"He died in hospital?"
"No, he died at his home. Let me explain from the beginning."
"Yeah." said Berry. "You do that."
Gwyn Arthur Jones talked for twenty minutes, puffing his pipe and staring down at his fingers on the plastic desk. He talked of the doctor's suspicions that Giles had been in a fight and Giles's insistence that he'd fallen in the Castle car-park.
"Which, considering the state of his clothes, was plausible enough. And was not something we could contest as, if there was another protagonist, we have not found him. Or her — who can tell these days? And I would add that the doctor did suspect at the time, from the way Mr. Freeman was behaving, that there might have been brain damage. He wanted to make an appointment at Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth, but your friend flatly refused and discharged himself."
Berry smiled. "Sounds like Giles."
"They parted with some acrimony. Personally I think the doctor ought to have exercised his prerogative to prevent our friend from driving. Still, he appears to have made it home, without mishap, to Y Groes. Where, it seems, his luck ran out."
Claire Freeman, who told the police she knew nothing of Giles's fall, had been out when he arrived home. She was not expecting him back from London until that evening.
Gwyn Arthur said. "Why did he come home early, do you know?"
Berry shrugged. "Any chance he had to get out of London, he took it. He was kind of obsessed with Y Groes — with having this bolthole, you know?"
Gwyn Arthur sighed. "It is a common aberration. Among the English."
"So what happened?"
"There is a school teacher in Y Groes. It seems she had become quite friendly with Mr. and Mrs. Freeman and was giving them lessons in the Welsh language. She was among a group of people who saw him lying in the car park on the Thursday night and went to help him. The following day, Mrs. McQueen — that's the teacher — learned that your friend had discharged himself from the hospital and gone home. So, in her lunch break, she went up to his house to see if he was all right. She knocked and got no reply, so she looked through the downstairs windows and saw a man's body, in a collapsed state, on the floor of one of the rooms. She went to the pub for help and two of the customers went back with her and broke down the rear door."
Berry was picturing the judge's house, the back porch near the window he'd prised open with a screwdriver on a late summer's afternoon.
"Mr. Freeman had probably been dead for over an hour by the time they got to him."
Gwyn Arthur took another envelope from a drawer. "Do you want to look at these?"
"What are they?"
From the brown envelope Gwyn Arthur pulled a dark grey folder, about six inches by eight, on which was printed, in black, the words dyfed-powys police.
"As I say, it did look somewhat suspicious at first. Mrs. McQueen telephoned the police. I drove across, with the scenes — of-crime officer. These photographs were taken before the body was moved."
Berry felt a little sick, tasted ginger marmalade. He opened the dark grey folder.
"They would have been produced at the inquest, had there been one," said Gwyn Arthur.
The pictures were in colour. They'd been taken with a flash.
Berry flinched.
Giles's lips were drawn back into a twisted parody of a grin. Both eyes were open, the left one purple and black. The bruising spread down one side of Giles's face and mingled with the freckles.
Another picture was taken from further back and higher up, like the photographer had been standing on a chair.
"Shit." Berry breathed.
It showed Giles sprawled crookedly, arms extended. All around him were scattered black books. One had its binding partially torn away, and curling pages lay around.
Tissue-thin. Berry could hear the pages whispering.
Next to Giles's head was a red dragon's head, spitting faded, threadbare fire into the dead man's right ear.
"The study." Berry said, going cold. "He died in the study."
"You have been in this house?"
"Once," Berry said. "Just once. What happened to the books?"
"He appears to have had some kind of, er, final fit, should I say? Obviously grabbed at the shelves to try and prevent himself falling. Dragged out the books. Quite a frenzy."
"So you ordered an autopsy."
"Naturally. The state of the room suggested a possible struggle. Oh, yes, we had the portable incident room on standby, I can tell you. But by teatime it was clear we had overreacted. These things happen."
"Brain tumour."
"It had been forming for — well, who knows how long, weeks, months, years? His wife tells us he had been suffering from very severe headaches. Mrs. McQueen confirms this. Perhaps, you yourself…"
"No. He never mentioned headaches."
"You see, with a condition like this, his apparent blackout on the car-park… Hit his head on a car bumper, he said. All consistent. It is a great tragedy, but that's all it is. Natural causes. No inquest. Unless there's something you feel you can add?"
"No," Berry said. "Nothing I have to add. Thanks, Inspector."
Gwyn Arthur Jones put the slim photo-album back in its envelope. "I'm very sorry."
"One thing " Berry said. "His wife, Claire."
"Quiet little girl." said Gwyn Arthur.
"Where was she when they found Giles?"
"My, you are a suspicious chap." said Gwyn Arthur with a half-smile. "Mrs. Freeman was quite a short distance away, at a friend's house, as it turns out. Mrs. Dafis. is it? I don't know without looking up the statement. Obviously she feels very bad about not being there when her husband arrived home and him dying like that, on his own. I hear the funeral is today."
"You going?"
"Well, see, I don't mean any disrespect, but not appropriate, is it, now?"
"Guess not."
"See, even if he'd gone to Bronglais, as the doctor wanted, the chances are it would have been too late, the size of that bloody thing. Any time he could have gone."
"Malignant? I was kind of shaky on The big words."
Gwyn Arthur's pipe had gone out. He laid it on the grey plastic desktop and looked at it.
"As the devil," he said. "As the bloody devil."
Chapter XLI
They came in from the Lampeter end, George twice stopping to consult the map, slowing at every signpost.
Terribly galling, because he was normally such a fast driver, often recklessly so in his wife's opinion.
"Pretty obscure place," George grunted. "Don't want to get it wrong."
"You don't want to get there at all," Elinor said icily.
"Elinor, I still say…"
"And why do you think we weren't told?" Elinor demanded. "Because I didn't tell her about his death. As simple as that."
"I can't believe," George said, slowing the Volvo for another signpost, "that she would be quite so petty."
"You mean, not so petty as me?"
"That is not what I said. Elinor, for Christ's sake will you stop this."
"We can't be far off," Elinor said and affected a shudder "I can feel it somehow."
George sighed and kept quiet. He was a rumpled man with hair of nicotine and white. He'd never really taken to his son-in-law, she thought. George avoided people in high-profile jobs. He wasn't a high-profile person. He'd never minded his daughter being a photographer, though, because the photographer was the one person guaranteed always to be behind the camera
She was like him in a way, Claire, George's daughter.
Wife of Elinor's dead son-in-law.
The shock, for Elinor, had been quite stunning. And to chance upon it, without warning, in Giles's own newspaper, spread on the ceramic worktop after breakfast, four brief paragraphs of obituary, a quote from the editor: immense flair… terrible tragedy… so young… will be hard to replace.