Simeon's Bride (34 page)

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I just sort of mentioned this and that. I went to ask what she wanted for tea, and she started rabbiting on about how Romy changed all of a sudden, stopped being her friend and so forth,’ Dewi said. ‘Then she comes out with this spiel about Romy making a web round her of all her deepest and darkest secrets, then attacking her like a spider goes for a fly trapped in the web. And she reckons Romy made her feel even more worthless than her husband does, and that’s saying something, apparently.’ He frowned. ‘She claims she took Romy’s name to get shut of the inadequacies other people say she’s got.’

‘Interesting,’ McKenna observed.

‘You think so, sir?’ I think it’s what Inspector Tuttle calls “
psychological
claptrap”. Anyway, I happened to mention we’d talked to John Beti, and she starts spitting words at me. John Beti, she says, is a filthy pervert Peeping Tom, snooping around the cottage and sniffing after Romy, who was too busy having it off with Jamie to notice overmuch.’

‘So?’ McKenna prompted.

Dewi shrugged. ‘So I mentioned what John Beti’s been telling us, and she goes ape-shit. Sat staring at me with those awful cold dead eyes she’s got on her, and said, “Do you know something, constable?” So I said, “What?” And she says, “Jamie Thief kept wanting more and more money to keep his mouth shut, so I sat on his chest and listened until he stopped breathing. And I’ll do the same to John Jones”. She fair made my skin crawl. She means it, you know.’

‘I’ve no doubt she does,’ McKenna said. ‘John Jones would be well advised to arrange to be dead of natural causes by the time Gwen Stott gets out.’

‘D’you reckon she’s mad, sir?’

‘No, I don’t, but she wants us to thinks she is, and I daresay some psychiatrist will be only too happy to oblige her way of thinking before the trial.’

‘D’you think she’ll get off with diminished responsibility, then?’

‘As Dr Roberts pointed out, mad or bad, she gets locked up,’ McKenna said. ‘To my mind, she lacks a conscience far more than Jamie Thief ever did. Let’s call it a day, now, shall we, Dewi? There’ll be a lot of sorting out to do tomorrow.’

‘I’m not on duty this weekend, sir.’

‘I know that. Anything special planned?’

‘Oh, you know … the usual….’

‘You’ll no doubt enjoy yourself more than Jack Tuttle, whatever it is,’ McKenna grinned. ‘He was right about why that woman was killed. Plain greed, whatever fancy notions Gwen Stott would like us to believe.’

‘It usually is,’ Dewi said. ‘Folk always want something they think other folk’ve got: love, money … If it’s not one, it’s the other. Both, some times.’ He made a neat pile of the loose papers on McKenna’s desk. ‘Folk never learn not to be greedy, do they, sir? Never learn you can’t take and get away with it.’

Walking up the hill to his home, McKenna hoped Dewi’s bright spirit would never be stifled by a web of greed spun by some golden-haired princess, that the boy’s wisdom would not desert him when most needed. A vain hope, he told himself, turning into his own street, for Dewi would fall into the same traps as other men, even the wariest: traps baited by life with the promise of all manner of magic.

The cat kept her vigil behind the front door, wrapping herself around his ankles as soon as he stepped over the threshold, purring and talking. He carried her downstairs, and stood by the open back door while she quartered the little garden, checking her territory, beneath a sky alight with the hues of rare gems. Below the terrace on which the house so precariously balanced, dense thickets of trees and wild shrubs clothed the hillside, dark leaves tipped gold by a setting sun. McKenna looked over the city, at the slope of a roof, the angle of a gable, visible here and there in the secret gardens behind the shops and offices on the High Street, at flowers luminous in the near dark, smoke rising in a thin pencil line from some tall old chimney. A flurry of bats erupted from the trees, fluttering black against the sky, watched by the cat, who raised her head and stood alert, ready to spring. Over the mountain ridge to the east, a new moon hung dazzling in a deep blue sky, like the Grim Reaper’s sickle hammered from gold.

Afternoon sunshine blazed outside McKenna’s office window, swathes of shadow dappling walls and floors as a breeze stirred the branches of the ash tree. He placed Beti Gloff’s statement in a folder with statements from the other residents of Salem village, her evidence, like the rest, barely worth the paper upon which written. She knew nothing, suspected nothing: anyone saying otherwise, her husband included, simply allowing imagination to run riot. Mary Ann, equally ignorant and unsuspecting, was pungent in her condemnation of John Jones’s deceptions, his excesses of imagination, his innate stupidity, taking pains to deride his claims of persecution at the hands of a gipsy.

Lighting a cigarette, he turned to Dr Rankilor’s report on Gwen Stott, noting from the covering letter that the report was not a definitive statement upon her competence or otherwise to stand trial, but merely a psychiatric assessment of her presenting problems. Before he completed reading the first paragraph, McKenna knew Dr Rankilor tilled the wholly familiar field seeded by Freud, gleaning a bumper crop. Gwen Stott was no heartless killer, no ruthless manipulator of people and money, but joined Romy Cheney and Jamie Thief in the ranks of that ever-growing army of victims, enlisted by unmet needs and the failure of all those to whom she entrusted her naive and trusting self.

Her life one of impoverishment, both materially and emotionally, she escaped the cold fire of her family home into the empty frying pan of marriage to Christopher Stott, a man emotionally immature, inadequate and fearful, unable to provide in any way what his wife could rightfully expect, his uncertain sexual proclivities an insupportable insult and betrayal.

Romy Cheney entered the equation at a critical time, to become catalyst and instigator of the chain of tragic events which followed, its first link forged the day she met Gwen, and found in her a strength, honed by adversity, she herself lacked. Romy, her own impoverishment cloaked with the trappings of material wealth, pursued Gwen with gifts and weekend breaks at the luxurious cottage, tales of riches and excitement, tantalizing and inevitably harrowing glimpses of a world
where Gwen could book no reservation and must content herself with crumbs from the rich woman’s table. Quoting Freud, the report stated:
unsatisfied
wishes
are
the
driving
power
behind
fantasies;
every
separate
fantasy
contains
the
fulfilment
of
a
wish,
and
improves
on
unsatisfactory
reality
. Allowed to inhabit Romy’s fantasy, Gwen’s own began to suffer erosion at the teeth of envy, an envy such as the homeless derelict might feel for one who dwelt in a mansion.

McKenna stubbed out the cigarette burned to a broken column of ash, and stared through the window, eyes dazzled by sunlight bouncing off the wall of the telephone exchange. Dr Rankilor had style to his writing, he thought: too much perhaps, for it enticed him away from facts into the realms of speculation, of imagination, and ultimately, of romance.

Friendship with Romy the bright lantern light in the narrow corridor of greyness down which her real life meandered, Gwen saw a turning here, a diversion there, hers for the taking if she heeded Romy’s advice, and travelled the remainder of her journey without the encumbrance of a husband. Romy presented the enormity of marital schism as of no consequence, for she had abandoned her own husband, and then her lover. Cajoled and persuaded to believe that people should be used only while useful, then discarded like worn-out garments, Gwen failed to see the warning signals, failed to understand, until too late, that Romy would sooner or later apply that same philosophy to their friendship. Realization dawned when the die was long cast and Gwen Stott thoroughly enmeshed in Romy’s silken, sticky web.

On that cold November morning Romy turned on her, for no reason, with no warning, the purring cat unleashing claws and striking out to kill. She said terrible things to Gwen; taunted her, diminished her, sneered at her, tore her fragile dreams to bloody tatters and flung them like soiled rags at her feet, as if suddenly crazed, her mind perhaps turned by drink and drugs. Gwen panicked, driven mad in her own way by the knowledge of hope dead, of choice snatched away, of nothing left but return to the bitter raw bleakness of her marriage.
Mrs
Stott
was
distraught
, Dr Rankilor wrote.
She
temporarily
lost
all
control
all
understanding
of
consequence
.
Romy struck out at Gwen, pulled her hair and tore at her face with long sharp nails, while Jamie, there because Romy had taken him for her lover, tried to pull her away. She fell, striking her head against a corner of the hearth, and Gwen remembered only the terrible crunching sound of the impact, Romy sprawled stunned at her feet, and Jamie’s hysterical screaming.

Jamie decided to kill; Jamie went for the barrow; Jamie picked up the limp form of the woman whose bed and body he so recently enjoyed, and bundled her into the barrow. Jamie pushed the barrow deep into the woods; Jamie bound her hands; Jamie tied the rope around her neck and
around the branch, and braced himself against the trunk of the tree while he pulled and hauled the rope and its load off the ground. Jamie stayed up the tree, legs astride the gallows branch, smoking one cigarette after another, long after the body of Romy Cheney stopped jerking and dancing at the end of its rope. Gwen only watched, dazed and stupefied and terrified beyond all comprehension, and Jamie went to his own grave three summers later with a worse name given to him by Gwen Stott’s malicious mouth than the bad one he gave himself.

Jamie died by accident. Crazed himself with drink and drugs, greedy for more and more of the booty, he threatened to brand Gwen a killer if she refused his demands. When she found the courage to do so, he attacked her like a rabid dog. Dr Rankilor drew attention to the photographs taken of Gwen’s injuries:
more
than
ample
proof
of
her
words
, if proof were needed.

For Gwen, the days and weeks following Romy’s death passed in that seamless stuporous fashion coming in the wake of any bereavement, when time is suspended, senses numbed, awareness obscured. Jamie insisted on taking Romy’s furniture and effects to the Stott house, saying the cottage must be empty, nothing left to raise curiosity about the tenant’s sudden disappearance. Finding the cheque book and credit cards when she packed away the detritus of Romy’s existence, Gwen realized she might still salvage some good from all the bad, not for herself, but for her child. A braggart as well as treacherous, Romy made no secret of her wealth or its origins, and Gwen convinced herself that Romy’s money was like all money, owned by whoever possessed it. Taking it into her own possession, salting it away for the rainy days of Jenny’s future, she spent only a few pounds on herself in the years since that terrible event, too fearful of discovery, of making holes in the only safety net available to her child. She watched helpless as Jamie’s never-ending avarice made the holes for her, until the time came when she could watch no longer.

McKenna stubbed out yet another cigarette burned away, and turned to Dr Rankilor’s concluding paragraphs, an ending providing no conclusion, but raising further questions, opening up more ways to travel into the mind of Gwen Stott, pathways twisting and looping and overlapping and ending up where they began. Tortured by her memories of that dreadful day, ambushed at every corner since, she took Romy’s name perhaps through some bizarre logic, resurrecting the woman to avoid confronting the fact of her death. Or perhaps she stole the name and all its connotations to make a dustbin into which she tossed those things about herself she so loathed and despised. Romy had to die because Gwen Stott, like anybody else, must be rid of the person who evoked their shame;
for
nobody
, Dr Rankilor wrote,
would
ever
be
able
to
say
of
Romy
Cheney
that
her
life
was
like
the
snowdrift,
leaving
only
a
mark
but
never
a
stain
. Indeed not, McKenna thought, seeing Jenny and her father and Trefor Prosser stained indelibly with Romy Cheney’s dirt.
And
thus
, Dr Rankilor continued,
Mrs
Stott
simply
rid
the
world
of
some
rubbish,
some
poisonous
waste,
and
what
the
world
regarded
as
her
scavenging
of
the
body
and
death
of
Romy
Cheney
was
but
a
form
of
atonement,
of
taking
on
the
sins
and
badness
of
the
woman,
as
the
sin-eater
takes
of
the
feast
laid
out
on
the
corpse,
and
atones
once
more
for
being
an
outcast
.

Speculation and imagination exhausted, Dr Rankilor turned to romance, suggesting that Gwen Stott unconsciously wished for Romy’s death, and thus failed to save her from Jamie’s depredations. For Romy exposed the canker within Gwen’s own family, the terrifying bogey of incest, all the more terrifying once Gwen understood that her daughter played the dual role of victim and seductress, slipping eel-like from one to the other.
A
classic
scenario
, the psychiatrist wrote,
where
only
the
mother
could
effect
rescue
. That such rescue was merely another fantasy, Gwen could not know until the tragic repercussions began reverberating about her head.

Lighting his third cigarette, McKenna let words and pictures run through his mind, underscored by Gwen Stott’s words telling him that Romy picked her up, took her for a ride, then abandoned her on the road. Which road, he wondered? And what escoriating injury did Romy inflict upon her friend when she pushed her from the speeding car, left her bouncing and tumbling on the hard surface of that unknown road? He put Dr Rankilor’s report away before its tentative siren call evoked compassion, and scrawled notes on a large sheet of paper to remind himself that nowhere did Dr Rankilor make any mention of John Jones, because John Jones was the fly in the psychiatrist’s soothing balm, the nasty little fly poking up his head from the great woodpile of rationalizations and justifications and defences for the indefensible.

The cigarette burned away between his fingers while he thought of the notions fashioned by Dr Rankilor, who seemed, like himself, unable to bring Gwen Stott into focus. Like a person seen in the mirror, she was a visual fallacy, and each person who looked saw only another reflection of the original untruth, as if the image and its untruthfulness were reflected infinitely in two parallel mirrors. Only Gwen Stott could find the reality, because she knew where it festered behind the image, and McKenna knew she never would, because there was nothing she needed or wanted to see.

Pulling down shirtsleeves and fastening cuff buttons, he stacked the huge pile of papers on his desk, took his jacket from its hanger, and left the office for a city quiet with the emptiness of a Sunday afternoon, only a few bored youths and their gaudy girls lounging on the pavement outside Woolworths. Saturday’s litter skipped down the street, harried
by a rising westerly wind, sunlight glittered on rooftops, highlighting dirt on the pavements, weather-worn paintwork on old window frames. The sharp tang of gorse blew from the mountain, lemony and fresh, as McKenna, jacket unbuttoned, strolled to the end of High Street, on to Beach Road, and down to the pier; one third of a mile of ornate ironwork and timber striking out into Menai Straits. Standing at the pier-end, the sea running fast beneath his feet, he took off his glasses, afraid of losing them to the snatching wind. Across the water, the shores of Anglesey looked near enough to touch, the mountains behind him sharp and clear against a pale-blue sky. Westwards, Menai Bridge spanned the Straits, graceful and precise, a mathematical formula proved in stone and iron.

On the terrace of the pier restaurant, he ate chicken sandwiches and strawberry gâteau, drank two cups of coffee and took Denise’s letter from his inside pocket. He put his glasses on to read, pausing here and there at some word or phrase among the many scrawled in her rather untidy hand on crinkly blue airmail paper. Cigarette burnt down in the ashtray, he stubbed it out and lit another, gazing out to sea at dark swathes of shoals under the running tide, gulls wheeling and diving, early tourists taking their turn on the pier. Off Beaumaris, a small flotilla of yachts tacked into the wind, sails full, like ice-cream cones bobbing on the sea, and in the far distance, the grey whaleback shape of Great Orme lay in the water against a cold eastern sky. He stared, some wisp of a recollection flickering along the edge of memory like a sputtering flame. Trying to catch the tail, hold it still long enough to look, he was left thinking only of a dreamscape on the edge of the world, glimpsed and gone.

Bill paid, letter folded safely in his pocket, he walked back up Beach Road and onwards to the council cemetery, through its high wrought-iron gates, crunching along gravel pathways to wander among the graves. Beyond rows of headstones, trees tossed on the wind, leaves full out and bright as new paint, their scent on the air. Seated on the hard slats of a bench, he looked at another aspect of the mountains seen from the pier, this view a backdrop for the smoke-stained chimney of the crematorium. Wispy smoke and a mirage of white-hot heat from Romy Cheney’s remains singed the air above the chimney three days before, her funeral graced by the village rector, himself and Dewi, and Eifion Roberts, gossipy with a man from the council. Robert Allsopp offered to pay for the funeral, receiving in return the little carton of ground wood and bone ash to scatter on a patch of Derbyshire moorland, there for it to swirl on the winds, be trodden under the hooves of a thousand sheep, washed into gullies by torrents of rain, and buried deep under the snows of winter. Romy Cheney needed no memorial, McKenna thought, for she lived too vividly in the memory of Jenny Stott ever to be decently
forgotten, as the dead should be with time. He thought of her hanging among the trees of Castle Woods, feeding nature as carrion nourishes, her worldly wealth scavenged by human vultures, and felt not the smallest twist of grief.