Simeon's Bride (27 page)

‘I wonder where she was yesterday?’

‘Who?’

‘Mrs Stott.’

‘No idea. Probably sitting on one of Romy’s overstuffed sofas with her feet up, stuffing chocolates into her gob, watching telly and getting cramp in her fat bum … I noticed a satellite dish on the back wall.’

‘Did you ask her about the suit Wil found at Gallows Cottage?’

‘I wish you’d shut up about that bloody suit! More likely belongs to her husband than her.’

In a quiet pub near Rhyl station, McKenna picked at a smoked chicken sandwich, then pushed it away half-eaten, lit a cigarette, and asked the waitress for a glass of whiskey. Downing the liquid in one swallow, he paid his bill and left. A chill wind swirled in the street, spattering rain on his face and coat as he unlocked his car.

He drove left from the promenade, towards the town’s sprawling suburbs: hundreds upon hundreds of red-roofed bungalows on curving streets behind sandy heathland crowning the sea defences. Wind whined and whistled past the open window, filling the car with salty scents and the smells of rain in the air.

Serena Kimberley inhabited a bungalow indistinguishable from all its neighbours: each detached, each set in a little plot of land, each with a patch of front lawn edged with borders, wrought-iron gates giving on to little driveways and a narrow view of back gardens with swings and rotary washing lines and glimpses of the railway line between London and Holyhead. No landmarks caught the eye, no points of orientation, no differences, except the occasional distinction of a red front door, or a blue one, each embellished with a cartwheel of stained and leaded glass, each bay window to the side of each front door dressed with curtain nets, frilled and patterned and looped and swathed, concealing life within from prying eyes without.

‘You should’ve telephoned,’ Serena said. A smile took any sting from the words. ‘Come in. Jenny’s in. Dreadful weather, isn’t it?’ He saw a pink plastic clothes basket on the kitchen floor. ‘The washing hadn’t been out ten minutes when it started to rain.’ She smiled. ‘With my son being away, I’d forgotten how much extra washing one teenager makes.’

‘How is Jenny?’ McKenna asked.

‘All right, considering everything.’ She led him into the room with the bay window, and lit the gas fire. ‘These rooms get very cold very quickly. Too much window, I suppose, as well as the house being below sea-level. Sit down while I make a drink.’

Returning with a pot of coffee and china mugs on a tray, she pushed an ashtray towards McKenna. ‘Jenny’s upstairs at the moment. Just say
when you’re ready to see her. You know, people say,’ she went on, ‘that children are resilient, but I’ve never believed that. I think they hide a lot of their feelings, and the bigger the feelings, the more they get hidden. Especially the really painful ones they don’t know how to deal with. They do it so their parents and family won’t be hurt. I can still remember some of the agonies I went through, and not over anything more important than boys.’ She grinned. ‘You know, does he love me? Will he marry me? D’you know what girls do? They write names in exercise books instead of doing their homework.’

‘What names.’

‘Well,’ she said, pulling on the cigarette McKenna had offered, ‘if I fancied a boy called Jimmy Martin, for instance, I’d write down “Serena Martin” and say it out loud a few times, to see if it sounds like somebody I’d want to be. And when I got the shivers and wobbly knees over another boy, I’d do the same with his name.’

‘And did you ever fancy being Serena Martin?’

She laughed. ‘I met my husband in junior school, but it never stopped me looking elsewhere, just in case!’

How could one family, McKenna wondered, produce this bold and rather joyous woman from the same stock as the brother; she full of energy, he bequeathed little or nothing?

‘I wonder if Romy Cheney wrote names in books until she found one she was comfortable with,’ McKenna said.

‘Romy Cheney?’ Serena repeated. ‘It’s very silly name, don’t you think? Quite unreal. As if she couldn’t make up her mind what she was and what she wasn’t … It sounds like an anagram, or even something made up at Scrabble if you had too many Ys and not enough vowels.’

‘Your brother said he thought she was a fake.’

‘Well, with a name like that, I’m not surprised. He had a fairly normal reaction for once.’

McKenna helped himself to more coffee, his throat still dry from whiskey. ‘Doesn’t he have normal reactions very often?’

Serena sighed. ‘He’s always unsure about what to do. Always has been. Lack of confidence, I suppose, which is nothing unusual in itself, but if you live with the likes of Gwen for any length of time, and you aren’t very sure and confident to start with, any hope you might have of reacting normally, of just seeing things in a straightforward fashion, will go right out of the window.’ She took a biscuit, and bit into it. ‘I have never in my life come across anybody so twisted, so able to twist anything and everything into something nasty. And for no reason except that she likes to cause trouble.’

‘Did your brother or Jenny ever talk to you about Romy Cheney?’

‘Not in any detail. She only seemed to matter to Gwen, and it was a long time ago anyway.’

‘Why doesn’t Mrs Stott have a job? I understand she often complained about being short of money.’

Serena laughed. ‘Gwen wouldn’t work! She isn’t qualified for anything, and she’d never demean herself by doing an unskilled job. Anyway, if she went to work and admitted some responsibility towards family finances, she’d lose the biggest stick she has to bash Chris over the head with.’ Serena offered him a cigarette, and asked, ‘Didn’t you come to see Jenny? Shall I call her down?’

‘Not for a moment.’ McKenna stood up to look through the window, gathering his thoughts, playing for time, feeling as if enmeshed in a seafog, blundering along a cliff-top path. One more false step and he would be lost. Virtually sure Gwen had killed Romy Cheney, and Jamie too, for greed or spite or jealousy or fear, or simply because they crossed her in a way only she could explain and understand, he knew he could prove none of it, and the investigation, its people, its dragging load of misery, weighed him down.

‘Your brother told me Mrs Stott made a number of allegations about him.’

‘What allegations?’ Serena asked. ‘Who to?’

‘To Romy Cheney. Possibly to others.’ McKenna answered her second question.

‘What did she say?

‘She said he sexually abused Jenny.’ McKenna watched her face, her eyes. ‘She also said he allowed a friend of his to abuse the child.’

Serena leaned back in her chair, staring at McKenna. ‘You’re not serious!’

‘Unfortunately, I am. And I must discuss the allegations with Jenny. I have no choice.’ Serena continued to stare, her face drained of colour, eyes wide. ‘I would prefer,’ McKenna went on, ‘to talk to her with you present, although such a procedure is not strictly proper because you are arguably biased by your relationship to Mr Stott.’ He broke off, hearing pomposity in the words, as always when he was pressured or disturbed.

‘And what would be proper procedure?’

‘An impartial adult, usually a social worker, present for Jenny. A policewoman, and possibly a solicitor.’

Serena lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old. ‘Have you told social services?’

‘I don’t wish to involve other agencies unless it becomes unavoidable. And I don’t think Jenny should be caught up in the victim industry.’ He sat down. ‘It’s a growth industry in our recession-hit times, where any number of people home in on victims of alleged abuse, ostensibly offering support and counselling, and making sure history doesn’t repeat itself.’

‘What’s so awful about that?’

‘Nothing in theory,’ McKenna admitted. ‘Except the victims must play their part in keeping the industry going and, in order to do so, they must remain, as it were, locked into the time period in which the abuse occurred. Hardly beneficial to any healing process, is it?’ He watched Serena’s face. ‘I don’t think it will do Jenny’s emotional or psychological health any good if she’s forced into a situation where she must constantly repeat what happened to her – that is, if anything did – must let others examine and re-examine, analyse and re-analyse, the misery and trauma and distress in the minutest detail. And I don’t think Jenny should be forced, at this stage anyway, to consider the prospect of having to give evidence in court against her own father.’

Serena shook her head. ‘I can’t take this in. I really can’t! You say Chris actually told you Gwen made these accusations?’

‘We do come across false allegations, you know. And allegations of sexual assault are always the hardest to deal with, because unless there is clearly identifiable forensic evidence, as in a rape, we must rely on testimony from others. Allegations of unspecified sexual assault are very easy to make, but very, very hard to prove or disprove.’

She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette, moving the crumpled butt round and round in the ashtray, making patterns in the grey ash. ‘D’you know what I thought as soon as the words were out of your mouth? I thought: this is Chris’s way of making sure Jenny never goes back to that house. Or to her mother!’ McKenna saw tears brimming her eyes. ‘Now d’you understand what I mean about twisted thinking?’

Raincloud, dark and ponderous, massed over the city, diminishing daylight. ‘Put the light on will you, Jack? Like a cave in here,’ Owen Griffiths said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘We need an order to inspect Mrs Cheney’s bank account. The cheque book found on Jamie very likely belonged to her, but the bank manager’s being obstructive.’

‘When are you going to find out who topped the woman? And why couldn’t Jamie’ve killed her and then himself? That would be nice and tidy.’

‘I don’t see why he should suddenly decide to do away with himself,’ Jack said. ‘Not after all this time.’

‘It could’ve been accidental. Whatever it was, you’re not getting very far, are you? It’s all “might have” and “maybe” and “perhaps” and “if this” and “if that”. Look at things from my point of view, Jack. You’ve got people accusing each other of just about every perversion known to man, and not a shred of hard evidence one way or another to prove any of it. Now you want a court order to go snooping in somebody’s bank account.’

‘What would you have us do, sir?’ Jack asked. ‘We can’t make bricks without straw. We’ve got plenty of straw, but it’s all the wrong sort …
just blows about’

‘Don’t ask me. You and McKenna and that lad Prys are supposed to be the detectives.’

‘You’re supposed to be in overall charge, aren’t you? Keeping tabs on things, making sure we don’t waste valuable police time, or upset our sensitive public, or make general arseholes of ourselves!’

Owen Griffiths stared. ‘McKenna rattled your cage, has he? He’s very good at that … Lifetime of practice, I shouldn’t wonder. You shouldn’t let him get under your skin. A lot of people make that mistake. If you simply ignore some of his remarks, it’s better for everybody. He’s not a particularly happy man.’

‘He’s not happy? He makes bloody sure nobody else is, as well!’

‘Yes, well that’s as maybe. But I’m quite sure you can take care of yourself. You work well together most of the time, don’t you? We don’t want to let a tiff ruin a good partnership. It’ll blow over, sure as a gale from the west blows itself out.’

With rare recourse to figurative speech, Jack said, ‘And as soon as one gale blows itself out, there’s another one out at sea ready to give you a battering.’

‘Exactly! So you trim your sails, don’t you? Other people’s emotions can take us into stormy waters … very treacherous waters. If you want to spend your days tacking along inshore, nice and quiet and safe, you shouldn’t set sail with them in the first place.’

Working systematically through the files on the death of Romy Cheney, Dewi discarded all but the strictly relevant, disposing of red herrings as a trawlerman might discard unmarketable fish from the night’s catch, even jettisoning the sleek grey car which had driven in and out of the investigation, making holes in its fabric so the pattern became torn and impossible to decipher. Left only with money and greed to consider, he told the manager of the bank in Leeds that a court order to inspect the account would put the bank and the police to a great deal of inconvenience. ‘And I don’t know, sir,’ he added, ‘but what your head office might not get upset about it, and say why didn’t you just tell us what we want to know without all the palaver.’

‘And what do you want to know?’

‘How much money is left in the account?’

‘One pound thirty seven pence.’

‘When was the last withdrawl?’

‘Friday last week.’

‘How much was taken out?’

‘Six hundred pounds.’

‘Cash or transfer to another account somewhere?’

‘Cash. From a machine.’

‘Any savings account in the same name? With you or any other bank?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Which machine was used?’

‘Our branch in Bangor.’

Dewi grinned at his reflection in the computer screen. ‘You’ve been most helpful, sir. I can’t thank you enough. Just one last thing. We need cancelled cheques for handwriting analysis. You wouldn’t want us making a blunder over thinking somebody got at one of your accounts when they shouldn’t. People want to know the banks won’t let any Tom, Dick or Harriet empty an account without checking the money’s going to the rightful person, don’t they? So we’ll expect all the cancelled cheques from the last four years. And statement copies, and records of standing orders. You should be able to get them in the post today. Mark the envelope for Chief Inspector McKenna.’

‘We don’t keep cheques that far back. And accounts are databased.’

‘Microfiche copies of the cheques will do nicely, sir.’ Dewi heard the man breathing fast and heavy, as if he had run a race. ‘Before you ring off, sir.’

‘Yes?’ The man sounded as if he chewed glass.

‘You keep individual data files on your customers, don’t you? Personal details as well as account information? So, we’ll have disk copies of everything to give us a nice full picture.’