Free From Aberystwyth with Love by Malcolm Pryce

Calamity pulled open the desk drawer and took out the latest issue of Gumshoe and left for the day. I sat down opposite.
    ‘What was that about bearded ladies?’ asked Llunos.
    ‘Calamity’s superseding the paradigm.’
    ‘How do you do that?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s the latest bee in her bonnet.’
    ‘She’ll get her ears boxed if she carries on like that. You can’t talk to people like that.’
    ‘I’ll have a word with her.’
    He stood up. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
    We strode along the Prom towards the Cliff Railway station at the end. As usual the two cars were frozen on the hillside, not moving, like two garden sheds built at the wrong angle. The immobility was an illusion. It was like the brass weights under a cuckoo clock: if you watched long enough you would be aware of a change in position.
    The world was the colour of concrete dust, washed out like an over-exposed transparency. The occasional sharp flashes of light from chrome bumpers or hub-caps, from open windows, or the steel frames of pushchairs made the heart wince with unfocussed longing. Holidaymakers ambled up and down wearing expressions of patient suffering.
    ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he said without preamble, ‘that thing with the hat was a bit strange.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘It’s not the only strange thing, either. I’ve been rushed off my feet since that old town reappeared in the lake.’
    ‘How so?’
    ‘All sorts of rum things going on, people behaving oddly. Chap who winds the town hall clock lost the key. Men leaving their families and running off to join the French Foreign Legion. I’ve got two members of the town council buying guitars – Fenders, too, not cheap ones.’
    ‘Maybe it’s just the heat.’
    Llunos gave a short sudden shake of the head. ‘It’s the lake. The reappearance of the town has precipitated a spiritual crisis in the town.’
    ‘Says who?’
    ‘My teacher. He says it’s stirring things up, the repressed memories of the townsfolk, it’s like our collective unconscious.’
    ‘I didn’t know you had a teacher.’
    Llunos cast me a sheepish glance. ‘Night school, been doing a course in psychology.’
    ‘I’m surprised to hear that of you.’
    ‘Me too.’
    I could sense he was torn between distaste for the confessional mode, and the need to share these thoughts with someone.
    ‘You have to move on, though, don’t you? Move with the times. The world is changing and you either adapt or get left behind. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’
    Llunos was a lawman in the old-fashioned mould, the sheriff of the frontier town whose methods were rough but reasonably effective. He preferred to beat rather than entreat, he liked the old-fashioned certainties of occasional short-term injustice that through the finely grinding mills of time and God ensured a form of justice not perfect but recognised by all as an acceptable accommodation in an imperfect world.
    ‘These new boys with degrees and stuff, they don’t approve of violence as a means to solving crime, they prefer modern scientific methods, they use psychology.’
    I said nothing. Today I had been invited along to listen.
    ‘Maybe if I can brush up on the textbook stuff I may make a move down to Cardiff, you know, the Bureau.’
    I nodded.
    Llunos adopted a deliberately casual tone: ‘What were you doing out there anyway?’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Where!’
    ‘Like I told you, we just went to look.’
    ‘Were you on a case?’
    ‘No.’
    He nodded thoughtfully. He didn’t believe me. This was the pantomime we often enacted called Protecting the Client; Vanya’s privacy had been entrusted into my safe-keeping. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded cops asking him his business but most people who walk through my door do and I respect that. Cops, though, they hate it. Llunos knew all this but he still had to ask.
    ‘You just happened to be going for a walk and found the hat.’
    ‘No, we found the girl who was wearing the hat. She ran off.