get stuck in the ditch.'
Advancing on the vehicle, the bundle of old clothes grew larger absorbing the snow on either side, issuing bits of shawl and ragged, stormblown hair.
'Bloody walking jumble sale,' Ray said out of the side of his mouth.
'Don't you think it's a bit odd,' Bill said. 'This old girl out on a night like this? And don't you think—?
'Yeh, I—'
The snow blasting in on Ray had suddenly become black and polluted with the smell of smoke and motor oil and also the four-day-old corpses in a makeshift enamel house he'd once been compelled to investigate in the Middle East.
He started to close his window, but the black snow was already filling the Daihatsu, and Ray went rigid with shock as he experienced a sensation of teeth on his chest and a slimy, probing tongue and a nuzzling and a guzzling at his bloodied shirtfront.
It was over in seconds and he was left with a heap of foul-smelling snow in his lap. When the appalling face came up in the windscreen, neither he nor Bill was able to speak;
Ray's foot sprang off the clutch, and the Daihatsu spurted suicidally away into the white night.
Hearing a rustling sound and a crackling, Ray shot one final gut-shrivelling glance to the side and saw the creature hovering over the snow, kept aloft by her flapping shawl, or perhaps, he thought, delirious with fear, as the Daihatsu smashed through a barbed-wire fence, perhaps she had little wings.
As she rose and hovered, the illusion of wings was hardened by the crackling noise she made.
'You said yourself this was a God-forsaken place. You said something had to get cleaned out before Christ could get in.'
'It's still the House of God, Morelli.' Idwal said. 'And I'm no grave-robber.'
'Think of it as an exhumation.' Berry said.
'I will think of it not at all.'
'Dai?'
'Come away. Morelli. Leave it, it'll do no good.'
Directly under the tower, the moon arching like a spotlit ballerina from its weather vane, Berry could see their faces very clearly. Idwal's was sombre, unmoving. Dai's disturbed and anxious.
He tried another angle. 'How much you know about this place? Why's it on a mound? Would I be right in thinking that in the old days, way back before there was a village, the oak wood covered all of this ground?'
'I don't know,' Idwal said heavily.
'And I don't care,' Dai said.
'So that maybe even before there was a mound — when's that, medieval, or earlier? — this was a place of worship. Sacred grove, whatever.'
'What happened to you in there?' Idwal asked him, with obvious reluctance.
Worst of it, he couldn't remember. Only that when they'd come up to him in the church, he'd been momentarily surprised to find it was a church and that when he looked up he couldn't see the moon.
'What does any of this matter?' said Dai.
'Of course it matters, you dumb bastards. People are dying.'
'I cannot believe any of this.' Dai walked off a couple of paces.
Sweltering in Robin's flying jacket, his whole body quivering with the need to do something, the sliding urgency of the situation. Berry looked up at the sky and it seemed like a great balloon, full of blood. He felt that soon the point of the church tower would spear the balloon and there'd be a never-ending gory deluge over Y Groes.
Alun had suggested to Guto that when they reached Pontmeurig Collage Hospital, he should be the one to carry Miranda in.
'May still be able to keep you out of this whole business.'
'Oh, aye? And which of us will tell the cops about the bodies in the wood?'
'You are right, of course,' Alun sighed. 'This whole campaign has been jinxed. For us, that is. Why could none of this have happened to Gallier?'
The snow had started where the oak woods ended and the conifers began their stiff, sporadic ascent of the Nearly Mountains. It had been fluffy and mild at first, innocent as dandelion clocks, before the hedges had solidified into frozen walls, like the Cresta run, the snowflakes gaining weight and bumping the screen; if it had not been for the four-wheel-drive they would have got no further.
They were perhaps two miles out of Y Groes when Guto thought he heard Miranda moan. His heart lurched.
'Come on then, love.' He raised her head up in the crook of his arm.
'Want me to stop, is it, Guto?'
'No, no… Keep going, man.'
Despite all the snow, it was far darker up here than in Y Groes. Guto wound down his window to give her some air and was shocked, after the clammy heat of the village, at the chill which rushed in with a stinging blast of snow.
'Come on, darlin', please…'He couldn't see her eyes. But his fingertips told him they were still shut. Shielding her from the blast with his right shoulder, he wound the window back up with his left hand, thinking. Oh, Jesus, what does a death-rattle sound like?
The Range Rover suddenly crunched to a stop; a creak of brakes and a hopeless sigh from Alun. Guto looked up and saw in the headlights a sheer wall of white, over half as high is their vehicle.
'I'm no expert,' Alun said, 'but I estimate it would take ten men until breakfast to dig us through that.'
Guto lowered his bearded face to kiss Miranda's stiffening, stone-cold brow.
Chapter LXXII
Past the iron gate now, to where the judge's house sat grey and gaunt and self-righteous in the sick, florid night.
All its windows darkened, except for one. And Bethan knew which one that was.
The light in the study was too small and weak to be the big brass oil-lamp. She approached it warily. She had to know precisely who was in the house.
She slid from tree to tree across the snowy lawn, eyes always on the window. And then, reaching the side- hedge she edged along it towards the house, camouflaged, she hoped, by her long, white mac.
The study window was set so high in the wall that she was able to slip into a crouch beneath it, moving up slowly to peer through a comer.
All the bookshelves were in deep shadow except for a small circle of heavy volumes above the great oaken desk at the far end of the room opposite the window. On the desk were two wooden candlesticks with inch-thick red candles in them, alight.
A book was splayed open upon the desk. Claire was not looking at it.
Her eyes were closed but, had they been open, their gaze would have been directed on Bethan.
Who gasped and sank down to the lawn.
In her memory, the old Claire's face had seemed small and round, the brisk, blonde hair fluffed around it. Now, under the tangled dark hair, the face had narrowed, the lips tightened, the lines deepened either side of the mouth. Severity.
Bethan wanted to run back to the hedge and away.
But she carried on under the window to the front door. It had been her intention to beat hard on the knocker to indicate she was in no mood for evasion. However, the door was ajar.
It opened without a creak and Bethan found her way into the living room, all in darkness, a gleam where the moon picked out the handle of a copper kettle in the inglenook.
The was no fire in the grate, nothing of the mellow warmth she'd found in here on the night of the first
