Simeon's Bride (22 page)

Rising early, Emma prepared a cooked breakfast for her husband and children before they awoke. Her head ached slightly, a relic of the night before and reminder of pleasant and invigorating hours away from her family. True to form, the twins stayed abed as long as possible, then clattered downstairs, snatched toast from the table before leaving for school. Saying nothing to either wife or daughters, Jack doggedly ate cereal and egg and bacon and sausage and toast and marmalade, whilst Emma watched confusion pursue anxiety across his face, that barometer of his temper.

‘Were you called out last night?’ she asked, refilling his teacup.

‘No.’

‘You had a quiet evening, I take it?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good. No problems with the girls?’

‘No.’ He chewed another piece of toast, swallowing so hard the Adam’s apple bobbed high in his throat.

‘You could manage them on your own without any trouble, then?’

‘Yes.’ His reply preceded understanding. Head jerking up, he asked, ‘What d’you mean?’

Naked fear shone in his eyes, pulled his mouth into a rictus. Emma sat down. ‘Denise and I are thinking of going on holiday together.’

‘Denise?’

‘Yes. Denise.’

‘When did you speak to her?’

‘Last night, of course. We spent the evening together. Who did you think I was with?’

Embarrassment coursing into his face, he stared back.

‘I don’t know what you thought I was doing, but you were obviously wrong, weren’t you?’

Unwilling to let go, the terrier intent on unearthing the last splinter of bone without appreciating that its sharpness might rip blood from flesh, Jack said, ‘I thought Denise was out with her soon-to-be ex-husband.’

‘She was out with me. We went for a pub meal, then a drive round Anglesey.’

‘Where to?’

‘Where to what?’

‘Where did you have a meal?’

‘Is this how you interrogate so-called suspects, Jack? What am I suspected of doing?’

He buttered another slice of toast, and slopped marmalade on top of the butter. ‘You’re being silly.’

‘I am not being silly!’ Emma snapped. ‘You’ve been moody and downright suspicious lately. What d’you think I’m doing? More pertinently, who d’you think I might be doing it with?’

‘I don’t know, do I?’ Jack slammed his knife on to the plate. It clattered off, smearing butter and marmalade on the tablecloth. ‘And you’re a fine one to talk about moods!’

‘I see. Well, we all know what sort of mischief wives get into, don’t we? Especially wives who have to put up with a miserable moody sod of a husband and a couple of bloody-minded teenagers day in and day out. Not to mention wives with nothing else to look forward to except more of the same and the sodding housework as well!’

Her eyes glittering with rage and not a trace of tears, Jack thought she looked magnificent, as if she should adorn the prow of a galleon, proud breasts breaking mountainous seas, the light in her eyes brighter than any mariner’s lantern. But, he thought, Emma might steer her ship into the whirlpool of Charybdis and laugh as it foundered with all hands off the rocks of Scylla.

‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘Say something!’

‘What am I supposed to say? Denise is making you discontented. She’s a bad influence on people.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! Can’t you see I’m in a rut?’

‘We’re all in a rut. It’s what life’s about most of the time.’

‘Oh, is it? Everybody quietly ploughing their own little furrow until they die? It might suit you, but it certainly doesn’t satisfy me!’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! That’s the sort of remark McKenna makes, and the attitude that’s wrecked his marriage. Hankering after some ideal which doesn’t exist in real life.’

‘Maybe Denise is beginning to see his point of view. Maybe she understands where she went wrong as well. What d’you think of that?’

‘I think,’ Jack said, weary and afraid and overwhelmed with a need to seek the comfort of her body, ‘we should stop fighting. I don’t understand why this is happening.’

Emma sighed. ‘That’s half the trouble, isn’t it? There’s not much to understand. I’m fed up, the way everybody gets from time to time.’ She began clearing the table. ‘The holiday was Denise’s idea. She needs a break. She’s been through the mill in the last few weeks, and it’s not over yet by any means. It’ll be ages before she’s back to anything like
normal, but at least she’s made a start, so I can stop worrying so much. When women stop caring about themselves, they go downhill faster than a runaway truck.’

‘Stop worrying? I thought you’d fallen out with her.’

‘We’re back on an even keel, even if other things have changed. But that’s how it goes, isn’t it?’

‘Where were you thinking of going on holiday?’

‘Somewhere warm and sunny. Greece or Rhodes, perhaps. It won’t be too busy at this time of the year.’

‘Then what?’

‘Denise will be moving. She’s rented a flat on the marina in Port Dinorwic. She and Michael went to see it last night.’

‘I meant, what about you?’

‘Me? What about me?’

‘Will you come home? Or will you be like that Shirley Valentine character, running away from your boring life and your boring husband and family? Isn’t that what women dream about, Em? Romance and excitement under a sunny sky?’

She dropped plates and mugs and cutlery in the washing-up bowl, squirted Fairy Liquid and ran hot water. Jack stared at her plump back and beautiful rounded buttocks. ‘Do you have to be in work soon?’ she asked.

‘Not particularly. Why?’

Emma pulled off the pink rubber gloves she had just donned. ‘Let’s leave the dishes to soak for a while, then.’

Waiting for the kettle to boil for morning coffee, Dewi absently read the dog-eared fax paper, more interested in the possible reason for Jack’s rare unpunctuality than the contents of the message. Scanning the sheet from halfway down the page, as was his custom, he failed to understand its significance until, he told Jack, he looked at the heading.

‘Where the hell has it been?’ Jack demanded. ‘It’s dated over a week ago.’

‘Dunno, sir. I expect we’ll find out eventually. Somebody’ll be for the high jump, won’t they? What are we going to do about it?’

‘I’m going to see the superintendent.’

Dewi dialled McKenna’s number. ‘Are you coming back to work today, sir?’

‘Would it be worth my while, Dewi? Or might I be better occupied doing the garden?’

‘Well, sir, you’ll likely turn over a lot more worms here.’

‘How’s that?’

‘You could say we’ve had a bit of a break. And it’s not the sort of break one particular person will be able to mend without God’s help.’

Not only against outsiders did the police close ranks, Owen Griffiths reflected, for senior officers fared ill when it was their task to apportion blame and discipline. None of his colleagues at any rank, either uniform or plainclothes, would admit even to seeing the fax from DVLA. He returned to his office, knowing further harangue to be futile, only likely to accrue resentments ready to boomerang when he had least defence. His damage limitation exercise would stand or fail on McKenna’s reaction, the measure of his righteousness. Owen Griffiths prayed for clemency from McKenna, for an acknowledgement that human error need not cause collapse of the edifice of law and order, and appreciated, perhaps for the first time, how a conscience on the loose, as McKenna’s frequently was permitted to be, caused trouble to rival outright corruption.

Mary Ann relished her power, as if those upon whom it was exerted were marionettes, to be kept in the wings of her little theatre until she wished to jerk a string or two, wanted to watch the figures clacking and jumping to her tune. Michael McKenna had danced down the path to frighten the puppet Beti Gloff could not work for herself, for Beti Gloff could only hop this way or that on her lame bandy legs, too disarrayed to conduct, too much in awe of Mary Ann to choreograph her own affairs.

For John Jones, Mary Ann was not a puppet-mistress, but high priestess of the great coven of womanhood, to which the woman in the woods and the other both had title, and for all his scorn and loathing, his fear triumphed. Blame Mary Ann he might for the terms under which Beti returned to him, terms hammered out, he was sure, by Mary Ann and her coven over pots of tea and sticky fattening cakes in the fuggy parlour of her cottage. But the hex upon him was the work of another, who had every step he took, even down the overgrown garden path to the privy, dogged by the gipsy with staring eyes and ashen face, a face luminous even on the darkest night when God locked moon below horizon, too mean even to light the stars. And that other one might, if John Jones let slip his guard for the tiniest fraction of time, make him reap what he had tried to sow.

‘What’s she doing here?’ Jack asked, returning to the CID office. Nell glared at him from dark piggy eyes punched like holes in the curdles of flesh slopped around the bones of her skull.

‘She’s been arrested, sir,’ Dewi said quietly.

‘What for? Shoplifting again?’

‘Er–no. Soliciting.’

‘Soliciting? You’ve got to be joking!’

‘In the Quarrymens Rest. The landlord got fed up and called us. We’re waiting for a WPC to sit with her.’

Jack stared blatantly at the blowsy, frowsty old woman, her clothes taut around belly and thighs, exposing flabbed knees and varicosed legs. She had the thick ugly feet of a streetwalker, and he wondered if she was born that way, her fate predestined by the configurations of body. ‘Christ Almighty! How could anyone go with her?’

Dewi shrugged. ‘They do say dirty water puts out fire just as well. What did the superintendent say about the car?’

‘Eh?’

‘The car, sir.’

‘Oh, yes. The car. We’re to follow it up. I thought I’d ring the chief inspector before we do anything.’

‘He’s coming in.’

‘Is he? How d’you know that, Prys?’

‘He was on the telephone, sir. And he says Mr Prosser’s come round, so somebody’ll have to see him.’

The psychiatrist frowned and leaned back in his chair, bringing gentle squeaks and sighs from its upholstery. ‘You cannot talk to my patient today, Inspector.’

‘Why not, Dr Rankilor?’

Dr Rankilor tapped his fingers quietly on the edge of the desk. ‘Mr Prosser,’ he intoned, ‘is not a well man. In fact, he is a very unwell man.’

‘I thought the head injury was healing.’

‘The physical injury, perhaps. My interest, however, is with the injuries of the ego, of the conscious mind and its subconscious, not with those of the mere flesh.’

‘In my experience, injuries of the mere flesh are far more likely to prove fatal than the other kind.’

‘You are a layman. You do not understand how a serious injury to the mind can cause a person to inflict mortal injury on the flesh.’

‘You think Trefor Prosser is suicidal?’

‘Why do you need to ask? He deliberately drove his car into a wall.’

‘He drove into a wall to avoid crashing into a bus.’

‘It is the implications of his action with which I must concern myself.’

‘What’s he said to you?’

‘Very little. He wishes neither to communicate nor think. But his psychic distress flaunts itself from every fibre of his being.’

‘Don’t you think you’re exaggerating this out of all proportion?’ Jack said irritably. ‘I want to ask him one thing.’

‘And maybe that one thing will lead to another and another, and then to a homicidal act against his own person, for that is the nature of suicide, after all.’

‘Trefor Prosser is a key witness in a murder investigation. I insist on speaking to him.’

‘In that case, we must consider an application to the courts for the protection of my patient. Mr Prosser does not wish to see you, and has nothing to say to you.’

Rage blossomed in Jack’s cheeks. ‘I’ll bet he doesn’t want to see me! Did he tell you he only crashed his bloody car because he was running away from us?’ He looked with disgust at the psychiatrist. ‘You’re letting him hide behind your white coat and your blasted Freudian fairy-tales!’

‘If you approached him with the same attitude you are demonstrating to me, I am not surprised he fled from you, Inspector. You British have a little adage, do you not, about having the grace to see yourselves as others see you? You should consider that whilst you are fulminating against my opposition.’

The house in Turf Square lay empty, silent and dingy in late morning sunshine. Pushing through a narrow wooden gate which reeked of creosote, and down the little alleyway between this house and the one next door, Dewi stood on tiptoe to peer into the room at the rear of the house. Curtains obscured his view, grey-tinged nets looped into swags at the centre and edged with frills, like, he thought, a tart lifting up her skirts to show her tatty undergarments.