Candlenight (34 page)

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?"