The Corpse with the Sapphire Eyes (32 page)

Alice wriggled in her wheelchair. “But what's all that got to do with us?”

The expressions around the table told me she was voicing a common query.

I cleared my throat. “I'm not the only one in this room who's trapped. You all have your own prisons, and you are all trying to make your escape. Siân? You live a rich and full life, with a loving husband and two wonderful, healthy children, and yet you are frustrated. Your life needs to be the way it is, you chose for it to be the way it is, and yet you couldn't see the joy in that.”

Siân jumped to her own defense. “I can really, Cait, we talked about it. I was just having a bad time with my pain, and my painkillers, that's all.” I hoped the hurt I'd caused would heal quickly, when she saw more of my method.

I nodded. “Yes, I know, but it's an example I wanted to share.” Siân looked deeply miffed.

“Bud,” I said next. He looked alarmed. “When your wife, Jan, died, I think you realized the nature of the prison you'd built for yourself.”

Bud swallowed nervously. I knew he would be up to my challenge, and that he'd follow my lead. Eventually, he nodded, resigning himself to taking part. “I lived in a cocoon of work. Total immersion. Of course, it comes with the job. It's essential. But when you have your life ripped apart like that, it changes the way you look at things. I'm sorry to say, Rhian, that's what you're going to be going through now. I packed in my job, and I've started to build a new life with Cait. We even have a new home to begin to make our own. It's hard—but I'm out of my old prison, and I won't be building another one any time soon.”

“So, because David's dead, we should all run about giving up work and—what? Starve? Be homeless?” said Dilys. “Stupid thing to say,” she spat at me.

“No,” I replied, “I don't just mean work. Some people work their whole life and, while their job gets them down, it's their home life that's their real prison. Prisons are how we become ‘institutionalized.' You said it yourself last night, Mair, and you were spot on. You, Owain, Dilys, and Rhian have never known a life lived anywhere but here. Castell Llwyd has become your literal, and figurative, prison.”

“Don't try to dress it up with fancy words,” snapped Dilys. “You're being nasty about my life. Belittling me, you are.” She seemed to be the most uncomfortable person in the room. “Have me sit here at the big table, telling me I'm rubbish? There's nice for you.”

“But you do things that allow you to have an escape, Dilys. Your cooking is excellent, I'm sure you're highly thought of by those you know in the local community, like your friend Audrey Williams, and your collection of cookbooks shows me you know of a world beyond these walls. Rhian, too. You use your connections with those around the world you do business with to allow you to see outside these walls. Mair, you have your online friends. Owain, you escape into history. Alice, I know you enjoy thinking about times gone by. Janet—well, you gave us a hint last night about how you've indulged while living here. Idris and Eirwen—you're rooted in the world outside because of, and for, your children. And of course there's Gwen who, although she doesn't live here, still will, like all of us, have her very own personal prison. What would you say that is, Gwen?”

Gwen shrugged and looked a little uncertain. “I don't know. I love my work, I enjoy being with talented, musical people. I don't have many close friends, but then that's not so unusual. I don't think I feel enclosed by anything, or anyone.”

“What about those you admire, Gwen? Those people you put up on a pedestal, and won't ever let climb down?”

“I don't know what you mean,” she whimpered.

“Gwen, since we ran into each other here you have acted as though you and I were great chums at school. We weren't. In fact, we didn't really know each other at all.”

Gwen looked shocked. “You were a great influence on me, and it's clear you remembered me. When we met here you recalled me exactly.”

I sighed. “I recall everything exactly, Gwen. I have a very strange and wonderful memory, which hangs onto stuff and never lets go. Whether I want it to or not. But I'll come back to that.”

Gwen slumped in her chair and glowered at her coffee cup.

“Thanks for the analysis, Cait, but how does all this connect to David, and all the other stuff?” said Siân.

“Because David was trapped in a prison too,” I said, “and he was trying to escape.”

“I never meant to be a part of a prison for him,” said Rhian plaintively. “He loved it here at first, but then he got restless. His rehearsals got longer, he had more meetings away from the castle, he spent more and more time working on his music projects and that flaming car out in the stables. Especially the last few months.”

“He wasn't working on the car at all,” I said. “He was working with Mair to try to find the treasure he believed was hidden in the Roman temple.”

Rhian looked puzzled, and Owain exclaimed, “With Mair? He's been working with me, too. More or less blackmailed me into letting him come into my tunnel with me.”

“Your what?” asked Alice. “Did you keep going with that stupid thing you began as a boy?”

“Okay, stop,” I said. “I'm not going to sit here and listen to all this. I'm just going to cut to the chase, as they say. For years Owain's prison—which he began to build for himself as a boy—has forced him to believe that the puzzle plate told him that a treasure was hidden in the Roman temple. He never realized that the plate was a fake, a very clever fake—in that it was relatively modern—though it did, in fact, point to a treasure.”

“Please explain that, Cait,” said Idris with some urgency. “You said it last night. What do you mean?”

I said, “David was onto something. I found a book in a locked drawer in the stables that was about Bletchley Park, where they had teams of code crackers and creators during the Second World War. You told me, Alice, that some hush-hush stuff went on here during those years, and I know for a fact that the Welsh language was used during the war for secret communications. Code crackers would enjoy working with a wealthy man who could make a fake puzzle plate. They'd see it as a great joke. I believe that's what happened; your husband worked with the eggheads to create the plate. It had to be more modern than you thought, Owain, if only because the ‘Cadwallader' form of your family name was used, rather than the original version of ‘Cadwaladr,' which was in use during the period when the Swansea Pottery was working. You also mentioned, Alice, significant renovations being undertaken before you moved back here permanently after the war, especially to the fireplaces. And then, of course, there were the portraits of you and your husband. Having seen both of them, and being able to imagine them in their original positions, they, and the puzzle plate, told me all I needed to know. Do you want me to go through the verse, Idris?”

“Yes, please, so long as you tell us all what it means,” he replied eagerly.

“Right then, the first two lines—‘Where the fire meets the earth, where the water meets the air / Where the face of beauty smiles, the treasures will be there'—frame the whole riddle and set us up for the rest. The next two lines are a couplet containing a specific clue—‘Black gold in a seam, now popping with a spray / For every humble man, there is a time to pray.'”

“Exactly,” interrupted Owain. “My tunnel from the coal cellar—‘black gold in a seam'—to the temple of Neptune, which is mentioned in the next two lines. See?”

“That's a part of your own, personal prison, Owain,” I replied. “Coal in a coal cellar doesn't ‘pop with a spray,' it only does that when it's burning. Those two lines are referring to
fireplaces
. And you kneel down when you pray like a humble man, so all you ever had to do was kneel down in front of the fireplaces, and that's where you'll find your treasure.”

“Well I've done that hundreds of times, thousands, in fact,” said Dilys, “and I haven't found any treasure.”

“You don't have to ‘find' it,” I replied. “It's in plain sight. Every single fireplace in this entire castle is lined and faced with gold tiles.
Gold
tiles. They aren't just glass tiles backed with gold leaf. I believe you'll find they are actual gold, covered with a glass film. Someone will have to have enough guts to pry one off, but I bet you'll see I'm right if you do.”

All heads turned to the fireplace in the room, and I could see eyes grow round. All except Owain, who said, “So, what does the next couplet mean?”

“Ah, yes,” I replied, “let's consider that one. ‘The breath of LlÅ·r and Neptune's tears—the same, there is no doubt / When they are gone, what gold is left, we cannot live without.' What could that mean? What can no one live without?”

“Water,” said Owain. “The Roman temple has a cistern at its heart. The water came down the hill into the cistern through a gaping mouth of Neptune, was held in a cistern, and when the cistern was full, the water came out of the mouth of another face of Neptune and flowed into the sea.”

“I agree that's how the temple worked,” I said, “but the answer, in this case, isn't water, it's salt. And, of course, when sea water evaporates—when water meets the air—what you have left is salt.”

“Preposterous,” exclaimed Owain, gleeful that he had another chance to throw his favorite insult at me, no doubt.

I glared at him as I responded. “Alice's, or should I say
Alicia's
, mother was the granddaughter of a Bolivian salt miner and a Patagonian weaver of wool. You told me that, Owain, and the portrait of Alice certainly contained enough Bolivian creatures, and even a Bolivian landscape, to emphasize that part of her heritage. There's also a great big pile of salt on the table next to Gryffudd in his portrait, in which he's holding a map of South America. The map even has an X on it, for goodness sake! I believe that, somewhere in your library, you'll find papers that show that Alice has significant land rights to an area of the Salar de Uyuni area of Bolivia, the world's largest salt flats. They're shown in the background of her portrait.”

“I own salt?” said Alice. “Why is that good thing? Isn't there enough salt in the world? Salt's cheap, isn't it?”

I nodded. “Yes, Alice, it is. But the impressive thing about the Bolivian salt flats is that they have been discovered to consist of a crust of salt that covers what is likely to be somewhere between fifty to seventy percent of the world's supply of lithium.”

“They make batteries with lithium, don't they?” asked Idris.

I nodded. “Yes, they do. And the world has never been more in need of batteries—especially with the way things are moving toward the greater adoption of electric cars.” I noticed that Idris sat more upright, a gleam in his eyes.

“Don't get too excited yet, Idris,” I said. “The Bolivian government has made it quite clear that they will only allow nationals to exploit the lithium reserves. I'm sure that Owain's genealogical research will prove very useful when you're required to prove that there is a Bolivian bloodline, which might allow you to capitalize upon your land rights.”

“Good work, Owain,” said Alice with pride. “You've always been a clever boy.”

Owain looked at his mother with great surprise, then returned his gaze to me, sullen again. “So what about the next two lines? What about them?”

“Ah yes. ‘The worthy man sees treasure through the silver and through glass / The vain man only ever sees the beauty that will pass,' is something that I came to understand when I was talking to Siân last night. I was recalling an instance when I'd seen how blood had managed to get between the silvering on the back of a mirror and the glass to which it was adhered. Although the fireplace shown in the portrait of Alice seems to be a fantasy fireplace—I haven't seen one like it in the castle—I know that the dressing table shown is real. It's the one in my bridal boudoir. Did you move that dressing table out of your own bedroom, Alice?”

Alice Cadwallader shook her head. “Not exactly. The dressing table didn't move, my bedroom did. The room you are in used to be my bedroom. The dressing table was far too big and heavy to be moved. The bed, too. They just stayed where they were. And that fireplace in the painting? The artists made it up. Said it was something he'd once seen, and it would make a nice background.”

“The bed is massive,” said Eirwen, “so I can see why you'd leave that where it was. It suits the room. But why would a dressing table be that hard to move?”

“I believe you'll find that the mirror is entirely backed with gold,” I replied, “behind the silvering, between the mirror and the wood backing. Did you have any other mirrors in your room, at that time, Alice?”

The old woman nodded. “Gryffudd used to say I was a woman who was unable to pass a mirror without looking into it, so he made sure I had a lot of them.” She thought for a moment. “The old boy was making fun of me, wasn't he?” She chuckled. “Well, maybe, I'll have the last laugh after all.”

“Where are all the mirrors now, Alice?” asked Eirwen, now as eager as her husband.

“Here and there,” replied Alice. “Don't go making a load of bad luck for yourselves. I'll point them out so you don't have to break every single one in the house. It could mean there's a lot of gold here.”

I nodded. “So the rest of the verse might be right. ‘Cadwalladers will never leave the castle of the gray / As long as ancients rest in peace and old walls not give way / By the rushing of my lifeblood, I swear this on my grave / The wise man will discover them, and my kin be ever saved.' By the way, Owain,” I added, “I believe the reference to walls not giving way is a nod to the fact that the river was diverted, and presumably walled to allow it to do so, by your father's father, thus preventing it from running straight through this very room.”