In Guilty Night

by Alison Taylor

  McKenna rose. ‘If that’s what you want. We’ll be back.’

  ‘Don’t you threaten me with your snide remarks! Wait ’til Mr Hogg finds out!’

  ‘There are limits to what can be hidden indefinitely, Mrs Hogg, however friendly you are with Councillor Elis.’

  Striding down a path slippery with frost, McKenna heard the front door slammed violently. Janet shivered, fumbling with the car door. ‘Bitch!’ she muttered. ‘Bloody bitch!’

  Thinking only of warmth and shelter and food in his belly to quell hunger gnawing at his innards like rats, Gary Hughes sat beneath the road deck which swooped over two massive stone lions, once guardians of the entrance to the long-vanished tubes of Britannia Bridge. Back against a concrete stanchion, knees hunched up to his chest, his whole body trembled with terrible cold. If he picked up his bag and walked the couple of miles back home, his mother would ask no questions, for since his return from Blodwel, instinct warned she might learn what no mother ever wished to know. She cared for his physical needs, letting blind hope care for the rest, while Gary despaired of the dreadful wounding words thrown in her face which built themselves into a barrier too huge for mother or son to surmount. Her plea for help brought the social workers, but instead of demolishing the barrier, they erected their own edifice around the family remnants, a prison from which no one could escape. Idly, he wondered if the moisture on his cheeks was icy mist curling up from the dark foul waters of Menai Strait, or the tears of a child wanting his mother’s arms.

  Rhiannon replaced the telephone receiver, disconnecting the number before it rang out. She sat in a silk-upholstered chair, silk-embroidered slippers on her thin elegant feet, and about her body, a peignoir of ice-grey silk chiffon, dyed marabou feathers frosting hem and cuffs and whispering with each breath she drew. She pulled suddenly at the neck of the fragile garment, disrupting its graceful silhouette. The slam of a door disrupted the quietness of the house. Mari, she thought, unable to sleep, restless with some misery or guilt. And what undermined her own resignation? Not the misery grown supple and familiar as the fingers which punched out the stream of numbers once more, or the guilt fostered out of duty. Again, she dropped the receiver before the number connected, contemplating the marriage she had come to view as love in altered circumstances, asking herself where that love ended and disgust began.

  Mandy Minx vomited twice more during the night, crawling on all fours, from the room she shared with another girl, along scuff-scarred lino tiles to the lavatory. Her retching brought company the second time. Not the room-mate, who cowered under her quilt feigning sleep, but her own Mr Luvvyduvvy, who stood by the cubicle door, wrinkling his nose at the stench, his eyes on the young buttocks firm beneath the thin pyjama trousers.

  ‘You all right?’ he ventured, when the retching abated. Mandy leaned over the lavatory bowl, fingers clenching the rim, sweat-dark hair brushing the porcelain, a stream of bloody spittle hanging from her chin.

  ‘You’d best get back to bed.’

  He moved to take her arm, and she wrenched away, rolling into the corner, one arm raised to ward off violence, the other wrapped about her body, comforting pain. Her eyes glittered with terror.

  ‘Hey!’ He jerked upright, suddenly recalling the long minutes Mandy had spent in the Hoggs’ flat after the police left, and before she reeled up to her room. ‘Don’t make a row. You’ll wake everybody up, then Mrs Hogg’ll be after you.’

  Mandy shivered so violently the cistern rattled. He fidgeted, despairing of his ability to deal with the girl who crouched and glared like a wild animal. How did he come to be in this place in the dead hours of a dark November night? What skills could control these alien beings with the same brash fearlessness displayed by Ronald Hogg and his wife? Neither would stand inept, as he did, but would make this crazy child return to her bed, so that sleep might erase a little more of the terrifying time in this enclosed world, where he and his colleagues contained children threatening devastation, who functioned like wolf-packs or marauding cybernauts from a time beyond nuclear holocaust.

  Would he be standing thus in four hours’ time, trapped by the vixenish creature crouched beside the lavatory, when Doris Hogg slip-slapped along the upstairs corridors in her bedroom slippers, dressing-gown trailing? Cook and cleaners would be at work, gossiping in hushed voices, clattering pans and banging metal buckets, swishing raggy stinking mops back and forth through rooms and corridors, leaving dirty shreds of rust-stained cotton under chair legs and door-frames and cupboards. The smell of frying eggs would seep through walls and floors, overlaying the other smell infesting every nook and cranny of the building. Fear coursed through his body like icy water when he thought of being found by Doris Hogg, of being found so wanting as she came upon them, he scratching at this thin beard, the wild-eyed girl wedged between wall and lavatory, blood spittle smeared over her face.

  One hand rested now on the lavatory rim, the other slowly massaged belly and midriff, and violence contorted her face as he watched. She rolled over, body convulsing, and retched yet again, and he saw a dark stain seeping down her pyjama leg.

  6

  ‘I don’t think they’re happily married,’ Dewi insisted. ‘What’ve they got in common? He’s taken up with horses and making money, and when she’s not being a big shot on the county council, she’s entertaining royalty or the like.’

  Janet’s mouth hardened with irritation. ‘People shouldn’t live in each other’s pocket just because they’re married. Separate interests are healthier.’

  ‘Jack Tuttle didn’t think so when his wife went on holiday without him and the girls. And Mr McKenna left Madame Denise ’cos they’ve got nothing in common. That one’s got more side to her than Elis and his wife put together.’

  ‘Gossiping’s very unseemly in a young man.’ Janet sniffed. ‘My parents are very happy, because they trust each other, and I imagine the Elises are the same.’

  ‘Your parents are happily keeping up appearances, for the benefit of your father’s flock.’

  ‘My parents have nothing to hide!’ Janet snapped. ‘Don’t judge everyone by your own nasty council-house standards!’

  ‘Oh, get real! You live in bloody fairyland half the time.’ He thrust a sheet of paper in front of her. ‘Seen this, Miss Clever-Clogs? Elis had a lady passenger when Traffic stopped him on Port Dinorwic bypass.’

  ‘So what? It was probably his wife.’

  ‘We’ve got to be careful,’ Owen Griffiths said. ‘I don’t hold with fifteen-year-olds on a pub crawl any more than you do, but Doris Hogg said she didn’t want the girl out on her own.’

  ‘Expressing our disapproval in writing would give Mr and Mrs Hogg something to wave under the nose of the next social worker who suggests unsupervised jaunts,’ McKenna pointed out.

  ‘You expect me to swallow that? You’d no more help those two than cut your own throat.’

  ‘Mandy told Janet most of the kids go out alone, Arwel Thomas, deceased, and Gary Hughes, whereabouts unknown, included.’ McKenna fidgeted with his lighter. ‘We should use that information to put pressure on Blodwel. What other lies have they told? We’re more than entitled to stress the risk to these kids. One’s already dead, after all.’

  ‘What else did Mandy say?’

  ‘This and that. She wasn’t very coherent. She and other girls clean Hogg’s flat and his house near Bethesda, and the boys do gardening and general donkey work, presumably as part of the rehabilitation package. Punishment routines include cutting grass with nail scissors and scrubbing floors with a toothbrush.’

  ‘She said all this last night, when she was drunk? She could’ve been romancing, or exaggerating things out of all proportion to get herself off the hook, and make you feel sorry for her.’

  ‘Unless we talk to her when she’s not in her cups, without Ron’s storm-troopers breathing down our neck, we’ll never know.’

  ‘How’s the family?’ McKenna asked.

  Slumped in the chair opposite McKe
nna’s desk, Jack yawned. ‘I thought kids of their age could be left to their own devices once in a while, so you can get on with being married.’ He coughed. ‘I suppose it’s fallout of a kind. Would you believe they cried during the night, and Em rushed in, just like when they were babies? She stayed there, as well.’ He frowned at McKenna. ‘I’m bloody fed up with these youngsters. Dewi Prys and Janet Evans are squabbling again. Don’t they get on your nerves?’

  ‘Janet’s too pushy and competitive for Dewi’s liking, and too well educated. They’re jealous of each other.’

  Jack smiled briefly. ‘He’s a closet chauvinist. He likes his women seen and not heard.’

  ‘Modern woman can be rather daunting. You weren’t happy when Emma started flexing her muscles.’

  Jack shifted in his seat. ‘That’s water under the bridge, and maybe I over-reacted. It was only a holiday.’

  ‘Does Emma know you’ve repented?’

  ‘She knows without being told, via intuition and instinct, like all women. It’s a shame Janet lets reason get in the way so often. She’s rowing Dewi because his instincts say things in the Bedd y Cor garden are far from rosy. According to the Traffic report on Elis’s speeding jaunt, he had a woman passenger. A blonde, which Rhiannon isn’t, and it was gone midnight when he was stopped.’

  ‘Elis’s kind don’t need to wait for night to hide their mischief.’

  ‘But they will. It’s an instinct, isn’t it? And there was more mischief last night. Somebody broke into a railway maintenance hut near Treborth. I sent Janet to see the Transport police, to keep her out of mischief for a bit.’

  ‘Anything missing?’

  ‘They didn’t say.’

  ‘She can go to Blodwel later, to ask after Mandy.’

  Eifion Roberts dropped a thick buckram-bound book on McKenna’s desk. ‘A translation of Lombroso’s thesis on the inevitability of the criminal type.’ He dropped a thin paper-bound volume on top. ‘And essays on the inevitability of child abuse, the even greater inevitability of the cover-up, from a European organization researching backlash, backlash being what folk upsetting the status quo can expect.’ He squinted at his companion. ‘So you know what’s in store, not that you give a monkey’s.’

  ‘Early retirement is the worst I could expect. I wouldn’t be the first.’

  ‘You’d likely be the first stuck with your principles rather than a load of shit.’ Roberts grinned. ‘Haven’t you found any ex-social workers booted out for criticizing Hogg’s notions of childcare?’

  ‘Social Services keep enemies as well as friends close by.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to rely on the suffering little children, like that poor girl with the Hutchinson’s teeth. They’re the ruinous inheritance of congenital syphilis. Lombroso would’ve loved her.’ Dr Roberts leaned back on the chair, lifting its front legs from the floor, rocking gently. ‘Why not capitalize on things?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Teenage girls and men, teenage boys and women. Seduction rather than competition is the probability. That girl wasn’t half giving you the glad-eye last night.’

  ‘More fool you!’ Doris said. ‘You’ll learn.’

  Beyond the office window, Robert Lovell saw a crumpled sheet of newspaper, an empty crisp packet and battered polystyrene food tray encroaching on Blodwel territory, harried by a mean wind risen off the mountains and already scouring pavement and flagstones of the damp clinging like grease for days past. He stifled a yawn, feeling again the urgency in his bladder, a heaviness borne not of water but of hours of tension and fatigue.

  ‘She was ill, Mrs Hogg. I could hardly leave her alone.’

  ‘As I said, you’ll learn. We’re not nursemaids. She can get herself drunk, so she can take the consquences.’ She frowned. ‘You’re no use to us if you’re too tired to do your job, are you? Fancy staying up all night with the likes of her.’

  ‘I don’t have your experience.’ He squeezed his thighs together, staunching the terror which sprang from the prospect of excusing his inadequacies to this woman’s husband, who was yet to emerge from their flat. He strained his ears, like an animal to the hunter. ‘I really thought she was ill. She’s started her period.’

  ‘That’s what’s wrong, then. She’s always sick, drunk or not.’

  ‘I marked her file. Was that right? I haven’t been shown.’

  ‘Female staff do it,’ Doris said. ‘Girls don’t like telling men that sort of thing.’

  ‘And I had to give her sanitary pads.’

  ‘How many? I’ll have to mark the stock book.’

  ‘How many?’ His pale face flushed, his hands trembled. ‘I – I gave her a packet.’

  ‘You’ll learn about that as well.’ She looked up, eyes glittery in the cold morning light. ‘If we let you stay on after the trial period.’ She reached for a large file from the shelf above the desk, breasts unbridled on the pages of the log book from which she had read of the night’s events. ‘They get three pads a day. If they have a whole packet, they don’t have to ask, and we don’t know if they’re on or not, so we wouldn’t know if they’d got themselves in trouble.’ She opened the file, turning its pages slowly. ‘And if I don’t get the packet back, the others’ll try it on.’

  ‘I noticed—’ He coughed, pushing his fist against his teeth to quell the noise.

  ‘Yes?’ Doris asked. ‘What did you notice?’

  ‘She had a period just over a week ago.’ He coughed again. ‘Shouldn’t she see the doctor? Having periods so often can’t be good for her.’

  ‘It’s her age. She saw the doctor when she came here.’ She picked up a biro and marked the stock file, snapping it shut. ‘The drink brought it on again. She was probably drinking gin.’

  ‘She said she had a lot of pain,’ he ventured. ‘She was sort of clutching herself.’

  ‘Oh, she’s really got your sympathy, hasn’t she? Has she said somebody hit her yet?’ Doris sniggered. ‘You want to watch yourself, because she might say you touched her up, and you can’t prove you didn’t. Wicked lies come easy to her sort. Like I said, you’ve a lot to learn.’

  ‘I wasn’t allowed to see Mandy Minx, sir. She’s been sick all night, keeping the staff from their cosy beds, causing no end of inconvenience. My heart bleeds!’ Janet stood before Jack’s desk, eyes bright with anger. ‘And I object to doing the work of British Transport Police. The railway and everything to do with it is their business.’

  ‘Not if it might impinge on our territory, as you well know.’

  ‘Somebody else could’ve gone. I’m assigned to a murder investigation, not a piddling little break-in at a railway hut!’

  Jack sighed. ‘Do stop bellyaching, Janet, and stop squabbling with Dewi Prys. You aren’t doing yourself any favours.’

  ‘He’s a bloody know-it-all!’

  ‘I can’t see much to choose between you in that respect.’

  Anger and embarrassment reddened her cheeks.

  Jack yawned. ‘We’re all on edge, with one thing and another. Mr McKenna’s already commented about personal feelings, and you’re lucky he missed you and Prys this morning. Don’t push your luck, because he won’t stand for any nonsense, and you might find yourself doing something a lot less career-enhancing than investigating burglaries at railway huts.’

  ‘It wasn’t a burglary. Someone just dossed there for the night.’

  ‘No harm done then, is there?’

  ‘What’s Mandy Minx’s proper name?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Jones, probably,’ Dewi said. ‘Look on the reports we made at Blodwel. She’s named for her mam, ’cos she’s known for putting it about. Can’t get enough, so they say, like a minx, whatever sort of animal that is.’

  McKenna grinned. ‘“Mink”, you idiot! Not “minx”.’

  ‘She looks like a rodent with those teeth, doesn’t she?’ Dewi shuddered delicately. ‘I wouldn’t fancy kissing her.’

  McKenna hid behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, Eifion Roberts�
��s precocious image of the girl acquiring more disturbing presence. ‘Where’s Darren Pritchard?’

  ‘A privately run lock-up near Abergavenny. The government’s selling off childcare as well as prisons and everything else. Darren’s mam was favoured with a visit from Social Services yesterday,’ Dewi said. ‘Who’s going to see him? You or Mr Tuttle? You’d need a driver, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Nobody’s going unless Superintendent Griffiths agrees, and there must still be trains, despite the drawbacks of rail franchise.’

  ‘Cardiff takes nearly a day, then you’d have to get from Cardiff to Abergavenny, and from Abergavenny to wherever, and if you took all that time getting there, you might find Darren spirited elsewhere.’

  ‘So he said: “Why can’t you telephone, and save a lot of money and trouble?”’ Jack reported. ‘Since when did a superintendent need permission to authorize a visit to South Wales?’

  ‘He’s anxious about encroaching on Social Services’ territory,’ McKenna said. ‘Among other things. Hogg’s already made one complaint, which he can only ignore so long.’

  ‘That was a set-up, to get us off his back.’

  ‘D’you want a trip to Abergavenny, then? That would warrant a complaint.’

  ‘Send Janet. She could try out her new car.’

  ‘I didn’t know she had one.’

  ‘A posh French 2.0 litre in a rather fetching metallic blue. They’re not cheap.’

  ‘Has Dewi seen it yet?’

  ‘I would imagine so, from the atmosphere between them. It’s parked in the yard next to that clapped-out thing he drives.’

  ‘He can’t afford anything else. He’s been the breadwinner since his dad was made redundant.’

  ‘Lucky Janet, then.’

  McKenna massaged his arm, eyeing Jack. ‘I hope she’s not taken over first place on your hit-list.’

  ‘I don’t have a hit-list, but I had to haul her over the coals earlier. She as good as said a bit of leg-work isn’t good enough for her any longer.’