headboard doing at the foot of the stairs?
'Claire? Claire!!' He began to climb the stairs. It was too bad. Just too bloody bad of her. Not even a fire lit.
Halfway up the stairs he looked back and saw that the door of the judge's study was hanging open again. He turned away from it and carried on to the upstairs landing.
He went into his office and looked around. Aghast.
His office had gone.
It was a bedroom.
His office was a bloody bedroom again!
Giles squeezed his aching eyes with trembling fingers. Illusion, fatigue, hallucination?
Let it be that. Please let it be that, God.
But when he opened his eyes. It was still a bedroom, and now he recognised the bed. Two green mattresses and a frame of light pine. It was the bed which had come into the house with the ghastly pink vinyl headboard.
'Claire!!' he screamed, his throat choking on the word. He began to cough.
He backed out of the room and threw open the door of their own bedroom, his and Claire's, knowing in an icy part of his stomach what he would find there. Whose bed, with its frowning headboard of carved oak.
'Thank God,' Bethan said, seeing Giles's car parked in the track between the two sycamores.
She'd driven straight out of the forestry and into the village at close to sixty miles per hour, knowing that at this time there'd be no children in the road — they'd all be in school by now, wondering where their head teacher was.
At seven minutes to nine, the head teacher had been shattering a wing mirror on the parapet of the bridge as the little Peugeot whizzed across like a frightened squirrel.
All the way across the hills she'd been peering nervously over walls and hedges and fences, expecting to see a car on its side somewhere, or bits of wreckage.
Well thank God he'd made it. Thank God for that, at least.
For what it was worth.
Bethan thought, on reflection, that perhaps the best thing that could have happened would have been a minor crash, something to get Giles towed back to Pont, deposited safely in the hospital with a broken leg, something minor but incapacitating.
For a few seconds she debated going up to the house to ask if Giles was OK. But really it was none of her business. All right, a bruised and beaten man and an increasingly loopy woman. What could she do about that? She was a primary school teacher, not a psychotherapist or a marriage-guidance counsellor.
Besides it was almost nine o'clock.
Christ. She felt as if she'd put in two full days' work, and it was not yet nine o'clock.
Five minutes or so later, Buddug's hands froze above the piano keyboard as Bethan slid into the school hall.
She stood in the doorway in her white mac with the streaks of mud and the huge grass stains. The children, sitting in five short rows, all turned towards her, and Buddug's head swivelled round slowly, her lips drawn back into a smile of incandescent malevolence.
'
She sat down at her desk in the hall, still wearing her mac, too weary to say anything as Buddug's hands smashed into the opening chords of the hymn.
Buddug sang with shrill, ferocious zest, hammering the keys like a pub pianist. Energy rippled through the room as the children yelled out the words, gleefully discordant. Bethan sat in her soiled raincoat and stared at the wall, utterly defeated.
Giles came out of the bedroom and stood at the top of the stairs, swaying.
He could not believe the agony.
Like a flower it had opened out. Bursting free inside his skull like some huge multi-petalled chrysanthemum. And at the end of every petal, a poisoned barb prodding into each tiny fold of his brain, awakening every nerve to the dazzling white light of purest pain.
He could not even bear to scream.
Mercifully, perhaps, the pain had deadened his emotions. Except for one. Which was rage.
Rage gathered in his throat, choking him. Rage against
And against him.
Her dead grandfather.
He began to walk down the stairs, each soft step detonating a new explosion in his brain.
He walked across the hall, past the pink vinyl headboard, to where the door of the judge's study still hung ajar.
Giles went in.
Part Six
BLACK TEA
Chapter XXXVIII
NO RACISM HERE — WE'RE BRITISH by Gary Willis, political staff.
Candidates in the Glanmeurig by-election have denied it's going to turn into a bitter Welsh-versus-English clash.
Launching his campaign yesterday, Conservative Simon Gallier said. I might have been born in England, but I've spent all my working life in Wales. I believe I stand for the quality of independence which has won worldwide respect for the Welsh nation.'
And his Labour opponent. Wayne Davies said. 'The main issue here is the threat to the rural economy and the urgent need for new jobs.'
It was a quiet start to a campaign expected to produce electoral fireworks. Everyone here is now waiting for the Welsh Nationalist candidate to show his hand…
'You really write that. Gary?' asked Ray Wheeler, of the
'Do me a favour,' Gary Willis said. Twenty-six years old the only reporter in the pack with a degree in economics and political science. 'Do I strike you as being that inane?'
'You'll get used to it, son,' Charlie Firth said, lighting a thin cigar.
'But what's the point in sending us out here if they've made up their minds what the issues are? Or in this ease, what the issues are not.'
'Don't be so naive, mate.' Ray Wheeler said. 'You really think your rag's going to give any credence to people who figure Great Britain needs fragmenting? Take my advice, send 'em the stuff and try to avoid reading what the buggers do with it.'
'And console yourself with one thought,' Charlie Firth produced an acrid cough. 'However hard it is for you to take, it would have been a bloody sight harder for poor old Giles.'
'That,' said Ray. 'is very true. Does this dump do sandwiches?'
'If it's
English was the dominant language tonight in the public bar of the Drovers' Arms, where all five rooms had been taken by representatives of the British national Press. Accommodation, reporters were learning, was not
