In Guilty Night (19 page)

‘What did they say?’

‘Oh, just that kids go into care for their own good, and end up more neglected, disadvantaged and abused than if they’d stayed at home. And dead or missing, of course.’ Jack coughed. ‘But where d’you draw the line with kids? And when?’ He rubbed his eyes again. ‘All the way to South Wales, I was arguing with myself. They’re my children, I’ve known them since they were born, and I’d never, ever wash my hands of them. Then I remembered how I felt the other night. Absolutely terrified, absolutely helpless. Just like Gary’s mother probably, and maybe even the Thomases.’ He coughed again. ‘But after what we’ve seen, I couldn’t ask for help with the twins even if I was absolutely desperate.’

‘I’m sure Emma’s right, so you won’t need to,’ McKenna said. ‘Don’t tar all children’s homes with the same brush.’

‘Why not? Hogg reckons he works with the dregs of society, like prison officers, and us, so none of us can help being tainted. And fair play to him and his thuggy women, being cooped up most of the waking day and half the night with a bunch of hostile kids can’t be very pleasant. What’s the price of survival in a place like Blodwel?’

McKenna sat down and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Hogg chose his job; I chose mine. People who expose themselves to the worst in others can expect to be exposed to the worst in themselves.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘So far, I’ve been able to come to terms with myself, but I doubt Hogg’s even bothered to try.’

‘That’s another thing,’ Jack muttered.

‘What is?’

Fidgeting with a paper-clip, Jack said, ‘What you’d call the worst in yourself, I suppose.’ He fell silent, then added, ‘Hogg’s right about being tainted.’

‘And?’

‘And count yourself lucky you’ve no children. There’s no need for you to face up to your own potential for child abuse.’ He rubbed at his eyes again, almost savagely. ‘I’m almost scared to be in the same room as the twins. What used to be loving and wholesome and natural just seems sick and dirty now.’

‘Where’s DC Evans?’ McKenna opened the door of the video cubicle to find Dewi alone in front of the flickering television screen, making notes.

‘She’s gone with uniform to bring in some of this lot.’

‘I’ve had a rocket off the Traffic inspector.’ McKenna sat down. ‘She outran a patrol car on the expressway not long before she nearly ran down a hare.’

‘She’s having problems with her father. She told me.’

‘I’m not surprised. She’s convinced the chapel’s covering up for child abusers within the ranks of the ministry.’

‘He wants her to resign.’

‘Janet’s quite capable of making her own decisions. Things would be much better if she left home.’

‘She wouldn’t want to leave her mam.’

‘Her mother would probably be very relieved to see the back of her. Adult children need to fly the nest.’

Dewi switched off the television, and turned to face McKenna. ‘You’ve never said that to me.’

‘You’re different, Dewi. Your family needs you, and you’ll never resent that, because you’ve all found your place together.’ He smiled, and switched on the television. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. Don’t ever make waves in your lovely calm sea, or let the storms blow up from nowhere.’

‘Some folk like the storms,’ Dewi commented. ‘Makes them feel something’s happening.’

‘Like shipwreck and death?’ McKenna gazed at fuzziness and poorly focused images on the screen, none the less repulsive for their amateur presentation.

‘They don’t seem real, do they?’ Dewi followered McKenna’s gaze. ‘If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t believe they were.’

‘Human nastiness in its real colours and all its ordinariness.’ Feeling sick with himself for wanting to look, McKenna thought again of Denise, cast like a pearl amid the lardy bodies with mouth and crotch agape, waiting to be pierced and pleasured.

Dewi pressed the fast-forward button, invoking a blizzard of flesh, before stopping on a close-up shot of two men, hands on each other’s genitals, naked on a stained and dirty bedcover. ‘Dai Skunk and his mate Ted. Ted must be inclined either way, ’cos he’s on another film with the wife of that man we caught pushing Ecstasy tablets in the clubs.’ He moved the film on once more. ‘Here she is again, with a woman I don’t know, both performing for the men. D’you reckon it’s like they say, sir?’

‘What?’ Distracted, beguiled, McKenna eyed the women, one thin and ageing, fingering the other, the fresh meat on the table, whose heavy thighs melted apart as the questing fingers of the thin woman cleaved her flesh like a hot knife through butter.

‘Folk reckon watching women together is a turn on.’ Dewi laughed quietly. ‘They don’t do much for me. One old, one flabby, and both mucky-looking.’

‘Is it all more of the same?’ McKenna stood up. ‘This garbage isn’t even illegal if it only involves consenting adults, no money changes hands, and it takes place in private.’

‘So why are we rounding them up?’

‘To find out what else is available to titillate the jaded local palate.’

The cathedral clock struck eleven as McKenna unlocked his front door, expecting to find the cat waiting for him as usual, but the hall was empty, and she failed to respond to his call. With mounting horror, he feared this precious waif of an animal had run away, looking for another heart to invade, and almost wept
with relief when he found her at last, fast asleep under his bed. She yawned, swiped at him with one front paw, and resumed her slumber.

He made supper, drank two mugs of tea, and lay on the sofa, the radio turned low. Arm and shoulder throbbed with a passion all their own, his ribs squeezed his lungs in suffocating embrace, his throat rasped raw with excess of lust for nicotine. He gazed about the small room, seeing not the pretty wallpaper or the pictures hung over mantel and table, but the flailing bodies and contorted faces of the men and women more real than their own reality in the fantasy performed for the cyclops eye of the camera.

He sat at the table, chain-smoking, reviewing the moral law he believed he assumed from choice, and thought of the vortex of dark excesses seething in his own heart, knowing how those who lingered in the twilit reaches of society so easily embraced the evils they were charged to eradicate.

Leaving the radio playing softly, he pulled his coat from the back of the chair and went out. Striding down the hill, past the cathedral and up Glanrafon, he crossed the road by the Safeway supermarket, where lights shone brightly in the car-park, and voices and clatter echoed in the unloading bays, and entered the darkness of Ffriddoedd Road. He walked its length meeting not a soul, past dark driveways like gaping mouths, scuffing his feet through drifts of sodden leaves, flitting like a wraith from the mist-shrouded lights of one street lamp to another, thinking how quickly his journey was done, and wondering if the earth truly shrank with the setting of the sun.

By the gateway to St Gerrard’s Convent, he stopped, looking through a thicket of trees at the darkened building, and thought perhaps tomorrow morning, or night, or the day after, some ordinary person might stumble over the cold rotting body of Gary Hughes or Mandy Minx, and become for a while an extraordinary person in the sight of the knowing world. He looked up at bluey-black sky milky with strands of fog, then went on his way, walking with Night, wondering which of her children, Sleep or Death, she might send to play with him until the sun rose once again behind the mountains in the east.

10

Standing with her back to the shop door, Mandy shivered convulsively, ratty teeth chattering inside lips chapped and pinched with cold.

Carol wiped a duster back and forth over the glass counter top, scrubbing at a stubborn finger-mark, pale hair swinging about her pallid cheeks. ‘I’ve only got ten quid in my bag.’

‘That’ll get me a long way, won’t it?’ Mandy snapped. ‘Can’t you borrow from the till?’

‘I’d get the sack.’ Carol ceased the futile polishing to stare at the other girl. ‘Don’t you know running away won’t do any good?’ She began cleaning again, wiping the duster over display boxes crammed with can openers and potato peelers and sink plugs in dirty white rubber. ‘You’ll end up like Arwel. So will that Gary.’

‘They’re not interested in me.’

‘They will be now.’ Carol pushed the hair off her face, frowning. ‘Did you have to come here? That policewoman keeps after me with her bloody questions. What if she asks about you?’

‘You say nothing, like you manage to say about Arwel.’

‘Shut up about Arwel!’ Carol whispered viciously.

‘You said his name! And if you hadn’t kept your mouth shut in the first place, he might still be alive.’

‘I promised!’ Carol rubbed at the tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘He made me. Nobody would’ve believed him.’

‘Somebody might,’ Mandy insisted. ‘Even if they didn’t, there’d’ve been trouble, and he wouldn’t’ve stayed at Blodwel.’

‘They’d’ve locked him up somewhere else.’ Carol sobbed openly. ‘I wouldn’t’ve been able to see him. I couldn’t’ve looked out for him.’

Mandy scowled with impatience. ‘You’re so fucking stupid, Carol Thomas! People always shit on you. Did you tell Arwel
it’d be all right so long as he kept his mouth shut and his arse wide open?’ She almost spat with disgust. ‘He trusted you! He’d’ve crawled on broken glass for you. Did you say the fancy boyfriend’d sort it?’ She advanced towards the counter, pushing her face so close she smelt the bile on Carol’s breath, whispering savagely, ‘You do right to look sick, ’cos it’s your fault he’s dead!’

‘If your average nice kid from your average nice semi on Bangor’s posh side got shafted and murdered, and went on the run in the teeth of winter, we’d be buzzing round like blue-arsed flies with all the world falling over itself to help, and sod the cost.’ Dropping the headquarters’ memorandum on McKenna’s desk, Jack sat down. ‘As it is, we get snotty memos from the accountants in charge of the force telling us how we’re wasting money chasing juvenile delinquents.’

‘It’s a reminder to keep outlay to the absolute minimum,’ McKenna said. ‘The budget’s overstretched already, without trips to South Wales and all the recent overtime. There’s no extra money due in the next financial year, so the current deficit will result in poorer services, fewer officers, and more pressure on us.’

‘Then we’d better inform the locals we can’t afford more crime until next April. Make a polite request for them to drop their shit in another force area. Merseyside Police probably wouldn’t notice.’

‘Oh, give it a rest!’ McKenna snapped. ‘Have you located Tony Jones yet? And did you talk to the twins again about Gary?’

‘We’re contacting all the secure units in Britain, as well as hospitals with facilities for juveniles, and I shudder to think of the phone bills,’ Jack said. ‘The twins aren’t actually speaking to me, because I’m a willing cog in the Fascist machinery that grinds people like Arwel and Gary and Mandy into the dirt.’

‘Are they speaking to Emma?’

‘Only when necessary, like when they want clean clothes or money. They don’t need us, you see.’

‘I see.’ McKenna pulled on his cigarette, throat still sore, lungs still tight.

‘You’re wheezing,’ Jack pointed out. ‘You’ll be down with bronchitis next.’

Ice as thick as snow whitened the mountain slopes, dingy under gathering cloud moving sluggishly north-east, and wreathing around the summit of Snowdon. Sitting in the car outside the
school gates, waiting for the pupils to emerge for morning break, McKenna scanned the tiny clusters of habitation straggling across the mountain foothills, wondering where, in that huge frozen wasteland, the missing youngsters might be. Hundreds of manpower hours had been wasted searching empty dwellings around Caernarfon and Bangor, scouring back yards and sheds and outhouses and boarded-up shops and farm buildings, invading squats, questioning anyone who came to hand, and in the absence of finding them alive in any of the logical places, McKenna feared they could only be found dead. He lit a cigarette, seeing in his mind’s eye Gary’s hair frosted with ice, eyelashes rimed with hoar, eyes dulled and dead beneath; and Mandy Minx, lips blue with cold, ratty teeth glittering white, hair like a splash of dried blood on the ice. He opened the window and tossed out the half-smoked cigarette, watching it fizzle in the greasy swill of the gutter.

High-pitched voices floated on the air, footsteps rattled on tarmac, and he climbed from the car, walking towards the spill of bodies coming around the sides of the ugly concrete building. He accosted a tall youth whose face blossomed with chill and acne.

‘D’you know where I can find the Tuttle girls?’

The boy’s teeth chattered gently. ‘Haven’t seen them. The school secretary’ll know where they are.’

The secretary told him the twins had failed to register, and the parents had failed to contact the school. McKenna sat again in the car, trying to decide what to do for the best, how to reimpose order on the chaos underlying all life which had erupted into the Tuttle household.

The house was empty of Emma and her daughters. Walking round to the back, he peered through the kitchen window at a pristine room bereft of traces of recent occupation. He lingered, looking through other windows, finding the garage vacated of Emma’s small car, and the twins’ bicycles leaning against one wall, dusty and abandoned, like the unquestioning innocence of childhood. He telephoned Jack, whose voice rose with hysteria, fear adding ugly harsh sounds to his words.

From the drawing-room window, Rhiannon watched the Range Rover come slowly down the lane then pass from sight, and stayed in her place, head tilted slightly, listening for wheels biting gravel, the gentle squeal of locking brakes, the chunky thud of the closing door, the crunch of her husband’s
footsteps as he mounted the steps to the front door. But the front door opened before the vehicle stopped, and she heard Mari’s light steps and tinkling laughter. She sighed for another missed opportunity, and returned to her chair, sitting with clasped hands, listening still but hearing nothing to bring any joy.

‘I can’t find Inspector Tuttle,’ Janet complained. ‘He told me to report to him when I got back.’