by Alis Hawkins
‘It was,’ she said, her voice low and subdued. ‘I’ve never had such a shock in my life. Not even when my mamgu died. But it’s different when it’s an old person, isn’t it? There isn’t all the sadness about things they’ll miss.’
Sally had been presented to John as something of a frivolous personality – his exact phrase had been ‘Ann made her sound like the sort of girl who’ll tell secrets to anybody’ – so it came as a surprise to hear such a philosophical outlook from her. I scrutinised her as best I could, wondering whether it was just her dark hair that had earned her the nickname, or whether there was more to it.
‘Sally, have you heard that the body of a young man was pulled out of the Teifi in Cilgerran on Monday morning?’
‘Yes.’ The distraction in her voice told me that her mind was still on her friend.
‘Yesterday, that young man was identified as Nathaniel Stockton.’
‘Nattie? Had he… I mean, did he…’
She had jumped to the same conclusion as her father. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Mr Stockton was murdered.’
‘But why?’ Her question was anguished. ‘He hadn’t even seen Lizzie after getting warned off.’
It was interesting that she had assumed that whoever had been responsible for the beating Nattie had received was also guilty of his murder. Had there, I wondered, been other threats made against him?
‘You’re sure Lizzie hadn’t seen Nathaniel Stockton since getting back from harvesting in the south?’ I asked.
‘No… Well, that’s to say, I hadn’t seen her. So I suppose… I don’t know. Perhaps she had? All I know is, I went to church on Sunday looking forward to seeing her, and her mother told me she’d died.’ Her voice broke and she turned her head away from me.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Jones.’
Before I could ask anything else, a shout from the Cenarth road on the south side of the churchyard made me jump. ‘Sally! You all right, are you?’
The road was much lower than the church and the distance involved meant that I could not see who had called out.
‘Yes thanks!’ Sally called back, her voice still catching. ‘Just having a word with Mr Probert-Lloyd. The coroner.’
Evidently her would-be saviour moved away on hearing this as there was no more from him. ‘Somebody’s keeping an eye on you,’ John remarked.
‘It’s just Twm y Gof – his father’s forge is only just over the road. He must’ve seen us walk by.’
‘Sweet on you, is he?’ I asked.
‘Not me, no.’
‘No, he was after Lizzie, wasn’t he?’ John said. Twm y Gof must be one of the names Llwyo had given him.
‘Not just him. Plenty of boys fancied Lizzie.’
I expected John to drop the subject, but he did not. ‘What’s he like, Twm?’
‘All right. Bit under his father’s thumb, but then everybody is. Only one blacksmith in the parish, isn’t there? It’s him or walk a long way.’
‘Did you ever see Twm arguing with Nattie Stockton?’ John asked.
Sally did not reply straight away. Was she trying to recall or wondering how truthful to be? Twm had implicitly offered to rescue her from us a minute ago, and looking after one’s own must cut both ways if it is to work. ‘Once,’ she said, eventually.
‘Go on,’ John encouraged her.
‘Me and Lizzie were standing over there,’ she indicated the corner of the churchyard with a raised hand, ‘one Sunday after church, with Nattie and another young man, and Twm came over from the forge. Told Lizzie she shouldn’t be hanging around with foreigners.’
She seemed disinclined to say any more, busying herself with resettling and fastening her shawl. ‘Did Nattie say anything in return?’ I asked.
‘He did.’ She stopped her pulling and twitching. ‘I think he was trying to impress Lizzie. He said it was no wonder she preferred his company when the only bachelors on offer here were… I don’t remember the word he said, but Lizzie told me it meant somebody who can’t read.’
Insulting Twm by using unfamiliar English words was hardly the wisest course of action, but it did explain Stockton’s reputation for behaving as if he was superior to everybody in Eglwyswrw.
‘Dr Gwynne told us that Lizzie Rees went to see him a few weeks ago,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Did you go with her?’
I heard Sally draw in a long breath, as if she was fighting back tears at the memory of the last visit she had made with her friend. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Did you go into Dr Gwynne’s consulting room with her?’
‘No. Dr Gwynne doesn’t allow that. It’s always private with him.’
‘So you don’t know what they discussed?’
‘Oh no, I do, yes. She wanted to ask him if she had to marry Nattie because she’d given him the coron fedw.’
‘Had she changed her mind about him?’
Sally did not reply.
‘We heard that there was another man she was interested in,’ John said.
‘There were lots of other men interested in her.’
‘Do you know which of those men warned Nathaniel Stockton off – beat him?’ I asked.
Sally shook her head.
‘Twm y Gof?’ I suggested.
‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.’
Unless she had seen Nathaniel Stockton being attacked, Sally was unlikely to name anybody, even under oath. We would soon be gone, but she would have to live cheek by jowl with the resentment of young men who would feel betrayed by her if she spoke up.
‘So Lizzie never said anything to you about another man she might’ve fallen for?’ John asked.
‘No. I mean, I knew there was somebody. Asked her straight, I did, when she told me why she wanted to go and see the dew— Dr Gwynne. But she wouldn’t tell me. “Not yet,” she said to me. “I’ll tell you when I’m sure. If I’m sure.”’
‘What do you think she meant?’
John let Sally take her time. ‘Sometimes,’ she said warily, ‘when you know a man likes you, it makes you more warm towards him, if you know what I mean. But you can’t get carried away with that. You have to wait awhile. Test it out.’
‘Test how?’ John asked. ‘By courting in bed?’
‘No! If things’d gone that far, she’d have told me. She would!’ she insisted when John did not reply immediately. But evidently Sally Jones had not been trusted as implicitly as she had believed.
I changed tack, dropping my voice so as not to be heard by the driver of the cart that was trundling by on the road below us. ‘Do you know why Lizzie stayed at home when her mother and sisters went to Ffynone?’
‘No, like I said before, I hadn’t seen her since she’d come back from down south. At the funeral, her father said she hadn’t been well – she had a cold.’ She stopped, but John obviously saw something that made him think she had more to say.
‘Go on,’ he prompted.
‘Her sister – Gwen, I mean, the little one – she told me that Lizzie didn’t have a cold, that she’d just said that so that…’ Sally hesitated again, ‘so that she could stay at home to wash the midnight shirt.’ She waited for a reaction, but when neither of us showed any scepticism, she went on more steadily. ‘Gwen thought I knew all about it, but I didn’t. I hadn’t seen Lizzie.’ She began to fiddle with the edge of her shawl once more, and I could feel her looking at me.
‘You don’t think…’ She checked herself, then surged on again. ‘Her mother said her heart’d just stopped. You don’t think she died of a broken heart because of who she saw in her vision, do you?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘One more thing,’ John said. ‘Did Lizzie know anybody in Cilgerran?’
She appeared to give this a few seconds’ thought. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’
‘You’re sure?’ John pressed. ‘No old family friends, no third cousins, nothing like that?’
‘No.’
‘And you’d definitely have known, would you?’
‘I would, yes.’
‘All right then, what about Nattie Stockton – did you see him at church last week?’
‘Yes.’ I heard a bleak note in Sally’s voice as she answered him. ‘It was me told him about Lizzie. When he couldn’t see her, he came straight to me. He could see I was crying, knew something was wrong.’ She lifted the edge of her shawl and dabbed her eyes. It must be cotton, I thought, rather than wool; probably her Sunday best. Perhaps, if her father was doing well, it might even have some silk in it.
‘Did he stay for the service?’ John asked. An excellent question.
‘No. He tried to talk to Esther – Lizzie’s mother – but all she’d say to him was that the workhouse doctor’d been to Rhosdywarch and seen Lizzie. Esther wanted him back to cut Lizzie open to see if he could find out why she’d died. I don’t think Nattie liked that idea. He just walked out of church then, and I didn’t see him after. He must’ve gone home.’
* * *
Once we had seen Sally back to the grocer’s shop and were out of earshot, I turned to John. ‘You think Nattie might’ve gone to Cilgerran looking for this other man; that’s why you asked whether Lizzie knew anybody there?’
‘He had to be there for some reason, didn’t he? Reckitt hadn’t done his post-mortem then, don’t forget, so Nattie might’ve jumped to conclusions about what’d happened.’
‘What if he went to see Reckitt? Everybody knew that Reckitt and I’d been to Rhosdywarch. Stockton might’ve wanted to ask him what he’d seen when he examined Lizzie.’
John drew in a considering breath. ‘Possible, I suppose. But don’t you think it’s more likely that if Nattie’d got wind that Lizzie was seeing somebody else – if she’d told him, even – he’d’ve blamed this other man for what happened to her? Or he might’ve heard the rumour about somebody coming away from Rhosdywarch in the early hours. He could easily have heard a whisper at church – maybe people were even looking at him funny. And he’d’ve known it wasn’t him who’d been there, so maybe he marched straight off to confront whoever it was?’
I sighed, remembering the emotions that had boiled in me when I discovered who had murdered Margaret Jones; the furious rage I had felt when I realised that I had left her in danger. I knew that if I had confronted her killer, I would not have been entirely responsible for my own actions.
Had Nathaniel Stockton confronted the man he believed to be responsible for Lizzie’s death, and died himself as a result?
John
On the way to Rhosdywarch, I tried to picture Nattie Stockton going to Cilgerran to confront Lizzie’s other man. Had there been a fight? It was possible – the bruising on Nattie’s face and body showed he’d definitely taken some punches. But his knuckles hadn’t been damaged, had they? So if there had been a fight, it’d been very one-sided.
Still, when we asked Mic Rees whether somebody’d been in bed with Lizzie on the night she died, I knew what Harry’s next question’d be. Is he from Cilgerran?
When you thought about it, asking whether his daughter’d been courting in bed was about the most intimate question you could ask a father. But then, coroner’s investigations put me and Harry in an odd position. For a short while we got to know a small number of people very well. We’d go back and forth to the same places again and again, asking questions, trying to get to the bottom of things. All the time inching closer and closer to the truth of what’d happened. And then, after the inquest, we just left. Like as not, we’d never see any of those people again.
It was the exact opposite of my job on the estate. At Glanteifi, I’d see the same people week in, week out, year after year, for the rest of my life. And I’d probably never get to know any of them as intimately as I knew the people we spoke to in our investigations after a single day. Was that something I needed to do? Really get to know the tenants, get them to trust me – not me, the agent for Glanteifi, but me, John Davies? Could I do that?
I didn’t know. I was worried that people would keep me at a distance because of my job, but perhaps, if I went to talk to them, sat in their kitchens, I could show them that behind the title, I was just like them, that I knew how they thought, how they felt.
We splashed through the ford at the bottom of the hill below Rhosdywarch and I looked over at Harry. ‘Are you going to try and have this conversation with Mic Rees privately?’
‘I think we’d better, don’t you? I don’t imagine he’ll tell us anything if we speak to him in front of his wife.’
* * *
I hadn’t been inside the house at Rhosdywarch before, but there was nothing surprising in the kitchen. Esther Rees was a woman who liked to be in charge, and her house said as much. There was nothing of Mic in the kitchen at all. No tools propped in a corner waiting to be mended. No pipe sitting on the hearth. Even the cushion on the big chair next to the fire didn’t have his arse-dent in it. It’d been shaken out, all its feathers fluffed up inside, as if it’d just been stuffed.
‘We were hoping to have a word with your husband, Mrs Rees,’ Harry said as we walked in.
Esther Rees was busy making butter in the cool draught between the open front door and the back window. ‘He’s not here,’ she said, not so much as breaking her rhythm with the knocker. Up and down it went in the earthenware churn.
‘When will he be back?’ I asked.
‘Sunday. He’s gone down to Haverfordwest with the carrier to deliver cloth.’
‘That’s a long way from home.’
‘Mic does good work. Takes it down to a tailor in the town this time of the year, every year, regular as clockwork.’ She panted slightly as she spoke. It’s strenuous work, making butter. And once you’ve started, you can’t really leave off, so she wasn’t being disrespectful, just practical. Most women would’ve asked if we minded if she carried on, but then Esther Rees wasn’t most women.
‘You probably won’t have heard,’ Harry said, ‘but Nathaniel Stockton’s body was pulled out of the river at Cilgerran on Monday.’
That stopped her. The knocker fell to the bottom of the churn and she stared at him. ‘Dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’ She wasn’t going to ask if he’d killed himself, like Sally Sips and her father.
‘That’s for the jury to decide. I’m holding the inquest on Monday. Can you ask your husband to attend, please?’
Esther grabbed the knocker’s handle and got back to work. ‘Why? Mic can’t’ve had anything to do with it. He’s been here all the time.’
‘I’d like him to come, nonetheless. There are some questions I need to ask him, and as he’s not here now, they’ll have to be answered at the inquest.’
‘Such as?’ Esther Rees kept her eyes on the churn. She needed to keep beating the fat out of the buttermilk till it was just a lump sticking to the little wings of the knocker.
‘Just ask him to attend, please. Ten o’clock on Monday at the Pendre Inn in Cilgerran.’
‘Right. I’ll tell him.’ When Harry didn’t reply, she looked up. She was waiting for us to leave.
But Harry wasn’t finished. ‘As I said, Mr Stockton’s body was found in Cilgerran. Do you have any family there? Did Mic do business there?’
She didn’t falter this time. Up and down. Up and down. She was a strong woman, Esther Rees, and the sound of the cream inside the churn was changing quickly. Squelching instead of splashing. Nearly done.
‘No,’ she said. ‘My family’s all over this way. Mic’s from up by Llanybydder.’
‘And he doesn’t do business in Cilgerran? Doesn’t take his cloth there?’ Fair question – it was a hell of a lot closer than Haverfordwest. But then it was a lot smaller, too.
‘No.’
‘What about Lizzie? Did she know anybody in Cilgerran?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
She didn’t look at us, didn’t hesitate. ‘Sure as I can be.’
But knowing what we knew now about the night of Lizzie’s death, that
might not be as sure as she’d like to be.
* * *
It felt as if we were leaving Rhosdywarch with our tails between our legs, but it couldn’t be helped. Mic was the only person who knew the name of the man who’d been with Lizzie Rees on her last night on earth, and he was on his way to Haverfordwest. It was time to get back home and deal with the living.
But Harry had other ideas. ‘I think we should try and find out where Stockton went after he left the church on Sunday, and how he ended up in Cilgerran,’ he said as we crossed back over the ford. ‘You know – whether people saw him walking towards Rhosdywarch or towards Cilgerran straight away, whether there was anybody with him…’
‘And who’s going to tell us that?’
‘Congregants at Eglwyswrw church.’
‘He didn’t stay for the service, remember? They’d all have been inside when he left – they wouldn’t know where he’d gone or who with.’
‘Latecomers, then. Or people who weren’t at church who were about at that time.’
‘Finding anybody who saw him would take too much time – we need to get back to Glanteifi. Or have you forgotten that it’s Matthew Thomas’s funeral tomorrow morning?’
The noise Harry made told me that yes, he had forgotten. And that he wasn’t exactly pleased to be reminded. Well I didn’t want to think about it either, come to that. Just saying the words had made me feel cold in the pit of my stomach.
‘We have to be there, Harry. If you really think it’s necessary, we can come back over here on Saturday. Or Sunday.’ I had a sudden inspiration. ‘Think about it – if we go to Eglwyswrw on Sunday morning, we’re more likely to be able to talk to the right people, aren’t we? The same people’ll be late for church every week if it’s the same as chapel. And the same people’ll be hanging about in the street as well. They’ll be there ready for us to talk to them.’
Harry gave one of those big sighs that meant he didn’t want to agree with me but he knew I was right. ‘Very well. Let’s stop in Eglwyswrw on the way home for something to eat, and you can write a note for Caleb Richards. At least the magistrates won’t be able to complain,’ he added. ‘They’re keen that I should use the local constables, so let’s see how much they like paying for the hire of a horse for a day while Richards rides over half of this side of the Preselis summoning witnesses.’