The Corpse with the Sapphire Eyes (11 page)

And, thank goodness, Dilys Jones's spread was obviously going to give me the chance to do just that. Mair was already seated at the table, nibbling toast, when we arrived. She greeted us warmly and informed us that Alice Cadwallader always breakfasted in her apartment, and that we should help ourselves from the dishes on the sideboards. She also warned us that Dilys cleared everything away promptly at 9:15
AM
so we'd better have all we wanted before then.

A little hesitantly, Bud and I began to open silver-domed dishes to see what was on offer. I was pleased for Bud to see that scrambled eggs were available, and I was delighted for myself that the second lid I opened was to a warming dish laden with perfectly cooked, glistening black pudding and chunks of golden fried potato. I took a little of each, while Bud heaped creamy scrambled eggs on top of hot, buttered toast.

Grimacing at what I had on my plate, Bud said, “That's that blood sausage, right? I don't know how you can eat it. Just the thought is enough to make my stomach turn over. What's in that dish, there? I dread to think.”

I lifted the lid on the next dish, and my nose told me what it held, even before my eyes could—cockles and laverbread.

“Good grief, what's that?” exclaimed Bud.

“It's seaweed that's been boiled for many hours, until it becomes this thick, green-black sludge. It's cooled, rolled with oats, sold that way, then prepared in your own kitchen by frying it with bacon, or certainly in bacon fat. Finally, the cockles are added so they warm through. They are like tiny little clams.”

“It looks disgusting,” Bud finally mustered, and I had to agree with him. “Does it taste better than it looks? It must do, or no one would eat it.” He looked horrified, and I thought he might start to heave.

“Okay, calm down, I won't force you to taste any of it.” I smiled nervously at Owain as he entered the room, greeted his sister, then us, and poured himself a cup of tea at the sideboard next to the one bearing the food. His appearance was rather alarming. The tired old suit he'd been wearing last night was obviously reserved for dinner wear, and he was now sporting a pair of vivid green tweed pants and a long-sleeved purple turtleneck sweater, over which he'd elected to don a V-necked, sleeveless, knitted mustard top. The garish ensemble was finished off with an incongruous pair of red rubber clogs, and the ultimate flourish of a large gold medallion, resting on, and occasionally bouncing off, his little pot of a tummy. I could tell it was engraved with something, but couldn't make out what. The chain upon which it hung was heavy and long—the thickness of a watch chain. Luckily I hadn't drunk enough the night before to develop a hangover, or I'd have needed sunglasses.

Owain and Mair had adopted what I guessed to be their usual places to the right and left of the vacant space at the head of the table. I noted that the seat there seemed to have been removed permanently to accommodate Alice's wheelchair. It also meant that no one else could sit at the head of the table when she wasn't present.
Telling.

Bud and I applied ourselves to our food. Mair was fixated on an e-reader, using her knuckle to move the pages along. I wondered what she was reading.

“Sounds like we were lucky that we didn't lose power last night,” she said, to no one in particular. She didn't lift her head as she spoke, so I wasn't sure if a response was required. “Lines down all over the place, it says here,” she added.

“Do you generate your own power here at the castle?” I asked.

Mair looked up and smiled. “That's quite a sore point hereabouts. Grandfather invested in bringing electricity to the Gower Peninsula very early on. Just so the castle could be hooked up. So we still get our electricity from the main grid. But we have our own generator ready to go as a backup, of course. If the lines on our property were to go down, we wouldn't be a priority for reconnection. Luckily they didn't last night, and the whole of the Gower seems to be fine as well.”

“Newspaper?” I asked.

Mair smiled and blushed a little. “I'm sorry, it's very rude of me to read at the table, but it's usually only family, and it's nice to know what's going on in the world. This is the local one.
South Wales Evening Post
. Pretty good usually, they are. Of course, they've got a lot in here about that terrible business with the football supporters' coaches on the M4. Five dead, twenty or more with serious injuries, hundreds treated for cuts and bruises. Very sad. And they're still trying to clear all the wreckage. Down to one lane eastbound for a couple of days, they say. Then they've got lots of stories from people sending in photos on Facebook or Twitter about how the storms affected them.”

“Why does everyone think we're interested in the minutiae of their lives, these days?” asked Owain pointedly. “I grant you there might well have been some inspiring tales of folks overcoming challenges caused by the weather, but I bet they aren't the people sending out Twit-things.”

“It's Twitter, Owain, as you very well know,” snapped Mair.

“Lowest common denominator pseudo-communication, that's what it is. I suppose they've filled their pages with photographs of broken branches, overflowing garden ponds, and drenched tabbies looking cute despite nearly drowning. It's all rubbish.”

Mair rolled her eyes as she looked toward me. “Owain thinks that the time I spend communicating with friends on Facebook is all wasted. He cannot believe that I am able to have wonderful fun discussing knitting patterns with people who share my passion for them all over the world.”

Siân bounded into the room, looking annoyingly slender in magenta sweats, just as Mair was talking about knitting. I braced myself. I could guess what was about to happen.

“Are you a knitter, Mair?” asked Siân brightly. I was taken aback by her cheeriness, given how upset she'd been when we'd left her the night before.

“Yes, I am,” replied Mair defensively.

“Me too.” My sister grinned. “Ever heard of a web community called ‘Ravelry'?”

Mair glowed. “I'm on there a lot. I have a busy project page, and I belong to lots of groups; the Archers' group and the classical music and opera one are my favorites.”

“Me too,” exclaimed Siân. She walked around the table to Mair's seat and reached out her hand saying, “You're Mair from Wales, aren't you? I'm Siân from Perth. We've talked on forums.”

Mair leapt up from her seat. “How silly of me, of course! I hadn't put two and two together. I saw that fabulous shawl you just made, on your project page. Beautiful colors. I can't believe it's you. I'm so very pleased to meet you in person. How wonderful to meet a fellow Raveler, and you of all people. That music forum's a bit quiet these days, isn't it?”

“You're right,” replied Siân, “it is. Which is a great shame; I miss talking to knitters about opera—listening and knitting go together so well. You make those wonderful socks, don't you? You post a lot of patterns, and all your own original work.”

I could feel the happy enthusiasm buzzing between them from across the table.

“I enjoy designing patterns. What a coincidence, us meeting like this, here in my very home. I've got some projects I'd love to show you,” observed Mair, looking gleeful. I envisaged hours of pally knitting chats between the two of them. “Did you bring a project with you?”

Siân nodded. “I couldn't knit on the flight, of course, but I packed one. It's going to be a lace scarf for the winter. I got the yarn from a woman in Perth, lives down near the Swan River. She uses local soils and minerals to dye it. Mixture of wool and silk, lovely to work with.”

Siân tutted as she peered down at my plate on her way to get some breakfast. She hovered at the sideboard, poured some hot water into a cup, dunked in a teabag for a millisecond, then plopped herself beside Mair. She'd put a half a slice of toast on her plate.
Dry toast, of course.

Settled beside her yarn-buddy, Siân said brightly, “Well this is a super coincidence, Mair. Serendipity. It'll make my weekend so much more enjoyable.”

My sister's words stung me. “Bud and I aren't big on coincidences,” I said grumpily.

“Well, you two wouldn't be, would you? You work with people who do horrible things, so I expect you always think that there's some sort of plot being played out.”

I couldn't believe Siân's dismissive words and tone. It threw me. Where was the Siân who'd wept for hours last night? The one who'd begged me to help her?

Bud shifted uncomfortably in his chair as he replied, “I'm not sure that's quite fair, Siân. Both Cait and I are trained to spot similarities and, of course, differences. You can't blame us for not believing in things falling into a pattern for no reason, because in the business of tracking down criminals there usually is a pattern, and one that's based upon a series of decisions taken by the person or persons involved. Often it's been created by people trying to cover their tracks. Cait's exceptionally good at finding such patterns in people's lives—the linkages, if you will, they have created as they live—and using those to assess their true natures.”

I silently thanked Bud for rushing to my defense.

“You might have a point if you're looking at one person's life under a microscope,” chimed in Owain, “but if you stand back and look at the broader picture, you can see patterns that cannot be explained. You moving from Swansea to live beside the Swan River, for example, Siân. I would call that a coincidence.”

I replied, “Or it might be that Siân was drawn to a place that ‘felt' familiar and welcoming because it had a name similar to where she grew up. It would have probably been an unconscious connection, but I believe it might have played a part in her decision making.”

Siân glared at me across the table as she said, “So we're all just slaves to our psyches, are we? Incapable of breaking early-life patterns? So it's all our parents' faults? I don't believe it for a minute. Of course parenting is very important, the most important job in the world, but people can change, people can make a new path for themselves.”

“If we all decide how to live our lives for ourselves, then why is parenting so important? You can't have it both ways, Siân.” I sounded more cross than I'd meant to.

“Why not?” snapped Siân.

Owain seemed oblivious to the sniping taking place in front of him as he followed his own train of thought. “As I mentioned last night, I have been putting together a detailed genealogy for the Cadwalladers, and I discovered that there's a river in South America called Arinos, the same as Mother's maiden name, but her family didn't originate anywhere near the river—they migrated from Patagonia to Bolivia. See? A coincidence.”

“Alice is Bolivian?” I couldn't place her red hair and pale skin in that part of the world at all.

Owain guffawed dismissively. “Not what I said, Cait. I said her
family
is from there, and it is. I have checked the Brazilian town of Arinos as well as the entire river area, and I can only find the roots of her paternal family in Bolivia, but nowhere near the river. It was a fascinating search.”

“I thought she was from Philadelphia. Are you saying she was born in Bolivia? Or how many generations removed is she?”

Owain smiled. “To be fair to you, her grandfather was from Bolivia, but he married a Welsh girl in Patagonia—as you know there is a large Welsh population there”—I nodded—“and they had a son who moved to Philadelphia, who then married Alice's mother. Her mother's family pretty much ostracized her at that point. Alice's mother was a Grand Dame of America—a very pure lineage going back to the Founding Fathers, and those who built the United States of America. The son of a Bolivian salt miner and a Patagonian spinner and weaver of wool wasn't who they wanted as a son-in-law.”

“So Alice was ‘Alicia Arinos' before she became Alice Cadwallader. That's quite a change,” Bud observed.

“And there are some more coincidences,” said Siân joyously. “Owain and Mair's great-grandparents, on their mother's side, were a miner and a weaver—and here's Mair a knitter and Owain interested in geology.” She smiled triumphantly.

“Not coincidences,” I said. “Owain's entire family seems to have always had an interest in rocks, geology, and mining, so he's been surrounded by it since he was a small child, and might have developed his interest as a way to impress and gain affection from his father. Mair lives in a country with a rich heritage of yarn-based crafts, as did her great-grandmother. Sheep are not a coincidence, they are a fact of life in Wales, Patagonia—and in Australia, Siân, another point of similarity between your old and new homes, which might well have made you feel comfortable when you moved there.”

“Coincidences do exist,” said Owain firmly. “It's the only way you can explain certain things.”

“It's the only
obvious
way to connect certain things, Owain,” I replied, just as firmly. “Further investigation usually reveals other more complex, decision-based reasons for connections.”

“That would be like your plate then, Owain,” said Mair flatly. “Though you've been investigating that for donkey's years, and you're still no closer to knowing what it all means.”

Owain moved his shoulders in an uncomfortable shrug as he studiously sipped his tea. “It's not something I think we should discuss outside the family any further, Mair,” he said quietly.

“Oh come off it, Owain,” said Mair. “Siân here is my sister-in-yarn, and we Cadwalladers have always said we'll try to treat our guests like family—though in our case that's more of a threat than a promise.” She grinned at Bud and me.

“Don't remind Cait that there's a puzzle, or a riddle, to solve here,” said Siân stirring her tea. “Cait's view is that life itself is a puzzle that has to be solved. She thinks there's an answer to everything—that there's always a solution to a problem. She has no idea that life isn't a mystery; it's a journey. You don't sit around and think about it, you get on with living it. No one ever found happiness by doing nothing, you have to actively search it out.”