by Roy Lewis
MURDER IN THE MINE
A gripping crime mystery full of twists
(Inspector John Crow Book 5)
ROY LEWIS
Revised edition 2019
Joffe Books, London
www.joffebooks.com
FIRST PUBLISHED AS “A QUESTION OF DEGREE” IN 1974
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Roy Lewis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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©Roy Lewis
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THERE IS A GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOK FOR US READERS.
CONTENTS
NOTE TO THE READER
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
INSPECTOR JOHN CROW SERIES
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Glossary of English Slang for US readers
NOTE TO THE READER
Please note this book is set in the early 1970s in England, a time before mobile phones and DNA testing, and when social attitudes were very different.
CHAPTER 1
The mountain drew him.
Blankets of rain cloud obscured the upper valley, and in the darkness the lean, emaciated trees behind the street dripped in a contemplative misery. As he walked up the track that had once rumbled to countless coal trucks the dirt rasped under his shoes. No traces of the old lines now remained; where they had been, a rivulet now ran, trickling down the hill to the village.
The wind was light on his wet face and the mountain was silent. He reached the brow of the hill and stopped, looked back behind him. Just below were the street lights of Pentre, curling away down to Ton and then ribboning away towards Dinas and Tonypandy. But the rain would soon shroud those lights. He turned and the dark shape of the old pit head loomed up ahead of him. Against the blackness of the hill he could just make out the winding house and the ruined buildings that had once been offices. They stood there in the wet night like so many sentinels guarding the corridors of the past, but it was not the ancient past that bothered him, it was the recent past, two months . . . it seemed like years.
He walked past the winding house, stumbling over loose brick and iron, and the manager’s office was to his left, ruined and broken-down. The wheelhouse lay ahead of him and it was as though it exerted some magnetic pull, drawing him towards it as it had done several times during these last months.
The entrance was black and menacing but he went in. Moisture dripped slowly through the broken roof. It was darker in here, too dark to see anything tonight. But he could remember.
The wheelhouse was silent yet full of echoes for him: echoes of the past, long dead echoes, overlaid by the taunting, threatening tones of a woman he thought he would never see again. He was unable to escape from her voice and her words. They came back to him in the small hours in his own home as they came back now, the words and the anger.
And the violence.
He could hardly remember what it was like, that violence. He had never struck anyone before, never a blow. But she had taunted him, and the taunts were in a sense worse than her threats and her demands for they tore into his emotions like claws into raw flesh. It was not the woman he had struck out against, but the words; it had been a defensive action born of anger and despair and hate of this woman who had come back out of the past.
And since then, silence. Long nights, painful days, the mountain looming up, the wheelhouse and the shaft, the scene of the quarrel, up here waiting, and the silence grew and lengthened and perhaps it would always be so.
A long silence.
He hoped it would be so; he prayed it would remain that way. A long silence. He stood there and the rain began in earnest. He waited a little while, in the darkness, but the voices were in his head, and he walked back down the track and went home.
On the mountainside, apart from the wind and the rain and the little scurrying animals, there was only the dead silence of darkness.
* * *
When Dai Chippo had come out of the Army he had a few tales to tell, a gratuity in the bank, a Scottish wife with a tongue as sharp as her parsimony, and the vague idea he’d like to set up in business. The only place available was the house on top of Pentre hill, right next door to a decaying entrance to a timber merchant (retired) and opposite the crumbling walls beyond which the old tram tracks, now greened over with disuse, ran steeply up the mountainside to the pit head, closed down this twenty years.
It was a good place for a business nevertheless, for it was near the Red Lion, which discharged men seeking penitent fish-and-chip suppers for their deserted wives, and only one hundred yards from the Conservative Club where committed Labour Party card-holders, who somehow reasoned they were bleeding the Conservatives white by playing billiards there all day and drinking subsidised beer, emerged at lunchtime for a quick snack. And on the hill there was no competition for Dai Chippo: the only business premises were the drapery stores at the bottom and the estate agents across the road.
The image of being a fish-fryer’s wife had not appealed to his wife Margaret but she had given in and Dai had had no regrets — there had been one bad patch when in the interests of profits and economy he had been reckless and Joe Joseph Weights-and-Measures had smelled a rat, found one, and then discovered in addition that Dai was using pig potatoes. But it had all blown over, especially when Dai had started selling other lines such as steak and kidney pies and chicken breasts. Faggots didn’t go.
He liked the job. Some nights, when the rain mists gathered at the top of the valley, hovering over Rhigos, sending wet blanketing curtains into the valley and causing old miners to cough in the darkness, Dai used to put on his coat over his white shop jacket and hurry up to the church just for the pleasure of looking back at the bright neon sign: FISH AND CHIPS.
Nothing more than that. Functional. Dai Davies. FISH AND CHIPS. Dai Chippo. Margaret hated the sobriquet but Dai didn’t mind it. Showed he was well known and liked. He enjoyed being liked. And he enjoyed his shop.
People came in and talked. Old people, youngsters, kids, men and women, they came in for a bag of chips and a chicken leg and they stayed on to talk. Most of the gossip from the Rhondda came into his shop. And most of the people from Pentre. Dai liked people. Especially women. He told them so, with his sly talk in the shop, and more directly on Tuesday afternoons when the shop was shut and Margaret was down at Ponty market with Mrs O’Connor, and other husbands were working day shift at the only pit left open or in the factories at Dinas Mawr or the Trading Estate.
Some Tuesdays he played billiards at the Club, or took Gyp for a walk.
* * *
‘Found him yet, then?’
Dai watched his sallow-faced assistant, a Margaret appointment, all narrow face, thin chest, as much sex appeal as a Co-op wardrobe, and when she had scooped up and bagged the chips he took it from her and the package to Mrs Daniels.
; ‘No, haven’t seen hide nor hair of him, best part of a week. Little bugger.’
‘Done it before, hasn’t he?’
‘Reg’lar.’
Dai turned to smile at the young woman who had just entered the shop; she had bold eyes, false eyelashes, and a smile as easy as her virtue. He grinned, widening and hardening the smile as he showed her his appreciation. He continued his conversation with Mrs Daniels but he looked at the young woman.
‘Aye, he’s done it regular, like, every time he gets the urge, you see. One thing you can say about dogs, Mrs Daniels, when they feel like it they do it. Whether it’s cocking a leg against a tree or lifting it over a bitch they just get on and do it.’
Mrs Daniels giggled. ‘There’s coarse you are.’
‘True enough, isn’t that so?’ Dai said, addressing the young woman. She raised a rigid, painted brow, affecting indifference.
‘I wouldn’t know. What’s the chicken breasts like?’
‘Chicken breast, woman’s breast,’ Dai chuckled softly. ‘Beautiful . . . We’re talking about my dog, you know, Gyp.’
‘Not been around for a week,’ Mrs Daniels said.
‘Saw him across the road last Saturday morning,’ the young woman said. ‘I’ll have six and two breasts if—’
‘Across the road?’
‘Aye, that’s right. Trotting up where the trams used to run.’
Dai was puzzled. ‘Gyp? Going up towards the Bwylffa? On a Saturday?’
‘That’s right. Morning.’ She preened herself at the attention she was getting’ ‘Two breasts, I said, because Jim’s home tonight and—’
‘But he couldn’t be,’ Dai said positively.
Pained eyebrows shot up like twin drawbridges of surprise. ‘Don’t be so bloody soft. I know when my husband’s home, don’t I?’ The lashes slammed down suddenly, aware of Mrs Daniels’s inquisitive glance. ‘Of course Jim’s home.’
‘Not Jim,’ Dai said, flustering the young woman in a way he never flustered her on Tuesdays. ‘Gyp. He couldn’t have been going up the Bwylffa, not on a Saturday morning. If he had, he’d have come home for dinner. You’re wrong, Jean.’
You’re wrong, Dai, the bold angry eyes told him; if you want to come around next Tuesday you’d better admit it, too.
‘He’s my dog,’ Dai Chippo said stubbornly.
* * *
‘You’re not going up there in the rain to look for the dog, surely!’ Margaret said with the angry, snappish resignation of a righteous woman wronged.
‘Shop’s closed’ Dai said.
‘The way you carried on last night in bed,’ Margaret complained, ‘tossing and turning, talking in your sleep . . .’
‘Worried.’
‘You never worry like that about me!’
‘Gyp’s a dumb animal.’
Margaret flared, her pale eyes narrowing as she calculated, checking to discover from her husband’s countenance whether the remark carried a deliberate slight, but Dai Chippo’s face was expressionless as he reached for his raincoat.
‘Won’t be long,’ he said, and she let him go.
Dai closed the door quietly behind him. A car came rushing along the street, dipping into the hill, and spray lifted from its bonnet, causing Dai to pause as he crossed the road. There were few people about and it was one of those grey wet afternoons when a man was best leaning on a billiards table or sleeping with another man’s wife. He could make out the dim form of Martin Evans through the frosted glass of the estate agent’s office, Morgan and Enoch, but Dai did not pause to talk. He walked straight along the pavement towards the crumbling wall, clambered over the broken stone to the slope where the old rails had run and began to climb.
The old roadway ran directly up the mountainside admitting no curves, no weakness. Some of the old timbers were still there though the rails themselves were as long gone as their users. Dai’s father had been a roadman in the pit, working in the blackness towards the face. He hadn’t wanted Dai down there though Dai had been built for it: short, powerfully muscled shoulders, stocky in build.
Dai hadn’t got his Higher School Certificate though, so he’d gone to the Army. Done well, he had. The old man said so with his eyes, before he died. He couldn’t speak; pneumoconiosis and a series of strokes had stilled his tongue. Dai wished the old man had said it aloud, even so, just once while he had been alive. He never had. Dai had seen little affection from the old man.
Gyp, now, he wore his heart where everyone could see it. That was why Dai loved him. You knew where you were with Gyp.
The mist was down, wet and clinging, and there was little to be seen. The valley itself was all but hidden, only the top terraces emerging from the rain as Dai climbed. A sheep coughed somewhere across on the left, an old man’s cough, harsh and gritty, and it reminded Dai of Ben Williams, the farmer. He stood no nonsense with dogs, if they came near his sheep he used his shotgun first and asked no questions then or later. A few dogs had disappeared on the mountain but no one had ever asked Ben about it down in the pub for he had a red eye.
* * *
He wouldn’t have shot Gyp. The dog didn’t bother sheep. Rabbits, yes, and there were a few coming back on the hill. But rats, mainly — it was why Dai had managed to persuade Margaret they needed a dog in the first place. Keep the rats out of the shop. Bound to come down from the old pit otherwise.
Ben Williams wouldn’t have shot Gyp.
Dai stood beside the fence, peering across the wire towards the huddle of stone buildings that was the farm, as though seeking the information, wordlessly. Nothing moved around the farmyard; it lay as though deserted, and dispirited, Dai moved away.
Rats. Gyp loved rats as a hunter loves a quarry. He broke their back with a snap and a swing of his head. He was a bloody good dog. He’d have come up here, Saturday morning, looking for rats if he had come at all.
To the Bwylffa.
The ribs of the old wheelhouse loomed out of the mist as Dai crossed the old road that ran up from Pentre hill and down to Ton, passable still but never used now. The rusted boilers with their shattered pressure gauges lay clumped under the hill: Dai had seen kids playing submarines in those, coming out encrusted in red rust. The manager’s office was a ruin now, roof gone, walls broken down, windows gaping like a toothless widow. Dai shivered. There was Death in this place and its damp hand touched his bones.
The trees dripped slowly, watchfully.
Dai walked across to the wheelhouse.
‘Gyp!’
Echoes roared their surprise at him and then faded reedily, mumbling in discontent, only to shout back crazily again, a broken pattern of confused sound, when he tried again.
‘Gyp! Where are you, boy?’
The wheelhouse yawned at him, the boilers watched him balefully, thirty years out of their time. They had earned their sleep. They seemed to resent his presence and the noise he was making.
‘Gyp!’
It must have been the malignant echoes, sharpened, attuned to his imagination. Dai stood still quiet and careful as the crouching trees, and he listened. The echoes had gone and he waited.
Until it came.
* * *
Dai was surprised at his own lack of excitement. He waited again, listening hard, and then he moved hesitantly towards the wheelhouse. He called the dog’s name again, heard the faint sound after the echoes had thrashed away their anger, and then he hurried forward towards the wheelhouse.
The timber spat at him with a cracking, rotten sound and he stopped in the doorway. Beyond, behind the bars and the chain, was the timbered entrance to the shaft. Sleepers had closed it but the years had opened it again. He could see the split between the rotten timbers and he thrust his way under the chain, past the bars and the leaning iron posts.
The rain grew stronger, spattering his hair and trickling down his neck as Dai got down on his knees on the green timber, leaned forward towards the broken, split shaft cover and he shouted again, with all the strength his lungs could
offer.
‘Gyp!’
The sound spiralled down a shaft deep and black as death but the whine that came up raised no hackles on Dai’s neck, for it was a call for help.
Gyp was down in the shaft.
Dai ran all the way back to the police station.
* * *
‘Difficult,’ said the police sergeant.
‘Bloody difficult,’ said the man from the NCB.
‘Been closed too long,’ the mine surveyor said. ‘Several falls, there’s been, blocking up the shaft, but no telling whether it would take a man’s weight. Dog, yes, but a man, I don’t know about that.’
The cover had been removed, the rain had stopped, it was almost dark and the shaft was black and menacing.
‘We’ll have to get him up,’ Dai said. ‘He’s been down there a week. He’ll be starving.’
‘Amazin’ he’s still alive,’ the mine surveyor said. ‘But there you are. Tough animals, dogs.’
‘So how do we get him up?’ Dai demanded impatiently.
The surveyor looked at him with an impassive eye. He was fond of pigeons himself. ‘Can’t use the ladder. Rusted away. Winch a chap down, in harness. Dicey, though, you know; sides could fall in if you’re not careful. But we’ll get the tackle rigged up, take us couple of hours. Then a man to go down with a lamp, trouble is if the dog’s injured he might be vicious—’
‘I’ll go down,’ Dai said.
‘Aye, thought so.’
Floodlights were brought and the old wheelhouse gained new life as it lay bathed in the glow and was surrounded by busy men setting up the winching apparatus. The old timbers were torn away from the mouth of the shaft and the winch placed in position, the bucket and harness slung below it.
Dai had gone home and was now dressed in jeans and black sweater, albeit showered with invective from Margaret who thought grown men should not make so much fuss about a mere mongrel dog. The mine surveyor suggested Dai should wear a helmet, both for protection and for the light its lamp would afford in the blackness of the shaft. Dai accepted it readily enough.