In Guilty Night

by Alison Taylor

  ‘Everybody’s being cautious!’ Janet snapped. ‘The social workers spout about confidentiality, the kids are terrified of everyone, the parents think we’re shit, and bloody Hogg and his wife rule the world!’

  McKenna sighed. ‘We’ve no evidence that Arwel’s death is connected with Blodwel, despite what we know of the place and the Hoggs.’

  ‘So what’s left?’ Janet demanded. ‘Elis? Can you really see him as a paedophile?’

  McKenna saw Elis as ambiguous and intrusive, a man whose organizing principles were not of his own choosing. Parking on the forecourt of Bedd y Cor, arm and shoulder strained by the drive up St Mary’s Hill and down narrow pot-holed lanes, he sat for a moment, watching dusk wash over the distant mountains. Lights within the house spilt soft wedges of colour across darkening ground and on the gleaming enamel of the beautiful car parked by the entrance to the stable yard. Kinetic art, McKenna thought, regarding the car’s exquisite contours, like the music with which Elis filled his empty spaces, and the horses on which he tried to break for freedom.

  Waiting by the front door, he heard the whinnying of a horse, the clatter of hoof upon cobble, and saw the prancing shape of the thoroughbred mare as she was led out to the field. The groom nodded.

  ‘Is anyone at home?’

  ‘Only the staff.’

  ‘I thought Mr Elis would be back.’

  ‘So did Mrs Elis. Reckon the weather’s held him up. There’s been snow, so I near. Won’t trouble us, will it? Still too bloody cold.’

  ‘Are you putting her out?’ McKenna gestured towards the fractious animal trying to shake her head from her keeper’s grasp.

  ‘Only so I can change her bedding without getting kicked to death.’ He stroked her neck, murmuring. ‘It’s her first foal, and she’s crabby as hell, ’cos she’s not quite sure what’s happening.’

  ‘When’s it due?’

  ‘No more than six weeks. She went to the stallion last January end.’ He stroked her again, running his hands over the swollen belly. ‘Should be a little beauty. Her for a mother, and sired by a Derby winner. Did you know?’

  ‘Mr Elis mentioned it.’

  The groom laughed. ‘I’ll bet he did! The stud fee was more than this place is worth. He’s on pins waiting to see what he got for his money.’

  The groom moved away, half-dragged by his fretful charge, while McKenna perforce wondered if Elis thought money could buy a child as easily as it bought a foal.

  Dewi waited in ambush outside the office. Walking through the door he held open, McKenna felt overcome by weariness, assailed on all quarters by demands for approval, protection, forgiveness, and other, deeper things to which he could not give name.

  ‘I sent you out.’

  ‘I’ve been out, sir. DC Evans has been back and forth a bit. She’s looking for Mandy’s mate Tracey. I came back to do some telephoning.’ He stood before the desk, waiting perhaps for an advance on approval.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I called some of the South Wales homes off the list. I said we want to interview the Tony Jones from Llandudno who was admitted a few days ago. I didn’t think you’d mind.’

  McKenna lit a cigarette, watching doubt begin to creep over Dewi’s face, and a smoke ring drift towards the dingy ceiling. ‘Depends on whether the outcome is a lot of flak and bugger-all else.’

  ‘There’ll be flak sooner or later, but I located him, so maybe we can get there before anybody puts the mockers on it by shifting him again.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Denbigh Hospital. Hogg put him in a secure unit near Swansea, they sent him to Denbigh yesterday.’

  ‘Why?’ McKenna snapped. ‘Why must I drag out every bloody detail?’

  ‘Apparently Tony claimed he’d been abused. The home contacted our Social Services and they probably told Hogg, because a taxi turned up first thing yesterday, with two great hulking blokes and a driver, and whipped him away. I rang the hospital. He’s on a locked ward, so it’ll be hard to see him without a doctor backing us.’

  By six o’clock, when she would normally be preparing to accompany her mother to chapel, Janet was on the coastal expressway, pushing her new car to its limits and listening to a song about the Road to Hell, smoke from the cigarette in her left hand stinging her eyes. She had nowhere to go, no one to call upon and find welcome, her home frostier than the night outside the speeding car with her father’s disapproval and her mother’s resignation. Passing the Talybont turn off at ninety miles an hour, she glimpsed a panda car with its lights doused. Lights suddenly blinding, it drew out in pursuit, and she pushed her foot on the accelerator, losing the hunters in a blaze of speed beyond the slip road to Llandegai.

  She drove hither and thither, on and off the expressway, undecided and fretful, nothing to report to McKenna except failure and opprobrium, even less to say to her parents, but more opprobrium to receive. She circled Treborth roundabout twice before turning towards Menai Bridge. A few cars passed on the other side of Treborth Road, dazzling her eyes as they took the bends. House lights twinkled behind high conifer hedging on the steep slope near the Antelope Inn, and she thought how shell-like a house seemed when lit so, insubstantial and hollow.

  She crossed the floodlit bridge, its reflection shimmering in the icy waters a hundred feet below, and drove towards Llanfairpwll, stopping by the lookout point to smoke two cigarettes, then fired the engine and retraced her tracks. Turning once more on to Treborth Road, she entered another world as the houses fell behind, and was engulfed by night and huge dark trees crowding down from the hillside to her left. Remembering tales of phantom figures rushing from the trees, she lit another cigarette, pushed another CD in the player, and watched the speedometer creep up to seventy miles an hour and beyond, tapping her fingers on the steering-wheel in time to Bad Medicine, savouring the smoke in her lungs and the sense of restrained power in the car she drove. She saw the figure too late, as it leapt out in her path. The car swerved wildly, careered over the white lines then back again, coming to rest with a terrifying thud against the steep verge. Air bags exploded in her face and at her side, stunning more than the impact, then deflated, exposing her to whatever lay outside the fragile shell of the car in which she cowered.

  ‘You lot are draining scarce economic resources.’ Eifion Roberts loomed over McKenna, his bulk darkening the small hospital lobby. ‘First you. Now her and the other one.’

  ‘David Fellows isn’t down to us,’ McKenna said. ‘Janet didn’t hit him.’

  ‘The silly mare smashed up thousands of quids’ worth of car because a rabbit jumped out on her. Good God! What next!’

  ‘It was a white hare, and you know the local superstition about hares and souls and witches. Why don’t you go home, and annoy your wife instead?’

  The pathologist sat down. ‘I’ll have a customer if Dai Skunk snuffs it. What happened to him?’

  ‘His mother made her monthly visit and found him collapsed in the bedroom, in a pool of blood. I’m waiting to find out if he’d been attacked.’

  ‘You pulling him for questioning over Arwel could’ve given folk reason to attack him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Can’t be helped, you’ve a job to do. How is Miss Evans?’

  ‘Hysterical. Her father’s with her.’

  ‘He won’t be best pleased, will he? That one’s more arrogant than the God he claims to serve,’ Dr Roberts commented. ‘Toe his line, or suffer for it. He tried to stop Janet going to university, then put the mockers on her doing social work. She probably only joined up to spite him.’

  ‘He’s a typical Welsh patriarch. Maybe you recognize his characteristics because you share them.’

  ‘I don’t browbeat people the way he does.’

  ‘Is that fact or fiction?’ McKenna demanded. ‘How d’you know all this stuff you spout?’

  ‘Hush up!’ Dr Roberts warned. ‘Here they come.’

  Slumped against the tall figure of her father, Janet limped slow
ly down the corridor. Completely ignoring the pathologist, Pastor Evans stopped in front of McKenna, and looked down upon him, sternly and unforgivingly.

  ‘I cannot help but blame you, Chief Inspector. Janet should have been at home, not driving all over the county when she’s obviously near exhaustion.’ He looked then upon his daughter, who hid her face in the folds of his dark grey overcoat. ‘See how shaken she is? I trust you won’t expect her back at work for a few days.’

  Watching the retreating figures of pastor and child, Roberts observed, ‘Put you in your place, didn’t he?’ He chewed his bottom lip. ‘Notice how he pretended I don’t exist? He’s never forgiven me for doubting God’s mercy.’

  McKenna stood. ‘I’m going to see about David Fellows.’

  The pathologist rose, panting slightly with effort. ‘Wouldn’t bother, he was already in theatre when I arrived. You eaten yet, Michael? There’s a Lob Scouse in the oven at home. Just what a body needs on a night like this.’

  The mattress beneath her lumpy with the impress of other bodies, Mandy rolled gingerly on her side, fearful of greater pain blazing along the pathways of her nerves. Dilys Roberts had opened the bedroom curtains before going to her own cubicle, letting night and tendrils of freezing air invade the room. Unblinking, Mandy listened to the porcine snuffling and snoring of the girl in the next bed, waiting for the noise to reach its peak. The girl gasped and grunted, then turned over on her face, and Mandy thought of the qualities of silence, the wide singing silence she knew as a child at her grandparents’ mountain farm, and the silence she knew now, charged with such strident tension.

  Her grandfather died of cancer when Mandy was seven. Her grandmother sold the poor living and the flock of sheep to pay their debts, moved to a small flat where her night silence was engulfed by traffic roaring in and out of the industrial estate, and sank into misery and depression. The grandparents buffered Mandy from her mother’s excess of wantonness, and when Grandfather went to Heaven and Grandmother to limbo, the child was left in the Hell on earth her mother created, until the social workers found another hell in which to place her.

  A psychiatrist reported on her deteriorating behaviour. Where Hogg used brutality, and Doris invoked the huge resources of her spite, the psychiatrist employed trickery and cajolery to force upon her the conformity apparently demanded by society. Hogg ranted constantly of conformity, intoning at meals, interrupting lessons, imposing himself on the most innocent recreation, using words and language Mandy could not comprehend, but the meaning of which she must absorb and obey. Like the other children to whom she dared voice her confusion, she understood nothing, except, as time progressed, the folly of not obeying Hogg’s dictates to the last syllable. Deadly routine, imposed for its own sake, brought stultifying predictability to each day, killing the smallest hope, the least initiative, the youthful dreams of jobs and boyfriends and babies. Blodwel-time existed within its own dimensions, limited to the day to come and the terrors it would bring.

  Wandering, sleepy thoughts jerked chaotically, tangled up inside her head. She stared at the ceiling, eyes fixed on a patch of dampness creeping from the corner of the room like a cloud, her breath loud and panicky, terrified once more of suffocating under her own helplessness. She lifted her head from the pillow, a wreck of a child clinging to a bit of hope, and looked at the lump of humanity in the other bed, fast in righteous torpor under the thin quilt. Pulling day clothes out from the pillow, she dressed, cloth against flesh so tearingly loud she expected Dilys Roberts to come running down the corridor, feet slapping on the linoleum tiles. No one woke, no one came to fling her bodily to the bed and stand over her, mouthing viciousness. She crept to the showers, closed the door, and pushed open the one window Hogg never bothered to nail shut, a vent too narrow for any but the thinnest of bodies. She wriggled out, glass pressing her head, frame biting her ribs and snagging her clothes, and hung on the ledge for a moment before dropping to the flagstones beneath.

  Eifion Roberts yawned, mouth wide as a hippo’s. McKenna yawned in sympathy. ‘Nice supper.’

  ‘Better than anything your Denise could rustle up. Bet you lived off Marks and Sparks ready mades.’

  ‘Why can’t you be quiet about her?’

  ‘She annoys me.’ Dr Roberts drained his glass. ‘She irritates me. She’s an ever-growing thorn in my flesh. I wish she’d sail off into the sunset on her boyfriend’s boat.’ Refilling the glass, he added, ‘And I’d be really made up if they foundered in the Seven Sisters tides off Holyhead.’

  ‘Anybody’d think she was your wife, not mine.’ McKenna yawned again. ‘You’re drunk as a skunk. I’d better help your long-suffering spouse get you to bed.’

  ‘There’s a thing, eh? Dai Skunk. I hope folk remembered the rules when they patched him up.’

  ‘I’m sure they did.’

  ‘Only that virus is over-friendly, and not in the least sexually selective.’ The pathologist gulped his drink. ‘Happy to take residence wherever folk are careless enough to offer, and given some blood or bodily fluid for transport, it’ll move house before you can say “bum boy”.’

  Dewi Prys waited again in ambush, outside McKenna’s front door. He climbed out of his car as McKenna parked his own, a padded envelope under his arm, and switched off the radio in the middle of a plaintive song about lost love.

  ‘What is it, Dewi? Can’t it wait?’

  ‘I’m not really the one to decide, sir.’

  Unlocking the front door, stumbling over the cat, McKenna switched on lights, casting an orangy glow on the darkened little street. ‘You can have ten minutes. I’m tired.’

  Rhiannon went to the ball alone, danced and drank and chattered, and let her host escort her home, arriving as the great longcase clock in Bedd y Cor’s hall chimed midnight. As she said goodnight to this Prince Charming, his hand squeezed her knee. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’ he whispered. The chauffeur glanced in the rear mirror, a knowing little smile about his lips. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I could do for you?’

  ‘The staff will be waiting. Do thank your wife for a lovely evening.’ She escaped the fingers pawing the back of her dress and reaching for her thighs, and almost ran for the door. The car waited, and she heard its engine purr to life only when the front door closed behind her.

  Mari waited in shadow at the rear of the hall. ‘The police came.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They didn’t say. Josh spoke to them.’

  ‘I expect they’ll come back if it’s important,’ Rhiannon said.

  ‘Cook left supper.’

  ‘I think I’ll go straight to bed.’

  ‘Mr Elias rang.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Rhiannon stopped halfway up the staircase, the hem of her dress cascading over the treads, fine-boned hand resting on the banister rail, diamond rings glittering.

  Mari shrugged. ‘Nothing much. He might not be back tomorrow.’

  ‘Where is he? Still in Germany?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.’ Mari turned towards her own flat. ‘It’s not up to me to ask him what he does with himself, is it?’

  9

  ‘I’m not surprised you’re tired,’ Griffiths observed, with some sympathy. ‘You’re not getting much sleep. Any word about David Fellows?’

  ‘He had a massive internal haemorrhage,’ McKenna said. ‘His systems appear to be collapsing generally, so nobody’s rating his chances.’

  The superintendent shuddered. ‘Was he attacked? Had he crossed the wrong people once too often?’

  ‘Like Arwel?’

  ‘Don’t make connections. People like Fellows live too close to badness. They get a kick from courting danger.’

  ‘There’s no evidence of assault. We treated his flat as a crime scene, but there was just a lot of junk and filth. And some home videos, which Dewi brought round to my house last night.’

  Griffiths drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘I wish Janet’d shape up like he does. I’m very disappo
inted with her. What was yesterday’s palaver all about?’

  ‘Stress and frustration. She’s finding it hard to adjust to this kind of investigation, and she’s terrified of failing. She wants to prove something to her father.’

  ‘She’s employed to prove things to a court, not her father,’ Griffiths commented acidly. ‘She’ll find herself back pounding the streets if she’s not careful, not flashing around dressed up to the nines and being self-important. Why does she wear her best clothes to go slumming on a murder hunt?’

  ‘She always dresses like that.’ McKenna smiled. ‘She’s a well-brought up chapel-minister’s only daughter, setting a good example.’

  ‘She’s repressed. Yesterday was a bit of rebellion, in my opinion. Pity she didn’t get it out of her system years ago, like Jack’s girls.’

  ‘Is Janet coming to work today?’ Dewi asked.

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Is her car badly damaged?’

  ‘Why don’t you call and ask her?’

  ‘I just wondered, sir. Is Mr Tuttle back?’

  ‘He was delivered safely from the teeth of the blizzard last night.’

  ‘Will he be going to Denbigh?’

  ‘No one’s going to Denbigh yet,’ McKenna said. ‘You’re watching home movies, and Inspector Tuttle’s on his way to Blodwel.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mandy Minx went walkies in the night, all alone.’

  ‘Maybe she’s meeting Gary.’

  ‘More likely she couldn’t take any more without going completely off her head.’

  ‘Mandy’s been an even bigger pest since she got drunk the other night,’ Jack reported. ‘Doris reckons she had drugs along with her drink.’

  ‘Doris would,’ McKenna said. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘He’s not well.’ Jack grinned. ‘The chief fire officer wasn’t best pleased to find the windows nailed up, so Ronnie’s anticipating trouble. He doesn’t respond well to added stress, because there’s more than enough with the job.’