by Rhys Bowen
“Oh, I see. Well, thanks a lot,” Evan replied.
“Missing, you said.” Tudur Thomas displayed a flicker of interest. “Run off, you mean? Done a bunk?”
“We’re not sure yet,” Evan said. “If he does come back here, please phone me straightaway, won’t you? And give my regards to your father.”
“I will, although he doesn’t know who I am today again. Up and down, like I said, but it’s definitely getting worse. We’ve got an appointment with the Social Services next week—trying to get him into a home. Frankly, he’s getting too much for me.”
Evan nodded. “It can’t be easy for you. And you’ve got your own life.”
Tudur Thomas stared out across the bleak moors. “That’s right. I had quite a nice little life.” He looked up at Evan. “When this Mr. Smith turns up again, tell him he can come and get his tape machine. The old man’s displayed no interest in it whatsoever.”
A mouthwatering smell of roasting leg of lamb greeted Evan as he was shown into Meirion Morgan’s cottage and seated at a white-clothed table.
“A drop of red wine with it?” Meirion asked as Megan passed the gravy boat. “I brought a whole case back with me from our last holiday to France. It’s plonk but it’s not bad. Keep me company.” He pulled the cork with a satisfying plop. “Megan won’t. She was raised chapel.”
“So were you,” Megan retorted with a smile. “Only you’ve slipped.”
“I better not, thanks. I’m on duty,” Evan said.
“Go ahead. A little glass won’t hurt you. And it’s supposed to be your day off.”
Evan smiled. “You’re right, and I think I’ve done just about everything I can for now anyway. If Mr. Smith has chosen to vanish for any reason, I’m not likely to find him. I’ll hand it over to the CID, and let them worry about it.”
“Quite right. They’re paid to have the headaches.” Meirion grinned as he poured two glasses of wine. “There you are. Good for the arteries.”
They had finished second helpings of lamb and Megan had just brought in a jam roly-poly and custard when there was a knock at the front door. Meirion got up. “Is it like this for you?” he asked. “Whenever we’re eating, that’s when people always come looking for me.”
“It’s always the same,” Megan muttered to Evan as her husband went to the door. “They never think he deserves any time to himself. It’s like he’s village property.”
They both stopped talking and looked up as Meirion came back into the room with another man. “It’s Mr. Prys,” he said, ushering him in. “He wants a word, Constable Evans.”
“I thought I better come straight away,” Eleri Prys said. He had been wearing a tweed cap. Now he held it in both hands, twisting it nervously. “It might be nothing at all, but … .” He paused and looked from Meirion’s face to Evan’s. “After I left you, I started thinking about that back entrance to the mine and whether anyone could have stumbled on it by mistake. So I went there, just to reassure myself, and I found it without any trouble. In fact, it looks as though the path has been used lately. The brambles have been trodden down. And there used to be a big wooden door across it, all nailed shut. But the wood’s pretty rotten and I tried it—you can force it open now if you really use a little strength. So I wondered if you wanted to come and take a look for yourselves because it’s just possible that your man did find his way in after all.”
Evan looked at Meirion with a sigh and got to his feet. Without a word, Megan swept away their plates to the oven. They hurried to the mine without speaking, then followed Eleri Prys as he picked his way between rocks and slag heaps. If it had once been a path, Evan wouldn’t have known it. It was overgrown with a tangle of dead brambles and stinging nettles.
“See here.” Eleri Prys pointed at the ground. A large foot had recently crushed some dying nettles.
The rockface loomed ahead of them—a wall of gray slate rising sheer above them. “This way,” Eleri Prys said. “Mind your heads.”
He led them under an overhang where a passage was cut into the hillside. A few feet inside, the passage was barred by a heavy wooden door. “See what I mean.” Eleri Prys went up to the door frame and shook it. It wobbled. “You can push this enough for a skinny bloke to squeeze through,” he said, glancing at Evan’s rugby player build. “He’d have to be strong, though. But it’s all right for us. I’ve got the key, if the lock isn’t too rusted.”
He fitted a key into the rusty padlock. It opened with a squeak and the heavy door swung inward at his touch, revealing a square tunnel, a little higher than a man and about as wide. A few feet into the dark passageway, it plunged downward. Eleri Prys switched on the big torch he was carrying and shone it down into the darkness. “If anyone went down here, he couldn’t have gone more than a couple of yards without a torch,” he said. “Did your bloke have a torch with him?”
“I very much doubt it,” Evan said.
“Then he couldn’t have gone far. It’s pitch black after a few yards and those old steps are treacherous. He’d have broken his neck if he tried to go down without light—” He realized what he had just said and looked up at them with a horrified face. “You don’t think that’s what might have happened, do you? He wouldn’t have been daft enough?”
Evan shrugged. “It doesn’t make sense to me. If he was about to meet you and get a proper tour of the mine, why go ahead on his own like that? What would it achieve?”
“And why risk this dangerous back entrance when the main entrance still has the electricity working?” Eleri Prys stared down into the darkness. “So, do you think we ought to go down and take a look?”
Evan was fighting back the rising dread he felt, looking down into that blackness. He swallowed hard to master himself. “Yes,” he heard himself saying. “I think we probably should.”
“Righto, then. If you gentlemen will wait here, I’ll just pop around to the front entrance and turn on the electricity. They still keep an emergency system with a few lights working—just in case. No sense in risking our bloody necks in the dark, is there?”
He hurried back down the path, leaving Evan and Meirion standing together. Evan tried desperately to think of small talk but nothing would come.
“I can’t say I’m looking forward to this much,” Meirion confided. “I never did like mines. I’m glad I wasn’t born in my father’s time, or I’d have been down there with the rest of them.”
“I don’t like them either,” Evan confessed. “I remember when my school class visited a coal mine. I got in such a panic they had to bring me back to the surface.”
“You don’t really think he went down there, do you?” Meirion peered into the blackness. “Christ, he’d have needed his head examined.”
“He has to be somewhere,” Evan said. “And this is the last place he was seen.”
“In which case how did his car get down to Porthmadog?”
“Good question,” Evan agreed. “Nothing about this makes sense.”
They turned around as they heard the sound of heavy feet trampling the dry undergrowth. “We’re in luck. It’s still working,” Eleri Prys called as he came toward them. “Come on then, let’s go. Unfortunately, there’s no light until we get close to the bottom of this stair, so watch your step please.”
He started downward, his torch lighting a few steps before them. Evan put his hand on the wall to steady himself as he descended. The rock was cold and damp. He forced his feet downward.
The stairway went on and on. One hundred steps. Two hundred steps. Darkness all around, so thick he could feel it pressing on him. Their feet, echoing in that narrow tunnel, and the light bobbing further and further ahead as Eleri Prys strode confidently down. Evan wished he hadn’t gone last. He was glad that the steps were broken and uneven so that he had to concentrate on where he put his feet.
Then at last a glimmer of light and one anemic bulb lit the final steps before the passageway opened into a black cavern.
“Well, he didn’t fall down the s
tairs, look you.” Eleri Prys shone the torch around the rocky floor ahead of them. “So either he didn’t come down here or he went on.” His voice now echoed from a high invisible ceiling. “This way leads to the main caverns. There should be some lights working, but watch your heads. It’s low in places.”
They left the echoing space for another square passageway. Evan walked at a crouch as the ceiling was less than five feet high in places.
“They must have been small men in those days,” Meirion commented after he banged his head.
“They didn’t care about the men,” Eleri said. “As long as the passages were big enough to get the slate through. That’s all that mattered, wasn’t it? They had little railcarts going through here. Ah, here we are now.”
They stepped out into what was clearly a vast space. Even though the one light lit only a small area around it, they could sense the openness. When Eleri pointed his torch upward, the beam melted into darkness without hitting the ceiling.
“This was the chamber where they kept the pictures,” he said. “They had it filled with sheds in those days. All gone now, of course.”
“How did they get everything down here?” Evan imagined staggering down those steps with large crates.
“The lift was working in those days, of course,” Eleri said. “How do you think they got the slate to the surface then?”
In the silence even their breathing echoed. Evan’s heart was hammering so loudly he was sure that the other men must hear it. He forced himself to walk away and inspect the area. All around the walls were piles of slate, jagged outcrops, small dark pools—but no indication that anyone had been here recently.
“Looks like I’ve brought you down here for nothing,” Eleri Prys said. “This would have been what he wanted to see. Not that there’s anything to see these days. I told him that, but he was very insistent. He’d already called the mine owners and made a fuss, so I had to agree, didn’t I?”
Evan came upon other dark openings in the walls. “What if he got confused and took one of these tunnels instead?”
“Ah well, he’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t he?” Eleri Prys sucked through his teeth. “That one leads to the main exit, but he would have found it barred, so he’d have had to come back down. But that one over there leads to older chambers that haven’t been used for a hundred years. A whole network of passages in that direction. It’s easy enough to lose your way in a mine.”
“Then perhaps he’s still down here and he’s lost,” Meirion suggested. “Try calling for him, boyo.”
“Grantley? Mr. Smith? It’s Constable Evans—are you down here?” Evan’s voice boomed around the cavern and echoed back from high rock walls, so that it sounded as if ten men were shouting. As the echoes died away, they waited, listening hopefully. Silence except for the distant dripping of water.
Evan stood at the entrance to the tunnel, straining his ears for any sound. As Eleri came toward him with the torch, its light picked out something on the soft carpet of damp slate. “Just a minute.” Evan bent to pick up the object. He held it up carefully in the torchlight. It was a cigarette butt. As Evan brought it closer to the light, he could read the words Gitane Internationale written around the top of the filter in dark blue letters. “Grantley Smith smoked these,” he said.
“Bloody hell,” Eleri Prys muttered. “So it looks like we’d better go on. But I’m not going too far. There’s no light down here and these old passages run for miles. It won’t help anyone if we end up getting lost too.”
They started forward again, wet slate crunching under their feet. Eleri thrust the torch into Evan’s hands. “Here, you take it, Constable Evans. You’ve got good eyes. You might spot another clue.”
Evan could hardly say that he’d rather follow, or better still, wait for them at the surface. He took the offered torch and shone it around ahead of them. This passage was smaller and wetter. Instead of running straight and even like the last one, it wound away from the large cavern. Small chambers opened on either side, some piled high with slate debris, some filled with dark pools. The ceiling got lower and lower until Evan was bent over, feeling the cold wet rock brushing against his hair and icy drips running down his neck.
Suddenly, the passage curved sharply again. Evan had been concentrating so completely on not banging his head that he didn’t notice the turn until almost too late. Ahead of him was dark water. As he reacted, he went to stand up and banged his head on the rock. Sparks shot across his eyes and the torch went flying from his grasp. He grabbed for it, but it bounced off a rock and rolled into the water.
Evan’s heart was racing as he anticipated the total darkness. Instead, miraculously, the torch stayed alight, turning the water from black to beautiful shades of gold and highlighting the rocky depths. It also illuminated the figure of a man, sprawled on the bottom.
Chapter 13
Ginger. It seems strange to say that word out loud now, after so long. Funny that I haven’t got a single photo of her. Well, cameras were a luxury in those days. We only borrowed them to take pictures at weddings and funerals. It doesn’t matter though because I can see her right now, clear as if she was standing here in front of me. Lovely, truly lovely. That platinum blond hair piled up on her head like Ginger Rogers. Those long Betty Grable legs. She was as good as any film star. I was sure she would make it in films if she could just get to Hollywood somehow. And she’d promised to take me with her.
I dreamed about it all day down in the mine. I pictured myself as the new Tarzan, Ginger as Jane, both of us swimming together in a blue Hollywood swimming pool with the palm trees swaying. When I was with her, it all seemed so possible, if we could just get through the bloody war in one piece.
To tell you the truth, I was itching for a little excitement that first year after war was declared. Nothing was happening at all in Wales—you wouldn’t even have known there was a war on, except that the young men put on uniforms and went away and everything was on ration. But I was already bored with working down the mine. All the older boys had already been called up and gone. I couldn’t wait to turn seventeen. Not that I wanted to be killed, but I wanted excitement. I wanted to get out of the mine and I wanted a uniform. Well, I was young and stupid in those days, wasn’t I?
And I was getting really tired of being heckled whenever army blokes came through. Every time a convoy of troops drove past, they’d yell at me: “What are you, a bleedin’ conchie? You should join up and do your part, son.”
Then they were gone before I could tell them that I was only fifteen and the army wouldn’t take me for another two years. It wasn’t my fault that I looked like a grown man.
I didn’t see so much of Ginger anymore in those days. She’d got a job working in one of the big hotels in Llandudno that they’d turned into convalescent homes for wounded servicemen. It used to drive me wild with jealousy thinking that she was around all those blokes all day.
“You do get yourself into a state about nothing, don’t you, Tref,” she said, and she ruffled my hair the way she always did. “I told you. They’re only a lot of cripples with half of their limbs blown away. What would I want with them when I’ve got a big strong bloke of my own, and every part of him is working just fine.” She reached out and demonstrated what she meant, letting her hand rest until I was excited.
She had finally let me do it with her. I was too keen and completely inexperienced but she seemed to like it all right—well enough to want to do it again next time we had a chance to be alone, and again the next time after that. But now she could only get off work every couple of weeks and I was going crazy working on my own in the dark every day, and my mind wandering into all kinds of worries about her.
And then it happened. My cousin Mostyn came looking for me in the mine one day. “The foreman wants you, Trefor bach. What you been doing, eh? Not disgracing the family name, I hope.”
My cheeks were burning as I ran to the foreman. No, I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d done wrong recently
—not like the time I’d dropped a big slab of slate when I was a new apprentice and it had cracked in two. That had cost me a day’s wages. I’d followed all the safety procedures when we’d been blasting, unlike Dai Evans, who had left his hammer at the face and was lucky he didn’t get it through his head.
“Over here, young fellow-me-lad.” The foreman was looking quite jolly. “Got a job for you. You’re the one who’s batty about art, aren’t you? Always drawing in your spare time, they tell me. Well, we’ve got a little project you can help on.”
When I heard that the pictures from the National Gallery were coming, I couldn’t believe my luck. This was it, my lucky break, the thing I’d been dreaming of. I imagined they’d let me help look after the pictures. I’d be able to help hang them and then dust them every day, which would give me a chance to study them close up. And who knows, maybe I’d meet someone from the National Gallery and he’d be impressed with my paintings and offer me a job after the war—providing there was an after the war, of course.
Just shows you what daft dreams you have when you’re young, doesn’t it?
And to prove how naive I was, I thought they were going to hang the pictures all over the walls of the slate caverns—a giant art gallery in total darkness. But then I found they’d put me on the team to build huts. It seemed the pictures were going to be stored in there—just like army huts, with central heating in them too, keeping the pictures at just the right temperature. And they were equipped with an alarm system. They were taking no chances, even deep inside a mountain with only one way out.
When the pictures arrived, I had my next disappointment. They were already in crates. I helped carry them into the huts and stack them under the watchful eye of National Gallery men. It was torture knowing that I might be carrying a Rembrandt or Da Vinci and not even be able to peek at it.
That’s really been the story of my life—being so close to something I really wanted and never being able to make it mine.
