Candlenight (55 page)

   
"Like Giles failing to
learn Welsh—to be a part of something he so much admired—"

   
"Right. Or have their negative
emotions take over. Lose their normal resistance to unacceptable or downright
brutal behaviour. Like ole George Hardy. Suburban solicitor beats wife to
death. In short, go nuts."

   
"Or," Bethan said,
"if we try to explain the deaths from natural causes, to get into such a
state that even their bodies stop fighting."

   
"OK, Like the immune
system breaks down or something of that order. My knowledge of these things is
no more than the average hypochondriac. So they're exposed to diseases, tumours
form that never would've, heart diseases worsen and, well, yeah—"

   
"I've always found it
bitterly ironic." Bethan said, bleakly, "that Robin, who was so opposed
to nuclear power, should die of a condition so often said to be induced by
radiation escaping from nuclear installations." She shook her head sadly.
"Radiation."

   
"Was he happy in Y Groes?
Was it like he'd imagined?"

   
"He—Oh, what does it
matter now . . ." Bethan was twisting her scarf. "The truth is we
never really had much of marriage in Y Groes. Almost as soon as we moved in, he
began to be tired and irritable. The stress of the move and the travelling and
having to search for nuclear dump-sites—that was what he put it down to. We
used to go for walks together, along the river bank, up to the woods, and he would
go so far and he just became . . . bone-tired, you know?' She turned away,
stared hard at the people-shapes
passing the misted car window. "l'm going to cry."

   
"Let's get outta
here." Berry flung the Sprite into gear, rubbing the windscreen clear,
moving into a line of traffic in the one-way system out of town.

   
"We really
are
insane, aren't we?" Bethan was
shouting at him. 'Tell me we're insane! Tell me we're imagining it all, fabricating
something out of thin air to account for a lot of people's bad luck. Look, for
God's sake, take me home, Morelli! Don't you have a job to go to?"

   
"No," he said.
"And you don't want to go home. You know where we have to go."

"No . . ." Bethan was shaking. That is, she was sitting here
very still, but he knew she really was shaking inside. We can't."

   
"How else?" He also
was shouting now, against the ear-threshing of a big delivery van alongside
them. "How else we gonna find out one way or the other? How else, without
we go in there and start kicking asses till we get some answers?"

   
"You don't know what it's
like!" Bethan screamed.

   
A lorry's brakes hissed . . .
ssssssssssssssssssiiiice!

   
He turned into a stream of traffic
crossing a wide bridge over the Wye.

   
"You came back, Beth.
Nobody said you had to take that job. You'd killed its baby and you came
back."

   
Bethan wept, biting hard into
her lower lip until blood came.

Chapter
 
LXII

Tin- radio had described the road over the Nearly Mountains as
"passable with care."

   
On the way to Pont, with his
wife Gwenllian in the passenger seat, Aled had driven with considerable concentration,
knowing of old what this road could do with a coat of snow on its back. On the
return journey, alone now, his driving had been sloppy, his mind on other
things, and he'd taken a corner too fast and ploughed the van into a
snowdrift.

   
Digging himself out with the shovel
he always kept in the back from November until May, Aled could see the tip of Y
Groes's church tower, a light haze around it, wispy blue.
While the sky above him, as he shovelled snow from around the van wheels, was
thick as pastry.

   
He was going back. He had put
Gwenllian, who did not understand these things, on the bus to Aber where her
sister lived. But he was going back.

   
What alternative was there? He
was the keeper, like his dad before him, of the most beautiful inn in the most beautiful
place you would find anywhere. This was what he told himself.

   
He threw the spade in the back
of the van. All around him the Nearly Mountains were tundra, no visible blade
of grass. The slender creature about two hundred feet away was a fox, ears
pricked, loping off when it saw him, black against the snow. Everything in
black and white from up here, except the sky over Y Groes.

   
By the time he arrived back in
the village — not yet ten o'clock—the sky had deepened to a lurid mauve, the
colour pouring in from a circle in the clouds like a hole sawn in a sea of ice
for Eskimos to fish. It was as if the church tower had stabbed out the hole.

   
In the village, the light
scattering of snow had already melted. For the first time Aled did not like the
fact that there was so little snow here while so much lay on the lower ground
of Pontmeurig. For the first time it seemed less than healthy. The ochre and
grey stone shone with moisture, like film of sweat. The whitewashed buildings
had a mauvish glow that made him think of the glow in the faces of people on radium
treatment.

   
It's gone too far, Aled
thought.

Going to snow again, though," Guto observed hopefully. Why don't we
call it off now?"

   
He wasn't inclined to risk any
journey which might so delay his return to Pontmeurig that it would be
difficult to slip unseen up the stairs at the Plas Meurig and into Suite 2, where
the woman at the centre of all his finest fantasies would be waiting in
exquisitely expensive French knickers.

   
There had been a few amazing
moments last night when the result of the Glanmeurig by-election had seemed a matter
of little consequence.

   
"No way," the General
Secretary of Plaid Cymru pronounced. He glared at the sky through his tinted
glasses—permanently rose-coloured, Guto thought—and then consulted his personal
organiser. "Saturday tomorrow, OK? Big day. And you have meetings
scheduled all next week. This is a crucial one. We can't be seen to be avoiding
discussions with the farming organisations. If
they
want to call it off, fine, but we cannot."

   
"But, Alun, nobody will
come! It'll be just like last time, and where does that leave us?"

   
Alun spread his hands.
"We're not dependent on the villagers, this time. It just happens to be a
central venue. Farmers, this is, Guto. And tell me, what does every farmer
have?"

   
"A bloody big chip on his
shoulder." said Guto.

   
"A four-wheel drive vehicle,"
Alun said patiently. "Enabling him to get to places otherwise
inaccessible. Which is why they won't call it off. Deliberately—to see what
you're made of. Fortunately, we also have two Land-Rovers at
our
disposal, one for you and me and one
for Dai and Idwal and the boys from rent-a-supporter, so you will not be lonely
this time. Anyway, it isn't going to snow that hard, according to the forecast.
And you will come across as tough and dynamic and totally reliable."
   
"Piss off," said Guto.

"Will you be staying another night. Miss Moore-Lacey?"

   
Miranda was an inch or two
taller than the proprietor of the Plas Meurig, but the way she looked at him
made it seem like a couple of feet.

   
"Possibly," she said.

   
His thin smile was barely
perceptible on his plump face. "Would it be possible for you to let us
know by lunchtime, do you think?" Slightly less deference than yesterday,
she thought. Might have to deal with that.

   
"I'll see," she said
airily and walked briskly through the hotel foyer to the front door, slinging
her bag over her shoulder as a gesture of dismissal.

   
Outside the door she giggled,
feeling almost light hearted. Wondering how many points one was entitled to for
a Neanderthal Welsh nationalist Having woken her up a some ungodly hour for the
purpose of giving her one for the road. Guto had slipped away before eight,
confident of passing relatively unnoticed among all the Tories and Liberals
milling around waiting for an early breakfast.
   
As she walked out to the Porsche, a
man with one of those motorised things on his camera look about half-a-dozen photographs
of her. Miranda waved gaily to him. Famous actress spotted in Wales. Hah!

All the main roads had been cleared of snow; the by-roads were not to be
trusted, the radio said.

   
"We shall be all right then."
Bethan said, "at least as far as Pontmeurig."

   
Ahead of them, the mountains
were pure white and flat as a child's collage.

   
"You ever break into a
tomb?" Berry asked. "Any idea how it's done? Jemmy? Jackhammer?"

   
Bethan began to worry about
him. She wished she had not told him about the baby. He was unshaven, the
blue-jawed tough-guy now, hair as black as her own falling over his forehead as
he spun the wheel to ease his car between a snow-drift and the hedge of a steep
incline. But there was a gleam of something unstable in his eyes. Something to
prove—to himself, to his father. And to her now. Which she did not want.

   
"I'm not crazy."
Berry said.

   
Bethan said nothing.

   
"Just I hate secrets. Hate
cover-ups."

   
"So I've gathered."
Bethan said.

   
"Way I see it, if the big
secret of that place is that Owain Glyndwr's body is there, and people somehow
are dying so that secret can stay a secret, then it's time the whole thing was
blown open. What we have to do is finish Ingley's work for him."

   
"Ingley died," Bethan
said. They had come the roundabout way because of the snow and were entering
the valley of the lead mine.

   
"We gotta blow it wide
open. Let the historians and archaeologists in there. Be a find of national
importance, right? Bring in the tourists. Let in some air."

   
This morning the abandoned lead
mine was bleakly beautiful, its jagged walls like some medieval fortress—the dereliction,
all the scrappy bits, under humps of snow. In a
place like this it would survive for ever, Bethan thought. Until its stones and
the rocks were fused into one in the way the snow had united them today.

   
Wales has no future, the poet
R. S. Thomas had written. No present. Only a past.

   
A past guarded with vengeful
fury.

   
Somewhere around her stomach,
Bethan felt a sense of insidious foreboding. Berry Morelli, like Ingley, like
Giles in his way, had become ensnared.

   
"Berry," she said.
"Please. Turn round. Let's go to an expert. Go to the University. Find
some help."

   
"No way," Berry'
said. "Academics don't take one look at a little red notebook and say,
wow, let's get over there. They take years. Go to committees. Seek funding to
establish official research projects. Only time they move fast is when it's
clear that, if they don't, all the evidence is gonna disappear. I guess that is
the kind of action we have to precipitate."
   
"It won't let you, Berry."

   
"It? It won't let me?
Jesus." The road widened out and he ground his foot and the accelerator
into the floor.

   
"Listen," Bethan
said. "How are we going to do this alone? Just two ordinary people. Two
ordinary
scared
people."

   
"All my life," Berry
said, "it seems like I've been a scared person. Neurotic, wimpish."
Un-American, he thought. 'This is where it ends."

   
Or you end, Bethan thought.

CELTIC NIGHT

Chapter LXIII

When they made love that afternoon it was almost like a ceremony. This,
in spite of the fact that it took place in the flat above Hampton's Bookshop,
in Bethan's single bed, and to the banal cacophony of duelling speaker-vans,
Tory and Labour, from the street.

   
A tender ritual, Berry thought.
A parting ritual. But why should either of them be thinking like that?