Last Tango in Aberystwyth

'Louie, you know I have to go, we're on a case.'

'There's no point going anyway.'

'No point?'

'Of course not. You think he's going to tell you something that will help us?'

'No point?'

'Not even a microscopic one.'

'Well you're a crap detective then,' she said, eyes watering with resentment and confusion.

My eyes widened in surprise. 'What's that all about?'

'Well, you went to see him, didn't you? Why did you waste your time if there was no point?'

'I ... er ... It was only after I went that I realised that there was no point.'

She blew a raspberry.

'How did you find out anyway?'

'I'm a detective.'

I sighed and Calamity stood up. 'I'm going.'

'I forbid you!' I said as she left, knowing full well that nothing I said would make any difference. But I said it all the same. 'I forbid you.' It was an old trick I'd learned from King Canute.

I sat there staring at my tea for a while and then ran out and down Pier Street towards the sea. I could see Calamity just about to turn left on to the Prom, so I turned into King Street behind the old college and cut through the Crazy Golf. From there I walked across the road and turned towards the pier. A few steps and she almost bumped into me. She turned and started to walk away but I caught her arm and pulled her over to the railings. She stood there not struggling but keeping her gaze stolidly averted, finding something improbably fascinating in the side of the pier.

Neither of us spoke and finally she said, 'What do you want?'

'I just want to tell you to be careful.'

She turned and looked at me, her eyes wet and gleaming. 'So I can go then?'

'What's the point of stopping you, you were going to go anyway, weren't you?'

'No, I wasn't. You forbade me.'

I put my arm over her shoulder, 'Just be careful and keep away from the bars, and whatever you do, don't believe a word he says. OK?'

She nodded.

*

Meirion was enjoying his usual early-evening aperitif at the Rock Cafe, his big belly wedged in between the immovable plastic seat and the edge of the table. Spread out before him a gazette of English and Welsh seaside towns preserved in pink sugar: Blackpool, Llandudno, Tenby, Brighton. I sat down and ordered the aniseed one with black and white stripes.

He had just finished a piece for the morning edition on the death of Mr Marmalade. It was, he said, a typical Meirion piece — hard-hitting, authoritative, tough but fair, and like all Meirion's hard-hitting, authoritative, tough and fair pieces it would never be published for fear of upsetting all the bigshots who owned the town. Still, he had to write them if he wanted to collect his salary.

He told me what he had managed to dig up on the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. 'I spoke to the chap who covered the story,' he began. 'It seems to have been some advanced neuroscientific research conducted by the military at the sanatorium. They chose that place because folk were already scared of it so they would keep away. Then something went badly wrong and the project was wound up in a hurry. It's all officially denied, of course.'

'So where does this Philanthropist fit in, the one who bought the place?'

'Dr Faustus? He was in charge. No one knows much about him, he's supposed to be some sort of experimental neuroscientist who had some pretty far-out theories about false memory syndrome. Apparently he was thrown out of the scientific establishment for being too crazy. After the thing was wound up the folks living out there started seeing things. Well a "thing" actually. A monster they said, or a ghost or something, living in the woods. The most celebrated case was a family out at Pontrhydygroes who saw something while on a picnic. They were making a home-movie. Didn't notice anything at the time but when the film came back they saw something in the trees behind them, something moving. That's what they say, anyway. The whole family disappeared not long after that. Their breakfast half-eaten on the table, the tea still warm in the pot. Never seen again. No sign of the film either. A lot of people who made statements to the police were later by questioned by a strange otherworldly man, dressed in medieval dress. He sounds a bit like this chap you mentioned in the Peacocks' coat. They didn't say what he wanted but after that they all withdrew their statements.' 'So there's a time-traveller walking around in the woods.' Meirion tore off a piece of bread to scrape up the last bits of rock from his plate. 'That's what they say. Of course, I prefer rational explanations myself. It may be possible that the military have been experimenting with some sort of time-travel device, and now there's a sixteenth-century Jew haunting the woods of Ysbyty Ystwyth; but if you ask me, it is far more likely to be a prowler wearing one of those coats they sell in Peacocks.'

The Heritage Folk Museum was housed in an old whalebone godown overlooking the harbour. In a series of rooms various scenes from seventeenth- or nineteenth-century rural life were acted out by the sort of people who couldn't hold down the type of jobs the twentieth century had to offer. Sitting at a spinning-wheel, lying on a bed pretending to die in childbirth, or with a face covered in fake smallpox weals ... It wasn't very demanding so long as you didn't have to say anything.

In the entrance hall there was an artist in dungarees putting the finishing touches to a mural of Mrs Bligh-Jones. It was done in that heroic style you get in Warsaw Pact town halls, where the worker holds aloft a hammer and leads forward the proletariat to a Socialist promised land. The artist had chosen to depict the moment just after the fateful decision to abandon the van: Mrs Bligh-Jones, Mrs Gorseinon, Mrs Tolpuddle and Mrs Montgomery strung out against the backdrop of the mountain; roped together at the waist, and wearing bowling shoes instead of crampons. I smiled politely at the artist but, to be honest, it was pretty crap.

Someone touched my arm lightly and I looked round. It was Marty's mum.

'Hello, Louie. How are you? Haven't seen you for so long.'

'I know, I've been meaning to visit, but ...'

She squeezed my arm. 'It's O K. I understand how busy you must be.'

We stood side by side and looked at the picture and when the artist went out for a cigarette Marty's mum glared at her. 'I would never say anything but, if you ask me, it's wrong. It didn't ought to be allowed.'

'What didn't?'

'What they've done to Mrs Cefnmabws! She's not there.'

She nodded indignantly at the mural. She was right, there should have been five figures in the landscape, not four.

'I know she lost her bottle,' Marty's mum continued, 'and ran off raving into the blizzard, but that didn't happen until later, did it? When they left the van she was still in charge. Mrs Bligh-Jones should be at the back, not the front.'

'Maybe it's something to do with perspective or something.'

'Perspective my foot! They've airbrushed her out of history, that's what they've done. That Mrs Bligh-Jones is such a busybody!'

I took her for a cup of tea and in the cafe she told me what brought her to the museum.

'There's been some fresh evidence about Marty.'

I turned and looked more closely at her. 'Fresh in what way?'

'They've released some of the official papers from the inquiry. The statute of limitations is up, isn't it? I finally found out the answer to a mystery that has haunted me ever since that morning he left for school and never came back.' She leaned closer and lowered her voice. 'That night before the cross-country run, he was out in the frosty woods collecting kindling for his granny. Away for hours he was. When he got back home he was half-starved with cold and his new coat was torn in half. I wasn't half angry with him, the perisher, but he wouldn't say how he did it. But now I know, don't I?'

'So what was it?'

'Apparently there was this piece of evidence at the inquiry that they didn't release for fear of embarrassing the Church. It was the testimony of a friar — one of them mendicant ones — and he had been lost in the woods that same night. Blue with cold he was, because he didn't have a proper coat. Well, they're not supposed to, are they? It's all part of the mortification. It seems when Marty saw him he tore his own coat in two and gave half to the friar.'