"What?"
"He fired himself," Addison Walls had said.
"Is he still in Wales?"
"Your guess is good as… No, hell, he's there all right, the weirdo bastard."
"But what's he doing there?
"Listen, lady, if I knew that…"
So, in the end, what had really done it for Miranda was the thought that she might be missing something.
That what Morelli had been rambling on about was not, in fact, the purest load of old whatsit, but something rather extraordinary—and she wasn't part of it.
This, and having no actual work in prospect for at least a month.
And owning a Porsche for the first time in her life and having nothing exciting to do with it.
Miranda's plan was to milk the Canon and drive across to Wales with whatever goodies he had to offer — and a lot of tyre-squealing on the bends.
"Martin," she said. "You mentioned somebody called Martin. Who died."
"Poor Martin, yes. Super chap in his way."
"So what happened to him?"
"Sure you won't have a drink?"
"After you tell me what happened to this Martin."
"You're a hard woman," Alex said, and he recalled how he'd met Martin Coulson some time after his retirement, while doing a spot of part-time lecturing at a Welsh theological college.
Coulson had been a student there, an Englishman, though you wouldn't have thought it, Alex said, to hear the boy speak Welsh.
"I'm no expert, mind. I was brought up in the Rhondda and left there at seventeen. My own Welsh is rudimentary to say the least. But my colleagues were enormously impressed by this young man's dedication. Actually, what it was was an obsession which lasted throughout his time at college. And his achievement was publicly recognised when he was declared Welsh Learner of the Year at the National Eisteddfod."
"What an accolade," Miranda said dryly.
"And after he was ordained he was keen to work in a Welsh-speaking parish. So the bishop decided it was time Y Groes had a curate. I think, actually, he was getting rather worried about Ellis Jenkins, the vicar there. Jenkins had been very well known as a poet, writing in English and then increasingly in Welsh and getting his work published under the name Elias ap Siencyn — ap Siencyn being the Welsh version of Jenkins. Anyway, the reason they were worried about him was that his work was becoming… shall I say, a little esoteric. And yet somehow strident. Rather extreme in an anti-English way."
"Loony Welsh Nationalist vicar?"
"Lots of them about, my dear. Never read R.S. Thomas?"
"I've never even read Dylan Thomas," said Miranda shamelessly.
Alex Peters made no comment on this. Miranda had taken note that the author's name which seemed to occur more often than any other on his own bookshelves was Ed McBain.
"Of course. Ellis Jenkins didn't want a curate, but he had no choice in the matter. So Martin, all enthusiasm, fluent in Welsh goes off to Y Groes, and within three months…he's dead."
Miranda waited while Canon Alex Peters filtered whisky through his beard.
"The inquest returned a verdict of misadventure, although I was not convinced."
"You thought he'd been murdered?"
"Oh, good Lord no. I thought he'd committed suicide."
"Oh," said Miranda, disappointed.
"He came to see me. Must have been about three weeks after going to Y Groes to take up his curacy. In a terrible state. Thin, hollow-eyed. Obviously hadn't been eating properly, or sleeping much, I would have said. We had a long discussion. I wanted him to stay the night but he refused. You might think, my dear, that we're all bumbling, stoical chaps, but I can tell you, a clergyman in the throes of emotional crisis is a dreadful sight to behold."
"Was he a poof?" asked Miranda, this being the only emotional problem she could imagine the average clergyman having to come to terms with.
"Oh, nothing like that. Nothing sexual. No, quite simply, the much-lauded Welsh Learner of the Year had got up in the pulpit for the first time, about to deliver his maiden sermon to the assembled villagers of Y Groes — and believe me that parish is one of the few left in Britain that still pulls 'em in on a Sunday. So there he is in the pulpit, fully prepared, rehearsed — and he can't do it. Won't come out."
"How d'you mean?"
Alex Peters threw up his arms.
"He finds he simply can't preach in Welsh!"
"I don't understand." said Miranda.
"Neither did he. This man was good. I mean very good — one chap at the college told me he sometimes thought Martin Coulson's Welsh was more correct than his own, and he'd lived all his life in Lampeter. And yet whenever he got up in the pulpit at Y Groes, he was completely tongue-tied. And not only that, he found he was increasingly unable to speak Welsh to the villagers he met socially or in the street. I'll always remember what he said to me that afternoon. He said. 'You know Alex, when I'm in Y Groes — as soon as I get out of the car — I feel like a damned Englishman again.'"
Miranda thought to herself that Martin Coulson must merely have come to his senses after wasting all that time learning a language that was about as much use in the civilised world as Egyptian hieroglyphics. The best thing he could have done was get on the first available train to London.
"I didn't know how to advise him," Alex Peters said. "I wondered whether Ellis Jenkins was intimidating him in some way. I suggested he take a few days' holiday and think things over, but he insisted on going back. It's always been a source of great regret to me that I didn't go with him for a day or two — how much help I'd have been, with no Welsh to speak of, is debatable. But, as one gets older, these things prey on one's mind."
"I gather he went back then."
"Afraid so. I phoned him once or twice to find out how he was getting on. 'Fine.' he said. 'What about the Welsh?' I said. 'Done any preaching?' 'Not yet,' he said, 'but I'm working up to it.'
"So what happens next is Jenkins abruptly decides to take a holiday. Never been known before. So, off he goes to North Wales on the Saturday, and the following day Martin ascends the steps of the pulpit, looks out over the congregation, opens his mouth to deliver the opening words he's presumably spent all night preparing — and has the most appalling nosebleed. I leave you to imagine the scene. Blood all over the pulpit. Martin backing off down the steps and rushing out. Service abandoned in disarray. All this came out at the inquest''
"How horrid," Miranda said.
"Next day they find the boy unconscious on the floor of the church. Cracked open his head on the pointed corner of some tomb. Rushed to hospital. Five days in a coma, then gone."
"Why did they decide it was an accident?"
"Well, he'd had quite a lot to drink, apparently, and he wasn't used to it. There was evidence that he was very depressed. That from me, of course — Jenkins was away at the time of the Martin's death, and he was being rather vague and bland about the whole business. And there was no suicide note, and so the feeling was that he must simply have had too much to drink, wandered into the church in the dark, tripped and bashed his head on the tomb. The idea of somebody deliberately smashing his head into the stone didn't appeal."
"But you thought—" Miranda was finding this rather distressing now. No fun any more.
"I suppose I had the idea of him kneeling there and being suddenly overcome with despair and throwing back his head and — crunch. Sorry, my dear, but you did ask. Now can I get you a drink?"
"Yes please." she said. "Just a tiny one. Lots of soda."
Forty minutes later she was roaring westwards — though very much in two minds now about the whole thing.
Thinking seriously about all this, what you had was not an intriguing mystery but something really rather squalid: the story of a grim, unpleasant place where people couldn't settle down and had become unhinged and killed themselves or each other out of sheer depression.