Candlenight

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?

They held each other and then he kissed her moist and beautiful eyelids as if for the last time.

"How about I go to Y Groes alone?" he said. "Nobody there knows me. It makes sense."

She surprised him. "All right," she said.

"OK." He got up, pulled his jeans and fisherman's sweater from a chair.

"We'll go separately," she said. "You go in your car. I'll go in mine — if it will start after two days in the car park in this weather."

'That's not what I meant."

"It's the best you'll get."

They dressed, went out to the kitchen. It was three-thirty. Soon the light would fade.

"Tea?" Bethan said.

"Let's go to that teashop by the bridge. I'll buy you a lovespoon."

She smiled. "I don't think I can look at another lovespoon after what you said about them. Hold on a minute, I'll be back."

She went back into the bedroom and he heard her opening the wardrobe. She returned in seconds and said, "It's snowing again. Try this for size."

It was a fleece-lined flying jacket of brown leather, as worn by fighter pilots in the Second World War.

"Robin's?"

"It's the only thing of his I kept. He'd always wanted one. I bought it for him the Christmas before he died. It cost me almost a week's wages."

Berry said. "I can't."

"Please…"

It was not a perfect fit, but it was close. Bethan adjusted the shoulders and arranged the huge, fleecy collar. "It's to say all the things I haven't felt safe in saying. Well, not in English anyway."

"You said them in Welsh?"

Bethan shrugged. "Maybe. Come on, let's go."

There was nobody else in the shop. They ordered a pot of tea, no milk. Sat down, but not in the window. Berry was still wearing Robin's flying jacket, which was kind of bulky and too warm in here, but he didn't feel he should take it off.

They looked at each other in silence for maybe half a minute, and then Berry said, getting down to business. "You see any point in confronting Claire? I met her a couple times, but I can't say I know her well enough to raise something like this."

"It might be worth talking to her," Bethan said. "There are things she ought to know by now. She's been brainwashed, of course."

Literally, Berry thought, remembering what she'd told him about Claire's head in the writhing Meurig.

"I would have to go alone," Bethan told him.

"Why?"

"Because I doubt she'd speak English to you."

"That far gone?"

"That far gone," Bethan said. "However, I should like to try someone else first. I have a feeling."

"Someone in the village?"

Bethan was nodding as the teashop door was flung open and a young woman stood there and gazed at them. She was frowning at first, but then a slow, delighted smirk spread over her finely sculpted features.

She wore a bright yellow coat and a very short skirt. Her hair was vividly red.

"Oh my God," she said, looking Berry up and down. "Bloody Biggles flies again."

Bethan thought she'd never seen anyone look so astonished — gobsmacked, Guto would have said — as Berry Morelli when the elegant red-haired girl walked over to their table and sat down.

"Ugh." Inspecting the contents of their cups and wrinkling her nose. "Not one black tea, but two black teas. If it wasn't so revolting it would be almost touching."

Berry said. "This, ah, this is Miranda. She's full of surprises. I guess this must be one of them."

"Isn't he wonderful when he's embarrassed?" Miranda said, holding out a hand tipped with alarming sea-green nails. "You must be Bethan. I've heard lots about you from Guto. Do stop squirming. Morelli."

"And I a little about you," Bethan said guardedly, shaking the hand.

"Now don't you worry your little Welsh head, darling," Miranda said. "I haven't come to take him away." She was the kind of woman, Bethan thought, who, if she did plan to take him away, would be entirely confident that this would pose no long-term problem.

"Pardon me for asking, Miranda," Berry said. "But what the fuck are you doing here?"

"Gosh," Miranda said. "I think he's regaining his composure. All the same, not the most gracious welcome for someone who's come to assure him he may not be bonkers after all."

"Coffee, Miranda?"

"No thank you, I can see the tin over the counter," Miranda wrinkled her nose again. "I'll come straight to the matter on which I've travelled hundreds of miles in appalling conditions. Have you by any chance heard of one Martin Coulson, former curate of this parish?"

"I didn't know that," Bethan said. "About the difficulty he had speaking Welsh."

"Like you were saying about Giles," Berry filled their cups from the pot: Miranda winced at the colour of the tea.

"Inside that village the language becomes a total mystery to the English, no matter how well they were picking it up before. Like a barrier goes up."

"It was very good of you to come and tell us," Bethan said. Thank you."

"How many coincidences can you take?" Berry shook his head. "Clinches it, far as I'm concerned."

"And what are you going to do about it?" Miranda demanded.

"The bottom line," Berry said. He lit a cigarette, watched her through the smoke, wondering where she'd go from here.

"I think it's all rather exciting," Miranda said, and they both looked at her, Berry with a rising dismay. He might have known she wouldn't have come all this way just to tell him about the death of an obscure country parson. She'd realised there was something intriguing going down and she wanted in.

"Listen, I realise it isn't my place to — But keep the hell out of this thing. Please." Realising even as he spoke that this was just about the last way to persuade Miranda to back off.

"He's right," Bethan told her seriously. "It's not exciting. Just very sad and unpleasant."

"Well, thanks for the warning." Miranda smiled sweetly at them both, abruptly picked up her bag and sailed towards the door. "I'll see you around, OK?"

She walked away down the street without looking back. Welsh snowflakes landing tentatively, with a hint of deference, in her angry red hair.

They cleared most of the snow from the Peugeot, chipped ice from the windscreen. "It's terribly cold for December," Bethan said, patting gloved hands together to remove the sticky snow. "We rarely see much of this before New Year."

It was coming down in wild spasms, the white-crusted castle looking almost picturesque against a sky like dense, billowing smoke.

"You're right, of course," Berry said. "One of us gets stuck, we at least have a second chance."

The engine started at the fourth attempt. Bethan let it run, switched on the lights, pulled her pink woolly hat over her ears. "OK," she said. "You follow me. When we get there, we park behind the school, out of sight."

The equipment was in the Sprite, behind the seats. Early that afternoon they'd been to see Dai Death who, in turn, had consulted his friend, the local monumental mason, supplier of gravestones over an area stretching from Pont down to Lampeter. Dai had been suspicious, but he'd done it — for Bethan.

"But first," Berry said. "We go see this friend of yours."

"I doubt I have any actual friends there," Bethan said. "This is just the one person I can think of who won't bar his door when he sees me coming."

Chapter LXIV

Up in the Nearly Mountains, headlights on, the snow was all there was. It came at the windscreen at first in harmless feathery clouds, like being in a pillow fight. Could send you to sleep, Berry thought.

The higher they climbed, the denser it became. Cold cobs, now, the size of table-tennis balls. The two small, red taillights of Bethan's Peugeot bobbed in the blizzard.

"Get me through this, baby, I'll buy you an overhaul," he told the Sprite, pulling it down to second gear on a nasty incline, wheels whirring. Ice under this stuff up here.

At least the snow was a natural hazard. we in same shit, you find out…

Like all his life had been propelling him into this. Leaving the US with his ass in a sling, so to speak. The disillusion of London and an England full of yuppies and video stores and American burger joints. Old Winstone dying on him. Giles.

All this he saw through the snow.

No family. No job. Now everything he had was out here in this cold, isolated graveyard of a region where people saw their own mortality gleaming in the darkness.

Everything he had amounted to a geriatric little car and — maybe — a woman who needed the kind of help he wasn't sure he had the balls to provide.

But if all his life was converging on this woman, it had to be worth walking into the graveyard, just hoping the Goddamn corpse candle wasn't shining for him.

For the first time since putting on Robin's flying jacket he went into a hopeless shivering fit, scared shitless.

Only five-thirty and Y Groes was midnight-still and midnight-dark.

Berry parked next to the Peugeot behind the school and got out, closing his driver's door just as quietly as he could, and looked around, disturbed.

"This is weird," he said and wondered how many times he'd expressed that opinion in the past week.

But, yeah, it was weird. No snow falling any more, only a light covering on the ground, a passing nod to winter, an acknowledgement that the season was out there but wasn't permitted to enter without an invite.

"The blue hole," Bethan said, taking off her woolly hat, shaking her hair; it was warm enough to do that. "It might be quite natural. One of those places where the arrangement of the hills—"

"You believe that?"

"No," she said. "Not entirely."

The sky was clear; you could even see stars, except for where the black tube of the church tower rose in the east. But only a few meagre lights in the houses. Power cut maybe.

He breathed out hard. "Beth, listen, from now on, we have to start believing all this other stuff is real. The corpse candles, the bird of death, the whole cartload of shit. Because in this place it is real. We left the civilised world behind, we don't play by those rules any more."

"I think I always did believe they were real," she said.

"Beth, before we go in there. I just wanna say—"

Bethan put the pink hat back on. "Save it. Please."

"But if—"

"I know," she said.

Aled looked far worse than she remembered. Perhaps it was the light from the oil lamp in the porch which yellowed his skin, made his eyes seem to bulge. His white hair was stiff- no spring to it, and his Lloyd George moustache misshapen and discoloured.

"Bethan." Disappointment there, but no real surprise; even his voice sagged. "Why do you have to do this to me?"

He didn't even seem to have noticed Berry Morelli standing behind her.

"You don't know why I've come yet," Bethan said.

"Oh, I know, girl. I know all right. And I'll tell you, you didn't realise when you were lucky. Take your friend with you and get back to Pont. If you can still make it."

"Still make it?"

"With the snow. That is all I mean."

"No, it isn't all you mean," Bethan said firmly. "Let us in, Aled."

"We open at seven."

"Good. That leaves us plenty of time to talk."

"Bethan, you don't want to do this. Too many people—"

"I'm allowed to do it. I'm Welsh."

"But he isn't." Aled didn't look at Berry.

"I'm not English either," Berry said. "And I'm not polite, so—"

"No." Bethan put a hand on his arm.

But Aled sighed and stepped back then and held open the door from the inside. Bethan walked in and Berry followed, and Aled closed the door and bolted it, top and bottom. "No lights," he said. "Snow brought down the power lines. Go through to the dining room where we can't be seen from the street."

Through the dining room window, they could see a small yard and the church hill rising sheer beyond it, palely visible because of its light dusting of snow. Aled make them sit around a square dining table, one of only five in the room. Then he lit a candle in a glass holder on the table — the only source of light or heat; just dead ash and the husk of a log in the grate.

"For a schoolteacher," Aled said, "you don't learn anything, do you girl?"

The convoy assembled at six on the castle car park. A Range Rover, a Daihatsu and a little Fiat Panda which was all Dai Death had been able to borrow from the garage at short notice.

Guto was furious when he saw who was piling into the six-seater Daihatsu.

"You said supporters," he snarled at Alun, the General Secretary.

"It'll be fine," Alun whispered back. "A little adventure for them."

"I hope there's a bloody pub there," Charlie Firth was saying, getting into the back between ski-jacketed Shirley Gillies with her Uher tape-recorder on her knee, and "Bill" Sykes in an ancient overcoat with a vicuna collar. Ray Wheeler was in the front with young Gary, Giles Freeman's replacement, and a farmer called Emlyn, who was driving.

It was still snowing, and there must have been four or five inches of it on the ground.

"Flaming cold," Firth said.

"We'll just have to bunch together," said Shirley. She was on her own tonight, TV news having been affected by a ludicrously timed cameramen's dispute about overtime payments.

Idwal Roberts, tweed trousers stuffed into his wellingtons, looked at the Fiat Panda and then looked at Dai. "You're sure this thing is four-wheel-drive?" Dai pointed to the appropriate lettering on the little car's rear door. Idwal looked unconvinced.

"I'm sorry. I've forgotten — which paper are you with?" Alun asked Miranda, who was looking startling in a huge lemon-coloured designer parka with lots of fake fur.

"Gardening News," Guto told him.

Alun, seeming somehow less efficient in a leather flat-cap and without his tinted glasses, gazed up at the dark and rumbling sky. "It was supposed to stop tonight."

"You dickhead," said Guto.

"Yes, yes," Aled said, anguished. "But there is no way anyone can ever prove it. And what good would it do anyway?"

Bethan began to feel sorry for him. He was worn and tired, his wife had left him…

"She will come back," Aled said. "When she is well again. When the winter is over."

"A lot of it left to come," Berry said.

"Yes." Aled stared into the dead fireplace. "I don't know, something has changed, gone wrong, isn't it?"

"Maybe it was always wrong," Berry said.

"No. It was not wrong." Aled's face was ragged in the candlelight. "How could it be wrong? We were preserving that which was ours. A shrine, it was. Is."

"Not 'is'." Bethan said. "You don't believe that now."

"I don't know. Why are you asking me these things? There is nothing you can do, except to save yourselves. Perhaps."

Berry said, "How can it not be wrong if people are dying?"

Aled put his face into his hands, peered slowly over his fingertips. "Ones and twos," he said. "That was all it ever was. It was so strong, see. They could not withstand the exposure to it. Some of them simply went away. Fine. But over the years, some… Ones and twos, that was all."

Bethan's pity evaporated. "'Ones and twos'. What does that mean, Aled? Minor casualties?" Hands curled into fists, pressing hard into the tabletop. "Expendable English people, like Martin Coulson and— and—"

"Yes, yes — I was so sorry. He was a good man, Robin. A fine man. And I did try to talk you out of it, the cottage, once. Do you remember that day? But they see this place and there is no stopping them. Seduced, they are. You know that." Eyes wide, full of futile pleading.

Bethan said quietly. "The Gorsedd Ddu"

"No. I will not talk about that."

"Ap Siencyn then."

"If you know, why do you ask me?"

Bethan hadn't known. Not for certain. "And the others?"

"Judge Rhys?" Berry leaned into the candlelight.

"Yes, Judge Rhys, and now—"

"Morgan?" Bethan demanded. "Buddug? Dilwyn? Glyn Harri?"

"Yes, yes, yes! And the rest are scattered all over Wales. I don't know how many, I only run a pub. Oh, God. what have I done?"

"Ap Siencyn." Bethan said. "Tell us about him."

"What is there to tell that you do not know? The minister, he is, and the dyn hysbys."

"What's that?" Berry said.

"The wise man," Bethan said. "The conjuror. The wizard. Most villages used to have one. Someone who knew about curing illnesses and helping sick animals and—"

"Like a shaman?"

"I suppose."

"He cure people?"

"Some people," Aled said.

"And what about the others?"

"We do not ask," Aled said. "It has been a good place to live."

"Where does the Gorsedd meet?" Berry demanded.

Aled screamed out, "What are you trying to do to me?"

And the candle went out, as if someone had blown on it.

Chapter LXV

The first vehicle in the Plaid Cymru convoy drew up to find the village school in darkness.

"What the hell—?" Alun jumped down from the Land Rover and strode to the school door.

"What did I tell you?" Guto roared after him.

Miranda stepped down into half an inch of snow. "So this is Y Groes." She paced about, kicking at the thin white dust with the tip of her boot. "It's almost warm here, isn't that odd?"

"I can't understand it," Alun was saying, walking round the building, looking into windows. "I was talking to the FUW not two hours ago. They said it was definitely on. I said, "Look, if there is any change, get back to me." I gave them the mobile phone number, everything."

"Oh, gave them the mobile phone number, did you?" Guto leaned against the bonnet of the Land-Rover and started to laugh.

"What's wrong?" Alun was affronted.

Headlights hit them, the Daihatsu crunched to a stop, and presently Bill Sykes wandered over, his long overcoat flapping. "Are we here, old boy?"

"We seem to have a problem, Bill," Alun said.

"The problem is Alun." Guto told him. "He is a city boy. Alun, do you have your mobile phone on you?"

"It's in the Land-Rover."

"Well, if you go and get it, I think you will find the words "No Service" emblazoned across its little screen."

"No way. That phone functions everywhere around here. It's the best there is."

"Dickhead." said Guto. "They haven't even got television in Y Groes."

"You're kidding."

Guto stepped back and held open the door of the Land Rover for his colleague. When Alun emerged, the five reporters were clustered around the Plaid candidate in the beam of the Land-Rover's headlights. They turned to face the General Secretary, all looking quite amused.

"Right." Alun said briskly. "I don't know why it's been called off, but it obviously has. Well… As you can see, it's stopped snowing, so I don't think we'll have any problems getting back. I think the least I can do is buy you boys a couple of drinks. The pub is just over the bridge."

There was a small cheer.

"You're a gentleman." said Ray Wheeler, of the Mirror. A nationalist and a gentleman."

Dai and Idwal arrived in the Fiat Panda, and Guto explained the problem. "I'm not having a drink," Dai said. "Bad enough getting here as it is."

"Well, have an orange juice," said Guto, as Miranda appeared at his shoulder, frowning.

"I've just had a peep round the back," she said. "Morelli's car is there, parked very discreetly under some trees. And another car, a Peugeot, I think."

"Bethan's car?" said Dai sharply. "They came to see me earlier, wanted to know about—" He looked across the village to the church hill. "Oh, bloody hell."

They knew Aled was shaking because the table was shaking.

"Go," he said. "All right? Go from here."

Berry found his lighter, relit the candle.

"Draught," he said.

"Remember what you said when we got here?" Bethan asked him.

"OK. Not draught."

The candle flared and Aled's white face flared behind it. Can you not feel it. man?"

Berry didn't know what he was supposed to be feeling, so he looked around the room and out the window. It was still not snowing. There were still no lights.

"The snow will melt before morning," Aled said.

"No chance. You shoulda seen it on the mountains."

"The village is generating its own heat," Bethan said. "Is that what you're saying?"

"Bethan, I once told you, see, this village makes demands."

"I remember."

"Demands, you know — sacrifices."

"You did not say anything about sacrifice."

"The old Druids, see." Aled said. "They did not sacrifice each other, their — you know, virgins, kids. None of that nonsense."

History lessons. Berry thought. Wales is all about history lessons.

"But I've heard it said they used to sacrifice their enemies," Aled said. "Their prisoners. A life's a life, see, isn't it? Blood is blood."

He stood up. "That is the finish. You have had enough from me."

Bethan was too shocked to speak.

Aled picked up the candle and they followed him out of the dining room and through to the bar, where he unbolted the oak front door.

"Opening time soon," he said. "And you won't want to see the Morgans, will you?"

"One more thing," Berry said in the doorway.

"No. No more things."

"You have a flashlight I could borrow?"

Aled did not reply but went behind the bar and fumbled about and then presented a long black torch to Berry.

"Rubber," he said morosely. "Bounces, see."

The crescent moon was curling from the tower like a candle flame. A huge, symbolic corpse candle, Bethan thought.

The smell in the December air was a little like the summer night smell of wild flowers, but heavier, sweet with decay, as though the flowers had sprouted unnaturally from the dead earth, like bodies in rotting shrouds thrusting their hands through the grave dirt. The ground, with its thin veneer of snow, had a blueish, sometimes purplish tint, like the cheeks of the newly-dead.

Bethan felt sick. She felt Y Groes closing around her. Bloated with blood, greasy with human fat.

"I want to leave," she said. "Now."

"Not till we take a look at the church."

"I will not go in there."

"I'll go in then."

"Did you realise what he was saying just now? About sacrifices?"

"I'll think about it later. Right now, I need to see that tomb."

Bethan cried out, "What good will it do now?"

She stood at the top of the deserted street, her back to the bridge, white raincoat drawing in the unnatural incandescence of the night so that it turned mauve.

Irradiated, Berry thought. He felt love and fear, and he almost gave in, hurried her back over the bridge to the cars.

Foot down, out of here.

Then they heard voices from the other side of the bridge and he took her arm and pulled her into the alley between the Tafarn and the electricity sub-station which tonight had no electricity to dispense.

Laughter.

"… hey Shirl, you can't be cold now."

"No, but it's awfully dark — Whoops!"

"Shit," Berry whispered. "What the hell are they doing here?"

"Guto," Bethan whispered back. "I can hear Guto's voice, and isn't that—?"

"Christ," Berry said. "It's Miranda."

The bunch of people crossed the bridge and they heard a banging on the pub door and Dai's voice. "Come on then, Aled. It's gone seven."

"And don't tell us the beer pumps don't work," shouted an English voice. "Won't affect the Optics."

The snow in the street seemed to sweat, and there was a kind of liquid hum in the air, as if the dead sub-station was a church organ and there was a hidden choir somewhere poised to sing out into the night.

Voice thick with growing nausea, Berry said, "What's the Welsh for fee fi fo fum?"

Chapter LXVI

Aled did not like this.

Every Friday night was more or less the same, summer or winter. By seven-fifteen, Glyn Harri would have come in, or maybe Dilwyn. Morgan, with or without Buddug, around eight.

These were the constants.

Others were regulars, not bound to a time: Dewi Morus, Mair and Idris Huws. Meirion. Dr. Wyn. And then the occasionals, who included the rector.

Tonight, gone eight now, and none of them had arrived.

There was no precedent for this.

Nearly a dozen people in the bar, but none of them locals and half of them English. Reporters. Loud people, practised drinkers.

"What's that stuff?"

Man in an expensive suit, well-cut to hide his beer-gut. Late forties, going unconcernedly to seed, leaning over the bar by the spluttering Tilley lamp, pointing to the bottle of Welsh Chwisgi.

"Whisky." Aled said. "Like any other. Blended over in Brecon."

"Welsh whisky? You're bloody joking."

"Try some." Aled said neutrally.

"Is it cheap? It should be."

"Cheaper than some. Dearer than others. There is also the Prince of Wales twelve-year-old malt. What you might call Wales's answer to Chivas Regal."

"Stone me. Better just give us a single then, Alec. No soda. Got to savour this one. Bloody Welsh whisky, Ray! One for you? Make it two then, Alec."

"We'll have the bottle," Alun, of Plaid, said generously. Put it on my tab."

Aled brought the bottle of Prince of Wales twelve-year old malt over to the cluster of tables. A brass oil-lamp hung from a great brown beam above them. A log fire blazed.

"Isn't this cosy?" a woman said. The chubby one, not the glamorous red-haired one.

Shirley Gillies had had two gin and limes very rapidly.

"Yeh, if you like the rustic bit," Gary Willis said, looking uncomfortable. "Not very into the primitive, personally."

"Trouble with you, Gary, is you have no soul." Shirley said. "A nice body, but no soul. I think it's rather wonderful, all the power lines down, the mobile phones useless."

"And in a pub!" said Ray Wheeler.

"I told you," Alun whispered to Guto. "I told you it would be an adventure for them."

"You know," Ray said. "This reminds me in a way of poor old Winstone Thorpe."

"Winstone's Welsh Experience," said Charlie Firth. "Miserable landlady, every bugger speaking Welsh, all the pubs closed 'cause it's Sunday, and only Jack Beddall to talk to."

Bill Sykes leaned into the lamplight. "You know I really think it's time I scotched this one for good."

"Belter than Welshing it." said Charlie Firth. "Although actually, this stuff's not bad. I reckon what it is, somebody bought a case of Glenfiddich and switched the labels."

"Sod off, Englishman." Guto said. "One of my mates, it is, makes this. But I shall pass on the compliment."

"Go on, Bill." Ray Wheeler topped up Sykes's glass with twelve-year-old Welsh malt. "Winstone Thorpe."

"Well… I suppose he told you he'd been sent out on a story about two Welsh farmers who'd been shot by their housekeeper."

"Back in the sixties," said Ray.

"Definitely not in the sixties, old boy. Long, long before that. And he only had Jack Beddall on the story because Beddall's been dead twenty years."

"Oh, wonderful!" Shirley Gillies finished her drink. "A mystery story. Can I have one of those?"

"On top of gin, Shirley?" Gary passed over the Prince of Wales bottle, two-thirds empty already.

"It did happen. The shooting. One of those peculiar rural ménage-a-trois situations. The housekeeper was an English girl who innocently answered an advert and found herself sharing a bed with two hairy yokels smelling of sheepshit. Most distasteful."

"Oh, I don't know. Shirley giggled and looked across at Guto, who had an arm discreetly around Miranda's waist. Shirley spotted the arm and looked disappointed.

"Anyway, the girl inevitably got pregnant and the farmers, being unable to decide which of them was the father, resolved the argument by throwing her out."

"Typical," Charlie Firth said.

"Only, when she left, she took their shotgun with her and returned that night and re-plastered the bedroom wall with the pair of them."

"Heavy," said Gary Willis.

"Quite a controversial court case in its day," said Bill Sykes. "She got off very lightly, perhaps because of the baby. I can't remember whether Winstone was actually born in the prison hospital or whether she was out by then, but he certainly—"

"You're joking!" Ray Wheeler put down his glass in astonishment.

"Hated the Welsh all his life," said Sykes. "Had it instilled into him at his mother's knee that no self-respecting English person should ever venture over Offa's Dyke. Been recycling the story as a sort of parable ever since."

"Just a minute," Miranda said. "Where exactly did all this happen?"

"Oh, somewhere up North. Snowdonia way. I imagine. I think I was the only one he ever told, but he didn't go into details, even with me."

"You mean this Winstone never actually came around here?"

"He never went to Wales in his life," said Sykes. "And he warned everyone else to stay out as well. Very fond of his mother, Winstone was. So now you know. I was sworn to silence, but it can't do any harm now, can it?"

"I can hardly believe it," Miranda said in a low voice to Guto. "Just wait till I tell Morelli. The only reason he got dragged into all this was old Winstone and his Cassandra routine."

"I'm confused," Guto said. "And I think I would prefer to stay confused."

Dai Death, who had no interest in any of this, was at the bar quizzing Aled about Bethan.

"I don't know where they went," Aled said. "But if you find them, get her out of here. This is no joke."

"I don't know whether I should be asking you this, Aled but why would they want to go up to the church with two crowbars and a hydraulic jack?"

Aled was silent, but Dai could tell this had cut him like splinters from a suddenly shattered bottle.

Eventually, Aled said slowly. "I shall have to tell them. If they don't already know."

"Tell who? What?"

"But I will not."

Unseasonal sweat shining on his head, rivulets rolling into his silver sideburns. Dai said, "I am finding it hard to work out who is mad here."

"Assume that everyone you meet is mad," Aled said.

Shirley had taken off her ski-jacket and unbuttoned her blouse to a dangerous extent. Charlie and Ray were taking an interest, but it was clear Shirley wanted Gary Willis.

It was very hot in the bar, the log fire superfluous in its inglenook. "Alec," Charlie Firth called out. "We'll have another bottle of that Welsh Scotch."

Aled brought the whisky and went over to the window, high in the wall behind the journalists.

Where were they?

There were few lights visible in the cottages across the street, but there was a glow about the cottages themselves, and a milky layer in the air. Premature snowdrops poked out of a tub under the window. He was sure they had not been there this morning.

"Can we move the table back from the fire?" the plump woman was saying. Half stripped, she was. "Too hot even for me."

He wanted to tell them to drink up and go.

In fact — realisation flared around him, underfired with a simmering fear — he wanted to go with them.

But if they did not go, he knew he could not stay and watch it happen, as he knew it must.

Chapter LXVII

Medieval, perpendicular. Two-tiered, pyramidal, timber- framed bellchamber…

The church was a giant monolith in its circular graveyard, its spire always seemed to be outlined against the brightest part of the sky, from wherever you were standing.

From the churchyard, you looked up and the whole edifice seemed to be swinging towards you, like a massive pendulum suspended from the moon itself.

"I can't," Bethan said. "I don't think I've ever liked old churches, even in the daylight, and I'm frightened of what this one has become. I'm sorry."

Berry had it worked out. She was saying this because she didn't want him to go in there. If he thought she was the one who was most scared he'd maybe back-off, seek help.

No way.

He took out his car keys. "Listen, how about you go fetch the Sprite. The gear's in back. Give me time to check things out — might not even be open." It was only a couple of hundred yards to the cars, and there was plenty of light.

She accepted the keys reluctantly.

"Listen, any problems, just blast on the horn, OK? Bring Guto and the guys outta the pub."

He tried out Aled's flashlight. The beam was strong and white and threw a mist into the air. He hurriedly directed it downwards, and it lit up a grave, and Bethan drew in a sharp breath.

On the gravestone was carved,

Dyma fedd Thomas Rhys…

Berry tried a shrug. "We had to be standing by somebody's grave."

He tried to ignore the smell, which was as if the grave had been opened.

A lot of whisky had been drunk. Alun, of Plaid, was looking at his watch. Miranda had fallen asleep on Guto's shoulder, Guto was endeavouring to give Bill Sykes a true insight into the philosophy of Welsh Nationalism, while Charlie and Ray were sharing a cold meat pie.

Gary Willis had gone to the gents, and Shirley Gillies had followed him out of the bar.

At the bar itself, the Tilley lamp had spluttered out and been replaced with a couple of candles in ashtrays.

"Quiet in here, though, tonight," Dai said to Aled. Where are all the locals then?"

Aled shook his head, said nothing.

"Funny buggers here," Idwal Pugh said. "Won't share a tafarn with outsiders, see."

"Rubbish, man," Dai scowled. "They have never been a town for that. I've been in here of a lunchtime, an English chap walks in and everybody in the place stops speaking Welsh immediately, out of courtesy. Very hospitable people, unusually hospitable."

"Where are they then?" Idwal said. "Most places, if there's a power cut, no telly—"

"They have no tellies here anyway. No reception, see."

"Well, radio then. Not even a proper light to read a book by, what would they do but go to the pub? No, you are naive about this, Dai."

"What I want to know," Dai said, "is what Bethan and at American fellow are up to."

"Get them out," Aled said suddenly. "Get them all out, Dai, for Christ's sake."

Behind him the telephone rang, and everyone looked up.

Dai said, "Don't imagine the phone to be working in a power cut. You forget it makes no difference."

Aled said, Y Groes pedwar, pedwar, chwech."

"Aled, is that you?"

"Yes it is."

"Aled, it's Gwyn Arthur from the police station. I'm ringing you myself because the roads are blocked all over the place and we've had to pull the cars off. Otherwise someone would have come out to see you."

"Snow's bad over there, then?"

"Worst for ten years. Aled, Aber police have been on the line, and I am afraid I have bad news. Very bad news. You should sit down if you can."

"Let's go for a walk." Shirley said, and she grabbed Gary Willis's hand.

Gary thought. Ah, what the hell — and allowed her to pull him to the pub door.

The problem was, he was getting married in a couple of months and was trying to develop a new and disciplined attitude when faced with the sexual opportunities, which ironically, had seemed to come his way quite often since his engagement.

On the other hand, Shirley, by all accounts, knew the score. Had a husband somewhere and a very discreet, adult approach to this sort of thing. She was also considerably older than Gary, and so, he reasoned, it would be a sort of a social service on his part.

Yeh, what the hell. They stepped out into the blue and purple night.

"Isn't it just amazingly… you know, not cold." Shirley had left her ski-jacket in the bar.

"Bit odd, really," Gary said. "Considering the conditions when we were coming over the mountains,"

"I quite fancy coming over the mountains," Shirley said grabbing hold of his tie and leading him into the street like a showman with a dancing bear.

She let him go when they reached the bridge, the river burbling below. Soft snow sat lightly and inoffensively on the top of the parapet. Shirley made a snowball and threw it at Gary. It hit him on the cheek and felt like candyfloss. Gary gathered up a handful of snow and advanced on Shirley who screamed delightedly.

Gary plunged the handful of snow down the front of Shirley's blouse. "You swine," She cackled and pulled his hand back down. "Now you'll have to get it all out."

"So I will," Gary said.

By the time they'd made their inebriated way to the far side of the bridge the blouse was off, Shirley waving it at Gary like a football supporter's scarf. Gary managed to grab a sleeve and the blouse tore neatly in half, leaving them looking down at their respective fragments and laughing helplessly.

Gary, sweating, pulled off his jacket and hung it over the bridge parapet.

They might have been on a beach in August.

Shirley unfastened her bra, took it off and twirled it around her head as she bounced off towards the woods. Gary thought she couldn't half move for her size.

"Slow down, Shirl, you'll have no energy left."

"Ho ho," Shirley gurgled. "We'll see about that, baby."

Running past the school lane, she let her skirt fall to her ankles and stepped out of it and kicked it away with the tip of a patent-leather boot.

She reached the edge of the woods and stood panting, wearing only her boots, a pair of pink briefs and a silver necklace, her back to an enormous oak tree, a ludicrous grin on her face.

Just for a moment, as he stood at the edge of the wood, fumbling with his belt, the total madness of the situation was fully apparent to Gary Willis.

He saw the oak tree, heavy with snow. He looked up at the iceberg hills, stark in the starry night. He looked across the bridge to the village, feeble glows from behind the drawn curtains of Christmas card cottages with snow on their roofs.

He looked at Shirley and saw the sweat freezing rapidly on her grinning face, the skin of her exposed body blue and mottled. And he thought,it isn't warm at all, it just seems warm to us.

And then the moment passed, and nothing was clear any more.

Chapter LXVIII

Berry walked into the nave, footsteps on stone.

Tock, tock, tock.

Outside, it had been unseasonally, ridiculously, warm.

Inside the church it was winter again. When he switched off the torch, the light was ice-blue from through the Gothic windows on either side and livid through the long window at the top of the nave, beyond the altar.

He was glad Bethan was not with him, but that didn't make him feel any better about being here.

He walked up the aisle towards the altar.

Tock, tock, tock,

tock, tock,

tock.

The churches of his several childhoods, in different States, had mostly been newish buildings masquerading as places as old as this. His dad had been a lapsed Catholic, his mom a Presbyterian. And so religion, to him, had been something pointless that people argued about.

Here, tonight — shining the torch on his watch he discovered it was not yet nine o'clock — he was aware for maybe the first time of the awful power of something venerated. Like the Welsh Language in Judge Rhys's study, only there was ritual worship involved here, and many centuries of it.

Whatever it was reverberated off the stones in the walls, was filtered through the mortuary light from the windows, lay rich and musky on the air.

And it didn't want him here.

Fuck you, he wanted to say, to make a stand, be defiant. But his full range of flip obscenities would seem pathetically peevish and infantile, and about as effectual as throwing stones at a tank.

"Help me," he said, to his surprise, and the walls immediately laughed off the words. me, hee, heee…

He switched on the torch with a thunderous clack-ack-ack, and the monstrous shadows leapt out, rearing up then settling back just on the periphery of the beam so he would know they were there, and waiting.

He drew breath and the rich air seemed to enter his lungs in staccato bursts, like something that was planning to come out as a sob. It was thick, sour-milk air, like in the judge's study, only here it had a great auditorium to waft around in and ferment.

Berry found the tomb. There was only one. It was in a small chapel to the left of the altar. A chapel of its own.

It was three feet high and five or six feet long, as long as the stone figure of the knight laid out on top, hands together, praying.

The knight wore armour and its face was worn, the expression on it blurred by the years. But the essence of this remained, and it had nothing reassuring to say. Berry thought the face might at one time have had a beard, but he could not tell if the beard was cleft.

He didn't like to look too hard at it, felt it was looking back.

There was kind of a plaque thing on the side of the tomb, with lettering. But this was in Latin and maybe Welsh too, and he couldn't make it out.

Meredydd, the guy's name, it had said in Ingley's book.

Owain Glyndwr, I presume, was what he'd figured he'd say on approaching the tomb. Let the stiff inside know it was dealing with a wisecracking, smart-assed American who was in no mood for any spooky tricks, OK?

Only the words wouldn't come out.

He thought that if anything spooky happened in this place, there would be little question of how he'd react. He would piss himself, throw up, something of that order.

The years had not blurred a very ancient, sneering cruelty in the face of this knight that belied the supplication of his hands.

Berry didn't like him one bit and he had a sensation, like a cold vibration in the air over the knight's eyes, that the feeling was mutual.

He put out a finger, touched the effigy's eyes, one, then the other. The way the centuries had worn the stone you couldn't be sure whether the eyes were closed or wide open. Berry felt exposed, observed, and was unable to rid himself of the notion that somebody was standing behind him in the cold chapel, perhaps the knight himself, a great sword raised in both hands over his head.

He tried to clear his mind of all such thoughts and made himself go through the motions of checking out the structure of the tomb, as Ingley must have done.

Before he died.

For Chrissake…

The body of the tomb was constructed out of stone blocks, each about ten inches by six, three rows of them supporting the top slab and the effigy.

He laid the torch down on the knight's stone-armoured breast, up against the praying hands with their chipped knuckles.

Then he turned his back on the tomb, fitted his fingers under the edge of the slab, closed his eyes, counted down from three… and heaved.

To his secret horror, the slab moved just enough to show him that with the equipment and perhaps a little help he could get inside.

The thought chilled his stomach.

OK. Calm down.

He knew he had to go fetch the stuff from the car, and whatever was in there he had to let out. And let some air into this place.

An act of desecration.

Sure. No problem.

Berry emerged from the chapel of the tomb holding the rubber flashlight confidently in front of him. The flashlight immediately went out.

He froze.

And the sour milk air clotted around him and clogged his head. He felt dizzy and sat down on some pew on the edge of the nave, and then found he could not move. His thoughts congealed; his senses seemed to be setting like concrete.

Then, after a while — could have been hours, minutes or only seconds — there were ribbons of light.

And the light came now not from the windows on either side or the long window behind the altar, but from above. It descended in a cold white ray, making dust-motes scintillate in the air, and he had the idea it must be the moon and the pillars and buttresses of stone were like trees on either side and the air was pungent now with brackish scents and the residue of woodsmoke.

As the walls of the nave closed in, he looked up into the light sky and on the boundary of his vision a black figure eased out of the mist.

Chapter LXIX

Bethan parked the Sprite in the shadow of the lych gate and sat there for a minute or two, making her mind up.

Then she got out, slammed the door — you had to slam it or it would not stay shut — and walked back down the lane to the Tafarn.

What she was remembering was Martin Coulson, the curate, who had fallen and smashed his head on the tomb of Sir Robert Meredydd. And this had happened in broad daylight.

The image came to her of Berry Morelli face-down on the stone-flagged floor, unmoving, a river of dark blood flowing down the aisle. She began to run.

By the time she reached the door of the pub, the perspiration was out around her eyes; she felt clammy, wanting to shed her hat and her raincoat.

But she remembered how Owain Glyndwr, it was said, could bring about rapid changes in the weather to confound his enemies. Even Shakespeare's satire seemed to reflect this. Bethan, having studied Henry IV at college, knew all Glendower's overblown speeches, heard them echoing as she ran.

Three times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head

Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye

And sandy-bottomed Severn have I sent him

Bootless home and weather-beaten back.

So Bethan took off nothing.

From the Tafarn's ill-lit interior came sounds of merriment. Guto's voice, and the rest were English accents.

Inside the doorway she almost bumped into a stooping figure emerging from the gents' lavatory.

"Bethan! Where the hell have you been? You look all of a tizz."

"Oh. Dai." It came out as a long sigh.

"You look as if you need a drink, girl. Come and—"

"No. no. no." Bethan wiped sweat from her eyes, smearing what remained of her make-up. "You must help me, Dai. First, you have to get all those people out of there,"

"Oh hell." Dai Death looked exasperated. "This is what Aled was saying before he stopped talking altogether.

Everybody's gone mad tonight. Anyway, they won't go. The road is blocked at the Pont end and God knows what it's like over the Nearly Mountains. The council's out with the snow-ploughs and they're waiting for some clearance from—"

"Dai, get them out. I do not care how. Tell Guto—"

"They're all bloody pissed, girl! They don't care whether they get home or not."

"God," Bethan was almost frantic. "Then can you and Idwal get up to the church and help Berry?"

"Why, what's he doing?"

Bethan wiped her eyes again and clasped her hands in front of her, squeezing the fingers. And told him very slowly and very precisely that Berry Morelli was trying to break into a tomb which was believed to contain the mortal remains of Owain Glyndwr.

Dai looked sorrowful. She did not think he believed what she had said, only that she was insane.

"My job, Bethan" he said, "is to put them in, not get them out."

"I wish this was all a joke, Dai. I really wish it was a joke."

Dai put a calming hand on her shoulder. "All right. All right. I will go. I'll bring Idwal. A good chapel boy. We'll both go. All right?"

Bethan nodded, sagging in the doorway. The heat was awful.

Aled washed glasses and watched the English drink.

The General Secretary of Plaid Cymru appeared at the bar. "Did they say when the ploughs would be through?"

Aled shook his head.

"Where's Emlyn gone. The driver? He said he was going to see some friends, but he hasn't come back. We need a good driver now, more than ever, for these chaps."

Aled shook his head, rinsed a glass, held it up in the candlelight, stood it on a shelf behind him.

"Any use, do you think, if I talk to the police?"

Aled made no reply. His hands moved mechanically, rinsing the glasses, holding them to the weak light, putting each one carefully on the shelf.

"I can't understand it. Why is the weather so bad in Pontmeurig when here it's so incredibly mild? I've never known anything like this… Oh. sorry, am I in your way?"

Charlie Firth had appeared unsteadily at his shoulder holding the plate which had held the cold meat pie he'd shared with Ray Wheeler. The plate slithered from his fingers onto the slop-mat on the bartop.

"I feel sick," Charlie said.

He said it loudly enough to turn heads. Ray Wheeler's head anyway. And Guto's. Miranda's head was still on Guto's shoulder, shifting occasionally in sleep.

"The way I see it," Charlie said, "it was either that Welsh whisky or the meat pie. I'm betting on the pie."

Aled washed another glass, rinsed it, held it to the candle.

"You listening to me, Alec?"

Aled turned his back on Charlie Firth and put the glass on the shelf behind him.

"You tried to poison me once. I said it'd never happen again."

"What are you talking about?" Alun said.

"You tried to poison me," Charlie Firth said, stabbing Alun in the chest with a rigid forefinger. "You're Welsh, aren't you?"

"And you, I'm afraid, are legless, my friend," Alun said jovially. "Go and sit down. We'll get you back soon, don't worry."

"Come on mate," Ray Wheeler said. "I had half that pie, and I don't feel sick."

Aled washed another glass, impassive.

Charlie reached across the bar, snatched it from his hand and hurled it at the nearest wall. Nobody saw it connect; the light was too weak.

Aled said nothing but walked out through the door to the kitchen.

"That's it then." Guto hauled Miranda to her feet in the manner of a man well used to removing comatose companions from bars. "This looks like another of those scenes I need to avoid."

"Don't know what's come over him." Bill Sykes said. He'd removed his overcoat and his jacket, was sitting in shirt sleeves and a paisley waistcoat. Nobody had commented on the disappearance of Shirley Gillies and young Gary.

"The Welsh," Charlie Firth's face was swollen with contempt, as if he were accumulating a mouthful of spit.

Behind him, Guto eased Miranda into the doorway, half-dragging her; she was dead weight. He motioned with his head to Alun, who mouthed. "We can't leave them here."

"We bloody can," Guto shouted.

"Where have you gone, Alec, you little Welsh twat?" Charlie Firth was roaring.

Alun dodged behind him to the door, shouting to Ray and Bill. "We'll find Emlyn for you. The driver. Send him back."

Outside, he found Guto on the bench to the left of the porch, with Miranda in his arms. "Come on, come on," Guto was whispering urgently.

"Yes, yes, I'm here," Alun said, searching his pockets for the Land-Rover keys. And then he realised Guto was talking to Miranda, her head cradled in the crook of his arm, blue snowlight washing over her classically English autocratic face.

Guto stared up at him, panic in his eyes. "Alun, I–I can't bloody wake her, can I?"

Chapter LXX

The white moon, sickle-sharp, overhung the glade. The fat trees crouched, entangling their aged, twisted branches like the antlers of stags.

Groundmist was waist-high and looked as thick as candle-grease. The trees were in a silent semi-circle within the mist. He tried to count them and could not.

Not because there were too many of them, but because his brain was working too slowly for counting, like a clockwork mechanism winding down. Also the trees were somehow indistinct, embedded in the groundmist. They were one. An old entity. A fusion of consciousness, of now and of then.

More than trees. They had strong, vibrant thoughts and the thoughts had sounds which came from far way, as if windborne. One was as high as a flute or a lamb's bleat. Another sombre and quivering like the lower octaves of a harmonium. They could have been male or female. And they were orchestrated together, one voice, which could have been speaking in no other language but Welsh.

The mist cleared a little, although it did not evaporate as much as soak into the ground, leaving solid patches like mould, like fungus.

Around an altar.

Which was not an altar of stone, as artists imagine, but of wood, the trunk of an immensely thick oak tree, split in half as if by lightning, hewn out down its centre to form a shallow cradle, almost a coffin. sice, he heard.

Wind in the trees, air-brakes of an articulated-lorry, bellows, a freezer door opening and closing. siiiiiiiiiiiice.

There formed in the hollow of the altar, in the cradle, in the coffin, a satin-white woman with flowing red hair through which tendrils of mist drifted and curled.

The trees encircled her, their knobbled branches bowed. Stood there in the moonlight — so much light from such a slender moon — and watched her dying like an October butterfly.

Hunched on a stool in the dark beside the kitchen stove, his head in his hands, Aled wept savage tears, while the crazy-drunk reporter banged his fist on the bartop and screamed abuse at the Welsh nation.

Aled was not weeping for the Welsh nation.

He was weeping because it was the end of everything.

"… on to the line at Aber station. Some sort of dizzy spell, perhaps… no, nothing anyone could do… So sorry, we are, Aled, sorry I have to tell you like this, too, but the weather…"

"Come out, you little twat! No sodding guts, any of you. Come out. I want a bleeding drink!"

A shattering. Glasses, newly-rinsed.

The most beautiful pub in the most beautiful village in…

Aled howled aloud at the night, at the village, at the heat, at the snow, at the Gorsedd.

"What time?"

"Not long after seven. Apparently, she just disappeared, went out alone… must have been confused, see, they said…"

Seven o'clock.

"Bethan, why do you have to do this to me…?"

He came slowly to his feet.

"I'm helping myself, Alec, all right?"

"Don't be a pillock, Charlie." Another English voice.

"Yeah, well, this way I know I'm not being bleeding poisoned. All right. Alec? That make sense to you?"

More glasses smashing.

But Aled's fingers were no longer shaking as he lit a candle, set it on a saucer and, holding the candle before him, went out of the kitchen the back way, through the scullery and into a stone-walled storeroom with no windows.

The storeroom had a long, narrow, metal cupboard, which was padlocked.

Aled put the candle on an old worktable, his hands flat on the cool metal cupboard door. Hesitated there a moment. And then felt about on the ledge above the storeroom door, where the key lay in grease and dust.

He undid the padlock, left it hanging from the lock as he felt inside the cupboard and found what he'd come for.

Guto and Alun lifted Miranda, all legs, into the back seat of the Range Rover.

"This is folly. Guto. Isn't there supposed to be a doctor here in the village?"

"Are you going to drive, or shall I?"

"Let me at least knock on a few doors first, get word to Emlyn to come and pick up the other reporters. Will take me no more than two minutes. We brought them here, after all."

"Stuff the party image," Guto shouted, loud enough to have awoken Miranda from any normal slumber. "For God's sake, look at the place! You'll knock and knock and no bugger will answer!"

Few of the cottages even showed the glow of candlelight or an oil-lamp now, and yet there was somehow a sense of silent, listening people behind every door.

"I mean, is this flaming normal? Atmosphere is as if there's been a nuclear alert."

"Yes. It's strange."

"So get moving, man. We have to get her to the hospital in Pont. And anyway—" Guto got in the back, lifting Miranda's head onto his knees, " — I wouldn't trust the bastard doctor here, and don't ask me why."

Alun climbed into the driver's seat. Guto saying, "In fact I wouldn't trust any bastard in Y Groes. Don't worry, Emlyn'll go back for them when he's ready."

The elderly Range Rover clattered into life, was rapidly reversed by Alun into the alleyway by the useless electricity sub-station, wheels spinning in the thin skim of snow. Guto, looking over at the hills, made majestic by the snow, thinking. Oh God, don't let us get stuck up there.

"Jesus," he said, a hand on Miranda's check. "She's not even warm. Heat. Put the heat on."

"You're joking, it's—"

"Put the bugger on full blast, man!" He smoothed Miranda's icy brow. "She can't — I mean, people can't just die, just like that, can they?"

"So who is she really?" Alun steered the Range Rover across the bridge. "Not a journalist, then "

Guto's hand moved over Miranda's throat, searching for a pulse, not knowing where it was supposed to be.

"Does it matter?" He felt his voice beginning to crack. Oh, Jesus, how abruptly, and with what brutality, life was coming at him these days. Despair to euphoria to an even deeper despair.

Alun braked hard.

"Strewth man, you'll have her on the floor."

"What is it?" Alun said.

"Whatever it is, sod it."

"No, something odd here. Guto. A jacket over the wall. And — trousers. No, a skirt. It's a skirt."

"Bloody hell, Alun, were you never young? Step on it!"

"In the middle of the road, Guto? A skirt discarded in the middle of the road?"

Following a scuffle of footprints, he swung the Range Rover off the road and into the entrance to the track that led into the woods, drove up it until it became too narrow for a vehicle.

Where he braked hard again and the engine stalled. And the headlights illuminated a wondrously ghastly tableau.

"God," Alun whispered in horror, and in awe.

He seemed uncertain, at first, about what to do. Then, efficient as ever, he calmly opened the driver's door, leaned out and was copiously sick in the snow.

Grabbing up a handful of unsoiled snow, he washed around his mouth, rubbed some into his eyes and sat back and closed them, reaching out with his right hand to pull the door shut.

Al the very instant it slammed into place, Guto thought he was aware of a distant blast, someone shooting at a rabbit in the winter hills.

Hesitantly, he lifted up Miranda's head, leaned across the back of Alun's seat, looked out through the windscreen and sat down very quickly.

"Jesus," he said.

Alun sat up, put the Range Rover into reverse and looked constantly over his shoulder until they were back on the road and the headlights no longer lit a recumbent, erotic sculpture in marble, two figures coitally entwined, utterly still, frozen together for ever.

"It's a nightmare, Guto," Alun said. "It has got to be a nightmare."

Yes. Of course. Sure. A nightmare. A dream from which you had to free yourself. The difference was that, in a dream, when that thought came to you, the realisation that you were in fact dreaming would wake you up at once.

This was the difference.

He tried to speak, to scream at the circle of black, malevolent trees under the white moon. He tried to scream out, you are not here, you are someplace else, this is a church for Chrissake…

These lines only came to him as vague things, nothing so solid as words.

Sice, the mist said, blown from the bellows. The mist had risen to cover the altar, but it may have been a mist inside his own head because this was how it was in dreams. siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

"Sais," Giles Freeman hissed, a red spectre staggering out of the mist in a torn and soaking suit, with a bulging black eye. "Means English. Often used in a derogatory way, like the Scots say Sassenach. Satisfied now?"

A string somewhere was pulled. A big door opened and closed. Thunk. Breath came back to Berry Morelli, air blasting down a wind-tunnel.

"DIM SAIS!" he cried out. stumbling out into the nave, arms waving, "DYDWY DDIM YN SAIS, YOU BASTARDS!"

"We never said you was, man," Dai Death said calmly. "Come on out now."

Bethan, waiting by the lych gate, saw Dai Williams and Idwal Pugh leaving the church with Berry Morelli, him gesturing at them, as if arguing. He was all right. He was not dying by the tomb, leaking dark blood over the stone flags.

Bethan's relief was stifled by the realisation that nothing had changed. The air still was fetid, the moonstreaked sky bulging over Y Groes like the skin of a rotting plum.

She did not go to him but slipped back through the lych gate and hurried a little way along the road until she saw a track winding between the silhouettes of two giant sycamores.

Chapter LXXI

Around the timber framed porch for several yards in all directions, the snow was as pink as birthday-cake icing and this had nothing to do with the strawberry sky.

When they dragged his body out, Charlie Firth seemed to have a hole in him the size of a grapefruit. As if he'd been punched by a fist in a boxing glove and the glove and gone through him.

Bill and Ray dragged him out on the off chance that he was still alive.

He wasn't.

The mistake he'd made had been to laugh when Aled had emerged from the back room holding out the double-barrelled twelve bore shotgun and hoarsely ordering them all to leave his inn. Charlie had made some reference to Old Winstone's mother and a shotgun and that she, being English, at least had the nerve to use it.

Ray Wheeler remembered Aled's hollowed-out face in the wan ambience of the candle, by then not much more than a wick floating in an ashtray full of liquid wax. He thought he remembered a glaze of tears in the licensee's eyes as he poked the gun barrel under Charlie Firth's ribcage.

Ray certainly remembered Aled reloading the twelve-bore from a box of cartridges on the bartop, Sykes shakily saying something along the lines of, "Now look, old boy, no need for this, surely?" The banalities people came out with when something utterly appalling had occurred.

Blood and obscene bits of tissue had been slurping out of Charlie all the way to the door and Bill was relieved to leave him in the snow. He and Ray, liberally spattered with pieces of their colleague, backed away from the body, looking for some cover in case the mad landlord should come charging out after them.

They hid in the car park at the side of the inn, behind the Daihatsu. "So where's everybody gone?" Ray said. "It's like bloody High Noon. What the fuck's wrong with this place?"

Bill Sykes ran in a crouch — how he thought that would make him less of a target for a man with a twelve-bore, Ray couldn't fathom — across the road to the only cottage with some sort of light burning inside. He heard Bill hammering at the cottage door hard enough to take all the skin off his knuckles and then enunciating in his polite and formal Old Telegraph way, "Hello, excuse me, but would it be possible to use your phone?"

There was no response at all from within, where a single small, yellow light never wavered. Not even an invitation to go away.

"I need to telephone the police," Bill said loudly into the woodwork.

To nil response.

"Well, could you perhaps telephone the police? Tell them to come at once. Please. Just dial nine nine nine. Think you could do that?"

The cottage was silent. The air was still. The burgeoning sky seemed to have sucked warm blood out of the snow.

"Oh, bollocks to this," Ray yelled. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

In thirty years of journalism, in Africa, South America, he'd never known a place, an atmosphere, quite so unearthly. He climbed into the Daihatsu, fumbled around and almost wept with relief when he discovered the key in the ignition. Obviously nobody worried about teenage joyriders on the loose in a place as remote as this.

Bill climbed in the other side. "Ever driven one of these things, old boy?"

"No," Ray said, through his teeth. "But I reckon this is one of those occasions when I could master the controls of a bloody Jumbo Jet if need be." He leaned forward to turn the key in the ignition, feeling distaste as a patch of Charlie's blood on his shirt was pulled against his chest.

Bill said. "What about Shirley and young whatsisname?"

"I reckon they've gone," said Ray, with more confidence than he felt. "The Range Rover's gone, hasn't it? The Plaid bunch."

"True. Well, off you go then, Ray. Probably the only way we'll get to alert the constabulary."

"I don't know what the hell kind of story we're going to do on all this, do you?"

"Least of my worries, old boy. Least of my worries."

After a hiccupy start, they got over the bridge and on to the road that look them out of Y Groes. There was only one and, at first, the going was easy enough. It was not snowing and the stuff on the road was impacted, no problem for the four-wheel drive.

They came soon to a signpost. Pontmeurig one way, Aberystwyth the other. "Doesn't say how far Aberystwyth is, Ray. I think we should stick to what we know."

"Yeah, OK." Ray steered the Daihatsu, headlights full on, into the hills. Where it soon became quite clear that Y Groes had got off incredibly lightly as far as the weather was concerned.

As the road rose up, they could see the church tower behind them under a sky so rosy it seemed like some sort of ominous false dawn. But before midnight?

Above and around them, however, the night was darker than Welsh slate, and then the snow began to come at them like a fusillade of golf-balls, through which they first saw the figure at the side of the road.

"Reckon this poor bugger's broken down?" Ray slowed the Daihatsu. "Or got his motor jammed in a drift?"

Bill Sykes was wary. "Nobody we, er, know, is it? Better be a bit careful here, Ray."

"Bill, it looks like an old woman."

The figure lifted a slick to stop them. They made out a long skirt and a ragged shawl tossed in the snowstorm.

Ray opened his window, got a faceful of blizzard. "Yeah, OK, luv. Can you make it over here, I don't want to get stuck in the ditch."

Advancing on the vehicle, the bundle of old clothes grew larger absorbing the snow on either side, issuing bits of shawl and ragged, stormblown hair.

"Bloody walking jumble sale," Ray said out of the side of his mouth.

"Don't you think it's a bit odd," Bill said. "This old girl out on a night like this? And don't you think—?

"Yeh, I—"

The snow blasting in on Ray had suddenly become black and polluted with the smell of smoke and motor oil and also the four-day-old corpses in a makeshift enamel house he'd once been compelled to investigate in the Middle East.

He started to close his window, but the black snow was already filling the Daihatsu, and Ray went rigid with shock as he experienced a sensation of teeth on his chest and a slimy, probing tongue and a nuzzling and a guzzling at his bloodied shirtfront.

It was over in seconds and he was left with a heap of foul-smelling snow in his lap. When the appalling face came up in the windscreen, neither he nor Bill was able to speak;

Ray's foot sprang off the clutch, and the Daihatsu spurted suicidally away into the white night.

Hearing a rustling sound and a crackling, Ray shot one final gut-shrivelling glance to the side and saw the creature hovering over the snow, kept aloft by her flapping shawl, or perhaps, he thought, delirious with fear, as the Daihatsu smashed through a barbed-wire fence, perhaps she had little wings.

As she rose and hovered, the illusion of wings was hardened by the crackling noise she made. gwrach., gwrach… gwrach…

"You said yourself this was a God-forsaken place. You said something had to get cleaned out before Christ could get in."

"It's still the House of God, Morelli." Idwal said. "And I'm no grave-robber."

"Think of it as an exhumation." Berry said.

"I will think of it not at all."

"Dai?"

"Come away. Morelli. Leave it, it'll do no good."

Directly under the tower, the moon arching like a spotlit ballerina from its weather vane, Berry could see their faces very clearly. Idwal's was sombre, unmoving. Dai's disturbed and anxious.

He tried another angle. "How much you know about this place? Why's it on a mound? Would I be right in thinking that in the old days, way back before there was a village, the oak wood covered all of this ground?"

"I don't know," Idwal said heavily.

"And I don't care," Dai said.

"So that maybe even before there was a mound — when's that, medieval, or earlier? — this was a place of worship. Sacred grove, whatever."

"What happened to you in there?" Idwal asked him, with obvious reluctance.

Worst of it, he couldn't remember. Only that when they'd come up to him in the church, he'd been momentarily surprised to find it was a church and that when he looked up he couldn't see the moon.

"What does any of this matter?" said Dai.

"Of course it matters, you dumb bastards. People are dying."

"I cannot believe any of this." Dai walked off a couple of paces.

Sweltering in Robin's flying jacket, his whole body quivering with the need to do something, the sliding urgency of the situation. Berry looked up at the sky and it seemed like a great balloon, full of blood. He felt that soon the point of the church tower would spear the balloon and there'd be a never-ending gory deluge over Y Groes.

Alun had suggested to Guto that when they reached Pontmeurig Collage Hospital, he should be the one to carry Miranda in.

"May still be able to keep you out of this whole business."

"Oh, aye? And which of us will tell the cops about the bodies in the wood?"

"You are right, of course," Alun sighed. 'This whole campaign has been jinxed. For us, that is. Why could none of this have happened to Gallier?"

The snow had started where the oak woods ended and the conifers began their stiff, sporadic ascent of the Nearly Mountains. It had been fluffy and mild at first, innocent as dandelion clocks, before the hedges had solidified into frozen walls, like the Cresta run, the snowflakes gaining weight and bumping the screen; if it had not been for the four-wheel-drive they would have got no further.

They were perhaps two miles out of Y Groes when Guto thought he heard Miranda moan. His heart lurched.

"Come on then, love." He raised her head up in the crook of his arm.

"Want me to stop, is it, Guto?"

"No, no… Keep going, man."

Despite all the snow, it was far darker up here than in Y Groes. Guto wound down his window to give her some air and was shocked, after the clammy heat of the village, at the chill which rushed in with a stinging blast of snow.

"Come on, darlin', please…"He couldn't see her eyes. But his fingertips told him they were still shut. Shielding her from the blast with his right shoulder, he wound the window back up with his left hand, thinking. Oh, Jesus, what does a death-rattle sound like?

The Range Rover suddenly crunched to a stop; a creak of brakes and a hopeless sigh from Alun. Guto looked up and saw in the headlights a sheer wall of white, over half as high is their vehicle.

"I'm no expert," Alun said, "but I estimate it would take ten men until breakfast to dig us through that."

Guto lowered his bearded face to kiss Miranda's stiffening, stone-cold brow.

Chapter LXXII

Past the iron gate now, to where the judge's house sat grey and gaunt and self-righteous in the sick, florid night.

All its windows darkened, except for one. And Bethan knew which one that was.

The light in the study was too small and weak to be the big brass oil-lamp. She approached it warily. She had to know precisely who was in the house.

She slid from tree to tree across the snowy lawn, eyes always on the window. And then, reaching the side-hedge she edged along it towards the house, camouflaged, she hoped, by her long, white mac.

The study window was set so high in the wall that she was able to slip into a crouch beneath it, moving up slowly to peer through a comer.

All the bookshelves were in deep shadow except for a small circle of heavy volumes above the great oaken desk at the far end of the room opposite the window. On the desk were two wooden candlesticks with inch-thick red candles in them, alight.

A book was splayed open upon the desk. Claire was not looking at it.

Her eyes were closed but, had they been open, their gaze would have been directed on Bethan.

Who gasped and sank down to the lawn.

In her memory, the old Claire's face had seemed small and round, the brisk, blonde hair fluffed around it. Now, under the tangled dark hair, the face had narrowed, the lips tightened, the lines deepened either side of the mouth. Severity.

Bethan wanted to run back to the hedge and away.

But she carried on under the window to the front door. It had been her intention to beat hard on the knocker to indicate she was in no mood for evasion. However, the door was ajar.

It opened without a creak and Bethan found her way into the living room, all in darkness, a gleam where the moon picked out the handle of a copper kettle in the inglenook.

The was no fire in the grate, nothing of the mellow warmth she'd found in here on the night of the first Welsh lesson.

Poor Giles.

Bethan shivered, not only at the memory of a dead, snarling Giles spreadeagled on the study floor but because the temperature in here was many degrees below the death-bearing mildness of the night outside.

This, she realised, was the reality. The heat outside, which did not melt snow, was something else.

Tightening the belt of her raincoat, she went through the open door to the inner hall, ducking her head although she was small enough to go under the beams. To her right were the stairs. To her left, a flickering under the door, was the-

Come in, Bethan.

She was sure not a word had been spoken aloud.

Yet she went in.

We need to move fast," Berry said. "They're gonna know we're here."

"Moving as fast as I can, man. You have the chisel?"

Berry patted a pocket of Robin's flying jacket. "Fix the light first."

Dai was wedging the torch roughly into the bottom of a centuries-old rood screen so that the beam was directed onto the tomb.

Distantly, they could hear Idwal Pugh pacing around outside. He would not come in.

Dai looked curiously at Berry, "How do you know that?"

"Know what?"

"That they will know we are here."

Berry shrugged. "Shit, I dunno."

The gipsy, he was thinking. She would know. Where are you tonight, lady? He grinned. He wasn't scared any more.

He thought, Jesus Christ, I'm not scared any more.

Dim Sais. Dydwy ddim yn Sais.

Where had that come from? He didn't know a word of Welsh, apart from sice itself and da iawn.

Weird, weird, weird.

Berry placed the chisel under the lip of the tomb, avoiding the eyes of the knight because this was just some old stone box, OK? Dai handed him the mallet and he struck the head of the chisel.

Thud-ud-ud.

Felt something crumble, give way.

He stopped. "Where's Bethan?"

"Outside, with Idwal, I should think. She didn't want to come in, either. Morelli…?"

"Yeah?"

"This thing with Bethan and you. Nothing serious there?"

"What's that mean?"

"You know what it means, man, you know the way it has been for her"

"Yeah." Berry hit the chisel again. They heard fragments of loose stone fall a few inches inside the tomb. A flat kind of chink as a piece struck something and did not bounce off, rather the substance it had fallen on simply crumbled.

Dust to dust.

The torchlight flickered.

"She's not for you, boy."

"You don't think so, huh?" Berry left the chisel jammed under the lid of the tomb. Dai fitted the end of one of the crowbars into what was now a half-inch gap alongside it.

The torchlight flickered.

Berry's eyes met the smooth, years-worn orbs of the knight's eyes.

They were open now. He knew those eyes were open.

"I think maybe we aren't gonna need the jack after all," Berry said.

Bethan said. "I've come to talk about trees."

Miss Rhys, the judge's granddaughter, was bolt upright in the judge's high-backed Gothic chair, her face made harsh by candlelight which ought to have softened it. Bethan stood on the old rug, where the dead Giles had lain, both feet on the dragon's head.

Claire said, '"My tree or yours?"

"You found your tree," Bethan said. "I want to find mine."

"Why?"

"I want to chop it down," Bethan said simply.

Claire Rhys looked at her with contempt.

"Well?" Bethan did not move.

"Have you asked Buddug?"

"If I had been five days in the desert, I wouldn't ask Buddug for a cup of water."

"Go away," Claire said. "Go and ask Buddug."

Bethan moved towards the desk, intending to knock a candlestick over in her face.

"Come any closer." Claire said calmly, "and I shall have to harm you."

Bethan stopped. The room had grown very cold, she thought, under the influence of its mistress's displeasure.

She said, "What have you become?"

Claire smiled. ""You never really met my grandfather, did you?"

Bethan said nothing.

"I've discovered, to my shame, that he was rather a weak man. He knew he had to return here, that he could not break the chain. So he left my grandmother and my mother in England and he came back. He came back alone."

Bethan was momentarily puzzled. Then she felt nearly ill.

"He ought, of course, to have brought them with him."

The village, Aled had said, demanded sacrifices.

"But he was weak, as I say. He left them and he returned alone."

… the old Druids, see, they did not sacrifice each other, their… you know, virgins, kids. None of that nonsense. But I've heard it said they used to sacrifice their enemies.

"You brought Giles as your little sacrifice," Bethan said, her voice like dust.

"And also atoned for Thomas Rhys," Claire said. "Don't forget that. I had to complete what he could not."

She meant her parents. She'd given her parents in sacrifice to Y Groes and to whatever lay in the tomb and whatever it represented.

He was only English, Sali Dafis had said.

"You were very stupid," Claire said. "You and your child could have belonged here. You could have lived in the warmth, at the heart of our heritage and watched it spread and grow and flourish like a lovely garden."

"Once the weeds had been killed," Bethan said.

"Your words."

"And Glyndwr will rise again, like the legends say, springing from his tomb with his army behind him to free Wales from the oppressor."

Miss Rhys spread her hands. "We are not naive. Glyndwr is dead and buried."

And then her voice rose, horribly close to Buddug-pitch.

"But the Bird is aloft. And Death walks the roads in his long coat. And the shit-breathed hag—Gwrach y rhybin—the hag is on the wing again."

Bethan turned away, almost choking.

They had both crowbars wedged under the lip of the tomb, the effigy on top slightly askew now.

The torch flickered.

Dai stood back. "I think we are there."

"How you figure we should play it? Slide it?"

"If we both get this end," Dai said, "we can lift it and then swing it to one side. Are you prepared then, Morelli?"

"For?"

"For whatever is… there. Spent most of my life with stiffs, see," Dai said. "You were a bit jumpy back at the depot, if I remember rightly "

"These are old bones. Old bones aren't the same."

Dai smiled, the torchlight glancing off his bald skull.

And you reckon it's old Owain Glyndwr in here? Well, tell me, Morelli, how will you know?"

"Be more obvious if it isn't."

"You mean if it's empty."

"Is what I mean." Berry stood at the head of the tomb, hands grasping the stone lip an inch or so from the eroded cheeks of the knight. "OK, Dai? We gonna count down from five and then lift and swing? Four, three, two, one—"

The torch went out.

Berry heard the grating thump of falling masonry. An icy, numbing pain bolted up his arm.

When the torch came on again, Dai was holding it. Berry looked down and couldn't see The end of his own left hand beyond the lip of the tomb, beyond the smirk of ages on the face of the knight. He was in agony, knew his wrist was broken, maybe his arm too. And, worse than that, he was trapped.

Dai was walking off into the nave. "I'm sorry, Morelli," he said over his shoulder. "But a man has to make sacrifices if he wants to retire to paradise."

It was all shatteringly clear to Bethan now.

"And Dilwyn's wife? A harmless little typist from the South-East?"

Miss Rhys stood up. "We've spoken enough, Bethan. Time you left, I think."

"It doesn't bear thinking about. How can you live with it?

"In comparison to what the English have done to the Welsh over the centuries, it's really rather a small thing, wouldn't you say? I should have thought that you, as a teacher—"

"But I don't have to live with it," Bethan said. "I can tell whoever I choose. Beginning with the police."

"Bethan, I used to be in journalism," Claire said wearily. I learned a lot about the police and the law. What it amounts to in this case is that the police don't believe in magic and, even if they did, no offences have been committed under the English legal system. Now go away and dwell upon your future."

When she calmly blew out both red candles, Bethan's nerve went; she scrabbled for the door handle and got out, feeling her way along the walls, through the hall, into the living room where the moon glanced off shiny things, and out into the blood-washed night.

She had to find Berry, get him away from that church, if Dai and Idwal had not persuaded him already to forget the fantasy of dislodging a tradition cemented through centuries.

She came out of the gateway, between the sycamores, looked up and down the country lane over the sweating snow. The Sprite was still parked where she'd left it. She looked in the back and saw that the hydraulic jack and crowbars were missing. Berry had gone to desecrate the tomb.

Trembling with anxiety, Bethan ran through the lych-gate into the circular graveyard where the atmosphere was close and clinging and the sky was low, red and juicy. She could see across the village — still no power down there, houses lit by glow-worms — to the Nearly Mountains, hard and bright with ice.

Bethan stopped and stiffened as a hand clawed her shoulder, spun her around.

Buddug seemed to tower over her, bulky in a dark duffel-coat, her big face as red as the sky.

"A question you have for me, is it, little bitch?"

Chapter LXXIII

They would come for him in time, he knew that.

It was not dark. The light from the sky leaked in from the long window, crimson.

He was too weary now to endure the pain of struggle, wanting to lay his head down on the tomb in exhaustion. But the only part of the tomb his head could reach was the head of the effigy, his eyes looking into its eyes, its lips… He turned away in revulsion and the movement dragged on his trapped arm and the pain made his whole body blaze.

He'd looked and felt around for something to wedge under the slab, next to his arm. Something he could lean on, hard enough perhaps to make some space to pull the arm out.

But Dai had taken away the jack and both crowbars and then Robin's flying jacket which Berry had hung over the rood screen while they worked on the tomb.

"Scumbag!" he screamed, and the walls threw it back at him with scorn."… bag, ag, ag."

The stone knight shifted, settled on Berry's arm; he thought he could hear his bones splintering, getting ground into powder. From the other side of the church wall, he heard the movement in the snow which he'd earlier assumed was Idwal Pugh.

"Idwal! Help me, willya!"

The cry was out before he could stop it.

No way could it be Idwal out there. No way could it have been Idwal first time around, when he and Dai were busy with the crowbars. Idwal had been dismissed or was dead or was a party to the betrayal.

Which was not a betrayal of him so much as of Bethan.

Was there anybody left in these parts who had not at some time betrayed Bethan?

He wept for Bethan and because of the pain, because he was trapped. Because, sooner or later, they were going to come for him.

Bethan looked up into the split veins and the venom. Black eyes and yellow, twisted teeth.

"Gwrach" Bethan spat.

Buddug did not move at first, but something leapt behind her black pebble eyes. And then her enormous turkey killer's hands came up with incredible speed and lifted Bethan off her feet and hurled her into the church wall.

Bethan's head cracked against the stone and bounced off and Buddug whirled and brutally slapped her, with bewildering force, across the face so that her head spun away so hard and so fast she thought her neck was breaking.

"The first thing we learn at school," Buddug said, not even panting with the exertion, "is to be polite to our elders."

Bethan fell in a heap to the soft snow and sat there half-stunned, her back to the wall, feeling the blood running freely from her nose or her mouth. Her glasses had gone.

"And the next thing we learn—" Buddug bent down and dragged her to her feet, tearing her white mac at the shoulders " — is to stand up when we are spoken to."

Bethan lolled, feeling her eyes glazing.

"Don't you go to sleep!" Buddug hit her again with a hand that felt as sharp and heavy as a wood-axe.

Buddug hissed, "You killed our baby."

Bethan tried to speak. Saw Buddug's hand raised again and shrank back against the wall.

"We like them to be pure-bred if possible," Buddug said. "Dilwyn's was a mistake. The child has to work harder, see, because of its mother."

"You're sick," Bethan whispered through swollen lips. "Go on, hit me again. What more can you do?"

"Idwal!" They heard from inside the church, a weak and despairing cry. "Help me, willya!"

Bethan's heart sagged in her limp body. Buddug's lumpen features cracked with glee. Do you love him?"

Bethan desperately shook her head.

"You will not miss him, then, when he is gone. They will leave him tonight to see how much he can do to himself and then, in the morning—"

Bethan rocked her head from side to side to shut this out.

Buddug pinched Bethan's cheeks together to make her look at her. "And then, in the morning —

"What are they doing to him?"

"No matter," Buddug said, ignoring the question. "He will be long gone by then. He will know that soon."

The knight smiled a victor's smile with reddened lips.

From outside Berry heard the sound of scuffling, heard talking in Welsh, a voice cry out in pain.

He recognised the voice at once.

"Bastard!" Berry screamed at the Goddamn knight, his control gone. "Motherfucker!" All the words that had seemed so pathetic, still seemed pathetic.

He pushed the fingers of his left hand as far as they would go into the gap between the slab and the walls of the tomb, jammed the arm in so that both arms were parallel under the knight's dead weight.

He waited two minutes like that, conserving his strength, then he wrenched hard on the trapped arm and simultaneously heaved upwards with the good left arm.

The knight shifted and he felt an appalling weight on the left arm. The good arm.

He cried to the rafters in his agony and passed out with the pain.

When the long, bitter cry came through the church wall, Bethan pushed Buddug aside and made a rush for the corner of the building and the doorway.

Or intended to.

She'd moved less than a couple of feet when one of Buddug's great hands caught her by the throat and squeezed on her windpipe. She is going to kill me, Bethan thought. Like the ducks, like the chickens in the farmyard.

"We do not walk away when we are being spoken to," Buddug said and squeezed harder.

All was quiet within the church.

"Will not be long, now," Buddug said.

"Why are you doing this?"

"Do not make yourself ridiculous," Buddug said.

Bethan thought of the Gorsedd Ddu, who judged the traitors and the cowards.

She thought, we must hear each other's agony and hopelessness before we die.

"Dewch" Buddug said, taking Bethan's arm. Come.

"No."

With little effort, Buddug twisted the arm until Bethan gritting her teeth, felt the bones begin to crack.

Sobbing, she nodded and Buddug propelled her across the churchyard to the top of the steps.

A meagre light appeared.

He opened his eyes and saw both arms under the stone and there was no pain now, but he could not move at all.

And beyond the chapel, visible through the lattice of the rood screen, the little light, like a taper.

The light did not move. It seemed to cast no ambience. Like the light through a keyhole, something on the other side of the dark.

Berry felt no pain, only sorrow and profound misery.

Chapter LXXIV

When the blizzard eased a little, Guto and Alun left the Range Rover with its nose in the snowdrift and walked away in different directions.

Alun's mission was to climb to the top of the nearest hill with his mobile phone to see if he could get a signal and, if he could, to send for the police. And the ambulance.

Which was too late now, anyway. Snow matting his beard and freezing there, coming over the tops of his Wellingtons with every step, Guto looked down on the Range Rover.

Left with its sidelights on and its engine running to keep the heater going, quite pointlessly, for Miranda Moore-Lacey.

Guto didn't have a mission other than to walk. He should have stayed in the heat, laid Miranda's body out in the snow. At the thought of this, he rammed his hands bitterly down into the pockets of his presentable Parliamentary candidate's overcoat and ploughed on.

Years since he'd walked the Nearly Mountains, and that had been in decent weather, he hadn't the faintest idea where the hell he was.

However, reaching the crest of a ridge he found he was looking back towards Y Groes where the sky still was streaked with this unhealthy red, shining out like the bars of an electric fire in a darkened room. An electric fire in the dark always conveyed a sense of illness to Guto; his mam used to leave one in his bedroom when he was sick. Years ago this was, but the impression remained.

He wanted a drink. He wanted several drinks. He wanted to get blind pissed and forget the wasted years between being a sick kid in a overheated bedroom and a big, arrogant, macho politician with a hard line in rhetoric and a posh English chick in French knickers.

Stupid to think that he could make all those years worthwhile at a stroke. The rock band that almost got to make a record, the book that almost sold five hundred copies. The posh English chick in French knickers who almost survived two whole days of being Guto Evans's woman.

He glared down at the village of Y Groes with savage loathing, vowed to avenge Miranda in some way and knew he wouldn't because he'd always be too pissed to function in any more meaningful way than punching the odd wealthy immigrant. And in just over a week's time he'd be a member of the biggest political group in Wales: the FPCC — the Failed Plaid Candidates' Club.

Overtired, overstressed, overweight, Guto staggered on through the snow and the self-pity, hard to decide which was denser. The endless snow seemed to symbolise both his past and his future. As soon as he crunched a narrow path, the sides fell in.

Looking down at his plodding wellies, he did not notice the shadowy figure walking up the hill towards him until it was upon him.

"Noswaith dda, Guto."

Guto did not recognise the man. That the man recognised him was no surprise; people usually did these days.

"You live near here?" Guto asked him. "You have a phone?"

"I've come from there." The man gestured towards Y Groes. Guto couldn't see him too clearly: he seemed to be wearing leather gear, like a biker.

"Poor bugger," Guto said, in no mood for diplomacy. "They let you out. is it?"

Guto felt the leather-clad man was smiling. "They let me out," he agreed.

"Good," Guto said.

The snow stopped, the air was still for a time. Guto looked at his watch, feeling this was significant. It was 12:05 a.m.

Something companionable about the stranger. Something odd, too. Something odd about the leathers he was wearing, and what would a biker be doing in the Nearly Mountains at midnight in a blizzard? Guto glanced at the man but still could not see him clearly; there was a haze about him.

They stood together on a snowy hummock, as though they were having the same hallucination, looking down towards Y Groes. Guto noticed that the sky over the village had lost its red bars, as if someone had unplugged the electric fire. The sky over Y Groes was just like the sky everywhere else: charcoal grey and heavy with suppressed snow.

"No time to waste, Guto." his companion said and clapped him briskly on the back.

"You're right." Guto said. 'Thanks. Diolch yn fawr."

He turned away, tramped off down the hill back towards the Range Rover. When he turned around, the man had gone, but there was a kind of heat below his left shoulder where the hand briefly had touched him.

He almost bumped into Alun, who had come over the rise, his mobile phone in his gloved hand. "Who were you talking to?"

"Some bloke," Guto said.

"I got through," said Alun. "Gwyn Arthur Jones is sending to Carmarthen for the police helicopter. They say we should go back to Y Groes and wait."

"OK." Guto got in the front of the Land-Rover with Alun, not wanting to look at what lay on the rear seat.

Alun reversed the Range Rover for almost half a mile until they came to a sign indicating a lay-by and he was able to make a three-point turn and they went back towards Y Groes, as Guto always knew they would.

"God, I feel sick," Miranda said in his ear, inducing icy palpitations down his spine. "What time is it?"

Snow swirled around the Fiat Panda, tucked into the side of the inn. "What have I become?" Dai Death said. "Tell me that."

"What have you always been, man? A covetous bugger." Idwal Pugh sat in the driver's seat, where he'd been for the past hour, trying to get the car radio to work. "Pontmeurig was not good enough. No, you had to find your paradise. Look at it. You call this paradise?"

"I didn't believe it. And then I did." Anguished. Dai pummelled his knees.

"I told you," Idwal said. "I warned you not to go in there."

"And then — was as if I was seeing everything through different eyes. I just dropped the bloody stone on his arm. I did that! Me! How is it I could do that? How?"

"You tell me."

"Seems like a dream to me now. Maybe it was a dream. Come back with me, Idwal."

"I will not."

"See, I go back there afterwards—"

"You told me."

" — when the snow has started and the fever has gone from my head. And I go back into the church, see—"

"Yes, yes. But where have they taken him?"

" — Bloody tomb open, bloody statue thing in pieces, shattered."

"But what was in it, Dai? Did you look?"

"Oh, Jesus." Dai wailed. "Don't go asking me that."

"A question you have for me. is it, little bitch?"

"I don't want to know," Bethan said, and knew immediately this was the wrong thing to say.

Buddug smiled horribly.

As a wind blew out of nowhere, she forced Bethan down the river bank to the edge of the water. Bethan looked up. Even without her glasses she could see the church tower had lost its grip on the moon, which seemed to be swimming away on a churning sea of cloud.

"Look, Buddug! Look at the sky!"

"It will pass," Buddug said. The wind had seized her ragged hair, making it writhe like serpents. She was the Gwrach y rhibyn. The death hag. She pulled Bethan into the shelter of the bridge. "I will tell you how it was," she hissed into Bethan's face, with a gush of vile breath.

"No!"

"We all came to see. A beautiful summer night, it was, the sun going down. And you in your white summer dress. Like a bride."

"And my husband already dying." Bethan tried to turn her head away and Buddug seized her cheeks between thumb and forefinger.

"Indeed, perhaps that was the very night he began to die," Buddug said, the muscular fingers of her other hand caressing the bruised skin on Bethan's neck with dreadful tenderness.

"No…" Bethan closed her eyes, felt and smelled Buddug's warm, putrid breath, began to cough.

"You closed them that night, too…" Bethan jerked both eyes open, looking into Buddug's yellow teeth, the black gaps between them, the breath pumped through those gaps like poison gas.

"You did not care," Buddug said dreamily. "You were in thrall to the night and the sweet smells and the old magic. And as you lay with your legs spread…" A heavy gust of wind came through the bridge, with a surge of snow.

"Gwrach! Bethan screamed through the wind. "Gwrach! Gwrach! Gwrach!"

Buddug had both her butcher's hands around Bethan's throat now, holding her at arm's length and looking from side to side, down at the river then up at the church and the heaving sky, with the sudden realisation that something fundamental had altered. "What have you done, bitch? What have you done to the night?"

"Gwrach!"

"You are… cachu." Buddug's eyes burning red like coals.

Bethan felt a thumb going up into her larynx, its nail probing like a knife. She felt the skin parting, her throat constricting, tongue out, eyes popping.

"And when I can see in your eyes that your time is upon you," Buddug told her, "I shall tell to you the name of the father of your child."

Bethan felt herself rising above the horror of the night and the hag's slaughterhouse hands and graveyard breath. Rising into the Wales of her childhood, low tide at Ynyslas, a fire of driftwood on her birthday, the view from Constitution Hill at sunset over the last ice lolly of the day. She heard lines of poetry: Gwenallt, Dic Jones the bard and finally, sonorously, in English, the haunted cleric, R. S. Thomas: to live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went to the making of the wild sky

Between the snowflakes, she felt the hot splashes of blood on her face, opening her eyes at the deafening blast, Buddug's hands still around her throat but no grip in them any more.

And Buddug, no head to speak of most of it in fragments down the front of Bethan's torn once-white raincoat.