Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (2 page)

There was the usual distant hum of traffic and a silence in the room that called for the slow tick of a grandfather clock to give it shape; but we’d sold the clock to pay to keep Myfanwy at the nursing home. So I tapped my pen on the desk and sighed every now and again. Calamity Jane, my partner, was sitting in the client’s chair practising the art of the hunch. She was holding a book in front of her face in the awkward attitude of one who has spent her seventeen and four-fifths years on the planet viewing the act of reading with disdain and has never acquired the correct posture for it. Then one day she discovers a book on a subject which fascinates her and sits there spellbound like a kid at a magic show. The book was an old training manual for operatives
of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Los Angeles. Don’t ask me where she got it; it was stolen. The chapter she was reading described the scientific approach to the hunch and prescribed a number of methods for cultivating it. I wasn’t so sure such a thing was possible but the technique she was trying entailed sitting still and allowing the mind to focus on the infinitesimal feelings and intimations that might or might not constitute the approach of a hunch. If you didn’t know, you’d think she was cultivating the art of aplomb. Calamity and I had been partners for a number of years and in that time I’d seen her brash and hotheaded, defiant, effervescent, full of joy, optimistic, noisy, brave and always suffused with the unsullied wonder of youth; but I’d never seen her sit still. I was grateful to the Pinkertons, even if the scientific art of the hunch did strike me as moonshine.

The phone rang and Calamity picked it up, and said without taking her eyes off the page, ‘Louie Knight Investigations.’ She listened, nodded and said, ‘I’ll see if he’s free.’ That’s what I mean about aplomb – this was the Queen of Denmark on the line, remember. She reached the phone over to me.

The voice on the other end of the line spoke the sort of English that was almost too perfect to be from a native of these shores and lent credence to her claim.

‘It’s about the dead Father Christmas,’ she began. ‘We read about it in the
International Herald Tribune
.’

‘It also made the
Shropshire Star
.’

‘The article said there was no identification on the body . . .’

‘That’s what they say; no one knows who he is or where he’s from.’

‘On the contrary, Mr Knight, everyone knows where he’s from. Father Christmas comes from Greenland.’

The sharpness in her tone made me pause for a second. Then I said in the sort of voice that gives nothing away, ‘That’s a good point.’

‘Somebody should tell them.’

‘Who? The police? I expect they already know. They were children too once, difficult though it is to believe.’

‘Then why don’t they publish the fact?’

‘Sometimes in cases like this they don’t publish everything they know. Cops like to keep a few things up their sleeve. It makes them feel smarter than the criminals. It’s all to do with psychology.’

‘God preserve us from cops who try to be clever.’

‘I have a lot of sympathy with that view. How exactly can I help you?’

‘Greenland is a self-governing overseas administrative division of Denmark, which makes the dead man an honorary citizen of my country. We take attacks on our citizens very seriously. You see where I’m heading?’

I said a picture was beginning to emerge.

‘I would like you to investigate the murder. I’ve put a small advertisement in the classified section of yesterday’s
Cambrian News
giving details of a reward for significant information which helps you crack the case. It’s a signed first edition of the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard. As you know, Kierkegaard first editions are hard to come by.’

‘I’ve never heard of him – the ‘K’ section in my school library got burned down.’

‘A great man, he wrote about despair.’

‘I’ve heard of that.’

‘I leave it to your discretion how to disburse the reward. It’s spelled S, Ø, R, E, N with a little dash on the O like a lopsided Saturn. Good luck!’

She hung up and I looked at Calamity. She said, ‘It was a pay phone.’

In books the PI would probably treat a call from the Queen of Denmark, especially when made from a pay phone, with a degree of scepticism; but in books they don’t have to eat whereas
in Aberystwyth it is a daily necessity. And I’d been in the game long enough not to care too greatly about my clients’ bona fides since they seldom had any. An hour later a messenger arrived with a postal order for five hundred pounds.

We banked it and wandered down to Sospan’s ice-cream kiosk for a small celebration. Hard currency upfront without even needing to beg was a rare occurrence for us. Sospan was sitting in his box, huddled in front of a brazier of coals, his normal expression of wan insouciance getting ever bleaker as the flesh of his cheeks melted away. They never cover it in
National Geographic
but the life cycle of the ice-cream man is a fascinating spectacle. Towards the end of summer Sospan overeats like a bear laying in a store of fat for winter. From dawn to dusk he grazes, dipping into the rich takings of summer, and for a few brief weeks his white coat balloons out until the buttons pop. Then business drops off, he starts to live off his fat, and around the end of November he swaps his summer coat for a thick white quilted winter one. It does little to disguise the fact that he is shrinking like a wraith. Just after Christmas, with the last of his ebbing strength, he closes the box and goes to sleep for three months, generally emerging again around the same time as the snowdrops.

‘Sospan, have you heard of a man called Søren Kierkegaard?’

‘The one who writes his name with an O that looks like a wobbly Saturn? ’Course I have. Teleological suppression of the ethical.
Fear and Trembling
,
Despair
and
The Sickness unto Death
. And don’t bother offering me the signed first edition, I’ve already got one. My grandfather left me it in his will.’

‘You’ve seen the ad, then?’

He pulled out a copy of the
Cambrian News
from under the counter and began rummaging around inside for the classified ad. I stopped him, closed the paper to the front page and read the report on the Father Christmas slaying. He’d been found in a Chinatown alley a few nights back, lying in a pool of blood.
He’d been shot twice, and while he lay dying the assailant had chopped off his manhood and put it in his mouth. Mrs Dinorwic-Jones, the art teacher who regularly drew the chalk outline round the freshly slain, was said to be in a state of shock. The final detail was the most intriguing. With his dying strength Father Christmas had dipped his finger in his own blood and written on the pavement the word ‘Hoffmann’.

CALAMITY ARRIVED at the office next morning carrying a bundle of butcher’s paper and a copy of the
Cambrian News
. She spread the butcher’s paper on the floor and handed me a marker pen.

‘What’s going on?’

‘JDLR,’ said Calamity.

‘I’m still no wiser.’

‘JDLR. It’s what the Pinkertons say. It means Just Doesn’t Look Right.’

‘What doesn’t?’

She pointed to the front page of the paper. It carried a photo of the celebrated chalk outline.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘Doesn’t his posture strike you as unusual?’

‘He’s been brutally murdered.’

‘Even so, it doesn’t look natural.’

‘He fell awkwardly.’

‘That’s my point: you can’t fall like that. Look.’

She did a slow, dignified collapse onto the floor, roughly in the same attitude as the corpse.

‘Draw round me.’

I took the cap off the pen and drew her outline.

She got up and looked down. ‘See? His foot’s facing the wrong way. He’s lying on his left side, his right knee is touching the ground on top of his left leg. There’s no way you can get the right foot to face backwards like that unless you break the leg.’

‘So maybe he broke it.’

‘The report doesn’t say anything about a broken leg.’

‘Maybe it’s just a mistake in the drawing.’

‘Mrs Dinorwic-Jones has been teaching life study classes all her life. She wouldn’t get something like that wrong. There’s only one explanation.’

‘Which is?’

‘He did it deliberately. He took his leg out of the trousers and stuffed his hat in the trouser leg and boot, then twisted it round to face the wrong way.’

‘Where’s his real leg, then?’

‘It’s pulled back and up, inside the thigh, like actors who play Long John Silver.’

‘Why would he do a thing like that?’

‘It’s a signal. He was dying. He had just a few minutes left to live. So what does he do? He writes “Hoffmann” in his own blood. Who’s Hoffmann? Good question. My hunch is, either he recognised his assailant, who happened to be called Hoffmann, or it’s a message written to an accomplice called Hoffmann or about a subject of mutual interest to them both which is connected with someone called Hoffmann. So the accomplice reads about the murder and the word “Hoffmann” and realises that Santa has hidden something in the alley for him and has used the phoney leg routine to point to it.’ She started to gather up the sheets on the floor.

‘You mean, he’s hidden something in the alley?’

‘Yes.’

‘And pointed to it with his leg?’

‘Phoney leg.’

I laughed. ‘OK, we check the alley. Do we have anything else to go on? I’m not saying the phoney-leg routine isn’t promising or anything, but it would be nice if we – you know – had something else.’

Calamity took out a notebook and flicked it open. ‘The DOA is called Absalom. Arrived in town two or three weeks ago; no
one is exactly sure when. Kept himself to himself. Took a job as Father Christmas even though he was Jewish. There’s mention of a woman.’ She opened the
Cambrian News
to the scandal pages. There was a picture of a mousey-looking Welsh woman in a stovepipe hat, in her early twenties probably, beneath a lurid headline: ‘
SANTA SLASH MOLL IN STOVEPIPE HAT MOOLAH MYSTERY’.

I skimmed the first paragraph. It was a feeble attempt to insinuate a sinister explanation of where the girl got the money for her hats.

‘She’s the harp player out at Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp,’ explained Calamity with a slight air of hesitation.

We swapped knowing glances. The holiday camp at Borth was not one of our favourite haunts, in contrast to most holiday camps they had a strictly enforced ‘No Dicks and Sleuths’ policy. They were good at spotting disguises, too.

‘We’ll take a ride out there,’ I said.

‘We also need to get some knitting needles.’

‘What for?’

‘Ballistics.’

‘Oh, of course.’

‘Been reading about it in the Pinkerton book. What you do is you stick the needle in the bullet holes in the wall and shine a flashlight along the line of the needle. That way you find out the trajectory, and you can work out where the firing came from.’

‘Is that so?’

Calamity assumed a nonchalant air. ‘Fairly standard scene-of-crime m.o.’

‘I’ve never come across it before.’

‘If Jack Ruby’s lawyer had tried it he probably wouldn’t have fried.’

‘Jack Ruby didn’t go to the chair. He died in hospital while awaiting a retrial. Embolism, I think.’

‘Same difference.’

‘And he shot Lee Harvey Oswald from three feet away. You wouldn’t need to stick a knitting needle into Lee Harvey Oswald to find out where the firing came from.’

‘It was just a . . . a . . .’ She consulted the Pinkerton book. ‘An illustrative example.’

‘That’s all right, then.’

‘I thought we could check the alley, see if the scene-of-crime boys missed anything.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘Of course it is. They only see what they’re expecting to see, because they arrive loaded with preconceptions. You have to empty your mind of the obvious and just see what turns up.’

‘And I bet that’s in the book, too.’

‘It’s all in the book, Louie.’

Outside the Chungking Express a police car with out-of-town plates was parked. We pushed through the door into the main parlour. It was the usual cuckoo’s nest of oriental bric-a-brac: lanterns, vases, model junks, silk dragons, a lacquered cabinet, Buddha and Confucius . . . objects side by side that would have occupied separate wings in a museum.

It was still early and the dining room empty except for a man eating an early lunch. A white napkin was stuffed a touch flamboyantly into his shirt collar. He wore a crumpled and stained suit that might once have been well cut and had an air that suggested the tailors of Swansea or Llanelli. Even without seeing the car outside I could smell cop. He looked up as we walked in, cast a glance and returned to the task of spooning the last drops of sauce from his plate into his mouth. We sat at an adjacent table. After deciding that no more could be scraped off the dish he threw it down with a rough clatter and dabbed his chin with the napkin. He shouted in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Hey, chop chop!’