Murder in the Mine

by Roy Lewis

  The thought of entering the shaft was not an entertaining one.

  He climbed into the bucket, strapped on the harness and with a shout he was swung into the shaft. The winch ground away above his head and the direct light from the floodlights was gone immediately, to be replaced only by a soft glow that played about the mouth of the shaft twenty feet above his head. Dai looked up and saw the rusted ladder rails reaching up to the surface and myriad points of light — drops of water — gleamed at him. Then he was dropping inch by inch into the shaft, the light seemed suddenly distant, and he became aware of the cold and the dampness all around him.

  He switched on the lamp and the light pierced the gloom, so that he could see the runnels of water on the brick sides of the old shaft. He felt the bucket jar against the sides, swinging violently as he turned to look about him and down, and seemingly far below he caught sight of the blockage near the first level. The signal wire was in his left hand — there had not been time to rig up any wireless contact — and he pulled it twice, the prearranged signal. The bucket slowed in its descent, crawled, almost stopped. Dai leaned out of the bucket.

  ‘Gyp?’

  The whining sound that came back was clear enough. The dog was there all right, alive, probably starving, but below him on the rock fall. The bucket winched him down slowly and he turned his head, playing the lamp on the level.

  Timber supports from the roof had collapsed, falling outwards and blocking the main shaft, or part of it at least. Dirt and rubble had accumulated there so that Dai could not have gone lower than the first level in any case. But he did not need to; Gyp, in his scurry after rats, had fallen through the boarding over the shaft and must have landed on the dirt — miraculously not killing himself in the process. The lamp shone into the entrance of the tunnel as he came lower and he caught the gleam of Gyp’s eyes.

  The dog was lying on its side, weakly, but it tried to rise as Dai came close. Its leg was broken; the sole incident of the fall, it would seem.

  ‘Damned lucky’ Dai said aloud, and in relief then tugged three times at the signal line. The bucket swayed, slowed, stopped, and Dai was just three feet above the level.

  He stayed there for a few minutes, considering. Gyp could not come to him. He would have to get out of the bucket to reach him, but there was the chance the rubble below him would not bear his weight. The remains of the rusted girders where the cage had run were the main support but they were old and unreliable: nevertheless, there was no other way to do it.

  Gingerly, Dai hoisted himself from the bucket, let it take his weight as he sought the ledge with his foot, and then continued to cling to it as he tested the platform of rubble. It seemed firm enough, sloping slightly down towards the entrance to the level. Keeping hold of the bucket he stepped away in careful fashion and then, emboldened, he released his hold and took two paces into the level.

  Gyp was there at his feet, weak, licking his hand as he leaned over and caressed him.

  ‘All right, boy, two minutes and we’ll have you out.’

  Dai explored the animal’s body heard the whining growl when he touched the broken front leg, and then he levered the little body up into his arms.

  ‘Right, boy, back into the bucket.’

  He turned with Gyp and the lamplight flashed on something lying near the place where the dog’s body had been. Dai paused, then turned away and reached for the bucket, placed the whimpering dog inside. He stood staring at Gyp for a moment then he turned back to the level.

  The brooch gleamed at him in the darkness, bright as a jewel. It was in the form of an oval, speared by a jagged lightning bolt. Dai crouched, picked it up and looked at it while images flickered through his mind like an old, badly run film. At last, slowly, reluctantly he raised his head, directed the beam a few feet further into the tunnel.

  With Dai and Gyp aboard, the bucket went for the surface in a series of smooth pulls, jerking them up faster than Dai had come down. When they finally emerged there was a light, ragged cheer from the half-dozen men gathered near the shaft entrance. Dai was assisted from the bucket. He carried Gyp in his arms like a baby. He was sweating profusely.

  ‘Bloody good show,’ the man from the NCB said, relieved that it had all gone without a hitch and without the need to pay compensation to anyone.

  The mine surveyor put out a hand and tentatively touched Gyp’s head. Pigeons didn’t bite, but dogs did.

  ‘He looks fit enough, really, for a week underground. Didn’t starve, anyway.’

  ‘No, he didn’t starve,’ Dai said and looked at the brooch in his left hand.

  ‘What do you . . .’ the mine surveyor began but the words died at the sight of Dai’s face.

  ‘He wasn’t alone down there,’ Dai said. It was only then that his teeth began to chatter.

  * * *

  The Bwylffa had seen nothing like it in the old days. Forty years ago there had been the bustle of men and horses and trams, the whistle of steam in the boilers and the hum and thump of the fan driving air down the shaft to the levels below. That had all gone now, and the years had quietened the pit head, twenty years of rust and grass had changed the character of the area, and there were only the rats and the foxes and the grass snakes to inhabit the hill.

  Until the mongrel had fallen down the shaft.

  Lights glared whitely down on the wheelhouse and the open shaft, there was a constant coming and going, vans and trailing cables and television equipment littered the pit head and across the stream, clusters of sightseers carried out vigils unlike those that had gone before in ancient pit disasters. Screens had been erected around the entrance to the shaft so the cameras were unable to obtain the kind of shots their handlers would dearly have loved to obtain but the skeletal steel of the wheelhouse and the lowering backdrop of the dark mountainside was some compensation; it gave the reporters the macabre atmosphere they desired to frame their story of mystery and death. It all helped to produce a frisson in the viewer, and that was good television. The presenter’s tone was earnest.

  ‘No details have yet been released and we have been unable to obtain comments from the senior police officers at the scene but considerable speculation has been aroused as to what exactly is to be found in the shaft. The story began in the late evening of yesterday when attempts were made to rescue a small dog that had been trapped in the old mine shaft. Its owner, Mr Davies, a local shopkeeper, was lowered into the shaft and was able to rescue the animal, but in so doing he discovered some items of clothing that excited his interest and suspicion.

  A report was immediately made to the local police and the CID ordered the area to be sealed off and a further investigation made. Excitement here mounts now as increased activity at the wheelhouse leads us to believe that the investigation of the shaft, bedevilled as it has been by two further falls of a minor nature, reaches a climax. Informed sources tell us that there is a body in the shaft; that it is the body of a woman; that it has been in the shaft for some considerable time.’

  ‘Was it you who spoke to the press, Dai?’

  Dai Chippo looked around him, uncertainly. It was not that he was frightened by police stations, it was just he didn’t like them. They were like dentists’ surgeries: they made him feel anxious and vaguely uncomfortable.

  And Detective-Inspector Dewi Jones had the same effect on him, too.

  He knew all about Dewi Jones. A big man, built like a warship: a pugnacious head with a prow of a nose; broad in the beam, ponderous under full steam, but as effective and dangerous in his job as he had been in the boxing ring. Dai had seen him fight when he had been Mid-Rhondda champion, and though he had never seen Dewi when he became Police Area Champion at middleweight he had heard that Dewi was dynamite. And there were a few chaps in the valleys who knew about that too, outside the ring at that.

  But speaking to the Press, what was wrong with that?

  ‘No law against it, is there?’

  ‘No law at all. But we’d have preferred you not to.’
>
  Dai Chippo reassumed his smiling expression, even if he was still uncomfortably aware of the sweat in his armpits and on his forehead.

  ‘It’s been three days,’ he said. ‘I’m a businessman and these newspaper boys have been fussing around my shop all the damn time. Got on Margaret’s nerves they have, and that means she has a go at me, you know?’

  Dewi Jones knew. It was common knowledge that Margaret Davies put the fear of God in her husband, who thought she was God.

  ‘And they keep asking for information, so what could I do? My wife on one shoulder, the Press on the other; all right, they brought in a bit of custom because even newsmen have to eat and fish and chips is as good as anything, but they lost me some too, thronging the shop. So I told them, explained to them what I knew about it all. I told them, just to bloody well get rid of them.’

  ‘You told them all you knew?’

  ‘Well, aye.’

  ‘Is that more or less than you told us?’

  There was a sadness in Dewi Jones’s eyes that suggested he was well aware of the powers Pressmen had to extort information the police could not. Dai was nettled at the suggestion, however.

  ‘I told it same as I told you.’

  ‘Which was . . . what?’

  ‘You’ve got it all down!’

  ‘But tell me again, will you? Just to be on the safe side, like, so we know we’ve made no mistakes.’

  Angrily, under no illusions, Dai told the detective inspector again. He sat and talked and watched Dewi’s pen travel over the paper, writing in neat shorthand the words Dai used. Those words would be checked later against what Dai had said previously, so Dai kept strictly to his story. He told him about the descent and the rescue of the mongrel, Gyp; he told him about the light shining on the brooch, and then on what seemed a pile of old rags. He had picked up the brooch, looked more closely at the ‘rags’ and realised what he had found. He had felt sick and shaky. He had reported his find immediately upon reaching the surface. The police had come, taking their time as usual, the body had been brought to the surface.

  ‘How did you know it was a woman, Dai?’

  ‘Oh, come on, by her clothes, of course. And boyos don’t wear brooches, do they?’

  ‘How long do you think she’d been there?’

  ‘Oh, about . . . hell, why ask me that? How should I know?’

  Dewi Jones raised his eyebrows and glanced thoughtfully at the shopkeeper. ‘Just a question, Dai. Don’t get excited. I just wondered whether you’d told us all you know.’

  ‘Nothing else to tell.’

  Detective Inspector Jones tapped his pen against his teeth and stared at his notes. ‘You sure, Dai? Tell you why I ask. When a chap’s a copper like me, he gets to rely not just on facts and words and direct evidence. He relies a bit on impressions, too. He looks at the man he’s interviewing and he begins to get an idea about what’s making the man tick, you know? I don’t know what’s making you tick, Dai, but you’re ticking all right. You’re ticking scared.’

  Dai Davies shook his head, nettled.

  ‘What makes you think I’m scared? I got nothing to be scared about. I just found that body, by accident.’

  ‘You’ve been sweating hard ever since you came in here, Dai, and your eye rolls around like a wall-eyed pit pony with the shakes. What’s the trouble? You can tell me.’

  Dai snorted. ‘Tell you what? About the Pressmen who been charging all around my shop? About the women who’ll talk a penn’orth of chips at the end of it? About the traipsin’ up and down, up and down to the station here?’

  ‘There’s more than that, Dai,’ Dewi Jones said quietly.

  ‘You’re damn right there’s more! I was down in that bloody hole! I was fetchin’ my dog and I saw that . . . that thing there. I tell you, it turned my stomach! And I can still see it, when I go to bed! It’s all very well for chaps like you to talk but I saw it, I touched it!’

  ‘I’ve seen and handled a few in my time too,’ Jones said, a little stiffly. ‘Headless bodies even, suicides on the tram lines down from the pit.’

  ‘Aye, but you get bloody well paid to do it!’

  Dewi Jones studied his notes, keeping his temper. He allowed the temperature to cool between them; he was still not entirely convinced; something bothered him about Dai Chippo’s story, but it all stood up, and accorded well with what he’d been saying all along. ‘So you got nothing more you want to add, then?’

  * * *

  ‘It’s not much to go on, is it?’ the Chief Superintendent said as he sat in conference with his senior CID staff.

  ‘And the trail’s pretty cold, too,’ the Chief Constable added, not willing to remain completely silent.

  ‘Three months, the pathologists reckon,’ the liaison officer confirmed. ‘When I was at the lab this morning they hadn’t got very far even now. Couple of bones missing, after the second and third falls, maybe a couple disturbed—’

  ‘Dai Chippo’s dog.’

  ‘Aye, I suppose . . .’

  ‘And it’s been all but a week,’ the Chief Super said as he looked around. ‘What do you think, sir?’

  The Chief Constable shrugged. ‘If you ask me, we need expert assistance.’

  ‘The Mets?’

  ‘Got no other choice, if you ask me. We’ll have to foot expenses, of course.’ The Chief Constable looked thoughtful, stroked his heavy jowls. ‘We’ll supply support staff and I’ll sound out the Home Office about the whole thing. I’d like to feel we would be able to handle the investigation . . . control it if you know what I mean.’

  The Chief Superintendent was doubtful ‘Not usual, sir. I mean, if Scotland Yard send one of their men down he’ll want full control. They always do.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but this is a bit different. In the valleys they’re a pretty close lot, you know that as well as I do. They’d clam up to someone from outside and he wouldn’t get anywhere. So I think it needs to be seen that the Murder Squad man acts in an advisory capacity, a consultative capacity. If I make out the case to London they’ll wear it, I’m sure, and the action will then be under our control.’

  ‘And the policy decisions?’

  ‘Those too.’

  The Chief Superintendent looked around at the senior officers attending. They needed the assistance of the Murder Squad, but he couldn’t see them sending a man who’d be prepared to play second fiddle.

  ‘I’d like to think we could do it, sir.’

  ‘We’ll make out a case,’ the Chief Constable said with more confidence than he really felt.

  ‘Wales is different.’

  ‘Something like that. We want someone from the Murder Squad but valley people being what they are, inbred, close-mouthed, I’ll lay it on thick. . .We’ll give it a try. Emphasise Murder squad . . . but advisory . . . consultative . . .’

  CHAPTER 2

  John Crow didn’t like it. He had told Commander Bill Gray, quietly and succinctly, just what he thought of the proposition. Gray, the diplomat as ever, hadn’t seen it in quite the same light as Crow.

  ‘I consider you’re regarding it in too severe a manner, John. I agree the request is unusual, but the Home Office see this as basically no different from sending another expert — such as someone from the Fraud Squad — to act as adviser. There are precedents for it. A rational request—’

  ‘I’ve already made my point. The arguments they raise look good on paper. They won’t work in theory. You know as well as I that an investigation must be the responsibility of one man, ultimately. And that man must be the senior investigating officer.’

  ‘I don’t see your problem,’ Gray said blandly. ‘You’ll be the investigating officer in all but name. You’ll be designated as acting in an advisory capacity but you’ll be working in precisely the same way as you always work—’

  ‘Except that I’ll be giving advice, which someone else—’

  ‘The Chief Constable.’

  ‘- can accept or reject. It won’t work.’

/>   ‘Not unless it’s tried. And you will try it, won’t you, John?’

  ‘If ordered to do so,’ Crow said stiffly. ‘Under protest.’

  Gray smiled and pressed a button on his desk. ‘That’s all right then,’ he said.

  * * *

  It was not the best day on which to make his first acquaintance with the Rhondda. The afternoon had started brightly enough and the sun had still been shining over Bristol when the train had pulled out of Templemeads Station, but by the time it reached Cardiff the clouds had drawn over and the rain began as the police car took him out through Llandaff towards the Rhondda.

  ‘You ought to try to get to see Llandaff Cathedral while you’re down here,’ the police driver said affably. ‘Worth a visit, sir.’

  The valley, Crow thought, was definitely not worth a visit. The drive out of Cardiff was pleasant enough in spite of the rain, but after they passed the narrow streets of Pontypridd he saw the blackness of the mean river and the scruffiness of the stone-littered hillside and his heart dropped. He was not looking forward to the assignment — not that he looked forward to any of them, but this less than most — and the way in which the mountains began to crowd in on him as he proceeded up the valley began to induce a feeling of acute depression. He felt hemmed in, physically and emotionally, by the valley and the job.

  Headquarters had been established at Tonypandy but the police driver quickly explained that a room had been taken for him in a hotel in Cardiff.

  ‘Nothing decent up around here, you see, sir. Thing is, there’s a few commercial travellers and they use the pub but in the main there’s no real hotels you could use—a couple in Ponty perhaps, but we’re so close to Cardiff you’d just as well stay there.’

  The Chief Constable said much the same thing after he introduced Crow to the team with which he would be working.

  ‘It was that or Caerphilly. We thought it would be useful if you came up here first, got introduced and all that, and then after you’ve had a chance to ask the questions you want to ask we’ll lay on a car and take you back to Cardiff.’