The House of Women

by Alison Taylor

  ‘If we catch the perpetrator, she’ll probably get criminal injuries compensation,’ he said. ‘But tell her not to hold her breath.’

  ‘She could make do with an old banger, I suppose. It needn’t cost more than a few hundred pounds, and it wouldn’t necessarily be less reliable, would it?’

  ‘My first car was fifteen years old, and I never had a day’s worry with it.’

  ‘Mama’s worried sick, you know. Could Annie get done for having a dodgy car?’

  ‘Only if she knowingly bought a stolen vehicle.’

  ‘Why don’t you say “car”? And what about driving it now she knows it’s nicked? What if your traffic cops chase her?’

  ‘Stop fretting!’ McKenna said, smiling to himself. ‘I’m not surprised she calls you Cassandra.’

  ‘It’s nothing to what she’s calling Clyde. I hope he’s gone before they get back.’

  ‘He’s there?’ He glanced at the clock. ‘I thought he was at work.’

  ‘Oh, he turned up about ten minutes ago, on his way to the depot, and he’s in a hell of a mood about something, so don’t be surprised if I ring back to say there’s been a shoot-out, like in the Bonnie and Clyde film. I just hope they don’t make too much noise about it, or leave too much of a mess. That film’s a real bloodfest, isn’t it?’

  ‘You should be out yourself, instead of waiting around the house for second hand experiences.’

  ‘I don’t want to go out. I’m writing.’ He heard her draw a deep breath. ‘Did you honestly like my story as much as you said? Only what you said made me feel so much better, because my teacher sort of put the mockers on things, and with Uncle Ned not around any more ...’

  ‘I really liked it, Phoebe. What’s your new project?’

  ‘I’m sorting out some ideas about Auntie Gertrude, and her dead lover and her dead baby. And about Llys Ifor, of course. I can’t see very far beyond it yet.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s no need to.’

  ‘It’s in my head day and night,’ she said, ‘always different and always the same, whatever time of day or night or season of the year I imagine, and whether or not Meirion and Auntie Gladys might have rearranged the animals, or the farm machinery, or the furniture, or themselves, or even Auntie Gertrude. How can one place positively invade your imagination, when there’s so much else in the world?

  ‘Perhaps because it’s there, and so are you.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit Celtically metaphysical?’ He heard a pen scratching on paper, the faint sounds of voices in the background. ‘I’m going to write to my father for a word processor, then I could sort my ideas properly. Modern technology’s wonderful, isn’t it? George says people often get totally besotted with their computers.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘He popped round last night to say he’s going home for the weekend. He’s still pretty upset, about Uncle Ned, and getting chucked in your cells, and I don’t think he feels safe in his flat any more, but I suppose people like him never feel safe, because they know too much about the past. It’s not a hundred years since the French were locking up naked black people in cages and showing them off like animals.’ He heard the tap of pen against teeth. ‘I could ask Mama to let him move into Uncle Ned’s rooms, couldn’t I? She’s had quite a change of heart about him, probably because he’s stopped making out like some real cool dude. He could give her a run for her money when it comes to being tense and neurotic, especially about the police.’

  ‘Black people often suffer the sharp edge of policing.’

  ‘Yes, he’s told me, and usually because they’re there and so are the police. I did think better of you, though I suppose you had no choice in the circumstances.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Never mind. It’s water under the bridge, as Uncle Ned would’ve said.’ She paused again, and once more he heard the scratching pen, although the voices were silent. ‘When can we have his funeral?’

  ‘Soon, I hope. We should have a date for the inquest next week.’

  ‘George asked again about finishing his work. Mama’s got no objection, though it’s not really her decision, but nobody can finish it if you don’t find all his papers.’

  ‘We’re still looking.’

  ‘Where? Aren’t you out of possibilities?’

  ‘Your mother said we could search the house, but we got a little side-tracked.’

  ‘I’ve been in the attics, and I even turned over Minnie’s room when she was at work, but it’s clean.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘She could’ve taken them,’ Phoebe asserted. ‘She’s pinched things before, and she could easily have sneaked in when he was asleep, especially if he’d taken one of his tablets. They made him dead to the world.’

  ‘But why should she?’

  He could almost see the shrug. ‘Because.’

  The voices rose again, then a door slammed.

  ‘It’s a good job we haven’t any guns in the house,’ she commented acidly.

  ‘What are they rowing about?’

  ‘Don’t know and don’t care. They’re always rowing, because there’s nothing between them but sex and stupidity, and the nastiness that goes with all that. They don’t have anything to talk about. Anyway, I must go, I want to finish my writing.’ She chuckled. ‘It’s bizarre the way it takes over, as if it’s the most urgent thing in the world, bullying me into doing something every day, no matter how small.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dunno, really, unless it’s because I might be dead tomorrow. I wouldn’t mean anything then, would I?’

  9

  In search of novelty, McKenna pushed his way through the crowded aisles of the new supermarket, then walked home, the ritualistic excitement of Saturday afternoon at the shops at its height, and the dead weight of cans and bottles in plastic carriers threatening to amputate the fingers of each hand.

  Seeing no cans or packets prettified with the winsome face of one of their own among the shopping, the cats stalked off to sit on the parlour window ledge. He stroked their firm heads and springy ears, and thought if anyone saw him, as he often chanced a glimpse into the secret lives of others, he would seem like the lonely, ageing man he was, with only his pets left to treasure.

  The telephone shrilled suddenly, and he was told that Phoebe had called the police station, upset and almost incoherent. When he tried to ring her, the line was engaged, and he drove away from his house with dry dirt and dust spraying from the tyres, and the knowledge that George’s innocence depended on the existence of another with death in mind.

  The front door of the elegant house in Glamorgan Place stood wide open, a swath of colour draped over the threshold as the westering sun dragged the light of the landing window in its wake. The hall was empty, each ground floor room bereft of life, and rounding the dog-leg of the staircase, he almost fell over Phoebe’s cat, hunched in a great mound of fur on the half landing. From one of the bedrooms he heard a child’s voice, sobbing quietly, and coming to a room summery with pinks and blues and pale watery green, he found Phoebe kneeling at her sister’s feet, and Mina slumped in a blue velvet chair. Her pale blue jeans and white blouse were splattered with deep, gaudy red, huge glistening beads of coloured glass rolled around her bare feet, and, trampled into a dark puddle on the green carpet, he saw a few long strands of gold. Her face was almost hidden by the swing of beautiful hair, and below wads of cloth binding her wrists, blood oozed, dripping slowly from the ends of her fingers.

  ‘I called an ambulance,’ Phoebe said through her tears. ‘I rang, but you weren’t there.’

  ‘How bad is it?’ Shamefully relieved the blood sacrifice was not hers, he crouched down, and lifted the limp hands in his own. Mina stirred, wincing with pain.

  ‘There’s so much blood!’ Phoebe’s voice was awe struck. ‘The bathroom looks like a slaughterhouse.’

  He pushed Mina’s hair over her shoulders and away from her face, looking into her half-closed eyes.


  Her skin was marble white, a bluishness seeping into the shadows beneath her eyes. She cried like a stricken animal when he lifted her arms above her head to staunch the flow of blood, and he saw himself in the abattoir, draining a carcase. ‘When did she do it?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ More tears coursed down Phoebe’s cheeks, in the tracks of others. ‘I was writing. Clyde went soon after I spoke to you, and I thought I heard her go to the bathroom, but I’m not sure when, then Tom started wailing. He was on the stairs, and wouldn’t come down, so I went up. She’d locked herself in, and she wouldn’t answer. It took me ages to break the door open.’ She wiped a hand across her face, smearing her skin with her sister’s blood. ‘And I had to use her beads for a tourniquet. I couldn’t find anything else.’

  ‘Why?’ McKenna asked helplessly, feeling Mina’s blood on his own hands. ‘Why did she do it?’

  As the ambulance siren wailed outside, Phoebe scrambled to her feet, ungainly and noisy, and ran downstairs, leaving him alone with Mina. Shallow breaths rattled in her throat, and her flesh was beginning to chill.

  He stood aside for the paramedics, his arm around Phoebe’s shoulders, then followed the stretchered body downstairs, Phoebe at his heels. Now on the landing window ledge, the cat was stippled with colour.

  ‘What shall I do?’ Phoebe asked, her own breath rasping.

  ‘I’ll take you to the hospital. How can we let your mother know? Has she got a mobile phone?’

  ‘She can’t remember how to use it, so it’s never switched on.’

  10

  Diana Bradshaw came instead of Edith, and, stripped of her garb of office, had no more distinction, McKenna thought, than any woman of indeterminate years he might pass in the street, and was no less inept in the face of near disaster. In a side room in the casualty department, she and Phoebe huddled together, while he paced the floor.

  ‘She’s done it before,’ Phoebe offered. ‘She took an overdose, but I’m not supposed to know.’

  ‘Why on earth should she do that?’ Diana asked. ‘She’s got everything to look forward to.’

  ‘Because she’s not normal!’ Phoebe snapped. ‘So even if she has got everything to look forward to, she won’t see it that way.’ She jumped up and smoothed her clothes, then her face blanched as she saw the bloodstains on her own garments, and she fell back into her seat. ‘Mama won’t know what to do,’ she said dully. ‘She’ll go back on her pills.’ Then she swore, as her mother and sister had done. ‘Minnie’s a selfish, stupid bitch! She doesn’t care who she hurts!’

  ‘Perhaps she cares too much,’ McKenna said, something falling into place of its own accord amid the chaos left over from Ned’s death. ‘Perhaps she’s running away from the harm she’s done, or even trying to make sure she does no more.’

  He went outside into the stultifying heat of an August afternoon turned rancid and enervating. Leaning against the nobbled brick wall, he lit a cigarette, and ordered the arrest of Jason Lloyd, then smoked the cigarette to its tip, thinking of the two lovely young women shut inside the building behind him, both beguiled by some guilt or arcane need into a letting of their own life blood.

  He lit another cigarette and took out his mobile telephone to dial Iolo Williams’s number, waiting an age for an answer.

  ‘Yes? Who is this?’ The voice was slurred and despondent.

  ‘Michael McKenna, and I’m at the hospital, where the doctors are trying to save your daughter’s life. She cut her wrists.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said —’

  ‘Why should she want to do that?’ A whine crept into his voice. ‘Why cause such a fuss?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ McKenna said. ‘Are you going to come?’

  ‘Me? Why? What good would that do? Edith’ll cope.’

  ‘Like she’s always done? She certainly backed a loser with you, didn’t she?’

  ‘Talk’s cheap,’ Williams commented, and McKenna heard the chink of glass against tooth.

  ‘Drinking again, Professor?’

  ‘Bullying people again, Chief Inspector? Why don’t you mind your own sodding business? You’d drive a bloody saint to drink!’ There was a pause, a deep intake of breath, then he said, the whine back in his voice: ‘I’ll wait for my wife to come home. She’ll decide what’s to be done. She knows Mina best.’

  ‘Isn’t she back from her shopping spree yet?’ McKenna asked. ‘She spends an awful lot of your money, doesn’t she?’ He, too, paused. ‘One of my officers keeps asking me how you support your life-style, and I must confess I’m at a loss for an answer.’

  ‘Yes, and he had the sodding cheek to ask me!’ Williams snarled. ‘Bastards! What the hell’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘Maybe nothing, but on the other hand, maybe a lot. It all depends.’

  ‘On what? Who’s next in line for persecution?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Don’t waste your time! I’m up to my bloody neck in debt, and sinking fast! I’ve got problems you’ve never even dreamed of.’

  ‘You’ll survive, as long as the currency of your reputation doesn’t suffer the devaluation it warrants,’ McKenna commented. ‘But you don’t disappoint, do you?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I rang out of courtesy, to tell you about your daughter, even though I didn’t expect you to break the habit of a lifetime by showing compassion. As I said, you don’t disappoint.’ He disconnected before the other man could answer, then threw his cigarette to the ground and stamped its fire to oblivion.

  *

  Phoebe and Diana seemed suspended in the same time in which he had left them.

  ‘There’s no news yet,’ Diana said quietly.

  ‘There won’t be, will there?’ Phoebe added. ‘He was only gone fifteen minutes.’ She turned her hands this way and that, scrutinizing their shape and colours, then held them palms up, and bent forward, peering at the matrix of veins on her wrists.

  ‘What is it, dear?’ Diana asked. ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘I’m trying to imagine the pain,’ Phoebe told her, and drew her nails viciously across the thin skin on her wrist.

  Diana lurched away towards the toilets.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Phoebe added, as if there had been no interruption. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  Sitting beside her, McKenna took the clawing fingers in his own.

  ‘I should pity her, shouldn’t I?’ Phoebe asked. ‘She was probably trying to write what she feels, the way I can, but she had to do it with a razor. She used Uncle Ned’s cut throat, the one his father left him. She must have pinched it from his room, and she’s made such a mess of the handle. It’s mother of pearl, and the blood soaked right in. Will it clean off, d’you think?’

  ‘I expect so,’ McKenna said.

  She began to fidget. ‘Will you take me home? I’ve got to clean the bathroom before Mama gets back. I couldn’t bear her to see it like that, especially if Tom’s in there, wallowing. He used to lick off the blood when I fell and cut my knees.’

  ‘Is there no way of contacting her? Has Annie got a mobile?’

  Phoebe shook her head, wisps of hair sticking to her cheeks.

  ‘What time will they be back?’

  She shrugged wearily. ‘Sixish? What time is it now?’

  ‘Ten past four.’ McKenna glanced at the wall clock, and rose. ‘Wait here while I find Mrs Bradshaw.’

  He roamed the unit, peering into curtained bays, and was about to ask a nurse to check the women’s toilets when he found her in a small office, beside a desk stacked with X-ray films and cartons of syringes.

  ‘I’ve seen her,’ she said. ‘They’ve almost finished stitching her up.’ Her eyes were bemused. ‘It’s her, you know. I said I’d know her if I ever saw her again.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Mina Harris.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She’s the girl who sprayed my car with brake fluid.’

  *

  Sutured and banda
ged, Mina was moved to a small ward overlooking the expressway which swept through a man-made ravine behind the city. Phoebe at his side, McKenna looked at the tangled disarray of Mina’s wondrous hair, and the ugly little ear on show to the world, then Phoebe rearranged the hair, covering the ear and creating new shadows on the grey skin. Under the closed lids, Mina’s eyes moved sluggishly.

  ‘Has she been put to sleep?’ Phoebe asked the young nurse fiddling with clips and bags and tubes.

  ‘She had a local anaesthetic,’ the girl said. ‘While they stitched her wrists.’

  ‘Doesn’t she need pain-killers?’ Phoebe nagged. ‘Won’t she be hurting dreadfully?’

  The nurse nodded. ‘I expect so.’ Giving the apparatus one final tweak, she moved away. ‘So maybe she’ll think twice next time.’

  *

  Torn between mother and sister, Phoebe decided Edith’s need was greater and went home with Diana, leaving McKenna to watch over the would-be suicide, who slept fitfully, mouth slightly open. Through the window beyond her bed, he watched an endless stream of cars, trucks and vans on the road below, and a dirty mist of exhaust fumes creeping slowly up the hillside to join the shadow falling behind the building as the sun dropped towards the horizon. He went outside several times to smoke hurried cigarettes and make short telephone calls, but returned anxiously to his post, only once pausing at the WRVS canteen for a cup of strong tea.

  Drowsing in his chair, he was dragged awake by a whimpering, as Mina struggled wildly to free herself from the sheet over her chest and the drip fastened into the back of her hand.

  ‘Don’t!’ He held her flailing arms, and felt the heat and chill and tremors in her flesh. ‘You’ll hurt yourself even more.’