Candlenight

looked like the eyes of a hairy sheepdog under pointed ears.

Frightfully Gothic. Even when they retired, she thought, some clergymen just had to find a typical vicarage to hole up in.

She parked the Porsche proudly in the driveway. It was only a secondhand one, with two substantial dents on its left haunch which she'd refused to let them repair. But it looked even better for that. Miranda liked her cars — and her men, come to that — to convey an impression of having been around.

This Canon Peters clearly had been around. He wore a crumpled cream suit, and his clerical collar, if indeed he was wearing one, was hidden behind a beard like those supplied with the more superior Father Christmas outfits.

'My dear,' he said, flinging back the door. He had to be over eighty and yet he was looking at her, Miranda noticed, with the eyes of a man who thought that if he played his cards right he might be in with a chance here.

'Ex-lover, eh?' Canon Peters said. 'What can the boy be thinking of? And a Porsche too! Two visions to break an old man's heart. Come through, my dear.'

Phew—! He hadn't been like this on the phone.

Miranda followed the old clergyman along a dim hall and then into a big warmly toned room, its walls painted the creamy colour of his suit.

'Drove Triumph Spitfires for years,' he was saying. 'Now the sods have taken away my license. Bloody eyesight test.'

'Didn't seem to me that your eyes were terribly deficient,' Miranda said.

'Fiddled the test, if you ask me. Thought I was too old for a sports car. Bloody bureaucrats. Like a drink?'

'Perhaps not,' said Miranda who had once had her own license taken away, as a result of a mere couple of double gins. Well, perhaps three.

'Suppose I'd think twice too, if I had a Porsche. Coppers love a Porsche.'

'They do indeed. Now. Canon Peters—'

'Alex, please. Sit down, my dear.' He brought himself a whisky and sat next to her on the chintzy sofa, an arm flung across its back behind her. 'I didn't really expect you to come.'

Miranda was surprised too. When the Canon had phoned, she'd been lying on Morelli's bed watching morning television — some awful ex-MP who thought he was God's gift — and feeling somewhat at a loose end. She'd traded in her Golf for the Porsche the previous day, the result of a particularly gratifying bank statement, and was trying to think of somewhere moderately exciting to exercise it.

But Wales?

Alex was saying, 'l can see you're hooked on this thing already.' On a coffee table he had a six-speaker ghetto-blaster of the most overt kind.

'Let me play you what I recorded from the radio. I listen to Radio Wales every morning, sentimental old sod.'

He pressed the 'play' key. 'Missed the first bit. I'm afraid. By the time I realised it was significant, damn thing was half over.'

… was found brutally beaten to death in a bedroom at the village inn. Mr. and Mrs. Hardy had been forced to spend the night at the inn after their car broke down. The couple, who were from Gloucestershire, were in the area to attend the funeral of their son-in-law, who died suddenly last week. Mr. Hardy, who was sixty- four, was found dead later this morning in his car in a remote area about three miles from the village. Police said they were not looking for a third person in connection with the incident.

'There,' said Alex, switching off the ghetto-blaster. 'I think we can take it, don't you, that these two people were Giles Freeman's in-laws?'

'It certainly looks that way. Gosh.'

'Did you try to contact your friend Morelli?'

'Oh yes,' Miranda said. 'In fact that's partly why I'm here.'

After the Canon's call she'd rung American Newsnet to inquire if they had a number for Berry Morelli in Wales and been told that Berry Morelli, as of this morning, was no longer working for the agency.

'What?'

'He fired himself,' Addison Walls had said.

'Is he still in Wales?'

'Your guess is good as… No, hell, he's there all right, the weirdo bastard.'

'But what's he doing there?

'Listen, lady, if I knew that…'

So, in the end, what had really done it for Miranda was the thought that she might be missing something.

That what Morelli had been rambling on about was not, in fact, the purest load of old whatsit, but something rather extraordinary—and she wasn't part of it.

This, and having no actual work in prospect for at least a month.

And owning a Porsche for the first time in her life and having nothing exciting to do with it.

Miranda's plan was to milk the Canon and drive across to Wales with whatever goodies he had to offer — and a lot of tyre-squealing on the bends.

'Martin,' she said. 'You mentioned somebody called Martin. Who died.'

'Poor Martin, yes. Super chap in his way.'

'So what happened to him?'

'Sure you won't have a drink?'

'After you tell me what happened to this Martin.'

'You're a hard woman,' Alex said, and he recalled how he'd met Martin Coulson some time after his retirement, while doing a spot of part-time lecturing at a Welsh theological college.

Coulson had been a student there, an Englishman, though you wouldn't have thought it, Alex said, to hear the boy speak Welsh.

'I'm no expert, mind. I was brought up in the Rhondda and left there at seventeen. My own Welsh is rudimentary to say the least. But my colleagues were enormously impressed by this young man's dedication. Actually, what it was was an obsession which lasted throughout his time at college. And his achievement was publicly recognised when he was declared Welsh Learner of the Year at the National Eisteddfod.'

'What an accolade,' Miranda said dryly.

'And after he was ordained he was keen to work in a Welsh-speaking parish. So the bishop decided it was time Y Groes had a curate. I think, actually, he was getting rather worried about Ellis Jenkins, the vicar there. Jenkins had been very well known as a poet, writing in English and then increasingly in Welsh and getting his work published under the name Elias ap Siencyn — ap Siencyn being the Welsh version of Jenkins. Anyway, the reason they were worried about him was that his work was becoming… shall I say, a little esoteric. And yet somehow strident. Rather extreme in an anti-English way.'

'Loony Welsh Nationalist vicar?'

'Lots of them about, my dear. Never read R.S. Thomas?'

'I've never even read Dylan Thomas,' said Miranda shamelessly.

Alex Peters made no comment on this. Miranda had taken note that the author's name which seemed to occur more often than any other on his own bookshelves was Ed McBain.

'Of course. Ellis Jenkins didn't want a curate, but he had no choice in the matter. So Martin, all enthusiasm, fluent in Welsh goes off to Y Groes, and within three months…he's dead.'

Miranda waited while Canon Alex Peters filtered whisky through his beard.

'The inquest returned a verdict of misadventure, although I was not convinced.'

'You thought he'd been murdered?'

'Oh, good Lord no. I thought he'd committed suicide.'

'Oh,' said Miranda, disappointed.

'He came to see me. Must have been about three weeks after going to Y Groes to take up his curacy. In a terrible state. Thin, hollow-eyed. Obviously hadn't been eating properly, or sleeping much, I would have said. We