The Echo of Crows, page 15
Eirion blinked. ‘Sounds like a good story. Probably the first murder ever in a place like this.’
A good story. Was that all that mattered to him now? Jane shook her head, smiling.
‘This place was only founded because it was the scene of a murder. And it was actually in Wales then.’
‘Founded on murder?’ Eirion turned to Jane as they left the car. ‘How d’you mean?’
It was cold in the churchyard. Jane tightened her woollen scarf below her ears, which were picking up the vaguely wooden sound of cawing crows.
It was a chilly day, and she had on her old red parka. She wanted it to be cold. More sinister, more forbidding. Heavy with a history that she now knew something about and Eirion apparently didn’t. She told him the hamlet had been named after a local Celtic leader, Clydawg, King of Ewyas, who had been murdered, and then made a saint. The church and the parish, adjoining Longtown, had been named after him and anglicized, becoming Clodock.
‘Round here, you came across saints who were just ordinary local guys, and kings of what we’d think of today as quite small areas,’ she said. ‘There was a dispute over a girl. Clydawg was killed by his rival. And, already being a king, he was canonized.’
‘And did the killer get the girl?’
Jane shook her head.
‘Can’t see it. Clydawg was apparently a good king, well liked locally. The site of his murder became a place of pilgrimage, and so the church was built here in… oh, the sixth century.’
The church seemed very stark and conspicuous, looming out of the landscape. Eirion took her arm and pointed down to a gravestone, not far from the side of the track and the church porch.
‘This was a Longtown murder,’ he said. ‘But the victim ended up here. Think she was born in Clodock.’
The stone said:
Ann Jones
“My blood was shed by cruel hands
Bereft of life by no demands…”
‘Another love story,’ Eirion murmured, ‘although it lacks the regal element. And I don’t think any blood was actually shed. Ann was poisoned.’
He’d seemed to know where to find the gravestone. They were back inside his sphere of recent research.
Jane spun. ‘How?’
‘Arsenic. Lots. Found in her guts, at the post-mortem, which…’ Eirion paused, ‘…was actually done, at least partly, by her husband. Her murderer. I’ve researched it online. Absorbing.’
Jane stiffened, staring up at Eirion as if she wasn’t sure any more who he was. He used to leave all this kind of research to her. But this was a story, more than two centuries old, and open for examination. As Ann Jones had been.
Jane said, ‘He cut up his wife himself?’
‘It wasn’t a professional dissection,’ Eirion said. ‘He doesn’t appear to have had any specialist anatomical knowledge… anything like that. Maybe he just said he was her husband and told the coroner he wanted to help.’
‘Help cut her up?’
She saw he was holding a clipboard with news-cuttings attached. He handed it to her.
‘This is from an old Hereford Times – a regular column looking back at sensational historical murders – so it’s a bit lurid.’
Jane snatched the clipboard, reading at random, her eyes rapidly landing on the account of the autopsy.
…helping out at his wife Ann’s post-mortem examination hardly bore the mark of an inconsolable widower. The 27-year-old bore ‘not the smallest concern or surprise’ as the knife cut into his wife’s corpse to reveal a stomach full of arsenic.
‘It’s very graphic,’ Eirion said. ‘Reading this stuff at home over a cup of tea is one thing. Reading it here is, I suppose, extra-creepy.’
He was right, Jane decided, as she reread the words on the stone not far from her feet. As she bent, she was feeling the weight of the leaden horizon, where the Black Mountains began.
‘You suppose there are actual traces of arsenic buried around here, Irene?’
‘If she’s under here…’
‘It might just be a memorial, or…’ Jane took a step back. ‘Well, she wouldn’t have been cremated back then, would she? And she died with a lot of arsenic inside – white and yellow, according to the post-mortem report you’ve got here.’
‘Back then’ sounded wrong. It wasn’t so long ago. Not long enough ago to have fallen into history like King Clydawg, who was murdered back in the Dark Ages.
Ann Jones was a real person, Jane thought: dead, but less legendary than Clydawg. Eirion looked up at the church tower and frowned. Two murders already and they hadn’t been here an hour.
‘Are you trying your best to discover a sense of foreboding up here, Jane? Something scary?’
‘You feel it too?’
Did he? She’d been wondering about this all the way here as the countryside grew lonelier.
‘Why should it matter how I feel?’ Eirion said. ‘I’m just trying to give you the facts.’
Had he done all this research purely for his feature in the paper, while aware of Jane’s sudden obsessive interest in this murder? And was her interest only obsessive because of her mum and Autumn and the ubiquity of historical hangings around here?
Jane saw that Eirion was determined to follow the good journalist’s formula: always get both sides of any story and faithfully represent them.
‘I have to accept that it’s one of the most unpleasant killings I’ve come across on this patch,’ he said. ‘William Jones falls for this very beautiful girl from Monmouth, Susannah Rugg, and decides to poison his wife to clear a space for her.
‘She was only eighteen. When Jones took up with her, he left Ann and their two kids. But after a while he went back to her, apparently abandoning his gorgeous girlfriend. Making it look like he and Ann were happily back together again. He was being conspicuously kind and considerate to her. And then, one day, he made her some soup…’
‘Flavoured with arsenic?’
‘Not just a sprinkle.’ Eirion nodded, grimly. ‘Their apparent reconciliation didn’t impress the inquest from the start. The coroner had Jones committed to Hereford, accused, with Rugg, of murdering Ann.’
‘On what evidence?’
‘Well, his casual attitude with the autopsy knife can’t have helped.’
Eirion said the lovers were both convicted at the Assizes and then hanged on a fine summer day in 1790.
‘So…’ Eirion took out his car keys, tossed them up and caught them. ‘You want to see where it all ends? I think I need to, anyway, for purposes of colour. Even if his body was only displayed there after death.’
Jane froze. Mum hadn’t mentioned any names, but could this have something to do with what she saw last night with Huw Owen? He’d already labelled her as an eavesdropper and a snitch, so maybe this was a time for discretion, especially with a journalist, boyfriend or not.
Eirion’s grin had an element of evil, Jane thought. He wasn’t taking this too seriously. It was a soft feature. Pure entertainment – that was all it was in Eirion’s view, whereas she saw it as part of her extended heritage, Herefordshire’s heritage. She also remembered a phone call from Huw when Mum was out yesterday and he’d rambled on about Clodock. He’d insisted, once she’d mentioned the planned visit, that she should take a look at the historic church while they were here.
And here they actually were, just the other side of Ann Jones’s grave. Did Huw know about that? Was it one of the Clodock items he’d wanted her to see?
He’d referred to places where evil things occurred, maybe years or centuries apart, which perpetuated a mood, a vibe which lived on, especially in sparsely populated areas.
Jane turned away from the gravestone and entered the church for only a quick glance. She was already trying Irene’s patience.
30
Crocbren
JANE DIDN’T REMEMBER Longtown Castle being so substantial, its jagged keep hanging darkly over the village which, unlike Clodock, was a definite community, with narrow streets, clusters of cottages and these dominant medieval ruins.
‘It was here on the bailey,’ Eirion said. ‘The outer earthworks.’
‘You mean the…?’
‘The crocbren. It was about having him on display, and not with Susannah, who some people felt kind of sorry for. They weren’t displaying killers’ corpses that often, anyway, by the turn of the nineteenth century.’
‘Or letting killers participate in the post-mortem.’ Jane clambered over a grassy mound. ‘Maybe the coroner suspected Jones would give himself away by almost enjoying it.’ She stopped for breath. ‘Was the body held in chains in the open air, so the stink would carry? You think you can still smell it, don’t you?’
‘No,’ Eirion said. ‘I’m a journalist, not a fantasist.’
Almost snapping, Jane thought. Touchy. And I know more than you do.
She said, ‘Maybe somebody thought it was a way to scare people…’
‘Scare?’
Eirion was standing where Jane was picturing the dark, stark frame of the crocbren. A couple of crows squawked gutturally as he moved quickly away. Jane thought he was trying to look a little scared, as if he wanted to unnerve her.
‘We’ll have to be going soon,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m working not touring.’
Jane, feeling cold, stared at him, dismayed. They couldn’t go on like this. ‘We’ve only just got here!’
His mood seemed to have darkened, like the sky, since they’d come here. Which startled her because Eirion somehow didn’t have moods.
He bent to the turf.
She said, ‘You’re not seeing it, are you?’
‘Seeing… what?’
‘The rotting… rotten flesh… eventually dropping off the bones which…’
‘Of course I—’
Eirion rose, turning away from the castle ruins and the place of execution, his voice mingling with the trailing echo of the castle crows and Jane’s evocation of the corpse horror.
‘…which are beginning to come apart… and crumble and… Hang on, Irene, give me time to savour the atmosphere… smell it.’
Eirion held an end of his scarf and walked away along the earthwork as it began to rain coldly. He obviously did want to see her a bit scared. She actually couldn’t smell anything.
Then he was back, with a closed fist.
‘What’s this, do you think?’ His right arm was extended towards her, something gripped in his fingers. ‘Just picked it up in the grass.’
Jane waited for him to catch her up. She smiled. Sourly, she hoped. He’d had ample time to arrange this discovery, which might have amused both of them at one time. Now it simply underlined his belief that she wasn’t growing up as fast as he was.
He opened his hand. Jane barely glimpsed a small figure, then wiped away her expected expression of disgust. Eirion’s face conveyed only disappointment.
‘Jane… don’t get this wrong. I did just find this in those weeds below the rubble… exactly where it might have been dropped by someone coming out of the ruins. Honestly, I swear—’
Jane turned into the hissing rain, remembering that warm afternoon in Ledwardine’s Gallows Lane when Eirion had said, I don’t want to start spreading fake history…
Now she was thinking of the fateful day when William Jones and Susannah Rugg had been hanged side by side near the centre of Hereford, before one of them was brought home to Longtown to rot in public. How fake had that been?
‘Jane, I thought you’d be interested to see what people are still doing near the old execution site—’
‘Bloody hell, Irene!’
She turned away, having fleetingly seen some kind of tiny doll-like figure with string around its neck, lying on his fingers.
A hanged doll.
*
‘This’ll be fine, thanks,’ Jane said stiffly.
Stepping out of Eirion’s car into the street, right outside what would be her shop until the Ledwardine Festival was over, really hoping Eirion wouldn’t be crass enough to invite himself in for a cuppa. He was leaning on the driver’s door.
‘Jane, look… if you thought I was trying to wind you up, you’re—’
‘I said not now.’ Jane was already fitting her key into the shop door. ‘Tell me tomorrow, if you must.’
Or preferably never. They’d hardly spoken on the drive back from Longtown, Jane beginning to wonder if they still had a viable future together. All jokes needed a measure of subtlety once you’d left school. Voodoo-type dolls were kids’ stuff… and showed Eirion’s opinion of her intellect. She didn’t like that one bit: male chauvinism of the lowest kind.
She stood with her back to the counter until his car moved away, its fading engine leaving her almost tearfully bewildered as she put on the desk lamp, sat down and surveyed the shelves: over two hundred second-hand books, along with a stack of CDs and vinyl given to her by Lol Robinson to display in the run-up to the festival.
If it happened. Lol’s enthusiasm was starting to wane, just as Jane was getting excited about reviving Ledwardine Lore, if only as a tribute to the late Lucy Devenish, its folklorist founder.
It now said closed on the door. She’d kept the shop as a retail outlet, only planning to close on the worst days during winter, and carried on collecting books about apples and local history, knowing they’d be snapped up in spring by visitors and incomers, keen to dig into the foundations.
In the local history books on display, she found several mentions of Longtown and Clodock dealing with murder, and that famous quote from Mrs Leather about the Devil meeting newcomers in the form of a large, black crow. Nothing about hanged dolls, which Jane had been half-dreading in case Eirion should find some folkloric justification for his juvenile joke.
What she did find were more crows, and Ella Mary Leather was here, too.
Longtown: a place where neither crows nor murders, she reflected, had been particularly scarce, although one book, by someone else, suggested that a few of the local killings were apocryphal. Some places, it seemed, were apparently conditioned by their physical strangeness and their peculiar history. Longtown seemed to be all about murder, and its adjacent village, Clodock, only existed because of one.
It had been a disturbing day, not least because of Eirion doing his cynical-hack crap, she thought, as the shop door was pressed. It didn’t open; she’d locked it, thinking that if it was Eirion she’d have to let him in. Or not.
But it was Lol Robinson. Looking, as usual, too young and affable to be topping the step-parent shortlist.
‘Jane, are you OK?’
‘Why would I not be?’
‘It’s just you look as if you’ve been…’ He accepted the opening door. ‘You look a bit upset.’
‘I’m fine.’ Jane felt herself blinking nervously. He couldn’t know anything, could he? ‘How’re you… and Mum?’
Lol looked kind of undecided, faintly bewildered, like there was something he wasn’t sure he should tell her.
Jane said, ‘What’s on your mind? You going to get married or forget it for another few years and cause some excitement in the care home?’
He grinned uncomfortably. Jane, figuring she’d won, backed into the shop and flopped on her stool.
‘So, what is on your mind, Lol?’
‘OK.’ He shut the shop door behind him and flattened a foot against it. ‘You usually know about these things, Jane. Is your mum into anything iffy right now?’
‘Iffy?’
‘I dunno. Anything that might make the Bishop get his vestments in a twist. I didn’t see her yesterday. I’ll be honest. I got a call from Huw Owen, and he thinks we should be keeping more of an eye on her, now that the woo-woo is coming back big time.’
Jane’s new-found discretion was sorely tested. She ached to tell him what she’d learned from Mum about last night’s big event but decided that disclosure should be left to Mum.
‘Yeah,’ she said, overly casual, ‘I’ve read that. We had three really quiet years and then… like, the prayer-book pile topples into the shredder. Right?’
‘Mm. Something like that.’
‘And Huw’s keeping an eye on her to make sure she’s not getting herself completely spooked-out,’ Jane added, ‘isn’t he?’
‘Well, yes, but he wants me to keep both eyes on her, too. He’s taken some kind of semi-retirement and he thinks your mum isn’t safe on her own. Thinks maybe I can restrain her from the extremes. And… Huw’s opinion is usually on the ball.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Anything you can tell me, that maybe I can run past him?’ He took his foot off the door. ‘I accept I should know more about what she’s messing with, but if it’s outside my twelve chords…’
‘Lol, are you going to get married? Or are you not that bothered?’
Lol thought about it, then nodded, slowly, with uncertainty, but a faint remaining hope. ‘I’m not lukewarm, just don’t know if she needs more of me in her life right now.’
‘When, then?’ Jane demanded, looking to the ceiling in faint disgust at his diffidence.
‘I don’t know.’ Lol shook his head. ‘A good way before the old folks’ home stage, I hope. But we can’t afford a wedding now, or care, probably, if it came to that, unless I get what’s called a proper job.’
What else could he say? Neither of them spoke for a while.
*
Bloody Jane!
Eirion stood by his car and took a deep breath, hoping the rain on his lips and head would help dilute his anger.
If it hadn’t been for Jane, he wouldn’t have thrown the sodding doll away so soon. He would have taken a picture of it on his phone.
Even though, as a working journalist, he knew what a load of bollocks all this probably was. Maybe he was in the wrong job. Journalists were supposed to be sceptical about strange phenomena. Sub-editors were trained to blue-pencil any line in a story suggesting that its author was predisposed to paranormal conclusions. A balance of opinions was the rule, to let the reader form their own opinion.
How could you convince your girlfriend (you hoped!) who started all this, that you weren’t trying to disparage her obsessions?
