by Alis Hawkins
Unusually for the time of day, everything was quiet, almost tucked up. Perhaps people were keeping silent out of respect. Whatever the reason, we were almost through the village and out the other side before we saw a soul. An old man with a peg-leg was sitting on a milking stool in the only open doorway, whittling a piece of wood.
He looked up as we went by. ‘Here for Master Rowland, is it?’ he asked, in English.
I nodded but didn’t stop.
Of course, he’d know what’d happened. He’d have seen the boy running past his door and asked him where he was going in such a hurry. We’d be lucky if there wasn’t a crowd of people waiting for us when we got to the schoolroom.
‘That was him,’ Enoch said, once we’d left the man behind.
‘Who?’
‘Old Mattie.’
Was it indeed? I had a pretty shrewd idea Harry’d want to talk to the nearest thing Mr Rowland’d had to an enemy, and now I knew where to find him.
I turned my head back to Enoch. ‘Where’s the school?’
‘Little way yet,’ he said. ‘Just keep on going and I’ll tell you where to turn.’
Mr Rowland might have been a popular teacher but his schoolroom wouldn’t have won any prizes. Before being turned into a school the building had been a cowshed with a half-loft. About eleven or twelve yards long and half as wide, it had a teacher’s desk and some cupboards at one end, two biggish tables under the windows, Enoch’s map of the world on one wall and the rest was just scattered benches. The only real improvements anybody’d made to it had been to give it a proper flagstone floor, glass in the windows to keep the weather out, and an iron stove to stop Rowland and his pupils freezing to death. It stood in the middle of the room with its flue running up into the loft.
The teacher’s body was lying on the floor, arms flung out, a ladder lying on top of it. I moved closer. The dead eyes were open, cloudy and empty. Whatever it is that makes us alive had gone.
Why hadn’t somebody closed his eyes? Fear probably. Don’t touch the corpse or Mr Probert-Lloyd’ll have your hair off!
I took my notebook out and started jotting things down.
Body some way from loft edge. Left ladder rail under corpse’s chin.
The plwyfwas, who’d introduced himself as Simi Jones, noticed me writing and shuffled towards me as if he was going to ask what I thought I was doing. He wouldn’t have moved so much as a muscle if it’d been one of the gentlemen taking notes.
I snapped my book shut and looked him in the eye. ‘So. Some poor child came in this morning and found him like this, did they?’
Before he could say anything, Harry jumped in. ‘I’m sure Mr Davies didn’t mean to sound critical, Mr Jones. It’s just upsetting, isn’t it? The thought of children coming for their lessons and finding him like this.’
Simi Jones didn’t reply. Just gave me a look fit to bruise flesh. I gave him it back, too. Right in his face. And a thin, ratty little face it was. The face of a man who couldn’t be bothered to keep his razor sharp. Probably wasn’t married. Mind you, man of his age didn’t need to keep a smooth chin, married or not. Past all that.
His narrow eyes flicked away from me and fastened on Harry. ‘Came straight to me, the children did, Mr Probert-Lloyd. They knew what to do.’ You could see he wasn’t comfortable speaking Welsh to a gentleman but Harry’d greeted him in Welsh so that was that.
‘And you did the right thing, too,’ Harry said. ‘You called the coroner.’
Jones’s sloping chin went up. ‘I know what’s to be done, sir, don’t you worry.’
He could say what he liked. Truth was, with us up the road in Tregaron, Rat-face wanted to show that he did things by the book. Now that we had the county police, parish constables only held on to their job if they really earned it.
He wasn’t that keen on still being there, though. Shifting from foot to foot, waiting for us to tell him he could go. Whatever he did for a living, he was losing money every moment he stood there.
Harry noticed the foot-shifting. ‘We needn’t keep you any longer,’ he said. ‘Where can we find you if we need to call a jury?’
Jury? Jones’s ratty little eyes almost crossed. Could see a world of trouble on the way, now, couldn’t he? All he’d wanted was for Harry to come and say, ‘Tragic accident, well done for observing proper procedure, just ask a doctor to come in and certify it for the register.’ But, if Harry ordered an inquest, Rat-face Jones’d be the one the magistrates called on to give an account of himself.
The magistrates didn’t like the sudden increase in costs since Harry’d taken over as acting coroner. Muttered about wasting ratepayers’ money. But, if you want my opinion, what really got up their noses was Harry making them look like a bunch of negligent fools who’d spent years not giving a damn about how ordinary people’d died.
I looked down at the body again. Looked like an accident to me. The ladder wasn’t secured. Somehow or other, Rowland had pulled it away from the loft as he was climbing up. And back he’d gone onto the flags.
Trouble was, if there was one thing working with Harry had taught me, it was that people see what they expect to see.
Or what they want to see.
‘Who’s the local registrar, here?’ I asked Rat-face as he turned to scuttle off. ‘We’ll need to talk to him.’
Jones gave me a nasty, yellow little smile and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Him,’ he said. ‘Mr Rowland. He’d been the registrar in Llanddewi for just over a year. Bench’ll have to find a new one now.’
Just what the magistrates loved, making sure there was someone to fill all the local jobs.
Once Rat-face’d gone, Harry half-turned to me. ‘Any particular reason you don’t like him?’
I didn’t answer. I knew he was telling me off. Don’t let your personal feelings get in the way. It was a song he’d sung before. All very well for him, he couldn’t see how people were looking at him, judging him. But, point made, he left it.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, switching back to English, ‘if you’d be so good as to step to one side while John and I do what’s necessary?’
I half-expected Dr Reckitt to object but he didn’t. Perhaps he was learning sense – Harry’d find it a lot easier to ask for his opinion now he hadn’t tried to force it on us.
‘Right,’ Harry said. ‘Let’s have a look at him, then.’
Harry
We stepped forward and, positioning himself at the corpse’s head, John began to describe the dead man for me.
‘Deceased is in early middle age. He has a full head of hair without any grey but his beard has started to turn. His face is beginning to show lines – he’s not young any more.’ He took two deliberate paces along the side of the body. ‘A little under six feet tall. Slim build.’ He squatted down. ‘He’s wearing a well-cut suit of clothes but they’re not new.’
‘Do we know where his jacket is?’ I asked. In my peripheral vision, I could see that the dead man was dressed only in his shirt and waistcoat.
‘No. Do you want me to look in the loft?’
‘Later. Carry on.’
‘He’s still wearing his necktie,’ John continued, ‘and his boots. Riding boots,’ he added, ‘not ordinary ones.’
I left the subject of boots on one side for now. ‘Any indication that he was drunk?’
John knelt and leaned over the dead man’s face. ‘No smell of alcohol.’ He stood again. ‘His arms are flung out to the sides, as if he was falling backwards.’ He sketched a vague windmilling of his arms in demonstration.
‘But the ladder’s lying right on top of him,’ I pointed out. ‘If it tipped backwards and he let go to try and save himself, you’d expect it to have bounced away from him, wouldn’t you? It wouldn’t land on top of him unless he’d been clinging to it.’
I heard John take a long breath through his nose. Thinking. ‘Unless he only let go at the last moment?’
‘Perhaps. Obvious injuries?’
John bent
over the dead man again. ‘A swollen lump on his forehead. Right hand side, just below the hairline. D’you want me to turn him over?’
I weighed my options. The position of the body relative to the ladder disturbed me. It was too early, as yet, to cry foul play but an inquest already seemed inevitable; there were clearly questions to be answered as to how this man had died. It would be prudent to assemble a jury today so that it could examine Rowland’s body in situ. That would be much more compelling – and evidential – than viewing the body elsewhere and simply hearing the scene described.
I nodded to John to turn him over. ‘But make a note of exactly how he’s lying and where the ladder is so we can recreate the scene for the jury.’
Having lifted the ladder away and leaned it against the wall, John stooped over the dead man and attempted to move his right arm into his side so as to roll him over. It was quickly clear that the body was stiff with the rigor of death.
Reckitt strode forward. ‘Let me help you.’
In the event, such was the corpse’s unwieldiness that Minnever’s help was also needed to turn it. Once this was accomplished, an ‘Ah’ from John and a muffled grunt from Reckitt told me that a possible cause of death had been revealed.
‘The back of his head is matted with blood. And there’s an obvious wound.’ John’s voice was carefully firm; he had yet to overcome a certain natural squeamishness.
‘May I?’ The request came from Reckitt.
‘Please, do.’ I knew he could be relied upon to see things that might otherwise go unremarked.
With an audible effort, Reckitt lowered himself to his knees and bent to examine Rowland’s head wound. After a minute or so, he struggled to his feet again and asked if John and Minnever would be so good as to help him return the body to its original position.
The dead man on his back once more, Minnever retreated while John and I watched Reckitt bend over the corpse, first on one side, then the other.
‘This man’s hands are badly damaged.’
‘By the fall?’ I asked.
Reckitt’s head stayed bent over the hand he was examining. ‘No. These are old injuries. If I had to guess, I’d say his hands had been crushed beneath a heavy weight.’
‘But those grazes look recent,’ John pointed out.
‘The superficial injuries were probably caused by the fall,’ Reckitt agreed, ‘but the earlier damage was much greater. You’ll need to ask people who knew him how much use he had of his hands. It’s hard to be sure while I’m unable to move them, but I’m certain his fingers wouldn’t have functioned normally.’
‘That would explain the beard,’ John said. ‘He couldn’t shave.’
‘And his stock has no bow,’ Reckitt agreed. ‘He’s just knotted it and tucked the ends in clumsily.’ With a grunt, he straightened up. ‘John, be a good fellow and see if his waistcoat is loose enough to put on over his head.’
John did as he was bid. ‘Very loose. You could get two of him in there.’
‘Explains why he was a schoolteacher at any rate,’ Minnever volunteered from behind us.
‘Possibly.’ If Rowland had been a pauper, I would have agreed without hesitation. There were precious few occupations for a working man with crippled hands. But John had said that Rowland’s clothes were well cut, if old. He had been better off, at one time, than he was now.
‘Can we go back to the grazes on his hands?’ I asked Reckitt. ‘How did he graze them if he fell backwards?’
‘I’m quite sure he didn’t fall backwards. The pattern of the grazes indicate that he put his hands out to save himself. Like so.’ Reckitt thrust his arms out. ‘His hands would have been the first part of him to hit the floor and, if that’s the case…’ Once more, he lowered himself to his knees and put his hands to the dead man’s chest. ‘Yes. Broken collarbone. Classic injury when taking a precipitate fall from height. The hands go out, instinctively, to save the head from hitting the ground. You see it in steeplechase riders when they’ve come to grief over a particularly nasty hedge.’
Reckitt was a fount of arcane information. What was his connection with steeplechasing? He was hardly an avid rider himself, preferring carriage to saddle where at all possible.
‘So he didn’t fall backwards? You’re quite sure?’
Reckitt rose laboriously. He was a big man and, though he was light enough on his feet when upright, rising from a kneeling position clearly troubled him. ‘All I can say for certain is that he first fell forwards, probably out of the loft given the clavicular fracture and the extent of the superficial damage to his hands. Whether he would have been able to climb the ladder after that I can’t yet say – I’ll need to examine him more closely.’
‘But if he fell and hurt himself,’ John objected, ‘why would he try and get back up the ladder? He’d go for help, wouldn’t he?’
‘He might not have realised how badly injured he was. Might have thought he could sleep it off.’ Reckitt’s tone was that of a man speaking to his equal; it was his habit to distinguish people purely on the basis of whether or not they were prepared to deploy their intelligence in a rational manner.
‘So, in his injured state, he might have tried to climb back up to the loft, misjudged it somehow and fallen, pulling the ladder back on himself?’ I suggested.
Reckitt’s attention was still on the body. ‘Possibly.’
While he deliberated, I turned an apologetic face to Minnever. ‘I’m sorry about this.’
‘Don’t be, Probert-Lloyd. It’s quite fascinating.’
Reckitt knelt once more at the dead man’s side, this time at his head. ‘Bruised lump just below the hairline as John observed,’ he said. ‘So, despite putting his hands out, he still struck his head.’
In my peripheral vision, I watched Reckitt push his fingers into Rowland’s hair and pull them out slowly, as if he were searching for nits. He did this several times before apparently parting the corpse’s lips and peering at them.
Frustrated by my inability to see what was happening, properly, I bit my tongue and waited for him to finish.
John, however, had no reservations about squatting next to the doctor and asking for an explanation of his methods. In a previous life, Reckitt had been an anatomy demonstrator at Guy’s Hospital and only the slightest excuse was required to set him off on an ad hoc lecture.
‘D’you see here,’ he said, ‘on the inner aspect of the lips? The man was a habitual lip-chewer. Makes it almost impossible to distinguish any new bruising or laceration.’
‘And if you could see bruising, what would that mean? That he hit his mouth as he fell?’
‘No. It would mean that somebody held their hand over his nose and mouth while he was insensible in order to smother him.’
The silence which greeted these words told me that I was not the only person to have been shocked. ‘But you can’t tell?’ John asked.
‘No.’ Reckitt’s head moved again, as if he was trying to bring something into the light. ‘I can’t see any bruising to the nose, either, but that’s not conclusive. You have to pinch nostrils extremely hard to bruise them and, if he was in no position to offer resistance, that degree of force would have been unnecessary.’
‘But you think somebody might’ve smothered him after he fell?’ John persisted.
‘It’s possible. The evidence suggests that, after he fell, somebody held him by the hair and banged his head on the ground. Repeatedly, in all likelihood. Why do that and then leave his death to chance?’
‘Held him by the hair? How can you possibly claim to know that?’
I suppressed a smile. Minnever’s incredulity was typical of the reaction Reckitt tended to produce in people.
Reckitt beckoned him over. ‘When we arrived, did his hair look like this?’
‘More or less, I suppose.’
‘No,’ Reckitt said, ‘it did not. We disarranged his hair in moving him. When we arrived, it was combed back in a neat manner. But this man had recently fallen fro
m a considerable height and hit his head hard enough to cause the frontal damage. His hair would have been considerably disordered.’
Minnever was not convinced. ‘But mightn’t he have come to his senses after a while and run his fingers through his hair? To get it out of his eyes so he could see to go back up the ladder?’
‘You will have observed my running my fingers through his hair, just now?’ There was a pause during which I assumed that Minnever had given some kind of assent. ‘In doing so,’ Reckitt went on, ‘I satisfied myself that manual rearrangement would not have been sufficient to achieve the level of neatness we first observed. And besides,’ the doctor moved to one side, ‘observe this hand, if you will. I shall need to examine him again once rigor mortis has subsided but I believe it’s unlikely that he had much movement in his fingers. I doubt whether he could straighten them properly, for instance.’
‘How do you come to suspect that?’ Minnever asked. ‘When your hand is relaxed, doesn’t it fall into that shape naturally?’ He held his hands out, palms up, fingers presumably curled, to illustrate his point.
Reckitt demonstrated neither discomfort nor irritation at being cross-examined. ‘Look at the recent damage to his hands. When he sustained his fall – forwards – he didn’t put his hands out, palms flat, fingers straight, as you or I would have done by reflex action. He couldn’t. So the grazes are to the heels of his hands and the dorsal aspect of his fingers.’
