In Guilty Night (2 page)

Jack shook his head in bewilderment. A scowl creased the face, and a pale hand reached out, clutching a bunch of keys. Unlocked, the door edged open a fraction.

‘What d’you want?’ the woman asked.

Feeling like a tinker offering laces and pegs, Jack said, ‘Who’s in charge?’

‘I am.’

‘Then I suggest you let me in. I’m a police officer.’

‘Are you?’ The scowl returned. ‘Show me your identification.’ She scrutinized the warrant, the photograph, his face, then opened the door wide enough for him to edge through, before locking it once more.

‘Wait here.’

She shuffled away down a corridor, leaving him in a hall barely warmer than outside, eddying with stale institutional smells, and a sour odour which made his scalp prickle. The walls were disfigured by finger marks and neglect, and the ornate hearth, boarded in with painted plyboard, was scarred with knife wounds and hot spilt liquid.

She returned with a cardigan around her shoulders. ‘Mr Hogg’s off duty ’til nine. You’ll have to come back.’

‘You said you were in charge.’

‘Mr Hogg’s in charge of Blodwel.’ She fidgeted with the keys.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Dilys Roberts. Why?’

‘Have you found that missing boy yet?’

‘No. He’ll be dossing with some mate. You should do something about it. Mr Hogg says harbouring a runaway’s a criminal offence.’ She frowned. ‘Anyway, I’ve already said you’ll have to talk to him.’

‘And where is he?’

‘In his flat.’

‘And where’s his flat?’

‘At the back of the building. But you can’t disturb him at this time of the morning!’ Scowling ferociously, she took him to a shoe-box of an office, its walls pocked with drawing-pin holes, its space cluttered with old metal desks, filing cabinets, an assortment of cast-off chairs. Seated in one of them, Jack wondered when the heating came on. Dilys Roberts sat opposite, her bare legs crossed, kneecaps gleaming white.

‘I’ve been up most of the night,’ Jack said. ‘And I don’t feel like getting the runaround. What took you so long to answer the door?’

‘There’s only me here ’til the domestics start. I’m doing a twenty-four hour shift from two yesterday. We all do them, except Mr Hogg, of course.’ The zeal of something like martyrdom briefly animated her eyes. ‘He doesn’t do shift work because he’s in charge.’

‘Does he not? Senior police officers work shifts. Why can’t your boss?’

‘That’s quite different. Mr Hogg’s a senior social worker.’

‘So tell me about the missing boy.’ He shivered violently. ‘And find a photo, will you? You must have one somewhere.’

‘D’you know him?’ Jack asked.

Dewi looked at the photograph. ‘Doesn’t look familiar, sir. You wouldn’t forget that face, would you?’

‘You claim to know most of the villains this side of the English border.’

‘Doesn’t look much like a villain, does he? Why was he in Blodwel?’

‘Something about “avoidably impaired development”, according to that Dilys Roberts. Whatever that might mean.’

‘I know her.’ Dewi grinned. ‘Not a fire you’d fancy poking, is she?’

‘Wipe that smirk off your face! You’re as crass as that butcher Roberts sometimes. And ring that damned children’s home and say we want someone at the mortuary.’ He glanced at the wall clock, rubbing eyes already gritty with tiredness. ‘Our Mr Hogg should be out of his snug little bed by now. He’ll do.’

‘These kids never learn, do they? Won’t listen to anybody, do their own thing and damn the consequences! They’re an ungodly lot! Rotten to the core with original sin, if you want a personal opinion I wouldn’t dare voice in the current climate, except to someone like yourself. Your job’s bad enough, but thankless isn’t the word for ours. But who cares? We can’t afford to train staff, we can’t even afford to employ what we need, and in any case, most of them don’t know the meaning of words like “commitment” and “vocation”. All they worry about is time off and holidays and pay rises.’

Jack stopped at the pedestrian crossing by the hospital car-park. ‘Mr Hogg, have you quite finished?’

‘You wanted to know,’ Hogg countered.

‘I’m only interested in how Arwel Thomas managed to disappear from Blodwel, and end up dead on the railway line.’

‘I’ve told you. They think absconding’s a game.’

‘Arwel won’t be playing again, will he? You’re sure it’s him?’

‘Such a pretty-looking boy, wasn’t he? You wouldn’t believe there was an ounce of badness in him. Now look where it’s got him.’

‘Where what’s got him?’ Jack asked, unlocking his car.

Easing into the front passenger seat, Hogg clipped on the seat belt, and a trace of Blodwel’s sour smell drifted under Jack’s nose. ‘Stupidity’s the best word for it. He spent no more than seventeen days in school in the year before he was admitted to care.’

‘What was he doing with his time?’

Hogg shrugged. ‘Same thing they all do.’

Jack accelerated down the hill towards the main road. ‘Perhaps you’d make sure the staff are available for questioning later. I intend to question the children, too.’

‘Oh, I think your senior officers will need to clarify areas of responsibility with the director of social services first. That boy went missing almost a week ago, and you heard what the pathologist said as well as I did.’

‘Dewi says the locals reckon Hogg’s a pompous, loud-mouthed arsehole,’ McKenna said. ‘And a bully.’

‘You’re off sick,’ Jack said. ‘Why don’t you go home?’

‘Why don’t you? You’re exhausted.’ Lighting a cigarette, McKenna asked, ‘When’s Eifion doing the post-mortem?’

‘He was about to start when I turned up with Hogg.’ Jack yawned, and yawned again, jaw cracking. ‘Hogg reckons Arwel was a bad lot, for all he was so “pretty-looking”.’

‘“Pretty” isn’t an adjective usually applied to teenage boys, is it?’

‘Depends on how you see them, I suppose.’ He yawned again. ‘Hogg sees teenage boys as a general pain in the neck. Girls too, I imagine.’

‘Where’s Jack Tuttle?’ Eifion Roberts asked.

‘At Blodwel,’ Dewi said. ‘Mr McKenna’s gone to see Arwel’s parents. Janet Evans is driving him.’

‘I’m surprised he’s not laid up. Dislocating your shoulder’s no pleasant thing. Must be tougher than he looks, eh? Still, he’s more use to himself at work instead of brooding and fretting about the house.’ He fell silent, then said, ‘The autopsy’ll take longer than I expected.’

‘Why’s that?’

Roberts sighed. ‘Anal injury, Dewi. Old healed lesions, and every indication the lad was savagely raped not long before he died, so I have to proceed on the assumption HIV may be present, and that’s quite a rigmarole.’

‘The director of social services issued instructions, Inspector,’ Ronald Hogg announced. ‘I’m in no position to disobey him.’ His office was well furnished and stiflingly hot.

‘And where else do we start if we can’t interview staff and children?’ Jack demanded.

‘The boy was a runaway.’ Hogg tapped a thin sheaf of papers on his desk. ‘I’ve already had to disrupt important routines and treatment plans on his account, and been left with a bunch of kids more het up and disturbed than ever. Whatever you need to know is written down here, although nobody knows anything to speak of.’

‘Did Arwel have any money?’

‘Pocket money’s locked up in the other office.’

‘What was he wearing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who does?’

‘Nobody. The children had other things on their mind, and Dilys Roberts was in bed.’

‘Why does she do so many sleeping-in duties?’

‘I’ve already told you we’re chronically short-staffed.’

‘Surely you keep clothing lists?’ Jack persisted. ‘You must be able to tell what’s missing from Arwel’s things.’

‘You can’t know from one day to the next what belongs to anybody.’ Hogg smiled disarmingly. ‘And you know exactly what I mean because you’ve got teenagers of your own.’

‘Did your boss tell you to be obstructive?’

Hogg sighed. ‘I’ve got to shield everyone from thoughtless interference, and we often encounter prejudice, so you’ll have to forgive me if I seem defensive. I’m only human, after all. Too many police officers think locking up youngsters is the answer to everything.’ He smiled again. ‘If only they realized social workers just shovel shit another way!’ Pushing the sheaf of reports across the desk, he added, ‘Don’t think I’m being impertinent, but isn’t it more important to find out where the boy spent the last week? He wasn’t with the others. Talk to that man they call Dai Skunk. I’m sure you’re acquainted with him.’

Crackling over the car radio, Dewi’s voice eddied like the mist from Menai Strait rolling over the cars and trucks and the roadworks traffic signal, and on towards the mountainous hinterland. The car heater blasted fuggy air in McKenna’s face, a mix of exhaust fumes and that foul stench coming off the sea at low tide.

Janet switched off the radio. ‘The phone won’t work either, sir, there’s too much static.’ She shivered. ‘My father’d call mist like this a cloud of human wickedness. He’s surprised God doesn’t use the cover to destroy all the points of reference on the human landscape, and start again.’ The traffic light changed to amber, and she put the car in gear.

‘Eifion Roberts says God wouldn’t have a choice about starting again if He knew what sort of Christians inhabit North Wales.’

‘My father actually believes Dr Roberts is a heretic. His name’s forbidden at the manse.’ She followed the long tailback of traffic, accelerating in the wake of a sleek silver car. ‘I expect his work made him like that, don’t you?’

An extension of its eastwards counterpart, this new road between Bangor and Caernarfon obliterated all sense of place, the landmarks of centuries obscured behind mounds of clay and man-made bulwarks. Dubbed by politicians as the Road of Opportunity, it was better named the Road to Hell, McKenna thought, opportune only for criminals bringing further ills to a poor society already beset.

‘HQ say to expect the ram-raiders in Caernarfon and further west now the road’s finished,’ Janet commented. ‘Crime’s our only growth industry, isn’t it? Still, I suppose that’s not surprising in a place people call the fag-end of Creation.’

Like the new road, the council estate beyond Caernarfon was stripped of individuality and character, a model of cultural conformity reduced to the lowest common denominator. Housed in a terraced block at the centre of the estate, the Thomas family lacked even a glimpse of the Snowdon range to the south or the sea to the north, their horizons limited by the narrow-mindedness of others. Waiting for Janet to lock his car and set the alarm, McKenna was slapped in the face by freezing air, and around the ankles by litter cavorting on a rising breeze. Light-headed, a little hungover from too many analgesics, he pushed open the decrepit wooden gate, and led the way up a scabrous concrete path. As she knocked on the door, he massaged the hand drooping from its sling, the fingers bluey tipped.

‘You should wear gloves, sir,’ his companion offered. ‘It’s cold enough to give you frostbite.’ She smiled. ‘What Inspector Tuttle would call a “worst case scenario”.’ She let the smile die as the front door opened.

‘Yes?’ the woman asked, looking from McKenna to the girl. ‘I’m not buying, so if you’re selling, you can sod off! And we don’t owe nothing to nobody except the council and Manweb, and they can sod off as well.’

‘Mrs Thomas?’ the girl asked.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘We’re police officers,’ McKenna said. ‘My name is McKenna, and this is Detective Constable Janet Evans.’

Thin of face, scrawny of body, she stood on the doorstep and chewed the inside of her mouth, looking somewhere beyond McKenna’s shoulder, while he looked in vain for a shadow of the beauty which had emblazoned the face of her son. ‘He’s not here,’ she said. ‘He’s not been here either. I told that copper
come the other day. If he’s legged it from that Blodwel it’s their fault. Nothing to do with me or his father. He’s gone on the run before. They should keep him under control. He’s worse now than when he went there.’

‘Might we come in?’ Janet asked. ‘We need to talk to you, and it’s bitter cold out here.’

‘I suppose so.’ She turned to walk inside. ‘Shut the door behind you.’

She led them to the back parlour, a cramped and shabby room overlooking a cramped and shabby patch of garden. As poorly proportioned as her dwelling, she sat in an armchair covered in dull brown vinyl, and chewed the inside of her mouth again. ‘What d’you want?’

‘Is your husband at home?’ McKenna asked, easing himself into another armchair. Janet sat at the table, crimping the cloth between her fingers.

‘No, he’s not.’

‘At work?’ Janet asked.

‘Gone to town.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Gone to sign on, hasn’t he? What’s it to you, anyway?’

‘When d’you expect him back?’ McKenna asked.

She shrugged. ‘When he comes.’

McKenna wondered how old she was, this care-ridden creature. ‘Mrs Thomas,’ he said, ‘is there anyone who could come in for a while?’

‘Why?’

Jack began to munch his third sandwich. ‘I’m starving.’

‘You’ll put on weight,’ McKenna observed.

‘Probably. I’m not blessed with a supercharged metabolism like you.’ He wiped his fingers on a napkin. ‘You can light up now I’ve finished eating.’ Gesturing to the Blodwel reports, he added, ‘They’re not worth the paper they’re written on, and Hogg won’t let anyone talk to us. How did you fare with Mrs Thomas?’

‘Little better.’ McKenna fidgeted with an unlit cigarette. ‘She didn’t cry, or do anything very much except chew her mouth and say Arwel would never be told.’

Jack sighed. ‘They’re heaping all the blame on the lad. He’s reaped whatever he sowed.’

‘It’s a very bitter harvest for a fourteen year old. Any news from Eifion?’

‘He won’t’ve finished.’ Jack yawned. ‘Did Mrs Thomas have any idea why Arwel ran away, or where he went?’

‘Nothing, or so she said.’ McKenna lit the cigarette.

‘Hogg said kids often abscond when they’re due in court, only Arwel wasn’t, so there wasn’t much point saying it. There’s nothing on Hogg in the computer. Pity, really.’