by Alis Hawkins
I followed him out to the midden and almost walked into a little pony trap that was standing in the small back yard.
‘Mind that,’ Llwyo said. ‘Belongs to the Sergeant’s and I don’t want it scratched, all right?’
I stared at it. ‘Is it left out here all the time?’
‘No, mostly it’s kept in the coach house, unless there’s something paying to be in there.’
I could see that the trap’d be easy enough to wheel in and out without a horse between the shafts. It was a low little thing, obviously designed for a biggish pony, not a carriage horse. A man could easily stand between the shafts and pull it.
‘High-class, mind,’ I said. ‘Lanterns and everything.’
‘You know what it’s like. Somebody takes it out in the morning, has a bit of a day somewhere, loses track of the time and ends up coming back in the dark.’
Very keen to talk about anything apart from Nattie Stockton, Llwyo was. Which suited me, seeing as he was telling me how three lads could easily have pulled this without a horse if they’d had to.
‘Sunday night – was it out here?’ I asked.
He sucked his teeth and thought. ‘No, it would’ve been inside on a Sunday. Not much business— Oh, hold on, no. We had Mr and Mrs Esau staying at the Sergeant’s that night. Horses in here, carriage in the coach house.’
Which meant the trap would have been here, nicely available. And the moon had been almost full on Sunday night – perfect conditions.
Llwyo was staring at me. ‘That it? Can I get back to work now?’
‘One more thing. Are there any ponds nearby?’
‘Ponds?’
‘Cattle ponds, duck ponds. Standing water generally.’
Eyes on me, he sucked a breath in. You could almost see the words ‘What’s this now?’ floating above his head. ‘There’s what they call the drovers’ pond. Just off the main road on Blaengwndwn land. ’Bout a quarter of a mile out of the village.’
Blaengwndwn. It had to be them.
Harry
I asked the landlord of the Sergeant’s if we could borrow Llwyo for half an hour or so on coroner’s business, and was granted as much time as I needed. ‘My lazy toad of a son will have to shift himself if the next coach comes in before you get back,’ he said. ‘Won’t do him any harm.’
Llwyo, however, obviously resented being press-ganged, and despite John’s best efforts remained monosyllabic as we walked out of the village, a raggle-taggle of small children following us chattering and laughing. Two gentlemen walking along in the company of a groom obviously represented excellent entertainment.
Initially I humoured the children, turning around periodically and rushing a few steps towards them in mock fierceness, but when Llwyo came to a halt and pointed at a lane a few yards ahead of us, I decided that I had provided sufficient amusement. ‘Enough now,’ I said. ‘Off home with you all. No more following us.’
I waited, but they did not turn around.
‘Go on now, off you go!’ I took a step towards them, my fierceness not false now, and waved my arms as if they were sheep.
They retreated, and one of the bigger ones turned around, inducing the others to follow suit. I watched them casting glances over their shoulders at us for a moment, then turned to Llwyo.
‘The pond’s just down there on the left,’ he said, pointing once more.
‘I’d like you to come with us, please.’
Without a word, he marched up the lane, John hard on his heels, with me following as fast as I could without running the risk of falling headlong. Once more I looked behind me. The children had returned and were advancing slowly towards us. ‘Go! Go home now,’ I shouted, ‘or there’ll be trouble!’
They stopped in their tracks, and one of the smaller ones burst into tears. Not wishing to induce any further wailing, I left them where they were and made as much haste as I could after John and Llwyo.
By the time I reached the pond, John was walking carefully around the edge. I stood back, so as not to trample on any evidence there might be, and watched his careful quartering of the ground.
At one point, he stooped as if to look more closely at something, then crouched down on his haunches. Though I was impatient to know what he had seen, I bit my tongue. He had evidently decided on a truce while we were on coroner’s business, but it would not do to provoke him.
Fortunately my patience was not long in being rewarded. ‘Llwyo,’ he called, ‘come here a minute, will you?’
As I picked my way carefully around the pond in the groom’s wake, a lark burst into song above our heads, trilling notes falling from a single point in the air as the invisible bird hovered on fluttering wings. In an old reflex, I looked up, and immediately the sky was full of the flat grey nothingness of the whirlpool.
‘See this?’ I heard John say. ‘There’s been a scuffle here. Look – you can see where the grass has been torn and flattened. And just by the water, there? Prints made by boots, not hooves. And then there’s these dents here.’ He looked up from his squatting position. ‘As if somebody’s been kneeling down.’
‘If you say so.’ Llwyo sounded mutinously unimpressed.
‘I do. And look here. Footprints. Two people, one each side of whoever was kneeling.’
Two people. One holding Nathaniel Stockton’s arm hard enough that his shirt buttons bit into his wrist, the other pushing his face beneath the surface.
I could restrain myself no longer. ‘How deep is the water just there?’
John pulled up his sleeve and thrust his hand in. ‘Six inches or so.’
‘And the bottom?’
‘Mud with little stones in it,’ he said, rising to his feet and shaking the mud and pond water off his fingers.
‘Pond weed?’ If the answer was no, then no amount of scuffling would convince a jury.
‘Yes, all the way around the edge.’
He moved a yard or two to the left and squatted again to examine something.
‘What can you see?’ I asked.
‘Some odd-looking prints. As if somebody’d been walking on their heels instead of with their whole foot.’
In my peripheral vision, Llwyo shoved his hands in his pockets as if he was bored. It was such an affectedly casual gesture that it instantly gave him away. ‘Llwyo? You know something don’t you?’
He shook his head. ‘This is nothing to do with me.’
‘Wrong. This is to do with anybody I see fit to question. Nathaniel Stockton was murdered. He had pond weed in his throat, which means he was drowned in a pond. If he was drowned in this one and you know something about those prints, you’d better tell me, or I’ll have you up before the bench!’
I rarely made threats, and my time as a barrister had taught me never to make any that I was not prepared to carry out. Perhaps Llwyo saw that.
‘Wil Llain’s only got half of his right foot,’ he said, reluctance in every word. ‘Accident at the quarry.’
‘So he has to walk on his heel?’
I could feel Llwyo’s resentful gaze on me. ‘Sam Cobs makes him a special half a boot.’
John’s notion that the three friends might have conspired to kill Nathaniel Stockton made sense of the state of the corpse; he had been battered but had not landed a blow himself. Now, the evidence here also seemed to bear the theory out. Two men holding Stockton, one of them pushing his head under the water while the lame and less well-balanced Wil Llain stood by.
And Twm and Dai – leaving Wil at home to provide an alibi for them if necessary – could easily have pulled the trap from the Sergeant’s to Cilgerran, with or without a pony. If anybody had looked into it in the dark, they would have seen nothing more than a man apparently curled up, sleeping off the effects of too much beer.
I turned and began walking back towards the road, the sun warm on my face. John and Llwyo fell into step with me. ‘What’s your real name?’ I asked Llwyo. ‘I need it for the records.’
‘David Davies.’
‘Very well, Mr Davies, I’m instructing you now, as coroner – which means as a magistrate – to say nothing about what you’ve seen and heard here to anybody. Particularly to Wil Llain, Dai Blaengwndwn and Twm y Gof. D’you understand?’
I caught an upward jerk of his chin.
‘If I get the slightest inkling that you warned them that I know what happened here, I’ll have you thrown in gaol, understood?’
‘I’m not stupid,’ Davies growled, made daring by my use of Welsh with him.
‘Who’s the plwyfwas in Eglwyswrw?’ I asked. ‘We’ll need him to bring the three of them to the inquest and to make sure they don’t cook up some story on the way.’
‘You might have trouble there. Our plwyfwas is the blacksmith’s brother. Twm’s uncle.’
I heard a grunt from John. We both knew that the law came a very poor second to blood. But fortunately, I was not wholly reliant on the parish constable. Pembrokeshire might not have a uniformed police force as yet, but in each of the county’s seven hundreds – the ancient administrative divisions – there were two salaried superintendent constables who oversaw all the parish officers. As soon as we got back to the inn, I would have John write a letter to the superintendents for Cemais. Twm’s uncle could deliver them. We needed Wil and his friends to be brought to the inquest without having had any chance to agree a story beforehand.
As we all made our way back to the lane, something caught at the edge of my peripheral vision. Accustomed, by now, to analysing impressions that went unnoticed by the fully sighted, I stopped and angled my gaze over the rough ground to see better.
John turned to see what had stopped me. ‘What’s that over there?’ I asked.
He followed my pointing finger up the shallow slope. ‘Looks like a corn-drying kiln.’
Fieldside corn kilns were smallish stone-built structures usually dug into a bank. Used for drying grain before milling, a small one like this was unlikely to be in frequent use.
Which would make it an excellent temporary hiding place for a body.
John
The sun was shining as we rode up Cilgerran’s main street, and people were enjoying the warm Sunday afternoon. Old people’d pulled chairs and stools outside their doors and were sitting talking to their neighbours while the women knitted or sewed and the men had their Sunday pipes. Little gangs of lads and girls were standing about, calling to one another and flirting, and children chased around like yapping puppies, playing the games little children play and laughing at things that stop being funny when your age goes into double figures.
Sitting on Seren’s back, dressed like a gentleman, I caught some female eyes. I’d forgotten how pretty girls looked in their Sunday best. I smiled back at them, and that feeling I’d had the night before in the Drovers came to sit under my breastbone. A yearning for something I hadn’t known I’d missed – people like me. Lads who’d grown up on farms, girls who’d been working at home or in service since they were eleven or twelve, ordinary people who didn’t have to worry about law exams or inquests or running an estate. Especially not running an estate. All the worries I was trying to ignore – worries about how I was going to manage – rushed into my mind and I had to push them back out of sight before they could make me sick with fear. I fixed my thoughts on girls instead. It wasn’t too difficult.
All the talk we’d heard about Nattie Stockton going to church to see Lizzie Rees had reminded me of why I used to go to chapel. And now, seeing the colourful Sunday shawls and the ribbons girls’d put in their hair and the smiles that only come when you’re not rushing to get on with your work, I thought maybe I’d start going to chapel again.
On the ride over from Eglwyswrw, we hadn’t talked about anything except the inquest, and it was the same now, when we sat down in the Pendre. I didn’t want to start arguing again, and I didn’t think Harry did either, and anyway, we had enough to think about. Like we always did before an inquest, we got on with planning the order we were going to call witnesses in and the questions we were going to ask. In particular, we talked about how to handle the three suspects.
Harry’d managed to badger quite a lot of information out of Llwyo about Wil, Twm and Dai. According to him, Wil and Dai had been thick as thieves since childhood – like brothers, he said – and Twm was Dai’s cousin. That meant Dai owed loyalty to both the other two. Twm was the kind of man who didn’t mind challenging strangers – we knew that because he’d come over to the churchyard when we were talking to Sally Sips to see if we were bothering her. So it looked like Wil was the one to go for. And it made sense for other reasons as well. Before the accident, his job at the quarry’d have meant that he was the one with money in his pocket, the one with good prospects. Now he’d be the lame one, the one who couldn’t run properly, who’d always come off worse in a fight. The one who might not be so attractive to girls as he’d been before. He’d be the easiest to push into a confession.
‘How do we handle him?’ Harry asked. ‘Sympathise with him about how hard it must’ve been to keep up with the other two, that we know all this can’t have been his idea?’
I nodded as I swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘Yes. If we can convince him that if they’re all tried, they’ll all hang, under the doctrine of common enterprise, we’ll have him. That’ll be his chance to tell us which one of them actually pushed Nattie’s head into the water. But we should bring him up to give evidence last, then we can use any of the lies the other two’ve told us to persuade him how much trouble he’ll be in if he doesn’t give us the truth.’
I’d learned a lot of tricks since becoming assistant coroner. Tricks I wasn’t always proud of, if I’m honest.
* * *
Seeing as we were on the county’s ticket, we stayed at the Pendre overnight instead of at Reckitt’s freezing-cold house, and I got a decent night’s sleep, which was a relief. With everything going on at Glanteifi, I hadn’t been sleeping well at all.
The next morning, we were having breakfast in the landlord’s parlour – which was a lot nicer than the taproom – when there was a knock on the door and a smartly dressed man walked in.
‘Beg pardon, I’m Superintendent Constable Vaughan. Just thought you’d like to know that the witnesses you wanted bringing up from Eglwyswrw are here. Brought them all separately, like you asked.’
Harry stood up. ‘Thank you. Where are they now?’ He looked like a child next to Vaughan; the man was over six feet tall. Just as well to be big if you’re going to frogmarch people around the countryside, I suppose.
‘They’re in the lock-up at the other end of the village. With the other superintendent and the plwyfwas we got in to help us.’
‘Not the one from Eglwyswrw?’
‘No, sir. Everything’s been done exactly as you said in your letter. We’ll bring them up here before you start – there’s a room waiting for them, is that right?’
‘Yes, upstairs. Have some breakfast before you go back, Mr Vaughan, and charge it to the coroner’s account. In fact, send your colleagues up in turn. You must all have been up at the crack of dawn.’
‘Well at least dawn’s early enough, this time of year. It’s when you’ve got to go marching about in the dark that it’s hard on a man.’
Harry thanked him again and off he went to have his breakfast.
I wondered what the lock-up in Cilgerran would be like. It probably wasn’t intended to hold five men at a time, so things could be quite cramped. Being roused at first light and marched up here would’ve told Wil, Twm and Dai that they were under suspicion, but at least they wouldn’t’ve had any time to get their story straight. Unless the children who’d followed us out to the pond had told them what we’d been up to. And that was a definite possibility. All it would’ve taken was one of them saying something at the evening service and our advantage would be gone.
Still, we’d done what we could.
* * *
The inquest was scheduled for ten, and people started drifting into the Pendre from n
ine onwards to get a good seat and catch all the gossip. The place had been properly scrubbed for the occasion – there was fresh sawdust on the floor, and the tables were clean and milky from limewash. It’d soon be back to normal, but at least the landlord’d made an effort for when people arrived.
From the snippets of conversation I heard, everybody seemed to know about Lizzie Rees giving Nattie the coron fedw, and the words ‘courting in bed’ came up quite a lot as well. That rumour’d gone around like butter in a hot skillet.
Harry and I were just working out where the witness chair would get the best light when Lydia Howell walked in. I’d wondered if she’d come, and to be honest, I was glad she’d be there to keep the peace on the way home.
She got some looks as she came over to us. She wasn’t wearing a betgwn like a working woman, but she didn’t exactly look like a lady, either. Her dress was plain, without all the frills and fancies you saw ladies wearing. But then if she’d been a lady, she wouldn’t’ve come into the taproom. Especially not on her own.
Except she wasn’t entirely on her own. Daniel ‘Lleu’ Williams was with her.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.
‘He arrived at Glanteifi yesterday,’ Lydia said.
‘I’ve left that school Miss Gwatkyn sent me to,’ the boy piped up. ‘It was no good to me. They wanted to teach me Latin and Greek and all that nonsense. I’ve got no use for that! I want to learn practical things.’
He’d been there a week.
‘Miss Gwatkyn told me to try it, and I have,’ he said, as if Phoebe Gwatkyn couldn’t expect any more of him. ‘It’s not what I need. I need to go and see Mr Harborne and his engineer. See if they’ll take me on.’
I turned to Lydia for advice, but all she did was raise her eyebrow. Did she think I was responsible for the boy running away?
‘As it happens,’ I told Lleu, ‘I spoke to Mr Bowen – Mr Harborne’s engineer – about you last week. His opinion is that you should go to school and learn mathematics and then go somewhere to study technical drawing. Don’t they teach mathematics at the school Miss Gwatkyn sent you to?’