by Rhys Bowen
It was an odd thing to find in the river, knowing that there were just sheep pastures above it. Nobody could have dropped it from the bridge, that was clear, or it would have been swept downstream. Even Evans-the-Post could figure that out. He stared upstream to see where it might have come from. That was when he saw what at first he thought was an odd-shaped boulder with water splashing over it.
* * *
Evan opened his eyes to sunlight painting a bright stripe across the flowery wallpaper. Mrs. Williams must have forgotten to waken him. He was about to leap out of bed when he realized it was Saturday. He lay back with a sigh of contentment. Nothing on the agenda for the whole day. He would read the paper while eating a leisurely breakfast, and then he’d do some climbing. It was weeks since a free day and a fine day had coincided and he felt like a challenging climb, maybe on the cliffs below Glaslyn. He hadn’t liked to go there since those two men fell to their deaths. But it was stupid to stay away from some of the best climbs in the area.
He got out of bed and a thought struck him—maybe Bronwen would be free today and might feel like going for a hike with him. They’d talked about hiking on the Llwyn Peninsula, where there was great birdwatching on deserted beaches.
He leaned on the window sill, an anticipatory smile on his face as he looked at the clear blue sky. Such days didn’t happen often in North Wales, so you had to drop everything and make the most of them. He could smell bacon and sausage frying downstairs and the radio blaring out the usual Saturday morning music that Mrs. Williams liked—pop music from the fifties and sixties, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, and the Beatles.
The village street was slowly coming to life. Owens-the-Sheep went by on his motorbike, his black-and-white border collies running at his heels. Farmers never had a day off, did they? The milk van was halfway up the street and Evan heard the familiar chink of milk bottles. Evans-the-Milk didn’t get many days off either. A couple of little boys ran up the hill dressed in their football uniforms. That reminded Evan that he did have a commitment—he’d more or less promised the boys that he’d go and watch their big game down in Beddgelert.
Never mind, the game would be over by noon and he’d still have half a day to do what he wanted … and Bronwen would definitely be at the game too. A good way to find out what her plans were.
He was about to turn away from the window when he saw an extraordinary sight. Evans-the-Post was running up from the bridge, his long limbs flying out, his head lolling from side to side as he ran, his mailbag dancing beside him, envelopes clutched in his hand.
Evan opened his window and leaned out. “Where’s the fire, Evans-the-Post?” he called.
The mailman stopped, looking up at him with his mouth open. “It’s no fire, man,” he stammered. “There’s something in the river, something you have to come and see right now!”
* * *
“Not again!” Detective Sergeant Watkins from the regional police headquarters in Caernarfon climbed out of the white police van.
Evan was waiting for him by the bridge with most of the village watching on from behind the yellow police tape he’d hastily put up. “Sorry to get you out on a Saturday, sarge,” he said apologetically, “but I’ve got a suspicious death I thought someone ought to see.”
“Do you always wait to find your bodies until I’m the only one on duty?” Sergeant Watkins growled. “I hoped I could go watch our Tiffany’s football match this afternoon. She’s turning into a good little player. Center forward. Pity she’s a girl, in fact. I could have signed her up with Manchester United.” He sighed. “Okay, so show me the body.”
“We pulled him out of the river,” Evan said hesitantly as he led the sergeant down the steep bank. “I hoped there might have been a chance we could revive him, but I’d wager he’s been dead a while.”
Ahead of them on the river bank a white sheet now covered the body of Colonel Arbuthnot. As they came closer, the wind lifted the corner of the sheet and the colonel’s left hand, with gold signet ring, was suddenly visible. Sergeant Watkins pulled back the sheet and stared down at Colonel Arbuthnot’s white, bloated face.
“Do you know who he was?” he asked sharply.
“Oh yes,” Evan said. “His name was Colonel Arbuthnot.”
“A local?”
“No, but well known around here. He’s been spending a couple of weeks here every summer for the past ten years or so.”
“Poor old chap,” Sergeant Watkins said. This was one of the things Evan liked about Watkins—he still cared. Most policemen didn’t, or pretended that they didn’t. “Still I imagine he was getting on in years, wasn’t he?”
“He had to have been at least eighty,” Evan said. “He was out in India before World War Two.”
“When was he last seen?”
“He left the pub about nine o’clock last night. I was there. I saw him leave. And apparently he always took a shortcut back to the Owens farm, where he stays. It goes behind the pub, along the riverbank and then crosses the river by that little bridge.” Evan pointed upstream. The river had narrowed at that point and the bridge was scarcely more than planks laid between blocks of granite.
Sergeant Watkins stared at it for a moment, then looked back, tracing the colonel’s route back to the Red Dragon.
“And he never made it home?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Even said. “Mrs. Owens, the farmer’s wife he lodges with, said that she left a cold meal out for him in his own sitting room, so she had no idea whether he came in. They go to bed early on farms. The meal wasn’t touched anyway.”
“And the door was still unlocked?”
“They never lock doors. They’ve got dogs.”
“So when did she find out he wasn’t there?”
“She didn’t. She said she was a little concerned that he was sleeping in so late, but she didn’t like to check on him and risk waking him.”
“So we can assume he didn’t make it home last night,” Sergeant Watkins said. “He’d been in the pub, you say? Drank a fair amount?”
“Four glasses of Scotch,” Evan said. “But he usually got through at least that much in an evening. It never seemed to affect him. He could put it away with the best of them.”
“All the same,” Sergeant Watkins went on, “I can’t quite see why you called us in on this. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? The old boy knocks back a few too many, his eyesight is probably poor and he loses his balance on the bridge. All it would take is a sudden gust of wind…”
“What about this, though?” Even turned the colonel’s head gently and indicated an ugly wound behind his right ear.
“Simple enough,” Watkins went on. “There are some pretty nasty-looking rocks down below that bridge. The old boy hit his head as he fell. He glanced up and saw Evan’s face.
“What?” Sergeant Watkins grimaced. “Oh come on, you’re not going to tell me that you suspect foul play, are you?”
“I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t,” Evan said.
“Do you find yourself another murder every couple of months so that you don’t get bored up here?” Watkins was only half joking. “Now I’m the detective around here and I’d just love to know, what makes you think that this wasn’t an accident?”
“This,” Evan said. He indicated the front of the colonel’s Harris tweed jacket. “See here. A couple of burrs and a foxtail caught in the tweed. He must have been lying in the grass before he was dragged into the water.”
“Not necessarily,” Sergeant Watkins said. “He could have taken off his jacket any time and laid it down on the grass. He could have sat on it, couldn’t he? He might not have noticed a couple of tiny burrs for days.”
Evan shook his head. “You didn’t know the colonel. He always liked to look what he called well turned out. He went home to change his trousers because he got mud on them before coming to the pub last night. He’d never have left the house with bits of plant stuck in his jacket.”
“We don’t know how good
his eyesight was.”
“Damned good,” Evan said. “He didn’t miss a thing.”
“So you’re suggesting,” Watkins said slowly, “that someone bashed this old man on the head and then shoved him into the river?”
“It seems that way.”
“It seems bloody stupid to me,” Sergeant Watkins said. “We’re not in the backstreets of Cardiff here. People don’t run around bashing old men over the head and tossing them into a river.” He looked long and hard at Evan. “You were right about the murders last time, but I can’t go along with this. Not unless you can tell me that you’ve got a raving lunatic running around the neighborhood or that someone had a score to settle with the old boy.”
Evan shook his head. “That’s the problem, sarge. As I said, he was well liked here. He was treated like a kind of village mascot.”
“So if anyone did kill him, they were taking a hell of a risk,” Watkins said. “Any passerby would have noticed if the old chap was being followed, wouldn’t they?”
Evan sighed. “Like you said, this isn’t Cardiff, sarge,” Evan said. “Most people are inside with their doors shut and curtains drawn by nine o’clock, and the others were in the pub.” He paused to think. “In fact almost all the men of the village were in the pub last night when the colonel went home.”
“You think it would have to have been a man?”
“It would take a pretty strong woman to make that dent in his skull and then drag his body into the river.”
Sergeant Watkins laughed uneasily. “Come on, Evans. You know what Detective Inspector Hughes is like. He’s at a conference in Colywn Bay all day but he gave me strict instructions to page him if anything came up. I don’t really have the authority to do anything without him, do I? And he gave me a hell of a time when he thought I’d let you stick your nose in those other murders.”
“So you want me to turn the other way and call this an accident just so that we don’t upset D.I. Hughes?” Evan asked.
“I’m going to call it an accident,” Sergeant Watkins said. “Unless you can give me any evidence to the contrary, apart from some bits of plant sticking to his jacket—which might have got there when you dragged him out of the river.”
Evan shook his head. “We lifted him out and laid him here.”
“Can you give me a single reason that anyone would want to kill him?”
“No,” Evan said after a pause. He was thinking of the colonel’s exit from the pub last night, the strange look that had come over his face and the way he had started babbling about that ridiculous story. Something had rattled the old man, that was clear. He had left in a hurry because he was upset—so upset that he had nearly knocked over Annie Pigeon as she was coming in, and he had scarcely waited to apologize. Given his old-world chivalry, that seemed significant. But it still was far from proof that his life was in danger.
“No, nothing at all,” Evan repeated. This was something he’d have to look into for himself.
“There you are then.” Sergeant Watkins let out a sigh of relief.
“But we can’t just write this off, sarge,” Evan insisted. “What if there’s a murderer here?” He paused then added, as Sergeant Watkins was pulling the sheet over the body again, “You didn’t want to think those two deaths on Mount Snowdon were murders either, did you?”
“All right. Don’t rub it in,” Watkins growled good-naturedly. “I know: You were right and I was wrong. Okay, this is what we’ll do. I’m willing to call this death suspicious, because of the trauma to the head. That means the body will be sent off to the Home Office pathologist in Bangor. Let’s see what he thinks caused the blow to the head. If he thinks there’s anything fishy about it, we’ll take it further.”
“When will we know?” Evan walked beside the sergeant back to his white police van.
“He won’t get to it until Monday.”
“Monday?”
“Hold your horses. I can’t call him in at the weekend, away from his fishing, can I? Not unless I was a hundred percent sure we’d got a crime. Everything will keep until Monday.”
“But what about the crime scene,” Evan said, looking back at the yellow tape. “There might be valuable clues that could be tampered with.”
“We’ll keep the tape up,” Watkins said. “Tell the locals we have to determine how he fell into the river before we can open up the path again.”
“Thanks, sarge.”
“And in the meantime, Evans,” Sergeant Watkins muttered as they approached the crowd behind the yellow tape, “I wouldn’t give any hints that you suspect foul play. This was a tragic accident, nothing more. Got it? We don’t want people panicking unnecessarily, do we?”
“No, sarge,” Evan said. He was thinking that it would give him some time to do some unofficial snooping. It would also put a killer at his ease. And when people relaxed, they sometimes slipped up.
“Oh, and, Evans,” Sergeant Watkins added as he climbed into the van, “no playing at detective on you own, understand me? You don’t touch anything until you get the go ahead from me, got it?”
“Very good, sir,” Evan said, giving a friendly wave as the van revved and eased its way through a crowd of curious onlookers.
But that doesn’t stop me from using my eyes and asking a few questions, Evan thought to himself.
Chapter 6
But by the end of Saturday Evan still had no other shred of evidence to convince Sergeant Watkins that they were dealing with more than an accident—apart from his own gut feeling. And he didn’t feel that they were dealing with the random act of a lunatic either. It was more sinister and more deliberate than that. For some reason someone had wanted the colonel silenced. Evan couldn’t think why. It was strange that his death had come immediately after his momentous discovery on the mountain, but Evan couldn’t imagine why the discovery of an old ruin would drive anyone to kill. If he’d been killed to prevent him from making a discovery—that would make sense. But this murder made no sense at all.
He had racked his brains all afternoon but couldn’t come up with anyone in Llanfair who didn’t like the colonel. The old man had been a popular figure in the village. To Evan’s knowledge he had never fallen out with anyone.
This was borne out by the genuine sadness Evan noticed as the colonel’s body was collected to be taken to the pathologist in Bangor. The local people stood watching silently. Men in the crowd removed their caps. Women dabbed at their eyes. Evan glanced around, trying to observe the crowd and note who was present, who was missing.
“Are you going to take the tape down now?” one of the little boys asked Evan as the van drove away.
“Not yet. We have to leave it up for the time being.” Evan raised his voice a little. “We need to find out just how and where he fell into the river, so that we can prevent any more accidents like this, don’t we?”
He started to move among the crowd, asking questions. On the pretext of asking people if they remembered what time the colonel left the pub, Evan managed to compile a pretty accurate list of who was there that night. The list included almost all the men of the village, plus some of the women as well. The only men not present were a couple of young lads out on dates, some fathers home with their wives, and the Rev. Powell-Jones who, unlike his rival at the other chapel, never touched the demon alcohol.
That meant that almost every able-bodied man in the village had a cast-iron alibi for that night. Most of them had seen the colonel leave the pub, but nobody saw what happened after that. As Evan had guessed, all the other inhabitants of Llanfair were safely indoors with curtains drawn at nine o’clock.
It was late Saturday afternoon when Evan finished interviewing the villagers and went to talk to Mrs. Owens, the colonel’s landlady. He skirted the police tape along the riverbank but crossed the river by the same little bridge from which the colonel had plunged to his death. Evan stood on the planks that spanned the stream, watching the water cascade over the rocks. It was true that the colonel could have hit his
head if he had fallen onto those rocks, and the rushing water would have wiped away any trace of blood. But the bridge really wasn’t unstable, and it was wide enough for a man to cross safely, unless he was very drunk indeed.
Mrs. Owens was quite distraught when she opened the front door. She dabbed her eyes with a sodden handkerchief as she led him into her kitchen and offered him a seat at the scrubbed pine table. Evan looked around with approval, thinking that this was just how a farm kitchen should look. One wall was taken up with an enormous Welsh dresser containing a set of willow pattern plates, another wall was dominated by a big cast-iron stove, now superseded by the smart electric range beside it. The walls were whitewashed stone and the floor well-scrubbed gray slate. The whole place was spotless. No wonder the colonel felt so comfortable here.
“We ought never to have shown him that shortcut.” Mrs. Owens sniffed as she poured Evan a cup of tea without asking. “It’s our fault. We should have known an old man like that could have lost his balance on that bridge. I kept telling Mr. Owens that it was rickety and needed repairing, but you know how busy he is.” She blew her nose noisily.
Evan nodded with sympathy. “Don’t upset yourself,” he said. “I’ve been across the bridge. It’s just fine and the colonel was as surefooted as an old goat, wasn’t he? Look where he hiked in the mountains and never had any mishaps.”
He stopped talking, staring out of Mrs. Owens’ window at the green slopes that rose steeply. Surely if anyone had wanted to kill the colonel, it would have been much less risky to have done it up there. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to have followed him up into the high country and waited for the right moment to push him over a cliff. No one would ever have disputed that was an accident. So why risk doing it so close to the village?
“… and he was always so happy here.” Evan came back from his thoughts to hear Mrs. Owens in the middle of a sentence.
“I’m sorry, I was thinking about something,” he said. “What were you saying?”
“Just that he always came here looking so peaky and down at the mouth and he perked up right away,” Mrs. Owens said. “I don’t think he had much to live for in London.”
