was still counting himself lucky that he had had his passport on him.
‘Goodbye,’ Finch said seriously. ‘Someone’s here to meet me, or I’d offer you a lift. Thanks for your company.’
‘So long, Finch.’
Then she was gone. Sam was left alone in the arrivals hall at Vancouver airport at one in the morning, with his car and his girlfriend and his stalled life waiting for him in Seattle. From the taxi line, John Belushi was glaring reproachfully at him.
It was snowing in North Wales, too. It was a different small segment of the world’s weather envelope, but the local effects were the same as in Vancouver or Oregon.
Alyn Hood paid no attention either to the bitter wind or the blur of snowflakes flying into his face and weighting his eyelashes. He stood on his doorstep for a moment, gazing thoughtfully into the darkness as if it were the middle of a summer’s afternoon. Then he turned and locked the door of the cottage, dropping the heavy key into his pocket. He set off down the path, bareheaded with his coat hanging loose, at a steady pace that indicated no hurry, or any awareness of the climate.
It was a long descent, down a rutted track where the potholes were already deceptively smoothed out by the settling snow. The man was a sure-footed walker. His easy pace never varied.
The track joined a lane at a gatepost where the plastic letters of an old sign, their cracked curves and serifs having acquired an eyebrow of snow, announced the name of the one-storey slate and stone cottage to be Tyn-y-Caeau. He turned left into the muffled silence of the lane and continued to descend the hill. His footprints threaded a solitary one-way trail in his wake. Half a mile further on, a tiny cluster of yellow lights showed thinly between silver-furred stone walls. There were perhaps a dozen houses here and a whitewashed pub turned grey by the insistent whiteness. There were no cars in the car-park, but a regiment of wooden bench-and-table sets in the frozen garden to the side indicated that this might be a popular place in more forgiving weather.
Alyn Hood went straight to the low door and pushed it open, familiar with its movement. A heavy draught curtain, attached to a rod on the back of the door, swung with it. There was a bar framed by glasses and bottles, a man behind its rampart polishing a tankard, and two customers. All three faces turned to the new arrival.
‘Al,’ the barman greeted him. The other two men nodded. One was very old, with a flat tweed cap welded to his head, the younger had a sheepdog asleep at his feet.
‘Pint, Glyn,’ Alyn Hood said.
‘Right you are.’ The barman pulled it and stood the handle glass to dribble on a bar towel.
‘Bit dead tonight,’ the sheepdog man said wonderingly, as if this room with its ticking clock and smoky fire usually resounded with cheering and dancing on table-tops.
‘Blasted weather,’ Glyn judged. ‘You’d expect a sign of spring, this time of year.’
‘It’s only March,’ Alyn Hood said mildly. He took his pint to a round table near the fire and sat down.
‘When is it you’re off this time, then?’ Glyn pursued him.
‘Couple of days.’
‘Bad enough here,’ said the sheepdog man.
Alyn smiled and the room fell silent again. He sat for perhaps twenty minutes, nursing his pint and looking into the red coals. A couple came in and sat in a corner murmuring together, their hands entwined.
Five minutes later the door whirled open once more, admitting a blast of cold air and a young woman who stamped her feet energetically to shed a ruff of snow. She looked around the bar and saw Al. ‘Thought I might find you.’
‘Molly. What are you doing here?’
‘Duh. Looking for you, maybe? Went up to the house, car there but not you. Where else could you be but down the pub? Do I get a drink?’
‘Coke?’
‘Nn.’ Molly put her head on one side. Her wiry hair was spangled with melted snow. ‘I’ll have a whisky and ginger ale, thanks.’ She stared a challenge at her father.
‘You’re not old enough. You driving?’
‘Get real. I’m eighteen. Near enough. And how else d’you think I got here from Betws? Mum lent me.’
Al sighed. His only child was a grown woman now, almost. Because he had missed so many of the vital, infinitesimal shifts of growth that had delivered her from sweet babyhood to this point, he knew he didn’t have the right to tell her she was too young to drink whisky, or anything else for that matter.
‘Very small Scotch and plenty of ginger, please, Glyn. And I’ll have a half.’
They took their drinks and sat opposite each other at the table. Father and daughter were noticeably alike. Their heads and hands were the same shape, and they sat in the same position with their legs pointing towards the fire and their ankles lazily crossed.
‘How is your mother?’
Molly regarded him. ‘The same.’
‘Did she send you?’
‘No. Well. In a way, I suppose. I said I was coming over and she offered me the car.’
They lifted their glasses at the same moment and thoughtfully drank.
The man with the tweed cap levered himself off his stool and headed for the door. ‘Night all. See you again, I hope, Alyn. All the best.’
Molly’s face drew in. The contraction of her mouth and eyes made her look angry. When the door had closed once more and the eddies of cold air were dispersed she said, ‘Don’t go back there. Don’t. I don’t want you to.’
There was a flicker in her father’s eyes, a shift in his glance that acknowledged and at the same time evaded her demand. Molly saw it and Al knew that she saw it. ‘I have to go, Molly. It’s what I do.’
‘You don’t have to. That’s a lie.’
‘I don’t lie to you, Moll. I try not to. Did your mother tell you to come here and say this to me?’
It was weary, over-trodden ground to Alyn. And the careful neutrality that Molly assumed in answering was a reminder that she had had to intercede for too long in the disputes between her mother and father.
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I came to say it myself. Dad, please don’t go. I’ve got a bad feeling about this time.’
He smiled then, briefly, and put his hands over hers. ‘You always have a bad feeling. Remember? And I always come home, don’t I?’
She would not meet his eyes. He turned her hands over, looking at the smooth palms, remembering these fingers when they were baby-sized and the way they curled to grip his adult forefinger. Holding on to him hard, even then.
‘Listen. I have to do this trip.’ For all kinds of reasons he was drawn back to the mountain. They were not, he acknowledged to himself, reasons he would care to analyse with his daughter. ‘I have to do this one and after I’ve done it I’ll hang up my boots.’
‘Do you mean that?’
From her mother, over the years, Molly had heard enough about her father’s faults. She knew well enough what he was bad at and deficient in, and out of her own sense of fair play she had privately reckoned up his strengths. In order to compensate.
One of them, perhaps the foremost, was that he was so strong. Not just physically, although he was that too, like iron – or one of his own smooth coils of rope, that was better. Iron was too rigid, where Al was supple. It was that he never gave way or compromised or stepped down. You were always certain of what he would do and the way he would do it, and that gave him a kind of … serenity,