Candlenight (51 page)

   
"Like Y Groes?"

   
Probably."

   
"You want to stop?"

   
"No. Can we go to England,
Berry?"

   
"We sure can," he
said, surprised. "Any particular part? Hull? Truro?"

   
"Not far over the border.
Herefordshire."
   
"Any special reason for
this?"

   
Bethan opened the red book.
'There's an address here.
Near Monnington-on-Wye. Do you know the significance of Monnington? Did you get
that far in Guto's book?"

   
"Uh-huh." Berry shook
his head.

   
"You can look out from
there and see the hills of Wales."

   
"I think I
understand," Berry said.

Chapter LVII

He liked less and less having to go into the oak woods, particularly in
winter. Without their foliage, the trees could look at you.

   
And into your soul.

   
He did not look at them, could
not face them. As he walked, he stared at the ground. But he could see their
roots like splayed hands, sometimes had to step over individual
knobbled fingers.

   
Remembering being introduced to
the woods as a boy, as they all had been. Taught honour and respect for the
trees, fathers of the village itself. And once, aged eighteen or thereabouts,
bringing a girl into the woods one night in May and feeling afraid at the
inferno of their passion.

   
Gwenllian. His wife now.

   
He told himself he was doing
this for her. Ill she was now, most of the time. Did not want to cook, would go
into no bedroom but their own, wept quietly in the afternoons.

   
Looking only at the ground, he
almost bumped into the oaken gate.

   
Rheithordy.

   
Looked up then, and into the face
of the rector.
   
Cried out, stifled it, embarrassed.

   
Ap Siencyn, in his cassock,
standing at the gate, motionless, like one of the winter trees.
   
"Rector," Aled said weakly.

   
Only the rector's hair moved.
Even whiter than Aled's and longer, much longer, it streamed out on either
side, unravelled by a little whingeing wind which the oaks had let
through as a favour.

   
The rector spoke, his voice
riding the wind like a bird.

   
"You are a coward, are you
then, Aled?"

   
"Yes," Aled confessed
in shame. "I am a coward."
   
There was a long silence then, the
wind cowed too.
   
"We shall have to leave, I
know." Aled said.
   
"Indeed?"

   
"We . . . I . . . There used
to be this exhilaration. A delight in every day. Contentment, see. That was how
it was.

   
"And you do not think we
have to justify it? Nothing to pay, Aled?"

   
"But why upon me? Me and
Gwenllian, all the time?"
   
"Perhaps it is a test. A test
which you appear to be on the point of failing."

   
"But when there's no
contentment left, only a dread—"
   
"It's winter, Aled. In winter,
the bones are revealed. In winter we know where we are and what we are."
   
Aled said, "Death himself walked
from these woods last night, and across the bridge and to the door of the
inn." The pitch of his voice rose. "
We heard him knocking, with his

claw, a thin knocking ..."

   
The rector said mildly,
"You've known such things before."

   
"It's changed," Aled
said. "There is . . . something sick here now."

   
The rector did not move yet seemed
to rise a full two feet, and his white hair streamed out, although there was no
wind now.

   
"How
dare
you!"

   
Aled shook his head and backed
off, looking at the ground.

   
"You puny little
man." He was pointing at Aled now, with a thin black twig, like a wand.
   
"I'm sorry."

   
"If you go from here you
must go soon," the rector said.
   
"Yes. There are relatives we can
stay with. Over at Aber."
   
"You must get out of our
country."
   
"Leave Wales?"
   
"And never return."
   
"But what will we do?"

   
"No harm will come to you,
I don't suppose," the rector said. "Unless you try to come back
here."

   
Meaningfully, he snapped the
twig in half and tossed the pieces over the gate so that they landed at Aled's
feet.

   
"It's building again, you
see," ap Siencyn said, deceptively gently. "You must be aware of
that. You must surely
feel it growing beneath us and all around us."

   
Oh yes, he could feel it.
Almost see it sometimes, like forked lightning from the tip of the church
tower.

   
"It's like the rising sun
on a cloudless day," the rector said. "Always brighter in the winter.
Rising clear. And those who do not rise with it, those not protected, will be
blinded by the radiance."

   
Aled thought, this man talks
all the time in a kind of poetry. Perhaps it is a symptom of his madness.

   
But the parish owned the inn
and many of the cottages and so he, in effect, was ap Siencyn's tenant. And in
other ways, Aled knew, ap Siencyn had the power to do good and to do harm. He
looked down at the two pieces of the twig at his feet and saw where his choice
lay.

   
"Don't leave it too long,
will you. Aled? Make your decision."

 
"Yes," Aled said. He
walked back through the woods towards the road, and the oak trees watched him
go.

Chapter LVIII

I felt it was right, see," Guto said. "Meant to happen. All my
life, the disappointments, the frustrations—all foundations for it I mean,
Christ. I
needed
this."

   
Dai Death said, "Oh, come
on, man. Not over yet, is it?"

   
"It is for me. I'll tell
you when it ended . . . that meeting in Y Groes. I just can't convey to you,
Dai, what it was like. Thinking, you know, have I come to the wrong bloody
hall, or what? Another pint, is it?"

   
"Not for me. And not for you
either. Finish that one and get a sandwich down you."

   
"Bloody mother hen."
Guto grumbled.

   
Well, all right, he was drinking
too much, he knew it. And in public. The party's General Secretary, Alun, had
warned him about this—"half the votes are women, never forget that"—as
they drove across to Aber for a lunchtime conference with two other Plaid MPs.
The other MPs had been encouraging. You could not really get an idea until the final
week, they said. But Guto had followed campaigns where a candidate who'd been
strongly tipped initially had dropped clean off the chart in the first few
days.

   
By the weekend the results of
the first opinion polls would be out. If they were half as bad as he expected,
he'd be placed at least third . . .

   
"Bethan it is, though,
really," Dai said. "Admit it."

   
Guto glared resentfully at the
undertaker through his pint glass. Then he put the glass down, fished out a
cigarette, the anger blown over now, leaving him subdued.

   
"Aye, well, that
too."

   
And that also would have been
so right, both of them gasping for fresh air—her with the trouble at school,
him badly needing a legitimate outlet for frustrations which were
threatening to turn destructive. Westminster, the bright lights—and what was so
wrong with bright lights'? He'd convinced himself—well, Christ, politics
weren't everything—that when he won the election she would go with him.

   
When he won . . .

   
He could have bloody wept.

   
"Who
is
this Morelli?" Dai asked. "Who is he
really
?"
   
"More to the point." Guto
said, "
where
is he?"

This was also what the girl in the Porsche wanted to know.

   
"Seen you on the telly,
isn't it?" Mrs. Evans said at once, having watched the car pulling up
outside the house and this exotic creature unwinding.

   
"Well, it's
possible," Miranda admitted modestly.

   
"It's the red hair. Wasn't
you in . . . Oh. what's it called now, that detective thing on a Sunday night
...?"

   
"Oh well, you know. I pop
up here and there." Miranda was hardly going to remind this little woman
that her best-known television persona was the girl accosted in a back street
by a leather-clad thug impressed by her shampoo. "Anyway, I'm awfully
sorry to bother you. but a journalist told me Berry Morelli was staying
here."

   
"Oh, Mr. Morelli. Him
you're looking for?"

   
"I am indeed."

   
"Well, he left, not two
hours ago."

   
"Do you know where he's
gone?"

   
"Well. I never asked him, not
wanting to pry, Miss—"

   
"Moore-Lacey. Miranda
Moore-Lacey."

   
"Oh, lovely. He'll be terrible
sorry to have missed you. Let me see now ... I wonder if my son . . . Perhaps
he can tell you where Mr. Morelli is. Do you know my son?"

   
"I'm afraid I don't know a
soul here."

   
"Well you can't miss Guto.
Very distinctive, he is. Black beard and a big green rosette. Can't be far
away, he's a meeting to do in town tonight. He'll be at the Memorial Hall
by seven. Do you know where that is?"

   
"I'll find it."
Miranda said. 'Thank you very much."

   
As she slid into the car, the
first snowflakes landed on its bonnet and instantly evaporated. Within ten
minutes there were rather more of them and they were not evaporating quite so
rapidly.

When they found Bryan Mortlake, he was splitting logs outside his house,
a former lodge next to the main road. He did not stop splitting logs when they
spoke to him, and he
did not invite them in.

   
"Ingley," he said,
raising the axe. "Nutcase," he said, bringing it down.

   
The axe hit the log dead-centre
and the two halves fell from the block. One rolled over Bethan's shoe.

   
"Safer to stand further back,"
Mortlake said, looking and talking more like a retired colonel than a retired
academic. Except retired colonels, in Berry's experience, were more polite.

   
He set up another log.
"Not still hanging around, is he?"

   
"He's dead." Berry
said.

   
"Oh? Well, he was still a
nutcase."

   
"You have many dealings
with him?"

   
"Not when I could help it.
Would you mind moving out of my light. Snow's forecast for tomorrow, did you
know that?"

   
"Dr. Mortlake,"
Bethan said. "Would you tell us what Dr. Ingley came to see you
about?"

   
Mortlake brought down the axe.
There was a knot in the log, and it jammed. He looked at Bethan as if it was
her fault then hit the axe handle with the flat of his hand to free it. Both
log and axe tumbled off the block and Mortlake looked furious.

   
"Look, what's all this
about?"

   
"We found your name and address
in this," Bethan pulled the red book from her raincoat. "I am a schoolteacher
in a village in West Wales, where Dr. Ingley was doing some research. When he
died, his notes were passed on to me. I'm writing a history of the village and
I thought—"

   
Mortlake snatched the book and
thumbed through it for about half a minute before handing it back with what
Berry assumed to be a superior, academic sneer.