Simeon's Bride (25 page)

‘What did she do with the mail?’

‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?’

‘Did you really not know Mrs Cheney was dead?’

‘No, I didn’t, and Gwen still talks as if she expects her to turn up sooner or later. Says she misses her, says Romy wanted her to leave me and shack up with her….’

‘And Jamie?’

‘Jamie knew Romy. He used to borrow the car, and Gwen said Romy wanted him to go on using it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Jamie was having an affair with her.’

‘I’ve never heard such a brew of a tale. He’s trying to pull the wool over your eyes.’ Jack lounged on McKenna’s own ancient sofa, a glass of whiskey in his hand. ‘I’m surprised you sat listening to him for so long. And you’ve only heard his side of the story. Wait ’til his missis gets her oar in.’

McKenna ignored the jibe. ‘What about the tale the girl told?’

‘Something and nothing, isn’t it?’

‘She knew about the furniture.’

‘So?’

‘And she knew about Jamie.’

‘Yes, but she doesn’t know anything worth knowing, does she?’ Jack pointed out. ‘Nothing that’s any use to us.’

McKenna downed his own whiskey. ‘It will be when we get our hands on Jamie.’

‘Did you get a warrant for him?’

‘Yes, and a search warrant for Stott’s house.’

‘Are you going to impound the car?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll have a busy day tomorrow then, won’t we?’

‘Stop sniping,’ McKenna snapped. ‘I’m tired.’

‘What are we doing with Stott?’

‘Holding him without charge for a further forty-eight hours.’

‘That should please him and his brief.’ Jack finished his drink and made ready to leave. ‘I’ll be off. I’m trying to relax as much as possible before Emma goes off jaunting with your Denise.’ He lingered at the foot of the staircase. ‘I’m not very struck with the idea, you know.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for them to go off alone like that. Why couldn’t they have few days in London, or at least somewhere nearer than Rhodes?’

‘Because London isn’t warm and sunny with blue sea and golden beaches.’

‘Well I won’t rest ’til they’re back safe and sound.’

‘Why? Are you afraid Emma might run off with a handsome young Greek?’

Returning from Rhyl, Dewi turned into Salem village and parked in the lane by Mary Ann’s house. Dim light glowed behind the closed curtains of her parlour window, its reflection dull on wet tarmac. Raindrops dripped on to his head as he waited at the front door.

‘Who is it?’ Her voice was muffled.

‘Dewi Police, Mary Ann.’

In the musty, overheated little parlour, Beti Gloff perched on the edge of the sofa, her stiff leg poking out on to the hearthrug.

‘How’s it going with you?’ Mary Ann asked.

‘So-so,’ Dewi said. ‘And you?’

‘The weather’s making my leg play up something chronic. I could hardly get out of bed this morning.’

‘It’ll perk up soon. We’ll be in May before long.’

‘I’ve seen snow on the mountains above Bethesda in July before now,’ Mary Ann said. ‘You don’t expect any miracles from the weather when you’re as old as me.’

‘How’s John Jones, Beti? Giving you any more grief?’

‘He’s minding his p’s and q’s for the present.’ Mary Ann spoke for her. ‘We’ll tell you when he stops. And what brings you calling at this hour, Dewi Prys?’

‘Keeping an eye on you two. And looking for Jamie.’

‘Jamie Thief?’ Beti gobbled. ‘He’s at home.’

‘No, he’s not,’ Dewi said. ‘He did a flit a few days ago, and he’s not been seen since.’

‘He’ll be in the caravan, then,’ Beti offered

‘What caravan?’

‘The caravan in the woods behind the old railway houses near the quarry,’ Mary Ann said. ‘Am’t I right, Beti?’

‘How d’you know?’

‘He always goes there when you coppers’re after him, doesn’t he?’

The last vestiges of day lit the sky in the far west, full night already folded into the crevices and over the steep cliffs of the Black Ladders, as Dewi turned the car towards Bangor and McKenna’s house.

‘D’you know what time is?’ McKenna asked. ‘Can’t whatever it is wait?’

‘Don’t know, sir. I thought I’d better ask you that.’

‘D’you want a drink?’

‘A brew wouldn’t go amiss.’ He trailed into the kitchen, sat biting his thumbnail while McKenna made tea and put it to stew on the cooker.

‘Any problems with Jenny and her aunt?’

‘No, sir. Jenny was asleep most of the time.’

‘I’m not surprised. The aunt didn’t say anything?’

‘This and that about the family. Her son’s at university in Liverpool. I got the impression she’s had a bellyful of her brother and his wife. Weird pair, by the sounds of it.’ Dewi poured milk into two mugs, took the teapot off the cooker, swirled its contents and poured.

‘Gwen Stott’s been keeping Prosser in line by threatening to grass him up for allegedly molesting her daughter. She also allegedly told Romy Cheney that Stott was doing the same.’ McKenna picked up his tea.

‘Stott told you that, did he?’ Dewi sipped his tea, blowing across its surface to cool the boiling liquid. ‘Assuming he’s telling the truth, it doesn’t say much for her, does it? Letting it go on and doing nothing to stop them. She’d have to be pretty stupid not to realize she was dropping herself in it along with them, and I don’t think she is – stupid, I mean. Mind you, Stott and Prosser must be really thick to let her get away with it.’

‘Perhaps they were simply scared. Once mud like that’s been thrown at you, it sticks. Better to dodge it.’

‘Will you tell Social Services?’ Dewi asked.

‘Only if I must. Jenny would be taken into care, and I don’t think being in a children’s home would do her much good.’

Dewi drained his tea. ‘She’s safe for the time being, anyway. I came to see you about Jamie, sir, because I might know where he is.’

‘And how might you know?’

‘I went to Mary Ann’s on the way back. She and Beti reckon he’s in a caravan near Dorabella Quarry. They say he’s been using it as a bolt hole for ages.’

‘Why don’t they tell us these things? They could’ve saved us no end of trouble.’

‘Same reason most folk keep quiet.’ Dewi grinned. ‘Shall we go and get him?’

‘It’s late, Dewi. And I’m tired.’

‘Yes, but he might not be there in the morning.’

Once a viaduct carrying the railway line from Dorabella Quarry to the port, the bridge fell to industrial decay, leaving only a few feet of its span balanced on either end of slate-faced ramparts. Ugly and
ill-proportioned
, the red-brick cottages fronted the road beneath the old bridge, windows dark and shrouded. Dewi drew the car on to the verge. ‘I’m not sure where the caravan is, and I don’t know how we get to it, but we shouldn’t need to wake people.’

‘We might not,’ McKenna said. ‘There’s no telling what Jamie might do. If he’s there, that is.’

Dewi shut the car door with a quiet click. ‘Soon find out, won’t we?’ He swung the torch beam on the ground, on beads of rain clinging to grass stems, a huge black slug glistening by his foot. ‘Ugh! I hate slugs. Never get that slime off your shoe when you tread on them.’

‘Got your handcuffs, Dewi?’ McKenna asked, watching a snail with its house on its back trailing in the wake of the slug.

‘Yes, sir.’

McKenna leaned against the car, pulling up his coat collar against chilly tendrils of mist and damp. ‘I’ll tell you what we haven’t got, and that’s the warrant.’

‘So? That’s for us to know and him to find out, isn’t it? I shan’t tell him.’

Walking fast and quiet along the grass verge, Dewi searched for a gate or gap in the thorny hedge. ‘The caravan must be in those trees.’ He pointed to a darker mass against the night black sky.

‘Into the field, then,’ McKenna said. ‘You can go first. I’m not dressed for adventuring.’

Dewi pushed into the hedge, parting branches to make way for McKenna, who stopped to disentangle his coat from a thorn, and heard a whistling and rustling surging towards him. ‘There’re rats on the move, Dewi,’ he warned. ‘Keep still.’

The tide of rats washed down the road, coats gleaming dully like oily water, then flooded into the blackness on the opposite side. ‘The council must be dumping rubbish tomorrow,’ McKenna said, watching the last of the tide ripple out of sight.

Climbing the steepening rise of the field towards the copse, Dewi said, slightly out of breath, ‘How do they know? The rats, I mean. How do they know where to scavenge?’

‘Same way the rat we’re after knows where to look,’ McKenna observed. ‘Jamie always knows where to scavenge profitably, where there’s a bit of human misery to benefit him. It wouldn’t surprise me,’ he added, stumbling on a tussock of grass, ‘if he killed Romy.’

‘Why would he?’

‘For profit. The car, money, whatever she had he wanted.’

‘But he didn’t get the car. There’s no sign of Jamie getting anything, and I’ve never known him be satisfied with nothing.’

McKenna was tetchy. ‘We don’t know what he got. Maybe he’ll tell us when we find him.’

‘He’s never told us before. He’s not likely to change the habits of a lifetime now, is he?’

The copse came upon them unexpectedly, its shadows overwhelming the two men. They stood by an oak tree, its knobbled trunk slimy with moss, rain dripping cold down McKenna’s collar. Whispering night sounds and the pitter patter of droplets falling from trees to earth punctured the silence, the air in the copse heavy and still, almost viscous. The torch beam fanned tree shadows over the ground, catching a glint of metal beyond. The caravan, once painted white and blue, now scabrous and rusting, listed on small pillars of bricks. In total darkness, one uncurtained window grimy and smeared, McKenna thought it bore the look of abandoment, of being vacant of life. He tried the door, and almost fell as it swung outwards, askew on its hinges. A stale odour wafted out, shot through and rippling with other scents.

‘Sir?’ Dewi’s voice, a harsh whisper, cut across the stillness.

‘Don’t touch anything.’ McKenna stepped into the body of the caravan, rocking as it teetered slightly with his weight. He took the torch from Dewi and lit the narrow space with powerful light. Dewi came up close behind, his rapid heavy breathing booming in McKenna’s ear.

McKenna saw nothing save the pictures in his head, the models in an exhibition of human tragedy. Romy Cheney, swung from a branch, long and thin and sinuous in the wind, black clothes draped around the Modigliani figure. Lame Beti, brutally ugly, escaped from a Breughel canvas and alive through the centuries. Jamie elegant and silent, marbled flesh and eyes milky in the torchlight, one long-fingered hand resting on a dirty mat at the side of the bunk, the other splayed over his chest, like the poet Chatterton, but dead in a filthy caravan in North Wales instead of a dirty garret in Grays Inn; captured at the moment of death, bodily degradation still invisible, only the squalor of his circumstances pointing the way forward.

Eifion Roberts, subdued by night and weariness, sat beside McKenna in the car. Arc lights glared blue-white inside the copse, lantern lights flickering in and out of the trees, shadows flitting behind them and through them. Rain came down hard, drumming on the roof of the car, washed in rivulets down the windscreen.

‘He’s not been dead long, Michael,’ the pathologist said. ‘Not more than twelve hours or so. He’s not even cold.’ He smiled slightly. ‘The
first half-decent corpse I’ve had off you for some time.’

‘What was it? Suicide?’

‘Doubt it. Carelessness, perhaps … won’t know ’til I cut him up, but there’s all the signs of a drug overdose.’ The pathologist rubbed his hands together. ‘Bloody miserable night, isn’t it? There might be some bruising round the face and neck, but it’s hard to tell with those lights. They make too many shadows. If there is bruising, it wouldn’t be all that unusual in an OD.’

‘He’s been on drugs for years.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. The pathologist coughed. ‘Odd, though. As far as we know, he only peddled the hard stuff. Preferred to take something safer.’

‘You amaze me,’ Dr Roberts said, with a touch of his usual asperity. ‘For someone in your position, you talk a load of crap at times. There aren’t any
safe
drugs! Not marijuana, not speed, not ecstasy, not alcohol, and certainly not that muck you fill your own lungs with. You’re a fool to yourself, McKenna. You’ll go to an early grave.’ He climbed out of the car, easing his bulk upright. ‘I’m going to my bed. I’ll see to young Jamie in the morning.’

‘He’ll never be anything but now, will he?’ McKenna said.

‘Anything but what?’

‘Young … He won’t grow old.’

‘You’re very maudlin. I daresay the world might be a better place for the likes of Jamie not growing old in it. It’s not true what they say about the good dying young, because he certainly wasn’t. Born bad, that one, corrupted in the womb … I’ll call you tomorrow.’ He took a few paces towards his own car, then turned back, leaning in to speak to McKenna.

‘If you take my advice, as one who knows about these things, you’ll go to your bed as well. You look about ready for the knacker’s yard. That lad in the caravan’s got more colour in his cheeks than you have.’

McKenna shrugged.

‘If you hadn’t been at such a low ebb with one thing and another, you wouldn’t’ve been ill in the first place.’ He slid back into the car. ‘You shouldn’t be at work. Barely out of hospital, and here you, are out on a night like this.’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Are you? What was it that psychiatrist said about Prosser? Something about ‘psychic distress’, wasn’t it?’

‘So?’

‘So it’s perhaps as well he can’t see you now, isn’t it? I’ll tell you something.’ Dr Roberts eased his bulk, shifting to find comfort. ‘Folk’ve been very worried about you in recent weeks.’

‘Why? Who?’

‘I’m not saying who. Just say people close to you. They’ve been fretting you might, as the saying goes, do something daft. More than one
person’s been worried you might end up face down in the shit at the bottom of the Straits.’