The Contraband Killings by Lucienne Boyce

Author:Lucienne Boyce [Boyce, Lucienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Wulfrun Press
Published: 2022-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

The arrival of two London officers and Captain Williams of the Loyal Anglesea Volunteers on Mrs Pugh’s doorstep threw the widow into a flutter from which it seemed she might never recover. They left her in the parlour with her daughter, brandy and smelling salts and went upstairs.

It was a small house on Baron Hill at the edge of the town, as dainty inside as out. The furniture in Bevan’s rooms was old and solid, the more up-to-date pieces having been reserved for downstairs display. There was a four-poster bed with thick curtains and a huge, creaking wardrobe that looked as if the house had been built around it. Time-dimmed paintings of landscapes and faces long since forgotten hung on the walls. All was clean, comfortable, and well-suited to a bachelor, especially one who kept his clothes folded away, his spare boots on trees, his shoes in a neat row, and his shaving equipment, tooth- and hairbrushes laid out in a line in front of the spotted mirror on the dressing table.

On the leather-topped desk, Dan found recent copies of The Chester Courant, state lottery tickets to the value of £15, paper, ink, sealing wax, letters from friends and family in Shrewsbury, and bills from tailors, bootmakers, gunsmiths and saddlers. The latest ones dated back no more than a couple of weeks and the earlier ones were marked as paid. Bevan had kept his finances as tidy as his belongings.

The drawers yielded a pack of cards, pens, a well-thumbed copy of a book on naval signals, a North Wales almanac, and a miscellany of papers. There was also a pocket-sized notebook. Starting halfway through 1796, it contained lists of place names and dates under headings by year. In many cases, the place name before the date had been crossed out and another written after it.

“What do you think this is?”

Evans replaced a tin of tobacco on the mantelpiece next to a rack of pipes and went over to take a look.

Captain Williams, who was rifling the contents of a sideboard, straightened up and said, “What’s that you have there, Officer Foster?”

Dan handed the captain the book. The other two looked on as he flicked through the pages. When he reached the last entry, Dan said, “Notice anything about the date?”

“‘Thursday 31 October’,” read Evans. “Yesterday’s date.”

“And Thomas Bevan’s last in this life,” said Dan.

“It’s a rendezvous! You said he was meeting someone. But there’s no place or time next to it.”

“There might not need to be, if it was a regular meeting. What do you make of it, Williams?”

The captain sucked in his breath. “I…I hardly like to…I must be wrong…it can’t be…”

“That’s explained it,” Dan said.

“Forgive me. What this suggests seems so fantastical. That Bevan, of all men—” He hesitated. “You see these names? Moelfre, Traeth Coch, Amlwch, and all these other bays and coves? They are all places where smugglers are known to land goods. And these dates, or at least the ones I recognise, refer to nights the riding officers were on patrol.

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