Welsh Requiem: A gripping cozy British murder mystery Read online

  Welsh Requiem

  (Welsh Village Murder Mysteries)

  K T MILL

  dark neon

  Copyright © 2022 by K T Mill

  ISBN: 978-1-913132-17-0

  Published by: dark neon

  The right of K T Mill to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  http://www.darkneon.com/

  The Welsh Village Murder Mysteries

  Welsh Requiem is the first book in the series of Welsh Village Murder Mysteries. It will be followed by…

  Who Killed Inspector Stoat?

  Table Of Contents

  Welsh Requiem

  Table Of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Bessie’s Welsh Cake Recipe

  Ingredients

  Method

  Now Read On…

  Who Killed Inspector Stoat?

  A Short Message…

  Leave a Review

  Chapter 1

  It all began with the thing on the rocks. It was lying at the bottom of the cliff on the northern side of the bay. Ruby thought it might be a seal but she was unable see it clearly because the morning was gloomy and the air was thick with sea mist. From where she was standing, on the beach, all she could see was a dark shape which might or might not be a seal.

  It was not her habit to go scrabbling about over the rocks. Usually she walked along the sand, listening to the surge of the sea and watching the lines of seagulls shuffling back and forth at the tide’s edge. But her curiosity was piqued. She had heard people say that seals sometimes came ashore but she had never seen one. She thought it would make an interesting picture.

  Ruby had already taken a few photographs that morning using the camera in her phone. The light had an attractive silvery quality and the cliffs, seen vaguely through the mist, would make a good subject for a painting. Watercolour painting was a hobby of Ruby’s. She would have been the first to admit that she was not really a very good artist but it gave her pleasure.

  It must have been about half past six when Ruby noticed the thing on the rocks. She had not slept well the night before and, since she could not bear lying awake in bed, at the first light of dawn she got up, got dressed and went down to the shore to try to blow the cobwebs out of her head. Once she had walked the length of the bay, she had intended to walk back up the hill to her cottage and have breakfast. For the past few weeks, since the mornings had become light enough, this had become her routine: wake, walk, breakfast.

  She had only been living in Rose Cottage for a couple of months. She had inherited the cottage from a great aunt, Mrs Guinevere Probert, whom she had never met. The fact that they had never met probably explained why Ruby was the sole beneficiary. Ruby had been told that her great aunt had not much cared for those members of her family whom she had met – a prejudice which Ruby found entirely understandable.

  Ruby tried to take a photo of the seal by zooming in using the highest magnification of her phone’s camera. But when she looked at the phone’s small screen the picture did not show much more than she could see with the naked eye – just weed-covered rocks with a big, black thing lying on top of them. That was when she realised that she would have to go scrambling over the rocks to get closer.

  The rocks were wet and slippery and her progress was slow. She was worried that, by the time she got close enough, the seal would have taken panic, waddled its way over the rocks down to the sea and swum away. It was hard for Ruby to keep her balance. She slipped on slimy bladder wrack, plunged her foot into a pool of cold water and, in trying to break her fall, put out a hand and cut it on some barnacles. She was pretty fed up by that time but that only made her more determined to get close enough to take a picture of the basking seal.

  When she got there she found that it was not a seal at all. It was a man. And he was not basking. He was dead – very definitely dead.

  Chapter 2

  By the time Ruby had finished talking to the police, the morning was well advanced. By the time she arrived back home it was almost eleven o’clock. As she pushed open the little, creaking wooden gate and walked up the cobblestoned path she could not help but smile. Rose Cottage was the sort of place she had always dreamed of. It was an old, stone-walled house with bottle-glass windows, roses scrambling up a trellis and a gnarly wisteria bush trailing over the front door.

  Rather than going straight into the cottage, she walked along the narrow gravel path that led into the back garden. Rose Cottage perched on the highest point of Fern Hill and Ruby’s back garden overlooked the great expanse of Clogwyn Bach Bay extending from a rocky promontory at its southern end to another rocky promontory at its northern end. It was beneath the cliffs at the northern end that she had found the body.

  On that clear, mild May morning, the view from her garden seemed to Ruby the most beautiful sight in the world. In the short time she had been there she had become very fond of Clogwyn Bach. The scenery was magnificent, the locals were – with one or two exceptions – friendly, and the village itself had a timeless quality. It was slow and sleepy in its isolation, giving the impression that the modern world has passed it by and it really did not care.

  The name Clogwyn Bach means ‘Little Cliff’ in Welsh. It is the smaller of the two Clogwyns which are situated on the south west coast of Wales. The larger town of Clogwyn Mawr (‘Big Cliff’) lies some ten miles to its north. To the disapproval of the few remaining Welsh speakers, many of the locals now call the towns by the Anglicised names, ‘Little Cloggy’ and ‘Big Cloggy’. Clogwyn Bach or ‘Little Cloggy’ was, in Ruby’s view, by far the nicer of the two Clogwyns. The locals called it a town but it was really no more than a village with dreams of greatness. What it lacked in amenities it made up for in its simple, unspoiled beauty. It sat at the bottom of the half-bowl of land formed by the semi-circular, tree-covered hills surrounding the bay. It was so idyllic that Ruby felt almost guilty for being unable to find the peace and contentment for which she longed.

/>   Ruby had barely had a good night’s sleep for the past month. She had been suffering from anxiety attacks and she did not know why. She assumed it might be something to do with the sudden change from the frenetic pace of her former life in London to the altogether more leisurely pace of her life in Clogwyn Bach.

  Ruby was an actress. Her younger friends told her that she should refer to herself as an ‘actor’ because the word ‘actress’ was sexist and old-fashioned. But she had grown up idolising Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and all those other great Hollywood stars. She could not think of them as actors no matter how hard she tried, and if the word ‘actress’ was good enough for Marlene Dietrich then it was jolly well good enough for Ruby Lake.

  While she had never been a very famous actress, she had made a reasonably successful career in both the theatre and on television. She often played ‘character’ parts such as vicars’ housekeepers, slightly dodgy lady villains or the strange woman in the corner house who spies on neighbours from behind the net curtains. She had never understood why people considered her to be particularly well-suited to those roles. She had always believed that she would be rather good at Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra but directors and producers did not share her conviction. On the other hand, if a television drama required a vicar’s housekeeper or a small-time lady crook, Ruby’s name would very probably be close to the top of the list.

  Even if you have not seen Ruby on TV, you may have heard of her thanks to the notorious ‘Lipstick Poisoner’ murder case (as the press called it). In fact, much to her chagrin, Ruby seemed to be more famous for that than for her acting. It happened while she was playing the part of the Fairy Godmother in the Christmas panto at Milchester-Mire; half way through the second half, one of the Ugly Sisters suddenly clutched her throat and collapsed on stage – stone, cold dead. The identity of the murderer might never have been uncovered but for Ruby’s observation of the lipstick on the whisky glass. However, that is quite another story and we shall have no more to say about it here.

  Ruby was not always in work, of course. She did not care to admit to it but she had, in fact, spent quite a bit of time ‘resting’, which is what actors do when there is nothing to be acted in. During her resting periods, she had filled in the time doing everything from selling advertising for a local newspaper to stacking shelves in a supermarket. She had also made a few TV commercials. She was one of the dancing kittens in the cat food advertisement which you have no doubt seen – “So tasty, they’ll eat it to the last miaow.” And she had also recorded quite a few radio commercials. You know the sort of thing – “Snibbet’s Intimate Deodorant, available from selected dealers, while stocks last, one purchase per household, subject to status, over 18s only, be sure to read the safety precautions, terms and conditions apply…” and so on and so forth. She considered radio commercials to be demeaning. They were certainly not what she had had in mind when she had been at drama school. She had gone through long years of training and had learnt to squeeze every last ounce of emotion out of everything from Brecht’s ‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’ to Osborne’s ‘Look Back In Anger’ – and what did she end up doing? Recording commercials for underarm deodorants and funeral saving plans!

  Chapter 3

  Unable either to relax or to concentrate on getting any work done, Ruby went next door to see her neighbour, Bessie Morgan, who lived in a cottage with the unpronounceable name ‘Awyr Môr’ which apparently means ‘Sea Air’, so why it could not have been called ‘Sea Air’ Ruby did not know. Ruby’s knowledge of the Welsh language was limited to a few place names and two or three of the more colourful swear words. She had been born in the little village of Slackton Ings in what she still called the West Riding Of Yorkshire (ignoring the fact that the Yorkshire ‘ridings’ had been disbanded decades earlier by government officials with no poetry in the souls). While her family had some Welsh connections, none of them spoke Welsh and Ruby always felt slightly intimidated by anyone who could not only pronounce the words but also understood what they meant.

  Bessie took Ruby into her kitchen, made some tea and brought out a plate of Welsh cakes, which was Bessie’s way of dealing with any sort of crisis. Bessie’s kitchen was warm, comfortable, old-fashioned and typically Welsh; just like Bessie herself. It had whitewashed walls, a slate-tiled floor, an oil-powered Aga range-cooker and a big oak table right in the middle of the room. On one wall there was a framed embroidery of the quotation, “One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.” Close by was a beautifully hand-written text, also framed, “Gweddi’r Arglwydd – Ein tad, yr hwn wyt yn y nefoedd” which Bessie had told Ruby was the Lord’s Prayer in Welsh, “Our father who art in Heaven.” In principle, Bessie was a Methodist though she claimed that she had “lapsed” long ago. On the mantelpiece over the fireplace there was a black-and-white photograph of Bessie as a young woman, holding hands with a smiling young man. They were at the seaside somewhere and the sun was shining in their faces. They looked radiantly happy.

  Ruby sat at the table and immediately jumped up again so suddenly that she very nearly knocked over her chair. “Something brushed against my ankles!” she said, “I think there’s a rat there!”

  “That’s not a rat,” said Bessie, “That’s Harry.”

  “Harry. Who’s Harry?”

  “My hedgehog.”

  “Your hedgehog?”

  “He’s having his breakfast.”

  “A hedgehog is having breakfast in your kitchen?” Ruby glanced under the table and, sure enough, there was a hedgehog tucking into a hearty meal of some unpleasant-looking brown mush in a saucer.

  “What’s he eating?”

  “Dog food.”

  “I thought hedgehogs ate cheese and drank milk?”

  “Then you thought wrong. Milk, you see, gives them diarrhoea. Now then, just you sit yourself down again and don’t you go paying any attention to Harry. Well! You’ve been in the wars by the looks of it.”

  “What?”

  “Your hand. That’s a nasty graze you’ve got there. Been fighting, have you?”

  Ruby told Bessie that she had slipped on some seaweed and scratched her hand on a barnacle-covered rock. It was really nothing, she said, but Bessie insisted on attending to it.

  “Yow!” Ruby yelled as Bessie dabbed a spot of iodine onto the cut. “Is that stuff safe? I didn’t think people still used it.”

  Bessie patted away the excess iodine using a paper towel and then she put a small plaster over the cut. “There now,” she said, “drink up your tea and you’ll feel all the better for it.” She put the bottle of iodine back into an old toffee tin in which she kept a range of medicines and ointments, many of which Ruby had not seen since her childhood. “It’s a big shock you’ve had, you see,” said Bessie, “It’ll have upset you, no doubt. Take things easy is what you should do now, to give yourself chance to get over it.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Bessie, it’s only a little cut. I’m not in shock!”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. After what you’ve been through this morning. A terrible shock that must be.”

  Ruby considered that. “No. Not really. Why do you think that?”

  “Enough to upset anyone, I should say. Finding a dead body. Well! It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “Actually, it was quite exciting.”

  Bessie was in the process of crumbling a piece of bread into a saucer. “There’s a thing to say!” She tutted her disapproval, “But there, you see, you don’t know what you are saying. On account of the shock.” She poured some milk over the bread and then poured some tea onto it.

  “Oh, I know what I’m saying all right,” Ruby insisted, “Nothing happens here usually, so finding a corpse! In mysterious circumstances! That certainly livens things up!”

  Bessie frowned. Ruby was not herself that morning. In the two months since Ruby had moved into Rose Cottage, Bessie had not heard her talk about anything more exciting than the weather forecast. In fact, Ruby had given ev
ery indication of being an entirely calm and sensible sort of person. She swept her path, she kept her front doorstep clean and she never got drunk and sang bawdy songs while dancing stark naked around her garden in the early hours of the morning (unlike old Mrs Probert, the previous occupant of Rose Cottage). So, on the whole, Bessie had thought she had done well to gain such a nice, uncomplicated, pleasantly dull neighbour.

  “The police were marvellous,” Ruby enthused, “And so many of them! It was just like one of those shows on the telly.”

  Bessie took the saucer of tea-soaked bread and put it alongside the saucer of dog food under the table. The hedgehog twitched his nose at it then stumped over and started eating from the new saucer.

  “I thought you said hedgehogs shouldn’t have milk,” said Ruby.

  “That’s not milk,” Bessie protested, “It’s bara-te, bread in tea. Very good for hedgehogs. And he’s got to have milk in his tea, hasn’t he?”

  When Ruby had first met her, she had thought Bessie was slightly eccentric. In the past couple of months, she had modified that opinion. She now thought that Bessie’s eccentricity was of such a high calibre that it would give hatters and March hares pause for thought.