The room fell into a hush.
What the hell was this? Mr.
Clean? Mr. Bloody Spotless?
Berry caught Guto's eye and raised an
eyebrow.
Guto appeared unconcerned.
"Well, you know," he
said to the silent, expectant Press,
"I feel a bit offended. I cannot
understand why you boys are concentrating on this one little incident. Here I
am, the party hard-man, scarcely a night goes by without I don't beat up an
Englishman . . ."
The head of the General
Secretary of Plaid Cymru swivelled through ninety degrees.
Berry couldn't see his eyes behind the
timed glasses but he was pretty sure that here was one worried man.
". . . and you pick on the one occasion when I am standing by that
very bar across the hall, minding my pint of Carlsberg. and suddenly I am at
the centre of a most regrettable kerfuffle for the sole reason that I happen to
be in the path of a gentleman who falls off his stool."
There was a hoot of derision
from the floor.
He's on a tightrope here, Berry
thought. These guys catch him out in a lie, he's finished. He was surprised to
find himself caring, just slightly, that Guto's campaign should not come to an
ignominiously premature conclusion. Even if the guy was staging the
bed-and-breakfast scam of the century.
"Then why did the police
find it necessary to question you?" demanded Gary Willis. Berry could see
one of the TV cameramen going in tight on Guto's face. He could see Shirley
Gillies urgently adjusting the level on her tape-recorder.
"I think perhaps."
said Guto, glancing across the room, maybe not so sure of himself now,
"that you should direct that question at my good friend. Chief Inspector
Gwyn Arthur Jones. Not for me to answer on his behalf, is it?"
Playing for time, Berry
thought. But these guys have all the time in the world.
"Come now," said a rat-faced
reporter Berry didn't recognise. "Let's not evade the issue. The inference
is that you feel so strongly about English people buying up all the best property
in these parts that you're liable to lose your temper when faced with a blatant
example of . . ."
"I think . . ."
Guto's voice was raised.
"I think perhaps you should
give the question rather more serious consideration before you answer, Mr.
Evans," said Bill Sykes with magisterial menace.
"Come on, Guto,"
Charles Firth said. "Let's have the truth."
He's had it, Berry thought
sadly. They're gonna rip him apart.
Guto raised a hand to quell the
murmurs. "I think we can resolve this very minor issue . . ."
"Not minor for you," somebody
said.
". . . if I introduce you
to a friend of mine."
At the back of the room, a metal-framed
chair fell with a bang as a man got to his feet.
"Terribly sorry,'' they heard, a kind of Chelsea purr. "I
do seem to have a knack of knocking furniture over in this place."
Everybody turned, including the
TV cameramen. Everybody except for Berry, who was standing at the back of the room
next to the guy who'd deliberately knocked his chair
over.
And was therefore the only one
to see Guto expelling a mouthful of air in manifest relief before his beard
split in delight.
You bastard, Berry said under
his breath. You smart son of a bitch.
"I was bloody worried for a minute or two, though," Guto
confessed to him outside. "Couldn't see a thing for those flaming lights.
I thought, Christ, what if he's not there? What if he was pissing up my leg all
the time?" The reporters had shuffled off to the Plas Meurig for the next
two party Press conferences. They were almost in carnival mood. Berry had watched
amazed as Bill Sykes had shaken Guto by the hand and Ray Wheeler had patted him
on the shoulder. Suddenly they love the guy. Berry thought.
He turned it all around.
The merchant banker from London—the
guy who'd bought the farm and a bruised nose—had raised a hand to Guto,
politely rebuffed the exhortations from the Press to elaborate further on the story
and slid into the Mercedes waiting on a double yellow line outside the
Drovers'.
"I confess," said
Guto. "that I am developing a certain respect for the English. He came up
to me, you know, after the
Western Mail
ran that piece. No hard feelings, old chap, all this, buys me a drink. Well,
both a bit pissed, we were, see, when it happened, and he knew the damage it
could do. So he says, look, boy, I'll come along and make a public statement if
you like."
"What can I say, Evans?
You blew them away."
Guto grinned evilly, "I
did, though, didn't I?" He glanced around to make sure the reporters were
out of sight, then he leapt up and punched the air. "Oh boy, thank you
English! Thank you, God!"
"You asshole " Berry
said. "You . . ."
He fell silent. Around the
corner came a hearse driven by a man with a bald head who nodded at Guto as he
passed.
Apart from the bald man, the hearse
was empty.
"Gone to fetch your
mate," Guto said.
Berry nodded. "How far is
the crematorium from here?"
Guto took off his Plaid Cymru
rosette and put in it a pocket of his jacket. He was wearing the black tie he'd
borrowed from Dai Death. "Not far," he said. "We can
walk."
Chapter XLII
The funeral service for Giles
Robert Freeman was pathetically brief. A throwaway affair, Berry Morelli
thought, compared with Old Winstone's London send-off.
The entire business took place
in the new Pontmeurig crematorium, the first the town had ever had, Guto
explained. Built because, when attempting to extend the local cemetery, the
council had hit a massive shelf of hard rock which meant that any future graves
would have had to be dug with dynamite.
At the end of a wooded lane
behind the hospital, the new crematorium looked, from the outside, like a small
factory with two discreet steel chimneys hardly hidden by recently planted
trees, especially in December.
The chapel inside was maybe a
third full, mainly due to the Press contingent. Reporters had filed in, fresh
from the Conservative, Simon Gallier's conference, as the organ drone began.
Only a handful of people had been in place when Guto and Berry had arrived.
Berry didn't recognise any of them at first, although a young woman in a black
suit and gold earrings looked vaguely familiar.
The minister had begun the
service before Berry realised that another woman, sitting in the front row two
or three yards from the coffin must be Claire Freeman. He'd met Claire maybe a
couple of times, never spoken much with her. She was the quiet type.
Now he was staggered by how
different she looked. And it wasn't only her hair, which he remembered as
blonde and was now almost black.
He wondered if poor old Giles
would recognise her. And then wondered why that thought had come to him.
The coffin of pale pine sat on
a plinth covered in black velvet. Would it slide away when the moment came, or
just slowly sink? Berry looked at the coffin and tried to banish the image of
Giles with his empurpled eye and his hands clawing at the black books.
Not meant to be there, the English.
Giles would be here forever now,
filtered into the Welsh air through the steel chimneys.
But why not a mellow grey stone in a corner of the churchyard at Y Groes,
where wild flowers grew and the air was soft with summer even when it wasn't
summer?
The minister was a young guy
with what Berry now recognised as a local accent. Each word was enunciated in that
rounded, robust Welsh way which still didn't cover up the obvious fact that the
minister didn't know a damn thing about Giles. When you listened to the words,
rather than the music of the words, you realised it was just a bunch of platitudinous
crap which could have applied, Berry thought, to some John Doe they'd pulled
out of the river.
There was just one hymn. An
English hymn that Berry had never heard before. As the congregation sang, with
little gusto, he read the words on the flimsy service sheet they'd been handed.
Love is kind and suffers long
Love is meek and knows
no wrong.
What did this have to say about Giles Freeman? Anything at all?
Berry began to feel angry. Was
this how it ended? They just signed the guy out, quick as they could, and drew
a neat line underneath. Would they give him a plaque somewhere: Giles Freeman,
immigrant, didn't last long?
He looked over at Claire. She
wore a plain, black dress and no jewellery apart from a heavy Celtic cross
around her neck. Over the back of her chair was slung a faded, green waxed
jacket, the kind Giles used to wear. It didn't seem like a tribute.
Claire's blonde hair, the
couple times he'd met her, had always been neatly trimmed, cut close to the
skull. Her new dark hair was longer and wilder. And Berry thought she seemed
taller somehow, maybe the way she carried herself. Although she wore no make-up
that he could detect, she had with her a glamour he didn't recall.
Each time he looked at Claire
he noticed that the other woman, in the black suit and the earrings, seemed to
be looking at her too. He remembered where he'd seen this woman now. In the
street last night. The one he'd wondered if she was a whore. He felt bad about
that now; she didn't strike him that way at all today.
"Who's that?" he whispered
to Guto. "Woman in the earrings."
Guto looked at him
suspiciously. "It's Bethan." he whispered back. "Bethan
McQueen."
"Ah," said Berry. The
schoolteacher referred to earlier by Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones.
As the congregation sank down
after the hymn, he heard the sound of stiletto heels on the chequered tiles at
the entrance, and then a slim woman of sixty or so came in, followed by a
harassed-looking man tucking the end of his tie inside his jacket. There was a
black smudge on his forehead. They sat across the aisle from Berry. The woman did
not look at the man. But, after a short while, she too began to look hard at Claire
Freeman, as if there was something there she couldn't quite believe.
Berry tried to work out if
anyone was with Claire and came to the conclusion that the people nearest her
just happened to be occupying those seats.
She was alone, and she didn't
look as though she cared.
He searched her face for
tearstains, any signs of grief. The face was without expression but calm and
womanly and strong.
And sexy? That dark glamour?
Jesus Christ, Morelli. He felt
uncomfortable, ashamed. He wanted to be out of here, and then he felt ashamed
about that too. Ashamed at the relief he fell at the end, five minutes later,
as the coffin drifted away below his eyeline, the machinery working smooth,
silent magic under the velvet-covered plinth.
Giles had gone.
Without a sound. Without a word
in his memory.
He looked at Guto and saw that
Guto was looking at the woman in the gold earrings. Bethan McQueen, who was looking
at where the coffin had been and was pale.
Outside, amid the leafless
trees, she joined them.
"That's it then,"
Guto said. "That's the lot. Don't mess about, do they, the English?"
"They mess about as much
as anybody." Berry said. "That's what's so . . ."
"I feel very empty"
Bethan McQueen was saying. "It wasn't a funeral, it was . . ."
"Waste disposal."
Berry said. He kicked morosely at the ornamental light-green, crystalline gravel
around the crematorium building.