In Two Minds

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘Was she so very pretty?’ I asked, trying not to sound as hungry as I felt for details of my mother.

  ‘Yes, she was. But I believe it was her vivaciousness which caught men’s eye.’

  A vivaciousness which had been snuffed out by my birth.

  Arthur Philips coughed slightly in the sudden silence. ‘We hear that you’ve been asked to stand in as coroner, Henry.’

  Ah, the social advantages that attached themselves to the entertainment of a blind man; his wife had evidently caught his eye and mouthed ‘change the subject’.

  ‘Indeed,’ I acknowledged. ‘Mr Bowen obviously saw talents in me which I had not seen in myself.’

  ‘I trust it wouldn’t be indelicate to ask whether you’ve identified the poor man?’

  His sympathy for the victim caused another upwelling of affection in me. Was it that that made me more confiding than I might otherwise have been? Whatever the impulse, I was soon to be glad of it.

  ‘We believe he might be a man called Jenkyn Hughes,’ I said.

  A gasp came from Mrs Philips.

  ‘Jenkyn Hughes the American?’ her husband asked.

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded, acutely aware that information was being exchanged between husband and wife. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Rather more than that,’ Mr Philips said, clearly agitated. ‘Our family is in business with him. How did he die?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. But it seems clear that it wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Somebody killed him deliberately?’

  ‘It seems so.’

  I caught a movement from Mrs Philips’s direction. ‘Oh, the poor man. Why on earth would anybody want to do him harm?’

  ‘That’s another question I must find the answer to,’ I said, keeping my tone rueful so as to avoid sounding officious. Her husband raised his glass to his lips but did not comment. Was he less surprised than his wife that somebody should wish to see the American dead? I forced a smile. ‘But this is no topic for the dinner table. Perhaps I could come and speak to you tomorrow, Mr Philips, at your place of work? I will have my assistant with me then. He makes notes for me.’

  ‘Of course. We’re entirely at your disposal – myself and everyone I employ.’ He hesitated before adding, ‘However, you might find it more useful to speak to my son, James. He is slowly but surely taking over the business from me and he has – had – more to do with Jenkyn Hughes on a day-to-day basis than I did myself.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Unsurprisingly, conversation became somewhat strained after that as Mr and Mrs Philips struggled with the knowledge that somebody they knew personally, somebody who had, more likely than not, sat at this very table, had died a violent death. So, after an exchange of mutual assurances of future visits and an enquiry as to where I might find the Philips’ business premises, Evan was alerted and Sara brought to the front door.

  Despite apprehensions which neither the boy nor I needed to articulate, we did not encounter the sailor on the bridge again.

  John

  I slept badly. Always do if I’ve got to get up earlier than usual. Afraid to go to sleep for fear of not waking up in time. Still, at least I managed to leave the house without seeing my landlady. Sour as sloes she’d been, when I told her I’d be staying in Cardigan for a few days.

  ‘I hope you’re not looking for a reduction in rent, John Davies. It’s not as if I can offer your room to anybody else while you’re away, is it?’

  It’d been on the tip of my tongue to remind her that she wasn’t going to have to feed me morning and evening either, but I managed to keep my mouth shut. She could easily turn nasty, and I didn’t want to have to look for new lodgings. I wasn’t exactly sitting pretty but at least it was a decent roof over my head at a rent I could afford.

  I was out of bed before it was properly light and off to the livery stables. Harry was a man of routine and I knew he liked his breakfast at nine o’clock. If I could be at the Black Lion just before that, I’d get breakfast too.

  The ostler’s boy gave me a surly look when I walked into the stableyard, but I’d warned his father I’d be there before sunrise so he couldn’t complain. I still half-expected him to tell me to tack the mare up myself but, as usual, Seren was ready – saddled and bridled. She knew me now and she made that friendly half-breath, half-whinny that horses use to their friends. It made me smile. I’d got attached to her, too.

  I settled myself in the saddle. It was a quarter past seven by the watch Harry’d given me and I was confident of being in Cardigan well before nine. There was still most of an hour left before sunrise but that cold, grey light that creeps over the countryside before the sun appears was plenty to see by and I followed the road out of town towards Cenarth.

  I was happy enough on horseback now to let my mind wander as Seren trotted steadily along the road. Whatever Harry thought, it seemed to me that today might be our last day investigating. All we needed to do for the inquest was to go over the river, knock on Captain Coleman’s door, confirm that this American was missing and we’d have all we needed. Identity of corpse: Jenkyn Hughes. Cause of death: murder.

  Teff Harris seemed to be everybody’s favourite for the crime and it was easy to see why. Firstly, he was always coming and going at Tresaith beach with the limestone hauling he’d got himself contracted to do. With Mrs Parry and Gwyn Puw away, the place had been deserted, so he could’ve easily arranged to meet Hughes there. No witnesses.

  Secondly, he was a soldier. Bashing somebody over the head wouldn’t be as difficult for him as it would be for the rest of us.

  Thirdly, there was no love lost between him and his neighbours. That might not seem like much but it told me a lot. Our house’d been not much better than Teff Harris’s and my parents had depended on their neighbours to see them through hard times. Likewise, their neighbours had depended on them, turn and turn about. That’s how things were. Life was too hard, too chancy, to think of falling out with the people around you, and you had to be suspicious of anybody who did.

  Then there was that anonymous letter. Ask Teff Harris what he did with the dead man’s clothes after he took him out of the sea and stripped him.

  I knew it might be nothing more than somebody trying to make trouble for Harris. But, then again, it might just as easily be from somebody who’d seen exactly what they said but was afraid of Teff Harris’s gun if they came forward in person.

  Coming up to Llechryd bridge, I stared over the sodden meadow at the river. Flat as beaten metal. Until it went over the weir and got tossed into tumbling froth, you wouldn’t even know it was water. Things didn’t always look like what they were.

  Teff Harris had said he didn’t know the corpse. Well, if he’d stripped it, he was lying – even the boy, Clarkson, described Hughes by his clothes. But, if the body really had been naked when he found it, I knew that, more than likely, Teff wouldn’t’ve recognised it. I’d seen my father blacked with soot and I knew I’d’ve walked past him as a stranger if he hadn’t been in our own kitchen. With the corpse’s face as it was, unless he had reason to suspect that it was Hughes, Teff Harris might well not’ve known him.

  I kicked my heels lightly into Seren’s sides until she rocked into a canter. Two heads were better than one and I hoped Harry’s had more in it than mine.

  But, when I got to the Black Lion, Harry didn’t want to talk about Teff Harris. He was full of Benton Reckitt. Or, at least, what Reckitt’d found inside the corpse’s head.

  Made no sense to me. I couldn’t see what having a lump growing in his brain had to do with Jenkyn Hughes getting hit over the head.

  Mind, when Harry told me what else Reckitt had said, it was suddenly crystal clear why people gossiped about him. Cutting up dead paupers to see what’d killed them was downright strange.

  ‘Did you ask him about the burns on Hughes’ face?’

  ‘We don’t know it is Jenkyn Hughes yet,’ Harry said. ‘But I did ask and Reckitt didn’t have much
to offer. He said he’s only seen minor burns from quicklime and only ever in the living. He couldn’t rule it out as the cause of the damage but he couldn’t say with any certainty that it was the cause, either. But he did tell me one thing I didn’t know. Quicklime acts as a drying agent. That’s why they used to throw it into plague pits – to absorb the liquids from putrefying bodies.’

  ‘I thought it was to break the bodies down. Dissolve them, kind of thing?’ Now I’d said it, it seemed stupid. As if quicklime could dissolve bone like salt melts a slug.

  ‘No. It was to stop the bodies stinking. To prevent disease.’

  ‘If it was a drying agent,’ I almost interrupted him, ‘that would fit. I said the skin looked leathery, didn’t I?’

  Harry nodded. ‘Which means he probably was buried in the kiln waste.’

  ‘With his clothes on. Clothes that were stripped off him later. Just like the anonymous letter said.’

  Harry ignored that so I told him everything I’d got from Clarkson, including the American’s flashy white trousers and chequered waistcoat. ‘Very recognisable clothes,’ I finished. ‘Nobody in Cardigan goes around looking like that, do they?’

  Harry thought for a bit. ‘Do you think whoever buried him in the kiln waste knew what would happen to any exposed flesh?’ he asked. ‘Or was it just an accident?’

  I said nothing. It was himself he was asking, not me.

  ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘why bother hiding the body at all? Why not just take him out to sea, tie him to something heavy and drop him overboard? Nobody’d have been any the wiser.’

  ‘Perhaps they wanted him to be found.’

  ‘Why?’

  I didn’t know. I’d just heard the idea coming out of my mouth.

  ‘And why take him out of the kiln?’ Harry wanted to know. ‘What was the point of leaving the body there, on the load of limestone?’

  ‘We’ve only got Teff Banc yr Eithin’s word that it was on the limestone. Well, his, and whoever wrote that anonymous letter.’

  ‘But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it was there,’ Harry insisted. ‘Why? Why leave it there?’

  ‘For it to be washed out to sea and come ashore somewhere else?’

  ‘But that would go against your theory that whoever put it there wanted the body to be found. Once it’d got washed out to sea, goodness knows where it would have ended up.’

  ‘We could ask Gwyn Puw. He’d know what would’ve happened to it. He lives on the beach. Bound to know about tides and currents and so on.’

  Harry nodded but I don’t think he really heard me. From the stillness of him, he was thinking hard.

  ‘It’d be a good idea to go back to Tresaith, anyway,’ I said. ‘To talk to Mrs Parry’s daughter.’ I told him about my visit to The Ship the day before. And about Bets Parry’s suggestion that Jenkyn Hughes was a womaniser.

  ‘I also think it might be a good idea to try and find out where Mrs Teff Harris is,’ Harry said. ‘It could be that we’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe she and Jenkyn Hughes ran off together and our corpse is somebody else entirely. A few coins have seduced us into thinking we know who he is.’

  ‘The boy, Clarkson, seemed pretty sure that his mother’d gone to her sister’s.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she’d tell him she was running off with her lover.’

  True.

  ‘Right. Let’s get on.’

  He got to his feet but I stayed where I was. ‘Have you told Inspector Bellis about those coins yet? Does he know the dead man might be Jenkyn Hughes?’

  Harry sighed. ‘No.’

  ‘We should do that first, then, shouldn’t we?’

  Harry pulled in another breath and held it while he chewed his lip. ‘Let’s go and see Captain Coleman first,’ he said. ‘No point troubling Bellis if Jenkyn Hughes is alive and well and eating breakfast in his lodgings.’

  We didn’t have to ask which house belonged to Captain Coleman. He’d hung a ship’s wheel next to the front door.

  ‘What on earth for?’ Harry asked when I told him.

  ‘Advertising his trade, I suppose.’

  Turned out I was wrong. Captain Coleman himself was long gone and it was his widow who let rooms in her house to lodgers. ‘Captain Coleman’s is what it’s always been called,’ she told us as she saw us in to her front room. ‘No call to go changing it now, just because my husband’s gone.’

  There were sailors’ trinkets everywhere in the tiny parlour. Little ships in bottles. One of those things they use to tell where they are at sea. Carvings made out of ivory like you see old sailors selling on the streets sometimes. And a flag, hanging in the corner. Either the widow was fond of all the paraphernalia, or she’d been very fond of her husband.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, Mr Probert-Lloyd. I don’t know when Mr Hughes will be back, you see. Not for some time, going by what his cousin said.’

  ‘His cousin?’ I asked. Hughes was an American, what was a cousin of his doing here?

  ‘Yes. Came to fetch Mr Hughes’s things. I didn’t know him but he had Mr Hughes’s signet ring to vouch for him. I knew it was his ring, I’d seen it a dozen times.’

  ‘When did he come, this cousin?’

  She looked at me, twisting her face with the effort of remembering. ‘A few days ago. I can’t tell you exactly, I’m sorry. The days all seem to go into one at my age.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mrs Coleman,’ Harry said, giving her a little smile. ‘Did Mr Hughes’s cousin say why he was collecting his things?’

  ‘Mr Hughes was delayed in Aberaeron, he said, so he’d asked him to fetch the boxes to his house. Mr Hughes didn’t want me to be out of pocket when I could be letting the room, you see. He’d only paid up to the end of the week and the cousin said Mr Hughes didn’t know when he’d be back.’

  ‘I see,’ Harry said. ‘This cousin, do you happen to remember his name, Mrs Coleman?’

  ‘Shoni Jones. From out Moylegrove way, he said. I don’t know the family but he said his father’s got a farm out there.’

  ‘He didn’t mention the name of the farm, by any chance?’ I asked.

  ‘He did, bach, but I don’t remember. Didn’t think it was important, you see. Not when he showed me the ring and said Mr Hughes wanted me to be paid what I was owed.’

  ‘Did he say when exactly he’d spoken to Mr Hughes?’

  ‘No, bach. Just that he’d seen him in Aberaeron, that’s all. He was his cousin, you see. It wasn’t my place to start asking questions like that.’

  Harry, who must’ve been wondering what the cluttered little room was full of, turned back to her. ‘Mrs Coleman, this is going to sound like a strange question but what colour hair does Mr Hughes have?’

  The old woman turned to him. ‘Brown, it is. No grey in it at all even though he’s nearly forty years of age.’ She smiled as if she was Jenkyn Hughes’s mother. ‘Very proud of his hair, Mr Hughes is. A full head of hair into old age runs in his family, he says. His father and his grandfather both had all their hair till the day they died.’

  I wondered if Harry was thinking what I was. That the dead man would’ve been able to say the same thing.

  The tide had come up, even in the short time we’d been in Captain Coleman’s, and the estuary mudflats were almost covered as we rode back towards Cardigan. The wading birds were closer to us now, dipping their beaks in the narrow strip of sandy mud between the reeds and the water. I didn’t know anything about water fowl and it was no use asking Harry what the little black-and-white birds were. Red legs, they had. We were so close I could see the colour of them.

  ‘What do we think of this cousin?’ Harry asked.

  I turned away from the river. ‘Do you mean is he really a cousin? Did Jenkyn Hughes really ask him to move his things? Or was he involved in killing him?’

  Harry blew out an impatient breath. ‘All of those. Dammit, it shouldn’t be this difficult to find out whether somebody’s dead or not!�
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  He was frustrated – you could see it coming off him like steam off a cow’s back in the rain. When he’d agreed to do the inquest, I don’t suppose he’d thought it would take half this long to find out who the dead man was. He’d’ve been hoping to present a nice clean account at the inquest and impress the voters.

  ‘We could go and see whether Teff Harris has confessed,’ I suggested. ‘If he has, we’ll know who the dead man is.’

  Harry chewed his lip. ‘Alternatively, we could go and see Mrs Parry. If she was in business with Hughes she might know who this cousin is. Or what Hughes was doing in Aberaeron.’

  ‘Or we could go to the police station,’ I pressed him, ‘and find that they’ve got all the information we need to re-convene the inquest. There might be no need to go riding about the county.’

  Harry narrowed his eyes. Why, I don’t know – he couldn’t focus that peripheral vision of his. Habit, I suppose.