by Alis Hawkins
And anyway, half the jurymen were probably too busy watching Harry to notice Dai’s face. He’d been doing this job nine months now, and he was good at it. Very good. He could hold juries spellbound with his words in a way that witnesses with their ums and ahs and stops and starts just couldn’t.
But whatever he said to Twm and Dai, whatever questions he asked or suggestions he made – You wanted to punish him, didn’t you, for Lizzie’s death? Because who would, otherwise? – neither one of them gave an inch. They just kept telling the same story. They hadn’t seen Nattie Stockton. They’d gone to the pond to drown kittens. That was why their footprints were there, that was why there were kneel marks there.
And to be honest, maybe they were cleverer than we’d given them credit for. Maybe they had gone back and drowned kittens, so Dai’s parents would back them up if they were questioned.
* * *
When Harry dismissed Dai and asked Caleb Richards to bring Wil Llain down, the crowd started milling around again and I saw Lydia get to her feet and excuse herself to the Stocktons. She came over to our table and leaned to speak into Harry’s ear. I couldn’t hear what she said over the noise in the room, but when she straightened up, Harry nodded, and she went back to her seat.
‘New strategy,’ he said. But there was no time for him to tell me what it was because Caleb was leading Wil Llain to the witness chair and the spectators were settling again.
Missing half a foot or not, Wil the quarryman was tall, upright in spite of his limp, and looked as if he had no nerves at all.
He was one of those slow people, Wil Llain. I don’t mean he was stupid; he just took his time with everything. Deliberate. Even the expressions on his face didn’t come and go like they do in most people. They lingered, as if it took a lot to make him feel something but then the feeling wasn’t easily snuffed out.
He smiled when Harry asked him if he’d been sweet on Lizzie Rees. ‘Every unmarried man in the parish was sweet on Lizzie. And some of the married ones as well, if you want the honest truth.’ The smile was still on his long, beaky-nosed face when Harry swooped in with the next question.
‘By Saturday afternoon, it was all around the parish that Nathaniel Stockton had been seen leaving Rhosdywarch at first light – that he and Lizzie had been courting in bed. Did you believe that?’
Clever. Asking whether he’d heard the rumour would’ve been as good as asking him if he’d had a motive to kill Nattie, so he’d’ve denied it. Asking whether he believed it suggested to the jury that Harry knew Wil had heard the gossip.
And Wil fell for it. ‘She’d given him the coron fedw, so I reckoned it was probably true.’
‘How did you feel when you heard she’d died?’
Wil looked straight at Harry and blinked a couple of times. ‘It was a shock. Terrible. Being so sudden like that.’
‘It was sudden,’ Harry agreed. ‘But not suspicious. Dr Gwynne had confirmed that before anybody heard a word about her death. Lizzie Rees died of natural causes.’
‘So the doctors say,’ Wil Llain said in his deliberate way. ‘But they don’t know everything, do they?’
Harry waited as a murmur of agreement went around the room. ‘True,’ he said, his blind gaze fixed on Wil to make him feel uncomfortable. ‘But the fact is, if a doctor says that somebody’s died a natural death, there’s no inquest, is there?’
Wil Llain stared at Harry for a long time but gave no answer. In truth, he didn’t need to. Harry was just making a point.
‘And if foul play goes undetected and there’s no inquest,’ Harry went on, laying out his words in that careful way that meant he was thinking while he spoke, ‘then somebody gets away with murder.’ He sighed. ‘A year ago,’ he continued slowly, ‘I found myself in that position. I knew somebody’d got away with murder, and I had to decide what to do.’ He was still looking in Wil’s direction and nodding a little bit as if he was agreeing with himself – or with Wil. ‘Somebody I cared about, somebody I loved – a young woman very much like Lizzie Rees – had been killed and I knew I couldn’t just let the man responsible get away with it. I had to do something.’
No response from Wil except in his eyes. They narrowed just a tiny bit. He was wary, Wil Llain.
People in the crowd leaned to their neighbours, whispering, wondering why Harry was telling him all this.
‘In the end, I couldn’t bring the killer to justice,’ Harry said. ‘He was beyond my reach. But at least I knew the truth.’ His fist came down on the table with a quiet thud that sounded louder than it was in the sudden hush.
‘And that was what you wanted, wasn’t it, Wil? The truth.’
Wil stared at him. I couldn’t have named the expression on his face, but his hands’d clenched into fists. I wondered if the jury would notice. Probably not; they were all watching Harry too.
‘It must’ve felt as if fate was taking a hand that morning, when Nathaniel Stockton came out of the Sergeant’s and almost walked right into you. When he turned round and walked the other way, you must’ve known at that moment that he couldn’t face you because of what he’d done.’ Harry paused for a second or two, eyes on Wil. ‘I know what that feels like, Wil. The man who murdered the woman I loved fled too. All the way to America.’
By now, the room was completely silent, but it was an uneasy silence. What’s the coroner doing?
‘You saw Nattie Stockton walk off the other way and you knew he’d be going up the lane so he could cut back across the fields. It was perfect, wasn’t it? Just as if it was meant. Dai had already been trying to talk the two of you into coming with him to get rid of some kittens, so after a few minutes, you said the word and off you all went.’
You said the word. Harry was telling Wil that, half a foot or not, he knew that he was the strong one of the three, the leader. Was that what Lydia’d whispered to him, or had it been her idea for him to talk about Margaret Jones?
‘It must’ve been easy to spot Nathaniel Stockton in the fields,’ Harry continued. ‘Did he run away when he saw you? Didn’t matter, though, did it, because Dai and Twm brought him back to you. And they held him while you tried to make him admit what he’d done to Lizzie. Because you knew – you knew in your heart – that he’d hurt her, didn’t you?’
I swear, half the people in the room were holding their breath now. You could almost feel the stillness of the air.
‘But he just wouldn’t give in, would he? Wouldn’t tell you the truth. He kept lying, saying he hadn’t been there. However hard you worked on him, he kept lying.’
Harry wasn’t asking questions, he was telling a story, and Wil Llain just sat there listening to him. And it seemed to me that his fists were a bit less tightly clenched.
‘I understand what you were doing, Wil. You wanted to take him to the magistrates with a confession, didn’t you?’ Harry didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I know how that feels – to hear that you were right, that what you knew all along was right and those who said it couldn’t be true, that you should just let it go, were wrong.
‘So you decided to frighten him. You could see that a beating wasn’t going to do the trick. And why would it? You’d tried that before, but he’d still defied you, still gone to Lizzie that night.
‘The pond was right there, waiting to give Nattie Stockton the fright of his life and show him you were serious, that he had to tell you the truth.’
Wil’s face hadn’t moved. He was just watching Harry, listening with no expression.
‘Twm and Dai held his arms behind him and forced his head down into the pond. With his face under the water, he could still hear you telling him he had to tell the truth.’
And now I was holding my breath, thinking about Nathaniel Stockton’s face being shoved down into the water and the weed and the mud.
‘How many times did Twm and Dai let him come up so you could ask him the same question – What did you do to her? Twice, three times?’
Harry waited, eyes on Wil. It was as if they were
alone in the room, just the two of them, with Harry offering Wil a way out, a way for him to make people understand.
‘You didn’t mean to kill him. Of course you didn’t.’ Harry’s words were gentle, almost kind, and Wil was shaking his head, just tiny little movements from side to side as if he hardly dared move, eyes fixed as if he was still watching Twm and Dai holding Nattie face-down in the pond.
‘You only wanted him to tell you what he’d done. But he wouldn’t,’ Harry said. ‘He’d killed Lizzie and he wouldn’t confess!’
I waited for Wil to deny it, to drag out the story of the kittens but things’d gone too far for that and he said nothing, just stared at Harry, moving his head in that small, small way.
‘He couldn’t confess, Wil,’ Harry said, ‘because he didn’t do it. He wasn’t with Lizzie that night. She was courting in bed with another man.’
‘Liar!’
Wil was halfway to Harry in one stride, fist drawn back ready, but Caleb Richards had his other arm up behind his back before he could move another inch. A couple of men surged forward out of the crowd to help him.
‘You’re a liar just like him! He killed her! I knew what he’d done, but he thought he’d got away with it. Thought all he had to do was keep saying no!’ Spit flew out of Wil Llain’s mouth as he shouted, and the three men who had hold of him only just managed to stop him coming at Harry.
Harry was on his feet too. Whether he wanted to defend himself or to try and assert some authority, I don’t know, but the spell in the room broke as Caleb and the other two men wrestled Wil to the ground and Caleb handcuffed him. Suddenly you couldn’t hear yourself think for all the shouts and questions and accusations.
I saw Lydia comforting Mrs Stockton, who had covered her face with her hands and was sobbing.
Harry turned away from the noise and spoke to the jury. ‘Gentlemen, unless you have any questions or you’d like to hear from any other witnesses, you should discuss your verdict.’
As the foreman turned to the rest of them, I took my watch out.
It took them less than two minutes to decide on their verdict, and the three men who’d drowned Nattie Stockton by accident because they wanted a confession and justice for Lizzie Rees were taken away.
Harry
John and I were in the habit of discussing our inquests as we made our way home, and the presence of Lydia and young Lleu with us on our journey home from Cilgerran proved no barrier to such a discussion, especially given the need to recognise Lydia’s invaluable advice as to a change of direction.
However, satisfactory though it was to have laid bare the truth behind Nathaniel Stockton’s death, I found myself oppressed by a sense of futility that John seemed to feel too.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘for once I agree with Dr Reckitt – people should pay attention to science. If Wil and the others’d listened to what Cadwgan Gwynne and Reckitt said, they wouldn’t’ve gone near Nattie Stockton. But no, they decided that the doctors didn’t know what they were talking about, because they wanted to believe Nattie’d killed Lizzie. Because he was a foreigner and he’d gone one better than them with her.’
But it was not only his killers’ preference for their own view of the world that had been responsible for Nattie Stockton’s death; secrets had killed him as surely as prejudice. If Lizzie had not hidden her feelings for Amos out of fear of her mother’s reaction, Amos would not have been mistaken for Nattie when he had been seen leaving Rhosdywarch on the morning of her death.
And Lizzie had not been the only one keeping secrets. There was something that both Mic Rees and Amos Bowen knew that Mic did not wish to be made public. It was not my job to discover what they were hiding, and yet I knew that unless I did, I would be no more satisfied that I had resolved the truth of Lizzie Rees’s death than Reckitt was.
We were more than halfway home, and had been travelling in a slightly melancholy silence for a little while, when John reined Seren in, causing our little cavalcade to slow from a trot to a walk. ‘Perhaps now’s not the time, but then I don’t know when the time might be,’ he said, sounding uncomfortable. ‘There’s something we need to discuss, Harry. Lydia has suggested that when I’m out on inquest business with you, Harry, she should stand in for me on the estate.’
Though he had managed to deliver the news without prevaricating, he sounded guarded, uncertain. Did he expect me to object? Perhaps he wanted me to object, having found himself unable to say no to her. Lydia could be formidable when she chose, and her ideas, as I knew to my recent advantage, were rarely other than sound, which made them hard to reject.
The lady herself, seated next to Lleu, whom she had allowed to drive, said nothing.
‘Well,’ I said cautiously, ‘I have no objection, but it must be your decision, John.’
An uncomfortable silence developed, during which Lleu began, unaccountably, to whistle. Finally John spoke up. ‘I think we should try it. See how it goes.’
‘I’m not suggesting that I step into John’s shoes as under-steward,’ Lydia said. ‘Just that I would be available to carry out his instructions and, if necessary, to make minor decisions on his – and your – behalf.’
If she granted herself the same latitude in carrying out his instructions that she laid claim to when acting for me as private secretary, John would be well advised to apply a firm hand to the reins from the outset. Accepting the Saunders-Jameses’ lunch invitation without consulting me was hardly the only occasion on which she had acted on her own initiative.
‘In Lydia’s capacity as occasional assistant,’ I asked cautiously, ‘would you anticipate her being a party to discussing such things as investments and the sale of land?’
The silence that greeted my question was palpable. Lleu’s whistling ceased, and even the children shouting in a nearby field seemed to have fallen silent, leaving only the birds in the hedgerows on either side of us to sing and chirp as if we did not exist. When John said nothing, Lydia spoke up, and I wondered whether she did so at his silent direction. ‘I must confess, I’d find it strange if we felt we couldn’t discuss things like that as freely as we discuss politics or philosophy.’
Her words conjured a vision in my mind’s eye: the three of us sitting in the library after dinner, deep in conversation. Perhaps consideration of the estate’s future did not need to consist only of the sense of leaden responsibility that I dreaded.
‘Miss Howell should definitely be a party to those discussions,’ John declared. ‘You and I don’t always find the right solution. Look how her intervention just changed the course of the inquest.’
‘Shall we discuss this further at another time?’ I asked, directing my blind gaze at Lleu, as if it were his presence that was responsible for my reluctance to continue the discussion rather than the disturbing notion, provoked by John’s words, that my performance as squire might frequently require Lydia to step in and proffer advice when my own ideas proved inadequate.
* * *
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd! Mr Probert-Lloyd!’ Wil-Sam, our hall boy, burst out of the house as soon as he heard us coming up the drive.
‘What is it?’ I asked, smiling at his excitement. ‘Is the Queen here?’
‘There’s a visitor! From London! Mr Augustus Gelyot.’ He pronounced Gus’s name as if it were a summoning spell.
I told the boy to take the horses round to the stables, and asked Lleu to follow him with the trap. ‘And Wil-Sam?’ He spun around. ‘Then you can take Lleu Williams here to the kitchen and ask Mrs Elias to give the pair of you something to eat.’ That would keep our would-be engineer occupied until I decided whether he should eat dinner with us or with the servants.
As John, Lydia and I trooped into the house, I wondered what on earth had brought Gus to Cardiganshire. He had not written to announce his intention to visit, so either he had very bad news to impart, or he had come on a whim.
‘Did he mention anything about coming down when you saw him the other week?’ I asked John.
&n
bsp; ‘Not a word.’
We discovered Gus sitting at the library’s open French windows, reading a newspaper in the late-afternoon light.
He sprang up as we came in. ‘Ah, the prodigals return!’
‘If there’s a prodigal here, Augustus, it’s you,’ I said, shaking his hand and grinning like an idiot before I remembered my manners and introduced Lydia.
‘Ah, the famous Miss Lydia Howell. So pleased to finally make your acquaintance, Miss Howell.’
‘Likewise, Mr Gelyot.’
‘What on earth has possessed you to quit civilisation, Gus?’ I asked.
‘I needed an excuse to get out of London. You know the city’s intolerable in summer. Only the Exhibition has made it bearable. But even that has paled now.’
It amused Gus to affect a louche persona who disdained gainful employment, but he had become a barrister with the express intention of honing his wit for Parliament, and he stood up in court relatively frequently.
‘And what excuse did you find?’ I asked, crossing to the drinks cabinet. Though I actually wished for nothing so much as a cup of tea, I did not want Gus to start teasing me about becoming a dull provincial just yet.
‘Brandy?’ I held the decanter up.
‘Dear God, P-L, do you still have no sherry? Even if you can’t muster a cobbler, you might at least give me something that won’t have me drunk before dinner.’
I remembered the sherry cocktail Anthony Saunders-James had served us at his boastful luncheon, and vowed that sherry would never have a place in Glanteifi. ‘Afraid not, old pal. Brandy or tea. Or claret, obviously.’
‘Then perhaps we should settle for tea. I don’t want either of us to be befuddled when I tell you why I’ve come.’
* * *
‘The thing is,’ Gus said once we had been provided with tea and given notice that, if we pleased, dinner would be served in an hour, ‘my dear pa is a wary old specimen. As you know, he’s fond of saying that he hasn’t made his money by being a credulous fool but—’