by Alis Hawkins
But it wouldn’t be easy. Matthew Davies, Hendre, might’ve been happy to talk to me, but not everybody would. I knew that from going to see Gwyn Puw the previous evening. When I’d knocked on his door, straight away he’d looked over my shoulder for Harry.
‘What do you want?’ he’d wanted to know, when he realised I was on my own.
‘Only a quick word, that’s all.’ There was brown coal burning on his hearth again. With the wind in the wrong direction it was blowing back into the cottage and I could taste it on my tongue. ‘About tides and that sort of thing,’ I told him when he just stood there, blocking the doorway. ‘Just some things I need to know.’ He still didn’t move. ‘Come over to The Ship and I’ll buy you a drink – easier to talk over a pint by the fire.’
Puw looked at me from beneath the ragged edge of that knitted cap of his. ‘Where’s your boss, then?’
‘Family matters.’
He eyeballed me some more then nodded and turned to pull his door shut. ‘Come on then. There’s no beer in but the missis’ll have some rum.’
In the taproom, I held my tongue while Mrs Parry got our rum for us. I didn’t want to talk to Puw with her standing there. She wasn’t above suspicion herself. Not with the life insurance she’d taken out on Hughes.
Luckily for me, she was no keener to stay and gab with us than I was to have her there. ‘You’ll be good enough, I’m sure, to call me if any other customers come in.’
Puw waited until she’d gone into the kitchen before speaking. ‘Won’t be any customers,’ he said. ‘Wintertime, nobody comes in unless there’s a boat on the beach or a fire in the kiln. And, anyway, this time of year there’s no money about, is there?’
The mention of money gave me a good way in.
‘So nobody’s going to come and try and make a bit of money on the cards or the dice?’
His eyebrows disappeared into the edge of his cap. ‘Gambling? Not in The Ship, boy.’
‘Doesn’t allow it, does she?’
He took a gulp of his rum. ‘No,’ he said, licking his lips. ‘Says it stirs up trouble. And you don’t go against Mrs Parry.’
I took a chance. ‘So where did Jenkyn Hughes go to do his gambling?’
Puw shook his head. ‘Don’t know. You’d have to ask somebody else about that.’
‘He’d got himself in a lot of debt, gambling,’ I told him. ‘Did you know that?’
A shrug. He’d heard rumours. But he wasn’t going to go as far as to look me in the eye.
‘Did you happen to hear what he was doing to pay off his debts?’
I’d asked the question to see if I could find out whether any ticket holders for the Ohio scheme might’ve heard that Hughes was playing fast and loose with their money. But, judging by Puw’s reaction, he thought I was getting at something else.
‘I don’t know anything about what was going on here,’ he mumbled furiously, still not looking at me. ‘I told you. I was on the herring boats.’
I took an eye-watering swallow of rum. My chest was beginning to feel tight with the brown coal smoking in the grate. I wished Gwyn hadn’t chosen to sit right in the inglenook.
‘You’re talking about the coal that’s been stolen?’ I said, as if I knew all about it. ‘The coal and the lime?’
Puw didn’t look up. ‘I told you. It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘You weren’t paid to be somewhere else, then – while your kiln was fired and tons of Mrs Parry’s lime was burned?’ I thought he might let something slip if I went on the attack. But it was me that’d slipped.
‘Don’t be stupid, boy! Nobody’s fired my kiln. Everybody for miles’d know.’ Now I had his eye. ‘Never seen a kiln burning, have you, boy? Can’t’ve. Smokes like the fires of hell, it does. See it for miles.’
‘If the lime’s not gone into your kiln, where’s it gone?’
‘Know for a fact there’s lime gone, do you?’ Puw was angry now. Or at least, he was raising his voice and giving me the beady eye.
‘What about the coal, then?’ I said. ‘No question that that’s gone, is there?’
He stared at me, hard. ‘Look, boy. I’ve told you. I wasn’t here. I don’t know anything about it. And it’s none of my business, anyway, until it’s time to fire the kilns.’
Something clicked in my head. ‘When is it time? When d’you usually start burning?’
Puw glared at me and I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he changed his mind. Maybe he’d worked out it wasn’t a trick question. ‘March or April. Depends on the weather. No point burning till people can get here. Don’t want piles of quicklime standing about.’
April was when emigrant ships started embarking for America. Had Jenkyn Hughes been selling the shipped-in anthracite twice, hoping he’d manage to replace enough for Mrs Parry’s use and then disappear to Ohio before Puw realised there wasn’t enough to fire his kilns?
The lime burner took my silence as a sign that I’d finished with him. He drained his beaker and put his hands on his knees to push himself up. ‘Before you go,’ I said, quickly, ‘could I just have a minute to ask about tides?’
Puw didn’t reply but he settled back down and started digging in his pockets. I waited until he’d taken a pipe from one and a roll of oilcloth from the other. If I let him light up, he might stay long enough for me to find out what I needed to know.
Once he’d packed his stained pipe with tobacco, he reached into his pocket again and pulled out a dried gorse-top.
‘Teff Harris says he brought the body up the beach off the limestone,’ I started, as Puw lit the gorse spill from the fire and put it to his pipe. He sucked the spitting, smoking flame into the tobacco, eyes on the spill, not on me. ‘Out of the sea, in other words,’ I said. ‘What do you think about that?’
The strands of tobacco crackled as they caught fire and Puw sucked at his pipe, eyes on the glowing clump. ‘If that’s what he says.’
‘If the body was dumped in the sea, wouldn’t the current’ve carried him away instead of leaving him on the beach?’
Puw blew smoke out. He still wasn’t looking at me. ‘Only if he was dropped in a depth of water. Not if the tide was nearly at the bottom.’
‘But if somebody dragged him on to the limestone when the tide was almost out, Teff Harris would’ve seen whoever put the body there, wouldn’t he? Either on the beach or coming away up the track?’
‘Maybe he did see them.’
‘He says not.’
Puw shrugged. He wanted the subject dropped. But I wasn’t ready to satisfy him yet.
‘Harris says he found the body naked.’
Puw shook his head but not in denial. None of my business what another man says.
I’d been thinking about Hughes’s naked body. There’d been no gashes from the limestone. No signs that the waves’d pulled him this way and that over the unloaded rock. ‘D’you think he could’ve been naked?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t the waves’ve moved him about – even at low tide? Torn his skin?’
Puw pulled a face, shifted in his chair. ‘Most likely, yes. Unless he was dumped when the water was completely off the stones.’
‘But then,’ I pointed out, ‘if there was no water on the stones at all, he’d’ve still had limestone dust on him. In his hair. On his skin. And he didn’t.’
Puw’d had nothing to say to that. Not that it’d really been a question, to be fair.
Now, lying sleepless in the dark, I thought about how it all came back to 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 decided to ride into Cardigan first thing and ask him that exact question.
Harry
I woke to a dry mouth and a hand on my arm. In the second or two that it took me to recall that I was in a chair at my father’s bedside, I also realised that I had a painful crick in my neck.
My father was conscious. And leaning towards me.
‘Father!’ I felt a rush of emotion. Relief?
‘’A’ey.’ My father’s voice was not his own; he produced this attempt at my name with the force of a small explosion, as if he had gathered such sounds as he was master of, bound each carefully to the next and then propelled them out past some invisible impediment.
I put my hand over his, where it was still clamped to my forearm. ‘Yesterday…’ I began, then stopped, unsure of what I had been going to say. Would my father even be aware of what had happened to him yesterday?
‘Ye’day…’ After he had expelled the truncated word, I heard another sound that might have been the sucking of saliva into a mouth not wholly in charge of itself. ‘Aw-hul.’ Awful. He remembered enough, then.
His efforts at speech told me that my father was in his right mind but that all was far from well.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think we’ve both had better.’
His hand gripped my arm with renewed force and I felt the effort required as he spat a single word.
‘Closet.’
All the principal bedrooms at Glanteifi had closets containing a close-stool and lime bucket. Indeed, until I was old enough to know much about agricultural husbandry, I had thought the only use for quicklime was to sprinkle in the close-stool bucket. Experience later taught me – both at school and at the homes of friends – that most people did not trouble themselves to reduce noxious odours, but my father was a fastidious man and he had always insisted on it.
Hoping devoutly that he was asking for no more assistance than would be required to get him through the closet’s door, I helped him from the bed and lent him my shoulder.
We made decent progress until his right leg, stiff and unbending, caused the rug to ruck up. I am sure we were a comical sight, my father refusing to let me go lest he fall over, me tugging at the rug beneath his feet, but it was not amusing to me. I had endured a long and uncomfortable night and felt tetchy and unreasonable.
Once we were inside the closet, the full reality of his paralysis made itself clear. Unwilling to let go of me, my father was using his only useful hand to clasp my arm and had no means of unbuttoning himself.
The mutual mortification of the next few minutes was exacerbated by my own struggles with buttons: I could only unfasten them by feel.
Leaving him safely ensconced behind the closet door, I made my way to my own chamber. A wash and fresh linen dispelled some of my ill temper.
However, on returning to my father’s room, my hope that he might have got himself off the stool and out of the closet was crushed by a sound of entreaty from behind the door.
Something was going to have to be done about this situation, and swiftly. I would ten times rather have followed my father on to the bench of magistrates than into his closet. If his command of his limbs did not improve, Justice Probert-Lloyd was going to have to submit himself to the services of an intimate kind of valet.
The day loomed, long and uncertain, and I wondered what John was planning to do with it. Whatever it was, I should communicate with him.
I put my head around the door and called down for Wil-Sam.
John
Breakfast at The Ship wasn’t up to the Black Lion’s standards but it was better than nothing
‘You can thank Bets for the porridge,’ Mrs Parry told me. ‘She went up to Hendre and got the milk straight from the cow an hour ago, else it would’ve been made with water like we usually do. She brought your mare down, too.’
I hoped Bets’d strained the milk before putting it in my porridge. I’d seen milk straight from the cow often enough – flakes of shit and particles of straw floating in the froth on top. Still, it didn’t do to be too fussy. As my old Mamgu used to say you’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.
‘By the way,’ I said, eyes on the scalding porridge, ‘I know Mr Probert-Lloyd wanted to speak to the men on the lime boat. When’s the next load coming in?’
Mrs Parry shook her head. ‘There’ll be no more deliveries until I can sort out what’s happened to the coal.’
Ruth Harris would miss the money with her man still in the Cardigan lock-up.
‘Do you think Teff Harris’s got anything to do with the coal going missing?’ I asked.
Her face didn’t change. ‘I doubt it very much.’
‘You trust him, then?’
She folded her arms. ‘Teff Harris is busy pulling himself up in the world. If he pisses on people, it’ll only be on those beneath him who can do him neither good nor harm.’
A full stomach almost made me forget my gritty eyes, and I felt quite cheery as I rode up the hill away from the beach. The sun was up and I didn’t think it was too early to go and have a word with Mrs Teff before heading down to the police station.
But when I got to the tŷ unnos I found the boy, Clarkson, by himself. He started to run towards the house, but then he recognised me.
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘Gone to Cardigan. To take food to my father.’
I knew Billy Go-About’s men had been feeding Harris, so I wondered if there was more to the visit than that.
‘Everything all right with the cow?’ I asked.
He beamed. ‘Yes. She’s grand.’
‘Did anybody come and try and take her?’
He shook his head. ‘Mam said they wouldn’t have dared. But I was ready for them if they had, wasn’t I?’
‘You were.’ But Mrs Harris must be confident in her own judgement. No mother willingly puts her child in danger. Perhaps she’d asked her beau, Dai’r Bardd, to keep an eye on him.
‘You know that man we were talking about before?’ I said. ‘Mrs Parry ’s friend with the chequered waistcoat?’
Clarkson cocked his head, nodding at the same time.
‘Did he ever come here, to the house?’
‘No.’
‘Sure?’
‘People don’t come here. Not much.’
I thought about that as I rode down to Cardigan. And about ‘Mam said they wouldn’t have dared’. What had happened after the last time Teff Harris’s neighbours had tried to steal his cow? In Mrs Parry’s terms, how exactly had Harris pissed on them?
Something else to ask husband and wife when I got to town.
It had rained in the night but the morning was bright and clear with little clouds racing each other like children in an innocent blue sky. Wet grass caught the low early-morning sun and seemed alight with it in the long shadows. I was so busy looking at it that I almost rode straight past Dai’r Bardd. Luckily, something about the man’s lanky lope elbowed me into paying attention and I pulled the mare up.
‘Good morning.’ His greeting was civil enough but he didn’t take his hat off. Mounted or not, I was no better than him.
‘Off to chapel?’ As if I didn’t know perfectly well where he was going.
He smiled easily. ‘I thought charity could come first today. I’m going to see if Mrs Harris, Banc yr Eithin, needs any help.’
‘I thought you’d know.’ I kept any expression off my face. ‘She’s not there this morning.’
‘Why should I know that?’
‘Didn’t you visit her when she got back yesterday?’
He frowned. ‘No.’
And yet he’d known she was back because he’d told Mrs Parry. Had he been spying on her? Watching the tŷ unnos? ‘Well, I’ve just been there and she’s gone down to Cardigan. To see to her husband’s needs.’
‘Oh. Of course. I should have realised.’ He couldn’t keep all the disappointment off his face, though he tried hard. ‘Has the boy gone with her?’
Interesting question, I thought. Had Vaughan been one of the cow-stealing neighbours? Fancying Ruth Harris needn’t’ve stopped him trying to impoverish her husband. Might’ve suited him to be in a position to come to her rescue, in fact.
‘No, Clarkson’s at home. I’m sure Mrs Harris would be grateful for you looking in on him. You could make sure there’s water hauled in and everything for when she
gets back.’ I paused fractionally. ‘I’m off down to the police station, now. I’ll mention to her that you’re going over, shall I?’
He kept his face bland, but I was sure he was seething inside. He’d been hoping for a quiet few minutes with another man’s wife and here I was offering his services to the man’s child instead. I knew Dai’r Bardd’s type. He was the kind of man who was accustomed to being the cleverest in the room. Men like him didn’t always do all the talking, but they did always want the last word. And he made sure he had it now.
‘Yes. If you’d be so good, give her – give them both – my best wishes. Tell them I hope that this whole business is resolved as soon as may be.’
I smiled maliciously to myself as I bade him good day and rode on. He hadn’t sent hopes that Teff would be released, only that things would be resolved. Well, if Teff was committed for trial and hanged for murder, that would certainly resolve things in a way that Dai’r Bardd would like, wouldn’t it?
If he’d been watching Banc yr Eithin for Ruth Harris’s return, had he spied on Teff, at other times, to know when it was safe for him to ‘happen’ to drop in? Had he stood on the headland watching Teff Harris on the beach, seen him stripping Jenkyn Hughes’s corpse? Vaughan was literate – he’d made a point of reading through my record of the wounds we’d seen on the body and signing his name to it with a steady hand.