'Did the Dean ever mention this case?'
She sighed at the memory. 'Yeah, he mentioned it. He was always going on about "them", how they were after him because he had something that belonged to them. He once said they would kill him if they caught him. Then one day I got tired of hearing it and I told him to prove it. So he showed me some papers. One of them was official-looking and written in runes. I couldn't understand it, but he could. I said, so what is it? And he said it was an official druid death warrant. And I said, who's it for? And he said, if I told you that, you'd be on it too.'
She reached for the gin bottle again. 'To tell you the truth, it all went in one ear and out the other. He was always full of crap. They all are.'
*
From Judy Juice's I drove down to the harbour and parked by the railings, facing out to sea. The favourite spot for people from the Midlands to eat their chips; people who drive for three hours for this view and never get out of the car to take a closer look. But tonight neither did I. It was raining again and I sat there, the wipers humming, and stared at the light on the end of the jetty, thinking about what Marty's mum had said. About the question the dissident lighthouseman dared to ask, but no one dared answer. About the suspicion that had haunted him every day since that moment when they found his wife preserved in a block of ice, frozen in time like a fly in amber, and Mr Cefnmabws peered into the sarcophagus of ice and saw that expression on her face. Was that terrible frozen snarl on her face simply the agony of her death-mask? The cruel hand of hunger and cold? Or did it hint at a different explanation for her death than the official version? Something else, something altogether darker? Was it a look of horror? The terror of someone who fled down that mountain because she saw something up there no decent person should be forced to witness? The question that Mr Cefnmabws wanted answered was a simple one. They had survived for three months up above the snow-line, alone with the bodies of their dead comrades, stranded in a world where not even the birds could survive. So what did they eat?
Chapter 16
When I opened up shop the next morning, Llunos was standing on the doorstep. He walked straight past me and up the stairs without a word. He threw his hat on the desk and slumped into the client's, chair and said, 'Is the girl here?'
'Calamity? Not yet.'
'What time are you expecting her?'
'Oh I don't know, some time this morning. You know Calamity.'
'Yes,' he said in a voice without warmth or inflexion. 'I know Calamity.'
His tone began to worry me. 'What's up?'
He grimaced. 'They've sprung Custard Pie.'
I jerked back slightly as if he'd held smelling-salts out to me. 'Sprung him, who has?'
He ran tired fingers through his thinning hair. 'I don't know, someone, some people ... I mean, who gives a fuck, he's out!'
'I can't believe it — a Triple-A-category prisoner in a maximum-security dungeon ...'
His face became flushed with anger and he shouted at me in a way I hadn't seen since the old days when we were adversaries.
'Now don't you start on me,' he shouted. 'I'm the one who put him away, remember? How do you think I feel? I'm not the one who's been giving him bird seed.'
'What are you saying?'
'I ought to have your licence for this.'
'You telling me he used the bird seed to escape?'
He picked up his hat and thrashed it down on the tabletop.
'Yes I'm telling you he used the bird seed to escape. The Birdman of Aberystwyth. How stupid can you get? How on earth could you fall for a stupid trick like that?'
'So what did he do, dress up as a seagull and fly away?'
He didn't answer but gave me a cold stare.
I went and fetched some glasses from the draining-board and poured two glasses of cold water.
There was a knock on the door and Llunos shouted, 'Enter.' One of the guards from Custard Pie's prison came in looking pretty much as you'd expect for a man charged with the task of standing guard over a single prisoner who had now escaped. He look hesitantly from Llunos to me and back again.
'Just tell it, officer,' said Llunos.
The guard fidgeted and wrung his hands. 'Well it's not ... I don't know where ... I mean the point ...'
'I said tell it, for Christ's sake!'
'He ... he ...' And then it all came out in a rush. 'He kept asking us to cook his eggs extra runny, said his stomach couldn't take cooked eggs. Every day raw eggs ... I mean, how were we supposed to know?'
Llunos gave him a scowl of thunder.
The guard hopped from foot to foot. He knew he was for the high jump for this.
'Well he was keeping them, wasn't he? You know that horrible stringy bit you get, like an umbilical cord or something, that sticks the yolk to the shell? He was saving them up. And there was the play-acting as well, so we thought he must be mad, like
'What play-acting?' asked Llunos.
'He was rehearsing for a part ... kept learning his lines, Little Red Riding Hood or something, it was.'
Llunos gave me a look of enquiry, wondering whether this meant anything to me, but it didn't.
'Maybe he was just trying to act the nutter. Go on.'
'That's what we thought, but we was wrong, see. It was the birds, you see, I mean we just never noticed. Well you wouldn't, would you?'
'Officer, if you don't get to the end of this story in one minute I'm going to throttle you.'
"Well, there he was like, taming these little sparrows and wrens and chaffinches and things and getting them to perch on his finger and sit on his head — it was really touching, or so we thought. Such gentle creatures, birds. But then we noticed there was something really strange about them. They found their way in all right, but they had terrible difficulty finding their way back out. It was as if they couldn't see the flue any more. And they kept flying into the wall and squawking. But now we know, don't we? All that time he was billing and cooing with them he was gouging their little eyes out and then saving them up in the jar meant for his cod liver oil capsules. Then when he had enough he used the boiled egg strings and the albumen and all the little sparrow eye jelly and made himself a set of those fake gouged eye kits you get from the joke shop. I mean, what a nutter! Anyway, next thing you know we get woken in the middle of the night by this blood-curdling screaming and there's Custard Pie standing with his eyes all bloody and streaming down his cheeks. He screams, "I've done my eyes, I've clone my eyes, get me an ambulance!" That's about it really.'
'That's it!?' I shouted. 'That's it!? You just thought, oh he's done his eyes. We'll call an ambulance. You didn't, like, take a look or anything?' I tried to sound harsh but there was no point. No point whatsoever.
The guard answered, 'I know it sounds daft. But what would you have done at 3 am? Maybe if you was an optician it would have been different but there was us, like, woken up in the middle of the night with this nutter screaming and his whole face gushing sparrow viscera mixed with boiled egg ... So we rang for an ambulance. Anybody would've.'
Llunos turned to me. 'Five minutes after the first ambulance left, a second one turns up. Seems the first was phoney. They found it burned out in Commins Coch this morning.'
*
I asked at the pier and down by the station where the apprentice toughs hang out. And I asked in the burger bars and cafes and amusement arcades. And I asked at the harbour and round Trefechan. But no one had seen Calamity recently. I even rang the school but they just laughed at me, they thought she had left the country. Llunos tried to reassure me, saying she would be fine. Custard Pie couldn't get far because every way out of town was being watched. The railway station, the Cliff Railway, the narrow-gauge railway, the bus station and the harbour. But we both knew Custard Pie was already gone. Probably already with Herod, wherever he was. There was no reason to suppose Calamity was with them, but all the same it didn't smell good to me and when I finally gave up wandering round town asking people if they had seen her, I went back to the office and picked up the keys to the car.