‘I imagine he’ll be thoroughly stressed out when he knows you talked to Darren, and God knows how he’ll react when we’ve seen Tony Jones.’
‘I’ve been trying to work out the implications of what Darren said about Blodwel and the Hoggs,’ Jack said. ‘But I can’t get my head round anything solid. It’s like tussling with fog.’
‘Owen Griffiths is having the same experience.’ McKenna lit a cigarette, and gazed through the window. ‘I’m quite sure Arwel wasn’t the only abuse victim, but we can’t connect the abuse with the Hoggs. We can’t even accuse them of knowing about it and doing nothing. When Mandy let the cat out of the bag about the kids’ nocturnal activities, she succeeded in letting them off the hook. Doris made it very clear she doesn’t approve of kids going out on the tiles, because they get up to mischief. Mandy got drunk, the boys got raped.’
‘And what about the brutality, the sheer bloody nastiness?’
‘Darren’s got axes to grind, Jack. You only heard one side of the story.’
‘And the balance of plausibility will rest on the other.’
‘How much does Hogg weigh, d’you think? He’s small and weedy and the wrong side of forty. And the teacher? About the same size, isn’t he, and near retirement,’ McKenna said. ‘Darren’s bigger than you.’
‘Size is nothing to do with it. Hogg terrifies these kids. They’re like rabbits caught in the headlights of a truck.’
In the windowless cubicle behind the canteen where video machine and television set were housed, Dewi opened the padded envelope and took out three tapes, the unlabelled casings greasy with fingerprints and scratched with much use. Pushing one in the mouth of the machine, he sat back, legs crossed, and watched images flicker to life on the screen.
The body that housed the soul of David Fellows bled inside itself again at noon, giving way to years of abuse and brutality, its organs too frail to sustain the pressure of blood flowing through them. The left kidney ruptured, leaking blood and uric acid, the right collapsed gently in the face of increased demands, their demise unremarked for critical milliseconds before the machines to which the man was wired recorded malfunction, and began a siren wailing. Before he reached the operating theatre, his heart was long in crisis, rhythms and pulses chaotic beyond recall.
Shortly after she finished lunching, his mother learned, from a gentle voice on the telephone, that her son died without regaining consciousness. The police were told soon afterwards, as the body on the trolley, sheeted and tagged, was wheeled to the mortuary by two porters.
Stirring a spoon round and around a mug of tea, Dewi said, ‘Those videos are gross.’
‘Home movies of that kind usually are,’ McKenna commented. ‘Who’s starring?’
‘A bunch of very consenting adults of both sexes, having it off in every way possible, some near impossible, and not a condom in sight. I know some of them, off the estate and round town.’
‘Then bring them in for a chat, and point out they’re contributing to the black economy.’
‘Janet’s here. She’s legged it from her father’s sermonizing.’
‘She can help identify the film stars.’
Dewi frowned. ‘Those videos aren’t fit for any woman to see, let alone a minister’s daughter.’
‘Women star in the bloody movies, don’t they? She gets no favours on account of her sex, and no protection from the nastier parts of the job. Modern lady police officers want it that way, and we wouldn’t want to disappoint them.’
And as he walked down the stairs from his office, McKenna wondered if the eye of the camera had ever captured Denise in wantonness, leaving her image to titillate the senses long after her body decayed to dust.
‘You don’t often visit me here, Michael.’ Eifion Roberts cleared files and textbooks from the spare chair in his small office. ‘To what do I owe the honour?’
‘Don’t ask. I might say there’s nothing more interesting at hand.’
Squeezing behind his desk, the pathologist nodded. ‘Police work must get very tedious. Same old questions to the same old faces, getting the same old answers. Maybe the lad in Denbigh’ll supply some novelty.’
‘He’s not there any longer. Can I smoke in this place?’ Lighting a cigarette before Dr Roberts responded, McKenna added, ‘Apparently he’s not mad, just bad. He tried to torch the ward, so he’s been shunted elsewhere. Jack’s still trying to find him.’
‘Can’t the hospital tell you?’
‘Social Services took him away late yesterday. We’re trawling all the juvenile secure units, because I doubt he’s walking free. He seems rather out of control.’
‘So people tell you.’ The pathologist doodled on the cover of a file. ‘Hearsay, presumption; what folk want you to think. I guess he was moved from Blodwel to stop him talking, only he shot his mouth off in South Wales instead, so he’s shunted to the funny farm. He might’ve resorted to arson to get people to listen.’
‘Rather extreme.’
‘Desperate measures become the only options. Abused kids often talk because they can’t stand the strain any longer, so they have to be discredited. The pity of it is that boys like Tony don’t see the consequences. Attempted arson looks like badness rather than desperation. Depends who’s looking.’ He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘I’ve just opened up David Fellows.’ McKenna stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette, and lit another. ‘Liver and both kidneys necrotic, guts riddled with massive tumours, Kaposi’s lesions all over. A veritable invasion of life in altered circumstances.’
‘You don’t look well,’ McKenna said. ‘Take the rest of the day off.’
Jack gestured to the files stacked on his desk and spilling on to chairs and floor, and rubbed his eyes, leaving bruise marks on the skin. ‘There’s too much to do, apart from the huge backlog of work on other cases, and I can’t make any headway. I don’t know what’s the matter.’ He paused. ‘And quite frankly, I’m fed up with Janet’s moods.’
‘Her father’s being difficult.’
‘So she says,’ Jack said, with some bitterness. ‘Aren’t all fathers difficult just for the hell of it?’
McKenna leaned against the window-sill, and lit a cigarette. ‘You might feel less distracted if you sorted out your own patch.’
‘I don’t know what to sort. Em says the girls are going through a teenage phase, like half the kids in Blodwel, and I’m over-reacting.’ Jack sighed. ‘What’s the difference between a phase and out of control? How can you tell if one kid’ll grow out of whatever makes teenagers behave like bloody lunatics, and another one won’t? Then the twins stuck their oar in about Arwel and Gary. God knows where they hear this talk. I dread to think who they’re mixing with in school.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Oh, just that kids go into care for their own good, and end up more neglected, disadvantaged and abused than if they’d stayed at home. And dead or missing, of course.’ Jack coughed. ‘But where d’you draw the line with kids? And when?’ He rubbed his eyes again. ‘All the way to South Wales, I was arguing with myself. They’re my children, I’ve known them since they were born, and I’d never, ever wash my hands of them. Then I remembered how I felt the other night. Absolutely terrified, absolutely helpless. Just like Gary’s mother probably, and maybe even the Thomases.’ He coughed again. ‘But after what we’ve seen, I couldn’t ask for help with the twins even if I was absolutely desperate.’
‘I’m sure Emma’s right, so you won’t need to,’ McKenna said. ‘Don’t tar all children’s homes with the same brush.’
‘Why not? Hogg reckons he works with the dregs of society, like prison officers, and us, so none of us can help being tainted. And fair play to him and his thuggy women, being cooped up most of the waking day and half the night with a bunch of hostile kids can’t be very pleasant. What’s the price of survival in a place like Blodwel?’
McKenna sat down and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Hogg chose his job; I chose mine. People who expose themselv
es to the worst in others can expect to be exposed to the worst in themselves.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘So far, I’ve been able to come to terms with myself, but I doubt Hogg’s even bothered to try.’
‘That’s another thing,’ Jack muttered.
‘What is?’
Fidgeting with a paper-clip, Jack said, ‘What you’d call the worst in yourself, I suppose.’ He fell silent, then added, ‘Hogg’s right about being tainted.’
‘And?’
‘And count yourself lucky you’ve no children. There’s no need for you to face up to your own potential for child abuse.’ He rubbed at his eyes again, almost savagely. ‘I’m almost scared to be in the same room as the twins. What used to be loving and wholesome and natural just seems sick and dirty now.’
‘Where’s DC Evans?’ McKenna opened the door of the video cubicle to find Dewi alone in front of the flickering television screen, making notes.
‘She’s gone with uniform to bring in some of this lot.’
‘I’ve had a rocket off the Traffic inspector.’ McKenna sat down. ‘She outran a patrol car on the expressway not long before she nearly ran down a hare.’
‘She’s having problems with her father. She told me.’
‘I’m not surprised. She’s convinced the chapel’s covering up for child abusers within the ranks of the ministry.’
‘He wants her to resign.’
‘Janet’s quite capable of making her own decisions. Things would be much better if she left home.’
‘She wouldn’t want to leave her mam.’
‘Her mother would probably be very relieved to see the back of her. Adult children need to fly the nest.’
Dewi switched off the television, and turned to face McKenna. ‘You’ve never said that to me.’
‘You’re different, Dewi. Your family needs you, and you’ll never resent that, because you’ve all found your place together.’ He smiled, and switched on the television. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. Don’t ever make waves in your lovely calm sea, or let the storms blow up from nowhere.’
‘Some folk like the storms,’ Dewi commented. ‘Makes them feel something’s happening.’
‘Like shipwreck and death?’ McKenna gazed at fuzziness and poorly focused images on the screen, none the less repulsive for their amateur presentation.
‘They don’t seem real, do they?’ Dewi followered McKenna’s gaze. ‘If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t believe they were.’
‘Human nastiness in its real colours and all its ordinariness.’ Feeling sick with himself for wanting to look, McKenna thought again of Denise, cast like a pearl amid the lardy bodies with mouth and crotch agape, waiting to be pierced and pleasured.
Dewi pressed the fast-forward button, invoking a blizzard of flesh, before stopping on a close-up shot of two men, hands on each other’s genitals, naked on a stained and dirty bedcover. ‘Dai Skunk and his mate Ted. Ted must be inclined either way, ’cos he’s on another film with the wife of that man we caught pushing Ecstasy tablets in the clubs.’ He moved the film on once more. ‘Here she is again, with a woman I don’t know, both performing for the men. D’you reckon it’s like they say, sir?’
‘What?’ Distracted, beguiled, McKenna eyed the women, one thin and ageing, fingering the other, the fresh meat on the table, whose heavy thighs melted apart as the questing fingers of the thin woman cleaved her flesh like a hot knife through butter.
‘Folk reckon watching women together is a turn on.’ Dewi laughed quietly. ‘They don’t do much for me. One old, one flabby, and both mucky-looking.’
‘Is it all more of the same?’ McKenna stood up. ‘This garbage isn’t even illegal if it only involves consenting adults, no money changes hands, and it takes place in private.’
‘So why are we rounding them up?’
‘To find out what else is available to titillate the jaded local palate.’
The cathedral clock struck eleven as McKenna unlocked his front door, expecting to find the cat waiting for him as usual, but the hall was empty, and she failed to respond to his call. With mounting horror, he feared this precious waif of an animal had run away, looking for another heart to invade, and almost wept with relief when he found her at last, fast asleep under his bed. She yawned, swiped at him with one front paw, and resumed her slumber.
He made supper, drank two mugs of tea, and lay on the sofa, the radio turned low. Arm and shoulder throbbed with a passion all their own, his ribs squeezed his lungs in suffocating embrace, his throat rasped raw with excess of lust for nicotine. He gazed about the small room, seeing not the pretty wallpaper or the pictures hung over mantel and table, but the flailing bodies and contorted faces of the men and women more real than their own reality in the fantasy performed for the cyclops eye of the camera.
He sat at the table, chain-smoking, reviewing the moral law he believed he assumed from choice, and thought of the vortex of dark excesses seething in his own heart, knowing how those who lingered in the twilit reaches of society so easily embraced the evils they were charged to eradicate.
Leaving the radio playing softly, he pulled his coat from the back of the chair and went out. Striding down the hill, past the cathedral and up Glanrafon, he crossed the road by the Safeway supermarket, where lights shone brightly in the car-park, and voices and clatter echoed in the unloading bays, and entered the darkness of Ffriddoedd Road. He walked its length meeting not a soul, past dark driveways like gaping mouths, scuffing his feet through drifts of sodden leaves, flitting like a wraith from the mist-shrouded lights of one street lamp to another, thinking how quickly his journey was done, and wondering if the earth truly shrank with the setting of the sun.
By the gateway to St Gerrard’s Convent, he stopped, looking through a thicket of trees at the darkened building, and thought perhaps tomorrow morning, or night, or the day after, some ordinary person might stumble over the cold rotting body of Gary Hughes or Mandy Minx, and become for a while an extraordinary person in the sight of the knowing world. He looked up at bluey-black sky milky with strands of fog, then went on his way, walking with Night, wondering which of her children, Sleep or Death, she might send to play with him until the sun rose once again behind the mountains in the east.
10
Standing with her back to the shop door, Mandy shivered convulsively, ratty teeth chattering inside lips chapped and pinched with cold.
Carol wiped a duster back and forth over the glass counter top, scrubbing at a stubborn finger-mark, pale hair swinging about her pallid cheeks. ‘I’ve only got ten quid in my bag.’
‘That’ll get me a long way, won’t it?’ Mandy snapped. ‘Can’t you borrow from the till?’
‘I’d get the sack.’ Carol ceased the futile polishing to stare at the other girl. ‘Don’t you know running away won’t do any good?’ She began cleaning again, wiping the duster over display boxes crammed with can openers and potato peelers and sink plugs in dirty white rubber. ‘You’ll end up like Arwel. So will that Gary.’
‘They’re not interested in me.’
‘They will be now.’ Carol pushed the hair off her face, frowning. ‘Did you have to come here? That policewoman keeps after me with her bloody questions. What if she asks about you?’
‘You say nothing, like you manage to say about Arwel.’
‘Shut up about Arwel!’ Carol whispered viciously.
‘You said his name! And if you hadn’t kept your mouth shut in the first place, he might still be alive.’
‘I promised!’ Carol rubbed at the tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘He made me. Nobody would’ve believed him.’
‘Somebody might,’ Mandy insisted. ‘Even if they didn’t, there’d’ve been trouble, and he wouldn’t’ve stayed at Blodwel.’
‘They’d’ve locked him up somewhere else.’ Carol sobbed openly. ‘I wouldn’t’ve been able to see him. I couldn’t’ve looked out for him.’
Mandy scowled with impatience. ‘You’re so fucking stupid, Carol Thomas! People alwa
ys shit on you. Did you tell Arwel it’d be all right so long as he kept his mouth shut and his arse wide open?’ She almost spat with disgust. ‘He trusted you! He’d’ve crawled on broken glass for you. Did you say the fancy boyfriend’d sort it?’ She advanced towards the counter, pushing her face so close she smelt the bile on Carol’s breath, whispering savagely, ‘You do right to look sick, ’cos it’s your fault he’s dead!’
‘If your average nice kid from your average nice semi on Bangor’s posh side got shafted and murdered, and went on the run in the teeth of winter, we’d be buzzing round like blue-arsed flies with all the world falling over itself to help, and sod the cost.’ Dropping the headquarters’ memorandum on McKenna’s desk, Jack sat down. ‘As it is, we get snotty memos from the accountants in charge of the force telling us how we’re wasting money chasing juvenile delinquents.’
‘It’s a reminder to keep outlay to the absolute minimum,’ McKenna said. ‘The budget’s overstretched already, without trips to South Wales and all the recent overtime. There’s no extra money due in the next financial year, so the current deficit will result in poorer services, fewer officers, and more pressure on us.’
‘Then we’d better inform the locals we can’t afford more crime until next April. Make a polite request for them to drop their shit in another force area. Merseyside Police probably wouldn’t notice.’
‘Oh, give it a rest!’ McKenna snapped. ‘Have you located Tony Jones yet? And did you talk to the twins again about Gary?’
‘We’re contacting all the secure units in Britain, as well as hospitals with facilities for juveniles, and I shudder to think of the phone bills,’ Jack said. ‘The twins aren’t actually speaking to me, because I’m a willing cog in the Fascist machinery that grinds people like Arwel and Gary and Mandy into the dirt.’
In Guilty Night Page 15