The Corpse with the Sapphire Eyes

by Cathy Ace

  “It’s alright for me to open up, but not you?”

  I sighed. “David might have hurt you emotionally, but Angus hurt me physically and emotionally. The bruises and the cuts healed, even if some of them left physical scars.”

  “Like the one above your nose? How d’you get that one?”

  I didn’t know she’d noticed it. “He smashed my face into a mirror. I was very lucky. The big chunk I pulled out of my forehead missed my eyes and just left this little mark.” I smiled ruefully. “I kept that piece of glass in a drawer for months, thinking I might one night use it on him while he lay beside me, unconscious from the booze. But I was a criminologist. I knew I’d get caught. So I threw it away. As I did, I noticed how my blood had crept in between the glass and the silvering on the back. Funny the things you remember, eh?”

  “It’s not funny the things you remember, Cait. You remember everything. Do you remember how it felt to be used up inside?”

  I nodded. “And I remember how hard it was to break it off with him, which sounds ridiculous given what he put me through. It was his instability that led him to seek stability through power over me. And, talking about instability, you’ve been displaying some pretty ripe symptoms of that since ‘Davies the Eyes’ was mentioned. Why do you think that is?”

  “Doing the shrink thing on me now are you, sis? Ask questions, don’t make suggestions? Okay, I’ll play. Overwhelmed by remembered unhappiness, and powerlessness, on the one hand; realizing that I feel some of that unhappiness in my current circumstances on the other; and then feeling guilty that I feel that way on . . . you know, the third hand.” She managed a smile.

  “You can’t change the past, but you can learn from it. If you don’t? You’re an idiot. And you’re not an idiot, Siân.”

  “But you’d let Angus back into your home the night he died, Cait. After you’d already thrown him out. You’d gone through all the tough stuff, kicking him out of your life. Why that night? I never, ever understood that.”

  “You deserve an explanation, Siân. I told the police at the time, of course, because they gave me no choice when they arrested me for his murder. Despite the fact that I was the one who called the ambulance and the police, what else could they think had happened? He was dead on my bathroom floor, and I was alive. I’ve told Bud too, of course. Angus was passed out drunk when the guys from the pub carried him into what they thought was still his home. He hadn’t told anyone that I’d kicked him out. Didn’t want to lose face. Once he’d passed out, he was never a problem. Of course, what I didn’t know was that he wasn’t just drunk, but that an injury from a pub fight several days earlier was already killing him because he’d ruptured his spleen. The police only found that out later on.”

  “So, if you hadn’t felt sorry for Angus, you’d never have ended up being arrested?”

  I nodded. “I made what I thought was the right decision at the time, but it turned out to be a bad one.”

  Siân sighed. “And now Davies the Eyes is dead, and I never got to tell him that if it hadn’t been for him hurting me as he did I’d never have emigrated, or met Todd, or had Beccie and Mattie. I think it might have helped me a lot if I’d been able to tell him that, to his face. That the awful thing he did to me ended up making me happy. Fulfilled.”

  “What he did didn’t end up making you happy, you made decisions to allow yourself to be happy. But, if it makes you feel better, you can still tell him how well you’ve done without him. He’s just downstairs.”

  Siân shook her head. “It’s too late. But I’ve told him in my heart. And I do love Todd, Cait. I just miss him. A lot. And I love my children. They are just such a huge responsibility. And I don’t miss working at all. Standing for hours and hours on end and being treated badly by megalomaniac surgeons isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. And I enjoy all my activities. They aren’t my escape, they are a part of the life I enjoy living. I’ve just been railing against the world, Cait. I’m so very, very tired, and my back is so bad after the flight.”

  “Your back?”

  “I have spinal osteoarthritis. It’s why I exercise so much, eat healthily, and generally take good care of myself. I have to, or I can hardly move because of the pain. I take some pretty strong pills to help me cope with it, and when I don’t take them I can get a bit irritable. There again, when I take too many the same thing happens. My mood can be all over the place if I’m not careful. Back pain is difficult to cope with—no one knows you’ve got it, they just think you’re being grumpy and difficult. It’s a chronic disease, and it’ll only get worse. All I can do is try to be as healthy and flexible as I can be, to stave it off for as long as possible. But I’m afraid that by the time the kids are gone, and Todd can retire, I’ll be a cripple, and he won’t want to look after me. It’s what Alice Cadwallader has, and you’ve seen how she is. Janet helps her exercise every day, but it’s tough.”

  “I’m sorry, I had no idea. Why haven’t you ever told me?”

  “You’re my sister, not my keeper. It’s not really anything to do with you. Oh—what’s that noise?”

  I stood up from the stool, my own back beginning to ache, and strained my ears. I could hear Dilys, calling in the hallway outside the door. I opened the door to let her in, but there was no one there. I checked along the landing, in both directions, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.

  As I walked back into the dusty room, I said, “Did you hear that?” I had to be sure I wasn’t imagining things.

  Siân nodded. “I thought it was Dilys, just outside the door.”

  “So did I, but there’s nobody there.”

  We both said “Weird,” at the same time. We grinned. Siân stood, with some difficulty, and we hugged.

  “Are you alright now?” I asked as kindly as I could.

  Siân nodded. There was a glint in her eye. “I’m going to be just fine, sis. But you’ve just thought of something, haven’t you? Is it something to do with David’s death?”

  I nodded absentmindedly. “I can almost taste it. I can almost see it. I need to think.”

  “Of course you do. Go on, I’ll be fine.”

  “Did you find a portrait of Alice’s husband up here? The one that matches hers?”

  “You mean the one you’ve been sitting in front of all this time?”

  I turned and saw it propped against a wall, behind me. The painting of Alice had shown me she was a vibrant, beautiful young woman. This one told me that Gryffudd Cadwallader had been a robust and pleasant-looking man with a ruddy complexion and a penchant for tweed. The background of the portrait showed Castell Llwyd in all its glory on an imagined horizon. The man himself filled about two thirds of the foreground, and his hands were overly large, it seemed. One hand held a scroll of paper, which bore a map showing South America; his other pointed down and to his left. His eyes twinkled with a wicked light. To one side of him was a table laden with exotic foods and piles of some sort of white crystalline substance. The Cadwallader Puzzle Plate stood upright on the table, his body obliterating most of the verse. But that didn’t matter, nor did the fact that the plate itself had been smashed. I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but couldn’t work out how it was linked to David Davies’s death. I needed a few more facts to crack the mystery of the puzzle plate.

  Chwech ar hugain

  I WENT DOWN THE STAIRS to the great hall as fast as I could. Once there I listened for a moment. Over the rain beating down on the glass above my head I could hear voices in the drawing room. I looked at my watch. It was gone three o’clock, so I was pretty sure that everyone would be in there, meeting to discuss their findings. I took a deep breath and launched myself at what I knew would be a critical encounter.

  When I entered the room, I was struck by how bleak and dead the place seemed without the dancing flames of a fire in the grate. Quite a few people looked taken aback by my appearance, which, given how very grimy and damp I was, wasn’t surprising. I didn’t hesitate. I marched to the fireplace and
poked about in the empty grate. I stuck my head into the opening beneath the chimney, which drew a few throat-clearings from the assembled group, then peered closely at the gold-backed glass tiles that surrounded every fireplace I’d seen, so far, in the castle. Even though the wind had died down, I could still hear whistling from the chimney.

  I stood and spoke directly to a worried-looking Alice. “When you moved back into Castell Llwyd after the war, had all the flues and fireplaces been renovated? I could see from outside that all the chimneys seem to be original features, but what about the tile work, the mantles, and the flues?” I didn’t exactly snap at the old woman, but I was trying to be businesslike. I noticed Bud’s reaction out of the corner of my eye, and I was confident he’d pick up on the fact that I was nose-down on the trail.

  Alice adjusted her shoulders. Clearly she wasn’t used to being addressed in such a manner. She looked injured as she responded, “They’d all been redone. Gryffudd said that the ministry people had made a right mess of them. Although the fireplaces should have been mainly decorative, because all the heating had been put in before we moved out—which in itself caused a massive upheaval—they’d seen fit to use them all.”

  “And which ministry was it that took over your home?” I was terse.

  Alice looked flummoxed. “I don’t know. I don’t remember, or I never knew. They were rather cagey about it all. Even Gryffudd.”

  I pressed on. “Owain, is everything that’s been written about the layout of the Roman temple to Neptune in your courtyard accurate, as far as you know?”

  It was Owain’s turn to look strangely at me. “Yes, as far as I have been able to establish. It was built in the tholos style, so round, which is very unusual, though it might be accounted for by the fact that it sits within a stone circle. It is located in an unusual position—yes, it’s close to the sea, of course, but temples were usually built as a part of a city, often close to the main forum. There was no city here, just the temple.”

  “It’s never been excavated. Is that correct?” I tried not to snap.

  “Heavens, no,” he exclaimed. “There was little appetite for that sort of thing before the Cadwalladers bought up the land, and my great-grandfather would never have allowed it, nor my grandfather, or father. I think it would be a sin. How could you dig about there without possibly disturbing something ancient, or even unfooting the stone circle? It could be a disaster.” Curious.

  “So the Cadwalladers built between it and the sea,” I mused, “cutting through Neptune’s sightlines to his element.”

  Owain’s bushy beard twitched. “You could put it like that,” he accepted.

  “One more thing, maybe for you this time, Idris,” I said quickly. “The bridge that’s collapsing, do you know if it, too, was repaired after the war?”

  “I do happen to know that,” he said, looking pleased with himself, “there was even paperwork about it. I had to dig it all out when we had the thing examined. The major rebuilding and reinforcing was done right after the major construction was finished here, so around 1900, but there was more done in 1941, though the papers didn’t say what, and even more in 1950. The 1950 work focused on the roadway as well as the bridge, and a new track to the main road was laid at the same time. That’s when it was paved for the second time. The first paving took place in 1903.”

  Owain butted in. “My grandfather, Powell Cadwallader, knew Edgar Hooley quite well. Powell had slag to get rid of from his steelworks, and Hooley had a wonderful way to use it. Hooley was born in Swansea, and Grandfather Powell was keen to use his new invention of modern-day tarmacadam. The family archives show that my grandfather allowed Hooley to test out some equipment he was developing to facilitate the preparation of his new product, equipment he then patented in 1904. When the Hickman family took over Hooley’s tarmac company in 1905, Grandfather set up with a couple of other chaps, and I happen to know they did quite well out of the demand that came during the Second World War, when airfields all over Britain were desperate for runways to be laid. As we all now know, Hooley’s invention changed the way we all live, and, quite literally, paved the way for the motorized world we know today. You know, it’s always struck me as odd that a man who invented a generic term used the world over, ‘tarmac,’ isn’t boasted about more by those of us who also come from Swansea.”

  “Hooley used steamrollers as a part of his process, didn’t he?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  Owain looked gleeful. “Indeed he did, Cait, and the children of the locals, and, indeed, many of the locals themselves, rushed to see the one they used here as it made its way to our estate. It was a major undertaking, considering the state of the local roads at the time. I believe that some local preachers called the whole thing ‘the work of the Devil,’ and pointed to the fumes and the smell as an example of what people might expect if they were to find themselves suffering in the damnation of Hellfire.”

  As Owain trailed off into a world where, I was convinced, he could find links for most of the world’s major developments to someone from Swansea, or at least from Wales, I noted that I was the only one interested in his eager discourse, which struck me as a good sign.

  “Mair, where were you when David Davies died?” My question brought everyone’s attention back into sharp focus.

  Mair looked terrified. Good. She spluttered, “I . . . I don’t know. When did he die? No one has said.”

  “Exactly,” I replied. “Dilys—you found his body at what time?”

  By now everyone was on full alert, and Dilys spoke with authority. “About five o’clock, it was. I went down to the kitchen to get the trays to clear after tea. As I came to bring them up, there he was, at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “The bottom of the up stairs, right?” I asked.

  Dilys nodded.

  “So who saw David before five o’clock, and where?”

  In deference to her position as his widow, I supposed, all eyes turned to Rhian. She looked confused. “I . . . I hadn’t seen David since after lunch. He was leaving our apartment just as I entered. It must have been about half past one, I think.” She looked sad, and almost ashamed, as she added, “I didn’t even say ‘goodbye,’ just ‘see you later.’ I didn’t know it was the last thing I’d ever say to him.”

  Rhian paused and seemed to be struggling with her emotions, but she pulled herself together and continued. “After that, I was busy all afternoon, then I helped Mam bring the tea up. I had a quick cuppa with her in the kitchen, then I went over to the stable office to pick up my laptop. I could see the weather wasn’t going to break, so I braved it and ran as fast as I could. When I got back, I helped Mam clear up after tea, then, when she went down to get the tray, I went up to our apartment. Gwen was there. Oh! That reminds me. I think I left my laptop in the kitchen, Mam. I’m sorry if it got in your way.”

  “No problem, love. You’ve got a lot on your plate. I shoved it in the back room,” replied Dilys.

  That was one question answered in my mind. I hadn’t been looking for a laptop amid the detritus in the back room, where David Davies’s body lay, but at least now I knew where it was, and that it wasn’t something that had been smashed or stolen.

  “Anyone else?” I asked.

  Mair cleared her throat and said, “I saw him after tea. I was going into the music room to do some knitting, and he was leaving it. Gwen was still in there. I think you’d been tuning the piano and having a run through for the wedding. Is that right?”

  Gwen nodded. “We’d done all we needed to do—discussed the pieces, got our music in order—and he said he was going to, you know, use the loo.”

  That raised an interesting point.

  “Where are the public washrooms, for people using the downstairs rooms who aren’t staying here?” asked Bud, right on cue.

  Eirwen finally perked up. “The gents’ are just past Alice’s little lift, under the grand staircase, the ladies’ are on the other side, in the same spot. They’re above the kitchens, beca
use that’s where the plumbing was. They aren’t very big, but each one has a disabled access stall, which takes up a lot of room.”

  “So David would have been out in the great hall at what time, Mair? Gwen?” I made eye contact with each woman in turn.

  The two women glanced at each other. “About half past four?” asked Gwen of Mair.

  Mair nodded. “That’s about right, I think.”

  “Did anyone see David alive after half past four?”

  Everyone shook their head.

  “Good. So now you can all tell me where you were between four thirty and five o’clock. I’ll start—I was in my bridal boudoir talking with Siân.” As I uttered her name, my sister entered the drawing room. She was still red-faced, but she looked a lot better than she had done when I’d left her. I patted the chair next to me, and she sat down.

  Rhian sniffed as she said, “I suppose I was coming back from the stable office, and then helping Mam.”

  “I was in the music room the whole time,” said Mair. “I was knitting and listening to a CD.” She looked over at Siân and added excitedly, “It was the new Simon Rattle one—the concert performance of Carmen, with Jonas Kaufmann. It only came out a few months ago. Have you heard it yet?”

  Siân nodded. “He sings a wonderful Don José,” she said with a smile.

  “Alone the whole time?” I asked, determined to not be sidetracked. Mair nodded.

  “I went up to see Rhian when I left the music room,” said Gwen, “but she wasn’t in her apartment. I took the chance to make some notes on the running order for your wedding. So I was alone too, until Rhian came back around five.” She looked somehow disappointed.

  Janet spoke next. “Alice was taking her nap, and I was relaxing in my room. Alice usually naps after teatime, then gets up and dresses for drinks and dinner. It’s my break time.” She smiled broadly as she spoke, and Alice acknowledged her words kindly.

  “From what time were you each alone in your respective rooms?” I pressed.