Constable Evans 02: Evan Help Us (6 page)

He sensed, rather than heard, someone moving behind him.

*   *   *

Evans-the-Post came out of the post office and general store with a bulging mailbag slung over his shoulder. A big smile spread across his vacant-looking face as he headed for the bridge. This was going to be a good day. There were several picture postcards among the mail he had to deliver and he could read those without anybody getting angry with him. And there was what looked like a wedding invitation for the Hopkinses. He’d have to find out who was getting married!

He glanced back to see if old Miss Roberts was watching him. She gave him a good scolding whenever she caught him reading the mail. “Crabby old woman,” he muttered to himself. Getting a peek at other people’s lives was one of the perks of being a postman, wasn’t it? And he didn’t mean any harm—everyone in Llanfair knew that.

The bridge was deserted and bathed in dappled sunlight as he loped toward it, his long limbs moving jerkily like an uncontrolled puppet. He was just about to settle himself when he glanced over the parapet to the rushing stream below. There was something moving in the water that glinted in the sunlight. It was cream-colored and shiny, moving gracefully among the reeds. At first Evans-the-Post thought that it was a new flower he’d never seen before. Some kind of water lily maybe. He decided to try and pick it. The policeman would know what it was, or the schoolteacher, if he wasn’t too shy to ask her.

He left his mailbag beside the bridge and clambered down the steep bank. Holding onto one of the alder trees that grew there, he leaned out into the stream and reached for the flower. After a couple of attempts he grabbed it. His smile of triumph faded when he lifted it out and saw what it was. It wasn’t a flower at all. It was a square of shiny, cream-colored fabric, silk maybe.

It was an odd thing to find in the river, knowing that there were just sheep pastures above it. Nobody could have dropped it from the bridge, that was clear, or it would have been swept downstream. Even Evans-the-Post could figure that out. He stared upstream to see where it might have come from. That was when he saw what at first he thought was an odd-shaped boulder with water splashing over it.

*   *   *

Evan opened his eyes to sunlight painting a bright stripe across the flowery wallpaper. Mrs. Williams must have forgotten to waken him. He was about to leap out of bed when he realized it was Saturday. He lay back with a sigh of contentment. Nothing on the agenda for the whole day. He would read the paper while eating a leisurely breakfast, and then he’d do some climbing. It was weeks since a free day and a fine day had coincided and he felt like a challenging climb, maybe on the cliffs below Glaslyn. He hadn’t liked to go there since those two men fell to their deaths. But it was stupid to stay away from some of the best climbs in the area.

He got out of bed and a thought struck him—maybe Bronwen would be free today and might feel like going for a hike with him. They’d talked about hiking on the Llwyn Peninsula, where there was great birdwatching on deserted beaches.

He leaned on the window sill, an anticipatory smile on his face as he looked at the clear blue sky. Such days didn’t happen often in North Wales, so you had to drop everything and make the most of them. He could smell bacon and sausage frying downstairs and the radio blaring out the usual Saturday morning music that Mrs. Williams liked—pop music from the fifties and sixties, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, and the Beatles.

The village street was slowly coming to life. Owens-the-Sheep went by on his motorbike, his black-and-white border collies running at his heels. Farmers never had a day off, did they? The milk van was halfway up the street and Evan heard the familiar chink of milk bottles. Evans-the-Milk didn’t get many days off either. A couple of little boys ran up the hill dressed in their football uniforms. That reminded Evan that he did have a commitment—he’d more or less promised the boys that he’d go and watch their big game down in Beddgelert.

Never mind, the game would be over by noon and he’d still have half a day to do what he wanted … and Bronwen would definitely be at the game too. A good way to find out what her plans were.

He was about to turn away from the window when he saw an extraordinary sight. Evans-the-Post was running up from the bridge, his long limbs flying out, his head lolling from side to side as he ran, his mailbag dancing beside him, envelopes clutched in his hand.

Evan opened his window and leaned out. “Where’s the fire, Evans-the-Post?” he called.

The mailman stopped, looking up at him with his mouth open. “It’s no fire, man,” he stammered. “There’s something in the river, something you have to come and see right now!”

*   *   *

“Not again!” Detective Sergeant Watkins from the regional police headquarters in Caernarfon climbed out of the white police van.

Evan was waiting for him by the bridge with most of the village watching on from behind the yellow police tape he’d hastily put up. “Sorry to get you out on a Saturday, sarge,” he said apologetically, “but I’ve got a suspicious death I thought someone ought to see.”

“Do you always wait to find your bodies until I’m the only one on duty?” Sergeant Watkins growled. “I hoped I could go watch our Tiffany’s football match this afternoon. She’s turning into a good little player. Center forward. Pity she’s a girl, in fact. I could have signed her up with Manchester United.” He sighed. “Okay, so show me the body.”

“We pulled him out of the river,” Evan said hesitantly as he led the sergeant down the steep bank. “I hoped there might have been a chance we could revive him, but I’d wager he’s been dead a while.”

Ahead of them on the river bank a white sheet now covered the body of Colonel Arbuthnot. As they came closer, the wind lifted the corner of the sheet and the colonel’s left hand, with gold signet ring, was suddenly visible. Sergeant Watkins pulled back the sheet and stared down at Colonel Arbuthnot’s white, bloated face.

“Do you know who he was?” he asked sharply.

“Oh yes,” Evan said. “His name was Colonel Arbuthnot.”

“A local?”

“No, but well known around here. He’s been spending a couple of weeks here every summer for the past ten years or so.”

“Poor old chap,” Sergeant Watkins said. This was one of the things Evan liked about Watkins—he still cared. Most policemen didn’t, or pretended that they didn’t. “Still I imagine he was getting on in years, wasn’t he?”

“He had to have been at least eighty,” Evan said. “He was out in India before World War Two.”

“When was he last seen?”

“He left the pub about nine o’clock last night. I was there. I saw him leave. And apparently he always took a shortcut back to the Owens farm, where he stays. It goes behind the pub, along the riverbank and then crosses the river by that little bridge.” Evan pointed upstream. The river had narrowed at that point and the bridge was scarcely more than planks laid between blocks of granite.

Sergeant Watkins stared at it for a moment, then looked back, tracing the colonel’s route back to the Red Dragon.

“And he never made it home?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Even said. “Mrs. Owens, the farmer’s wife he lodges with, said that she left a cold meal out for him in his own sitting room, so she had no idea whether he came in. They go to bed early on farms. The meal wasn’t touched anyway.”

“And the door was still unlocked?”

“They never lock doors. They’ve got dogs.”

“So when did she find out he wasn’t there?”

“She didn’t. She said she was a little concerned that he was sleeping in so late, but she didn’t like to check on him and risk waking him.”

“So we can assume he didn’t make it home last night,” Sergeant Watkins said. “He’d been in the pub, you say? Drank a fair amount?”

“Four glasses of Scotch,” Evan said. “But he usually got through at least that much in an evening. It never seemed to affect him. He could put it away with the best of them.”

“All the same,” Sergeant Watkins went on, “I can’t quite see why you called us in on this. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? The old boy knocks back a few too many, his eyesight is probably poor and he loses his balance on the bridge. All it would take is a sudden gust of wind…”

“What about this, though?” Even turned the colonel’s head gently and indicated an ugly wound behind his right ear.

“Simple enough,” Watkins went on. “There are some pretty nasty-looking rocks down below that bridge. The old boy hit his head as he fell. He glanced up and saw Evan’s face.

“What?” Sergeant Watkins grimaced. “Oh come on, you’re not going to tell me that you suspect foul play, are you?”

“I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t,” Evan said.

“Do you find yourself another murder every couple of months so that you don’t get bored up here?” Watkins was only half joking. “Now I’m the detective around here and I’d just love to know, what makes you think that this wasn’t an accident?”

“This,” Evan said. He indicated the front of the colonel’s Harris tweed jacket. “See here. A couple of burrs and a foxtail caught in the tweed. He must have been lying in the grass before he was dragged into the water.”

“Not necessarily,” Sergeant Watkins said. “He could have taken off his jacket any time and laid it down on the grass. He could have sat on it, couldn’t he? He might not have noticed a couple of tiny burrs for days.”

Evan shook his head. “You didn’t know the colonel. He always liked to look what he called well turned out. He went home to change his trousers because he got mud on them before coming to the pub last night. He’d never have left the house with bits of plant stuck in his jacket.”

“We don’t know how good his eyesight was.”

“Damned good,” Evan said. “He didn’t miss a thing.”

“So you’re suggesting,” Watkins said slowly, “that someone bashed this old man on the head and then shoved him into the river?”

“It seems that way.”

“It seems bloody stupid to me,” Sergeant Watkins said. “We’re not in the backstreets of Cardiff here. People don’t run around bashing old men over the head and tossing them into a river.” He looked long and hard at Evan. “You were right about the murders last time, but I can’t go along with this. Not unless you can tell me that you’ve got a raving lunatic running around the neighborhood or that someone had a score to settle with the old boy.”

Evan shook his head. “That’s the problem, sarge. As I said, he was well liked here. He was treated like a kind of village mascot.”

“So if anyone did kill him, they were taking a hell of a risk,” Watkins said. “Any passerby would have noticed if the old chap was being followed, wouldn’t they?”

Evan sighed. “Like you said, this isn’t Cardiff, sarge,” Evan said. “Most people are inside with their doors shut and curtains drawn by nine o’clock, and the others were in the pub.” He paused to think. “In fact almost all the men of the village were in the pub last night when the colonel went home.”

“You think it would have to have been a man?”

“It would take a pretty strong woman to make that dent in his skull and then drag his body into the river.”

Sergeant Watkins laughed uneasily. “Come on, Evans. You know what Detective Inspector Hughes is like. He’s at a conference in Colywn Bay all day but he gave me strict instructions to page him if anything came up. I don’t really have the authority to do anything without him, do I? And he gave me a hell of a time when he thought I’d let you stick your nose in those other murders.”

“So you want me to turn the other way and call this an accident just so that we don’t upset D.I. Hughes?” Evan asked.

“I’m going to call it an accident,” Sergeant Watkins said. “Unless you can give me any evidence to the contrary, apart from some bits of plant sticking to his jacket—which might have got there when you dragged him out of the river.”

Evan shook his head. “We lifted him out and laid him here.”

“Can you give me a single reason that anyone would want to kill him?”

“No,” Evan said after a pause. He was thinking of the colonel’s exit from the pub last night, the strange look that had come over his face and the way he had started babbling about that ridiculous story. Something had rattled the old man, that was clear. He had left in a hurry because he was upset—so upset that he had nearly knocked over Annie Pigeon as she was coming in, and he had scarcely waited to apologize. Given his old-world chivalry, that seemed significant. But it still was far from proof that his life was in danger.

“No, nothing at all,” Evan repeated. This was something he’d have to look into for himself.

“There you are then.” Sergeant Watkins let out a sigh of relief.

“But we can’t just write this off, sarge,” Evan insisted. “What if there’s a murderer here?” He paused then added, as Sergeant Watkins was pulling the sheet over the body again, “You didn’t want to think those two deaths on Mount Snowdon were murders either, did you?”

“All right. Don’t rub it in,” Watkins growled good-naturedly. “I know: You were right and I was wrong. Okay, this is what we’ll do. I’m willing to call this death suspicious, because of the trauma to the head. That means the body will be sent off to the Home Office pathologist in Bangor. Let’s see what he thinks caused the blow to the head. If he thinks there’s anything fishy about it, we’ll take it further.”

“When will we know?” Evan walked beside the sergeant back to his white police van.

“He won’t get to it until Monday.”

“Monday?”

“Hold your horses. I can’t call him in at the weekend, away from his fishing, can I? Not unless I was a hundred percent sure we’d got a crime. Everything will keep until Monday.”

“But what about the crime scene,” Evan said, looking back at the yellow tape. “There might be valuable clues that could be tampered with.”

“We’ll keep the tape up,” Watkins said. “Tell the locals we have to determine how he fell into the river before we can open up the path again.”

“Thanks, sarge.”

“And in the meantime, Evans,” Sergeant Watkins muttered as they approached the crowd behind the yellow tape, “I wouldn’t give any hints that you suspect foul play. This was a tragic accident, nothing more. Got it? We don’t want people panicking unnecessarily, do we?”