Candlenight

Berry said. 'This, ah, this is Miranda. She's full of surprises. I guess this must be one of them.'

'Isn't he wonderful when he's embarrassed?' Miranda said, holding out a hand tipped with alarming sea- green nails. 'You must be Bethan. I've heard lots about you from Guto. Do stop squirming. Morelli.'

'And I a little about you,' Bethan said guardedly, shaking the hand.

'Now don't you worry your little Welsh head, darling,' Miranda said. 'I haven't come to take him away.' She was the kind of woman, Bethan thought, who, if she did plan to take him away, would be entirely confident that this would pose no long-term problem.

'Pardon me for asking, Miranda,' Berry said. 'But what the fuck are you doing here?'

'Gosh,' Miranda said. 'I think he's regaining his composure. All the same, not the most gracious welcome for someone who's come to assure him he may not be bonkers after all.'

'Coffee, Miranda?'

'No thank you, I can see the tin over the counter,' Miranda wrinkled her nose again. 'I'll come straight to the matter on which I've travelled hundreds of miles in appalling conditions. Have you by any chance heard of one Martin Coulson, former curate of this parish?'

'I didn't know that,' Bethan said. 'About the difficulty he had speaking Welsh.'

'Like you were saying about Giles,' Berry filled their cups from the pot: Miranda winced at the colour of the tea.

'Inside that village the language becomes a total mystery to the English, no matter how well they were picking it up before. Like a barrier goes up.'

'It was very good of you to come and tell us,' Bethan said. Thank you.'

'How many coincidences can you take?' Berry shook his head. 'Clinches it, far as I'm concerned.'

'And what are you going to do about it?' Miranda demanded.

'The bottom line,' Berry said. He lit a cigarette, watched her through the smoke, wondering where she'd go from here.

'I think it's all rather exciting,' Miranda said, and they both looked at her, Berry with a rising dismay. He might have known she wouldn't have come all this way just to tell him about the death of an obscure country parson. She'd realised there was something intriguing going down and she wanted in.

'Listen, I realise it isn't my place to — But keep the hell out of this thing. Please.' Realising even as he spoke that this was just about the last way to persuade Miranda to back off.

'He's right,' Bethan told her seriously. 'It's not exciting. Just very sad and unpleasant.'

'Well, thanks for the warning.' Miranda smiled sweetly at them both, abruptly picked up her bag and sailed towards the door. 'I'll see you around, OK?'

She walked away down the street without looking back. Welsh snowflakes landing tentatively, with a hint of deference, in her angry red hair.

They cleared most of the snow from the Peugeot, chipped ice from the windscreen. 'It's terribly cold for December,' Bethan said, patting gloved hands together to remove the sticky snow. 'We rarely see much of this before New Year.'

It was coming down in wild spasms, the white-crusted castle looking almost picturesque against a sky like dense, billowing smoke.

'You're right, of course,' Berry said. 'One of us gets stuck, we at least have a second chance.'

The engine started at the fourth attempt. Bethan let it run, switched on the lights, pulled her pink woolly hat over her ears. 'OK,' she said. 'You follow me. When we get there, we park behind the school, out of sight.'

The equipment was in the Sprite, behind the seats. Early that afternoon they'd been to see Dai Death who, in turn, had consulted his friend, the local monumental mason, supplier of gravestones over an area stretching from Pont down to Lampeter. Dai had been suspicious, but he'd done it — for Bethan.

'But first,' Berry said. 'We go see this friend of yours.'

'I doubt I have any actual friends there,' Bethan said. 'This is just the one person I can think of who won't bar his door when he sees me coming.'

Chapter LXIV

Up in the Nearly Mountains, headlights on, the snow was all there was. It came at the windscreen at first in harmless feathery clouds, like being in a pillow fight. Could send you to sleep, Berry thought.

The higher they climbed, the denser it became. Cold cobs, now, the size of table-tennis balls. The two small, red taillights of Bethan's Peugeot bobbed in the blizzard.

'Get me through this, baby, I'll buy you an overhaul,' he told the Sprite, pulling it down to second gear on a nasty incline, wheels whirring. Ice under this stuff up here.

At least the snow was a natural hazard. we in same shit, you find out…

Like all his life had been propelling him into this. Leaving the US with his ass in a sling, so to speak. The disillusion of London and an England full of yuppies and video stores and American burger joints. Old Winstone dying on him. Giles.

All this he saw through the snow.

No family. No job. Now everything he had was out here in this cold, isolated graveyard of a region where people saw their own mortality gleaming in the darkness.

Everything he had amounted to a geriatric little car and — maybe — a woman who needed the kind of help he wasn't sure he had the balls to provide.

But if all his life was converging on this woman, it had to be worth walking into the graveyard, just hoping the Goddamn corpse candle wasn't shining for him.

For the first time since putting on Robin's flying jacket he went into a hopeless shivering fit, scared shitless.

Only five-thirty and Y Groes was midnight-still and midnight-dark.

Berry parked next to the Peugeot behind the school and got out, closing his driver's door just as quietly as he could, and looked around, disturbed.

'This is weird,' he said and wondered how many times he'd expressed that opinion in the past week.

But, yeah, it was weird. No snow falling any more, only a light covering on the ground, a passing nod to winter, an acknowledgement that the season was out there but wasn't permitted to enter without an invite.

'The blue hole,' Bethan said, taking off her woolly hat, shaking her hair; it was warm enough to do that. 'It might be quite natural. One of those places where the arrangement of the hills—'

'You believe that?'

'No,' she said. 'Not entirely.'

The sky was clear; you could even see stars, except for where the black tube of the church tower rose in the east. But only a few meagre lights in the houses. Power cut maybe.

He breathed out hard. 'Beth, listen, from now on, we have to start believing all this other stuff is real. The corpse candles, the bird of death, the whole cartload of shit. Because in this place it is real. We left the civilised world behind, we don't play by those rules any more.'

'I think I always did believe they were real,' she said.

'Beth, before we go in there. I just wanna say—'

Bethan put the pink hat back on. 'Save it. Please.'

'But if—'

'I know,' she said.

Aled looked far worse than she remembered. Perhaps it was the light from the oil lamp in the porch which yellowed his skin, made his eyes seem to bulge. His white hair was stiff- no spring to it, and his Lloyd George moustache misshapen and discoloured.

'Bethan.' Disappointment there, but no real surprise; even his voice sagged. 'Why do you have to do this to me?'