with icicles hanging off their eyebrow ridges it was the ruthless will of Mrs Bligh-Jones that forced them on, forced their rebelling sinews and surrendering flesh to scorn the pain. They were stranded for three months on that cruel mountain. Two of them died from pneumonia and Mrs Cefnmabws turned up the following spring preserved in a blockof ice like a mammoth. The only ones to make it down were Mrs Tolpuddle, who refused to talk about it; and Bligh-Jones, who lost an arm to frostbite. It didnât hold her back, though. She returned to town a heroine and promptly began carving it up into mini-fiefdoms for her lieutenants.
The only things she didnât contest were the girls and the drinking-clubs. Either out of an inherent puritanical streak or maybe out of a respect for tradition: because everyone knew that getting drunk was essentially a pagan activity and thus the birthright of the druids. And, no matter what else had changed, Bacchus was still the most popular god in town.
We drove slowly up towards Waunfawr in a slow file of traffic stuck behind a caravan. The windscreen wipers droned hypnotically, the rain sluiced down, and the sky above Aberystwyth turned the colour of bluebottles. Perfect weather for a day at Kousin Kevinâs. I thought again of what I had seen. Jubal, the man with a finger in all the pies in town, dancing with the woman who baked them.
Chapter 8
I WALKED DOWN the dimly lit, green-tiled corridor in a pair of paper socks given me at the door and a one-piece paper suit that rustled softly as I went. I had no keys and no watch and no coins and nothing made of metal nor any material that could be filed to an edge or moulded into something that could be used to bludgeon with. If the guards could have taken my fillings they would have done. I was thirty feet beneath ground level, under the castle, in a suite of rooms designed by Owain Glyndwr for people he didnât like. I was on my way to see Dai the Custard Pie.
It felt more like a hospital than a prison, the faint smell of disinfectant and a distant generator hum emphasising the otherwise total silence. Only the elaborate electronic locking of the huge steel doors made it clear that it was a prison. But perhaps at this end of the spectrum of penal incarceration there was no real difference. The psychologists might spend their lives trying to disentangle the Gordian knot of hate, insanity, malice, neurosis, psychosis, intent and irresistibility, genes and environment that made up the peculiar evil of men like Custard Pie, but whatever their conclusions you still needed a strong door on the room.
Thirty feet beneath the town; a tomb of steel and concrete that was fitted out like an ICBM silo and manned by guards who underwent the same psychological testing to get the job. Going to see a man whom I was responsible for putting here and whoI knew would never talk to me. But all the same, for the sake of the Dean â way out of his depth in the maelstrom of Aberystwyth and maybe already dead â I had to ask.
The Dean, like thousands of misguided fools before him, had dreamed of becoming a clown and then leaped into the abyss in an act that suggested that he already was one. And there was no one in all of Wales who knew more about the psychopathology of the clownâs mind than Custard Pie.
I donât know what I expected, but I was shocked when I saw him. He stood just a couple of feet away from me, a wall of bars from floor to ceiling separating us. He stared with eyes glittering crazily above the leather muzzle they had forced him to wear. He wore a bright orange prison-issue boiler suit and underneath it a knitted tank-top over a paisley pattern shirt. He smelled sour and unwashed; his fingernails were a couple of inches long and had started to turn yellow and curl. Most upsetting of all, the floor of his cell was littered with excrement. I turned in disgust to one of the guards who sat a few feet away playing
The only things she didnât contest were the girls and the drinking-clubs. Either out of an inherent puritanical streak or maybe out of a respect for tradition: because everyone knew that getting drunk was essentially a pagan activity and thus the birthright of the druids. And, no matter what else had changed, Bacchus was still the most popular god in town.
We drove slowly up towards Waunfawr in a slow file of traffic stuck behind a caravan. The windscreen wipers droned hypnotically, the rain sluiced down, and the sky above Aberystwyth turned the colour of bluebottles. Perfect weather for a day at Kousin Kevinâs. I thought again of what I had seen. Jubal, the man with a finger in all the pies in town, dancing with the woman who baked them.
Chapter 8
I WALKED DOWN the dimly lit, green-tiled corridor in a pair of paper socks given me at the door and a one-piece paper suit that rustled softly as I went. I had no keys and no watch and no coins and nothing made of metal nor any material that could be filed to an edge or moulded into something that could be used to bludgeon with. If the guards could have taken my fillings they would have done. I was thirty feet beneath ground level, under the castle, in a suite of rooms designed by Owain Glyndwr for people he didnât like. I was on my way to see Dai the Custard Pie.
It felt more like a hospital than a prison, the faint smell of disinfectant and a distant generator hum emphasising the otherwise total silence. Only the elaborate electronic locking of the huge steel doors made it clear that it was a prison. But perhaps at this end of the spectrum of penal incarceration there was no real difference. The psychologists might spend their lives trying to disentangle the Gordian knot of hate, insanity, malice, neurosis, psychosis, intent and irresistibility, genes and environment that made up the peculiar evil of men like Custard Pie, but whatever their conclusions you still needed a strong door on the room.
Thirty feet beneath the town; a tomb of steel and concrete that was fitted out like an ICBM silo and manned by guards who underwent the same psychological testing to get the job. Going to see a man whom I was responsible for putting here and whoI knew would never talk to me. But all the same, for the sake of the Dean â way out of his depth in the maelstrom of Aberystwyth and maybe already dead â I had to ask.
The Dean, like thousands of misguided fools before him, had dreamed of becoming a clown and then leaped into the abyss in an act that suggested that he already was one. And there was no one in all of Wales who knew more about the psychopathology of the clownâs mind than Custard Pie.
I donât know what I expected, but I was shocked when I saw him. He stood just a couple of feet away from me, a wall of bars from floor to ceiling separating us. He stared with eyes glittering crazily above the leather muzzle they had forced him to wear. He wore a bright orange prison-issue boiler suit and underneath it a knitted tank-top over a paisley pattern shirt. He smelled sour and unwashed; his fingernails were a couple of inches long and had started to turn yellow and curl. Most upsetting of all, the floor of his cell was littered with excrement. I turned in disgust to one of the guards who sat a few feet away playing
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