The House of Women

by Alison Taylor

  ‘We came to interview him.’

  ‘Without benefit of counsel? Really, Chief Inspector, you should know better! I’m not surprised your promotion was shelved.’

  *

  While Rowlands sat patiently on an overblown chair, picking at its dirty velvet cover, McKenna leaned against the dark panelling in the hall, half-listening to the solicitor’s querulous demands, and watching Williams stamp back and forth, and when he stopped in mid-stride to glare at his observer, mouth working grotesquely inside the crust of spittle, McKenna felt as if suddenly blessed, or cursed, with a smidgen of Phoebe’s insight, and looked right through the man to the void at his heart. ‘Do you pay any maintenance?’ he asked. ‘For either of them? Have you ever paid?’

  ‘What?’ the solicitor turned to his client. ‘What’s he talking about?’

  ‘I asked if Professor Williams pays maintenance,’ McKenna repeated. ‘Or, in your professional parlance, provides ancillary relief.’

  ‘For what?’ The solicitor frowned.

  ‘For —’ McKenna began, and was cut short by a high-pitched yell from Iolo.

  ‘Get out!’ He lunged forward, and pushed the solicitor violently in the chest. ‘Get out! Leave me alone!’ Snapping like a mad dog, he harried him towards the front door, and out into the night. ‘I don’t need you. It was all a mistake!’ The door slammed so violently a spatter of plaster fell from the ceiling, sprinkling more dust on the furniture and adding to the little heaps of dirt piling up in corners.

  ‘Was that wise?’ asked McKenna, as Williams leaned against the front door, panting for breath. ‘He won’t come running so fast next time you need him, and you surely will.’

  ‘Then I’ll get another solicitor! They’re like tarts, anyway. There’s always another one on the next street corner.’ He walked shakily along the hall. ‘And why should he know my business? It’s bad enough your knowing!’

  ‘The whole world may come to know eventually,’ McKenna pointed out.

  Williams smiled, a ghastly image. ‘I’m sure we could come to some arrangement.’

  ‘No, that won’t be possible,’ McKenna said. ‘We’ll do our best to protect your daughter, but that’s all.’

  ‘My daughter.’ Williams savoured the words. ‘People don’t call her that, you know. Not to my face, anyway.’

  ‘Quite. You’ve spent almost two decades pretending she’s something else, and much good it’s done. By the way, do you pay Edith maintenance?’

  ‘Her husband made sure they never went short, but I give her money for Mina’s clothes and holidays, and I pay the college fees.’

  ‘That’s another well-kept secret, is it?’ McKenna said. ‘Like your long standing relationship with Ned Jones.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ the professor announced, making a rush for the kitchen. ‘You ruined what would have been a nice dinner.’

  ‘Tough!’ Rowlands stood up to follow.

  ‘There’s no need for nastiness!’ Williams snapped, opening the refrigerator.

  The fly-blown light in the kitchen ceiling showed up patches of blackened grease on the tiled floor, and more grease and dirt besmirching counters and cooker hob and table top. Crumbs and bits of food crunched underfoot and littered the chairs, and the huge double sink overflowed with unwashed crockery and glassware.

  Pushing aside the debris of other meals, he put bread and cheese on the table, seated himself, and began randomly tearing apart the food and stuffing it into his mouth. While he chewed and swallowed, his scrawny throat describing the passage of his meal, McKenna opened the back door to release the sickening smell from every corner of the squalid room.

  Breathing in the fresh night air, Rowlands whispered: ‘We should ask environmental health to fumigate the place. He must be breeding roaches by the colony.’

  ‘Don’t talk about me behind my back!’ Williams gab-bled. ‘Say it to my face or shut up!’ Snatching a plate, some cheese, an apple, and a knife, he pushed back his chair. ‘I’m going to the study. Shut the back door.’

  ‘Do you pay maintenance to Margaret?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘I did until she shacked up with somebody else.’

  ‘She seems remarkably content.’

  ‘Bully for her!’

  ‘You have a new partner, so why begrudge her happiness?’

  ‘Why not?’ he demanded, tipping gin into a grimy tumbler. ‘She got off lightly.’

  ‘I wouldn’t agree,’ McKenna said. ‘May we sit down?’

  ‘You may as well, as you won’t bugger off. You can have a drink if you want.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ McKenna shifted a heap of papers from a chair.

  Williams grunted, then hacked the cheese and apple into ugly chunks which he stuffed into his mouth and washed down with gulps of gin.

  ‘When we asked you about Ned’s papers, you feigned ignorance,’ McKenna began. ‘In fact, you feigned ignorance about everything.’

  ‘What else could I do?’ the other man demanded. ‘Come out with my hands in the air?’ Chewing apple, he added: ‘I didn’t kill him, and I had nothing to do with his death. Why should I tell you things you don’t need to know?’

  ‘It’s not your place to decide what we need to know,’ McKenna said.

  ‘Did you need to know about Mina? Did you need to turn Edith inside out?’

  ‘Having to pry is one of the unfortunate consequences of a murder,’ replied McKenna. ‘So that we can discover what’s relevant.’

  ‘Edith isn’t, Mina isn’t, I’m not, and nor are the other girls.’ He paused, mouth working. ‘Nor is that bloody nigger, much as I’d like him to be!’

  ‘In our view, Ned’s death has its roots in his past.’

  ‘You can’t be sure.’

  ‘Give us some credit, Professor. No-one walked in off the street and spiked his food, and, sadly for you, no-one else appears to have a motive for wanting him out of the way.’

  ‘Who did tell you?’ he asked, his eyes glinting.

  ‘Not George, as you assumed.’ McKenna smiled bleakly. ‘Bits and pieces of information came together. Gladys Jones showed me a photo, taken on one of your long ago visits to Llys Ifor. Others also remembered “Eddie”, and one of your ilk filled in the blanks.’

  ‘If I’d wanted to kill him, I’d have done it years ago, but there was no need. We made a bargain, and he stuck to his part as if it were written in stone.’ Williams smiled, too. ‘Anyway, he was as much in it as I was.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘The manuscript business. It was a game.’ He emptied the gin bottle into his glass. ‘Then it got out of hand. We were going to own up, but everything snowballed.’

  ‘A game?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘It caused Ned’s first real breakdown, you know. He was so terrified we’d be rumbled, he got himself locked up in Denbigh Hospital, out of harm’s reach.’ Lighting a cigarette, he added thoughtfully: ‘Or perhaps he did it to get the feel of being behind bars.’

  ‘What exactly did you do?’ McKenna asked. ‘What did this “manuscript business” entail?’

  ‘Giving people what they wanted! We were both reading Welsh literature and language, and the lecturers were obsessed with the idea of a treasure trove of old manuscripts, if only someone could find them.’

  ‘So you decided to “find” a few,’ McKenna said. ‘Did you copy them from an obscure book?’

  ‘No, they weren’t copies. That’s the tragedy we had to live with.’ He drained the glass, then rummaged in a cupboard for more liquor.

  ‘Shouldn’t Professor Williams have a solicitor before we go further, sir?’ Rowlands asked. ‘He seems to be admitting to an offence.’

  ‘I don’t want a solicitor!’ Unopened gin bottle in hand, Williams turned.

  ‘You might feel differently when you’ve had time to reflect,’ McKenna pointed out.

  ‘And when I’ve sobered up?’ he asked. ‘It takes more than a few glasses of gin to affect me, more’s the pity.’

 
‘None the less —’

  ‘Hear me out, will you?’ A whine crept into his voice. ‘Let me talk. I know what I’m doing.’ The bottle clinked against the rim of the glass as the liquor tumbled out.

  ‘And what are you doing?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Shedding my skin? Copying Edith, perhaps. She says she feels so much better.’

  ‘Does she know? Does your wife?’

  ‘No-one in the whole wide world knew except Ned and me, and now there’s only me, and my God, I wish I were dead as well!’ He threw the cigarette stub into the hearth, and watched the smoke dragged up the chimney. Slumped in his chair, hands between his knees, liquor slopping from the glass, he said: ‘Ned collected paper even then, bits out of newspapers and magazines, old pamphlets, anything he thought might be interesting or useful, and I was looking through his stuff one Sunday afternoon because I was bored, and neither of us had money to go out.’ He shuddered gently. ‘Ned was lying on his bed, saying he felt hot and sleepy, and I remember chaffing him because he wouldn’t take off his tie and unbutton his shirt. I asked him if he went to bed with his coat and tie and boots on, and he said it wasn’t decent to show your flesh, and nothing good could come of it. I suppose he was thinking of his sister, the one who’s gone completely mad.’ Reminiscence softening his features, he half-smiled. ‘I’ve been telling him for years that bottling up all his natural instincts would just make him ill, but the daft old prude still probably died as chaste as the day he was born.’ He stared blankly at the dirty hearth, then reached for another cigarette and put the tumbler on the floor. ‘Anyway, in among his litter, I found a newspaper article about the messes left over from the war which desperately needed sorting, especially in Germany and Austria, and I figured a job abroad for the long vac would probably pay much better than the usual run of bloody awful student jobs.’

  ‘They weren’t much fun, were they?’ McKenna asked, stifling a yawn. ‘I sorted other people’s dirty linen in a laundry, folded millions of Christmas cards in a printing works, worked from dusk to dawn filling shelves in Woolworths, pulled pints and broke up murderous fights every term-time weekend in one of the worst pubs in Liverpool, and tramped miles around Anglesey delivering Christmas mail.’

  ‘I thought your family was comfortably off,’ Rowlands said to Williams. ‘Couldn’t they shield you from the rigours of student life?’

  ‘I wanted my independence.’ He turned to McKenna. ‘Tell him to get off my back, or he can get out!’

  ‘Tell me about the manuscripts,’ McKenna persuaded. ‘Tell me how you forged them.’

  ‘It was a joke,’ insisted the professor. ‘A game.’ He took a swallow of gin, and licked his lips. ‘I don’t know whose idea it was, or where it came from. It just happened, the way things do, one thing leading to another. We were sick of hearing about these bloody relics, we were bored, I was reading about left-over wartime chaos, Ned’s lying on his bed yawning like a hippo because he hadn’t slept off last night’s sleeping tablet, and then he wondered if the authors of these precious relics would have taken drugs, or chewed leaves, or stewed magic mushrooms.’ Shifting in his chair, he went on: ‘When I asked him why they should, he said if he deliberately stayed awake after he’d taken a sleeping tablet, he’d feel like a lark in the eye of the sun, and it was worth the terrible depression he had next day.’ He ceased speaking for a long moment, staring at the floor. ‘He showed me some of the verse he’d written when he was fighting the drugs, and it was so wonderful I felt sick with envy. I looked at him lying on that narrow bed with his hands folded across his chest and his old-fashioned clothes, and he still looked like a pathetic runt from the backwoods, even if there was this magic inside.’

  ‘What was he taking?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Mandrax. It was banned.’

  ‘Because it was lethally addictive,’ McKenna commented.

  ‘It was marvellous!’ Memory glittered in his eyes. ‘What the doctor gave me instead was like the difference between a miracle and a sleight of hand.’

  ‘Ned shared his prescriptions with you?’

  ‘Very, very occasionally. The tablets were too precious, you see. He kept the bottle tucked inside his waistcoat pocket, and every so often, he’d get it out, and we’d count the dreams.’ He sighed, his bony fingers trembling. ‘I told Ned that God had opened the door for us to write about what we saw, and sometimes, the words flowed so fast we couldn’t catch them all. I thought it was like clinging to a raft of twigs in a mountain cataract, but when we survived the journey, you can’t imagine the exhilaration.’

  ‘And the power, too, I suspect,’ McKenna suggested.

  ‘No!’ He shook his head. ‘Not the power, simply the knowledge, of what lay beyond the edge of the world. You’ve written yourself,’ he added, glancing at McKenna. ‘You’ve hunched over the paper well into the small hours, pen in hand, mind on the run with angels and devils, and the words coming from somewhere you never knew existed. You write, and read, and write, and when you’re too exhausted to make another scratch, you read it again, and almost stop breathing for the wonder of what you created.’ He paused, smiling with a ghastly weariness. ‘Then you sleep on it, and wake up with that excitement still making your heart thump nineteen to the dozen, and get the paper out from where you hid it, because if anyone else reads it while it’s so new the magic might vanish, and you read it again, and find the magic’s gone anyway, and you’re looking at a load of crap.’

  ‘It happens,’ McKenna said. ‘Nothing worth having comes easy.’

  ‘People say Mozart plucked his notes from the air as if God were handing them down to him, crotchet by quaver, and if that’s true, I know how he felt. In the cold light of day, what we wrote with the help of Ned’s tablets was even more marvellous than we thought.’ The remnants of the smile soured to a sneer. ‘Ned said that monstrous child of Edith’s has the gift, and she can get hold of it whenever she wants, without the help of God or medicine.’

  ‘I think he was right,’ McKenna agreed, offering his cigarettes. ‘Is that why you resent her so much?’

  ‘I don’t resent her!’ He fumbled in the packet. ‘I simply loathe her attitude, her impudence, her mouthiness, and, worst of all, her appalling nosiness. Never in my life have I come across anyone so blatantly and bluntly inquisitive.’

  ‘That’s how she gets the knowledge she needs to stoke the flames.’ As McKenna leaned forward to light Iolo’s cigarette, the other man’s odour drifted in his nostrils. ‘I don’t think she has any control over it.’

  ‘Well, she’ll be sorry when she finds herself like us, lashed to a wheel of fire!’ commented Williams, blowing smoke towards the dingy ceiling.

  Rowlands flicked his own lighter. ‘We’re still waiting to hear about the manuscripts.’

  ‘We didn’t do anything wrong!’

  ‘You’ve admitted to misuse of prescribed drugs.’

  ‘Don’t be so petty! Artists have to reach their visions, by any means, because it’s our destiny and our duty to show them to the rest of the world. You can’t expect us to be bound by common laws.’ Sulkily, he watched his interrogator. ‘Anyway, I had my own prescriptions. My doctor didn’t believe unsettled nights should interfere with my studies, and he talked as if taking tablets for this and that was the way ahead for everyone. Edith’s doctor probably convinced her of a pain- and misery free utopia at the bottom of a bottle of tranquillizers.’

  ‘Did you become addicted?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘That bloody dago at the surgery thinks I was! He said my anxieties and insomnia were caused by the drugs, and stopped my scripts.’ He picked up the tumbler of gin, and drank again. ‘So I took my custom elsewhere.’

  ‘To the off-licence?’ Rowlands asked.

  ‘To another bloody doctor!’ he snarled. ‘One who knows better than to bite the hand that feeds!’

  ‘Edith’s beginning to realize how much she lost through drug dependency,’ McKenna said quietly. ‘Perhaps it’s worth thinking abo
ut for yourself? Psychotropic drugs release negativity, inhibition, and memory, as you and Ned discovered, but there’s an equally powerful downside, as Edith’s learned to her cost.’

  ‘You’re one to talk!’ Williams said. ‘You must get through forty or fifty cigarettes a day.’

  ‘And I expect you do, too,’ McKenna replied. ‘But I rarely drink, and when I had to start upping the sleeping pills to make them work, I stopped taking them.’

  ‘Bully for you!’ he commented, reaching for the gin bottle. ‘Give yourself a pat on the back for all that self-control.’

  ‘The manuscripts,’ Rowlands said, his voice sharp. ‘Can we please get to the point of this visit? It’s very late, and forgive my deploying the kind of bluntness you so deplore in Phoebe, but to my mind, Professor, there’s no difference between your descent into drug-related crime and the teenage deadleg robbing to feed his habit. Except, of course, you can afford to support your habit, and even private prescriptions must come a lot cheaper than anything the local pusher dispenses.’

  ‘I won’t tell you again! I did not commit a crime!’

  ‘You engaged in a deliberate deceit, and however much you obfuscate the issue, you gained considerable social, academic, and material benefit.’ Rowlands paused. ‘In fact, your whole career rests on that fraudulent foundation, and I’m still not convinced you didn’t have a hand in silencing the only person in the world who could expose you for what you are.’

  ‘You can’t understand, can you?’ he asked, gazing at Rowlands with a strange light in his bloodshot eyes. He nodded towards McKenna. ‘He can, though, which is why he’ll listen to the bitter end. I couldn’t hurt Ned, because he was the only person on earth who knew me for what I am, so he was the only person on earth with whom there was not need to perform or pretend. We were in it together, both of us beyond the pale, and when the deceit and pretending stuck in my craw and started to choke me, I could go to him and find myself again. And before you start on the psychological bullshit bandwagon,’ he added, looking again at Rowlands, his voice harshening, ‘imagine how you’d feel in my shoes, if your imagination can stretch far enough. I’m worse off than any slave. For the last God knows how many years I’ve struggled through shifting sands, fettered with chains I put there myself, producing papers for academics the world over to scrutinize, lecturing to huge audiences, and pretending to a scholarship I don’t own and never had.’