Candlenight (50 page)

   
"I gather he went back
then."

   
"Afraid so. I phoned him once
or twice to find out how he was getting on. 'Fine.' he said. 'What about the
Welsh?' I said. 'Done any preaching?' 'Not yet,' he said, 'but I'm
working up to it.'

   
"So what happens next is
Jenkins abruptly decides to take a holiday. Never been known before. So, off he
goes to North Wales on the Saturday, and the following day Martin ascends the
steps of the pulpit, looks out over the congregation, opens his mouth to
deliver the opening words he's presumably spent all night preparing—and has the
most appalling nosebleed. I leave you to imagine the scene. Blood all over the
pulpit. Martin backing off down the steps and rushing out. Service abandoned in
disarray. All this came out at the inquest''

   
"How horrid," Miranda
said.

   
"Next day they find the boy
unconscious on the floor of the church. Cracked open his head on the pointed corner
of some tomb. Rushed to hospital. Five days in a coma, then
gone."

   
"Why did they decide it
was an accident?"

   
"Well, he'd had quite a lot
to drink, apparently, and he wasn't used to it. There was evidence that he was
very depressed. That from me, of course—Jenkins was away at the time of the
Martin's death, and he was being rather vague and bland about the whole
business. And there was no suicide note, and so the feeling was that he must
simply
have had too much to drink, wandered into the church in the dark, tripped and
bashed his head on the tomb. The idea of somebody deliberately smashing his
head into the stone didn't appeal."

   
"But you thought—" Miranda
was finding this rather distressing now. No fun any more.

   
"I suppose I had the idea of
him kneeling there and being suddenly overcome with despair and throwing back
his head and—crunch. Sorry, my dear, but you did ask. Now can I get you a
drink?"

   
"Yes please." she
said. "Just a tiny one. Lots of soda."

Forty minutes later she was roaring westwards—though very much in two
minds now about the whole thing.

   
Thinking seriously about all
this, what you had was not an intriguing mystery but something really rather
squalid: the story of a grim, unpleasant place where people couldn't settle
down and had become unhinged and killed themselves or each other out of sheer
depression.

   
When she'd pressed him, Canon
Peters had shrugged and said he just felt there were certain places you ought
to avoid if you possibly could.

   
"Yes, but
why
. . . ?"

   
"Oh, I don't know, my
dear. Why do some places, some people seem to attract tragedy? Is it isolation?
In-breeding? Perhaps it's something endemic to the whole area. Why was Winstone
Thorpe so bothered about Giles Freeman moving up there? I don't think we'll
ever reach any kind of conclusion. But I had it on my conscience that I might
have fobbed off young Morelli. And well, you know, after failing to save Martin
. . ."

   
Miranda had been vaguely intrigued
by this vicar person, this Jenkins.

   
"Ah." The Canon had
looked sort of wry. "I did meet him once, at a conference in Lampeter.
Spindly chap, staring eyes. And the stories, of course."

   
"What stories?"

   
"His obsession with the
old Celtic church—back at the dawn of Christianity in Britain. And what came
before it."
   
"And what did come before
it?"
   
"Oh, Druids and things. All tied
in with his preoccupation with being Welsh and the Eisteddfod and the Bardic tradition."

   
"Tedious," Miranda
said.
   
"Very, my dear."

   
Miranda had graciously declined
another drink and whatever else Canon Alex Peters might have had in mind. She hadn't
even stopped for lunch at any of the rather-inviting
Oxfordshire pubs. The tang of adventure in the air seemed to have dissipated,
leaving her quite moody and almost oblivious of the fact that she was driving
an actual Porsche.

   
Morelli was arguably the most
uptight, paranoid, insecure person she'd ever been close to. Was he really the
right person to be paddling about in this grotty little pool of death and
misery?

   
Miranda prodded the Porsche,
and it took the hint and whizzed her off towards the Welsh border.

Chapter LVI

Berry found it disturbing the way his whole life had been dramatically
condensed in just two days, his horizon reduced to a shadow.

   
Was this how it happened? Was
this what it did to you? Drew you in, and before you knew it there was no place
else to go, and the sky was slowly falling?

   
He was walking from the little
square behind the castle, through the back streets to Guto's place to pick up
his stuff, pay his bill, thank Mrs. Evans.

   
And then what?

   
Not yet noon, but it was like
the day had given up on Pontmeurig; the atmosphere had the fuzzy texture of
dusk.

   
He thought about Giles, who,
once he'd seen Y Groes, was sunk. Nothing else mattered but to escape to the place—a
place where the future, for him, was an illusion.

   
He thought about the Hardy
couple, how desperate she'd been to hightail it out of here and how everything
had pushed them back in until, different people by now—they
had to be different people—they'd destroyed each other.

   
Different people.

   
He'd come here two days ago
just to clear his own mind, settle his obligations. Now—he could hardly believe
how quickly and simply this had happened—
he
had no reason
to go back
. The link with London and,
through London, with the States had been neatly severed.

   
And there was Bethan.

   
Looking at it objectively, he
had to face this—Bethan was part of the trap.

 
Maybe they were part of each
other's traps.

 
Through the front window he could
see Mrs. Evans inside, dusting plates—a job which, in this house, must be like
painting the Brooklyn Bridge. And she saw him and put down her duster and
rushed to the door.
   
"Oh. Mr. Morelli—" she
wailed.

   
"Hey, listen. I'm real sorry
about last night, only I got detained and—"
   
"You haven't seen Guto. have
you?"
   
No he hadn't, thank God.

   
"Only he's gone off in a
terrible mood again. Came home last night moaning about being betrayed and
giving it all up, his—you know—the candidate's job. He doesn't mean it, mind,
but he's terrible offended about somebody."

   
A somebody with black hair and
big gold earrings and eyelids you could die over.

   
"How, ah, how's his
campaign going?"

   
"Oh dear, you haven't seen
the paper?"

   
On the hallstand, among about a
dozen plates, was a copy of that morning's
Western
Mail
, folded around a story in which Conservative candidate Simon Gallier
was suggesting that support for Plaid Cymru was rapidly falling away. He had
based his conclusion on a Plaid public meeting in the totally Welsh-speaking
community of Y Groes which, he claimed, had been attended by fewer than a dozen
people.

   
"—And when he saw that, on
top of everything, well—"

   
"I can imagine."

   
He could also imagine how
Bethan was going to feel about this. What a fucking mess.
   
"Can I pay you, Mrs. Evans?"

   
"You aren't leaving, are
you?" She looked disconsolate.

   
"I, ah, think it's for the
best. That's three nights, yeah? One hundred and—"

   
"You only stayed two
nights!"

   
"I shoulda been here last
night too."

   
"Go away with you, boy.
Two nights, that's eighteen pounds exactly."

   
He didn't want to screw things
up further for Guto by telling Mrs. Evans that even two nights, at the rates
quoted by her son. would come out at seventy pounds. He made her take fifty,
assuring her that all Americans had big expense accounts. Then he went to his
room, shaved, changed out of the American Werewolf sweatshirt and into a thick
fisherman's sweater because it wasn't getting any warmer out there.

   
Then he carried his bag downstairs,
thanked Mrs. Evans again, assuring her (oh, boy . . . ) that things would
surely work out for Guto, and took his stuff to the Sprite on the castle
parking lot.

   
Loaded the bag into the boot,
keeping an eye open for the Hard Man of the Nationalists. Guto was a guy with a
lot to take out on somebody, and he sure as hell wasn't going to hit Simon
Gallier if Berry Morelli was available.

   
He got into the car and sat
there watching the alley next to Hampton's Bookshop over the road, waiting for Bethan
to emerge.

   
They'd parted outside the funeral
parlour, he to pay Mrs. Evans, she to go home and change. They had said not one
word to each other about Elinor and George Hardy.

   
After half an hour it was very
cold in the car and he started the engine and the heater. She knew where he
was. She'd come.

   
What if she didn't?

   
He looked across at the flat
above the bookshop but could detect no movement. And yet she couldn't have gone
anywhere because her Peugeot was right there, not fifteen
yards away.

   
But what if she
had
gone away? What would he do if he never
saw her again? If that part of the trap were suddenly to spring open?

   
He couldn't face it. He needed
to be here now not for Winstone or Giles, who were beyond any help, but for Bethan.
Accepting now that this was why he'd let his job slide away. This was how his
life had condensed—around her. There was no way he could leave here without
her. But there was no way she was going to leave until—

   
A blink of white in the
alleyway, and she came out and walked quickly across the street to the car.

   
Berry closed his eyes and
breathed out hard.

   
Bethan got into the car and
slammed the door and they looked at each other.

   
And he said. "I know.
Drive, Morelli."

The village had been called Y Groesfan, and this had interested Dr.
Thomas Ingley.

   
Y Groesfan meant "the
crossing place," suggesting a crossroads. And yet no roads crossed in the
village; it was a dead end.

   
What other kind of crossing
could there be?

   
The origins of the village were
unknown, but the church was the oldest in this part of Wales, and its site, the
mound on which it was built, was prehistoric.

   
Most of the graves in the
churchyard dated back no further than the 1700s, but the tomb of Sir Robert
Meredydd in a small chapel to the left of the altar was late medieval.

   
Around the time of Owain
Glyndwr. It was recorded that Glyndwr, as a young man, had been to Y Groesfan
in the late summer of 1400 to "pay homage." This was only weeks before
he was declared Prince of Wales following a meeting of his family and close
friends at his house Glyndyfrdwy in northeast Wales.

   
All this Bethan had learned
from the red notebook found under a floorboard by the late George Hardy.

"But why does it have to be relevant'.'" Berry asked.

   
They were heading cast from the
town now, towards Rhayader, close to the very centre of Wales, where the executive
council of Plaid Cymru had met to decide on a
candidate for the Glanmeurig by-election.

   
"The last two people to
hold this notebook are dead," Bethan said, the red book on her lap.

   
"That scare you?"

   
"Left here," Bethan
said. She pointed out of her window.
"That church is Ysbyty Cynfyn. See the big stones in the wall? They are
prehistoric. The church is built inside a Neolithic stone circle. It used to be
a pagan place of worship;
now it's Christian."