Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  ‘And where’s Gallows Cottage?’

  Spreading a large-scale map of the estate on the desk, Dewi traced his finger along the seaward boundary, bringing it to rest on a small spur of land jutting into the Straits. ‘The cottage is here, at the edge of the woods, according to the ladies. They reckon you can’t see it except from the sea, and if you don’t know about it, you’d never find it. It’s almost as old as the village church, and it’s called Gallows Cottage, they say, because women who live there end up swinging off a gibbet somewhere.’

  McKenna pulled a notepad in front of him. ‘Who was the woman living there recently?’

  ‘They don’t exactly know, which rankles … she was definitely a foreigner – er, a foreigner like from England, sir. No idea what she was called. Beti says she saw her the odd time, in a car. No one knows anybody who spoke to her. Beti reckons she was about thirty odd, fair haired.’

  Making notes in his loose, rapid handwriting, McKenna asked, ‘How long ago?’

  ‘They can’t make up their minds. From what they said, three years ago – three years ago last autumn. Beti said the weather was turning cold when she first saw her, and doesn’t remember seeing her during the spring or summer.’

  ‘Well,’ McKenna observed, ‘the time ties in with what Dr Roberts has come up with so far. Did you see the cottage?’

  ‘No, sir. There’s a path through the woods from the village, but it’s quite a long way and none of the old ladies would come with me because it was getting dark and they reckon it’s haunted. There’s a track you can get a car down, but that starts on the estate somewhere.’

  ‘What kind of car did this woman have?’

  ‘Beti doesn’t know. Modern, she says, then says all modern cars look the same to her. She thinks it was some sort of grey colour, but she can’t be sure of that either, on account of the light being poor ’cos of all those trees and the time of year.’

  McKenna sat smoking. ‘Tell me about Gallows Cottage,’ he said.

  ‘To tell the truth, sir, I feel a bit of a divvy going on about ghosts and what-have-you….’ Dewi sounded uncomfortable. ‘I mean, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything, does it?’

  ‘Don’t know yet, do we? Who’s to say someone didn’t decide to recreate history or whatever it was the old ladies were talking about?’

  ‘Bit far-fetched, sir, if you ask me,’ Dewi commented. ‘Anyway, centuries past, this man and his wife lived at Gallows Cottage. He was called Simeon the Jew, and his wife was called Rebekah, and they had a baby daughter. Nobody seems to know what he did for a living, but one day, he came back from wherever they went in those days, and found the baby dead. Fallen down the stairs, so the wife reckoned.’

  ‘Nasty. What happened then?’

  ‘Dunno, sir. Not exactly,’ Dewi said. ‘But next thing anybody knows, Rebekah’s up at Caernarfon getting tried for murdering her baby. She’s found guilty, so they cart her off to Twt Hill and string her up. Then, legend has it, Simeon comes along and cuts her down. Nobody tries to stop him on account of they’re all scared of him ’cos he’s foreign, and he takes her body away and disappears. Not a word of what happened to him after. Never seen again. And nobody knows where Rebekah is buried.’

  ‘Probably threw her body in Menai Straits and himself after it, Dewi,’ McKenna said. ‘Poor bugger didn’t have much to live for, did he?’

  ‘Well, no, sir. I suppose not. Not if you look at it like that. But it’s not the end of the story, not quite. Simeon’s said to have done a fair bit of cursing when they hung his wife, and also threatened to walk. Like in ghosts walking,’ Dewi said. ‘Haunting. They say he threatened to walk the earth ’til he found his wife again. That’s what the old ladies were getting at, you see. They reckon Simeon lit on this woman living at Gallows Cottage, decided she’d do, and strung her up in the woods so he could have her soul … say her hands were tied up because Rebekah’s would’ve been when she was topped at Twt Hill. Mary Ann says any woman living at the cottage is likely to go the same way,’ he added. ‘She says the place should be burnt down ’cos it’s cursed.’

  ‘I daresay our terrorist friends would oblige if they were asked,’ McKenna grinned. ‘Has anyone ever seen Simeon?’

  ‘Well, a few of them would have you believe he’s around, but they’re bound to, aren’t they? It’s a good yarn, sir, especially for a dark night, or some poor sod just moved into the village.’ Dewi paused, frowning slightly. ‘There’s a funny atmosphere in that village. It’s a sort of woman’s world, if you understand what I mean, and the men don’t count for much. I didn’t hear a word about John Beti actually finding the body. To listen to Beti and the others, you’d not know he existed.’

  ‘We men don’t count for much anywhere, Dewi. It just suits the women to let us think we do.’

  Chapter 4

  In a mood as foul and dismal as the weather, Jack arrived at the police station on Monday morning to find McKenna haunting his office as Denise haunted his home. Eyeing Jack’s sour countenance, McKenna wondered what it was about rain which made people so evil-tempered.

  ‘Dewi Prys heard some interesting gossip yesterday, Jack. We might have a lead on the woman.’ McKenna handed over Dewi’s report, and disappeared to the canteen.

  Jack trailed behind, glancing through the report. Dewi Prys plagued him like a thorn in the side of a dog, yet there was no fault to be had with his work. ‘Don’t underestimate him,’ McKenna was saying. ‘He lets people talk, lets them relax, and just points them in the right direction now and then with a question.’

  Waiting with ill-concealed impatience for McKenna to drink two mugs of tea and smoke two cigarettes, Jack asked, ‘What’s on the agenda for today?’

  ‘I want to have a look at Gallows Cottage. And another visit to the old ladies might be useful, while you get someone to talk to Jamie about this car. Nothing’s come in on the missing women, but I don’t expect it to for some time.’ McKenna lit his third cigarette.

  ‘Don’t you think you should cut down on the smoking a bit, sir? Bad for you, you know.’

  McKenna took off his glasses to rub his eyes, and Jack noticed the smudge of shadow beneath them. ‘Kind of you to think of my health, Jack, but are you doing yourself any favours? You know promotion in this force is usually a matter of dead men’s shoes.’

  A sombre place on the brightest summer day, under a pall of rain and heavy cloud, the wet blue slate of its cottage roofs livid in the dull light, Salem village took upon itself a sinister aura. Densely massed trees, tall and overbearing, surrounded cottages, school and church, suffocating and oppressive. McKenna parked in the lane beside the row of cottages next to the school. The air was still, sodden with rain, and he was struck by an absence of noise, although he could see children at their desks in classrooms bright with fluorescent lighting. The trees were empty of birds, rooks’ nests in the high branches abandoned. Only half a mile from the shoreline, no gulls wheeled and screeched in the sky. He pulled his coat around him, and walked quickly to Mary Ann’s front door, rapping at its fox-head knocker.

  Lame Beti whipped open the door, a brilliant smile lighting her gargoyle face. ‘Hiya, del,’ she greeted him. ‘You want to see Mary Ann, do you?’

  People made jokes about Beti, the most cruel to be given currency that she had never been quite pretty enough, even when young, to stop the traffic, and that was why she looked as if mown down by a juggernaut. Following, as she weaved her way into Mary Ann’s parlour, McKenna wondered on the sins she had committed in a past life to carry with her through this one for all the world to see.

  Mary Ann’s cottage smelt of old damp in walls and floors, seeped into furniture and fabrics. The walls, once painted in pale emulsion, were stained yellowy brown with nicotine, a huge gas fire burned in the opening of an old range covering half the chimney wall, adding its fumes to an atmosphere drying McKenna’s throat more each time he drew breath.

  Squashed tight into an old armchair, Mary Ann held
court, fluffy white hair as yellowed above her forehead as the walls. A tin ashtray overflowed on the chair arm, and her feet in grubby pink carpet slippers pointed at him from the end of swollen, varicosed legs. Cruel cold daylight filtered into the room through old-fashioned lace curtains, to light on her face, the make-up peeling away from her nose like old varnish.

  ‘Dewi’s boss, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘He had us all in stitches yesterday. Isn’t that right, Beti?’

  Beti bobbed her head, then went to the kitchen, where McKenna heard the sound of a kettle being filled.

  ‘Didn’t you wed Eileen Owen’s youngest?’ Mary Ann asked. ‘Denise, isn’t it?’

  McKenna nodded, accepting her interrogation as a necessity if he wanted anything from her. ‘We went to school with Eileen.’ She looked sly, McKenna thought; mischievous. ‘Nasty piece of work she was. Always snitching on people.’

  McKenna said, ‘I didn’t know her very well, Mrs Edwards. She died not long after I married Denise.’

  ‘You didn’t miss much. You can call me Mary Ann, by the way, then I can call you Michael.’ She chuckled. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but that family of your Denise’s doesn’t half put on the airs and graces, what with Eileen’s eldest nearly born the wrong side of the blanket. Seven months gone was our Eileen going to the altar.’ She grinned. ‘She got religion afterwards, and went respectable. Well, at least, she pretended to. No better than she should be, that one, for all her going off to chapel every Sunday with a posh hat on her head. Don’t let me go jangling on, young man. You’ll want to be knowing about that woman and the cottage, won’t you? We told Dewi all we can remember, though it won’t hurt to tell it again, will it?’

  The children were out in the schoolyard on their lunch break before McKenna left Mary Ann’s cottage, their shrieks and shouts muffled by the weight of trees. The rain had eased a little, to what his mother called a ‘mizzle’, the old Irish name for mountain rain. His clothes smelt of the damp in Mary Ann’s cottage, and he had learnt nothing new, yet the time with the two women was restful with the comfort to be found in old age when it threatened nothing more than quiet decay.

  Once out of the village, the day seemed brighter, although heavy-bellied cloud festooned the distant mountains, promising more rain. Cars swished past on the roads, water spurting from under their tyres as McKenna parked outside the entrance to the estate office, beside Jack’s car, aware of a sense of depression and futility trying to creep upon him like dark cloud off the mountains.

  ‘Any news?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Jack said. ‘Jamie’s away somewhere, his mam reckons. Doesn’t know when he’ll be back. I had the impression the longer he stays away, the happier she’ll be.’

  McKenna locked his car. ‘Having a child like Jamie must be a burden.’

  ‘I suppose so. But you can’t avoid blaming the parents, can you? Somebody must’ve done something wrong to end up with a villain like him.’

  The manager of the estate office sighed. ‘We’re going back some time, gentlemen. Maybe three years, if not more. Gallows Cottage no longer belongs to the estate: it was sold several months ago as part of a rationalization programme.’ He sat at his desk, twiddling paper clips. ‘It really will take a while for me to find what you want … quite a while.’ He smiled brightly. ‘Why don’t you leave it with me, and I’ll get in touch as soon as I locate the documents?’

  McKenna crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. ‘I would much prefer you to look now, Mr Prosser. And I want to visit the cottage today. You realize we are engaged on a murder investigation?’

  Capitulating with ill-grace, Prosser pulled a stack of ledgers from the shelves beside his desk and began to leaf through them, glancing up every so often at the two police officers.

  ‘I’m surprised you records aren’t computerized, Mr Prosser,’ Jack said. ‘Makes life so much easier, don’t you think?’

  ‘They will be, once the rationalization is complete,’ Prosser said, with some acerbity. ‘Hardly worth it at the moment.’

  McKenna stood up, and began to wander round the dusty, untidy office. ‘What exactly does this rationalization programme entail?’ he asked.

  Prosser leaned back in his chair, his finger marking the place in the heavy ledger. ‘Oh, didn’t you know, gentlemen? The trust took over the estate some time ago. Or rather, it was handed over by the family in lieu of death duties after the old lord passed away. Naturally, the trust is anxious to have the estate run on a viable basis, whilst still, of course, retaining it for the nation, preserving it as part of our heritage. That has meant,’ he continued pompously, ‘cutting away a certain amount of dead wood, so to speak.’

  ‘I see,’ McKenna said. ‘Don’t you remember this woman? You must have dealt with her at the time.’

  ‘This is a very busy office. You’ve no idea of the amount of business we have to deal with. I can’t be expected to remember everything, can I?’

  McKenna leaned over and removed one of the ledgers. ‘Perhaps we might help? Three pairs of hands, you know…. What are we looking for? Do you have a separate file for each property?’

  ‘This really is most irregular. These transactions are confidential. And no, the records are simply chronological.’

  Jack picked up another ledger, spreading it open on his knee. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Prosser. We deal with highly confidential matters every day.’

  Handwritten in a variety of scripts ranging from neat copperplate to almost illegible scrawl, ledger entries covered years of business transactions, and Jack was struck by the fundamental inefficiency of such an archaic system. He found the entry as the old clock set into the pediment above the main door struck three, its delicate chime faint and leisurely. An entry dated 29 August, almost four years previously, showed Gallows Cottage leased, for a six-month period, to a Ms R Cheney at a Derbyshire address. An unusual name, he thought. And not one which he could remember seeing on the list of missing persons. He passed the ledger to McKenna.

  ‘Ms R Chainey, or Cheeney, Mr Prosser. C-H-E-N-E-Y. Do you remember her?’ McKenna asked. Prosser looked where McKenna pointed. ‘Oh, dearie me, gentlemen. This is not my writing, so I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

  ‘Whose writing is it, then?’ Jack asked.

  ‘It looks like Miss Naylor’s.’ Prosser held up his hand and smiled. ‘I know what you’re going to ask me. And the answer is no. She left last year to get married, and I have absolutely no idea where she lives, or even what she’s called.’ He closed the ledgers, and began to put them back on the shelving.

  McKenna stood up. ‘I’m afraid we shall have to take the ledgers with us, to have them searched properly. And it may be necessary to examine other documents. We’ll give you a receipt, and return them as soon as possible. And now, Mr Prosser, you can do us one final favour for today and escort us to the cottage.’

  Following Prosser in Jack’s car, McKenna could not rid himself of the mental image of the little office manager flouncing out of the building. ‘Right little twerp, isn’t he?’ Jack said, as they trailed the cumbersome red Volvo along a narrow tarmac lane, then over a graceful little bridge under which a small lock had been built for boats collecting slate from Dorabella Quarry. Prosser drove through a massive gateway leading out of the estate and took a gravelled lane leading to the left, the ever present trees soon thick around them, darkening the meandering lane.

  ‘I hate this bloody estate!’ Jack muttered. ‘Turn a corner, and you get lost in the sodding woods! You’re lucky you didn’t have to go traipsing down to the river on Saturday. What are these trees anyway?’ he added, peering through the windscreen. ‘They look like great overgrown weeds.’

  Chapter 5

  Gallows Cottage, at the bottom of a track hedged with tangles of bramble and hawthorn, was surrounded on three sides by the waters of Menai Straits, its gardens falling to the sea, which suckled and slithered against the rocky boundaries. The building seemed to have grown from the soil on whi
ch it stood, walls thick and ponderous, rendered with scabbed and salt-stained plaster. Little sash windows, sixteen tiny panes of glass to each, stared blindly from the walls. Rank grass and scrubby bushes straggled round its footings. An empty bird’s nest, torn down by winter gales, tumbled gently in the wind.

  Jack drew to a halt on a patch of heathland. Prosser was already waiting for them, one hand brushing a veil of rain from his thinning hair. ‘I don’t have a key, so I don’t know how you think you’re going to get in.’

  The woods formed a dense semi-circle, a windbreak of sorts, behind the cottage exposed to the elements on its other sides. Across the water, misted by rain, the island of Anglesey lay to the north, the humped shape of Puffin Island off its most easterly point. The sea was grey, choppy, pitted with raindrops, its gentle sucking the only sound apart from the patter of rain on the car roofs. McKenna wondered if the trees had been planted by some erstwhile landscaper, or if their seeds had merely been borne on the winds, come to rest in this desolate place.

  A man in stained and dusty overalls emerged from the front of the cottage, through a low door set in the middle of the wall. Above him, a small triangular canopy protected the doorway from the ravages of rain and snow, its projection supported by a carving. ‘Can I help you?’ he called.

  Prosser went to his car. ‘You won’t need me anymore, will you? I’m sure you can find your own way back. I’ll be expecting you to return the ledgers very soon, Chief Inspector.’ As McKenna thanked him for his help, Prosser disappeared in a swirl of exhaust fumes.

  ‘Doing up the place for the guy who’s bought it off the estate,’ the builder said. ‘Not,’ he continued, leading them into a dark hallway, ‘that it needs all that much doing. Somebody’s already done the donkey work, and didn’t ruin the place by modernizing too much, if you know what I mean.’

  McKenna lingered, reaching up to trace his fingers over the worn stone of the carving above the door: a dog with three heads. Cerberus, he remembered, legendary guardian of the entrance to the underworld, the Queen of Poisons distilled from its saliva. He drew his hand away, a little worm of dread slithering and sliding in his mind, some portent of the nastiness of it all which lay in wait.