by Rhys Bowen
Now that he was down here, he shouldn’t waste the opportunity. Grantley Smith came down here alone for a reason. He must have thought he was onto something pretty big—big enough to make him change the focus of his film. Either he had found what he was looking for and had it taken from him when he was killed, or he hadn’t found what he was looking for, but was getting too close for someone’s comfort.
Evan moved around the cavern wall, trying to remember which passage they had taken when they discovered Grantley’s body. This time, it wasn’t too hard. Enough booted police feet had tramped through recently and there was even a length of incident tape dropped on the floor. He crouched over and entered the tunnel. This one wasn’t as easy to handle. The low ceiling, brushing against his hair, gave him the constant feeling that someone was right behind him, and made him feel very vulnerable. If someone jumped him here, he’d have a hard time defending himself.
The passage twisted and turned until his torch lit up the black waters of the pool where Grantley Smith had lain. He must have been killed here, because there were no signs of a body having been dragged—which must mean that Grantley was surprised in his search in this area. Evan looked around. Something could have been hidden in the water, but why, when there were piles of loose slate cuttings in almost every corner. Myriad places to hide anything as small as a painting. Carefully, he put the torch down on a rock to light up the area and patted the spare battery in his pocket for reassurance. Then he started to dig through the nearest pile. It was wet and muddy. Any painting hidden here would have been ruined long ago.
Then he came to a long, narrow alcove, half filled with rocks. It was drier here, but it would take time to move these larger pieces of slate. He lifted them aside, one or two at a time. There was a symmetry about them that made him feel they were more than randomly stacked. As he worked, the pile of rocks grew in the passage and diminished in the narrow cave. But still his torch failed to pick out anything like paper or wood from a crate—only more and more gray rock. Then he lifted a particularly large, flat piece of slate and stood looking down at something that made him go cold all over. It was a bone.
Evan dropped to his knees and picked it up. A thin bone, about eighteen inches long. Had animals ever wandered into the mine? he wondered. He knew that sometimes there were sink holes into which sheep disappeared. But he was now standing many stories underground. Anything that got in here would have had to come down all those steps. Too big for a dog. A pit pony, maybe. They had used pit ponies down the coal mines. He wasn’t sure if they’d been used in the slate mines, too. But if this was a pony’s leg bone, then a nearby hoof would confirm it.
He scrabbled at the rock again, lifting another big piece and seeing the torchlight shining on something beneath it. Not a hoof, but the decayed greenish leather of a woman’s shoe with a peek toe and a square, high heel.
She was right, as usual. It was a brilliant idea. I’d been panicking for nothing. But for some reason my legs were trembling as I went down the steps into the mine. I’d been up and down those steps hundreds of times. I couldn’t understand why my legs felt like jelly now. The torch seemed to have no strength at all. Down and down I went and this voice in my head was whispering that I was going down to hell. I tried to shut it off, but it wouldn’t go away.
At last I made it to the sheds and stood there, panting as if I’d run a long race. Steady boy, I told myself. All you have to do is open up the shed, find the fake picture, and drop it into a pool for a while. The wet wrappings should make sure that it’s moldy and rotten by the time they get the paintings out. I was in the middle of prying the board off the back of the shed when I got the uncanny feeling that someone was watching me. I could feel the prickle at the back of my neck. I spun around and nearly died on the spot. A white figure was standing in the shadows behind me. I swung my torch onto it and Ginger’s laugh echoed around the huge space as if twenty people were laughing at me.
“Your face, Trefor,” she exclaimed. “You should see your face!”
“What are you doing down here? You nearly scared me to death!”
“If you want to know, I followed you down because I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to go soft on me at the last minute and put the real painting back. But you aren’t, are you?”
“I said I’d go through with your idea and I will,” I said. “Now you’re here you can help me by holding the torch.” I handed it to her. The wooden board came away easily enough and she followed me inside the shed.
“Ooh, look at all this,” she exclaimed. “I bet every one of these is worth a few thousand quid. Pity I didn’t bring my shopping bag.”
“You’re not to touch anything!” My voice was harsh with fright.
“Don’t worry. I’m not stupid. One picture is all I need to get me where I want to go.” She stood right behind me. “Is this it?”
I nodded and handed it to her. “There’s a pool of water over by the wall. We can lie it in that to make sure it’s good and soaked.”
We crossed the cavern and dropped the package into the pool. It floated until I held it under. The water was icy cold. I kept holding it under until no more bubbles came up. I jumped a mile as there was a splash right beside me and icy water hit me.
“What on earth are you doing?” I demanded.
Ginger was squatting beside me now. “I’m making it look authentic. You can’t just have one picture getting wet. If water came in, then several pictures would get wet, wouldn’t they?”
The enormity of what she was doing hit me. I scrambled to my feet and yanked her up too. She had a pile of packages beside her. One was already floating in the pool. I reached for it and dragged it out. “Those are priceless treasures. I’m not going to let you damage them.”
“Oh, don’t be so stuffy. They’re just boring old things that nobody likes these days anyway.” She reached for one of the pictures. “You have to make it believable, Tref. We’ll just chuck in a couple more then, all right?”
“No!” I grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the pool. The picture clattered to the floor and slid into the water. “Now look what you’ve done!” I shouted. I must have shaken her and she lost her footing, falling against me. That’s when I felt something—the hard, rounded curve of her stomach.
“What’s that?” I demanded.
“Nothing.”
“Yes it is.” I knew. My married sister had had a baby the year before. I’d felt her stomach once. “Ginger, you’re going to have a baby!” I felt a great surge of manly pride. “Why didn’t you tell me, you dope?”
“I couldn’t, could I? Not with you slaving away down that mine. I was going to before you joined up. I was just trying to find the right moment.”
I put my arms around her. “We’ll get married before I go.”
“All right,” she said.
I started laughing. “Let me look at you!” She laughed and tried to pull away. But something else was beginning to register. I hadn’t touched her since Christmas. That was all of seven, eight months ago, and she wasn’t that big. My sister was enormous by the time the kid was born.
The laughter had died away.
“It’s not mine, is it?” I asked her quietly.
“What do you mean? Of course it’s yours.” She was still trying to pull away from me. I was still gripping her wrist.
Pieces of a jigsaw were falling into place. “It’s his,” I said, and my voice was harsh again, like the way I spoke when I came back parched from the heat of the coal face. “That Johnny bloke I saw you with. I heard you talking to that girl in the laundry room. You said he’d do the right thing. That’s what you meant, wasn’t it? You and that Johnny bloke.”
She was looking at me defiantly now. “I suppose you had to know sometime,” she said. “He’s going to take me back to America with him. He lives in California, Tref. I’d be right there, close to Hollywood. Just what I dreamed of.”
“And me?” I demanded. “What about me? You were fooling ar
ound behind my back when I was slaving away down that hell-hole.”
“You shouldn’t have gone away and left me alone,” she said.
“As if I had a choice.”
“Yes, you did have a choice. Everyone has choices. You could have refused to go down that coal mine. They’d have had to have found you another job if you’d made enough fuss. Other men did.”
This had never occurred to me before and I was angry that she had known all along and not told me. “You weren’t going to tell me, were you? You were just going to go away with him and never tell me.” Then I realized something else. “And you were going to take the picture and bugger off to America and let me get caught. Let me and my family go to jail!”
“No, I wasn’t. Honest. I was going to write.” Her voice was tight and scared now.
“Don’t lie to me anymore!” I was yelling now. The whole cavern was echoing with angry sound. “You’re a filthy little tart. I bet you slept with all those blokes. You were probably laughing at me behind my back. Poor stupid Trefor Thomas who doesn’t know any better than working down a mine. He’s only a boy. A stupid village boy.” Without warning I started crying. “Well, I won’t let you go.”
“You can’t stop me.”
My hands came around her throat. “You’re not going away. Not to him. I won’t let you.” I was shaking her like a rag doll. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. I kept on shaking until there was no more life in her.
I found a nice quiet spot where it was always high and dry. I arranged her nicely too, with her yellow hair around her face and her arms crossed across her chest. She looked like she was sleeping. Then I buried her under a pile of slate.
Chapter 27
“You’ve found her then,” said a voice in the darkness behind Evan.
Evan reached for the torch, but he wasn’t quick enough. The other man grabbed it first and shone it into Evan’s face. “I knew it would only be a matter of time,” he said. “When you came back this morning, I knew you were onto me.”
Evan was trying to place the voice and put a face to the shadow beyond the light. In his shock it had taken him a moment to realize that the man was speaking Welsh, not English.
“Robert?” he asked.
“What are you talking about? Who’s Robert?”
The light was shining directly into Evan’s eyes, blinding him. The figure beyond the light was part of the blackness, no recognizable shape.
“He knew, didn’t he?” the voice went on excitedly. “That Englishman. I could see it right away. He knew. That’s why he came to see me.”
Tudur Thomas then. It had to be. But how?
“But you were down in Porthmadog, at the post office,” Evan heard himself say. “They remembered you.”
There was a cackling laugh that echoed from the rock walls. “Not as bright as I thought you were. Still, it doesn’t matter now. You’ve found her. That’s all that matters.”
Evan blinked in the blinding torchlight. Not Tudur Thomas. Trefor. It had never occurred to him until now that it could be the old man. Now he saw how stupid he had been to have ignored Trefor Thomas as a suspect. Just because his son treated him as an invalid didn’t mean that he was physically incapacitated. His own son had said it was his mind that was going. And his body was strong from fifty years down a mine. Evan stared down at the shoe, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Your girlfriend—Ginger, wasn’t it? She didn’t run off with an American, did she?”
“She was going to,” Trefor Thomas said. “She’d been seeing him behind my back. She was going to run off with him and leave me. I couldn’t let her do that.”
“So you brought her down here and killed her,” Evan said.
It all came back to the most basic of reasons again. He had told Bronwen that ordinary people only killed from the most primitive of human emotions. He should have known all along. The National Gallery didn’t seem to think they had mislaid any paintings. It had nothing to do with stolen pictures or clever schemes—just a boy and a girl and the despair of losing someone he loved.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Trefor Thomas said in a broken voice. “I didn’t know how to stop her from going. I was just so angry and upset, I didn’t know what I was doing. Before I knew it, she was lying there, dead, at my feet. So I buried her. I knew I’d be found out one day. That young English chap, he was onto me, wasn’t he? Why else would he have come back?”
“You saw Grantley Smith on Saturday morning? But I thought … .”
“It was his bad luck that I didn’t feel like going with Tudur to Porthmadog on Saturday. Usually I go with him, you know. I like the outing. But that morning I just didn’t feel up to it. So I stayed behind. And that young chap came to the door and started asking me a lot of questions. I saw then that he knew. So I told him about the back entrance to the mine. He was quite excited. I followed him down, just to see where he went and what he did. When it looked like he was getting too close to her, I killed him.”
He paused. Water dripped into the pool with a clear plop and the sound echoed unnaturally loud.
Trefor Thomas sighed and the sigh echoed, too. “It wasn’t hard at all, really. He didn’t even put up much of a struggle. Neither did she … . my Ginger.” His voice cracked with emotion. “It’s easier to kill after the first time. And by the third time, it’s no trouble at all.”
He waved the torch tantalizingly in Evan’s face.
“You wouldn’t find me easy to kill,” Evan said. “You managed to take Grantley Smith by surprise. I’m a big bloke, and I’m trained, too. I don’t think you’d manage to get your hands around my throat. No, you missed your chance, Trefor. You should have hit me over the head on the way down.”
“I don’t need to fight with you, Constable,” Trefor Thomas said easily. “I reckon I know these passages like the back of my hand. I worked down here long enough, didn’t I? I’ll just switch out the light and go back to the surface. You’d never find your way back in a million years. And they’ll probably never think of looking for you down here.”
“Don’t talk daft, Trefor,” Evan said, although he had started to sweat at the thought of being abandoned in darkness. “You think I can’t keep up with you? You think I can’t take the torch from you if I want to?”
“You can try if you like.”
“Come on, Trefor.” Evan softened his voice. “Haven’t you been suffering long enough? Own up and get it off your chest. They won’t put you in prison now. Your son will tell them that you’re old and sick. They’ll put you somewhere where you’re safe.”
“The mental home, you mean? I heard him talking on the phone. That’s what he plans to do, you know—put me in some kind of home. But they’d put me in prison, all right, when they found out what I’d done. And I’m not leaving my home.”
Without warning, the light went out. Evan had been dazzled by the light in his eyes. Now he was left with phantom lights flashing in front of him and the sound of feet scrunching in the passage ahead. He ran after the sound, trying desperately to catch up with the old man. It could be a trap, he knew. All the old man had to do was get far enough ahead, wait until Evan came past, and then jump him or strike him from behind.
He must be moving fast and quietly. Evan’s own footsteps masked any sound. He stopped for a second, his heart pounding. Silence, except for the eerie drip of water, somewhere to his left. Surely the old man couldn’t have got away so quickly? Was he waiting for Evan to come past? Step by step he moved forward, imagining a figure poised with a large rock in his hands around every next bend in the tunnel. Surely it hadn’t been as long as this, had it? Had he taken a wrong turn already? Sweat was running down his face, stinging at his eyes.
Then he heard it—a faint crunching of gravel ahead. He moved toward it, holding his breath, willing each footstep to make no sound. He could hear the old man’s breathing now, almost sense the warmth of his presence. Evan took a chance and hurled
himself forward. His large frame cannoned into the old man and they went crashing to the floor together. Trefor grunted as he hit the rock, then lay still. Evan felt for a pulse. The man was still breathing. The next step was to find the torch. He groped around, but the passage had already widened into the cavern. It could have rolled anywhere and he was reluctant to leave the old man. He started working out in a methodical circle, keeping one foot against the old man’s body. If he couldn’t find the torch, then there was no hope for either of them.
Suddenly, he stiffened. He was sure that he’d heard something—the scrunch of a footstep, maybe? Yes. Someone was coming. Help was on the way. Constable Morgan must have seen his car and realized where he had gone.
“Over here,” he called. “In the big cavern.”
A faint glow of light appeared, getting brighter and brighter. Someone came out into the cavern and torchlight strafed the walls.
“Over here,” Evan called again. “I’ve got Trefor Thomas. I need help with him.”
“Is that right?” a voice demanded, and Tudur Thomas stood over Evan, his torch shining down on him. “You’ve got my dad there, is it? What happened to him?”
“He fell and hit his head,” Evan said. He changed position so that he could get up quickly if needed. He wasn’t sure if he was facing an ally or adversary. Just how much did Tudur Thomas know? Surely old Trefor couldn’t have thrown Grantley Smith’s body into that pool alone. And Mrs. Williams had said he would do anything for his father. Did that include killing?
“What’s he doing down here?” Tudur asked, shining the light onto Trefor’s face.
“He followed me.”
“Did he try to kill you?”
“You know about Grantley Smith then?” Evan braced himself. Tudur Thomas was a big chap, about his own size, and he was holding a large torch in his hand.