. A grubby life lived according to the simple credo that with doilies, like snowflakes, there were never two alike.
I walked over and spoke to an old lady in the bay window. She was sitting in the chair with the exaggerated erectness of posture that no one knows how to do any more, just as no one can do algebra or decline a Latin verb. Her nose had a slight but permanent snooty tilt and she was peering through a lorgnette at the people walking past, trying to get as much disapproval in before her nap.
‘I bet you get a good view from here,’ I said.
She turned her gaze to me with painfully deliberate slowness. Her mouth was gathered together and clamped so tightly shut it distorted the rest of her face.
‘I mean, you can see everyone who comes in and everyone who goes out.’
I waited and waited, the smile slowly withering on my face, until after an eternity she finally opened her mouth and said, ‘Maybe.’ Then she returned her gaze to the street.
The detective’s cubby-hole was on the second floor in the same place it had been fifteen years ago. There was no one there but the soft sigh of steam from the recently boiled kettle told me he couldn’t be far away. I stepped in from the corridor. The room had been designed originally as a utility room and was mostly filled by a wooden desk. Pictures of nude women torn out of the tabloids were pinned to the wall, and on the desk, next to the kettle and chipped china mug, was a set of keys. I walked round the desk and opened the drawer. There were a few knitting patterns in there, no doubt left behind by guests, a sock, a cheese sandwich and an ice pick. The floor outside creaked and I looked round and found him staring at me with an air that suggested he’d been doing it for quite some time.
He was dressed in a dirty vest covered in dried egg, had four days’ growth on his glistening mauve jowls and his trouser flies were half-undone. His face was gummed up with sleep and he was so fat his hips almost touched both walls of the corridor. The cosh in his hand swung gently with an exaggerated casualness that suggested this was the sort of hotel where you could get coshed just for complaining about the soup.
‘You looking for something?’
I smiled bashfully. ‘I was just checking the fire escape.’
He sniffed the air. ‘Is there a fire? I can’t smell anything.’
‘Not at the moment but there could be – it happens in the best establishments.’
‘We should be pretty safe here then.’
‘You’ve got four stars outside the front door, that means you’re good enough to burn down.’
He lifted the blackjack and scratched his cheek with it. ‘Fire escape, huh? Mmmmm.’ He gave the matter some deep thought and then brightened, saying, ‘The mistake you made was to look for it in the drawer of my desk. We don’t keep it there.’ He squeezed into the room and threw some cleaning rags off the only other stool and motioned me to sit. I obeyed and he went to sit in his chair, giving the desk drawer a slam as he did. ‘I’ve been in this business twenty years now, and in my experience the place to look for the fire escape is outside the window.’
‘That was the first place I tried but I couldn’t see it.’
‘That’s because it isn’t there yet. Special arrangement with the fire brigade – if there’s a fire they’ll come and put a ladder against the wall.’
‘That’s reassuring to know.’
‘All part of the service.’ He pointed the blackjack at me. ‘Now we’ve sorted the fire escape out, perhaps you’ll tell me if there’s anything else I can help you with.’
I took out a hip-flask. ‘Do I look like I need your help?’
‘You look like a peeper to me.’
I nodded. ‘Well I guess you would know. Drink?’
He pushed his teacup across and I filled it and poured a shot into the cap for myself. He took a gulp and then nodded appreciatively. I took the photo of the Dean out and slid it across the desk. The John made no effort to look, just took another gulp of the rum, and another until it was empty and pushed the cup back towards me. I filled it. He took another drink and then picked up the photo, took one look, put it down and said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen him.’
I put a pound coin on the tabletop and he picked it up and examined it as if it were a foreign coin he hadn’t seen before. ‘Funny, you’re not the first person to ask about him.’
I waited for him to carry on but he didn’t. Instead he smiled. I put another coin down.
‘After he checked out a man came round dressed in a long black coat like they sell in Peacocks. Had a black feather in his cap. Wasn’t as polite as you.’
I nodded. ‘Did the Dean leave any forwarding address?’
‘Not strictly speaking.’
I put another coin down which met a similar fate to the other two. ‘What about speaking unstrictly?’
He scratched his chin again with the blackjack. ‘He didn’t say where he was going but the funny thing was he was dressed differently when he left. Completely different, almost as if he was trying to leave in a new identity – we often get idiots like that. Now once you know what he was dressed like, you can guess where he was going.’ He stopped and looked at me blankly.
I put my last coin down. He shook his head. ‘This one I have to charge by the syllable.’
‘How many words is it?’
‘Just the one.’
I sighed. ‘OK, surprise me.’
‘Ventriloquist.’
*
I walked up Great Darkgate Street and through the castle grounds towards the bed-and-breakfast ghetto down by the harbour. This was where the ventriloquists tended to stay, along with the out-of-work clowns, the washed-up impresarios and the men who ran away from the bank to join the circus. At the castle, I wandered through the piles of shattered stone and climbed up on to the hill by the war memorial. The sky was filled with bulbous shiny clouds hinting of a storm to come and churning the sea into soapy dishwater. Down below I could see Sospan’s new kiosk – repositioned and re-established after the short-lived fool’s errand of selling designer coffee to a town that hungered only for vanilla. And south towards the harbour, but moving north towards Sospan’s stall, with the slow but inexorable tread of a glacier, was my father, Eeyore, and the donkeys. Every day he would be there, even in the depths of winter when there were no tourists, plodding up and down the Prom, from Constitution Hill to the harbour and back. A pendulum of fur, wound by a key of straw.
I walked down and Sospan hailed me.
‘Bore da! Louie. Usual, is it?’
‘No, give me something I haven’t tried before.’
He wagged his index finger at me. ‘Got just the thing for you.’ He turned to the dispenser and I turned too, placing my back against the counter, and stared out to sea. Down below, etched into the slimed rocks, were the remains of an Edwardian sea-water bathing-pool. Less than a hundred years old and already there was almost nothing left: just an outline in the rocks like the bones of a fossil; proof that the poison that did for Nineveh and Troy had no intention of sparing Aberystwyth. Sospan handed me a pale green ice cream. ‘You’ll like this!’
I licked. It was like nothing I’d ever tasted before. ‘What is it, frog?’
‘Absinthe.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Lick it slowly now!’
He made one for himself and leaned forward to join me.
I said, ‘I thought we’d lost you for a while – given up on the ice-cream trade.’
He pulled a wan face. ‘You never really can, though, can you? It was like running off with a dizzy blonde. You know, fun for a while but she can’t cook and after a time you find all you really want is a nice bowl of caawl and someone to wash your socks.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a woman wash my socks for me since my mother died when I was a baby.’
‘You’ve missed out on a fine feeling there, Louie; washing a man’s socks, it’s what love’s all about in the end.’
‘I’ll slurp to that.’
‘You’ve just missed Father Seamus. He was asking after you.’
‘That’s nice of him.’
‘He loves the new absinthe – of course I don’t tell him what’s in it. I say it’s green tea.’
I looked at the faint, impenetrable smile that Sospan wore to meet all occasions. The same smile worn by the undertaker and the brothel-keeper and others with a professional understanding of the hearts of men and a policy not to interfere. It was good to have him back in business, we’d felt his absence keenly, just as we still miss the song of Myfanwy that no longer echoes down the streets at night.
‘I thought Father Seamus liked to take his ice down the other end of the Prom,’ I said.
‘Oh very sad, that is,’ said Sospan, hissing softly in sympathy. ‘It’s on account of this rejection of the teachings of the Church you find nowadays. A lot of the other kiosks refuse to serve men of the cloth.’
‘That seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it? It wasn’t the Christians who started this flood, it was the druids.’
‘I know, but they’re upset, aren’t they? Because there was no rainbow this time as a mark of His covenant. A lot of people are angry about that. “What’s wrong with us,” they say. “Why don’t we get one?”’
‘He probably just doesn’t want to waste a good rainbow.’
‘That’s what I tell them.’
‘Still, it’s nice of you not to go along with the rest of them.’
‘You know me, Louie, I never take sides.’
‘Your kiosk is a moral Switzerland.’
‘Everyone’s welcome, you know that. It’s an understanding I have with Evans the magistrate: I won’t judge you and he won’t serve ice cream in court.’
I looked at him. It was the first time I’d heard him attempt a joke and for once his smile almost became warm.
Eeyore arrived and ordered a 99. We nodded to each other and I patted the flank of Sugarpie and tied her halter to the lamppost. Eeyore had worked for the police for years before retiring to the gentler company of the donkeys. The only animals in the world, he once told me, with absolutely no agenda. In his time his fingers had been worn smooth from fingering the collars of the local hoodlums and he still had an encyclopaedic knowledge of their ways. I asked him if he knew anything about men in ankle-length Peacocks’ coats, with black feathers in the cap. He nodded and a troubled look stole over his old, lined face.
‘Yeah,’ he said with a heaviness in his voice. ‘I’ve seen something like that, once, a long time ago. He was a druid assassin called the Raven. The feather was his badge of office. Ravens were special agents, skilled philanderers, trained to seduce female agents and then kill them.’
‘Do you think this could be the same guy?’
Eeyore shook his head wearily, the memory was obviously painful. ‘No the Raven I arrested got five terms of life and died seventeen years ago in a knife fight in the maximum-security wing of Cwmtydu Pen. But these are a class of agent, a type. There are always more. For most of the time they live among us as sleepers. Lying dormant, in a sort of hibernation – going about their everyday business like you and me. Sospan here could be one and we wouldn’t know.’ He indicated the ice-cream man with his half-eaten cornet. I looked at Sospan who was polishing the Mr Whippy dispenser and pretending not to be listening. He smiled. Somehow I couldn’t see him as a sleeper, except in the ordinary sense of the word.
‘Then someone activates one and you can rely on some pretty unpleasant things happening. These men don’t get activated for commonplace jobs.’
‘They sound grim,’ I said.
Eeyore nodded. ‘They are. The worst thing is, once you set one loose, they can’t be recalled. The mission can’t be aborted. Even the person who activates them can’t do it.’
The Seaman’s Mission had been built by the church in the last century with a non-specific Episcopal architecture of bare stone arches and dark stained wood. The word ‘seaman’ had widened in scope since those days and now referred to any of the human flotsam shipwrecked by life and washed up on the shore of Aberystwyth. Vagrants and veterans of the Patagonian War; sea captains and stokers lost in a world where there is nothing left to stoke; monks on the run from their order at Caldy Island; lighthouse men whose lights had been doused or automated; and always there was a smattering of unemployable ventriloquists.
Downstairs there was an empty room with a notice-board and some hard seats set against a wall. Behind, towards the kitchen from which there came the strong odour of boiling cabbage, was a refectory-style dining-room. Five pence for a meal and don’t forget to help with the washing-up. Upstairs there were dormitories and private rooms for those with modest means; and in the corridor outside was a lady in a housecoat and headscarf mopping the tiled floor. I asked after Father Seamus who ran the place but she said he was out. She also said the Amazing Mr Marmalade was in Room 3 at the top of the stairs.
The door at the top was slightly ajar and the sound of soft sobbing came from within. I hesitated. I could also just hear the squeaky voice that I’d heard coming from the case.
‘There, there, Mister Marmalade. Everything will be all right, just you watch.’
‘It’s finished Señor Rodrigo, I tell you. All gone.’
‘Say not the struggle nought availeth, Mister Marmalade!’
‘Where did the years go, my dear friend?’
‘For a while we held them in our fist, Mister Marmalade, we held them close to our hearts, we did!’
There was a half-chuckle of remembrance. ‘Yes, we certainly did! But we couldn’t stop them, we couldn’t hold them for long.’
‘They fled like the pages of a torn-up programme blowing down the street.’
‘Yes, that’s exactly it, blowing down the street … staining the cold north wind with … with …’
‘With the shadow of our passing.’
‘Oh the shadow, yes!’ He chuckled again.
‘Happy days, Mister Marmalade.’
They chinked glasses.
‘We’ve been through a lot, Señor Rodrigo.’
‘We’ve seen them all, we have, we’ve seen them come and seen them take their bow.’
A floorboard creaked beneath my feet. Mr Marmalade and Señor Rodrigo suddenly stopped talking.
‘Who’s there? Who’s that?’
‘It’s a peeping Tom!’
I pushed the door open. ‘I heard a cry, so …’
Mr Marmalade squinted at me and then put on his glasses. ‘Oh, it’s you.’
I walked in. They were seated on either side of a cheap coffee table with spindly legs sharing a tea. Next to the table was an electric bar-fire, but only the flame-effect bulbs were switched on and the bars were cold and grey like rods of ash. Mr Marmalade was in his undershirt and trousers, braces hanging loose by his sides. Opposite him sat his dummy, Señor Rodrigo. He was wearing a pair of toreador trousers and a little matching jacket was folded neatly over the arm of his chair. He was also in his undershirt, thin wooden arms sticking out. They were sharing a tin of Spam, although Señor Rodrigo had not touched his.
Mr Marmalade spoke, ‘Heard a cry, did you say? No one crying in here. Did you hear anything, Señor Rodrigo?’
‘Must have been when you got that speck of dirt in your eye.’
‘Oh yes! That would be it. I got a speck of dirt in my eye.’ And then he added uncertainly, ‘Honest I did.’
I took out the photo of Dean Morgan and held it out. ‘I don’t want to interrupt your party, I’m looking for this man.’
Mr Marmalade lifted up his specs to rest them on his forehead and brought the photo up to within five inches of his eyes.
‘I don’t think I know him. Is he your friend?’
‘I’m investigating his disappearance. I’m a private detective.’
‘I told you it was a peeping Tom,’ said Señor Rodrigo.
‘Now, now,’ admonished Mr Marmalade, ‘there’s no need for that.’ And then, lowering the photo, ‘I don’t know him – is he in trouble?’
‘He might be. He’s just a harmless old man who might be mixed up in some trouble, the sort he probably doesn’t know how to handle. I think he might be disguised as a ventriloquist.’
Mr Marmalade pulled a face. ‘An impostor! We don’t like them do we, Señor Rodrigo?’
‘They always mean us harm.’
I took out my card and picked up the photo. ‘If you should see him, or if you know anyone who might know something, you can reach me at this address.’
On my way out the cleaner brushed past me and pressed a piece of crumpled paper into my hand. I waited until I had turned the corner at the end of the street and then read it. It said: ‘Meet me tonight at the Game if you want to find out about your friend.’ And then the inevitable Aberystwyth afterthought: ‘Bring plenty of money.’
When I got back to the office, there was an empty police car parked outside. The two occupants were already waiting for me in my office. One was Police Chief Llunos, and the other I didn’t recognise. Llunos reached out and shook my hand as usual, although maybe there was a strained air about him. The other cop just watched with a look on his face that suggested there was a bad smell in the room. I gave him a curt nod and without a word fetched three glasses from the kitchenette and poured out three rums on the desk. Neither of them made a move.
‘Thirsty?’ I asked.
The new cop said, ‘It won’t help you.’
I took a sip from mine and then said to Llunos, ‘Who’s the tough guy?’
He winced. ‘This is DI Harri Harries from Llanelli. He’s up here on attachment to … er …’
‘To wipe your nose?’
‘They said I’d have trouble with you,’ Harri Harries said sourly.
‘It looks like they were right.’
‘No.’ He walked up to me and positioned his face six inches away from mine and looked up. He was about seven or eight inches shorter than me and wearing the standard-issue CID crumpled suit and shabby raincoat. And he had been eating salami. ‘No, pal, they were wrong. I told them no shamus ever gives me problems. Not twice anyway.’
Llunos sat on the client’s chair. ‘Detective Harri Harries will be helping me out for a while. I’d appreciate it if you’d give him all the co-operation you can.’
I ducked out of the way of the salami breath. ‘He won’t get anything out of me until he improves his manners.’
‘Go on, cross my path, snooper, you’ll be doing me a favour. I’m already bored of this dump, I could do with some entertainment.’
I looked at Llunos. ‘Do they learn this dialogue in Llanelli?’
He shrugged. Harri Harries took a half-step to me until his coat was brushing lightly against my wrist. I could feel the heat from his body and detect the faint sour reek of Boots aftershave and unwashed ears.
‘Llanelli, Carmarthen, Pontypridd … fine towns. You want to know why? Because there are no peepers in any of them. There used to be, but I cleaned them all out.’
I turned to Llunos. ‘What do you need him to help you for? You seem to be doing a fine job all on your own.’
Llunos didn’t answer but the discomfort was evident on his face. Something had happened to make them send this monkey to sit on his back.
‘Getting the whole town washed away in a flood is doing all right in your book, is it?’ sneered Harri Harries.
‘That’s history.’
‘Oh, you don’t like history? How about something hot off the press? Like some cheap shamus busting into a private party and trying to put the frighteners on the Mayor?’
‘Or what about the Mayor ordering his men to beat up the shamus and chuck him unconscious into the sea?’
Harri Harries paused for a second. It seemed Jubal had omitted to mention this aspect of the night’s entertainment. I could see Harri Harries didn’t like that. Didn’t like the fact that the Mayor was handing out unauthorised beatings, or that he had pulled the wool over his eyes. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t like it less than he didn’t like me being at the party.
‘Shouldn’t have been there in the first place, should you?’ he snarled.
‘Nor should the Mayor. They sent you all the way up here just for that?’
‘No, there’s this other thing.’
‘What other thing?’
He stopped and looked at Llunos who stared solidly at his shoe.
‘None of your business. Although I don’t suppose you know what that phrase means, do you?’
‘I could learn.’
‘Oh you’ll learn all right!’
He walked to the window. At the desk he picked up the photo of Marty.
‘Who’s this, your wife?’
I said nothing and Llunos jumped slightly. ‘Hey, that’s … er …’
The new cop held the picture close to his face and then turned it round and read the back. ‘Hey, I know who this is, it’s the schoolkid isn’t it? The one that died on the cross-country run –’
I looked at Llunos who said simply, ‘He didn’t get that from me.’
Harri Harries sneered. ‘No I read it in your file, peeper. I bet you didn’t know you had one, did you? So I know all about your little pansy friend freezing to death during games.’ He dropped the photo into the bin. ‘Tragic. No reason to push your games teacher out of an aeroplane, though.’
‘I didn’t push him, he fell.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Not a lot to you, perhaps. But a lot to me. What happened to him was an accident; but what he did to Marty wasn’t.’ This was a lie, of course. He fell out when I hit him with a cricket bat. I glanced quickly at the bat which was standing in the corner of my office and then at Llunos who had been in the plane; he didn’t seem inclined to contradict me.
Harri Harries sneered, ‘Stop breaking my heart, snooper. Kid has a weak heart, dies on a cross-country run, so what? It happens. Doesn’t give you the right to charge round town on a white horse all your life and throw mud at the Mayor.’
‘And what the hell gives you the right to tell me what to do? You haven’t been in town five minutes yet!’
‘I’m the law round here, that’s all you need to know.’
I walked to the door and opened it. ‘Thanks for coming, tough guy.’
He walked through. ‘Keep your nose clean, peeper, or I’ll clean it for you.’
* * *
Llunos stood up and followed him. At the door he stopped and looked at me with the helpless expression of a friend who wants to explain but is struggling for the words. For years there had existed a sharp animosity between the two of us. Like most cops he didn’t like private operatives, but since that time we fought side-by-side in the plane a warm bond of friendship had arisen. Strengthened, I liked to think, by his growing awareness that despite the different approaches we were still on the same side. I waved him to go. I knew how much he hated this, he didn’t need to say.
As their footsteps receded down the wooden stairs I took the photo of Marty out of the bin and replaced it on the desk. For some time now the colours had been gradually lightening – a slow cinematic fade to white that echoed the moment in the fourth year when he disappeared into the blizzard. Only in my mind is the image still vivid. That day when the games teacher, Herod Jenkins, rejected his medical note and sent him on the cross-country run. Marty the consumptive schoolboy who never stood a chance. I picked up the cricket bat and took a swing, re-enacting the scene from three years ago when I finally avenged his death: when I faced up to Mr Jenkins in the fuselage of the plane and delivered the stroke that knocked him for six and sent that horizontal crease in his face they called a smile spinning out of this world. Since then I had lost count of the number of former pupils who had sidled into my office on account of it. Men who stood there in shabby suits, ill at ease and unsure how to say what they’d come for. They always smiled with relief when I said I understood and, without a word, handed them the bat. Howzat! they would shout as I bowled a piece of crumpled-up paper. Often the only other words they uttered before shaking me solemnly by the hand and leaving down the echoing, bare wooden stairs, were, ‘I was there from ’70 to ’75.’
* * *
I poured the untouched drinks back into the bottle, sat down and cradled my own glass and swirled the drink round. And wondered what this other thing was, the one that Harri Harries had mentioned and then didn’t want to talk about. The one that was none of my business. I was beginning to get that faint prickly sensation on the back of my neck. The one that said trouble ahead. There weren’t many certainties in the job I did. But there was one prediction I could make that was copper-bottomed. When some tough guy told me something was none of my business it always ended up being plenty of my business.