by Alis Hawkins
But Caldicot hadn’t looked down his nose at me, had he? He’d treated me like someone who mattered. We’d drunk claret together and he’d laughed and joked and answered my questions as if he never doubted my right to ask them.
And then, of course, he’d lied to my face.
Eyes on Miss Gwatkyn, I watched carefully. Nothing. Neither of them turned to the other, no glances were exchanged. Either they didn’t know each other or they were doing a good job of pretending they didn’t.
I watched Caldicot turn to the man standing closest to him – one of the Alltybela footmen – and say something with a jerk of his head towards the front of the room. Asking who the boy giving evidence was.
Not that he had long to watch him. None the wiser about where Rowland had been going late at night, Harry dismissed Billy and called Doctor Benton Reckitt to give his testimony.
Unlike Harry and Caldicot, nobody was backing Reckitt’s candidacy for the coronership and he’d had to go back to work after his brief see-how-the-land-lies trip to Tregaron at the beginning of the week. We hadn’t seen him at the Talbot that morning so he’d probably come up as far as Lampeter the previous day and ridden up to Llanddewi Brefi after an early breakfast.
I wondered how Reckitt was feeling, now he knew Ruth Eynon was responsible for Rowland’s tidy hair and not the teacher’s murderer. I knew Harry would’ve told Reckitt what we’d found out from the girls if he’d been able to but, as it was, there’d been no way of getting word to him. Would he suspect that Harry’d deliberately kept Ruth’s evidence quiet, to make him look like a fool on the stand? You never knew how Reckitt was going to react. Apart from his reaction to corpses. That was always the same – business-like, meticulous, diligent.
Watching him shamble down the room and lower himself on to the chair, you’d have sworn the doctor was the clumsiest person alive. But, with a scalpel in his hand, he was a different man entirely. He could lay a heart open and show you the workings of its smallest veins, then close his clever slicings up again so you’d never know he’d been in there.
The jury watched him take his seat. They didn’t look very impressed. Not that that was a surprise – short of finding poison in a body, jurors didn’t set much store by medical evidence, as a rule. If doctors had been better at curing people it might’ve been different. But, when they weren’t very good at keeping sick people alive, their opinion about how somebody’d died wasn’t considered to be worth much.
I flicked a glance at the newspapermen scribbling away at the back of the room. I wondered if they’d comment on Reckitt’s appearance. He was one of those men who always look untidy. His body seemed the wrong shape for clothes and he made things worse by not bothering much how he wore them. His necktie was always in an untidy knot, his trousers were baggy at the knee and you could tell he expected his maid-of-all-work to do his laundry instead of sending it out because his shirts were never starched and his coat needed a damn good brushing. Still, at least he’d shaved.
Harry looked up. ‘Dr Reckitt, would you be good enough to give us a description of the body as you found it and your thoughts on his injuries, please?’
Reckitt’s Welsh might be good enough for his workhouse patients, but he always gave evidence at inquests in English, so Ruth Eynon swapped to Welsh to translate his testimony for the jury. It was the first time I’d heard her speaking Welsh and she seemed a different girl. More confident. Mind, some of the doctor’s technical language gave her some trouble. Contusion. Dorsal. Effusion. Welsh wasn’t used for autopsy reports.
While we listened to more details of Rowland’s injuries than anyone strictly needed, I looked about to see how people were taking it. Every eye was on Reckitt or Ruth. Apart from one little boy on his mother’s lap who was pointing at something. I followed his finger and saw a butterfly fluttering against the cracked glass of one of the windows. The warmth of the sun must’ve woken it up and now the spring air was calling it out. The little boy patted his hands together in that clumsy way small children have and his mother smiled down at him. Something moved in my chest, like a heartstring being plucked.
‘At the jury’s viewing of the body,’ Harry said, ‘you gave it as your opinion that Mr Rowland was the victim of foul play. Is that still your opinion?’
Reckitt hesitated. ‘On balance,’ he said, after a second or two, ‘yes, it is still my opinion. The clavicular fracture – the broken collarbone – and the injury to the front of his head could have happened by accident; if he’d tripped over the rug in the loft, for instance. But the damage to the back of his skull definitely seems to indicate foul play. It’s a very significant wound – especially when compared with the relatively minor injury to the forehead – and indicative of some force.’
‘But that injury – the broken skull – could it not have been sustained by the ladder falling backwards, if Mr Rowland had tried to climb it after falling out of the loft?’
Again, Reckitt hesitated. Without the hair-combing murderer theory, he was having to re-think things. ‘I think it unlikely.’
‘And that injury is, in your opinion, what killed him?’
Reckitt looked at Harry as if he’d like to come over and shake him by the lapels. ‘Probably. But an autopsy, which I strongly advised, would have allowed me to be more definitive.’
Would it? He’d only come up with the smothering theory because he thought somebody’d held Rowland by the hair and banged his head on the floor, then smothered him to make sure he was dead. If nobody’d held him by the hair then maybe nobody’d banged his head.
Harry didn’t look up from his note-taking. ‘Could you explain to the jury what evidence a dissection of the body would have provided?’
Other people might’ve thought Harry was just dotting i’s and crossing t’s but I knew he wasn’t. He was challenging Reckitt to justify his complaint about not being allowed to open Nicholas Rowland up. He didn’t want the jury or anybody else to go away thinking he should’ve asked Reckitt to do more. Harry knew enough had already been left undone for this inquest and he wanted to avoid awkward questions at the public meeting.
‘I felt it would be prudent to look for signs that whoever was responsible for inflicting the blow to the back of Nicholas Rowland’s head had finished the job by smothering him.’
‘And that would, unequivocally, have proved foul play?’
‘Of course.’
Harry made a note then looked up in Reckitt’s direction. ‘You’ve stated that you don’t believe that the injury to the back of Mr Rowland’s head is consistent with simply falling backwards from the ladder. May I ask how you came to that conclusion?’
Reckitt shook his head. ‘What I actually said is that I thought it was unlikely. The main reason being the very different nature of the two injuries to his skull that I’ve already mentioned; one simply a significant contusion, the other a depressed fracture.’
Harry nodded as he wrote. ‘And, finally,’ he said, without looking up, ‘could you tell the jury what form of evidence you would have looked for at autopsy to support the idea that he might have been smothered?’
Reckitt leaned forward. ‘Anything in the state of the viscera that differed from normal.’
Ruth Eynon hesitated at ‘viscera’ and shot a glance at me. ‘Insides,’ I said quietly and she finished translating the sentence.
‘Anything that was different from normal?’ Harry frowned. ‘Am I right in thinking that there are no published descriptions of the effects of smothering that a medical witness might refer to? Nothing, in other words, to say, “this is what a victim of smothering looks like”?’
‘No. That’s why we need more autopsies.’
The crowd stirred a bit, then. More cutting people up, I could see people thinking. No, thank you.
Reckitt and Harry, between them, were turning his testimony into electioneering and it wasn’t going well for the doctor. Now, when he stood up the next day and spouted his nonsense about opening up every single person who�
��d died to see if a reason could be found for their death, people’d know that medical men weren’t even sure what they were looking for.
‘So,’ Harry said, ‘just to be completely clear for the jury. Even if you’d carried out an autopsy by dissection, you’d only have been able to say that either Mr Rowland’s viscera did look different from what you’d expect or that they didn’t. You wouldn’t have been able to say, with certainty, that he’d been smothered? Not beyond doubt?’
Reckitt stared across at us. Finally, it seemed to dawn on him that he hadn’t done himself any favours, here.
‘Doctor?’
Reckitt stared at him. ‘Not beyond doubt, no.’
‘So, again just to be clear for the jury, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, is it your opinion that the depressed fracture to the back of Mr Rowland’s skull – however he came by it – was the most likely cause of his death?’
The doctor didn’t sigh so much as deflate. ‘In the absence of any other evidence, yes.’
The jurymen started muttering amongst themselves. Harry let that go on for about half a minute, while he wrote down what Reckitt had said, then he looked up.
‘Gentlemen of the jury, is there anything you’d like to ask Dr Reckitt?’
All eyes turned to the foreman, Llew Price, who’d stood up. I had a pretty shrewd idea that he could speak English perfectly well – most shopkeepers could – but he asked his question in Welsh. Perhaps he wanted to be sure he’d asked exactly what he meant to. ‘Dr Reckitt, are you saying it’s impossible that Mr Rowland died from falling by accident?’
Reckitt turned to face him. Must’ve been unnerving for the grocer, Reckitt staring at him as if he could see his innards through his skin. I looked around the room quickly. Most people were watching the doctor but some were talking behind their hands or mouth-to-ear.
‘Without clear evidence, no medical man would ever rule something out completely,’ Reckitt said, finally. ‘There’s so much variation in what’s normal that it’s impossible.’
‘Aye,’ Llew Price interrupted before he could say any more. ‘Maybe Mr Rowland had a thin skull and it was easily broken. We don’t know, do we?’
‘But that’s something we could have known!’ Reckitt was half out of his seat as if he wanted to go and lay hold of Llew Price, make him listen. ‘Skull thickness and how it varies is a known quantity. We have data. A post-mortem would have told us whether Rowland’s skull thickness was unusual in any way.’
‘But knowing that he had a thin skull still wouldn’t tell us whether he died by accident, would it? It would only tell us whether it was more likely that he could’ve died by accident.’ Llew Price’s voice was apologetic, as if he was having to point out something he regretted. ‘It’s all about likelihood, isn’t it – all this medical knowledge?’
Likelihood. In English, he would’ve said ‘probability’, but Welsh isn’t a scientific language. English is good at absolutes. Science. Welsh is better at poetry and metaphor and a different kind of truth. Not one that’s clear cut and neat, like Reckitt’s scalpel cuts, but messy and bloody and confusing. Like life.
‘Thank you,’ Harry took control once more, ‘but I believe we may have wandered away from our inquest and into questions of philosophy. I think the main thing to bear in mind, from Dr Reckitt’s testimony, is that he strongly believes that foul play was involved but that he cannot absolutely rule out Mr Rowland’s death being an accident. Is that accurate, Dr Reckitt?’
What could Reckitt say? He might not like Harry’s summary, but that was what his evidence’d said.
The last witness on Harry’s list was Mattie Hughes. Harry didn’t think Mattie had any evidence to give the inquest as to who had killed Rowland but he wanted to try and prove to people that Mattie hadn’t.
The crowd watched as the old soldier hecked on to the platform with his stick. Since Rowland’s death, Llanddewi Brefi’d made Mattie Hughes into a pantomime villain but now, seeing him looking tired and perhaps not in the best of health, some people had the grace to look shamefaced after what they’d done to him the other night.
I flicked a glance at Llew Price. I hadn’t seen much in the way of impatience from him about Jeremiah Eynon being called. Biding his time, I supposed, listening to what everybody else had to say.
‘You and I both know,’ Harry began, as soon as he’d sworn Mattie in, ‘that there are people in this room – many people perhaps – who think you killed Nicholas Rowland.’
Mattie didn’t need to answer. The crowd did it for him. Apart from the journalists who just scribbled frantically, almost every person present turned their head to their neighbour and wondered at the coroner coming out with such a thing.
The man himself wasn’t so easily shocked. Eyes front and centre, he waited for the crowd to simmer down. ‘We do know that, yes,’ he said, when most of them’d shut up.
‘For the record, I’d like you to tell this hearing whether you did kill him.’
People who’d stopped muttering started again. They were getting good value out of this inquest.
Mattie waited, shaming them into silence. ‘No,’ he said, loud and clear. ‘I did not.’
‘Glad he’s dead though, aren’t you?’ a voice shouted from somewhere at the back of the room.
Mattie’s eyes never left Harry.
‘Is that true?’ Harry asked. ‘Are you glad he’s dead?’
‘No.’ Said without hesitation. ‘Saw enough death fighting the Boneys to last me ten lifetimes. Did I wish him gone from here? Yes. But I never wished him dead.’
‘Obviously, there are people here who might choose not to believe that,’ Harry said. ‘Can you give any evidence that you didn’t kill him?’
Mattie glared at him. ‘What happened to innocent until proven guilty?’
‘The ceffyl pren isn’t interested in that, though, is it, Mr Hughes? I’m offering you a chance, here before all your neighbours, to convince them that you didn’t kill Nicholas Rowland. It’s more than they offered you on Wednesday night.’
Mattie didn’t move. He was already sitting as straight as he could with his peg-leg out in front of him. Looked tidy, too. Shirt a freshly-boiled white, faded red jacket brushed clean, trousers old but pressed. Did he have a smoothing iron, I wondered, or had he put them under a box?
He’d polished his one boot, too. Blacked it to a mirror shine. Not to be cowed, Mattie Hughes.
But he still hadn’t said anything.
Harry and I had discussed how this would go. Hughes wouldn’t want to admit that there were things he couldn’t do. ‘You’ll have to ask him specifically,’ I’d told Harry, ‘make him tell you.’
‘Tell me, Mr Hughes,’ Harry said now, ‘can you climb a ladder?’
Mattie sucked his teeth. Even to save his skin he didn’t want to admit to infirmity. ‘I might be able to. If it was fixed and the rungs were sturdy.’
‘And if it wasn’t fixed? If the rungs weren’t sturdy? You wouldn’t be able to do it, would you?’ Harry asked.
Mattie’s eyes flicked to me. He knew where these questions were coming from and his jaw worked as if he was gathering a gob on his tongue to spit at me. ‘Ever tried hopping up a ladder, Mr Probert-Lloyd? Rungs are apt to give way. Found that out, to my cost, as a much younger man.’
‘Very well. You couldn’t have climbed into the loft over there and pushed Mr Rowland out. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you just happened to be down here, in the schoolroom, when Nicholas Rowland fell. You could have killed him then – just as Dr Reckitt suggested – couldn’t you?’
‘I could if I’d been here. But I wasn’t. And I didn’t.’
‘I’ve heard it said that you know a dozen ways to kill a man. Is that true?’
If Harry was trying to make Mattie Hughes angry, it was working. And it was getting the crowd going as well. The comments around the room were loud enough to hear and some were along the lines of see, even the coroner thinks he di
d it. But Harry knew what he was doing.
‘No,’ Mattie said, in a voice loud enough to shut people up. ‘I’ll admit to knowing a few. Every soldier does. Nothing like a dozen though.’ He leaned forward and began to stab the air between him and Harry with a finger. ‘But I learned to kill for King and country. Enemies. I didn’t learn how to kill people so I could come home and do it. Anybody who says that is insulting my regiment and insulting the crown!’
A certain amount of shouting broke out then, telling Mattie to mind who he accused. The little boy who’d clapped his hands at the butterfly looked frightened by all the shouting and his mother held his face to hers, stroking his hair.
‘I’ll tell you something else as well,’ Mattie said, as Simi Jones shouted for quiet. ‘I’ve only been in this school building once before today. And it nearly killed me.’
That shut people up more effectively than the plwyfwas.
Harry waited for absolute silence. ‘Can you explain, please, Mr Hughes?’
‘Just after Nicholas Rowland set up the school here, I came to see him. Couldn’t get a lift so I walked. With my crutch.’ He stopped, eyes on Harry, trying to pretend there was nobody else here. ‘It’s not comfortable, using a crutch. It rubs against you, here.’ He lifted his arm and slapped his hand onto the red material where his ribs went up into his armpit.
‘Here and back from my house is almost a mile. Nothing to you but it’s ten times what I normally walk. Rubbed the skin clean off. Red raw. Then it festered. Had a fever for a week. Had to have the doctor at the finish. Ask him if you don’t believe me.’