Simeon's Bride (14 page)

‘Can you do that, sir?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t it against regulations? We can’t very well get John Beti arrested over that body just because he’s clouted his missis.’

Both men walked down the path towards Beti’s cottage, Dewi shining
the torch, scanning the beam against tree trunks gleaming silver in the twilight, frightening small animals in the undergrowth.

‘John Beti won’t get arrested if he keeps his hands to himself and his nasty mouth shut,’ McKenna said. ‘And as nobody but you and me and the bodies in the graveyard is going to be knowing about it in any other way, it doesn’t matter if it’s laid down in the Holy Bible that you can’t do it, does it?’

John Jones lolled in the room which served himself and Beti as kitchen and parlour, a can of beer in his hand, the debris of breakfast, lunch and tea littering the table. Dirty dishes overflowed the sink. The room smelt, of nothing in particular except dirty humankind, the smell of unbathed flesh and unwashed clothes, of sweaty hair and rancid armpits.

‘What do you want, Dewi fucking Prys?’ he demanded, as Dewi and McKenna walked in.

‘We’ve come to tell you to keep away from Beti,’ McKenna said politely.

Beti’s husband smirked. ‘Setting coppers on me now, is she? Makes a change from that old witch up the road. And what am I supposed to’ve done to her?’

‘You insulted her,’ McKenna said, leaning over the man. ‘And you hit her.’

‘So what?’ John Jones said. ‘That a crime now, then, is it? Can’t a man keep his woman in order these days?’

Dewi leaned against the door jamb. ‘Depends what comes of it. Depends what he does to her, John Jones.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’

‘Why don’t you shut your mouth and give your arse a chance, old man?’ Dewi asked. ‘Listen to the chief inspector here. He’s telling you to leave Beti alone.’

‘So why don’t you both fuck off back where you came from? So I don’t have to complain to Councillor Williams about how I’m getting grief from the fucking coppers for doing nothing except find a body they’re too fucking slow to find themselves. Councillor Williams wouldn’t like to hear that. Not at all.’

Dewi advanced into the room. ‘Well, old man, if you’re going to complain to Councillor Williams, you may as well have something to complain about.’

‘Dewi!’ McKenna warned.

‘Oh, come on, sir! He makes me want to vomit! Got the bloody cheek to make snide remarks about Beti, and look at him! No oil painting, is he? And the stink on him!’ Dewi looked John Jones up and down. ‘I pity Beti, I really do! Fancy finding that lying next to you of a night!’

The old man leapt to his feet, lunging for Dewi.
‘Hwrgi
!’ he spat.

Dewi grabbed him by the throat. ‘No man calls me a whore’s dog!’ He shook John Jones, making his head snap back and forth on its skinny neck.

McKenna pulled them apart, pushing Beti’s husband, furious as a fighting turkey cock, back into his chair, and holding Dewi at arm’s length. ‘Stop it! Both of you!’ He dragged Dewi towards the door. ‘Wait outside!’ To the old man, McKenna snarled, ‘You go within a hundred yards of Beti, and I’ll lock you up. D’you understand? And I won’t care how much trouble you or your fancy bloody friends cause!’

He slammed the door behind him, and pushed Dewi down the path. ‘You bloody fool, Dewi Prys! Don’t ever behave like that again! D’you understand? My officers do not act like pit bull sodding terriers!’

Dewi stood in the darkness of the path beside the graveyard, his face mutinous in the light from his torch. ‘I don’t care!’ he stormed. ‘The bloody bastard asked for it! He should be swinging from some tree with a rope round his ugly neck! How could anyone be so horrible to Beti?’

‘Dewi, Dewi!’ McKenna sighed. ‘They’re married to each other, aren’t they? You can’t know what goes on between them. Nobody knows what goes on in people’s marriages.’ They walked slowly up the path. ‘You’ve taken sides, and it’s not our job to do that.’

Dewi stopped in his tracks and glared. ‘I always had you down for being a straight copper, Mr McKenna. If it’s not our job to take sides, what’re we doing here tonight?’

‘Crime prevention.’

‘Well, then!’ Dewi strode off. ‘It would count as crime prevention if I’d smashed his shitty head into the wall, wouldn’t it? Sir!’

McKenna leaned on the wall, delving into his jacket pocket for cigarettes and lighter. Blowing smoke into the musty night air, where it lingered just above his head like ectoplasm seeping from a nearby grave, he thought about the nature of the Celt, a subject on which Jack was given to rhetoric from time to time, of the opinion he dwelt among lawless feuding tribes. He could not grasp the ambivalence sleeping in the Welsh heart, could not understand the legacy of bitterness and sheer distrust left by centuries of oppression and injustice, and could not see why the thin crust of civilized behaviour might be shattered by that older legacy, the lessons of gangster politics and swift reprisal, learned from native forefathers. Jack never suffered the torments which might afflict McKenna or Dewi, could see nothing amiss in the fact that their role was to uphold and impose the law of a foreign government. And least of all would Jack ever understand the fear that rotted the Celtic soul, the fear that oppression only came to those who deserved it, to whom some defect of their deepest being rendered them fit for nothing else. McKenna finished the cigarette, and ground its glowing butt into a pile of leaf mould. Walking slowly up the night-shrouded path, glimpsing
only a few faint stars between the overhanging trees, he wondered how long it might be before the afflictions of Ulster found root in the fertile soul of Wales.

Trees rustled about him; he saw the ghostly shape of an owl flitting through the woods, felt the pulse of its huge wings on the air. Beyond the wall, will o’the wisp danced in the graveyard. Fool’s fire, McKenna thought, or perhaps the earthbound souls of stillborn children, hovering through eternity between Heaven and Hell. His shadow dogged his footsteps, as if come to life and whispering in his wake. His flesh crawled, waiting for the cold breath on the back of his neck, the icy fingers touching his face. He walked with a measured tread, refusing to look behind him, refusing to run. The round beam from Dewi’s torch danced in front of his feet. ‘Thought you’d got lost, sir,’ the boy said, leading the way back to McKenna’s car. As they strapped themselves in, he apologized. ‘I’m sorry I gabbed off back there, sir. That horrible old man made me mad.’ Peering through the back window of the car as McKenna drove out of the village, he added, ‘D’you know, sir, I could’ve sworn there was somebody behind you just now on the path.’

‘Cui
bono.’
Eifion Roberts lounged in McKenna’s office, brilliant morning sunshine behind the Venetian blind casting stripes on walls and floors and furniture.

‘What did you say?’ McKenna asked.

‘Cui
bono.
It means—’

‘I know what it means!’ McKenna said irritably. ‘Will you stop rocking backwards and forwards on that chair? You’re too fat. What am I to tell HQ if you break the legs?’

‘We are in a mood this morning, aren’t we? Got out of bed the wrong side, did you?’

‘Mind your own business.’

Dr Roberts picked up his mug of tea. ‘Woman trouble, McKenna.’

‘I bloody know that!’

‘What I meant was, you’re not getting any,’ the pathologist tittered. ‘Nothing to get your leg over.’

‘Must you be so disgustingly crude?’ McKenna snapped.

‘Sex is sex is sex, Michael, whatever fancy language you dress it up with. Anyway,’ Eifion Roberts smirked, ‘it’s a well-known medical fact that excess of unshed seed sends a body barking mad in next to no time. That’s why Onan in the Bible wasn’t as far off the mark as God made him out to be. Better out than in, as they say.’ He selected another biscuit from the plate on McKenna’s desk. ‘There was a case round Llanrwst or Ruthin when Queen Vic ruled our pleasant land. This lad murdered this girl because he was mad with love for her and she was going to marry somebody else. Slashed her throat this way and that ’til her head almost fell off, then trotted off and gave himself up to the local flatfoot.’

‘So what?’

‘So they didn’t hang him, did they?’ Dr Roberts said. ‘All these eminent medicos testified at the trial how he was suffering from what you’re suffering from, and they sent him to Broadmoor.’

‘I see.’ McKenna shuffled papers on his desk. ‘And what am I suffering from?’ he asked. ‘What pearls of medical wisdom are about to
dribble and plop from your fat little lips? Why don’t you just say? Then you can sod off and leave me in peace to get on with some work.’

Roberts laughed. ‘You can be so nasty, Michael, it’s almost a pleasure to listen to you! Jest if you will. Mock if you will. But go and get your end away, and see how much better you feel afterwards. That is, of course,’ he looked at McKenna with a sly leer, ‘if you can find anyone willing to accommodate you. How about that buxom little policewoman you transferred from Holyhead? She’s got a nice bum on her. It’d do you the world of good to unlace your moral stays, so to speak. You waft around like a Victorian virgin getting an attack of the vapours if anyone mentions sex.’ He grinned. ‘S-E-X, Michael McKenna. Like all things in moderation, it can be good for you.’ Suddenly serious, he added, ‘Tell me to mind my own business, but is that what’s gone wrong between you and Denise? I can’t help but see you as riddled with the Papist guilt about matters of the flesh.’

McKenna squirmed. ‘I don’t want to talk about Denise. She’s coming to the house tonight, and I haven’t a clue what to say to her.’

‘Let her do the talking, then. Always the best way with women, I’ve found…. You haven’t answered my question.’

‘As a matter of fact, Eifion,’ McKenna said, ‘I’m already unchained from that particular lunatic’

‘What lunatic?’

‘Socrates is supposed to have said the human sexual drive is like being chained to a lunatic’

‘Did he?’ Dr Roberts stared at McKenna. ‘He’s got a lot to answer for, hasn’t he? Almost as much as that old fraud of a psychoanalyst from Vienna. Must be where all the holy folk got the idea of using guilt as a cudgel to keep the fornicating hordes and their lunatics in order. And why the likes of little Betty Prout got thrown out of her village because she was expecting, and no ring on her finger…. She threw her baby down a well in the end, to get shut of the guilt and shame, and if that’s the best God can do for people, He should be ashamed of Himself.’

‘Not so long ago, you’d’ve been burnt as a heretic.’

‘Gone down in history,’ the pathologist agreed. ‘Hung drawn and quartered, like that Catholic priest William Davies. Bet you didn’t learn about him in church, did you? He was only a Welsh martyr. Not quite the same as an English one.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Offended Her Almighty Majesty Elizabeth the First of England by being RC and proud of it. They strung him up at Beaumaris Castle in 1593, and the locals wouldn’t supply the hangman, or the wood for the scaffold, so they brought them in from Chester. Then they cut the poor bugger down, carved him up into four neat joints, and put quarters on display at Caernarfon, Ludlow, Conwy and Beaumaris. Needless to say,’
he added with a wry grin, ‘William Davies doesn’t have a grave! And talking of folk rotting in full view, what about the corpses hanging at crossroads, and crows flying over your head with somebody’s eyes squashed in their beak … our Romy would’ve felt in good company, wouldn’t she?’ He drank the last of his tea, dabbing his lips with a paper tissue from the box on McKenna’s desk. ‘Actually, it was Romy I came to talk about.’

‘What about her?’ McKenna asked. ‘Something about the suit?’

‘No, you’ve had your bit of luck with that. Now you’ll have to find somebody with a penchant for nicking other people’s perfume to fit into it,’ the pathologist said. ‘And of course, if you do, you might find the lady’s got fatter or thinner in the past few years…. Bear up, Michael. It’ll all be over one day.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? I’m to look forward to dying, am I, because there’s damn all else to look forward to?’

‘All in the same boat, aren’t we? Waiting to cross the River Styx as soon as Charon gives the nod…. How d’you plan to find out who pushed that boat out for Romy?’

‘I’m waiting for Owen Griffiths to decide whether or not we start digging up floors at Gallows Cottage and combing those bloody woods. Jack Tuttle has some hare-brained idea the owner of the suit may be mouldering somewhere like her mate Romy.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she might have seen whoever topped Romy and therefore had to be done away with herself.’

‘Doesn’t fit, somehow, and don’t ask me why, ’cos I don’t know. I think this is women’s work,’ Dr Roberts said. ‘There’s a feeling of women being at the root of it, and men being nowt a pound…. Allsopp’s a fly-by-night, in the sense Romy flew by and left after dropping a bit of shit on his head. Her husband’s killed off in a car smash, and just deserts maybe. Simeon, if you can swallow the rumours, blunders through the centuries like a besotted teenager looking for his missis, who like as not chucked that kiddie of theirs down the stairs. Then there’s those old crones in the village with their tales … men are getting too hard done by to be perpetrating anything.’

‘Revenge?’ McKenna suggested.

‘What I said before.
Cui
bono
? The oldest motive of all.’

‘I don’t know,’ McKenna admitted. ‘Who benefits from Romy’s death….? The solicitor made no mention of a will.’

‘Then I daresay it’ll be whoever can get their greedy paws on whatever she had. Pity her solicitor couldn’t tell you where she kept her bank account, isn’t it? Did she pay him in cash, like she did with the rent?’ Dr Roberts stood up. ‘I’d better be going.’ He brushed biscuit crumbs off the lapels of his jacket. ‘Expecting the bishop himself, no less, to tell me
what’s to be done with Rebekah.’

‘She’s not turned to dust then?’

‘No.’ The pathologist grinned. ‘I could quarter her, couldn’t I? Give ’em a piece or two each … they’d still squabble, wouldn’t they? He sighed. ‘Like as not, they’d be rowing over this one ’til Kingdom come.’

‘Dewi could be right, Jack.’

‘In a pig’s eye!’ Jack exploded. ‘I don’t know how you put up with him. He gets on my bloody nerves!’

McKenna drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for a huge articulated truck to manoeuvre into Glynne Road, and up to Kwik Save supermarket. ‘That much is obvious, but you really needn’t be quite so abrasive with the lad. He has some good ideas.’ He looked at Jack. ‘Change your face, Jack! That expression is enough, as my old gran would say, to turn the milk in the cows’ bellies from here to Donegal.’

‘Dewi Prys might be clever, but he’s as mouthy and cocky with it as Jamie Thief. They’re like some kind of bloody twins, one each side of the law … why doesn’t Jamie speak Welsh? He only lives a few doors away from Dewi Prys.’

McKenna shrugged. ‘Same reason half the Welsh people in North Wales don’t speak Welsh, I suppose. Are you going to start learning?’

Jack grimaced. ‘Looks like I won’t have much choice if I want to stay around here. We’ve enough to do keeping the locals in order without having to learn Welsh.’

‘Policy, Jack,’ McKenna said. ‘The powers that be daren’t upset the Welsh Language Society, and they want everybody in Wales speaking Welsh. And, those who don’t like the idea are welcome to bugger off over the border.’

‘It’s all become very hardline political, hasn’t it? Near enough fascist, if you ask me…. I wouldn’t mind if Welsh wasn’t so bloody hard. I don’t know how you get your mouth round some of the words. Owen Griffiths
doesn’t speak Welsh, does he? I haven’t heard of anybody trying to make him.’

‘Yes, Jack, but he’s a superintendent.’ The road ahead finally cleared, and McKenna accelerated past the swimming baths. ‘Anyway, it’s not as hard as English. Did you know, there are bilingual mongols and subnormals? Makes you think, eh?’

‘You’re not supposed to say mongols or subnormals. It’s very politically incorrect.’

‘What else are you supposed to call them?’

‘I dunno,’ Jack admitted. ‘People with learning difficulties?’ he suggested. ‘Where’re we going?’

‘To see Mr Stott.’

‘Well, you’ve gone right past the entrance to Turf Square.’

‘He’ll be at work, won’t he? Showing visitors the glories of Snidey Castle.’

The huge bulk of Castle Keep soared into a bright blue sky, grey stone and neo-Norman arcades and mouldings in deep morning shadow. McKenna rested his arms on the car door, sunshine striking gold lights in his hair. ‘This place, Jack, is built on blood. I wouldn’t shed any tears if our terrorist countrymen reduced it to a heap of burnt-out ruins.’

‘That’s anarchist talk. What else were the locals supposed to do except work for the lord of the manor? Starve?’

‘The Welsh starved anyway. But without any dignity.’

‘I don’t think,’ Jack observed, ‘there is ever dignity in poverty and starvation. Do you? Come on. I want to have a shufti at Jamie’s boyfriend.’

Waiting upon Christopher Stott in a large vaulted room overlooking the back of the castle grounds, where lambs and ewes grazed in meadows undulating towards a distant seascape, Jack stared at dingy oil paintings in tarnished gilded frames hung against bare stone walls, wiped his fingers across the surfaces of heavy oak furniture, timbers dark with age and wax, made scuff marks with his shoes on the golden velvet pile of wall to wall carpeting. ‘How the other half lives, eh?’ he said. ‘Bet this place is colder than Eifion Roberts’ mortuary in the winter.’

‘Not so warm now, is it?’ McKenna, gazing from the window, shivered a little. ‘Gorgeous view from here, Jack. You can see the rhododendron woods.’

A tall thin man with a small beard slithered into the room. ‘You wanted to see me?’ he asked, looking from Jack to McKenna.

‘You’re Christopher Stott?’ McKenna asked.

The man nodded, his body waving from side to side with the motion of his head, like a sapling bending to the wind. He wore an etiolated
look, as if kept in a dark cupboard for many years, his body stretching itself: a plant stem searching for a chink of light. The sickly look of one living under constant stresses dulled his eyes and stripped colour from his skin.

‘What d’you want?’ he asked. ‘My boss doesn’t like staff having visitors.’ He placed himself carefully on the edge of one of the fat chairs, knees tight together, and his hands balled into fists in his lap. McKenna stared, while Jack spoke of cars and queries, wondering if Jack were not right about Christopher Stott’s being someone’s boyfriend, if not Jamie’s.

‘Mr Stott,’ McKenna said, ‘we understand you recently sold your car to a neighbour. We further understand you regularly allowed someone to borrow the car, a practice which appears to have continued to the present.’ McKenna heard himself becoming pedantic. ‘Perhaps you would care to tell us why?’

‘Why what?’ Stott looked again from one to the other, a frown cutting into the dry-looking skin of his forehead.

‘Why you lent the car to Jamie Thief!’ Jack snapped. ‘What d’you owe him for?’

‘Jamie Thief?’ Stott raised his eyebrows. ‘D’you mean Jamie Wright? That’s not a very nice way to talk about him, is it?’

The man was prissy: McKenna could think of no other word to describe him. ‘Jamie IS a bloody thief!’ Jack shouted. ‘That’s how he got his name.’

McKenna intervened. ‘Mr Stott, the matter of the car has occurred in the course of another investigation. And we must clear up any queries about this vehicle.’

‘Oh.’ Stott took his time to absorb the words. ‘What queries do you have?’

‘I’ve just told you, haven’t I?’ Jack sounded exasperated. ‘Why did you lend it to Jamie.’

‘Why not? I wasn’t aware it was a crime to lend a car to a friend.’ A smirk settled on Stott’s lips, thin behind the scraggy little beard, as he answered.

McKenna coughed. ‘What we’d really like to know, Mr Stott, is why Jamie should be a friend of yours.’

‘Really!’ The thin mouth made a moue of distaste. ‘What a question! And what, I may add, a waste of expensive police time, not to say mine, to come here asking such a question.’ Christopher Stott bridled with indignation. Watching him, McKenna saw fear beneath the bluster. He sat down, and leaned forwards.