Candlenight

enter in. It seems to me…'

There was a loud tap on the office door, and it was shouldered open by a large girl whose hair was streaked in gold and purple like the curtains in the chapel of rest. She was carrying a tea tray.

'Thank you, Gladys,' Dai said.

'Will you be going over to Y Groes, Mr. Williams, because you've another appointment at twelve. Do you want me to put them off?'

'I'm not going anywhere, girl. Why would you think that?'

'Well, no, I just thought, with the murder. Put it down here, shall I? If Mr. Pugh will move his legs.'

'Murder?' Berry said.

'Oh hell, Gladys,' Dai said. 'Murder is a different thing altogether. Police do their own fetching and carrying with a murder.'

'Only they've found something else now, Jane was telling me from the cafe. More police cars gone chasing up the Nearly Mountains.'

'Bloody tragic,' Dai said, and it was not clear whether he was talking about the death or the fact that, because it was murder, he had not been called in to remove the body.

'Poor girl,' Idwal said. 'First she loses her husband, and now…' He shook his head.

'No,' Bethan whispered. 'Oh, please, no-'

'Oh, Christ,' Dai said. 'I thought you knew — I thought that was why you were asking all this?'

Chapter LIV

The police car pulled in behind Gwyn Arthur's Fiesta. Detective Sergeant Neil Probert got out and looked down to where his chief was standing, at the bottom of a steep bank, about twenty yards from the road.

Probert, the Divisional natty dresser, was clearly hoping Gwyn Arthur would climb up and join him at the roadside. But when the Chief stood his ground, Probert wove a delicate path down the bank, hitching up his smart trousers at the waist.

'Thinking of joining the Masons, are we, Neil?' inquired Gwyn Arthur. 'Come on, man, the mud's all frozen!'

'Except for that bit,' he added with malicious relish as Probert squelched to a halt in a patch of boggy ground, where all the ice had been melted by the heat from the Volvo's engine.

The big blue car had gone down the bank and into a tangle of thorn bushes. Three police officers were cutting and tearing the bushes away for the benefit of a female Home Office pathologist who was rather attractive — certainly the best thing they could hope to encounter on a December morning in the Nearly Mountains.

'I spoke to the garage, sir,' Probert said, squeezing the brackish water from the bottoms of his trousers. 'He picked up his car at just after nine-thirty. Appeared quiet and preoccupied but not otherwise agitated. Inquired at the garage about a hardware shop and they directed him to Theo Davies, where he bought twenty feet of rubber pipe.'

'Not dissimilar, I take it,' said Gwyn Arthur, 'to the hose we see here affixed to the exhaust pipe.'

'Indeed, sir,' Probert said.

'In that case, Neil, it looks like a wrap.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Would you like to have a look at him, in case anything occurs to you?'

'No thank you, sir.'

'He doesn't look bad. Pink and healthy. Kind it is, to a corpse, carbon monoxide.'

'So I understand, sir.'

Gwyn Arthur nodded. 'All that remains, it seems to me, is for Mollie to furnish forensic with a few traces of blood of the appropriate group.'

'Hang on, Gwyn. I'm not even in the bloody car yet,' the pathologist called across, and Gwyn Arthur smiled at her.

'Just a point, Neil. Did anyone see him arrive at the garage?'

'Yes, sir. He was in a blue Land-Rover driven by a young female. Assumed to be his daughter.'

Gwyn Arthur nodded. Shortly after the discovery of her mother's body, the back of its head a mess, he'd spent ten minutes talking to Mrs. Claire Freeman. Obviously in shock, but remarkably coherent, Mrs. Freeman had told of picking up her father, as pre-arranged, at eight-fifteen and driving him to Pontmeurig. It had been agreed that Mr. Hardy would return with the car to collect his wife. His manner, as described by his daughter, was in no way suspicious. Indeed, he had several times expressed the hope that the car would be ready to collect so that he could take Mrs. Hardy home.

'If you find a pen, Mollie—'

'I know, I know…'

In a plastic sack at Gwyn Arthur's feet was an AA book, found on the passenger seat, partly under the dead man's head. Across the yellow cover of the book had been scrawled,

I'm so sorry. I do not know why it happened. I loved her really.

That poor girl.

In thirty years of police work, Gwyn Arthur had several times encountered people around whom tragedies grew like black flowers. This was definitely the worst case — compounded by her being stranded in a remote village in a strange country.

He thought fleetingly of the death of Giles Freeman, of the American who had come to the station with his undisclosed suspicions. Undoubtedly, there was more to this than any of them realised, but the details were likely to be deeply private, and what good would come of digging it over now? It was a wrap. He had a result. Murder and suicide, a common-or-garden domestic. Leave it be.

Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones: firm believer in compassionate policing.

'Oh, and BBC Wales have been on, sir. I think they might be sending a crew across from Carmarthen.'

'Get back to Mike from the car, tell him to phone and tell them they'll get more excitement out of the by- election.'

Gwyn Arthur jammed his hat over his ears, picked up the plastic bag containing the AA book and followed Probert up the bank.

'Tell him to give them a quote from me,' he said. 'Say we aren't looking for anyone else in connection with the incident at this time.'

Within the hour, reporters and crews from both BBC Wales and its independent counterpart arrived in Y Groes. Neither attempted to interview Claire. They had no luck with any of the villagers either, in that all those approached refused to give an interview through the medium of English. The licensee of Tafarn Y Groes, Aled Gruffydd, sounding very tired and nervous, said a few words to the reporter from Radio Cymru, the BBC's Welsh language radio station.

Translated, it came down to, 'This is a terrible tragedy, and we do not want to make things any worse. Just let it go, will you?'

Max Canavan, of the Sun, was the only reporter who attempted to talk to the woman who had lost her husband and her parents in separate tragedies within a week. The door of the judge's house was opened to him by a huge, bearded man who informed the reporter in a conversational tone that if he did not leave the village immediately he would not leave it with his arms unbroken.

Deprived thus of a story which might have opened with 'Tragic widow Claire Freeman spoke last night of her grief and horror. ' the national newspapers ignored what was, after all, only a domestic incident.

Chapter LV

So overgrown were the walls of the house with some sort of evergreen creeper that its gabled attic windows