A Small Hill to Die On: A Penny Brannigan Mystery (17 page)

“It was bad,” one technician remarked to the other. “Brutal. Just brutal.”

Thirty-four

Penny gazed out the window as fields hemmed in by hedgerows and stone fences flashed by. The snow had disappeared from the lower ground but still clung to the tops of the mountains. A light, persistent drizzle misted the windscreen, and every few minutes Victoria turned on the wipers. Their gentle, rhythmic scraping noise provided an oddly soothing background noise. Trixxi moved restlessly from one side of the car to the other and then sat down and curled up. Penny reached back, between the seats, and gave her a reassuring pat.

“Where was Trixxi while everything was going on?” Victoria asked, breaking the silence.

“They’d put her in the kennels with the other dogs. They got all the dogs out just before the fire really took hold, thank God.”

“Other dogs?”

“Yes, there were about half a dozen little dogs in there. Apparently, as a sideline, they were taking people’s dogs and selling them on. The dogs were to be taken to the vet today for scanning to see if any were microchipped. The police want to return them to their owners as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, Robbie wasn’t with them, though. Thomas and Bronwyn will be disappointed.”

“It seems strange that with that big grow op business going on they’d also be stealing dogs.”

“Gareth says it’s complicated, and they’re going to be ages unraveling the finances and everything else that was going on. But he thinks they’ve got everyone in custody, although Mai and her brother are being held in Birmingham. He says it’s going to be a nightmare sorting everyone out. The names are foreign, and everybody’s using false identities, anyway.”

As they approached the turnoff to Ty Brith Hall, the acrid smell of heavy smoke hung over the landscape. Trixxi resumed her pacing back and forth across the rear seat, whining.

They parked at the front of the house. The stables were cordoned off with police tape, and as they approached, an officer waved.

“That’s Chris. Chris Jones. I like him,” Penny said to Victoria as they both waved. “They’ll still be working on the forensics, I guess.” They stopped to look at the building. The grey stone was blackened around the area where the main door used to be.

“I guess because the building is stone the walls are still standing, but just about everything else is gone,” Victoria commented.

“The pot smell last night was overpowering,” Penny said. “I think we were all a little high, except for the firefighters who had their breathing apparatus.”

“What a mess. What a shame. I expect Emyr has been notified and he’ll be on his way home. It’ll be a lot to sort out. No doubt there’ll be a big insurance claim.”

“I don’t know about that,” Penny said as they started off down the path that led to the terraced cottages. “Because there was an illegal activity taking place here, and the wiring had all been jerry-rigged, maybe the insurance won’t cover it.” She shrugged. “But what do I know?”

“I was surprised that the police blew up the building,” Victoria remarked a few minutes later. Penny laughed. “They didn’t blow up the building. They had to blow the door off because it was so reinforced they couldn’t break it down. And then the building caught fire because of the faulty electrical rigging from the grow op. They’re dangerous places, grow ops.”

They walked on in silence, Trixxi trotting along beside them and stopping occasionally to sniff an interesting root or branch. They paused outside Pawl’s cottage, looked at each other, and then Penny knocked.

A few moments later, Dilys opened the door. She seemed older and stooped, as if under the weight of a heavy burden. Large dark circles under her eyes gave her a hollow, haunted look, and her matted hair was in desperate need of a good brushing. She looked first at Penny and then, with curiosity, at Victoria.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said to Penny. “You’d better come in. You and your friend.”

Penny couldn’t bring herself to look at Pawl’s chair, so she turned her back to the room as they stood clustered around the doorway. Dilys nodded when Penny introduced Victoria to her.

“We’re so very sorry for your loss,” Penny said simply.

“Yes, it was terrible the way Pawl went. Dying in a fire must be the worst way to go,” Dilys said. “I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like in that inferno—nor do I want to.”

“Have you had a chance to think about funeral arrangements?” Victoria asked.

“Nothing to think about,” Dilys replied. “Pawl wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered here, in the Ty Brith gardens, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The police told me there will have to be a postmortem, and then they will release the body. Pawl did not want a fuss and there won’t be one.”

“We brought you a few groceries,” said Penny, holding out a carrier bag filled with sandwiches Gwennie had made, a few bottles of water, some fruit and a couple of yogurts. “Please take it,” she added when Dilys hesitated. “Go on.”

Dilys took the bag and set it down on her worktable under the window.

“I wondered if we might sit down,” Penny said. Dilys nodded. “Dilys, will you be staying on, now that Pawl’s gone?”

“I doubt it. The cottage was for Pawl to live in. There’s no reason Emyr Gruffydd should allow me to stay on. I expect he’ll be back here in the next day or two. He’ll have lots to see to, what with the fire and all. And God knows what kind of mess those people left in the house.”

“Yes, that’s what we were thinking.”

Penny gazed at Dilys’s table with the old-fashioned weigh scale, mortar and pestle, empty jars with rusting lids, and tattered notebooks with yellowed pages.

“Dilys, I want to ask you something. I’ve got a feeling you know how Juliette died. I think Pawl knew how she died, and even all these years later it still caused him distress.” She leaned forward. “Maybe that knowledge has been a heavy burden for you to carry all these years. I’d like to know how she died, and I hope that if you do know, you’ll tell me. Maybe now’s the time.”

Dilys looked from one to the other and sighed.

“It was the tansy,” she said in a low voice. “Tansy tea.”

Thirty-five

Penny and Victoria exchanged a puzzled glance.

“Tansy tea?” asked Penny. “Is that some kind of herbal tea?”

A pained look crossed Dilys’s face. She licked her lips and swallowed.

“It’s what we call an abortifacient herb,” she said. “It brings on an abortion.”

She lowered her eyes.

“Juliette was pregnant, you see. She already had the one boy, he was about six, I think, and she didn’t want another child. At least not then. So she came to me, asking for help. I made up the tincture and gave her the tea, and then everything went horribly wrong.”

The words hung in the air.

Penny nodded, willing her to continue.

“Very powerful, the tansy is,” Dilys said. “You have to know what you’re doing. You have to get the dosage right. And God help me, I’ll never forgive myself, somehow that time I got it wrong.”

Tears welled up and she wiped her eyes with her smooth hands.

“She drank the tea over two or three days and nothing seemed to be happening, so she walked a couple of the dogs down here to see me. It was just before lunch; I remember because I told her Pawl would be along soon for his midday meal and asked her if she wanted to stay and eat with us. She said she did, and then said she wasn’t feeling well, so I suggested she lie down in the sitting room while I got the lunch things out. A few moments later, I heard her calling me, and when I got to her, there was blood everywhere.

“At first I wasn’t too surprised because you expect that, but when I realized the bleeding wasn’t slowing down, I got concerned. She was getting weaker, and just then Pawl came in, hot and tired from his morning’s work in the garden, expecting his lunch.”

Penny held her breath.

“When he saw the state she was in, he was beside himself. He wanted to run up to the Hall and fetch Mrs. Gruffydd, but what she could have done, I don’t know. Anyway”—she made a fluttering gesture—“it was too late. Juliette died.”

“And Pawl?” asked Penny.

“He was that upset, as you can imagine.” She shook her head. “He knew about the baby, but he didn’t know that Juliette had asked me to help her get rid of it. At first, he thought she’d had a natural miscarriage, so he wanted to tell Mrs. Gruffydd. But I had to explain to him what had happened and why we couldn’t let anyone know. I would have been arrested and sent to jail.”

“So you and Pawl wrapped up the body and hid it?”

“Yes, we did what we had to do. We wrapped her up in a duvet, I think it was, some kind of blanket anyway, and that night we took it to that old building by the river. It was empty. We were just going to leave the body there, but I said, no, let’s hide it. So we took off a bit of grillework, it was falling off anyway, and put the body inside.”

“And the cat?” asked Victoria. “The body was found with the remains of a cat.”

“Oh, that,” said Dilys. “I’d forgotten about that. Yes, that was Pawl’s doing. He’d found the cat’s body that morning behind one of the greenhouses and had planned to bury it that afternoon in the little pet cemetery they had somewhere in the apple orchard. So he decided to put the cat in with Juliette. She loved animals, so he thought it might be comforting to her to have the cat with her, for company, like.”

“For company, like,” Victoria repeated softly.

“Well, there you have it. My shame and my secret all these years,” Dilys said. “In a way, I’m relieved I’ve finally been able to tell someone. Of course, Pawl hated me afterward, and the atmosphere between us became unbearable, so I had to leave. I didn’t see him again for almost forty years, and when I came back, he was so poorly some days he didn’t even recognize me.”

“But at the time, when Juliette went missing, and everyone was looking for her,” Penny asked, “how did you manage to keep the secret and not give yourselves away? Surely everyone who lived or worked at the Hall was questioned.”

Dilys shrugged and adjusted the red scarf draped around her neck. “Well, I wasn’t about to say anything, was I, and neither was Pawl. Me and him were family, after all. What good would it have done anyone, least of all him, if I’d been banged up in prison? Would that bring her back?”

“It’s a lot to take in and I don’t know what to say,” said Penny.

Dilys sat back in her chair and sighed. “I suppose you’ll be telling the authorities?”

Penny said nothing. Victoria was about to say something, but Penny shot her a warning glance accompanied by a slight shake of her head.

“It doesn’t matter to me if you do,” said Dilys. “I’ll just deny everything, and they won’t be able to prove anything after all this time.”

Penny remained silent.

*   *   *

“Well?” said Victoria as they fastened their seat belts.

“I don’t know what to make of it. What do you think?”

“It’s a problem, that’s for sure. Dilys is old, all this happened a long time ago, she’s just lost her brother in a terrible way. Would punishing her now change anything? And maybe she’s been punishing herself all these years. She doesn’t seem like a callous person.”

“No, but she didn’t seem particularly remorseful, either, did she? And then there’s the question of justice for Juliette. All those years her body lay there in the ductwork of a decrepit old building. She was taken away from her child, who must have spent his whole life wondering what happened to her. And Pawl lost his child.”

A determined look crossed Penny’s face. “No. Why should we keep her secret? Why should we have to live with it? That would make us just as guilty as she is. I’ll tell Gareth tonight. No more secrets.”

Victoria slowed down as her car reached the end of the winding road that led down from Ty Brith, checked the road ahead for oncoming traffic, and then turned onto the motorway that would take them home to Llanelen. “The thing is, though, I expect by the time Gareth gets up there to talk to her, she’ll be gone again. She disappeared once before for a very long time, and she can do it again.”

Penny gave her a sharp look and pulled her mobile out of her handbag. “Do we know where she was all those years?” asked Victoria as Penny pressed the call button on her mobile. “Wherever she was, I expect she’ll be going back there anyway. She likely won’t be able to stay on in the cottage now that Pawl’s gone. Emyr gave permission for him to live there, not his sister.”

Victoria listened as Penny described to Gareth the conversation they had just had with Dilys. He asked a few questions and then Penny ended the call.

“Well?”

“He’s sending Chris Jones over to talk to her. Chris is at the Hall, so he’ll be there in a few minutes and Bethan’s on her way to join him. But I expect you’re right. Dilys is probably packing now, and she’ll have moved on by the end of the day.”

*   *   *

Glad of the chance to stretch his legs, Jones set off along the path that wound its way to the terraced workers’ cottages. In the last hour an ominous mist had settled over the tops of the Snowdonia Mountains, giving them a secretive look, and a heavy, patchy fog had come swirling down the valley, blanketing everything it touched in a shroud of Celtic mystery. As he passed the small copse of beech trees that separated the formal gardens near the Hall from the pastures and wildflower meadows beyond the workers’ cottages, he could barely make out the interwoven pattern of the black branches silhouetted against the pewter sky as the fading afternoon light seeped between the branches. And then a flash of scarlet, strident and bold against the dour, neutral tones of black and grey, caught his attention. Afterward, he would say he could barely see it, and at first he thought it was the fluttering of a piece of cloth, caught on a branch. But as he came closer, peering through the fog, he saw it was a scarf draped over the branch and, hanging from it, the body of a grey-haired woman, turning slowly, her shabby boots barely skimming the ground. Every turn added another twist to the knotted red scarf that suspended her, tightening the tourniquet around her swollen, purple neck.