In Guilty Night (29 page)

‘I told her to get the chimney swept,’ he whined. ‘I told her weeks back.’

‘Chimney sweeps cost,’ Carol pointed out. ‘When did it happen?’

Her father shrugged. ‘How the bloody hell do I know? It was like it when I got in.’

‘And how long ago was that?’

‘I don’t know.’

He remained in the soot, and Carol knew his feet would leave little pointed prints on the floors, like the marks of birds’ claws in snow. His mouth hung open slightly, his eyes looked as dull as the soot, and she wondered if, subconsciously, he knew himself too inadequate for the simple task of sweeping soot. She picked up shovel and hearth brush, and began to clean the dingy room, thinking him perhaps too stupid even to own a subconscious. Soot motes drifted among the dust and litter of ornaments and bits and pieces, and wiping her finger on the table and windowledge, she sighed.

‘I can’t clean all this and cook the tea.’

‘I could go for a takeaway,’ her father offered. ‘If you’ve got any money.’

Carol massaged the dull pain at the base of her spine, a new pain supplanting the earlier pain of engorged breasts. The child and the pain were like twin parasites, gorging off her meagre resources.

‘You’re getting fat round the middle,’ her father said. ‘What’ll we do for money when you can’t work any longer?’

‘Social Security, like now. Like ever since I can remember! Go and get the Hoover.’

‘Aren’t I going for a takeaway?’

‘After. You can help me clean up.’

He moved away from the soot puddle, and left a trail of pointed prints behind him. Carol thought she should pity his uselessness and hopelessness, then thought not, because default caused so much damage, as Arwel knew. He stole comfort and knowledge from the words and thoughts of others, and shared them with his sister, showing her how to find other truths to counter the brutal reality of the life they knew. She remembered what he said about the unacknowledged heroism of the poor, but watching her father shamble through the door, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind him, Carol searched his dull features in vain for any such nobility.

‘Where’s Mam?’ she asked.

‘Gone out. The social worker’s been.’

‘What did that bitch want?’

‘She came to say Arwel can be buried.’

‘What?’

‘Arwel can be buried, so Mam’s gone to the social to ask about money. Don’t they have to give you money to bury people?’

McKenna sat in the meeting which followed upon their trespass of Bedd y Cor, marvelling that assault upon the integrity of the beautiful car should cause such greater distress than upon its owner’s.

‘Who’ll pay for any damage to that fancy car?’ Owen Griffiths demanded. ‘We will! How much do they cost?’

‘A lot,’ McKenna said. ‘I’m sure Forensics will be extra careful.’

‘They’d bloody better be! I’ve seem them rip a car apart like a lion stripping a carcass.’

‘The quest for knowledge can be like a lion’s gorging. Tearing the flesh from the bones, sucking out the marrow.’

‘Oh, you do talk crap at times, McKenna! I’m glad you managed to keep your mouth shut for once in front of the higher-ups.’

‘I didn’t particularly want to share my knowledge.’

‘You might have to, however indigestible it is. Rhiannon’s put her husband well and truly in the shit, though he’s been very co-operative, for somebody having yards and yards of the poshest carpet pulled out from under him. He’s giving blood for analysis first thing in the morning. Why d’you think he didn’t argue?’

‘It’s easier not to go through the enforcement rigmarole.’

‘D’you think the press’ll get on to him?’

‘Probably, and they’ll crucify him.’

‘They love the mighty to fall, don’t they?’ Griffiths commented. ‘Mind you, the media lost interest pretty quickly.’

‘The media generally share the common view.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘Arwel alive was a bad lot and a drain on society’s scarce resources. Arwel dead is one less parasite.’

‘We’d only need a tiny shift in perspective to be back where Hitler left off, wouldn’t we? The government’s redefining one lot after another as unworthy, and expendable’s the next stop down the road. Who’d miss young Mandy, for instance?’ Griffiths coughed. ‘The solicitor says she’s a risk to herself, at risk from others, and depressed as well. Her social worker told us to take her back to Holyhead, and stop encouraging the attention-seeking.’

‘So why is she still occupying the detention cell?’ McKenna asked. ‘When I looked in, she was stuffing herself with a Chinese takeaway, and between mouthfuls of bamboo shoots and God-knows-what, demanding to know why Dewi Prys, or “him with the sexy eyes”, hadn’t been to see her.’

‘I’m indulging in lateral thinking.’ Griffiths smiled. ‘Going to my retirement with a bang. I’m asking her Nain to take her in.’

‘Social Services must’ve tried already.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? She’s never been asked. Social Services snatched the child, and she’s been crashing from pillar to post ever since.’

Before he fell sick, Jack had woven strings of coloured lights around the porch and through the bare branches of the trees in the garden, and walking up the path, McKenna trod through
puddles of warm colour, his figure dappled with pinks and blues and golden yellow.

The twins answered the door, smiled their beautiful smiles, and pulled him to the sitting-room, where they sat beside him on the sofa, his arms imprisoned by their own, their bodies yielding and loving.

‘Daddy’s in bed, drugged up with cough medicine and paracetamol.’

‘Asleep.’

‘And where’s your mother?’ McKenna asked.

‘She’s gone out with Mrs McKenna.’

‘We’re the nurses tonight.’

‘I’m sure your father’s in good hands,’ McKenna said. ‘Did the doctor leave a medical certificate?’

One twin left the sofa, foraged inside an old bureau, and handed McKenna the certificate. ‘He’ll be off at least ten days.’ She sat down and retrieved his arm. ‘Have you found Gary yet?’

‘No, but we found the missing girl.’

‘Will she go back to Blodwel?’

‘I hope not,’ McKenna said.

‘Daddy said he wouldn’t wish that place on his worst enemy.’

‘Can I see him?’ McKenna asked. ‘Just for a few minutes.’

In the rosy bedroom lamplight, Jack’s flesh gleamed with a bluish tinge, like incipient post-mortem lividity. ‘Scum rises to the top, like Hogg rose to the top of his profession. Elis’s been floating with the scum since he first drew breath.’

‘Don’t be so sour,’ McKenna chided.

‘I feel sour. If I had the energy, I’d be bloody seething.’ Jack struggled to sit up, breath rasping, clammy sweat on his forehead. ‘It looks as if Hogg hit the nail on the head, doesn’t it?’

‘Never mind Hogg or Elis. Concentrate on getting better.’

‘I don’t like leaving you in the lurch. Getting caught in that blizzard caused this.’

‘You’re being well looked after. Enjoy the rest while you can.’

Jack grinned lop-sidedly. ‘You wouldn’t credit how fast peace broke out when I took to my bed. The twins’re falling over themselves to help.’

‘You’re a focus for their energies.’

‘Denise called earlier. She likes sick-visiting, doesn’t she?’

‘I suppose it gives her a focus.’

‘She thinks you’re avoiding her, so I said you’re up to your eyes in work.’ Jack coughed. ‘She’s wittering about Christmas arrangements. I thought she was angling for an invitation here, but Em says not, ’cos Denise is flying out to the Canary Islands four days before Christmas.’

‘Who with?’

Jack coughed again, and massaged his throat. ‘Maybe the man with the yacht? Em won’t tell me, but she might tell you. Why not ask her?’

McKenna twisted his hands together. ‘I don’t particularly want to know.’

‘Well, it lets you off the hook. You could come to us for the day. You’ll be quite safe with Denise out of the way, won’t you?’

McKenna took a stack of files and reports home, and found solutions and endings to all but Arwel’s death and Gary’s whereabouts. Mandy had gone to her grandmother, perhaps giving hope and purpose to the woman’s remaining years. Darren Pritchard remained in South Wales, doing his time, while the remains of Tony Jones would eventually return home, dust and ashes. David Fellowes, dust and ashes already, drifted on the Irish Sea, according to Dewi’s note.

McKenna knew he was terribly depressed, but the struggle to feel any different was futile, the darkness within densely compressed by darkness without. Carol’s flickering brilliance lit the misery a little, yet raised other shadows, and Rhiannon’s perceptions had shed their own light, letting some of McKenna’s pieces fall in place, like the pattern of a kaleidoscope. But like that pattern, the pictures changed shape and focus each time he moved the angle of view.

As the cathedral clock struck ten, the cat ventured outside. The wind had turned, bringing scents of snow, and the distant lands in the east. Shivering, he waited by the door until she scuttled indoors and slumped before the fire, twitching when the doorbell pealed.

She had changed her clothes, McKenna thought, and dressed her hair, and clawed back from the edge of loss of control. Even her nails were filed and polished. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so late. I want to talk to you, and I don’t know what might happen tomorrow.’

‘I can’t discuss your husband,’ McKenna said. ‘But I’m sorry you face such dreadful uncertainty. How’s Mari?’

‘She’ll survive.’

‘I’ll make coffee.’ He hurried to the kitchen, clattering cups and saucers and spoons while the percolator seethed. She followed, trembling like a new leaf in cold April wind, then took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

‘Forgive me, I’m not usually so
distraite
. I usually hide my feelings. They’re such unseemly things, aren’t they?’

‘Only for other people,’ McKenna commented.

Rhiannon sat at the kitchen-table. ‘We had a visit from Carol. I’ve just taken her home.’

‘How?’

‘You mean: in what?’ She smiled. ‘We’ve leased new cars, of course.’

‘I see.’

‘I wanted to discuss money with you.’ Rhiannon took her coffee. ‘I’d like to pay for Arwel’s funeral, but thought I should ask you first.’ She spooned tiny crystals of brown sugar into her cup, and stirred the mixture. ‘My husband won’t be involved.’ She gulped the scalding coffee. ‘I’ve never seen Carol so upset. She hides her feelings better than me. Grief must be getting the better of her at last.’

‘She has to cope with her parents and their distress.’ McKenna lit a cigarette.

‘I shouldn’t think their capacity for distress extends beyond bothering about what the neighbours think of the funeral show. People like them exist in a kind of twilit world where insight and awareness are strangers, don’t they?’ Rhiannon sighed. ‘But they’re spared the anguish of recognizing their hopelessness.’

‘The Thomases of this world understand their hopelessness only too well,’ McKenna said. ‘That’s why they resort to drugs and apathy and suicide. Arwel resorted to his imagination instead, but much good it did him,’ McKenna said. ‘Tell me Mrs Elis, on the subject of suicide, why was Tony Jones called Papageno?’

She shrugged. ‘He was a terrible liar. Blodwel staff said he’d lie about anything to anyone because he loved to make trouble.’

‘And are you sure you didn’t get a message about three shillings and fourpence and a dance?’

Rhiannon tapped her spoon on the side of her cup. ‘Of course, I’m not sure. How can I be?’

‘And d’you suspect your husband abused Tony?’

‘Of course not! He hardly knew him.’ She frowned. ‘Ronald Hogg found Arwel and Tony in bed together.’

‘How d’you know?’ McKenna persisted. ‘Because he told you he did?’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Because you may have been wilfully misled, by someone with their own hidden agenda,’ McKenna suggested. ‘Think about it, at least.’

She drained her cup, and rose. ‘Let me know about paying for the funeral, won’t you? Carol said the benefits agency will take Arwel’s savings to offset the extra funeral grant, and I wouldn’t want anyone to face that kind of greed.’ She went to the parlour, and picked up her coat before he could help her, the silk lining rustling as she pulled it around her body. ‘There’s another favour you could do for me.’ She picked at threads torn from the sofa by the cat’s assaults. ‘One of the little boys at Blodwel has something of ours which I’d like back, but I didn’t want to upset him by asking. Could you ask Ronald Hogg? I can’t visit Blodwel. I’m waiting for a decision from the chief executive about my position.’ Her fingers taunted the threads. ‘I might be forced to resign.’

‘What is it?’

‘An artefact of my husband’s past.’ She smiled. ‘A tiepin made of red and white gold and shaped like a bullet, which is no doubt why the child was so taken with it. My husband was an RAF cadet at public school. The pin’s missing.’

‘Why a bullet?’

‘A joke commemorating some horseplay with their weaponry. He was once reprimanded for the negligent discharge of a firearm.’ Rhiannon thrust her hands deep in her pockets. ‘I really must go. Thank you for your help.’

‘How did the child come by the tiepin?’

‘Mr Hogg gave it to him. I assume my husband gave it to Arwel.’

‘I’m extrapolating,’ Eifion Roberts announced, pouring whiskey in his glass. ‘Anything can be extrapolated. Interpretation is infinite.’

‘You’re keeping me from my bed,’ McKenna said.

‘Give over! It’s not midnight yet.’

‘D’you ever have a hangover?’

‘I don’t drink much when I’m not with you.’ The pathologist smiled. ‘You don’t judge me like other folk. Have some. Better than caffeine.’

‘Sleep would be better still. I’ve had a taxing day.’

‘Haven’t we all? Last thing this afternoon, I watched a ferrety little undertaker and his sidekick tip Arwel’s body in a makeshift coffin and carry him away. They’ll embalm him, dress him up in his going-to-chapel-Sunday-best, and put him in another makeshift coffin with fake brass handles and a cheap nylon lining which looks like silk to the teary eye.’

‘Rhiannon wants to pay for a decent funeral.’