Simeon's Bride (10 page)

On Sunday morning, anxious to test whether the calm surface beguiling his eye since Friday hid any treacherous currents in his marriage, Jack told Emma he intended to visit McKenna.

‘Why don’t you ask him over for a meal this evening?’ Emma suggested. ‘He’s probably fed up with cooking for himself.’

‘What?’

‘I said invite him for a meal tonight.’

‘Right.’ Jack watched her face, her eyes, and found nothing save a bland smile.

Emma watched him back the car from the garage and turn into the road. As soon as he put his feet back under the table from where she had kicked them last week, Jack would want an explanation for her unexpected kindness towards McKenna, for Jack and anything approaching tact or subtlety were uneasy bedfellows. She would simply put forward a change of heart, Emma decided, an access of commonsense. He might not believe her, but the best of marriages had a few white lies billowing somewhere in the passageways of their history. It was strange, she reflected, clearing the breakfast table, how some little thing, some tiny thing, could force a person so violently into your thoughts you couldn’t prise them out again, and you spent your days engaged in normal trivial activity while the mind engaged itself with an excess of fantasy.

The twins began fighting in their bedroom. Emma went upstairs, summoned by rising voices, and screams of ‘Mummy!’ from both, and stood in the bedroom doorway, wishing it was McKenna who stared back at her, waiting and wanting.

Jack followed McKenna, still in pyjamas, puffy-eyed and dishevelled, down the stairs. The cat, curled up in front of the unlit fire, head tucked under paws, opened her eyes, yawned hugely, stretched, and returned to sleep.

‘Looks like she’s moved in,’ Jack commented. ‘Denise won’t like that.’

‘Denise won’t have to live with her. How are things at home?’

Jack sat at the kitchen table, watching McKenna make toast and scrambled egg and put the kettle on to boil. ‘Emma’s back to her old self. Or nearly. She wants to know if you’d like to come for a meal tonight.’

‘That’s very kind of her.’ McKenna made tea, lit the small burner on the gas stove, and put the teapot back to brew. ‘Tell her I’d like that. Very much.’

After a poor Sunday dinner of sausage and mashed potatoes, coloured with a dribble of thin gravy, Beti Gloff went out on her afternoon walk: three hours to herself before she must make tea for John Jones then leave dutifully for chapel. Some days, she roamed the city streets; on others, she would crab along the pathways of the mountain, staring down upon the little back streets, envy biting into her heart. She dwelt on the estate because John Jones odd-jobbed for the owners, his meanness too huge to pay rent on another house when one came free with his wages. That the house was little better than a hovel worried him not at all. Mary Ann and her cronies said among themselves that John Jones was too mean in every way, and that was the reason why no child added riches to Beti’s impoverished existence. He gave no thought to Beti’s comfort, to the pain her crippled body thrust upon her night and day, year in and year out. He sluiced himself down at the stone sink in the kitchen once a week in winter, twice each summer week, stood upright in the ramshackle privy hidden in blackthorn and bramble bushes at the bottom of their overgrown garden, and strung torn-up newspapers on a hook behind the privy door. Never once in the long dreariness of their marriage had John Jones thought his wife might like an indoor toilet, might need a warm bath to ease her poor body and its pain.

This fine Sunday, when the first real sunshine of the year warmed her twisted bones and caressed her ugly features as no man’s hand had ever done, Beti took a turn around the cemetery before making her way into Bangor. Happy to see those whose memory was bedecked with fresh flowers, she fretted for the others forgotten, graves untended, sour with weed and mossy gravel. She read again the inscription on the elegant marble gravestone guarding the mortal remains of Councillor Hogan:
fine verse, she thought, without understanding of its meaning, but taking comfort from the instruction that ‘All Shall Be Well’. In her chapel prayers, she tried not to ask God too often when exactly that perfection might manifest itself.

She made her way up the High Street to the Town Clock, and sat to rest her aching legs on a bench outside Woolworths, watching pigeons scavenge in Saturday’s litter, staring at the overhanging escarpments of Bangor Mountain, butter-yellow with gorse. There would be bluebells under the trees, she thought, enough to pick a bunch to set on her window ledge. The sweet scent of gorse and fresh green leaves drifted on the breeze, and Beti wondered absently why no bluebells grew in the woods around the village, why her cottage stayed dusky dark even on the most brilliant summer’s day.

Sighing with pain and the misery of it all, she rose, and began limping back the way she had come, into the little lanes behind the High Street, where she and Mary Ann and countless other girls had dreamed and played long summers past. The rows of two-up, two-down terraces were gone, bulldozed to make way for new brick dwellings, lining each side of the lanes, filling every available space: houses without gardens, merely concrete yards just large enough to turn a car. The builders had cut deep into the lower slopes of the mountain, leaving raw wounds in the soil, exposing tree roots to frost and rains; and looking upon this little Eden of the twentieth century, Beti felt a grief so deep and harsh she wanted to weep.

At the lower end of High Street she turned on to the long road leading down to the distant sparkling sea, a road once called Margarine Street, Beti remembered, laughing a little amid her tears, because the folk trying to better themselves in the fancy terraces beggared themselves simply to pay the fancier rents. She roamed further, criss-crossing the warren of old streets higgledy-piggledy behind Margarine Street, past cars parked bumper to bonnet where once a bicycle would be a luxury. Her legs hurt, more than usual, although the warmth of spring always burnt deep in her bones, as if this gentle heat swelled badness deep within, drew it out and cast it behind her in the long shadow that, in the dark days of winter, moved back inside her body, hiding itself and its pain and ugliness, running with the thin marrow in her bones. She rested briefly, leaning on someone’s garden wall, an unkempt garden behind, where an unpruned rosebush, spiky and sickly and feeble, yielded all its strength to vicious green thorns. Grass straggled around the bush, dandelions blossomed in the grass, weeds forced their glory through cracks in the front path, and Beti eyed the sleek smart car at the kerbside, its grey paintwork glittering like the distant sea.

Under the heat of a brilliant sun, the car reeked of heavy enamel and
chemicals, resembled some nasty dangerous animal, come to rest for a while, but sleeping with one eye open, ready to pounce and kill. Beti peered inside, slumping a little further down on the wall to do so, and saw upholstery like smooth grey suede. In the rear window, an ugly furry object of many colours hung on a length of black and yellow elastic, and she felt the blood run from her face so fast she expected to see it gush from the toes of her twisted shoes and pool on the pavement. All thoughts of tea and chapel driven from her mind, she yawed back up the road, stopping at the top to catch rasping breaths, glancing with terror over her hunched shoulder in case the owner of the car knew, by some mystical process, what had taken place on the sunlit street, and should even now be coming to shut her mouth for ever, to do to her what had been done to the woman in the woods.

Listening to a late concert on Classic FM, McKenna thought about the family whose evening he had shared, where the tensions beneath the surface ran like heavy currents in water, pushing the flow towards its destination, unlike the taut and vicious stresses which flowed between Denise and himself. The cat jumped on his knee, pushing her nose into his hand, and burrowed into his lap, her bones fragile and limp.

‘Talk about having your hopes dashed!’ Jack stalked McKenna’s office. ‘The first decent lead we get, and what happens? Turns out to be a dud. Just like all the rest!’

‘Maybe we can’t see the wood for the trees,’ McKenna said. ‘Like John Beti never noticed her body before … that is, of course,’ he added, ‘if John Beti and his wife are to be believed.’

‘D’you think we’ll get the cash to have a mock-up of the head made?’

‘No, but if nothing else, it looks as if we’re trying.’

Jack riffled the papers in Romy Cheney’s file. ‘We’d best keep quiet about the old woman. Beti made us look a bunch of fools.’

‘I hear she’ll be in the local paper this week.’

‘Let’s pray she says nothing about that bloody car, then.’

‘D’you think she really believes it’s the same one?’ McKenna asked. ‘Still?’

‘Swears on all the graves in all the graveyards this side of Chester, as well as her mother’s,’ Jack announced. ‘She’s got to be wrong! The man in Turf Square bought the car from a neighbour some months back.’

‘And where did the ornament come from?’

‘He can’t remember,’ Jack said. ‘He thinks his wife bought it for the kids from a service station … says he never really noticed it until I asked.’

Mary Ann was utterly scathing. ‘I told her!’ she said. ‘Over and over, and now she’s done what I told her not to. Led you right up the garden path, hasn’t she, Michael?’

‘You heard, did you?’

‘Heard?’ Mary Ann exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t do anything else, could I? Comes screeching in here last night after she’d rooted young Dewi out to look at this car, and sits where you are now, huffing and puffing, and telling how she was scared out of her wits – not that she’s got that many – afeared the man would come and get her because she’d seen the car that woman had. I tell you, all this attention she’s been getting from reporters and such like has turned her brain, and that wouldn’t take
much doing. After all,’ she continued, handing McKenna a mug of tea, ‘she’s never had any attention off anyone before, any pleasure, so you can’t blame her. I told young Dewi you’d all be fools to take notice of her. She’s rabbiting on day and night about this Simeon, reckons she’s scared to walk home on her own after dark because he’s everywhere in the woods, and staring at her, if you believe a word she says.’

‘Have you seen him?’ McKenna asked. ‘Has anyone?’

‘Of course not.’ Mary Ann puffed on her cigarette. ‘It’s one of them gippos. I’ve told Beti, but will she have it? And now she’s even got the vicar believing her. That silly devil’s talking about doing an exorcism round the cottage and in the woods. He’s as bad for the attention as Beti, only he’s got no excuse, ’cos he’s got a permanent audience every Sunday.’ She frowned. ‘Beti’s more to be pitied than condemned, I suppose, but that doesn’t excuse her making a nuisance of herself. Now then, Michael, how are you settling in to your new house? I hear a stray cat’s moved in with you.’

Leaning on the stone wall by the lych gate of the village church, looking into the graveyard, McKenna thought of death, that of others as well as his own. Less than a mile down the road lay the big council cemetery, the smoke blackened chimney-stack of its crematorium poking up into the sky. Sometimes, driving past, he imagined the grey smoke curling from the chimney was the detritus of his own bones and flesh, a burden disposed of furtively by Denise. He wanted to be buried on a bleak hill overlooking the Irish sea, but there was no one but her to know of that wish, no one to care if his spirit joined the other restless souls thwarted in death as they were in life.

High in the sky, the sun burned warm and bright, yet the church crouched in deep tree shadows, its yard awash with a thin sheet of dewy mist billowing gently between broken and crooked gravestones, exuding chill and dampness. Buried here, McKenna thought, he would perforce rise and walk, this patch no bed for a Christian soul. Before him, an angel spread wide wings over the grave of some forgotten worthy, marble drapery rising from a tangle of bushy overgrown shrubs, pitted and lichen-stained and livid against the backdrop of dark moss-stained trees, its eyes staring vacantly and coldly into his.

Rooks cawed and chattered in high branches, dead leaves rotted underfoot, small things scurried about him unseen as he walked down the stony path hugging the graveyard wall towards Beti’s cottage. He walked with his head lowered, watching the few yards of earth before his feet, afraid that if he raised his eyes, he might look into those of Simeon the Jew.

The cottage huddled in the woods, no smoke rising from its single chimney, no light of life behind either of its mean little windows.
McKenna struggled up the overgrown path, long brambles reaching out to snag his trousers, for all the world like Rebekah’s skeleton fingers clawing through time. He rapped on the door, and waited. No one came to answer him, and he left, almost running, taking the path to its other end only some few yards further. He stood on the pavement by the gateway panting, some ordeal survived, and walked back the half-mile to where he had left the car.

Dewi tried to read the fax as it came off the machine, rolling too fast for him to catch more than one line out of three or four. He waited patiently, then glancing at the cover sheet, sat down to read. Apart from himself, the office was empty.

‘The chief inspector’s in Caernarfon,’ Jack said.

‘P’raps you should see this then, sir.’

Jack took the fax from Dewi, read through its two pages, and said, ‘Oh, bloody hell!’

McKenna, arriving back well after five o’clock, found Jack waiting in his office, where he had waited for over an hour, thinking of nothing in particular, noticing how the once white venetian blind and the once magnolia walls had all assumed an ochrish hue. The room was always chilly, because McKenna opened the windows summer and winter, claiming the smell of stale cigarette smoke unbearable.

‘I thought you’d have left by now, Jack.’

‘I thought I’d wait for you,’ Jack said.

McKenna sat on the corner of the desk and lit a cigarette. ‘Crime continues apace in Caernarfon. A spate of car thefts last weekend …’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t think anyone in Caernarfon could afford a car worth nicking, would you….? Anything turn up here?’

‘Fax from Yorkshire Police.’ Jack handed over the paper.

McKenna read the terse paragraphs and put the paper back on the desk. He wandered over to the window, looking at the sliced-up view of road and bus shelters and the side wall of the telephone exchange. ‘Well, that’s that, then.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ McKenna said, ‘I was relying on something turning up to point us in the right direction … but it’s not going to happen, is it? Parents dead of old age. Ex-husband dead in a car crash, only he wasn’t quite her ex, only separated … no brothers or sisters.’ He picked up the fax again, and read the last page. ‘Yorkshire say no known relatives…. So what’s left? Nothing.’

‘I thought you were keen on fingering Allsopp?’

‘I can’t, can I?’ McKenna sat down. ‘Nobody saw hide nor hair of him round here, and we can’t start demanding to know where he was every minute of every day between three and four years ago.’

‘Maybe her husband finished her off, then got his comeuppance.’

‘He was dead before she moved in with Allsopp,’ McKenna said. ‘Must be where she got her money from. Insurance and whatnot.’

‘We’ve only got Allsopp’s word for when she moved in.’

‘We know when she rented the cottage. She was alive then, and for a while after…. No, Jack, this isn’t going to be one of our successes.’

‘I think you’re being defeatist,’ Jack said. ‘And who’s going to bury her?’

‘The council,’ McKenna said. ‘A pauper’s funeral, like Mozart. Open-ended coffin and a bag of quicklime.’

‘Surely not!’ Jack was horrified.

‘No, Jack,’ McKenna sighed. ‘We’re a tad more civilized these days. She’ll have a nice discreet hygienic cremation. You can contact the coroner’s office tomorrow and arrange for the inquest to go ahead. I don’t expect Eifion Roberts needs her any longer.’