Simeon's Bride (26 page)

‘I see.’

‘You don’t see at all,’ Eifion Roberts said. ‘You think people should mind their own business, you think they’ve no right to say anything. But some people actually care about you, even if you don’t give a toss for anyone except yourself and that stray cat warming your bed where a real woman should be. And,’ he continued relentlessly, ‘if you weren’t half eaten up with all this maundering and self-centred navel-gazing you love so much, maybe you’d be doing your job properly, and maybe we wouldn’t be traipsing round tonight in the pouring bloody rain dragging that lad’s body out of the rathole he died in.’

McKenna waited in the car, shivering from damp and cold and sheer fatigue, the heater turned full on, engine humming gently and blowing streams of fumes from the exhaust to spread like a layer of dewy mist over the greasy road. He fell asleep, and woke to see Dewi’s face pressed against the window. Opening the door, Dewi brought the scents of rainwashed night with him, and the musky odour of death.

‘Look at these, sir.’ He pulled a handful of sealed transparent evidence bags from the pockets of his waterproof. ‘Four packets of drugs, probably heroin or cocaine, three hundred and seventy quid in tenners, and a cheque book, and Jamie never had a bank account in his life. Only problem is, there aren’t any cheques left and the stubs aren’t filled in.’

McKenna stifled a yawn. ‘You’ll have to ask the bank in the morning. What else did you find?’

‘Bugger all really. A few clothes that could do with a wash, bits of food, about a ton of empty lager cans, fags … Jamie travelled light, you might say.’

‘I should imagine his sins weighed more than enough to carry around.’

‘I know we all bad mouth him, and he’s only had himself to blame, but it’s a bit pathetic in there. Dirty and damp, his few bits and pieces … a nasty place to die, sort of poverty-stricken and demeaning, if you know what I mean.’

‘Some would say it’s as much as he deserves.’

‘You wouldn’t, would you, sir?’

‘No, and I hope you never come to feel like that about people.’ McKenna took a cigarette from the packet, then pushed it back unlit. ‘I think we should leave the others to it and get some sleep. There’s a lot to do tomorrow.’

‘What about Jamie’s mam?’

‘We should tell her, shouldn’t we?’ McKenna said. ‘And what good
will it do to go upsetting her in the middle of the night, Dewi? Jamie’s dead. He’ll still be dead in the morning, no less and no more so than he is now … Leave her in ignorance a while longer, eh?’

‘But what if she hears about us being here in the night? You can’t have a crap round here without the whole world knowing how long you sat on the pan.’

‘I’ll send someone to see her as early as possible. There’s nothing to tell her yet, except he’s dead.’

‘D’you think he killed himself?’

‘Dr Roberts thinks he may have overdosed by accident. Jamie’s never struck me as suicidal. Murderous, yes, but not suicidal.’

Dewi stared unseeing through the windscreen. ‘I’ve known him all my life,’ he said. ‘We played together when we were so high. Now he’s gone, snuffed out just like that. I’ve only known old people die before, except little Barry John, and he was a mongol kiddie, so we all knew he’d never make old bones … I feel as if part of me’s gone with Jamie. His mam won’t care, you know, sir. She never did. My nain reckons that’s why he turned out bad. She probably won’t even bury him properly.’

McKenna put his hand on Dewi’s arm. ‘She might not be able to afford a decent funeral. You can’t blame people for things they can’t help. You can only judge people by what they can or can’t do, not what they simply do or don’t do.’

Dewi turned, and McKenna thought there were tears in his eyes. ‘No? Who do you blame, then? Why should some get off taking the rap, and not the others? It’s not fair. Where’s the justice in that?’

By 8.30 on Monday morning, McKenna had briefed a team of officers to execute the search warrant on Stott’s house in Turf Square. The Scorpio car, removed from an abusive owner shortly after first light, lodged at the garage of divisional headquarters until required as evidence.

‘Evidence of what?’ Jack grumbled. ‘Our incompetence? And why wasn’t I called out last night? I get the feeling you don’t want me know what’s going on.’

‘I’ve already told you why. You said you wanted to relax as much as you could.’ McKenna regarded the surly angry face of his deputy. ‘Not much point in both of us being too tired to stand up, is there? I want you to take charge of the search. You know what to look for.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I say so!’

‘I’m surprised you’re not sending wonderboy.’

‘Dewi Prys has other things to do.’

‘Oh, so you know who I mean, do you?’

‘Your attitude is bordering on insubordination.’

‘So what? You don’t give a toss for discipline! You let that little fart get away with murder at my expense.’

‘If you have problems in your relationship with colleagues, I suggest you ask yourself why.’

Fury mottled Jack’s face. ‘Oh, it’s my fault, is it? What about you favouring him? How d’you think that looks? Eh? I’ll tell you how. It makes me look a bloody fool!’

‘Dewi Prys has the makings of a very good detective. But he’s young I can put up with a bit of cheek now and then, while he does his job as well as he does.’

‘Oh, I see!’ Jack stormed. ‘You’re saying I don’t do mine well, are you?’

McKenna twiddled his pen, staring at the wall behind Jack. ‘You’re an inspector. Dewi’s a constable.’ He focused his eyes on Jack. ‘You should know better then to behave like this, and you should have learnt not to
let yourself be riled by a bit of mouthiness.’

‘That’s bloody unfair, and you know it!’

‘You’re not on the receiving end of the damned feuding between you and him, are you. I’m sick to death of it! And I blame you because you overreact most of the time.’ McKenna paused, then held up his hand as Jack opened his mouth to speak. ‘And don’t tell me I have no interest in discipline. I was under the impression you at least were a mature adult, and that discipline as such should not be an issue. And certainly not an issue allowed to interfere with the course of any investigation.’

‘Have you finished?’ Jack snarled.

‘No, I haven’t. Not quite.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘I think your domestic life may be affecting your judgement, and I think you ought to take stock of the situation as a whole. In fact, it might be useful for you to take some leave while Emma is away.’

‘Is that an order?’

‘Not at this moment. Whether or not it becomes so is entirely up to you.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Exactly what it appears to mean.’

Jack paled. ‘You’re trying to get rid of me, aren’t you, because I don’t fit in with your cosy little clique! Because I’m not pally-pally with the superintendent and I don’t suck up to the bloody councillors, and I can’t speak your horrible peasant gibberish! Have you any idea how I feel when you talk about things in Welsh and I haven’t a sodding clue what’s going on? You do it on purpose to make me feel left out, don’t you? Well, I’m getting the message! You don’t want me here, but you haven’t got the guts to tell me to my face!’ He wrenched open the door. ‘You Welsh are all the bloody same! You smile in someone’s face while you’re sticking a knife between their shoulder blades.’ He drew an angry rasping breath. ‘I’m not surprised you never catch the arsonists and bombers! You’re a bunch of sodding anarchists, and it wouldn’t surprise me if you don’t plant the bombs yourselves! Language of the hearth!’ he sneered. ‘We all know what that means in English, don’t we? Terrorism and arson and bombing!’

McKenna heard him blunder off down the corridor, the soft thud as the fire door at the head of the staircase shut itself. He closed his own door, and stood at the window waiting for the search party to drive out of the police station. The ash tree growing outside his window, he noticed, was beginning to cut off rather too much light. Jack’s car screeched suddenly from the driveway, narrowly avoiding collision with a Purple Motors’ bus and its cargo of early shoppers. McKenna stared at the wall of the telephone exchange, the cherry tree on the lawn in front dropping pink blossoms on to grass littered with drink cans and chip paper and crisp packets, and asked himself why he had deliberately set out to
wound Jack, wondering what perverseness, what malice, put the words in his mouth. Words, he thought. Only words, without purpose or intent left to themselves, merely a collection of symbols. But once uttered, once given life, such innocent words could leap and fight, crash into each other, trip from innuendo to meaning to becoming powerful and purposeful, overpowering their creators and becoming an end in themselves. Perhaps he was trying to divest himself of all those people who intruded into his consciousness, bore significance in his life, and who, therefore, tethered him, tied him about with bonds of friendship and love and all the pain those bonds might cause if the flesh struggled against them. First Denise, now Jack, because Jack was tied to Emma, and Emma to Denise, and all of them weaving ropes and ties around McKenna’s spirit, as if that spirit were a maypole, and he feared strangulation from its pretty dancing ribbons.

‘Where’s McKenna buggered off to?’ Eifion Roberts asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Dewi said. ‘He’d left when I got back. D’you want me to call him?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Just tell him I’m doing the autopsy on Jamie. I’ll get back to him.’

‘Should somebody come down?’

‘What for? Oh, you mean to sit in.’ He laughed. ‘There’s a poor young copper sitting right beside me, Dewi, getting ready to see his first cadaver sliced open!’

Dewi put down the receiver. The packets of drugs were on ther way to the laboratory for analysis, with other trace samples taken from the caravan and its surroundings, and casts of some of the footprints found in the muddy earth under the dripping trees of the copse. Dewi took the cheque book from its plastic envelope, looking at the creased and stained cover. Told the book had not come from a local branch of the bank, Dewi asked the manager of Romy Cheney’s bank in Leeds if it originated there, waited while the manager dithered and argued, finally conceded it would be no breach of precious confidentiality to answer the question, and promised to call back.

He was replacing the cheque book in its protective covering when he realized Jamie was probably the last to handle it: Jamie dead and cold and stiffening, supine under the pathologist’s scalpel, his lungs and liver and kidneys and heart wrenched from the dark secret place occupied since the moment of conception, and exposed to cruel light and probing eyes, mauled by rough hands, cut into slices and slivers by knives honed to wicked sharpness. Dewi felt a lurch in his belly, a coldness slice through him as of sharp steel. He sat at his desk, oblivious to time, to traffic grinding down the road beyond the window, and wondered what colour his own heart would be, imagined it flopping out before him,
pulsing and blue-veined, trailing slimy blood as it danced its death throes, before becoming still, withering before his eyes until it was nothing more than a shrivelled heap. Dead. If his heart was dead, he too would be dead. And how did it feel to die? He thought of Romy Cheney and the dread in her soul when her killer bound her hands and placed the noose around her neck and Romy knew there could be no escape, and he could not comprehend such thoughts, such terror without vestige of hope, no more than he could travel to the furthest star in the heavens. And when Romy’s killer looked upon their handiwork, and knew the heart was stopped and the last breath from her lungs, and the last thought dead in her mind, and that person understood, in that instant, there was to be no going back, not then, not ever, from what their wickedness had brought about, had the killer, Dewi asked himself, understood the unimaginable enormity of what had come to pass? Had terror come to the killer then, with the knowledge that nothing could ever again be the same? How could a person go on living, he wondered, with such a burden in their heart and mind and soul, lying ponderous and crushing in every atom of their being? And what might a person do after killing another person, he thought? Go home, make a pot of tea or a cup of coffee, eat a meal, go shopping, go to work, watch television, read a book, go to the pub, make love, sleep, dream, wake up, take an aspirin for a headache, telephone friends, write a letter…? A sob caught his breath, and he prayed God had for once been merciful, and taken Jamie in his sleep.

Jack opened the office door to find Dewi slumped over the desk, head cradled on his folded arms.

‘Where’s McKenna?’ he barked.

Dewi raised his head slowly. Under the mass of curly black hair, his face was gaunt, and Jack thought he saw tears misting the blue eyes.

‘What’s the matter with you, Prys?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ Dewi mumbled.

Relieved of a tension he had not known existed by the concentrated effort expended in searching Stott’s house, Jack felt calmed, almost light-hearted. ‘McKenna been at you as well?’ he asked. ‘He’s not in the best of tempers this morning.’

‘I was thinking about Jamie, sir. That’s all,’ Dewi said. ‘We used to be together all the time when we were kids until my nain butted in when he started thieving. We still got together. Used to sneak off to the swings by the river, and go home separately.’

‘Why d’you always talk about your nain? Did she bring you up?’

‘Mam and Dad brought us up, but Nain sort of decides about things, if you know what I mean. Decides what’s right and what isn’t. Because she’s old.’

‘How come your parents don’t mind?’

‘Mam couldn’t say much, could she?’ Dewi said. ‘Nain’s her mam. And Dad knew when to keep his mouth shut, because his mother was Nain’s best mate.’ He smiled. ‘Those old women had terrible fights sometimes, over this and that … wouldn’t speak to each other for weeks, maybe months, and every Sunday after Chapel they’d come to our house for dinner, still not talking, and we had to relay messages backwards and forwards over the table while they sat looking daggers at each other.’ The smile faded. ‘Nain cried for weeks after the old lady died. She still takes flowers to the cemetery every Saturday afternoon.’

‘Everybody should have somebody to grieve for them, I suppose. Even the Jamies of this world. Maybe he wouldn’t be where he is now if his nain had looked out for him.’

‘He never even knew who his real father was,’ Dewi said bitterly. ‘And nobody would tell him, not even his mam. She reckoned she’d fallen in the family way after a Saturday night out. She told him she’d been with this man up against a wall at the back of the Three Crowns, and he made Jamie on her, and they were drunk, his mam and this man … When he was little, he used to cry about not having a dad, went roaming the estate asking kids with fathers if he could go and live with them, so he’d have a dad. And people called him a little bastard and told him to bugger off back to his tart of a mother. And sometimes, the other kids were told to throw stones at him, like he was a mangy dog…’ Dewi stared at Jack, his eyes glittering. ‘And now they all reckon he got what he deserved. I heard an old witch in the shop this morning say whoever got rid of him should have a medal.’

‘We don’t know anybody got rid of him,’ Jack said. ‘And we all feel guilty when somebody dies, because we only remember the good things about them, and the bad things we did or said. You’ll get over it. I want you to help me make an inventory of the stuff from Stott’s place.’

‘What did you find?’

‘Just about everything, because Mrs Stott was only too happy to show us. Furniture, clothes, underclothes, diary, jewellery – expensive stuff by the looks of it – ornaments – no pictures; I take it Mrs Cheney wasn’t overkeen on pictures – books, the books Allsopp told the chief inspector about, with Allsopp’s name as bold as brass on the flyleaf, and they would’ve been returned because our Gwen isn’t partial to Dickens, only she didn’t know where to send them. You wouldn’t credit such bloody cheek, would you? And we found a bottle of that perfume, almost empty. Absolutely reeks of carnations.’

‘Were there any letters? Or bank books or credit cards?’

‘No. Not in her name and not in Stott’s. And no money to speak of, apart from what she said was the housekeeping in her purse.’ Jack yawned. ‘I don’t know about you, but these early starts get to me. You
must’ve been up half the night.’

Dewi shrugged. ‘Can’t we arrest her and do a body search? Unless she’s thrown anything incriminating, like that buckle Allsopp told Mr McKenna about, she must be carrying the credit card at least.’

‘What do we arrest her for? We can’t do her for stealing by finding because we’ve no proof all these weren’t given to her, just like she said, and the only person who could tell us is long dead.’

‘We’ve arrested her husband. Why not her?’

‘He hasn’t been charged, and we’ll have to let him go before long.’ Jack stood up. ‘I’m going for coffee. D’you want some?’

The bank manager from Leeds committed himself to the fewest words. ‘Stupid bugger!’ Jack slammed down the telephone, and gulped coffee. ‘He can’t tell us this and he can’t tell us that. He can’t tell us bloody anything because his client’s business is confidential, and will we stop harassing him because he’s said more than he should’ve done already, and if it ever gets out he’ll be for the sack. Serve him bloody right!’

‘It was her cheque book, then?’ Dewi said.

‘Didn’t you hear me? He can’t tell us.’

‘If he can’t say because his client’s business is confidential, the cheque book must belong to one of his clients. And the only likely one is Romy Cheney.’

Jack grinned. ‘Well, that takes us a mite further forward, doesn’t it? Far enough to get an order to view the account. Anything from Dr Roberts yet?’

‘He rang earlier. He said – he said he’ll let us know.’

‘The sooner the better. We need to know what killed Jamie.’ Jack picked up the empty coffee mugs. ‘If somebody did kill him, we know who didn’t: Stott for one and Prosser for another, but knowing Jamie’s lifestyle, any number of villains could’ve taken him out. He had friends in bad places.’