Candlenight

had a long discussion. I wanted him to stay the night but he refused. You might think, my dear, that we're all bumbling, stoical chaps, but I can tell you, a clergyman in the throes of emotional crisis is a dreadful sight to behold.'

'Was he a poof?' asked Miranda, this being the only emotional problem she could imagine the average clergyman having to come to terms with.

'Oh, nothing like that. Nothing sexual. No, quite simply, the much-lauded Welsh Learner of the Year had got up in the pulpit for the first time, about to deliver his maiden sermon to the assembled villagers of Y Groes — and believe me that parish is one of the few left in Britain that still pulls 'em in on a Sunday. So there he is in the pulpit, fully prepared, rehearsed — and he can't do it. Won't come out.'

'How d'you mean?'

Alex Peters threw up his arms.

'He finds he simply can't preach in Welsh!'

'I don't understand.' said Miranda.

'Neither did he. This man was good. I mean very good — one chap at the college told me he sometimes thought Martin Coulson's Welsh was more correct than his own, and he'd lived all his life in Lampeter. And yet whenever he got up in the pulpit at Y Groes, he was completely tongue-tied. And not only that, he found he was increasingly unable to speak Welsh to the villagers he met socially or in the street. I'll always remember what he said to me that afternoon. He said. 'You know Alex, when I'm in Y Groes — as soon as I get out of the car — I feel like a damned Englishman again.''

Miranda thought to herself that Martin Coulson must merely have come to his senses after wasting all that time learning a language that was about as much use in the civilised world as Egyptian hieroglyphics. The best thing he could have done was get on the first available train to London.

'I didn't know how to advise him,' Alex Peters said. 'I wondered whether Ellis Jenkins was intimidating him in some way. I suggested he take a few days' holiday and think things over, but he insisted on going back. It's always been a source of great regret to me that I didn't go with him for a day or two — how much help I'd have been, with no Welsh to speak of, is debatable. But, as one gets older, these things prey on one's mind.'

'I gather he went back then.'

'Afraid so. I phoned him once or twice to find out how he was getting on. 'Fine.' he said. 'What about the Welsh?' I said. 'Done any preaching?' 'Not yet,' he said, 'but I'm working up to it.'

'So what happens next is Jenkins abruptly decides to take a holiday. Never been known before. So, off he goes to North Wales on the Saturday, and the following day Martin ascends the steps of the pulpit, looks out over the congregation, opens his mouth to deliver the opening words he's presumably spent all night preparing — and has the most appalling nosebleed. I leave you to imagine the scene. Blood all over the pulpit. Martin backing off down the steps and rushing out. Service abandoned in disarray. All this came out at the inquest''

'How horrid,' Miranda said.

'Next day they find the boy unconscious on the floor of the church. Cracked open his head on the pointed corner of some tomb. Rushed to hospital. Five days in a coma, then gone.'

'Why did they decide it was an accident?'

'Well, he'd had quite a lot to drink, apparently, and he wasn't used to it. There was evidence that he was very depressed. That from me, of course — Jenkins was away at the time of the Martin's death, and he was being rather vague and bland about the whole business. And there was no suicide note, and so the feeling was that he must simply have had too much to drink, wandered into the church in the dark, tripped and bashed his head on the tomb. The idea of somebody deliberately smashing his head into the stone didn't appeal.'

'But you thought—' Miranda was finding this rather distressing now. No fun any more.

'I suppose I had the idea of him kneeling there and being suddenly overcome with despair and throwing back his head and — crunch. Sorry, my dear, but you did ask. Now can I get you a drink?'

'Yes please.' she said. 'Just a tiny one. Lots of soda.'

Forty minutes later she was roaring westwards — though very much in two minds now about the whole thing.

Thinking seriously about all this, what you had was not an intriguing mystery but something really rather squalid: the story of a grim, unpleasant place where people couldn't settle down and had become unhinged and killed themselves or each other out of sheer depression.

When she'd pressed him, Canon Peters had shrugged and said he just felt there were certain places you ought to avoid if you possibly could.

'Yes, but why…?'

'Oh, I don't know, my dear. Why do some places, some people seem to attract tragedy? Is it isolation? In- breeding? Perhaps it's something endemic to the whole area. Why was Winstone Thorpe so bothered about Giles Freeman moving up there? I don't think we'll ever reach any kind of conclusion. But I had it on my conscience that I might have fobbed off young Morelli. And well, you know, after failing to save Martin…'

Miranda had been vaguely intrigued by this vicar person, this Jenkins.

'Ah.' The Canon had looked sort of wry. 'I did meet him once, at a conference in Lampeter. Spindly chap, staring eyes. And the stories, of course.'

'What stories?'

'His obsession with the old Celtic church — back at the dawn of Christianity in Britain. And what came before it.'

'And what did come before it?'

'Oh, Druids and things. All tied in with his preoccupation with being Welsh and the Eisteddfod and the Bardic tradition.'

'Tedious,' Miranda said.

'Very, my dear.'

Miranda had graciously declined another drink and whatever else Canon Alex Peters might have had in mind. She hadn't even stopped for lunch at any of the rather-inviting

Oxfordshire pubs. The tang of adventure in the air seemed to have dissipated, leaving her quite moody and almost oblivious of the fact that she was driving an actual Porsche.

Morelli was arguably the most uptight, paranoid, insecure person she'd ever been close to. Was he really the right person to be paddling about in this grotty little pool of death and misery?

Miranda prodded the Porsche, and it took the hint and whizzed her off towards the Welsh border.

Chapter LVI

Berry found it disturbing the way his whole life had been dramatically condensed in just two days, his horizon reduced to a shadow.

Was this how it happened? Was this what it did to you? Drew you in, and before you knew it there was no place else to go, and the sky was slowly falling?

He was walking from the little square behind the castle, through the back streets to Guto's place to pick up his stuff, pay his bill, thank Mrs. Evans.

And then what?

Not yet noon, but it was like the day had given up on Pontmeurig; the atmosphere had the fuzzy texture of dusk.

He thought about Giles, who, once he'd seen Y Groes, was sunk. Nothing else mattered but to escape to the place — a place where the future, for him, was an illusion.

He thought about the Hardy couple, how desperate she'd been to hightail it out of here and how everything had pushed them back in until, different people by now — they had to be different people — they'd destroyed each other.

Different people.

He'd come here two days ago just to clear his own mind, settle his obligations. Now — he could hardly believe how quickly and simply this had happened—he had no reason to go back. The link