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.
