Each pulse across the dark green dial proved that Aberystwyth was still hale and the fathomless oceans that lay before the cradle and beyond the grave were being held in check by the thin brown line of beasts measuring out their metronomic dung-beat.
He ran a gentle hand of greeting down Calamity’s cheeks and said, ‘What’s up?’
‘We’re looking for a ghost called Gethsemane from Abercuawg,’ she answered indiscreetly.
Eeyore’s face darkened. ‘You shouldn’t joke about such things.’
Sospan tut-tutted in rebuke.
Calamity looked from face to face in search of an explanation. ‘We shouldn’t?’
‘Gethsemane Walters,’ said Eeyore. ‘That was a terrible case.’
‘You mean,’ said Calamity, ‘you’ve heard of her?’
‘Happened in 1955. I remember it well because I was courting Louie’s mum at the time, before we moved to Llandudno. The little girl was eight or nine years old, I think. Disappeared when they were building the dam.’
Calamity stared at him, eyes wide and shining. ‘So what happened to her? Did someone do her in?’
Eeyore pulled a face as if such bluntness was inappropriate. He sighed. ‘They convicted a boy for it, young chap called Goldilocks. I was never convinced about it to tell the truth, he was no angel, used to hang out with the mob who worked at the slaughterhouse, but it never felt right to me. He was due to hang that autumn but he escaped. Hasn’t been seen since. They never found Gethsemane’s body.’
‘The girl’s mother was Ffanci Llangollen the singer,’ said Sospan. ‘She was pretty big in the forties. That was her stage name of course.’
‘That’s right,’ said Eeyore. ‘She used to run the village school. After Gethsemane went missing she left town, and set off to look for her. Far as I know, she is still looking – comes back from time to time. But the really strange thing about the case, as I remember, came the following year. On Ffanci Llangollen’s birthday a spiritualist sent her a tape recording she had made at a séance, apparently it was the voice of Gethsemane. Of course, that’s a bit hard to believe but Ffanci swore it was her and the father killed himself on account of it. Said now he knew for sure she was in heaven there was nothing worth living for.’
‘Where’s the tape now?’ I asked.
‘Stolen,’ said Eeyore. ‘They reckon it was the work of snuff philatelists.’
We bought two vanilla cornets and walked along the beach in the direction of the Pier. There was no breeze and the surface of the sea was the colour and lustre of mother-of-pearl; it was so hot the air zinged. The heat was tangible, audible . . . it quivered and made the air tingle as if it had been struck by a giant tuning fork.
‘Boy!’ said Calamity. ‘If we were in a movie we would be walking across the desert and they would be playing that violin sound they always play, the one that goes Eeeeeeeeeeee!’
‘That’s right, and then one of us would look directly at the sun and they’d play an organ chord to show that we were going to die out there and be left as bleached bones with rattlesnakes living in the breast cage.’
‘Rattlesnakes die in the direct sun, they have to keep in the shade. That’s why you have to check your boots before you put them on.’
‘I know that, it’s the movie makers who get it wrong.’
‘It’s best to move about at night. If you want to shelter in a cave during the day you throw a rock in to see if there are any rattlers in there.’
I stopped for a second; it was surprisingly difficult walking across the carpet of pebbles. Calamity paused and looked up at me. Her face was washed with honey by the early morning sun. I smiled.
She had been thirteen when we first met, with spiky hair and jeans and a scruffy parka coat, chocolate-rimmed mouth set into a permanent downturn of sullenness. You don’t need to be much of an amateur psychologist to know that the sullen resentment and aggression is mostly just a defence to hide the confusion which swirls beneath the waters of the teenage heart. It seldom goes deep. Within hours of becoming my junior partner a smile had begun to tug at the corners of her mouth which she struggled to suppress with no more success than a man on a park bench trying to read his newspaper in a gale. Like most kids she takes life at face value. This can be a disadvantage in a crime fighter but this is counter-balanced by the certainty which it gives her. Her heart is not gnawed by doubt. She has the bright unsullied soul of a puppy, and the same propensity to make innocent mistakes. But there is also an air of street wisdom about her, a suggestion of savvy that contrasts with the dizzy confusion bubbling inside her young heart. In many ways she is the daughter I never had. Only once during our years fighting crime together has the fire that dances in her eyes been dimmed. It was when she returned after her ill-fated attempt to set up on her own. We were looking into the murder of a department store Santa at the time, and unusually for us it turned out to be a case with international ramifications. Calamity ended up liaising with the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency in Los Angeles. They made a fuss of her and suggested the possibility of a preferred associative relationship, whatever that is. So Calamity made a go of it on her own. She thought the business from the Pinkertons would see her through. I was scepticaclass="underline" how much business does a West Coast American operation do in Aberystwyth? But, at the same time, I was worried that my objections sprang from the selfish desire to hold on to her. I didn’t want to see her go but I felt at the time I had no right to stand in her way; if you love someone, they say, let them go. It took me a while to understand that this motto, though widely quoted, is not true. If you love someone, you’d be nuts to let them go. The whole venture only lasted a couple of weeks, just long enough for the tumbleweed of fate to pile up outside her door. I don’t think she even had a client. It was painful to watch, but I could see it taught her an important lesson about life, the one that says: in this world, people like the Pinkertons never call twice.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘To see Mooncalf.’
‘Right. We could ask if he does tickets.’
‘What sort of tickets?’
‘Travel ones. To Hughesovka.’
‘Who wants to go to Hughesovka?’
‘We do . . . might. To take a witness statement from the imaginary friend and stuff like that.’
‘What will we use for money?’
‘We’ll use part of what we get for the sock.’
‘Oh of course, I forgot. We’ll use the change left after buying the marble palace.’
Calamity’s brow clouded. ‘You don’t think it’s going to be worth much?’
‘My feeling is, this sock is going to bounce.’
The thought that the Yuri Gagarin sock might not be a source of great wealth silenced Calamity for a while, at least as far as the Pier.
We stopped in its shadow, and looked up. It was little more than a shed on stilts in which two tribes co-existed: the adolescent girls from whose numbers I had extracted Calamity, and the grannies. Invisible to each other, they occupy the same space without ever meeting like wanderers in those Escher engravings where staircases interlock along the planes of incompatible dimensions.
It was cool in the shadow, like the glade of a forest. Cool and damp and reeking of seaweed and guano. This was the real wonder. Not the tawdry scene up above but the bit underneath: the vast intricate criss-crossing web of ironmongery that held the whole thing suspended at the same level as the Prom. People claim the death of British manufacturing came when the last car factory was sold into foreign hands, but the real death was in 1980 when they stopped making Meccano in Liverpool. When the Pier finally falls down, no one will have the know-how to fix the ironwork. Until that time, uncountable starlings roost there and emerge at dusk in twittering skeins, endlessly, like a string of black handkerchiefs drawn from a magician’s pocket.