In Guilty Night (18 page)

A psychiatrist reported on her deteriorating behaviour. Where Hogg used brutality, and Doris invoked the huge resources of her spite, the psychiatrist employed trickery and cajolery to force upon her the conformity apparently demanded by society. Hogg ranted constantly of conformity, intoning at meals, interrupting lessons, imposing himself on the most innocent recreation, using words and language Mandy could not comprehend, but the meaning of which she must absorb and obey. Like the other children to whom she dared voice her confusion, she understood nothing, except, as time progressed, the folly of not obeying Hogg’s dictates to the last syllable. Deadly routine, imposed for its own sake, brought stultifying predictability to each day, killing the smallest hope, the least initiative, the youthful dreams of jobs and boyfriends and babies. Blodwel-time existed within its own dimensions, limited to the day to come and the terrors it would bring.

Wandering, sleepy thoughts jerked chaotically, tangled up inside her head. She stared at the ceiling, eyes fixed on a patch of dampness creeping from the corner of the room like a cloud, her breath loud and panicky, terrified once more of suffocating
under her own helplessness. She lifted her head from the pillow, a wreck of a child clinging to a bit of hope, and looked at the lump of humanity in the other bed, fast in righteous torpor under the thin quilt. Pulling day clothes out from the pillow, she dressed, cloth against flesh so tearingly loud she expected Dilys Roberts to come running down the corridor, feet slapping on the linoleum tiles. No one woke, no one came to fling her bodily to the bed and stand over her, mouthing viciousness. She crept to the showers, closed the door, and pushed open the one window Hogg never bothered to nail shut, a vent too narrow for any but the thinnest of bodies. She wriggled out, glass pressing her head, frame biting her ribs and snagging her clothes, and hung on the ledge for a moment before dropping to the flagstones beneath.

Eifion Roberts yawned, mouth wide as a hippo’s. McKenna yawned in sympathy. ‘Nice supper.’

‘Better than anything your Denise could rustle up. Bet you lived off Marks and Sparks ready mades.’

‘Why can’t you be quiet about her?’

‘She annoys me.’ Dr Roberts drained his glass. ‘She irritates me. She’s an ever-growing thorn in my flesh. I wish she’d sail off into the sunset on her boyfriend’s boat.’ Refilling the glass, he added, ‘And I’d be really made up if they foundered in the Seven Sisters tides off Holyhead.’

‘Anybody’d think she was your wife, not mine.’ McKenna yawned again. ‘You’re drunk as a skunk. I’d better help your long-suffering spouse get you to bed.’

‘There’s a thing, eh? Dai Skunk. I hope folk remembered the rules when they patched him up.’

‘I’m sure they did.’

‘Only that virus is over-friendly, and not in the least sexually selective.’ The pathologist gulped his drink. ‘Happy to take residence wherever folk are careless enough to offer, and given some blood or bodily fluid for transport, it’ll move house before you can say “bum boy”.’

Dewi Prys waited again in ambush, outside McKenna’s front door. He climbed out of his car as McKenna parked his own, a padded envelope under his arm, and switched off the radio in the middle of a plaintive song about lost love.

‘What is it, Dewi? Can’t it wait?’

‘I’m not really the one to decide, sir.’

Unlocking the front door, stumbling over the cat, McKenna switched on lights, casting an orangy glow on the darkened little street. ‘You can have ten minutes. I’m tired.’

Rhiannon went to the ball alone, danced and drank and chattered, and let her host escort her home, arriving as the great longcase clock in Bedd y Cor’s hall chimed midnight. As she said goodnight to this Prince Charming, his hand squeezed her knee. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’ he whispered. The chauffeur glanced in the rear mirror, a knowing little smile about his lips. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I could do for you?’

‘The staff will be waiting. Do thank your wife for a lovely evening.’ She escaped the fingers pawing the back of her dress and reaching for her thighs, and almost ran for the door. The car waited, and she heard its engine purr to life only when the front door closed behind her.

Mari waited in shadow at the rear of the hall. ‘The police came.’

‘Why?’

‘They didn’t say. Josh spoke to them.’

‘I expect they’ll come back if it’s important,’ Rhiannon said.

‘Cook left supper.’

‘I think I’ll go straight to bed.’

‘Mr Elias rang.’

‘What did he say?’ Rhiannon stopped halfway up the staircase, the hem of her dress cascading over the treads, fine-boned hand resting on the banister rail, diamond rings glittering.

Mari shrugged. ‘Nothing much. He might not be back tomorrow.’

‘Where is he? Still in Germany?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.’ Mari turned towards her own flat. ‘It’s not up to me to ask him what he does with himself, is it?’

9

‘I’m not surprised you’re tired,’ Griffiths observed, with some sympathy. ‘You’re not getting much sleep. Any word about David Fellows?’

‘He had a massive internal haemorrhage,’ McKenna said. ‘His systems appear to be collapsing generally, so nobody’s rating his chances.’

The superintendent shuddered. ‘Was he attacked? Had he crossed the wrong people once too often?’

‘Like Arwel?’

‘Don’t make connections. People like Fellows live too close to badness. They get a kick from courting danger.’

‘There’s no evidence of assault. We treated his flat as a crime scene, but there was just a lot of junk and filth. And some home videos, which Dewi brought round to my house last night.’

Griffiths drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘I wish Janet’d shape up like he does. I’m very disappointed with her. What was yesterday’s palaver all about?’

‘Stress and frustration. She’s finding it hard to adjust to this kind of investigation, and she’s terrified of failing. She wants to prove something to her father.’

‘She’s employed to prove things to a court, not her father,’ Griffiths commented acidly. ‘She’ll find herself back pounding the streets if she’s not careful, not flashing around dressed up to the nines and being self-important. Why does she wear her best clothes to go slumming on a murder hunt?’

‘She always dresses like that.’ McKenna smiled. ‘She’s a well-brought up chapel-minister’s only daughter, setting a good example.’

‘She’s repressed. Yesterday was a bit of rebellion, in my opinion. Pity she didn’t get it out of her system years ago, like Jack’s girls.’

‘Is Janet coming to work today?’ Dewi asked.

‘Probably not.’

‘Is her car badly damaged?’

‘Why don’t you call and ask her?’

‘I just wondered, sir. Is Mr Tuttle back?’

‘He was delivered safely from the teeth of the blizzard last night.’

‘Will he be going to Denbigh?’

‘No one’s going to Denbigh yet,’ McKenna said. ‘You’re watching home movies, and Inspector Tuttle’s on his way to Blodwel.’

‘Why?’

‘Mandy Minx went walkies in the night, all alone.’

‘Maybe she’s meeting Gary.’

‘More likely she couldn’t take any more without going completely off her head.’

‘Mandy’s been an even bigger pest since she got drunk the other night,’ Jack reported. ‘Doris reckons she had drugs along with her drink.’

‘Doris would,’ McKenna said. ‘Did you see him?’

‘He’s not well.’ Jack grinned. ‘The chief fire officer wasn’t best pleased to find the windows nailed up, so Ronnie’s anticipating trouble. He doesn’t respond well to added stress, because there’s more than enough with the job.’

‘I imagine he’ll be thoroughly stressed out when he knows you talked to Darren, and God knows how he’ll react when we’ve seen Tony Jones.’

‘I’ve been trying to work out the implications of what Darren said about Blodwel and the Hoggs,’ Jack said. ‘But I can’t get my head round anything solid. It’s like tussling with fog.’

‘Owen Griffiths is having the same experience.’ McKenna lit a cigarette, and gazed through the window. ‘I’m quite sure Arwel wasn’t the only abuse victim, but we can’t connect the abuse with the Hoggs. We can’t even accuse them of knowing about it and doing nothing. When Mandy let the cat out of the bag about the kids’ nocturnal activities, she succeeded in letting them off the hook. Doris made it very clear she doesn’t approve of kids going out on the tiles, because they get up to mischief. Mandy got drunk, the boys got raped.’

‘And what about the brutality, the sheer bloody nastiness?’

‘Darren’s got axes to grind, Jack. You only heard one side of the story.’

‘And the balance of plausibility will rest on the other.’

‘How much does Hogg weigh, d’you think? He’s small and weedy and the wrong side of forty. And the teacher? About the same size, isn’t he, and near retirement,’ McKenna said. ‘Darren’s bigger than you.’

‘Size is nothing to do with it. Hogg terrifies these kids. They’re like rabbits caught in the headlights of a truck.’

In the windowless cubicle behind the canteen where video machine and television set were housed, Dewi opened the padded envelope and took out three tapes, the unlabelled casings greasy with fingerprints and scratched with much use. Pushing one in the mouth of the machine, he sat back, legs crossed, and watched images flicker to life on the screen.

The body that housed the soul of David Fellows bled inside itself again at noon, giving way to years of abuse and brutality, its organs too frail to sustain the pressure of blood flowing through them. The left kidney ruptured, leaking blood and uric acid, the right collapsed gently in the face of increased demands, their demise unremarked for critical milliseconds before the machines to which the man was wired recorded malfunction, and began a siren wailing. Before he reached the operating theatre, his heart was long in crisis, rhythms and pulses chaotic beyond recall.

Shortly after she finished lunching, his mother learned, from a gentle voice on the telephone, that her son died without regaining consciousness. The police were told soon afterwards, as the body on the trolley, sheeted and tagged, was wheeled to the mortuary by two porters.

Stirring a spoon round and around a mug of tea, Dewi said, ‘Those videos are gross.’

‘Home movies of that kind usually are,’ McKenna commented. ‘Who’s starring?’

‘A bunch of very consenting adults of both sexes, having it off in every way possible, some near impossible, and not a condom in sight. I know some of them, off the estate and round town.’

‘Then bring them in for a chat, and point out they’re contributing to the black economy.’

‘Janet’s here. She’s legged it from her father’s sermonizing.’

‘She can help identify the film stars.’

Dewi frowned. ‘Those videos aren’t fit for any woman to see, let alone a minister’s daughter.’

‘Women star in the bloody movies, don’t they? She gets no favours on account of her sex, and no protection from the nastier parts of the job. Modern lady police officers want it that way, and we wouldn’t want to disappoint them.’

And as he walked down the stairs from his office, McKenna wondered if the eye of the camera had ever captured Denise in wantonness, leaving her image to titillate the senses long after her body decayed to dust.

‘You don’t often visit me here, Michael.’ Eifion Roberts cleared files and textbooks from the spare chair in his small office. ‘To what do I owe the honour?’

‘Don’t ask. I might say there’s nothing more interesting at hand.’

Squeezing behind his desk, the pathologist nodded. ‘Police work must get very tedious. Same old questions to the same old faces, getting the same old answers. Maybe the lad in Denbigh’ll supply some novelty.’

‘He’s not there any longer. Can I smoke in this place?’ Lighting a cigarette before Dr Roberts responded, McKenna added, ‘Apparently he’s not mad, just bad. He tried to torch the ward, so he’s been shunted elsewhere. Jack’s still trying to find him.’

‘Can’t the hospital tell you?’

‘Social Services took him away late yesterday. We’re trawling all the juvenile secure units, because I doubt he’s walking free. He seems rather out of control.’

‘So people tell you.’ The pathologist doodled on the cover of a file. ‘Hearsay, presumption; what folk want you to think. I guess he was moved from Blodwel to stop him talking, only he shot his mouth off in South Wales instead, so he’s shunted to the funny farm. He might’ve resorted to arson to get people to listen.’

‘Rather extreme.’

‘Desperate measures become the only options. Abused kids often talk because they can’t stand the strain any longer, so they have to be discredited. The pity of it is that boys like Tony don’t see the consequences. Attempted arson looks like badness rather than desperation. Depends who’s looking.’ He
drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘I’ve just opened up David Fellows.’ McKenna stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette, and lit another. ‘Liver and both kidneys necrotic, guts riddled with massive tumours, Kaposi’s lesions all over. A veritable invasion of life in altered circumstances.’

‘You don’t look well,’ McKenna said. ‘Take the rest of the day off.’

Jack gestured to the files stacked on his desk and spilling on to chairs and floor, and rubbed his eyes, leaving bruise marks on the skin. ‘There’s too much to do, apart from the huge backlog of work on other cases, and I can’t make any headway. I don’t know what’s the matter.’ He paused. ‘And quite frankly, I’m fed up with Janet’s moods.’

‘Her father’s being difficult.’

‘So she says,’ Jack said, with some bitterness. ‘Aren’t all fathers difficult just for the hell of it?’

McKenna leaned against the window-sill, and lit a cigarette. ‘You might feel less distracted if you sorted out your own patch.’

‘I don’t know what to sort. Em says the girls are going through a teenage phase, like half the kids in Blodwel, and I’m over-reacting.’ Jack sighed. ‘What’s the difference between a phase and out of control? How can you tell if one kid’ll grow out of whatever makes teenagers behave like bloody lunatics, and another one won’t? Then the twins stuck their oar in about Arwel and Gary. God knows where they hear this talk. I dread to think who they’re mixing with in school.’