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sorts."
Aled was small, but wiry and strong enough to take the corpse's weight at the
shoulders. "Big Morgan, it was, first started calling him that. Retired
teacher, I suppose, or a college lecturer. Some sort of historian. Always
walking around making notes, looking at things, never at people, you know the
kind. Oh. Christ, I forgot they did that. Pass me that cloth, will you,
Dai."
        "Sorry, Aled. Should have
thought." In this part of the world most people still knew the basics of
it. They had not grown up with funeral parlours; laying out their relatives was
something most of them had had to learn, like changing a wheel. Not only was it
uneconomical to pay somebody like Dai to prepare a corpse, it was also still
considered in many homes—and particularly, he'd found, in Y Groes—to be less
than polite to the deceased.
        "Can you do anything about
that?" Aled asked, nodding at the face. "Or does he have to go to his
maker looking as though somebody was amputating his leg without the anaesthetic?"
        Dai made a professional appraisal
of the customer's blue and twisted features, working out how they might be rearranged.
"Easy," he said loftily. "Piece of piss. What was it anyway?"
        "Well, heart. Angina, something
of that order. Dr. Wyn said he was not surprised at all. Been coming here for months,
see. Had his pills through Dr. Wyn regular."
        "Why was that?"
        "Well, convenient, I
suppose."
        "No, no. I mean why did he
come here? The fishing?"
    "No, I was telling you. Historian
or something. Into old churches."
        "Not old houses?" In
Dai's experience, most of the English people who persistently returned to this
area were looking to buy a piece of it, some little stone cottage with an
inglenook and a view of the mountains. "Buggers go crazy over places like
this."
        "Do they now?" Aled
said. "Well, well."
        "Name your price, man,
place like this. Name your bloody price."
        Aled made no reply. Dai looked
for an expression in the landlord's compact face, but none was apparent. All
the same, he decided this was as good an opening as any, and he said carefully,
"You know ... I was only thinking myself, well, I wouldn't mind retiring
to Y Groes, me and the wife. Nowhere quite like it, see, for the peace and
quiet. Casual like. In passing. Not sounding as serious as he really was.
"But hell, man, I don't suppose I could afford it any more, even with
selling the business, the way things are going, the prices."
        "Where do you want him?"
Aled asked, as if he hadn't heard any of this. "In that thing, is
it?"
    "In the shell."
    "The what?"
        "Shell. What we call it.
Utility job, see. Just to get him to the warehouse, and then the relatives
choose something more tasteful." Dai tapped the side of the light-coloured
coffin to show how cheap and flimsy it was, then returned hopefully, to his
theme. "What's the answer, though? What is the answer? Local boy wants a
home of his own, priced out of the market before he starts. Got to go, isn't
it? No option. Winds up in bloody Birmingham or somewhere and all the rich
buggers who couldn't tell a Welsh mountain ewe from a Beulah speckle-faced if
you drew 'em a diagram are moving in and building bloody squash courts. Well,
of course, I have nothing against the English, as a race . . . Right, now, you
get the other side and we'll . . . Ah, lovely job."
        Both men stood back. Dai Death
mopped his bald head with a handkerchief. "So, tell me, purely out of
interest, like . . . How much are they fetching?"
        "Beulah
speckle-faced?"
        "Houses, man! What would
it cost for me to get a place here? How much did the last one go for?"
        "I can't remember. It was
a long time ago."
        "Oh, come on now!"
Dai was getting a bit exasperated. What Aled was supposed to say was, well,
Dai, funny you should bring that up because there's this very interesting little
place I know of, not on the