Yeah, he thought, damn right I'm trying to put you off. Berry snapped the headlights on again. This was going to need careful handling.
It had seemed, in all the obvious ways, a good house. Barely fifty yards off the road, but nicely private, screened by laurels and holly and hawthorn, hunched into the hillside and protected from the wind. It had a view of the church hill some 250 yards away. Below that was the village; on winter evenings they'd be able to see the smoke spiralling from the village chimneys, warming the grey sky.
Nice. Cosy.
So the cottage looked, too, from the outside. Its walls were that warm, rusty grey that softened the outlines of the whole village. Its windows, six of them on the front, were small and quartered like in the picture books.
And clean. Somebody had been and cleaned the goddamn windows.
Not only that, they'd taken care of the garden too. It should have been overgrown, yet the small front lawn had been mown, the flowerbeds tended, even the roses deadheaded.
This did not look like the empty house of a man deceased.
Berry had said, 'You're sure we got the right place here?'
'No. I just thought we'd poke around somebody else's garden first, to pass the time. Of course it's the right bloody place!'
'Only somebody's taking good care of it for you. Why would they do that?'
'It was the judge's house, Berry. People respected the man.' As if to make his own mark on the garden. Giles bent down to a clump of pansies, and pinched off a couple of dead flowers. 'Perhaps the gardener and the cleaner wanted to maintain the place as he'd have wanted. Maybe they got a little something in the will.'
'I get it.' said Berry. 'So the lawyer wouldn't give you a key but he gave one to the cleaner so he or she could keep the place like the judge was still around.'
Giles clearly hadn't thought of this. Visibly miffed, he turned and walked off round the side of the cottage.
Berry caught him up.
'Hey, don't worry about it, fella. What d'you expect? You're English.'
'Now look!' Giles snarled. He spun round and shoved under Berry's nose an elegant English finger. 'Just stop trying to wind me up, all right? Me being English doesn't come into it.' And then he strode off across the back lawn that would be his lawn, olive-green waxed jacket swinging open to reveal his olive-green army-officer's pullover. An urban man who thought his life would be made suddenly healthier by driving an extra five hundred miles a week.
Berry looked at the cottage, soft-focus through the bushes. It was like most of the others in Y Groes, seemed as if it had grown out of the soil, its timbers forming together, like a developing bone structure.
Inevitably, the thought came to him: Giles might need his house, but the house doesn't need him.
Giles strode back across the lawn. He wore a wry half-smile. 'Sorry, mate. I'm touchy, OK? It means a lot to me. To be accepted. To be, you know, part of all this.'
'I can buy that.' said Berry. 'It's a good place to have.' Maybe good wasn't quite the word. It was its own place.
They peered through a few windows, but even though the glass was clean and sparkling it was too dark inside to see much. One downstairs room they couldn't see into at all.
'That's the study,' Giles said. 'Somebody must have drawn the curtains to protect the books from too much light.'
'Thoughtful of them.' said Berry.
And that should have been it. He should have told Giles how nice the cottage looked and what a lucky man he was and they'd have walked around a while then maybe gone down to the pub, had one drink, then off back to the coast. They would have done just that if, while strolling by the rear of the cottage, he, Berry dumb-ass Morelli, had not spotted a dark line along the edge of a window. Now the late Winstone Thorpe had himself a firm ally.
'Hey Giles — you want to get in here?'
'What d'you mean?'
'See, if I go fetch a screwdriver from the car, I can slip it into this crack, push up the lever and maybe — well, just a thought, ole buddy…'
'Ha,' said Giles. 'One in the eye for Mr. Goronwy Davies, I think. Well spotted. Berry.'
'Who's Mr. Goronwy Davies?'
'The lawyer in Pontmeurig. The chap who won't give us a key until probate's complete.'
'Ah, right.'
And from then on they'd been like two school kids on an adventure. The goddamn Hardy Boys strike again.
'You did like it. though?'
'Oh. yeah. Sure. It looked in pretty good condition. All things considered.'
'That's not what I meant.'
'We still on the right road. Giles? It looks different.'
'Just getting dark. Bound to look different. You seem a bit nervy tonight. Berry.'
'Me? Naw, tired is all. Been a long day.'
'I'm not tired. I'm exhilarated. It always seems to renew me, going back there. I feel it's my place. Becoming more like my place all the time. And Claire's of course. I mean—'
'Sure.' Berry said.
No, he thought. It's not your place at all. It's somebody else's place. Always be somebody else's place.
Chapter XVI
He'd dropped to the floor and found himself standing next to a sink. An old-fashioned sink of white porcelain sticking out of the wall. No cupboards underneath, just a metal bucket. It was gloomy in here, but there was no smell of damp. Two spiders raced each other along the rim of the sink. Spiders didn't like damp either — where had he read that?
It had been quite a squeeze getting through the window, which was only a quarter pane. It seemed unlikely that Giles would be able to manage it.
'Listen,' he'd shouted through the open window, 'why don't I come round, open the back door?'
'Good thinking,' said Giles. 'Only, don't shout, all right? We don't want to advertise ourselves.'
Berry threw the screwdriver out to Giles and carefully closed the window.
'Always knew I could've made it in the CIA,' he said aloud, and was surprised at how firm his voice sounded in here. You expected an echo in an empty house, but this was acoustically very tight, like a recording studio. He looked up, saw heavy oak beams and more beams sunk into the walls. That was it: timber-framing, low ceilings. A vacuum for sound.
Also, it wasn't an empty house. Much of the furniture, it appeared, was still here.
He looked around. The kitchen, right? It was quite small. Probably all cottage kitchens were small when this place was built back in the — when, 1800s, 1700s… earlier?
Whenever, no dinner parties in those days. Was there going to be room here for the dishwasher, the freezer, the microwave oven and all the other sophisticated stuff he was pretty sure Giles and Claire must possess?
Berry chuckled, which was a very intimate sound in here. He stifled it.
In one corner he could see a big Aga-type stove, the only substantial piece of the twentieth century, if you didn't count the faucets and the electric light, which was just a bulb with a white porcelain shade shaped like a plant pot.
There were two doors. He opened one and found some kind of storeroom or scullery. He hit his knee against a stack of shelves, still loaded with provisions. A packet fell off and he caught it. Paxo sage and onion stuffing. Judge Rhys's concession to haute cuisine?
The other door led him into a dim hallway, low ceiling, beams black and sagging. He could have used some light in here, but the power wouldn't be connected. The passage led straight through to the front of the house and
