The House of Women (5 page)

7

‘Did you call on Janet?’ Diana Bradshaw asked, sauntering unannounced into McKenna’s office. ‘Is she any better? I was quite worried about her.’ Sitting on the edge of the desk, she went on: ‘I had a chat with her this morning about her prospects, because she’s a bright, well-educated girl, and she
could
go right to the top. She doesn’t have a bad sickness record, does she? That would be such a shame.’

‘
No.’ McKenna pulled a cigarette from the pack, and flicked his lighter. ‘She’s usually bursting with rude health.’

‘
Oh, well, I expect it’s a hangover from holiday tummy.’ As smoke began to curl towards the ceiling, she placed her hand to her lips, coughing delicately.

McKenna nodded.
‘I expect so.’ As she coughed again, he said: ‘DC Prys is helping Rowlands with the car investigation, and I have an appointment to see Ned Jones’s doctor after lunch.’

‘
Good.’ She smiled. ‘You don’t need to report to me all the time, you know. You’re in charge of criminal investigation.’

‘
Superintendent Griffiths liked to have his finger on every pulse,’ McKenna said, smiling too. ‘His input was often invaluable.’

8

Like McKenna, Gabriel Ansoni was of immigrant stock, the grandson of ice-cream makers from northern Italy, but unlike McKenna, he remained a good Catholic.

‘
How’s the family?’ McKenna asked.

‘
Sufficient to keep His Holiness quiet for the time being.’ The dark eyes smiled at him. ‘And more than enough to tempt me to leave them with the relatives in Cremona!’ The smile faded, and he sighed. ‘Poor Ned won’t ever know that feeling, for all he was so close to Phoebe Harris.’

‘
I sort of knew him.’ Relating the long ago Eisteddfod contest, in his mind’s eye he saw Ned again, a thin figure stooping even in youth, mounting the stage to receive his accolade. ‘So if I’d taken it into my head to dispatch him after all these years, I’d be famous at last, wouldn’t I?’ He smiled briefly. ‘But his flame burned itself out without my help. What was wrong with him?’

‘
What wasn’t?’ The doctor spread his hands. ‘He had one illness after another, and all I could do in the end was give him attention, because he’d exhausted the limited resources of medical knowledge. The consensus among the countless consultants he’d seen was of a neurotic hypochondria of epic proportions. In other words, he’d driven himself half crazy.’

‘
Is there a history of mental illness?’

Turning to the computer to search the medical record, Ansoni said:
‘He was admitted several times to Denbigh Hospital with depression, and even sectioned once when he went completely crazy, and he spent a good part of his childhood and adolescence in one hospital or another. Tonsils, appendix, joint pains, chest pains, ear trouble, balance problems, headaches, gastro-intestinal problems, virulent mouth ulcers.’ He took his finger from the keyboard. ‘No physiological cause emerged, so a psychiatric conclusion was inevitably drawn, and indeed, such diffuse symptoms often indicate depressive illness.’

‘
Did you think he was a suicide risk?’

‘
Not really, although there were times when he seemed near the end of his tether.’

‘
Such as?’

‘
The last time we spoke.’ The doctor ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Osteo-arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis are common conditions at Ned’s age, and he had both, together with low blood pressure, and he often experienced minor loss of sensation in the extremities, but he’d convinced himself that something perfectly normal was extremely sinister, and would necessitate amputation of his legs in the not too distant future. I said he was talking nonsense and he told me to stop patronizing him, because as he knew his bodily workings better than any doctor, he knew these new pains and strange changes heralded disaster.’

‘
You’re on a hiding to nothing in that kind of situation,’ McKenna commented.

‘
Which is probably why I subscribed too easily, if not wholly, to the psychiatric diagnosis and consequently never went out of my way to shape a therapy for him.’

‘
You can’t treat what isn’t there.’

‘
He had real pain, even if it was the product of inner turmoil.’

‘
But you didn’t prescribe pain-killers?’

‘
Most strong pain-killers are highly addictive, and we have enough junkies courtesy of the NHS, without making more. Anyway, he never asked.’ He smiled again, fleetingly. ‘He was always on the edge of a psychological abyss, and he stopped himself from toppling over by sheer strength of will, so he dealt with his pain the same way. He once told me he even derived satisfaction from it, because it enhanced his awareness of the world.’

‘
People on the borderline of insanity often have heightened perceptions and instincts.’

‘
And which causes which?’ asked Ansoni. ‘He said he experienced pain in varying degrees day after day and night after night. He was helpless inside a body constantly threatening to kill him, from which, as he put it, he had to have prior permission for every breath he took, so I’m not surprised he became obsessed with its rhythms and workings and almost paranoid about his physical self.’ He paused, gathering his memories. ‘He used to clip articles from newspapers and magazines, and he’d come across one about aneurysms in the abdominal aorta, so he lay in the bath watching the throb of his own aorta, thinking an aneurysm would be like a bomb in his guts, but he wouldn’t know when the timer was set for detonation.’

‘
Sickness is an existentially precarious condition,’ McKenna said, ‘whatever the reasons. He was intensely conscious of the dichotomy between mind and body, and perhaps his mind just caved in to the pressure from time to time. I suppose you could say his social body never separated itself from his natural body.’

‘
To me, he simply personified the unbridgeable gulf between the sick and the well, but now his natural body’s dead, you can be sure his social body was somehow the cause of it.’

‘
Have you any idea what he could have taken?’

The doctor shook his head.
‘You’ll have to wait on the toxicology report, but I’ve seen people near death after eating a few strawberries. It could be an idiosyncratic response to any number of things, but he certainly had no suspect medication because there’d already been a rather worrying reaction to antibiotics I prescribed last year for a chest infection.’

‘
What kind of reaction?’

‘
A lower level of the one that killed him, which made me wonder if there was some malfunction of the adrenal cortex. The tests I arranged were negative, so Ned got himself a bracelet, and I filled in the details for him.’

McKenna frowned.
‘A bracelet?’

‘
An SOS bracelet. A waterproof capsule on a chain, with a long strip of paper inside to write down important data about medical conditions, drug sensitivity and so forth. He said his life might depend on it, so he wore it all the time, and I’m just beginning to realize how much I’ll miss him, for all he exposed our limitations and upset the balance of power. He was a good man, and he didn’t deserve the suffering he had.’

9

Rowlands felt slightly sick after being bounced for mile upon mile along the pot-holed lanes twisting between one run-down village garage and another. ‘Are these people we’ve seen paid informants?’ he asked, sucking a mint.

‘
No, sir,’ Dewi said. ‘I just know most of them, as you do.’

‘
And have they told you anything interesting yet?’

‘
You heard as much as me, sir.’

‘
I heard a gabble of Welsh, so I didn’t understand a word.’

‘
Really? You should’ve said. We’re not into language fascism, which is lucky for Inspector Tuttle, ’cos all he knows in Welsh are a few swear words.’ Taking a blind bend without reducing speed, he added: ‘Does Ms Bradshaw speak Welsh?’

Rowlands felt the seat belt lock tight across his chest.
‘I doubt it. She’s from Manchester.’

‘
How long’s she been with our force?’

‘
Two or three years, I think.’

‘
Is she married?’

‘
I believe so.’

‘
Any children?’

Rowlands tried to ease some slack into the seat belt.
‘D’you always ask so many questions? Doesn’t McKenna mind?’

‘
He lets me know if I overstep the mark. He’s straight.’

‘
And you’re so confident you could almost be called brash.’

‘
I like to be straight, too, sir. And having my own opinions isn’t disrespectful. Mr McKenna encourages us to use our initiative, under the right supervision. So did Superintendent Griffiths.’

‘
If that’s a coded message for me to take back to Ms Bradshaw, you’re wasting your time. I never met her before today.’

*

The car showroom, straddling a bleak hill above the Rhiwlas road, was an ugly ramshackle structure tacked on to the side of an old stone dwelling which now served as offices. Parking on a patch of gravel by the roadside, Dewi went first to peer through the glazed showroom doors, then to the other building. Opening the office door, he walked in, Rowlands in his wake. ‘This is Geraint, sir,’ he announced, nodding to the young man behind the desk, whose face blossomed with acne. ‘Geraint and his dad got done by Trading Standards for dishonestly flogging a vehicle, but they coughed up their fines without so much as a squeal of protest.’

‘
Was that the Tigra clocked from 33,000 miles to 14,000?’ asked Rowlands.

‘
It was.’ Dewi sat on Geraint’s desk. ‘I don’t think Geraint and his dad did the deed, but they won’t tell us who did.’

His glance flicking from one to the other of his visitors, Geraint said:
‘Can’t you leave it be? It’s over and done with.’

‘
Only till the next time,’ Dewi said. ‘I want to buy that car I looked at on Friday, but how can I trust what you tell me? For all I know it could be two halves out of fatal accidents, welded together in the middle, like the red coupe that poor woman bought from your pal Dervyn.’

‘
You’ve had an HPI check on the car you were drooling over,’ Geraint said. ‘You even checked the engine number.’

‘
I know I did, because somebody’s stealing engines, regrinding the block, and stamping on a fake number.’ He turned to Rowlands. ‘It makes you wonder if there’s an honest dealer in the whole of Wales, and when you look at the records of the likes of Dervyn, you begin to think criminals must be fatally attracted to dealing cars.’

‘
Who’s Dervyn?’

‘
Geraint’s old school chum, except neither of them spent much time in class. They used to go twocking, and now they’ve taken to clocking.’

‘
Stop showing off your language, Dewi Prys!’ Geraint snapped. ‘I don’t have any truck with that Dervyn.’

‘
There’s a remarkable incidence of small-scale criminal enterprise in the area,’ Rowlands observed. ‘In my experience operations like this are usually part of a ring.’

‘
That’s what I’ve been trying to get through Geraint’s thick skull. To give him his due, this is his first clocking offence and he says he was conned when he bought the car, but I don’t quite believe him.’ Noting Geraint’s scowl, Dewi added: ‘Which isn’t surprising considering some of the other tricks he’s turned, like sticking a loose nut behind a hub cap, then saying the clanking noise was a knackered drive shaft.’

‘
I only did it once!’ Geraint whined, spots livid against his pasty skin. ‘And if you don’t leave me be, I’m going to report you! This is police harassment.’

‘
No, it isn’t.’ Rowlands showed his teeth. ‘Not yet.’

10

As McKenna went in through the back door of the police station, the duty sergeant reported on Diana Bradshaw’s half-hourly attempts to locate him. Irritated, he walked slowly up the staircase, the heat within the building stealing his breath. Hearing his footfall in the corridor, she opened her door. ‘There you are!’ Her smile was brilliant. ‘I expected you back ages ago! Did you really need to spend half the day with the old man’s doctor?’

He leaned against the wall, sweat running down inside his shirt, feeling transient and insecure, like a bystander in an alleyway.
‘I think that’s a slight exaggeration, ma’am.’

Looking rather hurt, she invited him into the office, and sat behind her desk, her arms folded.
‘I hoped we’d be friends, you know, and there’s really no need for all this formality, except in front of the rank and file. I’m sure you didn’t always address Superintendent Griffiths as sir.’

‘
We’d known each other a long time,’ he said. ‘People here take a while to feel at ease with newcomers, and in any case, a measure of formality often avoids the embarrassment of getting in too deep too quickly.’

‘
Really? Well, thank you for the advice, chief inspector. Now, the pathologist wants to see you. Quite urgently, I understand.’