‘Yeah, that’s one valuable sock,’ said Calamity.
It was clear to all that in the manner of driving a hard bargain we were both newborn babes; in the souk they would be fighting over the chance to sell us a used camel. Mooncalf sucked air between his teeth to suggest the prospects were not good. ‘It seems to be genuine, no doubt about that, the weave of the asbestos is definitely Soviet and the style of sock was popular in the artistic and scientific communities of Moscow during the late fifties. The problem is, the market for Yuri Gagarin socks is very slow at the moment.’
He lowered the sock from his eye and a photo fell out. It was the picture Uncle Vanya had left with us. Mooncalf picked it up. ‘What’s holding the dog up?’
‘An imaginary friend,’ said Calamity.
Mooncalf nodded as if to indicate this was a reasonable hypothesis, although one among many. ‘Might be wires,’ he added. He held the photo up to his loupe. ‘Difficult to say without the negatives. It looks like one of those schools for remote viewing and associated paranormal investigation, which lends credence to your levitation claim. But it could be an ectoplasmic projection.’ He laid the photo down on the counter. ‘Not really my line.’
‘We came about the sock,’ I said. ‘We’d like to fence it.’
Mooncalf contorted his features into a look of fake shock. ‘Fence? We don’t deal in stolen goods here, Mr Knight, and I would thank you to remember it.’
‘What do you call it then?’
‘Facilitation. We help the police. We help them by bypassing them.’
‘OK, if we decided we wanted to be of assistance to the police in the way you describe, how does it work?’
‘I would be able to let you have a modest, non-refundable deposit on the sock while I made enquiries about the best way to return it.’ He pulled open a drawer and removed a thick paper-bound catalogue; it looked like the sort stamp collectors use as a reference. It had Cyrillic script on the front and assorted Cold War memorabilia, such as medals, hammer and sickle lapel pins, stamps, currency. He flicked through the pages and, finding the one he was looking for, scanned it with an unhappy mien, intended to lower our expectations of his first offer. Then he stopped and his eyebrows shot up, he peered closer at the page in the time-honoured manner of someone doubting the evidence of his senses. He stood transfixed for a second before slamming the book back in the drawer, and turning the key. ‘As I thought, the market is very slow. I’ll give you five hundred in cash.’
And he did.
Chapter 3
I arrived at the office later and found Calamity leafing through a pile of press cuttings that she had retrieved from the Cambrian News clipping archive. There was a cardboard box full of items relating to the case of the missing girl, dutifully collated over the years and filed away without much expectation that anyone would ever want them. She greeted my arrival with the pleasure of one who has a story to share and has been waiting for the audience to turn up. I leafed through the cuttings as she ran through the background to the case.
‘Gethsemane spent the morning in town with her auntie, Mrs Mochdre, buying a present for her mother’s birthday the following week. They went to the Pier amusement arcade as a treat, then returned to Abercuawg around lunchtime. Gethsemane went out to play with the neighbour’s dog, Bingo. The dog came back on its own later that afternoon. They used him as a sort of bloodhound, sent him off to search for her with the whole village following. They lost his trail and the dog was never seen again.’ She pulled a photo out of the box and slid it across the table. ‘This is Bingo, sired by the famous Clip—’
She broke off and gave me a look of guilty complicity. Clip had featured in one of our previous cases. He could now be found stuffed with sawdust sitting in a glass case in the museum on Terrace Road, one ear permanently cocked for the whistle of the Great Shepherd in the Sky. In his heyday he had been a star of the newsreels from the war in Patagonia in 1961, the Welsh Lassie. In moments like this, when a ghost from our past resurfaced, we struggled to recall whether the case had turned out well or not. There was one key criterion for deciding: did the client die? But we never actually met the client in the Clip case; she was, or claimed to be, the Queen of Denmark and our business was conducted over the phone. But since her head is still on the postage stamps we take it as a positive sign. And none of the postal orders she sent bounced. Calamity, remembering this vital fact, continued.
‘Goldilocks was a local hoodlum attached to the Slaughterhouse Mob – a bunch of tearaways who worked at the slaughterhouse and hung out at the Pier ballroom. They were into the usual small-time stuff: robbery, extortion, violence. The evening after Gethsemane disappeared someone saw Goldilocks burying something in his garden, it turned out to be one of her shoes. He couldn’t account for it and wouldn’t say where he had been on the day in question. He was convicted of her murder and escaped from Aberystwyth gaol the following November.’ She slid another photo across the desk. ‘This is him.’
He had an angelic face with tight blond curls. He didn’t smile and didn’t look like he understood the purpose of the expression. His eyes were dead, like those of a mackerel in the fishmonger’s. They were the eyes of a man whose heart is cold as a fireless grate, one who never takes pleasure or mirth from his passage through this world and is irritated and bewildered by those who do. You can tell a lot about the soul from a photograph. Or at least you think you can. Maybe I was just projecting into the image what I already knew. If I had been told this was a photo of a boy who had rescued a baby from a burning building I might have been touched by his gentle aspect and said he looked a little angel.
‘The only member of the Slaughterhouse Mob still alive is the chief typographer down at the rock foundry. We can go and see him.’ Calamity took out another cutting. ‘This is the only photo the newspaper could find of Gethsemane.’
It was a school nativity play: shepherds in dressing gowns and tea towels on their heads; a Roman centurion; a crib; Mary and Joseph; angels.
‘Gethsemane is the robin redbreast.’
She had bird’s feet made out of rope, a dark cloak and a cardboard beak. In her eyes there was a certain wistful awareness: staring out across the years from the grey fog of a tattered old photo, it betokened the early understanding of what life held in store for a misfit doomed to wear a cardboard beak when others among her peers were centurions or angels.
‘The guy playing Joseph is Rwpert Valentino, the star of the TV soap North Road. We can check him out, he hangs out every night after the show at the railway station buffet.’
‘How did you find that out?’
‘It’s in the scandal pages in the Cambrian News. He’s got a girl who works there.’
‘OK, that’s good stuff. Anything else?’
Calamity slapped the back of her hand against one of the news reports for emphasis. ‘This lady, Mrs Mochdre, interests me. Gethsemane’s aunt, the one who took her to the Pier that morning. Last one to see her alive, that’s always a red flag.’
‘Not always.’
Calamity scowled at me and carried on. ‘She’s married to the Witchfinder, keeps pigs, used to be pretty big in the ABLL.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The Anti-Bearded-Lady League.’
I blinked. It seemed like an appropriate reaction.
‘A lot of the champs on the Pro-Bearded-Lady circuit from the forties and fifties used to come from the area around Abercuawg,’ Calamity explained. ‘Mrs Mochdre used to campaign against it on grounds of idolatry or something. I thought we could talk to a few.’