by Alis Hawkins
Nobody moved except Lydia, who took the seat that was courteously vacated for her.
‘Gwilym,’ I said, once I had established that the boy had not seen Nathaniel Stockton leaving the church but had seen him emerging from the Sergeant’s Inn, ‘can you tell us – was the service still going on in church when Mr Stockton came out of the inn?’
‘Yes.’ Gwilym’s head was down, his answer directed into his lap.
‘Did he come out a long time before it ended?’ I wanted to know whether there was anybody apart from our suspects who might have followed him. Somebody leaving the church after the service was over was the most obvious candidate, but if Nattie had left the inn well before the service’s conclusion, his having been followed by a congregant was unlikely.
‘Yes, a long time before the end,’ the boy said. ‘They hadn’t even finished the second hymn.’ That confirmed the landlord’s account of his short conversation with Stockton while he downed a tot of brandy.
‘Did you see anybody else leaving the Sergeant’s and following Mr Stockton?’
‘No.’
‘Where did you see Mr Stockton go?’
‘He started off one way,’ the boy told his lap, his index finger pointing to his left.
‘Then what did he do?’
‘Stopped and turned back. Went the other way.’ His hand flipped over, his thumb extended to the right.
‘When did he stop?’
‘When he got to the coach house.’ His voice was so quiet that even I could barely hear him.
‘Speak up, boy,’ one of the jurymen called gruffly. ‘We can’t hear you.’
The lad seemed to shrink into himself, and I held up a hand. ‘No need. So you saw him stop when he got to the coach house next to the Sergeant’s. What made him stop – do you know, Gwilym?’
The boy shrugged, head lowered.
‘Do you think it was because he saw who was standing at the forge?’
Head still bowed, he remained mute, but the jury would take my point.
‘You say he turned and went the other way – would he still have been able to make his way back to Gilfachwen if he went that way?’ I asked, in case any of the jurymen were unfamiliar with Eglwyswrw’s main street.
Gwilym seemed to curl in on himself even more at this question, as if he was afraid that even a glimpse of me would cause him to catch fire. He made no sound, but John gave a soft tap on the table. It was our code: one tap for ‘witness indicates yes’, two for ‘no’; we had learned very early on that badgering reluctant witnesses to speak for my benefit rather than nod and shake their head had an unhelpfully repressive effect.
‘Gwilym, some of the jury don’t know Eglwyswrw,’ I said. ‘Can you tell us how Mr Stockton would have got back on the road towards Gilfachwen after going the wrong way?’
‘Up the lane to Trewilym,’ the child murmured. ‘Then over the fields. Then back to the road.’
I repeated the information for the jury, then asked him who had been standing outside the forge. As Lydia quietly translated the question for the Stocktons, the boy turned his head to the crowd, presumably looking for the three men. He would not see them, of course, but given that Twm y Gof and his companions had been frogmarched out of their homes at first light, I suspected that he would see members of their families staring back at him.
‘Gwilym?’ I prompted. ‘Don’t forget you’re under oath,’ I added gently, hoping to reassure him that people would understand that he had no choice but to give up the names I wanted.
‘Twm from the forge. Dai Blaengwndwn. And Wil Llain.’
If I had not already been familiar with the three men, his barely audible mumbling would have been unintelligible, so I repeated the names for the benefit of both spectators and jury. ‘Do you know them well?’
He shrugged.
‘I expect you see them about, do you?’
A smaller shrug and a tap on the table from John.
‘Obviously Twm’s at the forge all the time,’ I said. ‘But what about the others – are they there often?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Particular days?’
A shrug.
‘Sundays?’ I prompted. ‘After chapel?’
One tap. Yes.
‘Not at any other time?’
‘Evenings. Sometimes.’
‘All three of them?’
There was a pause, during which John leaned back in his chair. Wait. ‘Sometimes just Dai comes. Sometimes Dai and Wil.’
‘Never just Wil?’
No audible answer came from the boy, but there were two taps on the table from John. No.
‘Wil and Twm don’t get on, then?’ I was asking for my own benefit as much as for the jury’s information, seeking a hole into which I might insert a lever so as to prise a rift in the trio.
The boy twitched a shrug so small that I would not have noticed had I not been watching him carefully over the whirlpool. Again, two soft taps made sure that I knew the answer.
‘What did the three men do after Mr Stockton had turned round and gone the other way?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing at all?’
Wait.
‘They laughed,’ Gwilym muttered.
‘They laughed? Did the three of them stay at the forge long after that?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Where did they go?’
Another shoulder twitch.
‘Did you see which way they walked?’
‘Towards Blaengwndwn.’
‘Where Dai lives?’
One tap from John.
‘That’s the road towards Felindre Farchog?’ I clarified.
One tap. The child was afraid to give voice to what he saw as a dangerous truth.
‘So,’ I said, for the benefit of the jury, ‘it would have been easy enough for them to catch up with Nathaniel Stockton – the man who you saw coming out of the Sergeant’s – if they’d gone up into the fields?’
Another single tap.
I turned to the jury and asked if they had any questions for the boy. One member stood.
‘Did you ever see these three men talking to Nathaniel Stockton – the man you saw coming out of the Sergeant’s – before that day?’
A nod, a tap.
‘Often?’
‘Only once.’
‘What did they say?’
A shrug.
‘You didn’t hear?’
‘Not my business.’
‘Was it friendly?’
The boy hesitated. ‘Not really.’
‘Why?’
‘He was laughing.’
‘Who was – Nathaniel Stockton?’
One tap.
‘Do you know why?’
‘A word Twm said. An English word. It was the wrong one.’
So, not only had Nathaniel Stockton committed the cardinal sin of trying to woo a local girl, but he had mocked those who most objected to his doing so. Not a strategy calculated to win him friends in Eglwyswrw.
The juryman, apparently satisfied, sat down, and at my word, Gwilym fled. ‘Ask David Davies to step in, if you’d be so good,’ I called to Caleb. It was time for Llwyo to tell the jury what we had seen the previous day at the pond.
John
I was supposed to be making careful notes, but my mind kept snapping back to Lydia’s suggestion. Did I want her as my assistant? It would probably be good for the estate, but would it be good for me? Arguments on both sides kept appearing in my head, as if there were two tiny people inside my skull shouting at each other. I knew there weren’t, obviously – I’d seen the inside of more people’s heads than I wanted to, thanks to Harry and Dr Reckitt – but the voices felt real, and I couldn’t shut them up.
I don’t know how I managed to record the things Llwyo said. Later, when I was reading my notes for the inquest report, I didn’t have any memory of writing the words down. But there it all was – the evidence of what we’d seen when Llwyo took us out to t
he pond on Blaengwndwn land. The knee marks, the scuffling, the signs that Wil Llain and his half a foot had been there, that something’d been dragged through the mud and ashes in the corn kiln’s flue.
‘Dr Reckitt gave evidence that there was mud and pond weed in Mr Stockton’s airways,’ Harry said when Llwyo’d agreed that at least three people had been standing at the edge of the pond. ‘Can you tell the jury whether there was pond weed in the water near to where the footprints were?’
‘Yes. There was.’ Llwyo flicked a glance at me, as if him having to give evidence was all my fault. Perhaps it was.
‘You work at the Sergeant’s Inn stables, which stand within sight of the forge in Eglwyswrw. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever see the three men the stable boy named – Twm y Gof, Dai Blaengwndwn and Wil Llain – with Nathaniel Stockton?’
Another glance at me. Regretted selling me those names now, didn’t he? ‘No.’
‘You never even saw them exchange the time of day as he passed on his way home from church?’
‘No.’
‘So the incident Gwilym described, when Mr Stockton appears to have mocked something Twm y Gof said – you didn’t see that?’
‘No.’
He wasn’t going to give us a jot more than he had to, Llwyo. Didn’t want anything getting back to Eglwyswrw about him landing the three of them in the dock.
As soon as he left the witness chair, noise broke out everywhere again. Even the jurymen put their heads together and started talking about what they’d just heard. Things were stacking up, and in a different inquest – one with a coroner who wasn’t interested in doing anything more than he had to – they’d have gone out now to decide on a verdict. The evidence of what we’d seen at the pond and what Reckitt’d found in Nattie’s throat was easily enough to bring in a verdict of unlawful killing by person or persons unknown. But that wasn’t Harry’s way. He wanted Edgar and Beatrice Stockton to leave his inquest knowing who was responsible for their son’s murder. And he wanted to be able to deliver the culprits to the local magistrate so they could be arrested and kept in Cardigan gaol pending trial.
Caleb Richards had gone off to fetch the next witness, and the pot boys were going round with their jugs. I watched them making their way through the crowd, laughing with this person, calling out to that one, but always keeping on the move, filling pots and taking pennies.
Next to me, Harry was fiddling with his writing frame. ‘What did Lydia want?’ he asked. ‘Does she have views on my strategy for the inquest?’ I could tell he was trying to pretend he didn’t care one way or the other.
‘No, nothing like that. She had a suggestion about the estate. I’m sure we’ll talk about it on the way home.’ Better by far to talk about Lydia being my assistant than to go back to arguing with Harry about what to do with the money from the Moelfryn farms.
People in the front rows started craning their necks to see something behind us, and I swung round in my chair. Caleb Richards had come in with the man who’d called out to Sally Sips when Harry and I had been talking to her in the churchyard. Twm y Gof.
We’d decided to start with Twm because he seemed like the most likely ringleader of the forge gang. Meeting at his place would more or less put him in charge, so if we could get any information out of him, persuading the other two – especially Wil – to talk would be easy. That was what we’d thought, at any rate.
And when Twm came and sat in the chair in front of us, I had hopes that we were right. He might be stocky and muscular like you’d expect from a blacksmith’s boy, but I could see he wasn’t strong in the nerves department. Properly twitchy, he was – leg bouncing, fingers tapping on his knees, shifting in his chair every five seconds. I thought we’d be able to trip him up easily.
I was wrong.
Fair play, I don’t think our strategy was a bad one. Instead of going through questions the jury already knew the answers to and letting him get settled, we’d decided to go straight in on the attack, throw him off balance. And we were doing it in Welsh – the Eglwyswrw boys’d be more on guard in English because they’d have to think carefully about the right words for every answer – so Lydia was still translating for the Stocktons.
Straight away, Harry told Twm that we knew the three of them had been competing for Lizzie Rees’s affections. Told him we knew they’d all given love spoons to her, so an outsider coming in to sweep her off her feet must’ve been a very unwelcome shock.
And things seemed to be going to plan to start with. Twm was rattled – his knee was going up and down like a steam piston.
Then Harry told him we knew the three of them had tried to warn Nattie off, and that Nattie’d been seen trying to avoid them on the morning he was killed. ‘He saw you, and straight away he turned back the way he’d come. But you weren’t going to let him avoid you for long, because you’d heard the rumours about him being at Rhosdywarch, courting in bed with Lizzie, the night before, hadn’t you? You thought he’d defied you. And now Lizzie was dead.’ He sat there looking squarely at Twm and not seeing him at all.
‘The thing is, Twm, earlier in this hearing, one of the Gilfachwen outdoor servants who shared a loft with Nathaniel Stockton gave sworn testimony that he didn’t leave the loft that night.’
‘Then he’s lying!’ Good. Twm was cracking.
‘No. We know he’s not lying, because both Lizzie’s father and the man who was courting with her that night have given evidence. Amos Bowen was with Lizzie on the night she died, not Nathaniel Stockton.’
Twm was struck dumb for about five seconds. Then he shook his head as if he was clearing it. ‘No. That’s a lie. It was him. Stockton.’
‘You don’t go to Eglwyswrw church,’ Harry ploughed on, ‘so perhaps you don’t know Amos Bowen. He works – or I should say worked – over at Dolbannon. You might have heard of him. He used to wear an eyepatch and he has a stutter.’
By that point, Twm was halfway out of his seat. ‘What – Dolbannon’s twpsyn? Don’t talk nonsense, Lizzie would never—’
‘In fact, Mr Bowen is far from weak-headed,’ Harry said while Caleb Richards pushed Twm back down onto the chair. ‘People often mistake a speech impediment for a slowness in thinking, but Lizzie Rees knew that wasn’t true. She saw beyond the squint and the halting speech. She was in love with Amos Bowen.’
I thought we had him then. His face had gone a dirty grey. But shocked or not, he kept his mouth shut. And that was when our plan began to unravel.
‘You and your two friends were seen walking along the Felindre Farchog road in the direction of Blaengwndwn on Sunday morning, a few minutes after you’d seen Mr Stockton,’ Harry said. ‘Mr Davies and I walked out to the Blaengwndwn land yesterday, and we found a pond. A pond where there were footprints – some of which could only have been made by your friend Wil Llain – and signs that somebody had been kneeling next to the water.’
My heart started to beat faster then. What would Twm say when presented with actual evidence that they’d all been there?
‘Can you tell us what you were doing at the pond, Twm?’
‘Yes.’ Twm sounded as if somebody had their hands round his throat, squeezing it. He cleared it and tried again. ‘Yes. We were drowning kittens.’
Shit. Those damned children must’ve told Twm and the other two that we’d been out to Blaengwndwn.
Mind, Harry didn’t turn a hair. Barrister’s training. ‘Why would you take kittens all the way there from the farmhouse? Why wouldn’t you just drown them in a bucket in the yard?’
Twm cleared his throat again. ‘Dai’s little sister. She’s very soft-hearted. He didn’t want her to see.’
If they all stuck to that story, we were sunk.
Twm had a bit of colour back in his face now, and he jiggled and jittered his way through the rest of Harry’s questions.
Had they seen Nathaniel crossing the fields while they’d been at the pond?
No,
they’d been too busy drowning kittens.
What had they put in the corn flue?
They hadn’t put anything in there. A badger must’ve been in there looking for food.
What were the scuff marks at the edge of the pond, as if somebody’d been dragged there?
Wil Llain and Dai had tried to push him into the pond as a joke.
They’d got their story straight.
* * *
It was the same with Dai Blaengwndwn. He came up with more stuff about his little sister, and how she tried to persuade their father to let her keep each litter of kittens when there were more than enough cats on the farm already, but in the end, his story was exactly the same as Twm’s, even down to him and Wil trying to push Twm into the pond for fun. They’d been there drowning kittens. They hadn’t followed Nattie. They hadn’t seen him in the fields. They hadn’t killed him. They hadn’t put him in the kiln.
I watched Dai while he was giving evidence. I could see that he might’ve been more attractive to Lizzie Rees than Twm. Twm was too twitchy. He’d be quick to fly off the handle, and no wife wants that. Mind, we hadn’t got him to lose his rag and tell us the truth, had we, so perhaps he had more self-control than you’d’ve thought from looking at him. But either way, Dai was calmer, quicker to smile, especially when he was talking about his little sister.
Did the jury watch his face as carefully as I did? Did they see his reaction when Harry told him that it hadn’t been Nattie courting in bed with Lizzie that night, or when he told him who it had been? He didn’t go quite as grey as Twm, but something in his face changed, and I’d’ve been willing to bet anything you like that he suddenly felt cold and sick, the way you do when you suddenly realise that you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.
But that kind of reaction isn’t evidence, is it? Not enough to convince a jury. Not with the kitten story to explain away the evidence. Especially when the dead man was a foreigner.