Last Tango in Aberystwyth (30 page)

‘I would have got the bitch, too! But the fucking thing jammed.'

She let out a tiny gasp, and swayed slightly like a felled tree about to collapse. The gun slipped out of her hand and clattered to the floor. It was then that I noticed in the corner of her mouth a thin dark trickle oozing and bubbling with her breathing. Transfixed by the sight I let my gaze drop and saw the handle of the ‘Come to Sunny Aberystwyth' knife, stuck to her chest, just below where the heart should be. She let out a strange squeak and slid slowly to her knees, slumped against the cooker and stayed there between the cooker and the cupboard, wedged in by her own enormous weight. The blood in the corner of her mouth stopped frothing.

I stepped forward and put my finger under her chin and closed the ugly, gaping mouth. I didn't care so much about her eyes, I couldn't really see them. I could tell now that it was a taffeta gown, and she had a set of pearls and a brooch and various other trashy gewgaws. Only the hat was missing.

There was a rasping sound from the far end of the caravan, the sound of a match on the side of a box. A light hovered pale and gold for a second and then went out, replaced by the steadier flame of a candle. So acute had my senses become now in this near-perfect darkness that I could smell the smoke of the extinguished match. I took out my handkerchief and used it to pick up the gun.

‘It's all right, you won't need it,' a man's voice said. I walked up to him, sitting at the far end where I had sat with Judy Juice. The candle gave off a small halo of flickering gold that
occasionally touched the edge of his face. It was Lester, the security guard.

‘Not much use pointing that at me,' he said. ‘It's jammed.'

‘It's not jammed,' I said. ‘She just didn't know how to shoot.'

‘We both know that's nonsense. But it doesn't matter. I don't intend causing any trouble. After I've smoked my cigarette I'll call the police myself, if you like.'

‘And tell them what?'

‘That I killed that sack of shit down there in the taffeta dress.'

‘You did that for Judy?'

‘I don't expect you to understand. You didn't know her.'

‘Where is she?'

‘She's gone. Where you and the other men in Aberystwyth can't hurt her. Gone far from here to a place where she won't be confronted every day by the terrible reminder of her mother's cruel death.'

‘I thought she was an orphan.'

‘She was. Most of her life. But then she came to Aberystwyth and found a mother. And then saw her gunned down in the street a few months later.'

I gasped in the darkness. ‘Mrs Bligh-Jones was Judy Juice's mother?'

‘You didn't know? Why did you think she came to Aberystwyth in the first place? To live in this stinking caravan? She came to find her mother and I came because I couldn't bear to be away from her. She got me this job, you know. I'd like to think it was because she needed to have me near. But I know it was just pity. All the same, it saved my life.'

‘The Raven never guessed who you were?'

‘I looked him in the eye and he never knew; I even threw him out on his backside.'

‘I thought the baby died on Pumlumon.'

‘That's what Bligh-Jones told Herod. But it wasn't true. No more than it was true that he was the father. It was born in the byre, but it didn't die. She put it on the church steps and it got taken to the orphanage. Judy, my beautiful little Olivia Twist.'

I put the gun on the table. ‘You're really going to tell the police you did it?'

‘Yes.'

‘You'd better wipe Judy's prints off the handle of the knife then.'

‘I already have.'

I walked back up the caravan and out into the night, closing the door as I left. Behind in the darkness lay the corpse of a fat girl in taffeta, and a man calmly smoking a cigarette. A man known in Lampeter as Dean Morgan, head of the Faculty of Undertaking; the man who once boasted that his trade was death.

*

I was too tired to run but time was short. I managed to hail a cab on the main road and told him we had three minutes to get to the railway station. The streets were empty and we made it in two. I jumped out, thrusting too much money into his hand, and ran under the stone portal. The concourse was awash with that sharp white fluorescent light that hurts the eyes so much late at night. The lady was closing the buffet but I could see the train hadn't left. The end of the last coach was butted up against the point where the rails stopped, squeezed against the buffers. The diesel far off in the night, panting like a horse, flexing muscle, aching to leave. Along the platform the long awning stretched out into the darkness, ancient ironwork still embossed with the initials of the Great Western region. The filmy panes of glass smeared with the accumulated generations of GWR soot; and coated with that exquisite essence that condenses in the eaves of railway stations: the distilled longings and sadness of all the travellers
who have parted and departed, kissed and cried and anointed the spot with their hope. Railway stations at night: as romantic as the names of far-off towns on the long-wave radio dial; magical places dislocated in time that belong to night-wanderers; pilgrims and lovers; the lonely, the hopeful and the damned.

I searched madly for a coin to put in the platform-ticket machine, and the guard, seeing my plight and the desperation on my face, smiled and opened the gate. I ran down the platform. Beyond lay the lights of the engine sheds and the signal box, the lakes of dirty oil, the maze of lines, criss-crossing and gleaming like mercury spaghetti … And beyond that in the mauve autumn sky, a tangled necklace of stars.

A lone old woman in a black shawl walked up the platform pulling a small suitcase behind her. I reached her as she took a step up into the final compartment. She stopped and turned, one foot still in Aberystwyth, one foot in another world. The hat and shawl did little to disguise the liquid loveliness of Judy Juice.

She smiled, the faint smile of someone who expects to be disappointed and is at least pleased to be right.

‘I almost made it. One more step and I would have been there. I'm glad it's you, though, and not a real cop. You know cops …'

‘They either lock you up or fuck you up.'

‘Is she dead?'

I nodded.

Judy shrugged sadly. ‘I suppose I should pretend to be sorry, but I'm not.'

‘The Dean says he did it.'

‘He always was a fool.'

The guard walked up the platform slamming the doors, holding a flag at the ready.

I picked up the suitcase and put it inside the train.

‘He must have thought you were worth it.'

‘I said he was a fool.'

‘I can understand him feeling like that.'

She grinned. ‘You're sweet! Where were you when I was getting thrown out of college?'

‘Thanks for warning Calamity.'

‘Did she tell you that?'

‘No, she didn't know who it was.'

‘Forget it, it was nothing.'

‘It was everything.'

She reached up and stroked the side of my face. ‘Nice kid, you take care of her.'

I took the crook of her arm and helped her up and closed the door. She slid the window down and leaned out.

‘You're really going to let me go? I did it, you know. I killed her.'

‘I know. You had to.'

‘Does that make a difference?'

‘She took my gun, took it and wrote a note. That was no heat of the moment thing. Then she went round to your trailer with it. She would have killed you. If it hadn't jammed you would be dead.'

‘You're going to let the Dean take the punishment?'

‘As far as I'm concerned, only three people really know what happened in that caravan, and one of them is dead. I wasn't there.'

‘Will they believe you?'

‘No.'

‘You think they'll find me in Shrewsbury?'

‘Probably. But why stop there? The tracks go much further than that.'

‘Yeah, all the way to China so I've heard.'

The whistle blew and the train clunked as the engine took up the slack.

‘They'll know you let me go – the people at the station have seen you.'

‘And a taxi driver.'

‘What will they do to you?'

I sighed. ‘They could do lots of things. If I'm lucky they will throw every book in the library at me. If that doesn't satisfy them they'll take away my licence. It won't be the first time.'

‘You're doing all this for me? Why?'

I grabbed her hand on the window-edge and squeezed it gently. ‘Let's say it's an old trick I learned from Ben Guggenheim.'

She leaned forward and kissed me and said, ‘He sounds like a nice guy, I'll look out for him.'

The train jolted once more and then pulled out, gliding slowly, and then rapidly picking up speed. I stood there on the empty platform and thought of stories from long ago: of comets appearing in the skies when strange children were born; children with tails or covered in fur. And I thought a similar celestial marvel must have been seen once above Pumlumon, when Mrs Bligh-Jones lay down in a cow byre and a girl stranger than a changeling issued from her loins. No conjuror ever pulled anything more remarkable from a hat than that. The Bad Girl who saved Calamity's life and said it was nothing. But I knew how far from being nothing it was; knew the cruel price she must have paid. Because only one person could have told her the location of the rendezvous with Calamity: a man she despised; who serenaded her mother and then slew her; and who finally must have enjoyed that night the only girl in Aberystwyth they said he could never have.

A fine mist began to form making the lamps along the track fizz like sparklers and in the distance, somewhere around Llanbadarn, the tail-lights of the train finally winked out. From the street outside came the sound of a car door slamming, followed by the
staccato clatter of high heels on concrete. The urgent footfall of someone running for a train that has already gone. I turned and saw a lone girl racing towards me, like someone I once saw running across the dunes at Ynyslas. And then I caught a glimpse of the anguished look on her face and knew she had not come to catch a train but to stop one. ‘Oh Louie!' she gasped, throwing her arms around me. ‘Louie! Please don't go!' I buried my face in the tangled skeins of Myfanwy's hair and drank the scented darkness as the horn sounded from the distant hills and the night train to Shrewsbury raced eastwards, up that bright, silver ladder of hope.

Malcolm Pryce was born in the UK and has lived and worked abroad since the early nineties. He has held down a variety of jobs including BMW assembly-line worker, hotel washer-up, aluminium salesman, deck hand on a yacht travelling through Polynesia, and advertising copywriter. He currently lives in Bangkok.
Last Tango in Aberystwyth
is his second novel. His first,
Aberystwyth Mon Amour
, is also published by Bloomsbury.

 

THE LOUIE KNIGHT SERIES:

 

Aberystwyth Mon Amour
Last Tango in Aberystwyth
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth
Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth

 

by the same author

bloomsbury
pbk
s

www.bloomsbury.com/malcolmpryce

First published in Great Britain 2003

This electronic edition published in September 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

Copyright © 2003 by Malcolm Pryce

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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