The Thread of Evidence

by Bernard Knight

  The second caller was the dairyman from Aberystwyth, who came twice a week to collect eggs from Roland’s poultry. He had picked up the gist of the story from his other calls, like the postman. Both of them were quite ready to talk about it with the old man, but they found him brusque and short-tempered, quite unlike his usual self. Both the men were also openly incredulous about the whole business; and the dairyman, in particular, thought it a big joke. Roland refused to be drawn into saying anything more than a curt ‘damn nonsense’, so the men had to leave without gleaning any more juicy bits to pass on to their next calls.

  When Peter got back, he found his uncle sitting by the kitchen fire, poking it with unusual ferocity. The dog was crouched in a corner of the room, head on one side, looking warily at his master. Once again, Peter sensed that something was radically wrong with his usually placid uncle.

  Roland threw the poker into the fender with unnecessary violence.

  ‘Peter boy, have you been into the village?’

  ‘No. I’ve been down with Mary most of the day – since early this morning, anyway. Why d’you ask?’

  Roland Hewitt jumped out of his chair and went to the window. He stood staring out at the paved yard and garden beyond, his back to his nephew. Peter noticed that he hadn’t bothered to shave, or even put on a collar and tie.

  ‘So you haven’t heard the talk, eh?’

  His voice was harsh and his fingers trembled as he passed them through the grey stubble of his hair. He turned and began to pace up and down, until Peter stood in his path to block his agitated wandering.

  ‘Look here,’ began Peter. ‘There’s something worrying you, isn’t there? Something to do with these blasted bones?’

  Roland stared up at him, then seemed to crumple. His thin body drooped and went as limp as a punctured tyre.

  ‘Sit down there, boy, and listen.’ He sank back wearily into his own big chair and stared into the embers of the fire that he had just wrecked.

  ‘I may as well tell you the whole story now. You’ll be hearing it soon enough from other places, no doubt.’

  Peter stayed silent, letting the old man feel his way.

  ‘I don’t know how much your mother told you about my affairs. But, knowing the family, I expect they did their best to keep it quiet.’

  That’s true enough, thought his nephew. When he was a child, Uncle Roland had been a name that the grown-ups used to whisper in front of the young ones.

  To them, he was the black sheep who had gone to Canada. Any questions about him from the children were either ignored or evaded with such persistence that, eventually, he came to be a legend on a par with Santa Claus.

  Peter’s mother kept up a sporadic correspondence with Roland; but the rest of the family elders seemed to have denied his existence.

  ‘Your mother was the only one who ever had any time for me, bless her! She was the only one who bothered with me after I came back – apart from you, boy.’

  Roland spoke in a dull monotone, staring into the ashes.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come back. But I wanted to see the old place and have a few years here before I went.’

  He slipped back into speaking Welsh and Peter followed suit.

  ‘What’s this got to do with the gossip you’re on about?’ he asked, gently trying to prompt his uncle to get to the point.

  ‘They’re saying in Tremabon that this body up on the cliff is that of my wife – your Aunt Mavis,’ he said bleakly. ‘That I killed her all those years back and hid her up there.’

  Peter experienced a curious sensation. He knew that he should be appalled and shocked, yet he realized that this was what he must have been expecting. He had connected the two events, the bones and his uncle’s strangeness, in his subconscious mind; but only now had Roland’s bald statement thrust it into the front of his thoughts.

  His knowledge of his aunt was almost nil – he had been brought up to accept the fact that she had ‘run away’ from Uncle Roland, but the hint was left that he was not all that blameless himself. The whole affair was one of the unmentionable subjects in the family, like sex and cancer. He and his sisters had been brainwashed from infancy not to have any interest in it.

  ‘But that’s absurd – ridiculous!’

  He heard himself speak the words and realized how banally inadequate they were.

  Roland, now that he had started, plunged on with his story:

  ‘I was a lot older than Mavis when we married. That was another mistake, like coming back here to live. She was pretty – by Heaven she was! – but she was a bitch. A real little bitch, boy! We fought all the time, me trying to keep her respectable and her laughing in my face.’

  Peter saw his uncle’s bony fists clenching and opening spasmodically as his mind flew back over the years. His thin face was grey with anguish at the memories.

  ‘We stuck it for the best part of two years. Then things came to a head, and she went. God only knows where to. I never saw her again.’

  ‘Why did you quarrel so much?’

  ‘She was a little tart. I should have seen that long before I ever married her, I suppose.’ Roland replied bitterly. ‘But I was as silly an old fool then as I am now. I was too flattered to realize it, but of course she only married me to get out of working as a parlourmaid. I was left the farm by my uncle when I was thirty. So I was a good catch for a girl in service in those days – she made herself mistress of a hundred acres freehold. But that wasn’t all she was mistress of, not by a long way.’

  ‘Does Ceri Lloyd come into this, by any chance?’ Peter asked quietly.

  His uncle nodded. ‘Indeed, he does. He was the main cause of the trouble – though, to be fair, if it hadn’t been him, there would have been someone else in the village. She would have found another man to amuse herself with. I found out, afterwards that they had been pretty thick before we got married. And she didn’t let the wedding stop her fun. Ceri wasn’t well off enough for her to want to marry him instead of me – he worked in his father’s shop then, long before he had the Lamb and Flag.’

  ‘So the cause of the trouble between you was her carrying on with Lloyd?’ concluded Peter.

  ‘That was one part of it – but there were other men besides him, I’m sure. She took to going home to Liverpool for weeks on end. I know she had a good time up there when she went, and she only came home when her money ran out. Then she’d be nice to me for a bit. And, like a fool, I’d fall for it.’

  ‘And this went on for a couple of years?’

  ‘Yes, almost as long as that. Getting worse all the time.’

  ‘Why didn’t you divorce her?’

  Roland shrugged helplessly. ‘In those days, “divorce” was a terrible word to people of our class. I’d married her for better or worse, in the chapel, and I thought I had to put up with it. Anyway, I didn’t know how to go about it – though, just before she went, I was beginning to think about a separation, if not actual divorce, boy.’

  ‘What happened eventually – and how on earth does this body come into it, for goodness’ sake?’

  ‘Towards the end, she was going off to Liverpool even more often. She wouldn’t say anything, she’d just vanish and I wouldn’t see her for perhaps a month. She’d say she’d been staying with her sister, if she bothered to tell me anything at all. But, for all I know, she could have been anywhere in the country. A real bad one, she was! God knows, I was only a dull old farmer, but I did my best to please her when we got married.’

  His voice cracked with emotion. ‘I reckon I loved her then, but I came to hate her before those couple of years were past.’

  Peter could see the old man’s pale eyes moistening behind his old-fashioned glasses. He hurriedly changed the subject.

  ‘But what about her actual disappearance – why should there be all that nonsense about her being dead?’

  ‘The last few months were worse than ever, boy. She would come home from Liverpool, or from being with Lloyd, and start fighting right away �
�� real fighting, shouting, screaming, kicking – everything! She even came at me with a knife once, in her temper – saying how I’d ruined her life and was keeping her short of everything. It was terrible!’

  Roland rose abruptly from the fireside and began pacing the floor again.

  ‘I started hitting her back in the end – partly to keep her off me. She used to go mad with rage. But, in the end, it was hate and temper on my part, too – God forgive me!’

  Peter heard his uncle’s voice tremble. He had never before seen him in anything other than his usual placid and rather vague state of mind. The change was disturbing, almost frightening; and Peter was suddenly afraid that the old man was going to break down altogether.

  ‘But what actually happened at the end?’ he persisted, trying to stem the flood of emotion by concentrating on fact.

  Roland Hewitt stopped walking around and leant heavily on the edge of the kitchen table, staring down at the cloth.

  ‘One day, she didn’t come home. Must have been the middle of September, nineteen twenty-nine. There was nothing new in that. For a couple of weeks I thought she had gone on one of her trips to Liverpool. But then a letter came for her in her sister’s handwriting, so I knew she couldn’t be there. After another week, there was a second letter. Then, soon after, this sister – another bitch cast out of the same mould as Mavis herself – arrived on the doorstep demanding to know where Mavis was. Just about hysterical, she was.’

  Peter’s uncle paused as the scene flooded back into his mind.

  ‘I didn’t have any time for this sister and I told her so. I’d had about enough of Mavis’s antics by then. I wasn’t anxious to go hunting around the country, looking for her. I thought she was probably with some man. The sister raised the roof. I sent her packing, and she went straight to the police in Aberystwyth – saying that I’d done away with my wife.’

  Peter stared at Roland incredulously. ‘But that’s just plain ridiculous! Surely they didn’t take any notice of a silly accusation like that.’

  ‘It wasn’t just her word, boy. I didn’t know it then, but Mavis had been writing to her sister saying that she was going to leave me and that I was ill-treating her and injuring her and all the rest of it. The last time she went home, she showed some bruises to her.’

  ‘What was the point of that?’

  ‘I think she was working up to getting a divorce herself. She was a cunning little devil. She probably thought that, if she could divorce me for cruelty before I left her, she would get a good settlement and be free to carry on her affairs. Anyway, there were some letters as well, to this sister, which suggested that I was on the point of doing something drastic to her. Then that swine Ceri Lloyd went to the police with a lot of lies and made it worse still.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘This sister had gone to the local paper in Aber and spun them the same yarn. They published an appeal for anyone who knew where Mavis was to contact them. Damn reporters came pestering me at Bryn Glas. Then the police came nosing around. A wonder I wasn’t had up for turning a shotgun on someone, the trouble I had over those few weeks.’

  ‘What did the police have to say to you?’

  ‘I don’t think they took it very seriously at the time. They sized up the sister and Ceri Lloyd. But they had to do something for the sake of appearances. They soon dropped it, though.’

  ‘How long did all this trouble go on for?’

  ‘Until I cleared off to Canada. Some Sunday paper got hold of it – they must have been short of news in twenty-nine, because they took over where the local paper left off. They ran a big article about the “Mystery of Bryn Glas”, silly fools! That kept the scandal going. The village all judged and condemned me, of course. That fat swine Lloyd was the mouthpiece – he joined forces with the sister and went round talking to the reporters whenever he had the chance.’

  ‘You could have had him for slander, surely?’ Peter said indignantly.

  Roland sighed and shuffled back to his chair, his lean face grey and tired.

  ‘I suppose so, boy, but I was too worried to care. Everywhere I went, I felt that people were whispering and pointing at me – “Look, there’s the man who murdered his wife.” I stuck it for a couple of months, and then I had a chance of a quick sale for the farm. So, almost overnight, I sold up and went over to Alberta. I knew a fellow from Tremabon who had settled there, and he helped me get settled in a job in an agricultural store there. It wasn’t a bad life. I did pretty well over the years, but I always pined for the old place.’

  Roland looked around the kitchen as if he were seeing it for the first time.

  ‘I could have finished up here quite well, boy, but you can’t get away from the past.’

  Peter leant forward and spoke earnestly to the old man. ‘You’ve got nothing to get away from, Uncle! There’s nothing in what you’ve just told me to cause you to get upset and worried like this. Only a few old fools in the village shooting their mouths off. If they dare say anything that I can pin onto any particular person, we’ll get a lawyer to teach them a lesson!’

  Roland Hewitt stared at his nephew with troubled eyes. ‘I don’t know, boy – I just don’t know. I feel that something bad is going to happen. I’ve got to dreading every knock on the door today.’

  ‘Why, for goodness’ sake? I don’t need telling that you had nothing to do with Aunt Mavis’s vanishing trick. What is there to be afraid of, then? You didn’t kill your wife so this heap of bones in a cave is no concern of yours!’

  Roland refused to be reassured. ‘They’re all saying in the village that she was the only woman to be missing from Tremabon in living memory, so this must be her.’

  Peter groaned in exasperation.

  ‘Look, that’s nonsense! You know as well as I do that the skeleton can’t be Mavis. You didn’t put it there, and there’s no reason why anyone else should have. That’s all there is to it. Anyway, the state that thing is in, it could have been there for generations, so this must be the body of someone else. The police aren’t fools, not by a hell of a long way. They’ll be able to tell that this is the body of someone else in no time.’

  The logic of this seemed to strike home at last. A more hopeful expression crept into Roland’s face.

  ‘You really think so, boy?’

  Peter piled on the bedside manner. ‘Of course. They have scientists these days who will make mincemeat of these rumours in the village. They may never be able to say exactly who the bones belong to, but I’ll bet they know already that they can’t possibly have come from Mavis Hewitt.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘Going on what the pathologist has told us so far, sir, there seems no reason why this couldn’t be Mavis Hewitt.’ With an air of finality, Pacey laid a thin folder on the edge of the chief constable’s desk.

  The detective-superintendent and his assistant sat in Colonel Barton’s office on the first floor of the County Constabulary Headquarters at Cardigan. Following his talk with the local constable at Tremabon, Pacey had gone back up the cliff as fast as his bulk would allow him. He collected Willie Rees and the few more objects that the digging team had found amongst the last rubble in the shaft, then left Inspector Morris to organize the sealing-off of the tunnel.

  He then hustled back with Rees to his police Wolseley and drove off rapidly towards Aberystwyth. After an hour of furious activity in the basement of the police station there, he had telephoned the chief, then roared away again down the coast road to Cardigan.

  By the time they arrived in the county town, it was about seven o’clock in the evening of that strenuous Monday. Pacey was beginning to yearn for a rest and a decent meal. But, with Rees still in tow, he went straight to the police headquarters where the colonel was waiting for them. He gave him a succinct account of the day’s events and ended up by sliding the pitifully thin file with its scanty record of the case, onto the desk.

  ‘All I’ve got so far is in there, sir, but there’s nothing important that
I haven’t already mentioned.’

  The chief constable reached for it and carefully scanned the few sheets of paper which it contained.

  Inspector Rees sat primly on a hard chair at one end of the desk, looking like an elderly spinster at a vicar’s tea party. Charles Pacey, his large body draped uncomfortably over another small chair at the opposite end of the desk, waited patiently for the chief to say something.

  Colonel Barton sat bolt upright in his swivel chair, one hand fingering his neat grey toothbrush moustache as he studied the file.

  He looked up at last. ‘And you say, Superintendent, that there’s no sign of the original report of the sister’s complaint in the records at Aberystwyth?’

  ‘No, sir. We had a good search through all the old records in the station. But, apart from an entry in the daily Occurrences book, there was nothing else.’

  Willie Rees thought of the frantic hour they had just spent in the basement of the police station, scrabbling through heaps of dusty paper tied in even dirtier string.

  ‘Do you think anything will turn up, either after a better search or, perhaps, here in the headquarters archives?’

  Pacey looked doubtful. ‘I haven’t much hope of that, Colonel. Thirty years is a long time and the war in between played havoc with a lot of storage routines. I know tons of stuff was thrown out to make room for shelters and things like that.’

  ‘Where can we hope to get some further information?’ The colonel rapped out his questions in the manner of one with years of military command behind him.

  Pacey, looking like a village yokel compared with the small, neat figure in front of him, puffed out his red cheeks as he considered this.

  ‘Well, there’s the local newspaper files. Their office in Aber was shut when I was there. So I thought it could wait until morning, without going chasing after the editor. Then we might find someone who was in the police force thirty years ago and might remember something about it. None of the present men up there are anything like old enough. But I’ve got the names of a couple of retired officers who might have been there at the time.’