Candlenight

Chapter XXXVIII

NO RACISM HERE — WE'RE BRITISH by Gary Willis, political staff.

Candidates in the Glanmeurig by-election have denied it's going to turn into a bitter Welsh-versus-English clash.

Launching his campaign yesterday, Conservative Simon Gallier said. I might have been born in England, but I've spent all my working life in Wales. I believe I stand for the quality of independence which has won worldwide respect for the Welsh nation."

And his Labour opponent. Wayne Davies said. "The main issue here is the threat to the rural economy and the urgent need for new jobs."

It was a quiet start to a campaign expected to produce electoral fireworks. Everyone here is now waiting for the Welsh Nationalist candidate to show his hand…

"You really write that. Gary?" asked Ray Wheeler, of the Mirror, grinning through Guinness froth.

"Do me a favour," Gary Willis said. Twenty-six years old the only reporter in the pack with a degree in economics and political science. "Do I strike you as being that inane?"

"You'll get used to it, son," Charlie Firth said, lighting a thin cigar.

"But what's the point in sending us out here if they've made up their minds what the issues are? Or in this ease, what the issues are not."

"Don't be so naive, mate." Ray Wheeler said. "You really think your rag's going to give any credence to people who figure Great Britain needs fragmenting? Take my advice, send 'em the stuff and try to avoid reading what the buggers do with it."

"And console yourself with one thought," Charlie Firth produced an acrid cough. "However hard it is for you to take, it would have been a bloody sight harder for poor old Giles."

"That," said Ray. "is very true. Does this dump do sandwiches?"

"If it's egg sandwiches," Charlie said, "count me out. The Welsh aren't poisoning me a second time."

English was the dominant language tonight in the public bar of the Drovers' Arms, where all five rooms had been taken by representatives of the British national Press. Accommodation, reporters were learning, was not plentiful in this area. Max Canavan, of the Sun, had been left with an attic, while Peter Warren, of the Independent, couldn't find anywhere in town and would be forced to commute each day from a hotel on the seafront at Aberystwyth.

"Bloody BBC," said Ray Wheeler.

"What have we done now?" Shirley Gillies demanded.

"Only block-booked the best hotel in town."

"Advance-planning," Shirley smiled sweetly. "I shall think of you guys when I'm sitting down to dinner at the Plas Meurig in approximately an hour's time. Still, it's awfully, you know, homey here, isn't it."

"Piss off, Shirley," said Charlie Firth.

"The Plas Meurig," Gary Willis said, "is where the Tories'll be having their daily Press conferences, yeh?"

"And the Liberals," Shirley said. "It's a big place. They're at opposite ends. I'm not sure where Labour are, but at least you won't have to get up too early to cover the Plaid pressers, will you?"

They've got bloody great green signs all over the door of the other bar," Ray Wheeler said. "Listen, are we going to tackle the bugger about this assault stuff tomorrow?"

"Assault stuff," Shirley leaned forward. "Do tell."

"Come on, Shirley." Ray said. "Everybody knows about that."

"The merchant banker he filled in." Charlie bunched a fist. "Think you can buy up all our farms and get away with it, do you' you English swine? Take that."

Charlie pretended to hit Gary Willis.

"Oh, that" Shirley said. "Is it actually true?'

"What's that matter to these buggers?" Gary said.

"Watch it. Willis." Ray held Charlie's beer glass over Gary's head and tilted it threateningly.

Just then a customer put down his glass of lager, detached himself from a small group of companions and leaned across the reporters' table in a conspiratorial fashion, like a trader in dirty postcards.

"Not met him yet then, this nationalist maniac?"

Charlie and Ray favoured this native with their open, friendly, reporters' smiles. They couldn't see him very well because the public bar had bad lighting, as distinct from soft lighting.

"Do you know him, then?" Shirley Gillies asked.

"Surprisingly distinguished-looking, he is. Not you know, tremendously tail. But powerfully-built. What the Welsh consider a fine figure of a man."

"Like, short and fat?" said Charlie.

"Stocky," corrected the customer. "A good beard on him, too, but tidy. Dresses casual, like, but not… not a slovenly man."

"Looks a bit like you, then?" Ray Wheeler said.

"Indeed." The man put out a hand. "Guto Evans, my name."

He took a deep breath and, with visible effort; added, "At your service."

A dark-haired man came in through the bottom door and quietly look a seat at the adjacent table, behind Shirley Gillies.

"Hullo, Berry," Shirley said.

"Hi," he said quietly.

"Where are you staying?"

"Dunno yet. I just got here. Where are you staying?"

"Plas Meurig." Shirley said smugly. "Beeb's taken about ten rooms, what with all the telly boys and the technicians. Charlie and Ray are awfully miffed." She lowered her voice. "That's Guto Evans, by the way, the Plaid Cymru candidate. Isn't he perfect?"

"You here on your own. then?" Ray Wheeler said to Guto. "No aides, agent, entourage?"

"My local, this is." Guto told him. "I tend not to require any political advice on which brand of lager to select. Can I get you boys a drink, or is the English Press immune to bribery?"

"Son," said Ray Wheeler, "you've obviously got a big future in politics. Mine's a brandy."

"Come and talk to us." Charlie said. "Tell us what this election is really about."

"Off the record, is it?" Guto said dubiously. "I've been warned about you boys."

"Oh, sure." Charlie said. "Don't you worry about a thing, Guto. We're all old hands at this game, except for Gary, and his paper ignores everything he writes anyway." Gary Willis looked very annoyed, and Charlie chuckled and offered Guto a cigar.

"Look, I have to walk back to the Plas Meurig," said Shirley Gillies, "or I won't get my dinner. I'll talk to you again, Guto. OK?"

"I'll walk with vou." Berry Morelli said. "Dark out there."

"Amazing, isn't it." Shirley said, plump body even plumper in an enormous pink padded ski-jacket. "I mean, it's just a village, really. A big, untidy village."

Seven p.m. The lights of Pontmeurig seemed vague and sparse, suffocating in a cold night mist. There was no moon, no stars.

"You were expecting neon?" said Berry.

Shirley shivered and wobbled. "I suppose not. Still…"

"Yeah, I know what you mean. That frontier-town feel."

They walked across the Meurig bridge. No lights were reflected in the river heaving sluggishly below.

"Berry, look. I was awfully sorry about Giles," Shirley mumbled. "We weren't very kind to him, were we?"

"Kind?"

"It's horribly ironic, though, isn't it, that we're all out here and he's… I mean, I was picturing him in that pub. He'd have been centre stage, holding forth, correcting our pronunciation of Welsh names. Absolutely in his element."

"Yeah."

"I mean, isn't it just so cruel?'

They walked down from the bridge and after a few yards there was a right turning, a sweeping drive and pillars supporting illuminated AA and RAC signs. In the middle distance, a floodlit façade, a colonial-style verandah. The Plas Meurig Hotel. Two-star.

"Thanks Berry. I don't think I would've enjoyed walking down here alone. Are you here for the duration?"

He shook his head. 'Two days."

"So where are you going to sleep tonight?"

"This an invitation, Shirley?" He was being polite.

"Gosh…" Shirley simpered. "I suppose it is rather a cold night to spend in one's car. But I think not, really. Not at the start of a campaign. I generally prefer to let the excitement build a little before I start to let myself go."

Shit. Berry thought sourly, heading back over the bridge. This was what they meant by election fever?

The thought of even attempting to spend a night in an Austin Healy Sprite made Berry quicken his pace. It hadn't occurred to him that accommodation might turn out a problem.

What he didn't want was to stay in the same establishment as Firth and Wheeler and those guys. He was here on a mission, and it didn't have anything to do with politics.

He speeded up, seeking to stride through his own sadness and guilt, but they were frozen around him in the mist. It had made big, deep razor-slits in his life, this thing. Might have cost him the only person who could still make him laugh.

"Well, really, it's no good, is it?" Miranda had said as he brought down the lid of his suitcase. For once, being low-voiced, low-key, absolutely and uncharacteristically serious. Sitting on a hard wooden chair well away from the bed.

"Honestly," she'd said. "I'm terribly, terribly sorry about your friend."

"But?"

"But I'm not sure I want to be associated with a really crazy person anymore."

So, there it was. The bottom line. The boy's neurotic.

"Listen, maybe you're right." Spreading his hands, appealing for some understanding. "Like, I can't say if I'm crazy. How can I know that? I just have to go find out. I got no choice. Not now."

Miranda had looked about as sad as she was capable of looking. Berry had made her take his key in case she needed a nice central place to sleep, throw wild parties.

"Oh God." Maybe a spark of her old self. "I've got the awful feeling I once played this scene in a World War One spoof at the Edinburgh fringe. Go away. Go and play with your ghosts, Morelli. Your Welsh ghosts."

Walking back now into this one-horse town in search of some place to sleep. Solitary like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. Except Clint was tough, needed no friends and no reassurance. Also Clint knew he was not neurotic.

Berry Morelli stared savagely down the underlit street. It was just about the last place anybody could imagine being part of Britain. Sunk so far into its own private gloom that when people moaned about the place, they moaned in a language nobody outside even wanted to understand. Some deep irony there. He wondered what it would be like for whoever won this election, sitting up there in the Mother of Parliaments, representing this. Honourable Member for Shitheap, Wales.

Berry chuckled cynically to himself. As the evening advanced, the town could almost be said to be filling up with people. A Land-Rover disgorged four men and a woman into the main street. Two kids on motor bikes cruised down the street, circled the castle car park and then cruised back. Night life in Pontmeurig. A black-haired woman in a white mac glanced at Berry as she walked past. She had an oval face and heavy eyelids and she looked no more happy than he might have expected, given the surroundings. He wondered if she was a hooker, but decided not.

Chapter XXXIX

She poured another cup of tea, having a sour, perverse kind of competition with herself to see how strong she could make it, and how strong she could drink it.

Outside the window it was not Saturday night in Pontmeurig, but it looked like Saturday night. That is, there were more than half a dozen people on the streets, the town having come alive in the hour after nine o'clock.

They weren't all here for the by-election. The sudden excitement had brought out local people, hoping perhaps to catch sight of some half-famous politician, here to campaign for Simon Gallier or Wayne Davies. Tomorrow night, two of Plaid Cymru's MPs would be here to support Guto. Big deal, she thought.

Knowing that really she ought to be throwing herself into this campaign, knocking on doors, scattering leaflets. Support your local boy and your local party, you know it makes sense.

Her hands tightened on the window ledge. Street light was washing in the pits and craters of a face beneath the lamp.

Bethan drank some dark tea, which was horrible and burned her mouth. It seemed as if every time she looked out of her window she saw one or both of the boys who'd attacked Giles. Shambling out of the Drovers' or into the tobacconist's that Guto's parents used to own. Grinning at each other. Arrogant, like crows.

Or perhaps it wasn't them at all. She didn't trust her own perceptions any more.

This morning she had been lo County Hall in Carmarthen to see an assistant in the office of the Director of Education. She had asked for Roy Phillips, who was nice and had helped her in the past and who could he relied upon at least to give her a sympathetic hearing. But Roy had taken early retirement, she'd been told. They'd sent her a chisel-faced young man with rimless glasses, like a junior officer in the gestapo, and she hadn't known where to begin.

Eventually, Bethan had made herself say it, and the junior officer had leaned back in his leather swivel chair and blinked.

"Mrs. McQueen… I hardly know how to react. Have you discussed this with the parents?"

"No. They would, naturally, object strongly. Parents always do."

He was looking urbane and half-amused. They were speaking Welsh.

"I confess, this is the first time such a proposition has ever been put to me by a head teacher. I find it rather extraordinary."

"The circumstances are fairly unique. The village is very enclosed. Too self… self-absorbed. I've been convinced for some time that the children need exposure to a wider culture. All I am asking is that it should go on the next list. That the possibility should be debated at county level."

"You are aware that this was mooted some years ago, when we were particularly short of money." He had probably still been at university at the time, Bethan thought. "And there was an enormous row. If you remember, the committee decided that this was a good school with a terrific record… And, of course, there was the question of transportation in winter."

"I remember, but…"

"And now, with the roll approaching a reasonably healthy level for a rural area, the prospect of fifty pupils in a year or two, you come here — one of our, ah, brightest head teachers — to say you think your school should be closed down."

"Yes." Bethan had stuck out her jaw, determined. "I don't think it's educationally viable. I used to believe in small schools. I no longer consider them valid. Not this one anyway."

"Extraordinary," he said. "You would be putting yourself out of a job."

"Yes."

"I think you should put all this in writing. Mrs. McQueen."

Oh God, Bethan thought. What am I doing here? He thinks I'm off my head.

The education official was peering at her over his glasses in the manner of a far older and more experienced man.

Bethan hated him already.

"I'm wondering," he said, "if there isn't something more to all this. How do you get on with the other teacher? Mrs. Morgan, isn't it?"

"I am sorry to have troubled you." Bethan said tightly, in English. "You are right. Perhaps I'll put this in writing to the Director."

"It would be best."

She'd left then, her dignity in shreds. She hadn't gone back to the school. Could not face Buddug — who, she felt, would know exactly where she had been and why.

Bethan had gone straight home — just over an hour's drive — where she'd thrown her coat on the settee, put the kettle on and was plugging in the electric fire when the phone rang. It was a welfare adviser in the education department, a woman she knew slightly. They had wasted no time.

"We think you should take two or three weeks off."

"Oh?"

"You've obviously had a very stressful time lately. Finding that body. And the man who… Why don't you go and see your doctor? Gel him to give you something to help you relax. Some of us thought you went back to work rather too soon after your husband died."

"What about the school?"

"Don't worry about that, We've spoken to Mrs. Morgan, and offered her a relief teacher. But she says that can manage very well on her own."

The phone shook in Bethan's hand.

They had rung Buddug. Well, of course they had. They must have rung her within minutes of Bethan leaving Carmarthen. She could almost hear the shrill babble over the phone… '"Oh, the poor girl… yes, very, very sad, I have tried to help her, but it has all been getting on top of her… No, indeed. I don't think she is good for the children in this slate, not at all… Perhaps a different post somewhere would be the answer…"

Bethan had flung her coat back on and walked around and around the town in the dark, feeling like a ghost condemned to an endless circuit. Well, she had to do it. She had to try. Now there was nothing left to try. She'd returned to the flat over the bookshop and made strong tea, her final bitter refuge.

Standing in the window now, watching the town filling up with strangers. New life out there.

Finding that body. And the man who…

… had been lying face-down among a scattering of books. Black books. Hands frozen like claws. Hands which had torn the book's from the shelves in a frenzy, nail marks scored down black spines.

Morgan had turned him over with one hand, effortless. His bloodless lips pulled back in a snarl. Eyes glazed-over but still screaming. How could eyes scream? Bethan had turned her head away and run from the house. Ran down the path, between the sycamores, leaving the iron gate swinging behind her.

Oh, Giles.

Oh, God.

"Where'd the guys go?"

He was addressing the Nationalist candidate, Evans. Nobody else in the bar he recognised, apart from a couple of MPs drinking Scotch and examining a map. "Buggered if I know, Keith." one of the MPs was saying. "By tomorrow night. I'll have done my stint, so I couldn't care less."

"Charlie and Ray," said Guto, "and young Gary…have gone for a meal. I recommended the Welsh Pizza House." He grinned malevolently. "Serve them right."

Berry Morelli noticed how Guto's beard split in half when he grinned. The guy looked like some kind of caveman.

"American, eh?' Guto said.

"Sure am." Berry said, like an American. "Just great to be in your wunnerful country." he added wearily.

"Yes, I bet" said Guto. "You want to ask me any questions before I get too pissed?"

"No," said Berry, who wasn't expected to file a story the following day, unless something happened — and Addison Walls's definition of "something" usually meant several people dead.

"Good," said Guto. "Bloody shattered, I am. I think I shot my mouth off again."

"I thought that was what politics was about."

Clearly less inhibited in the presence of someone who was neither English nor Welsh, Guto affected a drawling English accent " 'Seeaw! Tell us about yourself, Guto! Why does it say in your Press handout that you're only a part-time lecturer?'" His voice sank bitterly. "Because this is Wales, pal. I could only get a full-time lecturer's job in England."

"You wanna drink?" said Berry.

"Aye, why the devil not. Pint of Carlsberg? What can you say, eh? One day in politics and I've had it up to the bloody eyeballs."

"One day in politics is a long time, buddy."

"You know what else they asked me? What was the name of the rock and roll hand I played bass guitar with? What was the name of the flaming band? Why the hell would they want to know that?"

"You really are new to this game, aren't you?" said Berry.

"Is it that bloody obvious?"

"They had to know the name of the band so they could have it checked out in the morgue."

Guto looked mystified.

"Most members of most rock bands." Berry said patiently, "have stuff in their past that doesn't lie down too easy with a career in politics. Like getting busted for dope, smashing up hotel rooms. Yeah?"

"Ah… right," said Guto. "But no. Not me. Once got busted for Woodbines in the school lavatories. I did. But drugs, no."

"Hotel rooms?"

"The hotels in these parts, nobody would notice."

"Mr. Clean, huh?'

"Mr. Bloody Spotless." said Guto. "Well, you know…"

"Yeah."

Guto grabbed his pint with both hands. At which point, a thought seemed to strike him and he put the glass tankard down on the bartop and said seriously. "I never asked — are you a reporter?"

Berry started to laugh. He laughed so hard he thought he was going to lose control of his bladder. He laughed so hard people began to stare at him.

"What did I say?" said Guto.

Berry shook his head, tears in his eyes. He was thinking of the po-faced front-bench bastards in the House of Commons. He was thinking of the Energy Secretary making a careful statement at the bottom of his manicured lawn in the Cotswolds. He was thinking of his dad and a particular senator.

In the normal way of things, none of this would have seemed funny enough to make him lose control in a public bar.

He wondered, after a few seconds, if what he was really doing wasn't crying.

"I'm sorry," Berry said, getting his act back together. "Yeah, I'm a reporter, but I don't think I came here to report. I think I came to go to a funeral."

Guto said nothing.

"My pal died." Berry said. 'Tomorrow he gels cremated."

"Oh Christ," said Guto. "Giles Freeman, is it?"

Berry looked hard at the Nationalist guy. What did he know about Giles Freeman? "I'm looking for someplace to stay." he said. "One night, maybe two."

"Every hotel in this town is booked solid," said Guto.

"That's what I heard."

"Giles Freeman, eh?"

"Yep. You knew him? I guess he knew you."

"We met," said Guto. "Just the one time. But memorably. Looking for a posh place, are you?"

"Huh?"

"To stay."

"I'm looking for a bed."

"My Mam is feeling aggrieved." Guto said. "She does bed and breakfast all through the summer. Now, when everybody wants to stay in Pontmeurig, I have to tell her: forget it. Mam. What is it going to look like, you taking in party workers or reporters? English reporters, for God's sake! Me out there on the hustings and you cashing in. So, very aggrieved she is feeling."

"What's the charge?' Berry noticed Guto was suddenly looking at him the way business people the world over looked at Americans.

Guto's eyes gleamed. "Thirty-five quid a night?"

"Th..?"

"Big breakfast, mind," said Guto.

Guto's mother was a small, scurrying, squeaky creature with an agonisingly tight perm. In a living room so crammed with little jugs and vases and thousands of polished plates that Berry didn't like to move his arms, she told him seriously that Guto would be the death of her.

"She is delighted, really," Guto said. "She's never had an American to stay. What's your name anyway?"

"Morelli."

"That's an American name?"

"Don't be so rude, Guto." Mrs. Evans snapped. She smiled at Berry and her teeth moved.

"We had some Morellis, we did, at the back of us in Merthyr. Do you know Merthyr…?"

"Of course he bloody doesn't, Mam. Listen, Morelli, we can't do hash browns or steak and eggs for breakfast. Well, eggs are OK, but…"

Berry told them he was vegetarian.

"Oh dear, oh dear, we haven't any of that." wailed Mrs. Evans, squeezing the corners of her apron in anguish. "What will you think of us?"

"Toast?" said Berry. "Marmalade?"

"An American vegetarian?" said Guto, aghast.

"He'll be the death of me, this boy," said Mrs. Evans.

Chapter XL

Berry spent the night under a mountain of blankets in a bed like a swamp. He slept surprisingly well, and, at eight-fifteen on a grey Pontmeurig morning, came down to a table set for one, with a spare napkin. There was thick toast, thin toast and toasted rolls. There were three kinds of marmalade.

"These jars are new," Berry said.

"I sent Guto for to wake them up at the shop," Mrs. Evans explained. "I still don't feel right about it. I can't have you paying for a proper breakfast."

It occurred to Berry that Mrs. Evans did not know she was charging thirty-five pounds a night.

"Guto had to leave early to prepare for his Press conference," she said. "He'll make a terrible mess of it, I know he will. He'll say all the wrong things."

He already did, Berry thought. "He'll be fine," he said.

"Do you think so?"

"Guy's a natural politician."

"He won't win, I'm afraid," Mrs. Evans said. "And then he'll come on with all this bravado. And then he'll drink himself silly."

"They say he has a good chance."

Mrs. Evans shook her head. "Any chances he has he'll ruin. That kind of boy. They offered him a job once, down in Exeter. Head of the History Department. He wouldn't have it. That kind of boy, see."

"This is great," Berry said, munching a slice of toast with ginger marmalade.

"It's not a proper breakfast."

"It's my kind of breakfast," Berry said, "Can you tell me where I find the police department in this town?"

There were two public buildings in Pontmeurig built in the past five years. This morning Berry would visit both. One was the crematorium, the other was the police station.

The police station was so modern it had automatic glass doors.

"Who's in charge here?" Berry said.

"I am," said an elderly police constable behind the latest kind of bulletproof security screen. "'So they tell me." His voice came out of a circular metal grille.

"You don't have detectives?"

"Detectives, is it?" The constable looked resentful. "What is it about?"

"It's about what I guess you'd call a suspicious death," said Berry.

The policeman's expression remained static. He picked up a telephone and pointed to some grey leather and chrome chairs. "Take a seat, my friend." he said. "I'll see if Gwyn Arthur's arrived."

Above the security screen, the digital station clock was printing out 8:57 a.m.

The huge oak hatstand was a determined personal touch in Detective Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones's new office, where everywhere else was plastic or metal or glass and coloured grey or white. Berry decided the Chief Inspector might be the only guy in the CID who still wore a hat.

"I can appreciate your concern." Gwyn Arthur said. "I can even understand your suspicions." He spread his long fingers on the plastic of his desktop. "But none of us can argue with a post mortem report."

He took an envelope from a drawer of the desk. "You realise I don't have to show you this."

"Good of you." Berry said.

"Trying to be cooperative I am. As I say, I can understand your suspicions."

Before consenting to discuss Giles Freeman, the Chief Inspector had spent a good ten minutes lighting his pipe and asking Berry a lot of questions about himself. Casual and leisurely, but penetrating. He'd examined Berry's ID and expressed considerable curiosity about American Newsnet before appearing to accept that Berry's interest in this case was personal, as distinct from journalistic.

"This is the autopsy report, yeah?"

"You can skip the first three-quarters if you aren't interested in things like what your friend had for breakfast on the day he died. Go to the conclusion."

"I already did," said Berry. "Some of these medical terms elude me, but what it seems to be saying is that Giles died of a brain tumour. Which is what we were told."

"Indeed," said Gwyn Arthur. For a Welshman, he was surprisingly tall and narrow. He had a half-moon kind of face and flat grey hair.

"I don't get it"

"What don't you get?"

"This stuff. These. Berry held up the report. "This mean bruising, or what?"

"More or less. Abrasions. Consistent with a fall on a hard surface. Consistent also, I may say, with a blow. Which occurred to the doctor who examined him in the hospital and who passed on his suspicions to us."

"He died in hospital?"

"No, he died at his home. Let me explain from the beginning."

"Yeah." said Berry. "You do that."

Gwyn Arthur Jones talked for twenty minutes, puffing his pipe and staring down at his fingers on the plastic desk. He talked of the doctor's suspicions that Giles had been in a fight and Giles's insistence that he'd fallen in the Castle car-park.

"Which, considering the state of his clothes, was plausible enough. And was not something we could contest as, if there was another protagonist, we have not found him. Or her — who can tell these days? And I would add that the doctor did suspect at the time, from the way Mr. Freeman was behaving, that there might have been brain damage. He wanted to make an appointment at Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth, but your friend flatly refused and discharged himself."

Berry smiled. "Sounds like Giles."

"They parted with some acrimony. Personally I think the doctor ought to have exercised his prerogative to prevent our friend from driving. Still, he appears to have made it home, without mishap, to Y Groes. Where, it seems, his luck ran out."

Claire Freeman, who told the police she knew nothing of Giles's fall, had been out when he arrived home. She was not expecting him back from London until that evening.

Gwyn Arthur said. "Why did he come home early, do you know?"

Berry shrugged. "Any chance he had to get out of London, he took it. He was kind of obsessed with Y Groes — with having this bolthole, you know?"

Gwyn Arthur sighed. "It is a common aberration. Among the English."

"So what happened?"

"There is a school teacher in Y Groes. It seems she had become quite friendly with Mr. and Mrs. Freeman and was giving them lessons in the Welsh language. She was among a group of people who saw him lying in the car park on the Thursday night and went to help him. The following day, Mrs. McQueen — that's the teacher — learned that your friend had discharged himself from the hospital and gone home. So, in her lunch break, she went up to his house to see if he was all right. She knocked and got no reply, so she looked through the downstairs windows and saw a man's body, in a collapsed state, on the floor of one of the rooms. She went to the pub for help and two of the customers went back with her and broke down the rear door."

Berry was picturing the judge's house, the back porch near the window he'd prised open with a screwdriver on a late summer's afternoon.

"Mr. Freeman had probably been dead for over an hour by the time they got to him."

Gwyn Arthur took another envelope from a drawer. "Do you want to look at these?"

"What are they?"

From the brown envelope Gwyn Arthur pulled a dark grey folder, about six inches by eight, on which was printed, in black, the words dyfed-powys police.

"As I say, it did look somewhat suspicious at first. Mrs. McQueen telephoned the police. I drove across, with the scenes — of-crime officer. These photographs were taken before the body was moved."

Berry felt a little sick, tasted ginger marmalade. He opened the dark grey folder.

"They would have been produced at the inquest, had there been one," said Gwyn Arthur.

The pictures were in colour. They'd been taken with a flash.

Berry flinched.

Giles's lips were drawn back into a twisted parody of a grin. Both eyes were open, the left one purple and black. The bruising spread down one side of Giles's face and mingled with the freckles.

Another picture was taken from further back and higher up, like the photographer had been standing on a chair.

"Shit." Berry breathed.

It showed Giles sprawled crookedly, arms extended. All around him were scattered black books. One had its binding partially torn away, and curling pages lay around.

Tissue-thin. Berry could hear the pages whispering.

Next to Giles's head was a red dragon's head, spitting faded, threadbare fire into the dead man's right ear.

"The study." Berry said, going cold. "He died in the study."

"You have been in this house?"

"Once," Berry said. "Just once. What happened to the books?"

"He appears to have had some kind of, er, final fit, should I say? Obviously grabbed at the shelves to try and prevent himself falling. Dragged out the books. Quite a frenzy."

"So you ordered an autopsy."

"Naturally. The state of the room suggested a possible struggle. Oh, yes, we had the portable incident room on standby, I can tell you. But by teatime it was clear we had overreacted. These things happen."

"Brain tumour."

"It had been forming for — well, who knows how long, weeks, months, years? His wife tells us he had been suffering from very severe headaches. Mrs. McQueen confirms this. Perhaps, you yourself…"

"No. He never mentioned headaches."

"You see, with a condition like this, his apparent blackout on the car-park… Hit his head on a car bumper, he said. All consistent. It is a great tragedy, but that's all it is. Natural causes. No inquest. Unless there's something you feel you can add?"

"No," Berry said. "Nothing I have to add. Thanks, Inspector."

Gwyn Arthur Jones put the slim photo-album back in its envelope. "I'm very sorry."

"One thing " Berry said. "His wife, Claire."

"Quiet little girl." said Gwyn Arthur.

"Where was she when they found Giles?"

"My, you are a suspicious chap." said Gwyn Arthur with a half-smile. "Mrs. Freeman was quite a short distance away, at a friend's house, as it turns out. Mrs. Dafis. is it? I don't know without looking up the statement. Obviously she feels very bad about not being there when her husband arrived home and him dying like that, on his own. I hear the funeral is today."

"You going?"

"Well, see, I don't mean any disrespect, but not appropriate, is it, now?"

"Guess not."

"See, even if he'd gone to Bronglais, as the doctor wanted, the chances are it would have been too late, the size of that bloody thing. Any time he could have gone."

"Malignant? I was kind of shaky on The big words."

Gwyn Arthur's pipe had gone out. He laid it on the grey plastic desktop and looked at it.

"As the devil," he said. "As the bloody devil."

Chapter XLI

They came in from the Lampeter end, George twice stopping to consult the map, slowing at every signpost.

Terribly galling, because he was normally such a fast driver, often recklessly so in his wife's opinion.

"Pretty obscure place," George grunted. "Don't want to get it wrong."

"You don't want to get there at all," Elinor said icily.

"Elinor, I still say…"

"And why do you think we weren't told?" Elinor demanded. "Because I didn't tell her about his death. As simple as that."

"I can't believe," George said, slowing the Volvo for another signpost, "that she would be quite so petty."

"You mean, not so petty as me?"

"That is not what I said. Elinor, for Christ's sake will you stop this."

"We can't be far off," Elinor said and affected a shudder "I can feel it somehow."

George sighed and kept quiet. He was a rumpled man with hair of nicotine and white. He'd never really taken to his son-in-law, she thought. George avoided people in high-profile jobs. He wasn't a high-profile person. He'd never minded his daughter being a photographer, though, because the photographer was the one person guaranteed always to be behind the camera

She was like him in a way, Claire, George's daughter.

Wife of Elinor's dead son-in-law.

The shock, for Elinor, had been quite stunning. And to chance upon it, without warning, in Giles's own newspaper, spread on the ceramic worktop after breakfast, four brief paragraphs of obituary, a quote from the editor: immense flair… terrible tragedy… so young… will be hard to replace.

Elinor had liked Giles. He'd been strong in his opinions, forthright. Whereas George had always been so grey. She'd been sure that Giles would, after a few weeks, realise the impossibility of living in Wales and lead Claire back.

Lead. That was it. He'd always been a leader. That was what she'd liked about Giles, that staunchly English quality of leadership.

"I don't know where we're going to stay." George was saying. "You do realise there's a by-election on."

"We'll find somewhere," Elinor said, more briskly than she felt. "Just get us there."

"It's four miles," George said. "That's what the signpost said. But you know what they say about Welsh miles."

The aftershock had been the discovery that Giles's funeral was not to be in London. Elinor had learned this by telephoning his paper. She'd phoned the number in Y Groes about twenty times, of course, and got an answering machine. Claire's voice… in Welsh! She'd refused to leave a message after the tone. "Claire, I'm sorry, I refuse to leave a message." she'd said once, voice faltering, and hung up, regretful and feeling rather stupid.

At the paper, the political editor said he too was surprised that the funeral was being held in Wales, although with both Giles's parents being dead be supposed there was no special reason for it to be done in London. And with the by-election on, there'd at least be enough reporters out there to make a respectable showing.

Elinor had been glad, at least, to learn that Giles was not to be buried in the churchyard at Y Groes. Even the ceremony would not be held there.

And yet she did wonder why.

And still she had not spoken to Claire. Her daughter's reaction on their appearance at the funeral was something she could not even attempt to predict. She accepted that they had not parted on the best of terms, but for the girl to avoid her own mother at a time when a mother was needed the most…

George had taken a hopelessly circuitous route and they had turned into the road linking Aberystwyth and Pontmeurig, entering the grim valley of the disused lead mine.

Feeling at once sorrowful, offended and inadequate, Elinor experienced the pinprick of a small tear. Her daughter was a widow. A widow and childless.

"I suppose she'll marry again." George said suddenly, as if he'd picked up her thoughts. Which was something he never did, being far too insensitive.

"What do you mean?"

"She's young. I suppose if she stays out here, there'll be lots of chaps… that is, I mean…"

"Stays?" Elinor's body went as rigid as the stark towers of the lead mine. "Stays here? Are you quite mad?"

Guto was in deep shit.

Berry had seen it coming, a whole dump-truck load. Guto underneath, apparently oblivious of the danger.

The man steering the dump truck, one sure finger on the wheel, was F. C. W. "Bill" Sykes. Political Editor of the Daily Telegraph, one of fourteen reporters and two TV crews, ranged in a three-quarter circle around the candidate.

Television lights were belching hot glare into the makeshift gladiatorial arena in the shabby lounge of the Drovers' Arms.

They were mob-handed now, no longer the inoffensive affable guys in the public bar last night. Notebooks and pocket cassette machines next to the cups at their elbows.

No alcohol, just hard caffeine. They meant business.

Berry Morelli had covered one British by-election before and knew they were basically all the same: every morning, for about a fortnight, each of the political parties would hold a Press conference with the candidate and some heavy back-up from Westminster — a minister or a shadow-minister or, on perhaps one occasion, the party leader. In Plaid Cymru's case, Berry guessed, the leader would show up pretty often, on account of the party had only three MPs to pull out.

They must be saving the big guns for later. Guto was doing his first conference solo, accompanied by only one minder — Plaid's General Secretary, a diffident guy in tinted glasses. This afternoon they'd be out on the streets, canvassing, pressing the flesh, as they put it. And then, each night there'd be public meetings to address.

Hard grind.

And this morning, the baptism of fire.

It started with a question about an act of vandalism perpetrated by the Welsh Language Society against a leading high-street building society which had been unwise enough to refuse a mortgage application in Welsh.

"Ah, well," Guto explained, "they are youngsters with a mission and sometimes they get carried away."

"Usually by the police." Ray Wheeler said from the table nearest Guto's. There was laughter.

"All right then, old boy," rumbled Bill Sykes. "While we're on the subject of brushes with the law…"

He was unfolding a cutting from Wales's national news- paper, the Western Mail.

"Let's get this one out of the way, eh?" Sykes said kindly. "Clear the air. This business of you being questioned by the constabulary about minor injuries inflicted on some poor chap from London who'd had the temerity to buy himself a farmhouse near here. Small incident in a pub, I believe."

"This pub, Bill," Charlie Firth said. "May even have been this very room. This is where they hold the auctions, isn't it?"

"Was it really?" said Sykes. as if he didn't know.

"Anyway, let's polish it off now, shall we? Then we can all have a nice peaceful campaign. What exactly happened. Mr. Evans?"

The room fell into a hush.

What the hell was this? Mr. Clean? Mr. Bloody Spotless?

Berry caught Guto's eye and raised an eyebrow.

Guto appeared unconcerned.

"Well, you know," he said to the silent, expectant Press, "I feel a bit offended. I cannot understand why you boys are concentrating on this one little incident. Here I am, the party hard-man, scarcely a night goes by without I don't beat up an Englishman…"

The head of the General Secretary of Plaid Cymru swivelled through ninety degrees. Berry couldn't see his eyes behind the timed glasses but he was pretty sure that here was one worried man.

"… and you pick on the one occasion when I am standing by that very bar across the hall, minding my pint of Carlsberg. and suddenly I am at the centre of a most regrettable kerfuffle for the sole reason that I happen to be in the path of a gentleman who falls off his stool."

There was a hoot of derision from the floor.

He's on a tightrope here, Berry thought. These guys catch him out in a lie, he's finished. He was surprised to find himself caring, just slightly, that Guto's campaign should not come to an ignominiously premature conclusion. Even if the guy was staging the bed-and-breakfast scam of the century.

"Then why did the police find it necessary to question you?" demanded Gary Willis. Berry could see one of the TV cameramen going in tight on Guto's face. He could see Shirley Gillies urgently adjusting the level on her tape-recorder.

"I think perhaps." said Guto, glancing across the room, maybe not so sure of himself now, "that you should direct that question at my good friend. Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones. Not for me to answer on his behalf, is it?"

Playing for time, Berry thought. But these guys have all the time in the world.

"Come now," said a rat-faced reporter Berry didn't recognise. "Let's not evade the issue. The inference is that you feel so strongly about English people buying up all the best property in these parts that you're liable to lose your temper when faced with a blatant example of…"

"I think…" Guto's voice was raised.

"I think perhaps you should give the question rather more serious consideration before you answer, Mr. Evans," said Bill Sykes with magisterial menace.

"Come on, Guto," Charles Firth said. "Let's have the truth."

He's had it, Berry thought sadly. They're gonna rip him apart.

Guto raised a hand to quell the murmurs. "I think we can resolve this very minor issue…"

"Not minor for you," somebody said.

"… if I introduce you to a friend of mine."

At the back of the room, a metal-framed chair fell with a bang as a man got to his feet. "Terribly sorry,'' they heard, a kind of Chelsea purr. "I do seem to have a knack of knocking furniture over in this place."

Everybody turned, including the TV cameramen. Everybody except for Berry, who was standing at the back of the room next to the guy who'd deliberately knocked his chair over.

And was therefore the only one to see Guto expelling a mouthful of air in manifest relief before his beard split in delight.

You bastard, Berry said under his breath. You smart son of a bitch.

"I was bloody worried for a minute or two, though," Guto confessed to him outside. "Couldn't see a thing for those flaming lights. I thought, Christ, what if he's not there? What if he was pissing up my leg all the time?" The reporters had shuffled off to the Plas Meurig for the next two party Press conferences. They were almost in carnival mood. Berry had watched amazed as Bill Sykes had shaken Guto by the hand and Ray Wheeler had patted him on the shoulder. Suddenly they love the guy. Berry thought.

He turned it all around.

The merchant banker from London — the guy who'd bought the farm and a bruised nose — had raised a hand to Guto, politely rebuffed the exhortations from the Press to elaborate further on the story and slid into the Mercedes waiting on a double yellow line outside the Drovers'.

"I confess," said Guto. "that I am developing a certain respect for the English. He came up to me, you know, after the Western Mail ran that piece. No hard feelings, old chap, all this, buys me a drink. Well, both a bit pissed, we were, see, when it happened, and he knew the damage it could do. So he says, look, boy, I'll come along and make a public statement if you like."

"What can I say, Evans? You blew them away."

Guto grinned evilly, "I did, though, didn't I?" He glanced around to make sure the reporters were out of sight, then he leapt up and punched the air. "Oh boy, thank you English! Thank you, God!"

"You asshole " Berry said. "You…"

He fell silent. Around the corner came a hearse driven by a man with a bald head who nodded at Guto as he passed.

Apart from the bald man, the hearse was empty.

"Gone to fetch your mate," Guto said.

Berry nodded. "How far is the crematorium from here?"

Guto took off his Plaid Cymru rosette and put in it a pocket of his jacket. He was wearing the black tie he'd borrowed from Dai Death. "Not far," he said. "We can walk."

Chapter XLII

The funeral service for Giles Robert Freeman was pathetically brief. A throwaway affair, Berry Morelli thought, compared with Old Winstone's London send-off.

The entire business took place in the new Pontmeurig crematorium, the first the town had ever had, Guto explained. Built because, when attempting to extend the local cemetery, the council had hit a massive shelf of hard rock which meant that any future graves would have had to be dug with dynamite.

At the end of a wooded lane behind the hospital, the new crematorium looked, from the outside, like a small factory with two discreet steel chimneys hardly hidden by recently planted trees, especially in December.

The chapel inside was maybe a third full, mainly due to the Press contingent. Reporters had filed in, fresh from the Conservative, Simon Gallier's conference, as the organ drone began. Only a handful of people had been in place when Guto and Berry had arrived. Berry didn't recognise any of them at first, although a young woman in a black suit and gold earrings looked vaguely familiar.

The minister had begun the service before Berry realised that another woman, sitting in the front row two or three yards from the coffin must be Claire Freeman. He'd met Claire maybe a couple of times, never spoken much with her. She was the quiet type.

Now he was staggered by how different she looked. And it wasn't only her hair, which he remembered as blonde and was now almost black.

He wondered if poor old Giles would recognise her. And then wondered why that thought had come to him.

The coffin of pale pine sat on a plinth covered in black velvet. Would it slide away when the moment came, or just slowly sink? Berry looked at the coffin and tried to banish the image of Giles with his empurpled eye and his hands clawing at the black books.

Not meant to be there, the English.

Giles would be here forever now, filtered into the Welsh air through the steel chimneys.

But why not a mellow grey stone in a corner of the churchyard at Y Groes, where wild flowers grew and the air was soft with summer even when it wasn't summer?

The minister was a young guy with what Berry now recognised as a local accent. Each word was enunciated in that rounded, robust Welsh way which still didn't cover up the obvious fact that the minister didn't know a damn thing about Giles. When you listened to the words, rather than the music of the words, you realised it was just a bunch of platitudinous crap which could have applied, Berry thought, to some John Doe they'd pulled out of the river.

There was just one hymn. An English hymn that Berry had never heard before. As the congregation sang, with little gusto, he read the words on the flimsy service sheet they'd been handed.

Love is kind and suffers long

Love is meek and knows no wrong.

What did this have to say about Giles Freeman? Anything at all?

Berry began to feel angry. Was this how it ended? They just signed the guy out, quick as they could, and drew a neat line underneath. Would they give him a plaque somewhere: Giles Freeman, immigrant, didn't last long?

He looked over at Claire. She wore a plain, black dress and no jewellery apart from a heavy Celtic cross around her neck. Over the back of her chair was slung a faded, green waxed jacket, the kind Giles used to wear. It didn't seem like a tribute.

Claire's blonde hair, the couple times he'd met her, had always been neatly trimmed, cut close to the skull. Her new dark hair was longer and wilder. And Berry thought she seemed taller somehow, maybe the way she carried herself. Although she wore no make-up that he could detect, she had with her a glamour he didn't recall.

Each time he looked at Claire he noticed that the other woman, in the black suit and the earrings, seemed to be looking at her too. He remembered where he'd seen this woman now. In the street last night. The one he'd wondered if she was a whore. He felt bad about that now; she didn't strike him that way at all today.

"Who's that?" he whispered to Guto. "Woman in the earrings."

Guto looked at him suspiciously. "It's Bethan." he whispered back. "Bethan McQueen."

"Ah," said Berry. The schoolteacher referred to earlier by Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones.

As the congregation sank down after the hymn, he heard the sound of stiletto heels on the chequered tiles at the entrance, and then a slim woman of sixty or so came in, followed by a harassed-looking man tucking the end of his tie inside his jacket. There was a black smudge on his forehead. They sat across the aisle from Berry. The woman did not look at the man. But, after a short while, she too began to look hard at Claire Freeman, as if there was something there she couldn't quite believe.

Berry tried to work out if anyone was with Claire and came to the conclusion that the people nearest her just happened to be occupying those seats.

She was alone, and she didn't look as though she cared.

He searched her face for tearstains, any signs of grief. The face was without expression but calm and womanly and strong.

And sexy? That dark glamour?

Jesus Christ, Morelli. He felt uncomfortable, ashamed. He wanted to be out of here, and then he felt ashamed about that too. Ashamed at the relief he fell at the end, five minutes later, as the coffin drifted away below his eyeline, the machinery working smooth, silent magic under the velvet-covered plinth.

Giles had gone.

Without a sound. Without a word in his memory.

He looked at Guto and saw that Guto was looking at the woman in the gold earrings. Bethan McQueen, who was looking at where the coffin had been and was pale.

Outside, amid the leafless trees, she joined them.

"That's it then," Guto said. "That's the lot. Don't mess about, do they, the English?"

"They mess about as much as anybody." Berry said. "That's what's so…"

"I feel very empty" Bethan McQueen was saying. "It wasn't a funeral, it was…"

"Waste disposal." Berry said. He kicked morosely at the ornamental light-green, crystalline gravel around the crematorium building.

"Bethan, this is Morelli. He was a friend of Giles Freeman." Guto turned to Berry, "Bethan was teaching him Welsh."

"Without great success, though, I am afraid." Bethan said, solemnly shaking hands with Berry.

Reporters came out in a bunch. Charlie Firth taking out one of his thin cigars. Ray Wheeler saying.. "down the pub and give the poor sod a decent wake, eh?"

The sixtyish couple hung around the doorway, apparently waiting for someone. The woman pointed at the man's forehead and he look out a handkerchief and wiped away the black mark.

"What did you mean." Bethan said to Berry Morelli. "by waste disposal?"

"I wouldn't mind so much, but the bloody thing was serviced a fortnight ago," George Hardy said. "I don't suppose you happened to notice a Volvo garage in the town."

"You fool," Elinor's features were pinched with contempt. "Is it likely?"

"Suppose not. I wish she'd come out. Get this over."

"All you've ever wanted, George, is to get things over."

Claire did come out then. She was with the minister. They shook hands and then spoke briefly in Welsh. The minister went back into the crematorium. Claire approached her parents.

"I wondered if you would come," she said.

The sky had darkened, with a warning of rain on the gathering wind.

"Hello, Claire." said George. "We had a dreadful journey and then the car broke down two miles from here and we had to be towed in. You look marvellous, doesn't she Elinor?"

George always came out with the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong order. But what were the right things, in this situation? How were you supposed to approach a daughter who had deliberately kept you in the dark about the sudden death of her husband?

And who was not the daughter you remembered.

"Yes, Elinor said. "She looks… well."

Claire kissed her father and looked calmly at her mother.

Elinor could stand it no longer. "Oh, Claire. " Face crumbling, though the muscles were fighting it. "Why?'

She was furious with herself for this.

Claire stepped back. The wind caught her dark hair, which seemed three times as long and dense as Elinor remembered it.

"I wrote to you," she said. The letter's probably waiting for you at home."

"Why didn't you phone?" Elinor's eyes were glassy with frozen tears. "I learned about it in the newspaper, for God's sake!"

Claire said. "I'm sorry. I find this difficult to explain, but I could not invite you here. If you were going to come it had to be your decision."

She's so remote from us, Elinor thought. Look at her, with her shaggy mane and her faraway eyes.

"How do you feel, darling?" George was saying. "Are you all right?"

Claire smiled with dignity and composure. "I am adjusting," she said.

"We should offer our condolences to Claire, I guess."

"I think you'll find." Bethan said, "that she doesn't need your condolences." She turned her back on the chapel entrance. "I have to go. I'm sorry."

Berry watched her walk away down the gravel path. "I think I need to talk to her."

"I don't think so." Guto said.

"She was the one found Giles, right?"

"Listen. Morelli, leave her alone, she's had problems."

"Giles had problems."

"I know, but she cannot help you. Her husband died, see, a few months ago, of leukemia. She has not come to terms with that. Her nerves are not good, they've taken her off work."

Plaid's bearded hard-man seemed oddly ill-at-ease, Berry thought.

"I've known her a long time. Fond of her, see."

Clearly, Berry thought.

Plaid's General Secretary appeared at Guto's elbow.

Away from the TV lights, he'd taken off his tinted glasses.

"You have twenty minutes to get some lunch, Guto, then we're off to Eglwys Fawr."

"Eglwys Fawr?" Gusto was dismayed. "That's practically North Wales. We really have to start by canvassing the barbarians?"

"Work North to South of the constituency, I thought. Then back again."

"You are the boss." Guto conceded. "See you tonight, Morelli?"

"Sure, but I may have to barter over the bill. Or maybe tell the tabloid boys how much you're charging."

"You wouldn't…"

"Try me."

Guto scowled at him and followed the General Secretary down the crematorium drive. Claire Freeman and the older couple walked past Berry, none of the three even looked at him.

At the bottom of the drive Guto turned and called back. "Remember what I said about Bethan, Morelli. I don't know what you want here, but she can't help you, OK?"

Berry was suddenly alone on the ludicrous green gravel in front of the modern disposal plant that ate Giles Freeman.

A line of Bob Dylan's went through his head, something about pitying the poor immigrant, who wishes he'd stayed at home.

He tried to analyse how he felt. Whether he was out of his mind or there was something happening here. He couldn't get a handle on any of it. All too… Words like amorphous, nebulous and numinous came into his head. Crazy stuff.

Rain began to tumble on him, and he ran down the drive and back into the town.

Chapter XLIII

This, Elinor thought, frozen into silence, could not be happening.

The ghastly little pointed spire loomed up in the centre of the windscreen and she almost screamed in revulsion.

"Rather pretty, really," George said, and Elinor shrivelled him into the back seat with a blowlamp glare.

Claire drove the Land-Rover like a man, spinning the huge utility steering wheel, dark hair bouncing as she tossed the big vehicle through the gears. As though she were a farm girl who'd been driving Land-Rovers and tractors most of her life, Elinor thought in dismay.

It was, of course, all George's fault.

When the garage in Pontmeurig had said it would take a day, perhaps two, to get the parts, he ought to have told them to forget it and had the vehicle towed to the nearest Volvo dealer, no matter how far away that was.

But not George.

Not compliant, feeble George.

Elinor and Claire had been drinking dreadful instant coffee in some dismal teashop, saying stiff, formal things to each other when George had returned from the garage with the bad news.

"Problem is, there's nowhere to stay in this town," he'd said. "By-election, you see."

And then, without even looking at Elinor, he'd turned automatically to his daughter and said…

Actually asked her, without even thinking…

"Don't suppose there's any chance of you putting us up for the night, is there, Claire?"

Elinor had wanted to pour her coffee over his head.

But she could not help noticing that, for the first time, Claire had appeared discomfited. "I'm not sure that would be wise."

Elinor was damn sure it wouldn't be wise, having long ago sworn never to set foot in that abominable house again.

"Well unless you can lend us a tent." George said with a silly laugh, avoiding his wife's blazing gaze. "I don't know quite what we're going to do. The garage chappie said Aberystwyth was about the nearest place we could hope to get in, and apparently several of the hotels there are closed for the winter. Bloody inconvenient."

"It's absurd," Elinor said.

And then Claire had said, "Look, if it's only for one night, perhaps—"

"No!" She couldn't stop herself.

"I was thinking of the Tafarn" Claire said. "The village inn."

And now the Land Rover was rattling down from the hills, out of the forestry, Elinor next to Claire in the front, George in the back. Claire had told them she'd acquired the second-hand farm vehicle from someone called Dilwyn, in exchange for Giles's car. Which Elinor thought was a disgusting thing to do within a few days of his death, as well as a disturbing indication that Claire was now committed to living in a place where a Land-Rover was considered a sensible mode of transport.

A grey squirrel shot out of the hedge, apparently intent on hurling itself under their wheels. Claire ignored it.

"Look out!" Elinor yelled, but Claire neither braked nor swerved.

"You've run over it!"

"Perhaps." Claire didn't even look in the mirror.

Elinor was profoundly shocked. "What's happened to you. Claire? What's happened to you?"

"Don't be ridiculous, mother." Claire tossed her ragged black mane. 'They're vermin."

Elinor was hunched in the corner, well away from her daughter, wrapping her arms around herself, shivering inside.

Claire spun the wheel as they rolled out of the trees and past the sign that said simply, Y Groes. The lumbering vehicle went across the river bridge with only inches to spare either side. The inn lay before them, and above it reared the church, its squat tower massive from this angle, its weather vane pricking a pale halo in the cloudy sky.

"Stopping raining, anyway," George observed from the back seat.

Chapter XLIV

It took Berry all of twenty minutes to find out where Bethan McQueen lived.

First off, he went into the Welsh Pizza House and ordered a plain cheese and tomato from an English guy who wore a white plastic apron. On the apron a drooling red dragon brandished a knife and fork. The pizza was crap, but the guy thought Bethan McQueen might be the girl who lived over the bookstore.

Hampton's bookshop had a window display featuring the new Ordnance Survey maps, local travel guides and a handful of books — in both English and Welsh — about the history of Wales. Most prominently displayed was a paperback with a man's face superimposed over a map of Wales. The face looked thoughtful and ended in a beard with a forked tip. The book was called Glyndwr, The Last Prince. It was by a Dr. D. G. Evans.

"Naw." Berry said aloud. 'Couldn't be."

He went in out of the rain.

"Dreadful weather," said an elderly man, looking up from a copy of the Spectator spread before him on the counter.

"Could be worse. I guess," Berry said.

"It was worse a few nights ago. The river almost burst its banks."

Berry picked up the Glyndwr paperback and turned it over and saw another bearded face in a black and white photograph on the back.

"Holy shit," he said.

"Sold seven copies in the past couple of days," the elderly man told him proudly. "Mostly to journalists more interested in the author than the subject."

Berry put the paperback on the counter with a ten pound note. "Guess that makes it eight."

"Actually, they're remainders," the bookseller confessed. "Touch of inspiration, though I say it myself. As soon as I heard Plaid'd picked him as the candidate, I rang the publishers and offered to do a deal for however many copies they had left, they were only too pleased, only having managed to get rid of a couple of thousand."

"When'd it come out?"

"Five years ago? Six? Not much interest, you see, outside Wales, in Owain Glyndwr." He wheezed out a laugh. "Actually, not much interest inside Wales until now. But that's business. You have to seize the moment. If he wins I'll doubtless flog the lot, if he doesn't I'll still have made a reasonable profit."

Berry said. "Listen, can I ask you… Does Bethan McQueen live here?"

"Ah," The bookseller folded the paperback into a brown paper bag and handed Berry his change. "The lovely and intriguing Mrs. McQueen." He pointed to the ceiling. "Up there."

"Intriguing?"

"Oh well." He smiled ruefully. "Beautiful widow living quietly and discreetly. Never any visitors… Well, this chap" — he pointed to the Glyndwr books — "on occasion, but never for very long. I'm a terrible old gossip, as you may have gathered, so pay no heed to a thing I say. There's a short alley next to the shop door. Just inside that you'll find another door in a recess. Ring the bell. I don't know if she's in."

"Thanks." Berry stepped out into the rain and then dodged into the alleyway. The door in the recess was plain, no glass, and painted some indiscernible colour. He pressed the bell-push and waited, not able to tell if it was working. Until the door opened and Bethan McQueen stood there in white jeans and a turquoise sweater of soft wool.

"Mr. Morelli."

"Hi," Berry said, suddenly lost for words. "I, ah… I have this feeling we should talk."

"About Giles Freeman?"

"And maybe other things."

Bethan McQueen said, "Did you tell Guto you were coming?"

"Sure did."

"And what did he say?"

"I don't recall the exact words. But he seemed to be indicating that if I bothered you I could expect to have him clean the street with my ass."

Bethan McQueen turned on a small, impish smile. "You had better come up," she said, "while he's safely out of town."

"Tea? Or coffee."

'Tea, please. No milk."

"I'm glad you said that, I don't think I have any milk. Do you like it strong?"

"Like crude oil," Berry said. While she made the tea he took in the apartment. It looked temporary, like a storage room for furniture that was destined for someplace else. There was a big sofa with a design involving peacocks. He sat in one of a pair of great fireside chairs with loose covers in a floral print. Too big for the room, like the enormous Welsh dresser in honeyed pine. The dresser was empty save for a few books.

As Bethan returned with a tray, two white cups with saucers on it, and biscuits, there came a hoarse crackle from outside and then a tannoyed voice announced:

"THIS IS SIMON GALLIER, YOUR CONSERVATIVE CANDIDATE. I SHALL BE AT THE MEMORIAL HALL AT SEVEN-THIRTY TONIGHT WITH MY SPECIAL GUEST, THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR TRADE AND INDUSTRY, THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOHN GORE. I HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE AND WE WILL BOTH WELCOME YOUR QUESTIONS ON LOCAL AND NATIONAL ISSUES."

Then the same message — presumably — was repeated, in Welsh.

"He's English, this Gallier." Berry said, taking a cup and saucer. "But he's learned Welsh, right?'

"I believe" — Bethan perched on an arm of the sofa— "that he has been on some sort of crash course. Two weeks work at a residential centre. Very intensive."

"Like, they wake you up in the middle of the night, flash a light in your face and make you answer personal questions in Welsh?"

Bethan smiled.

"That the kind of course you had Giles on?"

Bethan's smile became a frown. "Don't think me rude." She looked him hard in the eyes. "But who exactly are you?"

Simon Gallier's speaker-van made a return trip up the street, "DON'T FORGET, SEVEN-THIRTY AT THE MEMORIAL HALL. AND MAKE THOSE. QUESTIONS TOUGH ONES!"

"That's a tough one," Berry said.

"You do not know who you are?"

He drank some tea.

"Who do people think you are?" she asked.

It was the strongest tea he'd ever been served. It had to be at least a six tea-bag pot.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not helping the situation am I? I, ah… I'm a reporter. I work for an American news agency in London. Giles was my friend. Originally, what happened with this guy we both respected — dead now — he told me to dissuade Giles from throwing everything up and moving to Wales. So I came out here with Giles — early in the fall this was — lo look at his cottage. And there was… something there I didn't take to, OK? Now Giles is dead. That's it. That's everything. Basically."

This was what reporters were supposed to be able to do. reduce the Bible to a paragraph.

And edit all the meaning out of it.

Bethan McQueen drank her tea slowly, watching him.

"Giles was my friend too," she said eventually. "I tried to teach him Welsh, and I failed. It was a disaster. I came to feel that the lessons were doing him harm. When I learned about his… tumour, it was as if I had personally, you know…"

"Finished him off?"

"Yes."

"That's crazy, Beth."

"Bethan."

"Sorry."

"No, I'm sorry. My husband called me Beth. I'm being stupid"

"If we're getting into self-flagellation here," Berry said, "most likely, I killed him. I failed to persuade him not to come here. Didn't hardly try. If he'd been in London maybe he'd have gotten some medical attention instead of pushing himself like he did, to move out here in record time, commuting to and fro, all that."

"I don't think that is what you're saying, is it?" Bethan said.

"I'm sorry…?'

"You said you think you might have killed him because you failed to persuade him not to come here. You are implying he died because he came to Y Groes."

"Well, no, I. "

"That is not what you were implying?"

"I… Shit, I don't know." Berry rubbed his eyes, drank more tea. She was forcing him to say things he hadn't even put into thoughts.

"Look, give me your cup." Bethan said. "I should not have tried to poison you."

"What?"

"Nobody can drink tea as strong as that. Except for me when I am feeling beaten, which is most of the time at present."

Berry held out his cup. "It was wonderful tea. I mean that, seriously."

"You are joking. I'll make some fresh."

"Listen, forget the tea. Siddown please."

Bethan put her cup and saucer on the floor and sat down on the sofa. She reached forward and flipped the switch on the side of an archaic three-bar electric fire.

"This is kinda hard." Berry said. "It's like we're walking round each other, keeping a distance. Like suspicious dogs, trying to provoke each other into snapping or something,

Listen, how about we go for dinner tonight? Always presuming there's some place other than the Welsh Pizza House where we can actually get some dinner."

"I'm sorry. I mean, I really am sorry. I have to go to Simon Gallier's meeting. In my role as Guto's secret agent. I have to report back."

Berry thought about this. "Well, would you mind if I tagged along? I have to file some kind of piece to the agency tomorrow. I do need to see this guy Gallier in action."

"All right."

"Good. Maybe we can figure out how to approach this thing. Always assuming there's something that needs to be approached."

"Mr. Morelli, I've lived with this for so long that I don't know who to trust any more."

"Berry, for Christ's sake."

"Bury?"

"As in strawberry. My name."

"Oh."

They stood up. Bethan straightened her sweater.

"I would love to say you can trust me," Berry said. "Only I'm not sure I can trust myself. I'm notoriously neurotic."

She faced him from the other side of the monster sofa with the brilliant peacock fans on it.

"She said, "Do you believe Giles died because he came to Y Groes?"

"I.

"It's important. Do you believe it?"

Berry shook his head. "Also, I'm indecisive."

"Well, I believe that Robin…"

"Robin?"

"My husband. I believe Y Groes killed Robin. I hate that village, Mr. Morelli. I'd like to see the church fall down and every stone of every building smashed and pounded into The ground."