Simeon's Bride (35 page)

Allsopp identified the buckle without hesitation, anonymous technicians and scientists identified the scrapings from under Jamie’s nails as the flesh of Gwen Stott, the six fingerprints from Jamie’s squalid caravan as her own, and matched the many signings of Romy Cheney’s name with Gwen Stott’s script, wrapping around the woman a neat and tidy parcel of guilt. John Jones remained incarcerated, insistent on the protection of thick walls and locked doors, enjoying notoriety, expecting only a slap on his scrawny wrist for the little theft.

McKenna ground out his cigarette end, scuffing it over with gravel, and walked towards a grove of trees beside the river, hearing the rush of water below the fall of land. He might meet Beti Gloff, he thought, out on her interminable perambulations, or Mary Ann escorted by her son to view her husband’s grave. Running them to earth the day Denise flew to Rhodes, he confronted the two women in Mary Ann’s sour kitchen, where they cackled amid the teacups like the witches John Jones said they were. Neither cared very much about what he had to say: Beti Gloff shrugging her humped back in silence, Mary Ann favouring him with the observation that God’s Will was God’s Will, and who was he or she to argue with that?’

Legs aching a little, he found another seat on a low marble bench in the shadow of the trees, the river behind him fast and full with rain from the mountains, unmown grass damp underfoot, sprinkled with daisy heads open to the sun. He thought of Christopher Stott, Jenny and Trefor Prosser, sure there was yet more bad to come, despite Prosser’s newfound optimism, Stott’s belief that rust ate into his own chains at last. Jenny remained the hostage, her future bleak, the mother who should embrace and protect her locked away with fantasies for comfort.

He pulled Denise’s letter from his pocket, wind crackling through the pages, one small gust threatening to carry them whirling high into the trees and out of his grasp for ever. No salutation, no “Dearest”, as she would have once written, not even his name, but merely a date scrawled under “Athens”, and over a long, gossipy woman’s letter, interrogations between the lines, cattiness sharpening words as vacant of sensibility as her heart was devoid of that yearning which filled the gulf between reality and the ideal. He refolded the pages, realized she would return in two days’ time, knowing she had become a figment of her own imagination, and the wife he desired a figment of his own. He thought of all the women in his world, these soldiers of Trefor Prosser’s “monstrous regiment”, and thought there were no words more true than those of the Russian woman who said: ‘What is women’s life about if not legends,
gossip and rumours?’

Gravel turned underfoot as he walked slowly towards the cemetery gate, cramp dragging at his legs, evening chill pinching his neck and finger ends. He wondered where Rebekah’s murdered baby might rest, little bones crumbled to nothing, and saw the raw black earth of a new grave still making a mound over its coffin, flowers withering yellowy-brown and sour-smelling around its edges, and felt a jolt in his belly, for Jamie lay below the black earth, his place marked by a lopsided wooden cross painted untidily with a number. Standing at the foot of the grave, McKenna recalled the dismal hurried service in the cemetery chapel, a hasty interment while he and Dewi waited apart from the tiny group of mourners, watching Jamie’s mother, thin in dusty black, her face faded by misery, clutch the arm of the man people said begat her son, but who married her sister. Losing Jamie was almost like losing a friend, he thought, for if nothing else, Jamie was the known devil, and no one could know who might come to take his place in the scheme of things, fill the hole left by his passing. Would the family give him a headstone as soon as the earth stifling him hardened and flattened itself? And what might be inscribed upon it? He turned to follow the progress of a grey squirrel suddenly bounding from behind a marble cherub, watched it scuttle towards the trees, hoping no twisted sense of humour had “Jamie Thief” engraved on marble or black granite or purple slate. The squirrel disappeared from view in the long grasses, and turning back, McKenna looked straight into the eyes of the man who stood at the head of Jamie’s grave, sunlight striking brilliant lights in long black hair hung about an ashen face, wind lifting ruffles about the throat. Breath frozen in his lungs, McKenna tore his eyes away from those steeped in the darkness and despair of centuries, and stumbled blindly up the path, straining to hear the footsteps behind him, knowing there would be not the slightest whisper of sound as the man came close enough to lay his dead cold hands around McKenna’s neck and breathe the grave-smell in his face.