In Guilty Night (33 page)

‘That’s a very foolish and misguided viewpoint,’ McKenna snapped. ‘Fear and ignorance are always put forward to excuse Germany under Hitler, and all the other excesses of wickedness that besmirch history.’

‘There’s too much likening of Hogg to Hitler,’ Griffiths said. ‘I’ve heard the gossip. And Doris Hogg isn’t Eva Braun!’

McKenna dragged a cigarette from the packet. ‘Places like Blodwel are the breeding grounds of wickedness, wherever it crops up.’ Lighting the cigarette, he added, ‘Delve into your own heart with a little more brutal honesty, and you’ll know exactly what I mean.’

‘You giving me another lecture?’

‘I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, because you haven’t seen the light in their eyes, or smelt the odour they carry, like something rotting.’ McKenna paused. ‘Seeing evil as inhuman lets us exclude evil people from the human race, so we aren’t forced to examine how they bring to life and act out the dark
and complex fantasies of every human psyche, and don’t need to accept the similar potential in us all, given the right triggers and the right climate.’

‘I’m fully aware of the limits of my potential,’ Griffiths said. ‘I know exactly what I could and couldn’t do.’

‘Only in your present environment. You’ve no idea what you might do elsewhere, any more than I have. Our parents’ generation slaughtered men, women and children because they were led to believe such destruction was necessary to survival, but I don’t expect they saw themselves as murderers.’

Strapped in the front passenger seat of McKenna’s car, Eifion Roberts pulled at the belt cutting across his belly, muttering, ‘They build cars like they make clothes these days, and if you’re not thin as a stick, God help you!’

‘Stop bellyaching,’ McKenna said. ‘You should go on a diet. How many of your cadavers died from obesity?’

‘I don’t bloody know, ’cos I don’t keep tally! God, McKenna, I never thought you’d join the PC lobby.’

‘I worry about you.’

‘Because I drink a bit, and eat three square meals a day? I was a fat bouncing baby and a big strapping lad, and now I’m a fat old man. So what?’

‘You’re hardly old.’

‘I feel like Methuselah some times.’

McKenna grinned. ‘Dracula’s more up your street.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ Dr Roberts fidgeted again with the seat belt. ‘Blood’s got a nasty metallic taste.’

‘I wonder how sin tastes.’

‘We could ask Doris, couldn’t we? Why didn’t you do what Griffiths told you, and keep shtum?’

‘It’s left a horrible taste in my mouth.’

‘It’s no worse than a lot of Celtic traditions.’

‘I’m appalled by the implications for Carol.’

‘She might feel a lot better.’

‘Doris said she defiled Arwel’s body.’

‘Fat chance after everybody else’d had a go!’

McKenna turned towards Deiniolen and the mountain passes. ‘It was a truly horrible experience.’

‘Carol isn’t guaranteed eternal damnation for taking her own bit of vengeance. For all we know, God’s happy to offload some of the work. He’s stuck with the same boring routines for eternity.’ Roberts grinned. ‘He can’t even die to get away from
the daily grind, can He?’

‘Do you and God talk on a direct line?’

‘We don’t need the help of priest or pastor. When I strip a body to its bare bones, I see such wonder, so maybe He shows me the secrets of life as well as death. I’ve seen it all, except the colour of the soul.’ Gazing through the window at thorny trees stripped bare by the harsh breaths of winter, the pathologist added, ‘Don’t you wonder where all those souls go?’

‘Heaven or Hell, after a few thousand millennia in purgatory.’

‘What about the practical details? Does our construct of linear time survive after death? Has the pope visited Heaven or Hell or purgatory?’

‘One has faith,’ McKenna said. ‘It’s all very simple.’

‘So do I pity you or envy you?’ Dr Roberts asked. ‘I think the soul is simple energy. You can’t make it, you can’t destroy it.’

‘And is mankind going to the devil because we’ve exhausted the supply?’ McKenna drew up in the forecourt of the shop-cum-garage on the village street.

‘Don’t ask me. I’m not your priest.’ Muttering again, he struggled from the car. ‘What’re we doing in this Godforsaken place?’

McKenna locked the car and set the alarm. ‘Looking for Gary.’

‘Why should we fare better than your lot and Mountain Rescue?’ Looking up and down the street, squinting at the hummocks and rises of the foothills, strewn with outcrops of veined white rock, Eifion Roberts added, ‘And don’t think I’m hiking up those bloody mountains, ’cos that horrible mountain darkness’ll drop on us like a bloody shroud before long.’ He looked into the distance, at cloud massed around the peaks overhanging Llanberis Pass, vapours trailing against escarpments of slate, a monochromatic scene of white sky beyond the grey cloud, of black mountain shapes in the foreground etched against grey mountain shapes in the distance, awesome, grandiose and terrifying. Trailing in McKenna’s wake, he said, ‘It’s no wonder folk here turn to crime. There’s nowt else to do but bash the wife and kids and ogle a good-looking ewe every full moon. Talk about limited horizons!’

‘Will you shut up?’ McKenna snarled. ‘People might hear you!’

‘What people? I don’t see any people.’ Panting gently, Dr Roberts caught up with his companion. ‘They’re all inside
those poky little hovels with the doors shut tight.’

‘You wanted to come, so stop moaning, and save your precious breath for walking.’

‘I was bored. Nobody’s died needing my attention, and there’s nothing worth watching on telly. I’ve got limited horizons of my own.’ He slumped down on the low stone wall bordering the road. ‘We won’t suddenly come upon young Gary, you know. If he’s here to be found, the others’ll find him, sooner or later.’

Sitting beside his friend, McKenna lit a cigarette. The stones ground against each other under their weight, gathering energy. Dr Roberts coughed as smoke, pungent in the cold air, drifted past his face, and McKenna felt the slab beneath his buttocks rock.

‘Forensics found a few strands of Arwel’s hair in the cab of the horsebox, but nothing else of interest, nor in the trailer.’

‘Have they demolished that sculpture on wheels yet? They’re wasting time and money on that.’ Dr Roberts rubbed his hands together, then thrust them in his pockets, and a gently shivering passed through his body to the wall. ‘I doubt we’ll match Elis’s samples with Arwel’s. The preliminary profile is quite different.’

McKenna dropped ash to the ground, where it lay in a little grey tube, rolled gently by the wind creeping through the valley. ‘Tony Jones told a boy at the South Wales home he’d been sodomized and beaten and humiliated, but didn’t say by whom.’

‘What about the other lad Jack Tuttle saw?’

‘He told South Wales police to see Tony, then said he wasn’t surprised Tony killed himself because most kids in his position end up dead one way or another.’

‘Poor little devils!’ Eifion Roberts shivered again. ‘And what can anyone ever do to make it better?’

The two cats slept side by side before the fire. Glancing around the parlour, McKenna found nothing amiss, and went to the kitchen to heat a casserole Denise left in the freezer after his accident. His arm ached, and his collar-bone ground against other bone as stones in the roadside wall ground against each other. Sitting at the kitchen-table, watching the microwave’s electronic display, he wondered what happened afterwards to the energy thawing and heating his food. Perhaps, he thought, cutting slabs of fresh bread, it went on to cook his innards, for
he could not envisage such primal force owning the intelligence to distinguish between cold dead animal meat to roast, and warm living human meat to shun. Energy, he decided, was like the gene, intent only on survival, and wondered if Eifion Roberts ever puzzled over a mysteriously microwaved gut or gullet.

They had tramped lanes and sheep tracks and village streets, past shop windows where Gary’s face smiled prettily under the legend
HAVE
YOU
SEEN
THIS
BOY
?, down the narrow muddy path beside the river, and along the main road beyond the village, stumbling over tussocky verges under a sky luminous with distant stars.

‘I’m having a rest,’ Eifion Roberts had announced, sitting on another tumbled wall. He took out his flask and drank deeply, before handing the flask to McKenna. ‘Why don’t we call it a day?’ He pointed to the lower slopes of the mountains beyond the little village. ‘See those lights twinkling and bobbing? That’s your lot and Mountain Rescue, doing the job properly. We’re just farting around, ’cos you’re worried sick and can’t settle. You shouldn’t feel guilty about what other folk do.’

McKenna had lit a cigarette, smoke and raw cold mountain air burning his throat. ‘We panicked him.’

‘It could be pure coincidence. Gary could be living it up in the Smoke for all you know. I doubt he’s still round here. You’ve had near saturation cover in the media, never mind posters up all over the county.’ Dr Roberts coughed, and patted his chest before pulling his scarf tighter around his throat.

They had walked another mile deeper into the mountain pass, pressing against rough walls as cones of light against trees and rock preceded the occasional car, the weight of darkness and mountain pressing from both sides and above as the sky dwindled to a narrow ribbon of lighter darkness between the crags, before turning back, like empty-handed hunters in the night, Eifion Roberts pale and weary as an old man.

The cat purred around his legs while he ate, the other animal by the kitchen door, eyes large with hunger. Even in distress it was beautiful, fine-boned and elegant, eyes alive with intelligence. Part Siamese, McKenna decided, and looked down at his own, who resembled a little fur pudding. Thinking of Jack Sprat and his wife, his thoughts drifted from cats to Ronald Hogg, thin and less than elegant, stripping children’s
souls of the fat and the lean. Doris Hogg was another pudding, a stodgy unappetizing confection, indigestible as sin. He wiped the last of the gravy with a piece of bread, and wondered at the horizons of the strange landscape to which the loneliness he mistook for solitude had brought him.

‘St Mihangel’s called, sir,’ Dewi said. ‘Arwel’s funeral is on Tuesday at two-thirty in the afternoon.’

‘It’s hardly likely to be two-thirty in the morning, is it?’ McKenna snapped.

‘It’s not our fault we couldn’t find Gary,’ Dewi protested. ‘Between us and the volunteers and Mountain Rescue, there were thirty odd people, and we walked miles. We looked everywhere there is to look.’

‘You’d have found him if you had.’

‘Perhaps we’re searching the wrong area,’ Janet ventured. ‘The mountains cover hundreds of square miles. He could be anywhere.’

‘And he could very well be dead!’ McKenna snarled.

‘We weren’t to know he’d leg it, sir,’ Dewi said. ‘And I’ve lost count of the times we’ve been back and forth pestering anybody who might know where he’s gone.’

‘It may not be our fault at the moment, Constable Prys, but when Gary’s body, or what’s left of it, is found in the spring, stuck in a mountain gully with only a dead sheep for company, it
will
be our fault!’

Dewi jumped up. ‘I’ll own for what I do or don’t do, but I won’t carry the can for the rest of the world!’ He went to the door, eyes bright with anger. ‘It might be our job to shovel the shit the rest of the world drops, and the rest of the world thinks that’s all we’re good for, but I’m damned if I’ll take the blame ’cos the shit’s there in the first place!’ The door shuddered as he wrenched it open, shuddered again as he slammed it shut.

Janet coughed. ‘Will St Mihangel’s minister take the service, sir? The Thomases are chapel, and St Mihangel’s is church.’

‘If God Himself took the service, through the person of your righteous father, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference, because the Thomases are heathens, like the rest of the bloody Welsh!’

‘We do understand, sir,’ Janet said gently. ‘It’s horrible for all of us, but you’re responsible for everything.’

‘You are patronizing me, Constable Evans. I am not a “case” to be analysed, nor am I an errant member of your father’s flock!’

‘I wasn’t!’ Janet too rose from her seat, eyes awash with tears. ‘We’re doing our best, but you change like the weather, and we don’t know where we are from one minute to the next.’ The tears spilled down her flushed cheeks. ‘I can’t say right for saying wrong, can I? You’re just like my bloody father!’

Dewi assaulted the bastion of McKenna’s displeasure with bacon sandwiches, a pot of tea, and an apology. ‘And Janet’s gone to see Gary’s mother again.’

Showing him a memo faxed from headquarters, McKenna said, ‘The accountants have computed time and manpower expended on Gary, so we stop looking unless more concrete evidence turns up.’ He took a sandwich from the plate. ‘And they took the trouble to compute his probable safety, correlated with the number of juveniles who go missing each year, and are presumably tagged on city streets, in hostels, or detention.’

‘He might just be on the run, and perfectly OK.’ Dewi licked melted butter from his fingers. ‘But I reckon he ran ’cos he’s scared of Hogg.’

McKenna wiped his own fingers on a paper napkin. ‘We should discuss Hogg, Dewi, because Superintendent Griffiths raised a very legitimate objection about the extent of gossip likening Hogg to Adolf Hitler, and was particularly irritated to see you goose-stepping round the squadroom with your arm raised in the Nazi salute singing “Ronnie rules the bloody world” to the tune of
Deutschland
über
alles.
’

Dewi choked on the remnants of his sandwich.

‘Don’t give a repeat performance, will you?’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He poured tea, passing McKenna a new china mug flaunting roses and bright green leaves. ‘Is there anything special you want doing? All the paperwork’s up to date.’

McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘If you’re not too tired, see if you can get any more sense out of the Thomases, then bring Carol back here. I want to talk to her.’