by Roy Lewis
Crow stared at Luffman, thinking of what he had already heard earlier.
‘She worked there?’
Frank Luffman laughed.
‘Almost got there, John. No, she used to work there as a receptionist till she moved up in the world.’
‘You mean she got married?’
‘That’s so. To one of the partners. She was still married to him when she first met James Klein. And the marriage was still in existence when the papers disappeared.’
Crow was silent. He was beginning to see bits of the jigsaw form a pattern. Klein was in trouble, Donna Stark helped him out. Later, Donna Stark went to live with Klein . . .
‘What happened to her husband?’ Crow asked sharply.
Luffman shrugged.
‘He left the partnership shortly after Donald here was sent down. No longer in practice, it seems.’
‘Were they divorced?’
‘No record of it as far as I know.’
‘And why did Stark leave the partnership?’
Luffman smiled.
‘You’ll have to ask them that yourself. But I bet you get damn all out of them about it. They’ll tell you he left of his own accord and by agreement. You’d hardly expect them to agree he left because his wife — with or without his connivance — pulled some papers out of the private office in order to get Jimmy Klein off the hook, do you? Even solicitors have a sense of self-preservation.’
‘Mmm.’ Crow frowned. He looked at Donald Rich, saw the bitterness in the man’s eyes staining them like a dark shadow, and he wondered.
‘Were you ever in the Rhondda, Mr Rich?’
CHAPTER 4
Dewi Jones was waiting at Crow’s hotel when he returned from Newcastle. He seemed pleased to accept Crow’s offer of dinner together; he was even more pleased when Crow turned the conversation to sport and Jones was able to discuss the relative merits of Cardiff and Llanelli Rugby Clubs, Glamorgan and Gloucestershire Cricket Clubs, and how good fighters were hungry fighters.
‘There were a lot of them around in Wales in the old days,’ he said enthusiastically, ‘but the Welfare State has killed them off. Me, well, I was pretty good but I would never have lived in the same ring with the old ones. They had to fight, you see. It was the only way to get a steak in your belly in those days. It was the necessity that pushed them and made them good fighters. There are necessities other than hunger, of course, Being black for instance — it creates a drive in a man that makes him want to succeed. Need to succeed. So black fighters make good fighters too. And if you’re black and hungry . . . Aye, a man will fight hard if the need is in him. Sometimes it’s physical, but it can be emotional too.’
The remark brought Crow’s mind away from sport, and the conversation he had deliberately encouraged with Jones in an attempt to break away from the case he was dealing with. It pushed him back to Donald Rich. The man had denied ever having been to Wales, but he may well have had a motive for murdering Donna Stark. If he had felt she was really responsible in some way for his becoming the scapegoat in the Northeast Credit case, there might have been a strong enough need in him to pay her back. Perhaps the thoughts were mirrored in his eyes or in his lugubrious expression, for Dewi Jones fell silent as he finished his sweet. When coffee came he looked up and said, ‘Was the trip to the North worthwhile, sir?’
Crow grimaced, stirred some cream into his coffee and looked out of the window to the Cardiff streets.
‘I was able to look up an old friend, so there was that to its credit. Apart from that, not a great deal. This man Klein—’
‘The one Donna Stark had been living with?’
‘Yes. He’s got a shady background and maybe reason to want to kill her, whatever he says. He threw her over in favour of another woman, and he says Mrs Stark accepted it. But if she didn’t, if she was likely to cause trouble, if she was threatening to break up Klein’s impending marriage with Grace Rendell, a marriage on which he was relying to save his car-hire business, well, it could have been reason enough to kill her.’
‘But why in Wales?’
Crow sipped his coffee, added some more cream. He had long ago learned nothing in his diet would ever put flesh or fat on his bones. He was committed irrevocably to leanness whether he liked it or not. In fact, it bothered him little even if people did smile when they saw him out with Martha, plump as he was skinny.
‘Why in Wales, indeed. Klein suggested she was looking for greener grass once she knew she could get no more cash or security from him. Our information is she went to a former lover, Jack Scales. Now then, have you managed to unearth anything on him?’
‘Only that he’s here in Cardiff.’
Crow eyed Dewi Jones. The heavy face betrayed no emotion, no excitement, and yet the thought must have been in Jones’s mind as it was in Crow’s. Scales was in Cardiff; Donna Stark had died in the Rhondda.
Was this the connection they were seeking?
They stopped the car, just after it drove under the railway bridge at the head of Bute Street, and Jones and Crow got out. Crow did not know the area and wanted to see it. He had heard enough of Tiger Bay in the past, but he guessed that the reputation would largely have been one it gained between the wars and things would be quieter now. He guessed right, of course. As the two policemen walked along Bute Street there was some evidence of decay and poverty; peeling paint, dirty windows, corner shops crammed with cheap, shoddy goods, dirty gutters and chip-papers swirling in the roadway. But the cars parked along the street were large enough, if not of recent vintage, and the coloured men who lounged at the corners displayed no interest in the strangers. Some children played in the side streets, noisy as any children, scruffier than many, but the whole scene was no more rundown than many Crow had come across, Areas in London were worse, Birmingham had its streets no better; it was reputation and the proximity of the docks that gave Bute Street its continued tawdry glamour.
‘They still get trouble in the pubs, Saturday nights,’ Jones said almost apologetically, as though wanting to maintain the street’s roughly romantic image.
‘They do in most pubs,’ Crow said shortly’
‘Is this the address we’re looking for?’
It was a narrow terrace house, not far from the consulates based near the docks themselves. The door was open, the passageway beyond dark, uninviting and smelly. At the foot of the stairs was a bowl half-full of stale beer. Indistinguishable black objects lay half submerged in it.
‘Cockroaches,’ Dewi Jones said. ‘My grandmother used to drown them like that — they love beer, put a bowl down and out they come in the dark.’
‘DDT works better.’
‘But not so much fun for the kids. Ever seen a drunken cockroach trying to escape?’
Crow didn’t want to. They climbed the stairs, paused at the first landing, hammered on the door. The old woman who answered directed them above; the bulb on the landing did not work and there was only the dim glow from below to light their way.
Jack Scales was not quick to answer the knocking.
When he finally opened the door it was slowly, to peer around it at the visitors. The fact they were strangers and reasonably well dressed seemed to reassure him.
‘Whaddya want?’
He had been drinking and was vaguely belligerent. Stale beer and tobacco gusted out on his breath.
‘We’re police officers,’ Crow said and pushed at the door. If Scales had intended resisting he forgot about it and retreated into the bedsitting-room. It was a mess. The curtains were drawn and their dinginess seemed to emphasise the squalor of the room itself. The bed in the corner was unmade, there were dirty plates and cups on the table, a pile of discarded rumpled clothing lay heaped on the easy chair and the pans on the gas cooker were thick with grease, the accumulation of weeks. Crow wrinkled his nose in distaste.
‘Mr Scales?’
‘That’s right.’
He fitted the room, and yet on the other hand he did not. Scales was about five fee
t eleven in height, lean but well-muscled in shoulder and arms, and his waist was slim. He looked fit and strong and his face was a handsome one, a proud jutting nose and a broad mouth giving him an air of arrogance. But he was slumped as he stood facing Crow, his mouth was turned down and disappointed, his muscles slack. There was a puffiness about his eye that suggested the drinking was not occasional and the hard muscles of his belly would soon slacken and spread. He was a strong, handsome man going to seed; properly dressed and sober he would make a striking figure, but in shirt sleeves and stained slacks and slippers he looked like a man sliding fast into middle age before his time.
‘We want to ask you a few questions.’
‘What about?’
‘Donna Stark.’
‘Bloody hell.’
Scales stood still for a moment, his dark eyes glaring first at Crow and then at Jones. At last he turned away, hauled off his shirt, drew aside the curtain that hid the washbasin in the corner and he proceeded to wash himself, hands, face, neck, shoulders, armpits, with much puffing and grunting as the coldness of the water bit at his heated body. The two policemen watched him. He searched for a towel, found none, so dried himself on the curtain. He would be cleaner by a little, but more sober by a great deal. It had been the object of the exercise. He turned, stood looking at them and slowly pulled his shirt back on. He said nothing.
‘When did you last see Donna Stark?’ Dewi Jones asked.
Scales grimaced.
‘It’s no good me saying I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about?’
‘None. We’ve information from the north-east’’
‘Areet, then. Months ago.’
‘How many months?’ Crow asked sharply.
Scales tucked his shirt into his trousers with exaggerated care. He looked down, pulled up the zip.
‘April, May . . . about then.’
‘She died in June.’
Scales continued to stare down at his trousers. He turned slowly, reached for the easy chair, pulled the clothes to the floor and sat down. He let out his breath slowly. When he looked up his eyes shone with a cold light.
‘Aye . . . I read about it.’
‘When?’
‘This week. I just got off the freighter, Isle of Arran. Saw it in the South Wales Echo. First I knew. Bit of a shock.’
Dewi Jones grunted. ‘That’s why you’ve been soaking the beer?’
Scales turned his pale eyes in Jones’s direction; his glance was indifferent.
‘I been at the beer because I just got back from sea, because it was a hell of a trip, because I’ll never sail with that bloody skipper again, because I got some money to burn, because I’ve had a couple of women and I need to wash them out of my system . . . and because I like a bloody good skinful.’
Sarcastically, Jones said, ‘I thought you might have been drinking to wipe out her memory.’
‘I thought you might have been drinking because you were scared,’ Crow suggested mildly.
The indifference vanished from his eyes to be replaced by a blur of caution, mingled with suspicion. Scales opened his mouth, then closed it again, twisting it in thought.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said, with a rustle of menace in his voice.
Crow grunted, put his hands behind his back and looked down at the seated man.
‘Pretty obvious, I would have thought. I interviewed James Klein a few days ago. He told me Donna Stark had been living with him but when he threw her out, about last March, she went back to you. Now then, let’s look at the rest of it. She turns up in Wales, murdered. You turn up in Wales, drinking heavily after you’ve heard her body has been found. You say you’re not saddened by her death. Isn’t it logical to think you might be drinking to drown fears that the police might work out that you put her in the shaft?’
Scales jerked his hand spasmodically in an involuntary anger that he quickly controlled. He waited, chose his words with a care that would not have been possible minutes earlier, but the cold water and the questions had sobered him completely.
‘I saw she was dead. I was sad. But not curious. Or scared. Nothing to do with me, any of it. We was finished, washed up.’
‘When?’
‘I told you. April.’
‘A few minutes ago, it was May.’
Scales scowled at Dewi Jones, bit at his finger and said, ‘Areet then, you want me to be accurate to the day. April, May, it was around then she and me parted. The exact date would be some time in third week of May, Because after I sailed on the Isle of Arran that was it. Never saw her again.’
Dewi Jones looked at Crow, knowing the importance of the next question.
‘We’ll be checking it,’ Crow said softly, ‘but by your recollection when was the date of sailing for your freighter?’
There was a jeering note in Scales’s voice when he replied, almost as though he knew how he was about to torpedo their suspicions.
‘May 29th, out of Cardiff and Barry. Check it till you’re blue in the face.’
The room was silent. Crow and Jones looked at each other; they both knew what this meant and Scales would be foolish to give a date that could not be corroborated.
Crow sighed.
‘All right. Mr Scales, that seems to let you out, since Mrs Stark was certainly in the Rhondda Valley after you left. But perhaps you’d be kind enough to help us further in our enquiries by answering a few more questions.’’
Scales rose and walked across the room to the washbasin. Underneath the basin was a crate. He pulled it out, took out the last bottle of beer and opened it. He grinned wolfishly at the two policemen.
‘Ask away. What have I got to hide?’
* * *
The house was a quiet, semi-detached, unpretentious dwelling among the older premises behind Roath Park. It was fronted by a small stone wall that enclosed an unkempt square of turf edged with roses that were all but strangled by suckers. Crow looked at the roses sadly from where he sat with Jones in the car; he liked roses even though he had little time for gardening, and it was unfortunate those should have been allowed to grow like that.
It was well past midday and he and Jones had been waiting for an hour. The street had been quiet except for a few roundsmen and children coming home from the school at the far end of the street. If there was no sign of the man they were waiting for in the next twenty minutes Crow would have to leave the siege to Jones and go for lunch, before relieving Jones later.
‘If he’s out on a case,’ Jones said with displeasure souring his voice, ‘I hope she’s been worth it. If you can’t finish with a bird by midday. . .’
As if in answer a blue Morris came around the corner two hundred yards away. It drove sedately up towards them and parked outside the house with the dilapidated rose bushes. A man got out of the car, glanced casually towards them, locked the car and entered the house.
Crow and Jones got out of their car and walked to the house, knocked on the door, and the man who had entered opened it almost immediately. He had taken off his jacket and he carried it in his hand. He looked his two callers up and down and grinned in friendly fashion.
‘Jacks if ever I saw one. You’re looking for Teddy Skene?’
Crow nodded gravely.
‘You’ve found him,’ said the man in the doorway. ‘And his house is yours because co-operation is and always has been Teddy Skene’s watchword. Gentlemen, come in.’
He had wavy, thinning brown hair that was carefully arranged to hide the bare patches of scalp, and a stomach concealed by a carefully cut grey suit that had seen better days and would see worse. His nose was strong, his chin weak and his mouth was wide, smiling, friendly and co-operative. He would be a man who reacted to people; he reflected their moods faithfully, gave them what their words or their eyes told him they wanted, and in so doing he gave nothing of himself. He talked garrulously, but his garrulity was not uncontrolled — his verbal spasms were designed as carefully as his co-operation. If people like you, you
can manipulate them. If you throw enough words at them they hear nothing—and they talk out of sheer necessity. It was why Crow said nothing while Skene spoke rapidly, machine-gunning his words and filling the room with the explosions.
‘After all, the way I look at it, we’re in much the same line of business. Sure enough, I don’t look like a jack but what jack does, to an unpractised eye, unlike mine, I mean? I don’t look like a jack, but then, I don’t look like an enquiry agent either. I look like a butcher perhaps, or a clerk from town, or maybe even a bookie — at least when I wear that damned awful check suit of mine — but an enquiry agent, not likely! But that’s all part of the business, isn’t that so? I mean, when you fellers are working on a case you need to go about your business unobtrusively from time to time. You don’t want to be spotted when you’re waiting in a pub for a snout. Same with me. Not quite the same line but there are times when I’m in the dirty business, you know, followin’ some chap’s wife to see if she’s sleeping with the milkman or whoever, and then what’s there about me to notice? I mean, my suit? Not too good, not too scruffy. My appearance? What’s there to remember about it? One of the reasons I went into the business, believe me, I just looked in the mirror one morning and I said, “Teddy, the gratuity’s all but gone, what the hell you going to do now?” And the answer was there for me. Somethin’ where being nondescript was useful; where being able to fade and merge was a good thing. So there it was . . .’
Dewi Jones did not possess Crow’s patience and at last, with a hint of asperity, he cut in on Skene’s chatter.
‘If you just slow down a moment, Mr Skene, maybe we can explain why we’re here.’
‘Questions, ain’t that it?’ Skene smiled, showing two yellowing teeth and a gold-capped dog tooth. ‘Jacks ask. But you should’ve told me you were coming, wouldn’t have kept you waiting that way. Out of the way, on a case all night, it’s a rough life—’
‘Do you know Jack Scales?’ Jones interrupted again.