"If they're desperate enough. Or they've been offered some terribly lucrative job out there, and there can't be many of those. Why do you ask?"
"OK." Berry said. "Hypothetical, right? If you had friends aiming to move to Wales, what would you say to them?"
Miranda's mouth twitched impatiently. "I'd probably say au revoir rather than goodbye because most of my friends wouldn't even survive in Dorking. Morelli, what is all this about?"
Berry sighed. "Listen, forget the hypothetical shit. What it's about is there's this guy moving to Wales and I find myself in the position of having to try and prevent that. I mean, Christ. I never went there, I don't plan to go there, but I got to talk this guy out of it. Guy who wants to make his home there more than anywhere else in the world, however bizarre that sounds to you. That's it. That's the situation."
Under the duvet Miranda ran a hand across his thigh and back again. "Nothing doing, then?" she said, affecting a squeaky East End accent.
"Gimme a break."
"Morelli, I'm sure there's an awfully interesting story behind all this but I don't somehow think I want to go into it after all. It sounds frightfully complicated, and" — she reached over to her teacup on the bedside cabinet and tipped her cigarette into it half-smoked—"quite honestly, I find the whole subject of Wales the most awful turn-off."
Miranda snuggled down, poking her bottom into Berry's right thigh and within a minute was asleep, leaving him to switch off the light and stare uncertainly into the blotchy dark, trying to figure out how this situation came about.
Chapter VI
That evening, seeing Winstone Thorpe flick open his ancient hooded eyes, Berry had thought of an old tomcat on a back-porch alerted by the flutter of wings.
"Where's that then?" Winstone had asked in that tired, diffident way he had."
"It's a smallish country sort of welded onto the side of England, Winstone," Giles Freeman explained, and he giggled drunkenly. "It's where the M4 peters out. They've got mountains there. Play rugby. Sing a lot."
"Oh…" old Winstone Thorpe chuckled and his chins wobbled. "You mean Wales. Sorry old boy, must've misheard."
Sure you did, you old bastard. Berry thought affectionately. He looked at Winstone across the pub table. Then he looked at Giles, who was clearly too drunk to realise he was being set up. Several of the other journalists, who knew Winstone of old, glanced up from their drinks and grinned.
"Wales, eh?" Winstone said. "Oh dear."
There he goes. Berry thought.
"All right," Giles Freeman said testily. "What's that supposed to mean?" Giles had drunk maybe five pints of beer, and he wasn't used to it. His fair hair was in disarray and his long face was hot and shiny, freckles aglow. He was too drunk to realise how bored they all were with hearing about his incredible piece of luck — well, Claire's actually, her inheritance. But an utterly amazing old place, splendid countryside, absolutely terrific atmosphere. Just being there made you realise how totally cardboard and artificial your urban environment was.
So Giles had fallen heavily for some backwoods shack.
And now old Winstone Thorpe, who had retired that day after more than half a lifetime on the Daily Telegraph, was blinking lazily beneath eyebrows like thatched eaves and saying "Oh dear."
"Well, come on, Winstone," Giles was leaning aggressively across the table now. Berry had never seen him like this before; somebody had hit a nerve. "If you've got something to say, just bloody say it."
"But. dear chap…" Winstone put down his empty whisky glass and looked around vaguely until Ray Wheeler of the Mirror slipped him a replacement. "Ah, a fellow Christian. Thank you. No, you see — am I stating the obvious here? You're an Englishman, old boy." Somewhere a clock chimed. It was eleven o'clock, and there was a momentary silence in the battered Edwardian bar of what old Winstone Thorpe maintained was the last halfway decent pub in what used to be Fleet Street.
Berry found himself nodding. Aside, perhaps, from old Winstone himself, Giles Freeman was just about the most English guy he'd ever met. even here in England.
"Now look, Winstone." Giles took an angry gulp of his beer. "That is just incredibly simplistic. I mean, have you ever even been to Wales? Come on now. tell the truth?"
Wrong question, Giles, thought Berry. You just walked into it. He leaned back and waited for Winstone Thorpe's story, knowing there had to be one.
"Well, since you ask…" The venerable reporter unbuttoned his weighty tweed jacket and lifted his whisky glass onto his knee. "Matter of fact. I was in Wales once."
"No kidding." Berry said and then shut up because there were guys here who still had him down as a no-talent asshole on the run. Things had changed since his last time here, as a student in the seventies. People had gotten tighter, more suspicious — even journalists. They were coming across like Americans imagined the English to be — stiff, superior. And they were suspicious of him because he wasn't like Americans were supposed to be — didn't drink a lot, never ate burgers. They weren't programmed for a vegetarian American hack who'd come up from the Underground press and dumped on his distinguished dad. Berry looked around the three tables pushed together and saw complacent smiles on prematurely-florid faces. These were mainly Parliamentary reporters like Giles. In this job, after a while, after long hours in the Westminster bars, journalists began to look like MPs.
"Early sixties, must've been." Winstone said. His face had long gone beyond merely florid to the colour and texture of an overripe plum. "Sixty-two? Sixty-three? Anyway, we were dragged out to Wales on a Sunday on the son of story that sounds as if it's going to be better than it actually turns out. Somebody'd shot this old fanner and his son, twelve-bore job, brains all over the wall. Lived miles from anywhere, up this God-forsaken mountain. Turned out the housekeeper did it, sordid domestic stuff, only worth a couple of pars. But that's beside the point."
Berry glanced over at Giles who was trying to look bored. Giles caught the glance and rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. Berry got along OK with Giles, who was less clannish than the others.
"Point is," Winstone said. "Locals treated us as if we were lepers. Here we are, sitting in this grim, freezing so-called guest house like the lost bloody patrol — Sunday, so all the pubs are closed, can you imagine that — and all we can hear is the rain and the natives jabbering away at each other in Welsh, which is just about the world's most incomprehensible bloody language. We try to quiz the landlady: Are you sure you didn't know them, Mrs. Davies, they only lived two hundred yards away, surely you heard the shots, didn't you?" Everybody in Wales is called Jones or Davies, terrible interbreeding. 'Will you take your tea now?' she says. 'It's nearly time for the chapel.' Then she waddles out on us. And she'd been to chapel twice that day already!
"And we're there for hours and bloody hours, Freddie Payne of the Express, Jack Beddall of the Sketch, and me, knocking on the doors of these broken-down farmhouses, trying to drag a statement out of Chief-lnspector-bloody-Davies-no-relation. Trying to cultivate the local reporter who didn't even drink, even when it wasn't Sunday. Getting absolutely nowhere. Dreadful times, old boy."
Giles Freeman sighed. "Look, that's…"
A restraining hand went up. Nobody deflected old Winstone Thorpe from his punchline.
"So, what I did in the end. I went over to the local chapel and picked a name off a bloody gravestone. Emrys Lloyd — never forget it. And I wandered back to the pub and button-holed one of these local shepherd-types. 'Look here, I suspect this is a long-shot, old boy, but I don't suppose you knew this great-uncle of mine. Emrys Lloyd, his name. Told he used to live in this neck of the woods…'"