Candlenight, page 31
He thought about the Hardy couple, how desperate she'd been to hightail it out of here and how everything had pushed them back in until, different people by now—they
had to be different people—they'd destroyed each other.
Different people.
He'd come here two days ago just to clear his own mind, settle his obligations. Now—he could hardly believe how quickly and simply this had happened—he had no reason
to go back. The link with London and, through London, with the States had been neatly severed.
And there was Bethan.
Looking at it objectively, he had to face this—Bethan was part of the trap.
Maybe they were part of each other's traps.
Through the front window he could see Mrs. Evans inside, dusting plates—a job which, in this house, must be like painting the Brooklyn Bridge. And she saw him and put down her duster and rushed to the door.
"Oh. Mr. Morelli—" she wailed.
"Hey, listen. I'm real sorry about last night, only I got detained and—"
"You haven't seen Guto. have you?"
No he hadn't, thank God.
"Only he's gone off in a terrible mood again. Came home last night moaning about being betrayed and giving it all up, his—you know—the candidate's job. He doesn't mean it, mind, but he's terrible offended about somebody."
A somebody with black hair and big gold earrings and eyelids you could die over.
"How, ah, how's his campaign going?"
"Oh dear, you haven't seen the paper?"
On the hallstand, among about a dozen plates, was a copy of that morning's Western Mail, folded around a story in which Conservative candidate Simon Gallier was suggesting that support for Plaid Cymru was rapidly falling away. He had based his conclusion on a Plaid public meeting in the totally Welsh-speaking community of Y Groes which, he claimed, had been attended by fewer than a dozen people.
"—And when he saw that, on top of everything, well—"
"I can imagine."
He could also imagine how Bethan was going to feel about this. What a fucking mess.
"Can I pay you, Mrs. Evans?"
"You aren't leaving, are you?" She looked disconsolate.
"I, ah, think it's for the best. That's three nights, yeah? One hundred and—"
"You only stayed two nights!"
"I shoulda been here last night too."
"Go away with you, boy. Two nights, that's eighteen pounds exactly."
He didn't want to screw things up further for Guto by telling Mrs. Evans that even two nights, at the rates quoted by her son. would come out at seventy pounds. He made her take fifty, assuring her that all Americans had big expense accounts. Then he went to his room, shaved, changed out of the American Werewolf sweatshirt and into a thick fisherman's sweater because it wasn't getting any warmer out there.
Then he carried his bag downstairs, thanked Mrs. Evans again, assuring her (oh, boy . . . ) that things would surely work out for Guto, and took his stuff to the Sprite on the castle parking lot.
Loaded the bag into the boot, keeping an eye open for the Hard Man of the Nationalists. Guto was a guy with a lot to take out on somebody, and he sure as hell wasn't going to hit Simon Gallier if Berry Morelli was available.
He got into the car and sat there watching the alley next to Hampton's Bookshop over the road, waiting for Bethan to emerge.
They'd parted outside the funeral parlour, he to pay Mrs. Evans, she to go home and change. They had said not one word to each other about Elinor and George Hardy.
After half an hour it was very cold in the car and he started the engine and the heater. She knew where he was. She'd come.
What if she didn't?
He looked across at the flat above the bookshop but could detect no movement. And yet she couldn't have gone anywhere because her Peugeot was right there, not fifteen
yards away.
But what if she had gone away? What would he do if he never saw her again? If that part of the trap were suddenly to spring open?
He couldn't face it. He needed to be here now not for Winstone or Giles, who were beyond any help, but for Bethan. Accepting now that this was why he'd let his job slide away. This was how his life had condensed—around her. There was no way he could leave here without her. But there was no way she was going to leave until—
A blink of white in the alleyway, and she came out and walked quickly across the street to the car.
Berry closed his eyes and breathed out hard.
Bethan got into the car and slammed the door and they looked at each other.
And he said. "I know. Drive, Morelli."
The village had been called Y Groesfan, and this had interested Dr. Thomas Ingley.
Y Groesfan meant "the crossing place," suggesting a crossroads. And yet no roads crossed in the village; it was a dead end.
What other kind of crossing could there be?
The origins of the village were unknown, but the church was the oldest in this part of Wales, and its site, the mound on which it was built, was prehistoric.
Most of the graves in the churchyard dated back no further than the 1700s, but the tomb of Sir Robert Meredydd in a small chapel to the left of the altar was late medieval.
Around the time of Owain Glyndwr. It was recorded that Glyndwr, as a young man, had been to Y Groesfan in the late summer of 1400 to "pay homage." This was only weeks before he was declared Prince of Wales following a meeting of his family and close friends at his house Glyndyfrdwy in northeast Wales.
All this Bethan had learned from the red notebook found under a floorboard by the late George Hardy.
"But why does it have to be relevant'.'" Berry asked.
They were heading cast from the town now, towards Rhayader, close to the very centre of Wales, where the executive council of Plaid Cymru had met to decide on a
candidate for the Glanmeurig by-election.
"The last two people to hold this notebook are dead," Bethan said, the red book on her lap.
"That scare you?"
"Left here," Bethan said. She pointed out of her window.
"That church is Ysbyty Cynfyn. See the big stones in the wall? They are prehistoric. The church is built inside a Neolithic stone circle. It used to be a pagan place of worship;
now it's Christian."
"Like Y Groes?"
Probably."
"You want to stop?"
"No. Can we go to England, Berry?"
"We sure can," he said, surprised. "Any particular part? Hull? Truro?"
"Not far over the border. Herefordshire."
"Any special reason for this?"
Bethan opened the red book. 'There's an address here.
Near Monnington-on-Wye. Do you know the significance of Monnington? Did you get that far in Guto's book?"
"Uh-huh." Berry shook his head.
"You can look out from there and see the hills of Wales."
"I think I understand," Berry said.
Chapter LVII
He liked less and less having to go into the oak woods, particularly in winter. Without their foliage, the trees could look at you.
And into your soul.
He did not look at them, could not face them. As he walked, he stared at the ground. But he could see their roots like splayed hands, sometimes had to step over individual
knobbled fingers.
Remembering being introduced to the woods as a boy, as they all had been. Taught honour and respect for the trees, fathers of the village itself. And once, aged eighteen or thereabouts, bringing a girl into the woods one night in May and feeling afraid at the
inferno of their passion.
Gwenllian. His wife now.
He told himself he was doing this for her. Ill she was now, most of the time. Did not want to cook, would go into no bedroom but their own, wept quietly in the afternoons.
Looking only at the ground, he almost bumped into the oaken gate.
Rheithordy.
Looked up then, and into the face of the rector.
Cried out, stifled it, embarrassed.
Ap Siencyn, in his cassock, standing at the gate, motionless, like one of the winter trees.
"Rector," Aled said weakly.
Only the rector's hair moved. Even whiter than Aled's and longer, much longer, it streamed out on either side, unravelled by a little whingeing wind which the oaks had let
through as a favour.
The rector spoke, his voice riding the wind like a bird.
"You are a coward, are you then, Aled?"
"Yes," Aled confessed in shame. "I am a coward."
There was a long silence then, the wind cowed too.
"We shall have to leave, I know." Aled said.
"Indeed?"
"We . . . I . . . There used to be this exhilaration. A delight in every day. Contentment, see. That was how it was.
"And you do not think we have to justify it? Nothing to pay, Aled?"
"But why upon me? Me and Gwenllian, all the time?"
"Perhaps it is a test. A test which you appear to be on the point of failing."
"But when there's no contentment left, only a dread—"
"It's winter, Aled. In winter, the bones are revealed. In winter we know where we are and what we are."
Aled said, "Death himself walked from these woods last night, and across the bridge and to the door of the inn." The pitch of his voice rose. "We heard him knocking, with his
claw, a thin knocking ..."
The rector said mildly, "You've known such things before."
"It's changed," Aled said. "There is . . . something sick here now."
The rector did not move yet seemed to rise a full two feet, and his white hair streamed out, although there was no wind now.
"How dare you!"
Aled shook his head and backed off, looking at the ground.
"You puny little man." He was pointing at Aled now, with a thin black twig, like a wand.
"I'm sorry."
"If you go from here you must go soon," the rector said.
"Yes. There are relatives we can stay with. Over at Aber."
"You must get out of our country."
"Leave Wales?"
"And never return."
"But what will we do?"
"No harm will come to you, I don't suppose," the rector said. "Unless you try to come back here."
Meaningfully, he snapped the twig in half and tossed the pieces over the gate so that they landed at Aled's feet.
"It's building again, you see," ap Siencyn said, deceptively gently. "You must be aware of that. You must surely
feel it growing beneath us and all around us."
Oh yes, he could feel it. Almost see it sometimes, like forked lightning from the tip of the church tower.
"It's like the rising sun on a cloudless day," the rector said. "Always brighter in the winter. Rising clear. And those who do not rise with it, those not protected, will be blinded by the radiance."
Aled thought, this man talks all the time in a kind of poetry. Perhaps it is a symptom of his madness.
But the parish owned the inn and many of the cottages and so he, in effect, was ap Siencyn's tenant. And in other ways, Aled knew, ap Siencyn had the power to do good and to do harm. He looked down at the two pieces of the twig at his feet and saw where his choice lay.
"Don't leave it too long, will you. Aled? Make your decision."
"Yes," Aled said. He walked back through the woods towards the road, and the oak trees watched him go.
Chapter LVIII
I felt it was right, see," Guto said. "Meant to happen. All my life, the disappointments, the frustrations—all foundations for it I mean, Christ. I needed this."
Dai Death said, "Oh, come on, man. Not over yet, is it?"
"It is for me. I'll tell you when it ended . . . that meeting in Y Groes. I just can't convey to you, Dai, what it was like. Thinking, you know, have I come to the wrong bloody hall, or what? Another pint, is it?"
"Not for me. And not for you either. Finish that one and get a sandwich down you."
"Bloody mother hen." Guto grumbled.
Well, all right, he was drinking too much, he knew it. And in public. The party's General Secretary, Alun, had warned him about this—"half the votes are women, never forget that"—as they drove across to Aber for a lunchtime conference with two other Plaid MPs. The other MPs had been encouraging. You could not really get an idea until the final week, they said. But Guto had followed campaigns where a candidate who'd been strongly tipped initially had dropped clean off the chart in the first few days.
By the weekend the results of the first opinion polls would be out. If they were half as bad as he expected, he'd be placed at least third . . .
"Bethan it is, though, really," Dai said. "Admit it."
Guto glared resentfully at the undertaker through his pint glass. Then he put the glass down, fished out a cigarette, the anger blown over now, leaving him subdued.
"Aye, well, that too."
And that also would have been so right, both of them gasping for fresh air—her with the trouble at school, him badly needing a legitimate outlet for frustrations which were
threatening to turn destructive. Westminster, the bright lights—and what was so wrong with bright lights'? He'd convinced himself—well, Christ, politics weren't everything—that when he won the election she would go with him.
When he won . . .
He could have bloody wept.
"Who is this Morelli?" Dai asked. "Who is he really?"
"More to the point." Guto said, "where is he?"
This was also what the girl in the Porsche wanted to know.
"Seen you on the telly, isn't it?" Mrs. Evans said at once, having watched the car pulling up outside the house and this exotic creature unwinding.
"Well, it's possible," Miranda admitted modestly.
"It's the red hair. Wasn't you in . . . Oh. what's it called now, that detective thing on a Sunday night ...?"
"Oh well, you know. I pop up here and there." Miranda was hardly going to remind this little woman that her best-known television persona was the girl accosted in a back street by a leather-clad thug impressed by her shampoo. "Anyway, I'm awfully sorry to bother you. but a journalist told me Berry Morelli was staying here."
"Oh, Mr. Morelli. Him you're looking for?"
"I am indeed."
"Well, he left, not two hours ago."
"Do you know where he's gone?"
"Well. I never asked him, not wanting to pry, Miss—"
"Moore-Lacey. Miranda Moore-Lacey."
"Oh, lovely. He'll be terrible sorry to have missed you. Let me see now ... I wonder if my son . . . Perhaps he can tell you where Mr. Morelli is. Do you know my son?"
"I'm afraid I don't know a soul here."
"Well you can't miss Guto. Very distinctive, he is. Black beard and a big green rosette. Can't be far away, he's a meeting to do in town tonight. He'll be at the Memorial Hall
by seven. Do you know where that is?"
"I'll find it." Miranda said. 'Thank you very much."
As she slid into the car, the first snowflakes landed on its bonnet and instantly evaporated. Within ten minutes there were rather more of them and they were not evaporating quite so rapidly.
When they found Bryan Mortlake, he was splitting logs outside his house, a former lodge next to the main road. He did not stop splitting logs when they spoke to him, and he
did not invite them in.
"Ingley," he said, raising the axe. "Nutcase," he said, bringing it down.
The axe hit the log dead-centre and the two halves fell from the block. One rolled over Bethan's shoe.
"Safer to stand further back," Mortlake said, looking and talking more like a retired colonel than a retired academic. Except retired colonels, in Berry's experience, were more polite.
He set up another log. "Not still hanging around, is he?"
"He's dead." Berry said.
"Oh? Well, he was still a nutcase."
"You have many dealings with him?"
"Not when I could help it. Would you mind moving out of my light. Snow's forecast for tomorrow, did you know that?"
"Dr. Mortlake," Bethan said. "Would you tell us what Dr. Ingley came to see you about?"
Mortlake brought down the axe. There was a knot in the log, and it jammed. He looked at Bethan as if it was her fault then hit the axe handle with the flat of his hand to free it. Both log and axe tumbled off the block and Mortlake looked furious.
"Look, what's all this about?"
"We found your name and address in this," Bethan pulled the red book from her raincoat. "I am a schoolteacher in a village in West Wales, where Dr. Ingley was doing some research. When he died, his notes were passed on to me. I'm writing a history of the village and I thought—"
Mortlake snatched the book and thumbed through it for about half a minute before handing it back with what Berry assumed to be a superior, academic sneer.
"Bilge." Mortlake said.
"What's bilge?" Berry said. "What's he saying here? That's all we want to know."
"You a Welsh schoolteacher too?"
"I'm a friend of Mrs. McQueen. You have a problem with that?"
"Look," Mortlake hefted the axe and the log onto the chopping block and stood back panting. "Did you ever meet the man?"
Berry put a foot on the log, hit the axe handle, freed it and gave it to Mortlake.
"No," he said.
"He had a crackpot theory about Glyndwr. Who, you may remember, was supposed to have ended his days a few miles from here, at Monnington."
"We are going there next." Bethan said.
"Can't see what good that will do you. None of its proven. There's an unmarked stone in the churchyard there, which they say is Glyndwr's grave. I doubt that."
Berry said, "What was the crackpot theory?"
Mortlake threw down the axe. "You know, half the foolish myths in British history begin like this. In my view, when someone cobbles together a lot of patent rubbish and
then dies without publishing it, we should all be damned thankful and let it lie."
