The Thread of Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  Griffith managed to suppress his excitement under a gruff official manner. After being introduced to the holidaymakers, he turned back to the garden gates.

  ‘Right, we’ll get on up there, then.’

  Peter, in defiance of Mary’s threats, was determined not to miss anything. He knew the constable quite well, both from shooting trips and meetings in the local public house.

  ‘Mind if I come up, Wynne? This sounds interesting.’

  Griffith nodded, but there was a cautious look on his face.

  ‘I suppose it’s all right, Mr Adams – but you won’t go writing anything in your paper, will you? At least, not until you have a word with my inspector.’

  Peter laughed off the other’s fears.

  ‘I’m on holiday, Wynne – so don’t worry.’

  Given this ambiguous assurance, the constable set off up the cliff path opposite the gates of the house. With Peter bringing up the rear, the little party followed a winding sheep track through the bracken. Climbing higher and higher up the steep slope, they saw the house shrink in size until it looked like a toy below them. The village behind them came into sight, resembling a medieval map spread out at the top of the valley.

  The little doctor began to puff with exertion, and even the constable had to remove his helmet to mop the sweat from his brow. The sun was on the horizon, but it was still warm as they finally reached the summit of the cliff and found themselves on the fairly level grass at the top.

  They paused for a breather and Peter looked seawards at the great sweep of Cardigan Bay which was now visible.

  ‘My God, what a view!’ exclaimed one of the Coventry visitors, taking in the wall of cliffs marching to the horizon on either side, with the green sea and white rollers at their feet.

  The policeman was in no mood for scenery and started off along the ridge to the south. On their right, the smooth grass and ferns swept down to the limestone crags which fell sheer into the breakers.

  ‘Along here, was it, sonny?’ Griffith asked one of the little boys. He was the elder of the two, a carrotty-haired child of about seven.

  ‘Yes, a bit farther on. I’ll show you,’ chirped the boy. He pranced ahead, the other one racing after him, afraid to be left out of the limelight.

  They stopped at the edge of a little ravine and waited for the grown-ups to come.

  The first lad pointed across at the other side of the little valley.

  ‘There it is, sir. That hole in the ground.’

  Peter and Wynne looked blankly at the other side.

  ‘I can’t see anything. Can you?’ asked the doctor.

  All that was visible on the further bank were some gorse bushes and a few stony outcrops.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ yelled the red-haired boy and charged down into the gully, his legs going like pistons to keep up with his headlong flight. A scraggy sheep stampeded blindly from his path and some gulls rose, screaming abuse into the blue sky.

  ‘Here it is, Dad!’ yelled the boy. He appeared to be pointing at an outcrop of grey stone; but, as the adults moved nearer, Peter could see that a patch of ferns and stunted gorse hid the opening of a shaft, which faced out to sea.

  A crude ramp, overgrown and crumbling, led to the mouth and the men climbed up to join the two boys.

  ‘It was in here, Dad,’ said the elder.

  ‘I found it first, honest,’ yelled the little one, determined not to be outdone.

  John Ellis-Morgan peered into the dark hole.

  ‘It’s a lead mine all right, not a natural cave. I’ve been in a few of them up here in my younger days; but I never remember seeing this one before.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ commented Peter. ‘The opening faces the cliff. So, unless you happen to be a seagull, you would be hardly likely to notice it.’

  The PC was pulling a large torch from his pocket.

  ‘New batteries, this week,’ he explained needlessly.

  Removing his helmet, he plunged into the entrance. Immediately there was a muffled curse in Welsh and he backed out, rubbing his forehead.

  ‘Piece of rock hanging down just inside,’ he muttered to the doctor. ‘Better stay here until I see what it’s like. The roof seems half-collapsed.’

  He put his helmet on again and went back inside, bending low to get his six foot two frame into the passage.

  The others waited expectantly around the mouth of the mine.

  ‘This place can’t have been used for donkey’s years, surely?’ asked one of the holidaymakers.

  Ellis-Morgan shrugged, his shoulders twitching in his characteristic sparrow fashion. ‘Certainly not in my time, and I’ve been here thirty years. I think some of them were worked up until the First World War; but not on this part of the cliffs. It may well have been generations since they took ore from this place.’

  Peter was standing at the opening, watching the constable’s wavering light go deeper into the heart of the cliff.

  ‘How far in did you find the bone, sonny?’ he asked the ginger boy, who was crouched at his feet.

  ‘About twice the length of a house,’ the lad replied graphically. ‘We couldn’t go any further – there was a big heap of stones and our candles were getting dim.’

  Peter grinned at the boy’s father. ‘Boys never change, do they?’

  There was an echoing call from the bowels of the earth. ‘Dr John – can you come in now?’

  Griffith was shouting from the deepest point he could reach and the words had an eerie sound by the time they got to the shaft entrance.

  Ellis-Morgan dragged a torch from his own pocket and shouted a reply:

  ‘Right, Wynne. I’m coming now.’

  Leaving the other men clustered around the entrance, he vanished into the shaft. Being many inches shorter than the policeman, he was able to walk upright once inside the tunnel. The floor was cluttered with pieces of fallen rock but, apart from pools of muddy water, he found the going fairly easy.

  Griffith’s torch wavered ahead of him, growing larger as he approached.

  He came up to the officer at a point which he roughly estimated as being thirty yards from the entrance.

  ‘The roof’s come down here, Doctor.’

  The constable spoke in Welsh now that they were away from the holidaymakers.

  The doctor shone his torch over the end of the shaft. An avalanche of grey stone had completely blocked the tunnel, leaving a great abyss in the roof over their heads.

  ‘A fairly recent fall, Wynne. This stone is cleaner and a lighter colour than the walls.’

  Griffith waggled the spotlight of his torch on to the ground at their feet.

  ‘And look here, Dr John – what’s this?’

  Ellis-Morgan hitched up his trousers and squatted at the edge of the roof fall. An inch of murky water covered the floor, but a muddy brown object could still be seen sticking out from beneath a stone.

  ‘Give me a hand to move some of this rock,’ commanded the doctor. They began pulling away the stones at the bottom of the heap.

  Ellis-Morgan uncovered the whole of the brown stick-like thing and held it up to the beam of his torch.

  ‘This is another bone, boy,’ he chirped. ‘No doubt about it being human; it’s a forearm bone.’

  The PC was almost beside himself with excitement.

  ‘Duw, Doctor. The whole skeleton may be just under these stones here.’

  He began scrabbling furiously at the bottom of the pile, pulling out stones of all sizes and dropping them into the muddy water, oblivious of the damage to his uniform trousers.

  ‘Here’s some more – and a couple there!’

  The physician began fishing out more fragments as Griffith uncovered them.

  ‘There’s another big one,’ said the excited constable, as he lifted a particularly large rock.

  The doctor had barely grabbed it when there was an ominous rumble and an avalanche of stone slid down to fill in their excavation completely.

  Ellis-Morgan hast
ily backed away.

  ‘Better leave it for now. Otherwise we’ll have the whole lot down on top of us.’

  He picked up the bundle of remains and turned to the entrance.

  ‘Let’s go and see what we’ve already found looks like in the open.’

  They made their way back to the impatient group at the mouth of the shaft, to emerge, mud-spattered and blinking, into the evening light.

  Peter pounced on his father-in-law-to-be. ‘What did you find in there? Are those more bones?’

  ‘Hold on, lad. Let’s put these down somewhere.’ The doctor spread his finds on the grassy bank at the side of the old ramp.

  ‘Now then, let’s see how much anatomy I remember after forty-odd years.’

  He studied the grubby collection as the others clustered around to look over his shoulders.

  ‘This is a radius – from the forearm. And these two are ribs,’ he said, holding them up.

  ‘And this is a vertebra – from the spine. And this.’

  He laid some more ribs out in a neat row.

  ‘What’s that big one?’ asked the ever-impatient Peter.

  ‘Ah, that’s the prize of the collection, Griffith – the one we found last.’ He picked it up. It was a bone about a foot long, with knobs at either end.

  ‘This is the bone from the upper arm – the humerus. And this is a right-sided one,’ the doctor proudly explained.

  ‘They don’t look much like the bones my student pal used to have,’ objected Peter. ‘They were smooth and white.’

  ‘And they hadn’t been lying in mud and water for umpteen years, either,’ countered Ellis-Morgan. ‘These have got half an inch of mud stuck to them.’

  He rubbed the arm bone vigorously in the grass to clean it.

  ‘That’s better – what’s this, I wonder?’

  The doctor jerked his glasses back up his nose with a finger, and peered short-sightedly at the bone.

  He picked at something with a fingernail while the others waited expectantly.

  After a long moment, he squinted at the constable over the top of his spectacles.

  ‘Wynne, perhaps you’ll get those sergeant’s stripes out of this after all!’

  He tapped the bone as he spoke.

  ‘There’s a saw cut here. Just below the shoulder!’

  Chapter Two

  ‘I always said that it was him that had done it!’

  The speaker gave a final rub to the pint glass and hung it on its hook over the bar.

  His audience on the other side of the counter, nodded in unison. Three tankards were lifted to their lips as if to put a seal of approval on the landlord’s judgement.

  ‘How did you come to know of it so soon, Ceri?’ asked one of the men, a wizened old fellow in a crumpled felt hat. Ceri Lloyd, the landlord of the Lamb and Flag, Tremabon’s only public house, leant his enormous body across the small bar in a gesture of confidence.

  ‘Lewis John the Post Office came in about an hour ago,’ he hissed in a loud stage whisper. ‘His missus was on the switchboard when Wynne Griffith put a call through from the doctor’s house to his inspector in Aber – heard it all, she did.’

  ‘’T isn’t right, that,’ one of the other men muttered into his beer. ‘That nosy old bitch will cause some trouble one of these days.’

  He was recollecting some rather indiscreet telephone calls which he had recently made himself.

  ‘Well, she did, anyhow,’ carried on Lloyd – his cascade of chins wobbling as he strove to impart his confidential news to the whole of the crowded bar parlour. ‘Griffith was reporting some bones that him and Dr John had just found.’

  ‘You’ve told us all that once already,’ complained the third man, a ruddy-faced old boy with ‘farmer’ written all over him. ‘What I want to know is, why you think it’s anything to do with Roland Hewitt’s missus?’

  ‘Well, stands to reason, don’t it?’ said Ceri. He moved away for a moment to draw a pint for another customer. The small low room held a dozen or more regulars, and they sat with their ears almost flapping to catch the scandal that was being dispensed from the bar as freely as the ale.

  Ceri rang the price of the pint into his till and draped himself back over the pumps.

  ‘Stands to reason, I said – how many other women have we ever had vanish from Tremabon, eh, Jenkin?’ His piggy eyes challenged the man with the battered hat.

  ‘How do you know this here body is a woman, anyway?’ Jenkin had come in later than the others and was a step behind in the gossip.

  ‘The doctor told Griffith. That’s all he could say about it, according to Lewis John’s wife – that and the fact that the body had been cut up into little pieces.’

  The constable’s mention of one saw cut had already been magnified into utter dismemberment by the villagers. The landlord slapped a podgy hand on the counter.

  ‘So there, Jenkin – I ask you again, what woman has gone from Tremabon in suspicious circumstances, eh?’

  There was dead silence in the bar. All heads were turned to look at the great fat publican.

  He savoured the moment, his drooping lips rolling a cigarette butt around, before delivering the denouement.

  ‘Mavis Hewitt, of course – you know that as well as I do.’

  Crumpled-hat nodded grudgingly. ‘Ay, it was a rare old fuss at the time. But, damn it, that was more than thirty year ago – a hell of a long while back!’

  ‘And these here bones go a long way back, too, by the sound of it,’ Ceri hissed triumphantly.

  A young man wearing a bus driver’s uniform moved up from the end of the bar.

  ‘What’s all the mystery about old Hewitt, Ceri?’ he asked. ‘You old jossers seem to know something pretty salty about him.’

  Ceri looked down from his six foot frame of gross obesity. ‘You’re too much of a kid to remember, boy. But your dad would know about it.’

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘You know Roland Hewitt, you say?’

  ‘Yes, everybody does. He lives in that blue cottage up off the Cardigan road. Came from Canada a few years back to retire here. It’s his nephew that’s courting the doctor’s daughter.’

  The publican nodded condescendingly. ‘You’ve got it – but did you know that he was born in Tremabon and lived here at Bryn Glas farm until nineteen twenty-nine? Then he skipped out of the country, he did. Just after his wife vanished, it was.’

  The young man stared at Lloyd over his glass. ‘What d’you mean – skipped the country?’

  Jenkin of the crumpled trilby hat took up the story. ‘Things were getting too hot for him – I remember it like it was yesterday. The papers had a hold of it, and the police were nosing about Bryn Glas. So Hewitt packed up and cleared off to Canada. Mighty quick, he was, too.’

  ‘Well, what did happen to his wife, anyway?’ asked the bus driver, looking back to Ceri Lloyd.

  The landlord took up another glass to polish.

  ‘Nobody knows – or didn’t until today,’ he leered. ‘She just vanished. Her sister came down from Liverpool and started the ball rolling. Raised a devil of fuss, she did; but nothing came of it. Old Hewitt was too clever for all of them.’

  The young man looked scornful.

  ‘I think you’re all a lot of bloody old women making a scandal out of damn all!’

  The publican was outraged at the bus driver’s impudent challenge to his leadership of the gossip.

  ‘And what d’you think you know about it, Gareth Hughes? You were still a twinkle in your old man’s eye then. Listen, I knew Mavis Hewitt better than most around here. I know what went on up at Bryn Glas all right!’

  Jenkin’s leathery face wrinkled as he sniggered evilly. ‘You knew her all right, Ceri – you were half the cause of the trouble between her and old Roland, I reckon.’

  Far from being offended, the fat landlord actually preened himself.

  ‘Well, I’m not denying that I had a way with the girls when I was a bit younger – before I
grew this.’ He patted his great stomach affectionately.

  The bus driver gulped his beer impatiently and slapped it down for a refill. ‘You still haven’t said what the connection is between this bone business and old Hewitt.’

  ‘Are you daft, man?’ demanded Ceri, as he drew another pint. ‘Roland did his wife in, back in twenty-nine – hid the body up on the cliff and hopped it abroad. Plain as the nose on your face, it is!’

  Gareth Hughes made a rude noise. ‘Get away, man! What would he want to come back here for, after all those years?’

  Ceri gazed at him pityingly. ‘Haven’t you ever heard that murderers always come back to the scene of their crime – always?’

  The bus driver sneered. ‘You old geezers love making mountains out of molehills, don’t you? If I were you, I’d watch what you say. Hewitt could have the law on you for slander. And, if the police knew that that old crow in the post office was listening to their secrets, they’d lock her up.’ He poured the rest of his beer straight down his throat and walked out of the bar.

  The red-faced farmer glared after him indignantly. ‘Think they know it all, these young chaps. I remember Mavis Hewitt well enough myself – pretty little thing, she was. Red hair and a lovely pair of ankles on her.’ Long-forgotten lust shone in his bleary eyes for a brief moment. Ceri licked his fleshy lips at memories of his own.

  ‘The only lively bit of goods we ever had in this damn village. The women used to hate her, just because she used to turn all their husbands’ heads in the road.’ He paused and slowly rolled his eternal cigarette butt from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  ‘Yes, quite a piece, was Mavis – younger than old Hewitt by a good few years. Only been married about eighteen months when she disappeared.’

  ‘How old do you reckon she’d be then?’ asked the farmer.

  Ceri scratched the stubble on his vast chin.

  ‘Let’s see. She was two years younger than me – that would make her born in nineteen oh-three, so she’d be twenty-six.’

  Leather-face came back into the conversation. ‘In gentleman’s service, she was, as far as I remember.’

  ‘Yes, a parlourmaid until Hewitt got hold of her. English girl originally, from Liverpool.’