Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  ‘Blood and tissue samples from Mrs Stott.’ Dewi placed one sheet on McKenna’s desk. ‘Handwriting samples.’ Another sheet drifted down on top of the first. ‘And the bank in Leeds.’

  ‘Mr Tuttle will see to Mrs Stott,’ McKenna said. ‘You can take a statement from the taxi-driver who dropped her off near the caravan on Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Which taxi-driver?’ Jack asked.

  ‘The one who came in last night after his boss told him we were wanting information about women taking trips out on Sunday,’ McKenna said. ‘He’s already identified her.’

  ‘Nobody told me about that,’ Jack grumbled.

  ‘Probably because you weren’t here.’

  ‘Some of us do have homes to go to. Even though mine’s like a bomb site at the moment. Still, they go on holiday tomorrow, so things should settle down.’

  ‘Do we know how Gwen Stott got back?’ Dewi asked.

  ‘Oh a broomstick, probably,’ Jack said. ‘When do we interview her again? There’s a lot of questions need asking.’

  ‘And no guarantee we’ll get any answers,’ Dewi said.

  ‘There never is,’ Jack pointed out. ‘Par for the course in this job. Shouldn’t stop us asking, though.’

  ‘Speaking for myself,’ Dewi added, ‘I can’t say I even want to set eyes on that woman ever again, never mind talk to her.’

  ‘That’s all very well, Prys,’ Jack said. ‘We’re entitled to our feelings, but we can’t let them interfere with the work.’ He stood up, pulling in his stomach, and McKenna wondered if he would lose any weight while Emma holidayed in the sun, denying her husband the comforts of bed and food. ‘I’ll make a start,’ Jack added, taking the court orders. ‘Get the samples we want.’

  ‘Suppose she won’t co-operate?’ Dewi asked.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Prys. She’ll be done for contempt of court if she doesn’t.’

  ‘I can’t see that bothering her. She’s locked up already and likely to stay that way, so a few more months for contempt won’t be any hardship.’

  The newly painted walls of Gallows Cottage glittered in the sunshine, vestiges of an early morning mist drifting against its footings and sidling around McKenna’s ankles. On ground still sodden from the rains, and squelching underfoot, he stood where the track gave out to the cottage garden, listening to a silence unbroken save for the muffled distant clank of machinery on Port Penrhyn, a whispering in the trees behind him. Fresh grass already sprouted along the ridge of the trench where Rebekah’s remains languished for so long, weaved a carpet of bright green over the top of the septic tank. Within a few weeks, there would be no trace of Wil’s passage, and summer visitors would search in vain for Rebekah’s sad resting place.

  ‘Did you come to look at the view, or was it something else you wanted?’ Wil stood in the shadow of the door, head slightly to one side.

  McKenna walked down the little slope towards him, feeling cold damp from the ground wrap itself around his feet, for all the warmth in the sky above. ‘Just thought I’d call in to say hello.’

  ‘Hello, then,’ Wil grinned. His eyes darkened. ‘Thought for a minute you might be the other one, until I saw you wasn’t.’

  ‘What other one?’

  ‘The other one some folk say is a gippo, and I know is nothing of the sort.’

  ‘How d’you know?’ McKenna recalled the night on the path beside the village graveyard, the cold on the back of his neck and the fear crushing on his heart.

  Wil regarded him searchingly, unsure, reluctant to make of himself a fool or worse. McKenna touched the carving above the doorway, new paint smooth and thick on the three heads of the dog.

  ‘I see you’ve painted this. Odd thing to have over the door to your house, don’t you think? Can’t think why anyone should want it there.’

  ‘Why? What’s it supposed to be? Apart from bloody ugly, that is.’

  McKenna followed him inside. ‘The only three-headed dog I’ve heard tell of is Cerberus. Legend has it he guards the entrance to the Underworld.’

  Wil shifted an upturned crate for McKenna to sit down, then put the kettle to boil on the Primus. ‘That figures, doesn’t it? Just the thing for this benighted place.’ He leaned against newly fitted kitchen units, stuffing tobacco into his pipe. ‘Must be where the gippo who isn’t a gippo comes from then,’ he said, squinting at McKenna. Despite its new paint and sparkling windows, the bright yellow sunshine outside, the cottage was shadowy and chilly, its sad history imprisoned inside thick stone walls, crowding out the living.

  ‘Does he come often?’

  From behind puffs of sweet-scented smoke, Wil said, ‘Once would be too bloody often with the likes of him, wouldn’t it?’ He turned away, placing his hand against the side of the kettle to test the heat. ‘Know who I’m talking about, do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wil turned back, his face grave. ‘Fair makes your scalp crawl, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ McKenna repeated.

  ‘Ah, well.’ Wil put three mugs in a row, and a handful of teabags in a stained metal pot. ‘It’s a comfort to hear you say I’m not going out of my mind with it.’ The kettle whined to the boil. Wil made tea, put the pot back on a low flame to brew for a while. ‘Not the sort of thing you want to talk about with most folk.’ He disappeared up the staircase to return with Dave.

  ‘The bloody English and all the other bloody foreigners are welcome to the place. And everything in it.’ He poured tea and handed round the mugs. ‘See you’ve solved one of your murders, then. Found out who strung up her in the woods yet?’

  ‘What happens if I refuse?’

  Jack looked from Gwen Stott to her solicitor, the three of them crowding the fusty dismal interview room where the tape recorder blinked and whined. Beyond the open door, a young policewoman leaned against the wall, staring down at her scuffed shoes.

  ‘You can’t refuse, Mrs Stott,’ the solicitor said. ‘The police have court orders.’

  ‘I can!’ Gwen Stott insisted.

  ‘If you do, you will be charged with contempt.’

  ‘Then what happens?’

  ‘Then you can be sent to prison.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Doubt, a small uncertainty, drew a frown on her face.

  ‘Absolutely positive. Usually for quite a while. Contempt is regarded with the seriousness it merits.’

  ‘And you always go to prison?’

  ‘Of course you do! Where else d’you think you’re likely to go? Butlins Holiday Camp?’

  ‘Well, there’s a lot in the papers about juveniles getting fancy holidays when they’ve been robbing and mugging, isn’t there?’ She leaned back in her chair, her weight forcing creaks from the plastic shell. Curdles of fat around her thighs overflowed the edges, the dingy fabric of her skirt creased under her buttocks. In his mind’s eye, Jack tried to clothe her in the suit from Gallows Cottage, and failed to put the picture together. He stared unashamedly, seeking visible signs of the person who dwelt inside the unlovely body, behind the plain and pudding face; searching for the one who went with murderous intent to Jamie Thief, fought with him, felt his nails draw blood, and crushed the breath and the life from his body. Now her face was scrubbed of make-up, Jack saw the scratches clearly, fading jagged brownish lines on her pasty skin, a little bruised about their edges, as if drawn by a child with a smudgy crayon in its hand.

  And he sought the will and determination which manipulated money and people and time, the cleverness which covered her faint tracks through the paths and thickets of Snidey Castle woods, the wickedness which probably tied a noose about the neck of Romy Cheney and hung her body from a creaking branch, but found nothing of what he sought, could imagine nothing of what had happened. She was ordinary, a person one would pass in the street without thought or glance, a person without true dimension or substance or presence, as if merely cut from paper. So very ordinary, he thought; almost banal. He saw her only in the shadow of his own prejudices, unaware that evil, lik
e every other human condition, wore the same ordinary face.

  ‘Yes,’ McKenna said. ‘I know I must interview her.’

  ‘When are you going to do it?’

  ‘When we have a match for the blood and tissue samples.’

  ‘Well it’s a near miracle we got them. I’ve never come across such a rigmarole.’

  ‘Eifion Roberts said she’s nobody’s fool.’

  ‘You also said he said she’s a moral imbecile,’ Jack said. ‘What d’you think he meant by that?’

  ‘She’s a bloody psychopath! What d’you think he meant?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? I do know she’s spread one almighty pile of shit on people.’

  ‘And it rubs off on us.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘Like all the other shit off all the others rubs off on us. And God knows what effect it has in the long run.’ He stared at Jack, smoke pluming towards the ceiling. ‘It probably all adds up like a huge supermarket bill you can’t afford to pay, or a debt from a loan shark … I’d like to throttle the bitch. But I won’t. I’ll talk to her nicely and take a statement from her, and do my job properly, and talk to her daughter again, and turn the knife in the child’s guts to get her used to the feeling.’

  ‘D’you have pictures in your head? Is that why you talk the way you do?’

  ‘How do I talk?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Jack shivered while fresh warm air breezed through the open window. ‘I just don’t like the pictures you make in my head.’

  Chapter 37

  Slouched in his chair, McKenna watched tobacco smoke drift towards the office ceiling, its discoloration remarkable where heat from the light attracted the most smoke. Undecorated for too many years to remember, the seedy air of degeneration about the police station symbolized the erosion of will so typical of human behaviour in hard times, daubing places and people indiscriminately with despondency, the dingy grey colours of poverty. The ash tree outside dragged its branches against the window, smearing the dirt from dust and rain and traffic fumes. A Woolworth’s plastic carrier bag caught in its branches hung full to bursting with rainwater.

  Watching the curls and whorls of smoke, casting about for something to do, he acknowledged the lack of professional detachment keeping him away from Gwen Stott, and decided it was neither irrational nor unreasonable, but merely a normal human response to abnormal circumstance. Castigating its police when humanity deserted, society understood neither the causes of desertion nor its implications, knew nothing of the marauding images which first sickened and disturbed, before exciting and enthralling the mind of a man. He wondered about the pictures waiting to be found in Gwen Stott’s mind by psychiatrists and counsellors, by professional victim-seekers, and the portrait to be painted of her for display to the people she had wronged. Perhaps a trauma from her own childhood lay in wait, to be hauled into the light of day for examination and magnification, for extrapolation and rationalization, to become a peg upon which to hang all her culpability. He imagined her cocooned within a chrysalis fashioned from reasons and justifications, emerging blameless as a fragile insect, guilty of being only the victim of another’s victimization. To strip people of the dignity of individual responsibility was folly, he thought, for responsibility was a form of human currency, and inequitably distributed, Peter would be robbed to pay Paul, until Peter stood firm against having the last crust of innocence snatched from his lips. Then the whole edifice of social order might collapse like a row of dominoes, felled by the momentum of pass-the-parcel blame.

  Somewhere in the building, Jack was shuffling papers, organizing people, preparing documents for the crown prosecutors. McKenna let his thoughts drift again to Greek islands and sunshine hot enough to stir the blood, warm nights fragrant with exotic flowers and the remains of day, and to passion and Denise, her pale elegant body and gilded hair. Again he thought of Emma Tuttle, and stood up suddenly, restless and touched by an indefinable sense of loss, of mourning for something as much beyond reach as if it had never been, or were already dead.

  Gwen Stott looked at her solicitor, then at McKenna, face and eyes betraying nothing beyond boredom and the stirrings of irritation. The tape recorder light gleamed like a Cyclops eye in the dismal room, waiting to record whatever she might say, or simply, her silence. Silence might be her best defence, McKenna thought, leaving no opening for prying minds to gain access to her fears and weaknesses, her petty vices and shameful secrets, or the cherished self-image for which she had killed rather than allow its destruction. Then he asked himself if this woman were capable of fear or shame, if she had not killed simply because it was expedient to do so, the life she took of no more import than the life of an insect upon which she might tread as she plodded the streets.

  ‘I wish to discuss with your client her relationship with Mrs Margaret Bailey,’ McKenna said to the solicitor. ‘And Mrs Bailey’s death.’

  ‘I don’t know anybody called Margaret Bailey.’ Gwen Stott’s voice was calm, without inflexion.

  ‘Then we will refer to Mrs Bailey as Romy Cheney,’ McKenna said. ‘As you know, Romy Cheney’s body was found some weeks ago in Castle Woods, and has since been positively identified from medical and dental records as that of Margaret Bailey.’

  Gwen Stott watched McKenna fixedly as he talked of Gallows Cottage, its erstwhile tenant and her furniture and effects, of her car and bank account, of computerized transactions unravelled painstakingly by Dewi Prys, of Christopher Stott and Trefor Prosser and Jenny, of Jamie Thief and a tell-tale taxi-driver.

  ‘What can you tell me about Romy Cheney?’ he said finally.

  The woman smirked. ‘I can tell you plenty about her. And none of it good.’

  ‘Then please do so.’

  ‘Well,’ Gwen Stott began, eyes flicking from McKenna to her solicitor, ‘she drank a lot, and smoked a lot, and encouraged me to drink and smoke even though she knew I didn’t like to. And she took pills.’

  ‘What sort of pills?’

  ‘Pills for being depressed. Pills to go to sleep. Pills to keep her awake. She was always moaning about being miserable and depressed and saying nobody wanted her.’ Gwen Stott smirked again. ‘I’m not surprised she killed herself in the end. She talked about it often enough.’

  ‘Romy Cheney did not commit suicide, as I’m sure you know. There has been considerable publicity about the fact that her hands were bound behind her back. That is not consistent with suicide.’

  Gwen Stott shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

  ‘Where did you meet her?’

  ‘At some do at the Castle. I went to stop my husband making a fool of himself in public, but he did anyway.’ Anger distorted her face for an instant. ‘Somebody introduced us to Romy, and instead of saying “Hello” like normal people, he had to show off, didn’t he?’ Her eyes took on a distant look, as if she no longer saw McKenna and her solicitor and the colourless walls of the interview room, but viewed instead a film of her life. She began a monologue, showing McKenna the same film, its people moving jerkily through a time long gone in grainy monochrome images. He tried to interrupt, to ask questions. She ignored him, until the solicitor finally dammed the avalanche of words.

  ‘Mrs Stott!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘What?’ Her eyes turned slowly, dreamily.

  ‘My job, Mrs Stott, is to protect your interests while the police question you. We have been here’ – he stopped to look at the expensive watch on his wrist – ‘for over an hour, and seem to be no further forward than we were at the outset.’

  ‘He asked me about Romy Cheney.’ She jerked her head towards McKenna. ‘So I’ve been telling him.’ The counter on the tape machine clicked down to twenty-nine minutes. ‘And she was the one who said Jenny was acting funny.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ McKenna said.

  ‘Romy Cheney said Jenny was behaving funny, and did I know what that Trefor Prosser was like. She said he wasn’t safe around kids.’

  ‘And?’

  The woman sh
rugged again. ‘That’s all. She reckoned Jenny should be kept away from him.’

  ‘Is that why you took your daughter to Gallows Cottage, Mrs Stott?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why you permitted Romy Cheney to interrogate your daughter about Mr Prosser and your husband?’ McKenna said. ‘Why you colluded with her in her sexual assault upon your daughter?’

  ‘What’re you talking about?’ Gwen Stott’s face betrayed only a seething impatience.

  ‘We have a statement from your daughter. Romy Cheney sexually assaulted her, whilst claiming to demonstrate to the child, who was then only ten years old, the actual nature of such an assault.’

  ‘Did she? I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ McKenna demanded. ‘Your husband and daughter both say otherwise. Your daughter says you were in the cottage when the assault took place. She says she heard you walking around upstairs.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know what was going on, then. Did I?’ She looked to the solicitor for support. ‘If that child’s saying I knew about it when I was upstairs at the time, you’ve only got her word for it, haven’t you? You should know what girls are like.’

  ‘We are talking about your own child, Mrs Stott.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Why did you take Romy Cheney’s furniture and personal effects from the cottage? Why did you take her car?’

  ‘She’d gone. She wasn’t using them anymore. Everything was going to waste. I’ve told you how much she paid for the furniture and carpets.’

  ‘Where had she gone?’

  ‘How should I know? She was always going off. A real fly-by-night, Romy Cheney was.’

  ‘Did she say you could take her things? Did it never occur to you that she might want them?’

  ‘Oh, really!’ She fidgeted in the chair, crossing and uncrossing unshaven legs, the dark hairs tangled beneath pale stockings. ‘What a stupid question! If she wanted them back, she only had to ask, didn’t she? And,’ she went on, glaring at McKenna, ‘she never did.’