Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  Jack unpacked clothes and books and records, wired up the stereo system, made the bed, and went shopping for groceries and cigarettes and a bottle of whisky. He cooked a pan of spaghetti for supper, and after he left, midnight long gone, McKenna sat by the fire in the downstairs parlour, drinking, listening to music and a soft breeze whispering in the trees below the garden. He heard a cat sing outside the door. The black and white lady he had seen before crouched on the slate flags in the yard, staring with fluorescent eyes, backing away when he held out his hand. He put a dish of milk on the doorstep, and shut the door. When he looked again, the dish was licked clean, the yard empty. He went to bed, taking a sleeping tablet and a mug of hot chocolate, hoping for a little of the oblivion found by the woman in the woods.

  Beyond Macclesfield, he began the long climb into the Pennines, stopping for dinner at the Cat and Fiddle Inn on the crest of a high moor, before the last leg of his journey through Buxton, and into a town distinguished by street after street of Victorian terraced houses, by tall old mills standing foursquare and turreted behind high walls, and by its inhabitants, remnants of invading Saxon hordes, their voices grating, words befouled by flat ‘a’s and mysterious dialect. He booked into a small hotel at the foot of Snake Pass, then walked along lanes and stony tracks until night fell swift and sudden, its silence punctuated only by his own soft footfalls and a keening wind off the moors.

  Robert Allsopp occupied an elegant apartment, one of several in a large Edwardian mansion called Howard’s End, the last of a group of large Edwardian mansions in the matured and manicured grounds of Howard Park on the outskirts of the town. And very literary, thought McKenna, parking outside the front entrance. The circular drive embraced smooth lawns around a great flowering tree, its icing of pink-white blossoms melting at its foot. A small row of bells, a name card inscribed in copperplate under each, hid within the front porch. McKenna put his finger to the bell of Flat 4 and waited. He rang again, and waited again, and watched as a shadowy figure grew larger and larger behind the ornate leaded glass of the inner door.

  Invited into a spacious, luxurious room, he found Allsopp at breakfast, his table, set under the bay window, overlooking well-tended fields, and a red-brick farm with a little tower, its outlines blurred by rain gusting off the hills.

  ‘I hardly expected you to come all this way to see me,’ Allsopp remarked. ‘Can I offer you some coffee?’

  Around McKenna’s age, Allsopp was shorter, more sturdily built, with quite piercing blue eyes. His appearance, the contents of his flat, suggested no dearth of money, no impact of recession on his well-ordered life.

  ‘I don’t wish to take up too much of your time, but there are some questions I must put to you.’

  ‘Fire away.’ Allsopp continued with his breakfast. He poured milk from a squat little jug laced with posies on to a heap of muesli in a matching bowl. Two croissants lay on a flower-decked plate. He pushed sugar and the milk jug towards McKenna. ‘Help yourself.’

  McKenna looked surreptitously for an ashtray, in a room bearing that unsullied look peculiar to the homes of non-smokers. Allsopp bore the same look.

  ‘You lived with a Ms Cheney for a while,’ McKenna began. ‘At your old address.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Allsopp munched on his muesli.

  ‘She rented a cottage in North Wales some three and half years ago,’ McKenna went on.

  ‘Did she?’ Allsopp took a gulp of coffee, pushed aside the empty cereal bowl, and reached for the croissants.

  ‘She didn’t tell you?’

  ‘No.’ The croissants were torn apart, soft yeasty insides spread with low-fat margarine, and apricot jam from a tiny pot embellished with a picture of Chatsworth House and a coat of arms.

  ‘Wasn’t that a little strange? You were living together.’

  ‘Yes.’ Allsopp took a large bite of croissant, licking jam-sticky fingers: thick, sturdy fingers, more than capable of tying an efficient noose. ‘She walked out on me.’ What better way to explain her disappearance, McKenna thought?

  ‘Did she say anything before she left?’

  ‘No.’ The second croissant went the way of its companion, washed down with more black coffee.

  ‘Weren’t you worried?’

  ‘Why should I be? Up to her what she did with herself.’

  ‘Mr Allsopp.’ McKenna’s temper began to make knots in his stomach. ‘I have come a long way to see you. It really is most important you tell me everything you can about Ms Cheney.’

  ‘Why?’ The blue eyes turned full on him, strong and uncompromising. ‘What she does is her own business.’

  ‘We need to eliminate her from an investigation.’

  ‘What investigation?’

  ‘A murder investigation.’

  ‘I see.’ Allsopp finished his coffee, and stacked his plates on top of each other. ‘Who’s been murdered?’

  ‘We don’t know. That is why I must speak to Ms Cheney.’

  Allsopp stood up, gathering the dirty dishes. ‘Best of luck, then. If you find her, tell her to let me have my books back, will you? She took a set of Dickens’ novels, in matching leather bindings, and I rather miss them.’ He walked out of the room, and McKenna heard the sound of running water and clattering pots. Allsopp returned to find his visitor standing by the fireplace, smoking a cigarette. The two men stared at each other. Allsopp sighed. ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but feel free to hang on until the rain lets up a bit.’

  ‘Mr Allsopp, you have a choice.’ McKenna tapped ash into the grate. ‘You can talk to me here or you can talk to me at the police station.’

  The man’s face flushed. ‘I’m beginning to feel just a little under pressure,’ he said. ‘Exactly what are you suggesting I might have done?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve done anything,’ McKenna said quietly. ‘You won’t co-operate. At the very least, you are a material witness.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘I’ve already told you: to a murder investigation.’

  He stared at McKenna. McKenna stared back, until Allsopp sat down rather suddenly at the table. ‘This is no joke, you know.’

  ‘No one’s joking,’ McKenna said. ‘I want to know every single thing you can tell me about Ms Cheney. And you can start by telling me her name.’

  Allsopp looked not so much defeated as resigned; defeat a concept allowed no hold in his scheme of life. ‘Give me a cigarette, will you? I’m trying to give up, stopped buying the things…. Cheney was her maiden name.’ He drew on the cigarette. ‘She was called Margaret … Madge for short. She didn’t think it suited her, so she called herself Romy. After some character in a Virginia Woolf novel.’

  ‘And what was her married name? Come on!’ McKenna snapped. ‘Stop making me drag out every single word. It’s your time we’re wasting.’

  ‘Bailey. Her husband was a Tom Bailey.’

  ‘And where will I find him?’

  ‘No idea,’ Allsopp said. ‘She’d left him before she met me…. Bit of a bolter, if you ask me, but I didn’t know that at the time. I met her at a party about five years ago, and we sort of clicked….’ Jumped into bed together, McKenna interpreted sourly.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘We decided to live together, see how it all panned out.’

  ‘Where did she live with her husband?’

  ‘Somewhere in Yorkshire. I’m not being difficult,’ Allsopp said. ‘She wouldn’t talk about him, said it was all too painful…. Wasn’t up to me to intrude, was it?’

  ‘Did she ever talk about children?’

  ‘Children? Her children, you mean? Oh, no, she never had any children.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ McKenna frowned.

  ‘Well, I can’t be sure, can I? But she never talked about children, and women normally do, don’t they?’

  * * *

  Allsopp poured coffee from a freshly brewed pot, found an ashtray, and begged another cigarette from McKenna. ‘It never reall
y occurred to me before,’ he said, ‘how secretive she was.’

  ‘Why, d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. We had an odd sort of relationship … we weren’t really close, and that suited me, I suppose. I don’t like being wrapped up in other people. She went her way, and I went mine, most of the time.’

  ‘Did you have other women friends? Other lovers?’

  ‘Not while we were together. Nor, as far as I know, did she. But I could be right off the mark about that. It’s not likely she’d have told me if she did.’ He sipped his coffee, and smoked McKenna’s cigarette. ‘She gave me no warning, you know.’ He looked at McKenna, the blue eyes cloudy. ‘She just upped and left.’

  ‘Did she leave much behind?’

  ‘Some clothes, a few odds and ends…. I gave them to Oxfam when I moved. There was no sign of her wanting them.’

  ‘She must have taken some things. You mentioned some books.’

  ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? I suppose I should’ve seen it coming … for some time before she left, she was going away weekends, and odd days during the week. And before you jump down my throat, I don’t know where to. I’m away a lot on business, and I just assumed she was bored, going off to see friends. And no!’ He held up his hand. ‘If you offered me money, I couldn’t give you the name of one single friend of hers. I never took that much notice.’

  ‘You seem to have been remarkably uninvolved,’ McKenna observed.

  ‘People do what suits, don’t they? I’ve already said: it suited me, and it suited her. Both of us grown up, nobody to answer to.’

  ‘Did you miss her when she left?’

  He scratched his head. ‘Can you spare another cigarette? Thanks…. To tell the truth, I was bloody seething! Here was I, gone to all the trouble of buying a house, buying furniture, setting it up, and for what?’ Allsopp asked. ‘Nothing, in the end. That’s what I meant about her being a bolter. She’d probably done the same thing with her husband, and maybe other men, for all I know. Staying until the novelty wore thin, then off to trample the grass on the other side of the fence.’

  ‘An opportunist.’

  ‘No, just self-centred, I guess. Like me.’

  ‘And you believe she left of her own free will?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘So you didn’t think of reporting her as a missing person?’

  ‘Would you have done? Suppose I had, and the police arrived in some little love nest…. I simply wasn’t worried about her. Just angry, as I said.’

  McKenna read through his notes, filling in bits here and there in the very sketchy drawing defined by Allsopp’s words, which might be nothing more than a web of lies, rehearsed over and again, in the event anyone ever came looking for his erstwhile paramour.

  ‘How long is it since she left?’

  ‘Four years ago October coming … late October, nearly November. I put the house on the market the following spring and it went almost right away. I was lucky. Got out before the market slumped.’

  ‘What did she look like? How old was she?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Thinnish, quite lanky, a bit shorter than me … about five foot eight or nine. Short brown hair, bleached somewhat. Her birthday’s in January, around the seventh or eighth. She’d have been thirty-eight the next year.’

  ‘Any scars? Any signs of old injuries? Any talk about having an accident when she was younger?’

  ‘Not that I recall,’ Allsop said. ‘She was very healthy … surprising, really, because she drank red wine like most people drink water … addicted to the stuff, and never any the worse for it.’

  ‘Did she ever talk of connections in North Wales?’

  ‘No. I’m sure about that. Nothing at all.’

  ‘And where did she work?’

  ‘Work?’ Allsopp raised his eyebrows. ‘She didn’t. I paid most of the household expenses. Romy had her own money. I presumed it was alimony.’

  ‘She was divorced, then?’

  Allsopp rubbed his hands over his face. ‘I don’t know! I’ve told you, she wouldn’t talk about it. I assumed she was.’

  ‘I’ve nearly finished,’ McKenna said. ‘Although you’ll be expected to make a formal statement. What kind of car did she drive?’

  ‘A metallic grey Ford Scorpio. She bought it during the summer … traded in a Mercedes, which, I presumed, was spoils of the marriage.’

  ‘Any chance you remember the licence number?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Allsopp shook his head. ‘It was local … Manchester area. That’s really all I know.’ In the dull white light breaching the large window, his face looked grey, eyes bleak as the distant moorlands. ‘D’you think she’s dead?’ he asked. ‘Is that why you’re asking all these questions?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ McKenna admitted. ‘Some days ago, a woman’s body was found in dense woodland near Bangor. Been there for some considerable time, apparently. At present, we’ve no idea who she is. We know Romy Cheney rented a cottage near the woods about the time she left you. So,’ he added, ‘until we locate her, we won’t be much further forward.’

  ‘I see,’ Allsopp said tonelessly. ‘I wouldn’t like to think of that happening to her. I was fond of her.’

  McKenna sat in his car outside the big house, wondering whether he should trust his own judgement and believe Robert Allsopp, whose tale told more of wanton selfishness than of the moral default likely to make a murderer. He climbed out of the car and rang Allsopp’s bell again.

  ‘What is it now?’ Allsopp sounded quite weary, the puffing and stuffing blown out.

  ‘A couple more things.’ McKenna consulted his notebook. ‘The names of her doctor and dentist. Where she banked, and in what name. And how long did she actually live with you?’

  ‘That’s three things. You said two.’ A ghost of a smile touched Allsopp’s mouth. ‘The dentist I don’t know. The doctor was Dr Kerr on Norfolk Street. The bank I don’t know. And she was with me just over eleven months.’ He began to close the door.

  ‘Mr Allsopp,’ McKenna said.

  Lines of worry, or perhaps even grief, were being drawn over Allsopp’s face, changing its texture and expression, blurring the contours. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘We found a belt on the body …’ McKenna said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It appears to be an expensive belt,’ McKenna said. ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Romy had lots of belts. Went with all the clothes she had …’ Allsopp said. ‘And all expensive.’

  ‘Just a thought,’ McKenna said. ‘This belt’s made from thick brown leather. Very plain. The buckle’s missing, so it isn’t much use to us.’

  ‘How wide is it?’

  ‘How wide is what?’

  ‘The belt, of course!’ Allsopp snapped. ‘That’s what you’re asking about, isn’t it?’

  McKenna glanced at him sharply, then riffled through his notebook, looking for the notes culled from Eifion Roberts’ report. ‘Three and half inches,’ he said.

  ‘Thick leather? Like hide?’

  McKenna nodded.

  ‘It could be one I bought for her in Switzerland. I mean,’ Allsopp hesitated, ‘it could be … I can’t be sure.’

  ‘What about the buckle?’

  ‘If it’s the same belt – if – I bought it because of the buckle. It caught my eye. The belt was just plain brown … sort of chocolaty colour.’

  ‘And the buckle?’ McKenna found he was holding his breath.

  ‘Silver,’ Allsopp said, looking beyond McKenna into his memory. ‘Solid silver, if the price was anything to go by.’

  ‘And?’ McKenna said. ‘The design? The shape?’

  ‘Round … a wreath of leaves of some description round the edge … very finely carved, or whatever you do with silver.’

  ‘Yes?’ McKenna wanted to shake the man.

  ‘I’m trying to think,’ Allsopp said. He scratched his head. ‘It looked like a Greek or Roman carving … anyway, it was a man with two f
aces, one pointing left, one right.’

  ‘Thank you!’ McKenna closed the notebook with a snap. He crunched over the gravel to his car. ‘We’ll be in touch. And by the way, the two-faced man is Janus, the Roman god of doorways.’ Lingering under the grand porchway of the house, Allsopp watched until McKenna’s car turned out of the drive and into the road.

  In a café in the town centre, McKenna absently watched the waitress, a chit of a girl in short tight skirt and stiletto heels so high she could barely stand upright. Tottering past, she bestowed an arch smile, and asked, in that dreadful local accent, if there was anything else he would like her to do for him. He thought of the other woman, selfish and wayward, caring nothing for the havoc she caused in passing, to whom the doctor’s records, dusty and untidy in a filing cabinet, and a brittle foggy X-Ray of a smashed ankle bone, had given a name at last.

  Romy Cheney had indeed had two pregnancies, both aborted: inconvenient accidents of Nature, remedied by Man. Without sympathy for Allsopp, a man of little insight or sense, governed by the expediency of desire, McKenna saved his opprobrium for Romy Cheney, a woman without shame or conscience, a woman whose most significant contribution to life appeared to be her conspicuous failure as a keeper of morality.

  He telephoned Jack. ‘We have a name for the woman.’

  ‘About time too‚’ Jack said. ‘What d’you want me to do?’

  ‘Start the paperwork,’ McKenna said. ‘I want an order for the GP to release her medical records, arrangements made for a full statement from Allsopp, and enquiries to Yorkshire Police about her ex-husband and family. I’ve got a few addresses from the GP to begin with. The first thing you can do, Jack,’ he added, ‘is put all the names she used through the DVLA computer. We need the number of the car.’

  He could hear Jack’s pen scratching. ‘Any likely suspects?’

  ‘Allsopp, perhaps?’ McKenna suggested. ‘Can’t say I’m struck with him. But I suppose the ex-husband’s a better bet.’