'You ever break into a tomb?' Berry asked. 'Any idea how it's done? Jemmy? Jackhammer?'
Bethan began to worry about him. She wished she had not told him about the baby. He was unshaven, the blue-jawed tough-guy now, hair as black as her own falling over his forehead as he spun the wheel to ease his car between a snow-drift and the hedge of a steep incline. But there was a gleam of something unstable in his eyes. Something to prove — to himself, to his father. And to her now. Which she did not want.
'I'm not crazy.' Berry said.
Bethan said nothing.
'Just I hate secrets. Hate cover-ups.'
'So I've gathered.' Bethan said.
'Way I see it, if the big secret of that place is that Owain Glyndwr's body is there, and people somehow are dying so that secret can stay a secret, then it's time the whole thing was blown open. What we have to do is finish Ingley's work for him.'
'Ingley died,' Bethan said. They had come the roundabout way because of the snow and were entering the valley of the lead mine.
'We gotta blow it wide open. Let the historians and archaeologists in there. Be a find of national importance, right? Bring in the tourists. Let in some air.'
This morning the abandoned lead mine was bleakly beautiful, its jagged walls like some medieval fortress — the dereliction, all the scrappy bits, under humps of snow. In a place like this it would survive for ever, Bethan thought. Until its stones and the rocks were fused into one in the way the snow had united them today.
Wales has no future, the poet R. S. Thomas had written. No present. Only a past.
A past guarded with vengeful fury.
Somewhere around her stomach, Bethan felt a sense of insidious foreboding. Berry Morelli, like Ingley, like Giles in his way, had become ensnared.
'Berry,' she said. 'Please. Turn round. Let's go to an expert. Go to the University. Find some help.'
'No way,' Berry' said. 'Academics don't take one look at a little red notebook and say, wow, let's get over there. They take years. Go to committees. Seek funding to establish official research projects. Only time they move fast is when it's clear that, if they don't, all the evidence is gonna disappear. I guess that is the kind of action we have to precipitate.'
'It won't let you, Berry.'
'It? It won't let me? Jesus.' The road widened out and he ground his foot and the accelerator into the floor.
'Listen,' Bethan said. 'How are we going to do this alone? Just two ordinary people. Two ordinary
'All my life,' Berry said, 'it seems like I've been a scared person. Neurotic, wimpish.' Un-American, he thought. 'This is where it ends.'
Or you end, Bethan thought.
Part Nine
CELTIC NIGHT
Chapter LXIII
When they made love that afternoon it was almost like a ceremony. This, in spite of the fact that it took place in the flat above Hampton's Bookshop, in Bethan's single bed, and to the banal cacophony of duelling speaker-vans, Tory and Labour, from the street.
A tender ritual, Berry thought. A parting ritual. But why should either of them be thinking like that?
They held each other and then he kissed her moist and beautiful eyelids as if for the last time.
'How about I go to Y Groes alone?' he said. 'Nobody there knows me. It makes sense.'
She surprised him. 'All right,' she said.
'OK.' He got up, pulled his jeans and fisherman's sweater from a chair.
'We'll go separately,' she said. 'You go in your car. I'll go in mine — if it will start after two days in the car park in this weather.'
'That's not what I meant.'
'It's the best you'll get.'
They dressed, went out to the kitchen. It was three-thirty. Soon the light would fade.
'Tea?' Bethan said.
'Let's go to that teashop by the bridge. I'll buy you a lovespoon.'
She smiled. 'I don't think I can look at another lovespoon after what you said about them. Hold on a minute, I'll be back.'
She went back into the bedroom and he heard her opening the wardrobe. She returned in seconds and said, 'It's snowing again. Try this for size.'
It was a fleece-lined flying jacket of brown leather, as worn by fighter pilots in the Second World War.
'Robin's?'
'It's the only thing of his I kept. He'd always wanted one. I bought it for him the Christmas before he died. It cost me almost a week's wages.'
Berry said. 'I can't.'
'Please…'
It was not a perfect fit, but it was close. Bethan adjusted the shoulders and arranged the huge, fleecy collar. 'It's to say all the things I haven't felt safe in saying. Well, not in English anyway.'
'You said them in Welsh?'
Bethan shrugged. 'Maybe. Come on, let's go.'
There was nobody else in the shop. They ordered a pot of tea, no milk. Sat down, but not in the window. Berry was still wearing Robin's flying jacket, which was kind of bulky and too warm in here, but he didn't feel he should take it off.
They looked at each other in silence for maybe half a minute, and then Berry said, getting down to business. 'You see any point in confronting Claire? I met her a couple times, but I can't say I know her well enough to raise something like this.'
'It might be worth talking to her,' Bethan said. 'There are things she ought to know by now. She's been brainwashed, of course.'
Literally, Berry thought, remembering what she'd told him about Claire's head in the writhing Meurig.
'I would have to go alone,' Bethan told him.
'Why?'
'Because I doubt she'd speak English to you.'
'That far gone?'
'That far gone,' Bethan said. 'However, I should like to try someone else first. I have a feeling.'
'Someone in the village?'
Bethan was nodding as the teashop door was flung open and a young woman stood there and gazed at them. She was frowning at first, but then a slow, delighted smirk spread over her finely sculpted features.
She wore a bright yellow coat and a very short skirt. Her hair was vividly red.
'Oh my God,' she said, looking Berry up and down. 'Bloody Biggles flies again.'
Bethan thought she'd never seen anyone look so astonished — gobsmacked, Guto would have said — as Berry Morelli when the elegant red-haired girl walked over to their table and sat down.
'Ugh.' Inspecting the contents of their cups and wrinkling her nose. 'Not one black tea, but
