Candlenight, page 22
"Th .. . ?"
"Big breakfast, mind," said Guto.
Guto's mother was a small, scurrying, squeaky creature with an agonisingly tight perm. In a living room so crammed with little jugs and vases and thousands of polished plates that Berry didn't like to move his arms, she told him seriously that Guto would be the death of her.
"She is delighted, really," Guto said. "She's never had an American to stay. What's your name anyway?"
"Morelli."
"That's an American name?"
"Don't be so rude, Guto." Mrs. Evans snapped. She smiled at Berry and her teeth moved.
"We had some Morellis, we did, at the back of us in Merthyr. Do you know Merthyr . . .?"
"Of course he bloody doesn't, Mam. Listen, Morelli, we can't do hash browns or steak and eggs for breakfast. Well, eggs are OK, but . . ."
Berry told them he was vegetarian.
"Oh dear, oh dear, we haven't any of that." wailed Mrs. Evans, squeezing the corners of her apron in anguish. "What will you think of us?"
"Toast?" said Berry. "Marmalade?"
"An American vegetarian?" said Guto, aghast.
"He'll be the death of me, this boy," said Mrs. Evans.
Chapter XL
Berry spent the night under a mountain of blankets in a bed like a swamp. He slept surprisingly well, and, at eight-fifteen on a grey Pontmeurig morning, came down to a table set for one, with a spare napkin. There was thick toast, thin toast and toasted rolls. There were three kinds of marmalade.
"These jars are new," Berry said.
"I sent Guto for to wake them up at the shop," Mrs. Evans explained. "I still don't feel right about it. I can't have you paying for a proper breakfast."
It occurred to Berry that Mrs. Evans did not know she was charging thirty-five pounds a night.
"Guto had to leave early to prepare for his Press conference," she said. "He'll make a terrible mess of it, I know he will. He'll say all the wrong things."
He already did, Berry thought. "He'll be fine," he said.
"Do you think so?"
"Guy's a natural politician."
"He won't win, I'm afraid," Mrs. Evans said. "And then he'll come on with all this bravado. And then he'll drink himself silly."
"They say he has a good chance."
Mrs. Evans shook her head. "Any chances he has he'll ruin. That kind of boy. They offered him a job once, down in Exeter. Head of the History Department. He wouldn't have it. That kind of boy, see."
"This is great," Berry said, munching a slice of toast with ginger marmalade.
"It's not a proper breakfast."
"It's my kind of breakfast," Berry said, "Can you tell me where I find the police department in this town?"
There were two public buildings in Pontmeurig built in the past five years. This morning Berry would visit both. One was the crematorium, the other was the police station.
The police station was so modern it had automatic glass doors.
"Who's in charge here?" Berry said.
"I am," said an elderly police constable behind the latest kind of bulletproof security screen. "'So they tell me." His voice came out of a circular metal grille.
"You don't have detectives?"
"Detectives, is it?" The constable looked resentful. "What is it about?"
"It's about what I guess you'd call a suspicious death," said Berry.
The policeman's expression remained static. He picked up a telephone and pointed to some grey leather and chrome chairs. "Take a seat, my friend." he said. "I'll see if Gwyn Arthur's arrived."
Above the security screen, the digital station clock was printing out 8:57 a.m.
The huge oak hatstand was a determined personal touch in Detective Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones's new office, where everywhere else was plastic or metal or glass and coloured grey or white. Berry decided the Chief Inspector might be the only guy in the CID who still wore a hat.
"I can appreciate your concern." Gwyn Arthur said. "I can even understand your suspicions." He spread his long fingers on the plastic of his desktop. "But none of us can argue with a post mortem report."
He took an envelope from a drawer of the desk. "You realise I don't have to show you this."
"Good of you." Berry said.
"Trying to be cooperative I am. As I say, I can understand your suspicions."
Before consenting to discuss Giles Freeman, the Chief Inspector had spent a good ten minutes lighting his pipe and asking Berry a lot of questions about himself. Casual and
leisurely, but penetrating. He'd examined Berry's ID and expressed considerable curiosity about American Newsnet before appearing to accept that Berry's interest in this case was personal, as distinct from journalistic.
"This is the autopsy report, yeah?"
"You can skip the first three-quarters if you aren't interested in things like what your friend had for breakfast on the day he died. Go to the conclusion."
"I already did," said Berry. "Some of these medical terms elude me, but what it seems to be saying is that Giles died of a brain tumour. Which is what we were told."
"Indeed," said Gwyn Arthur. For a Welshman, he was surprisingly tall and narrow. He had a half-moon kind of face and flat grey hair.
"I don't get it"
"What don't you get?"
"This stuff. These . . Berry held up the report. "This mean bruising, or what?"
"More or less. Abrasions. Consistent with a fall on a hard surface. Consistent also, I may say, with a blow. Which occurred to the doctor who examined him in the hospital and who passed on his suspicions to us."
"He died in hospital?"
"No, he died at his home. Let me explain from the beginning."
"Yeah." said Berry. "You do that."
Gwyn Arthur Jones talked for twenty minutes, puffing his pipe and staring down at his fingers on the plastic desk. He talked of the doctor's suspicions that Giles had been in a fight and Giles's insistence that he'd fallen in the Castle car-park.
"Which, considering the state of his clothes, was plausible enough. And was not something we could contest as, if there was another protagonist, we have not found him. Or her—who can tell these days? And I would add that the doctor did suspect at the time, from the way Mr. Freeman was behaving, that there might have been brain damage. He wanted to make an appointment at Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth, but your friend flatly refused and discharged himself."
Berry smiled. "Sounds like Giles."
"They parted with some acrimony. Personally I think the doctor ought to have exercised his prerogative to prevent our friend from driving. Still, he appears to have made it home, without mishap, to Y Groes. Where, it seems, his luck ran out."
Claire Freeman, who told the police she knew nothing of Giles's fall, had been out when he arrived home. She was not expecting him back from London until that evening.
Gwyn Arthur said. "Why did he come home early, do you know?"
Berry shrugged. "Any chance he had to get out of London, he took it. He was kind of obsessed with Y Groes—with having this bolthole, you know?"
Gwyn Arthur sighed. "It is a common aberration. Among the English."
"So what happened?"
"There is a school teacher in Y Groes. It seems she had become quite friendly with Mr. and Mrs. Freeman and was giving them lessons in the Welsh language. She was among a group of people who saw him lying in the car park on the Thursday night and went to help him. The following day, Mrs. McQueen — that's the teacher—learned that your friend had discharged himself from the hospital and gone home. So, in her lunch break, she went up to his house to see if he was all right. She knocked and got no reply, so she looked through the downstairs windows and saw a man's body, in a collapsed state, on the floor of one of the rooms. She went to the pub for help and two of the customers went back with her and broke down the rear door."
Berry was picturing the judge's house, the back porch near the window he'd prised open with a screwdriver on a late summer's afternoon.
"Mr. Freeman had probably been dead for over an hour by the time they got to him."
Gwyn Arthur took another envelope from a drawer. "Do you want to look at these?"
"What are they?"
From the brown envelope Gwyn Arthur pulled a dark grey folder, about six inches by eight, on which was printed, in black, the words DYFED-POWYS POLICE.
"As I say, it did look somewhat suspicious at first. Mrs. McQueen telephoned the police. I drove across, with the scenes -of-crime officer. These photographs were taken before the body was moved."
Berry felt a little sick, tasted ginger marmalade. He opened the dark grey folder.
"They would have been produced at the inquest, had there been one," said Gwyn Arthur.
The pictures were in colour. They'd been taken with a flash.
Berry flinched.
Giles's lips were drawn back into a twisted parody of a grin. Both eyes were open, the left one purple and black. The bruising spread down one side of Giles's face and mingled with the freckles.
Another picture was taken from further back and higher up, like the photographer had been standing on a chair.
"Shit." Berry breathed.
It showed Giles sprawled crookedly, arms extended. All around him were scattered black books. One had its binding partially torn away, and curling pages lay around.
Tissue-thin. Berry could hear the pages whispering.
Next to Giles's head was a red dragon's head, spitting faded, threadbare fire into the dead man's right ear.
"The study." Berry said, going cold. "He died in the study."
"You have been in this house?"
"Once," Berry said. "Just once. What happened to the books?"
"He appears to have had some kind of, er, final fit, should I say? Obviously grabbed at the shelves to try and prevent himself falling. Dragged out the books. Quite a frenzy."
"So you ordered an autopsy."
"Naturally. The state of the room suggested a possible struggle. Oh, yes, we had the portable incident room on standby, I can tell you. But by teatime it was clear we had overreacted. These things happen."
"Brain tumour."
"It had been forming for—well, who knows how long, weeks, months, years? His wife tells us he had been suffering from very severe headaches. Mrs. McQueen confirms this. Perhaps, you yourself . . ."
"No. He never mentioned headaches."
"You see, with a condition like this, his apparent blackout on the car-park ... Hit his head on a car bumper, he said. All consistent. It is a great tragedy, but that's all it is. Natural causes. No inquest. Unless there's something you feel you can add?"
"No," Berry said. "Nothing I have to add. Thanks, Inspector."
Gwyn Arthur Jones put the slim photo-album back in its envelope. "I'm very sorry."
"One thing " Berry said. "His wife, Claire."
"Quiet little girl." said Gwyn Arthur.
"Where was she when they found Giles?"
"My, you are a suspicious chap." said Gwyn Arthur with a half-smile. "Mrs. Freeman was quite a short distance away, at a friend's house, as it turns out. Mrs. Dafis. is it? I don't know without looking up the statement. Obviously she feels very bad about not being there when her husband arrived home and him dying like that, on his own. I hear the funeral is today."
"You going?"
"Well, see, I don't mean any disrespect, but not appropriate, is it, now?"
"Guess not."
"See, even if he'd gone to Bronglais, as the doctor wanted, the chances are it would have been too late, the size of that bloody thing. Any time he could have gone."
"Malignant? I was kind of shaky on The big words."
Gwyn Arthur's pipe had gone out. He laid it on the grey plastic desktop and looked at it.
"As the devil," he said. "As the bloody devil."
Chapter XLI
They came in from the Lampeter end, George twice stopping to consult the map, slowing at every signpost.
Terribly galling, because he was normally such a fast driver, often recklessly so in his wife's opinion.
"Pretty obscure place," George grunted. "Don't want to get it wrong."
"You don't want to get there at all," Elinor said icily.
"Elinor, I still say . . ."
"And why do you think we weren't told?" Elinor demanded. "Because I didn't tell her about his death. As simple as that."
"I can't believe," George said, slowing the Volvo for another signpost, "that she would be quite so petty."
"You mean, not so petty as me?"
"That is not what I said. Elinor, for Christ's sake will you stop this."
"We can't be far off," Elinor said and affected a shudder "I can feel it somehow."
George sighed and kept quiet. He was a rumpled man with hair of nicotine and white. He'd never really taken to his son-in-law, she thought. George avoided people in high-profile jobs. He wasn't a high-profile person. He'd never minded his daughter being a photographer, though, because the photographer was the one person guaranteed always to be behind the camera
She was like him in a way, Claire, George's daughter.
Wife of Elinor's dead son-in-law.
The shock, for Elinor, had been quite stunning. And to chance upon it, without warning, in Giles's own newspaper, spread on the ceramic worktop after breakfast, four brief paragraphs of obituary, a quote from the editor: immense flair . . . terrible tragedy ... so young . . . will be hard to replace.
Elinor had liked Giles. He'd been strong in his opinions, forthright. Whereas George had always been so grey. She'd been sure that Giles would, after a few weeks, realise the impossibility of living in Wales and lead Claire back.
Lead. That was it. He'd always been a leader. That was what she'd liked about Giles, that staunchly English quality of leadership.
"I don't know where we're going to stay." George was saying. "You do realise there's a by-election on."
"We'll find somewhere," Elinor said, more briskly than she felt. "Just get us there."
"It's four miles," George said. "That's what the signpost said. But you know what they say about Welsh miles."
The aftershock had been the discovery that Giles's funeral was not to be in London. Elinor had learned this by telephoning his paper. She'd phoned the number in Y Groes about twenty times, of course, and got an answering machine. Claire's voice ... in Welsh! She'd refused to leave a message after the tone. "Claire, I'm sorry, I refuse to leave a message." she'd said once, voice faltering, and hung up, regretful and feeling rather stupid.
At the paper, the political editor said he too was surprised that the funeral was being held in Wales, although with both Giles's parents being dead be supposed there was no special reason for it to be done in London. And with the by-election on, there'd at least be enough reporters out there to make a respectable showing.
Elinor had been glad, at least, to learn that Giles was not to be buried in the churchyard at Y Groes. Even the ceremony would not be held there.
And yet she did wonder why.
And still she had not spoken to Claire. Her daughter's reaction on their appearance at the funeral was something she could not even attempt to predict. She accepted that they had not parted on the best of terms, but for the girl to avoid her own mother at a time when a mother was needed the most . . .
George had taken a hopelessly circuitous route and they had turned into the road linking Aberystwyth and Pontmeurig, entering the grim valley of the disused lead mine.
Feeling at once sorrowful, offended and inadequate, Elinor experienced the pinprick of a small tear. Her daughter was a widow. A widow and childless.
"I suppose she'll marry again." George said suddenly, as if he'd picked up her thoughts. Which was something he never did, being far too insensitive.
"What do you mean?"
"She's young. I suppose if she stays out here, there'll be lots of chaps . . . that is, I mean . . ."
"Stays?" Elinor's body went as rigid as the stark towers of the lead mine. "Stays here? Are you quite mad?"
Guto was in deep shit.
Berry had seen it coming, a whole dump-truck load. Guto underneath, apparently oblivious of the danger.
The man steering the dump truck, one sure finger on the wheel, was F. C. W. "Bill" Sykes. Political Editor of the Daily Telegraph, one of fourteen reporters and two TV crews, ranged in a three-quarter circle around the candidate.
Television lights were belching hot glare into the makeshift gladiatorial arena in the shabby lounge of the Drovers' Arms.
They were mob-handed now, no longer the inoffensive affable guys in the public bar last night. Notebooks and pocket cassette machines next to the cups at their elbows.
No alcohol, just hard caffeine. They meant business.
Berry Morelli had covered one British by-election before and knew they were basically all the same: every morning, for about a fortnight, each of the political parties would hold
a Press conference with the candidate and some heavy back-up from Westminster—a minister or a shadow-minister or, on perhaps one occasion, the party leader. In Plaid Cymru's case, Berry guessed, the leader would show up pretty often, on account of the party had only three MPs to pull out.
They must be saving the big guns for later. Guto was doing his first conference solo, accompanied by only one minder—Plaid's General Secretary, a diffident guy in tinted
glasses. This afternoon they'd be out on the streets, canvassing, pressing the flesh, as they put it. And then, each night there'd be public meetings to address.
Hard grind.
And this morning, the baptism of fire.
It started with a question about an act of vandalism perpetrated by the Welsh Language Society against a leading high-street building society which had been unwise
enough to refuse a mortgage application in Welsh.
"Ah, well," Guto explained, "they are youngsters with a mission and sometimes they get carried away."
"Usually by the police." Ray Wheeler said from the table nearest Guto's. There was laughter.
"All right then, old boy," rumbled Bill Sykes. "While we're on the subject of brushes with the law . . ."
