by Rhys Bowen
“I’m afraid nobody’s allowed in yet,” Evan said.
“But I came all the way here. It cost me seventy pence on the bus and there won’t be one back until ten.”
“You can come across to the police station,” Evan said. “I’ll make you a cup of tea and maybe I can take down everything you’ve told me. Who knows, it might be important.”
“Might it now?” Gladys looked delighted. “Well, who would have thought it?” She trotted beside Evan on her little bird legs, taking five steps to every one of his.
“You know, I might recognize the voice again if I heard it,” she said as they moved away from the crowd. “It was kind of unusual like.”
They had just reached the police station and Evan was about to unlock the door when a shrill voice froze him in his tracks. “Constable Evans! I need your assistance this minute, if you please.”
Evan turned around to face Mrs. Powell-Jones, storming down the street with a look of thunder on her face. “Constable Evans. Will you please go and tell those impudent young men who are currently lounging around the police car in my driveway who I am? They are refusing me entry to my own house. They informed me, very rudely indeed, that they had orders to admit nobody and that included me.”
Evan began to think more kindly of Jim Abbott and his partner. Anyone who could get the better of Mrs. Powell-Jones, even temporarily, deserved a medal.
“I’m afraid what they said is true, Mrs. Powell-Jones,” Evan said soothingly. “We can’t have anyone in there until the lab boys have had a chance to take their samples.”
Mrs. Powell-Jones’s face was incredulous. “Take their samples? I understood this was a tragic accident. Are you saying it’s something more sinister?”
“Not at all. But in the case of any accidental death, we have to establish the exact cause, and that means taking samples from objects in the room.”
“I’ve never heard such rubbish,” Mrs. Powell-Jones snapped. “If I don’t get access to my house soon, I shall have to telephone my friend the commissioner. I need to see if any of my furniture has been damaged in the accident. It’s very old and valuable, you know.”
“I’m sure it won’t take long once the Forensic team arrives, Mrs. Powell-Jones,” Evan said. “It should be all clear by later today. I wouldn’t worry.”
“Valuable ornaments might have been knocked over,” Mrs. Powell-Jones said. “Not that I am one to place a monetary value on things, but my ornaments have great sentimental value for me. Some of them have been in my family for generations.”
“There was nothing broken as far as I could tell,” Evan said.
Mrs. Powell-Jones’s ears pricked up. “Ah, so you actually saw the body?”
“Yes, I was the one who found him.”
“And?”
“I really can’t tell you anything yet. The D.I. will be issuing a statement. I’ve been told not to talk about it.”
Mrs. Powell-Jones shook her head in annoyance and made tsk-tsk noises. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to let the house to that man, however much money he offered,” she said. “If I’d realized he was the same Ifor Llewellyn who used to carry the coal scuttles up to our rooms … breeding will tell, you know. Or lack of it.” She leaned closer to Evan. “I understand he drank, like a fish?” She paused. Evan said nothing. “Drinking is the cause of so much grief in the world, isn’t it?” she went on. “That’s why I—” Suddenly she noticed Gladys standing in the shadows of the doorway. “Gladys, what are you doing here?”
“I was coming to do my work, ma’am. They asked me to come in today.”
“On a weekend? They were paying you extra, I hope?”
“Oh yes, ma’am. Quite a bit more than you give me.” Gladys looked smug.
“Such extravagance.” Mrs. Powell-Jones shook her head again. “Ah well, I suppose I must do my duty and go to offer words of comfort to the bereaved widow. She is in the house, I take it?”
Very clever, Evan thought. Mrs. Powell-Jones certainly wasn’t stupid. “No, she’s up at the Everest Inn,” he said, watching her face fall. “I think your husband’s already up there with her.”
Having dispatched Mrs. Powell-Jones, Evan seated Gladys, made her tea, and was just getting her statement from her when he saw the white shape of the Police Incident van come to a halt outside his open door.
“I’ll be right back, Gladys. Don’t go away,” he said.
“It’s up the street where those people are standing, by the chapel,” he called to the van. To his surprise it was not one of the lab technicians but Sergeant Watkins who got out of the van first.
“I’ll be with you boys in a minute. You know where to go, don’t you?” Watkins waved to the van driver and the van then continued on up the street.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Sarge,” Evan began. “I thought you’d got today off and—”
Sergeant Watkins cut him short. “Okay, how do you do it, that’s what I want to know?” he demanded, striding toward Evan.
“Do what?”
“Is it something about your nose? It’s not a particularly big nose. It’s a very ordinary nose, when you come to look at it, so it must be something else.”
Evan was looking at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking Serbo-Croatian. “Excuse me, Sergeant. I don’t follow you. Why are we talking about my nose? What’s that got to do with anything? Am I supposed to have smelled something?”
“You know very well you are. Smelled a rat, that’s what.” Sergeant Watkins tapped the side of his own, more generous, nose as he gave Evan a knowing wink. “You sensed it, didn’t you, right from the start. You picked up on the glass for one thing. And those subtle questions to the doctor about heart attacks. You didn’t suspect for one minute that he’d had a heart attack—”
“Wait a second, Sarge,” Evan interrupted again. “Are you telling me that it wasn’t an accident?”
“Accident my foot,” Sergeant Watkins said. “Someone coshed him on the head.”
Chapter 11
Evan stared at him. “He was murdered? They’re sure of it?” Had he suspected it all along, he wondered. Had that been the uneasy prickling of his skin when he was in that room? Was it the presence of evil and not the heat that had made him feel clammy, and made Mostyn Phillips look as if he was about to faint?
Sergeant Watkins moved closer to him although there was nobody within hearing distance. “Pretty conclusive, I’d say. There was no alcohol in his system, for one thing. So he hadn’t been drinking. The killer just splashed it around a lot to give that impression. And whatever killed him wasn’t the knob on the fender. It had at least one sharp edge.”
Evan tried not to be glad that his hunch had been right. An accident was one thing. This opened up a whole new can of worms.
“The D.I. is down in Caernarfon, playing host to the press and loving every minute of it. So I’ve got instructions to come up here and do the spadework before he shows up. Are you in the mood for some digging?”
Evan smiled. “Ready when you are, Sarge.”
“Right, let’s go into your office and you can start me off with the background facts.”
“I’ve got the cleaning lady in there right now,” Evan said. “You could start with her. She was one of the last people to see and hear Ifor Llewellyn alive. I’ve just been taking her statement, in fact.”
“One of the last people, was she? That’s useful.”
“It certainly is,” Evan agreed. “And according to her, it seems that Ifor had a visitor yesterday evening, not too long before he was killed.”
He ushered Sergeant Watkins into the one-room station. “Gladys, this is Sergeant Watkins,” he said. “I think he’d like to hear your story.”
“Very well, sir,” Gladys said, smiling shyly.
“Before we start, Gladys,” Sergeant Watkins said. “You’ve been working in the house all the time Mr. Llewellyn’s been there?”
“Oh yes sir, and for years before that. I’ve been housek
eeper to the minister and Mrs. Powell-Jones since nineteen seventy-nine. I know that house like the back of my hand.”
“Good.” Sergeant Watkins nodded. “We’ll probably want you to come on a tour with us later, after the men from my headquarters have finished with the room. Now, Gladys,” he perched on the edge of Evan’s desk, smiling down at her. “What can you tell me about working for Mr. and Mrs. Llewellyn?”
“Well, sir, it wasn’t always easy, as I was telling Constable Evans here. I never knew whether I was coming or going. When the minister was there, everything went like clockwork. They always had lunch twelve-thirty on the dot. I always laid the little table for tea before I went at four. And it was always washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, polishing on Wednesday—”
“Yes, we get the picture,” Watkins interrupted. “And it wasn’t like that with Mr. Llewellyn?”
“Oh no, sir. Like I said, I never knew what was supposed to be happening. I’d get there at nine o’clock and they’d still be asleep. I’d be in the middle of my dusting and they’d want breakfast. Sometimes they had lunch at three o’clock in the afternoon and…” she lowered her voice and leaned closer to the two policemen, “they wanted me to use garlic, sir. I told them I’d never seen a need to use that smelly stuff before and I wasn’t about to start now.”
“So the hours were all mixed up. What else? What was the atmosphere like there? Happy?”
“Noisy sir. Awful noisy.”
“Yelling, you mean?”
“Mostly singing, sir.”
Watkins tried not to smile. “Some people actually like that noise, Gladys, but I can’t say I’m one of them myself. I’d rather have the Beatles. So Mr. Llewellyn sang a lot. What about Mrs. Llewellyn?”
“She was moody like, sir. Didn’t say much—of course it was hard to say much when he was around. Sometimes she lay in bed with a book most of the day, then she’d go out for a drive, but she didn’t seem to enjoy life, if you get my meaning, sir.”
“Did she have many friends?”
“Oh no, sir. Nobody came to see her, the whole time she was here, as far as I know. She was on the telephone a lot though. I think she talked to her children. Her face looked quite different when she was on the telephone.”
“But the children weren’t here at all?”
“No sir. We heard that the whole family would be coming, but the children never came after all. Mrs. Llewellyn said she’d left them in Italy. Of course they’re both grown up and able to take care of themselves, so I understand.”
“And Mr. and Mrs. Llewellyn—how did they get along?”
“Not always so well, sir.” Gladys looked uncomfortable, as if she didn’t want to be disloyal to her employer. “In fact when he wasn’t singing he was shouting. There was a lot of shouting going on in that house, sir.”
“So they fought a lot. About what?”
“Oh sir,” Gladys looked shocked. “It wasn’t my business to listen in to their conversations. Besides, they did most of it in English—and the language they used, sir! I’ve never heard a lady use words like that before. I used to go and shut myself in the kitchen when they started.”
Sergeant Watkins jotted in his notebook. “And what about visitors, Gladys. Did they have many?”
“None at all while I was there, except for Mr. Phillips stopping by with some music a couple of times, and Evans-the-Meat delivering—but that was tradesmen’s entrance, not the front door.”
“So nobody came to call in a month?”
“Mrs. Llewellyn told me that Mr. Llewellyn’s doctor told him to get away somewhere peaceful and have a complete rest. He’d been overdoing it, she said, and his blood pressure was very bad. But if you ask me, sir, I don’t think he was helping his blood pressure very much, the way he acted.”
“And did they get many phone calls, Gladys?” Evan asked. “Did you have to answer the phone for them?”
“Oh no, sir. It wasn’t my place to answer the phone.” She leaned closer again. “I’m a wee bit scared of the telephone still, sir. It doesn’t seem natural, sending voices down a wire, does it?”
“So you’ve no idea who might have called them?”
Gladys shook her head.
“Tell the sergeant about last night before you left,” Evan said.
Gladys recounted the story, almost word for word as she had given it to Evan. Sergeant Watkins made notes. “So you didn’t go to the front door and let the person in, Gladys? And you couldn’t tell who it was?”
“No sir. Like I told the constable, I was back in the kitchen with the door shut, making the pie. And when I went to the living room door, I only heard little snatches of the other voice. Mr. Llewellyn did most of the talking as usual, and a lot of laughing, too. But the other voice was much softer—a gentle voice like.”
“Woman or man?”
“That’s what I can’t say, sir. I told Constable Evans. Not a very high woman’s voice, look you, but it could have been either.”
“And when you left to catch your bus, Gladys,” Sergeant Watkins asked, “did you happen to notice any strange cars parked nearby?”
Gladys frowned. Then she shook her head. “I was in a hurry because I was worried the bus might go without me,” she said, “but I think I would have noticed if anyone had parked outside the house.”
Sergeant Watkins got up again. “Thank you, Gladys. You’ve been very helpful,” he said. “Would you mind sticking around for a while? I’d like you to get a look at the room where the cri—the accident—happened. You could tell us if anything had been moved since you saw it last.”
“I’d be happy to, sir,” Gladys said. “The next bus doesn’t go until ten anyway. I’ll pour myself another cup of tea, if you don’t mind.”
Evan followed the sergeant out into the bright sunshine. “Very interesting. He fought with his wife. She wasn’t very happy.”
“But she also wasn’t there,” Evan said. “She only just got back from London when we were there, remember?”
“We can easily check up on that, can’t we?” Watkins asked. “London can be a very convenient alibi. I think we should go and talk to her now, before any word gets to her that we’re looking on this as a suspicious death.”
They walked up the village street. “Lovely day isn’t it?” Evan said.
Sergeant Watkins frowned at him. “Don’t rub it in. I’d promised my wife and daughter that I’d take them to the eisteddfod. Our Tiffany’s keen on seeing the dancing competition. Why do these things always happen on fine days—and on my days off, too? I was looking forward to hearing you sing tonight!”
Evan gave him a look that stopped the grin. “I don’t know if we’ll be doing it now. Ifor was the one thing that made us sound halfway decent. Some of the men want to go ahead as a sort of tribute to Ifor, but I suppose it will all be up to Mostyn.”
“He seemed to be taking it very hard last night,” Sergeant Watkins said. “I can’t imagine he’d want to be up there in front of people today with his star performer dead.”
“Probably not,” Evan nodded thoughtfully, “although there was little love lost between those two. I can’t say Mostyn would grieve over Ifor Llewellyn’s death.”
Sergeant Watkins looked up expectantly. “Are you hinting at something?”
Evan laughed. “Oh no, I’m not hinting that Mostyn might have killed him. He was certainly angry enough the night before when Ifor threatened to join another choir, but I don’t think he’s the type to go coshing people over the head, do you?”
Watkins smiled, too. “You’re right about that. Positively green he looked last night, didn’t he, poor little bugger. And I don’t think he could reach Ifor’s head, unless he got a stepladder!”
“There’s no way Mostyn would have killed off his star performer,” Evan said. “He actually thought we had a chance for the gold medal with Ifor singing the solos. He’d have waited until after the eisteddfod to do anything to him.”
“That’s probably true,” Watki
ns agreed. “You don’t give up your one chance for a gold medal, do you?”
“Anyway, he couldn’t have killed Ifor, even if he’d wanted to,” Evan pointed out. “He was down in Harlech waiting for us when we arrived last night. He’d been there all evening with some of his pupils from school. And Ifor was still alive and singing when the last of the choir members drove out of the village.”
“Oh? They heard him, did they?” Sergeant Watkins looked with interest at the group of villagers still hanging around the crime scene. “Are any of them here now?”
“Most of them,” Evan said. “Harry-the-Pub and Evans-the-Meat said they’d heard him.”
“Maybe we should talk to them on our way past, while we’ve got them together here. We’ll be able to pin down the last time he was seen or heard alive, and who knows, someone might just have noticed something important.”
“They don’t miss much around here,” Evan agreed.
“Good. Then why don’t you start asking the questions?” Watkins patted him on the arm. “They’re liable to tell you more than me. And you know my Welsh is a little rusty. I’ll just go in and check on the lab boys.”
He ducked under the white police tape that now blocked off the driveway, passed the van that was parked outside the house, and disappeared into the building. The Llanfair locals crowded expectantly around Evan.
“What’s going on then, Evan bach?” Charlie Hopkins asked, nodding in the direction of the house. “What’s all the fuss about?”
“They’re just trying to make sure of all their facts before they make a press statement, I’d imagine,” Evan said evasively. “You know how newspapers always get the wrong end of the stick.”
“Either he hit his head or he didn’t,” Evans-the-Meat said belligerently. “I don’t see what’s so hard that they need to send up half the county’s experts wasting good taxpayer money.”
“It’s all routine procedure in cases like this, Gareth,” Evan said. “When someone winds up with a bloody great hole in his head, we have to check it out thoroughly.” He moved closer to the group of men, who were standing a little apart from other small groups of women, children, dogs, and bikes.
