by Cathy Ace
Delighted she finally knew how to speak about Sam, Carol asked, ‘Has she been here long?’
‘About two months. A bloke Dad knows who runs a bookshop in Haverfordwest rang up and said she was looking for a job for the summer. He told Dad she did well at his place, so we took her on.’ Val lowered her voice. ‘Cash in hand, you know. We need a bit of cover now and again, and it’s been good for me to be able to get a few hours off midweek. Just as well now that Dad’s going to be up at Chellingworth Hall working on those bibles.’
Carol realized she needed to press on. ‘Tell you what, Val, I’ll get a set of our standard terms and conditions to you so you can look them over regarding the agency taking on your case, as well as your dad’s, then I can draw up a quote for you, the same way I’m doing one for him.’
Val sat down. ‘Ah, now there’s the problem; I haven’t really got much money. Bless them, the BBC never did pay well, and the restaurant ate money – pardon the pun. Even so, I’d managed to set myself up with a little cottage just outside Hay. About a year after Mam died I sold it so Dad and I could buy this shop. I had to do something to get him going again, or he’d have withered away. I moved back in with him. Into my old room, in fact.’ Her expression told Carol it was an arrangement which left a lot to be desired. ‘I only take a pittance out of this place, a bit of spending money rather than a salary. All the money we make goes back into stock. So I’m a bit short of cash.’
Carol immediately wondered what Val’s father was planning to use to pay for the services he’d already asked the agency to quote against.
‘Could you work on some sort of percentage basis?’ ventured Val. ‘Whatever we sell the miniatures for, you get a cut?’
Carol knew she was on shaky ground; if anyone’s time but her own were to be used on this case, she’d have to get an unusual arrangement agreed by her colleagues. ‘We’ve never done that before. I’ll have to talk about it with the rest of my group.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m sure you want to keep these safe—’ Carol nodded at the books – ‘but do you have any photocopies?’
Val beamed. ‘An entire set, and I even did enlargements, though they’re a bit blurry.’ She handed over a folder full of papers. ‘I’ll hear from you, then?’
‘You will,’ said Carol. ‘Meanwhile, I’d better get some photos of the set-up downstairs, and get back to the office.’ The women hugged – around Albert – and Carol carefully descended the stairs.
Carol left the shop about fifteen minutes later, just after Bryn had rushed out saying he’d forgotten he had an appointment with a potential client. She crossed the road to snap shots of the front of the building. As she did so, her attention was taken by an elderly man pushing a bicycle down the hill toward the shop. Turning onto the street in front of the shop’s door, he leaned his cycle against the wall, pulled a parcel of books from inside its basket and plonked them on the end of the table outside the shop. Carol snapped furiously, right up until the man had cycled past her and out of sight.
‘Your mam’s done very well today, Albert,’ she informed her infant son. ‘I think I’ve caught the book-depositor red-handed. Let’s go and see what he put on that table, shall we?’ Albert blew spit-bubbles by way of a reply, and Carol took the photographs she needed of the books the man had delivered, then headed back to her car.
A few hours later, having had the chance to update Mavis on her progress on the telephone, she was feeling less chuffed: Mavis had pointed out how solving a case the agency hadn’t even been commissioned to take, and where there was certainly no contract in place to allow them to charge for their services, was not the best way to go about business. Carol had to agree with her colleague as they spoke, but she mentally took the moral high-ground as she sipped her warm milk before bedtime.
FOUR
With Albert’s two a.m. feeding over, and him finally asleep, Carol found herself annoyingly alert. She decided the best thing to do was apply herself to discovering all she could about the possible creator of the mysterious miniatures, firstly because she was genuinely curious and, secondly, because she’d warmed to Val but felt her colleagues might need some convincing when it came to taking on her case.
Half an hour later she was in her element, her fingers tapping at keys as skillfully as those of a concert pianist, the output being, to her mind in any case, more melodious than any music ever composed. She didn’t miss living and working in London, but she did miss the relative freedom of the hours she used to spend at her desk connecting with the world through the wonders of modern technology. Left to her own devices she’d have spent her entire life like that without even noticing the lack of real human companionship. David’s arrival in her department at work had saved her from existing in a techno-bubble, and with Albert’s birth had come a depth of love and true, primordial connectivity. She was bound to her son forever, which was something she considered as she delved into the facts surrounding the death of Lizzie Llewellyn which centered on the killing of one sibling by another – something she, as a new mother, couldn’t imagine.
Having decided she’d begin by trying to find out about Lizzie Llewellyn, the artist, she quickly realized she’d left behind the representations of the dead woman’s art and seemed to be getting drawn into the coverage of her brother’s trial for her murder. The more ‘news’ she read, the more she came to the belief it was all just one big swirl of regurgitated hearsay. Online sources seemed to feed off each other, and even the big-name newspapers and TV channels with journalists dedicated to the Llewellyn case didn’t seem to do much more than restate what had been said in court. Carol began to wonder if the creature once known as ‘the investigative journalist’ was as dead as the proverbial dodo.
From the aggregation of all the various reports she unearthed, it became clear to Carol that two critical factors had led to the highly unusual, but not unheard of, situation where Nathaniel Llewellyn, the brother of Lizzie, had been convicted of her murder without her body ever being found: the large amount of blood found at his cottage in Gower, and the testimony of a neighbor, one Mrs Wynne Thomas, that she’d seen Nathaniel bundling something large and bulky into the hatchback of his car on the same day as the discovery of said blood.
Carol considered what she’d discovered. Unlike the jury, Carol didn’t have the chance to see photos of Nathaniel’s cottage where the blood had been discovered, but she read enough descriptions of the place and the scene witnessed by the police upon their arrival to be able to work out for herself that any such photos would have been likely to turn the stomachs of most people.
The pathologist called by the Crown had testified it was unlikely anyone who’d lost the amount of blood she judged to be present at the scene could have survived. She’d further confirmed it was definitely Lizzie Llewellyn’s blood – DNA testing had proved this beyond doubt. Carol noted the pathologist had grudgingly accepted, under cross-examination, that it was possible for a woman of Lizzie Llewellyn’s age, size and level of fitness to survive even after losing a couple of pints of blood, though Carol spotted the Crown had leaped upon that acceptance and the pathologist had stated likely disorientation and possible unconsciousness, if not immediate death, ensuing.
The lack of a body, a murder weapon and even a credible time of death meant the jury had been subjected to a great deal of evidence about the coagulation rates of blood, as well as contradictory evidence from witnesses about their interpretations of the patterns of blood at the scene.
She read various reports of the testimony of several witnesses all of whom agreed the brother and sister had been arguing loudly and aggressively when they ate a meal together at The Bay Bistro in Rhossili on the afternoon of the day before the grisly scene had been discovered. No one had seen Lizzie Llewellyn alive after she got into her brother’s car in the car park at Rhossili.
Nathaniel claimed the siblings were having one of their usual run-ins about art, and their own interpretations of it, and that their s
o-called argument was nothing out of the ordinary, for them. He said the siblings enjoyed a good dinner together at his cottage, and he went to bed that night, with his sister using the spare room, and slept heavily. He admitted to being drunk. He claimed he didn’t wake until early the next afternoon, whereupon he discovered his cottage was covered with blood and his sister was nowhere to be found. He’d phoned the police immediately, which, he claimed, proved his innocence.
He had no explanation for his neighbor’s sighting of him wrangling something bulky into the back of his car that morning, affirming he hadn’t woken until around two p.m. With his sister’s blood and hair having been found in his vehicle – a revelation one reporter noted made the jury glare at the accused – Nathaniel stuck to his story of being in a deep, alcohol-induced sleep until long after the claimed sighting of him. The same reporter also gave a highly sympathetic account of how distressed Mrs Wynne Thomas – a woman who’d lived down the hill from Nathaniel’s cottage for many years, and therefore used to seeing him about and identifying him from a distance – had been when facing the man in court.
Carol paused and gave the matter some thought. Her background checks into the neighbor didn’t suggest she bore Nathaniel any animosity, nor that she had an axe to grind when it came to the Llewellyns in general. In several sources Carol noted the woman had even declined to give media interviews ‘out of respect for the family.’
Carol sat back and clicked the end of her pen, the rhythm helping her concentrate. It was a horrible case. Much had been made of how Nathaniel, the younger sibling but more prominent artist, had belittled his sister’s work in a now-infamous BBC documentary. He’d received huge sums of money for commissions of massive, public installations, whereas she had labored in poor conditions to produce her tiny works which challenged prevailing artistic opinions. Carol noted how it was Nathaniel’s high profile as an artist who’d received money from the public purse that had added fuel to the fire of publicity, with taxpayers being only too happy to demand the immediate removal of art created by a convicted killer.
As she read on, Carol’s heart went out to Gwen Llewellyn, Lizzie and Nathaniel’s mother. Press photos showed her beaming proudly at the official unveilings of several of her son’s works and at small-scale shows her daughter had mounted, then haggard and drawn at Nathaniel’s trial. Gwen had, it seemed to Carol, taken every possible opportunity presented to her to say she believed her son to be innocent. Believing any mother would be likely to say the same thing, Carol dug around trying to find out how unusual it was for a person to be found guilty of murder when a body hadn’t been discovered, and realized it was a rare, though not altogether unheard of, verdict.
Standing down from her research for a moment, Carol tried to imagine how Gwen Llewellyn must feel; her son incarcerated for killing her daughter, her life empty and in ruins. ‘Would I blame myself?’ Carol asked aloud in the quiet of her own home.
Unable to discover very much at all about Lizzie Llewellyn, which made Carol wonder about how much attention the media had given the killer rather than the victim, she allowed herself to watch the entire documentary the BBC had made about Nathaniel and his work some time before he’d been accused of his sister’s murder.
Other than realizing she didn’t much care for his style of flamboyant murals and overblown ‘statement sculptures,’ the thing Carol noted was the man was a good deal more successful at shedding the pounds than she’d ever been; his photographs showed him at a variety of girths over the years. It seemed his weight went up and down like a yo-yo. She rubbed her mid-section as she wondered if she’d ever lose the baby-weight she’d gained, then realized she was thirsty. A big glass of cool milk, that was what she needed, then maybe she’d sleep. At least for a couple of hours.
FIVE
Saturday 21st June
‘It’s the right thing to do, and that’s why I’ve called this emergency meeting,’ said Carol firmly. She felt every eye in the room boring into her – and that was quite a lot of eyes, if you counted Albert, Gertie and McFli as well as her four colleagues.
‘We’ve never been in this situation before,’ said Christine uncertainly. ‘There’s the business point of view, but, as Carol says, there’s the moral obligation too.’
Annie stood and paced, Gertie following her like the puppy she was. ‘Look, I’ve got to get to Hereford to get the train to Swansea, so I can’t hang about. I understand why you wanted me to be here, Car, but I’ll go with the flow on this one. Whatever you all decide is fine by me. I don’t know why we can’t just send Bryn Jenkins the proposal and the contract and, if he bites, then show him the photos you took of that bloke on the bike and tell him we did what he wanted us to do. It’ll mean we can charge him somethin’, even if it in’t as much as we’d like. How about that?’
Mavis remained seated when she tutted. ‘It’s no’ the point.’
Carol remained firm. ‘The point is, we shouldn’t charge him for setting up a surveillance system he doesn’t need. It’s a shame, because I had a bright idea about being able to borrow all the hardware so we could have done a bang-up job for him at very little cost – so long as he and we were prepared to write a testimonial for the company loaning us the equipment. It could have done us a bit of good by getting our name onto their website. But it’s wrong to do it.’
‘I agree,’ said Althea. ‘Carol was a witness to the very action we were possibly going to be hired to detect. You’re always telling me we are professionals, not just amateur sleuths. Well, professionals have ethics. I’m with Carol on this.’
The look bestowed upon Althea by her housemate Mavis could have withered weeds. Althea straightened her back and petted McFli with her foot. Silence followed – not a normal state of affairs at all.
‘Ach, I agree,’ said Mavis petulantly. ‘You’re quite right, Carol, we cannae charge Bryn a fee. Send the email you’ve composed, with the photos of the man on the bicycle, and be done with it.’
Carol did as had been agreed, allowing other business to be discussed briefly, then stood and made it clear she wanted to address the group. She explained about the books Val had shown her, allowed the women to circulate the photocopies of the miniatures – along with a magnifying glass Carol had brought from home – and to think about the opportunity to not work for a fee, but for a percentage of any finally agreed sale price.
‘I spent some time last evening scouring a selection of newspaper and TV stories, from online sources, about the Lizzie Llewellyn case, and I’ve just emailed the package to all of you. I know you’re off to work on this other case in Swansea, Annie, but I thought it worth keeping you in the picture. I’m sure we’ve all heard at least something about the Lizzie Llewellyn murder, and, if these miniatures turn out to be by her, they could be worth a good deal of money.’
Annie’s eyes lit up. ‘She’s the one who was done in by her brother, innit? Disappeared, they thought, but they found loads of blood at the brother’s cottage, and someone said they saw him pushing something that looked like a body into his car. That’s the one, right?’
Carol nodded. ‘He was found guilty of murder just a couple of months ago, and he’s serving a prison sentence in Swansea right now.’
‘I recall they didnae find a body,’ said Mavis.
‘You’re right,’ replied Carol, ‘but this was one of those rare cases where the jury found a person guilty despite that. The evidence suggested Lizzie would have lost far too much blood to have survived her injuries, and blood and hair found in the brother’s car, plus the testimony of a neighbor from the local area, pretty much sealed his fate.’
‘And this Val Jenkins reckons these tiny little drawings are by the dead woman?’ asked Annie, squinting through the magnifying glass.
‘She does, and I can see why. I’ve poked about on the Internet and have discovered images of her work. She had a reputation for completely updating the ancient art of miniatures, going far beyond the portraits they’d usually been used to depict.
She produced tiny works that portray modern life – street scenes, urban landscapes, people going about their everyday life.’
‘I don’t see the point,’ said Annie, rising to gather herself to leave. ‘I mean, who would buy one of these when you can’t even really see them? Makes no sense to me.’
Christine said, ‘I’ve seen some of her works in the homes of people I know. There’s a special way of displaying them, with a large magnifying glass – bigger than the one we’ve got here – set into a stand, so it’s always in front of the piece, all used as part of the set-up.’
Annie chuckled. ‘Oh I see, just another way to put art out of the reach of the masses, eh? Not only does it cost a bomb to buy the art, but then you have to shell out for an expensive piece of kit so you can see the blessed thing. Very clever.’
‘It does seem like a very elaborate way of doing things,’ agreed Mavis, ‘but there’s no accounting for taste, as I’m sure we can all agree. Are you leaving us now, Annie?’
‘Yeah, best be off.’
‘How do you feel about us doing some work on this case without our being paid until the owners sell the stuff?’ asked Carol.
Annie paused. ‘You know I’m alright for a bit with the money I made from selling my flat in London, so I can coast for a while, and there could be a big pay-off. I mean, think about how much money all those dead singers make from their records. I reckon it’s got to be the same for artists. Not going to be painting any more of those, is she? So if everyone else is alright with it, I’m for it. But now I’ve got to get going.’
Carol said, ‘I don’t think we’d all need to work on it, but thanks.’
Annie dragged Gertie toward the door, pulling on a waterproof to guard against the torrential summer rain outside. ‘I’m dropping this one at Tudor’s, then I’ll be off,’ she called over Gertie’s excited yelps as the puppy tried to give McFli a parting lick. ‘I’ve got me bags packed, and I’m on the train that’ll get me to Swansea in time for the client to meet me and take me to the B&B he’s organized near his factory. I’ll report in by email. See you all in a week, if not before. If Carol’s luck is anything to go by I’ll have nabbed the culprits within two hours of arriving there, and be back here before you know it!’ Smiling and waving sent her on her way.