41. SUSPECT 4: Pistol Pete

The ghost in the fire

Wild stories that Pete, a performance poet who wore a black leather glove to conceal third degree burn scars, had spent several decades looking for the person who burned down his dad’s pub. The Oyster Catcher, obviously long gone, never rebuilt, and down the docks anyway so not the sort of place the boys would have drunk in, was famed for its operations outside the law. It was a city state with enough room for six at the bar and twenty round the fireplace. Investigators reported that’s where the inferno started, with a block of ember falling out on the rug after all had left for the night with heavy heads. The radiating orange glow from the flames could be seen from the Heights, lighting up the Transporter Bridge a quarter mile along the dockside. Pete’s dad, who himself had the organic connections to smugglers any landlord of a stevedore’s drinking hole would have, sustained lifelong lung injuries and lost everything else. Pete was there, getting only at the edges of the fire like a woodpecker. That’s not how he creased up his hand, though. That was a steelworks accident ten years later. He’d been drinking. Not uncommon for half the shift to be sloshed back then. Pete was volatile, uncompromising, driven both by the dark shadows of the damage done to his dad and family living, but also by the chains that come out of the town and keep you right where you are. If you’re looking for a killer, Pete had had it in him at some point. No doubt. It’s difficult now to put that man from then with this guy now who often taps Moses on the shoulder with his gloved hand, a satisfied attractive smile across his rugged face, and offers to recite him his new poem. And the poetry isn’t bad, as a mishmash of sonic patterns, the man has an ear, no denying. But what he’s actually on about half the time is anyone’s guess. He’s become a Beat, a New Ager, a hippy with shoulder length hair that sometimes glistened with glitter and the occasional bead, a man tired of the anger and violence that dominated his younger life. He was for hire at one point, apparently; a heavy. Muscle. Good at his job because he took pleasure in it. He now sits at the front end of the Pips, often in the company of students, not looking out of place for his fifty-plus years, but rather like one of those eccentric mature students who were common to the arts college around this time. He told fantasized stories about his past and his art and how he had travelled and slept on the floors of the great underground poets of the eighties like Dario Fo and Wole Soyinka or whoever else he’d read about recently and liked, and the young pups who get wrapped up in this stick around. Young girls like him. He’s no predator. That’s probably why they like him. He exudes a protective warmth, his hippy philosophy underpinned by the unshakeable steel of his origin story. He never speaks of sex or love but his eyes beam with love for the cosmos. Pete has, of course, suffered a breakdown, and he wears it like an honoured garment bestowed on him by a cult leader. The turn was probably around the time his daughter, arty and strong and pale and serious, a hard goth, and an artist with enormous potential, went to live in Spain with her lecturer from art college. He was about the same age as Pistol Pete. Pistol Pete was not happy with this. But what was he to do? Kill the guy? Drive his beloved daughter away with the outergusts of his whirlwind violence? No. Instead he seemed to burn up, burn out, and he disappeared for a while. Maybe he went to Spain, maybe he went deep into the woods, but he came back a hippy who for a while drew pictures of angels on beer mats and handed them to people whose aura he liked. But there was something in his eyes. Moses saw it. Vardaman saw it. Beneath the glaze was a volcano, and that meant that whenever Pistol Pete stopped you at the bar to recite a poem you stopped dead and fucking listened and when all was done you patted him on the shoulder and said something a few steps beyond a platitude, pick out a phrase, try to uncover some subtext, and you waited for him to beam and then you moved on. Would he flip, unspool, at a bad review? Doubtful. But was it worth the risk to find out? No. No, it wasn’t. And, as Moses often said, the stuff wasn’t half bad anyway. It had more energy than most of the contemporary poets he came across in bar readings in Cardiff. But how does this all connect to Aaron? The connection is simple, and indicative of the twists and turns of this town. The rumour was that it was Aaron, paid up by some smuggler who was owed money, who had burned down the pub. He would have been a kid at the time – ten, eleven years old? And Pistol Pete had always known this. But what good does it do anyone enacting revenge on a child with no agency in any of this, a child who was doing as he was told and probably given a tenner for his little slippery troubles. Lift the broken latch on the store room door, slide in – no adult or even teenage could get through there – light the rug and slip back out. Whoever was behind it picked the right kid, because he was always going to be a snot nosed piece of work that Aaron; but still Pete wanted to know who was behind it, not which kid was pushed through a window and told it was a game or whatever. But little shits grow up to be big problems. Moses had wondered about the rumour, about the truth of it. And when it came down to it, he didn’t believe it was true. But he believed Aaron had flung this around himself, to make his own story more elegiac, have him as the child hoodlum who grew up into Johnny Big Bollocks, but also to mock Pistol Pete for his newfound pacifism, for his love of literature and kindness. Had Pete knocked that smirk off Aaron’s face? You want to be the kid who burned down my father’s pub? Well, this is what you asked for.