Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (21 page)

‘Not really.’

‘It wasn’t a request.’

I walked round and climbed in the passenger side. Erw scrumpled up the newspaper and thrust it in the well between the two seats, then eased the nose of the car out into the traffic stream. He steered with one hand, the one holding the bun. As he drove he took bites from the bun and steadied the wheel with his elbow.

‘They were face down in the harbour. Know anything about that?’

‘No.’

‘Tyre-iron marks on their heads. Know anything about that?’

‘No.’

‘Witnesses saw them come out of your office a few days ago. Know anything about that?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think you would.’

The stone steps that led down to the basement of the police station had that same old gritty sound: that oh so familiar rhythmic, plodding, forlorn scraping like a steam train chuffing sadly on its way to the wreckers’ yard. The walls glistened with the same municipal cream paint, applied to the same uneven brickwork, wet with the same saline condensation and the same all-pervading rheumatic dampness. The air was laden with the same stale cooking smells, from a canteen where food is assembled from kits. There were dull thumps of things being moved around, a few floors up; and the awareness of a presence: inaudible, odourless, below the threshold of any sensation; but there, somehow, all the same. A far-off susurration . . . it was the subliminal register of the sea coming in and going out. It seemed to me I had been making this journey all my life, like those people who take their vacation in the same spot every year. The ones who book the same caravan and come not because they want a change but because they don’t. Life is too hard if you have to think about it. Aberystwyth police station: our cell is marked with an X. The food is a bit greasy, but the weather has been nice. We get regularly beaten. Please send a lawyer. Wish you were here. The light was as yellow as egg yolk.

We turned left at the bottom of the stairs, into D section: a short corridor with four cells up one side and wall-to-ceiling bars like in the cowboy films. The deputy showed me to my room. There was someone already in it. Miss Evangeline. She was sitting on the bed, staring ahead with the fixity of purpose that rabbits in headlights are said to display. She flinched when the door slammed and the key went clickety-click like the bolt being pulled back on a rifle. Tadpole had been kept in the hospital overnight with mild concussion and released next morning. That was two days ago. She’d been busy in the meantime: this was her revenge.

‘Miss Evangeline, what are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been arrested. Oh dear Lord above!’

‘For what?’

‘The charity disabled boy outside the Pier, the one made of fibreglass, someone broke his box open and took the money. They say it was me. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t. It must be a mistake.’

‘They found some money in my handbag. But I don’t have any money.’

‘What were you doing at the Pier?’

‘I was with that nurse.’

‘Tadpole?’

‘Yes. She took me for a walk along the Prom, it was so nice of her – normally she never bothers. When we got to the Pier I lost her and the next thing I knew there was a consternation and they were accusing me of stealing. Oh Lord!’

Erw appeared in the corridor. I walked over to the bars, we stood face to face.

‘Let her go.’

‘Can’t do that, Peeper, she’s a felon. Damaging council property, theft, can’t let her go.’

‘She’s blind, for God’s sake!’

‘So is the law, Shamus, so is the law.’

‘She didn’t do anything and you know it.’

‘Do I know that?’

‘She was set up.’

‘Who by?’

‘Tadpole.’

He pretended to consider, then shook his head with incredulity. ‘No, not Tadpole. She’d never do a thing like that. She loves those old codgers up there.’

‘Like hell she does.’

‘It broke her heart, it did, having to turn Miss Evangeline in. You should have seen the trouble I had getting her to fill out the witness statement.’

‘And I bet she’s the only witness, too.’

‘I’ve got a witness and the evidence of the stolen money. I’ve got enough to be going on with. She’ll get her day in court. If she’s innocent, if it’s all just a terrible miscarriage of justice – and let’s be honest, these things do happen now and again – then she’ll walk.’

He flicked open a notebook and consulted his notes. ‘Now, suppose we forget the bleeding-heart stuff and concentrate on the matter in hand, namely the nature of your connection with the two deceased Moth Brothers. Tell me what they were doing in your office. And please don’t pretend they weren’t there.’

‘They came to confess to the murder of Father Christmas.’

‘That was nice of them. Now, why would they do that? As opposed, for example, to confessing to the proper authorities, i.e. me.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t like that answer, Louie.’

‘I don’t like it, either.’

‘OK. Suppose you tell me the name of your client.’

‘Her name’s Margrethe Glücksborg.’

‘Margaret . . . ?’

‘Glücksborg. With an umlaut.’

‘With a what?’

‘Two little dots above the u.’

‘You think I don’t know how to spell Glücksborg?’ Something flashed in the pools of Erw’s eyes when he said that. It could have been the shiny silvery belly of a trout dashing through the sundappled waters, but I didn’t think so. I think it was the switchboard sparking angrily when no one is in attendance; the dancing blue flame that says this man is totally mad and is capable of killing someone over the perceived insult of not knowing how to spell Glücksborg.

I said, ‘Sorry, of course you know.’

‘Where can I find her?’

‘Copenhagen.’

He paused to reflect, made a slight nod, and wrote it down in his book. ‘And what does Margaret do?’

‘She opens shopping malls.’

He nodded again and enunciated the sentence as he wrote it down. ‘. . . shop . . . ping . . . malls. Excellent. We’re almost finished. You’ve been very cooperative. Now, just one more question, merely routine. ‘Opening shopping malls isn’t really a job, is it?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘If it was, I wouldn’t mind doing it myself. But the thing is, normally they get important people to do it; do you see where I’m heading? So be a sport, tell me who she really is.’

‘She’s the Queen of Denmark.’

‘Wonderful.’ He wrote it down. ‘Queen of Denmark. I think that covers all the formalities.’ He snapped the notebook shut and handed it to a deputy. ‘Get that typed up.’ He watched the deputy depart, then turned back to me. We were alone now, just the three of us.

‘Speaking off the record, I have a little problem. I don’t like your Queen of Denmark story. You know? Somehow it doesn’t ring true. When you’ve been a policeman as long as I have you get a sort of instinct for these things . . .’

‘A hunch?’

‘Exactly. A hunch. And mine tells me the Queen of Denmark story is all poo. Do you feel like changing or adding to it?’

I said nothing.

‘Not feeling talkative? That’s OK. In my experience peepers are never the most chatty of people, but I have a way of dealing with that.’ He walked over to a cupboard and brought out a monkey wrench. A big one. The sort mechanics use to loosen the wheel nuts on giant earth-moving machinery. He waved it in front of me and rattled the bars with it. The muscles of my groin tightened and I took an involuntary step back from the bars. He
laughed and walked over to the radiator. He put the wrench on the valve and began twisting it shut. After he had finished he did the three others along the corridor. Then he brought out a long hooked pole and opened all the skylights. The cold, damp air swirled in and the temperature plunged.

‘Brrrr!’ he said.

Miss Evangeline began to shiver violently.

‘Oh yes, I do so like to hear people chattering.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘this is between you and me. Let Miss Evangeline go, or take her to a warm cell. She doesn’t have to suffer this.’

‘Tell me who your client is, you asshole peeper, and we can all go home, including . . . Miss Evangeline.’ He put on a silly accent to say her name and I knew then that it was hopeless. There was no point appealing to his better side: he didn’t have one. He was made from the same stuff as Tadpole: industrial waste from the arsenic factory. He walked to the wall and unhooked the fire hose.

‘OK, I’ll tell you,’ I said.

He grinned and aimed the fire hose at me. ‘Shoot!’

‘She’s . . . er . . . he’s . . . it’s . . . oh, what’s the point? You won’t believe me.’

‘Try me.’

‘It’s someone – I don’t know his name, we meet in secret – but it’s someone from the police, undercover, some sort of secret investigation.’

He laughed. I would have laughed, too; it was pathetic.

He brought the fire hose up and said, ‘Yeah, well, I’ll check that out. In the meantime we’re going to play a party game called Pass the Pneumonia. You can tell me in the morning who your client is.’

‘Oh, Mr Knight, I’m so cold!’

I took my jacket off and slipped it over Miss Evangeline’s shoulders. It was the stupidest thing I ever did.

It took him the bat of an eyelid to work out the implications
of my chivalry. Longer than most people would have taken, because he couldn’t understand from personal experience why anyone would want to comfort another person like that. But he knew an opportunity to twist the knife when he saw one. You could trace the progress of the penny dropping by the speed of the grin stealing over his face. He turned the hose from me to Miss Evangeline and turned it on. It knocked her off the bed, and by the time I reached her and tried to shield her she was drenched. He turned out the lights and left. I shouted after him: obscenities, and threats, vile insults to wound his manhood, to goad him into returning; but it was no use. He was wise to that one, too. So I shouted at the skylight; shouted until my voice gave out; hoping to alert someone passing by. But the sound of a man’s cries coming from the police station window is not unusual. Only when it goes suddenly quiet is it really scary.

I read somewhere that an Eskimo who falls through the ice into the water in Greenland has only one chance of survival. He has to run; anywhere will do as long as he runs. If you stand still you freeze to death in under a minute. I didn’t know if it was true; I would have to ask the Queen of Denmark next time she called. I looked at Miss Evangeline shivering and knew she wouldn’t want to run anywhere. At such times you realise how many simple facts about this world there are that you should know but don’t. Is it better to keep your cold wet clothes on or take them off? But the point was academic, I knew she wasn’t going to be taking them off; so I did my best to hold her and keep her warm. She soon lapsed into delirium. She spoke about the horse in the paddock for a while, and gained more lucidity and spoke of the child they took away from her.

‘It was a little girl,’ she said.

‘That’s nice.’

‘I wonder how she’s doing.’ And then: ‘You could find her, couldn’t you? You’re a detective.’ She paused to collect her breath
and control the shivering, as if summoning up the strength for one last important task. ‘Couldn’t you?’

‘I suppose . . .’

‘Find her for me, please, Louie. Tell her that her mum didn’t want to give her away, tell her there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about her. Will you tell her?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t have to be now. Not tomorrow. But one day.’

‘Yes. One day I will find her and tell her.’

‘Thank you.’

It was about 2 a.m. when she died.

The next day Calamity bailed me. It was a bright sunny day: the sky as pellucid and blue as a china doll’s eyes. We stood at the sea railings, leaning against them, hair ruffled by a soft sea breeze, our faces gilded by the watery sunlight. On such days it was a joy to wake up. Sometimes you had to wonder what the gods were playing at.

‘You shouldn’t be worrying about me, you’ve got your own business to run now.’

‘We go back a long way, Louie.’

‘That’s true.’

‘No way I could have left you there. You wouldn’t have left me.’

‘No, but I don’t want you . . . you know, to let things slip. You need to work hard to build a business up. How’s it going?’

‘Oh, pretty slow. Still waiting to hear back from the Pinkertons; can’t really do much until then. Sorry I wasn’t in when you came round.’

‘I haven’t been round.’

‘Oh. Someone told me they’d seen you knocking on my door.’

‘No.’

‘Must have been someone else.’

There was a pause and we were distracted by a man in a sandwich
board walking past. ‘
HOFFMANN IS COMING,’
it said. The End was, it seemed, no longer nigh. The Apocalypse had been postponed. Calamity made a slight, embarrassed shrug, as if the world had gone to pot during my night in jail and she was somehow to blame.