In Guilty Night (28 page)

‘What shall I do with Mandy, sir?’ Janet asked.

‘Put her in the detention cell for now. We need to stop her going off again. It’s a load off my mind to know she’s safe.’

‘We’re supposed to notify Social Services.’

‘McKenna can do that. You organize a solicitor for the girl, and sit in with her, ’cos you never know what she might want to say.’

The servants huddled in the kitchen, numbed with shock, watching men in uniform steal the beautiful car. Josh watched from the door of the grey horse’s loose box, saddle slung over the bottom hatch, bridle hanging from the pommel.

Mari ran from the back door, her feet skittering on the cobbles like the horse’s hooves. She made as if to chase the car, the last of the convoy moving up the drive, stopped and screamed after it, then ran back indoors.

Dewi shut the door and caught her arm. ‘Stop it! Calm down!’

She dragged herself away, ran to the drawing-room where McKenna waited with Elis and his wife, and began to scream at McKenna, tearing her hair and the neck of her tunic, still screaming.

Elis put his arms around her from behind and held the flailing hands. ‘Hush, Mari, hush. You’ll be all right.’ He held her tight, looking at McKenna, who thought sorrow embraced the girl. ‘You’ve revived all her demons, Chief Inspector, invaded the place where she felt safe from the past.’ The girl slumped against his body, breath rasping. ‘She thinks you’re about to destroy her sanctuary.’

‘Examining the vehicles is part of our ongoing investigation of Arwel Thomas’s death,’ McKenna said.

‘What have we done to you?’ Rhiannon asked. ‘D’you resent us because you think we have too much?’

‘The deputy chief constable will put a number of questions to
Mr Elis,’ McKenna added. ‘We neglected to include Mari’s car on the warrants, and would be obliged by your permission to remove it.’

Mari pulled herself from Elis’s grasp and ran from the room. Within a split second, it seemed to McKenna, who thought time must surely be awry, she returned to throw a small leather fob at his feet, and watched from her harbour within Elis’s arms, as Dewi bent to retrieve the keys.

‘Who’ll talk to me?’ Rhiannon demanded. ‘To Mari?’

‘Other senior personnel with the deputy chief.’

Rhiannon sat on the Knole settee, reaching forward to brush a wisp of straw from her husband’s breeches. She folded and crumpled the straw, tossed it on the blazing logs, and said, ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘I’m not authorized to interview either you or Mr Elis. I’m sure you appreciate the reasons.’

‘And when will the others arrive?’

‘Soon.’

‘Then perhaps Constable Prys would kindly ask Cook to bring coffee while we wait.’

Geared for a tussle, Janet was surprised by the meek and almost agreeable manner in which Mandy relinquished herself to the police officers who suddenly arrived at Tracey’s tiny bedsit above a derelict High Street butcher’s shop.

‘I knew she’d grass me up,’ Mandy said, as Janet put a mug of canteen tea on the table in the detention cell. ‘She doesn’t want to get done for hiding me.’

‘You can’t blame her.’

‘Are you going to tell Hogg?’ Mandy sipped the tea, and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her jacket pocket.

‘My boss will contact Social Services later. A solicitor’s coming to talk to you.’

‘You’ve got to tell Hogg. He’s in charge of all the kids.’

Janet saw fear glitter in Mandy’s eyes, heard its note rising in her voice. ‘I do what my boss tells me, and he told me to get you a solicitor.’

‘Why?’

‘He thinks you need one to protect you.’

‘I haven’t done nothing,’ Mandy whined. ‘Honest I haven’t!’

Janet sighed. ‘Why did you run away again? Did something happen?’

Mandy tipped ash on the floor. ‘Doris told the foster people I
made up horrible lies, so they were nasty with me, weren’t they?’

‘Did you lie about Mr Hogg?’

‘Where’s your boss, and the one with sexy eyes?’ Mandy giggled, and picked up her mug of tea.

Wrapped in musty blankets, Gary dozed as winter twilight settled about the mountains. Rain spattered the windows, harried by a wind turning this way and that before settling to blow with increasing vigour from the north-east. He shivered in his sleep, fingers of icy air poking and prying about his person, then twitched, muscles shrinking under the skin, as alien noise intruded. Motionless, he strained to place the scratching and rustling which flickered in and out of the compass of his hearing, then tumbled from the bed and ran from the tiny room, thinking only of rats come to gnaw the flesh from his bones.

He stood by the parlour window, watching night drift in from the east, the twinkling lights of the cottage dotting the mountain foothills like tiny stars fallen to earth. Hunger gnawed at his stomach more viciously than any rat, and as soon as night grew old enough to empty the village of watchful eyes, he would venture out again, beyond the low wall where the steely-plumed raven alighted each morning to sing for him its bleak morbid song, and down the empty lane.

Searching the house would be easy, McKenna thought, for Bedd y Cor housed little more than necessity. No litter, no untidiness, nothing which did not seem to fulfil ongoing and discernible purpose, as if the Elises felt compelled to remove the evidence of each spent day, in hope the next might bring something worth keeping.

He waited in the room next to Elis’s study, seated on a beautiful antique Davenport beneath a chandelier of Bohemian crystal. Flames from an artfully designed gas fire flared up the chimney, their light dancing on the ebony piano, lid closed, from which the room drew purpose.

Restless, he stood up, and leafed through the book on the piano lid, hearing the spine crackle as he flicked age-spotted pages. The endpapers showed a bear grasping a winged mace, crouched in the arbour of leaves, the title page a lute-playing cherub in rococo setting. Turning to the last few pages, he found at their end the same bear in the same arbour, guarding
the mace and a small photograph. As the door opened, he slipped the photograph back in its hiding place.

‘Shall we go to the drawing-room?’ Rhiannon suggested. ‘One mustn’t smoke near pianos. They’re more temperamental than any horse.’ She led him down the hallway, past the table now bedecked with fresh white pom-pom dahlias, and through the ornate door. ‘My husband’s in his study with the deputy chief constable, and Mari was taken away by your young man and a lady superintendent.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Thank God the media don’t know.’

‘You seem to have taken charge, Mrs Elis.’

‘I’m trained to keep the world turning even if Armageddon’s on the horizon. Poor Mari really sees you as one of the Four Horsemen.’

‘I deeply regret upsetting her.’

‘You terrified her, but she’s probably so devastated because she’s in love with my husband. Poor child! She wants him to cool the hot blood in her veins, and why not? Lust doesn’t make moral distinctions. She hates Carol because she thinks he gives her the pleasuring she wants for herself.’

‘And does he? Carol’s pregnant.’

‘But not by him.’ Rhiannon began to pick at a tiny thread disfiguring the perfect hem of her dark wool skirt. ‘A young man from Caernarfon fathered the child, not that it matters. I’m sure she’ll produce a robust and perfect infant. Did you find the photo of our son in the sonata scores? My husband hides them everywhere. When he’s in the music-room, there’ll be a sudden silence, and I imagine he’s staring at one of them the way he stares at the Beethoven portrait. D’you suppose he’s looking for a ghost of the same intelligence in the child’s eyes?’

‘What went wrong?’

‘No one knows.’ She pulled the thread, frowning when it refused to yield. ‘And the pain’s eaten us up from the inside out, like a cancer.’

‘And Arwel?’ McKenna ventured.

‘He seemed to break through the foot-thick misery around my husband, but such young brilliance is so fickle, isn’t it?’ Fiddling again with her skirt, she added, ‘Mari doused his light when she told us why he’d gone into care. Her grandmother said everyone in Caernarfon knew he was in moral danger, so my husband walled him up behind the misery with himself and a dead man.’

‘And did you ask anyone to define “moral danger”?’
McKenna asked. ‘Arwel’s admission was prompted by persistent truancy. We assume the sexual abuse came later.’

‘Ordinary people usually know the truth,’ Rhiannon said. ‘His parents knew, anyway.’

‘I’m not sure they did until we told them.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘They’ve been befuddled by jargon, reacting to ill-founded gossip and the huge propensity for misunderstanding at the heart of verbal reports.’

‘My grandfather used to tell a story from the Great War.’ She smiled fleetingly. ‘Someone passed a message down the trenches, saying: “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance”, but by the time it reached its destination, it had become: “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance”.’ She paused, gazing into the fire. ‘I thought Arwel might’ve confided in Mari, but he didn’t. She was only interested in weighing his potential, creating a seductive dependency.’ Glancing at McKenna, she said, ‘She’s not consciously calculating, just a young woman like any other, weaving savage and erotic dreams around one man, from whom she’s perfectly safe, desiring what another young man would become.’ She frowned. ‘She wouldn’t be safe with Arwel, would she? They’d be a congregation of terrors, clinging together like survivors from a shipwreck. I fear for her, because her native wit won’t help her to live in harmony with herself.’ She fell silent, hands idle in her lap. McKenna noticed her fingernails, ragged and bare of polish, and thought she threatened to fall apart at the seams, like her skirt. ‘What questions will my husband be asked?’

‘The deputy chief constable will decide.’

‘On your instructions, I’m sure. Why must you be so oblique?’

‘It’s a habit,’ McKenna said. ‘Often a necessary one.’

‘Obviously. You misled and disarmed my husband very elegantly.’

‘No, Mrs Elis, I did neither.’

She watched him thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps you simply touched him. Perhaps he believes you share his darkness. I can’t, but it overwhelms me, nonetheless.’

‘You make me very sad.’

‘We’re sad people. Two embolisms travelling the vein of life.’ She began to fidget again with her skirt, lifting the hem in search of the rogue thread, exposing a length of pale slender leg to McKenna’s view. ‘My husband was reared in
institutions, where the strong preyed on the weak as they’ve always done.’ She let the skirt fall, and leaned forward, hands clasped around her knees ‘He’s very subtle in his seductiveness, isn’t he? It’s the habit of his lifetime, although knowing of his past won’t make the slightest difference. If he killed Arwel, there’s no going back on that sequence of events, because like the sequence of notes making up a piece of music, however much it’s repeated, whatever differences you discern each time, the notes and their sequence always stay the same.’ She paused, then added, ‘My husband’s obsession with Beethoven isn’t healthy or enlightening, you know. He imagines himself chained to a past where they share a common horror, so he plays the same few pieces of music over and over again until my nerves are so tense I want to scream, because he thinks he hears echoes of his own tragedy. His past is more important than our present or future, and it governs his life.’

‘And is your house so tidy because you hope psychological obliteration might follow the physical?’

‘Possibly.’ Rhiannon let the ghost of a smile touch her eyes. ‘It hasn’t worked. Life is never so neat.’

‘And is this relevant to Arwel’s death?’

‘My turn to be oblique, Mr McKenna.’ The smile flickered again. ‘I’ve taken my responsibilities as a councillor very seriously, and read as much as possible. The dysfunctional family is nothing new. Beethoven was the product of one, his father such a drunkard people expected the liquor excise to suffer when he died.’ She fretted again at her skirt. ‘But the psychological impact of an abusive childhood extends far beyond the victim, like a dirty cloud smearing everything with its filth.’

‘Are you talking about behaviour patterns people learn and can’t break?’

‘My husband learned to seduce when he was a child, and he can’t break the habit, because when he was eight years old, one of the prep schoolmasters raped him.’ She took hold of the end of thread, and pulled viciously. McKenna heard a tiny ripping noise, then saw the curl of fibre pinched between her thumb and forefinger, rolled in a little ball, and tossed in the ashtray. ‘Word travelled like wildfire through the school about fresh meat on the stodgy menu, so people fell on him, wanting a bite. It sounds like a game, some arcane public-school tradition, and I suppose it’s sport of a sort, like boys throwing stones at frogs. But the frogs don’t die in sport, do they? They die in earnest.’
She began pulling at a minute length of loose wool at the cuff of her sweater. Then he realized by seducing what he could accommodate, he could seduce protection to hold the rest at bay. D’you understand me? Those who had him protected him from those who wanted him. It was probably his first business deal.’

‘And where does Arwel fit in?’

‘I don’t know whether he was victim or predator. Perhaps he was both, preying on my husband with his love and becoming the victim of his love.’ She paused, then said, ‘I think Carol’s the only one who loved Arwel for himself. My husband loved him as a companion in misery, and they went visiting that time which pulls him with its mighty chains.’ Turning back the cuff to look for the root of the thread, she added, ‘My husband can’t break the habit of returning to his childhood, you see, and I fear he took Arwel with him to share the terrible burning pleasure he tells me is like no other, and the pain with a dark beauty all its own.’

Returning home from servitude for one man, Carol found another wanting more. Her father stood in the back parlour, toes encroaching on the puddle of soot which had flowed down the chimney, over the hearth, and on to the threadbare rug. Blueish flames struggled to burn soot-drenched coal in the grate.