by Alis Hawkins
‘No.’ The word was sharp. ‘I’ll do it now.’
I nodded. If the state of the corpse was going to induce him to bring up his breakfast, better that he did it while only I was here as witness.
‘Damn. The cloth’s stiff with seawater. I can hardly fold it back.’ His voice had the studied normality of somebody who was trying very hard not to be disturbed.
Folding proved impossible so, in the end, he grabbed the sheet and pulled it to the ground, where it stood in rigid folds. With a grunt of impatience, he kicked it to one side and bent over the naked corpse.
‘God almighty!’
I thought he was referring to the smell which had filled the air with the sail’s removal. ‘He’s been dead a while, evidently.’
‘No. His face, it’s–’
I heard voices outside. ‘What’s happened to his face?’ I asked, quickly.
John stumbled past me, gasping air into his lungs. I hoped, for his sake, that deep breaths would bring his heaving stomach under control. If he threw up its contents now, the number of voices outside suggested that he would do so in front of the entire inquest jury.
I followed him, setting aside questions of what might have happened to the dead man’s face and nerving myself to tell a group of men I had never met before that I was blind.
A blind coroner?
The words would go through every man’s mind. Of course they would.
A flame of anger licked up inside me. What was a blind man supposed to do with his life? Beg on the street? Keep decently to his house so as not to embarrass others?
‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ I hoped that my speaking Welsh would take them aback just enough to allow me to assert myself. ‘For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Harry Probert-Lloyd of Glanteifi. I’ve been asked to stand in as coroner for the time being.’
A figure stepped forward, uniform blue coat and white trousers identifying him as a police officer. ‘Good morning, sir. Constable Thomas Jones, Cardiganshire Constabulary.’
‘Have you seen the body yet, constable?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then can I suggest that you do so while I swear in the jury?’
He marched off in the direction of the outhouse, his footsteps muted on the sandy turf and I turned back to the jury, imagining looks exchanged amongst them. How far afield had gossip gone about my investigations before Christmas?
Sweet on Margaret Jones, he was. That’s why he wanted to know who killed her.
‘If you don’t know me, you won’t know that my sight is poor.’ Let them wonder exactly what I could see. ‘My colleague, John Davies, will oversee the view of the body with me. But first, we need to record your names. If you’d be so good as to introduce yourselves, I’d be grateful.’
A few awkward seconds followed while the jury silently decided who should speak first, then came the usual list of anglicised patronyms – Davies, Thomas, Williams, Jones, Evans, James. And one Vaughan – an ancient English spelling of Fychan, Small. It would be their responsibility to decide, on their viewing of the body and any other evidence that presented itself, who the deceased was and how he had met his end.
‘Have you elected a foreman?’ I asked.
They had and he spoke up: Vaughan.
‘Thank you, Mr Vaughan. All that’s left is to swear each of you in.’
I said it as if I had done it a hundred times before but, had it not been for John’s help, I would have had no idea that the jury had to give their oath before viewing the body. Pomfrey had left a volume of advice for coroners with me at Glanteifi, murmuring, ‘Perhaps your father…’ But it had been John to whom I had given the book, and the task of instructing me in my duties.
Oaths duly taken, I suggested that, in order to allow each juror to scrutinise the body appropriately, they should conduct the view two at a time.
The first pair were stepping forward when Constable Jones emerged.
‘Gone a nasty green colour, Jones has,’ John observed, voice low so that the officer would not hear him.
Our corpse was evidently not a pretty sight and I wondered, again, what had happened to his face.
Inside, I turned to the first jurors. Were they feeling a queasy anticipation after witnessing Jones’s reaction?
‘May I have your names, please? I need to be sure that every man has viewed the body.’ Of course, John would make sure of that, but I wanted to commit names and voices to memory as best I could.
‘Twm Wern Fach,’ the first man said, giving the name of his farm by which his neighbours would know him. ‘Thomas Thomas on the jury list.’
‘Obadaiah Vaughan,’ said the taller figure. ‘But only to my mother.’ I heard the smile in his voice. ‘Everybody else calls me Dai’r Bardd.’
Dai the Poet? I hoped flights of fancy would not affect his performance as foreman.
‘Step forward, gentlemen –’ I moved aside so that they could get to the body – ‘and state what you see.’
They moved towards the corpse. I waited for one of them to speak but, after a single hissed intake of breath as they bent over the body, the kind a man makes when he cuts himself with a careless slice of his pocket knife, there was no sound.
‘Do you know the deceased?’ I asked.
They did not. Neither man turned from the body as he answered and I recognised the same horrible fascination that had fixed my own eyes to my first cadaver.
‘Can we begin with whether the corpse is that of a man or a woman?’ I prompted. I knew the answer, but it seemed an uncontroversial place to start.
One of the men cleared his throat. ‘It’s a man.’ Dai’r Bardd. His voice had a youthful tone but there was something about it that made me think he might be one of those men who simply seem perpetually young, whose waistline does not thicken and whose hair does not recede as the years advance. ‘A youngish man by the look of his hair,’ he continued. ‘No grey in it.’
‘Colour?’
‘Brown. Much as I can see in this light. Not dark but not fair either.’
‘And his face?’ I asked. ‘Is that fair or dark?’
‘That’s difficult to say,’ Vaughan’s voice was steady, ‘because his face has no skin on it.’
After what must have been half an hour of prompting, questioning and one swift exit to vomit loudly on the grass outside, I had a clear idea of what the dead man looked like. A little above average height and, variously, ‘well nourished’, ‘muscular’, ‘strong-looking’, or ‘fit to fight you’. His arms were reported to be pale and hairy, as was his torso. Jurors also noted scars here and there but none so fresh as to have contributed to his death.
The corpse’s hands were in a state similar to his face – the skin quite gone. But they did provide us with some information about the dead man. ‘They’re not a working man’s hands,’ John said. ‘Not big enough. And, anyway, you’d expect his arms to be brown if he’d laboured for a living.’
‘Are you sure there’s nothing about him that you recognise?’ I asked again and again. ‘His hair? The shape of his face?’
Whatever had stripped the skin from the dead man’s face had also taken his eyes, so I asked whether his teeth were unusual in any way – overlapping, missing some at the front, anything which would enable one of my jurors to recognise him.
But no. His teeth, like the rest of him, it seemed, were unremarkable.
When the last pair of jurors came in, I did not wait for them to shuffle uneasily around the body. ‘Gentlemen, can you please confirm that this is a dead male, and that there are no recent injuries to the front of his body?’
I waited while they bent over the exposed corpse, examining the legs for thoroughness’ sake before straightening up and confirming what I had said.
‘And describe what you see on the back, if you’d be so good.’
John was already rolling the body over.
After a muttered oath from one of them, they agreed, as all the others had done, that his back was a mass
of bruised flesh from shoulders to buttocks and on down his legs.
‘Except there are some places which aren’t bruised,’ one of them said ‘where the skin looks ordinary – here,’ he apparently motioned to John to come and look, as if he imagined that nobody else had done so, ‘across his shoulders, look. And here, on his buttocks.’
‘What about his legs?’ I asked. It was a leading question; I knew the answer, and not only because I had heard it from the other jurors.
‘Same on the backs of his legs. Little patches where the skin isn’t bruised.’ He turned to me. ‘What causes bruises like that?’
I had asked the twelve men not to confer about what they had seen until the last pair had emerged from the viewing and, evidently, they had followed my request to the letter.
‘It’s not bruising,’ I told him, recalling my friend Gray’s explanation of the apparent injury to one of his precious corpses. ‘It’s what the doctors call livor mortis. When the heart stops pumping, the blood settles in the lowest part of the body. This man was laid on his back after he died.’
‘What about the pale patches?’
It was exactly the question I had asked in St George’s hospital mortuary. In all probability, everybody asked it when confronted with the phenomenon for the first time.
‘The blood settles around any unevenness in the surface that the body’s lying on.’
‘He must’ve been lying on something rough, then?’
I nodded. ‘He was found lying amongst a load of lime on the beach.’
‘Fell off the boat that brought the lime in then, is it?’
I ignored his question; that was for the public hearing of evidence. ‘Can you look at his head, please?’
Their reluctance as they shuffled towards the man’s skinless face was obvious. From the terse, tight-throated comments of the men who had already viewed the body, my mind’s eye saw flesh that was both desiccated and wet, pitted tissue that looked somewhat less than human.
I shivered. ‘There’s nothing in his face that tells you who he might be?’
Subdued mumbles told me that there was not.
‘Very well, if you could just have a look at the side of his head.’
Like the others, they quickly found the wound.
‘Nasty.’
‘Would you describe it for Mr Davies, please?’
‘There’s a lump, and broken skin,’ one man offered.
‘No blood,’ the other said, ‘but you can see where it’s open, there.’
‘Can you estimate its size for the record, please?’
‘About two inches long. Lump’s bigger – swollen around it.’
I knew that the swelling could have taken place even if death had occurred within a minute of the blow being inflicted. As a boy, I had once tripped in a hell-for-leather run and crashed my cheekbone into a rock. In the time it had taken to look around for witnesses to my humiliation, my eye had begun to close with the swelling.
‘And its position?’
I saw a movement towards the body, imagined fingers pincered between ear and wound. ‘About half an inch above his left ear.’
I was about to dismiss the men when one said, ‘Nasty bump, granted, but he drowned, didn’t he? If he was found on the load of lime in the sea?’
As I had asked him to do when previous jurors had suggested drowning as a cause of death, John returned the corpse to its original position. ‘Watch,’ he said, before pressing down on the dead chest.
The Thames gave up unidentified people with dispiriting regularity and drowned corpses had been a commonplace on Gray’s dissection table. ‘If he’d drowned,’ I said, ‘you’d see a fine froth coming out of his mouth. He might have come out of the water but he didn’t drown.’
John
The man who’d found the body still hadn’t turned up by the time we finished the view and neither had anybody else. I had a nasty feeling I knew what was going on. This magistrate – Pomfrey – had been hoping Harry’d just ask the jurors for a verdict and decide the inquest was done. But he didn’t know Harry.
‘An inquest is a public hearing,’ he told the jury. ‘Justice must be seen to be done or it’s not justice. I’m sorry, gentlemen, I have no choice but to adjourn the hearing until public notification of it can be given.’
I watched the jurors exchanging the sort of looks that told me they’d been taking bets on this happening. But nobody said a word. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Not to the acting coroner. So, without the sniff of a suspicion that they’d second-guessed him, Harry thanked them all and off they went.
‘What happened to the man who found the body?’ I said as I watched the men drib and drab up the path to the headland in twos and threes. ‘D’you think Mr Pomfrey forgot to tell him to be here?’
‘No.’ Harry’s jaw was tight under his beard. ‘I think Mr Pomfrey forgot to arrange a proper inquest hearing.’
So. It wasn’t just me who thought the magistrates’d tried to use Harry to get this done quietly, on the sly.
‘Right.’ Harry’d made a decision. ‘We’re going to go and have a little chat with Theophilus Harris and find out why he didn’t come and tell us how he happened to stumble across the body.’
Constable Jones gave us the man’s details, then, when Harry dismissed him, he saluted like a soldier and marched off up the hill, back to whatever duties he’d come from.
I fetched the mares, we tightened their girths, heaved ourselves into the saddle and followed the path Jones had taken.
Halfway up the bracken-covered hillside, I looked back down at the beach with its two peaceful looking buildings. You’d never credit that there was a faceless corpse lying down there, covered in a sailcloth. But then, if Harry became coroner, that’d be his life, wouldn’t it? Seeing death everywhere.
I tried not to think about the corpse and stared out over the sea. All those colours of blue and grey and green. The immenseness of it. Stretching all the way down to Cardigan, up to Aberystwyth and, out there, out beyond the horizon, Ireland. Then America.
The vastness of it made you feel small. Like an ant in a field. It was so huge you couldn’t see the size of it.
Once we were up on the headland, I turned to Harry. ‘Was it Justice Pomfrey that this man, Harris, reported the death to?’ I was wondering whether this fiasco of an inquest was all Pomfrey’s idea or whether the other magistrates’d just volunteered him to talk to Harry.
‘He didn’t go to a magistrate to report the death,’ he said. ‘Seems he chose to favour the local registrar with the news.’
‘Why? He couldn’t have thought it was a natural death, surely? Not with a face like that?’
‘Goodness knows what he thought,’ Harry said. ‘Fortunately, the registrar knew his job.’
‘Knew he’d be in a whole lot of trouble if he just registered the death, you mean. You can’t just give up a body for burial without a name. Especially if it looks like that.’
‘I’ll have to take your word for how it looks.’ Harry smiled – sort of – which seemed like a good sign. Perhaps he was making peace with his blindness. Then again, I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad for my prospects. Perhaps he was making peace with being squire of Glanteifi as well.
Constable Jones’d told us that Harris’s house was just off the turnpike road from Cardigan to Aberaeron. ‘It’s a tŷ unnos,’ he’d said.
Harry’s eyebrows’d shot up. ‘I didn’t think anybody still did that.’
Jones’d been too respectful to say so, but that just showed how much Harry didn’t know. Building tai unnos might’ve been an old custom but it was still useful. If you could raise a house on common land between sunset and sunrise of a single night, and have smoke coming from the chimney as the sun came over the horizon, you were allowed to enclose the ground around it.
Mind, only desperate people built tai unnos. Enclosing common land takes grazing away from neighbours’ animals, and this Harris’d be lucky if he hadn’t made an e
nemy of everybody who lived within a walking mile of his house.
As we got to the turnpike road, Harry kicked his mare into a trot.
‘What’s the rush?’
‘No rush, just want to get there and get on.’
Of course he did. He wanted this done. Finished. The reasons for this man’s death presented to the world in an orderly fashion. He wanted to show he’d be a good coroner.
Damn. For the last month I’d been trying to tell myself that he was just taking his time thinking about the best way to go about setting himself up as a solicitor. But I think, in my guts, I’d always known he wasn’t going to do it. If he’d been serious, he’d’ve done it straight away, as soon as we’d finished our investigations about Margaret Jones.
I’d just been fooling myself. Harry wasn’t going to take me on as an articled clerk. Trouble was, I’d set my heart on articles now – on being a solicitor myself in due course.
Looked like I was going to have to find another way to do it.
Harry
Theophilus Harris’s home was easy to identify from the name Constable Jones had given it – Banc yr Eithin – as the back wall was dug into the gorse-covered mound that rose behind it.
‘Door’s open,’ John said ‘but I can’t see anybody about.’
I patted the neck of my little mare, Sara, and slid from her back. ‘I don’t suppose he’s far away. There’s not much labouring to be had at this time of year.’