by Alis Hawkins
It started as they came in. They looked around at the schoolroom and saw what we’d seen when we first came in. A cowshed that hadn’t had much done to it to make it fit for teaching in.
I saw one man looking at the walls. The thin coating of limewash they’d been given hadn’t been anything like enough and the shit that’d been left after a quick clean had come through. Ugly brown stains travelled two feet up the wall in most places, as if there’d been a flood.
God, what must these gentlemen think of us, you could see the jury thinking, if this was the best we could find him in the way of a school? Only one room for everybody, no proper desks or chairs. And where are the books the children were supposed to be reading?
I knew the answer to the last question because I’d looked around earlier. They were in a low, battered cupboard in the far corner of the room. And, fair play, they were proper reading books, not just old copies of the Testament or whatever somebody’d had lying about. Far better than anything I’d had, I knew that.
I watched the jury glancing up at the loft where Rowland had lived. It was as if they thought their eyes were tricking them and, instead of lying there sprawled and stiff on the ground, he was still up there, watching them.
Or maybe it was just the thought of the fall. If they all knew about his hands, how useless they were, perhaps they thought this was an accident that’d been waiting to happen.
‘A shaky ladder?’ The first man to speak looked from Rowland, with his ladder on top of him, to Harry and me. ‘Is that what’s killed him?’
Then they were all at it.
‘Best teacher we’ve ever had in Llanddewi. The things my Twm used to come and tell us!’
‘No thought for himself, ever. Only for the children and his new school.’
‘Duw! The new school – what’s going to happen to that, now?’
What new school? If it’d been up to me, I’d have asked, but I knew Harry’d want to get the view over with before we started on other questions. He was a great one for not accidentally putting ideas into the jury’s heads. And, anyway, we’d waited long enough already. He’d refused to go back to Tregaron while Simi Jones drummed up his jury so we’d found a decent public house in the village and persuaded the landlady to find some bread and cheese for us while we waited.
Once we’d sworn the jurors in and Harry’d explained what was required, they all shuffled round, looking at how Rowland was lying.
‘Notice the position of the ladder,’ Harry said. He was speaking Welsh, as usual. I’d told him a hundred times to let me do the talking, that it made people nervous to hear a squire speaking their own language, but he wouldn’t listen. Didn’t want to be thought of as a gentleman, did he? Just as the coroner. As if that wasn’t the same thing.
‘I want you to think about that ladder,’ he said. ‘If it fell backwards with Mr Rowland on it, is that how you’d expect it to be lying?’
So much for just letting them look at the body.
I watched the men glancing at each other. They’d all taken their caps off, in deference to Harry as much as to the corpse, so I could see the looks they gave each other. What does he mean – how does he expect a ladder to lie?
Even if their imaginations didn’t get much work from one week’s end to the next – unless it was to imagine how close the workhouse doors were getting – they did their best. They fixed their eyes in one spot and tried to put themselves on that ladder. To feel it toppling backwards, their weight pulling them to the ground, their arms going out to save them, the ladder coming down, bouncing, skidding away. Then they looked at the body again, saw the ladder lying there, pointing up under his chin. It meant something, but what?
The sky had clouded over since Rowland’s examination earlier and there wasn’t as much daylight coming in through the door, so Harry decided to move the body outside where the jury could see it more easily. Four men carried one of the heavy schoolroom tables out on to the muddy lane and two others brought the corpse.
It wasn’t the first time Harry’d done this with a jury. If the place where somebody’d died was poorly lit, it was better to bring the body into the light than to take a lantern to it.
The jury’d all have seen dead friends and relatives laid out, of course, but not a body stiff and awkward like this. There was something not quite human about the way Rowland’s limbs were frozen.
‘Stiff as a plank,’ one man said. ‘He didn’t fall out of that loft this morning.’
Harry turned to Benton Reckitt. ‘Doctor?’
Reckitt stumbled a bit over his Welsh but it wasn’t a bad attempt, fair play. As attending physician at Cardigan workhouse, I suppose he’d had to learn enough to speak to his patients. ‘I’d say he’s been dead at least since last night – sometime before midnight – maybe longer. It’ll be easier to tell as we see when the stiffness goes off.’ Speaking poor people’s Welsh, Reckitt sounded a lot less stuffy than he did in English.
‘Did anybody see Mr Rowland yesterday?’ Harry asked.
I caught one man’s chin-cocked response. ‘You did, did you?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘At chapel.’
‘The Unitarian chapel, is that?’ Harry asked.
Another nod. Our Unitarian friend was a man of few words. No bad thing, generally. The less you say, the less people can find fault with you.
‘And after that?’ Harry tried to give the impression of looking round at the jury. They probably all knew about his odd sort of blindness but he always tried to make it look as if he could see. Kept people guessing about how much sight he still had.
Looks darted round the group. Heads shook.
‘Nobody?’ I wanted to make it clear for Harry. ‘None of you saw him after chapel yesterday?’
More head shaking. Mumbles to the same effect.
‘Do any of you know what Mr Rowland would normally do on a Sunday afternoon?’ Harry asked. ‘Did he have a Sunday school for the adults at his chapel?’
‘There is a Sunday school,’ the Unitarian said, ‘but Mr Rowland isn’t – wasn’t – the teacher any more.’
‘Does anybody know where he might have been yesterday afternoon?’ Harry asked. ‘Who he might have seen?’
I watched them shuffling, scratching their heads, jamming their hands in their pockets. All waiting for somebody else to speak first.
‘Might’ve gone to see Miss Gwatkyn,’ one of them said. Mutters of agreement came straight away. Miss Gwatkyn of Alltybela. Gentry. Above suspicion. It was all right to mention her.
‘Was he a frequent visitor there?’ Harry asked.
Thick as thieves, Tobias Hildon had said.
One man spoke up. ‘She owns this place. Paid Mr Rowland to run the school.’
That was worth knowing. Had some of the money in the trunk come from Miss Gwatkyn? I made a note in my book. Didn’t really need to, but it’s just as well to let people see you doing your job.
‘Very well,’ Harry said, ‘let’s proceed. Will somebody be good enough to remove Mr Rowland’s clothes so that his body can be examined?’
Nobody stepped forward so, in the end, I just picked the two men standing nearest to the table and told them to do it.
‘Has to be done,’ I said. ‘The jury has to look for marks on the body. And none of us wants to be here all day, do we?’
His trousers and drawers came off easily enough once they’d unbuttoned his braces but, with his arms as they were, getting his shirt off was virtually impossible, never mind his underlinen. Harry decided that we’d have to cut it off.
‘But those are good clothes!’ somebody protested.
‘They’re the clothes he’ll be buried in, unless somebody comes forward to tell us otherwise,’ Harry said, ‘so it’s not going to make any difference.’
Somebody pulled out his knife and cut the clothes so that they lay around Rowland’s body. The paleness of his skin was striking against the dark body hair that curled down in a narrowing trail from collarbones to privates.
Rowland had been a wiry type of man, not showing a lot of either fat or muscle. His arms, particularly, looked weak. But then, with his hands as they were, I didn’t suppose he’d been able to do much.
Harry asked the jury to choose a foreman to describe the wounds so I could write them down.
‘Go on, Llew, you do it,’ one man said. All the others quickly agreed and a small, well-fed man stepped forward.
‘Llewelyn Price,’ he said when I asked for his full name for the record. ‘I keep the grocer’s shop in Llanddewi.’
Llew Price turned out to be a good choice of spokesman. Years of examining the goods that came into his shop’d given him a sharp eye and quick judgment. In no time he’d described grazed hands and a purplish lump where Rowland’s collarbone’d broken. There were also bruises on the dead man’s right hip and knee from the fall.
‘Before we go on,’ Harry said, ‘can you describe how his hair looks, please, Mr Price?’
I saw Llew Price flick a glance at Harry then, quickly, he moved it to me. I just nodded at the corpse for him to get on with it.
The grocer peered at the dead man. ‘Well. He’s always had a good head of hair, Mr Rowland. It’s a bit longer than he usually had it – probably hadn’t been up to London for a while.’ He turned to me. ‘Always used to get his hair cut whenever he went to London.’
That was an interesting piece of information. Not the hair cutting – everybody has to get their hair cut – the bit about going to London regularly. I made a note of it, which seemed to satisfy Llew Price because he went back to doing what he’d been asked to do.
‘It’s brushed back off his forehead. Used a bit of oil to keep it tidy by the looks of it. Not much but there’s something there.’
‘And you’d say it was tidy, now?’ Harry asked. Before the jury arrived, Harry’d asked me to fetch a comb or brush from Rowland’s loft and make his hair look like it had before Reckitt’d started fiddling with it.
Llew Price looked back at the corpse. ‘Yes. Neat. Like he always kept it.’
Harry nodded. ‘Thank you. Examine his head, now, if you would, Mr Price, before we turn him over.’
Price peered down at Rowland’s face. I wondered if he felt the same need I had to reach out and close the teacher’s eyes.
‘Reddish lump where the hair meets his forehead on the right-hand side,’ he said, peering at Rowland’s forehead without touching it, just like I had. He walked around the table so he could see the other side of the corpse’s head properly. ‘Can’t see anything else.’
Harry asked for the body to be turned over and, after he’d explained to the jury that what looked like bruising all over the dead man’s back and legs was just the blood in him settling to the lowest parts, they calmed down and got on with looking at the bloody wound on his head.
‘It’s wide and deep,’ Llew Price said when Harry asked him to describe it. ‘There’s a dent where you can see the skull’s broken,’ he swallowed. ‘And there’s blood in his hair.’
‘How big would you say the wound is?’ I was duty bound to ask. Any wound’s dimensions had to go down on record.
Price held a finger edge-on to the wound. ‘An inch and a half, or so, from one broken edge to the other.’
‘Are there any wounds or bruises to the back, otherwise?’ Harry asked.
I watched Price look. He was careful and thorough. He might only be small, but Llew Price was one of those men people give way to. He had something about him. Presence, I suppose you’d call it.
‘No, nothing else,’ he said when he was sure.
Once the body was on its back again, Harry carried on. ‘I want you to look at his hair, now we’ve turned him over again,’ he said. ‘See how untidy it is, just from the body being moved? How do you think it would have been if he’d just fallen from the loft?’
I watched the jury looking at each other. Those who were capable of it did some imagining. The rest shuffled their feet.
‘The wound on his head, his grazed hands and his broken collarbone all mean that he must have fallen forwards out of the loft,’ Harry said. ‘But Dr Reckitt tells us that it was the injury to the back of his head that killed him.’
All right, he wasn’t letting Reckitt speculate but this was a long way off just letting the jury look at Rowland’s wounds, wasn’t it?
Llew Price ventured a question. ‘Begging your pardon, Mr Probert-Lloyd, if he fell forwards, how was the back of his head injured?’
‘Clearly, after he’d fallen out of the loft, somehow the back of his head hit the ground, very hard.’ Harry waited while they looked at each other then asked, ‘Which of you knew Mr Rowland best?’
After some muttering, the Unitarian was pushed to the front. ‘Gambo saw him at chapel. And Mr Rowland taught him to read in Sunday school.’
Harry turned his eyes in the direction of the man called Gambo. ‘Is that right?’ I could see where the nickname’d come from – he was unusually tall and bony, like the long, bare-ribbed haycarts we called gambos.
A nod.
‘Could Mr Rowland straighten his fingers, like this?’ Harry held his hands out, palms down, fingers stretched long.
Gambo shook his head. ‘No. His hands were twisted, sort of. Closed up. Like this.’ He held his hands out, fingers curled.
‘So, he couldn’t have done this?’ Harry combed straight fingers through his hair.
I was watching the other jurymen. You could see the light dawning on a few faces, like turning the wick up on a lamp. He couldn’t have tidied his own hair after he’d fallen. Somebody else must’ve done it.
‘No, sir,’ Gambo said. ‘His fingers wouldn’t do that.’
Harry just let them think about that. The ones with imagination would have to tell the ones without what he was getting at, later.
‘Deciding how Mr Rowland died is the job of the inquest,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you talking about it with anybody else before then. I’m going to adjourn proceedings, now, until the end of the week. We’ll hold the inquest here, in the schoolhouse, on Friday.’
‘Pardon me, Mr Probert-Lloyd,’ one of the jurors said, ‘but couldn’t we have the hearing sooner? It seems as if we might have all the information we need to decide on a verdict, now.’
Harry turned to him. ‘I understand, but I want to allow time for two things. Firstly, for any witnesses to what happened here to come forward. And secondly, to allow time for me to discover what family Mr Rowland had and inform them. It’s a terrible thing to learn of the death of a loved one from the newspapers.’
He could tell them that if he liked. I knew the truth.
Harry wanted to find out who’d killed the teacher.
Harry
The jury having been dismissed, I turned to Minnever. ‘If you wish to make your way back to Tregaron, I shall quite understand. But I will be detained a little longer.’ I had hoped that he would leave John and me to quiz Reckitt in private but Minnever was not to be dismissed so easily.
‘No, Harry. There’s very little to be gained in Tregaron, now, without you. I’ll wait and we can ride back together.’
I acquiesced with the best grace I could muster and turned my attention to Simi Jones. ‘There’s the question of where the body should lie until the inquest is complete.’
Though Rowland’s body was unclaimed by any immediate family, it seemed entirely inappropriate that he should lie, abandoned, in a converted byre. ‘Is there anybody in the village that we could ask?’
Jones shifted his feet uncomfortably. ‘Plenty of people’d be honoured, Mr Probert-Lloyd, but that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Whoever you asked, everybody’d want to know why they’dbeen chosen. There’d be bad feeling.’
It was a more forthright answer than I had expected from him and I was reasonably certain that he would not have volunteered such information in English.
‘What about the Unitarian chapel?’
‘That’s miles away, sir.’
‘But we’ll need a cart
, so would that matter?’
Simi Jones was spared the necessity of responding by the arrival of a horse and trap. Its driver jumped down to help the lady passenger and, just for a moment, a thought flashed through my mind that it might be Lydia Howell, newly arrived from Ipswich via Glanteifi and in search of us. But I dismissed the notion as soon as it came. When Lydia and I had agreed, in January, that she would come to Glanteifi to work as my private secretary, she had been uncertain as to the period of notice she would be obliged to work. ‘And, besides,’ she had said, ‘I wouldn’t want to leave the children until I knew they were in good hands. I’ll write as soon as I can name a date.’
This lady could not be Lydia.
I watched the new arrival descend from her trap out of the corner of my eye. Small and slight, the figure was quick and light on her feet as she came towards us.
Suddenly remembering the naked state of Rowland’s body on the table, I gave Jones swift instructions to cover him before addressing the lady. ‘Good day. Whom do I have the honour of addressing?’
‘Good day to you. Phoebe Gwatkyn, of Alltybela.’ She did not introduce the man who had given her his hand to help her down from the trap, though, as he moved back to the horse’s head, she thanked him with a ‘Diolch, Gwilym.’ A servant, then.
