Candlenight (49 page)

   
Gwyn Arthur jammed his hat over
his ears, picked up the plastic bag containing the AA book and followed Probert
up the bank.

   
"Tell him to give them a
quote from me," he said. "Say we aren't looking for anyone else in
connection with the incident at this time."

Within the hour, reporters and crews from both BBC Wales and its
independent counterpart arrived in Y Groes. Neither attempted to interview
Claire. They had no luck with any of the villagers either, in that all those
approached refused to give an interview through the medium of English. The
licensee of
Tafarn Y Groes
, Aled
Gruffydd, sounding very tired and nervous, said a few words to the reporter
from Radio Cymru, the BBC's Welsh language radio station.
Translated, it came down to, "This is a terrible tragedy, and we do not
want to make things any worse. Just let it go, will you?"

   
Max Canavan, of the
Sun,
was the only reporter who attempted
to talk to the woman who had lost her husband and her parents in separate
tragedies within a week. The door of the judge's house was opened to him by a
huge, bearded man who informed the reporter in a conversational tone that if he
did not leave the village immediately he would not leave it with his arms
unbroken.

   
Deprived thus of a story which
might have opened with "Tragic widow Claire Freeman spoke last night of
her grief and horror . . " the national newspapers ignored what was, after
all, only a domestic incident.

Chapter LV

So overgrown were the walls of the house with some sort of evergreen
creeper that its gabled attic windows looked like the eyes of a hairy sheepdog
under pointed ears.

   
Frightfully Gothic. Even when
they retired, she thought, some clergymen just had to find a typical vicarage
to hole up in.

   
She parked the Porsche proudly
in the driveway. It was only a secondhand one, with two substantial dents on
its left haunch which she'd refused to let them repair. But it looked even
better for that. Miranda liked her cars—and her men, come to that—to convey an
impression of having been around.

   
This Canon Peters clearly had
been around. He wore a crumpled cream suit, and his clerical collar, if indeed
he was wearing one, was hidden behind a beard like those supplied with the more
superior Father Christmas outfits.

   
"My dear," he said,
flinging back the door. He had to be over eighty and yet he was looking at her,
Miranda noticed, with the eyes of a man who thought that if he played his
cards right he might be in with a chance here.

   
"
Ex
-lover, eh?" Canon Peters said. "What can the boy be thinking
of? And a Porsche too! Two visions to break an old man's heart. Come through,
my dear."

   
Phew—! He hadn't been like this
on the phone.

   
Miranda followed the old
clergyman along a dim hall and then into a big warmly toned room, its walls
painted the creamy colour of his suit.

   
"Drove Triumph Spitfires
for years," he was saying. "Now the sods have taken away my license.
Bloody eyesight test."

   
"Didn't seem to me that
your eyes were terribly deficient," Miranda said.

   
"Fiddled the test, if you
ask me. Thought I was too old for a sports car. Bloody bureaucrats. Like a
drink?"

   
"Perhaps not," said Miranda
who had once had her own license taken away, as a result of a mere couple of
double gins. Well, perhaps three.

   
"Suppose I'd think twice
too, if I had a Porsche. Coppers love a Porsche."

   
"They do indeed. Now.
Canon Peters—"

   
"Alex, please. Sit down,
my dear." He brought himself a whisky and sat next to her on the chintzy
sofa, an arm flung across its back behind her. "I didn't really expect you
to
come."

   
Miranda was surprised too. When
the Canon had phoned, she'd been lying on Morelli's bed watching morning television—some
awful ex-MP who thought he was God's gift—and feeling somewhat at a loose end.
She'd traded in her Golf for the Porsche the previous day, the result of a particularly
gratifying bank statement, and was trying to think of somewhere moderately
exciting to exercise it.

   
But Wales?

   
Alex was saying, "l can
see you're hooked on this thing already." On a coffee table he had a
six-speaker ghetto-blaster of the most overt kind.

   
"Let me play you what I recorded
from the radio. I listen to Radio Wales every morning, sentimental old
sod."

   
He pressed the "play"
key. "Missed the first bit. I'm afraid. By the time I realised it was
significant, damn thing was half over."

   
. .
. was found brutally beaten to death in a bedroom at the village inn. Mr. and
Mrs.
    
Hardy had been forced to spend
the night at the inn after their car broke down. The
   
couple, who were from Gloucestershire, were in the area to attend
the funeral of
 
their son-in-law, who
died suddenly last week. Mr. Hardy, who was sixty-four, was
      
found dead later this morning in his car
in a remote area about three miles from the
   
village.
Police said they were not looking for a third person in connection with the
        
incident.

"There," said Alex, switching off the ghetto-blaster. "I
think we can take it, don't you, that these two people were Giles Freeman's
in-laws?"

   
"It certainly looks that
way. Gosh."

   
"Did you try to contact
your friend Morelli?"

   
"Oh yes," Miranda
said. "In fact that's partly why I'm here."

   
After the Canon's call she'd
rung American Newsnet to inquire if they had a number for Berry Morelli in
Wales and been told that Berry Morelli, as of this morning, was no longer
working for the agency.

   
"What?"

   
"He fired himself,"
Addison Walls had said.
   
"Is he still in Wales?"

   
"Your guess is good as . .
. No, hell, he's there all right, the weirdo bastard."

   
"But what's he
doing
there?

   
"Listen, lady, if I knew
that . . ."

   
So, in the end, what had really
done it for Miranda was the thought that she might be
missing
something.

   
That what Morelli had been
rambling on about was not, in fact, the purest load of old whatsit, but something
rather extraordinary—
and she wasn't part
of it
.

   
This, and having no actual work
in prospect for at least a month.

   
And owning a Porsche for the
first time in her life and having nothing exciting to do with it.

   
Miranda's plan was to milk the
Canon and drive across to Wales with whatever goodies he had to offer—and a lot
of tyre-squealing on the bends.

   
"Martin," she said.
"You mentioned somebody called Martin. Who died."

   
"Poor Martin, yes. Super
chap in his way."

   
"So what happened to
him?"

   
"Sure you won't have a
drink?"

   
"After you tell me what
happened to this Martin."

   
"You're a hard
woman," Alex said, and he recalled how he'd met Martin Coulson some time
after his retirement, while doing a spot of part-time lecturing at a Welsh theological
college.

   
Coulson had been a student
there, an Englishman, though you wouldn't have thought it, Alex said, to hear
the boy speak Welsh.

   
"I'm no expert, mind. I
was brought up in the Rhondda and left there at seventeen. My own Welsh is
rudimentary to say the least. But my colleagues were enormously impressed by
this young man's dedication. Actually, what it was was an obsession which
lasted throughout his time at college. And his achievement was publicly
recognised when he was declared Welsh Learner of the Year at the National Eisteddfod."

   
"What an accolade,"
Miranda said dryly.

   
"And after he was ordained
he was keen to work in a Welsh-speaking parish. So the bishop decided it was
time Y Groes had a curate. I think, actually, he was getting rather
worried about Ellis Jenkins, the vicar there. Jenkins had been very well known
as a poet, writing in English and then increasingly in Welsh and getting his
work published under
the name Elias ap Siencyn—ap Siencyn being the Welsh version of Jenkins.
Anyway, the reason they were worried about him was that his work was becoming .
. . shall I say, a little esoteric. And yet somehow strident. Rather extreme in
an anti-English way."

   
"Loony Welsh Nationalist
vicar?"

   
"Lots of them about, my dear.
Never read R.S. Thomas?"
   
"I've never even read
Dylan
Thomas," said Miranda shamelessly.

   
Alex Peters made no comment on
this. Miranda had taken note that the author's name which seemed to occur more often
than any other on his own bookshelves was Ed McBain.

   
"Of course. Ellis Jenkins
didn't want a curate, but he had no choice in the matter. So Martin, all
enthusiasm, fluent in Welsh goes off to Y Groes, and within three months . . .he's
dead."

   
Miranda waited while Canon Alex
Peters filtered whisky through his beard.

   
"The inquest returned a verdict
of misadventure, although I was not convinced."

   
"You thought he'd been
murdered?"

   
"Oh, good Lord no. I
thought he'd committed suicide."

   
"Oh," said Miranda,
disappointed.

   
"He came to see me. Must
have been about three weeks after going to Y Groes to take up his curacy. In a
terrible state. Thin, hollow-eyed. Obviously hadn't been eating properly, or
sleeping much, I would have said. We had a long discussion. I wanted him to
stay the night but he refused. You might think, my dear, that we're all
bumbling, stoical chaps, but I can tell you, a clergyman in the throes of emotional
crisis is a dreadful sight to behold."

   
"Was he a poof?" asked
Miranda, this being the only emotional problem she could imagine the average
clergyman having to come to terms with.

   
"Oh, nothing like that.
Nothing
sexual
. No, quite simply, the
much-lauded Welsh Learner of the Year had got up in the pulpit for the first
time, about to deliver his maiden
sermon to the assembled villagers of Y Groes—and believe me that parish is one
of the few left in Britain that still pulls 'em in on a Sunday. So there he is
in the pulpit, fully
prepared, rehearsed—and he can't do it. Won't come out."

   
"How d'you mean?"

   
Alex Peters threw up his arms.

   
"He finds he simply can't
preach in Welsh!"

   
"I don't understand."
said Miranda.

   
"Neither did he. This man
was good. I mean very good—one chap at the college told me he sometimes thought
Martin Coulson's Welsh was more correct than his own, and he'd lived all his
life in Lampeter. And yet whenever he got up in the pulpit at Y Groes, he was completely
tongue-tied. And not only that, he found he was increasingly unable to speak
Welsh to the villagers he met socially or in the street. I'll always remember
what he said to me that afternoon. He said. 'You know Alex, when I'm in Y
Groes—as soon as I get out of the car—I feel like a damned Englishman
again.'"

   
Miranda thought to herself that
Martin Coulson must merely have come to his senses after wasting all that time learning
a language that was about as much use in the civilised world as Egyptian
hieroglyphics. The best thing he could have done was get on the first available
train to London.

   
"I didn't know how to
advise him," Alex Peters said. "I wondered whether Ellis Jenkins was
intimidating him in some way. I suggested he take a few days' holiday and think
things over, but he insisted on going back. It's always been a source of great
regret to me that I didn't go with him for a day or two—how much help I'd have
been, with no Welsh to speak of, is debatable. But, as one gets older, these
things prey on one's mind."