Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  John Jones moved forward, boots squelching. ‘It’s there. I can see it.’ Slowly, almost reluctantly, they followed the crabbed figure. On a mound within the woods, amid a convolution of dead trees throttled with ivy, the body, barely more substantial than the shadow of a shadow, swung on the end of frayed rope, clothes which had once been black hanging in grey tatters about its limbs. Little fillets of dried flesh still clung here and there; a few tufts of matted hair sprouted from its head. The eyes were long gone, a feast for the crows and magpies. Jack looked upon their find, and his scalp crawled. How many days and nights had she hung there, drenched by rain, scalded by the summer sun, scoured by the winds, and made brittle by deep mid-winter frost?

  The corpse dangled close to the ground, rope and neck and spine and legs stretched by gravity and damp: elongated into some surrealistic form, feet pointing like those of a dancer, motion frozen in mid jump. A ragged skirt swung with a life of its own, giving off heady puffs of some strange scent. Touching nothing, in fear of damaging the frail remains, Jack examined the body. As he moved around, it seemed to swing after him, attracted by a strange magnetism, the head leaning forward to watch his progress. He felt its hip brush his shoulder, and almost screamed with terror.

  A suicide, he decided, and a typical way for a woman to kill herself. He stood behind her, that strange scent drying the back of his throat, and looked at what remained of her hands, crippled and clawed below the thick leather strap which bound her wrists tight together like those of the convict ready for execution.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Have you told McKenna yet?’ Emma Tuttle asked her husband.

  ‘Couldn’t raise him. Been trying all afternoon and evening.’ Jack yawned.

  ‘D’you want me to call Denise?’

  ‘No, love. I’ll ring again before we go to bed. Nothing to be done tonight, anyway.’

  Emma threw another log on the fire. ‘Is anyone still down in that awful place? On a night like this?’ she asked. ‘You haven’t left anyone there on his own, have you?’

  ‘No point. We don’t know how long the body’s been there until Eifion Roberts does the post-mortem … if then. From the looks of it, she died at least before winter set in.’

  Emma shuddered. ‘Poor woman!’ she said. ‘It’s absolutely dreadful, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose….’ Jack yawned again. ‘Are the twins all right?’

  ‘Of course they are,’ Emma said. ‘Why shouldn’t they be?’

  ‘They’re very quiet.’

  Emma smiled. ‘Typical policeman, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Just because they’re not making a noise, you presume they’re up to no good.’

  ‘Well, that’s usually the case with them, isn’t it?’

  Full darkness fell before police and forensic officers left the woods, trailing after stretcher-bearers and the pathologist. Cutting down this anonymous woman was a delicate task, two people needed to hold her as Dewi climbed up to untie the rope. The knots too tight, the rope too sodden to unravel, he was forced to saw it through, while the others steadied the convulsive swinging and jerking of the body below.

  ‘Well, we can be sure it’s not suicide,’ Eifion Roberts observed. ‘Nobody could strap up their own hands like that…. That belt might tell us something eventually.’ He straightened up, pulling off surgical gloves. ‘Don’t envy you this one. Looks more like an execution than a common or garden murder. You might well find yourselves looking at a terrorist link.’

  * * *

  ‘What sort of day did you have?’ Jack asked his wife.

  ‘Not very enjoyable, to be honest,’ Emma admitted. ‘Chester was terribly crowded. I don’t know why we bother going on a Saturday afternoon, except Denise seemed to need some time to herself … she bought a lovely suit from Browns.’

  ‘And how is our elegant Mrs McKenna?’

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t talk about her in that nasty tone,’ Emma snapped. ‘She’s very unhappy.’

  ‘So is her husband,’ Jack said.

  ‘Is he?’ Emma asked. ‘Well, that doesn’t give him the right to make her life a misery. She was actually crying today. In public! They’d had another row this morning. And d’you know what about?’ Emma demanded. ‘Religion, of all things. How can any normal person row about religion?’

  Jack sighed. ‘He’s Catholic, she’s Chapel.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So she keeps harping on about him going to chapel with her even though she knows he won’t.’

  ‘I suppose that’s his story, is it?’

  ‘What’s hers, then?’ Jack said.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so bloody spiteful!’ Emma exclaimed. ‘For Denise of all people to sit in a café crying….’

  Jack stood up. ‘And we’ve all seen Denise cry when it suits her, haven’t we? Tears welling out of those baby-blue eyes … how did you describe it, Em? Like glass beads, you said, sliding down porcelain cheeks, then shattering on the ground. Very fanciful. How long d’you think she spent rehearsing that?’

  ‘Why must you be so absolutely horrible about her? What’s she done to you?’

  ‘Emma!’ Anger put an edge to Jack’s voice. ‘Denise McKenna is spoilt. Have you ever wondered what she does with herself all day? Except spend his hard-earned money? No kids, no pets, every gadget you can think of in that house. And a cleaner! She’s bored! And women like her,’ he added, ‘are bloody dangerous, because they make everybody else as bored and dissatisfied as they are.’

  Jack arrived at the police station early on Sunday morning to find house-to-house enquiries in Salem village already organized, and McKenna seated at one of the computers, trawling the missing persons index.

  ‘Roberts is already doing the post-mortem, so he can go sailing this afternoon,’ McKenna said.

  ‘Did he tell you his theory?’

  McKenna looked up. ‘Terrorists? A possibility, I suppose, but unlikely.’ He pushed his chair away from the desk. ‘Our local outlaws haven’t killed anybody yet. They seem quite content with arson and the odd letter bomb.’ Reaching for his cigarettes, he added, ‘Anyway, you expect a bullet in the back of the neck from proper terrorists. After the knee-capping, of course.’

  Jack said, ‘You’re not supposed to smoke near the computers, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It says so on that notice on the wall.’

  ‘I know that, Jack. Why not?’

  ‘I dunno … I suppose the smoke buggers up the works or something.’

  McKenna stood up. ‘Well, we wouldn’t want to do that, would we?’

  Expecting one of the mercurial changes of temper which characterized McKenna’s personality and made those around him feel they blundered with shrouded eyes through a minefield, Jack forebore to ask why McKenna preferred to work on a precious weekend off. Some things, he told himself, were best unsaid, for such questions might draw a response no one could ignore.

  Demons of folklore and wraiths of legend danced the twisting narrow lanes of Salem village, padded on silent feet in the wake of the living, and weaved threads of dark magic through the woods. Its dwellings built within sight of the squat-towered church and graveyard, the village inhabited the dark shadow of Castle Woods: acres of impenetrable growth along the foreshore of Menai Straits and beyond the bluff of land on which Snidey Castle stood.

  Fashioned by local skills, local labour, more than a century before for an Englishman gorged on the slave trade, fat with riches and cruelty, the castle swallowed the ruins of an ancient manor. The Englishman named his grotesque folly Castell Eborgofiant – the Castle of Oblivion – and the slate quarry gouging a huge wound in the distant mountain, where Welsh slavery further bloated his riches, he named for his wife Dorabella.

  Castell Eborgofiant became Snidey Castle almost as soon as the last stone was bedded into place, a small revenge for a huge injustice: Snidey because it hid itself within the shroud of trees, only the top of a battlemented keep in view; Snidey because it was bogus, a fake castle,
embellished beyond all reason or sense. Every time he glimpsed those grey battlements, Dewi Prys wished upon that long-dead Englishman and his Dorabella all the torments of imagination, prayed for the ghosts of all the souls, black and Welsh, from which greed had stripped dignity in life, to lie entwined with them in death in their ornate and vulgar tomb in the village graveyard.

  His colleagues interviewing people at the castle and in the houses near the main road, Dewi wandered around the easterly side of the village, past the old schoolhouse, the vicarage, and the little row of single-storey dwellings next to the primary school, before making his way down the path beside the graveyard, under dripping trees and branches dragging low and heavy. The path debouched eventually at a small gateway in high stone walls marking the estate’s southern boundary, beyond which a little drinking fountain still trickled with brackish water pooling stagnant and spotted with slime.

  Smells of rotting leaf mould curled in the air, reminding Dewi of the riverbank and the deep woods and the poor ravaged body dangling from its rope. ‘There’ll be some story behind that,’ his nain had observed. The old ones on the council estate, safe from whatever horrors languished less than a mile up the road, relished long into the early hours of Sunday morning, on ghosts and tragedy and those secret things, just out of sight of this world, lying in ambush for the unwary.

  Lame Beti, out on her wanderings, her perambulations around the countryside, yawed from side to side up the path towards Dewi. She was never still, as if her crippled frame could not rest with its deformity, or bear to contemplate its ugliness. She grinned, showing teeth more crooked than the gravestones in the churchyard next to where they stood. ‘Hiya, del. No need to ask what you’re doing here.’

  Her voice, mangled by a cleft palate, grated on the ear. No one could look Beti in the eye: one bulbous muddy eye, to quote Nain’s picturesque description, looked towards Bethesda, the other to Caernarfon: east and west. She was the most extravagantly ugly person Dewi had ever seen: more grotesque than any gargoyle leering from the church walls, as ugly as a gathering of all the sins in the world.

  ‘Nain and her cronies were up half the night jangling,’ he said.

  She cackled. ‘John Jones given folk something to talk about, has he?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Dewi agreed.

  ‘Was you on your way to see me, del?’ she asked. ‘Only I’m not there, like. What did you want to know?’

  ‘Anything you’ve got to tell me.’

  She started off up the path, moving with surprising speed, lame legs swinging out each side of her body. Dewi went with her. ‘I’m going to see if Mary Ann wants any messages. You come with me. She’s always glad of a bit extra company.’

  Chapter 3

  At lunchtime, when a spiteful north-easterly wind, the back end of recent storms lashing its tail like an angry cat about to spring, splashed squally rain against the windows of Eifion Roberts’ laboratory, he abandoned all notions of an afternoon’s sailing on the Straits.

  The post-mortem on the unknown woman was undemanding, cause of death apparently throttling at the end of a rope. The rope, grown thin with time, its running noose tightened almost horizontally around the neck by the weight of her body’s descent, shedded bits of stringy fibre on the bench where it now lay. Dr Roberts photographed and X-rayed the body, giving particular attention to an old and complex fracture he found on the left ankle bone. Too little flesh remained, except for where clothing had protected her from the elements, to show evidence of injury prior to death. The skull, stripped almost clean, by birds and nature and insects, bore no fracture. Putrefaction was long complete; the internal organs shrivelled, almost mummified. He removed, with tremendous care, the major organs and uterus, sealing them in jars ready for dissection.

  Emrys, his assistant, carefully unwound the belt which had bound the woman’s wrists. Made of dark brown cowhide, without ornamentation of any kind, it was three and a half inches wide, its colour bleached where rain and sun and wind had touched. Someone had cut off the buckle, leaving a jagged end.

  Spread on a table, the woman’s ragged garments gave off a faint scent. Dr Roberts sniffed at the clothing, trying to place the smell in memory. Redolent of funerals, but not the scent of death, it was a dry mustiness catching in the throat, and would, he thought, make him feel terribly and inexplicably depressed if it became too cloying.

  Emrys looked up from a thick manual detailing garment makers and labels. ‘The clothes are German in origin, Dr Roberts,’ he said. ‘Only problem is, they’re sold through at least a hundred outlets in Britain. Middling expensive, but nothing special.’

  ‘Bugger!’ Eifion Roberts fingered the garments. ‘Not much hope of finding out where she bought them, then?’

  ‘I’ll fax some photos to Germany, anyway. They should be able to tell us when they were made, where they were sold … might narrow it down a bit.’

  ‘Fat chance! When did we last strike gold with that line of enquiry? Women’s clothes, they’re like I don’t know what…. Like grains of sand, they are, millions and millions of the bloody things. Makes you depressed just thinking about them…. We’d need Princess Di on the slab before we stood a chance of getting an ID off her clothes.’

  Emrys smiled. ‘If Princess Di went missing for as long as this lady, somebody might notice.’ He fingered the belt. ‘I’ll send a photo of this as well. It’s very good quality leather.’

  Dewi’s two colleagues returned to Bangor in mid-afternoon, with odds and ends of information, but nothing apparently relevant or of real interest.

  ‘They’ll have to go out again tomorrow,’ Jack said to McKenna. ‘Half the village was off somewhere for the day.’

  ‘Any decent programmes on TV tonight?’ McKenna asked. ‘Because if not, we’ll send a team out from the evening shift. Nothing like entertaining people of a dull Sunday evening.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Pity none of the missing women had an injury like the one Dr Roberts found on this lady’s ankle.’

  ‘Hard graft time again then, isn’t it?’ Jack said.

  By late afternoon, each police force reporting missing women had received a faxed package of description, X-rays and photographs of teeth, injury and sinuses, and a request for enquiries to be made of hospitals, doctors and dentists in their areas. Dr Roberts tentatively, as he told McKenna, put the dead woman’s age at between twenty-five and forty-five, but probably around thirty-five. She had probably, but only probably, he emphasized, been dead some eighteen to forty-eight months, but most likely somewhere in between.

  ‘May as well put the file in pending now, Jack,’ McKenna said. ‘If it wasn’t for the bound wrists, we’d simply have an unfortunate suicide. Where’s young Dewi? He should have been back with the others.’

  ‘He called in a while ago. He’s talking to some of the old women in the village. Reckons they might know something useful.’

  ‘Doubt it. Still, no harm in trying … has anyone talked to Jamie Thief yet?’

  ‘Sorry, no. Slipped my mind with all the excitement.’

  ‘He’ll keep. You get off home, Jack. We’ll start again in the morning.’

  Driving home, Jack wondered how McKenna would avoid Denise when excuses about pressure of work were finally exhausted, and why so many policemen’s marriages ended in disaster, with bitterness and drunken violence sadly commonplace. Management maintained a bland public image, fed on the misapprehension that admission of imperfection would damage public confidence. Complaints against the police multiplied, but became muddied and obfuscated, the complainant often victimized, while the media railed about accountability, made allegations of rank-closing and wilful disinformation. Word had travelled about the woman’s bound hands, as Jack knew it would: two London journalists simply insulted him when he refused to comment on possible terrorist involvement.

  Emma was pleased to see him, last night’s anger dissipated. Jack was less than delighted to find Denise McKenna draped elegantly across the sofa, sipping white wine, l
ooking as if she intended to stay, questions about her husband, his whereabouts, hanging unspoken between them.

  The inspector was too abrasive, too dismissive of things not neatly fitting his own views, Dewi told himself, relieved to find Jack Tuttle gone. He liked and respected McKenna, even if others said the chief inspector was difficult, too prone to heed his imagination.

  ‘Sorry I’m late back, sir. Been talking to the old ladies in the village.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They had a lot to say, but then, they always do…. Beti took me to Mary Ann’s. Then Faith and Mair Evans turned up, probably’ – Dewi looked up and grinned – ‘because they saw me going into Mary Ann’s and couldn’t wait to nosey-parker. Anyway, they were jangling about this and that, then Faith says did I know about the woman who lived at Gallows Cottage some time back, and Mary Ann says, “I told you! Didn’t I tell you last night? Didn’t I say she’d gone the same way as the other one?” So I said, “What other one?” and nobody took a blind bit of notice of me for ages ’cos they were going on about what happens to women living at Gallows Cottage. Fair made my flesh crawl with their tales, sir.’