Simeon's Bride (20 page)
‘Can’t say I’m surprised. Politics, lad. And money, of course. Interfere with bloody everything these days. Still, you never know what might turn up out of the blue. How’s the boss?’
‘He’s out of hospital, sir. We took him home this afternoon.’
‘Where to? That hovel he’s renting? Was he well enough to be left on his own?’
‘I think so. Mr Tuttle said he could stay with them for a while, but the chief inspector said no. Anyway, Mrs Tuttle arrived soon after with the cat, because she’s been fretting for Mr McKenna. Then Mrs McKenna turned up, and started nagging because he wouldn’t go back with her.’
Dr Roberts chuckled. ‘Got the women fighting over him, has he?’
‘They weren’t fighting, sir.’
‘Not while you were there, I daresay, but I wouldn’t lay any bets on what happened after.’ Dr Roberts chuckled again. ‘Anyway, lad, what did you ring me about?’
‘I – er – sort of wondered what’ll happen to Mrs Bailey.’
‘Who’s doing the funeral?’
‘The council.’ Dewi’s voice expressed the melancholy he felt. ‘Her ex-boyfriend came up with a lot of lame excuses, but what it boils down to is he doesn’t want the bother or the expense, not knowing if he’ll get the money back, so I suppose you can’t blame him too much.’
‘It’s a poor do, isn’t it? They’ll cremate her. It’s cheaper, and it saves on precious land. Let me know when the funeral is, Dewi.’ Dr Roberts fell silent, then said, ‘People make you sick sometimes. There’s all that to-do with the other one, and nobody gives a tinker’s cuss about this poor soul.’
The photograph sent by Robert Allsopp lay atop the fax copy to the council. Romy Cheney, as she then called herself, stood alone on the bleak moorlands of northern England, dark cloud sweeping the sky behind her. She looked cold, hunched inside a thick brown-hued jacket, a gaily coloured scarf around her neck, its long ends streaming in the wind. Dewi studied her, wondering if even then, Death combed the moorlands for her, knowing her to be as unloved and unwanted by Life as her body was now. He picked up the photograph, let his eyes wander back and forth, from the woman to the car, only its front half caught by the camera’s eye, parked at an angle, front nearside wheel deep in peaty black soil.
Waiting for McKenna to answer the front door-bell, he looked up and down the miserable street, watching a dog rummage in black plastic bags left out for the dustmen. It came sniffing round his ankles, thin wormy body scabrous looking in the moonlight, and disappeared when McKenna opened the door.
‘Sorry to bother you, sir.’ McKenna wore a dressing-gown, pyjama bottoms showing under its hem. ‘I didn’t mean to get you out of bed.’
‘You didn’t. Come in.’
‘You all right, sir?’ Dewi asked, sitting on the edge of the chesterfield while McKenna slouched in an armchair.
‘I keep getting terribly hungry, so I must be, mustn’t I? Want some coffee?’
Dewi sipped his drink, gazing into the sputtering flames of the gas fire, and looked up to see McKenna’s eyes, dark and probing, on his face.
‘What’s the matter, Dewi?’
‘The photo Allsopp sent showed part of a car. I know you can’t tell what sort. It’s too small, too much in shadow…. But you can see the bonnet and radiator and the front wheel. I showed Beti, but she’s worse than useless. Couldn’t say yes and couldn’t say no.’
‘And?’
‘And I was wondering if we couldn’t get the photo enlarged, see if we can bring up the numberplate.’
‘It’s probably Allsopp’s car. Even though he can’t, of course,
remember
if it is or it isn’t.’
‘I know. But that bloody Scorpio’s getting on my nerves! I even dream about it. Wasn’t one of those kids Brady and Hindley murdered found by examining photos of people and cars and moorland?’
‘Yes, it was. Get Mr Tuttle to send the photo to the lab tomorrow, and tell him to keep quiet about it.’
Trefor Prosser stirred again during the early hours, exciting his guardians’ notice before retreating into coma. The medical registrar on night duty studied the monitors around the cot, took pulse and temperature, spent some moments looking thoughtfully down at the inert figure beneath the sheets, before moving on to check the other occupants of the unit, puzzling still on the man in thrall to relentless unconsciousness. Prosser’s head injury was not severe, his vital signs were energetic, and given return to wakefulness, full recovery should proceed unhindered. The registrar entered on file the need for an early referral to the neurological registrar.
Wil Jones went early to work, reluctant and fearful, planning the finishing touches to Gallows Cottage and his escape from a place which had, in yielding bits of its history, disturbed his equilibrium, and led him to think of other worlds just beyond the safe boundaries he recognized as those of his own. Dave taking an early holiday to visit family in England, Wil too had taken a day of rest. And another, unable to return alone to Gallows Cottage after finding the man, white-faced and hungry looking, quiet and still as the dead, at the foot of the staircase as Wil came down from painting the back bedroom to make his morning brew. He stopped halfway down the stairs, and spoke some words. He could not remember what he said, only how the sounds somehow stuck in his throat, jammed in there with a heart that leapt from its moorings at the sight of the man in his antique dress. The man faded from sight as he watched, evaporated like a wisp of sea fog in winds off the Straits, leaving the same damp chill to creep up the stairs and lick around his ankles.
Christopher Stott, as he had twice each day since the previous week, telephoned the hospital to enquire about Prosser, and received the same bland response as on every other occasion. Fear and anxiety ground their teeth together, his flesh caught between: fear for himself, anxiety for Prosser. He knew he was trapped, had seen the jaws draw closer together, until he now had no escape apart from that so tempting, so
gloriously liberating, he viewed its dark shadow with something approaching welcome.
Jamie Thief, brashness beset by the same gnawing anxiety which devoured Christopher Stott, tried to assess if he really had anything to fear from the police, and knew he need only fear Dewi Prys, whose intuitions and leaps of imagination had coloured their childish play with magic, when they larked together in the streets, down in the woods, along the railway lines and under the viaduct at the far end of the council estate; the closest of friends until Jamie was caught out in his first adventure on the far side of the law. Imprisoned then by his nain in the cage of respectability, Dewi could only stare from the windows of his council house as Jamie mooched the streets alone, a hardness growing in his eyes as it made a stone of his heart. Jamie sometimes wondered how his own life might be had he not craved the excitement of thievery, had not learned at such an early age that something could indeed be culled from nothing. He sat in his mother’s kitchen, and decided a little absence might be prudent. Packing a holdall with jeans and sweatshirts and trainers and underclothes, he pulled up the floorboard in his bedroom, and extracted what remained of the proceeds from his last trip to Manchester in the Scorpio car delivering a package collected from the pilot of a small boat anchored in Benllech Bay. He left the house, with no note for his mother, no intimation whether he might return this week or next year or never, and walked to the main road, to catch a bus to the small caravan lodged behind old railway cottages dismal in the lee of Dorabella Quarry, where he knew he could safely hide, from Dewi Prys at least, for as long as necessary.
The postman brought one letter for McKenna, which he dropped unopened on to the kitchen table. He felt rather better, having slept well and eaten a good breakfast. He made coffee, and sat in the parlour, the letter on his lap, thinking about Denise, who became more distanced with each passing day, too remote even for nostalgia to reach. He wondered how she might spend the rest of her life, and saw her only as two-dimensional, a cutout pasted on the board of recollection, with no force to her presence to make an impact in his own surroundings. He thought too of Emma Tuttle, and felt a tug of some emotion less than agreeable beneath the warmth his thoughts evoked, as if he stood at the edge of a pool of water, its surface luminescent, reflecting the heat of some sun, hiding treacherous, fathomless depths into which he would plunge if he so much as touched one finger to the mirrored calm to let its heat warm the cold blood running in his veins.
He opened the back door for the cat, watched her stalk the little patch of soil before leaping the wall and disappearing. He went upstairs to
dress, thinking a walk would be pleasant, despite low cloud heavy with rain behind the university building. His reflection in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door showed colour returning to his pale cheeks, life to the eyes, and he dared to hope that bodily health might bring with it a wholeness, an individuality rubbed away by the friction of living as half of an ill-matched pair. Unused to seeing himself thus, he stared at the man in the mirror, behind which, or within, lay still a sense of something lacking, of some deficiency, as if he too might be merely two-dimensional; and wondered, if he looked long enough, whether the orphan child still dwelling within the man would emerge, take hold of his hand, and lead him bravely into that light the man was too afraid to let into his life. But then, he thought, the child he had once been was dead, slain by time, no more than a ghost in the darkness, and no help to the living.
Trefor Prosser’s pale and motionless form was wheeled away for a brain scan and skull X-rays, although in the experience of the neurological registrar, coma victims returned to the world when and if they wished to do so. He suspected this man preferred the cushioned peace of unconsciousness, would elude as long as possible whatever terror had forced him into his car and into a wall at sixty miles an hour. Having seen the police report on the accident, and read with particular interest the statement of the bus driver, the registrar was convinced Prosser had tried to kill himself. Not only would memory return with consciousness, but the risk of another suicide attempt hard on its heels, Trefor Prosser yet another lost soul who wished to relinquish all control over his life in an act which was no statement of defiance, but the final act of subjugation, of the worthless, and the last and most abject apology for having dared to live.
Jack thought he might fill the hiatus in his work by taking leave, and wondered if Emma would object too much if he applied for a transfer, for there was a vague feeling deep inside his head that it might be wise to move her as far away from McKenna as possible. Working carefully through the log of outstanding offences, coding them for urgency and the likelihood of successful solution, he found his attention overtaken by other matters, by nagging thoughts of Emma and Michael McKenna, the way she had looked at McKenna yesterday, the expression on Denise’s face when she noticed, the spasm of rage which had twisted Emma’s mouth when Dewi Prys escorted Denise down the staircase into McKenna’s parlour.
McKenna took his walk, returning to find both the cat and Denise waiting on his front doorstep. He hoped the air of disarray about Denise had no cause other than the ravages of weather, of wind and rain in her hair and on her face. He offered her coffee and lunch, and felt a great lightness
when she left, having said very little at all and nothing of consequence, spending most of the visit staring blankly through the parlour window at the university building on the hill opposite, its contours misted and twisted by rain sweeping down the valley. As she stood at the front door, putting up her umbrella, he noticed nicotine stains on her fingers, chipped nail varnish, a patchiness to her complexion where make-up was carelessly applied. Daylight that day was cruel to her, marking the lines and shadows of age, signs of disintegration and impending chaos. He told her to take care of herself, and she turned, surprised from her apathy, to see the door closing behind her, and McKenna’s form behind its glass panes, walking away.
Sitting on a wall beside the main road, spiky fair hair darkened by rain blowing in from the west, Jamie watched a Purple Motors bus, bound for the mountain villages, take the sharp bend by the entrance to Port Penrhyn, and career past, water spurting from tyres making a swishing noise on the tarmac. The driver never so much as glanced at him; would not, if asked by anyone trying to piece together Jamie’s movements that day, even be able to recall the drab anonymous figure by the roadside.
Jamie wondered why he should put himself to the trouble of catching a rickety bus, then walking almost a mile in the pouring rain to the caravan, when there were people down the road who owed him, and whose debt had no completion date. His conscience, perhaps aborted like an unwanted foetus in his early years, did not trouble him with questions about debts of his own. He snatched whatever he could from wherever he could, on a presumption never disproved that the world had no scruples about stripping him of the most primitive rights, the most humble dreams.
Picking up the holdall, he began walking towards the city, down Beach Road, past the haunted Nelson Inn, the bistro which was once a funeral parlour, and then turned right into a small warren of narrow streets. Two-up-and-two-down cottages, once home to seafarers and dockers whose industry kept afloat huge vessels carting slate from the quarry to ports the world over, faced each other across cobbled strips dribbled with a slurry of black asphalt. There were sea-scents in the air, salty and slightly fishy, and on the wind sneaking around corners, slapping bits of litter up and down the street and against the huge blocks of undressed stone which formed the cottage walls. Jamie turned into Turf Square, and walked up a little flight of concrete steps under the front porch of one of the new houses, small poor-looking houses, as mean as the old cottages but without any of their charm. Rendered walls stained and scabby, paintwork salt-scarred, the houses bore already the miserable faces of slum dwellings.
The front door opened. ‘He’s not in. He’s at work,’ the woman said, and began to close the door in Jamie’s face.
‘I know.’ Jamie’s face showed no emotion. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
The woman stared at him. ‘You’d better come in, then,’ was all she said, before opening the door a little wider.
‘Why has all our leave been cancelled for tomorrow, sir?’ Dewi asked.
Jack looked up from the police federation circular he was reading. ‘What’s that, Prys?’
‘Why has all our leave been cancelled.’
‘It’s that wedding, that’s why.’
‘What wedding?’
‘I’m trying to read!’ Jack snapped. ‘If you’d listen to what’s being said at briefings, you wouldn’t need to ask damn fool questions! Haven’t you got anything to do?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then bloody do it!’ Jack snatched the circular from the desk in the squad room and stalked out.
A two-page memorandum in the briefings’ file from Divisional Headquarters gave notice of the double wedding of couples from the ‘itinerant peoples of Britain’, with some 600 similar guests expected. Dewi wondered what politically correct diminutive might be gleaned from ‘itinerant peoples’ which would have the universal appeal of ‘gippo’, the same pejorative ring. The double wedding at the city’s Roman Catholic church would be celebrated later at the Octagon Nightclub, and he hoped the rain would blow out to sea before morning, for no normal person wanted to be wed on a dismal day, and there was nothing to say such feelings were denied to the gipsies. He wondered too if the man who roamed Salem village and the woods around Snidey Castle would be one among the 600.
Donning his waterproof, he went a-wandering in the High Street, tramping in and out of shops, looking for Devil’s work abroad on streets awash and near-deserted.
McKenna dozed in front of the fire, the cat draped across his lap, to wake late in the afternoon, the parlour dim and scented with dampness. Carefully moving the limp animal, he switched on lights, and went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea and cut a sandwich, carrying plate and mug back to the fireside. Lethargic in body and restless in mind, his thoughts were those which disturb, become uncomfortable by trespassing beyond the safe boundaries of thoughts and ideas necessary for survival and enjoyment, into realms of the imponderable and impenetrable. In childhood, he would spend hours staring through his bedroom window on a starlit night, imagining the sky a velvet cloth stitched with jewels, then a gauzy wisp through which those same jewels glittered softly, before seeing the sky as the beginning of infinity, beyond
which lay nothing the human brain could conceptualize.
Age dulled the excitement of abstracts, bringing in its place a pernicious notion that all life was futile, all its activities merely the filling in of Time before Death came calling. What lay beyond that event he envisaged akin to the nothingness beyond infinity, where the state of grace his religion told him to seek without telling where to look mattered less than nothing. McKenna sighed, as he did much too often, about no one thing in particular but most things in general, and decided to acquire a television, to acquire one opiate even if the other was of no assistance.
Dewi walked the High Street between the Plaza cinema and Jewson’s Yard, a mile each way, overshadowed by dark cloud behind Bangor Mountain. Kicking at litter on the pavement, irritable and bored, he wanted to be part of that great war raging between good and bad which the newspapers reported daily, yet twice in and out of Woolworths, he failed to apprehend a single shoplifter, found not a single vehicle along those miles illegally parked or untaxed. No urchins scavenged the street picking pockets, no vandals smashed windows, no elderly citizens sat dazed and panting, beaten and robbed. He saw only Jamie’s distant cousin, a little the worse for drink, staggering half on and half off the pavement at the bottom end of the High Street. Sheltering by Jewson’s gate, he watched until the man turned up Penybryn and disappeared from view, wondering if it was true, as the old-timers said, that bad weather was the best policeman of all, and hoping again for sunshine and a stirring of blood on the morrow.
