The Thread of Evidence (8 page)

‘And this went on for a couple of years?'

‘Yes, almost as long as that. Getting worse all the time.'

‘Why didn't you divorce her?'

Roland shrugged helplessly. ‘In those days, “divorce” was a terrible word to people of our class. I'd married her for better or worse, in the chapel, and I thought I had to put up with it. Anyway, I didn't know how to go about it – though, just before she went, I was beginning to think about a separation, if not actual divorce, boy.'

‘What happened eventually – and how on earth does this body come into it, for goodness' sake?'

‘Towards the end, she was going off to Liverpool even more often. She wouldn't say anything, she'd just vanish and I wouldn't see her for perhaps a month. She'd say she'd been staying with her sister, if she bothered to tell me anything at all. But, for all I know, she could have been anywhere in the country. A real bad one, she was! God knows, I was only a dull old farmer, but I did my best to please her when we got married.'

His voice cracked with emotion. ‘I reckon I loved her then, but I came to hate her before those couple of years were past.'

Peter could see the old man's pale eyes moistening behind his old-fashioned glasses. He hurriedly changed the subject.

‘But what about her actual disappearance – why should there be all that nonsense about her being dead?'

‘The last few months were worse than ever, boy. She would come home from Liverpool, or from being with Lloyd, and start fighting right away – real fighting, shouting, screaming, kicking – everything! She even came at me with a knife once, in her temper – saying how I'd ruined her life and was keeping her short of everything. It was terrible!'

Roland rose abruptly from the fireside and began pacing the floor again.

‘I started hitting her back in the end – partly to keep her off me. She used to go mad with rage. But, in the end, it was hate and temper on my part, too – God forgive me!'

Peter heard his uncle's voice tremble. He had never before seen him in anything other than his usual placid and rather vague state of mind. The change was disturbing, almost frightening; and Peter was suddenly afraid that the old man was going to break down altogether.

‘But what actually happened at the end?' he persisted, trying to stem the flood of emotion by concentrating on fact.

Roland Hewitt stopped walking around and leant heavily on the edge of the kitchen table, staring down at the cloth.

‘One day, she didn't come home. Must have been the middle of September, nineteen twenty-nine. There was nothing new in that. For a couple of weeks I thought she had gone on one of her trips to Liverpool. But then a letter came for her in her sister's handwriting, so I knew she couldn't be there. After another week, there was a second letter. Then, soon after, this sister – another bitch cast out of the same mould as Mavis herself – arrived on the doorstep demanding to know where Mavis was. Just about hysterical, she was.'

Peter's uncle paused as the scene flooded back into his mind.

‘I didn't have any time for this sister and I told her so. I'd had about enough of Mavis's antics by then. I wasn't anxious to go hunting around the country, looking for her. I thought she was probably with some man. The sister raised the roof. I sent her packing, and she went straight to the police in Aberystwyth – saying that I'd done away with my wife.'

Peter stared at Roland incredulously. ‘But that's just plain ridiculous! Surely they didn't take any notice of a silly accusation like that.'

‘It wasn't just her word, boy. I didn't know it then, but Mavis had been writing to her sister saying that she was going to leave me and that I was ill-treating her and injuring her and all the rest of it. The last time she went home, she showed some bruises to her.'

‘What was the point of that?'

‘I think she was working up to getting a divorce herself. She was a cunning little devil. She probably thought that, if she could divorce me for cruelty before I left her, she would get a good settlement and be free to carry on her affairs. Anyway, there were some letters as well, to this sister, which suggested that I was on the point of doing something drastic to her. Then that swine Ceri Lloyd went to the police with a lot of lies and made it worse still.'

‘What happened then?'

‘This sister had gone to the local paper in Aber and spun them the same yarn. They published an appeal for anyone who knew where Mavis was to contact them. Damn reporters came pestering me at Bryn Glas. Then the police came nosing around. A wonder I wasn't had up for turning a shotgun on someone, the trouble I had over those few weeks.'

‘What did the police have to say to you?'

‘I don't think they took it very seriously at the time. They sized up the sister and Ceri Lloyd. But they had to do something for the sake of appearances. They soon dropped it, though.'

‘How long did all this trouble go on for?'

‘Until I cleared off to Canada. Some Sunday paper got hold of it – they must have been short of news in twenty-nine, because they took over where the local paper left off. They ran a big article about the “Mystery of Bryn Glas”, silly fools! That kept the scandal going. The village all judged and condemned me, of course. That fat swine Lloyd was the mouthpiece – he joined forces with the sister and went round talking to the reporters whenever he had the chance.'

‘You could have had him for slander, surely?' Peter said indignantly.

Roland sighed and shuffled back to his chair, his lean face grey and tired.

‘I suppose so, boy, but I was too worried to care. Everywhere I went, I felt that people were whispering and pointing at me – “Look, there's the man who murdered his wife.” I stuck it for a couple of months, and then I had a chance of a quick sale for the farm. So, almost overnight, I sold up and went over to Alberta. I knew a fellow from Tremabon who had settled there, and he helped me get settled in a job in an agricultural store there. It wasn't a bad life. I did pretty well over the years, but I always pined for the old place.'

Roland looked around the kitchen as if he were seeing it for the first time.

‘I could have finished up here quite well, boy, but you can't get away from the past.'

Peter leant forward and spoke earnestly to the old man. ‘You've got nothing to get away from, Uncle! There's nothing in what you've just told me to cause you to get upset and worried like this. Only a few old fools in the village shooting their mouths off. If they dare say anything that I can pin onto any particular person, we'll get a lawyer to teach them a lesson!'

Roland Hewitt stared at his nephew with troubled eyes. ‘I don't know, boy – I just don't know. I feel that something bad is going to happen. I've got to dreading every knock on the door today.'

‘Why, for goodness' sake? I don't need telling that you had nothing to do with Aunt Mavis's vanishing trick. What is there to be afraid of, then? You didn't kill your wife so this heap of bones in a cave is no concern of yours!'

Roland refused to be reassured. ‘They're all saying in the village that she was the only woman to be missing from Tremabon in living memory, so this must be her.'

Peter groaned in exasperation.

‘Look, that's nonsense! You know as well as I do that the skeleton can't be Mavis. You didn't put it there, and there's no reason why anyone else should have. That's all there is to it. Anyway, the state that thing is in, it could have been there for generations, so this must be the body of someone else. The police aren't fools, not by a hell of a long way. They'll be able to tell that this is the body of someone else in no time.'

The logic of this seemed to strike home at last. A more hopeful expression crept into Roland's face.

‘You really think so, boy?'

Peter piled on the bedside manner. ‘Of course. They have scientists these days who will make mincemeat of these rumours in the village. They may never be able to say exactly who the bones belong to, but I'll bet they know already that they can't possibly have come from Mavis Hewitt.'

Chapter Six

‘Going on what the pathologist has told us so far, sir, there seems no reason why this couldn't be Mavis Hewitt.' With an air of finality, Pacey laid a thin folder on the edge of the chief constable's desk.

The detective-superintendent and his assistant sat in Colonel Barton's office on the first floor of the County Constabulary Headquarters at Cardigan. Following his talk with the local constable at Tremabon, Pacey had gone back up the cliff as fast as his bulk would allow him. He collected Willie Rees and the few more objects that the digging team had found amongst the last rubble in the shaft, then left Inspector Morris to organize the sealing-off of the tunnel.

He then hustled back with Rees to his police Wolseley and drove off rapidly towards Aberystwyth. After an hour of furious activity in the basement of the police station there, he had telephoned the chief, then roared away again down the coast road to Cardigan.

By the time they arrived in the county town, it was about seven o'clock in the evening of that strenuous Monday. Pacey was beginning to yearn for a rest and a decent meal. But, with Rees still in tow, he went straight to the police headquarters where the colonel was waiting for them. He gave him a succinct account of the day's events and ended up by sliding the pitifully thin file with its scanty record of the case, onto the desk.

‘All I've got so far is in there, sir, but there's nothing important that I haven't already mentioned.'

The chief constable reached for it and carefully scanned the few sheets of paper which it contained.

Inspector Rees sat primly on a hard chair at one end of the desk, looking like an elderly spinster at a vicar's tea party. Charles Pacey, his large body draped uncomfortably over another small chair at the opposite end of the desk, waited patiently for the chief to say something.

Colonel Barton sat bolt upright in his swivel chair, one hand fingering his neat grey toothbrush moustache as he studied the file.

He looked up at last. ‘And you say, Superintendent, that there's no sign of the original report of the sister's complaint in the records at Aberystwyth?'

‘No, sir. We had a good search through all the old records in the station. But, apart from an entry in the daily Occurrences book, there was nothing else.'

Willie Rees thought of the frantic hour they had just spent in the basement of the police station, scrabbling through heaps of dusty paper tied in even dirtier string.

‘Do you think anything will turn up, either after a better search or, perhaps, here in the headquarters archives?'

Pacey looked doubtful. ‘I haven't much hope of that, Colonel. Thirty years is a long time and the war in between played havoc with a lot of storage routines. I know tons of stuff was thrown out to make room for shelters and things like that.'

‘Where can we hope to get some further information?' The colonel rapped out his questions in the manner of one with years of military command behind him.

Pacey, looking like a village yokel compared with the small, neat figure in front of him, puffed out his red cheeks as he considered this.

‘Well, there's the local newspaper files. Their office in Aber was shut when I was there. So I thought it could wait until morning, without going chasing after the editor. Then we might find someone who was in the police force thirty years ago and might remember something about it. None of the present men up there are anything like old enough. But I've got the names of a couple of retired officers who might have been there at the time.'

‘Then, of course, there's this sister. The one mentioned in the station report book.' The colonel deftly removed Pacey's trump card before he could play it.

‘Yes, sir, I've already telexed the Liverpool police to see if she's still alive and at the same address,' said the detective, being determined to win the trick.

‘We'll be lucky to find her after all this time – she must be getting on now.' Willie Rees diffidently threw his voice into the duet between Pacey and the chief.

Pacey shrugged his bull shoulders.

‘It's still possible. Her age wasn't mentioned anywhere. But she sounds like an elder sister, judging by the way she was acting.'

The colonel carefully brushed up the ends of his military moustache. ‘Then, of course, you'll have to get around the village people pretty thoroughly tomorrow.'

Pacey groaned silently. His chief was a good scout in that he would always back any of his men up to the hilt against outsiders; but he had this annoying habit of stating the obvious as if it were a stroke of his own genius.

‘Er, yes, sir,' replied Pacey. ‘I'll work them over first thing in the morning. I'll take Sergeant Mostyn with me as there's not much else doing to keep him here.'

‘When will the scientific people be able to give you some really detailed information?'

‘Professor Powell is taking all the bones to his anatomy department in the morning and he hopes to be able to let me know something over the phone later in the day. I expect that the Forensic Lab will be longer than that with the stuff they've got, though.'

‘What did Morris's diggers unearth this afternoon – you said you collected some more things from him?'

‘A few more beads, two teeth and some more hair – again definitely reddish in colour. There were a few scraps of cloth and a bit more shoe, as well.'

‘So there's plenty for the boffins to work on?' observed Barton, fiddling with his moustache again.

‘Yes, sir, I've already sent it down to the Swansea lab.'

The colonel delicately adjusted the position of his inkstand and straightened up the already faultless blotting pad.

‘The question is now, how much proof do we need before we tackle this chap Hewitt?'