"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.