‘He’s still alive…’
‘Where do I find him?’
‘Ask at the vicarage. That’s St Mark’s.’ Sprie pointed to a steeple, dark grey against the blue sky. ‘The vicarage is behind the church. The vicar will put you right.’
‘I used to enjoy doing for Mr Williams.’ Tessie O’Shea sat in an armchair with a black cat on her lap. ‘Just me and Petal now, isn’t it, Petal? You know, you get to an age when all you can do is enjoy each day for its own sake and not worry too much about the future.’ Tessie O’Shea’s cottage was small and cosy and warm and homely. As much as Sam Sprie’s garden had been a gardener’s garden, Yellich thought that Tessie O’Shea’s cottage was a domestic worker’s domicile.
It was a stone-built structure with thick stone walls which Yellich knew would be warm in the winter when the open hearth was burning and he noted it to be cool in the summer.
The stonework above the door of the cottage had a date—1676 AD—carved into it and it sobered Yellich to ponder that when Napoleon retreated from Moscow Mrs O’Shea’s cottage was already in excess of two hundred and thirty years old. ‘But you want to know about Mr Williams?’
‘Yes. Huge house for you to look after.’
‘If he lived in all of it, it would have been, but he had the one bedroom, the one sitting room, the one study, he ate in the kitchen. The rest of the house gathered dust. So I could manage it. You know when I said he used to eat in the kitchen, I meant that he sat down with me and ate at the kitchen table, me and him ate together, him in his high chair…what kind of man would sit down and eat with his domestic? A gentleman would, that’s who would. He was a gentleman, treated me as an equal. I loved working for him. I did better for him because of it…his attitude, I mean. I always made sure he had plenty of tinned food in so he could survive if I wasn’t there, so he didn’t have to go out to the shops. He was a bit shy about his height, he was a small man, about three feet high. It wasn’t so bad when I was ill for a day or two, or at the weekends, but I used to enjoy a fortnight in Ramsgate every July. I’d worry about him then.’
‘I understand that it was yourself who found his body?’
‘Aye…me…I’ll never forget it…I knew something was wrong…the dogs, you see, they were in a strange state…looking sorrowful…whimpering…and they flocked round me when I rode up on my bicycle…as if I was a rescuer. I went into the house…the dogs had licked their water and food bowls dry…so I gave them some water, plenty of water…it was the summertime, this time of year…and then went looking for Mr Williams…calling out his name…found him in the bath…his little body and all that water. Face down, he was. There’s a few things that didn’t add up, oh no, they didn’t, didn’t add up at all.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, for one thing he didn’t take baths. He had a fear of drowning, he had the lake in the grounds filled in for that reason, pretty well the first thing he did was to fill in the lake.’
‘Sam Sprie has just told me, he let the angling club fish it out, and then filled it in.’
‘Yes…that’s right…the village liked him after that…but those people that have got the house now…but anyway, he always took showers, had a platform built to stand on…he had the shower put up for him, bit of a contraption but it worked. Then he had some steps built up to get from the floor onto the platform. The bath was a bit big for him to get into…you imagine a bath ‘Yes.’
‘The rim of which is just below shoulder height as you stand against it, if you’re in it and outstretch your arms, you can touch either side, just, and if you stand at the opposite end of the bath to the taps, it takes you half a dozen full-length strides, at least, to reach the taps…well, that was the size of the bath for Mr Williams. I can see why he was frightened of drowning.’
‘So can I, since you put it like that.’
‘And when I found him, the steps and the platform were up against the wall, well away from the bath…he couldn’t have got into the bath without the steps.’
‘Are you suggesting someone else was involved?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything, but…well, this is going back ten years now…but the bath was filled with tap water.’
Yellich raised his eyebrows as if to say, What other sort of water is there?
‘I mean,’ said Mrs O’Shea. ‘I mean as opposed to water from the shower. The taps on the bath were never used, they hadn’t been used at all during the time that Mr Williams was the owner. The house was empty for a while before Mr Williams moved in…they’d rusted shut…I couldn’t turn them on, I used the water from the shower when I cleaned the bath. I don’t say they were rusted solid, a strong man could have turned them on, but I couldn’t, and Mr Williams didn’t. But when I found him, the shower was dry, not dripping, because Mr Williams never turned it off properly, but the taps were dripping. And I turned them on and then off again, easily, they’d been freed off.’
‘Hence the open verdict,’ Yellich said more to himself than Mrs O’Shea.
‘Probably. There was something deliberate about the death, but I don’t think anybody wanted to say suicide…no note or anything…Mr Williams wasn’t depressed…he was just trotting along with life and had a good sense of humour…I mean, he didn’t like being a cretin, he told me once that that was his medical condition…I’ve heard the word being used as an insult, I never knew it was a real medical condition until I met Mr Williams, but he just accepted it…his dogs didn’t see him as a dwarf. The gardener never saw him from one week to the next, he had few visitors…there was just me…and after a while, after a short while, I didn’t see him as different at all. I got to like doing for him, as I said. Used to talk to me, tell me how he’d done on the stock market…“Did well today, Mrs O’Shea,” he’d say or, “Didn’t do too well, but I’ll make it up tomorrow.” Then he’d spend time with his dogs. He loved them and they loved him…didn’t take them walks but they had the run of the grounds. He just wasn’t a suicide type person. There was nothing to do with the dogs after he died but have them put down. They pined for him…they wouldn’t be taken from the house…I know what they felt…I gave up my work after that and settled for my pension and my savings. I just couldn’t do for anybody after Mr Williams.’
‘Did you ever meet his relatives?’
‘His brother once or twice, Mr Max Williams, smooth type, gold fillings…all smiles and daggers…he visited once and left his wife and children in the car outside the house on a hot day…after that he just visited alone. One day…well, see, if you “do” for a man or a family long enough you get to know what’s going on and once Mr Williams told me that his brother was getting expensive, then he said, “but what can I do? Blood is blood.” That’s what he said. “Blood is blood.”’
‘Did you meet his nephew or niece?’
‘The nephew. The navy man. Arrogant giant of a man. The way he looked at me…like dirt. He called me “O’Shea” and he called the gardener “Sprie”, just surnames…but never in Mr Williams’s hearing. He was handsome in his uniform and he knew it, very full of himself. I suppose the girls would go for him. Visited Mr Williams a few times in the last eighteen months…spent time with the dogs…bought them licorice…dogs are fond of licorice…walking the grounds with them. They got to wagging their tails when he came.’
‘One last question, Mrs O’Shea, the day you found Mr Williams’s body. What day of the week was it, can you recall?’
‘It was a Monday. Definitely a Monday. It’ll be written up, you’ll be able to check it, but I can tell you it was a Monday. First day of the week, last day of my working life.’
Yellich walked the short, but not unpleasant, walk to the vicarage which was not, to his surprise, a stone-built, ivy covered house, but a newly built semi-detached house set in a neat garden and a gravel drive. He thought himself fortunate to find the Reverend Eaves at home. He revealed himself to be a tall, kindly seeming, silver-haired man and was pleased to direct Yellich to the home of Sydney Tamm who had been church warden at the time of Marcus Williams’s death.