In Guilty Night

by Alison Taylor

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Complaints. Violence.’ Rhiannon picked up her cup, and Mari reached forward for her own. ‘And to being held responsible for everything the children might do. It’s an impossible job.’

  ‘Have there been complaints about Blodwel?’

  ‘I understand a boy alleged ill-treatment before he went to juvenile custody for a string of offences.’

  ‘Who investigated the complaint?’

  ‘The director assured the committee the complaints were malicious, and we were happy to support his decision not to investigate.’

  ‘Might that not be a little shortsighted, Mrs Elis? Councillors hold the legal responsibility, and endorsing such a decision might appear a conspiracy to outsiders.’

  ‘The director is well able to judge a situation and its implications.’

  Mari coughed suddenly, slopping coffee on her hand, and began her wailing again. Rhiannon pulled a handful of tissues from the box, dabbing at the reddened skin, soothing the girl’s distress.

  Janet stood up. ‘You need cold water on that, Mari. Let’s go to the kitchen.’ She pulled the girl to her feet, hurrying her from the room. Standing beside her at the kitchen sink, holding the trembling hand under the spurting tap, Janet felt a feverish trembling course through the girl’s whole body. ‘If you’ve anything to tell me, Mari, for God’s sake do it!’

  Mari wrenched herself away, and fled the room.

  ‘The elected members on most councils defer to the experts in their employment,’ McKenna said. ‘They’re usually happy to believe what those experts tell them. I’m more interested in what you said that made Mari weep so bitterly.’

  Janet lit a cigarette. ‘She had nothing more to say about Arwel and his parents, so I asked about Carol, and she said Carol’s a bloody slag, and burst into tears. Then Rhiannon walked in. Mari says she’s never heard of Gary Hughes. Neither has Rhiannon. I thought of asking her where Hogg dumped those other kids, but she might’ve thrown a wobbler.’

  ‘As well you didn’t.’ McKenna frowned. ‘When did Elis go away? He said nothing to me.’

  ‘He’d need to go further than Germany if he wanted to leg it properly. Rhiannon said he’s buying a horse. I asked her how she got on with Arwel, but she didn’t know him well. She and Elis have quite separate interests, and as horses aren’t one of hers, Arwel wasn’t either, though she’d noticed he was always hungry, always in the kitchen, cadging stuff off Mari and the cook. Those kids we saw last night looked half-starved, didn’t they? And Dr Roberts found Arwel’s stomach virtually empty.’

  ‘About the Blodwel children, Janet.’

  ‘For some odd reason, they call the redhead with the funny teeth Mandy Minx,’ Janet said. ‘And the one with a bad perm and huge breasts is pregnant. Dilys Roberts was furious when she told me.’

  ‘Hogg has made a complaint, on behalf of the staff, claiming you and Dewi tried to make them leave you alone with the children.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’

  ‘He feels we may be subjecting Blodwel to unreasonable pressure, and refusing to accept that Arwel’s death is entirely unrelated to his placement there. Dewi didn’t help by ringing up Doris at midnight.’

  Janet flushed. ‘I’m sure our hierarchy can find somebody with two blind eyes and two deaf ears to take charge of the investigation. They could ask for volunteers at the next Lodge meeting.’

  ‘Have a care, Janet,’ McKenna warned. ‘Your career’s just beginning. Upset the wrong people now, and you’ll retire a constable.’

  ‘I’ll resign rather than compromise my conscience!’

  ‘Will you, though? I’ve seen many young officers strut the moral high-ground, only to accommodate their scruples and return to earth after a few enforced stumbles.’ Pulling a cigarette from the open packet on the desk, he added, ‘Protecting the institutional body always outweighs protecting the individual. Defective components have to be removed, much as a gangrenous limb is amputated.’

  ‘You don’t believe that.’

  ‘I may be the exception necessary to prove the rule. I may not care to be an insider. I may be abnormal. I probably am. Robert Oppenheimer believed all men of goodwill desire the approval of their colleagues.’

  ‘He invented the nuclear bomb, didn’t he?’ Janet frowned. ‘So maybe the sort of approval he talked about ends in death and devastation.’

  ‘Where are they all?’ Griffiths asked, standing at the door of McKenna’s office, in the shadow of an early twilight. ‘The CID office is empty, and I can’t find Jack Tuttle.’

  ‘I sent Jack home to get some sleep before the twins go on the rampage again. The others are traipsing round town asking questions, trying to find Gary Hughes, and whoever wasted Arwel Thomas.’

  ‘You shouldn’t use Americanisms like “wasted”. Not that it doesn’t sum up what happened to Arwel.’ Griffiths sat down, hands on knees. ‘Seen Elis again yet?’

  ‘He’s done a bunk to Germany.’

  ‘I hope he hasn’t. Extradition’s a pain in the arse.’

  ‘We’ll know when he doesn’t come back.’

  ‘In my experience, absconding’s an effect, not a cause. Jack knows that, doesn’t he? I wish we could be more sure why children go from Blodwel with such depressing regularity.’

  ‘What’s happening with Hogg’s complaint?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘It’s metaphorically under my bum for now.’ Griffiths smiled. ‘For as long as I can keep it there.’

  ‘If you’d like to create a diversion, you could make a complaint on our behalf,’ McKenna said. ‘Blodwel has sash windows with metal and plastic frames and perspex glazing, and the top sashes can’t be opened more than a couple of inches because wood blocks have been nailed underneath on the outside. I didn’t get a chance to examine the fire exits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those are locked or blocked.’

  ‘That’s very serious. I’ll have to inform the chief fire officer right away, won’t I?’

  Looking at the photograph provided by Mrs Hughes, McKenna decided Gary was another pretty boy, wholly without Arwel’s incandescent loveliness, but still pretty enough, although more of a man and less of a boy, his features already hardening into maturity. He wore a coquettish look, a heavy gold ring in one ear, his curly brown hair artfully styled to make the most of his face. Bedd y Cor and its leaf shroud reminded McKenna of one poem written in the fourteenth century. Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote too of the Gary Hughes of his day, calling him a pale-faced flirt of a boy with a lady’s hair upon his head. McKenna prayed this boy flirted with nothing more than the power of his youth, but putting away the image in the newly opened file, he realized how fiercely that power invited its own extinction.

  ‘Saw Dai Skunk,’ Dewi told McKenna. ‘Leaning against the wall by Valla’s chippy at the bottom of High Street.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Waiting for the Grim Reaper most probably.’

  ‘I daresay he won’t have long to wait.’

  ‘One of Nain’s friends is fed up waiting to find out what’s happened to her grandson. He was shifted from Blodwel the other day without a word, and sent to South Wales. He’s called Darren Pritchard.’

  ‘Where in South Wales?’

  ‘Dunno yet. We’ll find out. I had the impression we won’t be shown the door by folk who’ve had kids in Blodwel, ’cos they reckon Hogg needs sorting. The local paper’s planning a big spread about kids running away and getting killed, and some TV reporter’s been talking to the locals and filming interviews.’ Dewi paused. ‘I get the feeling Blodwel’s near internal collapse, so too much of the wrong sort of attention could be the last straw, couldn’t it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t lay odds. Any news about Gary?’

  ‘I waylaid a few kids outside school, but nobody wanted to talk about him.’

  ‘We’d better see his mother again.’ McKenna stood up. ‘She must be distraught. The Tuttles were beside themselves.’

  ‘She’s nobody to turn to, has
she?’ Dewi said. ‘Still, you don’t need to credit her with proper feelings, ’cos she lives in a shitty hole and looks like she doesn’t deserve any better. D’you think social workers’d think twice about what they do to people if someone snatched their own kids and put them in Blodwel?’

  ‘Needing social work is an admission of inadequacy, so it’s a contradiction in terms to credit clients with normal feelings or perceptions.’ McKenna walked downstairs, Dewi in his wake. ‘Social workers are agents of social control, employed to keep the unruly hordes in some kind of order. Notably, the poor unruly hordes, which is why people fall over themselves to accommodate the likes of Elis.’ He shivered as freezing night air crept around his ankles, pulled a scarf high around his neck, and shivered again.

  Dewi looked up at a sky milky with cloud, the moon a pale hazy disc. ‘It’s full moon tonight. It could get warmer.’

  ‘It could get colder, too,’ McKenna said. ‘Always expect the worst, then you’ll have such lovely surprises when it fails to arrive.’

  Parking in the only space available, behind a battered Ford Escort half on the pavement, Eifion Roberts puffed and panted up the hill towards McKenna’s house, and saw Denise McKenna, snug in a new sheepskin coat, unlocking the door of her own brand new car. She ignored him, driving off with a flourish of tyres and plumes of exhaust fumes, her pale face and gilded hair luminous in the dashboard light.

  ‘Your wife looks very glamorous,’ he said, as McKenna closed the front door. ‘Very cosily posh in her new coat. An early Yuletide gift from her admirer, d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t care to ask.’

  ‘Did you care to ask if she knows Elis?’ Roberts sat on the chesterfield, drawing a protest from the cat, a louder one from the springs, holding his hands to the fire.

  ‘He doesn’t mix socially.’

  ‘Won’t be much use as Lord Lieutenant then, unless Councillor Rhiannon does enough mixing for both of them. Stupid woman! Fancy letting herself be fobbed off over that Hogg and his nasty habits.’

  McKenna hovered over him. ‘D’you want anything in particular? Not to be churlish, but I’m tired. No one had much sleep last night.’

  ‘I won’t keep you from your lonely bed too long.’ Roberts eyed the sling on McKenna’s arm. ‘You want to get that off before the circulation seizes up, never mind the muscles.’

  ‘The hospital said a week. The ligaments were badly wrenched.’

  ‘They’ll be healing.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  McKenna bit his lips to quell a screech of pain as the pathologist removed the sling, pulled the stiffened arm straight, and began a vigorous massage from wrist to shoulder and across the back of the neck.

  ‘You’re all knotted up,’ he commented, kneading and pummelling, digging thumbs into the hollows beneath McKenna’s shoulder-blades. ‘I rang the lab today. Arwel’s blood tests aren’t ready, but a good DNA profile came from the semen traces in the body. What about the site search?’

  ‘Hundreds of tyre tracks,’ McKenna said, words punctuated by the rhythms of Eifion Roberts’s hands. ‘Enough litter and other rubbish to silt up Menai Strait.’ He coughed. ‘No sign of Arwel’s clothes, or anything else useful. How long will the blood tests be?’ His own blood began to course through atrophied muscle and tissue.

  ‘A few days.’ Roberts held McKenna’s arm at the elbow and gently rotated the shoulder. ‘Are you making any progress?’

  ‘We’re eating our way through the tartine de merde.’ McKenna winced. ‘Had another big slice today.’

  ‘What’s a tartine de merde?’

  ‘In polite terms, a manure pie. Voltaire said—’

  ‘Voltaire!’ Dr Roberts squeezed McKenna’s upper arm and pushed the humerus into the socket. ‘You’ve a head full of other folks’ words. Have you no thoughts of your own?’

  ‘You’re hurting!’

  Roberts blithely continued his manipulations. ‘It’s all very well citing others, but Voltaire wasn’t necessarily always right because he was Voltaire, even though he wasn’t far wrong about the English shooting an admiral from time to time to keep the others in line.’ He peered down at McKenna. ‘You tend to upset the folk with the big guns a bit too often.’

  ‘We’re in Wales.’

  ‘I don’t recall the Welsh ever being slow to borrow when it suits. You should watch your back.’

  Hands deep in pockets, face shrouded by a thick scarf, Janet traipsed slowly along the High Street, irritable and despondent, precious off-duty hours wasted in pursuit of local youths frittering away time in bars and on street corners. She asked about Gary Hughes and Arwel Thomas and Darren Pritchard, about Blodwel and its master, and lost count of the faces staring blankly, mouths shut like traps, the backs insolently turned.

  Bright lights swagged around the porch of The Black Spaniard bar promised warmth at least. Crossing the road, she was almost felled by two girls lurching on to the pavement, holding each other, giggling and snorting. The brassy-haired hussy in a tiny skirt, her legs pimply with cold, pushed past in a draught of cheap perfume and expensive liquor. Cloudy hair stippled purple and gold and pink by the lights, lipstick staining her pointed teeth; the other girl simply gaped.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Janet demanded, catching her arm. ‘You shouldn’t even be out, never mind pub-crawling.’

  The other girl pushed Janet in the chest. ‘Fuck off!’

  ‘Shut up!’ Mandy whispered. ‘She’s a cop.’

  ‘So?’ The blonde girl stared at Janet. ‘She can still fuck off.’ Shoving and pushing, she tried to pull Mandy from Janet’s grasp. ‘She’s not done nothing, so fucking mind your own fucking business, Miss Piggy!’

  Janet elbowed her away. ‘Shut up, like Mandy says, you loud-mouthed bitch!’

  Anger blazed in eyes fringed with lashes improbably thick and stickily black. ‘One more step,’ Janet warned, ‘and one more word, and you’re done for assault.’

  The girl spat on the ground. Mandy whimpered. ‘Go away, Trace. Please! Go away!’

  Tossing her head, her hair so sticky with spray not a wisp moved, Tracey clattered down the road, stopping after a few yards to gesture obscenely to Janet. Mandy sagged against the wall, snivelling, licking her lips with the huge purple tongue.

  ‘Oh, be quiet!’ Janet snapped. ‘What the hell are you up to?’

  ‘You won’t tell I was in a pub, will you?’ Mandy whined.

  ‘Are you on the run?’

  ‘No!’ Mandy stared, aggrieved.

  ‘I’ll hear the same from Blodwel staff when I take you back, will I?’

  Mandy smirked and licked her lips. ‘Mr Luvvyduvvy said for me to be back by half ten. I’m getting the bus.’

  ‘Who’s “Mr Luvvyduvvy”? Who said you could be out at all?’ Janet demanded. ‘You’re not allowed out without staff.’

  Mandy giggled, drink rising to quench her earlier fears. ‘Who told you that crap?’ She belched and put her fingers to her lips, giggling again. ‘Staff let us out so they can sit in the office jangling.’

  ‘And did they let Arwel go out?’ Janet asked, her voice quiet.

  Mandy slumped further down the wall, her legs beginning to buckle. ‘Him and Gary and him what got sent all the way to South Wales before we got up.’ She giggled again, nodding her head wildly like a silly ornament in the back of a car. ‘Sexy Gary and sexy Arwel came back with lots of fags and lots of cash, and bitchy Doris took it all….’ Her eyelids blinked, and she lurched towards Janet, gulping convulsively. ‘I feel dead sick, miss.’

  Averting her eyes from steaming vomit running in the gutter and swirling against kerbstones glittering with frost, Janet hauled the weeping, whining girl towards the telephone box by the railway bridge. Pushing Mandy inside, she squeezed in behind, and dialled McKenna’s number. A strange voice answered, snappish and male. ‘Who wants him?’

  ‘DC Evans.’

  ‘Thought it might be somebody else,’ Eifion Roberts gr
unted. ‘It’s for you,’ Janet heard him say.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, sir,’ Janet said. ‘I found Mandy on a pub crawl with another girl. She says she’s got permission to be out. What shall I do with her? She’s just been sick all over the road.’

  ‘Has she really?’ McKenna said. ‘Does she look ill?’

  Mandy stared vacantly, face waxen, bluey lips gasping, eyes sunk in shadowy sockets rimmed with navy-blue mascara, the smell of vomit on her breath making Janet heave.

  ‘She looks ghastly, sir. She might’ve had more than drink.’

  ‘Indeed she might,’ McKenna agreed. ‘I’ll send a car to take you to the police station. Dr Roberts won’t mind looking at her.’

  Doris laughed harshly. Robert Lovell, the bearded man, Mandy’s ‘Mr Luvvyduvvy’, stood deferentially at her side, hands clasped in front of his genitals.

  ‘What’s so amusing about a drunken fifteen year old?’ McKenna demanded.

  ‘I told the social worker that girl can’t be trusted, but would she listen? “Mandy’s got to learn to cope with her freedom”, she said. Stupid creature! Those social workers don’t get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to sort out the mess!’

  ‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ McKenna pointed out. ‘Hardly the middle of the night.’

  ‘Decent God-fearing people think so,’ Doris said sanctimoniously. ‘Even if you don’t.’

  Crossing his legs, almost happy with the resurrection of his arm, McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘Contrary to what you and your husband led us to believe, Mandy says children often go out alone.’

  ‘You’ve no right to question her without us there!’

  ‘Her interests couldn’t be more compromised than they already are.’ McKenna blew smoke towards the ceiling, and Lovell tentatively pushed a metal waste bin towards him. ‘Others seem to be similarly compromised by your less-than-responsible attitude towards childcare.’

  ‘Get out!’ Doris shouted, so loudly, so suddenly, Lovell jumped. ‘I’ll ring the director if you don’t. I’ve got his home number. Get out!’