The House of Women

by Alison Taylor

  She slumped into a chair, and leaned over the table, a parody of Edith earlier that day.

  ‘She’s gone to the shops.’ The words were punctuated with sobs.

  ‘Is Mrs Williams here?’

  ‘I don’t want to see her!’ Phoebe’s voice rose ominously. ‘I hate her!’

  ‘Then I’ll stay with you until Annie gets back.’ He took out cigarettes and lighter, and looked around for the ashtray. ‘What’s happened since we spoke on the phone? You were crying before we arrived, weren’t you?’

  The cat sidled around the door, and jumped on the table, bulldozing her shoulder with its head. She reached out to stroke him, catching her breath in a huge sigh. ‘You’ll have to use a saucer, ’cos they’ve got the ashtrays. Solange smokes like a chimney as well. Their house stinks, and they stink, and she stinks most because she doesn’t have a bath very often. French people don’t, you know. I expect that’s why they invented perfume.’ She tickled the cat’s ears. ‘His fur smells of cigarettes when they’ve been here, like a council house cat, but you can smoke if you want, because you’re not like them. I expect you open your windows, and wash your clothes and hair, because you smell quite nice.’ She smiled wanly. ‘Like Uncle Ned, in a way. Maybe you use the same soap.’

  ‘Maybe,’ McKenna agreed, taking a saucer from the dresser. ‘What’s upset you?’

  She wrapped her arms around the cat, and hugged him. ‘It’s silly, really. I said Annie and me were baking, didn’t I? The cake looked so nice we decided to have some as soon as it cooled, only when I bit my piece, it tasted horrible, like sawdust, but there’s nothing wrong with the cake. It’s me.’ She caught her breath again. ‘Then I realized nothing’s tasted the same since Friday, and when I went into the garden, the flowers smelled almost rancid, and it’s all cold and damp under the tree where I used to sit with Uncle Ned, not cool and fresh like it was last week. Everything’s gone flat and sad, like it’s all over.’

  ‘You’re grieving, Phoebe. You’ve lost someone you loved very much, who’s always been part of your life.’

  ‘It hurts,’ she whispered. ‘It hurts so much!’

  He stroked her hair. ‘Does Annie understand?’

  ‘She hurts, too. And little Bethan keeps asking where Uncle Ned’s gone, and we don’t know what to tell her.’

  ‘The truth is best.’

  ‘But could she understand? Annie wants her to go to the funeral, but Mama said it’d be cruel, because she’s far too young.’

  ‘Even if Bethan can’t understand now, she’ll remember when she’s older, and be able to put the whole picture together.’ He tapped ash into the saucer. ‘She won’t be afraid of some terrible mystery, or think people simply disappear off the face of the earth.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Phoebe sniffed, scouring her face with her hands.

  ‘Does your mother miss him, too? Is that why she’s so distraught?’ He heard a rustle, felt a gentle draught.

  ‘My mother barely tolerated him.’ Annie Harris walked into the kitchen, plastic carrier bags in one hand, a small child with wispy fair curls clinging to the other. She dumped the bags on a worktop, and turned to face McKenna, the child leaning against her legs. ‘And my mother isn’t distraught. She’s retreated into drug-assisted hysteria, which is her usual response to stress.’

  McKenna rose, and held out his hand.

  ‘Michael James McKenna,’ Phoebe intoned. ‘Detective chief inspector. My sister Anastasia and my niece Bethan.’ Annie shook his hand briefly, then ruffled her sister’s hair. The child gazed up at him, blue eyes wide. ‘You’ll notice,’ Phoebe went on, ‘that Bethan’s got blonde hair, only hers is genuine.’

  Annie smiled. ‘You also have noticed it’s impossible to get Phoebe to shut up.’ Turning to her, she said: ‘I thought you’d gone for a lie-down.’

  ‘I had, then Mr McKenna came, and the professor had a tantrum. He’s sulking in the sitting room with Solange.’

  ‘Well, I hope they don’t plan to stay for dinner.’ Annie began to empty the carrier bags, and said to McKenna: ‘Janet Evans is still waiting on the stairs, you know, with the men in what Bethan calls spacesuits.’

  ‘They’re forensic officers,’ Phoebe said. ‘They were here on Friday, and now they’re back to turn Uncle Ned’s room inside out for fingerprints and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Why?’ Annie stopped emptying the bags.

  ‘Yes, why?’ Phoebe demanded.

  Still on his feet, McKenna fidgeted with his lighter.

  ‘Please don’t prevaricate,’ Annie added. ‘I need to know what to tell my mother.’

  ‘Ned was killed by an allergic reaction to one of the drugs listed as potentially lethal on his SOS bracelet, which is still missing, so at the moment, we’re treating his death as suspicious.’

  ‘I told you!’ Phoebe announced, shock draining the colour from her face. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  Annie sighed. ‘Yes, child, you told me. Now get the cat off the table.’

  *

  The seal around the door of Ned’s room was intact. McKenna watched as it was opened, then went in, Janet at his heels. Unaired for over four days, its leaded windows catching the full force of afternoon sunshine, the room was stifling, the smell of old books and musty paper overpowering.

  Janet wrinkled her nose. ‘Can we open the windows?’ Noticing the chair in which Ned died, its plush seat stained and crinkled where his bodily excretions had dried out, she added: ‘And can we move this? Phoebe’s quite likely to come nosing.’

  ‘When it’s been re-examined,’ McKenna said.

  ‘Apart from the SOS bracelet and any tablets, what else are we looking for?’ She surveyed the desk and shelves, the stacks of papers and books, and wandered through a shaft of sunlight drifting with dust motes to look at two old wood caskets, roughly bound in brass, which stood on one of the shelves built into each chimney alcove.

  ‘Don’t touch those! Please!’ Phoebe stood in the doorway.

  ‘Don’t come in,’ McKenna told her.

  ‘You mustn’t open them!’ Her face began to crumple, more tears imminent. ‘They were Uncle Ned’s. He called them his Box of Dreams and his Box of Clouds.’

  ‘And what’s in them?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Dreams and clouds,’ Phoebe said, ‘and if anyone opens the boxes, they’ll blow away.’

  Making his way back to the door, careful not to touch any surfaces, McKenna said to Janet: ‘Take care of the boxes. I’ll be downstairs.’

  Phoebe clumped down ahead of him, to the waiting cat. ‘Are you going to take our fingerprints? Mine’ll be all over Uncle Ned’s things.’

  ‘We’ll take everyone’s,’ McKenna said, herding her back to the kitchen.

  ‘Even the professor’s?’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘He won’t like that.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll appreciate the need.’ Hand on the kitchen doorknob, McKenna asked: ‘Has he ever hit you?’

  She shook her head. ‘He just shouts. He’s always raising his hand like he did earlier. He does it to Solange when he’s annoyed.’

  ‘And what does she do?’

  ‘Smack him down, and mutter rude things in French.’

  Bethan sat on a stool by the table, sucking orange juice through a straw. Pink rubber gloves on her hands and a butcher’s apron around her shapely waist, Annie chopped onions, tears streaming down her face. ‘Wipe my eyes, Phoebe. I can’t see a thing.’

  Tearing paper towel from a roll, Phoebe obeyed.

  ‘And make a pot of tea while I finish the vegetables.’ She glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘Shouldn’t Mina be home by now?’

  ‘She wasn’t back ’til midnight last night.’

  ‘Well, it’s her loss if she misses dinner,’ Annie said. ‘Do those two in the sitting room get tea?’

  ‘They’ve got a bottle of wine. I expect they’ll go when it’s empty.’

  ‘Good.’ Laying out a tray with mugs and biscuits, Phoebe waited for the kettle to boil, surve
ying McKenna. ‘I’ll take Bethan to play in the garden when the tea’s ready, so you can grill Annie while we’re out of the way.’

  *

  ‘My baby sister’s taken quite a fancy to you.’ Annie topped up McKenna’s tea, and poured her own. Iolo Williams and his wife had left, Solange dumping two wine glasses, both smeared with fingerprints and one with lipstick, and an empty bottle, on the kitchen counter, and then, with ill grace, the ashtrays, collected from the sitting room at Annie’s request.

  ‘She’s got something about her,’ McKenna said.

  ‘She has, hasn’t she? And whatever it is, Uncle Ned saw it, too.’

  ‘I need a lot of information.’ He stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer. ‘It’s difficult to ask your mother, and Phoebe’s too young.’

  ‘So you’re left with the option of grilling me.’ Annie smiled briefly. Her eyes were the same colour as Phoebe’s, darkening or gleaming as the light touched them. ‘Mama isn’t usually like this,’ she went on. ‘She’s a perfectly competent mother, but like many people, she can’t cope with severe emotional stress.’

  ‘I understand she uses tranquillizers.’

  Annie leaned back in her chair, hands thrust into the apron pocket. ‘She’s an NHS addict.’

  ‘She’s not alone in that, either.’

  ‘It’s too easy, isn’t it? You take the tablets to blank out some pain, and before you know it, you can’t get through a day without them. Like you and cigarettes, I imagine. Mina’s had drugs as well, but she was probably trying to blank out herself.’

  Childish yelps and shrieks came from the garden, and through the window, he saw Bethan and the cat chasing Phoebe. ‘I’ve not met her yet.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘Phoebe talks about her a lot.’

  ‘She’s pathologically jealous of Phoebe. That’s why there’s so much hostility. Don’t assume looks are everything, Mr McKenna. Phoebe’s very bright, and she has the gift of making contact with people. Uncle Ned was the same. They shared a type of warmth you don’t come across very often.’ Rising to stir the pot of meat and vegetables simmering on the gas cooker, Annie added: ‘Mina resented Phoebe from the moment she was born. She’d ruled the roost until then, and had no real competition, because I was so much older.’

  ‘What happened to your father?’

  ‘Nothing remarkable.’

  She wedged the lid on the pot, and sat down, hands in apron pocket again. She had a quality of stillness he found restful, an unusual economy of movement and effort far from her mother’s incessant agitation, yet she was unmistakably Edith’s daughter. Watching the play of light on her face, he wondered if Edith had once shared this full-blooded womanliness, before life sucked it from her.

  ‘Did Phoebe tell you father’s a civil engineer?’ Annie asked. ‘He’s in North Africa at the moment, building roads in inhospitable places. He’s worked abroad for years, and earns much more than he would here, which is how he managed to keep Mama out of his hair and the rest of us in relative comfort.’ She smiled fleetingly, mischievously. ‘So now you can stop fretting about where the money comes from!’

  Nonplussed, he cast around for something to say.

  ‘I was about eight when he first went overseas,’ she went on, ‘and I realized afterwards they’d actually separated. Then he came back, and they “tried again”, as the saying is, but it didn’t work, so he left, not long after Mina arrived.’ Her eyes darkened. ‘I was glad when it was over. My childhood was marked out by their tears and misery and screaming rows, but I never knew what it was all for, and it seemed such a waste. I used to wish Uncle Ned was my father, because he certainly loved us far more than my real father ever did.’

  ‘But your father must have come back yet again,’ McKenna said.

  She nodded. ‘And Phoebe was born. It was quite peaceful for a while, but I suppose there was too much history, and it got the better of them. We haven’t seen him for almost seven years. He sends cards and presents at the right times, but that’s all.’

  ‘When did your mother start taking drugs?’

  ‘When Mina was a baby. I think she had post-natal depression, then she almost went to pieces when my father left.’ Rising again to stir the pot, she said: ‘That’s why Uncle Ned came, and that’s why Mama could never relax with him. He reminded her of the bad times, just by being here.’ She leaned against the counter. ‘And her own weaknesses, too, I imagine. That can’t be comfortable for anyone.’

  ‘Wasn’t he rather an odd choice of surrogate guardian? He had his own problems.’

  ‘He was family, and he was always a lot more together, as Phoebe would say, than people ever gave him credit for.’

  ‘I accept that, but there’s a long history of mental illness.’

  ‘The whole family’s weird. Ned’s depressions were nothing.’ She lifted the lid off the pot, then turned down the heat. ‘And anyway, they didn’t drop from the sky, even though troubles can be like rain.’ Sitting again, she added: ‘He never took the kind of drugs Mama gorges like Bethan would wolf sweets, because he’d suffered too much from the treatments forced on him in hospital. He wanted to get her off tranquillizers, but she wouldn’t even try to help herself.’

  ‘What treatments did he have?’

  She shrugged. ‘Dr Ansoni could probably give you the details, but Ned called them “chemical restraints”, as opposed to the straitjacket, presumably. They left him with the shakes, you know. Jumping legs, chattering teeth; that sort of thing.’ Her eyes darkened again. ‘Mina was a bitch to him at times! His teeth had fallen out years ago, probably because of the drugs, and his false teeth clicked when he spoke, which annoyed her, so she sneaked them from his room one night, and he was frantic. He didn’t eat for two whole days, then I found them in her schoolbag. She’d hide those two boxes Phoebe was worrying about, too.’

  ‘The Dream Box and the Cloud Box. Did he make up the names for her, like a story?’

  ‘Possibly. He was very imaginative. He made you see things differently.’

  ‘I know. He beat me to the Eisteddfod essay trophy.’

  ‘Phoebe said.’ Annie smiled. ‘She’d remembered your name from the yearbook, and because she couldn’t get at Ned’s copy, she went to the public library.’

  ‘She never mentioned it.’

  ‘She wouldn’t. She likes to know more than you think she does. She’s probably got a huge Box of Secrets under her bed.’

  ‘I’ll need to take a formal statement from her. And from your mother and Mina.’

  ‘And from me?’

  ‘Were you here on Friday?’

  ‘I hadn’t been since Wednesday. I usually call once a week, and go to the farm the day after. Have you spoken to Gladys yet?’

  ‘Your mother asked me to, but there’s nothing to say at the moment.’

  ‘I’ll be going again, anyway. Mama just wants Ned’s things out of the way.’

  ‘Have you any idea if he made a will?’

  ‘He didn’t need to,’ Annie said. ‘His entire estate reverts to the surviving family members, through his father’s will. A tontine, I think it’s called.’

  ‘Complicated,’ McKenna commented. ‘So who benefits when Ned’s side of the family dies out?’

  ‘No, you misunderstand: the whole family, Mama and us included. We’ll each receive a portion of Ned’s estate. Effectively, it can go on for ever.’

  ‘And what’s the estate worth?’

  ‘Not much, and a lot less than it used to be.’ She sighed. ‘D’you remember what I said about his depressions? His father left Ned and his sisters some stocks and shares, quite separate from the contents of this will, and Ned sold most of his to buy rare books and manuscripts. At the time, he was in lodgings in Hirael, and the house went up in flames one day because someone overloaded an electrical socket. Most of his collection was destroyed, and he was ill for quite a long time afterwards.’

  ‘Was he not insured?’

  ‘Only partially, but he was devastated becaus
e the books and documents were irreplaceable. I think he’d hoped to save them for posterity.’ She rose to give the pot another stir, the smell of simmering beef and herbs and vegetables filling the kitchen. ‘Not to be rude, but it’s getting near dinner-time, and I want to get Bethan to bed soon.’

  McKenna stood up. ‘Thank you for your time.’

  ‘Will your people be much longer in Ned’s room? I don’t want to wake Mama until they’ve gone.’

  ‘I’ll see. The room will be sealed again, and we’ll arrange to take statements as soon as possible. And we also need everyone’s fingerprints for elimination, including Bethan’s.’ He took a card from his wallet, and left it on the table. ‘Get in touch if you want anything.’

  Annie read the details of work, home and mobile telephone numbers, and slipped the card into her apron pocket as Janet appeared at the door.

  ‘We’ve finished for now, sir. I don’t think we should start rummaging through the papers until we know what Ned was working on.’

  ‘George knows exactly what Ned was doing,’ Annie offered. As Janet went back upstairs, she said: ‘Is she pregnant? I had that same look on my face when I knew Bethan was on the way. It’s as if you turn in on yourself, and shut down all the non-essential systems.’

  8

  When McKenna returned to the station, after leaving Janet and the forensic officers to remove papers and personal effects from Ned’s room, he found Rowlands and Dewi eating sandwiches and drinking coffee.

  ‘Ms Bradshaw’s left for the day, sir,’ Dewi said.

  ‘Any joy with the cars?’

  ‘The people we wanted to see had gone on holiday.’

  ‘Are you actually telling me you didn’t contact them beforehand?’

  ‘Sorry, no,’ Rowlands said. ‘My fault.’

  ‘Yes, it bloody is!’

  ‘It’s mine as well, sir,’ admitted Dewi.

  ‘You’re like bloody children dodging school!’ McKenna seethed. ‘Have you wasted the whole day?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Then you can start making up for it when you’ve finished at the trough!’

  ‘Bradshaw told us about Ned Jones,’ Rowlands said.