Murder in the Mine

by Roy Lewis

  ‘Jack? From way back. Hell, yes, we were old buddies.’

  ‘It was he who put Donna Stark in touch with you?’

  The effervescence faded somewhat, the mouth became tighter and less co-operative. Skene managed a smile, and scratched the lobe of his ear thoughtfully.

  ‘Mrs Stark, is it? I wondered when you’d get around to me.’

  ‘You remember her, then?’

  Skene nodded.

  ‘I remember her well enough. Wasn’t all that long ago, after all, was it?’

  He paused, as though expecting Dewi Jones to fill in the date for him; Jones did not. Instead, Crow said in a quiet voice, ‘You remember her, and I assume you also know, probably from the Press, that her body was recently found in a mine shaft in the Rhondda. But you haven’t contacted the police of your own accord.’

  Skene hummed in his nose, waved his hands in front of him as though tossing a ball from one hand to another, and adopted a sly look, cocking his head on one side.

  ‘Now, come on. You know the game as well as I do. Here I am, a private enquiry agent, wrong side of the door, isn’t that so? You chaps don’t like people like me, we’re not legitimate. All right, so here I am, I get an assignment. I finish it and a few months later the bird turns up dead. Am I the one to go screaming to the police, ‘I knew her, I knew her!’ Am I hell! Oh, I guessed you’d finally make it to me because I got respect for you characters — you’re a damned efficient lot. But equally, there was the chance you’d miss me, and if so, great. I mean, I’m being frank with you, you know? I don’t want to get involved with any murder cases. You find me, I’m involved; I keep quiet, you don’t find me, I’m not involved.’

  ‘We found you,’ Dewi Jones said.

  ‘Yeah. I’m involved.’

  ‘You’d better tell us how deeply,’ Crow suggested.

  Skene took a flat tin from his pocket, selected a miniature cigar and lit it. He puffed at the cigar for a few moments until its cheap aroma stained the air, and then he waved it theatrically in Crow’s direction, jabbing it forward to emphasise his points.

  ‘Involved yes; but deeply, not at all. A woman gets a recommendation to come see me, she comes, I do the job for her, purely investigative stuff, she goes away after paying up and I got no reason to go after her, never even see her again. Mrs Stark came in, and she went out. That was it. So I don’t think you’ll get much help from me.’

  ‘What was the assignment she gave you?’ Jones asked.

  Skene affected mock astonishment.

  ‘You surely don’t expect me to tell you that! My relationship with my clients—’

  ‘You won’t get any clients unless you tell us all we want to know,’ Jones said threateningly.

  Skene grinned.

  ‘I know it. But I had to make a gesture, hey? It was a search job. She wanted me to look up her long lost loved one. She wanted tags on her husband. . .the one that got away.’

  ‘Her husband? Here in Cardiff?’

  ‘So she thought.’ Skene frowned suddenly, shook his head. ‘Bloody hell, maybe I should have come to you rather than wait for you to find me. But the fact is, I didn’t want to get involved in it all—’

  He looked around the room blankly, as though realising for the first time that he was in his own sitting-room. The cheap paper-backed thrillers were stacked untidily in a glass-fronted bookcase, the settee cushions were stained and rumpled as though he had slept on them recently, and there was a dirty shirt hanging over the back of one of the chairs.

  He walked across, twitched the shirt away and said, ‘Let’s sit down. Lemme get myself a drink and I’ll stitch the whole thing together for you, start to finish.’

  * * *

  Once he started talking the cigar ash lengthened and the glow died. He talked quickly, smoothly, but once launched away from his preliminaries, by way of excuses and explanations once again for his silence, he kept pretty much to the point.

  ‘To fill in the background, I better tell you about me and Jack Scales. I first met him in Cyprus. Okay, you look at me and my paunch now and you don’t know – I was a PTI out in Cyprus and up to the neck in all that EOKA ruckus, almost got my head blown off a few times, but it was in a downtown bar that I came nearest to saying good night and then it was this big Navy character who lifted three wogs out through the window and got me free before the MPs arrived, and that was Jack Scales. Well, we saw a bit of each other after that, and when I left the Army and came home to Cardiff . . . well, I’m a Rhondda man, of course, but there’s no good jobs up there, is there? Jack Scales rolled up one day too, off a ship, looked me up, we talked over old times, and during the last ten years it’s happened a few times. Whenever he gets in at the docks, he looks me up. I got married eventually, coloured girl, smashing legs, but it didn’t work out, and Jack drifted back north, Hartlepool, didn’t see much of him. Then out of the blue, few months back, he turns up here again.’

  Skene took a sip of his whisky, eyed the bottle as though he had little belief in the truth of its label, then continued.

  ‘Now what I got to say from here on is part fact, part impression. But you’ve seen Jack Scales, you’ve heard his side of it and you’ll be able to make up your mind whether what I say is right or wrong. But it seems to me the whole thing went something like this . . . When Jack Scales was up at Hartlepool he met this bird Donna Stark. This would be after she split from her old man, I reckon, but they shacked up together for a while because Jack had a fair bit of money at that time, and you got to admit he’s a handsome chap when he takes the trouble to shave. ’Course, I don’t know how they came to break, but my guess is Mrs Stark saw no long-term thing with Jack — I mean, he could give her a good time in more ways than one but she wanted a bit of cash as well, so after a while she pushed off. Jack told me she went to live with a bloke called Klein . . . though there was something funny about that, Jack hinted she was pressuring Klein about something . . . and it was a good time after that she suddenly returned to Jack.’

  Skene looked at his cigar disgustedly, ground its tip into an ashtray on the table and wrapped his fingers around his glass again as though warming them.

  ‘Now it could be she left Klein of her own accord, could be she was thrown out. But Jack was certainly no good to her. He was fed up with the north, he was thinking of going back to sea, and though he said that was the reason he brought her to me I don’t think it really went like that. I don’t reckon Mrs Stark even thought of sticking to Jack; she was just using him. And she used him to good effect. He gave her a bed for a few weeks and then, when she got started on the hunt for her old man, he was able to put her in touch with me.’

  ‘Why you?’ Crow asked coldly.

  For a moment Skene didn’t like it and allowed the feeling to show. He brushed it away with a grin, part cynical, part indulgent.

  ‘Ha, you jacks, you’re all the same. You’re the professionals, you don’t see any mileage in us fellers beyond the door. Well, let me tell you, I get my days! But, fair enough, why me? The answer comes in two packets: Donna Stark knew her husband had moved then south to Newcastle before she shacked up with Jack and then Klein, and she had a feeling it’d be Cardiff, Wales, somewhere around here; second, Jack Scales was thinking if she wasn’t staying he could take a freighter from the Docks down here and do her the favour she wanted as well. . .he couldn’t find her old man for her and didn’t want to anyway, but he could put her in touch with a friend who possessed the necessary skills.’

  ‘Teddy Skene,’ Dewi Jones said grimly.

  ‘The one and only.’ Skene grinned again, tapped his whisky glass against his teeth. ‘And that’s how it was. Jack had a word with me, squared things, brought Donna Stark around and I was given the assignment. It took me three weeks, she paid up once I gave her the information, and that was that.’

  His grin had gone and was now replaced with a foxy smile as he looked from one policeman to the other.

  ‘All this square with what Jack to
ld you?’

  ‘More or less,’ Crow said. ‘But there’s still a few questions.’

  ‘Lemme answer them before you ask,’ Skene said swiftly. ‘First, Jack pushed off, went to sea, I didn’t see him for several months, just recently, matter of fact. Second, I didn’t see all that much of Donna Stark. She visited me three times: one, to give me what she had by way of facts; two, to check on how things were going; three, to get the goods and pay up. And when she paid, she was on her uppers.’

  Crow frowned.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean she was ten quid short. I could have quibbled, maybe asked for it in kind, but I don’t work that racket, it’s the way coal bills don’t get paid, you know? But I gave her what she wanted, she paid me what she could, and she went. Last I saw of her.’

  ‘When was this?’

  Skene screwed up his eyes as though thinking hard, though Crow guessed it was a mere pretence; Skene would have known exactly what he was going to say the moment the police walked into his house. He was no fool, he had guessed they’d reach him eventually, he would have worked at his memory to get all the facts straight, supportable, and beyond doubt.

  ‘June . . . fifth, I reckon.’

  ‘You’re precise.’

  ‘On the sixth I tangled with a lascar down in Bute Street; late evening, I was shadowing this bird and the lascar came out, left most of his upper plate in my knuckle when I hit him. I’m short-tempered for an enquiry agent—someone comes at me, I hit him first, think things over later.’

  ‘Not a good way to live,’ Dewi Jones rumbled.

  ‘But I’m still alive — and after Cyprus and Cardiff Docks that’s saying something,’ Skene replied swiftly.

  ‘All right,’ Crow said, ‘you gave Mrs Stark her information on the fifth of June and she left.’

  ‘Never saw her again, or heard of her till I read about the body in the Bwylffa. Then I closed my mouth and waited for you. But I’ll tell you one thing, without you asking. I know what she wanted from her old man’’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Money, of course.’ Skene grinned, and satisfaction marked his tones with an unpleasant sound. ‘I seen it in women before, and it was there in her face. She intended soaking her old man when she got her hands on him, it was there in her mouth, and it was there in her eyes. She had hard eyes, but maybe experience had done that for her. And one thing more; it’s my guess he wasn’t going to like her asking, either. That was in her face too . . . she was eager to soak him, but she was not far from scared, either. Excited scared, you know what I mean? Nervy.’

  The two policemen sat silently for a while. Crow thought about the dead woman in the shaft and how she had appeared the last time Skene had seen her. Excited, nervy, intense with the thought that she needed to gear herself up to demand money from her husband, the man who had left her . . . or had been deserted? . . .

  ‘The word is blackmail, I think,’ Skene said abruptly.

  Crow was surprised. There was a nervous undercurrent in Skene’s voice that affected him like an electric charge and once he had spoken Skene seemed to regret it.

  ‘On what grounds would she try to extort money?’ Crow asked.

  Skene shrugged.

  ‘You’d have to ask him; I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘But you do know where we can find him?’

  ‘That was the information she came to me for,’ Skene began to rise, turning towards the door. ‘But I’d have to go take a look at my files to—’

  ‘No,’ Crow said. ‘You don’t need to look at any files. You’ve already checked, against the day we came here. Where will we find him?’

  Skene stood still. His face was suddenly greyer, as though conscious of the fact he should have come forward earlier with the information and now a little scared at the likely repercussions for his silence.

  ‘In the Rhondda.’

  He hesitated and then, with a subdued pride in his work struggling through to reassert itself beneath the anxiety, he added, ‘But it wasn’t easy, believe me. She came to me, told me her husband was called Stark, had Welsh connections, had come south probably to Wales, was a solicitor, and I tell you, I checked every bloody where. And if he hadn’t been fool enough to take a job which had legal connections I’d never have found him, even then.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You see, when he came to Wales he threw over his membership of the Law Society, or maybe he got removed from the Roll, I don’t know. You’ll have to check that out for yourselves: I didn’t look into it. But he had legal knowledge, and he was a professional man, and there was one way he could make a good living without ever having to join a professional body. And that’s what he did. But he still had contacts with lawyers. And that was how I got him, in the end. I showed the photograph Mrs Stark had given me to God knows how many solicitors and at last, in the Cardiff Arms Hotel of all places, up in Treorchy, I hit the jackpot. A solicitor from the Rhondda, he was with the chap I was talking to, he looked over his shoulder, saw the snapshot and said he knew him. Not a lawyer, he said, but he’d had dealings with him. Not a lawyer, and not called Stark. But the same chap, right enough.’

  Skene paused as though for effect, awaiting approval.

  Crow sat woodenly, unwilling to give Skene his little triumph.

  Disappointedly, Skene grunted.

  ‘Not a lawyer. An estate agent up in the Rhondda. In Pentre. Martin Evans.’

  * * *

  Ceinwen Williams tapped on the door and opened it. There was a slight frown on her face as though she were facing something she should know about but did not. Martin Evans looked up from the papers he had spread in front of him in his office.

  ‘Two gentlemen to see you,’ Ceinwen said. ‘Policemen.’

  It was no question, but the query was there in her voice. Martin Evans looked stolidly at her, expressionless.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Crow and Detective Inspector Jones,’ Ceinwen said as though reciting a Sunday school litany. Something flickered in Martin Evans’s features but it was gone before she could seize on it, identify it as an emotion.

  ‘Shall I let them in?’

  For a moment she thought he was not going to answer. She opened her mouth. ‘Martin, it can’t be—’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘Show them in, Ceinwen. And. . . and after you’ve done that, go home.’

  Puzzled, she stared at him as though she could not believe what she had heard.

  ‘Go home, Ceinwen,’ he repeated, and his tone was final.

  As she retreated, bewildered and anxious, Crow appeared behind her. He leaned forward.

  ‘It’s possible we may wish to ask a few questions of Miss Williams.’

  Martin Evans placed his hands on the table in front of him and looked directly at Crow. ‘I don’t think it will be necessary,’ he said.

  The message in his eyes was unmistakable. Strain marked his features and it was obvious to Crow that Martin Evans had been expecting a visit from the police for some time. More than that, he had reached the point where he no longer wished to hide, or prevaricate, or deny. Martin Evans was vulnerable. Crow didn’t like it. He preferred to deal with men who had a certain amount of iron in them, so that he could push for the truth without compunction. When a man was near breaking point, as Martin Evans was, there was always the danger that sympathy broke through in Crow’s attitudes.

  This was dangerous, for all the layers might not then get peeled away.

  Crow walked into the room, Dewi Jones just behind him. Jones closed the door quietly, then stood with his back to it. He obviously expected John Crow to undertake the questioning but this Crow was reluctant to do immediately.

  He wanted to watch Martin Evans. He looked towards Dewi Jones, nodded, then walked towards the window, glanced out at the hillside, then turned to face Martin Evans.

  ‘Inspector Jones has some questions for you, Mr Evans.’

  Evans sat very still, saying nothing. His g
rey eyes were blank, and his craggy features seemed to have crumbled like rain-rotted rock. He was withdrawing into himself; it was as though he would be listening to their words from a distance. Crow had seen this before: a man unwilling to face reality and the horror of truth, but forced to come to grips with it by the very predicament in which he found himself.

  Dewi Jones cleared his throat, marched forward, took a chair, sat down, and pulled out a pencil and notebook.

  ‘Mr Evans, you are the owner of this business, Morgan and Enoch, Estate Agents?’

  The grey eyes were unwavering but Evans nodded slightly.

  ‘Before you bought the business, and came to live here, where were you living and what were you doing?’

  There was no reply. Dewi Jones frowned, waited for a brief period, bit his lip thoughtfully, glanced towards Crow and then tried again.

  ‘Was it from Newcastle you came?’

  Martin Evans remained silent, but there was a flicker in his eyes.

  ‘We think you were up in Newcastle. What were you doing there?’

  Still there was no reply. Evans sat motionless and Dewi Jones stirred uncomfortably in his chair. Irritation entered his tones.

  ‘Now come on, man, it’s no good just sitting there saying nothing. We’ve got a job to do, this is a murder enquiry, we got questions to ask, and if you’re not willing to answer them here, you know you’ll just have to come down to the station in Tonypandy with us and answer them there. So see sense, man, cooperate with us a bit and let’s get things straightened out.’

  Evans blinked several times, as though trying to get rid of a mist before his eyes, but he still seemed unable to focus properly on Jones. Crow frowned, looked over his shoulder towards the hillside again. The top of the winding house at the Bwylffa was just visible, stark against the backdrop of the mountain.

  Quietly, Crow said, ‘You’d have been able to see what was happening up on the hill, there at the pit when they discovered the body, wouldn’t you?’

  Perhaps it was the contrast between Jones’s voice and Crow’s; perhaps it was the change of tack, the reference to the hill. Whatever it was, it reached Martin Evans. He looked at Crow and the window beyond; his eyes cleared, his mouth opened, and though he said nothing at least he was alert again. Crow suddenly felt very sorry for this man, for he was beginning to see how it all could have happened.