Bill climbed in the other side.
"Ever driven one of these things, old boy?"
"No," Ray said,
through his teeth. "But I reckon this is one of those occasions when I could
master the controls of a bloody Jumbo Jet if need be." He leaned forward
to turn the key in the ignition, feeling distaste as a patch of Charlie's blood
on his shirt was pulled against his chest.
Bill said. "What about
Shirley and young whatsisname?"
"I reckon they've
gone," said Ray, with more confidence than he felt. "The Range Rover's
gone, hasn't it? The Plaid bunch."
"True. Well, off you go
then, Ray. Probably the only way we'll get to alert the constabulary."
"I don't know what the hell
kind of story we're going to do on all this, do you?"
"Least of my worries, old
boy. Least of my worries."
After a hiccupy start, they got
over the bridge and on to the road that look them out of Y Groes. There was
only one and, at first, the going was easy enough. It was not snowing
and the stuff on the road was impacted, no problem for the four-wheel drive.
They came soon to a signpost.
Pontmeurig one way, Aberystwyth the other. "Doesn't say how far
Aberystwyth is, Ray. I think we should stick to what we know."
"Yeah, OK." Ray
steered the Daihatsu, headlights full on, into the hills. Where it soon became
quite clear that Y Groes had got off incredibly lightly as far as the weather
was
concerned.
As the road rose up, they could
see the church tower behind them under a sky so rosy it seemed like some sort
of ominous false dawn. But before midnight?
Above and around them, however,
the night was darker than Welsh slate, and then the snow began to come at them like
a fusillade of golf-balls, through which they first saw the
figure at the side of the road.
"Reckon this poor bugger's
broken down?" Ray slowed the Daihatsu. "Or got his motor jammed in a
drift?"
Bill Sykes was wary.
"Nobody we, er, know, is it? Better be a bit careful here, Ray."
"Bill, it looks like an
old woman."
The figure lifted a slick to
stop them. They made out a long skirt and a ragged shawl tossed in the
snowstorm.
Ray opened his window, got a
faceful of blizzard. "Yeah, OK, luv. Can you make it over here, I don't
want to 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.
gwrach
. . , gwrach . . . gwrach. . . .
"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
Welsh lesson.
Poor Giles.
Bethan shivered, not only at
the memory of a dead, snarling Giles spreadeagled on the study floor but
because the temperature in here was many degrees below the death-bearing
mildness of the night outside.
This
, she realised, was the reality. The heat outside, which did not melt
snow, was something else.
Tightening the belt of her raincoat,
she went through the open door to the inner hall, ducking her head although she
was small enough to go under the beams. To her right were the stairs. To her left,
a flickering under the door, was the-
Come
in, Bethan.
She was sure not a word had
been spoken aloud.
Yet she went in.
We need to move fast," Berry said. "They're gonna know we're
here."
"Moving as fast as I can,
man. You have the chisel?"
Berry patted a pocket of Robin's
flying jacket. "Fix the light first."
Dai was wedging the torch
roughly into the bottom of a centuries-old rood screen so that the beam was
directed onto the tomb.
Distantly, they could hear
Idwal Pugh pacing around outside. He would not come in.
Dai looked curiously at Berry,
"How do you know that?"
"Know what?"
"That they will know we
are here."
Berry shrugged. "Shit, I
dunno."
The gipsy, he was thinking. She
would know. Where are you tonight, lady? He grinned. He wasn't scared any more.
He thought
, Jesus Christ, I'm not scared any more
.
Dim
Sais. Dydwy ddim yn Sais.