Last Tango in Aberystwyth (3 page)

‘Are you hoping to write for the parish magazine?'

‘Oh no! Not that sort of media. I mean I'm studying to be a medium.'

I said, ‘Ah.' And then after I'd thought some more, added, ‘I didn't know you could do that.'

Gretel smiled and looked down at her clogs. ‘You don't believe, I can tell.'

‘I didn't say that, I've got an open mind.'

Morgana nudged her friend. ‘Make some ectoplasm, that'll shut him up.'

There was another peal of giggles and this time they both laughed so much the wooden beads clacked.

‘Oh I couldn't!' squealed Gretel. ‘Not after what happened the last time.'

The barman threw a suspicious look in our direction as if he'd read our thoughts and didn't need any reminding about the last time. Gretel added, ‘Besides, it takes me half an hour just to get an eggcupful!'

‘I expect a little goes a long way,' I said helpfully. ‘Tell me about the Dean.'

Gretel picked up her beads, fingered them for inspiration and, prompted by subtle but insistent nudges from Morgana, gave me the background. He'd been at the college for many years and in all that time hadn't said boo to a goose. There wasn't any record of him ever having said anything to a goose, in fact, but if he had you could be sure it would have been more polite than boo. Then
one day, out of the blue, he astonished everyone by announcing his intention to go away for a few days.

This revelation led to looks of disbelief being exchanged between the two girls. I was about to say it didn't seem like such a big deal when we were interrupted by raised voices at the next table.

A young man put down his glass sharply. ‘Oh really, Jeremy, next you'll be telling me, like, Osiris never happened or something!'

‘I'm just saying –'

‘Perfumed unguents, wax, spices … you know all that goo they make balm out of. Alexander the Great preserved in honey …'

‘Oh sure, spare me the O level stuff please! All I'm saying is wrapping in cloth and burying in dry sand was accidental and wasn't a chief mortuary concern …'

‘And I suppose the settlements at Abu Qir don't exist either?'

‘Sssh, you two, keep it down!' said some of the other students at the table. ‘You'll disturb the other drinkers.'

There was a murmur of approval round the table. ‘Yeah, it's getting late anyway, we'd better go back and study.' They began to finish off their drinks.

We turned back to our own conversation.

‘Maybe the Dean just felt like a holiday,' said Calamity.

Gretel blinked in disbelief. ‘But Dean Morgan would never do anything as frivolous as that! And besides, he didn't say he was going to Aberystwyth, that's the funny part. It was Gwladys Parry the cleaner who saw him just by coincidence on the Prom, coming out of the Excelsior Hotel. Well, we couldn't believe it. The Dean in Aberystwyth! I rang the Excelsior Hotel straightaway and they said he had already checked out. Then a few days after that he rang me from that number I gave you –'

‘The speakeasy?'

‘Yes. But when I called him back it was really strange, I could hear the sounds of … well … a party or something in the
background and the man who answered said …' She half-closed her eyes as she tried to remember the exact formulation, ‘“It is the club policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of any patrons on the premises.” But I knew it must have been a wrong number because the Dean would never go to a party.'

‘It's unheard of,' said Morgana.

‘What did he call you about?'

‘Oh, he said to cancel his milk and I was to take his cat and the litter of kittens she'd just had and drown them.'

I took out the photo. It was just a stiffly posed shot of a priest in a dog-collar, taken for some yearbook or catalogue and obviously cut out of one.

‘That's the best I could find.'

‘Maybe he just wanted to go and play bingo or something,' suggested Calamity.

‘But why would he want to do that?'

‘For some light relief. Must be pretty spooky looking at stiffs every day.'

Gretel gave an understanding sigh. ‘Yes, I know what you think – we must be really boring because we do what we do, not like those students in Aberystwyth. Everyone thinks the same.'

‘Or they think we're really ghoulish,' said Morgana. ‘Just because we do experiments with worms and flesh.'

Gretel nudged her friend. ‘They're disappointed because we're not like the Bad Girl.'

They giggled again.

‘Who's the Bad Girl?'

‘Oh,' said Gretel throwing her nose up. ‘We don't talk about her.'

‘And you're wrong anyway,' added Morgana. ‘Undertaking's a lot more exciting than you think. Do you know …' she exchanged a conspiratorial glance with Gretel, ‘we each get a cadaver at the beginning of term to practise on, just like being a real doctor. Fancy that!'

‘Yeah,' said Gretel. ‘And some of the ones from Aberystwyth have died violently. I found a bullet hole in mine.'

‘And mine had a crushed larynx!'

‘And we get to go on some great field trips – the catacombs or crypts … at Easter we're going to Golgotha.'

‘All the same, none of this is any reason to think he's in trouble.'

Morgana nudged Gretel. ‘Tell him about the other thing.'

Gretel took a breath and leaned closer in. ‘A week after he went, a man came looking for him. A really strange man.'

‘You mean strange for Lampeter,' asked Calamity, ‘or strange for a normal town?'

I kicked her under the table.

‘He was dressed funny and was unfriendly,' said Gretel.

‘Rude,' added Morgana.

‘What did he look like?'

‘We couldn't see his face,' said Gretel, ‘because he wore a muffler and had a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low –'

‘With a black feather stuck in it.'

‘And he wore a long black coat like the ones the medieval Jews wore – you know, like the ones they sell in Peacocks for nineteen ninety-nine.'

‘The gaberdine ones.'

‘Then a few days later the Dean called again, and I told him that a man in a Peacocks' coat was looking for him and he sort of cried out and said, “Oh my God, I'm doomed!”'

‘What I don't get,' said Calamity, ‘is why he contacts you and not a secretary or something?'

‘Because', said Gretel, ‘we're his friends, we do voluntary work for him and things.'

‘What sort?'

She shrugged. ‘Oh nothing special, alms-giving mostly. Just like students anywhere, really.'

I let that one pass.

They paused and then said together, ‘And of course we do his laying out.'

I fought the reflex to choke. ‘You do that for the Dean?'

‘Well, you can't expect him to do it himself, can you?' said Morgana huffily.

‘And he pays us for it,' said Gretel. ‘We're lucky to get it. I mean, how else are you supposed to survive on a grant these days?'

As the bus drove up the main street to turn at the top we saw through the back window a fracas on the neatly trimmed lawns of the college. The two students who had been arguing earlier in the pub were trading blows, surrounded by the rest of their group who were excitedly egging them on. From the cloisters on either side of the lawn, scholars and tutors poured forth in a flapping black gale of academic gowns, like starlings or startled bats, running like the wind and shouting dizzily with excitement, ‘Scrap! Scrap! Scrap!'

THE EXCELSIOR WAS one of those crumbling, fading hotels that stood in a gently curving row on Aberystwyth Prom facing the sea. It was a hotel that spent the summer dreaming of better days, and wore its four stars on either side of the main door like combat medals. Like the motoring organisation that awarded the stars, it was a refugee from the world of A and B roads and button B telephones. A world in which a lift was considered an American contrivance and shared bathrooms at the end of the corridor were the norm. People still wore jackets and ties here and took luncheon and, perhaps most damning of all, it was the world that gave us Brown Windsor soup. Inside the hotel the floors creaked as you walked, like the innards of a wooden ship. It was an old, rickety dowager of a hotel and if it were possible for a building to get arthritis and walk with a stick this one would. I knew all this because once, for a season many years ago, I had worked there as the house John. An underpaid sleuth with a cubby-hole and a nightstick and a remit to keep one eye on the shifty characters who walked in off the street and an even beadier eye on the dodgy ones who worked there.

In the old days, as with all hotels with pretensions to grandeur, the door had been opened by a man dressed as a cavalry officer from the Napoleonic wars. But he had long since gone and today I had to push the heavy brass and glass door open myself. Inside the lounge, little had changed. The swirly carpet, the antimacassars; the horse brasses … And the same cast of characters: the greasy manager's son at the bar in a tatty white shirt and bow tie,
eternally polishing a pint glass; in the bay windows sat members of that travelling band of spinsters and widows who spent their lives wandering from hotel to hotel in a predetermined route round the coast of Britain. Shrivelled old women who appeared at the same time each year with the predictability of migrating salmon and who insisted on the same room and ordered the same food. And every day at dawn they crept downstairs to place their knitting on the vacant armchairs signifying possession for the day like the flag on Iwo Jima.

The only other residents were the travelling shawl salesmen and the doily traders. There were two sitting at a table near the bar, talking doily shop in the impenetrable slang of their trade. Strange words and familiar ones used in strange ways. The weave, the whorl, the matrix, the paradigm; a disc, a galaxy, a web, a Black Widow and White Widow; a Queen Anne and a Squire's Strumpet … I listened to them talk for a while. These were the strange, forlorn men you sometimes passed when you went for a drive – parked in a lay-by and crouched over a map. Next to it, a local newspaper opened to the death announcements with one of them circled in ballpoint. A grubby life lived according to the simple credo that with doilies, like snowflakes, there were never two alike.

I walked over and spoke to an old lady in the bay window. She was sitting in the chair with the exaggerated erectness of posture that no one knows how to do any more, just as no one can do algebra or decline a Latin verb. Her nose had a slight but permanent snooty tilt and she was peering through a lorgnette at the people walking past, trying to get as much disapproval in before her nap.

‘I bet you get a good view from here,' I said.

She turned her gaze to me with painfully deliberate slowness. Her mouth was gathered together and clamped so tightly shut it distorted the rest of her face.

‘I mean, you can see everyone who comes in and everyone who goes out.'

I waited and waited, the smile slowly withering on my face, until after an eternity she finally opened her mouth and said, ‘Maybe.' Then she returned her gaze to the street.

The detective's cubby-hole was on the second floor in the same place it had been fifteen years ago. There was no one there but the soft sigh of steam from the recently boiled kettle told me he couldn't be far away. I stepped in from the corridor. The room had been designed originally as a utility room and was mostly filled by a wooden desk. Pictures of nude women torn out of the tabloids were pinned to the wall, and on the desk, next to the kettle and chipped china mug, was a set of keys. I walked round the desk and opened the drawer. There were a few knitting patterns in there, no doubt left behind by guests, a sock, a cheese sandwich and an ice pick. The floor outside creaked and I looked round and found him staring at me with an air that suggested he'd been doing it for quite some time.

He was dressed in a dirty vest covered in dried egg, had four days' growth on his glistening mauve jowls and his trouser flies were half-undone. His face was gummed up with sleep and he was so fat his hips almost touched both walls of the corridor. The cosh in his hand swung gently with an exaggerated casualness that suggested this was the sort of hotel where you could get coshed just for complaining about the soup.

‘You looking for something?'

I smiled bashfully. ‘I was just checking the fire escape.'

He sniffed the air. ‘Is there a fire? I can't smell anything.'

‘Not at the moment but there could be – it happens in the best establishments.'

‘We should be pretty safe here then.'

‘You've got four stars outside the front door, that means you're good enough to burn down.'

He lifted the blackjack and scratched his cheek with it. ‘Fire escape, huh? Mmmmm.' He gave the matter some deep thought and then brightened, saying, ‘The mistake you made was to look for it in the drawer of my desk. We don't keep it there.' He squeezed into the room and threw some cleaning rags off the only other stool and motioned me to sit. I obeyed and he went to sit in his chair, giving the desk drawer a slam as he did. ‘I've been in this business twenty years now, and in my experience the place to look for the fire escape is outside the window.'

‘That was the first place I tried but I couldn't see it.'

‘That's because it isn't there yet. Special arrangement with the fire brigade – if there's a fire they'll come and put a ladder against the wall.'

‘That's reassuring to know.'

‘All part of the service.' He pointed the blackjack at me. ‘Now we've sorted the fire escape out, perhaps you'll tell me if there's anything else I can help you with.'

I took out a hip-flask. ‘Do I look like I need your help?'

‘You look like a peeper to me.'

I nodded. ‘Well I guess you would know. Drink?'