by Alis Hawkins
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, is it?’ she asked. ‘The acting coroner?’
For some reason, hearing her described as Rowland’s patron had led me to believe that Miss Gwatkyn must be an elderly lady but her clear voice and the fluidity of her movements said otherwise.
The necessary introductions concluded, Miss Gwatkyn came straight to the point. ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, where do you intend that Mr Rowland should be laid out, now that the viewing of the body has been carried out?’
‘Given that he had no family in the village,’ I said, ‘that represents something of a dilemma.’
‘No family, but a sincere friend in me. I would consider it a great favour if you would allow me to take his body back to Alltybela.’
Her request, though a trifle unorthodox, offered a more satisfactory solution than having Rowland’s body lie at a distance in the Unitarian chapel and was unlikely to stir up resentment in the village, particularly as the friendship to which Miss Gwatkyn laid claim seemed to have been generally acknowledged.
Neither of us asked Simi Jones for his opinion. Far better for him if he was able to go back to the village and report that the matter had been taken out of his hands by the gentry.
Once her custody of the body had been agreed, Miss Gwatkyn turned to her driver and spoke in Welsh. ‘Gwilym, could you and Simi manage to put Mr Rowland in the trap?’
But Simi Jones spoke up. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Gwatkyn, the body’s in no state to go into a trap. Better if you send a long cart round.’
Somewhat to my surprise, Miss Gwatkyn took no apparent offence at being contradicted in this way. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I shall see to it. Meanwhile, could you ask Gwenllian Walters and Mari Eynon to come over to Alltybela later, and lay him out? I think their daughters might like to help, too.’
And with that, she bade us good day.
Twilight was creeping quietly toward the hills as we left to return to Tregaron, and the setting sun moved long shadows with us through the lanes, so that, in my peripheral vision, we seemed to be escorted by a silent troupe of ghostly, stretch-limbed riders.
The countryside around was unfamiliar to me as, despite being a Teifi Valley native, I had never been to Tregaron before that week. It makes me sound as parochial as the least well-travelled of my fellow-countrymen, but I have to confess that anywhere further upstream than Lampeter felt like a foreign land.
As the cowshed school fell away behind us and I tried to gather my thoughts about Rowland’s death, I heard one of the other horses breaking into a trot to catch me up. I looked around expecting to see John’s dark hair and glasses in my peripheral vision; it had become our custom, on the way home from viewing a body, to formulate a list of potential witnesses for the inquest. However, the horse that trotted up alongside mine was not John’s little mare but Minnever’s rangy grey.
He came straight to the point. ‘After spending so much time on that, we’ll have a lot of ground to make up tomorrow. I’d arranged meetings with some important people today – there will be ruffled feathers to smooth.’
Minnever’s crassness made me want to punch him. He had just dismissed a man’s death in a single word: ‘that’. Almost as bad was his relegation of the inquest’s importance to a status beneath that of courting voters.
Oblivious to my silence or choosing to ignore it, he went on. ‘It’s a good thing the parish constable’s already involved. He and John can be down here attending to witnesses and so forth while we’re in Tregaron—’
‘No.’ I could not bear to let him finish his sentence. If he had said ‘making up for lost time’ or, worse, ‘on more important business,’ I believe I would have dismissed him there and then. ‘You just heard me making arrangements to visit Miss Gwatkyn first thing tomorrow—’
‘John can do that. He almost passes as gentry and, in the circumstances—’
‘The circumstances are the death of a man who was her friend. I will go and see her.’
Minnever huffed an impatient sigh. ‘Very well then, if you must. At what time can I assume you’ll be back so that I can arrange meetings?’
A sudden silence fell between John and Reckitt behind us. Our argument had obviously brought their conversation to a halt. Much though I wanted to shout at Minnever, I lowered my voice; this was election business and, however improbable it seemed, Reckitt was a rival candidate.
‘You don’t seem to understand, Minnever. I am the coroner. I investigate deaths. John is my officer. He accompanies me.’
‘But he’s often gone off to investigate when you’ve had more pressing business—’
‘I have been forced to allow him to deputise for me, occasionally,’ I hissed. ‘But only when it’s been unavoidable. However,’ I raised my voice slightly as he tried to interrupt, ‘I do not consider meetings with political supporters to be unavoidable.’
‘Then you’re a fool. These are men who can make or break your campaign.’
‘You speak to them, then! Tell them I’m doing my job – if they’re worth their salt they’ll understand, surely?’ I turned my gaze in his direction and he disappeared into the odd patch of blindness at the centre of my vision that I privately called ‘the whirlpool’. Somehow, it still felt right to give people the impression that I was looking at them.
‘No, Harry, that’s where you’re wrong—’
‘How can I possibly demonstrate greater commitment to the post than by going about coroner’s business to the best of my ability?’
The silence that followed was uncomfortable. I was used to garrulousness from Minnever. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, eventually, ‘that that question indicates how far you are from understanding your situation.’
A chill spread from the nape of my neck to the rest of my body. ‘My situation?’
‘Why do you imagine that the Tories have raised their own candidate?’
‘For the same reason that you and the Liberals are backing me – because they want to test the waters for the general election next year.’
Minnever sighed. ‘I don’t suppose for a second that it’s crossed the Tories’ minds that we’ll try and take the county seat from them. No, they’re putting Caldicot up to oppose you because they’re unhappy. You refuse to work with them on the bench, you appoint your own coroner’s officer instead of using police officers, you hold three times as many inquests as your predecessor—’ He pulled himself up. ‘If you’d expressly set out to annoy the magistrates, you could scarcely have come up with a better strategy.’
‘And if I’d set out expressly to please the magistrates,’ I said, stung, ‘I wouldn’t be doing my job! A coroner’s job is to represent the dead and bereaved—’
‘That may be so. But, unfortunately, neither the dead nor, as a general rule, the bereaved are liable to pay county rates. Those who pay don’t benefit and those who benefit don’t pay. Do you see the conundrum, Harry?’
‘I see very well. The magistrates would like to stop people grumbling about the rates. But I can’t help that. Accidents can and should be prevented. Murders can and should be investigated—’
‘Harry, please listen to me. In the Teifi Valley, the post of coroner has always been in the gift of the magistrates. There hasn’t been a contested election here in living memory. And even when there was, the franchise was so limited that it was a foregone conclusion. You are the first man to challenge the Tories on this.’
Though I wanted to argue that the county magistracy was not the same as the Tory party, I knew he was right. There would be scarcely a man in ten on the local bench who would describe himself as a Liberal.
‘Think very carefully before you snub the men who can help you, Harry. Think very carefully indeed.’
Harry
I had assumed that my argument with Minnever was the last one I would have that day but I was wrong. Though my agent had arranged to dine elsewhere – no doubt in an attempt to unruffle some influential feathers – John and I were not to be left to eat our dinner in peace.
We had scarcely changed and come down to the room that had been made available for our private use in the Talbot Inn, when Benton Reckitt appeared, still, as far as I could tell, in his riding clothes. His spurs were not properly fastened and they moved audibly with each footstep.
‘Ah, excellent. You’re here!’ He made straight for the fire and bent towards it. ‘I’d like to be allowed to examine the body again.’
I had become accustomed to Reckitt’s direct manner of approaching things and found it oddly restful. It obviated the need for analysis; one simply opened one’s mouth and replied.
‘Why?’
Reckitt straightened up and pulled a chair from under the table. But instead of sitting on it, he seemed to rest his weight on its back, as if he required an anchor of some kind. ‘Do you remember asking, when I examined the body on Tresaith beach, if I could tell whether he’d been smothered?’
It was typical of Reckitt to remember the details of the first post-mortem examination he had carried out for me but not the name of the victim. ‘I do,’ I said, ‘very well.’
‘I believe I told you then that, in the absence of evidence on the body’s surface, I knew of no physiological signs that would indicate such a thing?’
‘You did.’
‘This death – this murder – offers me the opportunity to begin documenting such physiological signs. It gives us an unparalleled opportunity to document the resulting damage to bodily tissues.’
I sighed inwardly. Reckitt was asking me to bend the law; the dissection he was proposing was not necessary to determine the cause of death. ‘Reckitt, this man is respected – revered – by people here. What would they think if they knew I’d allowed you to butcher his body for your own satisfaction?’ I disliked putting it so crudely but I wanted him to understand how such a thing would be seen.
‘It’s not for my own satisfaction! It’s for the advancement of medical science.’ Reckitt relinquished his hold on the chair and stood up straight. ‘You know perfectly well,’ he said, ‘that if we hadn’t been summoned to see the body today, it would have been put down as accidental death. Some quack would’ve signed the death certificate – sight unseen as likely as not – and that would’ve been an end to it.’
He began to pace and the little room in which we sat suddenly seemed smaller, filled with his seething frustration. ‘We need properly appointed medical witnesses to certify death. And they need to be properly trained. Which they would be if we had more knowledge. Knowledge which can only be gained from routine post-mortem dissections.’
I sighed. This was a familiar theme from Reckitt who believed that all deaths should be fully investigated by a doctor, that no death certificate should ever be completed on the basis of supposition or likelihood. And, as I should have known, he had not finished.
‘It’s absolutely ludicrous that only in exceptional circumstances are we permitted to determine exactly how a person has died! The government brought in death certification to give them data to improve public health but we’re simply not collecting those data!’
‘Perhaps people’d rather bury their relatives in one piece and stay in ignorance,’ John said.
Reckitt’s silence told me that he had been taken aback by the interruption. Was he wondering, as I was, whether John was defending my own recent actions? For, after my father’s death from repeated apoplectic strokes, I had balked at allowing Reckitt to dissect his brain.
I swallowed and opened my mouth to say something but Reckitt was there ahead of me. ‘It’s precisely because people make irrational decisions that the government must legislate,’ he said. ‘If a murderer must be prevented from killing again, why must a disease be allowed free rein when knowledge might stop it in its tracks?’
‘But cutting up a body isn’t going to let you stop disease, is it?’ John sounded agitated. ‘Finding out what’s killed a person doesn’t mean you can prevent anybody else from dying from the same thing! If somebody gets typhoid fever, they either die or they don’t! Knowing what it is makes no difference.’
Typhoid fever. It was no mere illustration on John’s part. An outbreak had killed his parents and little sister.
‘If we were allowed to perform autopsy examinations in order to understand diseases, we might – in time – be able to cure them!’
‘But where will it all end, this mania for cutting people up?’ John’s agitation had become anguish. ‘I read that book – Frankenstein – about sewing bits of dead bodies together and bringing the whole thing to life. Is that where we’re going – to a world where we make new people out of dead ones?’
I do not know which surprised me more, his previously unvoiced apprehension or his having read Mary Shelley’s book; Frankenstein had been old hat even when I had read it at school.
‘That’s a work of fiction,’ Reckitt said. ‘As far as I’m aware, nobody is seriously thinking of attempting to create life.’
‘All right, maybe not create, but what about using this electricity to bring dead things back to life?’
‘If you’re talking about Galvani, he didn’t bring his dead frogs back to life, just made them twitch! And those party tricks have come to nothing. Do you honestly think that, in fifty years, we wouldn’t have found a way of reanimating corpses if it could be done? Galvani’s experiments are a byway of medical history. They have nothing to do with the proper, scientific study of anatomy and physiology.’
John folded his arms. ‘You can think it’s a byway if you like, but I think it’s the thin end of the wedge. Experimenting, cutting everybody up after they’ve died – where’s it all going to end?’
I intervened lest Reckitt should attempt, in all seriousness, to answer John’s rhetorical question; our medical friend in full didactic flight was the rhetorical equivalent of being hit over the head repeatedly with a blunt instrument. ‘I fear John’s reaction is likely to be representative of public opinion, Reckitt. People still associate dissection with criminality.’
‘But that’s nonsensical!’
‘Is it? It’s not much more than a decade since the Anatomy Act—’
‘Nearly two decades, actually.’
‘—and you know better than anyone that, before that, dissecting rooms were full of hanged felons and corpses stolen from their graves!’
‘Full? The “dissection rooms” as you call them were never full! If doctors are poor diagnosticians and worse anatomists, it’s because they were lucky ever to see the inside of a cadaver!’
Next to me, John’s tension was palpable, but before he could speak again, the door opened and we were saved by the arrival of dinner.
John
Alltybela was the oddest mansion I’d ever seen. It wasn’t so much its situation, though, to be honest, I wouldn’t have built a house right at the top of a ridge, view or no view. No, it was the way it was constructed. It had two fronts. As you came up the drive, you saw an old-fashioned hall, like something from the time of Queen Elizabeth. Two storeys of tiny-paned windows, glinting in the sunshine. But, instead of taking you up to the old front door, the drive swept you past the hall. And there, around the corner, on a right-angle, was another, much more modern wing.
And the oddness of the place didn’t stop at the front door. Once we were inside, I looked about the grand entrance hall while a footman took our coats and hats – fair play to him he didn’t so much as turn a hair at Harry’s awful Mackintosh coat – and I realised there were no portraits of ancestors on the walls. Just maps, something that looked like a cape made of animal skin with bright binding on its edges and a pair of oval-shaped wooden frames with a kind of twine lattice. I couldn’t imagine what they were for.
‘Miss Gwatkyn is in the morning room, gentlemen. If you’d care to come this way.’
The Alltybela butler was a lot friendlier than Moyle, the butler at Glanteifi. Ever since I’d moved into the mansion when Harry made me under-steward, Moyle’d been treating me as if I was a guest he couldn’t wait to see the back of.
/>
The morning room wasn’t big but it was full of light. The long windows drew your eye as soon as you walked through the door and, instead of looking around the room, you found yourself looking out over a few acres of parkland in front of the new wing. Which was just as well, to be honest. The furniture was old and I was sure that the fashionable ladies of the parish, if they ever came here, would tut over chairs that needed re-upholstering and raise their eyebrows at the age of the rugs. Exotic they might be, with their designs and colours, but they’d been trodden to bare threads in parts. And what Llanddewi Brefi’s ladies made of the fact that there was a harp in the corner of the room where you’d expect to see a piano was anybody’s guess.
While we were waiting for tea to be brought, Miss Gwatkyn and Harry had the kind of chat that the gentry have. Miss Gwatkyn offered Harry her condolences on his father’s death and he thanked her and changed the subject by asking how long the family’d been on the estate. Turned out the Gwatkyns had been here since Henry Tudor’s time.
‘I’m sure my ancestors were here before that,’ Miss Gwatkyn said, ‘but that was when the estate, as it is now, was granted to Sir Iorwerth Gwatkyn.’
Harry grinned. ‘Grateful thanks for supporting the new king’s claim to the throne, I suppose?’
