Constable Evans 03: Evanly Choirs Read Online Free PDF

come back and rent it. What’s the betting Mrs. Powell-Jones put him in his place when they were young. He probably had to bow to her.”
    Evans-the-Meat laughed. “Nothing like coming back in victory, is there. I wonder how he got them to leave?”
    “He offered a huge sum of money, that’s what I heard,” the Reverend Parry Davies said.
    “It must have been a huge sum to make her hand over the place to her former maid’s child,” Charlie Hopkins commented. “Well, isn’t this a turn up for the books.”
    “I think it’s a great honor for Llanfair,” Evans-the-Meat said grandly, “as long as no bloody tourists come wanting to catch a glimpse of him.”
    “Now if we could only get him to join our choir for the eisteddfod, ” Charlie quipped.
    “Oh ’deed to goodness, yes. He’d want to do that, wouldn’t he? Make a change from La Scala. Do you think he’d be good enough for us?” The low-ceilinged barroom echoed with jeers and noisy laughter.
    “Why don’t you go ask him, Charlie,” Harry-the-Pub suggested with a grin. “After all, you persuaded the constable here to join us.”
    Mostyn Phillips cleared his throat. “I happen to know Ifor Llewellyn,” he said. “He and I got scholarships to the Royal School of Music in London at the same time.”
    “Is that a fact?” Suddenly Mostyn was the center of attention.
    “You really know Ifor Llewellyn?” Betsy asked, wide-eyed and impressed.
    “He and I shared digs together, our first year in London,” Mostyn said. “I—uh—also knew the lady who is now his wife. I introduced them, in fact.”
    “Almost like one of the family, isn’t he, boys?” Barry-the-Bucket clapped Mostyn on the back, sending him off balance and into the bar. “Good for you, Austin Mostyn.”
    “Well then,” Evans-the-Meat said grandly. “You’ll be the one to ask him to join us, won’t you?”
    Mostyn cringed with embarrassment. “Be reasonable, man. I can hardly ask one of the greatest tenors in the world to sing with the Llanfair Côr Meibion.”
    “I don’t see why not,” Evans-the-Meat insisted. “If it was a favor for a very old friend, like.”
    “Maybe you could ask him to sing a few solos—sort of drown out the rest of us,” Evans-the-Milk suggested. “It would certainly make the judges sit up and take notice, wouldn’t it?”
    “If you really do know him as well as you say,” Barry-the-Bucket commented.
    Evan put his hand on Mostyn’s shoulder. “You were asking for a miracle a few minutes ago, Mr. Phillips. I’d say you just got it.”

Chapter 4
    “I don’t know if we were wise to choose this route on a day like this,” Evan said to Bronwen as he helped her over a stile. “It looks like we’ll be walking in the clouds most of the time.”
    Bronwen took his hand and stepped nimbly up onto the stile. She was wearing khaki hiking pants today instead of her usual long skirts, and a blue-green jacket that gave her normally blue eyes a greenish glow. Her fair hair was back in a long braid but a few stray wisps swirled in the wind around her face as she smiled down at Evan.
    “I like walking in the clouds,” Bronwen said. “I like that feeling of unreality—being somewhere magical, quite apart from the real world down below.”
    They had been climbing steadily into the mist until they reached a high moorland of springy turf and heather. A pair of red grouse rose flapping from the grasses in front of them and from high in the mist came a plaintive wailing cry, like the call of a frightened child waking from a nightmare. It was so eerie, echoing from unseen cliffs, that they paused, alarmed for a second, then both said, “Raven,” at the same moment.
    They laughed and walked on but the unearthly quality of the cry haunted them. Evan felt his skin prickling.
    “How about eating our lunch down by Llŷn Crafnant?” he asked. “The sun might be out there.”
    “Sounds fine to me,” Bronwen said.
    They reached a high pass where the wind