Simeon's Bride (23 page)

‘There’s nobody home, sir,’ he told McKenna, slipping back into the car. ‘What shall we do now? Go to the castle and wave that fax under
Stott’s nose?’

‘Dunno, Dewi. It’s not quite as straightforward as it seems.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘We know the Scorpio belonged to Romy Cheney, or Margaret Bailey as she’s named here, but there’s not a mention of Stott. The next listed owner is our smelly friend down the road.’ He turned to look for the sleek grey vehicle, and found its parking space occupied only by a ginger cat crouched upon its haunches.

‘But Stott admitted selling him the car,’ Dewi pointed out. ‘How’s he going to worm his way out of that?’ He fidgeted with the door handle. ‘We won’t know unless we ask him, will we, sir?’

Red light pulsing, the tape recorder in the interview room emitted a high-pitched whine. Screwed up plastic film from the tape cases crackled and unfurled in a grey metal waste bin. Stott’s laboured breathing overwhelmed the soft instrusive noise of machinery. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked McKenna, eyes frantic, like those of a cornered animal. Sweat beaded his pasty face, trickled in front of his ears.

‘You are not obliged to say anything, Mr Stott,’ the solicitor advised.

‘It would be better if he did,’ McKenna said. ‘Until recently, Mr Stott was in possession of a car which belonged to Margaret Bailey, the woman found dead some weeks ago on Snidey Castle Estate. Mr Stott sold the car to a neighbour.’ He handed the fax to the solicitor.

‘I don’t see my client’s name here.’

‘Mr Stott has already confirmed selling that particular car, and we have a full statement from the buyer.’

The solicitor turned to Stott. ‘As I said, you don’t have to say anything.’

‘What will happen if I don’t?’

‘Well,’ the solicitor said, covering a yawn, ‘I’d say the police have enough to detain you whether you talk or not.’

Jack paced back and forth in McKenna’s office. ‘I’m not surprised the government stopped the bloody Irish having the right to silence!’

‘Mr McKenna’s Irish really, sir, so you shouldn’t be so rude,’ Dewi said.

‘Shut up!’ Jack turned to McKenna. ‘Can’t you find something for him to do?’

‘Can’t you two act like adults?’ McKenna snapped. ‘Why don’t you exercise your minds instead of your mouths? Then you can tell me what we do next. We can’t talk to Prosser because that bloody psychiatrist won’t let us, and we can’t talk to Stott because he’s hiding behind the kind provisions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Not forgetting Jamie, of course, who seems to have done a bunk. Any word round town about where he might be, Dewi?’

‘No, sir. Nobody’s talking.’

Jack said sulkily, ‘Maybe Stott’ll change his mind.’

‘Fat chance!’ Dewi said.

‘You got any better ideas, Prys?’

‘I might have, but I wouldn’t be telling you if I did!’

McKenna jumped up, his chair crashing against the wall. ‘Be quiet! I will not tolerate such behaviour!’

Jack looked from McKenna to Dewi and walked out of the room, slamming the door so hard he rattled the walls.

‘Sorry, sir,’ Dewi offered. ‘Mr Tuttle gets my back up at times.’ He sat quietly, legs crossed, hands folded in his lap, waiting for the storm to pass. ‘Somebody ought to tell Mrs Stott about her husband,’ he said into the lengthening silence. ‘Did Mr Tuttle tell you we saw her yesterday? Watching the gipsy wedding along with everybody else, she was. I told Mr Tuttle that suit Wil Jones found would fit her like a glove.’

Gwendolen Stott stared without expression at McKenna and the uniformed policewoman sitting on a fat sofa, the twin of her own seat, furniture crowding this too narrow, too low room. Her feet, clad in scuffed black court shoes with turned up toes, barely touched the carpet. Beside her lounged a girl in her early teens, dressed in a lilac and pink shell suit, shod in expensive white baseball boots. She drew her feet underneath her body, drawing a frown from her mother. ‘Take your feet off the furniture, Jennifer.’ The girl scowled, tossed her head, whipping the pony-tail of blonded hair across her face. She shifted into obedience, and ground the toes of her boots into the carpet.

Plain white walls, an ugly shabby carpet garish with whorls and swirls of orange and red and dirty brown, embraced rich furniture dressed in William Morris linens, windows of mean proportions dressed with matching curtains which hung too long. McKenna noticed a rickety shelf unit stacked with antique figures, elegant slipware jugs, leather-bound books tumbled amid the paperbacks and telephone directories and mail-order catalogues. Above an electric fire in a fake hearth, a small mirror reflected the top of Gwen Stott’s head, a foreshortened view of her shoulders, the empty vase on the window sill behind her. The room wore an air of fustiness, shut off from fresh sea breezes and spring sunshine.

The woman wore a similar air, untouched by the warmth of any passion, unstirred by any living wind in the dark abyss of her soul. McKenna wondered what nourishment the girl’s burgeoning womanhood might scavenge from the barren landscape of her mother’s house. Neither mother nor daughter offered the smallest smile to their visitors: he had seen the mother frown and the daughter scowl, and thought that would mark the limit of their offerings.

‘I have to tell you, Mrs Stott, that your husband has been arrested, and is being kept in custody,’ McKenna said.

The girl stared at her feet, still trying to scrub holes in the ugly carpet. The woman made no response.

‘Would you like to know why?’ McKenna asked.

‘I suppose you’ll tell me anyway.’ Ungraciousness honed to such fitnesse provoked McKenna.

‘Most women would be only too anxious to know.’

‘Most women,’ she snarled, ‘don’t have the likes of him for a husband!’

The girl raised her head. ‘You’re always saying nasty things about Daddy,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why and he doesn’t either.’

‘Doesn’t he?’ Gwen Stott demanded.

Speculating on the nature of those sins of which Stott had caused her to suffer the consequences, McKenna said, ‘Mr Stott has been arrested over the sale of the car.’

‘Is that all? Be more to the point if you arrested him over Trefor Prosser, wouldn’t it?’

‘Would it?’ McKenna asked. ‘We are not aware that Mr Prosser and your husband are involved in anything illegal.’

‘More’s the pity, isn’t it? More’s the pity it isn’t illegal.’

‘I can’t comment upon that.’ McKenna stood up, the policewoman following suit. ‘Your husband will come before the magistrates in a few days. Whether or not we will oppose bail, I am unable to say. That depends on what information arises.’

The girl stared at her mother, tears glistening in her eyes. ‘Mummy!’ She clutched her mother’s sleeve, and the woman jerked away. ‘Mummy! Daddy’s in prison! What are we going to do?’

‘Nothing!’ The word bit the air, eating up the soft sounds from the girl’s throat. The woman stood against the light, a short and heavy shape casting a pall of shadow. McKenna tried to imagine her dressed in the pretty suit exhumed from Gallows Cottage and, unlike Dewi, failed.

‘If you need support or assistance,’ he said, ‘we can contact the Social Services Department. Or anyone else you care to suggest.’

‘I can manage perfectly well.’

‘Your daughter?’ McKenna asked, looking at the child whose face was ugly and old with misery.

‘What about her?’

‘She’s rather distressed.’

‘She’ll get over it, won’t she? She’s her father’s daughter, after all.’

‘What’s he done?’ the girl wailed. ‘Why won’t anybody tell me?’

‘I knew that damned car would cause trouble. I’ve said so often enough, but nobody listens to me, do they?’

‘How did you know it would cause trouble?’

‘Ask him.’ She walked to the door and pulled it open. ‘I’d like you to leave.’

‘Mr Stott will be at the police station until he goes to court,’ McKenna said. ‘You may visit him if you wish. And your daughter, too, of course. If you need financial help, you must contact the DSS.’ 

‘You don’t listen either, do you? I can manage.’

The girl tugged again at her mother’s sleeve. ‘Can we go and see him? Please!’

‘No!’ Gwen Stott rounded on her daughter. ‘No, no, NO!’

Dewi Prys stood at the door of one of the detention cells in the basement, breathing in the cold metallic scent, like that of blood, of every cell in the world. Stott, the only detainee, resembled every prisoner: shocked and cold and desperate and diminished. Dewi wondered fleetingly if the act of taking another’s liberty, however briefly, however much warranted, was not the most diminishing act one human being could perpetrate against another, apart from taking life itself.

‘Have you had tea, Mr Stott?’

‘I don’t want anything.’

‘Perhaps you’ll have something later, then.’

‘Perhaps.’ Haunted eyes, red-rimmed in darkly shadowed sockets, stared at him. ‘Has—’ Stott caught his breath, as if he would choke. ‘Has my wife been told?’

Dewi sat on the one chair, opposite the bunk where Stott hunched. ‘The chief inspector went to see her a while back.’

Stott was silent for long moments. ‘I don’t expect she’ll come to see me, will she?’ he asked eventually.

‘I don’t know, sir. You can have visitors any time. Well, any reasonable time. Not midnight, for instance.’

Stott smiled weakly. ‘I won’t hold my breath, Constable. Could my daughter come?’

‘We’d need a policewoman sitting in on account of the girl being so young. How old is she?’

‘Nearly fifteen.’ The man stared unseeingly. ‘Thank God she’s not a baby…. I don’t know how she’ll cope as it is…. And I don’t expect her mother will be any help.’ Bitterness twisted at his mouth, sparkled in his eyes. He focused his gaze on Dewi, and said, ‘What am I to be charged with?’

‘I don’t really know, sir. You see, not saying anything at the interview screwed things up a bit in that direction.’

‘The solicitor told me not to.’

‘I’m not criticizing, sir. It just makes things more difficult. I mean, we know some things about that car, but as you won’t tell us the rest, we have to find out what we need to know from other places.’

‘I see.’

Dewi waited, but nothing was volunteered. ‘I’d better be off. Is there anything you want to be going on with?’

Stott looked down at his hands. ‘Can I have a wash? I’ve no soap or towel or anything. Or pyjamas.’ He looked up, eyes wet with unshed tears. ‘Shall I have to sleep in my clothes?’

‘No.’ Dewi suddenly loathed himself and the job he did. ‘I’ll sort things out now. Would you like something to read?’

‘Thank you, yes.’ The words were almost whispered. ‘Constable? Could you do something else for me, if you’re allowed? I’ve got a sister in Rhyl. Could you see if Jenny – my daughter – can go and stay with her?’

‘What are you doing, Prys?’ Jack accosted Dewi, temper heating beyond his control, fuelled simply by the sight of this
bête
noire
of a youth, reading numbers off the back of his hand as he punched them on to the telephone.

‘Making a telephone call. Sir.’

‘I can see that! Stop being clever, Prys. Who’re you calling?’

‘Stott’s sister.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he asked me to.’

‘Because he asked you to? What are you, a bloody nursemaid?’

‘He’s worried about his daughter.’

‘Worried about his little girl, is he? He should’ve thought of that before he got himself mixed up with killing and blackmail and thieving.’

Dewi put the receiver in its cradle. ‘We don’t actually know he’s mixed up with anything. People are supposed to be innocent until proved otherwise.’

‘Jesus! Not you as well!’

‘Not me as well as who else, then?’

‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that or I’ll have you on a disciplinary charge! Whether or not you’re McKenna’s blue-eyed boy.’

Smiling to himself, Dewi picked up the telephone again. ‘I don’t think I’m anybody’s blue-eyed boy, sir. Maybe it’s just on account Mr McKenna and me see eye to eye on a lot of things.’

‘You’re an arrogant little sod!’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dewi agreed. ‘If you say so, sir,’ he added, then turned away, to speak to the woman who answered his summons.

McKenna went downstairs as the town clock struck two, and as the bell of the cathedral clock added its more sonorous tone. He sat in the kitchen, a mug of tea on the table, a cigarette in his hand, surveying his own repetitive thoughts, so trapped within their little cage they brought nothing but a leaden tedium, creeping into his bones like a fatal disease. Denise, calling upon him earlier, bubbled with a brew of tales: of the holiday she would take the following week, of her plans to move, to sell at a garage sale what neither she nor he wished to keep, and of Jack Tuttle, jumping hither and thither as his wife, poised on the edge of a small liberation, tweaked at the strong ropes binding her marriage together.

He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old, wondering if he would be engaged in similar activity, disengaged still from all but futility, in twenty years time, or thirty, or forty. He returned to bed well after dawn reddened the eastern sky, falling asleep to the screech of gulls, the clacking of the duo of nesting jays in the trees below his window. He
dreamed he was become an old man, crabbed and skinny and wrapped in papery flesh, as rickety as the chair in which he crouched before a mean fire, chewing upon thoughts of Denise, the old flame guttering in the corridors of time whilst he waited for Death, the only visitor likely to call.

Walking back from Safeways late on Sunday morning, a plastic carrier bag of groceries and cat food in each hand, McKenna saw storm cloud advancing from the east, moved sluggishly along by a chill little wind to build castles in the sky behind Bangor Mountain. Yellow gorse on its crest glowed livid, newly blossomed trees began to bend and thresh as the wind poked at their limbs with mean thin fingers. Large raindrops splashed on the pavement before his feet, turning to a downpour, to sheets of water billowing down the valley, long before he toiled up the hill to his house. As thunder growled and rumbled behind the mountain, McKenna thought of God, irreverently; of God and Mrs God in the throes of marital disharmony, tearing apart their mansion in the skies, dividing up the loot of vanquished love. Lightning flashed and crackled over the rooftops as he hurried homewards panting for breath, sensing electricity in the air enter his body and pull its balance awry.

Dewi telephoned late in the afternoon, when the day had fallen to twilight, the power lines to Nature, leaving McKenna and those areas of the city visible from his windows drowned in sombre purple-grey, drenched with rain, and lit by dancing forks and shards of brilliance as the storm surged back and forth from land to sea like a tide.

‘You got a power cut as well, sir?’ Dewi asked.

‘I do hope you didn’t call simply to ask me that.’

‘No, sir. I just wondered, that’s all. Somebody wants to see you.’

‘Who?’

‘Mrs Kimberley. She’s Mrs Stott’s sister-in-law.’

‘What’s her involvement?’

‘She’s Mr Stott’s sister, sir. I just said.’

‘You said she was Mrs Stott’s sister-in-law.’

‘Same difference, sir. Are you coming?’

‘Can’t it wait?’ McKenna looked out at the storm, gathering itself behind the easterly tip of Anglesey for another onslaught, Puffin Island almost obliterated in an eerie darkness where sea and sky and land merged. ‘Can’t you deal with her?’