Evan can Wait: A Constable Evans Mystery (12 page)

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Authors: Rhys Bowen

BOOK: Evan can Wait: A Constable Evans Mystery
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“This was the chamber where they kept the pictures,” he said. “They had it filled with sheds in those days. All gone now, of course.”
“How did they get everything down here?” Evan imagined staggering down those steps with large crates.
“The lift was working in those days, of course,” Eleri said. “How do you think they got the slate to the surface then?”
In the silence even their breathing echoed. Evan’s heart was hammering so loudly he was sure that the other men must hear it. He forced himself to walk away and inspect the area. All around the walls were piles of slate, jagged outcrops, small dark pools—but no indication that anyone had been here recently.
“Looks like I’ve brought you down here for nothing,” Eleri Prys said. “This would have been what he wanted to see. Not that there’s anything to see these days. I told him that, but he was very insistent. He’d already called the mine owners and made a fuss, so I had to agree, didn’t I?”
Evan came upon other dark openings in the walls. “What if he got confused and took one of these tunnels instead?”
“Ah well, he’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t he?” Eleri Prys sucked through his teeth. “That one leads to the main exit, but he would have found it barred, so he’d have had to come back down. But that one over there leads to older chambers that haven’t been used for a hundred years. A whole network of passages in that direction. It’s easy enough to lose your way in a mine.”
“Then perhaps he’s still down here and he’s lost,” Meirion suggested. “Try calling for him, boyo.”
“Grantley? Mr. Smith? It’s Constable Evans—are you down here?” Evan’s voice boomed around the cavern and echoed back from high rock walls, so that it sounded as if ten men were shouting. As the echoes died away, they waited, listening hopefully. Silence except for the distant dripping of water.
Evan stood at the entrance to the tunnel, straining his ears for any sound. As Eleri came toward him with the torch, its light
picked out something on the soft carpet of damp slate. “Just a minute.” Evan bent to pick up the object. He held it up carefully in the torchlight. It was a cigarette butt. As Evan brought it closer to the light, he could read the words
Gitane Internationale
written around the top of the filter in dark blue letters. “Grantley Smith smoked these,” he said.
“Bloody hell,” Eleri Prys muttered. “So it looks like we’d better go on. But I’m not going too far. There’s no light down here and these old passages run for miles. It won’t help anyone if we end up getting lost too.”
They started forward again, wet slate crunching under their feet. Eleri thrust the torch into Evan’s hands. “Here, you take it, Constable Evans. You’ve got good eyes. You might spot another clue.”
Evan could hardly say that he’d rather follow, or better still, wait for them at the surface. He took the offered torch and shone it around ahead of them. This passage was smaller and wetter. Instead of running straight and even like the last one, it wound away from the large cavern. Small chambers opened on either side, some piled high with slate debris, some filled with dark pools. The ceiling got lower and lower until Evan was bent over, feeling the cold wet rock brushing against his hair and icy drips running down his neck.
Suddenly, the passage curved sharply again. Evan had been concentrating so completely on not banging his head that he didn’t notice the turn until almost too late. Ahead of him was dark water. As he reacted, he went to stand up and banged his head on the rock. Sparks shot across his eyes and the torch went flying from his grasp. He grabbed for it, but it bounced off a rock and rolled into the water.
Evan’s heart was racing as he anticipated the total darkness. Instead, miraculously, the torch stayed alight, turning the water from black to beautiful shades of gold and highlighting the rocky depths. It also illuminated the figure of a man, sprawled on the bottom.
Ginger. It seems strange to say that word out loud now, after so long. Funny that I haven’t got a single photo of her. Well, cameras were a luxury in those days. We only borrowed them to take pictures at weddings and funerals. It doesn’t matter though because I can see her right now, clear as if she was standing here in front of me. Lovely, truly lovely. That platinum blond hair piled up on her head like Ginger Rogers. Those long Betty Grable legs. She was as good as any film star. I was sure she would make it in films if she could just get to Hollywood somehow. And she’d promised to take me with her.
I dreamed about it all day down in the mine. I pictured myself as the new Tarzan, Ginger as Jane, both of us swimming together in a blue Hollywood swimming pool with the palm trees swaying. When I was with her, it all seemed so possible, if we could just get through the bloody war in one piece.
To tell you the truth, I was itching for a little excitement that first year after war was declared. Nothing was happening at all in Wales—you wouldn’t even have known there was a war on, except that the young men put on uniforms and went away and everything was on ration. But I was already bored with working down the mine. All the older boys had already been called up and gone. I couldn’t wait to turn seventeen. Not that I wanted to be
killed, but I wanted excitement. I wanted to get out of the mine and I wanted a uniform. Well, I was young and stupid in those days, wasn’t I?
And I was getting really tired of being heckled whenever army blokes came through. Every time a convoy of troops drove past, they’d yell at me: “What are you, a bleedin’ conchie? You should join up and do your part, son.”
Then they were gone before I could tell them that I was only fifteen and the army wouldn’t take me for another two years. It wasn’t my fault that I looked like a grown man.
I didn’t see so much of Ginger anymore in those days. She’d got a job working in one of the big hotels in Llandudno that they’d turned into convalescent homes for wounded servicemen. It used to drive me wild with jealousy thinking that she was around all those blokes all day.
“You do get yourself into a state about nothing, don’t you, Tref,” she said, and she ruffled my hair the way she always did. “I told you. They’re only a lot of cripples with half of their limbs blown away. What would I want with them when I’ve got a big strong bloke of my own, and every part of him is working just fine.” She reached out and demonstrated what she meant, letting her hand rest until I was excited.
She had finally let me do it with her. I was too keen and completely inexperienced but she seemed to like it all right—well enough to want to do it again next time we had a chance to be alone, and again the next time after that. But now she could only get off work every couple of weeks and I was going crazy working on my own in the dark every day, and my mind wandering into all kinds of worries about her.
And then it happened. My cousin Mostyn came looking for me in the mine one day. “The foreman wants you, Trefor bach. What you been doing, eh? Not disgracing the family name, I hope.”
My cheeks were burning as I ran to the foreman. No, I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d done wrong recently—not like the time
I’d dropped a big slab of slate when I was a new apprentice and it had cracked in two. That had cost me a day’s wages. I’d followed all the safety procedures when we’d been blasting, unlike Dai Evans, who had left his hammer at the face and was lucky he didn’t get it through his head.
“Over here, young fellow-me-lad.” The foreman was looking quite jolly. “Got a job for you. You’re the one who’s batty about art, aren’t you? Always drawing in your spare time, they tell me. Well, we’ve got a little project you can help on.”
When I heard that the pictures from the National Gallery were coming, I couldn’t believe my luck. This was it, my lucky break, the thing I’d been dreaming of. I imagined they’d let me help look after the pictures. I’d be able to help hang them and then dust them every day, which would give me a chance to study them close up. And who knows, maybe I’d meet someone from the National Gallery and he’d be impressed with my paintings and offer me a job after the war
—
providing there was an after the war, of course.
Just shows you what daft dreams you have when you’re young, doesn’t it?
And to prove how naive I was, I thought they were going to hang the pictures all over the walls of the slate caverns—a giant art gallery in total darkness. But then I found they’d put me on the team to build huts. It seemed the pictures were going to be stored in there—just like army huts, with central heating in them too, keeping the pictures at just the right temperature. And they were equipped with an alarm system. They were taking no chances, even deep inside a mountain with only one way out.
When the pictures arrived, I had my next disappointment. They were already in crates. I helped carry them into the huts and stack them under the watchful eye of National Gallery men. It was torture knowing that I might be carrying a Rembrandt or Da Vinci and not even be able to peek at it.
That’s really been the story of my life—being so close to something I really wanted and never being able to make it mine.
“Is that him?” Sergeant Watkins stared down at the body. He had come with the ambulance team, in response to Evan’s emergency call from the mine office at the front entrance. Reluctantly Evan had had to lead the way back down to the body and now stood beside the sergeant, feeling the weight and horror of the mine pressing on him again.
Evan couldn’t see the face, but the dark curls, the black leather jacket, and tight black jeans on long limbs were easy enough to identify. Lying sprawled out like that, he looked like a giant spider. He shuddered. “Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s him.”
“Stupid bugger,” Watkins said, still staring down in fascination. “He must have blundered down here and not realized the passage went to the left and stepped straight into the bloody water.”
“I wonder why he didn’t manage to get out again?” Evan asked. “It should have been easy enough to haul himself out.”
“He might have tripped and hit his head on a rock and fallen in unconscious. Or maybe he couldn’t swim,” Watkins said. “Either way, we’ll know as soon as we get a postmortem. If he hit his head first, he probably won’t have water in his lungs.”
“And we’ll see the wound,” Evan added.
Watkins turned to the ambulance men, who were standing uneasily in the shadows. “Okay, boys. You can bring him out.”
The youngest member of the crew leaned over the side in an attempt to grab the body.
“Watch it, boyo,” the older man warned, “or we’ll be pulling you out, too. These bloody pools are deeper than they look.”
He took a pole and stuck it down into the water. It reached nowhere close to the bottom. “I reckon it’s twelve feet down at least. You’d better get your wetsuit on, lad.”
The younger man began putting on a wetsuit. Watkins moved closer to Evan. “So how did you find him down here?”
“Process of elimination and some luck,” Evan said. “The odd
thing is that he had an appointment with Mr. Prys that morning. Why not wait and have a proper tour?”
“Bloody stupid, if you ask me,” Watkins said. “How did he get this far, that’s what I want to know? If he came in the back way, like you said he did, there’d have been no light at all, would there? And I don’t see his torch anywhere.”
“We checked out the area pretty thoroughly,” Evan said. “We didn’t find anything.”
“It could be under him,” the older ambulance man suggested. “We’ll know in a minute when young Rob gets all suited up.”
“I might need you to help me, Mr. Howells,” Rob said as he prepared to lower himself into the water. “I don’t know if I can bring him up alone.”
“You get him moving and I’ll use the hook when he comes within reach.” Mr. Howells took off his jacket and started rolling up his sleeves. “I’m not getting in that cold water unless I really have to. Besides, if he’s been there a while, he’ll come floating to the surface easy enough. I’m rather surprised he hasn’t already.”
Rob put on goggles and lowered himself into the water. Then he took a deep breath and plunged downwards. The eerie light of the torch made his descent throw distorted shadows across the cave roof. He reached the body, tugged at it, then came back to the surface, gasping for breath. “Bloody hell, Mr. Howells, he’s heavy. I can’t move him.”
“Have another try, lad. You’ve got the only good wetsuit. Just grab his arm and swim up with him.”
Rob went down again. He grabbed the corpse’s arm and kicked for the surface with all his might. The corpse hung beneath him like a rag doll. Mr. Howells reached in with the grappling pole and snagged the jacket.
“Bloody’ell. He is heavy.”
Evan took off his own jacket and reached in to help as the body came closer to the surface. He started as his hand closed
around the wet tendrils of hair. At last, gasping with effort, the three of them managed to drag the body to the side of the pool, then lift it onto dry land. As they moved it, something fell from the jacket and tumbled to the bottom of the pool.
“No wonder he was so heavy,” Rob commented. “That was a piece of slate. Look, he’s got another bloody great piece inside his jacket, and more in his pockets.”
Watkins looked at Evan. “Someone wanted to make sure he stayed down.”
Evan stared down at Grantley’s lifeless face, with its wide-open eyes staring up as if in surprise. “In which case his death wasn’t an accident at all. Someone followed him down here and killed him.”
Watkins nodded. “Not a bad place to hide a body. If that torch hadn’t been waterproof, you’d never have seen him. He could have lain there for years.” He turned to the ambulance men, who were now pulling off Rob’s wetsuit. “Good work, lads. Now let’s get him to the morgue and see what the postmortem shows.”
As the men lifted him onto a stretcher, Grantley’s head fell back. Evan nudged Watkins. “Look at his throat, Sarge.”
Watkins looked where Evan was pointing at the areas of discoloration. “Badly bruised. Could mean he was strangled. I should call the D.I.” He got out his mobile phone, then laughed. “Of course. It’s not likely to work down here, is it?”
The somber procession set off back to the surface. Evan was surprised to find it was still daylight, a dusky pink twilight in which the smoke from fires hung in the still air. It felt as if he had been down there for days, weeks, years. He stood breathing in the crisp winter air.
Watkins tapped his arm. “You all right? You look like you could do with a drink.”
“I’m fine now,” Evan said.
“It must have been rough for you down there,” Watkins muttered. “I remember how claustrophobic you were when we went
through the Chunnel to France that time. It doesn’t normally affect me, but I have to say that place gave me the willies. It must be something to do with knowing there are millions of tons of rock over your head.”
Evan managed a smile.
Watkins snapped open his phone. “Right. I should call the D.I. and see what he wants me to do. Then I think I’ll come with you and break the news to his mates. This is going to be rather a blow to them, isn’t it?”
They hardly spoke as they drove the fifteen miles back to Llanfair. Evan, still recovering from being in the mine, was glad that he had to concentrate on driving the winding road.
“So, what do you think?” Sergeant Watkins asked as they walked across the Everest Inn car park together. “You’re the one who’s good at solving murders. What sort of bloke was Grantley Smith? Were you around him enough to get an impression of him?”
Evan nodded. “He was the sort who liked to push people’s buttons. I think he got his kicks from antagonizing other people. He certainly got my hackles up and I hardly knew him.”
“Ah, so you might turn up on the suspect list, might you? You were the one who knew where to look for him, that’s always suspicious.”
Evan chuckled. “Unfortunately, I’ve got a perfect alibi,” he said. “At the time he must have been killed, I was up at the lake with the film crew, waiting for someone to turn up so that they could start work.”

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