Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  She made her way up the High Street to the Town Clock, and sat to rest her aching legs on a bench outside Woolworths, watching pigeons scavenge in Saturday’s litter, staring at the overhanging escarpments of Bangor Mountain, butter-yellow with gorse. There would be bluebells under the trees, she thought, enough to pick a bunch to set on her window ledge. The sweet scent of gorse and fresh green leaves drifted on the breeze, and Beti wondered absently why no bluebells grew in the woods around the village, why her cottage stayed dusky dark even on the most brilliant summer’s day.

  Sighing with pain and the misery of it all, she rose, and began limping back the way she had come, into the little lanes behind the High Street, where she and Mary Ann and countless other girls had dreamed and played long summers past. The rows of two-up, two-down terraces were gone, bulldozed to make way for new brick dwellings, lining each side of the lanes, filling every available space: houses without gardens, merely concrete yards just large enough to turn a car. The builders had cut deep into the lower slopes of the mountain, leaving raw wounds in the soil, exposing tree roots to frost and rains; and looking upon this little Eden of the twentieth century, Beti felt a grief so deep and harsh she wanted to weep.

  At the lower end of High Street she turned on to the long road leading down to the distant sparkling sea, a road once called Margarine Street, Beti remembered, laughing a little amid her tears, because the folk trying to better themselves in the fancy terraces beggared themselves simply to pay the fancier rents. She roamed further, criss-crossing the warren of old streets higgledy-piggledy behind Margarine Street, past cars parked bumper to bonnet where once a bicycle would be a luxury. Her legs hurt, more than usual, although the warmth of spring always burnt deep in her bones, as if this gentle heat swelled badness deep within, drew it out and cast it behind her in the long shadow that, in the dark days of winter, moved back inside her body, hiding itself and its pain and ugliness, running with the thin marrow in her bones. She rested briefly, leaning on someone’s garden wall, an unkempt garden behind, where an unpruned rosebush, spiky and sickly and feeble, yielded all its strength to vicious green thorns. Grass straggled around the bush, dandelions blossomed in the grass, weeds forced their glory through cracks in the front path, and Beti eyed the sleek smart car at the kerbside, its grey paintwork glittering like the distant sea.

  Under the heat of a brilliant sun, the car reeked of heavy enamel and chemicals, resembled some nasty dangerous animal, come to rest for a while, but sleeping with one eye open, ready to pounce and kill. Beti peered inside, slumping a little further down on the wall to do so, and saw upholstery like smooth grey suede. In the rear window, an ugly furry object of many colours hung on a length of black and yellow elastic, and she felt the blood run from her face so fast she expected to see it gush from the toes of her twisted shoes and pool on the pavement. All thoughts of tea and chapel driven from her mind, she yawed back up the road, stopping at the top to catch rasping breaths, glancing with terror over her hunched shoulder in case the owner of the car knew, by some mystical process, what had taken place on the sunlit street, and should even now be coming to shut her mouth for ever, to do to her what had been done to the woman in the woods.

  Listening to a late concert on Classic FM, McKenna thought about the family whose evening he had shared, where the tensions beneath the surface ran like heavy currents in water, pushing the flow towards its destination, unlike the taut and vicious stresses which flowed between Denise and himself. The cat jumped on his knee, pushing her nose into his hand, and burrowed into his lap, her bones fragile and limp.

  Chapter 13

  ‘Talk about having your hopes dashed!’ Jack stalked McKenna’s office. ‘The first decent lead we get, and what happens? Turns out to be a dud. Just like all the rest!’

  ‘Maybe we can’t see the wood for the trees,’ McKenna said. ‘Like John Beti never noticed her body before … that is, of course,’ he added, ‘if John Beti and his wife are to be believed.’

  ‘D’you think we’ll get the cash to have a mock-up of the head made?’

  ‘No, but if nothing else, it looks as if we’re trying.’

  Jack riffled the papers in Romy Cheney’s file. ‘We’d best keep quiet about the old woman. Beti made us look a bunch of fools.’

  ‘I hear she’ll be in the local paper this week.’

  ‘Let’s pray she says nothing about that bloody car, then.’

  ‘D’you think she really believes it’s the same one?’ McKenna asked. ‘Still?’

  ‘Swears on all the graves in all the graveyards this side of Chester, as well as her mother’s,’ Jack announced. ‘She’s got to be wrong! The man in Turf Square bought the car from a neighbour some months back.’

  ‘And where did the ornament come from?’

  ‘He can’t remember,’ Jack said. ‘He thinks his wife bought it for the kids from a service station … says he never really noticed it until I asked.’

  Mary Ann was utterly scathing. ‘I told her!’ she said. ‘Over and over, and now she’s done what I told her not to. Led you right up the garden path, hasn’t she, Michael?’

  ‘You heard, did you?’

  ‘Heard?’ Mary Ann exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t do anything else, could I? Comes screeching in here last night after she’d rooted young Dewi out to look at this car, and sits where you are now, huffing and puffing, and telling how she was scared out of her wits – not that she’s got that many – afeared the man would come and get her because she’d seen the car that woman had. I tell you, all this attention she’s been getting from reporters and such like has turned her brain, and that wouldn’t take much doing. After all,’ she continued, handing McKenna a mug of tea, ‘she’s never had any attention off anyone before, any pleasure, so you can’t blame her. I told young Dewi you’d all be fools to take notice of her. She’s rabbiting on day and night about this Simeon, reckons she’s scared to walk home on her own after dark because he’s everywhere in the woods, and staring at her, if you believe a word she says.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’ McKenna asked. ‘Has anyone?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Mary Ann puffed on her cigarette. ‘It’s one of them gippos. I’ve told Beti, but will she have it? And now she’s even got the vicar believing her. That silly devil’s talking about doing an exorcism round the cottage and in the woods. He’s as bad for the attention as Beti, only he’s got no excuse, ’cos he’s got a permanent audience every Sunday.’ She frowned. ‘Beti’s more to be pitied than condemned, I suppose, but that doesn’t excuse her making a nuisance of herself. Now then, Michael, how are you settling in to your new house? I hear a stray cat’s moved in with you.’

  Leaning on the stone wall by the lych gate of the village church, looking into the graveyard, McKenna thought of death, that of others as well as his own. Less than a mile down the road lay the big council cemetery, the smoke blackened chimney-stack of its crematorium poking up into the sky. Sometimes, driving past, he imagined the grey smoke curling from the chimney was the detritus of his own bones and flesh, a burden disposed of furtively by Denise. He wanted to be buried on a bleak hill overlooking the Irish sea, but there was no one but her to know of that wish, no one to care if his spirit joined the other restless souls thwarted in death as they were in life.

  High in the sky, the sun burned warm and bright, yet the church crouched in deep tree shadows, its yard awash with a thin sheet of dewy mist billowing gently between broken and crooked gravestones, exuding chill and dampness. Buried here, McKenna thought, he would perforce rise and walk, this patch no bed for a Christian soul. Before him, an angel spread wide wings over the grave of some forgotten worthy, marble drapery rising from a tangle of bushy overgrown shrubs, pitted and lichen-stained and livid against the backdrop of dark moss-stained trees, its eyes staring vacantly and coldly into his.

  Rooks cawed and chattered in high branches, dead leaves rotted underfoot, small things scurried about him unseen as he walked down the stony path hugging the graveyar
d wall towards Beti’s cottage. He walked with his head lowered, watching the few yards of earth before his feet, afraid that if he raised his eyes, he might look into those of Simeon the Jew.

  The cottage huddled in the woods, no smoke rising from its single chimney, no light of life behind either of its mean little windows. McKenna struggled up the overgrown path, long brambles reaching out to snag his trousers, for all the world like Rebekah’s skeleton fingers clawing through time. He rapped on the door, and waited. No one came to answer him, and he left, almost running, taking the path to its other end only some few yards further. He stood on the pavement by the gateway panting, some ordeal survived, and walked back the half-mile to where he had left the car.

  Wil Jones, as frustrated in his own way with the comings and goings around Gallows Cottage as was Trefor Prosser, had a contract to fulfil, a time limit written in which would cost him money if breached, and this morbid interest in a two-hundred-year-old body interfered with his work. The trench dug out, Wil agreed not to lay the drains until historians from the university completed their survey of Rebekah’s grave.

  Standing at a bedroom window, he watched the people scratting round, as he called it, in the trench. Forced indoors, he and Dave began decorating, although Wil wanted to put that finishing touch last of all, and could not settle while other work remained undone. He wondered about the thin, dark-haired man, standing just inside the trees, watching, as he was himself, the activity at the trench.

  Dewi tried to read the fax as it came off the machine, rolling too fast for him to catch more than one line out of three or four. He waited patiently, then glancing at the cover sheet, sat down to read. Apart from himself, the office was empty.

  ‘The chief inspector’s in Caernarfon,’ Jack said.

  ‘P’raps you should see this then, sir.’

  Jack took the fax from Dewi, read through its two pages, and said, ‘Oh, bloody hell!’

  McKenna, arriving back well after five o’clock, found Jack waiting in his office, where he had waited for over an hour, thinking of nothing in particular, noticing how the once white venetian blind and the once magnolia walls had all assumed an ochrish hue. The room was always chilly, because McKenna opened the windows summer and winter, claiming the smell of stale cigarette smoke unbearable.

  ‘I thought you’d have left by now, Jack.’

  ‘I thought I’d wait for you,’ Jack said.

  McKenna sat on the corner of the desk and lit a cigarette. ‘Crime continues apace in Caernarfon. A spate of car thefts last weekend …’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t think anyone in Caernarfon could afford a car worth nicking, would you….? Anything turn up here?’

  ‘Fax from Yorkshire Police.’ Jack handed over the paper.

  McKenna read the terse paragraphs and put the paper back on the desk. He wandered over to the window, looking at the sliced-up view of road and bus shelters and the side wall of the telephone exchange. ‘Well, that’s that, then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ McKenna said, ‘I was relying on something turning up to point us in the right direction … but it’s not going to happen, is it? Parents dead of old age. Ex-husband dead in a car crash, only he wasn’t quite her ex, only separated … no brothers or sisters.’ He picked up the fax again, and read the last page. ‘Yorkshire say no known relatives…. So what’s left? Nothing.’

  ‘I thought you were keen on fingering Allsopp?’

  ‘I can’t, can I?’ McKenna sat down. ‘Nobody saw hide nor hair of him round here, and we can’t start demanding to know where he was every minute of every day between three and four years ago.’

  ‘Maybe her husband finished her off, then got his comeuppance.’

  ‘He was dead before she moved in with Allsopp,’ McKenna said. ‘Must be where she got her money from. Insurance and whatnot.’

  ‘We’ve only got Allsopp’s word for when she moved in.’

  ‘We know when she rented the cottage. She was alive then, and for a while after…. No, Jack, this isn’t going to be one of our successes.’

  ‘I think you’re being defeatist,’ Jack said. ‘And who’s going to bury her?’

  ‘The council,’ McKenna said. ‘A pauper’s funeral, like Mozart. Open-ended coffin and a bag of quicklime.’

  ‘Surely not!’ Jack was horrified.

  ‘No, Jack,’ McKenna sighed. ‘We’re a tad more civilized these days. She’ll have a nice discreet hygienic cremation. You can contact the coroner’s office tomorrow and arrange for the inquest to go ahead. I don’t expect Eifion Roberts needs her any longer.’

  Chapter 14

  John Jones, when reporters came knocking on their door to talk to his wife, refused to be included in the photograph, and churlishly said nobody would be done any good from putting a face to the name of the man who found the body in the woods. Functioning by instinct rather than reason, an instinct which nourished the delusion that if his face remained unseen, his body would remain safe, John Jones imagined himself as a child playing hide and seek will imagine himself: invisible prey so long as he cannot see the predator. But John Jones’s instincts were too primitive, honed only by opportunism, for too little danger had come his way in the past.

  He hoped the picture of Beti showed her ugliness in all its terrible glory, prayed her shame would make her hide for the rest of her days. The paper went to press soon, and there remained only a few more hours for him to wait before he could crow in her face, as raucous and nasty as the rooks in the churchyard trees.

  Wil Jones eyed the sky to the east, then to the west, where the wind had changed course during the night, rising off the Irish Sea. He lifted his nose like an animal, scenting rain in the air. Leaves, still limp, newly dropped from their buds, trembled on the wind, turning up their pale backs.

  Dave worked in the trench, laying and sealing drains ready for delivery of the septic tank. Wil roamed the cottage, from room to room, trying to decide whether to finish painting upstairs, or begin downstairs. He sat on an upturned crate in the kitchen to read his checklist, always systematic, knowing without ever being told if things were done arse-about, as he said, they usually had to be done again.

  The staircase was finished, treads scrubbed clean of a thick patina of dirt and grease. Close-fitting oak planks formed the stairwell, their heavy grain, rendered almost black with age, burnished and glowing with life after 400 years. Standing at the foot of the staircase, Wil realized, with a funny little jolt in the pit of his stomach, that the cottage was already two centuries old when that poor creature they found in the trench had dropped, or perhaps thrown, her little baby down those stairs, to see it die in a welter of blood and brains on the hard flagstones at the bottom. Then Wil thought of other deaths, whose memory might be steeped into the heavy walls of Gallows Cottage.

  The decorating finished, he would rub the stone treads with paraffin, to put a sheen on their surfaces, the way housewives in the mountain villages polished slate doorsteps and window ledges, those folk too poor to spare precious paraffin using soured milk instead, so their remnants of pride were not dirtied by the poverty.

  He smoked a pipe, put the kettle on for morning break, and decided to finish painting the bedrooms. He took his toolbox up, ready to nail down a couple of loose floorboards in the back bedroom. Glancing through the window, he saw Dave bent over in the trench, his backside sticking up in the air, and the hungry-looking man, watching again from the trees. Losing all patience, he went carefully down the stairs and out of the front door but, by the time he reached the garden, the man had disappeared.

  Late on Tuesday afternoon, McKenna took a call from a solicitor in Yorkshire.

  ‘I would have contacted you days ago, Chief Inspector,’ the solicitor said, ‘if I’d realized it was Mrs Bailey’s body found in those woods of yours. Where on earth did you come up with the name I saw in the newspapers?’

  ‘It was the name she was using,’ McKenna said. ‘What can you tell us about her?’

  ‘Not
much, I’m afraid. I was sorting out her divorce when Tom was killed. Nasty business all round.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Jack saw McKenna’s eyebrows twitch. ‘Why was that, then?’

  ‘Oh, you know … accusations of this and that.’ The solicitor sounded as if he regretted broaching the subject.

  ‘Accusations of what? Why was she divorcing him?’

  ‘I didn’t say she was divorcing him, did I?’ the solicitor said. ‘As a matter of fact, he was giving her the heave-ho.’

  ‘Why?’

  The man’s sigh whispered down the line, like the sorrow of an earthbound spirit. ‘Can’t do her any harm to tell you now, I suppose. They do say the dead are out of reach, don’t they?’

  ‘Out of reach of what?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Everything, I suppose. Envy them sometimes, don’t you?’

  ‘Are you asking me?’ McKenna said.

  ‘I don’t quite know, to tell you the truth. Has anybody been able to tell you about her?’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Tell you what she was like. As a person.’

  ‘No.’ McKenna was beginning to grind his teeth, Jack noticed. ‘No, they haven’t. It would be very helpful – very helpful indeed – if you could flesh out the skeleton a little, so to speak.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that I can help you over much, because I never knew her well. I knew them both socially, up to a point, but only as acquaintances. Not what you might call friends.’