Candlenight

Chapter V

Lying back, red hair all over the pillow and the cane headboard, Miranda applied the Zippo to the end of her cigarette and said, "So how was it for you, Miranda?"

Berry Morelli said, "Huh?" the sweat on his back was merely damp now, and chilly. It was an hour before dawn, the bedroom half-lit from the street.

In a dreamy voice, Miranda replied," Well, since you ask, Miranda, not too wonderful. I can say, with some degree of confidence, that I have definitely had better. I suppose, as rapes go, it was not without consideration…"

"Rape?" Berry Morelli sat up. "You said rape?"

"Well, if it was meant to be love-making," Miranda said, "it was distressingly short on the customary endearments. In fact, now that I think about it, it was entirely silent, bar the odd sharp intake of breath."

"Hey, listen I…" Berry leaned over her and helped himself to one of her cigarettes from the bedside table.

"…And then I began to detect in the rapist a…sort of underlying absence of joy, would that describe it? One's first experience of pre-coital tristesse. Or perhaps it was simply lack of interest, which would be considerably less tolerable." Miranda turned onto her side to face him, looking pale and fragile — which she wasn't — in the hazy streetlight from the uncurtained window.

"OK," she said. "What's eating you, Morelli?"

Berry hauled the black hair out of his eyes. The hair was still wet. From the rain, not the sweat. "Listen, I'm sorry."

"Oh, please… not the apology. I expect I enjoyed it more than you anyway." She covered up a breast and stared into space, smoking.

This Miranda. You could never figure out if she was deeply wounded or what. Berry rolled out of bed and into his bathrobe. "You want some tea? He was fully into tea now, no coffee these days. Very British.

"No sugar," Miranda said. "No, wait… make that two sugars. I suspect, God help me, that the night is yet young."

"I'll fetch a tray. Black?"

"Morelli, we haven't all got the zeal of the converted."

"OK." While Berry's hands moved things around in the tiny kitchen, his head was still walking the streets. There'd been cabs around the hospital but he'd needed to walk. Death did that to you, he thought. You had to keep moving, proving to yourself you still could.

A bad night, in the end.

And he'd lost a friend.

He couldn't afford to lose a friend in this country. It only left one, if you didn't include Miranda. Which he didn't, yet.

"Biscuits, too, Morelli," she called imperiously from the bedroom. Miranda, whom he'd often find in his bed but whom he hesitated to call his regular girlfriend. Who'd gone home with him the first time because, she explained, she liked the sound of his name, the way you liked the sound of Al Pacino and Robert de Niro. There were dukes in Miranda's family and her aunt had once been a temporary lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne. Berry liked the sound of Miranda's name too, the way you liked the sound of cucumber sandwiches and Glyndebourne.

"Morelli!"

"What?"

"Biscuits."

"Yeah, I heard."

"The chocolate ginger things from Sainsbury's. OK?"

"Right."

Earlier tonight Miranda's good mood had blown like a light bulb after she'd produced tickets for Peter Gabriel and he'd told her he wouldn't be able to make the gig on account of it was Old Winstone's farewell binge. Old Winstone, his friend.

She hadn't believed him. "What's he doing having it on a Sunday night?"

"All about Monday morning. If he gets smashed, he doesn't wake up till way past the time he normally goes to work. Thus avoiding the initial trauma of his first day of retirement."

"You think I'm awfully stupid don't you, Morelli?" Miranda had said.

"Listen, I'm…"

"Sorry. Yes."

Berry put on the light as he carried the tea tray into the bedroom. "I didn't figure on you being here when I got in."

"I suppose that explains it." Miranda said. "You thought you were shagging someone else."

"You never came back before. Not the same night. Not after a fight. How'd you get in anyway?"

"I'm frightfully unpredictable," she said, sitting up, breasts wobbling at him and somehow making the trayful of cups jiggle in his hands. "It's part of my appeal." She giggled, a sound like Chinese bells, signifying things were OK again, for the time being. "And I'm not going to tell you how I got in, because I'm also terribly clever and rather mysterious."

Mysterious, she wasn't. In spite of everything, he grinned, wishing he could say she was his girlfriend. Why was he so goddamn insecure? He set the tea tray down on the bed and Miranda reached across to pour. "Too strong as usual, Morelli. You're an awfully selfish bastard."

He flinched a little. It was what his old man had said, leading to Berry's decision to leave the States. You're a goddamn selfish bastard. You don't have to agree with a fucking thing I stand for, but when you screw things up for me to further your own pissant career, that's indefensible, boy.

"Listen, I guess what happened was I used you," he confessed to Miranda, "to reinforce my hold on life. How's that sound?"

"Pretentious."

"It was kind of a heavy night."

"You're not pissed, though, are you?"

"No. I… Jesus, this guy — a friend — he just died on me."

"To be quite honest I thought somebody was dying on me" Miranda said. "Don't do it again. Wake me up first. I might've missed it."

"Yeah. I'm. " Shit, he seemed to spend half his time apologising to people. Maybe he should apologise for apologising too much. He felt he could still hear the ambulance siren, the efficient clunk of the rear doors after they'd loaded the stretcher. The finality of it. He'd known then that it was final.

"Oh for God's sake, Morelli…" Miranda drowned her cigarette end in the dregs of her tea, a small rebellion against her refined upbringing. "Tell mummy all about it. Who died on you? You don't mean really died? As in, you know… turning up one's toes?"

Berry drank his tea, not quite knowing where to start. He detected mild amusement in Miranda's green eyes. How could it be really serious if he'd strolled in afterwards and screwed her, however perfunctory that had been?

"I ever tell you about this guy I know, Giles Freeman?"

"The political reporter? I met him. if you remember, that time at Verity's. Very dashing and sporty, but terribly earnest. Quiet little wife, a bit hamsterish."

Berry admired the way Miranda took in the essence of people she'd met only in passing. Ought to have been a much better actress than she was — maybe she just found it hard to let her own outrageous personality be submerged by lesser ones.

"You're saying Giles Freeman is dead?"

"Huh? No, shit. Giles is fine. That is…" He put the empty cup on the tea-tray and set it down on the carpet. And then he asked her, because this really was the bottom line. "You ever get to Wales?"

"Wales?" Miranda patted around the duvet for her cigarettes. "What's Wales got to do with it?"

"You ever go there?"

"Morelli." she said, "do I look like the kind of person who has Welsh connections? Like someone who reads the Bible all the time, plays rugby and eats seaweed?"

Berry thought about this. "Maybe not." he conceded. He found her cigarettes in a fold of the duvet, lit two and passed her one. "Folks do that in Wales? They eat seaweed?"

"So it is said. They make some kind of bread from it. I went there once, but it was depressing. It rained."

Miranda. If she visited the Taj Mahal during a monsoon it would forever be depressing.

"But this is Britain, right?" Berry said. "This is Wales, England? Same island. What I mean… Welsh folks live in England. English folks live in Wales."

"If they're desperate enough. Or they've been offered some terribly lucrative job out there, and there can't be many of those. Why do you ask?"

"OK." Berry said. "Hypothetical, right? If you had friends aiming to move to Wales, what would you say to them?"

Miranda's mouth twitched impatiently. "I'd probably say au revoir rather than goodbye because most of my friends wouldn't even survive in Dorking. Morelli, what is all this about?"

Berry sighed. "Listen, forget the hypothetical shit. What it's about is there's this guy moving to Wales and I find myself in the position of having to try and prevent that. I mean, Christ. I never went there, I don't plan to go there, but I got to talk this guy out of it. Guy who wants to make his home there more than anywhere else in the world, however bizarre that sounds to you. That's it. That's the situation."

Under the duvet Miranda ran a hand across his thigh and back again. "Nothing doing, then?" she said, affecting a squeaky East End accent.

"Gimme a break."

"Morelli, I'm sure there's an awfully interesting story behind all this but I don't somehow think I want to go into it after all. It sounds frightfully complicated, and" — she reached over to her teacup on the bedside cabinet and tipped her cigarette into it half-smoked—"quite honestly, I find the whole subject of Wales the most awful turn-off."

Miranda snuggled down, poking her bottom into Berry's right thigh and within a minute was asleep, leaving him to switch off the light and stare uncertainly into the blotchy dark, trying to figure out how this situation came about.

Chapter VI

That evening, seeing Winstone Thorpe flick open his ancient hooded eyes, Berry had thought of an old tomcat on a back-porch alerted by the flutter of wings.

"Where's that then?" Winstone had asked in that tired, diffident way he had."

"It's a smallish country sort of welded onto the side of England, Winstone," Giles Freeman explained, and he giggled drunkenly. "It's where the M4 peters out. They've got mountains there. Play rugby. Sing a lot."

"Oh…" old Winstone Thorpe chuckled and his chins wobbled. "You mean Wales. Sorry old boy, must've misheard."

Sure you did, you old bastard. Berry thought affectionately. He looked at Winstone across the pub table. Then he looked at Giles, who was clearly too drunk to realise he was being set up. Several of the other journalists, who knew Winstone of old, glanced up from their drinks and grinned.

"Wales, eh?" Winstone said. "Oh dear."

There he goes. Berry thought.

"All right," Giles Freeman said testily. "What's that supposed to mean?" Giles had drunk maybe five pints of beer, and he wasn't used to it. His fair hair was in disarray and his long face was hot and shiny, freckles aglow. He was too drunk to realise how bored they all were with hearing about his incredible piece of luck — well, Claire's actually, her inheritance. But an utterly amazing old place, splendid countryside, absolutely terrific atmosphere. Just being there made you realise how totally cardboard and artificial your urban environment was.

So Giles had fallen heavily for some backwoods shack.

And now old Winstone Thorpe, who had retired that day after more than half a lifetime on the Daily Telegraph, was blinking lazily beneath eyebrows like thatched eaves and saying "Oh dear."

"Well, come on, Winstone," Giles was leaning aggressively across the table now. Berry had never seen him like this before; somebody had hit a nerve. "If you've got something to say, just bloody say it."

"But. dear chap…" Winstone put down his empty whisky glass and looked around vaguely until Ray Wheeler of the Mirror slipped him a replacement. "Ah, a fellow Christian. Thank you. No, you see — am I stating the obvious here? You're an Englishman, old boy." Somewhere a clock chimed. It was eleven o'clock, and there was a momentary silence in the battered Edwardian bar of what old Winstone Thorpe maintained was the last halfway decent pub in what used to be Fleet Street.

Berry found himself nodding. Aside, perhaps, from old Winstone himself, Giles Freeman was just about the most English guy he'd ever met. even here in England.

"Now look, Winstone." Giles took an angry gulp of his beer. "That is just incredibly simplistic. I mean, have you ever even been to Wales? Come on now. tell the truth?"

Wrong question, Giles, thought Berry. You just walked into it. He leaned back and waited for Winstone Thorpe's story, knowing there had to be one.

"Well, since you ask…" The venerable reporter unbuttoned his weighty tweed jacket and lifted his whisky glass onto his knee. "Matter of fact. I was in Wales once."

"No kidding." Berry said and then shut up because there were guys here who still had him down as a no-talent asshole on the run. Things had changed since his last time here, as a student in the seventies. People had gotten tighter, more suspicious — even journalists. They were coming across like Americans imagined the English to be — stiff, superior. And they were suspicious of him because he wasn't like Americans were supposed to be — didn't drink a lot, never ate burgers. They weren't programmed for a vegetarian American hack who'd come up from the Underground press and dumped on his distinguished dad. Berry looked around the three tables pushed together and saw complacent smiles on prematurely-florid faces. These were mainly Parliamentary reporters like Giles. In this job, after a while, after long hours in the Westminster bars, journalists began to look like MPs.

"Early sixties, must've been." Winstone said. His face had long gone beyond merely florid to the colour and texture of an overripe plum. "Sixty-two? Sixty-three? Anyway, we were dragged out to Wales on a Sunday on the son of story that sounds as if it's going to be better than it actually turns out. Somebody'd shot this old fanner and his son, twelve-bore job, brains all over the wall. Lived miles from anywhere, up this God-forsaken mountain. Turned out the housekeeper did it, sordid domestic stuff, only worth a couple of pars. But that's beside the point."

Berry glanced over at Giles who was trying to look bored. Giles caught the glance and rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. Berry got along OK with Giles, who was less clannish than the others.

"Point is," Winstone said. "Locals treated us as if we were lepers. Here we are, sitting in this grim, freezing so-called guest house like the lost bloody patrol — Sunday, so all the pubs are closed, can you imagine that — and all we can hear is the rain and the natives jabbering away at each other in Welsh, which is just about the world's most incomprehensible bloody language. We try to quiz the landlady: Are you sure you didn't know them, Mrs. Davies, they only lived two hundred yards away, surely you heard the shots, didn't you?" Everybody in Wales is called Jones or Davies, terrible interbreeding. 'Will you take your tea now?' she says. 'It's nearly time for the chapel.' Then she waddles out on us. And she'd been to chapel twice that day already!

"And we're there for hours and bloody hours, Freddie Payne of the Express, Jack Beddall of the Sketch, and me, knocking on the doors of these broken-down farmhouses, trying to drag a statement out of Chief-lnspector-bloody-Davies-no-relation. Trying to cultivate the local reporter who didn't even drink, even when it wasn't Sunday. Getting absolutely nowhere. Dreadful times, old boy."

Giles Freeman sighed. "Look, that's…"

A restraining hand went up. Nobody deflected old Winstone Thorpe from his punchline.

"So, what I did in the end. I went over to the local chapel and picked a name off a bloody gravestone. Emrys Lloyd — never forget it. And I wandered back to the pub and button-holed one of these local shepherd-types. 'Look here, I suspect this is a long-shot, old boy, but I don't suppose you knew this great-uncle of mine. Emrys Lloyd, his name. Told he used to live in this neck of the woods…'"

He paused while everybody laughed, except Giles. 'Told 'em my name was Ivor Lloyd and I'd been born in Wales but moved out at an early age, always regretted I'd never learned the good old language, all this bullshit… Well, dammit, you couldn't stop the sods talking after that. Gave me everything I wanted. No longer one of the enemy, you see. I could be trusted. They even felt sorry for me because I was a bloody exile in England, can you believe that?"

"No," said Giles Freeman loudly, something catching fire behind his freckles. "It's utter bollocks. You made it up. You've always made things up, you old bastard."

Winstone Thorpe looked hurt. "Not a bit of it, old boy, that was precisely what happened. And the thing is—"

"Utter balls." Giles said contemptuously. He glared across the table at Winstone. "You're just a boring old con-man."

And that, Berry perceived, was the point at which the other guys decided that Giles, irrespective of the amount of booze he'd put away, had overstepped the mark and should be dealt with for pissing on a national monument.

Giles didn't notice the guys exchanging glances. "You know why the Welsh are suspicious of the English?" he demanded, slapping the table, making waves in all the glasses.

"Actually." said Shirley Gillies, one of the BBC's political reporters, "I once—"

"Just hang on a minute, Shirley. Listen. I'll tell you why. Because we're so… bloody… smug. We think we're the greatest bloody race on earth. We think we're great by tradition. And the idea of people here in Britain, in our island who don't want to speak English… we think that's a joke. Because ours is the language of Shakespeare and Keats and Barbara bloody Cartland…"

"Actually." Shirley Gillies repeated, as if Giles was some stray drunk who didn't really belong in their comer. "I had rather a similar experience of being frozen out in Wales. Only I wasn't as clever as you. Winstone. I rather left with egg on my face."

And this mention of egg reminded Charlie Firth, of the Mail, of the time he and his wife had gone into this Welsh snack bar for a meal just as it was about to close. The waitresses had muttered to each other — in Welsh, of course — and eventually served Charlie and Mrs. Firth a couple of scrambled eggs which had left them both with seriously upset stomachs. "Had to stop off at about seven public lavs on the way hack." Charlie said. "Like, you expect it in Spain, but…"

"Poisoned." said Max Canavan, of the Sun. "They poisoned you on account of you was English, yeh?"

Voices had risen, everybody grinning, suddenly having fun thinking up horror stories about Wales. Or more likely, Berry figured, making them up as a communal putdown for Giles. Other hacks in the bar, not part of Winstone's farewell pissup, were gathering around, sensing that electric change in the atmosphere, noses almost visibly twitching. The pack instinct was always strong among British national journalists. Guys from papers which were bitter rivals hung out together like a street gang.

"Oh dear me. look." Old Winstone said. "I didn't want to start—"

"Always been like that," said Brian McAllister of the Press Association. "I remember once I was in Colwyn flamin' Bay… Anybody ever been to Colwyn Bay?"

"Called in once, but it was closed." Charlie Firth said.

"Bloody Welsh," one of the newcomers said. "Frogs, Krauts, Eyeties — I can get along with all of 'em. but the bloody Welsh…"

"Right." Giles was on his feet, swaying. freckles ablaze. "I've fucking had enough of this." He was very angry and began to extricate himself from the table. "Bigoted, racist bastards…"

"No, mate, they're the racists," Ray Wheeler of the Mirror said gleefully. "The Welsh. Ever since we beat the brown stuff out of 'em back in, when was it, I dunno, Edward the First and all that."

"Piss off" Giles snarled, and slammed his glass down so hard that it cracked in two places. Giles being Giles, he paid for it on his way out.

Berry hesitated a moment, then followed him.

Chapter VII

Giles had been pacing the pavement under a mild summer drizzle. As Berry came up behind him he swung round murderously. Berry swiftly put a lamp-post between them.

"Who the hell's that?" Giles said.

Berry stepped out from behind the post.

"Oh," Giles said. "You."

"Yeah."

"If it was that fucking Firth I was going to—"

"Sure."

Giles grinned, white teeth flashing in the headlight of a Bentley whispering somebody home. "Bit pissed. Those bastards." He pushed fingers through his heavy fair hair. "Feel a bit of a prat now, actually. Shouldn't have let them wind me up. Shouldn't have gone for old Winstone like that. Not like me. Am I very pissed?"

Berry looked him up and down. "Smashed outta your skull," he said.

Giles laughed. "You're probably quite a decent guy, Berry, for an American. You didn't say anything bad Wales."

"That's because I never went there, Giles. It most likely is the armpit of Britain."

"Bastard."

"Sure."

The pub door opened and Giles swung round again in case it was somebody he felt he ought to hit. Ted Wareham, of the Independent, came out grasping a bottle of Scotch and didn't notice them.

"So you're leaving us, Giles," Berry said.

Giles said, rather wearily, "I don't know. Don't know what to do. For a while I've been looking around thinking it's time I moved on. Where do you go? It's a trap."

"Trap?"

"The money for one thing," Giles said. "We moan sometimes, but, bloody hell, where else can you collect on this scale in our job? Plus, it's an addictive sort of life. Policing the Great and Good, or whatever it is we do. But the thought of spending another thirty years around this bit of London, drinking with the same blokes, getting older at shabbier and ending up, at best, as some lovable father figure with a face full of broken veins and a knackered liver…"

"That wouldn't happen to you. Giles." Berry said, meaning it. "You're not in that mould."

"What's that mean?"

Berry shrugged.

"Anyway I reckon we've been thrown a lifeline, Claire and me. To pull us out of our complacency. Just came out the blue. Something we'd just never thought of. We drove out there — couple of weeks ago — first thing in the morning. Quite a grey morning, everything really drab. But by the time we got there it was a gorgeous day, and it got better and better. And we found the cottage almost straight away just as if we were being guided. Up the street, over the bridge, past the church, along this shady country lane and there it was. I felt—"

Giles hugged the lamp-post in a burst of passion, then pulled away. "Bloody beer. This is not like me, not like me at all. You'll go back in there and tell them what I said and all have a fucking good laugh."

"Aw, Giles, come on…"

"Sorry, sorry… an injustice."

"Those guys didn't even notice me leave, 'cept for Winstone. So what did you feel?"

"What?"

"When you saw the place. What did you feel?"

"Look, here's a cab. I'll have to grab it. OK? Excitement, Berry. Only more than that, much more. I didn't want to come back. Course it was all locked up. we couldn't get in that day, just peering through the windows like Hansel and bloody Gretel. It was enchanting. I'd have stayed there all day and slept on the grass when it got dark." Giles got into the taxi. "Tell the buggers that, why don't you. I don't care."

Berry watched the cab's tail-lights vanish into the traffic along what used to be Fleet Street.

Then he went back into the bar.

"Those stories," Berry said. "All shit, right? Kind of, let's put the frighteners on ole Giles."

"Yes and no. old boy." Winstone Thorpe said. "Yes and no."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, probably, that nobody poisoned Charlie Firth. Can you really see that man dining on unlicensed premises?"

At close to midnight, old Winstone and Berry Morelli were the only two left. Berry because he thought he had nobody to go home to tonight and Winstone because — as he'd told them all earlier-he suspected that when he walked out of the bar this time he'd never come back. People had been shaking his hand and promising to look in on him sometime. Berry didn't think any of them ever would.

"And no?"

"No what?"

"You said yes and no."

"Ah." Winstone finished off his last Glenfiddich. At this hour even he wouldn't get served again. "I suppose… Well, I was drinking with our property chap the other day. Do you know how many English people have bought homes in Wales over the past few years? Tens of thousands, apparently. Mind boggles. Got them cheap, you see — well, cheap compared with the south-east. Plenty of spare cash about down here these days. So it's holiday homes, retirement homes, views of the mountains, views of the sea."

Winstone put his glass down, sat back. "Backs to the wall, now, the Joneses and the Davieses. Getting driven out, along with what's left of their language, by all these foreigners searching for the old rural idyll bit."

Like Giles.

"Very pretty and all that, apparently, this cottage of Claire's. They're so enchanted with the place, they're talking about leaving London altogether and trying to make a living out there… or even commute, for God's sake."

Winstone shook his head sadly. "Pretended I was asleep but really I was the only one listening to him. Oh dear… Bad news, old boy. Going to get ugly. Seen it before. Nothing drives people to loony extremes more than religion and national pride."

"We never learned much about Wales at school, back home."

"A hard and bitter land, old boy. Don't have our sensibilities, never been able to afford them. We go there in our innocence, the English, and we're degraded and often destroyed. I'm talking about North Wales and the West where they've always danced on the edge of the abyss. Look, this is most unlike me. but is there some club we could go on to?"

Berry smiled. "It isn't the end, Winstone. They said you could freelance for them, right?"

"Not the same, old boy. Wife gone, kids abroad. Paper's been my family" Winstone put a hand on Berry's arm and the ancient eyes flickered. "Look, you put the arm on young Giles. Persuade him to get the bloody place sold. Soon as he can. We're really not meant to be there, you know, the English. Stop him. I mean it. You have to do this for the boy. He won't survive. Listen to me. this is not the drink."

Berry met Winstone's urgent, bloodshot gaze and saw some long-buried sorrow there. "C'mon," he said. "I know somewhere." He thought Winstone was suddenly looking too old and too sober. "Anyway, you try and talk Giles out of something, he just gets more determined."

"He's a decent chap, compared to most of us," Winstone said. "But naive. Innocent. Throw everything away if somebody doesn't stop him. You see — as an American you may not understand this, but the thing is, Giles made the big time too soon. What's he now, thirty-three, thirty-four? My day, you were lucky if you'd made it to the Nationals at all by that age. So now Giles is looking around and he's thinking, where on earth do I go from here? What's there left to do? Sort of premature mid-life crisis, everything comes younger these days. And of course he can see all the editors getting alarmingly younger too. One day his copy's being handled by some chap who only shaves twice a week. Or worse still," Winstone got unsteadily to his feet and reached for his raincoat, "not shaving at all, if you see what I mean."

"Women." Berry said.

Winstone scowled. "So he's looking for a new adventure, But he thinks — fatal this — he thinks he's looking for his soul."

"In Wales?"

"Insanity." Winstone paused in the doorway, took a last look around the almost deserted bar. His face was pale, his jowls like tallow dripping down a candle. "The boy was right. I talk too much nonsense. So now nobody believes my stories anymore."

"Winstone, Giles was smashed."

The old journalist smiled wistfully and walked out into the street, where the night was warm but rain was falling. "You know, old boy," he said after a moment, turning and looking around him in apparent confusion. "I must say I feel rather odd."

"It's gonna pass, Winstone, believe me, it's gonna pass, You just got to find a new… Hey—"

Winstone gripped the lamp-post which Giles had hugged in his drunken excitement. "Do you know what, old boy?" he said conversationally. "I'm think I'm having another stroke."

Winstone Thorpe quietly slid down to his knees on the wet pavement, as if offering a final prayer to the old gods of what used to be Fleet Street.

"Shit," Berry breathed. He stared down at Winstone in horror. The old man smiled.

Berry dashed back and stuck his head round the pub door. "Somebody call an ambulance! Listen, I'm not kidding. It's ole Winstone!"

He rushed back to the old man. "Hey, come on, let's get you back inside, OK?"

But, as he bent down, Winstone toppled — almost nonchalantly, it seemed — on to his face. As if his prayer had been answered.

Chapter VIII

"Dead?" Giles said. "But that's wonderful."

Claire passed him his coffee. "Oh, Giles, let's not get—"

"I know, I know, I'm sorry, it's the beer. Bit pissed. But it is rather wonderful, isn't it? Not for the old boy, of course, but we've all got to go sometime and, bloody hell, he couldn't have chosen a better time for us, could he?"

"You can't say that yet," Claire said. 'They might not even let you do it."

She'd been waiting up for him with the news, that mischievous little tilt to her small mouth; she knew something he didn't. It was as near as Claire ever came to expressing excitement.

Giles had both hands around his coffee cup, squeezing it.

"Let them try and stop me," he said. "Just let the bastards try. Did it say on the news what his majority was?"

"I don't think so. They may have. It was still dawning on me, the significance of it, you know."

"Right then." Giles sprang to his feet. "Let's find out."

"Will you get anybody? It's nearly one o'clock."

"No problem." He was already stabbing out the night desk number on the cordless phone. Standing, for luck, under the framed blow-up of Claire's first photograph of the cottage, the one taken from between the two sycamores at the entrance to the lane. They'd taken down a Michael Renwick screenprint to make space for it on the crowded buttermilk wall above the rebuilt fireplace.

"Peter, that you? Oh, sorry, look is Peter there? It's Giles Freeman. Yes, I'll wait."

There were blow-ups of five of Claire's photographs on the walls. None of the award-winning Belfast stuff, nothing heavy. Just the atmosphere pics: the old woman collecting driftwood on the shore, the shadowed stillness of a cathedral close at dusk, that kind of thing. The picture of the cottage was the only one that hadn't appeared in a paper or a magazine. Giles loved it. He was still amazed by Claire's ability to move at once to the right angle, to link into a scene.

"Peter. Listen, sorry to bother you. but I've just heard about Burnham-Lloyd, the MP for Glanmeurig. Was there time for you to run it in the final?" Giles sniffed. "Well I think you should have. Peter. I really do, even if it is only Wales." He and Claire exchanged meaningful glances.

"Anyway, listen Peter, what was his majority?"

Giles waited. Claire perched on the edge of the sofa and cupped her small face in her slender hands, short, fair hair tufting through the fingers. She wore a cream silk dressing gown and wooden sandals. Giles, re-energized by the news, eyed her lustfully.

"Bloody hell." he said. 'That's not bad. That's not at all bad. Thank you, Peter, thank you very much indeed."

He cleared the line and made a whooshing sound.

"Narrow?" Claire asked.

Giles said, very slowly and precisely, "Eight hundred and seventy-one." His freckles were aglow again. He tossed the phone almost to the ceiling and caught it. "Eight hundred and seventy fucking one! It's marginal, Claire! Plaid's been slowly gaining on him for years! Oh God, I really do feel something's working for us."

"I suppose," Claire said thoughtfully, "I feel a bit scared now. It's all coming at once. Propelling us into something. Out of our control." She was still feeling upset, actually, by her mother's reaction. She'd phoned her while Giles was out, to explain about the inheritance, tonight being the first opportunity since her parents had returned from their cruise.

Giles was hungrily pacing the carpet "What I'll suggest is a bit of a recce. Zoom up there this weekend. Take the air. Talk to people."

"I can't. I've got that thing for the Observer in Norwich." Claire was glad to put it off. She'd been frightened by her own emotional response when they'd first gone to look at the cottage. The feeling that somehow she was meant to live there. Now she wanted to slow things down, give them time to think. Giles, however, had to be firing on all cylinders or none at all.

"Well, all right, next weekend." he said impatiently. "You see, what we have to do is build this up as a really significant mid-term by-election, knock up a couple of prelim pieces, hype it up a bit. We can have the cottage as our base, save them hotel bills and stuff. And while we're there… I mean, with the run-up and everything, we're talking well over three weeks for a by-election campaign. So we can do all the groundwork, either for persuading them they really need a full-time staffer in Wales or setting up some decent freelance outlets. I would have sounded people out tonight, but they were all being so bloody snide and superior."

Slow down, slow down, Claire yelled inside her head. But Giles in overdrive was not open to reasonable argument. She wanted to tell him about her mother, but in his present state of drink-enhanced euphoria he wouldn't take it in. And even when stone cold sober, hearing what she'd had to say — the bitch — would only harden his determination.

As expected, her mother had been stiff and resentful, so Claire herself had gone on the attack. "Mother, why didn't you tell me he was dead? Why did I have to find out from the solicitor?"

Elinor made an impatient noise. "Because… Oh, look, we only found out the day we left. I mean, really, what was I supposed to do, put it in a postcard from Greece? Weather fine, old Rhys dead?"

Old Rhys. Claire's grandfather.

"Mum — I can't believe this — he was your father."

A distant snort.

"I know, I know," Claire snapped. "But that doesn't alter anything, does it?"

"It clearly altered things for him, if he's left his awful hovel to you. He only ever saw you once. I wonder what he did with his money."

"It seems." Claire said icily, "that he left most of it to the Church."

There'd been a silence, then Elinor gave her a short, false cackle. "Oh dear, do excuse me. It's simply that the idea of God and my father discovering each other in that ghastly Welsh backwater is rather too much to take at this hour of the night."

Claire had expected bitterness, had been ready for some of this. But nothing as unpleasant as…

"What happened to his whores. I wonder. Perhaps he was predeceased. Do you think he died alone and unloved? I do hope so."

This is awful. Claire thought. She knew her mother did not need the money. But she must, all the same, have hoped for some token in the will, a sign that Thomas Rhys even remembered once having a wife and a daughter… as well as a grandchild.

"Did you — tell me the truth now. Claire — did you ever go to visit him, you and Giles?"

"Of course not! I mean…" There had, it was true, often been times when Claire had felt powerfully drawn to seek out the mysterious Judge Rhys. That tug of curiosity edged with an undefined sense of guilt and longing, whenever she'd come across a picture of Welsh mountains on some holiday brochure. And then there'd been that electric moment when she'd first seen the village — a mere three months ago. but it fell to Claire as if she'd known it all her life in some unexplored part of her soul.

"Then why?" Elinor's voice was flat and hard. "Apart from a desire to spit on your grandmother and me. Why? Can you explain it?"

"No," Claire said in a small voice. "Mother, look, I–I know you must be terribly hurt—"

"Don't patronise me, Claire. I'm extremely glad the old swine's gone, I didn't want a penny of his money and I shall be thankful when you've sold that damn house for as much as you can get."

"Sell it?"

"Well you're hardly going to live in it are you?" her mother had said.

"I've been thinking," Giles was saying. "Perhaps we should make contact with a few of the local tradesmen — plumbers, carpenters. Book them in advance. Sometimes guys like that can be jolly hard to find in rural areas, and they need lots of notice. Then we're going to need an automatic washing machine and all that. We shall have to work pretty fast."

"Yes, but Giles… what if the by-election goes ahead before probate's complete. There's no way round that, you know. We can't let workmen into a house that isn't ours yet."

Claire somehow felt she had to create as many obstacles as she could to counteract the awesome pull of the village. To make sure that it was the right thing to do. that it really was meant.

"Won't happen." Giles said confidently. "No way there'll be a by-election until all the party conferences are safely over. We're talking November at least."

Claire realised then that this by-election could be quite a good thing after all. It would give them a trial period to see if life in Wales really suited them. Trying to get the cottage into some kind of shape and cover an election campaign at the same time would be quite a testing experience. And if they realised they were making a big mistake they could always come back here and either sell the place or keep it as a holiday home — and feel grateful they hadn't burned their boats.

"I'll tell you one thing, though," Giles said, leaning against the remoulded plaster of the fireplace. "Those bastards tonight, my so-called colleagues. It's made me realise how badly I want to get out of all this. It's a phoney life, a facade, just a garish backcloth we think we can perform against. Not real at all. I mean, I can't get on with those guys any more. Even Winstone — Christ, I thought he was a friend." He shook his head with his mouth tight. Then he loosened up and flashed Claire a grin. "What have you got on under there?" He tossed the phone into an armchair, threw off his jacket and plunged at the sofa.

Claire let him pull the dressing gown off her shoulders and suddenly quivered.

Nothing to do with Giles. Something her mother had said was replaying itself. She hadn't realised at the time, hadn't seen the significance… left his awful hovel to you. He only ever saw you once…

When? Claire didn't remember ever seeing her grandfather. She'd always understood there'd been no contact whatsoever since the day. two years before she was born, when Judge Thomas Rhys had gravely announced that he would be returning to the place of his birth, but his family would not be accompanying him. So when?

Excitement and dread combined to make Claire shiver.

Giles moaned, lips tracking down her bare shoulder. "Darling…" he breathed.

Chapter IX

Look," Miranda said. "I just don't see it. Why don't you come back to bed?"

The sun had emerged, and Miranda looked rosy and warm and inviting.

"I didn't expect you would." Berry said, standing by the window, turning to look into the street three storeys down.

"What counts is how I see it." He gazed out towards the Thames. This building did not itself overlook the Thames but you could see some other buildings which did.

"Well it certainly isn't my idea of a dying wish or a last request or whatever," Miranda said. "To make a last request you have to know you're dying. And from what you say. he didn't."

At the hospital, the tired-eyed young doctor on night-duty, jeans under the white coat, had said it looked like a small stroke followed by a second, massive stroke. Happened like an earthquake, or maybe an earthquake in reverse, a mild foreshock and then the big one. Bip. bam! Good a way to go as any, better than most. And he'd had a minor one before, had he? Say no more. Later, the cops had gone through the motions, because of the way it happened.

"I'm gonna call Giles," Berry said. "Maybe we can organise lunch."

… Look, you put the arm on young Giles. Persuade him to get the bloody place sold. Soon as he can.

"You were going to have lunch with me, remember, if you were in town." Miranda pulled the duvet over her breasts and went into a pout.

Shit, how was he supposed to get this across?

"See, it's just… when I first came over here I didn't know England from a hole in the ocean and ole Winstone, he kind of initiated me."

"Is England so complicated?"

"Minefield." Berry said. He'd taken the job with the agency, American Newsnet, without thinking, in his haste to get out. Mario Morelli's son guilty of unAmerican behaviour.

"The English National Press, they were a club I didn't know how to join." he said. "I walked in this bar one night and sat down and all these guys stared at me like I'd thrown up on the table. After a while one leaned over and said out of the corner of his mouth, "You do know you're sitting in Winstone's chair.'"

"I think I've seen that film," Miranda said.

"So I apologised to Winstone."

"As you would."

"And he became the first one of them I really talked to, you know? I asked him a whole bunch of those questions I didn't dare ask anyone else. By closing time he'd explained how Parliament worked and all those British niceties. Why it isn't done to talk to the Queen without she talks to you first, or label a guy a killer after he's charged and like that. No big deal, but he saved my ass a few times, while certain people stood around waiting for me to fall on it. He was always there, anything I needed to know. He drank like prohibition was starting tomorrow, but it didn't matter to him that I didn't join him."

"So long as you paid for his I shouldn't imagine it would bother him in the slightest," said Miranda. "You're endearingly naive sometimes, Morelli."

"The only other guy ever spared the time to help me along was Giles," said Berry.

Stop him. I mean it.

"Morelli," Miranda said. "You're overreacting. If Freeman is loopy enough to want to throw up his career to go and live in wildest Wales it's his decision. None of your business. And if you think old-what's-his-name is going to come back and haunt you, you must be even simpler than most of your race. Now come back to bed. I warn you — last chance."

We're really not meant to be there, you know, the English.

"How much of a generalisation is it, that stuff about rugby and the Bible?"

"Wales? Who cares? It's still an awfully long way from Harrods."

"You're a big help. Miranda."

"Oh, you are a pain, Morelli. Look. I haven't been very often. It's got lovely mountains and nice beaches here and there. And in the south there used to be a lot of coal mines, and Cardiff's fairly civilised these days but terribly bland…But, from what you say, your friend is off to one of the primitive bits, about which I'm really not qualified to comment. You know me and the primitive. Admittedly, there are times for being primitive.

Miranda put on her most lascivious smile which, Berry had to admit, was pretty damn lascivious.

"Yeah, OK," he said. "Maybe I'll call Giles later."

Chapter X

It was the third headline on the BBC Radio Wales news at 8 a.m.

"… and Sir Maurice Burnham-Lloyd, Conservative MP for Glanmeurig for more than thirty years, is dead."

Guto Evans felt unexpectedly nervous. He lay in bed and waited for the full report. By the time it came on, he'd convinced himself that he definitely wasn't going to get the Plaid nomination. Dai Death had been right: no chance.

The whole report lasted just over one minute. After a summary of the high points of Burnham-Lloyd's career (Guto wondered how they'd managed to pad it out to twenty seconds) there was a short clip of the Secretary of State for Wales speaking over the telephone to the studio.

"… but most of all." crackled the Secretary of State, "Maurice was a constituency man, a farmer among farmers. He was always deeply concerned that people in London and in Brussels should be aware of exactly how their policies would affect a sheep farmer in the heart of Glanmeurig."

Guto groaned, snapped off the radio and pushed back the covers. "Mam!" he shouted, hearing the clatter of a pan from downstairs. "Mam, no breakfast for me. I've got to go out right away. OK?"

Bethan. He had to see her before she left for school or he'd spend the day in a state of advanced paranoia. Being a widow seemed to have endowed Bethan with a certain aura of wisdom.

He found her making her way across the car park below the castle ruins. She was carrying her briefcase and a pile of exercise books to the little green Peugeot.

"What should I do then, Bethan?" Guto demanded without preamble.

"Now," said Bethan thoughtfully, leaning into the car. "Do you think I should put all these hooks into the boot or will they stay on the back seat without falling over?"

"Do I phone anybody or do I wait for them to contact me?" said Guto in agony. "Don't want them to think I'm pushing, see."

"I think what I shall do," said Bethan. "is put them on the back seat and prop them up behind the briefcase."

"I've got to be well placed for it. I mean. I'm pretty well known locally."

Bethan straightened up. She was wearing a black cardigan over a white cotton dress, and big gold earrings. Guto felt a pang of something not connected with politics.

"Well Guto." she said. "There you have identified the problem. You are exceedingly well known locally."

They stared at each other across the roof of the little car.

"What are you getting at?"

"Well, who in this town has not heard you ranting on at length about the English and what we should do to keep them out? Ah, they say to strangers, you know who that is don't you? That is Guto Evans the famous extremist."

"Well, good God, woman, they all agree with me."

"Of course they don't, and neither does the party. Guto, the one thing you must never suggest these days is that Welsh Nationalist means anti-English."

"I know that, but…"

"And a by-election! In-depth scrutiny by the media of all the candidates, especially ours. Muck-raking. Well, think about it — can Plaid credibly be represented by a man who once had a homing device attached to the underside of his van so the police could keep track of his movements?"

"Oh, now, that was a mistake. They thought I was—"

"But it will come out. So will the pub brawl—"

"I was never charged, for God's sake—"

"Only because all your friends lied through their teeth. Now Guto. I'm not saying that, in one respect, a man of your talents would not be the best hope in a by-election. But you have a lot of work to do. Have to change your image, Guto. People must get used to seeing you around in a smart suit and a tie. And er—" Bethan smothered a giggle " — kissing babies."

"Aaaargh." growled Guto in disgust.

"English babies too." Bethan slid into her car.

Guto watched her drive away, dragging a cloud of early-morning exhaust across the Pontmeurig bypass and on to the mountain road to Y Groes. Though still warm, it was the first grey morning in three weeks. There was rain in the air and mist on the hills.

"Damn it. Bethan." Guto mumbled wistfully, shambling back into the town, past the castle destroyed by his hero, Owain Glyndwr. "If I could have you, they could stuff the bloody nomination."

Impossibly, as Bethan drove out of the forestry, the mist appeared to evaporate and the church tower of Y Groes shimmered in a shaft of gold. It's a blue hole, this place. Bethan thought, but she took no great pleasure in the thought these days.

The school was on the other side of the river in a little lane of its own. screened from the village by a row of elms which had somehow survived successive epidemics of Dutch Elm Disease when nearly all the others for miles around had succumbed.

Bethan liked to get to school at least ten minutes before the first of the children, but Guto had delayed her and there was a small group of them around the wooden gate, chattering in Welsh. They stopped when they saw Bethan and chorused dutifully, "Bore da, Mrs. McQueen."

"Bore da, blant,' said Bethan, shouldering the gate open, arms full of briefcase and books. The children followed her in, all good Welsh-speaking children from Welsh-speaking families, not a single English cuckoo. Which disappointed Bethan in a way, because she used to enjoy the challenge of taking a handful of children from London or Birmingham at the age of five and then sending them on to the secondary school completely fluent in Welsh, even starting to think in Welsh.

The school had been lucky to survive so long with only twenty-four pupils. Twice the education authority had attempted to close it down and transfer the children to Pontmeurig. But that would have meant an eight-mile journey for them along a mountain road that was often impassable in winter, and the local councillors had won the day.

Bethan waded into the school through a puddle of children, the smallest ones pulling at her skirt to attract her attention. She never discouraged them. The school had a warm family atmosphere.

"Bore da, Mrs. Morgan." the children sang, as Buddug entered, the deputy head teacher or Bethan's entire staff, depending on how you saw it. Buddug, a big woman in her middle fifties, a farmer's wife with red cheeks full of broken veins, like a map of the London Underground, had taught at Y Groes for over thirty years and was regarded as the head of the school by everyone except the county education officials who'd appointed Bethan.

"Eisteddwch!" Buddug commanded, and the children squeezed into their seats and snatched a final few seconds of chatter as Buddug strode across to the piano for the morning hymn which was only changed once a week and was limited to the three tunes Buddug could play, except at Christmas when carols were sung unaccompanied.

"Buddug," said Bethan in her ear, "can you spare me a couple of minutes during playtime? Something is bothering me."

Buddug beamed and nodded and crashed her stiffened fingers down on the keyboard like a butcher cleaving a side of beef.

"It's this," said Bethan determinedly, and opened the child's exercise book to reveal the drawing of the corpse and the corpse candle over the grave.

"Yes, isn't it good?" said Buddug. She turned over the exercise book to read the name on the front. "Sali Dafis. Her writing has improved enormously over the past few weeks, and look at the detail in those drawings!"

"I'm not objecting to the quality of it." said Bethan. "It's more the content. I asked them to pretend they were working for the papur bro and to write about something which had happened in the village."

"Excellent," said Buddug. "And were any of the others as good as this one?" She stared insolently at Bethan out of dark brown eyes.

"Oh, Buddug, what are you trying to do to me?"

"I don't understand. What are you objecting to? What sort of ideas have you brought back from the city? Would you rather the children wrote about one-parent families and lesbians?" Buddug laughed shrilly.

Bethan snatched back the book and turned away, blinking back angry tears. Seeing, out of the window, the children in the playground, seeing a certain corruption in their eyes and their milk-teeth smiles.

"I accept," she said carefully, still looking out of the window, her back to Buddug. "that a child has to learn about death. I don't believe that being taken to view a neighbour in her coffin and being informed that her dying was foretold by the corpse candle is a particularly healthy way of going about it."

She gathered her resolve and whirled back at Buddug, who was wearing an expression of mild incomprehension now, like a cow over a gate.

"I don't believe." Bethan said furiously, 'that little children should see the woods not as the home of squirrels and somewhere to collect acorns but as the place where the Gorsedd Ddu hold their rituals. I don't believe that when they hear the thunder they should think it's the sound of Owain Glyndwr rolling about in his grave. I don't want them looking at storm clouds and not seeing formations of cumulonimbus but the Hounds of Annwn gathering for the hunt. l just don't believe—"

"You don't believe in anything!" Buddug said, smiling, eyes suddenly alight. "And this is not a place for people who do not believe in anything. Playtime is over. Time to bring them in."

She rang the brass handbell with powerful twists of an old milkmaid's wrist.

Chapter XI

The rolling countryside of the Cotswolds was turning out to be good therapy for Berry's car, which had been a mite bronchitic of late.

He drove an old Austin Healey Sprite of a colour which, when the Sprite was born, was known as British Racing Green. He loved this car. It coughed and rattled sometimes and was as uncomfortable as hell, but it was the fulfillment of a dream he'd had since seeing an old detective show back in the States called Harry O, whose hero drove a British MG sports car and was, even by Californian standards, very laid back.

The Cotswolds, also, were laid back, often in a surprisingly Californian way: rich homes sprawled languidly behind lush foliage which was not so lush that you couldn't admire the beautiful bodies of the houses and their gorgeous Cotswold tans. Was this what remained of olde England: a burglar alarm and a Volvo estate car outside some cottage originally built for farm workers who couldn't afford their own cart?

Touch of therapy for Berry too, to be out here. Distances were negligible in Britain. Couple of hours ago he'd been in the office, the combination of events and Miranda ensuring that by the time he arrived at work he was already feeling overtired. This had cut no ice at all with American Newsnet's London bureau chief, Addison Walls, who'd ordered him to go at once to Gloucestershire, where the Government's Energy Secretary had his country home. The Minister was to give an unofficial Press conference explaining why he'd chosen to resign over the Oil Crisis.

"Anybody in the States give a shit about this?" Berry had asked, and Addison Walls looked at him like he was crazy.

"Morelli, watch my lips. The Oil Crisis. O-I–L."

"Yeah, yeah, OK. Just tired, is all."

"Get outta here." muttered Addison Walls. "Fuckin' radical."

When he finally arrived at what turned out to be quite a modest Cotswold farmhouse — barely an acre of land around it — Berry learned he'd missed the Press conference by a good twenty minutes. He found two reporters chatting by their cars in the lane. One was Shirley Gillies of the BBC with a black Uher tape recorder over her shoulder. The other was Giles Freeman, his wheat-coloured hair uncombed and grey circles under his eyes.

"Don't worry about it. mate." he told Berry, waving a weary, dismissive hand. "Wasn't worth coming. Terse statement, nothing new in it. Wouldn't answer questions. Posed for a few simpering pictures with his wife. Didn't offer us coffee."

"Giles rebuked him for wasting our time." Shirley Gillies said. I'm afraid if I spoke like that to a Government minister, the next farewell piss-up would be mine, but he as good as apologised to Giles. Who can be quite impressive when he's sober."

Giles, who was wearing a crumpled cream suit, shrugged in a what-the-hell kind of way. The attitude of a guy who wasn't planning to be around much longer. Berry thought.

He hesitated then said. "Ah, talking of farewell piss-ups. I suppose you…"

Giles sighed. "It was all round the office. What can I say? I feel awful. Easy to say, 'if only I'd known.' I mean, God—"

Berry wondered if this might be the time to fulfil his obligation to put the arm on Giles. He couldn't, however, say anything with Shirley around. Couldn't think, anyway, how to start. Suppose Old Winstone was simply paranoid?

"Still, I suppose if he'd had a choice of where to snuff it," Giles said, "he'd probably have opted for the pub."

"I gather you were still there. Berry," Shirley Gillies said brightly, "when it happened."

"Yeah," Berry said. "Tell you about it sometime"

"Yes," Shirley said, clearly meaning no. "Look. I must go. See you around, Giles."

Giles and Berry stood in silence in the Colswold lane as Shirley loaded her gear into her car. It was a soft, dull summer morning, still moist from last night's rain.

"Bloody awful smug place, this," Giles said. "Not exactly nature in the raw. is it? Not like—" He broke off.

"You gonna give me the Minister's statement?"

"Sure. Let's find a pub. You don't have to rush back?"

Berry shook his head. Giles said abruptly, "We're nowhere near bloody Painswick, are we?"

"Now how would I know that?"

"Claire's mother lives near Painswick. Wouldn't like to run into the old bat. Not just now. I wouldn't be responsible."

Berry followed Giles's silver BMW in his beat-up Sprite. They motored through shimmering ochre villages before pulling up at Hollywood's idea of an olde English pub, outside which Giles had detected an obscure Real Ale sign. They sat on upholstered wooden stools at the bar, the first customers of the day. On Giles's recommendation. Berry ordered two halves of something even thicker and murkier than Hollywood's idea of English beer.

"Hair of the dog." Giles said. "Bloody animal."

"He'd hate you to feel bad about this, Giles. He was very fond of you and Claire. Winstone, I mean."

Giles found a lop-sided smile. He told Berry a couple of funny Old Winstone anecdotes from way back. Berry had heard both before, but he chuckled over them anyway, for Giles's sake, assuring him again that Winstone had in no way been offended by the way he'd stormed out of the bar and no, there was no way it had caused any stress which might have hastened the stroke.

"That story he told." Berry said, fishing for a reaction.

"About the domestic murder and the Welsh landlady and all. I guess it was kind of a Winstone parable. He'd been hearing about how bad things were over in Wales. Folks feeling their heritage was being ripped off. Dumb foreigners on a back-to-nature trip stampeding the sacred cows."

"Yes." Giles said. "But, don't you go thinking we're going to be like that. Claire and me. We aren't going to march in like bloody yuppies on the make. We'll learn the language, the whole bit. Go, er, go native. Well…I… You're not really interested in hearing this, are you, Berry?"

"I am, Giles."

"You sure? I think people were bored last night."

"No way, Giles. Jealous, is all."

"You think that?"

"Sure. Tell me about Wales, Giles."

Giles shrugged and had a slurp of Real Ale. "Well, for a start, even though she'd never even been there before this, Claire has very strong family links with this village. Y Groes. So we feel we're… reviving something. And reviving ourselves in the process. Do you know what I mean?"

"When I was a kid." Berry said, "they used to tell me my great grandpa made the best pasta in Venice. That doesn't mean that to find eternal fulfilment I have to be a fucking gondolier"

Giles gave him a warning look and started rocking on his bar stool. "Look, poor old Winstone struck a nerve when I was pissed. I'm sorry about that, but it doesn't change anything. You hear about Burnham-Lloyd?"

"Who?"

Giles told Berry about the impending by-election. It seemed to restore his mood. "Brilliant timing, don't you think? Not just another midterm by-election, old son." He was holding his beer to the light and nodding appreciatively at tiny specks in the amber fluid. Berry pushed his own glass away in disgust.

"Burnham-Lloyd." Giles said. "Tory, OK? Held that seat for over thirty years on the strength of being a local chap, well in with the farmers, all that. But Plaid Cymru — that's the Welsh nationalist party — have been slowly gaining on him for years. The other parties haven't much support, so it's a two-horse race. Going to be a cracker. Gives me a chance to go in there as a reporter, meet the local people, discover all the key local issues. So when we move we won't be going in cold."

Berry nodded. Maybe Giles wouldn't get along with the local people, would discover he was out of sympathy with the local issues. Well, maybe…

"What about you. Berry? Has it got Newsnet potential? I'll tell you — mass-immigration by English people is sure to be a major issue. And the one that could give the seat to Plaid. Absolutely fascinating."

"What are we looking at here Giles? Beginnings of an Ulster situation?"

"Oh, good God no. They're just after devolution to begin with, power to run their own affairs. Then to become a free state within Europe. Not a huge step for Wales — or Scotland, for that matter. And in spite of the odd bits of terrorism, it's not a nation inflamed by anti-English passions, whatever Old — whatever people say."

"Yeah," Berry said non-commitally. Most Americans didn't even realise Wales was a separate country. If they mentioned it at all they talked about "Wales, England." like it was some district.

"We were going to drive out there this weekend," Giles was saying. "Make a few political contacts and have a little drool over our cottage at the same time. Won't be ours for a couple of months yet — legal red-tape — but it's a wonderful feeling, just standing in the lane gazing at it through the trees, making plans."

Berry noticed the grey circles under Giles's eyes had shrunk and his freckles were aglow.

Look, you put the arm on young Giles.

"Only we can't go because Claire's saddled with this job for the Observer in East Anglia—"

"Too bad." Berry said.

"Unless… Hey look. Berry, what are you doing next weekend?"

Playing with Miranda. "Nothing fixed," Berry said.

"Feel like taking a drive out there?"

"To Wales?" She'll kill me, he thought.

"You could get it on exes, surely? Bit of research?"

"Well, I—"

"And you could come and see our cottage, see Y Groes — and then you'd realise why we're so excited about it.

Persuade him to get the bloody place sold.

"Come on. Berry, WW be fun."

Not meant to be there, the English.

"What do you say?"

Stop him. I mean it.

"Yeah, OK," Berry said. "Why not?"

Chapter XII

"Miss Sion!'

Bethan turned at the school door, the key in her hand.

"You decided you'd better come back then, did you Sali?"

She was small for her age, Sali Dafis, and looked more fragile than other members of her family. Her father, Dilwyn, and her nain had coal-black hair, but Sali's was wispy brown. A legacy from her mother, the secretary from Essex whom Dilwyn had met on holiday at Butlins, Pwllheli.

"It's a bit late now, though, isn't it?" Bethan said. "And I'm not Miss Sion any more, remember?"

They were alone in the yard. It was a gloomy afternoon now. Overcast. A reminder of how rapidly the days were shortening. Locking the school door. Bethan had heard a child's shoes tripping across the yard towards her and wondered if it would be Sali.

"See me after school, please," she'd finally written in the exercise book, but Sali had gone off with the others half an hour ago. Now she was back, alone. An indication that she didn't want her friends to know she was seeing the teacher.

"But Miss Sion, your husband is dead."

Bethan breathed in sharply, as if stabbed. Children could be vicious.

"Mrs. McQueen, if you don't mind. I won't tell you again. We don't go back to our old names just because—" Bethan had a thought. "Who told you to start calling me Miss Sion again?'

Sali Dafis looked at her feet and said nothing.

"Never mind," Bethan said. "I think I can guess. Look, why don't we talk to each other tomorrow. We don't want your nain wondering where you are." Or the old hag will put a curse on me, she thought, then decided that wasn't funny.

Sali looked up at Bethan very solemnly and seemed about to say something.

"Well?"

"Mrs. McQueen." said Sali innocently, "would you like to see a dead body?"

Bethan put the key in her bag and snapped it shut. "All right, we'd better have our talk right now. You wait there while I put my things in the car, then we'll go for a walk."

She was definitely not in the mood for this.

They followed the river from the rear of the school towards the oak woods, most of which were coppiced by Meirion, the forester whose father had done it before him. It was like entering a huge, entimbered medieval cathedral. Awesome in the right light, but dim and heavy now, the trees immense and gnarled, prickly bushes in the shade of some of them. The river entered the woods and then went off on its own. away from the path.

"So whose was the dead body — the one you thought I might like to see?"

Bethan knew very well that nobody had died in the village recently, except for the antiquarian at the Tafarn and Mrs. Tegwyn Jones, Ty Canol, over a week before that.

"Don't know." Sali said.

"Why would you think I might even want to see this… this dead body?"

"Don't know." Sali said.

They were approaching the thick wooden gate draped with creepers that said on it one word.

Rheithordy.

The rectory. It was the only house in the wood. Well, not quite in the wood: the house itself was in a green clearing, but the encroaching oaks had claimed most of its garden, heavyweight sentinels around it. The rectory was itself hugely timber-framed, and Bethan found it all a bit ominous, as if the beams in the house's skeleton had only been borrowed from the wood.

Hurrying the child past the gate, because the rector also tended to give her the creeps. Bethan said, "'You know what a dead body is, don't you Sali?"

She saw the child nod without looking up. This was not going to be easy. Why did she feel, uncomfortably, that the big trees were listening to her with more attention than Sali?

"Do you really know what a dead body is? It's nothing to do with the person who used to be in the body. That is why we bury them — because they are no use to anyone anymore. What people are is nothing to do with their bodies. The really important part is something that just uses the body to get around in. And when it's too old or badly damaged, we discard it, throw it away."

Bethan felt inadequate to the task of explaining to an eight-year-old the things that few adults claimed to understand. This was no time to be trite or patronising.

"When someone brings an old car or a Land Rover into your dad's garage, he… he mends it. If he can. And if it's just too old and tired out, then he has to send the car to the scrapyard. And the driver gets a new one. That's what happens to our bodies when we've used them up — we get rid of them and then we get a new body — a heavenly body."

This is pathetic, Bethan thought.

"I know that," Sali said scornfully, kicking at the dirt. "My nain can see people in their heavenly bodies."

Bethan stopped walking.

"Sometimes." Sali said, walking on then turning round on the path, "she asks me if I can see people in their heavenly bodies."

Dear God.

"But I can't," Sali said. "Well, I don't think I can. Nain says that is because my mam was English. She says the English haven't got the gift."

Lucky them, thought Bethan. They were following the path deep into the wood. It would soon be strewn with acorns. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and nature rambles and autumn leaves to press. Once, autumn had excited Bethan — the scent of burning leaves, logs gathered for the fire, newly made toast. Someone to eat it with. She thought, that's right, burst into tears in front of the child.

Instead she sat down on a big tree stump and pulled Sali towards her, gripping the girl's arms. "Sali, look at me."

Sali gazed into Bethan's face. Disturbingly, she was reminded of the way Buddug had looked at her that morning. Condescending.

"Sali, some… some people don't want to let the dead go. Do you remember last year… my husband died."

The child stood stiffly between Bethan's hands. She did not seem interested.

"I was very sad." Bethan said. "I didn't want him to be dead. I used to think about him all the time. I still—"

"He was only English." Sali said "I — what did you say?"

Sali pulled quickly away and ran off.

"Sali! Come here!"

The child had vanished, as if the woods had absorbed her. Alone now in this sombre place Bethan thought, I've blown it. We're on different sides of some invisible barrier. She's gone to Buddug and Mrs. Bronwen Dafis.

"Sali, come back now, we have to go home."

The child had disappeared.

"Sali, where are you?"

The wood was heavy with age and stillness. No birds fluttered in the undergrowth. Overhead the branches formed a great canopy of darkest green, no breath of Autumn yet among the foliage.

"Sali! This instant!"

Bethan had risen to her feet, feeling cold now in her white cotton dress. She stepped off the path and a bramble ensnared her shoe, pulling it off.

"Damn you. Sali—"

She tore her shoe away from the spiny tendril, scratching her hand, drawing blood. What was she bothering about? The kid probably knew every inch of these woods, and there were no marauding paedophiles in Y Groes.

"I'm going home now, Sali. If you want to stay here all night, that's up to you."

What if she'd fallen somewhere? Pushing on through the bushes. Bethan suddenly became aware of the sound of rushing water

What if she'd fallen in the river?

"Sali! Shout if you can hear me!"

She saw where some of the undergrowth had recently been flattened, and she moved towards it. Overhead, the sky had darkened and mingled with the interwoven leaves. There was a harsh spattering of rain. She could hear it but couldn't feel it yet.

"Shout, Sali!"

She prised her way through the bushes towards the sound of water and felt her dress tear at the hem.

"Damn you. Sali, if you're—"

A blackberry had been squashed against her hip and she looked down and saw bubbles of juice like dark blood. Then she slipped and fell down the river bank, rolling over and over.

The crows had taken his eyes.

That was the first thing she saw.

She was winded by the fall and lay on her back, a few yards from the water. Pain rippled up her left leg: ankle twisted.

A muddy boot swung gently about a yard above her head. She must have caught it as she rolled past. The boot made a sort of click as it swung against the other boot.

Bethan retched.

"I said, didn't I. Miss Sion?"

Sali Dafis was standing at the edge of the river looking proudly up at where he hung, nylon climber's rope under his chin, knotted around the branch, his tongue out, black now.

Chapter XIII

Pontmeurig was eight miles from Y Groes, on the other side of the Nearly Mountains. A slow, messy drive, especially for a hearse.

It was an untidy town, mottled grey and brown, something that had rolled down from the hills in the Middle Ages and was still rolling, new housing estates and factories spilling over the old boundaries on either side of the river.

Still puzzled by the attitude of Aled Gruffydd, Dai Death drove the corpse into town past the cattle mart and the new car park and past what was left of the medieval castle, looming grey in the dusk. Sometime in the early fifteenth century the castle had been burned down by Owain Glyndwr, it was said, in retribution for something, and had never been rebuilt because nobody could remember why the hell they'd ever needed a castle in Pontmeurig anyway.

In a street squashed behind the ruins, almost opposite one of the town's three chapels, was an offensive new fast-food take-away. The Welsh Pizza House, owned, of course, by English people. Next to it was a small yard with a sign that said: V. W. Williams and Sons, Funeral Directors. Dai was parking the hearse under the sign when the police car drew up alongside and a constable wound down his window.

"You've done it again, Dai. He's not yours yet, he's ours."

"Oh, bloody hell." said Dai. "I'm sorry, Paul. Automatic pilot I'm on today. You back into the entry and I'll turn around."

"Daft bugger, Williams," he told himself, switching his lights on, then putting the hearse into reverse. Understandable, though: it had been a year since the Dyfed-Powys police had last used him as a meat wagon.

He pulled out into the main street and drove past the police station to the cottage hospital at the bottom of the town. The forecourt wasn't very big and was packed with cars, because it was visiting time, so he had to park on the pavement outside. He got out, hoping the police would find him a space. He didn't like having a fibreglass shell seen in public; people would think he specialised in cheap coffins.

A thirtyish couple walked past in identical outsize lumberjack shirts and baggy corduroy trousers with turn-ups. The man had a baby strapped into a sort of sling around his chest. "Pity, really.'" he was saying. "Super view. I thought." The voice carried across the quiet street.

"Look at that." Guto Evans said, walking up behind them on his way to the Drovers. "The Ethnic Look. Designer working clothes. And of course they have to pretend they can't afford a bloody pram. Evening, Dai."

"What do they call those things?" Dai asked him.

"Something Red Indian."

"Papoose." said Guto in disgust. "The day you show me a Welshman with a papoose around his neck is the day I emigrate to Patagonia" He peered into the back of the hearse. "Who have you got in there?" His black beard split into a wide, carnivorous grin. "Burnham-Lloyd himself is it?"

Dai did not find this funny. He'd had a vague hope that he, the local man, would have been chosen to handle the Burnham-Lloyd funeral, but the more he thought about it the less likely it seemed.

"Let me tell you something, Guto." he said. "Even if, through some insane aberration, they were to make you the candidate, I don't even think your mother would vote for you. It's a hiker."

"What is?"

"Him. In the back. They found him in the woods by Y Groes."

"English?"

"Probably."

"Second one in just a few days. Bloody hell, Dai, might as well be working for the council, the times they send for you to cart away the rubbish."

"Anybody can tell, Guto, that you are a natural politician. That sense of fair play, of diplomacy, the way you choose your words so as not to cause offence." Dai opened up the tailgate of the hearse so fast that Guto jumped back. "How would you like to help me carry him in?"

"Me? Carry a coffin? An Englishman's coffin?"

"Don't like the thought of death, do you, Guto?"

"Get lost," said Guto.

Dai nodded knowingly. Most people were made instantly uncomfortable by the arrival of himself and his hearse. Except for those in professions touching on the death business — doctors, nurses, solicitors, monumental masons.

And the police.

By the time Dai had arrived the body had been cut down and lay on the river bank in the manner of a determined sunbather, vainly stretching out his head to catch what remained of the light.

Then Dai saw the rope still dangling from the branch and realised what this was all about.

"Oh dear," he had said to Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones, and the policeman nodded.

"I've never understood why they come out here to do it," Gwyn Arthur said, taking out his pipe. "Three or four a year, I reckon. If it's not here it's the Elan Valley. If it's not a rope over a tree it's a rubber pipe from the exhaust."

Dai did not mention that it was his personal ambition to die here too in case the Chief Inspector got the wrong idea.

"Well, they come here for holidays. Happy memories, isn't it. Want to go out where they were happiest."

"Bottle of pills and a photo album would save us all a lot of mess," said Gwyn Arthur.

The corpse looked to be in his mid-forties and quite a seasoned hiker, judging by his clothing and well-worn boots.

"Who found him?"

"What's her name — the teacher. Pretty girl."

"Bethan? Oh God."

"Well, one of the kids it was originally. Anyway, Dai, we want to have a little poke around the woods, just to make sure he was alone. Then you can cart him up to the hospital mortuary. Why don't you go and bang on the Tafarn door and get Aled to give you a pint. If you leave your casket on the bank, by there, my boys will have filled it up for you by the time you get back."

Dai made his way back to the hearse. He'd managed to squeeze it into a bit of a clearing by the roadside so it wasn't very far to carry the coffin down to the river — not as far, anyway, as it would seem to the coppers carrying it back.

It was less than a quarter of a mile to the village, so he walked, feeling the air — so much lighter, somehow, than the air in Pontmeurig. He strolled across the bridge to Tafarn y Groes. It was just gone six. Aled rarely opened before seven-fifteen. Dai rapped briskly on the pub door. Forgetting, until the pain stung his knuckles, what a solid oak door this was.

For a long time there was no response.

Dai was about to knock again when the door opened slowly and unwillingly, and in the gap he saw Aled's worried face. His white hair was uncombed: he had a hunted look about him.

"Coffee. Aled?"

"What?"

"Coffee. I won't ask you for a pint, but I wouldn't mind a coffee."

"What are you doing here?"

Dai was thrown by this. All right, he was early and some landlords could be expected to be inhospitable. But not Aled. Aled was flexible.

"Something wrong, is there?"

"No… Well. Gwenllian's not so good. Bad throat. Awake half last night. Got a bit behind, we have."

"Oh. I'm sorry. In that case I won't bother you."

"No. no," Aled said, opening the door wider. "Come in. I want to talk to you."

Aled made him coffee in the bar. There was no sign of Gwenllian. But then, in Dai's experience, there rarely was; she kept to herself to the kitchen and served infrequently in the bar.

"Another body then." Dai said.

"What?" Aled dropped a saucer.

"A body. Up by the woods. Hiker. Strung himself up, poor bugger."

"Oh." Aled was staring at the broken saucer as if someone else had dropped it. He began to pick up the pieces.

Dai drank his coffee in silence, burning his mouth in his haste to be away. There was clearly something wrong here, more than a bad throat.

Aled said, a bit hoarsely, "How did you get on with Dr. Ingley?"

"The Prof? Shipped back to — where was it now? Basingstoke."

"Gone?"

"Gone," said Dai.

"Where did you keep him?"

There was an odd question.

"How do you mean?"

"Where did you put the body?"

"Well, chapel of rest,"

"No… no problems?"

What the hell did that mean?

"I was asked to embalm him. Usual thing. Why do you ask?"

"No reason," Aled said. Though it was not quite dark yet, he moved to the switches on the wall and put all the lights on.

Blinking in the sudden glare, Dai thought at first he must be seeing things when he noticed how badly the landlord's hand was shaking.