Candlenight, page 21
"Like, short and fat?" said Charlie.
"Stocky," corrected the customer. "A good beard on him, too, but tidy. Dresses casual, like, but not ... not a slovenly man."
"Looks a bit like you, then?" Ray Wheeler said.
"Indeed." The man put out a hand. "Guto Evans, my name."
He took a deep breath and, with visible effort; added, "At your service."
A dark-haired man came in through the bottom door and quietly look a seat at the adjacent table, behind Shirley
Gillies.
"Hullo, Berry," Shirley said.
"Hi," he said quietly.
"Where are you staying?"
"Dunno yet. I just got here. Where are you staying?"
"Plas Meurig." Shirley said smugly. "Beeb's taken about ten rooms, what with all the telly boys and the technicians. Charlie and Ray are awfully miffed." She lowered her voice. "That's Guto Evans, by the way, the Plaid Cymru candidate. Isn't he perfect?"
"You here on your own. then?" Ray Wheeler said to Guto. "No aides, agent, entourage?"
"My local, this is." Guto told him. "I tend not to require any political advice on which brand of lager to select. Can I get you boys a drink, or is the English Press immune to
bribery?"
"Son," said Ray Wheeler, "you've obviously got a big future in politics. Mine's a brandy."
"Come and talk to us." Charlie said. "Tell us what this election is really about."
"Off the record, is it?" Guto said dubiously. "I've been warned about you boys."
"Oh, sure." Charlie said. "Don't you worry about a thing, Guto. We're all old hands at this game, except for Gary, and his paper ignores everything he writes anyway." Gary Willis looked very annoyed, and Charlie chuckled and offered Guto a cigar.
"Look, I have to walk back to the Plas Meurig," said Shirley Gillies, "or I won't get my dinner. I'll talk to you again, Guto. OK?"
"I'll walk with vou." Berry Morelli said. "Dark out there."
"Amazing, isn't it." Shirley said, plump body even plumper in an enormous pink padded ski-jacket. "I mean, it's just a village, really. A big, untidy village."
Seven p.m. The lights of Pontmeurig seemed vague and sparse, suffocating in a cold night mist. There was no moon, no stars.
"You were expecting neon?" said Berry.
Shirley shivered and wobbled. "I suppose not. Still . . ."
"Yeah, I know what you mean. That frontier-town feel."
They walked across the Meurig bridge. No lights were reflected in the river heaving sluggishly below.
"Berry, look. I was awfully sorry about Giles," Shirley mumbled. "We weren't very kind to him, were we?"
"Kind?"
"It's horribly ironic, though, isn't it, that we're all out here and he's ... I mean, I was picturing him in that pub. He'd have been centre stage, holding forth, correcting our pronunciation of Welsh names. Absolutely in his element."
"Yeah."
"I mean, isn't it just so cruel?'
They walked down from the bridge and after a few yards there was a right turning, a sweeping drive and pillars supporting illuminated AA and RAC signs. In the middle distance, a floodlit façade, a colonial-style verandah. The Plas Meurig Hotel. Two-star.
"Thanks Berry. I don't think I would've enjoyed walking down here alone. Are you here for the duration?"
He shook his head. 'Two days."
"So where are you going to sleep tonight?"
"This an invitation, Shirley?" He was being polite.
"Gosh . . ." Shirley simpered. "I suppose it is rather a cold night to spend in one's car. But I think not, really. Not at the start of a campaign. I generally prefer to let the excitement build a little before I start to let myself go."
Shit. Berry thought sourly, heading back over the bridge. This was what they meant by election fever?
The thought of even attempting to spend a night in an Austin Healy Sprite made Berry quicken his pace. It hadn't occurred to him that accommodation might turn out a
problem.
What he didn't want was to stay in the same establishment as Firth and Wheeler and those guys. He was here on a mission, and it didn't have anything to do with politics.
He speeded up, seeking to stride through his own sadness and guilt, but they were frozen around him in the mist. It had made big, deep razor-slits in his life, this thing. Might have cost him the only person who could still make him laugh.
"Well, really, it's no good, is it?" Miranda had said as he brought down the lid of his suitcase. For once, being low-voiced, low-key, absolutely and uncharacteristically serious. Sitting on a hard wooden chair well away from the bed.
"Honestly," she'd said. "I'm terribly, terribly sorry about your friend."
"But?"
"But I'm not sure I want to be associated with a really crazy person anymore."
So, there it was. The bottom line. The boy's neurotic.
"Listen, maybe you're right." Spreading his hands, appealing for some understanding. "Like, I can't say if I'm crazy. How can I know that? I just have to go find out. I got no choice. Not now."
Miranda had looked about as sad as she was capable of looking. Berry had made her take his key in case she needed a nice central place to sleep, throw wild parties.
"Oh God." Maybe a spark of her old self. "I've got the awful feeling I once played this scene in a World War One spoof at the Edinburgh fringe. Go away. Go and play with your ghosts, Morelli. Your Welsh ghosts."
Walking back now into this one-horse town in search of some place to sleep. Solitary like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. Except Clint was tough, needed no friends and no reassurance. Also Clint knew he was not neurotic.
Berry Morelli stared savagely down the underlit street. It was just about the last place anybody could imagine being part of Britain. Sunk so far into its own private gloom that when people moaned about the place, they moaned in a language nobody outside even wanted to understand. Some deep irony there. He wondered what it would be like for whoever won this election, sitting up there in the Mother of Parliaments, representing this. Honourable Member for Shitheap, Wales.
Berry chuckled cynically to himself. As the evening advanced, the town could almost be said to be filling up with people. A Land-Rover disgorged four men and a woman into the main street. Two kids on motor bikes cruised down the street, circled the castle car park and then cruised back. Night life in Pontmeurig. A black-haired woman in a white mac glanced at Berry as she walked past. She had an oval face and heavy eyelids and she looked no more happy than he might have expected, given the surroundings. He wondered if she was a hooker, but decided not.
Chapter XXXIX
She poured another cup of tea, having a sour, perverse kind of competition with herself to see how strong she could make it, and how strong she could drink it.
Outside the window it was not Saturday night in Pontmeurig, but it looked like Saturday night. That is, there were more than half a dozen people on the streets, the town having come alive in the hour after nine o'clock.
They weren't all here for the by-election. The sudden excitement had brought out local people, hoping perhaps to catch sight of some half-famous politician, here to campaign for Simon Gallier or Wayne Davies. Tomorrow night, two of Plaid Cymru's MPs would be here to support Guto. Big deal, she thought.
Knowing that really she ought to be throwing herself into this campaign, knocking on doors, scattering leaflets. Support your local boy and your local party, you know it makes sense.
Her hands tightened on the window ledge. Street light was washing in the pits and craters of a face beneath the lamp.
Bethan drank some dark tea, which was horrible and burned her mouth. It seemed as if every time she looked out of her window she saw one or both of the boys who'd attacked Giles. Shambling out of the Drovers' or into the tobacconist's that Guto's parents used to own. Grinning at each other. Arrogant, like crows.
Or perhaps it wasn't them at all. She didn't trust her own perceptions any more.
This morning she had been lo County Hall in Carmarthen to see an assistant in the office of the Director of Education. She had asked for Roy Phillips, who was nice and had helped her in the past and who could he relied upon at least to give her a sympathetic hearing. But Roy had taken early retirement, she'd been told. They'd sent her a chisel-faced young man with rimless glasses, like a junior officer in the gestapo, and she hadn't known where to begin.
Eventually, Bethan had made herself say it, and the junior officer had leaned back in his leather swivel chair and blinked.
"Mrs. McQueen ... I hardly know how to react. Have you discussed this with the parents?"
"No. They would, naturally, object strongly. Parents always do."
He was looking urbane and half-amused. They were speaking Welsh.
"I confess, this is the first time such a proposition has ever been put to me by a head teacher. I find it rather extraordinary."
"The circumstances are fairly unique. The village is very enclosed. Too self . . . self-absorbed. I've been convinced for some time that the children need exposure to a wider culture. All I am asking is that it should go on the next list. That the possibility should be debated at county level."
"You are aware that this was mooted some years ago, when we were particularly short of money." He had probably still been at university at the time, Bethan thought. "And there was an enormous row. If you remember, the committee decided that this was a good school with a terrific record . . . And, of course, there was the question of transportation in winter."
"I remember, but . . ."
"And now, with the roll approaching a reasonably healthy level for a rural area, the prospect of fifty pupils in a year or two, you come here—one of our, ah, brightest head teachers—to say you think your school should be closed down."
"Yes." Bethan had stuck out her jaw, determined. "I don't think it's educationally viable. I used to believe in small schools. I no longer consider them valid. Not this one anyway."
"Extraordinary," he said. "You would be putting yourself out of a job."
"Yes."
"I think you should put all this in writing. Mrs. McQueen."
Oh God, Bethan thought. What am I doing here? He thinks I'm off my head.
The education official was peering at her over his glasses in the manner of a far older and more experienced man.
Bethan hated him already.
"I'm wondering," he said, "if there isn't something more to all this. How do you get on with the other teacher? Mrs. Morgan, isn't it?"
"I am sorry to have troubled you." Bethan said tightly, in English. "You are right. Perhaps I'll put this in writing to the Director."
"It would be best."
She'd left then, her dignity in shreds. She hadn't gone back to the school. Could not face Buddug—who, she felt, would know exactly where she had been and why.
Bethan had gone straight home—just over an hour's drive—where she'd thrown her coat on the settee, put the kettle on and was plugging in the electric fire when the phone rang. It was a welfare adviser in the education department, a woman she knew slightly. They had wasted no time.
"We think you should take two or three weeks off."
"Oh?"
"You've obviously had a very stressful time lately. Finding that body. And the man who . . . Why don't you go and see your doctor? Gel him to give you something to help you relax. Some of us thought you went back to work rather too soon after your husband died."
"What about the school?"
"Don't worry about that, We've spoken to Mrs. Morgan, and offered her a relief teacher. But she says that can manage very well on her own."
The phone shook in Bethan's hand.
They had rung Buddug. Well, of course they had. They must have rung her within minutes of Bethan leaving Carmarthen. She could almost hear the shrill babble over the phone . . . '"Oh, the poor girl . . . yes, very, very sad, I have tried to help her, but it has all been getting on top of her . . . No, indeed. I don't think she is good for the children in this slate, not at all . . . Perhaps a different post somewhere would be the answer . . ."
Bethan had flung her coat back on and walked around and around the town in the dark, feeling like a ghost condemned to an endless circuit. Well, she had to do it. She had to try. Now there was nothing left to try. She'd returned to the flat over the bookshop and made strong tea, her final bitter refuge.
Standing in the window now, watching the town filling up with strangers. New life out there.
Finding that body. And the man who . . .
. . . had been lying face-down among a scattering of books. Black books. Hands frozen like claws. Hands which had torn the book's from the shelves in a frenzy, nail marks scored down black spines.
Morgan had turned him over with one hand, effortless. His bloodless lips pulled back in a snarl. Eyes glazed-over but still screaming. How could eyes scream? Bethan had turned her head away and run from the house. Ran down the path, between the sycamores, leaving the iron gate swinging behind her.
Oh, Giles.
Oh, God.
"Where'd the guys go?"
He was addressing the Nationalist candidate, Evans. Nobody else in the bar he recognised, apart from a couple of MPs drinking Scotch and examining a map. "Buggered if I know, Keith." one of the MPs was saying. "By tomorrow
night. I'll have done my stint, so I couldn't care less."
"Charlie and Ray," said Guto, "and young Gary . . .have gone for a meal. I recommended the Welsh Pizza House." He grinned malevolently. "Serve them right."
Berry Morelli noticed how Guto's beard split in half when he grinned. The guy looked like some kind of caveman.
"American, eh?' Guto said.
"Sure am." Berry said, like an American. "Just great to be in your wunnerful country." he added wearily.
"Yes, I bet" said Guto. "You want to ask me any questions before I get too pissed?"
"No," said Berry, who wasn't expected to file a story the following day, unless something happened—and Addison Walls's definition of "something" usually meant several people dead.
"Good," said Guto. "Bloody shattered, I am. I think I shot my mouth off again."
"I thought that was what politics was about."
Clearly less inhibited in the presence of someone who was neither English nor Welsh, Guto affected a drawling English accent " 'Seeaw! Tell us about yourself, Guto! Why does it say in your Press handout that you're only a part-time lecturer?'" His voice sank bitterly. "Because this is Wales, pal. I could only get a full-time lecturer's job in England."
"You wanna drink?" said Berry.
"Aye, why the devil not. Pint of Carlsberg? What can you say, eh? One day in politics and I've had it up to the bloody eyeballs."
"One day in politics is a long time, buddy."
"You know what else they asked me? What was the name of the rock and roll hand I played bass guitar with? What was the name of the flaming band? Why the hell would they
want to know that?"
"You really are new to this game, aren't you?" said Berry.
"Is it that bloody obvious?"
"They had to know the name of the band so they could have it checked out in the morgue."
Guto looked mystified.
"Most members of most rock bands." Berry said patiently, "have stuff in their past that doesn't lie down too easy with a career in politics. Like getting busted for dope, smashing up hotel rooms. Yeah?"
"Ah . . . right," said Guto. "But no. Not me. Once got busted for Woodbines in the school lavatories. I did. But drugs, no."
"Hotel rooms?"
"The hotels in these parts, nobody would notice."
"Mr. Clean, huh?'
"Mr. Bloody Spotless." said Guto. "Well, you know . . ."
"Yeah."
Guto grabbed his pint with both hands. At which point, a thought seemed to strike him and he put the glass tankard down on the bartop and said seriously. "I never asked—are
you a reporter?"
Berry started to laugh. He laughed so hard he thought he was going to lose control of his bladder. He laughed so hard people began to stare at him.
"What did I say?" said Guto.
Berry shook his head, tears in his eyes. He was thinking of the po-faced front-bench bastards in the House of Commons. He was thinking of the Energy Secretary making a careful statement at the bottom of his manicured lawn in the Cotswolds. He was thinking of his dad and a particular senator.
In the normal way of things, none of this would have seemed funny enough to make him lose control in a public bar.
He wondered, after a few seconds, if what he was really doing wasn't crying.
"I'm sorry," Berry said, getting his act back together. "Yeah, I'm a reporter, but I don't think I came here to report. I think I came to go to a funeral."
Guto said nothing.
"My pal died." Berry said. 'Tomorrow he gels cremated."
"Oh Christ," said Guto. "Giles Freeman, is it?"
Berry looked hard at the Nationalist guy. What did he know about Giles Freeman? "I'm looking for someplace to stay." he said. "One night, maybe two."
"Every hotel in this town is booked solid," said Guto.
"That's what I heard."
"Giles Freeman, eh?"
"Yep. You knew him? I guess he knew you."
"We met," said Guto. "Just the one time. But memorably. Looking for a posh place, are you?"
"Huh?"
"To stay."
"I'm looking for a bed."
"My Mam is feeling aggrieved." Guto said. "She does bed and breakfast all through the summer. Now, when everybody wants to stay in Pontmeurig, I have to tell her: forget it. Mam. What is it going to look like, you taking in party workers or reporters? English reporters, for God's sake! Me out there on the hustings and you cashing in. So, very aggrieved she is feeling."
"What's the charge?' Berry noticed Guto was suddenly looking at him the way business people the world over looked at Americans.
Guto's eyes gleamed. "Thirty-five quid a night?"
