Not One of Us

by Alis Hawkins

  Don’t be fatuous, Harry. She didn’t have to say it. But the alternative to retreating into fatuity was to face the truth: my father had not trusted me with his diaries. He might have shared them with me before John ever came to Glanteifi, before the strokes that eventually killed him had yet prevented him from speaking.

  But why would he? I had given him ample evidence that I had no interest in the way he ran Glanteifi.

  And now I had exacerbated things by running away. If John delayed in coming to Eglwyswrw, I would have to interview churchgoers and Sunday loiterers myself. To say I did not relish doing so without him at my side was an understatement.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, I stood at the churchyard gate, nerving myself to accost any latecomers.

  Yesterday’s rain was gone, and the September sun smiled down on me as I waited, but today, apparently, the whole congregation had arrived in a timely fashion. Perhaps they had all been agog to hear any news of Lizzie Rees and Nathaniel Stockton. Two sudden deaths in the same week must surely be unprecedented in this small community.

  Around the churchyard wall, at the side of the Cenarth road, a horse shifted, its harness jingling. Abandoning my post, I followed the sound and found a carriage and three traps, including, presumably, the one in which David Jones had conveyed his family and Amos Bowen to church the previous week.

  A boy sat on the wall beside all the hobbled horses. ‘Good morning,’ I greeted him. ‘Were you here watching the horses last week during the service?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you see anybody come out of the church and walk away – perhaps while people were still arriving? A young man, a little taller than me, with dark hair?’

  He did not reply immediately, and being unable to tell whether this was due to effortful recall or the hope of payment, I took a small silver coin from my pocket – a threepenny piece as far as I could tell from its size.

  It seemed to galvanise the child. ‘There was somebody. Came running out.’

  I held the coin in the palm of my hand, pretending to scrutinise it. ‘Was there anybody with him?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Was there anyone else who might’ve seen him too? On the main street, perhaps?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir. Can’t see much of the street from here, can you? And it would’ve been time for chapel, anyway.’

  In other words, most Eglwyswrw folk would have been at Sunday worship burnishing their souls or maintaining the good opinion of their neighbours. I gave him the coin and was about to turn away when I remembered something else. ‘The man who ran out of the church – did he go off towards Felindre or the other way, towards the Cilgerran road?’

  ‘He didn’t go either way. He went straight into the Sergeant’s.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘No. You can’t see the Sergeant’s from here, the stables’re in the way. But I heard the door open and bang shut. There’s a weight on it so it shuts by itself if you don’t hold onto it – makes a heck of a noise.’

  * * *

  The landlord’s response when I had established Nattie Stockton’s movements on the previous Sunday was one of slightly affronted astonishment. ‘That was the young fellow they dragged out of the river? Well, nobody told me that!’

  ‘So,’ I confirmed, ‘he just drank a brandy and left – is that right?’

  ‘Well, you know, we talked about poor Lizzie Rees. He’d only just heard.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing much. Just how it’d been a shock hearing it like that when he’d come to church expecting to see her.’

  ‘You hadn’t met him before?’

  ‘No.’

  Could he be lying to me, trying not to get involved? Given the way news travelled, he must be aware that I was holding an inquest the following day in Cilgerran. I missed John and his skills of observation acutely, and I was becoming increasingly worried that he would not follow me this morning as I had requested. We had never found ourselves fundamentally opposed in this way before, and I was at a loss to know how to mend the rift.

  ‘Have you heard much gossip in here about Lizzie Rees’s death?’ I asked the landlord, realising that I should have asked him before.

  ‘You know how it is, Mr Probert-Lloyd, a publican hears all sorts, and if he’s wise, he takes it all with a fistful of salt.’

  I took this for what it was: a polite way of declining to comment. A publican with a loose tongue soon had no patrons.

  ‘But,’ he added, ‘there was plenty of talk about that young man – the Englishman, I always heard him called. People would’ve taken Lizzie Rees dying like that a lot more easily if he hadn’t been involved with her. Even sensible heads were saying he must’ve had something to do with it.’

  Thanking him, I sat down again with a mug of beer to await the end of the service over the road.

  So engrossed was I in my thoughts that I did not notice the door open behind me, and almost jumped out of my skin when John sat down opposite me and started speaking as if we had been in the middle of a conversation.

  ‘Harry, what if Nathaniel Stockton never went to Cilgerran? What if whoever killed him just took his body there to throw it in the river?’

  John

  Harry looked as if he’d been shot when I sat down. Was he that surprised to see me? I knew we had things to sort out between us, and we would. But not today. Today was for finding out whatever we could about Nattie Stockton’s death and we both knew that if we couldn’t get what’d happened to him clear in our heads before the inquest, the whole thing’d be a shambles. I didn’t want people from St Florence coming up here and saying we didn’t know what we were doing.

  ‘We’ve been assuming that because he was found in Cilgerran, he must’ve been killed there,’ I said. ‘But what if he wasn’t?’

  I sat back as the landlord came over with a jug of coffee and some cups on a tray. I hoped it’d be better than Reckitt’s.

  ‘Think about it,’ I said when he’d gone. ‘Reckitt says Nattie was probably killed late on Sunday morning or early Sunday afternoon, so he can’t’ve gone far after leaving the church. More than likely he was killed somewhere near here.’

  Harry chewed the inside of his lip. ‘True. But why take the body to Cilgerran, then? It’s a long way from here.’

  ‘Not that far if you’ve got a horse or a cart.’

  ‘After dark, presumably?’

  ‘Probably. We know he was left somewhere after he’d been killed. Hidden somewhere small, with him being tucked up like he was.’

  I wasn’t going to admit it to Harry, but Nattie being killed here rather than in Cilgerran had been Dan James’s idea.

  After Amos’d left the Drovers, I’d sat down with Dan and another Newcastle Emlyn boy. Once they’d told me all the town gossip I’d missed, they’d tried to get me to talk about life at the mansion. In the end, the other lad had got fed up with me being discreet, and had left Dan and me on our own.

  ‘Why are you really here?’ Dan asked, keeping his voice low. ‘It wasn’t just because you fancied a pint, was it?’

  I looked over the table at him. We’d been good friends at one time – even after we left Mr Davies’s school to go to work – but I hadn’t seen him, not to have a drink with, for months. Since Harry’d made me under-steward, I’d been living a completely different kind of life, but now, sitting here with Dan, I realised there were bits of my old life I missed.

  ‘I needed to get out of the house,’ I admitted. ‘It gets a bit much sometimes.’

  ‘What, living with the crachach, you mean?’

  I grinned and supped my ale. Didn’t want to be disloyal. ‘Just feels like we’re always talking about work. If it’s not the estate, it’s an inquest.’

  ‘You’re never telling me that it’s dull being coroner’s assistant?’

  ‘No, it’s not that…’

  ‘What, then?’

  I didn’t want to tell him about the argume
nt I’d had with Harry, so instead I told him about Nattie Stockton’s death and the strange condition his corpse’d been in when Caleb Richards brought it to the Pendre.

  ‘Compared to how we usually do things,’ I said, ‘we left it all a bit up in the air over there, to tell you the truth. We had to get back for Matthew Thomas’s funeral yesterday, and we’ve been up at Plas Blaengwyn today.’

  Daniel stroked his chin. It was something he used to do at school to make the rest of us laugh when our teacher said ‘consider this, gentlemen’, but I wasn’t laughing now. ‘If somebody threw him in the Teifi at Cilgerran,’ he said, ‘it was probably because they were hoping the tide’d wash him out to sea, right?’

  That was what Caleb had thought too. Wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then I didn’t live by a tidal bit of the river. Neither did Dan, come to that, but he’d always been quick.

  ‘So it doesn’t necessarily follow that he was killed in Cilgerran, does it?’ he said. ‘That was just a convenient place to get rid of him. I reckon the killer’s got to be whoever beat your Englishman up before.’

  Which was the same conclusion Sally Sips’d jumped to. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, if they thought he’d defied them, started seeing this Lizzie again – even got her courting in bed – they’d’ve been pretty bloody furious, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, I know. But what’d be the point of killing him after she’d died?’

  ‘Punishment.’

  ‘She died a natural death. And people knew that right from the off. Her father went for a doctor to certify the death before he even sent a messenger to tell her mother.’

  ‘Maybe so. But what doctors say and what people believe are two different things, aren’t they? What did everybody in Eglwyswrw think? That’s the question. More to the point, what did the boys who gave your dead man his beating think?’

  Dan leaned over the table, close enough for the acne scars on his forehead to show up in the light of the candle between us. ‘They think this Nattie was courting in bed with this girl and while he was there she died, and now he’s getting away with it. No inquest. No trial. No punishment. But they’ve lost the girl they were all chasing. They’d want him to pay, wouldn’t they?’

  I looked at Harry now. ‘I think we should still talk to people after church – see if Nattie was seen going off with anybody. And then we should find out whether there are any ponds nearby.’

  * * *

  The Sergeant’s landlord told us that the church service usually finished around half past eleven, so we walked out of the inn at a quarter past, just in case. It was a nice day. Waiting outside wasn’t going to hurt us.

  Opposite the inn, a boy I’d seen around the stables before was sitting outside, perched on a saddle horse.

  ‘Not at chapel?’ I said it with a smile, so he’d know I wasn’t finding fault.

  ‘Got to be here when they come for their horses,’ he said, jerking his head backwards at the churchyard to let me know who ‘they’ were.

  I stood where I could see him and keep an eye on the churchyard. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harry quietly move out of sight. Good idea. Best if the child thought it was just me being nosy and the master’d gone on to wait for whoever we were here to see.

  ‘Were you sitting out here last Sunday morning?’ I asked.

  The boy sucked snot back through his nose and spat. I waited, watching him. He’d be about eleven. His hair was too long and kept falling into his eyes. He pushed it away with dirty-nailed fingers, but it just fell straight back. Must drive him mad.

  ‘Yes,’ he said when he was good and ready.

  ‘A man came over from the church, just around the time the service was starting,’ I said. ‘A young man. He went straight into the Sergeant’s. Did you see him?’

  The boy squinted up at me. ‘What did he look like?’

  I described the clothes Nattie Stockton’d been wearing when he died. ‘About as tall as me,’ I said, ‘with dark hair.’

  ‘Didn’t see him go in. Must’ve still been seeing to the horses.’

  ‘But you saw him come out, did you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Think carefully, now. When he came out of the Sergeant’s, was there anybody else about that you could see?’

  He gave it some thought, glanced up and down the street, trying to remember. Then he chin-pointed up the road. ‘Over there.’

  ‘Who did you see?’

  The boy started taking an interest in his fingernails, using the thumbnail of one hand to pick the dirt out from under the nails on the other.

  ‘I won’t tell anybody you told me,’ I said. ‘But I need to know. For the coroner.’ It was a risk. Mentioning Harry could go either way – it might scare him into telling me, or scare him so much he clammed up altogether.

  ‘Twm y Gof and his friends,’ he said, without looking up. ‘Having a smoke after chapel. Like always.’ He was cleverer than he looked, this boy. If it always happened, it didn’t need to have been him that’d told me, did it?

  I looked behind me. The blacksmith’s open-fronted workshop was barely twenty yards away, on the opposite side of the road. There was nobody there now. ‘Chapel finish early last week, did it?’ I asked. There weren’t many chapels that let you out much before midday as a rule.

  ‘Elders’ meeting,’ he said, wiping his nose with the side of a finger then rubbing the snot off on his trousers.

  ‘When you saw the man come out of the Sergeant’s, did they say anything to him, Twm and his friends?’

  He shrugged, eyes down.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked. He looked up then. I didn’t suppose people usually asked. ‘Gwilym.’

  ‘Gwilym, I need to know what happened. It’s really important, because somebody killed that man later that day.’

  The boy’s eyes widened, but then his face closed up. If the man he’d seen had been murdered, talking to me might be dangerous.

  ‘Did Twm and his lot say anything to him?’

  ‘Couldn’t hear.’

  ‘Did they follow him?’

  A shake of the head, eyes down.

  ‘So he just walked past them and they took no notice of him?’

  A shrug.

  ‘Gwilym, come on! Tell me what happened and then I’ll go.’

  The boy stared up at me, hoping I wasn’t lying to him but worried that I was. ‘He didn’t walk past them. When he got to the coach house, he turned around and came back this way.’

  I looked at the sight lines. Stockton wouldn’t have been able to see the forge from the entrance to the Sergeant’s – he’d only have seen Twm and his friends standing there when he drew level with the coach house.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘He walked that way.’ The boy nodded in the direction of the road to Cardigan.

  I stared down the road. There was a lane that went off not far along.

  ‘He went across the fields?’

  Gwilym shrugged. If the man’d gone in the opposite direction from the one he’d take to go home, then at some point he was going to cut across the fields, wasn’t he?

  ‘And the men at the forge – they didn’t follow him?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘They went off that way.’ He nodded in the direction of Felindre Farchog. ‘One of them lives along there.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dai Blaengwndwn.’

  ‘Was Wil Llain with them?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Anybody else?’

  ‘No.’

  Twm y Gof, Wil Llain and Dai Blaengwndwn. The three who’d been after Lizzie, according to Llwyo. If they’d also been the ones who’d given Nattie Stockton a beating, then no wonder he didn’t want to walk past them. The question was, had they caught up with him somewhere on his way home?

  By this time, a few people were standing in the churchyard and I could see the vicar by the door, talking to people as they came out. But now we knew when Nattie Stockton had last been seen and where h
e’d been going, there was no need to talk to the rest of the congregation.

  I gave Gwilym a penny and went round the stables to tell Harry what I’d found out.

  ‘Reckitt said somebody’d twisted Stockton’s arm behind his back and forced his face into the water, right?’ I said. ‘But what if it wasn’t just one somebody? These three names keep coming up whenever we talk about Lizzie Rees and Nattie Stockton – Twm y Gof, Wil Llain and Dai Blaengwndwn. So maybe all three of them were involved.’ I could see him turning that over in his mind, working out if it fitted what we knew. ‘Think about the bruising on his body,’ I said. ‘It’s the kind of thing you’d expect if two people’d held him and a third had done the punching, right? So maybe once they’d finished punching him, they drowned him.’

  Harry nodded, with that fixed look on his face that told me he was trying to see it all in his mind’s eye; walk through it.

  ‘If they intercepted him going over the fields, it does seem to add up.’ He sounded cautious. ‘If we can find a pond, and somewhere nearby where they might’ve hidden him, then I think it’d be worth calling the three of them to give evidence tomorrow.’

  ‘We’d need to stop them getting together beforehand and coming up with a pack of lies.’

  Just then, I saw Llwyo walking up to the stables and saying something to the boy. ‘There’s my prime informant,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and ask him about ponds.’

  * * *

  Llwyo was not best pleased when he turned to see who was blocking the light and spotted the two of us standing in the doorway.

  ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for the town crier. I’ve told you everything I know about Lizzie Rees.’

  I watched him hanging his jacket on a nail. He must live in the village, because he’d already changed out of his Sunday best into his working clothes. ‘It’s not Lizzie Rees we’re here to talk about,’ I said. ‘It’s the Englishman. Nathaniel Stockton.’

  He picked up a shovel and scooped up a pile of shit that a big grey gelding had just dropped. ‘’Scuse me.’