Murder in the Mine by Roy Lewis

Author:Roy Lewis [Lewis, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thrillers and mysteries
Published: 2019-01-26T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Commander Gray was displeased by the suggestion but John Crow pressed his arguments with force. In the first instance, if it became absolutely necessary, Crow would simply take a backlog of leave due to him and spend it in Cardiff. But secondly, there were other considerations to take into account: the fact that the Murder Squad was not overstretched at this particular time. Crow himself had recently undertaken two investigations that had been rapidly concluded, and it was necessary to send a representative to the forensic science conference at the University of Wales. The third argument was perhaps the most cogent, however, and most likely to appeal to Commander Gray: a chief inspector of the Murder Squad had been attached to the investigation into the murder of Donna Stark, his duties had been advisory and consultative, he had counselled caution and his advice had been disregarded. There were two possibilities therefore — the case against Martin Evans might stagger to an unsuccessful conclusion, and the involvement of the Murder Squad might be seen to be utterly ineffective.

It was the last possibility Commander Gray was not happy about. He was a political animal in his bones, he obeyed his masters. So when Crow suggested the solution he finally agreed: John Crow should be the representative selected to attend the conference at the University of Wales, but should at the same time hold a watching brief on the preliminary hearing before the magistrates in the matter of the prosecution of Martin Evans.

‘I suppose you have doubts about his guilt,’ Gray said sourly.

‘Not exactly. I just think we don’t know the whole story. And you know as well as I do that if the ends aren’t all completely tied up it might get thrown out as no case to answer, or worse, it might get to the Crown Court and fail badly there. Reputations can be lost . . .’

It was enough for Gray.

* * *

John Crow attended the sherry party at the conference, though he did not care for such forced occasions, then took dinner with the rest of the members. He sat in on the first lecture, in which an eminent pathologist spoke of the use of body temperature in estimating the time of death, and the limitations to be recognized in the evidential value of the pathologist’s deductions. In his room later that night John Crow found himself staring at and not understanding the exponential terms he had written in his notebook ‘where O : the temperature excess of the rectum over the environment at the time t and B, C, Z, p= constants for the corpse under observation. . .’

He found great difficulty in going to sleep that night, the words constants for the corpse under observation spinning around in his mind until they somehow became utterly confused with Martin Evans and Donna Stark and a deep black shaft. The shaft became his room at four in the morning, the distant wail of an ambulance siren was Donna Stark’s death cry, and Martin Evans was the enigma, the dark shadow in the darkness.

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