‘Wrongly expropriated, in fact,’ added Othniel.
‘You saying he’s not a Christian?’
‘No, we’re not saying that exactly. The name Santa Claus is derived from St Niklaus of Myra, in Asia Minor, a fourth-century Christian bishop. Now we got nothing against this chap—’
‘He once resuscitated three girls who’d been murdered and pickled in brine,’ said Meic.
‘Of course,’ added Othniel, ‘if he’d resuscitated some girls we’d pickled in brine we wouldn’t be very accommodating about that.’
‘When we pickle someone we expect them to stay pickled.’
‘Some people would call us old-fashioned.’
‘Although not to our faces.’
‘No, not to our faces.’
‘Tell me about the taxonomic problem.’
‘Santa Claus is an upstart. The real Father Christmas is the pagan god Odin who brought presents at the time of the festival of Yule, which celebrated the winter solstice, the death of the old year. The early Christians put their festival on the same date so that everyone could swap over without giving up their favourite rites.’
‘Which we don’t think is very fair on Odin.’
‘I can see why that would annoy you. Apart from wanting the books for your library, why are you telling me?’
‘So we don’t have to kill you, too.’
‘Do you have to kill me?’
‘If you stuck your big hooter in places where it had no business being inserted, and found some evidence that might be embarrassing to us in this connection, we would have to kill you, wouldn’t we?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Oh, believe us, we would.’
‘Would that be such a problem for you?’
‘It would be an unnecessary inconvenience.’
They stood up and left, adding, ‘And this is the season of goodwill.’
I think it was the second Thursday before Christmas when the woman claiming to be the Queen of Denmark called about the ad. It was one of those melancholy winter afternoons; the sky had that flat translucent greyness which filters through the window of the office like the glow you get from an old TV tube after it has been switched off. The sort of translucence that used to puzzle me when I was a kid and still had the capacity to stare in wonder at the sky. The sort of sky that communicates in some arcane way that snow is on the way. There is only one way to describe a winter sky like that. Plangent.
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.