by Alis Hawkins
Harry didn’t need to ask. A respectable-looking man sitting near the front stood up. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I treated him.’
Harry asked for his name and, while he was writing it down, Mattie Hughes sat, back straight, glaring at the two of us. Knew he wasn’t done with, yet.
‘So, Mr Hughes, from that compelling piece of evidence, we can infer that, if you’d walked here less than a week ago, your ribs would, once more, be rubbed raw.’
‘Correct.’
Harry turned to the doctor. ‘That’s right, is it?’
‘It is.’
Quick note made, Harry turned back to Mattie. ‘May we see your ribs, please?’
Mattie’s face turned red. From anger, not embarrassment. ‘Will people believe me if they see them?’
‘Have you other means of transporting yourself?’
‘You know I haven’t.’
Harry turned his gaze to the rest of the room. A hundred pairs of eyes looked back at him, waiting. He’d feel them even if he couldn’t see them. ‘Did anybody here provide transport for Matthew Hughes last Sunday?’ he asked.
I ran my eyes from face to face, looking for any flicker of guilt or recognition, before I settled on Phoebe Gwatkyn. If anybody was going to’ve taken pity on Mattie Hughes, it was her. She had a guilty conscience about him. But, apart from looking over at her stableyard servants who all shook their heads, her response was the same as everybody else’s. No.
‘Did anybody see any strangers in the village on Sunday, then?’ Harry asked. ‘Anybody who might have offered Mr Hughes a lift?’
People looked about, wanting somebody to say that they’d seen a cart passing through, but all they got was their neighbours looking back at them, shaking their heads, pursing up their lips like cats’ arses.
‘So, without any form of transport, to have reached the school, you would have to have walked. I ask again, please will you remove your coat?’
For a second, I thought Mattie’d refuse. But he knew that, if he did, he’d be a dead man. Harry’d made the case for his innocence, now it was his job to prove it.
Finally, his hands went up and, eyes still fixed on us, he undid the buttons down the short front of his jacket. Then he stood up but, before he could shrug himself out of the jacket, Billy Walters ran up on to the platform and helped him take it off. It was an act of pure kindness, to save Mattie from the humiliation of losing his balance, and I knew Billy’d suffer for it. At home if not in the village.
I looked over at Morgan Walters. His face was blank but he was staring at Mattie and his son. Perhaps the ceffyl pren outing hadn’t just been to save Nan from giving evidence. Selling beer and keeping a post office was never going to compete with war stories, but with Mattie blamed for Rowland’s death, he wouldn’t have been able to fill Billy’s head with notions of running away to be a soldier, would he?
The boy held Mattie’s coat while the man himself stumped forward to stand in front of me. ‘No point showing Mr Probert-Lloyd,’ he said, loud enough for everybody to hear. Getting his own back.
He lifted his shirt and unbuttoned the front of his underwear for me to see where the wound was. Fair play, the man was clean. I looked past the grey hair on his chest and round to the side, under his arm. There was a big patch of shiny pink scar-skin. It’d healed but it still didn’t look right and I could believe that it’d festered badly. But as for recent rubbing or scabbing, there was no sign of anything like that.
‘Look on the other side, just in case people decide to start wondering,’ Mattie said in the same, loud voice. He might be standing in front of me and Harry, but this spectacle was for the crowd’s benefit.
I looked. Nothing.
Harry nodded. ‘Thank you, Mr Hughes.’ Then, while Billy helped him back into his jacket, Harry said, ‘I have only one more question. Why did you come to see Mr Rowland on that one occasion you mentioned?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
Harry looked at him. ‘If people don’t know, they’ll invent answers which might be to your disadvantage.’
Mattie nodded. ‘Fair enough.’ He finished buttoning his jacket and sat down. ‘I wanted to ask him if he’d leave the little ones to me and just take the bigger ones who could already read and write.’
‘And he said no, presumably?’
‘He did.’
‘Did he give a reason?’
‘Made some excuse. But excuses don’t put bread on the table.’
Mattie thanked and dismissed, Harry turned his seat to face the crowd.
‘This isn’t a trial. It’s an inquest. The job of the jury is to say how Nicholas Rowland died. If – and I emphasise that “if” – the jury decides that he was unlawfully killed, it is for the law – the magistrates and the police force – to apprehend and try the guilty party. I hope it has been clearly demonstrated here, today, that Matthew Hughes had no part in Nicholas Rowland’s death. I know the ceffyl pren was carried to his house this week. People were angry and they were looking for a scapegoat. You may have thought Matthew Hughes had reason to want Mr Rowland dead. But he did not kill him. He couldn’t have. So let that be an end to it.’
At the back of the hall, the newspapermen’s hands must’ve been cramping. They’d want that little speech verbatim, for sure.
I glanced sideways at Harry. Had he forgotten about Llew Price, or did he just think the jury’d heard enough to come to a verdict? Either way, I could’ve sworn he was about to give the jury their instructions. He turned to them and began. ‘Gentlemen of the jury, you’ve heard from all the witnesses that I am going to call—’
Llew Price stood up as if he was on a spring. ‘Excuse me, Mr Probert-Lloyd.’
Harry sighed. ‘Sit down, Mr Price. I’m getting there.’ Llew sat and Harry carried on. ‘As I was saying, you’ve heard from all the witnesses that I had meant to call. But this has been an unusual inquest for me. The forthcoming election has left me insufficient time to prepare as I would have liked and I have been forced to rely – more than usual – on the support of my jury. I now call Mr Jeremiah Eynon to give evidence. But it is not I who will be asking questions of him but the jury’s foreman, Mr Price.’
Harry
The man I took to be Jeremiah Eynon began to make his way along the row where he was sitting and I felt a cold dread creep over my scalp at what might be about to emerge.
Sitting there, having ceded control of my own inquest, my negligence was plain for all to see. I had been all too ready to believe that Ruth’s financial contribution to the Pantglas household would obviate any objection her father might have to her working for Rowland. I should have acted as soon as I realised that Ruth had not simply been Rowland’s assistant, nor even simply a teacher but some kind of protégé.
Even before Rowland had arrived in Llanddewi Brefi, Nan Walters had been sharing her Lampeter ladies’ school education with her friend, and Phoebe Gwatkyn had taken both girls under her wing when Rowland had asked for her assistance. It was entirely possible that Jeremiah Eynon had resented this multiple annexation of his daughter and I should have gone to see him, questioned him. But I had been preoccupied with too many other things.
Sunday shoes squeaking with each step, Eynon strode down the length of the schoolroom. Unlike most farmers of his age, his back was straight and his movements had a sureness which spoke of joints as yet untroubled by arthritis.
I confirmed his identity, swore him in and turned to the jury. ‘Mr Price?’
As Llew Price rose from the jury benches, Ruth Eynon also stood up and almost ran to where Nan Walters was sitting with her family. A brief but inaudible conversation ensued and Nan made her way to the front to take her friend’s place. Evidently, Ruth did not wish to translate her father’s evidence.
Llew Price waited for Nan to take her place then began. His voice was clear and confident, that of a man whose moment had come.
‘Your cousin – the sailor, Shoni Goch – was staying with you at Pantglas unt
il recently, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’ Eynon’s voice was cold, flat.
‘Did he go to chapel with you the day Mr Rowland died?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did he go home with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘All the way home?’
When Eynon failed to respond immediately, Price did not wait. ‘He didn’t walk all the way home with you, did he? He wanted to talk to Ruth so the two of them set off back to Pantglas together. But they argued and, when she got home, Ruth was by herself.’
Llew Price had missed his vocation: he should have been a barrister. His tone brooked no contradiction. ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’
The question was met with another silence from Eynon which I decided not to tolerate. Best to remind people that Price might be asking the questions but this was still my inquest. ‘Mr Eynon?’ His face turned towards me. ‘Did your daughter arrive home alone?’
For a moment, I thought Jeremiah Eynon would defy me but then his answer came, clipped and tight. ‘Yes.’
Llew Price waited a moment to see whether I would ask another question and, when I did not, he set about Eynon once more. ‘Word in the village is that Shoni Goch wanted to marry your Ruth and he wasn’t very happy about her working with Mr Rowland.’
Finally, Jeremiah Eynon managed more than a resentful affirmative. ‘What do you mean “word in the village”? Who’s saying that?’
‘I can ask any number of people to come and swear to that if I need to. Answer the question please.’
‘You didn’t ask a question, Llewelyn Price!’
‘Did your cousin, Shoni Goch, want to marry your daughter, Ruth?’
‘He’s always been fond of her—’
‘Was she engaged to be married to him?’
After a brief silence, Eynon said, ‘There’s an understanding. Has been for years.’
It was quite clear, now, why Nan had replaced Ruth as interpreter.
‘So, if there was an understanding,’ Llew Price’s tone slid from assured towards self-righteous, ‘if Shoni Goch had told Ruth that he didn’t want her teaching at the school any more, she’d have given it up, would she?’
‘Nobody was asking her to give up teaching, Llewelyn Price.’
‘So what did they argue about?’
‘It’s only you that says they argued.’
‘No. It’s not only me that says it. As it happens, I didn’t see the argument but I’ve been told about it by more than one person. They thought I should know.’
A tense silence followed Price’s words. Why would he say that people thought he should know of this argument? Because he was the jury foreman?
Before I could give the question any thought, Price began again. ‘When did Shoni Goch get back to your house?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t take my watch out and make a note. We don’t all keep records of every going out and coming in like you do, Llewelyn Price.’
Was Eynon belittling assiduous stock-taking or insinuating that Price spied on people? A shop which sold everything from salt to lamp wicks would be an ideal vantage point.
‘I’m not asking you to name the minute, Jeremiah Eynon! I’m asking you to give us some idea of when your cousin came back to Pantglas. Was it ten minutes after Ruth? An hour? Was he away the rest of the afternoon?’
In the silence that followed, everybody in the room heard a little voice ask, ‘Mami, where’s the butterfly gone?’ but such was the tension that nobody laughed and the only answer was a self-conscious shushing from the child’s mother.
‘Well?’
Even without Eynon’s barb about note-taking, the animosity between the two men was obvious. I wondered what the cause of their antagonism was and whether it might be relevant.
‘I don’t know when he came back,’ Eynon said. ‘We went out to chapel again in the afternoon, then there was a cymanfa ganu. He was there when we got home.’
‘He wasn’t with you at the cymanfa?’
‘No. Wouldn’t expect him to be. Everybody knows he can’t sing a note.’
I watched Llew Price pull himself up to his full height in my peripheral vision. Did I see him shake his head slightly? And, if so, was he signalling denial or disbelief? Price would know as well as anybody in the room that a cymanfa ganu – a gathering to sing – was as much a social event as it was a musical one. If Shoni Goch was home from the sea, everyone would have expected to see him there, even if he spent more time outside with the men smoking a Sunday ration of tobacco than inside with the singers.
Finally, Price spoke again. ‘Very well then. After arguing with your daughter, Ruth—’
Eynon began to object but Price raised a hand. ‘Let me finish then you can have your say. After arguing with Ruth, your cousin, Shoni Goch, wasn’t seen again for several hours – that’s true, isn’t it?’
‘You’re still talking about an argument that didn’t happen—’
‘They did argue. I can ask—’
‘—and just because we didn’t see him till later doesn’t mean nobody did.’
Eynon and Price spoke over each other, each attempting to drown the other out and I feared that proceedings were in danger of deteriorating into a public quarrel. I had heard tales of fisticuffs at inquests and I did not intend to preside over anything of that kind.
‘If I may intervene?’ I looked out into the schoolroom, featureless faces crowding in around the whirlpool. Not a single person would I be able to identify and yet every eye was fixed on me; it was an unpleasantly exposing feeling, as if I had appeared before them in my underlinen. ‘Did anyone see Mr Rowland after he left the Unitarian chapel on Sunday last?’
A voice was raised to say that its owner had passed the time of day with him on the way home. One or two others said they had done the same.
‘And about what time of the afternoon would that have been?’
‘About one o’clock,’ the first voice said, to general agreement.
‘Did anybody here see Mr Rowland after one o’clock in the afternoon?’ I asked.
At my side, I knew John’s gaze would be combing through the whole crowd from the darkest corner of the room to the most sunlit. A general restlessness amongst the spectators told me that they, too, were looking to each other for evidence that Rowland had survived the afternoon. But if he had, then it had been an afternoon passed without the company of anyone from Llanddewi Brefi, for nobody admitted to having seen him.
Before Llew Price could say anything that might prejudice the rest of the jury, I asked another question. ‘Did anyone here see Mr Rowland in the company of this man, Shoni Goch, at any point after he left the chapel?’
No one spoke. I counted a full minute while I waited but, if anybody had seen Eynon’s cousin with the teacher, they were not going to tell me so.
‘Did anyone see Shoni Goch approaching this school?’ I sensed a shiver of something go around the room at this more fraught question; heads turned to share wordless speculation with neighbours, bodies shifted uncomfortably on benches and against walls.
‘Can anyone here shed any light at all,’ I asked, finally, ‘on where Shoni Goch spent the afternoon and early evening?’
I was aware of deviating uncomfortably from normal inquest procedure but I did not want suspicion simply transferred from Mattie Hughes to the absent Shoni Goch without good cause. When nobody offered any information, I turned back to Jeremiah Eynon. ‘Mr Eynon, what time did you get home and find your cousin there?’
‘At about ten o’clock.’
‘And did he go out again after that – after the rest of the family had gone to bed, perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘You’re quite sure?’
‘He couldn’t have gone out without us knowing.’
‘Very well. And what was his demeanour when you got home – did he speak to you about Ruth?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’ That seemed unlikely, given his argument with the gir
l.
After a short silence, Eynon said, ‘He was drunk.’
Presumably, as nobody had seen him in Llanddewi Brefi, he had walked to Tregaron and relative anonymity to drown his sorrows.
‘Did you speak to Ruth about what had happened?’ I asked.
‘She wasn’t there.’
‘Where was she?’
‘Went off with Nan Walters after the cymanfa ganu.’
So as not to have to face Shoni Goch and an inevitable argument with her father, presumably. ‘Before you went back for the cymanfa,’ I asked, ‘did Ruth say anything, then, about what had passed between her and your cousin?’
The silence that greeted this question had a teeth-grinding quality. ‘Told her mother that Shoni’d want to speak to me later. Nothing else.’
I took my time over writing this down then turned my gaze back to Eynon, positioning the whirlpool so that he appeared in my peripheral vision.