Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (4 page)

‘Who is Hoffmann?’

‘Indeed! Who is he? How many men over the years have uttered that deceptively simple phrase? How many times have those syllables quivered on the lips of a dying man? Who is Hoffmann? I myself have sought the answer to this riddle. In Moscow, in Warsaw, in Buenos Aires, in Jerusalem, in Zurich and London and Washington; in Peking and Kamchatka, in Berlin and Ljubljana. . . Who is he? An enigma for sure. A myth perhaps. A riddle, yes. Perhaps the greatest spy of the late twentieth century. Maybe the greatest who ever lived.’

He paused and stared up the Prom towards the Pier, as if the answer to this the deepest of mysteries, the riddle of Hoffmann’s identity, could be found up there somewhere amid the rusting ironwork that was a home to a thousand seagulls and pigeons.

‘I see that we will make no more progress today. Perhaps after another innocent person has been killed you will begin to appreciate the gravity of this situation. And it is indeed most grave. You see, Mr Knight, you and I and your little girl are standing before a unique fissure in the topography of the epoch. Hoffmann has decided to come in from the cold.’

THE OLD JEW wandered off in the direction of the kids’ paddling pool and sat down on a bench. He stared out to sea but it was clear he was still observing us. Two workmen in overalls were pasting posters to boards attached to the sea railings. Two posters that represented in many ways the twin poles of love and terror to be found in the collective Aberystwyth heart.

One advertised a new movie,
Bark of the Covenant
, featuring Clip the Sheepdog. Clip had been the canine hero of the war in Patagonia at the end of the ’50s; a beloved star of the
What the Butler Saw
newsreels, the Welsh Lassie. After the end of that insane conflict the dog had been stuffed and now sat obediently in a glass case in the museum on Terrace Road, his muzzle permanently fixed in the bright smile that they said was a high-water mark of the taxidermist’s art. The movie was a re-release, the director’s cut. The other poster bore a different sort of smile, the grin of a man less beloved than Clip: it was the face of my old games teacher, Herod Jenkins. The bogey man who haunted all our nightmares. Years ago in school I had watched him send my consumptive schoolmate Marty off on a cross-country run into a blizzard from which he never returned. In later years Herod had tried to blow up the dam and drown our town. His face, too, was famous for its smile, or rather the horizontal crease across his face that he called a smile.

Calamity and I watched the two men dip their brooms in watery wallpaper paste and sweep them rhythmically across the paper. The long, slow arcs, like windscreen wipers, smoothing out the
horizontal crease in the paper, but doing nothing for the one in Herod Jenkins’s face. According to the poster Herod Jenkins had found work at the circus: ‘Samson Agonistes, half man, half bear!’ It was a role created bespoke by the tailors of fate. Circus strongman, the last refuge for a renegade games teacher who has run out of options. The circus was parked about twenty miles outside town, at Ponterwyd. They didn’t dare cross the county line and come any closer to town because Herod was a wanted man in Aberystwyth. Although wanted only in the technical legal sense. I shivered.

‘What do you reckon?’ said Calamity.

I put a fatherly arm across her shoulders. ‘If he was telling the truth, and he really doesn’t know what the item you found is, he doesn’t know it’s a hat-check receipt, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So there’s no reason why we should tell him. We’ll come back and pick it up another time.’

‘I’m aching to know what it is.’

‘Me too, but sometimes you just have to be patient about these things.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We’ll go to the Kamp and then talk to Father Christmas’s girlfriend.’

We drove out to Borth with heavy hearts. We hated going to Kousin Kevin’s Kamp; we always got thrown out. It was only a matter of how far we got inside the perimeter gate before it happened.

After the turning at Rhydypennau we bade farewell to the sun. The world was grey. It was just one of those accidents of geography. All the rocks found along this coast are grey, buff, beige or dirty mauve. In other parts of the world the hills are quarried for bright, shining Carrara marble. Just a little accident of geography,
that’s all, but it is surprising how much it can affect the contents of the human heart. Try as you may, you can’t imagine people lolling about in togas and sandals, drinking wine, in buildings made of slate. Just as it’s hard to imagine them beneath the bright hills of Liguria, in their halls of white marble, sitting in crow-black rags, stirring cauldrons and tending spinning wheels like they do in Talybont.

We drove in through the perimeter fence and past the guard house, under a bleak wrought-iron sign, and on to the car park. The snow that had fallen a few days ago still remained here on the north-facing slope. Against the whiteness the buildings looked darker and more sombre, a world of two tones which reminded of those arty photography exhibitions they sometimes held up at the Arts Centre on campus. The sort of blurred, out-of-focus snaps that normal people threw away but that won prizes if you exhibited them.

‘You can get rickets if you stay at this place too long,’ said Calamity.

‘How do you know?’

‘I read about it in the paper. They recommend you to eat mackerel while you’re here because it’s high in vitamin D.’

I reversed into a parking space and butted the rear of the Wolseley Hornet up against a wire-netting fence on which was stapled a metal sign showing an Alsatian dog in silhouette attached to a leash held by a clown.

‘Judging by past experience we won’t be here more than ten minutes so you should be OK. If you start feeling dizzy, let me know.’

I was wrong. We were there less than six minutes.

Any time after mid-October was low season at the Kamp and it would get lower and lower until about late March. The only blip was around New Year when a few people turned up who had won weekends away in the works’ raffle. But it was too early for that, and as we wandered through the lines of dark brooding
barracks we saw almost no one except the odd Klown slouched in a doorway, and up by the perimeter a party with buckets and spades digging in the kitchen garden. We headed straight down the rows and followed the smell of frying to the refectory.

It was warm and stuffy inside and reeked of fried bacon and tea that had been stewing in a big silver urn since the days of Noah. A few families sat eating from meal trays at long trestle tables. Nearer the door a man sat alone, scooping soup from a wooden bowl. We sat at his table.

‘Mind if we join you?’

He paused and looked and said nothing.

‘Great place isn’t it?’

His eyes narrowed but he kept on eating as if there was a time limit and he was up against it. It was probably true.

‘You been here long?’ I beamed at him.

He put the spoon down and said, ‘Why you asking? I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Just being friendly.’

‘We were looking for the harp player,’ said Calamity.

‘The one in the stovepipe hat,’ I added. As if there were any other type.

The man narrowed his eyes and regarded us for a second; then, having decided it was safe to divulge this piece of information, said: ‘She doesn’t come on till the evening.’

We feigned disappointment.

‘Did you know she was seeing the Father Christmas who got whacked?’ said Calamity.

The man choked on his gruel. He picked up his bowl and spoon and scurried over to one of the Klowns. He spoke to him, turning and pointing to us as he did. The Klown took out a notebook, wrote something down, and then left the room. We decided to leave, too.

‘What are we going to say to the stovepipe hat girl when we find her,’ said Calamity.

‘Well, we could always try the subtle approach you just used there; that seemed to work quite well.’

‘Yes, I goofed. We need to be more oblique.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘The Pinkertons wouldn’t have done it like that.’

‘What would they have done?’

‘Psychology. That’s what they’d have used.’

‘I’m all for that.’

‘If we go straight in and ask the party about her relationship with the DOA, she’ll clam up, right? We have to find a way to make her drop her guard. We achieve that objective by enlisting her sympathy.’

‘How do we do that? Say our dog’s got a thorn in its paw?’

‘No, but you could pretend to be sick and we could knock on the door.’

‘I’ve got a better idea. You pretend to be sick and we knock on the door.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because they will feel more sorry for you, especially as you will look so sweet with those ribbons in your hair.’

‘What ribbons?’

‘The ones we will buy on the way.’

‘I’m not wearing ribbons.’

‘Think of it as going undercover.’

We were interrupted by the sound of an explosion somewhere towards the car park. Calamity and I exchanged glances and without needing to discuss it turned our steps in that direction.

A man wearing chef’s whites rushed out of the kitchen and came up to us. ‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘No, we’re just going over to the car.’

‘Your car?’

‘Yes, we heard something over there, sounded like a crash.’

‘Wouldn’t you prefer to go to the bus stop? There’s one due any minute.’

‘Bus stop?’

‘It’s a wonderful service, sir, truly wonderful. You really shouldn’t listen to those idiots who disparage it. Really you shouldn’t.’ He looked at me with a beseeching expression and watery eyes filled with imploring anguish. His voice was thin and had the whine that a regularly beaten dog gets. ‘Please, sir, it really is a wonderful bus.’ He grabbed my sleeve. ‘I wish I had time to take it myself.’

‘But we’ve got a car, we want to go to our car.’

His face fell and a look of utter hopelessness swept across it. ‘Your car, yes, of course you do. And why not? If I had a car, I’d want to go to it too. It would be crazy to expect anything else.’ He let go of my sleeve with the air of a man whose last hope of salvation has disappeared. ‘It was foolish of me. Absurdly foolish.’

‘I’m sorry but we really must be going.’

‘You can come, too, if you like,’ said Calamity.

The man struggled with himself in the grip of his anguish. He grabbed his wrist and twisted it. ‘But what are you going to do when you get to your car?’

‘Drive home, I suppose.’

‘But that’s a crazy plan . . .’

A man in a tuxedo and black bow tie appeared from around a corner and joined us. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘He wants to drive home,’ said the chef.

The man in the tuxedo grinned with joy. ‘My word, sir, my word! A sportsman, a true sportsman.’

‘We were going to drive to Talybont.’

‘I see, sir, you are an optimist. A man who, if I may be permitted the observation, sees always the doughnut and never the hole.’ He turned to the chef. ‘Don’t you agree, Johnny?’

‘Absolutely Mr Fortnightly. You have to admire it, you really do.’

The man who was Mr Fortnightly allowed a look of wan sadness
to transform his face. It was acting, but it was good acting. ‘Ah, but alas, sir, I suspect even you would be rather less sanguine if you were to see the condition of your car now.’

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘I fear a rock may have hit the fuel tank.’

‘Is someone throwing rocks?’

‘Rocks are a common feature of the sea shore.’

‘But our car isn’t on the sea shore . . . is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how did it get there?

‘Plummeted.’

How?’

‘I’m afraid there you have me, sir. You will have to take the matter up with Mr Newton.’

‘Where can I find him?’

‘He’s in Westminster Abbey. Unless you are a modernist, in which case you would probably have more sympathy for the view of Mr Einstein . . .’

‘You’re referring to Sir Isaac Newton, aren’t you?

‘Indeed, sir. Your car has been gripped by the mysterious force of gravity and fallen off the cliff. In doing so, it has sustained what both the aforementioned physicists would describe as a massive increase in entropy, to a degree that would severely prejudice your plan of driving it home.’

We reached the car park and found, to our relief, that our car was still there. But the one next to it was being winched up from the beach. The two men exchanged gleeful glances and then burst out laughing. The man in the tuxedo handed me a card on which was written, ‘Kongratulations! You’ve just had your leg pulled by Johnny Sarkastik and his assistant, Mr Fortnightly.’ He grabbed my hand and shook it, saying: ‘Well done, sir, what a sport!’ Then he lowered his voice and added, ‘You had a lucky fucking escape this time, didn’t you, snooper.’

We interpreted this as an invitation to leave and drove to
Talybont. On the way we stopped a district nurse who pointed out the cottage where the harpist lived. It was set away from the road at the end of a small lane, built from slabs of grey stone under a mauve roof of slate gleaming in the watery air. Dank weeds and grasses grew up against the walls and gave off a strong vapour of rottenness; a horse stamped in a stable nearby.