by Roy Lewis
The Chief Constable hitched himself forward in his chair, linked his fingers together anxiously and frowned at Crow.
‘Are you now telling us that Warlock will have grounds for upsetting the confession? Dammit, man—’
‘Let me finish,’ Crow interrupted quietly. ‘I don’t think there are grounds as such, provided Evans is still going along with what he said. It’s just that I’m curious, and always have been curious about that interview we conducted. You see, it went like this. When we arrived to question Evans he was in a state of shock: he was facing the truth, the fact of his wife’s death. Oh, I know he was aware that she was dead, but it was as though he had thrust it away from him, hoping his link with her could never be discovered. But now it had, and he was unwilling to accept it immediately.’
‘Was he in that state when he gave his confession?’ the Chief Constable asked anxiously.
Crow shook his head.
‘That was only the first stage. Inspector Jones asked him a few questions and he gradually snapped out of his shock, his reluctance disappeared, and he became more alert. More, he became defensive, in a very controlled way. He admitted nothing — but he asked us what we knew.’
The Chief Constable raised his eyebrows. The inflection and emphasis Crow used meant nothing to him and he showed his puzzlement openly. Crow smiled grimly.
‘It’s common enough as a manoeuvre. He simply did not want to admit to anything he need not; he needed to discover what we knew before he made a statement.’
‘But he confessed,’ the Chief Superintendent said angrily.
‘Not immediately,’ Crow replied, ‘He got us to paint the picture. He denied knowledge of the murder in the first instance and then Jones—’
Crow paused, hesitated over making it seem as though Jones had gone too quickly, too soon, and amended the statement. ‘And then we put our case to him, we told him how we saw it all add up, we named names . . . And Evans changed again, in demeanour.’
‘How do you mean?’ The Chief Constable was watching Crow carefully, and with more respect now. He had realised the manner in which Crow was to some extent covering for Inspector Jones’s precipitate behaviour in questioning Evans, and much of his earlier bluster was disappearing.
‘You say he was shocked first, then defensive — ,
‘He had changed once more. He was nervous again, And after we underlined the motive for murder, the fact of the destruction of his business through gossip well, he lapsed into deep thought after that and it was as though we weren’t there. It was at that point, I believe, that decisions were reached by Martin Evans. And once he reached them, he confessed to the murder of his wife.’
There was a brief silence where all digested the meaning behind his words.
‘All right,’ the Chief Superintendent said. ‘So he decided, so he confessed. Quick and clean.’
The Chief Constable was more perceptive, or less involved in terms of pride. He nodded, still staring at Crow. He was beginning to understand.
‘You’ve been worried ever since, the longer you think about it.’
‘That’s right,’ Crow said. ‘something happened to Martin Evans during the course of the interview and at that point he reached a decision. He had never intended confessing but he’d been anxious and scared. He came to himself, he got out of us just what we knew, and then he sank into a deep consideration as to what he should do about it all. And his decision —’
‘Was a confession!’ the Chief Superintendent almost shouted. ‘Hell, man, you know how it is. Anxiety, remorse—’
‘No.’ Crow’s voice was incisive. ‘Shock, anxiety, then a controlled leading of us in a defensive pattern, then consideration, then confession. It’s not a normal pattern, damn it, you must see that! It’s been bothering me ever since we arrested him. The confession wasn’t . . . natural I tell you, I was at a lecture recently and it was only then the thing crystallized for me. The lecturer was talking about body temperature, the constants for the corpse. That was it, you see, when a man’s dead you can apply constants — temperature, warmth of the room, body, environment — but when a man’s alive what are the constants? None, or few, because men react differently to their surroundings and their environment. And that’s what we don’t know. That’s what we need to know. We need to discover what Evans was reacting to when he confessed!’
‘He was reacting to you and Inspector Jones and his guilt and the fact of his wife’s death and the long wait until the body was discovered and the massive blow to his hopes she’d never be discovered. . .Hell—’ the Chief Superintendent waved an angry arm, ‘the list is endless.’
‘It could be all of those,’ Crow said quietly. ‘But it could be more too. Something we don’t know about; something we should know about.’
‘And that,’ the Chief Constable added, ‘is why you didn’t want us to press on so quickly with the prosecution.’
Crow inclined his head. The point was made; he was not going to rub it in.
‘At that time I wasn’t able to explain things so positively, even to myself. Then it was just a feeling something was wrong; now it’s a conviction.’ He rubbed his right hand over his bony left wrist in a gesture of self-doubt. He hesitated before speaking. ‘I think Evans is still hiding something.’
‘You’ll tell us you think he’s not guilty next,’ the Chief Superintendent grumbled.
‘No,’ Crow said slowly. ‘There’s guilt in the man. It was in his face when we first walked into his office. He was full of guilt about the death of Donna Stark. I’m sure of that, but there’s something else, something we don’t yet know . . .’
‘I think you’ve made the point,’ the Chief Constable said. ‘The case is now adjourned for the weekend after tomorrow. I shouldn’t think Warlock will call witnesses for the defence. They’ll be held in reserve. His submission of no case won’t be until next Tuesday, I should think, when we’ve finished our case. After that it’s got to go to the Crown Court—’
‘We’ll need to act quickly,’ Crow said. ‘I propose I commence an immediate and full investigation into Evans’s background and history. You’ll clear it with Commander Gray?’
The Chief Constable nodded. He pulled towards him the file on Martin Evans, read it for a few minutes and then nodded again. He looked up at Crow; they were of one mind now.
‘You’ll have to get out to Canada as quickly as possible,’
‘Canada?’ the Chief Superintendent said in stupefaction. ‘What the hell do we expect to get from there?’
Crow stood up and reached for the file on the Chief Constable’s desk.
‘With luck, a few answers—and maybe the truth.’
CHAPTER 6
The menu was in French and English. As they lunched on a pedigreed lobster in the century-old sea-food bar Crow commented upon the menu to his host. George Grattan smiled and wiped his mouth with his napkin.
‘Been eating here in English for years, before seventy French CBC employees marched in and demanded their orders got taken in French. Changed since then.’
‘I gather the same kind of problems have arisen in Wales of recent years,’ Crow said,
‘That so? Minorities, hey? Tell you, time was, the most important minority around here was the millionaires — forty-two of them lived within a mile of this spot. But Montreal is changing, I tell you. Sure, the Old Quarter is still a maze of cobbled streets, sailors’ taverns and Louis Quinze churches you can still get home-cured tobacco and pigeon pies in Bonsecours Market; Sherbrooke Street is still elegant with its elms and grey stone mansions, but most of them are now converted to luxury shops and the rich have fled up Mount Royal.’
‘You haven’t.’
George Grattan chuckled, cracked his lobster claw and wiped his fingers. He was a big man in a wrinkled grey suit. He sat squarely and comfortably in his chair, solid, dependable, reliable as a favourite hound. He looked like one in fact, Crow had decided, with his sad eyes that would never betray surprise or accept dou
bt, his dewlaps around his chin and his long, heavy face.
But he had the persistence of a hound too, once he had caught sight of his quarry: when Crow had arrived at the office for his appointment Grattan had simply swept him out again, taken him for a swift tour through the Old Quarter and then treated him to an expensive lunch.
‘Looks like you need fattenin’,’ he had said amiably, brooking no protest. Crow had given in.
Grattan chuckled again, a rich sound thick as gravy, as he extracted the last morsels of meat from the claw.
‘There’s rich, and rich,’ he said. ‘I’m sixty now and sure, I could retire, I got enough money behind me, the business has really boomed these last ten years. It’s changed Montreal to a concrete and glass jungle but that’s not my affair. I build what I get paid to build. But I like to keep an office down this part of town, if only for access to the Old Quarter.’
His sad eyes grew reflective.
‘But times sure is changing. Lot different from the time when we got started.’
‘That’s really what I’d like to hear about,’ Crow said. ‘About the old times, when you started in business with Alan Stark.’
‘Alan? I thought it was Martin you were interested in. Fine lad, Martin. I was sorry to see him leave. He never kept in touch, neither, not after the first couple of years’’
‘I’d like to hear about the Alan Stark you knew, first, by way of background,’ Crow said.
Grattan nodded, beckoned to the waiter and ordered coffee. It was served almost immediately and Grattan took his black.
‘Background, hey?’ he said. ‘Well, lemme see, what can I tell you? The way things were in 1939? The war? The building boom? You can get all that from books and newspapers, I reckon. It’s Alan Stark you want to know about. Okay, he was about six feet tall — unusual for a Welsh miner, I reckon, they’re short and dark, ain’t that so? Good-looking feller, dark hair, handsome, blue scar on his forehead from a pit accident. But he’d have been wasted in Wales in the mines, you know that? He came to Canada with his wife Jean — pretty kid, she was too, blonde, a bit fluffy, but good-natured and adored Alan — and Martin would be about three years old then, a lively kid. They came to Montreal in ’39 with just a few dollars between them. Alan worked all sorts of hours until he got himself a stake, and then he bought a truck, then another, built up a small trucking business until in ’43 he was doing well — and he merged with my old man’s building firm.’
Grattan sipped his coffee, clucked his tongue in appreciation and looked around him with satisfaction.
‘It was a good day for my old man when Alan Stark went in with him. The main thing you got to remember is that a firm can founder unless new blood comes in. Alan Stark was raw as hell, had no business background but in a strange way that helped considerably — he came up with ideas no one else thought of and the business went ahead. It was good. And after Jean died . . . that would be about 1949 . . . he really worked his guts out.’
Grattan glanced covertly at Crow and smiled.
‘Course, I don’t want to give the impression Alan Stark was all work. He used to play too. Why, when we were across in Vancouver one time, there was this party, she was built like a . . . well, I won’t go into that . . . After Jean died, though, a lot of the fun went out of him. He had a woman tucked away for a while, just outside town, but never went too good. And then he got killed.’
‘What happened?’ Crow asked.
‘Car accident,’ Grattan said shortly. Ploughed right into a truck. Funny that, in a way . . . he built up a business by trucking and then ended up under the crushed cab of one. Bad business altogether . . .’
‘How did Martin take it?’
‘Ah well, Martin . . .’ Grattan finished his coffee, waited until the waiter had served him and Crow a second time, and then turned back to Crow. ‘It was about this time Martin was making his way in the business. Alan Stark had come up the hard, entrepreneurial way with nothing behind him but grit and native intelligence. He wanted Martin to start different. They had a talk when Martin left school and he got him fixed up at law school. Once he qualified Martin came into the firm all right, but as a qualified lawyer, and he worked to build up a sound legal section so we didn’t need to rely on outside firms. Things had gone well and the legal department was solid when Alan died.’
‘That was in . . .?’
‘Oh, hell, when was it . . . 1957 or 1958? As I recall Martin was about twenty-two, anyway it happened near to his birthday. But you asked how he took it, well, he took it bad.’
‘Was he close to his father?’
Grattan nodded emphatically.
‘Pretty close. Bit of an odd character really; solid on principle. I mean, he was a lawyer, and his old man had been a miner, a trucker and at the end a businessman but Martin took something from his mother too, a sort of quiet, almost religious outlook on life. A good churchgoer, you know. Small Methodist place, they went to, him and his mother, till she died. ‘Course, she’d have been chapel-going in Wales. They’re strong on that there, huh?’
‘There’s a chapel near every bus stop in the Rhondda,’ Crow said. ‘And a pub.’
Grattan chuckled and finished his coffee.
‘Good marketing techniques there, I reckon. Get off the bus, take your choice! Anyway, like I said, Martin was pretty cut up after his father died. I was executor to Alan’s will and Martin took over the handling of it all. And that’s really how he came to cut loose from the firm, I guess.’
‘How do you mean?’
Grattan snapped his fingers for the bill.
‘Well, it was like this. Martin wasn’t too happy, I reckon, continuing to work with the firm after Alan died. They was pretty close, as I said, particularly after Martin’s mother died. Well, there he was, legal adviser to the company, his father just dead, and I guess he felt footloose, unsettled. The will gave him the push or the excuse he needed. He left us.’
‘What in the will gave him the push?’
Grattan took the bill from the waiter, scrutinized it, then signed it and handed it back. The waiter bowed obsequiously and moved away. Grattan took a toothpick from the glass in front of him and began to pick at his front teeth.
‘You got to remember,’ he said, ‘over the years Jean and Alan Stark never forgot their homeland. They were typically Welsh, I understand, in that they kept their accents — though Martin had an accent that was half Welsh and half Montreal, if you know what I mean — and they kept their affection for Wales. I hear they’re all like that, the Welsh — think their country’s really special and all that. Anyway, the fact is Alan talked about the Rhon. . .the Rhond. . .’
‘The Rhondda.’
‘Rontha, yeah, that’s it,’ Grattan said with satisfaction, and inspected a piece of lobster meat on his toothpick. ‘He talked about it a great deal, and when he’d had a few whiskies he’d get real homesick, you know? Well, inevitably, I guess, it had its effect upon young Martin. And after his father died, the will was read and there was a clause in it that gave Martin the incentive, the push he needed. It was a legacy, payable to a friend of the family.’
‘What friend?’
Grattan shook his head regretfully.
‘You got me there, too long ago for me to remember, but you could always check through probate, of course. But as far as I can make out, it was this way. Alan Stark grew up in the Rhondda and married a local girl, Jean. Both he and Jean were pretty thick with another couple who must have got married the same time and they remained friends right up until the time Alan Stark brought his wife and kiddie to Canada. After that, I don’t know the story exactly, but I guess both these friends must have got killed or something, because there was no mention of them in the will. The legacy was to their daughter, and that was Martin’s reason for leaving us here in Montreal.’
‘You mean he decided to pay the legacy to this girl in person?’ Crow asked.
‘That’s about the way it was. You got to remember, the will name
d this girl and Martin had to trace her. He made enquiries by letter first of all but learned, far as I recall, that this girl wasn’t living in the valley any more. So he decided he’d go across there and find her.’
‘In Wales?’
‘Not so. England, far as I could learn.’ Grattan frowned and tossed his toothpick aside. ‘The girl had left the valley, was working somewhere in London. Martin wrote me about it. Told me how he had some difficulty tracing her but finally made it. Paid her the legacy soon as he found her. Same letter he told me he was pulling out of the firm here in Montreal. Left it to me to fix a price for his shares. There was no argument about it. So I transmitted the money to him about six months later. Thought it would come in as a useful windfall at that time — along with the present I sent.’
‘Present?’
Grattan scratched at his dewlap.
‘Yeah. Wedding Present.’
There was a short silence. At last Crow asked quietly ‘You mean Martin Stark married this girl?’
George Grattan was no fool; he caught the inflection and stared at John Crow.
‘You didn’t get around to telling me yet,’ he said wryly, ‘just what all this questioning is in aid of. I know it’s an investigation of some sort but you ain’t been very helpful. Martin’s in trouble, I know that, but—’
‘He’s charged with the murder of his wife,’ Crow said. Grattan’s face became fixed with astonishment and he blinked twice, as though trying to brush Crow and what he was saying from his consciousness.
‘He murdered the girl?’
Crow frowned; he was puzzled. Things weren’t fitting quite into place.
‘This friend of the family — are you sure Martin Stark married her?’
‘He was all set to. Told me he’d found her, paid her the legacy, got friendly, fell in love, and they was getting married. But murder!’
‘When was it he would have married her?’ Crow asked sharply.