ONCE UPON A time you just went mad and gave everyone a good laugh. They created a special position for you – the village idiot. You didn’t mind too much because you were mad and being a buffoon was probably no worse than tilling the squire’s fields for a living. Later when the world got more enlightened they got rid of the job and called you a fool or an idiot or an imbecile. And it was still OK to laugh. They weren’t squeamish about where they put you either, or what they called it. Asylums for criminal lunatics, asylums for incurable lunatics, hospitals for the insane, pauper asylums, workhouses for lunatics … If you were rich you might end up in a chancery asylum, but it was still a madhouse. Then someone had the bright idea of charging for the privilege of laughing at you. It was quite a popular pastime for a while, even more than the zoo. By the outbreak of the Great War and the new age of science they had managed to discern four grades of madness: idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded people and moral defectives. And nowadays, of course, there are hospitals for the mentally ill, and no one is mad any more. Although when you walk down the streets of Aberystwyth on Saturday night you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
After we left Cadwaladr we picked up the car and drove out to Ysbyty Ystwyth to take a look at the old sanatorium. You might have called the Georgian country house with its ivy-covered redbrick exterior handsome if you didn’t know the history. But there wasn’t anyone for miles around who didn’t. It’s a taint by association that a house can never shake off.
It hadn’t always specialised in the insane. After 1918 the house was taken over by a charity set up to treat victims of shellshock. And after that, when that particular malady lost its fashionable appeal, even though the victims didn’t lose their shock, it became a sanatorium treating TB patients who couldn’t afford to go to Switzerland. Later still, in the fifties and sixties it reverted to treatment of the mentally ill, and especially the fashonable new cure for depression – electro-convulsive therapy. People living nearby claim the lights in their sitting-rooms used to flicker during a busy day.
The grim, forbidding prospect instantly squashed the mood in the car. It was only a building, of course, just bricks and mortar and ivy and joists of dry wood and crumbling plaster. And yet it seemed impregnated like a sponge with all the woe that had been spilled there. The windows were dark and filled with an emptiness like the eye sockets in a skull. The deserted grounds seemed still alive with broken men from the trenches being wheeled around in bath chairs by nurses in funny uniforms. Cadwaladr’s especial distaste for the place was understandable: many of the soldiers from the Patagonian conflict had been brought here and left to rot. The perimeter was enclosed by a stone wall, green with ivy and lichen and topped by newly installed rolls of razor-wire. Signs were placed at evenly spaced intervals along the wall warning us of various dire things. Private. Keep Out. Guard-dog patrols. And one sign said chillingly: ‘Trespassers will be shot. By Order The Philanthropist’.
I dropped Calamity off in town and spent the rest of the afternoon flashing the top of the fudge box round places where the girl might be recognised. There was nothing remarkable about the picture. A young girl sitting at a spinning-wheel in an old cottage. Dressed in a shawl, coarse woollen skirt and of course the stovepipe hat. The girl was pretty, they always were. Might even have been beautiful but you couldn’t tell with all the make-up. For a man whose only contact with female company was theology students she might have been attractive, bewitching even.
The same pattern of polite boredom was repeated everywhere I went. One swift uninterested glance at the picture and then a shrug. Sure they’d seen girls like this before, hundreds of them, but they couldn’t say if they’d seen this one. They were ten a penny. No, make that a hundred. Stick around in Aberystwyth and you’ll see a busload every week. Simple unlettered farm girls from up beyond Talybont, playing the one half-decent card life had dealt them – their looks. Nothing spectacular, but good enough. Girls who dreamed of making it big as a model, maybe featuring in the ads for the tourist board or on the cover of the Cliff Railway brochure, but all they ever got were the knitting patterns and the fudge boxes. But of course you can’t make a living out of modelling fudge boxes no matter how frugal you are, but a pretty girl in a stovepipe hat can always make a bit extra on the side in the druid speakeasies down by the harbour.
The men from the cheese yards were bent over the counter of Sospan’s even further than usual, huddling together for the collective warmth. As if the inside was a brazier and they were watchmen sick of watching. I dropped by and mentioned the Philanthropist, but even Sospan, for once, had little to say on the subject. Everyone agreed that only a foreigner would have bought the haunted house. But they couldn’t agree on where he came from. Some said he was a Texan and others a Saudi prince. All agreed he had made his money in oil. Or white slave trafficking. ‘I heard he’s got an idiot wife locked away there,’ said one man. ‘Who hasn’t?’ answered another, and someone else added, ‘He can have mine if he wants!’
* * *
I passed round the picture of the girl and again it was the same response. Why get upset about a particular one when you can get any number down at the harbour and they all look the same anyway don’t they? Once they’ve got the hat on and the make-up and the wig. Then someone wishing to be helpful suggested I try Spin Doctors on Chalybeate Street, and wishing to be polite I said I would. ‘You mind she doesn’t put a spell on you!’ someone shouted after me as I left.
The shop smelled of must and dry cardboard. It could have been an ironmonger’s or a bike shop but the frames in the window and hanging from the ceiling had one wheel and four legs. A bell tinkled in the back as I walked in, ducking under the foliage of hanging spinning-wheels. In the centre of the shop there was a space cleared among the bric-à-brac and a wheel stood on a podium. Even knowing nothing about them I could see this one was special. The frame was a modern carbon fibre composite, fitted with a derailleur gear-change made by Shimano of Japan. There was a racing-style aluminium footgrip on the treadle, and an alloy hub on the wheel. An enamel logo on the main frame tube said ‘The Sleeping Beauty’.
‘She’s a beauty that one, sir!’
I looked down and saw the old lady, no bigger than Mrs Pepperpot, four feet nothing perhaps, clad in the traditional witches’ livery of black: ebony puritan shoes with shiny buckles; charcoal stockings and black skirt, blouse, bodice, shawl and fingerless mittens; obsidian beads and studs in her ears and a sable knitting needle through a bun of hair now silver but that no doubt had once been black. She stroked the Sleeping Beauty lovingly. ‘Handcrafted titanium distaff. None of your injection-moulded tat. Last for ever this one will.’
‘That’s good, I hate it when they fall apart halfway through a spin.’
‘Is it for yourself, or are you looking for a gift?’
I took out the fudge-box top. ‘I was actually looking for a driver.’ I pushed the lid under her nose and she cast an eye over. Her face fell slightly.
‘I’m afraid we don’t sell girls. It’s too much trouble feeding them up.’
‘Yeah I know, they leave a trail of your best bread all the way home; tell me about the wheel.’
‘Cheap plastic wood, probably Taiwanese. You wouldn’t get very far spinning on it but then the people who take these sort of snaps don’t care too much about that, do they?’
‘You ever sell one like this?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t handle that end of the market.’
‘What about the girl?’
‘What about her? She’s no spinner, that’s for sure. Her seating position’s all crooked, and her hands are in the wrong place. The way she’s clutching the distaff like that you’d think it was a man’s “you know what”. Still, you can hardly blame her, I suppose, it’s probably what she’s used to, isn’t it! Treadle trollops we call them.’ And then added, ‘I’ve just put the cauldron on, if you’d like a cup of tea?’
‘No thanks,’ I said turning to go. ‘I’m in a hurry.’
‘Well, would you like to sign the petition?’
‘Petition for what?’
‘Mrs Llantrisant. We’re hoping to get her sentence reduced.’
‘But I’m the one who put her there.’
‘Oh I know, but you couldn’t have known they would stick her on that cold damp island. It’s giving her all sorts of problems with her joints.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I can sign it. I mean, what if she starts another flood?’
She followed me to the door and held it open. ‘Are you sure I can’t interest you in the Sleeping Beauty? We do hire purchase.’
‘I’ll let you know, I still need to look at a few others first.’
She smiled knowingly, and shouted after me, ‘Good luck with your search. If you bring me a piece of the girl’s hair I can probably ask the spirits for you.’
If the girl was selling herself down by the harbour, the best man to ask was the one who had a professional interest in fallen women – Father Seamus. I strolled with renewed sense of purpose up Great Darkgate Street towards the ghetto in the shadow of the castle. I bumped into him coming out of one of the houses where he made pastoral visits. Like many of the houses that had managed to withstand the flood, it now had five or six families instead of two or three. He greeted me and we shook hands. The problems he had to deal with were not that different from the ones his medieval forebears had faced and had the same cause: too many families living in one room, the clothes drying on one radiator, the horrible thick unhealthy fug poisoning the air. But he soldiered on.
‘Still fighting the good fight, are we, Father?’ I asked cheerfully.
‘Oh struggling on, struggling on,’ he said, the words delivered with the affected soul-weariness of the man who dons the cloak of the martyr and finds he likes the fit so much he gets a matching pair of gloves made.
‘How about yourself, Louie?’
‘Struggling on, struggling on.’
He put a fraternal arm on my shoulder and led me down the street. ‘Don’t give up now, we need men like you.’
‘Do we, Father? Do we really?’
He stopped and took a closer look at me, his finely attuned antenna warning him of an impending loss of faith. ‘Are you all right, Louie?’
‘Of course.’ I showed him the photo. ‘I’m looking for this girl.’
He took it wordlessly, peered at it and then handed it back. ‘Sorry, Louie. You know how it is. I’ve seen loads like this.’
‘Yeah I know how it is.’
‘Sorry I can’t be more help. Is she in trouble?’
‘I don’t know. Probably. Isn’t everybody?’
‘That’s why we need men like you, Louie. Men who scorn the comforts of the hearth and the softness of straw beneath their heads. Men who stand guard so weaker men can sleep. Men who climb the cold stone steps to the battlement and stand watch, blasted by the icy wind, their eyes unvisited by sleep and smarting in the winter frost. Silent centurions, Mr Knight, to hold out their shield. Men like you and Mr Cefnmabws at the lighthouse flashing his light to guide the ships safely home.’
‘Amen,’ I said.
We stopped at the street corner and prepared to part.
‘And don’t forget to include yourself in that list, Father,’ I added.
He smiled wanly. ‘I do what I can with the strength God gives me. It isn’t much.’
I said goodbye and walked through the churchyard behind the old college. As I walked the words of his sermon echoed in my mind. It was a pretty speech, but it didn’t really ring true. Was I really a silent centurion, scorning the soft straw to climb up the icy battlement? I didn’t think so. I certainly didn’t feel like one. But one thing I was pretty certain of. When I showed him the picture of the girl and he said he didn’t know her, he had been lying.
I reached the bit of the Prom where it bent like an elbow jutting out into the frothing water. There was a girl standing on the D-shaped buttress, staring out to sea, wearing an old fur coat from the Salvation Army shop. It was Ionawr. I touched her gently on the shoulder so as not to make her start. But she did anyway and looked round. Then she squealed and hugged me and when we broke off she still held one of my hands in hers.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ she said.
‘I was out at Ynyslas.’
‘I’ve got someone who wants to meet you. Well, he doesn’t really want to but I told him he had to.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Remember after Mrs Beynon’s you told me about that monk with the suitcase?’
I nodded.
‘I know who it is, it’s one of my regular … er … you know …’
‘Friends?’
‘Yes. He’ll be in the new Moulin tonight.’ She jerked her head back slightly to indicate the pier behind her where the replacement for the famous old club in Patriarch Street had recently sprung up. ‘You don’t go there much, do you?’
‘Not really, too many memories, I suppose.’ I showed her the fudge-box top and this time I got a reaction.
‘I don’t know who the girl is,’ she said, ‘but I recognise the location. I’ve done some work there myself. It’s the Heritage Folk Museum.’
I went to the Cabin in Pier Street and met Calamity. Her expression told me straightaway that she had something on her mind.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she said when I sat down.
‘Tell you what?’
‘About Custard Pie.’
I breathed in sharply.
‘He asked to see me, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You know damn well why I didn’t. Because if I had, the next minute you would be down there visiting him.’
‘And what’s wrong with that?’
‘Everything’s wrong.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘I don’t want you having anything to do with him. It’s too dangerous.’
‘I’m not a kid, you know.’
‘So you keep telling me. You’re sixteen and three quarters. It may seem a lot to you but, believe me, it isn’t.’
‘What happened to us being partners?’
‘The first job of a partner is to take care of the other one.’
‘But what can he do, he’s behind bars?’
‘I don’t know what he can do. I’m not smart enough to think of anything, but he is.’
‘Louie, you know I have to go, we’re on a case.’
‘There’s no point going anyway.’
‘No point?’
‘Of course not. You think he’s going to tell you something that will help us?’
‘No point?’
‘Not even a microscopic one.’
‘Well you’re a crap detective then,’ she said, eyes watering with resentment and confusion.
My eyes widened in surprise. ‘What’s that all about?’
‘Well, you went to see him, didn’t you? Why did you waste your time if there was no point?’
‘I … er … It was only after I went that I realised that there was no point.’
She blew a raspberry.
‘How did you find out anyway?’
‘I’m a detective.’
I sighed and Calamity stood up. ‘I’m going.’
‘I forbid you!’ I said as she left, knowing full well that nothing I said would make any difference. But I said it all the same. ‘I forbid you.’ It was an old trick I’d learned from King Canute.
I sat there staring at my tea for a while and then ran out and down Pier Street towards the sea. I could see Calamity just about to turn left on to the Prom, so I turned into King Street behind the old college and cut through the Crazy Golf. From there I walked across the road and turned towards the pier. A few steps and she almost bumped into me. She turned and started to walk away but I caught her arm and pulled her over to the railings. She stood there not struggling but keeping her gaze stolidly averted, finding something improbably fascinating in the side of the pier.
Neither of us spoke and finally she said, ‘What do you want?’
‘I just want to tell you to be careful.’
She turned and looked at me, her eyes wet and gleaming. ‘So I can go then?’
‘What’s the point of stopping you, you were going to go anyway, weren’t you?’
‘No, I wasn’t. You forbade me.’
I put my arm over her shoulder. ‘Just be careful and keep away from the bars, and whatever you do, don’t believe a word he says. OK?’
She nodded.
*
Meirion was enjoying his usual early-evening aperitif at the Rock Café, his big belly wedged in between the immovable plastic seat and the edge of the table. Spread out before him a gazette of English and Welsh seaside towns preserved in pink sugar: Blackpool, Llandudno, Tenby, Brighton. I sat down and ordered the aniseed one with black and white stripes.
* * *
He had just finished a piece for the morning edition on the death of Mr Marmalade. It was, he said, a typical Meirion piece – hard-hitting, authoritative, tough but fair, and like all Meirion’s hard-hitting, authoritative, tough and fair pieces it would never be published for fear of upsetting all the bigshots who owned the town. Still, he had to write them if he wanted to collect his salary.
He told me what he had managed to dig up on the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. ‘I spoke to the chap who covered the story,’ he began. ‘It seems to have been some advanced neuroscientific research conducted by the military at the sanatorium. They chose that place because folk were already scared of it so they would keep away. Then something went badly wrong and the project was wound up in a hurry. It’s all officially denied, of course.’
‘So where does this Philanthropist fit in, the one who bought the place?’
‘Dr Faustus? He was in charge. No one knows much about him, he’s supposed to be some sort of experimental neuroscientist who had some pretty far-out theories about false memory syndrome. Apparently he was thrown out of the scientific establishment for being too crazy. After the thing was wound up the folks living out there started seeing things. Well a “thing” actually. A monster they said, or a ghost or something, living in the woods. The most celebrated case was a family out at Pontrhydygroes who saw something while on a picnic. They were making a home-movie. Didn’t notice anything at the time but when the film came back they saw something in the trees behind them, something moving. That’s what they say, anyway. The whole family disappeared not long after that. Their breakfast half-eaten on the table, the tea still warm in the pot. Never seen again. No sign of the film either. A lot of people who made statements to the police were later questioned by a strange otherworldly man, dressed in medieval dress. He sounds a bit like this chap you mentioned in the Peacocks’ coat. They didn’t say what he wanted but after that they all withdrew their statements.’
‘So there’s a time-traveller walking around in the woods.’
Meirion tore off a piece of bread to scrape up the last bits of rock from his plate. ‘That’s what they say. Of course, I prefer rational explanations myself. It may be possible that the military have been experimenting with some sort of time-travel device, and now there’s a sixteenth-century Jew haunting the woods of Ysbyty Ystwyth; but if you ask me, it is far more likely to be a prowler wearing one of those coats they sell in Peacocks.’
The Heritage Folk Museum was housed in an old whalebone godown overlooking the harbour. In a series of rooms various scenes from seventeenth- or nineteenth-century rural life were acted out by the sort of people who couldn’t hold down the type of jobs the twentieth century had to offer. Sitting at a spinning-wheel, lying on a bed pretending to die in childbirth, or with a face covered in fake smallpox weals … It wasn’t very demanding so long as you didn’t have to say anything.
In the entrance hall there was an artist in dungarees putting the finishing touches to a mural of Mrs Bligh-Jones. It was done in that heroic style you get in Warsaw Pact town halls, where the worker holds aloft a hammer and leads forward the proletariat to a Socialist promised land. The artist had chosen to depict the moment just after the fateful decision to abandon the van: Mrs Bligh-Jones, Mrs Gorseinon, Mrs Tolpuddle and Mrs Montgomery strung out against the backdrop of the mountain; roped together at the waist, and wearing bowling shoes instead of crampons. I smiled politely at the artist but, to be honest, it was pretty crap.
Someone touched my arm lightly and I looked round. It was Marty’s mum.
‘Hello, Louie. How are you? Haven’t seen you for so long.’
‘I know, I’ve been meaning to visit, but …’
She squeezed my arm. ‘It’s OK. I understand how busy you must be.’
We stood side by side and looked at the picture and when the artist went out for a cigarette Marty’s mum glared at her. ‘I would never say anything but, if you ask me, it’s wrong. It didn’t ought to be allowed.’
‘What didn’t?’
‘What they’ve done to Mrs Cefnmabws! She’s not there.’
She nodded indignantly at the mural. She was right, there should have been five figures in the landscape, not four.
‘I know she lost her bottle,’ Marty’s mum continued, ‘and ran off raving into the blizzard, but that didn’t happen until later, did it? When they left the van she was still in charge. Mrs Bligh-Jones should be at the back, not the front.’
‘Maybe it’s something to do with perspective or something.’
‘Perspective my foot! They’ve airbrushed her out of history, that’s what they’ve done. That Mrs Bligh-Jones is such a busybody!’
I took her for a cup of tea and in the café she told me what brought her to the museum.
‘There’s been some fresh evidence about Marty.’
I turned and looked more closely at her. ‘Fresh in what way?’
‘They’ve released some of the official papers from the inquiry. The statute of limitations is up, isn’t it? I finally found out the answer to a mystery that has haunted me ever since that morning he left for school and never came back.’ She leaned closer and lowered her voice. ‘That night before the cross-country run, he was out in the frosty woods collecting kindling for his granny. Away for hours he was. When he got back home he was half-starved with cold and his new coat was torn in half. I wasn’t half angry with him, the perisher, but he wouldn’t say how he did it. But now I know, don’t I?’
‘So what was it?’
‘Apparently there was this piece of evidence at the inquiry that they didn’t release for fear of embarrassing the Church. It was the testimony of a friar – one of them mendicant ones – and he had been lost in the woods that same night. Blue with cold he was, because he didn’t have a proper coat. Well, they’re not supposed to, are they? It’s all part of the mortification. It seems when Marty saw him he tore his own coat in two and gave half to the friar.’
I patted her hand. ‘He was a fine boy.’
‘They kept quiet about it so as not to upset the poor chap. He was embarrassed, you see, because he thought all the other mendicants would laugh at him for taking charity from a little schoolboy.’
‘I expect he would have been mortified.’
Marty’s mum nodded without understanding and then carried on excitedly, ‘Anyway, I’ve just been speaking to the people who run this place and they’re thinking of making a tableau of it – to illustrate the theme of suffering and charity through the ages. I’ve just been giving them some of his old clothes.’
After Marty’s mum left with my promise to visit her soon I wandered into the exhibit hall. I showed the pictures of the Dean and the girl to the doctor carrying a jar of leeches. He recognised them, and said he seemed to vaguely remember them working there for a while, drifting in and drifting out as people tended to do. Workers seldom stayed long – life there was hard and the working conditions primitive. The girl had been spinning and the man had mended coracles. The last he’d heard the Dean had got a job working as a satyr in the Beltane speakeasy.