In Two Minds

by Alis Hawkins

  A picture came into my mind. Harry going up from Glanteifi to fetch limestone with the home-farm servants. I’d have laid good money that they’d never had to do what my father’d been forced to do – wait at the tollgate at midnight so that he could go down to the coast and back in the same day and only pay one toll on his cart and load of lime. Glanteifi’s men would’ve had plenty of money for tolls. They’d’ve taken it leisurely. I could see it in my mind’s eye – Harry and the servants sitting around the warmth of the kiln long into the night, the windows of The Ship bright in the dark, sounds of laughter and gossip as farmers and labourers caught up with friends and relatives they hadn’t seen in months.

  ‘How big?’ Puw repeated. ‘I don’t know in feet and inches, Mr Probert-Lloyd. I can stand up in there with plenty of room to swing my shovel, I know that much.’

  ‘About six and a half feet high and as many deep, I’d estimate,’ Vaughan said.

  Easily enough space for a body.

  ‘And what makes you think the dead man was in there?’ Harry wanted to know.

  ‘The coins.’ Puw nodded towards the cents in my hand. ‘And his face and hands.’

  All right, I’ll admit it, I knew next to nothing about lime burning. But, according to Puw, we had to understand that if we wanted to know what had happened to our corpse’s face.

  ‘You explain it, Dai,’ the lime burner said. ‘You’ll say it better than me.’

  I watched Dai’r Bardd settle himself and find a place to begin. The man loved being the centre of attention.

  ‘If you put raw limestone on the fields,’ he said, ‘nothing would happen except you’d have very stony fields. I don’t know who found out that burning limestone changes it, or how they came to do such a thing, but when you put limestone in the kiln and burn it, what comes out looks the same but it’s not. It’s changed into quicklime. Now then, you can’t just put quicklime on the fields, either, or it burns the grass. It needs to be slaked – watered.’

  He looked at me, wanting to know that I’d followed so far. I nodded.

  ‘You have to be careful with quicklime – it’s dangerous stuff. As soon as it comes into contact with water, it blows – heats up quickly, fizzes, cracks and the lumps fall apart. If you put a big piece in a bucket with some water, it blows itself apart until, in the end, all you’ve got is lime slurry – and it’ll be hot enough to burn your hand if you put it in. I’ve known carts catch on fire from quicklime blowing when a load’s not covered and it gets rained on.’

  ‘So, if a man was lying under a layer of quicklime waste and the wind blew the rain in and slaked the lime, the skin under it would burn because of the heat?’

  Dai’r Bardd nodded, a sly smile on his face and one eyebrow up. Not dull are you, boy? ‘Yes, he said. ‘And not just because of the heat. Quicklime itself burns if your skin’s wet from sweat or rain.’

  ‘Funny thing,’ Puw was happier to put his tuppenceworth in now the technical matters had been dealt with. ‘You don’t always feel it when it’s just on your skin like that. I got blisters all down my arm, once, before somebody told me it was burning.’

  ‘Would rain blowing in really be enough to do it?’ Harry asked.

  Puw nodded. ‘Duw, yes. Plenty, rain would be. Sweat’ll do it, like Dai said.’

  Harry frowned, chewed his lip. ‘He’d have needed to be lying with his head to the entrance of the draw-hole then?’

  We all sat there for a moment, thinking about it. Obviously, if Harry was right, the dead man had been dragged into the draw-hole feet first.

  ‘When we saw him, he was naked,’ Harry said, ‘but only his face and hands were burned.’

  ‘Must’ve still been dressed when he was covered with the waste,’ Vaughan said.

  ‘Wouldn’t the quicklime burn through the clothes?’

  ‘No.’ Puw shook his head. ‘Not like it does with skin. Never known it to go through my clothes.’

  ‘But you said it could set fire to a cart,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Only a load still in lumps. Not enough heat in dust.’

  ‘So where are his clothes?’ Harry asked. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Haven’t seen them, I haven’t,’ Puw was defensive. As if Harry’d accused him of robbing the corpse.

  ‘And, if he’d been buried under the waste in your kiln,’ Harry went on, thinking out loud, ‘how did he come to be lying on that boatload of limestone when Teff Harris found him? Did somebody come and undress him and drag him down the beach?’

  I felt Dai’r Bardd’s eyes on me and looked over at him. He inclined his head towards the coins on the table.

  ‘I don’t know who killed him,’ he said. ‘But if those fell out of his pocket into the waste, then I think I know who he was.’

  American coins.

  ‘Jenkyn Hughes,’ I said. ‘The American that Mrs Parry’s in business with.’

  Harry

  Benton Reckitt still not having presented himself by the time we had finished our midday meal, I decided to go and see Inspector Bellis in order to make him aware of what Puw had told us. I relished the thought of presenting him with evidence that, far from washing up on Tresaith beach, the body had been taken into the water from Puw’s limekiln.

  We walked into the relative warmth of the police station to be greeted by an eager Constable Morgan.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Probert-Lloyd. You’ve heard then?’

  I disliked the implied complicity of his tone. ‘Heard what, Constable?’

  A door opened. ‘That will do, Morgan.’ Inspector Bellis had heard us come in. Had he been expecting us? ‘Please, gentlemen, come in to my office.’

  I strode towards him, trying to dispel the feeling of being at a disadvantage, while Bellis held the door open.

  Billy Go-About, I said to myself. Don’t think of him as Inspector Bellis, cut him down to size as Billy Go-About.

  ‘I trust your autopsy was illuminating, Acting Coroner?’

  Your autopsy. The one you so whimsically insisted on.

  I pulled out a chair and waited for Bellis to take his own seat behind his desk. When he did not, I remained standing. ‘Very much so, thank you. As was the information I received prior to coming here. I now believe I have a far better understanding of how this man came by his injuries and how he ended up in the sea.’

  ‘Oh, I think we shall know nothing less than the truth of the matter very soon, as it happens.’

  His tone warned me that something had changed since our last meeting and I managed to stretch a smile over gritted teeth. ‘How so?’

  ‘We’ve made an arrest.’

  Made an arrest? ‘I see. May I ask who?’

  ‘The discoverer of the corpse, Acting Coroner. Theophilus Harris. I’m expecting my officers back with him at any moment.’

  Bellis’s self-satisfaction was extremely aggravating. ‘May I ask on what evidence you have arrested Harris?’

  He leaned over his desk and picked something up. ‘This was waiting for me when I arrived at the station this morning.’

  He was proffering what I assumed to be a sheet of folded paper. John intercepted it. ‘If you don’t mind, Inspector?’

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry, I’d forgotten.’

  I was quite certain he had done no such thing. If it had been a faux pas he would have been highly embarrassed. No, Billy Go-About was making a point. A blind man can’t do this job.

  ‘Ask Teff Harris what he did with the dead man’s clothes,’ John read, ‘after he took him out of the sea and stripped him.’

  I waited for him to go on but there seemed to be no more. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It’s quite enough!’ Bellis barked. ‘Tampering with a body, falsifying evidence, impeding identification, lying about the course of events… What reason could he have for doing any of those things unless he was guilty?’

  ‘If he did them. We have only the word of an anonymous letter writer, Inspector. Which I consider to be very far from proper ev
idence.’ I turned back to John. ‘What kind of paper is it written on?’

  There was a brief, considering silence. ‘Half a sheet of ordinary letter-paper. Cut in half, not torn. Scissors, I’d say, rather than a knife along a fold, the edge is very clean.’

  ‘You say it was waiting for you when you arrived this morning, Inspector. I assume, therefore, that it did not arrive in the mail?’

  Bellis hesitated slightly. ‘It was wedged beneath the outer door. Whoever wrote it thought they could slip it under, but our station is better constructed than that.’

  I turned back to John. ‘What’s the handwriting like?’

  ‘Legible and on a line,’ he said after a moment or two. ‘No misspellings. But I wouldn’t’ve said it’s the hand of somebody who uses a pen for his living. Looks as if time’s been taken over it.’

  The image of a slowly moving hand appeared in my mind, a tongue protruding slightly between lips set in concentration. But whose lips?

  ‘I think you’ll find that, when he realises he was observed, Mr Harris will soon tell us the truth.’

  I looked up sharply and the inspector disappeared into the whirlpool of my central vision. Well aware of the methods used to arrive at ‘the truth’ in London police stations, I did not wish to be a party to such tactics, here.

  ‘Inspector, if Theophilus Harris wishes to confess of his own free will that’s well and good. But I would like your word as a gentleman that he will be offered no violence to induce him to do so.’

  If I had asked for Bellis’s word that he would stop consorting with prostitutes in dark alleys, the silence which greeted my request could not have been more outraged.

  ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, it is only your inexperience as coroner that prevents me from taking the gravest offence at that request.’

  But feigned indignation was too common a barrister’s trick for me to be discomfited. ‘I may be inexperienced as coroner, Inspector, but please do not assume that I have no experience of what takes place in police stations.’

  I could feel the look he fastened onto my face. Was he rethinking his opinion of me or allowing his impatience to swell into dislike? It was one thing to stand my ground with this man, I realised, but I could not afford to make an enemy of him.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, as if he had conceded the point. ‘We will take it as a matter of record that Mr Harris will go unmolested. Perhaps,’ I said, offering him a sop, ‘I should have been more suspicious when he failed to turn up to the viewing of the body.’

  To my relief, he took the bait. ‘Indeed. His absence suggests that he was afraid he would give something away.’

  Evidently, the inspector had not met Teff Harris. The former soldier had struck me as a man who would give away nothing he did not intend to part with.

  Just then, a door slammed open in the outer room, followed by a burst of shouting. I heard Harris’s unmistakable tones.

  ‘Where is the inspector?’ I heard him shout in Welsh, then again, louder, in his oddly accented English.

  I turned to leave the office, but was preceded to the door by Bellis. ‘Allow me to deal with this, if you’d be so good.’

  He closed the door behind him. I opened it again and followed him out. Harris was speaking, controlled but furious. ‘I demand to know on what evidence I have been arrested. There is a law in this country. You can’t just take a man because you don’t like the look of him.’

  ‘Be quiet, Harris!’

  If Bellis had hoped that the voice of command would instantly bring a subaltern to attention, he was disappointed.

  ‘I will not! I am entitled to know on what evidence I have been arrested.’ Harris faced the inspector, his figure, in my peripheral vision, so upright with fury that it seemed he might actually leave the ground. Then he turned in my direction.

  ‘Are you responsible for this? You wanted to know why I didn’t come to the police with news of the corpse. This is why! All I did was find him.’

  Bellis spoke before I could catch my breath. ‘We have ample evidence to arrest you, Harris. You were seen.’

  ‘That’s a lie! All I did was find him and put him in the shed.’

  ‘We have reason to believe that is not true.’

  ‘What reason?’

  ‘A letter stating that you stripped the corpse before leaving it in the shed. Why would you do such a thing if you had nothing to hide?’

  I waited for Harris to accuse Bellis of naivety if he could think of no other reason for a corpse to be stripped. In London, the assumption John had made – that the dead man’s clothes had been removed in order to sell them – would have been universal. But then, unidentified corpses were hardly as commonplace in Cardiganshire as they were in the capital.

  But Teff Harris surprised me by going to the nub of the matter. ‘Where did this letter come from? Who wrote it?’

  ‘That needn’t concern you.’

  ‘It does concern me! Any number of people have grudges against me! I can give you a list of half a dozen people who might have written a letter like that.’

  ‘Quiet!’ I jumped, startled at Bellis’s unexpected vehemence. ‘Take him into the lock-up, Williams.’

  ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd.’ Harris’s voice took me by surprise.

  ‘A moment,’ I said, holding up my hand to Constable Williams who was attempting to drag Harris away.

  ‘They’ve left my son on his own,’ Harris said. ‘He’s only eight years old.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell him to go to a neighbour’s house?’

  ‘None of our neighbours would take him in.’

  I can give you a list of half a dozen people who might’ve written a letter like that. Were all his neighbours on the list?

  ‘Can you take him to the workhouse in Newcastle Emlyn until they let me out? Or until my wife gets back. If you leave a note for her in the house – she can read – she can go and fetch him.’

  Had his wife really gone to care for a sister? A man who can kill one person might not stop at killing another to protect himself. It might be a good idea to do as he asked in order to have an opportunity to speak to his son.

  I nodded. ‘Very well.’

  Williams, presumably following some gesture from his superior, jerked Harris towards the door.

  ‘What about the cow?’ John surprised me by asking.

  ‘Tell Gwyn Puw I’ll pay him to go up and see to her,’ Harris called as he was bundled out. ‘He’ll do it for money.’

  ‘What now?’ John asked as we made our way back to the Black Lion.

  I did not reply immediately; the concentration required in order to see where I was going and to avoid walking into things or people made coherent speech difficult.

  ‘We continue with our investigation,’ I said, when my way cleared slightly. ‘Mr Bellis may choose to see an anonymous letter as sufficient reason to look no further but I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t think Harris is guilty?’

  ‘I don’t think I should stop investigating just because it pleases Billy Bellis to arrest somebody on flimsy evidence.’

  John dropped behind me to let a woman with a bundle go by, and I waited for him to resume his place at my side.

  ‘If we assume, for now,’ I said, ‘that the dead man is this American, Jenkyn Hughes, we need to find out what he was doing at Tresaith and whether he was killed there. Also, it would be useful to find out whether he knew Teff Harris.’ I hesitated. ‘I’d like you to go and take Harris’s son to Newcastle Emlyn while I wait for Benton Reckitt.’

  John digested my request. ‘You want me to go and fetch this child, and take him to the workhouse?’

  ‘I’d do it myself, but I need to be here to talk to Reckitt. I want to ask him about this lime-burn theory of Puw’s. But, realistically, the child will be more likely to speak to you than to me.’

  ‘What, because you’re a gentleman and I’m not?’

  ‘Because I’m blind.’ I had little experience of children but I knew that I would have fo
und a blind man fearful as a child. ‘If his father’s attitude is anything to go by,’ I said, ‘the boy might be reluctant to speak. But if you put him on the saddle in front of you and take him down to the workhouse, it might just give him enough time to trust you and to tell you something.’

  As I walked through the front door of the Black Lion, a servant approached and told me that a gentleman was waiting in the back room.

  ‘Dr Reckitt, is it?’

  ‘No, sir. A Mr Pomfrey.’

  Pomfrey, the magistrate? What did he want?

  He stood, courteously, as I entered the room. ‘My dear Probert-Lloyd, how enterprising of you to station yourself here!’

  I inclined my head in acknowledgement and asked what brought him to my door. I could not help suspecting that he had come at my father’s request, whipper-in to a wayward hound.

  ‘Oh, well, we rather threw you into the rushing flow, as it were, at Bowen’s instigation, so I thought I’d just come and make sure that you were managing to swim without too much difficulty.’ Pomfrey reached for the bottle on the table at his side. ‘May I offer you a glass of Madeira?’