Candlenight (53 page)

   
"That's wild," said
Berry. "I mean, that is
wild
.
You're suggesting this guy Dilwyn's ancestor built some kind of special funeral
cart or horse-drawn bier or whatever they had in those days to fetch Glyndwr
home. And five centuries later the family's still in the transport business. Who's
the fourth man, the farmer?"

   
"Morgan. There is only one
Morgan family in Y Groes, and Buddug is married to the head of the tribe."

   
"The ball-slasher?"

   
Bethan nodded into the mirror,
unsmiling. "The Morgans have farmed there since . . . who can say?"

   
Berry said. "Are we imagining
all this?"

   
She said sharply. "You
mean am I imagining all this?"

   
He went over and put his hands
on her shoulders, didn't try to dislodge the towel. She carried on combing out
her hair as if his hands weren't there.

   
"Bethan, I'm taking a deep
breath, OK? What makes you think that if Claire is pregnant we may not be
talking about Giles's baby?"

   
She did not reply, went on
combing her hair, although the tangles were long gone.

   
Through the mirror, he saw what
looked like old tears burning to come out. She blinked them away.

   
He fell suddenly angry but said
nothing—where was the use in pressurising her?

   
But then, abruptly, she put
down the comb, wiped her hands on a pastel tissue and told his reflection,
without preamble, why she'd gone to Swansea after Robin's death.

   
When she'd finished talking, he
went over to the window and looked down to where sporadic night traffic was circumventing
the construction site for some new road.

   
He really wanted to believe
her.

   
But how much of this could you
take? Things getting weirder by the minute.

   
"Stupid of me," she
said. "I did not want to tell you, but you pushed."

   
He turned back and started
towards her.

   
"No," she said.

   
He sat down on the bed. put his
hands over his face and rubbed his eyes in slow circular movements.

   
He said, "And it really
couldn't have been his, Robin's?"

   
"No."

   
"Bethan. I don't only want
to believe you. I need to believe you."

   
"That is not good
enough." she said.
   
sice
. . . sice . . . sice
... the air said. Tissue-thin-pages whispering.

   
Bethan tossed her head back,
stared at the ceiling. The chasm between them was about a hundred miles wide.

   
You and me
, the Gypsy said,
we
in same shit. One day you find out.

   
What Bethan had told him was
that approximately three weeks after Robin's death, she had discovered she was expecting
a baby. Because she knew in her own mind that this could not be Robin's child,
she had moved to Swansea where no one knew her. And where the pregnancy had
been terminated.

   
"I did not kill my
baby." she emphasised quite calmly. "I killed
its
baby."

   
"It?"

   
'The village. Y Groes."
   
Oh, Christ.

   
He had no idea how to follow
this up. Either she'd tell him or she wouldn't. His lips kept forming
questions, but the questions never made it. Only one.

   
"How could you go back?"
he asked. He'd asked her that before.

   
"How could I not go
back?" she replied.

"And do you work with Morelli?" the Bearded Welsh Extremist
asked. Every few seconds somebody on the way out would slap him on the back and
say something jolly in Welsh.

   
"You have got to be
joking." said Miranda.

   
"Well what do you want him
for?"

   
"I don't actually
want
him." Miranda said frankly—no
point in trying to bullshit a politician; they were all far too good at it not
to spot it coming from someone else. "I just want to pass on some
information which might help him."

   
"I see," said the BWE,
whose name she couldn't remember, except that it sounded vaguely insulting.
"Well, I don't know where Morelli has gone but I do know who he is
with." His eyes were smouldering, she thought, in rather a dark and
brooding way, like some sort of Celtic Heathcliff. "Tell me," he
said, "have you anywhere to stay?"

   
"Well, I have."
Miranda told him. "But it isn't much of a place."

"Oh, well, good accommodation is hard to find with this election
on."

   
"You're telling
me
. I wound up at some faded Victorian dive
called the Plas something or other."

   
His eyes stopped in
mid-smoulder and widened. "The Plas Meurig? You managed to get a room at
the Plas Meurig?"

   
"I realise there's got to
be, a better hotel somewhere, but I
was
in rather a hurry."

   
He appeared to be regarding her
with a certain respect, on top of the usual naked lust. But before she could
capitalise on this, an efficient-looking man with tinted glasses and a clipboard
slid between them. "Guto," he said. "Problems, I'm afraid.
Tomorrow night's meeting with the farmers' unions. Bit of a mix-up over the
hall at Cefn Mynach.
liberal Democrats have got it, so I'm afraid . . . Look, I did try for an
alternative venue to Y Groes, but it's central for the farmers."

   
"No way, Alun,"
snarled Guto. "I wouldn't go back there if the alternative was a bloody
sheep-shed in the Nearly Mountains."

   
Miranda thought,
Y Groes
. . .

Lowering his voice, this Alun said. "Come on. Guto. We should see
it as a challenge. We can build on tonight's success, regain our position.
You're acquiring an enviable reputation for turning the tables."

   
"Aye, and the Press will
show up in force when they find out," said Guto. "No, forget it, postpone
it."

   
"We can't postpone it. We'll
come across as unreliable, look, I shall make sure there's a good crowd this
time. We can even take most of one with us. Come on man, you did well
tonight."

   
"Alun," the Extremist
said. "I am getting a bad feeling about this."

   
Oh my God, Miranda thought. Not
another one.

Chapter LX

Berry Morelli slept uneasily. Bethan did not sleep at all.

   
Outside, even in Herefordshire
now, it was snowing lightly but consistently.

   
They had not touched one
another.

   
The room had caught an amber
glow from the road-construction site below. And in this false warmth Bethan was
remembering a close summer evening, a bitter argument with Robin, who was
always tired and fractious but insisted it was nothing physical. She remembered
storming out, nerves like bare wires, and being soothed at once as the
air settled around her, as comforting as soft arms.

   
It did this sometimes, the
village. Was absorbed through the skin like some exotic balm. The soporific
scents of wild flowers on a breeze like a kiss. Your churning emotions
massaged as you walked down the deserted street, past the
Tafarn
, the church tower soaring from its grassy mound, venerably
beneficent.

   
Robin raging alone inside their
terraced cottage at the top of the street, while Bethan was wafted away on the
silky, cushioned wings of the evening.

   
She remembered the air lifting
her gently over the stile to the meadow that sloped to the river, trees making
a last shadow-lattice on the deepening green.

   
Remembered yielding her body gratefully
to the soft grass, letting the breezes play in the folds of her summer dress.
There seemed to be several breezes, all of them warm, making subtle ripples and
swirls and eddies.

   
And she had fallen asleep and
dreamed a child's dream of the
Tylwyth
Teg
, the beautiful fairy folk.

   
Awoken in the moistness of the
night, the dampness of the grass, the cold wetness between her legs, the
bittersweet tang of betrayal, a lingering faraway regret.

   
And no memory at all of what
had happened.
   
Of what.
   
Or who.

"Guto," she said. "Git-toe. It really is a super
name."

   
"Thank you," Guto
said dubiously. He was trying not to be charmed by this creature who, only
minutes earlier, had been chanting git-toe, git-toe through clenched teeth, in
concert with the rhythm of her loins.

   
What also filled him with a
certain perverse delight was the thought that, in order to bonk this terribly
English Englishwoman, he had actually infiltrated Simon Gallier's fortress, the
Plas Meurig, and was about to spend a night within the hallowed portals free of
charge.

   
Whatever the result, it had
certainly been an experience, this by-election.

   
"You might as well tell me,"
he said. "How the hell did you manage to persuade them to let you have a
room? And not just any room, for heaven's sake . . ."

   
He was looking up suspiciously
at an ornate Victorian ceiling across which misshapen plaster cherubs frolicked
amid gross moulded foliage.

   
"Isn't it so utterly
tasteless?" said Miranda and giggled, a sound which reminded Guto of the
tinkling door chimes in Pontmeurig's new health food shop which he'd entered
for the first time during this afternoon's canvassing.

   
"It might be
tasteless," he said. "But it's probably the best room they've
got."

   
An awful thought had crept up
on him. They wouldn't, would they?

   
"Hah!" Miranda sprang
up in the bed, wobbling deliciously. "I know what you're worried
about!"
   
"What am I worried about?"

   
"You think I've been
planted, don't you? You think I'm an expensive bimbo hired by the opposition to
discredit you. You think any second now the door's going to fly open and chaps
will crowd in with popping flashbulbs. You do, don't you? Admit it!"

   
"Was a thought," Guto
mumbled gruffly.

   
"Hah!" Miranda
shrieked and rolled about laughing. "Oh, how utterly wonderful that would
be!"

   
"Shut up, woman,"
Guto hissed. "Everybody'll know you've got somebody in here."

   
"Oh, I love it when you
call me 'woman'."

   
"Well, come on, enlighten
me. How
did
you get into a hotel
that's been claiming to've been hooked up solid for weeks?"

   
"I'm not going to tell. I
have my methods."
   
"Now look. I'll . . ."

   
"
Will
you, Guto? Will you really? Do you think you still have the
strength? Well, in that case I'll tell you just a little, it all comes down to
judicious use of that famous phrase. Do you know who I am?" which never
works with the police these days but still tends to put hoteliers in the most awful
tizz, especially in small-town snobby dumps like this. So don't worry any more,
OK?"

   
"Who said I was
worried?"

   
Miranda dug into the bedclothes.
"Oh dear, he's utterly flaked out, isn't he, poor little Welsh thing. All
right, I'll give him half an hour to recover. And you can use the time to tell
me all about this dreadful village where people go to die."

   
"Y Groes?" Guto fell
back into the pillows. "I suppose I died there myself, in a metaphorical
way. In the theatrical sense of presenting your famous one-man show and no bugger
applauds."

   
"Did you know a chap
called Martin Coulson?"

   
"Met him the once.
Briefly, like."

   
"I was talking to this old
vicar who believes Coulson committed suicide because he was brilliant at
speaking Welsh but he couldn't get a word of it out in the pulpit. Does that
make any sense to you?"