by Roy Lewis
‘Aye,’ Dai said thoughtfully, with a frown on his face. ‘I don’t think they’ve found out just who the woman was, yet. Let alone what she was doing around here. Stranger, indeed.’
Martin Evans squinted up into the sunshine. There were no clouds massed above the hills, it was a perfect afternoon, and the Bwlch-y-Clawdd was sharply etched against the blue sky, its lower slopes darkened by the Forestry Commission plantations, its round-shouldered bulk heavy and somnolent in the sunshine.
‘In for a heat wave, I believe,’ Evans said.
‘Could be.’
‘Yes . . . well . . .’
It was the stumbling end to a difficult, stilted conversation but Martin Evans seemed unwilling to break away. He hesitated, looking about him at hills and sky, with a set expression on his face. Confused, Dai waited, was on the point of taking his leave when Martin Evans suddenly took courage and asked the question in his mind.
‘Did . . . did you ever see her, Dai? Before you went down the shaft, I mean?’
Dai Chippo had a swift image, a brooch flashing in his mind’s eyes, bright and sinful. He felt cold. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never did.’
* * *
The office premises of Morgan and Enoch, Estate Agents, consisted of a terrace house in which a wide window had been fitted years ago. This was the main unit of conversion; inside, there was a short passageway leading to two rooms—first on the right, the reception area, second on the right Martin Evans’s office, looking out to the hillside at the back. There had been a flat at the top of the stain but it had not been used since Evans had bought the firm and the premises.
Ceinwen Williams sat in the reception-room. Her desk was formica-topped and bore a typewriter and a telephone. A large table fronting her desk was covered with loose sheets advertising properties for sale, and on the wall were two prints and a large map of the Rhondda with a number of small flags pinned to it, like an operations map in a military campaign. It was Ceinwen’s idea and introduced an element of aggressive salesmanship that was essentially foreign to her nature. She was small, quiet, reserved but efficient. She was a sensitive soul, the neighbours said. Martin looked through the open doorway and smiled at her. She smiled back.
‘Cup of tea?’
‘Please.’
He walked along the passageway to his own office and then crossed the room, stood by the window, staring up at the hill. He could see the shoulder of the mountain where it swung across, sedge-green, to the first rise of the old slag heaps, black scars on the face of the mountain but greening over as years went by. The straight, uncompromising roadway ran directly up to those tips, and the level of the old Bwylffa pit. He could just see the top of the wheelhouse, stark and black against the blue sky. He had seen the lights up there last week as he had stood here in the office and watched them work to recover the thing that was in the shaft. . .
‘Here you are, Martin,’ Ceinwen said.
He swung around, surprised. ‘That was quick.’
‘The kettle was already boiling in the back room. I thought you’d get back by this time . . . Did you persuade him to buy the house in Gelli?’
‘You know I could never persuade a client to do anything. You’d already sold it to him.’
Ceinwen smiled. It brought a light to her blue eyes and softened the lines of her face so that she seemed to shed ten of her thirty years. ‘We just work well together . . . a good partnership,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
She looked at him and the smile faded. She sat down, handed a cup of tea across to him as he took the chair behind his desk, and then watched him as he sipped at it. They sat in silence for a while, looking at each other, unsmiling.
‘I think we’ll get a buyer for the house in Maindy Road,’ she said.
‘Good.’
He stared at his tea. Ceinwen waited for a little while and then she said, ‘What’s the matter, Martin?’
He looked at her quizzically. ‘Nothing. What should be the matter?’
‘Don’t play with me. I’ve known you long enough, and well enough, to be aware of the fact you’re disturbed. Something is troubling you.’
‘Nothing.’
Silence fell again. His eyes strayed to the window. ‘What will you be doing this evening, Ceinwen?’
She sat very quietly in her chair, looking at her hands. ‘What I do most nights. I’m knitting that cardigan for little Jimmy down the road. I think there’s a play on the television later.’
‘Yes. I shall watch it. You . . . you miss your grandmother, don’t you?’
Ceinwen put her head on one side, like a shy bird, and smiled. Softly, she said, ‘There are many people I miss. My mother. . . my father, even. But yes, I miss Gran Parry, perhaps most of all. She was important to me when I was growing up because she was home. Later, when I came back to look after her, I was repaying her for bringing me up but I think, you know, I was coming home to feel at home again, safe, and protected. And she was able to help. But you know that too, Martin. Yes, I miss her, I miss her dreadfully. There are times when I wake in the house and think she’s still there. The feeling can be so real, Martin, I can almost feel her presence. You know what I mean?’
Martin’s eyes were fixed on hers.
‘I know exactly what you mean. In the dark hours, the dreaming hours, the important realities come into their own. It’s when what’s past comes alive again, if you want it.’
Ceinwen’s cup rattled against her saucer and the sound seemed to startle Martin; he looked away from her and glanced towards the window again. He frowned. ‘There are other things people want to forget, and can’t.’
‘Martin, you are worried about something.’
‘No, Ceinwen, really I’m not.’ He smiled at her, leaned forward to pat her hand almost protectively. ‘I think I’m just tired, that’s all. And this business up above us, on the hill, the shaft . . . I don’t know, it’s unsettled me somehow.’
‘I wondered whether it was that,’ Ceinwen said. ‘The way you’ve been staring up towards the Bwylffa.’
‘I’m just tired,’ he said quickly. He sipped his tea. ‘Did I hear that Sammy Feeney died last week?’
‘Yes. He was ninety, you know. There’s a funny thing, though . . .’
‘What?’
‘Lily Jenkins.’
Martin Evans frowned. He had met Mrs Jenkins, but it had been some time ago, and he couldn’t remember . . . Then it came back to him. Most streets in the Rhondda had a Lily Jenkins. They were of an old breed and they were always elderly — even when they were young. Lily Jenkins herself was probably well over seventy now but she would have looked much the same when she was thirty as she did now, Martin guessed. A big woman, square-built, a face constructed on severe lines, experience of hunger and death and strikes and pit disasters and unemployment scoring her mouth and her cheeks until she resembled a raddled apple, rough skin, dry, dying.
And Death was her trade.
She was no professional; she worked from no Chapel of Rest or Undertaker’s Funeral Parlour, She always came before the undertaker, to sit in the death watch while life slipped away from her friend or acquaintance. She took upon herself the physical burden of relatives’ grief, she gave them respite from sick-bed and deathbed. And when the time came she laid them out, nightshirt replacing long pants, nightdress replacing coarse woollen with cotton. When the undertaker finally arrived the deceased was ready, eyes closed, arms crossed, peaceful. It was Lily Jenkins’s way; it was the valley’s way. Or had been. The ones who lived like Lily Jenkins were old now, and the old ways were dying. Young people had different ideas. They didn’t even dress like Lily did, and had done all her life, severely, in dark clothes. Mourning clothes.
‘I remember her,’ he said. ‘Black dress. Lives next street up from you.’
‘Yes. Thing is, she didn’t come down to Sammy Feeney.’
‘No?’
Ceinwen detected the lack of understanding in his voice and flickered a little smile
towards him. ‘You won’t see it as I do. Thing is, Lily is like an institution. For as long as I can remember she’s been around the street, always the same. She never married, and somehow she’s always been there to comfort people, you know? To be at their side when they’re dying, and to lay them out when they’re dead. The old folk like things done that way — expect it. But she didn’t come down to Sammy.’
‘I don’t follow. . .’
Ceinwen shook her head.
‘Well, Sammy Feeney was her generation — older, I know, but of the same outlook, you know? He’s been ill for months but she didn’t go near. And now he’s dead, and she hasn’t gone to see to him. I know Sammy’s daughter — and she’s sixty — was very upset about it. But Lily Jenkins hasn’t been out of the house really, not for months. I don’t know that someone shouldn’t get the doctor to her. I mean, she sits there by herself, and surely, if she doesn’t do the laying out what’s left in life for her? Cooking mince pies for the neighbours at Christmas, and that’s about it. I’ve been wondering whether we shouldn’t have a word with Father Power about it — Sammy was Catholic, but he’d still have expected Lily, you know, though most of her friends are chapel. . .’
Martin Evans allowed his attention to wander. The conversation, and Ceinwen herself, were becoming typical Rhondda in outlook, scope, and limitation. They were concerned with the basic truths in the community: social chatter, religion, death, socialism. Rugby was left to male conversations. The rest. . .
It was like the sky outside that window. Endless, purposeless, drifting forever in a void; the words came and went and the people came and went and they were all the same, there was no escaping the essential sameness and the futility of it all. Ceinwen had been different for a while but she was changing, settling into the pattern and the rut that was life in the valley. Perhaps he was too.
He looked at her. Thirty. Just a few lines around her soft eyes; sad lines. A face that could brighten in excitement in its way. Pleasant, quiet, soft. Many people had said she would make someone a good wife. A few had said to Martin Evans that he ought to marry her.
A spinster in Treorchy; a bachelor in Ton. Only three miles, but a world apart.
He put down his cup abruptly. It rattled with an unexpected violence in the saucer and Ceinwen looked up, surprised. She stopped speaking when she saw the strain in Martin Evans’s craggy features.
‘Stop it, Ceinwen,’ he said abruptly. ‘Stop it. There’s been talk enough of death.’
* * *
Ceinwen left for home at four-thirty. After she had gone Martin Evans unlocked his desk drawer and took out the letter, dropping the envelope back into the drawer. He sat staring at the letter for a long time. At last he locked the drawer once more, walked to the window, lit the edge of the letter with his cigarette lighter and watched the paper curl and flame. He dropped the last corner out of the window. The ash drifted in the barely existent breeze and was dissipated on the hill.
Martin Evans went home.
* * *
The late heat wave that Dai Chippo and Martin Evans had discussed turned into reality. The valley sweltered under a hot sun and the members of the CID and the local police working in Treherbert took off their jackets as they patiently conducted the house-to-house enquiry. The Red Lion was a popular pub and had a well-respected darts team. Its membership was scattered up the valley and other pub teams visited the Red Lion regularly. All the clientele were asked the same questions: only a few stated they had been at the Red Lion on 6th June, all denied ever having seen a woman in a brown and white coat, and the photograph meant nothing to them.
Similar checks were carried out and enquiries made in the houses leading down towards the square and Ystrad station. Regular commuters to Cardiff from Ystrad, Llwynypia, Tonypandy and lower down the valley were questioned, but none was able to say he remembered a stranger on the train on 6th June. Local shop and café owners were quizzed but in each case the police drew a blank. The pile of statements grew as the days advanced, tempers became short, and Dewi Jones suggested they simply were not going to get anywhere.
Crow thought the same until he read through, once more, the reports of interviews conducted with the men who had been present when Dai Chippo had come up out of the shaft with his dog Gyp.
‘Tom Bailey,’ he said.
Dewi Jones screwed up his eyes, wrinkled his nose, thought for a moment. ‘Mine surveyor,’ he said at last.
‘NCB. He was up at the pithead when Dai came up.’
‘Davies spoke to him.’
‘That’s right.’
John Crow passed the typewritten statement across without saying more and walked across to the window to look out towards the hills above Tonypandy. One thing, the valley looked better in the sunshine. It was even possible to imagine what it must have been like before it was raped by coalmines and terraced houses.
The pits were all gone now, but the narrow streets remained, climbing up the hillsides in regimented lines just below the menacing curves of the slag heaps.
‘How did we miss this?’ Dewi Jones asked in surprise.
‘Fact is, we did,’ Crow said shortly, and ran a hand over his bald, domed skull. His palm came away damp. ‘We’d better get Davies in again.’
* * *
Dai Chippo had been nervous enough when he had been questioned by Dewi Jones but his nervousness was greater when he saw Chief Inspector Crow seated across the room. It was partly due to Crow’s appearance, no doubt: the tall form on which the dark suit seemed to hang, the bony wrists, the lugubrious face below the bald head. But his presence also was disconcerting; there was something menacing about having a senior detective in the room while Dewi Jones asked the same old questions over again.
‘You’ve got a good memory, Dai,’ Jones said at last.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Word perfect, you are,’ Jones smiled, glanced across to John Crow. ‘You’d think he’d memorized it, word for word, wouldn’t you?’
‘Perhaps he’s just telling the truth,’ Crow said, with a gentle grimace.
Dai Chippo squirmed and tried to become angry, but temper was damped by nervousness. ‘Truth it is, and if the same words come out it’s not because I’m a bloody parrot, it’s because there’s no other way to tell it accurately. And as for my memory—’
‘It is good,’ Dewi Jones interrupted. ‘Bound to be. Word for word, this is . . .’
‘All right.’ Dai Chippo shrugged. ‘As you like. But I don’t see what you’re—’
Dewi Jones put a great ham fist on the table between himself and Dai Chippo. The movement interrupted the fish fryer, who stared at the fist as though it were a threat. Dewi Jones stared at it too, with serious eyes.
‘Let me put it to you like this, Dai. You remember all this, you’ve told it several times, same words. But there’s just one thing about it all that isn’t right.’
‘It’s all exactly—’
‘Exactly the same as you’ve said before. But you see, it’s not complete.’
Dai Chippo sat very still. His stocky shoulders were squared and his head was up. Carefully, he linked the fingers of his left hand with those of his right. He looked at Crow, considering, then turned back to Dewi Jones.
‘It’s complete.’
Jones sighed, tapped his massive knuckles on the table like a teacher saddened by a recalcitrant pupil. ‘Not according to what other people say.’
‘What other people?’ Dai Chippo asked with a snap in his voice. ‘Bloody gossipers, I suppose, people who go about with nothing else to do than say if I found that bloody woman down in the shaft I must have known she was down there all the time. You don’t want to listen to people like that, Dewi Jones, not if you—’
The horny knuckles rapped this time, peremptory in a demand for silence. The fist bunched, determinedly menacing now. ‘I want to know what happened at the top of the shaft, Dai, when you brought up the dog. I want to know what you said, who you spoke to.’
Silence fell. Dai Chippo looked vaguely puzzled, a frown of indecision on his face. He unlinked his fingers as though they would unpick his memory and he cleared his throat noisily. ‘Well, all right. Easily said. I found the dog, up I came. They helped me out of the bucket and somebody said something like congratulations. After that, Tom Bailey . . .’
‘Aye, that’s right. Yes, tell me about Tom Bailey.’
The frown deepened on Dai Chippo’s face and his eyes became careful, flicking quick glances towards Crow and back again to Jones.
‘He stroked the dog, like, bit nervous he was but he stroked him. Said Gyp looked pretty fit after being a week underground. It was then that I told him about the body of the woman down the pit. I got pretty sick then, at the thought of how Gyp had managed to survive, and what I remembered I’d seen down there.’
John Crow leaned forward. He spoke for the first time. His voice was soft, deceptively gentle. He injected sympathy into Dai Chippo’s nervous veins. ‘I appreciate it must have been quite a shock for you, Mr Davies. Perhaps that’s why, in the aftermath of that shock, you might have done something, said something you probably forgot later.’
Dai Chippo did not want Crow’s sympathy; it frightened him. He squirmed away from it, shook his head doggedly.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I can remember everything I did or said. I don’t know what you’re after . . .’
Crow stood up, paced across the room with his long stride and stood over the shopkeeper. Dai looked up, and began to rise.
‘Stay where you are, Mr Davies. You may well be right in what you say — you remember everything. Perhaps it’s Mr Bailey who’s wrong. But what we can’t understand is why he should have reported your conversation with him the way he did. He would have no reason to use the words he used, if they were not true.’
‘Words, what words?’
‘Perhaps Inspector Jones will read them to you,’ Crow said quietly.
Dewi Jones reached for the file on the desk, opened it, selected the sheet of paper and read aloud from it in a flat, emotionless monotone.