The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (87 page)

There was another bitter silence.

“So where are we?” asked the coroner, with a bland smile. “If you’re not going to charge Lloyd, then I’ve got to get on with my inquest and draw a line under this matter.”

Mordecai ground his teeth. “I hate to see the bastard getting away with it! I even had a word with the Crown Prosecutor, but he laughed down the phone at me. He said the CPS wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole, unless we came up with something definite.”

The coroner rose to his feet and motioned with his head at his officer.

“Well, there’s nothing more to be gained by sitting here, Inspector. Unless you can get a confession out of this man by tomorrow-or come up with some solid evidence, I’m going to have to complete the inquest. We can’t keep the poor woman above ground for much longer.”

When all the others had left his office, Mordecai Evans glowered at his sergeant.

“Confession be damned! That crafty bugger Lloyd wouldn’t confess to giving short weight in a packet of his crisps!”

A week later, Lewis Lloyd attended the coroner’s inquest, held in a vacant room in the Magistrate’s Court. He wore a dark suit and a black tie as he sat avoiding the poisonous looks thrown across the court at him by Mordecai Evans. Apart from the police and a couple of bored young reporters from the local papers, the only other people present were three nosey old men, whiling away their retirement in the warmth of the court, as the weather had turned frosty outside.

As prophesied, the proceedings were short and unproductive. Doctor Carlton appeared in person to give his post-mortem findings, but the coroner had accepted the written report of the Home Office man, which contributed nothing more useful. With the Detective-Inspector glowering at every word, David Mostyn rattled through the evidence and rapidly summed up the negative findings. There was no jury and he wisely made no comments about any suspicious circumstances, as this was outside a coroner’s jurisdiction. After asking Lloyd if he wanted to ask any questions, which Lewis mutely declined, Mostyn brought in a “open verdict”, leaving the cause of death unascertained. Even the fact that he had refused a cremation certificate was not mentioned in open court, leaving the option open for an exhumation at a later date if any further evidence came to light, unlikely though that seemed.

As Lewis Lloyd walked out into the cold street, Mordecai “accidentally” stumbled against him, making the publican stagger.

“Think you’re such a clever bastard, don’t you, Lloyd! But I’ll have you one of these days!” he snarled.

Ignoring the empty threat, Lewis drove back to Tonypandy just in time for lunchtime opening and a plea from Sharon.

“The lager’s off, Mr Lloyd. Can you put another one on, please?”

He opened the trap in the floor behind the bar and went down the steps to the cellar, switching on the lights as he went. For a few minutes, he trundled aluminium kegs about and connected pipes with the ease born of long familiarity.

“All right, girl, try it now!” he called up the steps. When all was working again, he prepared to climb up to the bar, but took a moment with his hand on the light switch to look around the large cellar. Apart from the row of metal casks and cylinders with their complex piping connected to the bar above, there were racks and cases of bottles, boxes of crisps and peanuts and a collection of oddments which made part of the chamber look like a jumble sale.

As his eyes roved over the old wooden barrels, off-cuts of carpet, plastic bags, broken table lamps, discarded chairs, a dilapidated wardrobe and two bicycles, he grinned to himself. Those silly buggers of policemen had searched this place several times and had seen and even handled the instruments of Rita’s death without the faintest notion of recognizing them as such.

Satisfied that he was now safe for ever, he clicked the switch and went up to check that the lager was flowing properly.

Early that evening, he decided to celebrate by staying the night in his cabin high above the valley. Leaving Wayne to look after the bar, he climbed up Mafeking Street to reach the hut that used to shelter the men maintaining the cable hoist that once brought the black waste up from the colliery. It was almost dark when he unlocked the door. Inside, the cabin felt cold and damp and he shivered for the first time that autumn. Looking though the window to see if there were any birds about, there was just enough light to see as far as the old lime kiln, which had given him the idea in the first place.

As he crumpled up some newspaper and pushed it into his stove with a handful of firewood, he recalled reading about those kilns, which burned endlessly in the old days, turning lumps of limestone into quick-lime for farmers and builders. On winter nights, tramps used to sleep huddled near them for warmth – and quite a few never woke up. The heavy carbon dioxide gas produced by the kilns used to settle over them and, though not poisonous in itself, displaced all the oxygen and peacefully extinguished their dismal lives.

Intrigued, Lewis had pursued his researches in the Reference Library and discovered that such deaths left no physical signs whatsoever, the explanation being derived only from the circumstances. He also read that not only lime-kilns, but wells dug deeply into chalk and even grain silos on farms could produce this fatal heavy vapour that killed so silently.

He put more wood and coal on the fire and lit a butane camping-lamp to give him enough light to read his latest bird-watching magazine, for there was no electricity in the hut. Sitting in the tattered but comfortable arm-chair, he leafed through the pages, with a can of Boddington’s Bitter and a Cornish pasty for sustenance. As the room warmed up, Lewis became comfortably drowsy but, before falling asleep, he went over yet again in his mind, the details of the plot which had defeated the best brains of the police and the forensic experts.

That memorable night, Rita had been out for the evening, allegedly at a hen-party, but Lewis was well aware that she had gone out to a club in Merthyr with her latest chap, a used-car dealer from Aberdare. She had returned at one in the morning, reeling drunk and this had decided him that tonight was the night-or, rather, morning. After giving him some semi-coherent abuse, Rita tottered off to her bed and within minutes was flat on her back, snoring like a hog.

Lewis Lloyd had swung into action, going down to the cellar for his equipment. From the old wardrobe, he took four wire coat-hangers saved from the dry-cleaners and bent them at right-angles. He took them upstairs with a few black plastic rubbish bags and carefully constructed a kind of open-topped well around his wife’s head. By sliding one end of each hanger under the pillow and the duvet, he erected four supports around which he arranged the plastic bags, securing them with sellotape.

At this stage, he checked that she was undisturbed, but as expected, Rita was out cold and, even if she had woken up, would have been too confused to know what was going on. Satisfied, he went downstairs again and humped up one of the gas cylinders that was used to pressurize the metal beer kegs. Propping it against the bedside cabinet, he used a length of spare tubing to fill his improvised gas chamber with carbon dioxide. He left the end of the tube inside, keeping a slow but steady flow to displace all the air from inside his little tent. Lewis was well aware that it would overflow, but the heavy gas would sink to the floor and was no danger to himself. He checked at intervals with a cigarette lighter to make sure that the chamber was full, the flame going out from lack of oxygen as soon as he dipped it below the top edge of the plastic bags.

“Worked like a dream!” he murmured, as he slumped in his armchair, then giggled as he wondered if Rita had had any last dreams that night. Her breathing changed after a few minutes from noisy snoring to a rasping hiss, and quickened in rate. Then it began to diminish, both in volume and speed, and after another five or six minutes appeared to cease altogether. By the light of his little flame, he could see that her face and lips had become faintly violet and he suspected that she was already dead. To be on the safe side, he left the gas running and went outside for half an hour, to avoid any possible effects upon himself. When he came back, he knew she had gone, but checked the absence of a pulse in her neck just to make sure.

Turning off the gas, he opened the window to dissipate any remaining vapour. Then he dismantled his apparatus and returned the cylinder to the cellar, where he reconnected it to the barrel of lager, ready for business when they opened. He straightened out the hangers and hung them back in the wardrobe, then filled the plastic bags with old papers and other rubbish and dumped them out in the yard, ready for the bin-men. His work done, he made one last check to make sure that Rita had not managed some kind of resurrection, then he went to bed himself and slept soundly with no twinge of guilt or conscience until it was time to “discover” her body.

Now with a sigh of satisfaction, Lewis sleepily finished his beer and putting aside his birdy magazine, slid further down in his chair for a doze and to think about a trip he had planned to Mid-Wales next month to look for red kites.

“Now we’ll never bloody know what happened to his missus!” grumbled Mordecai Evans, as they left the coroner’s court a week later.

“It certainly wasn’t carbon monoxide poisoning, that’s for sure!” said Willy Williams. “Did you see the colour of his skin in the mortuary? Now I know what they mean by ‘being in the pink’!”

The Detective-Inspector ignored his sergeant’s feeble attempt at witticism. “The SOCOs say the flue-pipe of that stove must have been blocked since last Spring. Bloody ironic, really!”

Willy nodded sagely. “Lewis Lloyd would have appreciated that, if he’d known. A jackdaw’s nest, of all things!”

“Serve the bugger right,” grunted Mordecai.

1
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Afrikaans: “Good day.”

2
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Afrikaans: “Scram!”

3
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Curved Boer pipe.