In Guilty Night (41 page)

‘Imagination is prized by the Celtic races,’ the director commented. ‘Unfortunately, too many are unable to distinguish between fantasy and fact, so it falls to others to keep a hold on reality.’ He brushed another speck of dust from his lapel. ‘My reality involves trying to balance the needs of society against those of the children whose behaviour poses a threat to that society, and it’s generally an almost impossible task. Even so, I am not endlessly accountable. The line must be drawn at some point.’

‘I think you’ll find others have a different view of the extent of your accountability,’ Griffiths said. ‘How much supervision did Hogg receive? From what we hear, he and his wife were let loose in Blodwel to do as they pleased. He built his own empire, and everyone deferred to his wishes. Even you, we hear, wouldn’t gainsay the power he wielded. How did that come about? Did you never think to question the structure he built behind the walls of Blodwel?’

‘I heard nothing to give me cause for concern,’ the director said. ‘And I still haven’t.’

‘Darren Pritchard paid you a visit, did he not?’ McKenna asked. ‘Will we find others tried to tell you they lived with terror? Some of these children have their own guilt, because they believe they colluded with Hogg. They had no choice. The abuse of others was the price of their own survival.’

The deputy chief constable coughed. ‘Gary Hughes shared a
bedroom with an eleven year old boy, who “loved Sir like a father”. Hogg told this child that Gary was a “bumboy”. The child said if Gary failed to do “what Sir wanted”, he’d say Gary had raped him.’ He glanced at the statement. ‘Mr McKenna noted here that Gary began to weep, because he fears he’s become what Hogg said he was, and wonders when he’ll begin to desire what so revolts him.’

‘You see our difficulty?’ the director of social services asked. ‘Allegations of child abuse attach a terrible social stigma to accused and accuser alike.’

‘Is that an excuse for doing nothing?’ Griffiths demanded.

‘There’s no need to be hostile, Superintendent. We’re all on the same side in this battle. Unfortunately, you seem blinded by the dust of the conflict. I must keep sight of the problems and principles.’

‘Arwel and Gary and Tony embody a principle your professional jargon describes as the paramount interest of the child.’ Griffiths leaned forward, breathing heavily. ‘They embody a problem, too, so you jettisoned principles for the sake of convenience.’

‘Shall we discuss Arwel?’ McKenna intervened. ‘Did you ever see him? We saw him only in his coffin, but he kept his rare beauty even after death. His sister’s also very lovely, and despite seeming very ordinary and nondescript, his parents are forever distinguished by having had one of their children done to death. It’s going against Nature to outlive your child, isn’t it? Tony’s mother said it’s like breaking one of God’s laws, and I imagine the Thomases are no less devastated, for all their bitterness and confusion.’

‘These boys’ve been too easily written off as bad kids from bad ignorant families, and a waste of space alive or dead,’ Griffiths added. ‘Beyond a passing usefulness, their living was as trivial as their dying. Gary’s given us a lot of insight, you see. Arwel was Hogg’s most profitable commodity because he looked so virginal. Tony was the “bit of rough” for people who wanted that sort of thing, and Gary seems to have been all things to all men.’

‘Including friends of David Fellows,’ McKenna said. ‘He was known as Dai Skunk for years, because he smelt of dirty sex. When he developed AIDS, people called him Dai Death instead. He died last week. Hogg knew him, and knew he was selling these boys to Dai’s sexual partners. He told Gary and Arwel they were trading poisoned love.’

The councillor stared at McKenna, a frown creasing his forehead.

‘Our investigation of Arwel’s death was bedevilled from the outset by lies and evasions.’ McKenna stubbed out his cigarette, and lit another. ‘For instance, when we first interviewed Arwel’s social worker, she neglected to tell us she’d found him hitching on the Bethel road the day after he ran away. She took him back to Blodwel.’

‘And she’s facing criminal charges for not telling us,’ Griffiths added.

‘Arwel absconded when Hogg arranged for him to spend a few days “partying” with some well-paying customers,’ McKenna went on. ‘When his social worker returned him to Blodwel, Doris slung him in the showers, dressed him in his best clothes, and drove him to the rendezvous. She collected him on the Saturday afternoon and took him to her own house to report to her husband.’

‘This is becoming very tedious,’ the director said. ‘Is there a point? And how can you possibly know all this?’

‘Gary was at the house,’ Griffiths said. ‘Waiting for Doris to drive him to another rendezvous. Arwel said where he’d been but he didn’t bother saying what’d happened, because Gary knew for himself.’

‘Hogg was counting money in his sitting-room,’ McKenna said. ‘Pile upon pile of twenty-and fifty-pound notes. Arwel watched, commenting about “blood money” and “wages of sin”, with tears running down his face, but Hogg ignored him, fastened rubber bands round his bundles, and put them in a fancy biscuit tin. Doris was in the kitchen, “clattering pots”. As he locked the tin in the sideboard, Hogg said to Arwel, as if discussing the weather: “You’d crawl over broken glass for your sister, wouldn’t you? Did you know Dai Skunk’s got AIDS? Men go with him, then they go with you, then they fuck your sister, ’cos she’s a whore like you”. He laughed, Gary reports, then said: “And if you haven’t given her AIDS yet, you will one day”.’

‘Imagine, if you can, Arwel’s rage and despair,’ Griffiths said. ‘Then try to understand his helplessness. He lunged at Hogg, Gary tried to pull him off, and Arwel went flying. His head hit the TV screen so hard the set crashed against the wall. Gary heard two crunching noises, then Arwel lay on the floor, quite still apart from his lower legs, which twitched and jerked forever.’

‘He knew Arwel was dead when urine stained his trousers and trickled on the floor. Doris apparently raged about the damage to her new carpet,’ McKenna added. ‘Hogg promised to hide the body where it would never be found if Gary agreed to keep his mouth shut “tighter than he’d ever wanted to shut his arse”.’

Griffiths watched the councillor, who stared through the window at coming night. ‘But of course, he didn’t keep his word. He dumped Arwel in the tunnel, and Gary ran away because he knew he’d be blamed. We all know how very convincing Hogg can be, don’t we?’

‘It’s hearsay!’ The director made a dismissive gesture. ‘You could ruin careers with this nonsense, and I doubt you’d say to Ronald Hogg’s face what you’re slandering him with behind his back.’ He rose angrily. The councillor rose too, lower legs twitching with tension. ‘And don’t think you can heap all the blame on us. I’ve heard there’s a police officer involved somewhere. Maybe more than one.’

Griffiths raised his eyebrows. ‘But you just said you heard nothing to cause you concern. What else did you ignore, I wonder?’ He began to make neat piles of the scattered documents. ‘Never mind, time will tell. Our investigations are under way, and of course, there’s the evidence.’

‘What evidence?’

‘What we’ve already found, what forensic science will unearth at Hogg’s house and Blodwel, and the legacy of Arwel’s imagination.’ Griffiths smiled bleakly. ‘You can never write off anybody, you know. Sometime during his miserable life, Arwel found his imagination captured by medieval Welsh poetry, so his sister bought him a book he desperately wanted. He used that book to make a coded record of the car registration numbers of the men who abused him and the other children.’ He picked up the list of names and addresses Dewi had extracted, on McKenna’s instructions, from the DVLA computers. ‘God willing, we’ll get lucky, and put some of them behind bars where they belong. Then we’ll watch for the next lot to crawl out of the woodwork. And we
will
watch, because eternal vigilance is no price at all for a child’s safety, is it?’

19

On the day his wife made her escape from misery and winter, McKenna made his last visit to Bedd y Cor, but not to show the quality of his mercy as Rhiannon wished.

Driving down the lane, he pulled into the verge to let Mari pass with her pretty car. She nodded with steely control, more of Rhiannon’s mantle filched each passing day. The boy beside her ignored him, but the woman in the rear seat waved, and McKenna wondered when Gary replaced Arwel in the schemes of Mari and her mistress.

He parked by the gate, and, as he pushed it open, saw a magpie lifting from the thorny hedgerow. He looked skywards for its mate, but saw only the faint silver shape of an aeroplane thousands of feet above, exhaust streaming behind in a clear golden line. He wondered if Denise were aboard, and if she would, as Dewi hoped, see Hogg and his ugly wife indolent and grease-rubbed on a foreign beach. McKenna hoped not, and hoped never again would they see the moon and the stars, feel the sun and the wind, or know anything beyond the horror of being alone in each other’s company, putrid with sin and irredeemable. The silver shape vanished into the eye of the sun, and he thought again of the children who passed on knowledge they should never own, of those who had nothing to say, and of those who wept because the man they called “Sir”, and whom they revered, abandoned them when he too flew away in the big silver aeroplane of which he so often boasted.

A crabbed old man in moleskin trousers dragged a rake back and forth over the manicured grass around the house, making neat piles of blackened leaves and crippled twigs to heft on a bonfire smouldering behind the wall and puffing dark acrid smoke skywards. A steely-plumed raven circled him, pecking for worms.

‘It’s a fine afternoon,’ the old man commented. ‘Nice bit of sunshine to warm your bones.’

McKenna smiled. ‘Let’s hope there’s more to come.’ He watched the gardener’s mate, teetering on a little wooden ladder propped against the trunk of the oak, trying to gouge out a huge lip of fungus that pouted from a wound in the tree.

The housekeeper answered the door, and took him to Elis’s study. As he stood by the window, he thought the russet leaves outside might today frame a picture from the brush of Mr Stubbs the Horse Painter. On the sweep of turf before the house, under a pale sky streaked with drifting smoke, Josh held the fretful chestnut mare, leaning against her shoulder. Nostrils flaring, she tossed her head and snapped her hooves restlessly, gouging little divots of mud from the grass and, but for the glass before him, McKenna knew the bitter smell of turned earth would again assail his senses. Elegant in dark garments of cloth and animal skin, Rhiannon stood nearby, gloved hands resting on the handles of the chair whose wheels had scarred the ground. She took one of the boy’s palsied hands, and lifted it to the animal’s shoulder. Instincts surging, the mare shied violently away, wrenching the groom from his feet.

Rhiannon pulled the chair and its cargo on to the drive, then stooped to retrieve the bright wool shawl which fell from her child’s shoulders when he recoiled from the terrified mare. The housekeeper appeared in McKenna’s view, spoke to her mistress, then took charge of the wheelchair and its passenger as Rhiannon walked away.

‘Come to the drawing-room.’ She stood in the doorway, and as McKenna followed her down the hall, scents of smokiness and perfume drifted towards him from her clothes and hair. They passed the music-room, its door wide open, the ebony piano in gauzy shrouds.

‘I wanted to see your husband,’ McKenna said. ‘Isn’t he here?’

‘No.’ Dropping her coat and gloves on the floor, she slumped in a chair, gesturing her visitor to another seat.

‘I saw Mari with Mrs Hughes and Gary.’

‘Did you? I’ve offered to cover the legal costs if Gary wants to sue the council for negligence and personal injury. He needs to act quickly, doesn’t he? When people see what others made of him, they’ll judge him worth nothing but contempt.’

‘And will you offer the same facility to others?’ McKenna asked. ‘The Thomases, for instance?’

‘Even my money doesn’t flow endlessly,’ Rhiannon said sharply. ‘I think I’ve already underwritten any dues I might have to that family.’

‘Your husband might think differently. Where is he?’

‘Away on business.’

‘What kind of business?’

‘His kind of business, raiding someone’s emotional assets. He’s almost bankrupted mine, but I don’t expect he’ll have the slightest difficulty finding some other fool willing to pay any price for a glimpse of that wistful smile. He’s always had an excellent nose for a deal to suit himself.’ She stared at McKenna. ‘I thought for a while you were one of his conquests, before I realized you don’t belong to anyone.’

‘You’ve become very cruel.’

‘Perhaps I’ve absorbed some of your ruthlessness, Mr McKenna. Perhaps my mercy drained away. Who knows?’

‘Will he come back?’

‘He usually does.’ She held out her hands to the fire. ‘But this time I might tell him to go away again. I might point out I could have mounted one of the horses if I really wanted to be taken for a ride.’

‘A shift of perspective might reveal just another deceiving façade,’ McKenna said. ‘Your husband isn’t the fatally wounded soul you imagined for so long, or the monster you see before you now. And for all you know, he might have constructed the face he believed you wanted to see. Everyone dissembles, and even your son has his mystery.’

‘You know nothing!’ Rhiannon snapped. ‘You haven’t lived with this suffering of his, this inner estate he cultivates like this house and land. You haven’t heard him deplore the way our son was kept alive, while he’s done exactly the same with his misery, instead of letting nature take its course.’ She paused, eyes darkening. ‘And you haven’t had to count the cost of his companionship, over and over again. Arwel’s become the estate’s most recent acquisition, my husband’s latest excuse.’

‘For what?’

‘More suffering. He killed Arwel by default, so he says, so he’s appropriated the guilt and the drama and the self-pity.’ She rubbed her eyes, leaving a smudge of shadow on her face. ‘Carol asked for his help, because she thought power was as thick in his hands as money. She wanted him to vanquish Arwel’s pain and terror, but he did nothing. He says he was terrified of the authority controlling Arwel, but I don’t believe
him. He likes pain. It makes him feel he’s alive, so he never lets it go, even if it’s not his to enjoy. Now, of course, he hopes Carol will never forgive him, even though he wants to be allowed to believe Arwel’s better off dead, and out of the clutches of the incurable sickness they shared.’