The House of Women

by Alison Taylor

  Janet’s mother must have retreated to the manse, McKenna thought, facing Pastor Evans in the narrow corridor outside the intensive care unit. Ashen-faced, quivering with the rage which so often precedes grief, Evans hissed words of censure and disgust, then brushed past, leaving behind him the smell of the chapel, a medley of dust and prayer books and polish and maleness which pervaded his daughter’s car and person, overwhelming the costly French perfumes she wore in disguise.

  Watching the fine grey cloth of the pastor’s summer coat swirling about his legs, McKenna made his way to the nursing duty station, a narrow counter overhung by a bank of monitors, where lights pulsed and machines bleeped in harmony and discord.

  ‘Is she conscious?’ he asked a tall black woman, whose ornately plaited hair enhanced her height and presence. ‘Can I see her?’

  The consciousness which had mercifully deserted Janet the day before remained out of reach, and her body seemed shrunken, absent of kinship with the vibrant, temperamental girl who resided in his memory. Watching the regular rise and fall of her chest, he thought of Phoebe’s musings on perception, and wondered if life depended for its existence on the memory and participation of an observer.

  4

  ‘Jason’s out on patrol,’ Dewi said. ‘He’s not due at the depot before lunch-time.’

  ‘When does his shift finish?’ McKenna asked. ‘Four o’clock.’

  ‘Try to collar him at lunch-time, then, but don’t be too pushy. And did you let Annie know about her car?’

  Dewi nodded. ‘She’s furious.’

  ‘Hardly surprising,’ McKenna said. ‘She can keep it over the weekend, but you’d better tell her we want it first thing Monday morning for the vehicle examiner.’

  ‘You can tell her yourself, sir. She’s in your office.’

  *

  She wore a finely-seamed dress, in the style her mother favoured, and looked, he thought, as Edith must have done before she faded, and age rather than youth came to define every curve of her body. ‘This week’s been like the doldrums,’ she said. ‘Little winds blowing you this way and that, then a calm period, then a sudden storm, brewing up from nowhere, leaving you breathless and baffled.’ She brushed a bead of sweat from her hairline. ‘There was a breeze yesterday, but it seems to have died. Did you know this is the second hottest August since records began in 1727? I read it in the paper this morning.’

  ‘I can’t imagine people harnessing such information so long ago,’ he commented. ‘I can’t believe they knew enough.’

  ‘Why not? They weren’t inherently less developed.’ She grinned at him. ‘I expect you think your parents had only just raised their heads above the primeval sludge, don’t you?’

  ‘Not quite, although it’s hard to tell at times with the Irish.’ He smiled in return. ‘But they seemed content with less.’

  ‘All we need is food, shelter and warmth. The rest is decoration, diversions from the real business of death and sex, like my car. What’s the problem with it?’

  ‘You’ve fallen foul of the car-ringers.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘More than a quarter of all recorded crime involves the half million vehicles which get stolen every year. Like a lot of popular mid-price range cars, yours was probably stolen to order, then fitted with number plates derived from a same year model we’ve already traced. Number plates also come from accident write-offs, which the insurance companies sell to wreckers.’

  ‘But I’ve got registration documents,’ she protested.

  ‘Which only prove that computers can’t think for themselves. There’s no automatic cross-check when documents go in for change of ownership.’

  ‘So now what happens?’

  ‘If the vehicle identification plate hasn’t been drilled out, it will show chassis, engine, marque and year details, and provided the chassis and engine numbers weren’t removed and reblocked, we can find out where your car came from.’

  ‘And I’ll be minus my car and still in debt to my mother for several thousand pounds.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Damn and blast that bloody Jason and his “bargain of the year”! What a fool I was.’

  ‘D’you know where he got the car?’

  ‘One of his mates in the trade, he said. According to him, he’s got mates in all sorts of trades. I hope you’re going to ask him.’

  ‘We’ll ask,’ McKenna promised, ‘but please don’t alert him.’

  ‘He probably knows already. Mina was in when Dewi Prys phoned earlier.’ She scowled fiercely. ‘Oh, damn and bloody hell!’

  For no discernible reason, her agitated gestures reminded him of Denise, and he recoiled involuntarily, resentful and even fearful. Later, he realized the similarity depended on a glimpse of some quality common to all women, but only after he had begun to appreciate that real, harm had been rendered by the miserable attrition of his marriage.

  *

  Sweating profusely, Dewi sat in McKenna’s office, legs crossed, hands in pockets. ‘What happened at the hospital, sir?’

  ‘Pastor Evans gave me the benefit of his opinion, which, as expected, amounts to Janet’s condition being our fault.’

  ‘He can go hang!’ Dewi snapped. ‘Is she any better?’

  ‘I don’t think she’s any worse.’

  ‘But she’s very ill all the same, isn’t she? God! The way the blood poured out of her was horrible!’ He rubbed the swelling on his head, and winced. ‘Who’d imagine it can go so dreadfully wrong? Mam said even an ordinary miscarriage can be fatal.’

  ‘It can happen. Why not go to see her? She might have come round by now.’

  ‘I’ll wait. Her father’ll be there, won’t he?’ He picked at a worn patch of veneer on the desk. ‘Has anyone said anything about the demo?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Should I make a report about it?’

  ‘Only what you remember, bearing in mind that a whack on the head can affect the powers of recall.’

  ‘I was well out of order, sir.’

  ‘And not for the first time. I sometimes think you harbour a death wish.’

  ‘I don’t do it on purpose.’

  ‘Yes, you do. We all act on purpose, unless we’re mad, and even lunatics can come up with reasons which satisfy their own logic.’

  ‘I lost my temper.’

  ‘You do that too often, as well,’ McKenna commented. ‘You’re prone to acting like a naughty child, especially when you’re bored, and you pick fights with Janet, expecting Jack Tuttle or myself to sort you out as if we’re your parents. Well, we’re not, and it’s high time you started acting like an adult at work, as well as at home. You passed your sergeant’s exams with flying colours, but I’m not prepared to recommend your promotion at present.’

  ‘Point taken, sir.’

  ‘Then do something about it,’ McKenna said tetchily. ‘This is the last time I’ll help you off the hook. If you must kick against authority structures because they’re there, then accept that a couple of broken feet is all you’ll get. You’ve got the potential to be a very good officer, and a similar potential to be a real liability. It’s your choice.’

  *

  ‘Iolo declined the services of a solicitor,’ Rowlands reported, dropping his files on McKenna’s desk. ‘He’s still hoping to keep his affairs out of the public eye, and he’s back to his usual obnoxious self, so he’s probably got an almighty hangover.’

  ‘He must have a hangover every day,’ said McKenna. ‘He probably can’t remember being without one.’

  ‘Like you can’t remember being without kids once they’re born,’ Rowlands commented, offering cigarettes. ‘He was also very maudlin and self-pitying, but I’m afraid my sympathy wouldn’t rise to the occasion. He’s a sly piece of work, always on the lookout for himself, and making up his own rules as he goes along.’

  ‘He may be aware of the extent of his dislocation from normality, and that’s why he hits the bottle,’ McKenna said, taking a cigarette. ‘Maybe his brain was
glitched in the womb, not enough to cause full-blown mental illness, but enough to condemn him to a no man’s land between sanity and insanity. That could explain why he functions as he does, when he’s had plenty of time and opportunity to learn what’s acceptable and legal.’

  ‘He’s adamant he did nothing wrong with the manuscripts because he never made any claims about them. He simply offered them for an opinion, and other people decided what they were. If the experts judged them to be genuine, then genuine they must be. When I pointed out that simply offering them for an opinion was tantamount to fraud, he threatened to have the screaming ab-dabs. And he’s paranoid about Polgreen: called him a lot worse than jungle bunny.’

  ‘Guilt-speak,’ McKenna decided. ‘How did they age the documents?’

  ‘That was also Ned’s fault, because if he hadn’t cut an article out of some obscure paper, they wouldn’t have known where to start.’ Rowlands took a sheet covered with notes from one of the files. ‘Iolo reckons the world’s full of gullible people desperate to jump on the back of some “discovery” and ride to fame, so they could have got away with taking far less trouble, but with the help of this article, they did a superb job.’ He scanned the notes. ‘Ned allegedly sneaked around the National Library tearing endpapers and the odd blank page out of rare old books, then they copied out their own offerings, with Indian ink and quills cut from seagull feathers.’

  ‘I don’t believe it! Ned wouldn’t vandalize books.’

  ‘You can’t know that, and I think it fits rather neatly. Ever after, he’s beset by the enormous awe-inspiring knowledge that in his eyes, he’d done terrible wrong, and would have to pay accordingly, and he caused his own pain in case God thought about letting him off the hook.’ He returned to his notes. ‘They aged the ink by pouring boiling tea over the paper, then splattered candlewax and butter and oil at random. Iolo also mentioned rubbing in bread-crumbs and dirt, and chewing the edges to mimic vermin damage. His face quite lit up when he was talking, and he wittered at some length about the very long, and very respectable history of faking, but I had to tell him I’d never heard of Keating, de Hory, van Meegeren, or Hebborn.’

  ‘I hope he included his namesake,’ McKenna added. ‘Edward Williams, AKA Iolo Morgannwg, was faking bardic verse two hundred years ago, as well as rewriting Welsh history, and, like any student of Welsh literature, Iolo would know all about him. That’s probably where he got the idea.’

  ‘Ned would’ve known, too, and knowing the source of the poetry rather puts paid to your romantic notions about the survival of documents.’ Slipping the paper back with its fellows, Rowlands smiled. ‘You still believe the verses are Ned’s own work, don’t you?’

  ‘What I believe doesn’t matter, but I doubt if Iolo will amaze the world with a bounty of wonderful poetry now he’s thrown off the shackles of deception.’

  ‘He’s done no such thing,’ Rowlands told him. ‘He’s no intention of admitting to anything except a student prank, which wasn’t his idea, and not even that unless he’s out of options.’

  ‘We can’t justify the cost of having the manuscripts examined unless there’s a direct and demonstrable connection with Ned’s murder, so Iolo’s face will probably be saved, which will be a huge relief to the Welsh academic establishment. You’d better send him home. La belle femme should be back soon from her London expedition.’

  ‘I still want to know where the money comes from.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask when you had the chance?’

  ‘I did, and he told me to mind my own sodding business.’

  ‘And where did he meet with Ned when he felt himself in need of honest comfort?’

  ‘They had a weekly date at a pub in Menai Bridge.’

  ‘Did they?’ McKenna frowned. ‘How come, when Phoebe was usually with Ned?’

  ‘They met while she was in school, and during the holidays, Iolo suffered, which is another reason for him to hate her.’ Rowlands picked up the files, and tucked them under his arm. ‘And you were wrong about his name change. It wasn’t a symbolic separation from Ned and their joint past. People were always confusing the two of them, and he got sick of it.’

  5

  On his way to Merlin Security, Dewi made a detour to the hospital, and spent an age gazing at Janet’s silent shadowy form, a cold sick feeling wrenching at his heart. The image and its misery stayed with him when he emerged into the searing outside light, to make his way to the mortuary. Sun-parched bits of leaf and litter crackled underfoot on the narrow flagged path, and he waited respectfully while a tenanted hearse pulled away, followed by a pie and sausage van which had come around the corner from the kitchen area. As the door of the pathology building closed behind him, images from the world beyond began to dance in his sun-dazzled eyes, like magenta-tinted photographic negatives.

  The ground floor offices were deserted. Rounding a corner, he passed a small coffin propped against a ‘Staff Only’ sign, and went into the autopsy room, where one of the technicians was swabbing the floor and whistling to himself, his tune competing with the hissing of air extractors under the shining tables empty of all but their worn black head-rests.

  ‘I’m looking for the pathologist,’ Dewi said. ‘He should have some papers for us.’

  ‘Who’s “us”?’ the other man asked, eyeing the visitor as if assessing the outcome of his trade.

  Dewi fumbled in his pocket for identification. ‘Police.’

  ‘Right. I’ll go see.’

  Gazing around him, buttocks pressed against a huge steel draining board, Dewi decided the place resembled a catering kitchen, provided it was unoccupied, provided he could ignore the strand of lank grey hair stuck to one of the head-rests, and provided he refrained from looking too closely at the tiers of pickled parts on a shelf attached to the wall, but boredom prevailed, and he wandered over. The specimens had an intricate beauty all their own, he thought, surveying the wonderful length of a man’s dissected penis, the flower of an excised carcinoma, and a prune skin like a splinter of wood, caught in a sac grown out of a bowel wall. At the end of the shelf, he found a tiny human foetus, no bigger than a baby mouse, cradled in a nest of tissue dark with haemorrhage, and was reading the label pasted to the front when the technician returned, a long piece of paper pinched in his gloved fingers.

  Once more out in the sunshine, eyes beguiled by different images, Dewi leaned against the hot metal of his sparkling car, learning from the length of paper that Jason Lloyd’s mother, assailed by ills of depressing proportion, depended on the medical profession for both mental and physical equilibrium. Fluctuating blood pressure exacerbated her varicose veins, dermatitis provoked other itches, and infections raged hard on each other’s heels through her throat, lungs, and other soft tissues. Scanning the list of prescriptions for tranquillizers and soporifics and antibiotics, he saw that her worn out uterus had fallen to the surgeon’s scalpel four years previously, and climbed into his swanky car with his mind’s eye overwhelmed with an awful image of Janet, open on a mortuary table with her dead baby nesting in her bloodied innards.

  6

  ‘Will Mrs Lloyd remember what she does with her all her pills?’ McKenna asked, putting the paper on his desk. ‘She’s had six scripts for antibiotics in less than eighteen months, so it’s a fair bet she didn’t even finish each bottle, but I wouldn’t lay odds on her being able to lay hands on the left-overs.’

  ‘She only had one script for tetracycline,’ Dewi pointed out.

  ‘Is she one of your many acquaintances on the estate?’

  ‘I don’t know her to speak to.’

  McKenna glanced at his watch. ‘You’ve time to pay her a visit, and get to the depot before Jason finishes his lunch break.’

  ‘What shall I say if she asks how we know about her tablets?’

  ‘Use your initiative!’

  7

  The cathedral clock chimed the half-noon as McKenna unlocked his front door. One cat was curled around the cool porcelain pedestal
of the washbasin, the other stretched out in the bath, and neither took any notice of him until he splashed a droplet of water on Fluff, and she twitched from head to tail with disapproval.

  After he had eaten, he sat in the garden for a while, looking among the glossy ivy for the pine-marten’s glory, and found his eyes beginning to close of their own volition. He blinked fiercely, and, glimpsing a movement from the corner of his eye, saw one of the feline choristers about to slink into the house. He let it go, too lethargic to bother, and tuned his ears for the outbreak of more territorial conflict.

  8

  ‘Jason’s mam was out,’ Dewi reported, ‘and Jason’s still on a job, and won’t be finished before two. I didn’t bother waiting because he’s in the Pwllheli area. It’ll take him at least forty minutes to get back.’

  McKenna yawned.

  ‘His dad was out, as well, so I had a word with the sister who won that wet T shirt competition at the Octagon. She said her mam keeps all her left-over pills, in case.’

  ‘In case of what?’

  Dewi shrugged. ‘In case she can’t get to the doctor, or he won’t give her more pills when she does get there, or she can’t afford a new prescription. I don’t know, do I?’

  ‘Did you see the left-overs?’

  ‘They’re all over the house. A couple of pills in one bottle, five or six capsules in another. Kitchen cup-boards, parlour mantelpiece, bedside table, and more in her handbag, according to the daughter.’ He pulled a notebook from his shirt pocket. ‘I made a list, but there wasn’t any tetracycline.’

  ‘Double check on the trade names,’ McKenna said. ‘There’s a drugs directory somewhere among the junk you shifted into the main office. If you can’t find it, ring Dr Ansoni. When will Mrs Lloyd be home?’

  ‘Late. She’s gone to Llandudno, shopping.’

  *

  McKenna was assessing the need to do some shopping of his own when Phoebe telephoned, edgy with anxiety. ‘Annie’s taken Mama and Bethan for a drive,’ she said. ‘She’s taking advantage of the car while she’s got it, and I can’t imagine how she’ll manage when you take it away. How will she get to school, and here? And how on earth will she be able to keep an eye on Auntie Gladys?’ Before he could respond, she rushed on. ‘She can’t afford another, because she still owes Mama for this one, and her mortgage eats a huge chunk out of her salary. I don’t think Mama’s got any more wads of cash to lend, either.’