In Guilty Night

by Alison Taylor

  Mari Williamson leaned against the front door of Bedd y Cor, looking over McKenna’s shoulder at night clouds drifting in from the east. The vestiges of a distant winter sun cast drab gold lights on her hair and a little colour to her pale face. Her eyes were red, as if she had wept much and slept little.

  ‘Mr Elis isn’t here.’

  ‘I’d like a word with Mrs Elis. Is she in?’

  The girl shivered, wrapping her arms around her body. ‘It’s still so cold, isn’t it? And so dark and miserable. I hate this time of year. I feel like my shadow’s inside me.’ She lifted her head, staring hard at the man who still waited on the doorstep. ‘You expect horrible things to happen. Like what happened to Arwel.’ Her eyes were as dull as the creeping cloud. ‘Was he really naked? People are saying he froze to death. Is that true?’

  ‘He was already dead, Mari. Someone put his body in the tunnel.’

  ‘Will you find out who did it?’

  Rhiannon came around the side of the house, momentarily unrecognizable in dirty Wellingtons and work clothes. Her dark hair sparkled with frost, and her cheeks glowed pink. ‘I thought I heard voices. What are you thinking of, Mari? You shouldn’t keep Mr McKenna at the door.’

  Breezily hospitable, she almost pushed McKenna into the house, and stood on the mat easing off her Wellingtons. ‘Put these in the boot room, please, and ask Cook to serve coffee.’ The girl took the dirty footwear from her mistress, and walked away, head bowed, feet dragging on the stone slabs. Rhiannon took her visitor through an ornate door into a large luxurious drawing-room. A gigantic log fire spat and crackled in the wide stone hearth.

  ‘Do sit down,’ she said. ‘I was helping with evening stables. There’s such a lot to do once the horses come in for winter. The grooms can’t manage alone, and my husband isn’t back yet.’ She stretched her legs toward the fire, wriggling her toes in their thick woollen socks, incongruous amid the finery in her scruffy clothing. ‘Mari seems to be going to pieces.’ She brushed a stray tendril of hair with the back of a grubby hand. ‘She’ll be better when my husband returns. They get on very well.’

  ‘She asked me about Arwel.’

  ‘Did she?’ Rhiannon asked absently. ‘She’s not as tough as you’d think, just very good at hiding her feelings.’

  ‘That’s not surprising, giving her background.’

  ‘She was sexually abused, in one of the many foster homes.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Her social worker said she made an allegation about a foster brother, and had to be moved. I took it as a veiled warning Mari could pose a threat to my husband or the male staff.’ She smiled fleetingly. ‘But so far, so good.’

  ‘Was the allegation investigated?’

  ‘She was only about eight or nine, and Social Services concluded she was lying. Children in care often allege abuse, out of spite, or just to get attention.’ She stared at the fire, flame shadows dancing on her skin and hair. ‘It’s part of child’s nature to lie, isn’t it? For all sorts of reasons, apart from deception.’

  ‘If your own child said he was abused, would you believe him?’

  ‘We pay for the best possible care.’

  ‘Can you buy that kind of guarantee?’

  ‘I must believe I can, Mr McKenna. I must hope only the likes of Arwel and Mari are vulnerable, otherwise I’d go out of my mind.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Where is she? Why can’t she do as she’s told?’

  She snatched at the door, almost flooring the woman on the other side, who put a huge silver tray on a side table, smiled briefly at McKenna, and left.

  ‘Is your arm better?’ Rhiannon asked brightly, handing coffee to her guest. ‘I noticed the sling’s gone.’

  ‘Much better, thank you.’

  ‘That’s good.’ She smiled, lips tight, as if she intended to permit no further betrayals. ‘Riding’s terribly risky. My husband falls off sometimes, but so far he’s been lucky. One of his friends was killed a few years ago when her horse shied at a lorry.’ She shuddered. ‘It happened so fast. No one could have saved her.’

  ‘Arguably better than a lingering death,’ McKenna observed. ‘Does your son ride? Horses are very therapeutic for the handicapped.’

  ‘I don’t wish to discuss my son,’ Rhiannon said quietly. ‘You don’t mince your words, do you?’

  ‘Dissembling rarely elicits the truth.’

  ‘My husband thinks truth and delusion wear the same mask. If he’s right, how can we tell the difference? Are we all condemned to spiritual and moral wilderness?’ She sighed. ‘As for my son, he’s too disabled to sit on a horse. I don’t expect he can even tell the difference between a horse and himself. He’s little more than a vegetable, but one must dissemble, and say he has “profound learning disability”. So you see, he could never accuse anyone of anything, could he?’

  ‘This cold fair gets in your bones,’ Owen Griffiths said. ‘Shouldn’t you keep your sling on? That injury’ll haunt you every time there’s a change in the weather, like rheumatics.’

  ‘My shoulder’s much better. Eifion gave it a going over.’

  ‘Folk used to say he’s got the power of healing. He should’ve stayed with the living.’

  ‘He’s an excellent pathologist,’ McKenna commented.

  ‘He takes things too much to heart, and he can’t bring folk back from the dead. He’s rattling cages all over the place about this lad.’

  McKenna lit a cigarette, watching smoke drift towards the ceiling. ‘He’s disgusted by the complacency, and the way paid professionals divest themselves of responsibility at the first sign of trouble.’

  ‘We’re only the keepers of law and order. Morality’s for the likes of Janet’s father.’

  ‘The wretchedness of the Blodwel children is everyone’s responsibility.’

  Griffiths sighed. ‘Stop feeling sorry for them. They’re bound to be miserable. They’re too much bloody trouble for themselves and everyone else.’

  ‘Too many children go into institutions through no real fault of their own, acquire bad habits and a worse reputation, and end up as adults with no hand in their own making, devoid of resources and derelict of hope.’ McKenna tapped ash from the end of his cigarette. ‘We can’t survive without hope.’

  ‘Near the English border, there’s a village called Hope and another called Caergwrle. People say if you live in Hope, you’ll die in Caergwrle, so I suppose that’s only another name for despair,’ Griffiths said. ‘I wonder what keeps Elis and his wife going.’

  ‘She talked about the boy today. Apparently, he’s little more than a vegetable, though perhaps he still has feelings.’

  ‘Did she say what sin he’s the punishment for?’ Griffiths asked. ‘You could ask Elis, if he comes back. D’you still want to go to South Wales?’

  ‘Jack’s going. I couldn’t drive that distance.’

  ‘Why can’t we come with you?’ Jack’s twin daughters sat together on the sofa, threatening tears.

  ‘It’s not a pleasure trip,’ Emma said impatiently. ‘You can help me with the Christmas shopping.’

  ‘Town’s horrible. Great long queues of people buying rubbish nobody in their right mind’d want.’

  ‘And people rattling begging bowls for charity.’

  ‘And beggars by the town clock.’

  ‘And a fat old fool dressed up like Santa Claus.’

  ‘Perverts could dress up like Santa, couldn’t they? Santa’s an anagram of Satan.’

  ‘It’s also Spanish for saint!’ Jack snapped. ‘Have you both finished?’

  ‘Christmas gets rammed down our throats, every year, for weeks on end!’

  ‘If you both feel you’ve outgrown boring tradition, your father and I will be happy to forego Christmas,’ Emma said silkily.

  ‘We didn’t say that.’

  ‘We said it’s horrible and commercialized and tacky.’

  ‘And it’ll be more so in South Wales,’ Emma said. ‘Far more people to do whatever you de
plore.’

  ‘You’re not coming, anyway,’ Jack added. ‘You can clear out that pigsty of a bedroom instead. Why don’t you ever hang up your clothes?’

  ‘They’re not ours.’

  ‘Whose are they, then? Santa’s?’

  ‘Denise thought the girls might want them,’ Emma said. ‘They won’t fit me.’

  ‘Denise? Are we reduced to having her charity?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Emma snapped. ‘The clothes are far too expensive for the charity shops.’

  ‘They might be very expensive,’ Jack said with gritted teeth, ‘but as far as I’m concerned, anything off her back is far too cheap for my wife and daughters, so next time she brings her tacky nasty hand-me-downs, I hope you’ll tell her what to do with them!’

  ‘What’s Elis’s child called?’ Dewi asked, placing a mug of tea beside McKenna.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Has Elis found Arwel’s book yet?’

  ‘Rhiannon didn’t say.’

  ‘Do Social Services know Mr Tuttle’s off to the deep south tomorrow?’

  ‘No.’ McKenna rubbed his shoulder, where pain had crept back under cover of darkness. ‘Any word about Gary? Ideas? Suggestions?’

  ‘Only that he’s a loner, and keeps his doings well and truly to himself.’ Dewi paused. ‘Is it worth talking to the gippos?’

  ‘Don’t say “gippos”, Dewi. It’s one of the unacceptable words of this day and age.’

  ‘I knew there was something!’ He dragged a bundle of papers from his pocket. ‘I’ve cracked some of Arwel’s clues.’

  McKenna scanned the creased and scrawled-upon pages, pursuing lines of thought as if deciphering an abstruse mathematical equation. The answers were underlined with three flourishes of red ballpoint. ‘Beastly’, ‘pants’, ‘beggar’, ‘dwarf’, ‘slow-witted’, ‘shit-lump’—

  ‘It’s very antiquated Welsh, isn’t it?’ Dewi asked. ‘Made me wonder if Arwel didn’t pinch the words from a Dafydd ap Gwilym poem, or some such.’

  Frowning, McKenna scribbled on his notepad. Dewi craned over the desk to read. ‘“Beastly beggar, slow-witted dwarf, shit-lump pants”. Not very nice, is it, sir?’

  ‘It’s not supposed to be,’ McKenna said. ‘Wales’s most famous bard had a mate called Rhys Meigen, but they fell out when Rhys insulted Dafydd and his forebears in verse. Legend has it Rhys dropped dead from shame when he heard Dafydd’s reply.’ Frowning again, he added, ‘Don’t you wonder how Arwel Thomas knew enough medieval Welsh to make crosswords from it when he hardly ever went to school?’

  ‘Not really,’ Dewi said. ‘The teachers ram Welsh literature down your throat ’til you feel like throwing up, and a bright lad like Arwel was said to be, wouldn’t find it hard to learn anything that took his fancy.’ He flicked the raggy papers, smiling. ‘If the story about Rhys Meigen’s true, it proves the pen’s mightier than the sword, doesn’t it? Is that poem what people call a “death verse”? Why don’t we try it out on Hogg, and see what happens?’

  ‘And what if it worked?’ McKenna asked. ‘I don’t think we should actively invoke the Celtic other-worldliness.’

  ‘It’d be one way of solving a few of our problems, wouldn’t it?’ Dewi said. ‘Have you got a copy of the poem, sir? I’d like to read all of it. Can I borrow it?’

  ‘Only if you swear not to recite the juiciest bits to Jack Tuttle next time you have a difference of opinion.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work on him. He wouldn’t understand the Welsh.’ Dewi smiled again. ‘Detective Constable Clever-Clogs Evans is another matter, though.’

  ‘And where is she?’

  ‘Wasting her time harassing Carol Thomas in Caernarfon.’

  ‘Maybe you should talk to the girl. Capitalize on the laws of nature, as Dr Roberts suggests.’

  ‘You think?’ Dewi asked. ‘I didn’t have much luck with Dai Skunk, did I? Despite his inclinations.’

  Behind the counter of the hardware store, Carol dealt absently with the few customers who demanded her attention, glancing repeatedly at her wristwatch, trying to will away that dreadful gnawing pain in her belly. Perhaps, she thought, in a few days or weeks or months, she would no longer stand behind this counter as she had through all the dismal dreary months since leaving school. People walking or shuffling or barging through the narrow glass-panelled door would be faced instead with the embodiment of her pain, its end result, a monstrous object grown in the darkness of her heart, like a cancer which consumed her from the inside out. She stared at the glass shelves opposite the counter, at a jumble of clocks, each telling a different time, and begged God to turn back their hands through hundreds of revolutions, to invoke the magic of Time, and bring Arwel back to life.

  Her parents wanted him buried. They whined and niggled and argued, banged from the house to the call-box over the road, and returned to vent their frustration on their other child, but Arwel remained in his mortuary bed, the embryo of a man inside a winding sheet, and Rhiannon Elis’s awesome power fell to dust.

  Carol pressed her fists to her eyes, staunching tears that came unbidden, day and night, in private or public, and went to lock the door. Turning the sign from Agored to Wedi Can – Open to Closed, she watched the straggle of late shoppers, cowed by a freezing wind off the sea, and saw the policewoman, dressed in her smart country clothes, waiting to accost her, to importune her with questions to which she would never provide answers.

  7

  Jack left early for Abergavenny, long before the twins awoke. He kissed the drowsy Emma and crept downstairs, afraid that his daughters, still beloved for themselves but to be feared for what time and youth wrought in them, might be in pursuit, and insist on travelling with him. He raised the garage door quietly, wincing as the hinges squealed, shut the car door with a gentle click, and reached the end of the road, glancing more than once in the rear mirror, before he felt safe.

  Patchy black ice made the Dolgellau road treacherous. He concentrated on its sudden dips and blind bends, trying not to think of the twins, of the schism to come, but as the miles disappeared under the wheels of the car, and grey dawn light brought shape to the world fleeing past him, he began to fret once again.

  Waiting for the cat to return from her first foray, McKenna sat shivering by his parlour fire, looking through the window at cold grey sky and wasted rags of leaf. A wind had risen late yesterday, blowing the tatters of fog out to sea, but died in the night, killed by frost lying thick and suffocating on the ground and about the roots of trees and bushes.

  The cat leapt on the windowledge and scratched the glass, and he opened the door. She rushed indoors and shot up the staircase, but he stood by the open door, freezing air about his body, listening for birdsong, trying to recall when he last heard gulls screeching and mewling about roof-tops and chimney stacks, or the clacking jays in the trees below the garden.

  The hay was almost too warm, Gary thought, the heat rising about his head and warding off a bitter draught through the unglazed window high in the wall of the cow byre. He turned over sleepily, stretching his legs, stalks of dried grass tickling his ankles where his jeans rucked up during the night. He scuffed the jeans in place with the toe of his boots, and sniffed the air around him, the scent of summer still trapped in the great bales of hay. Pulling at a desiccated clover head, feeling hunger draw in his belly, he wondered if he could knock at the farmhouse door like a traveller in history, and be given sustenance, but knew himself for a fool if he ever believed hope might triumph over experience. He heard the thump of hoof upon earth as the cattle below him roused, smelt the warmth of their rising breath, and turned on his side, drifting back to sleep.

  Jack’s destination lay well beyond Abergavenny, along winding roads verged with muddy grass, scarred with wheel tracks and strewn with litter. Set in a shallow depression in the misty hillside, the house looked ill-kempt and rundown, the short drive naked of most of the gravel once laid there. He clattered up four stone steps and rang the bell, an
old ceramic button dirtied and chipped by a thousand fingers.

  A bearded man led him to a small waiting-room scented with boiled cabbage and chip-fat, grumbling. ‘Social Services should say when someone’s coming. Darren Pritchard’s enough of a problem without this sort of thing.’ He stood over his visitor, stroking the beard, and Jack wondered idly if he was kin to the bearded man who dithered among the children of Blodwel, both cloned from a master model for the purposes of containing derelict youngsters, neither aware of life beyond the walls of the prisons they inhabitated. ‘It’s very disruptive,’ he added. ‘We’ve got all sorts here. Arsonists, rapists, murderers. We can’t be too careful.’

  Jack yawned. ‘That bad, is it? I’m surprised. Even juveniles go to prison for arson and the rest.’

  ‘Social workers prefer special placements like this.’

  ‘Before or after the trial? Darren hasn’t been killing or torching or raping as far as we know.’

  ‘He’s got bad potential. This is a preventive placement. He caused mayhem at the Bangor home.’ The man stroked his beard again. ‘Why d’you want to see him?’

  ‘He can help us with a current investigation.’

  ‘Maybe I should check with his social worker.’

  ‘Social workers don’t normally work Saturdays,’ Jack pointed out. ‘And I haven’t spent five hours on the road to be told I can’t talk to the boy. Just go and get him, will you?’

  ‘He’s in the secure unit. It’s your funeral if anything goes wrong.’

  Accessed by a heavy fire-proof door at the rear of the house, the secure unit was bright with fluorescent light, noisy with the clang of metal upon metal and the rattling of keys. Four boys, clad in pyjamas and bedroom slippers, leaned against raw brick walls, staring as the door thudded shut behind Jack. He trailed the wispy girl who exchanged escort with the bearded man, through the dayroom and into an office.