Candlenight (35 page)

   
"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."