The Corpse with the Sapphire Eyes (20 page)

Bud looked as puzzled as I felt. “Why would someone change his clothes? And only his bottom half, at that. I'm remembering correctly, aren't I? This is how he was dressed above the waist? That is the sweater that had handprints on it?” asked Bud.

I nodded. “Yes, the top half hasn't changed, only the bottom half. Hang on, let's have a look at his back again.”

“No, no more rolling him about,” said Bud sternly.

I tutted, knowing he was right, then had a thought. I darted to the corner of the room, where I'd seen a box of kitchen supplies the night before. I rustled about and finally pulled out a couple of pairs of Marigold kitchen gloves, still in their wrappers.

Once we'd pulled on the gloves, Bud and I rolled the body far enough for me to be able to see that the grubby handprints on his back had disappeared.

“Maybe someone brushed them off?” mused Bud.

“Maybe,” I replied thoughtfully.

“But why change only half his clothes?”

“Exactly,” I replied. “Why indeed?”

As I mentally ran through the several reasons I could think of for someone changing only some of David Davies's clothes, Bud said, “Are you done with him now?”

I nodded, and we let him roll back into his original position, then replaced the sheet.

“What did you learn about him from his rooms?” asked Bud, carefully tucking the sheet around the edge of the body.

Pulling the yellow gloves off my hands, I looked at what had become of David Davies and said, “He was neat, very keen on looking his best in all ways. Rhian was either too busy to keep herself and her belongings in good condition, or she'd stopped caring. Her mother said that she'd let herself go—I saw signs of that. But David? No, he was clean, neat, tidy. His concert-wear was immaculate. He wanted to make a good personal impression.”

Bud nodded sagely. “So, your assessment?”

“Taking the evidence of their living quarters together with what I've seen of Rhian, and judging by our interactions with her, I would say that David was keeping himself looking good for someone other than his wife, whereas she felt abandoned, yet still in love with the man. One thing that puzzled me was that I found nothing to do with music there. Yes, there were the clothes he'd wear to conduct the choir, but that was it. I'd have thought that a choral director would have a large amount of music—you know sheet music, different accompanist parts, maybe even orchestral parts—close at hand. I also didn't find any work clothes to speak of. He had some clothing there that suggested light
DIY
duties, but nothing that looked like it had been knocked about in a garden or while doing anything very dirty or involving manual labor, like fixing problematic radiators. Yet his hands suggested he did do work like that, and Rhian told me he did. So I believe that David had at least one other location where he kept belongings. We need to find that, I think.”

“Unlikely to be the coal cellar,” said Bud glumly.

I nodded. “True, but I want to look at it anyway. Let's find it and check it out, however dirty we might get. Hopefully, we'll discover why there's so much coal dust involved with this mystery.”

We left the confines of the dank, abandoned back kitchen, and moved toward the wonderful smells coming from the working one. I couldn't help myself, my saliva glands kicked in and I drooled at the thought of the roast beef dinner to come. Judging by the aromas wafting about us, Dilys was well ahead with the cooking of the meat. I poked my head into the kitchen, which looked quite different now that pots and pans were in use on the stovetop and Dilys herself was bustling around the large central table.

As she noticed us, her head snapped up and she glared at us both. “Finished poking about in all my stuff, have you?” She sounded angry.

“Thank you very much for your patience, and your understanding,” said Bud smoothly. “As a retired police officer who has, sadly, had to conduct many such searches, may I say what a beautiful home you have? I was very respectful of your property, Dilys, and I hope I haven't disturbed anything. I'd hate to have left things less than perfect for you, as you clearly take such good care of your personal space.”

Dilys glowed with pride. She grew at least an inch, and her eyes softened. For the first time since I'd met her I saw a genuine smile flood her face with a warmth I couldn't have believed possible of the woman.

“Oh, go on with you now.” She smiled coquettishly at Bud. “Saying nice things like that about me? It's just a few rooms, and not much to show for my life in them. But I do like to keep things tidy, see. Important that is, especially when you haven't got a lot of space. I don't know how that Rhian of mine can't see it. Terrible mess her place gets in sometimes, and I'm the one who has to go in and clean it all up.”

“Well you do an excellent job, Dilys. And I wanted to thank you for letting me into your place.”
Bud is very good at this.

“I know that Cait was just as respectful of your daughter's living quarters,” he added, “but we did just have a couple of questions.”

Dilys beamed at him. “Ask away, go on, just ask away.”

“We wondered if you knew of another area where David might have kept other personal effects. There didn't seem to be much music, or anything much associated with his work as a musician. Do you know where that might be?”

As Dilys wiped imaginary crumbs from the table, she said lightly, “Yes, he keeps a lot of his bits and bobs out in the old stable building. It's where they park the cars, you know?” Bud nodded and she continued, “He spends a lot of his time there, or spent it I should say. Liked to skulk about, he did. I know you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but I thought Rhian could have done better, and she should have done, but he was a charmer, that one. Sly with it too. And he drank.”

Dilys stopped wiping and looked at Bud. “One thing I can tell you is that the stable block is where he used to say he was going, but I don't know how he ever got as dirty as he did when he was there. I've seen him walking upstairs looking a right mess, and I've seen him stuffing things in the washing machine out the back here that he didn't know I saw.”

“For example?” I asked, determined that I wouldn't be ignored.

Dilys gave me a withering look—it seemed that her warmth was reserved solely for Bud—and replied, “I can't remember specifics, but trousers, shirts, and things like that. Things it was his wife's job to keep clean for him. Mind you, keeping house isn't Rhian's strong point, I'm sorry to say.”

Once again Dilys had managed to talk a lot but say very little. The only grains of insight I'd gleaned from our conversation was that David sometimes did his own laundry, and that Bud and I should probably brave the elements once again and traipse over to the stable block to try to discover more about the dead man's life.

“If you'd be kind enough to point us in the direction of the coal cellar, the laundry area, and maybe the boiler room and so forth, then Cait and I can hunt about in those areas. Also, if we're going to do that, would we need flashlights?”

“Flashlights? Oh, you mean torches,” said Dilys. “Well, you won't because there's lights everywhere you've just mentioned, but you can have this one just in case.” She reached into a cupboard beneath her capacious sink and pulling out something that looked like a small cannon. As Bud took it from her I noted the surprise on his face as he felt its weight.

Dilys walked us to the end of the kitchen. “Go in the opposite direction to the back kitchen and go alongside the stairs, and there's another little corridor behind there, and then it opens out into my room for doing the laundry. Farther along is another door into the boiler room. For the coal cellar you'll have to go right through; the cellar's on the other side of the house. You can't miss it. Like I said, there are lights everywhere, even if it's just a bulb hanging, but please turn everything off as you leave.”

It seemed that the woman was dismissing us because she turned to the oven, looked at her wristwatch, and said, “That's that then.”

I looked at my own watch. It was only just two o'clock, so the roast beef, which we were due to eat at five o'clock, couldn't be ready. I wondered what she had in the oven if it wasn't the beef, but I didn't get to find out because Bud all but dragged me out into the corridor on the side of the coal cellar. It seemed I was going to find out why David had been so grubby after all—
at least, I hoped I was
.

FOLLOWING DILYS'S INSTRUCTIONS WAS A
lot easier than she'd made it sound. The laundry room had been painted white, so the lights in there made the walls glare, and it was as clean as I imagined Dilys could manage, given its great age and location. The two washing machines and two dryers had seen better days. Beyond the laundry room was a grubbier area, full of heating equipment, which whirred and roared, and then we finally stood in front of what had to be the door to the coal cellar. It was very large, made of thick, rough-hewn planks of wood, and extremely dirty. A giant iron bolt was all that held it closed, and it slipped open easily in Bud's hand.
Interesting.

Looking at his hand already covered with coal dust, Bud remarked, “Keeping those rubber gloves on might have been a bright idea.”

He shrugged, pulled open the door, and reached around inside the room for a light switch.

“Flashlight?” I suggested. Bud clicked it on and immediately located the switch for a series of three light bulbs hanging from wires. I hadn't known quite what to expect of a medieval dungeon that had been transformed into a Victorian coal cellar, but the sight that met our eyes was definitely underwhelming.

Large stones had been mortared together, and were thick with decades of coal dust. The floor was uneven and strewn with the detritus of the thousands of tons of coal that had been delivered over the years, then carted out, presumably in buckets, to fill the fireplaces once used in every room of the castle.

“I wonder how they got the coal into here?” My words echoed in the ancient chamber. It was a deeply unsettling sound.

Bud turned the flashlight beam toward the ceiling of the room. “Doesn't seem to be any sort of an opening up there,” he noted. “We must be under the great hall here. I can't imagine they'd deliver the coal into the house to get it down here. Have you any knowledge about coal deliveries in that giant memory of yours?”

I smiled sweetly as I replied, “I'm old enough to remember the coalman delivering coal to our very own home, you know.” Bud chuckled. “The coalman would come to the front door and you'd say how much you wanted—the bags weighed a hundredweight. That's the imperial version, weighing one hundred and twelve pounds, not the one used in North America, which is one hundred pounds. So the coalman was always a strong man, because he'd carry the bag to the coalhouse. We didn't have a cellar at our home, but a big cupboard thing outside the back of the house. In our case, it was next to the toilet.”

“Whoa! You had a toilet outside your house?” Bud sounded incredulous. “But you had other ones inside, right?”

I shook my head. “Not until I turned twenty, when Mum and Dad managed to get some money from the government to update the house and install a toilet indoors. It was upstairs, in the bathroom. I remember when I came home one Christmas to visit from university, how proud they were as they opened the door to the bathroom to show it off to me. It was a big surprise. Now maybe my telling you that it's ridiculous that we have four bathrooms in our new house makes a little more sense?”

Bud shrugged.

I continued, “By the way, you've just covered your face with coal dust. But, as I was saying, when the coalman came, he had to walk right through our house to get to the coal shed, so Mum would put newspaper on the floor for him to walk on. As you can imagine, his boots were filthy, and he'd shed dust as he walked. One of our grandmothers lived in a semi-detached house, unlike ours, which was terraced, so the coalman didn't have to walk through her home with his big, filthy sack, he'd just walk around the side path and to her coal house that way. Hers was her old air-raid shelter, dug up from the garden where it had been buried through the war, and repurposed.”

Bud looked thoughtful as he said, “You've never really talked to me about all this family history of yours, Cait. And it's so very different from my own. We should do this more often—but maybe not while standing in a filthy place like this.”

“You're right,” I replied. “I have to admit that I love the smell of coal—it makes me feel safe.” I took a deep breath, and Bud threw me a glance that suggested I was losing my mind. “But, no, coal wouldn't be delivered into the great hall above us, it would make far too much mess. I do have a thought though. If the original Norman-style structure was built on top of the even older medieval structure that was here, then, of course, what is now the great hall didn't exist at that time. The great hall floor and staircase were constructed between the two new wings, and that stained glass roof was stretched across it, creating the wonderful space that someone then decided to clutter up with all manner of ancient armor and stuffed beasts from around the world.”

“And if it didn't exist when the original Castell Llwyd was built,” said Bud proudly, but badly mangling the pronunciation, “then there might, indeed, have been a chute in the original driveway, or courtyard, or whatever they had there at that time, where they could bring the coal in a truck and dump it right in here. Good thinking, Cait. Then, when they built the great hall, they must have constructed some other way to get the coal down here. From the new driveway, I guess? A longer chute?”

I nodded. “But the question remains, where's that entry point?”

We moved farther inside the room, being careful about where we put our feet, and examined each of the four walls and the ceiling. Bud continued into the cellar, moving his light about as he did so.