Candlenight by Phil Rickman Page B

out of the rat race? Well, maybe.
Maybe, with the right lady. Maybe for a few months. Maybe in the summer.
        You
put the arm on young Giles. Persuade him to sell the bloody place, soon as he
can . . .
        But what would Winstone Thorpe
have said if he'd seen this place?
        "Tell you what,"
Giles was saying. "Why don't you come down for a weekend, or even a
holiday, when we're settled in? Bring whoever it is you're with these
days."
        "Miranda ," said
Berry doubtfully.
        "Oh yes, the one
who—"
        "Thinks I look like Al Pacino.
When he was younger, of course."
        Giles, face bright with pride,
opened the iron gate and carefully closed it when Berry was through. Then he
led the way along a track no more than eight feet wide, lined with
hawthorn and holly.
        They came at last to the house.
And that was where, for Berry Morelli, the idyll died.

 

    Chapter XV
     
    The dead, lower branches of the close-packed conifers, pale brown by
day, were whitened by the headlights—the only kind of direct light they'd ever
known. Berry thought. He was aware of just how narrow a channel the road made between
the bristly ranks. Like driving down the middle of a toothbrush. He wondered
what it would be like in the frozen days of January.
    Berry shivered.
        "You thought of
that?" he asked, needing to talk.
    "Thought of what?" said
Giles.
        "How it'd be in winter. Like
when you have to get up at 6:30 on some freezing dark morning and drive to
London on icebound roads and wonder how you're ever gonna make it back if
there's snow. You ever think about that?"
        "Nothing's without its
problems," Giles said. "If you start to dwell on things like that,
you never try anything new."
        The forestry was thinning out
now. Berry braked as a rabbit scooted across the road. How about that,
something alive in this place. He shivered again. Pull yourself together,
asshole.
        It wasn't so dark yet, not when
you got through the forestry. When they cleared the next ridge they'd get the benefit
of the light coming off the sea. A sign said Pontmeurig 5, Aberystwyth 16.
One-horse resort or not, he'd be glad to see Aberystwyth again. Least it had a
few bars and a pier with coloured lights and gaming machines. Familiar. tacky
things.
        "Berry?" Giles said.
        "Uh huh?" He turned
briefly to look at Giles, saw only a hunched-up shape in a space too small for
it and the glow at the end of a cigarette.
    Giles said, "Are you trying to
put me off?"
        "Put you off?"
        They came into the valley of
the disused lead mine, stony towers black against the western sky. It looked
powerfully stark, quite impressive now it was too dark to see all the drab
detail. Wales's answer to Monument Valley.
        Yeah, he thought, damn right
I'm trying to put you off. Berry snapped the headlights on again. This was
going to need careful handling.
        It had seemed, in all the obvious
ways, a good house. Barely fifty yards off the road, but nicely private,
screened by laurels and holly and hawthorn, hunched into the hillside and protected
from the wind. It had a view of the church hill some 250 yards away. Below that
was the village; on winter evenings they'd be able to see the smoke spiralling
from the village chimneys, warming the grey sky.
    Nice. Cosy.
        So the cottage looked, too,
from the outside. Its walls were that warm, rusty grey that softened the
outlines of the whole village. Its windows, six of them on the front, were small
and quartered like in the picture books.
        And clean. Somebody had been
and cleaned the goddamn windows.
        Not only that, they'd taken
care of the garden too. It should have been overgrown, yet the small front lawn
had been mown, the flowerbeds tended, even the roses deadheaded.
        This did not look like the
empty house of a man deceased.
    Berry had said, "You're sure we
got the right place here?"
    "No. I