The House of Women (37 page)

Mrs Lloyd frowned.
‘Which girl? Mina Harris? She wouldn’t need
my
tablets! Her mother’s got enough to sink a ship.’

*

The big carton was on his desk, bulging sides and straining flaps silvery with the residues of fingerprinting powder. He moved it to the floor, leaving the desk top bare of all but an ashtray, and began to extract the densely packed contents, knowing from experience that the whorls and loops of his own fingertips would be ingrained with the powder for days to come.

Through the open windows, deep luminous twilight beguiled his eyes, and night air, sharp with the scent of smouldering wood, drifted into the room. Elbows on the desk amid the litter of paper, trapped in the slipstream of others
’ lives, he felt a sudden sense of near desolation.

*

Grabbing the chance for vengeance in both pudgy, sweaty hands, Jason’s workmate at the Merlin yard had taken the police first to the carton locked like a Chinese puzzle inside the steel cage in the bowels of the building, then to the well-equipped vehicle maintenance bay behind the building, where Jason and his shadowy assistants stripped stolen cars of their identity before respray and revamp, and onward sale. However else Jason might be described, he was undoubtedly also enterprising and opportunistic, McKenna realized, leafing through pads of blank MOT certificates and a folder crammed with duplicate registration documents. Inside another folder he found boarding cards for the Irish ferries, enough for any number of trips to the duty-free outlets, and tucked behind, seventeen plastic National Insurance identity cards, each with the potential to mine the gold of the benefits system. Wondering at the extent of Jason’s hidden empire, he cast around amid the litter for the relics of the man who had seen the other paper and understood its implications, and, in refusing to enter another conspiracy of silence, brought about his own extinction.

The forensic team had neatly tabulated the contents of the carton, packing sheaves of letters and dog-eared, brown-edged clippings from old newspapers and journals into clear plastic wallets. As Phoebe and George had said, Ned
’s address book was filled with foreign names and streams of numbers, written out in black ink, blue ink, ballpoint and fountain pen, amendments overwritten in soft lead pencil, and in another large, cloth-bound book, Ned had sketched ideas on the common roots of Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, marking the pulse of strong alliteration which threaded both languages, and the oral traditions of ancient cultures. Folded inside the back cover was an article, torn from a scientific journal, about the exhumation of a story-teller’s mummified body, recovered with its wonderful grave-trappings from the ice of three millennia.

Leaving aside the evidence of Jason
’s enterprises, he began to repack the carton. Ned’s birth certificate, faded and striated with thin brown lines where it had been folded and refolded, was returned to its envelope, and placed carefully on top of a tiny pocketbook bound in slaty-blue buckram and darkened with fingering, from which McKenna learned that slate was split into Queens, Princesses, Duchesses, Countesses and Ladies, each a specified measure smaller than the other. Bemused, he admired the wit, or the malice, which devolved an English hierarchy of caste upon the native riches of a country transformed by a sixteenth century Act of Union into England’s first colony.

More letters were parcelled up with brown paper and thick string, some of their envelopes embellished with colourful foreign stamps, others showing the head of George VI, longer dead than his feckless elder brother, whose faded image adorned a few. Loosely retying the parcels, he put them with the other treasures to read at leisure, thrilled by the prospect, and even a little chilled, as the grave-robbing scientist might feel.

Pages held together by fraying pink tape, Ned’s will was folded inside a long manila envelope. He bequeathed his scholarship to George, his personal possessions to Phoebe, his love and gratitude to Edith and her daughters and grandchild, and recorded his hope that Mina might find peace. In a handwritten note at the bottom of the last page, he reported vainly searching his heart for forgiveness for Eddie, for all he knew he warranted pity.

The last parcel spilled its contents willy-nilly over the dusty desk, threatening a cataract of crackled old photographs, postcards cut from soft thick cartridge, and crudely executed engravings on thin, crisp paper with decided edges. Sifting and sorting, McKenna snapped a rubber band around the postcards, then picked up the first engraving which came to hand, staring at a dark, thick-lipped and flat-nosed face made darker still by its anonymity and lack of expression. A number which looked vaguely familiar was inscribed in the bottom right hand corner. He looked at another dark face, another number, on paper still buckled in places where the ink had soaked in randomly. So much black ink, he thought, counting faces and noting almost unconsciously the near-perfect sequence of numbers which the slave-owners would use in lieu of printed money as the title of their wealth for transactions and collateral.

Marvelling at their differences and not their blackness, struck by the proud cast of a skull or the beauty of an expression, he separated the men, women and children, then remembered where he had seen the numbers before, and was sorely tempted to upend the carton in search of Ned’s prize-winning essay. Reluctantly, he put the engravings in a large new envelope, and thought those faces might now have a different kind of value in the market-place, which Phoebe could realize, perhaps returning Llys Ifor to its one-time glory.

Before reinventing himself in the wake of ethical confusion and degeneration, Eddie Williams occupied the lens of Ned
’s camera on many occasions, often with the unmistakable turrets of Aberystwyth in the background, but only rarely had he or someone else caught the colour of Ned’s melancholy in the camera’s eye. Not for the first time, McKenna wondered if there had been love between those two young men, and whether lust, or guilt, or time, or understanding withered it to death.

Trying to recall the chemical process which transformed black and white to sepia, he sorted through other photographs, where other white men displayed their own ethical degeneration, grouping themselves before wounded mountains and the crude machinery of blasting and quarrying, surrounding themselves with white women and white children, and the trappings bought with stolen lives, without a black face in sight, not even peering from under the caps and hats of coachmen, grooms and chauffeurs. Llys Ifor in its heyday was barely recognizable, formal gardens beyond the front door where he had trampled
rough grass and crumbling steps, and a man and woman, who must surely be Ned’s parents, posed on the lawn with their four children, in tranquillity and sunshine, where he had found only the dark aftermath of tragedy and disintegration.

Expectation lightened faces in the next swatch of photographs, for whereas their ancestors were known only by number, some of these people were named in faded script on the verso. Out of chains and bondage, they were free to go, but from where to what, he thought? A Rachel and a Dogood stood outside the gate of Llys Ifor, a carpet bag of monstrous proportions at their feet, roses which no longer graced the masonry brushing Rachel
’s shoulder. They smiled with gleaming teeth, like others lined up on a station platform beneath a fret-edged wooden canopy, which reminded him of the tatted borders his grandmother tacked to her kitchen shelves. Amid this dark tide were the sepia faces of intermarriage, and he found them again in another setting, no longer smiling so brightly, and almost bereft of human proportion against a backdrop of smoke-gorging steelworks and massive verticality, straight lines radiating from colliery winding wheels, and conical mountains manufactured from waste, where, on a cynical promise of something better, the remnants of one bondage had been exchanged for the blight of another.

Closing the carton lid, McKenna put the engravings and Ned
’s will in his briefcase, and humped both downstairs to his car. Opening the boot, he turned as he heard creaking door hinges and soft footfalls.

‘
Are you off, sir?’ Dewi asked, his face a pale blur, light rimming his body.

‘
Soon.’ He locked the boot, and made his way back, Dewi behind him. ‘Surely you haven’t finished with Jason?’

‘
Refreshment break. Prisoner’s rights, and all that garbage.’

‘
And?’ he asked, going into the ground floor office where photocopiers and fax machines were housed.

Dewi shrugged.
‘He’s still claiming to know nothing about nothing, so we’re waiting to hear what’s been going on at Merlin yard.’ Hands in pockets, he leaned against the wall, watching McKenna feed Ned’s will through the copier. ‘We told him what his mam and his little sister and his big sister had to say, and got a load of very foul language and precise details of what he’ll do to them as soon as he gets the chance. So hopefully, sir, you won’t order his release.’

‘
Indeed not,’ McKenna said, putting the original will back in its envelope, ‘although I’m not sure what we can charge him with.’

‘
He assaulted Mina.’

‘
So she says.’

‘
He used to tear out his sister’s hair.’

‘
So his mother says.’

‘
And his fat mate at the yard grassed him up.’

‘
Not enough, I think.’

‘
OK,’ Dewi said. ‘What about Mrs Lloyd’s pills, then? Where did they go, if not in Jason’s pocket, then down Ned’s throat?’

‘
Who knows? She’s got hundreds of pills, she’s careless, she’s even stupid, and she’s his mother, so a pound to a penny, when she works out why we’re interested in the tetracycline capsules, she’ll be back here saying she’s just remembered throwing them down the bog.’

‘
Great!’

‘
But then,’ McKenna added, stapling the pages of the copy will, ‘we haven’t taken a statement from Mina yet, and as Jason wouldn’t see himself getting caught, he was probably as careless with the bits and bobs of his stolen car enterprise as his mother is with the manna of the NHS.’

‘
While he’s on his mandatory rest, I could ask Geraint and Dervyn to reconsider previous comment, in the light of our new knowledge,’ Dewi offered. ‘Put it to them how any information could be very helpful to us and them alike.’

‘
You could. I’m going to see if Mina’s fit to be interviewed.’

‘
Will you ask about Janet while you’re there?’

‘
I phoned about an hour ago.’

12

A near metamorphosis had overtaken Mina in the few hours since he had left her bedside. She had been bathed, her hair was washed and dried and brushed into a glinting cascade, and the structured form of a lacy brassiere made a pattern beneath her pale blue satin night-shirt. Almost bright-eyed, she chatted to the black-garbed shape who held her bandage-cuffed hands, and under the hard glare of the ward lights, McKenna could see snarled grey strands frizzing out of the black helmet of Solange’s hair.

She turned, the sinews in her neck pulled tight, then whispered to Mina, and rose. Almost pushing, she shunted him into the corridor, out of earshot of the girl and her police guardian.
‘
Mon
dieu
! I come back, and what do I find?’ The huge chunks of silver around her neck glowed. ‘Mina here,
comme
ca
!’ She threw her hands in the air. ‘And my husband!’

‘
What about your husband?’ McKenna asked.

‘
He is so drunk it is frightening, and when I ask him why, he says I must look behind him. So I look, and there is nothing.
Rien
! I say there is nothing, and he says Ned grins over his shoulder!’ She walked away from him. ‘I must have a cigarette.’ Her voice despairing, she added: ‘I tell him I will make his doctor come, and he says he wants to see nobody, not even me, and then he cries, like a silly big baby!’

He followed her along corridors and down staircases to an open fire door at the rear of the building.

Finely shod feet amid the leavings of a hundred other smokers, she rooted in her shiny black bag for a pack of Gauloise and a pebble-shaped lighter covered in brown crocodile skin. ‘So,’ she went on, blowing smoke into the night, ‘I try to pull sense from him, and he says you try to make him see Mina, but he is afraid.’

‘
I told him she’d tried to kill herself.’ Away from the bright lights she seemed even more two dimensional, and he looked in vain for her shadow on the ground or the walls behind them, but as he lit his own cigarette, the flame cast human warmth on her face. ‘And I suggested he might want to be with her, given the circumstances.’

‘
Ah, the circumstances.
Those
circumstances!’ She inhaled more smoke, and let it dribble from her nostrils. ‘He thinks I do not know, but I tell him different.’ Wisps of smoke drifted from her mouth. ‘Mina, when she finds out, she tells me, and I ask myself why people are so cruel. Why must she know? Does it make the world better?’

‘
Edith said something about “imperious authority”.’

‘
Edith is here when I come. And Annie. They bring clean clothes, and Edith helps the child to wash herself.’

‘
When did they leave?’

She glanced at her watch.
‘Not long. Annie, she says Edith is
très
désolée
, and she takes her home, and I stay with Mina.’

‘
Has Mina said anything to you about Jason?’

‘
She says very much,’ Solange answered, dropping ash among the trampled cigarette butts. ‘She tells me about the stuff she puts in the butter, and she thinks it is amusing, and she tells me how they play
la
malice
on that beautiful black man, and she believes that is
very
amusing, because she says he insulted her.’

‘
La
malice
?’ McKenna asked. ‘D’you mean a trick?’ She nodded. ‘They enter his
appartement
when he is away, and Jason, he hides something there.’

‘
How did they get in?’

‘
The black man gives a key to Ned, so Mina, she says she takes the key when Ned is not looking.’ She dropped more ash on the ground. ‘I tell Mina, you know. A thousand times I tell her this Jason is bad, I say he is
dangereux
,
un
bâtard
, but she says she loves him.’

‘
I must talk to her.’

‘
My husband says I am to call his solicitor if you come here.’ She smiled, with irony. ‘But I call him already, and he says my husband is very rude to him, and he owes him much money. So I tell this man he is
merdeux
, and say my husband owes
tout
le
monde
very much money!’

Despite himself, McKenna smiled.
‘If you have so many debts, why don’t you stop spending?’

She folded her arms across her body, cigarette glowing in her right hand, and looked up at him, face expressionless.
‘You waste your time to ask
me
. My husband, he spends money like people say it would grow on the spiky bushes in the garden. Me, I keep my clothes and my jewels from when I model.’

‘
I see.’

‘
Also, I tell him I do not like to live in a big house, and I think he has no need to have a new car every year.’ She dropped the butt, and ground it to nothing, then shrugged. ‘But he does not listen to me. He does not listen to
anyone
.’

‘
Perhaps Edith’s solicitor could come,’ McKenna said, holding open the door. As she passed, her rich scent and the pungent smell of French tobacco assaulted his senses.

‘
Perhaps,’ she agreed, clicking along the corridor. ‘But why make more cost for Edith?’

‘
He’d be paid by the state, Mrs Williams. People still have the right to free legal representation if we need to question them.’

She shrugged again, the universal Gallic solution, and waited patiently while he made the call, then added:
‘You understand she is a stupid girl? A very stupid girl.’

‘
Because of Jason?’

‘
Non
! She is born stupid. She does not understand what she does, what other people do. She does not see that they have reasons.’ She trailed after him up the staircase, age telling. ‘She talks, she makes one word go after another word, but she has no comprehension.’

‘
Do you like her?’

‘
Like?’ She smiled again, with more irony. ‘I love her, like I love a young animal which is sick and can do nothing to help itself.’ She paused at the head of the stairs, panting slightly. ‘Edith, she loves her, but she is helpless. She sees there is this great empty place in Mina’s heart.’ She walked on again, like a shadow without validating form. ‘But Edith has Annie, who is good, and she has the other child, who is frightening because she has too much in her head, and, I also think, in her heart, like Ned.’ At the entrance to the ward, she stopped again. ‘My husband, Mina is all he has. Perhaps she is the punishment of God, for his sins.’

*

Screens had been drawn around Mina’s bed, and through the open window by her side, draughts of hot night air riddled with the stink of exhaust fumes eddied up from the road. She started to yawn almost as soon as McKenna began his questioning, but more, he suspected, from boredom than fatigue. ‘But I’ve already told Solange,’ she said, looking fretfully from McKenna to the solicitor. ‘Ask her.’

‘
I must ask you.’

‘
What?’

‘
Tell me again about the powder Jason gave you.’

Almost by rote, with the same inflexions in her voice and expressions on her face, she repeated what she had said earlier in the day, only elaborating, with a little giggle, on Jason
’s proposals for Phoebe’s cat. ‘He said he felt like tying the thing up, pouring petrol on it, and dropping a match. People in Australia do it all the time.’

‘
C’est
terrible
!
’
Solange gasped.

‘
What happened to the papers Jason gave you?’ McKenna asked, appalled by her vacuous acceptance of barbarity.

‘
Uncle Ned took them, and he wouldn’t give them back to me, even when I told him Jason’d be mad with rage.’

‘
What did Uncle Ned say?’

‘
He said Jason could go to Hell.’ She stopped speaking, biting her lower lip. ‘And I’d never heard him swear before, not even when something awful happened.’

‘
So how did Jason get his things back?’

‘
I got them, of course! He asked me to.’

‘
When?’

‘
At night.’

‘
Which night?’

‘
I can’t remember. One night last week, I suppose.’

‘
What did you do?’

‘
I went into Uncle Ned’s room when he was asleep, but I couldn’t find Jason’s things, so I had to take all these boxes and packets, ’cos I didn’t know where he’d put them.’

‘
And when did you give them to Jason?’

‘
He was waiting outside.’

‘
Outside where?’

‘
The back gate, with his van. He was doing nights nearly all last week, so we couldn’t go out anywhere nice.’

‘
Tell me about the keys to George’s flat,’ McKenna said.

Her mouth twisted.
‘It served him right! He didn’t need to be so horrible to me!’ Then her mouth resolved itself into a smirk. ‘And it’s a good thing he was away, because Jason would’ve beaten him up for what he said.’

‘
When did you take the key?’

‘
I don’t know.’

‘
Day? Night?’

‘
Daytime. Mama sent me upstairs to tell Uncle Ned his tea was ready, but he was in his bathroom, and the key was on his desk, so I took it.’

‘
Why?’

‘
Jason wanted it.’

‘
What for?’

‘
I don’t know.’

‘
Did Uncle Ned say anything to you about the papers and the key?’ McKenna asked, glancing at his notes. Across the bed, the solicitor’s secretary held her hands over the keys of her state of the art computerized stenographic machine.

Mina nodded, and yawned again.

‘What did he say?’

She sighed, rather peevishly.
‘He said he knew I’d taken them for Jason, and if I didn’t make Jason give them back in twenty-four hours, he was going to the police.’

‘
Did you believe him?’

‘
I don’t know. I just told Jason.’

‘
And did you take Uncle Ned’s SOS bracelet?’ McKenna asked, almost as wearied as the girl appeared.

She nodded.

‘When?’

‘
The night before he died.’

‘
How?’

‘
When he was asleep. He’d taken a tablet. Mama said he took it before supper.’ She smiled vaguely. ‘Did you know taking tablets on an empty stomach makes them work faster? Mama said so, but she wasn’t sure if hot drinks stopped them working altogether.’

‘
Weren’t you out late that night?’ said McKenna, racking his memory.

‘
Yes.’

‘
So how could you know what your mother said?’

‘
I heard her when I came in. She was on the phone to Annie.’

‘
So when did you take the bracelet?’

‘
Late.’

‘
Was everyone else in bed?’

‘
Yes.’ She yawned again, and rubbed her eyes with the grubby bandaged wrists, like a tired child.

‘
Did you wait until everyone was asleep then go into Uncle Ned’s room? Did you go up to his bedroom?’

She nodded again.

‘Was he wearing the bracelet?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
Even if he’d taken a sleeping pill, wasn’t it risky to take off the bracelet?’

‘
I don’t know.’ She looked shiftily at him, then down at her hands, spread limply on the coverlet.

Jason
’s knowing smirk and insolent words came to McKenna’s mind. ‘Were you on your own?’

‘
Uncle Ned was there.’

‘
I know that, Mina. Was anyone else with you?’

‘
Like who?’

‘
Like Jason?’

Bright spots of colour mottled her cheeks.

‘Was Jason with you?’ he persisted.

She nodded again.

‘Say “yes” or “no”, please,’ he instructed.

‘
Yes.’ The word was almost inaudible.

‘
Who removed the bracelet?’