We climbed the steps that curved up the buttress of the sea wall, on to the Prom and back into the light.
‘How come Gethsemane’s spirit ended up in Hughesovka?’ Calamity asked.
‘Maybe if you are a spirit you don’t have much control over who you end up possessing.’
‘Yes, it could be like hiring a car, you just have to take what they give you.’
‘That’s if it is her spirit.’
‘What else could it be?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We need to get hold of that séance tape,’ said Calamity, and then added, ‘What do you think the chances are of us solving the case?’
‘I’d say no chance whatsoever.’
‘We can’t really fence the sock unless we make at least a token effort, can we?’
‘No, it wouldn’t be right. Although I have a terrible suspicion that the man-minutes we just used up in our brief conversation have already exceeded the value of the sock.’
‘Yuri Gagarin socks must be worth more than that.’
We walked through town to Chalybeate Street where Mooncalf & Sons had, according to the silver copperplate shop sign, been dealing in antiques since 1834. I wasn’t sure there had even been a street here back then. The Mooncalfs were originally brothers and two of West Wales’s most respected fencers of stolen goods. The shop in Chalybeate Street handled antiques and ‘special requests’. The other branch had operated out of a caravan in Clarach and dealt with stolen religious icons. This branch had stopped trading a while back when mobster Frankie Mephisto had incinerated the caravan with one Mooncalf brother still in it.
Mooncalf was a small man, and the counter behind which he stood reached up to his chest. He was amiable with a wizened, sharply pointed look common to men in fairy tales who are prematurely aged by evil witches, but which can also arise from spending too many hours late at night scheming. In former times he would have made a living operating a string of child pickpockets, or chimney sweeps whom he would have discouraged from dawdling on the job by lighting a fire in the grate while they were halfway up the chimney.
He threw his arms out in delighted greeting. ‘Mr Knight and Calamity! What a lovely surprise. Welcome to Mooncalf & Sons.’
‘Since 1834, eh?’ I answered.
‘The brand has been around since then, Mr Knight. Mooncalf & Sons is the soul, the actual premises are merely the physical body that houses it.’
‘How’s business?’
‘Slow, but the long-term prospects seem assured.’
‘I suppose there is always a market for stolen goods.’
Mooncalf winced. ‘Stolen goods! Who deals in stolen goods? If that is what you have in mind you would appear to have come to the wrong shop. Mooncalf & Sons is a respectable business with a spotless reputation.’
‘Not according to the police.’
‘Mr Knight, you walk into my shop and make these . . . these insinuations. You remind me, if I may be permitted an indelicate turn of phrase, of a man who engages the services of a prostitute for the night and spends the whole time berating her for the shameful way she makes her living.’
‘Do you do tickets?’ said Calamity.
He paused and reassumed the look of Buddhist serenity with which he had originally greeted us. ‘What sort of tickets?’
‘Travel ones. We need to go to Hughesovka.’
‘No, we don’t,’ I said.
‘We might do.’
‘It’s really not likely.’
‘Hughesovka!’ exclaimed Mooncalf as if it were the name of a favourite son. ‘What a noble goal! And what a wise choice in coming here to make your travel arrangements.’
‘Is it expensive?’ asked Calamity.
‘Ordinarily the cost of a ticket – like that of a virtuous woman – is priced above rubies, since it is impossible to get there by conventional means. Hughesovka is, as you know, a closed city along with Gorki and numerous others.’
‘What’s a closed city?’ said Calamity.
‘One that is closed to Western tourists. As such you will find no travel agent in town will be able to help you, but since Mooncalf & Sons is no ordinary travel agent, you are in luck. When would you like to go?’
‘We’re just enquiring at the moment,’ said Calamity. ‘How much does it cost?’
‘That depends on a number of factors. Whether you are reasonably flexible about dates and routes, and whether you would like to delegate to me the delicate business of travel visas and aliases. This is highly recommended.’
‘What are the aliases?’ asked Calamity.
‘Normally you need two, I always recommend a belt-and-braces approach since we are talking about quite a high cost of failure here, including potential loss of liberty for a considerable length of time and possibly torture using psychotropic drugs. Thus I would urge you to go for two aliases. The first is to get in and the second is a form of insurance should the first alias cause you to run into difficulties – say your alias describes you as a spinning-wheel mechanic and by some terrible fluke of fate you are called on while you are there to repair a wheel, and your ignorance is thus laid bare—’
‘Or you go as an obstetrician and a lady goes into labour at the back of the number 15 tram,’ I said.
‘An all too frequent occurrence,’ said Mooncalf. ‘Never go as an obstetrician. Fortunately, Mooncalf & Sons protects its clients against such cruel exigencies of fate by virtue of our unique, patent-pending, double-ID indemnity procedure. Once the first alias becomes corrupted, you can still invoke, as a form of reserve parachute, the second and return safe and sound, albeit a touch chastened by experience, to the comforting embrace of the Aberystwyth bosom. I’ll arrange for you both to have a day on the road with Meici Jones.’
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘He’s the spinning-wheel salesman. A great and trusted associate of the firm Mooncalf & Sons. It will be a great help with your alias: spinning-wheel salesman is a superb disguise.’
‘Wow!’ said Calamity. ‘How much will all this cost?’
‘I’ll need to make a few enquiries, so give me a few days to put a proposal together. You might need to join the Communist Party.’
‘We also need you to put us in touch with some snuff philatelists,’ I said.
Mooncalf laughed unconvincingly. ‘There’s no such thing.’
‘Yes, we know, but just pretend there is. We have a rich client interested in buying the séance tape sent to Ffanci Llangollen in 1956.’
Mooncalf removed his glasses and polished them with the tail of his shirt. ‘I’ll see what I can do, very difficult, very difficult.’
I put the sock down on the counter. ‘And we’d like to talk to you about this.’
Mooncalf put on a neutral expression, the sort a man assumes in order not to give too much away at the start of a negotiation. Or maybe he just thought it was a sock.
‘It’s a sock,’ said Calamity. ‘It was worn by Yuri Gagarin.’
Mooncalf made a small ‘ah’ sound indicating the arousal of his professional interest. He pulled a jeweller’s loupe from under the counter and screwed it into his eye socket. He held the sock up and examined it.
‘We were hoping it was worth something,’ said Calamity.
I spluttered, ‘Worth something! Of course it’s worth something, it’s one of the most famous socks in the world. It’s worth . . . lots.’