In Guilty Night (27 page)

‘Plausible. Feasible.’ Eifion Roberts refilled his mug with coffee, and handed the pot to McKenna. ‘Even very reasonable. Why should Hogg report Arwel and Tony and their alleged goings-on? Social Services like to keep their secrets secret and their mucky linen in their own washing basket, like the rest of us, and all you’ve actually got against Hogg is Mandy’s less than reliable testimony, a handful of rumours among the restless natives, and a failure rate with kids that’s par for the course.’

McKenna lit a cigarette, and tossed the empty carton in the waste bin. ‘I wish to God we could find Gary Hughes.’

‘You’ve smoked over ten fags since I arrived,’ Dr Roberts
noted. ‘Gary doesn’t want to be found, though he could be leaving you a trail of sorts.’ He watched McKenna pace the room. The cat too watched her master, disturbed by his restlessness. ‘The problem is you labelled Hogg as the cause and extent of all the troubles at the outset, and you’re clinging to that, though you may well be quite misguided. Hidden agendas don’t only underwrite the ethos of abusive institutions. They’re dear to us all, even the Mandys of this world.’

‘We know about the Elises’ hidden agenda,’ McKenna said. ‘He wanted to adopt Arwel, she wanted to stop him.’

Munching a digestive biscuit, Dr Roberts said, ‘I think there’s unfinished business there, and you should be finding out what’s scribbled on the other hidden agendas tucked up their couture sleeves like posh hankies. He strikes me as a damn sight more ambiguous than Goethe’s twilight. She’ll be like any other woman under the fancy clothes and make-up.’

‘You’re not very helpful, are you?’

‘I can’t think for you.’ He reached for another biscuit. ‘You read Lombroso’s epic yet?’

‘Some, in between social work and childcare literature, and learned essays on the nature of institutions.’

‘And Beethoven’s epistles, which I daresay you find more enlightening. Would Lombroso’s parameters mark Elis as a baddie? Or Rhiannon? Are their ears misaligned in profile with the nose? Are the facial proportions discordant? And what about teeth?’

‘Their teeth are a credit to modern dentistry,’ McKenna said. ‘Unlike Mandy’s.’

‘Fancy being able to see your fate by opening your mouth, eh?’ Dr Roberts sighed. ‘I’ve noticed the central upper jaw incisors are slightly out of true on a lot of these troubled and troublesome girls. Did you know Beethoven had geeky teeth? Probably ’cos his father smacked him in the mouth so often.’ Wiping crumbs from his lips, he added, ‘Caring Victorian husbands banned their wives from listening to the piano music, because of that dreadful feeling it arouses in the guts, like inflamed sexual desire. Mind you, I don’t expect it makes Elis want to turn his attention to his wife. Sexually, we’re all as grey as a cat in the moonlight, but he’s far more shadowy than most.’

‘He makes me think of sex.’ McKenna sat in the worn armchair beside the fire, and put his coffee-mug carefully on the edge of the hearth. ‘And the sorrow of it.’

‘You think too much, and that can become a dangerous habit,’
Dr Roberts commented. ‘Looking at those porn movies from Dai Skunk’s place could make you believe something crucial’s missing from your life. Pictures like that can stir and heat the coldest blood, never mind sending the imagination places it could get desperate to live in.’ He watched McKenna rip open a new cigarette packet. ‘But they’re just variations on a theme, because sex palls fast after that first, short, explosive journey out of childhood.’

McKenna smiled wryly. ‘And Nature must keep our interest going somehow?’

Dr Roberts nodded. ‘Until that lady’s ready to finish us off, the reproductive power of the gene will rule the world, as always, while we bow down to our infatuation with our own death, and the awesome knowledge of being held fast in the slipstream of Time.’

‘The best minds don’t accept Time as a great comet hurtling from infinity to infinity,’ McKenna said. ‘It’s a construct of artifice.’ He smiled. ‘And even without the benefit of modern science, Goethe understood that no thing decays to nothing. One form of energy simply transforms to another.’

‘Bully for Goethe!’ Dr Roberts observed. ‘Didn’t stop him being terrified of dying, did it?’

Beyond the bedroom window, a pale winter moon rode high in the sky, clouds dragging across its face, and McKenna wondered what music the clouds made in heaven as they heaved and rolled and unravelled themselves, fighting winds whose only reality was the flight of the clouds they harried. In the garden below, grey in the wan moonlight, a strange cat slept beneath one of the spindly shrubs, curled in a tight ball on the cold earth.

The other cat nuzzled his hand as he lay wakeful, stroking her soft coat. A simple theme ran through his mind, the variations of its notes and intervals following one upon the other until it was over, and he fell alseep at last, some time after the cathedral clock chimed three long notes.

13

‘Oh, God!’ Owen Griffiths groaned. ‘D’you really want to question Elis under caution?’

McKenna nodded. ‘And I want search warrants for his vehicles and house.’

The superintendent frowned. ‘You were gunning for Hogg.’

‘Hogg isn’t out of the frame. Putting the finger on Elis might be a diversionary tactic.’ McKenna rubbed his forehead, feeling the tension of an incipient headache. ‘But we can’t ignore Elis. Maybe he’s simply another victim of this sodding awful mess, and he loved the boy as a surrogate son, or maybe he indulged his preference for the love that dare not speak its name.’

‘Oh, God! Don’t bring Oscar Wilde into this, or that upper-class pervert he was so besotted with.’

‘Pervert or not, Lord Alfred Douglas wrote a rather poignant verse on the subject.’

‘The
Ballad
of
Reading
Gaol
is a good deal more poignant, and a sight less sentimental.’ Griffiths took a pen from the desk tidy, and drew a row of interlocking boxes on a sheet of official notepaper. ‘How many vehicles?’

‘Car, Range Rover, a large horsebox, a trailer and a tractor.’

‘Forget the tractor. Whoever dumped the boy had him in a boot or something.’ Griffiths began to draw bars inside the boxes. ‘Or a trailer.’ He surveyed his doodling, then drew a figure behind the bars. ‘And the ground was so hard with frost, we couldn’t tell if a herd of elephants’d been there. Oh, sod it!’ He threw down the pen, and tossed the paper in the waste bin. ‘I’d better contact HQ, hadn’t I?’

‘Unless you want to assume that mantle of responsibility yourself.’

‘I wanted to retire peacefully. Fat chance, eh? Is there any point searching the house? I know the boy’s clothes are still missing, and Forensics are still sifting all the rubbish dredged
up by the railway, but I doubt Elis is stupid enough to leave hard evidence around, and any of Arwel’s stuff you found at Bedd y Cor could quite legitimately be there. He spent enough time at the place.’ Griffiths sighed. ‘Ronald Hogg could justify anything. In one breath he’s relating his dreadful suspicions of Elis, and in the next, he’s saying why he did nothing to stop the association.’

‘But as Eifion Roberts pointed out, it’s all wonderfully plausible and reasonable. Hogg can only wait and watch, as he puts it, until Elis drops himself in it. Until then, he has to take him and his motives at face value, because otherwise he might deny a very disadvantaged child the chance of a wonderful rehabilitation.’

‘Can’t Hogg make up his bloody mind? Was Arwel a wicked, manipulative blackmailer who got his just deserts, or a poor disadvantaged victim?’

McKenna rubbed his shoulder, wondering if phantom pain would haunt the rest of his days. ‘One man’s truth is another’s deception. Life is ambiguous.’

‘People are ambiguous, and people make life what it is for others, and I don’t like the life Hogg makes for these children.’ Griffiths sighed again. ‘I’d better crank up the engine and get the wheels going, but don’t be surprised if HQ send someone more exalted than you or me to talk to Elis.’

McKenna stood up. ‘Eifion wants a disposal certificate. No one’s ever questioned his autopsy findings, and he’s got all the tissue samples he needs.’

‘I’ll ask the coroner for a burial certificate. Let Social Services know, because the Thomases’ll need help paying for the funeral. The pittance of a grant this bloody government gives would just about get the poor lad tipped in a common grave. Didn’t John Donne call life a common grave? We’re wrapped in our shrouds from the moment of conception.’

Emma Tuttle sounded as if she had been weeping. ‘I’ve called the doctor, because Jack’s really ill. He’s been miserable for days, but I thought it was work and the girls getting him down.’ She drew a rasping breath. ‘It’s probably ‘flu. His temperature’s high, and he’s shivering an awful lot, but I had a dreadful struggle to make him stay at home. He’s fretting about that missing boy, wondering where he could be….’

‘Stop worrying,’ McKenna said. ‘We’ll manage.’

‘Why are you always so kind to me?’ She paused, then said,
‘Don’t answer that. I’ll call again when the doctor’s been.’

‘I could collect the medical certificate later.’

‘And you can pick up the note Denise left last night because you won’t return her calls. She wants to know about Christmas.’

Cigarette burning in the ashtray, McKenna looked at the wall calendar and noted, with an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach, that Christmas would be upon him and the rest of the Christian world in less than three weeks’ time. Denise would warrant a gift, despite the adultery she thought only a convention for the discarded wife of this modern world. Her greetings card would arrive soon, reminding him of his responsibility to the society of men. Eifion Roberts would remind him in a different way, importuning him to gaiety and seasonal amnesia with friendship and a bottle or two of spirits, and Jack would issue invitations to Christman lunch and tea, when the twins would tease and flatter, Jack would talk of this and that, and Emma would simply be herself. The hours between the eve and the day could be spent at mass with the other Catholic souls marooned in this puritan landscape, he thought, and realized he could do anything or nothing, as he wished, but knew the days to Christmas would nonetheless be counted out until their burden was dead and gone, and only a few more hours remained before the turn of the year, when the sap would rise and life blossom once more.

Dewi walked in and sat down. ‘Dr Roberts called to say the HIV and VD tests on Arwel were negative, but we won’t hear about Tony yet.’

‘Inspector Tuttle’s off with ‘flu.’

‘More likely the stress of thinking Dai Skunk breathed AIDS on him. It’s weakened his defences, so the viruses can get at him.’

‘Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote a poem about a hut ruined in a storm, but I think the subject describes a woman who’s lost her virtue, like one of Beethoven’s “ruined fortresses”.’

‘Arwel’s crosswords haven’t helped much, have they?’

‘We don’t know enough about him to understand them. Like notes in music, words have personal values and embrace personal concepts, and they can be meaningless or revelatory, depending on the thoughts and experiences behind them.’

‘And the imagination,’ Dewi added. ‘Who’ll be asking Elis the nasty questions?’

‘HQ’s sending a person of rank,’ McKenna said. ‘Probably more than one. Where’s Janet?’

‘Interviewing the lady video stars. I doubt she’ll get any more joy than we had with the blokes, but at least we won’t have any claims of sexual harassment by nasty brutal male officers.’

‘We should set Pastor Evans on them. His nose is long enough to sniff out any souls struggling to emerge from the filth.’

Driving up St Mary’s hill, the car labouring in second gear, McKenna glanced at Dewi, and wondered how the Prys family spent Christmas. He imagined simple contentment, the family conversing in the shorthand, unintelligible to outsiders, which rendered them safe from invasion, then discarded romantic nonsense about the lot of ordinary folk. Like himself, Dewi was trying to escape the toil and disappointment to which he was born.

Luminous in red and green livery, a white patrol car laboured behind, bearing men to drive away the vehicles in which Elis and his wife gracefully flaunted their wealth and their differences. He thought of the huge inconvenience to which they might be put by the execution of the warrants, then cursed himself for forgetting the pretty little car in which Mari Williamson flaunted her own difference.

‘Elis’ll probably go ballistic,’ Dewi said. ‘I can’t see him and Rhiannon hoofing it to town for a pack of bog rolls.’

‘I expect Mari does the nitty-gritty bits of keeping their persons in comfort, and it doesn’t help that I forgot all about impounding her car.’

‘We’ll just take it. They’ll be too up in the air to notice anything much.’ Dewi wiped his cuff on a patch of condensation on the side window, and watched the high banks and bare clipped hedges flying past. ‘I usually enjoy this kind of thing, you know. Dropping on folk with warrants and a bunch of pounding flatfoots from uniform is exciting, like the films. I’m not enjoying this at all. It doesn’t feel right.’

‘It’s necessary. We do our job without malice or favour.’

‘We might mean no malice, but the rest of the world won’t see it like that.’ Dewi frowned. ‘Hogg’s set us up, and we’re dancing to his horrible little tune.’

‘Elis has questions to answer, and I should have asked them a damned sight earlier than today.’ A few drops of rain spattered the windscreen as he bumped down the lane to Bedd y Cor. He took the last bend, and almost stood on the brakes as the great grey horse reared before him like a beast from a
Gericault canvas, hocks down, veins throbbing, hind legs sprung with immense power, front hooves flailing over the car bonnet. He saw Elis pull back the animal, and watched something near exhilaration on his face change as understanding arrived.

As soon as she picked up the telephone, Janet had recognized the voice, breathy with fear, gabbling an address.

‘It’s the other girl we want. Tracey whatever-her-name-is will keep,’ Owen Griffiths said. ‘Take somebody from uniform if McKenna hasn’t hijacked them all.’