Last Tango in Aberystwyth Read Online Free PDF

Church you find nowadays. A lot of the other kiosks refuse to serve men of the cloth.’
    â€˜That seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it? It wasn’t the Christians who started this flood, it was the druids.’
    â€˜I know, but they’re upset, aren’t they? Because there was no rainbow this time as a mark of His covenant. A lot of people are angry about that. “What’s wrong with us,” they say. “Why don’t we get one?”’
    â€˜He probably just doesn’t want to waste a good rainbow.’
    â€˜That’s what I tell them.’
    â€˜Still, it’s nice of you not to go along with the rest of them.’
    â€˜You know me, Louie, I never take sides.’
    â€˜Your kiosk is a moral Switzerland.’
    â€˜Everyone’s welcome, you know that. It’s an understanding I have with Evans the magistrate: I won’t judge you and he won’t serve ice cream in court.’
    I looked at him. It was the first time I’d heard him attempt a joke and for once his smile almost became warm.
    Eeyore arrived and ordered a 99. We nodded to each other and I patted the flank of Sugarpie and tied her halter to the lamppost. Eeyore had worked for the police for years before retiring to the gentler company of the donkeys. The only animals in the world, he once told me, with absolutely no agenda. In his time his fingers had been worn smooth from fingering the collars of the local hoodlums and he still had an encyclopaedic knowledge of their ways. I asked him if he knew anything about men in ankle-length Peacocks’ coats, with black feathers in the cap. He nodded and a troubled look stole over his old, lined face.
    â€˜Yeah,’ he said with a heaviness in his voice. ‘I’ve seen something like that, once, a long time ago. He was a druid assassin called the Raven. The feather was his badge of office. Ravens were special agents, skilled philanderers, trained to seduce female agents and then kill them.’
    â€˜Do you think this could be the same guy?’
    Eeyore shook his head wearily, the memory was obviously painful. ‘No the Raven I arrested got five terms of life and died seventeen years ago in a knife fight in the maximum-security wing of Cwmtydu Pen. But these are a class of agent, a type. There are always more. For most of the time they live among us as sleepers. Lying dormant, in a sort of hibernation – going about their everyday business like you and me. Sospan here could be one and we wouldn’t know.’ He indicated the ice-cream man with his half-eaten cornet. I looked at Sospan who was polishing the Mr Whippy dispenser and pretending not to be listening. He smiled. Somehow I couldn’t see him as a sleeper, except in the ordinary sense of the word.
    â€˜Then someone activates one and you can rely on some pretty unpleasant things happening. These men don’t get activated for commonplace jobs.’
    â€˜They sound grim,’ I said.
    Eeyore nodded. ‘They are. The worst thing is, once you set one loose, they can’t be recalled. The mission can’t be aborted. Even the person who activates them can’t do it.’
    The Seaman’s Mission had been built by the church in the last century with a non-specific Episcopal architecture of bare stone arches and dark stained wood. The word ‘seaman’ had widened in scope since those days and now referred to any of the human flotsam shipwrecked by life and washed up on the shore of Aberystwyth. Vagrants and veterans of the Patagonian War; sea captains and stokers lost in a world where there is nothing left to stoke; monks on the run from their order at Caldy Island; lighthouse men whose lights had been doused or automated; and always there was a smattering of unemployable ventriloquists.
    Downstairs there was an empty room with a notice-board and some hard seats set against a wall. Behind, towards the kitchen from which there came the strong odour