The Corpse with the Sapphire Eyes (23 page)

“What?”

“You're trying to fill up the space that's empty because your husband isn't a constant and important part of your life anymore.”

“Mattie and Beccie need me to get them about the place. That's a fact of modern life, Cait, and something you'd understand if you were a parent.”

“I get that bit, Siân, but the rest of it? The dollhouse is a symbol of the perfection for which you are striving, but which is unattainable. Own the fact you'll never be the perfect wife and mother. Own the fact that someone broke your heart decades ago and that it's alright for that to still hurt. Own the fact that you went to Australia for all the wrong reasons. Own the fact that no marriage is perfect.”

“Says my sister who's getting married in the morning.”

“Possibly.”

“Marriage is a trap, Cait. A trap you build for yourself, and then go leaping into wearing a really expensive frock and a stupid, naïve grin. Kids? Even more of a trap. And one you can't ever get out of, not even if you want to. At least you don't have that to face.”

“A trap?” I knew I sounded exasperated as I spoke. “You might think that marriage is a trap, but people make traps for themselves all the time, in all sorts of ways. Of course, they don't know what they've done until it's too late, then they spend the greater part of their energy trying to work out how to escape the trap. I see it all the time in criminal psychopathy, but non-criminals do it too. It's surprisingly normal human behavior.”

Siân sighed. “Not a lecture, Cait, I'm in no mood for it. Just get to the point, if there is one, please?”

“We're in exactly the right place to talk about being trapped. We're trapped at Castell Llwyd along with everyone else.
We'll
be able to get out when the bridge is sorted. But the others? It's too late for most of them, I think.

“You know what, Cait? You're right about this place. It gives me the creeps. You can feel the poison here. I haven't felt right since I got here. I thought I'd feel different, coming back to Wales. Back
home
. But it's not home anymore. It's just a place.”

“Of course this isn't home, Siân. Home was a three up, three down in Manselton with an outside toilet and a diet of homework and cheap, filling foods, and an inculcation of a work ethic that taught us both that we could do better than our parents. We were their escape. We were their reason for doing all they did. Look at what we did. You and I live about as far away from Wales, and each other, as we could get, at almost opposite sides of the world. We left. We escaped.”

“So you're saying that it's natural to feel trapped, and to focus on getting out, but when you get out, you're still trapped, or you just build yourself another trap you then have to try to escape from? That's flaming depressing. Thanks.”

“Tell me about David. Why did you fall for him? And how hard did you fall?”

Siân had stopped crying, which was a good sign. She glared at me. “He was handsome, charming, witty, talented, funny, and he liked me. He liked me as me. I was gawky and quite clever but not very. I had a middling talent as a singer and didn't excel at anything, and I was a largely unnoticed person, whom he noticed. He was my first boyfriend, my first
everything
. I thought we would get married and have beautiful and talented children, but once he'd got what he wanted he dumped me and moved on to his next conquest. What really hurt was that he told everyone about us, so people would point and giggle. Thank heavens there wasn't Facebook, or any of the things my kids use these days. You must understand. You went through it with Angus, right?”

“I don't want to go there, Siân,” I said quietly.

“It's alright for me to open up, but not you?”

I sighed. “David might have hurt you emotionally, but Angus hurt me physically
and
emotionally. The bruises and the cuts healed, even if some of them left physical scars.”

“Like the one above your nose? How d'you get that one?”

I didn't know she'd noticed it. “He smashed my face into a mirror. I was very lucky. The big chunk I pulled out of my forehead missed my eyes and just left this little mark.” I smiled ruefully. “I kept that piece of glass in a drawer for months, thinking I might one night use it on him while he lay beside me, unconscious from the booze. But I was a criminologist. I knew I'd get caught. So I threw it away. As I did, I noticed how my blood had crept in between the glass and the silvering on the back. Funny the things you remember, eh?”

“It's not funny the things
you
remember, Cait. You remember everything. Do you remember how it felt to be used up inside?”

I nodded. “And I remember how hard it was to break it off with him, which sounds ridiculous given what he put me through. It was his instability that led him to seek stability through power over me. And, talking about instability, you've been displaying some pretty ripe symptoms of that since ‘Davies the Eyes' was mentioned. Why do you think that is?”

“Doing the shrink thing on me now are you, sis? Ask questions, don't make suggestions? Okay, I'll play. Overwhelmed by remembered unhappiness, and powerlessness, on the one hand; realizing that I feel some of that unhappiness in my current circumstances on the other; and then feeling guilty that I feel that way on . . . you know, the third hand.” She managed a smile.

“You can't change the past, but you can learn from it. If you don't? You're an idiot. And you're not an idiot, Siân.”

“But you'd let Angus back into your home the night he died, Cait. After you'd already thrown him out. You'd gone through all the tough stuff, kicking him out of your life. Why that night? I never, ever understood that.”

“You deserve an explanation, Siân. I told the police at the time, of course, because they gave me no choice when they arrested me for his murder. Despite the fact that I was the one who called the ambulance and the police, what else could they think had happened? He was dead on my bathroom floor, and I was alive. I've told Bud too, of course. Angus was passed out drunk when the guys from the pub carried him into what they thought was still his home. He hadn't told anyone that I'd kicked him out. Didn't want to lose face. Once he'd passed out, he was never a problem. Of course, what I didn't know was that he wasn't just drunk, but that an injury from a pub fight several days earlier was already killing him because he'd ruptured his spleen. The police only found that out later on.”

“So, if you hadn't felt sorry for Angus, you'd never have ended up being arrested?”

I nodded. “I made what I thought was the right decision at the time, but it turned out to be a bad one.”

Siân sighed. “And now Davies the Eyes is dead, and I never got to tell him that if it hadn't been for him hurting me as he did I'd never have emigrated, or met Todd, or had Beccie and Mattie. I think it might have helped me a lot if I'd been able to tell him that, to his face. That the awful thing he did to me ended up making me happy. Fulfilled.”

“What he did didn't end up making you happy, you made decisions to allow yourself to be happy. But, if it makes you feel better, you can still tell him how well you've done without him. He's just downstairs.”

Siân shook her head. “It's too late. But I've told him in my heart. And I do love Todd, Cait. I just miss him. A lot. And I love my children. They are just such a huge responsibility. And I don't miss working at all. Standing for hours and hours on end and being treated badly by megalomaniac surgeons isn't all it's cracked up to be, you know. And I enjoy all my activities. They aren't my escape, they are a part of the life I enjoy living. I've just been railing against the world, Cait. I'm so very, very tired, and my back is so bad after the flight.”

“Your back?”

“I have spinal osteoarthritis. It's why I exercise so much, eat healthily, and generally take good care of myself. I have to, or I can hardly move because of the pain. I take some pretty strong pills to help me cope with it, and when I don't take them I can get a bit irritable. There again, when I take too many the same thing happens. My mood can be all over the place if I'm not careful. Back pain is difficult to cope with—no one knows you've got it, they just think you're being grumpy and difficult. It's a chronic disease, and it'll only get worse. All I can do is try to be as healthy and flexible as I can be, to stave it off for as long as possible. But I'm afraid that by the time the kids are gone, and Todd can retire, I'll be a cripple, and he won't want to look after me. It's what Alice Cadwallader has, and you've seen how she is. Janet helps her exercise every day, but it's tough.”

“I'm sorry, I had no idea. Why haven't you ever told me?”

“You're my sister, not my keeper. It's not really anything to do with you. Oh—what's that noise?”

I stood up from the stool, my own back beginning to ache, and strained my ears. I could hear Dilys, calling in the hallway outside the door. I opened the door to let her in, but there was no one there. I checked along the landing, in both directions, but there wasn't a soul in sight.

As I walked back into the dusty room, I said, “Did you hear that?” I had to be sure I wasn't imagining things.

Siân nodded. “I thought it was Dilys, just outside the door.”

“So did I, but there's nobody there.”

We both said “Weird,” at the same time. We grinned. Siân stood, with some difficulty, and we hugged.

“Are you alright now?” I asked as kindly as I could.

Siân nodded. There was a glint in her eye. “I'm going to be just fine, sis. But you've just thought of something, haven't you? Is it something to do with David's death?”

I nodded absentmindedly. “I can almost taste it. I can almost see it. I need to think.”

“Of course you do. Go on, I'll be fine.”

“Did you find a portrait of Alice's husband up here? The one that matches hers?”

“You mean the one you've been sitting in front of all this time?”

I turned and saw it propped against a wall, behind me. The painting of Alice had shown me she was a vibrant, beautiful young woman. This one told me that Gryffudd Cadwallader had been a robust and pleasant-looking man with a ruddy complexion and a penchant for tweed. The background of the portrait showed Castell Llwyd in all its glory on an imagined horizon. The man himself filled about two thirds of the foreground, and his hands were overly large, it seemed. One hand held a scroll of paper, which bore a map showing South America; his other pointed down and to his left. His eyes twinkled with a wicked light. To one side of him was a table laden with exotic foods and piles of some sort of white crystalline substance. The Cadwallader Puzzle Plate stood upright on the table, his body obliterating most of the verse. But that didn't matter, nor did the fact that the plate itself had been smashed. I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but couldn't work out how it was linked to David Davies's death. I needed a few more facts to crack the mystery of the puzzle plate.

I WENT DOWN THE STAIRS
to the great hall as fast as I could. Once there I listened for a moment. Over the rain beating down on the glass above my head I could hear voices in the drawing room. I looked at my watch. It was gone three o'clock, so I was pretty sure that everyone would be in there, meeting to discuss their findings. I took a deep breath and launched myself at what I knew would be a critical encounter.

When I entered the room, I was struck by how bleak and dead the place seemed without the dancing flames of a fire in the grate. Quite a few people looked taken aback by my appearance, which, given how very grimy and damp I was, wasn't surprising. I didn't hesitate. I marched to the fireplace and poked about in the empty grate. I stuck my head into the opening beneath the chimney, which drew a few throat-clearings from the assembled group, then peered closely at the gold-backed glass tiles that surrounded every fireplace I'd seen, so far, in the castle. Even though the wind had died down, I could still hear whistling from the chimney.

I stood and spoke directly to a worried-looking Alice. “When you moved back into Castell Llwyd after the war, had all the flues and fireplaces been renovated? I could see from outside that all the chimneys seem to be original features, but what about the tile work, the mantles, and the flues?” I didn't exactly snap at the old woman, but I was trying to be businesslike. I noticed Bud's reaction out of the corner of my eye, and I was confident he'd pick up on the fact that I was nose-down on the trail.

Alice adjusted her shoulders. Clearly she wasn't used to being addressed in such a manner. She looked injured as she responded, “They'd all been redone. Gryffudd said that the ministry people had made a right mess of them. Although the fireplaces should have been mainly decorative, because all the heating had been put in before we moved out—which in itself caused a massive upheaval—they'd seen fit to use them all.”

“And which ministry was it that took over your home?” I was terse.

Alice looked flummoxed. “I don't know. I don't remember, or I never knew. They were rather cagey about it all. Even Gryffudd.”

I pressed on. “Owain, is everything that's been written about the layout of the Roman temple to Neptune in your courtyard accurate, as far as you know?”

It was Owain's turn to look strangely at me. “Yes, as far as I have been able to establish. It was built in the tholos style, so round, which is very unusual, though it might be accounted for by the fact that it sits within a stone circle. It is located in an unusual position—yes, it's close to the sea, of course, but temples were usually built as a part of a city, often close to the main forum. There was no city here, just the temple.”

“It's never been excavated. Is that correct?” I tried not to snap.