by Alis Hawkins
Harry was a member of the Society of Coroners, which kept us up to date with goings-on like this. Since I’d been working with him, it’d been my job to read him anything that came from the Society.
My dinner was going cold in front of me, so I picked up my cutlery and made a start. A fish knife still felt odd in my hand. A tricky implement.
‘You know as well as I do,’ Lydia said, ‘that he won’t comply with anything that puts the coroner in a subservient role to the police.’
I swallowed a mouthful of salmon. It might as well have been sawdust. I didn’t want to be having this conversation. I might be at odds with Harry, but it still didn’t feel right talking about him behind his back.
Lydia picked up her knife and separated skin from flesh along the whole length of her fish in one deft movement. ‘But whatever he decides, you and I know that it’ll be up to us to make sure he doesn’t do anything too unwise.’ She looked up from her plate. ‘Because if he alienates the whole of the county magistracy at this stage, I don’t think his tenure as coroner will be very long-lived, do you?’
Harry
As we left the family at Rhosdywarch, Reckitt suggested that we might break our journey back to Cilgerran at the Sergeant’s Inn in Eglwyswrw, and as the tea we had been given by Esther Rees had served only to make me realise how thirsty I was, I agreed readily.
Though I had not visited the inn for years, I was familiar with it from my younger days. In the autumn before an ‘inappropriate association’ had seen me banished to Oxford, I had stayed there when I went to Eglwyswrw for Ffair Feigan, the Meigan Fair, with my boyhood friend Davy Thomas.
The fair had made Eglwyswrw as busy as a Soho street, crowded with hundreds of people in whatever finery they could muster, and the main road had been dangerously narrowed by stalls offering revellers everything from ribbons to rice pudding.
Davy and I had been there, like every other unmarried person, to attract the attention of the opposite sex. Groups of young men and women paraded up and down, calling out to each other; ambassadors flitted from lads’ gangs to girls’ in order to press the suit of one of their number; girls gathered fairings from as many admirers as they could and spent the rest of the time comparing trophies and giggling behind their hands.
I remembered the deftness with which Davy had attached the two of us to a group of lads from Cilgerran. Somehow, though we were from the other side of the river, he had known one of them, and that had been sufficient introduction to see us accepted; especially as he had omitted to mention my surname.
Davy had been as ardent a suitor of pretty girls as anybody, and with his muscular frame and dark good looks – so different from my own pale slightness – he had not waited long for his attentions to be reciprocated.
For myself, I had enjoyed the carnival atmosphere at first and had smiled at my own fair share of young women. But as the day had worn on and more than a few individuals of both sexes found themselves the worse for drink, good-natured flirting had turned into something more sinister and threatening. Young men who had spent all their money on fairings prowled the stalls looking for a carnal return on their investment, and some girls were sufficiently drunk to find themselves obliging.
There had, I remembered, been a good deal of manhandling of young women who had become separated from their friends, sometimes in fun but often with lustful intent. Once or twice I had seen men I took to be parish constables intervening, but more frequently, it was a girl’s friends who had swarmed up to defend her honour with hat pins and knitting needles.
Now, as our horses ambled up the almost deserted street to the Sergeant’s Inn, my thoughts turned from those young women to the one whose death had brought us here. Elizabeth Rees had been nineteen years old – she must have attended her fair share of Meigan Fairs. Had the farm servant who had been sweet on her bought her favours and sought to catch her eye last November? Perhaps he had succeeded and things had gone too far. Something, after all, had made Esther Rees wary of her daughter’s suitors. But I should not be looking for suspects – Reckitt had seen nothing to suggest that Lizzie’s death had not been a natural one.
Like any coaching inn, the Sergeant’s was prominently positioned on the main road, standing opposite Eglwyswrw’s church. As we pulled up before the facade, I looked past the grey whirlpool at the centre of my vision and along the road as it sloped down to a little bridge. Here and there I could just make out the occasional figure wending its way home or to one of the alehouses at the end of a long working day.
Roused by the sound of our horses’ hooves, a boy rushed out of the stables opposite the inn and laid hold of each bridle as we dismounted. ‘Staying, sirs, or just stopping?’
‘Stopping.’ I reached into my pocket for a penny and tossed it to him. ‘We’ll be on our way again in an hour.’
The inn was a sturdy two-storey establishment, stone-built and white-rendered beneath a slate roof. Inside, it had a well-kept, prosperous air, with a malty smell of ale in the first stages of preparation somewhere on the premises.
Though the ceiling was low, betraying the inn’s age, the ground floor was spacious and the flagstones beneath my feet, far from being sawdust-covered like those of an alehouse, were swept clean and had the slightly slick surface that I associated with the kitchen at Glanteifi. I wondered if the servants here used buttermilk to scrub the floors as ours did.
‘Good evening, gentlemen! Dr Reckitt, isn’t it? And would this be Mr Probert-Lloyd, the coroner?’
The ability of innkeepers both to remember faces and to keep abreast of local goings-on never ceased to impress me. But of course, news of Lizzie Rees’s death was already common knowledge; the fellow who had given us directions earlier had shown us that.
Our host ushered us to the settles on either side of the fire in the main room, then, having brought us a jug of ale, at Reckitt’s request he agreed to provide us with some dinner.
‘Are you in funds, Reckitt?’ I asked, once we were alone. He was not in the habit of treating me to dinner.
He stretched his legs towards the fire. ‘I hope to be, directly. To the tune of two guineas.’
‘I think planning a post-mortem might be a little premature,’ I said, keeping my voice down lest we attract the attention of the two other men sitting within earshot. ‘We’ve seen nothing to suggest foul play.’
‘Nothing except a perfectly healthy young woman dying for no apparent reason and her father lying about it.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Rees lied. He told us his daughter died in bed. But I think it extremely unlikely.’
‘Reckitt, please, moderate your tone,’ I hissed, inclining my head towards the drinkers at the other end of the room.
He reached to the floor for his mug. Was he embarrassed at my pointing out his inappropriate loudness, or irritated? I had only his silence to go on, and that was insufficient.
‘Your evidence for that statement?’ I asked, barely above a mutter.
He leaned towards me and lowered his voice a fraction. ‘When people die in their sleep – unless they’ve been unconscious for some time and unable to take in fluids – there is almost invariably urine leakage, because the bladder fills up through the night. Unless death occurs very soon after retiring, when the sphincter is released, urine is expelled.’
Physiology lesson over, he retrieved his mug and drank.
‘You’re telling me there was no evidence of urine in Lizzie Rees’s bed?’
‘I am. It was completely dry.’
‘What’s to say that she didn’t die soon after she went to bed? There would have been no time for her bladder to fill up then.’
‘It’s possible. But unlikely. You recall Rees telling us that the quack doctor had looked in the girl’s mouth as best he could?’
I ignored his denigration of Dr Gwynne. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘If she had died early in the night, and the doctor didn’t see her until the morning, her jaw would have stiff
ened, making it impossible for him to look into her mouth. Rees’s testimony suggested that it had merely been difficult. Similarly, to have examined her intimate female area, it would have been necessary for him to be able to move her lower limbs.’
‘Except that her father couldn’t say whether he’d done so.’
‘Why else lift her petticoat?’
‘To look for bruising on the torso?’
‘Nevertheless, if it’s true that he was able to conduct at least some kind of examination of her mouth, it’s unlikely that rigor mortis was much advanced. When I examined her, at five o’clock however, rigor was pretty well established.’
‘Which means?’
‘That she had probably been dead at least twelve hours, and therefore died before five in the morning. So if the quack managed to open her jaw, he must have seen her before eight, which seems unlikely. My conclusion, therefore, is that Rees exaggerated and that the quack merely parted her lips.’ Reckitt’s voice had resumed its normal lecturing tone, so despite the fact that it meant I could no longer see him, I leaned closer to encourage a reduction in volume.
‘Let me understand you. You think that Dr Gwynne’s physical examination was not as thorough as we’ve been led to believe, and that there might be something in her mouth that could indicate how she died?’
‘Very possibly.’
‘You also believe that it was impossible for her bladder not to have been at least partially full. Therefore, her father must have removed soiled clothes and put clean ones on her?’
‘Ah, as to their cleanliness, there’s something interesting there. I’m not persuaded that the garment she was wearing was completely clean – by which I mean freshly laundered. It wasn’t soiled, but from its smell, it had been worn.’
Putting aside the mental picture of Reckitt breathing in the scent of the dead girl’s underlinen, I asked, ‘Does the petticoat’s having been worn not argue against you?’
‘If you consider my earlier reasoning, you will see that it cannot.’ He paused. ‘Furthermore, her body had been washed. You will have noticed that it did not smell of urine.’
When Mic Rees had drawn back from the sight of his daughter’s body being undressed, had he been driven by guilt rather than decency? ‘Do you have any theories as to why her father might have lied about where she died, and when?’ I asked.
‘I do not. However, I can tell you that as far as I have been able to ascertain from a surface examination, she was not the victim of violence. Not physical violence, anyway. As yet, rigor has prevented me from determining whether she had been forced against her will.’ He took another swallow of his ale. ‘I’ll need to examine the body again when rigor mortis has receded, but now that I’ve apprised you of the suspicious circumstances, I hope you’ll agree that a full post-mortem examination is indicated.’
I sighed. ‘Reckitt, I’m coming under a great deal of pressure from the county magistrates to reduce the number of inquests.’
‘Which county?’
‘What…’ I had been going to ask what relevance that could possibly have, but half a second’s thought gave me the answer. ‘Cardiganshire,’ I admitted, ‘for the most part, but—’
‘She died in Pembrokeshire.’
‘Yes. I know. But each of—’
‘You can’t allow the magistrates to dictate!’ Reckitt’s volume rose once more. ‘They are medical ignoramuses!’
‘But look at it from their point of view. If there’s no actual evidence of—’
‘No evidence was the response of the imbecilic officers in Norfolk when faced with the Balls family! You do remember the Balls case?’
Reckitt might be vague about the names of his patients, and scarcely ever exerted himself to remember the names of people to whom he was introduced socially, but he never forgot a name if it was concerned with medical research or jurisprudence. And well he might remember this particular one, for the case argued strongly for the routine examination of corpses by dissection.
Jonathan Balls had killed at least eight members of his family, and possibly many more, before he and his baby granddaughter died on the same day. When repeated appeals from his neighbours finally forced the authorities’ hand and the two bodies were exhumed, it was discovered that he had poisoned himself and the infant. Subsequently, the bodies of ten of his other relatives were exhumed and seven were discovered to have been poisoned.
My fellow feeling for the Norfolk coroner in the case had risen considerably in the last twenty-four hours, as prior to the two final deaths, he had been unaware of the unusually high rate of sudden death in the Balls family; Norfolk’s magistrates had ruled that before a parish constable could take news of a death to the coroner, he must obtain written permission from a minister of religion, parish overseer or church warden.
The relevant men in authority not wishing to seem profligate with ratepayers’ money, evidently no such permission had been granted. Children suddenly taking sick and dying, they might have argued, was commonplace. And Balls’s wife had been over eighty at the time of her death, hardly an obvious murder victim.
The same could not be said of Lizzie Rees, a vigorous, healthy young woman who had, it seemed, simply died. But not, apparently, in her bed and not in the garments in which her corpse had been presented to us.
Still, I was loath to allow Reckitt to think he could manoeuvre me into ordering a post-mortem simply by mentioning Jonathan Balls.
‘What exactly would you be looking for if you dissected the body?’
‘I’d be looking for poison in the first instance. After that, a haemorrhage on the brain, a ruptured aneurysm, pulmonary embolism or asphyxia idiopathica.’
A haemorrhage on the brain. Reckitt was proposing not only to cut into Lizzie Rees’s torso and examine her viscera but to take his saw and shear off the top of her skull in order to remove her brain. But that would go beyond the remit of an inquest post-mortem. For that, he needed only to rule out foul play, and apart from poison, none of the causes of death he had mentioned qualified.
Before I committed myself, there were more questions to be answered. If we were to determine time of death with more accuracy, I needed to know at what time Mic Rees had summoned Dr Cadwgan Gwynne to certify his daughter’s death. I also wished to speak to whoever had taken the awful news to Esther Rees at Ffynone. Why had Mic Rees sent somebody else to speak to his wife rather than going to fetch her himself? Might the reason have any bearing on the timing of Lizzie’s death? The answers to those questions might help me understand why Rees had lied to us about where his daughter had died.
‘I shall speak to Rees again tomorrow,’ I told Reckitt, ‘and make some other enquiries.’
‘Excellent.’
‘And depending on the answers I receive, and your own findings as to whether Lizzie Rees had been sexually molested, I will then decide on the advisability or otherwise of a post-mortem.’
I ignored his harrumphing and called a servant to take a message to the stables that we would be staying after all. It crossed my mind to send another to Glanteifi with a message for John, who was due home today. However, given that I would not now be returning home tonight, I felt l could confidently leave it to John to infer that there was an investigation in hand.
He would know that he was needed.
John
I’d expected to sleep well after all the travelling I’d done, but with Harry still over on the other side of the river, I lay awake half the night arguing with myself about what to do in the morning.
It looked as if this death in Brynberian or Eglwyswrw or wherever it was had turned out to be suspicious. Harry’d be investigating and he’d expect me to go over there first thing with my assistant coroner’s hat on.
But why should I? He’d run off to the other side of the river when by rights he should’ve told Reckitt to go and look at the body by himself and only come to him if there were suspicious circumstances. Those’d been the rules even before the magistrates’ letter.
And anyway, I had enough on my plate. I had to decide how I was going to broach things with Mr Ormiston on Monday, as well as sort out all the work he’d left for me to do.
On the other hand, if I didn’t go over to Eglwyswrw to find Harry, goodness only knew what foolishness Reckitt would lead him into.
By the time the dawn light started poking its way into my bedroom around the curtains, I’d batted the arguments backwards and forwards for hours until I’d finally made a decision. Harry had to start playing by the rules, and it wouldn’t help if I encouraged him to think that he could go rushing about doing as he pleased and I’d follow like a lap dog. I was staying here.
* * *
I hadn’t expected Mrs Griffiths, the housekeeper, to be up and about at dawn with the other servants, but she came into the kitchen as I was finishing off some of yesterday’s bread with butter and honey.
‘I see you’re not in riding clothes, Mr Davies. Does that mean you’re not going over to Pembrokeshire to meet Mr Probert-Lloyd?’
I swallowed a mouthful and shook my head at the same time, which almost made me choke. ‘No,’ I croaked. ‘Estate work to do.’
She gazed at me, her expression hard to read. I thought she liked me well enough, but I knew she was devoted to Harry, and perhaps she thought I was being disloyal to him.
‘Did you enjoy the Great Exhibition?’ she asked.
Chewing again, I nodded. ‘Strangest thing happened up there, mind. Me and Daniel Williams – Miss Gwatkyn’s hall boy – were standing looking at mowing machines when somebody came up behind us and started speaking to us in Welsh!’