Simeon's Bride (3 page)

In a mood as foul and dismal as the weather, Jack arrived at the police station on Monday morning to find McKenna haunting his office as Denise haunted his home. Eyeing Jack’s sour countenance, McKenna wondered what it was about rain which made people so evil-tempered.

‘Dewi Prys heard some interesting gossip yesterday, Jack. We might have a lead on the woman.’ McKenna handed over Dewi’s report, and disappeared to the canteen.

Jack trailed behind, glancing through the report. Dewi Prys plagued him like a thorn in the side of a dog, yet there was no fault to be had with his work. ‘Don’t underestimate him,’ McKenna was saying. ‘He lets people talk, lets them relax, and just points them in the right direction now and then with a question.’

Waiting with ill-concealed impatience for McKenna to drink two mugs of tea and smoke two cigarettes, Jack asked, ‘What’s on the agenda for today?’

‘I want to have a look at Gallows Cottage. And another visit to the old ladies might be useful, while you get someone to talk to Jamie about this car. Nothing’s come in on the missing women, but I don’t expect it to for some time.’ McKenna lit his third cigarette.

‘Don’t you think you should cut down on the smoking a bit, sir? Bad for you, you know.’

McKenna took off his glasses to rub his eyes, and Jack noticed the smudge of shadow beneath them. ‘Kind of you to think of my health, Jack, but are you doing yourself any favours? You know promotion in this force is usually a matter of dead men’s shoes.’

A sombre place on the brightest summer day, under a pall of rain and heavy cloud, the wet blue slate of its cottage roofs livid in the dull light, Salem village took upon itself a sinister aura. Densely massed trees, tall and overbearing, surrounded cottages, school and church, suffocating and oppressive. McKenna parked in the lane beside the row of cottages next to the school. The air was still, sodden with rain, and he was struck by an absence of noise, although he could see children at their desks in
classrooms bright with fluorescent lighting. The trees were empty of birds, rooks’ nests in the high branches abandoned. Only half a mile from the shoreline, no gulls wheeled and screeched in the sky. He pulled his coat around him, and walked quickly to Mary Ann’s front door, rapping at its fox-head knocker.

Lame Beti whipped open the door, a brilliant smile lighting her gargoyle face. ‘Hiya,
del
,’ she greeted him. ‘You want to see Mary Ann, do you?’

People made jokes about Beti, the most cruel to be given currency that she had never been quite pretty enough, even when young, to stop the traffic, and that was why she looked as if mown down by a juggernaut. Following, as she weaved her way into Mary Ann’s parlour, McKenna wondered on the sins she had committed in a past life to carry with her through this one for all the world to see.

Mary Ann’s cottage smelt of old damp in walls and floors, seeped into furniture and fabrics. The walls, once painted in pale emulsion, were stained yellowy brown with nicotine, a huge gas fire burned in the opening of an old range covering half the chimney wall, adding its fumes to an atmosphere drying McKenna’s throat more each time he drew breath.

Squashed tight into an old armchair, Mary Ann held court, fluffy white hair as yellowed above her forehead as the walls. A tin ashtray overflowed on the chair arm, and her feet in grubby pink carpet slippers pointed at him from the end of swollen, varicosed legs. Cruel cold daylight filtered into the room through old-fashioned lace curtains, to light on her face, the make-up peeling away from her nose like old varnish.

‘Dewi’s boss, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘He had us all in stitches yesterday. Isn’t that right, Beti?’

Beti bobbed her head, then went to the kitchen, where McKenna heard the sound of a kettle being filled.

‘Didn’t you wed Eileen Owen’s youngest?’ Mary Ann asked. ‘Denise, isn’t it?’

McKenna nodded, accepting her interrogation as a necessity if he wanted anything from her. ‘We went to school with Eileen.’ She looked sly, McKenna thought; mischievous. ‘Nasty piece of work she was. Always snitching on people.’

McKenna said, ‘I didn’t know her very well, Mrs Edwards. She died not long after I married Denise.’

‘You didn’t miss much. You can call me Mary Ann, by the way, then I can call you Michael.’ She chuckled. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but that family of your Denise’s doesn’t half put on the airs and graces, what with Eileen’s eldest nearly born the wrong side of the blanket. Seven months gone was our Eileen going to the altar.’ She grinned. ‘She got religion
afterwards, and went respectable. Well, at least, she pretended to. No better than she should be, that one, for all her going off to chapel every Sunday with a posh hat on her head. Don’t let me go jangling on, young man. You’ll want to be knowing about that woman and the cottage, won’t you? We told Dewi all we can remember, though it won’t hurt to tell it again, will it?’

The manager of the estate office sighed. ‘We’re going back some time, gentlemen. Maybe three years, if not more. Gallows Cottage no longer belongs to the estate: it was sold several months ago as part of a rationalization programme.’ He sat at his desk, twiddling paper clips. ‘It really will take a while for me to find what you want … quite a while.’ He smiled brightly. ‘Why don’t you leave it with me, and I’ll get in touch as soon as I locate the documents?’

McKenna crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. ‘I would much prefer you to look now, Mr Prosser. And I want to visit the cottage today. You realize we are engaged on a murder investigation?’

Capitulating with ill-grace, Prosser pulled a stack of ledgers from the shelves beside his desk and began to leaf through them, glancing up every so often at the two police officers.

‘I’m surprised you records aren’t computerized, Mr Prosser,’ Jack said. ‘Makes life so much easier, don’t you think?’

‘They will be, once the rationalization is complete,’ Prosser said, with some acerbity. ‘Hardly worth it at the moment.’

McKenna stood up, and began to wander round the dusty, untidy office. ‘What exactly does this rationalization programme entail?’ he asked.

Prosser leaned back in his chair, his finger marking the place in the heavy ledger. ‘Oh, didn’t you know, gentlemen? The trust took over the estate some time ago. Or rather, it was handed over by the family in lieu of death duties after the old lord passed away. Naturally, the trust is anxious to have the estate run on a viable basis, whilst still, of course, retaining it for the nation, preserving it as part of our heritage. That has meant,’ he continued pompously, ‘cutting away a certain amount of dead wood, so to speak.’

‘I see,’ McKenna said. ‘Don’t you remember this woman? You must have dealt with her at the time.’

‘This is a very busy office. You’ve no idea of the amount of business we have to deal with. I can’t be expected to remember everything, can I?’

McKenna leaned over and removed one of the ledgers. ‘Perhaps we might help? Three pairs of hands, you know…. What are we looking for? Do you have a separate file for each property?’

‘This really is most irregular. These transactions are confidential. And no, the records are simply chronological.’

Jack picked up another ledger, spreading it open on his knee. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Prosser. We deal with highly confidential matters every day.’

Handwritten in a variety of scripts ranging from neat copperplate to almost illegible scrawl, ledger entries covered years of business transactions, and Jack was struck by the fundamental inefficiency of such an archaic system. He found the entry as the old clock set into the pediment above the main door struck three, its delicate chime faint and leisurely. An entry dated 29 August, almost four years previously, showed Gallows Cottage leased, for a six-month period, to a Ms R Cheney at a Derbyshire address. An unusual name, he thought. And not one which he could remember seeing on the list of missing persons. He passed the ledger to McKenna.

‘Ms R Chainey, or Cheeney, Mr Prosser. C-H-E-N-E-Y. Do you remember her?’ McKenna asked. Prosser looked where McKenna pointed. ‘Oh, dearie me, gentlemen. This is not my writing, so I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

‘Whose writing is it, then?’ Jack asked.

‘It looks like Miss Naylor’s.’ Prosser held up his hand and smiled. ‘I know what you’re going to ask me. And the answer is no. She left last year to get married, and I have absolutely no idea where she lives, or even what she’s called.’ He closed the ledgers, and began to put them
back on the shelving.

McKenna stood up. ‘I’m afraid we shall have to take the ledgers with us, to have them searched properly. And it may be necessary to examine other documents. We’ll give you a receipt, and return them as soon as possible. And now, Mr Prosser, you can do us one final favour for today and escort us to the cottage.’

Following Prosser in Jack’s car, McKenna could not rid himself of the mental image of the little office manager flouncing out of the building. ‘Right little twerp, isn’t he?’ Jack said, as they trailed the cumbersome red Volvo along a narrow tarmac lane, then over a graceful little bridge under which a small lock had been built for boats collecting slate from Dorabella Quarry. Prosser drove through a massive gateway leading out of the estate and took a gravelled lane leading to the left, the ever present trees soon thick around them, darkening the meandering lane.

‘I hate this bloody estate!’ Jack muttered. ‘Turn a corner, and you get lost in the sodding woods! You’re lucky you didn’t have to go traipsing down to the river on Saturday. What are these trees anyway?’ he added, peering through the windscreen. ‘They look like great overgrown weeds.’

Gallows Cottage, at the bottom of a track hedged with tangles of bramble and hawthorn, was surrounded on three sides by the waters of Menai Straits, its gardens falling to the sea, which suckled and slithered against the rocky boundaries. The building seemed to have grown from the soil on which it stood, walls thick and ponderous, rendered with scabbed and salt-stained plaster. Little sash windows, sixteen tiny panes of glass to each, stared blindly from the walls. Rank grass and scrubby bushes straggled round its footings. An empty bird’s nest, torn down by winter gales, tumbled gently in the wind.

Jack drew to a halt on a patch of heathland. Prosser was already waiting for them, one hand brushing a veil of rain from his thinning hair. ‘I don’t have a key, so I don’t know how you think you’re going to get in.’

The woods formed a dense semi-circle, a windbreak of sorts, behind the cottage exposed to the elements on its other sides. Across the water, misted by rain, the island of Anglesey lay to the north, the humped shape of Puffin Island off its most easterly point. The sea was grey, choppy, pitted with raindrops, its gentle sucking the only sound apart from the patter of rain on the car roofs. McKenna wondered if the trees had been planted by some erstwhile landscaper, or if their seeds had merely been borne on the winds, come to rest in this desolate place.

A man in stained and dusty overalls emerged from the front of the cottage, through a low door set in the middle of the wall. Above him, a small triangular canopy protected the doorway from the ravages of rain and snow, its projection supported by a carving. ‘Can I help you?’ he called.

Prosser went to his car. ‘You won’t need me anymore, will you? I’m sure you can find your own way back. I’ll be expecting you to return the ledgers very soon, Chief Inspector.’ As McKenna thanked him for his help, Prosser disappeared in a swirl of exhaust fumes.

‘Doing up the place for the guy who’s bought it off the estate,’ the builder said. ‘Not,’ he continued, leading them into a dark hallway, ‘that it needs all that much doing. Somebody’s already done the donkey work, and didn’t ruin the place by modernizing too much, if you know what I mean.’

McKenna lingered, reaching up to trace his fingers over the worn stone of the carving above the door: a dog with three heads. Cerberus, he remembered, legendary guardian of the entrance to the underworld, the Queen of Poisons distilled from its saliva. He drew his hand away, a little worm of dread slithering and sliding in his mind, some portent of the nastiness of it all which lay in wait.

Treads worn hollow in the middle, the ancient stone staircase climbed the centre of the building. McKenna had a sudden vision of a child’s broken body lying at its foot, the stone bloody and daubed with bits of brain and splinters of bone.

Taking Jack and McKenna into the kitchen, the builder gave them seats on upturned crates. ‘What can I do for you, then?’

Jack said, ‘We’re trying to find out about a woman who lived here around three and half years ago. She rented from the estate.’

‘Oh, yes? Probably who did the repairs and suchlike,’ the builder said. ‘The place has been empty at least three years. That’s why it’s a bit of a mess.’

‘Odd for someone to spend money on a place they’re only renting,’ McKenna said.

‘Well,’ the builder said, lighting a pipe, ‘unless she didn’t mind living in a slum, she wouldn’t’ve had much choice. A lot of properties on the estate’ve gone to rack and ruin over the years. Nobody bothered with them. And you can take my word for it, the estate wouldn’t argue with a person willing to spend a bit of their own cash.’

Another man walked into the kitchen, nodded to Jack and McKenna, and put a kettle on a Primus stove. ‘This here’s my mate, Dave. He’s deaf, so don’t expect him to talk to you.’ The builder looked at the other man, and gestured for him to make tea for all of them. McKenna wondered how it felt to be stuck in this place with only a deaf man for company. ‘Who’s bought the cottage?’ he asked.

‘Bloody English!’ the builder sneered. ‘For letting out to the tourists. That’s if,’ he smirked, ‘it doesn’t get torched by the arsonists first!’

‘Careful what you say,’ Jack warned.

The builder stared at Jack. ‘I’ll say what I think, whether you like it or not. Not from these parts, are you? Otherwise,’ he went on, ‘you’d know how folk feel about that bloody great castle up the road and the huge great rooms and the posh curtains and carpets, and furniture you couldn’t buy with a million-pound win on the pools. And,’ he added, ‘you’d know about the dirty little hovels the quarrymen lived in, cottages owned by that lot who had the castle built, cottages a man and his wife and kiddies got thrown out of on to the streets when it suited the lord of the manor, or when a man’s lungs’d rotted to pulp from the quarry dust.’ He stopped to draw breath, chewing at the pipe. ‘So don’t be surprised if we don’t want the English coming buying houses the locals should be
living in, especially if they’re just going to use them for holidays. There’s too many young families round here can’t even afford one roof over their heads, never mind two!’

‘What’s to stop them getting a mortgage for one of these places?’ Jack asked.

The builder said, ‘This dump fetched about three times what a normal person could afford.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s on the estate, and the estate decides how much the properties get sold for. After all,’ he added with some bitterness, ‘they wouldn’t want any local riff-raff living here now when they’ve managed to keep them out for so long, would they?’

Dave passed tin mugs of tea around, and took his to sit at the bottom of the stairs. McKenna said to the builder, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t by any chance know who did the other building work?’

‘No, but I’ll ask around. Doesn’t that little fart from the estate office know? Expect he has trouble finding his backside to give it a wipe when he’s had a crap!’ He cackled gleefully, puffing out little belches of smoke. The cottage was cold, a chill of age and time, trapped within its walls, coming at you, McKenna thought, like fingers. The builder said, ‘Why d’you want to know, anyway?’

‘We’re trying to locate the woman who rented the house,’ Jack said.

‘Why? D’you think it was her you found in the woods the other day?’

‘We don’t know,’ McKenna said. ‘Tell me, was anything left behind, in the way of furniture or clothes or whatever?’ He watched Dave, come back into the kitchen to rinse his mug.

‘Nothing. The place was stripped.’

‘What work are you doing?’ Jack asked.

‘There’s a bit of damp to be got rid of … thorough clean-up, decorating…. The only big job is building proper sewers. The drains just go straight into the sea, so the council’s making the new owner do a decent job with a septic tank. We’d have started today but for the weather.’

Dave stared at McKenna, then tapped the builder on the shoulder, pointed to McKenna, then to somewhere beyond the kitchen walls. He made sounds in his throat, guttural and gulping, about a carpet in the parlour, taken up and put in the outhouse.

Little more than a shed with a sloping roof built on to the side of the cottage, the outhouse was once a scullery. A stone sink mouldered under the single window, the remains of a copper tub beside it. The carpet, rolled up and placed upright in the far corner, stank of must. Dave and Jack heaved it to the dirt floor, unrolling it as best they could. ‘Good bit of carpeting,’ the builder said, fingering the edge. ‘Wool, by the feel of it. Must have cost a fair bit. Somebody must’ve dropped a fag end and burnt it. There’s a big stain as well. Probably why it was left.’

He tugged at the carpet until the burnt part came into view. Nearby, a large dark stain spread through the fibres. McKenna felt a little tingle of excitement. Where discoloured, the wool felt matted and stiff under his fingers. Jack looked at the stain, then at McKenna.

‘Look,’ McKenna said to the builder, ‘leave everything as it is until we can get people here to have a good look round, Can you lock this shed?’

‘Think it’s blood, do you?’ The builder eyed the carpet. ‘Could be, I suppose. Mind you, could be anything, couldn’t it? Been there a fair while. Could just be some English arsehole spilling a glass of wine.’

‘Yes, well we won’t know that until we examine it properly.’ Jack’s irritation was obvious. ‘And in the meantime, you keep quiet.’

‘Don’t bully me!’ the builder snapped. ‘I’m quite capable of knowing when to keep my mouth shut!’

Sighing, McKenna thanked the builder and Dave, trying to soothe ruffled feathers. Glaring at Jack, the builder said to McKenna, ‘Anything we can do to help
you
. I’ll ask around in the pub tonight about the other builders. Where can I get hold of you?’

Jack sulked through tea-break, ostentatiously reading Dewi Prys’s report. McKenna, with a strong urge to shake his deputy, shut himself in his office instead with other reports and papers, to find no novelty anywhere, even Dr Roberts’ report devoid of further interest. Asking Derbyshire police to find and interview Ms Cheney, he suspected the investigation would simply move sluggishly around, for a few weeks or months, to end up where it began. Death wrought violently in these parts was usually fashioned by kith or kin: a farmer run amok with a shot-gun, made crazy by years of servitude to a harsh and barren land; young men settling age-old tribal feuds with a flash of sharp blade or the pounding of studded boots against the face and skull of the enemy. This woman’s death had the feel of coldness and deliberation, undignified by the heat of any passion, however aberrant.