Read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth for Free Online Page B

halfway. ‘My name’s Seren.’
    I crouched slowly and allowed Calamity to jump down.
    ‘I’m Louie and this is my partner, Calamity.’
    Calamity shook her hand and said, ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.’
    A shovel tingled on the silver air like a tuning fork and we all turned at the same time towards the cottage. The peat cutter was standing in the doorway. He was wearing brown corduroy trousers tucked into wellington boots, a tweed jacket and had a tough dark face surrounded by thickly curled blue-black hair, lightened here and there with tufts of silver like a badger. He might have been forty-five or fifty-five. He spoke to Seren in Welsh and walked off, carrying a spade.
    Seren invited us into the cottage and we sat at a wooden kitchen table and waited for her to brew a pot of tea. I could see the peat cutter though the window walking off across the marsh. There was a book on the table: a scholarly tome about soil geology. I flicked through the pages, it was mostly tables and formulae and diagrams representing the various shapes of the ponds in the marsh and how they came to be formed by the wind and rain and tidal action.
    ‘Is the peat cutter interested in all this?’
    ‘He wrote it.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Well, he did the pictures – I mean he dug them. Some bloke from the university wrote the book and sent it to him.’
    ‘Is Mr Meredith your dad?’
    ‘No, I’m from the Waifery. I don’t have a dad, I was a foundling. But I come here quite a lot and Meredith lets me do what I like. I saw you the other night.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘I was the one who found the locket. I’m sorry about your girlfriend.’
    ‘That’s nice of you.’
    ‘You won’t tell Sister Cunégonde you saw me here, will you? She’d be furious.’
    ‘Do holy sisters get furious?’
    Seren looked at me in astonishment. ‘Are you kidding! They never do anything else. Specially old Cunybongy. It’s because I’m a category A Waif. They’re the worst, you see. I need special attention to stop me straying from the path. That’s why I’m not allowed to come here. She says I don’t understand how easy it is for a young girl to stray from the path and be lost. But that’s silly, I could find my way around here with my eyes shut.’
    ‘Maybe she means it in a different way.’
    ‘Don’t be daft, what other way could there be?’
    Later, as we trudged back to the car and were about to get in, I heard a cry and the sound of someone running.
    ‘Louie! I’ve got one!’ It was Seren and she was carrying a shoebox. Inside was a sleeping gull.
    There was a barrel organ leaning against the wall when we got back and upstairs in the office was a man, a suitcase and a monkey.
    ‘Just came to see how you were getting on with the investigation,’ said Gabriel Bassett.
    Cleopatra was sitting on the desk; she gesticulated and Gabriel added, ‘She says good afternoon.’
    We smiled at her and she made an impatient ‘reminder type’ of gesture.
    ‘And also,’ said Gabriel sheepishly, ‘she asked whether you’ve seen Mr Bojangles.’
    ‘Tell her, no, but we’re keeping our eyes peeled.’
    ‘That’s good, she’ll like that.’ He translated and she did, indeed, look pleased.
    ‘We’ve been working flat out on the case,’ lied Calamity. ‘And we’ve made a lot of progress.’
    ‘Anything you’d like to share with me?’
    We both struggled not to follow his gaze which was directed at the wall bearing nothing but a pinned up tea towel with the words
comes stabuli
. It was fairly clear that we had not been flatout or making a great deal of progress. I made a mental note to move the incident board into the kitchen.
    ‘I see you bought the tea towel,’ he said.
    Neither of us could think of a suitable response to that and he said, ‘You do understand, don’t you, it is very important to me that you solve this case by the deadline I gave. There can be no question of further payment if you don’t.’
    ‘We