Candlenight

out her hair as if his hands weren't there.

'Bethan, I'm taking a deep breath, OK? What makes you think that if Claire is pregnant we may not be talking about Giles's baby?'

She did not reply, went on combing her hair, although the tangles were long gone.

Through the mirror, he saw what looked like old tears burning to come out. She blinked them away.

He fell suddenly angry but said nothing — where was the use in pressurising her?

But then, abruptly, she put down the comb, wiped her hands on a pastel tissue and told his reflection, without preamble, why she'd gone to Swansea after Robin's death.

When she'd finished talking, he went over to the window and looked down to where sporadic night traffic was circumventing the construction site for some new road.

He really wanted to believe her.

But how much of this could you take? Things getting weirder by the minute.

'Stupid of me,' she said. 'I did not want to tell you, but you pushed.'

He turned back and started towards her.

'No,' she said.

He sat down on the bed. put his hands over his face and rubbed his eyes in slow circular movements.

He said, 'And it really couldn't have been his, Robin's?'

'No.'

'Bethan. I don't only want to believe you. I need to believe you.'

'That is not good enough.' she said. sice… sice… sice… the air said. Tissue-thin- pages whispering.

Bethan tossed her head back, stared at the ceiling. The chasm between them was about a hundred miles wide.

You and me, the Gypsy said, we in same shit. One day you find out.

What Bethan had told him was that approximately three weeks after Robin's death, she had discovered she was expecting a baby. Because she knew in her own mind that this could not be Robin's child, she had moved to Swansea where no one knew her. And where the pregnancy had been terminated.

'I did not kill my baby.' she emphasised quite calmly. 'I killed its baby.'

'It?'

'The village. Y Groes.'

Oh, Christ.

He had no idea how to follow this up. Either she'd tell him or she wouldn't. His lips kept forming questions, but the questions never made it. Only one.

'How could you go back?' he asked. He'd asked her that before.

'How could I not go back?' she replied.

'And do you work with Morelli?' the Bearded Welsh Extremist asked. Every few seconds somebody on the way out would slap him on the back and say something jolly in Welsh.

'You have got to be joking.' said Miranda.

'Well what do you want him for?'

'I don't actually want him.' Miranda said frankly — no point in trying to bullshit a politician; they were all far too good at it not to spot it coming from someone else. 'I just want to pass on some information which might help him.'

'I see,' said the BWE, whose name she couldn't remember, except that it sounded vaguely insulting. 'Well, I don't know where Morelli has gone but I do know who he is with.' His eyes were smouldering, she thought, in rather a dark and brooding way, like some sort of Celtic Heathcliff. 'Tell me,' he said, 'have you anywhere to stay?'

'Well, I have.' Miranda told him. 'But it isn't much of a place.'

'Oh, well, good accommodation is hard to find with this election on.'

'You're telling me. I wound up at some faded Victorian dive called the Plas something or other.'

His eyes stopped in mid-smoulder and widened. 'The Plas Meurig? You managed to get a room at the Plas Meurig?'

'I realise there's got to be, a better hotel somewhere, but I was in rather a hurry.'

He appeared to be regarding her with a certain respect, on top of the usual naked lust. But before she could capitalise on this, an efficient-looking man with tinted glasses and a clipboard slid between them. 'Guto,' he said. 'Problems, I'm afraid. Tomorrow night's meeting with the farmers' unions. Bit of a mix-up over the hall at Cefn Mynach. liberal Democrats have got it, so I'm afraid… Look, I did try for an alternative venue to Y Groes, but it's central for the farmers.'

'No way, Alun,' snarled Guto. 'I wouldn't go back there if the alternative was a bloody sheep-shed in the Nearly Mountains.'

Miranda thought, Y Groes…

Lowering his voice, this Alun said. 'Come on. Guto. We should see it as a challenge. We can build on tonight's success, regain our position. You're acquiring an enviable reputation for turning the tables.'

'Aye, and the Press will show up in force when they find out,' said Guto. 'No, forget it, postpone it.'

'We can't postpone it. We'll come across as unreliable, look, I shall make sure there's a good crowd this time. We can even take most of one with us. Come on man, you did well tonight.'

'Alun,' the Extremist said. 'I am getting a bad feeling about this.'

Oh my God, Miranda thought. Not another one.

Chapter LX

Berry Morelli slept uneasily. Bethan did not sleep at all.

Outside, even in Herefordshire now, it was snowing lightly but consistently.

They had not touched one another.

The room had caught an amber glow from the road-construction site below. And in this false warmth Bethan was remembering a close summer evening, a bitter argument with Robin, who was always tired and fractious but insisted it was nothing physical. She remembered storming out, nerves like bare wires, and being soothed at once as the air settled around her, as comforting as soft arms.

It did this sometimes, the village. Was absorbed through the skin like some exotic balm. The soporific scents of wild flowers on a breeze like a kiss. Your churning emotions massaged as you walked down the deserted street, past the Tafarn, the church tower soaring from its grassy mound, venerably beneficent.

Robin raging alone inside their terraced cottage at the top of the street, while Bethan was wafted away on the silky, cushioned wings of the evening.

She remembered the air lifting her gently over the stile to the meadow that sloped to the river, trees making a last shadow-lattice on the deepening green.

Remembered yielding her body gratefully to the soft grass, letting the breezes play in the folds of her summer dress. There seemed to be several breezes, all of them warm, making subtle ripples and swirls and eddies.

And she had fallen asleep and dreamed a child's dream of the Tylwyth Teg, the beautiful fairy folk.

Awoken in the moistness of the night, the dampness of the grass, the cold wetness between her legs, the bittersweet tang of betrayal, a lingering faraway regret.

And no memory at all of what had happened.

Of what.

Or who.