NOTE: This alibi sounds as if it could have been cooked, but the fact that no one queried it at the time seems to suggest that it’s far too solid to be easily dismissed.
After Dafydd had gone my father decided to wait at the cottage till Kester was able to recross the Shipway at dawn. My father had started to worry again and wonder if he’d been right to abandon him.
Kester didn’t return. Later a search party was organized but there was no one at the Worm. Kester’s body was washed up a week later.
The coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of accidental death, but the general consensus of opinion was that Kester had committed suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. (It was felt the jury wanted to spare the family the unpleasantness of a suicide verdict.) The possibility of murder was eliminated when the coroner stressed the fact that was clearly brought out in the testimony: that my father couldn’t have caught up with Kester and still got back across the Shipway before the tide rose that evening. As far as I know everyone completely accepted this, and even if the Kinsella brothers didn’t they kept their mouths shut. It wasn’t until the Bryn-Davies lawsuit two years later that Declan stood up in the witness box and called my father a liar, a killer and an extortionist.
COMMENT: Sooner or later I’m going to have to face up to the evidence of that bloody shit Declan Kinsella.
WARNING: I must keep my cool.
VERDICT: Soldier on.
IV
Uncapping a bottle of Coke in an attempt to kill my longing for a cigarette, I reread what I’d written and was satisfied that my words formed the authorized version of the truth. Perhaps this version was indeed the truth. But I knew I shouldn’t forget that the real truth about this particular truth was that no one knew for certain what the real truth was. The coroner’s jury had declared an accidental death, the public at large had diagnosed a suicide, the Kinsella brothers had talked of a murder, but the proven truth had eluded everyone, slipping through the concrete facts like an illusion manipulated by a magician. But in fact was this situation so very unusual? How far was it ever possible to know the whole truth? Human perception was so limited; in a moment of depression I remembered that there were even some philosophers who believed it was impossible for the human mind to grasp reality at all, a belief which would mean that my quest for the real truth would be doomed to sink in a sea of illusion.
Then I pulled myself together. I was a rational man who believed in the reality of hard facts, and I refused to be depressed by philosophical idiocies. As far as I was concerned, establishing the truth by stripping reality of distortion was purely a matter of willpower and determination; all it needed was the right attitude of mind.
Picking up my pen again I once more turned to face the past.
V
KESTER’S DEATH: POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS.
There are four possible explanations for Kester’s death: (1) natural causes (2) accident (3) suicide and (4) murder.
Let’s dispose of natural causes: the autopsy revealed that death was by drowning. There was no evidence of heart attack or stroke.
Now let’s take murder, the least likely of the remaining possibilities. If I accept the alibi, then my father could have killed Kester only if Kester had been waiting for him on the Inner Head. This doesn’t seem to have occurred to the coroner, who apparently had no trouble accepting my father’s evidence that he and Kester had remained a quarter of an hour apart. Or perhaps it did occur to the coroner but he discounted it.
My inclination is to discount it too: After all, why should Kester loll around on the Inner Head and wait for my father to murder him? If I were being followed by a trained killer who hated my guts, I’d keep going in the hope that he’d turn back. Also, why should my father want to murder Kester anyway when all Kester wanted to do was to write in peace at Rhossili? And finally, even if my father did want to murder him why do it after two witnesses had seen him chasing Kester to the Worm? If my father did kill Kester—and I can think of no sane reason why he should—then the real mystery here is not how Kester died but why.
VERDICT ON THE MURDER THEORY: No motive. And almost certainly no opportunity. Murder highly unlikely if not downright impossible.
So we’re left with accident or suicide. I have to admit that suicide’s the most plausible explanation. He’d been mentally disturbed, he’d lost everything that made life meaningful to him, he’d continued to fail as a writer. What I really have to do here, to disprove the suicide theory, is to prove Kester had a powerful motive for staying alive.
VERDICT ON THE SUICIDE THEORY: It’s possible. But it’s a possibility that I could still explode.
Finally, how likely is it that Kester died by accident? The main argument against it is that Kester was no athlete and therefore he would have taken no physical risks. However there is a chance he could have been whipped away by a freak wave. In any other setting this would be almost too unlikely to consider seriously, but on a tidal causeway like the Shipway such a disaster wouldn’t be improbable at all. Kester might well have tried to recross the Shipway before it was entirely safe—in which case the danger of a freak wave would have been very real.
VERDICT ON THE ACCIDENT THEORY: I think this must have been how Kester met his death but I must keep an open mind until I’ve exploded the suicide theory. This is because there’s no way I can prove he died by accident except by proving he couldn’t have died in any other way.
VI
I uncapped another Coke and again read through what I’d written. So far so good. I had stated the puzzle in its orthodox version and listed the rational explanations. But now my task became more difficult because I had to consider the alternative to the orthodox version, the facts that didn’t tally with this somewhat fragile reality, and here waiting for me, as I knew very well, was the ghost of Declan Kinsella.
Declan had died a year ago of a coronary. In a television news item he had been described as a notable patriot and statesman. Kester’s most powerful champion and the star witness of the Bryn-Davies lawsuit was now permanently beyond my reach.
So was his brother Rory. He’d died of drink back in the Fifties.
Yet I couldn’t ignore the Kinsella brothers. I couldn’t ignore anyone who had called the authorized version a pack of lies. The Kinsella brothers were a dimension of reality and I couldn’t merely dismiss them as a myth, no matter how absurd or unlikely their evidence seemed to be. Declan in particular wove in and out of this saga like a recurring nightmare. The temptation was to diagnose him as a grief-crazed Irishman who was prepared to say anything to avenge his brother’s death, but was it really possible or likely or credible that this “notable patriot and statesman” had told a pack of lies in the witness box in pursuance of what the judge had described as “a peculiarly sordid family feud”?
And that brought me to the horror of the Bryn-Davies lawsuit, the catastrophe which had locked my father into a downward financial spiral and driven him for the second time beyond the edge of sanity into a nervous breakdown. Pam had said to me at the time: “I expect you’re a bit bothered by Declan’s evidence, aren’t you? It would be only natural if you were. Would you like to talk it over?” But I had refused to talk it over. It was easier to refuse to think about it; easier, much easier just to tell myself that Declan Kinsella was a shit and his testimony was a lie.
I drank my Coke and remembered Pam saying to me the night before: “Very few people are strong enough to look unpleasant truths straight in the face.”
But I was now going to be strong enough. The Bryn-Davies lawsuit was an unpleasant fact but it had to be confronted, and picking up my pen again I began to will myself into a cold analytical state of mind by writing down the facts as I remembered them.
VII
KESTER’S DEATH: THE CONSEQUENCES: THE BRYN-DAVIES LAWSUIT. The Bryn-Davies lawsuit was engineered by Declan Kinsella in order to give himself a public platform from which he could attack my father. His silence at the inquest is probably explained by t
he fact that he was unable to prove his suspicions of murder and merely wanted to listen to the evidence so that he could take full advantage of it later. Could he have foreseen the lawsuit as early as that? Yes, because the odds were he knew what was in Kester’s last will. Kester had made this will after he had given Oxmoon to my father, and in the circumstances it’s more than likely that he discussed his will with Declan when he discussed the loss of Oxmoon.
The will gave Declan the chance to initiate a lawsuit, and he used Owen Bryn-Davies Senior as a cat’s-paw in his plan. The will represented Kester’s attempt to strike an equitable balance between his protégés, in view of the fact that I was now sure to inherit Oxmoon from my father. After the loss of Oxmoon Kester’s fortune consisted of money invested in various stocks and shares but in addition there was a pied-à-terre in London, a fact of considerable importance because it meant that Kester’s will still spoke of real and personal property, even though the bulk of his real property had been ceded to my father. With the exception of a few legacies this personal fortune of Kester’s was devised and bequeathed to my contemporary Owen Bryn-Davies Junior. I received a hundred pounds, all the books in the library at Oxmoon and all Kester’s unpublished manuscripts.
As soon as probate had been granted, Declan swung into action. He convinced Owen Bryn-Davies Senior that my father had obtained Oxmoon by extortion—and this meant that Kester’s deed of gift was invalid and that Oxmoon now passed to Owen Junior as the heir to Kester’s real property. Owen Senior decided to go to law on behalf of his son, but when the case got to court it wasn’t the will that was on trial; it was my father.
Declan’s story—which was laughed out of court—was that Kester had accidentally killed Uncle Thomas in a brawl and had then panicked, summoned my father and with his help covered up the crime by faking the car smash. Later, according to Declan, my father had turned around and used his knowledge of the crime to blackmail Kester. In this way he had extorted Oxmoon.
That covered the extortion theory. Then Declan elaborated his theory of murder. He said that Kester had eventually become so determined to recover Oxmoon that he had been prepared to go to the police and risk winding up in jail for a spell rather than continue to submit to my father’s blackmail. Declan said Kester had returned to Gower to reclaim Oxmoon from my father and my father, facing ruin, had killed him to keep him quiet.
At this point the judge lost patience, mourned the absence of proof and said the case should never have been allowed to come to court. He dismissed the case without awarding costs and told the parties to resume their sordid family feud elsewhere. The press had a field day. My father was generally acknowledged to have been exonerated but a lot of mud had been flung at him and some of the mud inevitably stuck.
The Director of Public Prosecutions considered whether the investigations into the deaths of Kester and Thomas should be reopened, but decided against it on the grounds of insufficient evidence. This meant that my father was technically innocent because no one had proved him guilty, but the gossip was rampant and it was then that my father embarked on his career as a recluse. Footing his legal costs also started him on the downward path to financial ruin. So Declan achieved his object. He wanted to crucify my father and he crucified him. Not only that, but my father’s still on the cross and no psychiatrist, not even Pam, can apparently succeed in cutting him down.
So much for the facts of the Bryn-Davies lawsuit. But what do I make of Declan’s evidence?
There are three possibilities here: either it was fact; or it was fiction; or it was a mixture of the two. Whichever possibility is correct, the fact remains that Declan, who knew his brother very well, believed that my father was morally responsible for Kester’s death. Declan may not in fact have believed Kester had been murdered; he may just have propagated that story out of sheer revenge, but if he didn’t believe in murder he must surely have believed my father had driven Kester to suicide. If he thought Kester had died by accident Declan wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to make my father pay.
All this means that if I’m to prove Kester died an accidental death I’ve somehow got to prove that Declan was dead wrong in his interpretation of the tragedy. However, there’s at least one way of explaining why Declan wound up dead wrong: he could have been blinded by rage and grief, unable to reason effectively with the result that he drew a series of false deductions from the facts. I think I might be prepared to concede he spoke sincerely but sincerity is no guarantee that what he spoke was the truth.
Can I forget the preposterous theory of extortion and write it off as an Irish fairy tale? I only wish I could. But I can’t because Declan based his belief that Kester was murdered on the theory that my father extorted Oxmoon from Kester and was then obliged to kill Kester to keep it. In other words, the extortion gives my father a motive for murder. If there had been no extortion then the deed of gift would have been perfectly valid and my father would have been secure in the knowledge that Kester could never get the property back. Murder would have been quite unnecessary. So the way to explode any theory of murder is to explode the theory of extortion, and I don’t see how I can avoid including the subject in my inquiries.
Had Kester done something that would lay him open to blackmail and if he had, what was it? It’s very hard to believe Declan’s story. For instance, if Kester had accidentally killed Thomas, why had he panicked? He’d have been much more likely to hold fast, stand firm, do the right thing and call the police. It wouldn’t have been pleasant but he probably wouldn’t have wound up in jail. And if he had panicked, why call in my father, the one member of the family he couldn’t stand and didn’t trust? And why would my father have lifted a finger to help him stage a car smash? The story just doesn’t stand up at all.
So what does this mean? It means that either Declan invented the whole story to support his extortion accusation or else for reasons of his own he was putting a gloss on some true facts. Maybe there was a crime and maybe it did concern Thomas, but whatever happened didn’t happen the way Declan said it did.
Yet Pam says many people secretly believe in the extortion theory. Does this mean they also, secretly believe my father was a murderer? What in fact do all the witnesses who gave evidence at the inquest truly believe? They may have told the truth as far as possible in the witness box but how close to the real truth is that truth? I shall have to question everyone again and form my own opinion.
One further thought occurs to me. I still can’t believe there was any extortion, but if there was it actually presents a powerful argument against a theory of suicide. If Kester had been forced to surrender Oxmoon he’d never have rested until he’d got it back. He’d have fought to the last ditch. He’d have kept himself alive for Oxmoon, and the last thing he’d ever have done would be give up and throw himself despairingly into the sea.
So I must pursue this issue of extortion. There’s no way I can kid myself it’s irrelevant to my inquiries.
VIII
It was midafternoon, but I wasn’t finished. I still had to make a list of the witnesses I needed to interview but I felt exhausted. Taking a hard look at unpalatable facts is an exhausting occupation, and after eating a bar of chocolate I brewed myself some more coffee before I turned to a fresh page of my notebook.
At once I was faced with the fact that the Kinsella brothers weren’t the only crucial witnesses whom I was now unable to interview. There was another witness too who was permanently beyond my reach, the one witness who had loved both Kester and my father, the only witness who could have had sufficient intuition to grasp exactly what had been going on. Bronwen had only survived my grandfather by four years. Sian had said to me with resignation after her mother died: “She did try to survive but it was too difficult without him. She said the wheel was wrecked beyond repair.”
I thought of Bronwen talking of the Wheel of Fortune.
After Kester’s death she had said to me: “It was fated. He was strapped to a wheel of fortune from which he hadn
’t the will to escape,” and when I was grieving that I would never see him again she had said to me: “But you will see him again—and again—and again. You’ll look across the circle and you’ll hear his echo in time.”
But I’d felt I couldn’t bear to hear that echo so I had closed my ears against it and I hadn’t mentioned Kester to Bronwen again. She was the one who had spoken of him in the end. I’d just been expelled from Harrow and I’d gone to visit her in the hospital where she was dying. She had said: “You’re making such a mistake, Hal, by trying to punish your father. He’s suffering enough as it is.” But I’d been only fifteen and I’d no idea what she meant. I was too young then to connect my performance at Harrow with my rage at Kester’s death.
“Forgive him,” Bronwen had said. “Forgive them both. Don’t let them draw you into their shared circle, don’t let them destroy you as they’ve destroyed each other.”
“What circle?”
“The wheel of their fortune, the circle of their lives. … The wheel must be reshaped, the circle redeemed, such a burden to pass to you, you must be very strong, very brave.”
“I don’t understand, Bronwen. I don’t understand a single word you’re saying.”
“Be loyal to your father.” Those had been her last words to me. “Be loyal to your father,” she had said, so I had turned over a new leaf, working hard at the crammers, gaining a place at Bristol University to read classics, trying to help my father as he floundered deeper into debt and despair after the catastrophe of the Bryn-Davies lawsuit.
But my father had been impossible to please. Even Gerry, his favorite brother, had quarreled with him in the end.
“You want to destroy yourself, Harry. You’re not basically interested in survival. You just want to open the floodgates and let disaster pour in.”
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