by Alis Hawkins
I sighed, but she had not finished.
‘But working with John on estate business means that sometimes you may have to restrain yourself from rushing off the minute you hear of a sudden death.’
The implication – that I was like a bored schoolboy abandoning resented lessons when something more appealing offered itself – infuriated me, a reaction that must have been visible to Lydia.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, retreating into formality, ‘that was poorly put. I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, Lydia.’
‘Apologise?’
‘Retreat behind your good-servant facade.’
‘Have you forgotten that you employ me, Harry?’
‘Technically, yes.’
‘No, not technically. Actually. On what basis would I live here if not as your private secretary?’
I stared blindly at her, unable to answer. The truth was, I did not think of her solely – if at all – as my secretary. I thought of her as my friend, an irreplaceable part of my household family.
‘Harry,’ she began again, her tone softer now, ‘I understand that you don’t want to be the sort of squire your father was. But I don’t think you know what kind of squire you might be instead.’
Her words went to the miserable heart of the matter. She was right. I did not know how to be here. I had failed to apply myself adequately to the task of being squire of Glanteifi because what I really wanted was my old life, the life that had been mine in London before my sight put a stop to it. A life of satisfactory employment as a barrister engaged by charities to represent impoverished defendants. Of attending lectures by Radicals and free thinkers. Eating raucous dinners with other barristers. Dancing with Gus. The life that I had chosen and clung to in desperation – even as my blindness tore me away from it – now felt as if it had belonged to another man. A happier, more carefree man.
I wanted to be him again, but I did not know how to find him here.
Somehow Lydia understood my distress. She left her chair and came to kneel in front of me, taking my hands in hers. At her touch I felt an almost overwhelming desire to fall on her breast and weep all the stifled tears that were stiff in my throat.
‘Harry…’ she said. Was she waiting for me to look up, meet her eye? If so, that was a fool’s errand. ‘If anybody can be a Radical and a squire, it’s you. You manage it in the coroner’s chair, after all.’ I heard the smile in her voice. ‘But you must stop looking back to your old life and put your hand to the plough of this one. It’s the only way.’
John
When we set out for Cilgerran the next morning, I felt as if I hadn’t properly woken up. After everything that’d happened yesterday, I’d slept like the dead – overslept, in fact. Ianto’d had to come and wake me up, else we’d’ve been late for the jury’s viewing of the body.
I don’t know how Harry’d slept, but he didn’t have much to say either. He told me what Reckitt’d said about the sitting corpse the previous day, and then we rode in silence. I still couldn’t stop thinking about old Matthew Thomas at Nantyddwrgi – how he’d cried when we told him he was going to have to leave his home. Is this what it’s going to be like on Glanteifi land now?
Well, if that was the future at Glanteifi, I didn’t want to be part of it. And I’d decided something. When we got back later, I’d go over to Nantyddwrgi and make sure Matthew and his wife had somewhere to go. If their son couldn’t take them in, I’d try and find them a cottage somewhere on the estate. I should’ve thought of it yesterday, but I hadn’t been in a fit state, if I’m honest.
When we got to the junction with the Cenarth road at the bottom of Rhiw Siôn, I looked over to the west. You could see the course of the Teifi marked out by the early-morning mist down in the bottom of the valley. That happens in summer – the mist hangs low over the river like a long cloud until it gets burned off by the sun in the heat of the day.
Seren trotted down the steep little slope and I sat down deep in the saddle and breathed in the early morning air. It left a chill in my nostrils that wouldn’t’ve been there a month ago, and the scents of sun-drying hay and wild flowers that’d sweetened the warm air of high summer were gone. The grass and flowers growing up the hedge banks on either side of me had nearly all gone to seed now, and their stems were dry and dead. Autumn was coming, you could feel it. Some of the smaller trees were already turning, their leaf edges brown and dry, and the dog roses in the hedge were bright with hips, not flowers. Everything was running out of life.
* * *
We couldn’t get to Cilgerran fast enough for my liking. Harry and I’d never had so little to say to each other, and by the time we reached the Pendre, the silence was like a third person riding between us.
At the inn, Dr Reckitt already had the body out of the back room. He was bending over it when we arrived.
‘Good morning, gentlemen!’ He had that glint in his eye that you only ever saw when he had a dead body in front of him. Like a pig in muck, he was.
‘What have you found?’ Harry said. ‘You’ve managed to straighten him out, I see.’
‘Yes, by seven this morning he was amenable to the anatomical position.’ Reckitt waved his hand over the corpse. ‘The young constable was here soon after, and he’s already paraded the publicans of the town past to see if they know him.’
‘And do they?’ I asked. Dr Reckitt sometimes left out the bit of information you really needed, as if he thought it was obvious.
‘No. Not one of them. Claim never to have seen him, even. Shall we go through what I’ve discovered?’
Harry nodded. He knew I preferred to get as much noted down as I could before the jury came, then I wasn’t rushing to take names at the same time as I was writing a description of the corpse and its wounds.
I took my notebook and pencil out. ‘Off you go, Doctor.’
‘Before us is a man in his early to middle twenties. Of average height, and slim though muscular build. No abnormalities of the facial features or indications of any kind of malformation. No obviously broken bones.’
‘In other words, a perfectly healthy individual apart from his being dead?’ Harry said, straight-faced.
‘That I could not say without performing a dissection.’
I wrote the man’s probable age down as twenty-one to twenty-five years, his height at five feet seven, my own height – I was getting good at estimating that by now, and I hardly ever needed to use the measure I carried – his hair colour as dark brown and its length as longer than average. ‘Eye colour?’ I asked. The corpse’s eyes were closed.
Reckitt glanced up. ‘Brown.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Wounds. Looks like somebody gave him a bit of a kicking.’ The ribs and abdomen were an angry mass of red and purple.
‘Not if you mean that literally, Mr Davies. The bruising is exclusively from his being punched. In one or two places you can see the knuckle marks quite clearly. Furthermore, kicks usually result in broken ribs, whereas this man’s ribs are intact.’
I wrote that down. ‘Anything on his back?’
‘Some light grazing across the shoulder blades. But come and see for yourself.’
I helped him turn the body over. I was still feeling slow and useless, and we almost had the board off the trestles at one point, but Reckitt managed to jam his thigh up against it just in time. Gave me a look, mind. He wasn’t used to me being cack-handed.
Once the dead man was safely on his front, I stared down at the pale skin, the knobs of his backbone and the bony bands of his ribs. My clumsiness’d left one of his arms trapped under him and his shoulder blade was sticking out. I felt sick – the dead skin was stretched so tight over the bone I was afraid it might split. Maybe Dr Reckitt was worried as well, because he freed the arm and laid it down at the corpse’s side.
I quickly looked at the grazing he’d mentioned, which turned out to be quite hefty scratches slanted just off the horizontal across his back. Some wer
e broad and red, some thin and faint as if somebody’d drawn them in diluted ink with a fine-nibbed pen. None of them seemed to have broken the skin much – you could see that just the very surface layer’d been torn and was ridged up on the edges of the most noticeable marks.
‘What do you think caused them?’ I asked.
‘We’ll come to that in a minute.’ He did like to give information in a logical manner, Reckitt. Wasn’t keen on telling you things in any old order. ‘While he’s prone, observe the lividity, if you please. It is significant.’
I did as he asked, writing down the pattern Harry’d already described to me – settled blood in the buttocks, feet, hands and face. ‘Seen anything to change your mind since straightening him out?’ I asked. ‘Or do you still think he was kept in a sitting position after he died?’
‘I stand by my earlier conclusions. And he wasn’t simply kept seated – it seems likely that he was wedged into a small space, face on his knees, which is why you see the settling of livor mortis there too. The pattern tells a story.’
‘And that story is?’ asked Harry from behind me.
‘Patience, Probert-Lloyd! Let us first consider the manner of his death.’ Reckitt leaned towards us over the table. I braced myself for one of his lectures, but that wasn’t what we got. What we got was a surprise.
‘Yesterday, gentlemen, I told you that this man had not drowned in the river. I was wrong.’
I think my mouth might actually have fallen open. I’d never heard Benton Reckitt say those words before.
‘He did drown,’ he went on, ‘but not in the Teifi.’
Harry stared hard in his direction. ‘How on earth can you know that?’
‘Because there’s no pond weed in the river – it’s far too fast-flowing.’
‘Pond weed?’
‘When I compressed his chest to confirm my assumption that he had not drowned, I was surprised to see the characteristic pinkish froth of death by drowning. It brought with it a small quantity of mud and a green substance that I subsequently identified—’
‘As pond weed,’ I finished.
‘Indeed. I believe he inhaled it when his head was being held under the water.’
‘How do you know he was being held?’
‘Didn’t Harry tell you about the small contusions I found on his left wrist? Here, look.’
Harry hadn’t mentioned any injuries to the corpse’s wrist. Had he forgotten, or did he think the doctor had been making something out of nothing? I shot him a look as I moved towards the body, but of course it was wasted. Dr Reckitt raised the man’s arm and twisted it so I could see the inside of his wrist. There were three small red marks. ‘What are they?’
‘Bruises, essentially. The little mother-of-pearl buttons on his shirt sleeve dug into his flesh while somebody was gripping his wrist. You can see there’s some reddening of the arm – light bruising.’
I thought about it. ‘So somebody pulled him out of wherever he drowned?’
‘That might be a plausible explanation if not for his face.’ Reckitt put the corpse’s arm down gently and moved to his head. I followed. ‘Do you see these small wounds?’
I peered at the dead face. The day before yesterday, this man had been as full of life as I was now. Now he was just a collection of skin, muscles, bones and organs. Whatever had made him human was gone.
Against the background of his blood-saturated face, I could just make out small cuts and gouges to his chin, nose and forehead. My stomach did a quick lurch as I put all Reckitt’s clues together and worked out what must have happened. ‘You think somebody pushed his arm behind his back and forced him face down into the water?’
‘Yes. Shallow water with small stones at the bottom. The stones cut his face as he tried to move his head to breathe or escape his captor.’
I stared at the corpse. Somebody had deliberately held this man’s face under the water while he drowned.
Harry
The jury arrived, as instructed, at ten o’clock and were guided through their viewing of the body by Dr Reckitt. John read his notes to them – omitting our conclusions – and asked them to confirm that there were no other wounds visible nor anything else of note.
Then, despite the fact that the answer was already evident from their scattered comments, I asked them whether they knew the man’s identity.
‘Not a Cilgerran lad,’ one of them observed. ‘Nor from the farms about.’
His fellow jurors mumbled and grunted their agreement.
‘And none of you had seen him before?’ It seemed unlikely. Caleb Richards had asked the town’s publicans to come and view the body, and none of them had reported having seen him.
Heads were shaken. ‘Maybe he went into the river from the other side?’ an older man suggested. ‘A Cardi?’
A Cardi. A Cardiganshire boy, like John and me.
‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Mr Richards will let you know once I’ve set a date for the inquest.’
The jury dismissed and the corpse restored to the dark little back room, Reckitt announced his intention to ride over to Eglwyswrw for Lizzie Rees’s funeral.
‘Eglwyswrw?’ John said. ‘Don’t you mean Brynberian?’
‘I do not. Miss Rees is to be interred at the parish church in Eglwyswrw. Apparently that’s the church she attended with her mother.’
‘What about the rest of the family?’ While Reckitt always had to be dissuaded from detailing every single fact he had gleaned about the bodies of the sick or the dead, he displayed very little interest in the daily lives of healthy people.
‘I gather Mr Rees attends Brynberian chapel with his younger daughters.’
‘Well that explains why it was mostly Eglwyswrw boys who were chasing Lizzie,’ John said. ‘If she went to church there she’d be one of them, even if the family lived closer to Brynberian.’
While John was speaking, Reckitt, clearly seeing no further role for himself in the conversation, left without another word.
‘Bye, Doctor,’ John said wryly.
‘Never mind him,’ I said, ‘nor poor Lizzie Rees, come to that. Our pressing task is to identify our dead man.’
‘Can I make a suggestion?’ Caleb Richards asked.
‘Of course.’
‘I could speak to the foremen at the quarries and see if any of them are missing a quarryman.’
I was about to tell Richards that according to a recent decision by the magistrates he would not be paid for his services when I realised that I was not in Cardiganshire now.
‘If Mr Richards does that, we can go back to Glanteifi,’ John said when I did not respond immediately. ‘There’s no point us riding about the place asking questions as well.’
He was right. I should simply let Richards go about his business. We had already shown the jury all the evidence they would need to come to a verdict of unlawful killing, and strictly speaking, the only other duty that fell to me was the identification of the deceased. Once we knew who he was, we could convene an inquest. But I had never yet held an inquest into what was clearly an unlawful killing without at least some idea of who might have been responsible.
Still, it would do no harm to let Richards go and talk to the quarrymasters. ‘Thank you, Mr Richards. If you’d be so good, I’d appreciate that. And if you do happen to discover who he is, see if you can find out who his friends and associates were, will you? We’ll need to speak to them, call them as witnesses.’
Once Richards had left us, I turned to John. ‘Why are you so keen to get back? I thought you and Ormiston had visited all the tenants in arrears yesterday. Surely things are quieter now until we actually get to Michaelmas?’
Michaelmas was the next quarter day on which rents would be due. The tenants Ormiston and John had visited the day before had failed to pay the Midsummer rent, and like as not the Lady Day rent too.
‘I want to see what we can do for the tenants who’re losing their land.’ His voice was tight. What emotion was boiling awa
y in him. Anger? Shame?
Keen to be gone, he set off around the side of the inn.
‘John!’
He stopped but did not look round.
‘I’m sorry about the tenants who’ve been given notice. You should have come to me.’
In an instant he had turned and was striding back to where I stood. ‘No, Harry. You should’ve come to me. Or to Mr Ormiston. You should have given him proper instructions that would’ve looked after the tenants instead of telling him to squeeze as much money out of them as possible so you can invest it!’ He stood there panting slightly, waiting for me to defend myself. But I had no idea how to tell him how ashamed I was of my inaction.
‘Right. Well. If you want to stay here, fine. Do as you like. I’m going home to try and look after Glanteifi’s people.’
* * *
I let him go. I did not have it in me to follow him and endure his silent fury all the way home; it had been bad enough on the ride over. Besides, it seemed prudent to stay in Cilgerran until I knew the results of Caleb Richards’ visit to the quarries.
I walked back into the odorous gloom of the Pendre’s interior and asked the landlord to let Richards know when he returned that he could find me at Reckitt’s house. The inn had now become my de facto base in Cilgerran, and the landlord no doubt took it for granted that I would hold the inquest here.
‘Would you happen to have some bread and cheese?’ I asked. I had deprived John and myself of anything but a slice of bread and honey in my haste to leave Glanteifi that morning. John, I knew, had assumed that I wanted to get here in time to talk to Reckitt before we met with the jury, but in truth, my primary reason for leaving in such haste had been to avoid having to face Lydia over breakfast. The intimacy of our midnight encounter in the library would, I feared, make our next meeting uncomfortable for both of us.
Still, discomfort notwithstanding, I could not stay in Cilgerran indefinitely. I had accepted an invitation to lunch tomorrow at Plas Blaengwyn, one of the bigger local mansions. Its new residents, Mr and Mrs Anthony Saunders-James, had only recently returned from an extended honeymoon tour of the Continent, during which the house had been much renovated and modernised, and immediately on their return they had begun issuing invitations in order to show off their refurbished home.