Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  ‘And was there any particular reason for that?’

  ‘For what? Oh, I see! No, not really. We just didn’t mix with the same people. Tom Bailey was a dentist, with a decent private practice. Mad keen on driving. Rallies, racing … he was the most reckless and stupid driver I’ve ever seen in my whole life. We all knew he’d either kill himself or somebody else one day.’ The solicitor coughed. ‘Well, he got himself first, didn’t he?’

  ‘What about Margaret?’

  ‘Margaret. Yes … a strange woman, Chief Inspector. Unusual. Different, if you know what I mean.’ He paused. ‘Actually, not the sort of wife to suit Tom Bailey when you come to think. She had something about her, I suppose, though for the life of me, I couldn’t say what it was. He was one of those people who go through life taking everything they can lay their greedy hands on, and giving nothing back.’

  ‘How was she different?’

  ‘I can’t really say, because I don’t really know.’ McKenna waited patiently for the man to continue. ‘You always tended to notice Margaret, even though you could hardly ever say why … I mean, she didn’t look special, she didn’t look any different from anybody else, really, from any of the people you pass a thousand times in the street … all those faceless sorts of people you see all around you everywhere….’ His voice tailed away.

  ‘Even they,’ McKenna said, trying to prompt the man’s memory, touch his imagination, ‘even they are individuals, aren’t they? They have passions and fears and hopes and their own despair.’

  ‘I suppose so, yes. Margaret certainly had her despair. She looked sometimes, Chief Inspector, as if it was eating her up, like some cancer. Eating her up from the inside out, and one day it would consume her completely. She was so terribly painfully thin, as if she couldn’t stomach solid food. I used to be afraid her bones would come poking out through her skin when she moved. And her eyes looked as if they were falling right out of her head sometimes…. I expect that’s the reason she drank so much. That and other things.’

  ‘Was she an alcoholic?’

  ‘Not quite. I daresay she would’ve been, given a little longer in this vale of tears.’

  ‘Why was her husband divorcing her?’

  ‘Margaret said he used to beat her.’

  Jack watched McKenna flinch. ‘Then why wasn’t she divorcing him?’

  ‘Because he beat her when he found out she was having affairs with other women.’

  McKenna filled in circles and ellipses on his doodles. ‘The architect of her own destruction, Jack.’

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

  ‘What else am I supposed to say? None of this gets us any nearer to finding out who topped the poor bitch.’ McKenna opened desk drawers, threw in files and papers, slammed the drawers shut, and stood up. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Go home to that pretty wife of yours if you’ve any sense.’

  ‘Don’t you think we should be looking for another woman, after what that solicitor said? Or a disgruntled husband?’ Jack stared at McKenna, unable to fathom the absence of interest. ‘There’s any number of motives there.’ He held up his hand, ticking off items as he listed them. ‘First, her husband was divorcing her. Second, her husband beat her … and maybe that accounts for the abortions….’

  ‘Well, we’re never likely to know,’ McKenna said wearily. ‘She’s dead and her husband’s dead.’

  ‘We could ask around the hospitals,’ Jack said. ‘Thirdly, this solicitor reckons she was a lesbian, of all things. God alone knows what that might’ve provoked!’

  McKenna sat on the edge of his desk. ‘Jack, because someone says someone else is something or other, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.’

  ‘Then why say it?’

  ‘Margaret Bailey may have said it to dramatize herself. Or perhaps she didn’t. Someone else could have said it…. A snippet of gossip, sly whispers in the right ear, and before you can draw breath, Margaret Bailey’s a fully paid-up, card-earning member of the great sisterhood of Sappho.’ He pulled a cigarette from the packet. ‘And Margaret Bailey doesn’t have the slightest clue why people start giving her a wide berth and the cold shoulder.’

  ‘Why are you so negative?’ Jack demanded. ‘As soon as we might be getting anywhere, you go and put the mockers on it.’

  ‘Because I don’t think any of this is relevant.’

  ‘Not relevant?’ Jack stared. ‘Of course it is. It must be.’

  ‘Why must it?’ McKenna argued. ‘Even if she was a lesbian, what’s that to do with her being killed?’

  Jack considered the question. Eventually he said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Quite.’ McKenna put the unlit cigarette in its packet. ‘You don’t know … and unless you invent a scenario with a jealous lover, or a ménage à trois, or something bizarre like that, you’re not likely to find out.’ He regarded Jack, smiling a little. ‘The English aren’t very passionate, Jack. They don’t usually kill, or get killed, for love. They kill for greed, for envy, for hatred, for revenge, for fear, or simply to save face.’

  ‘So you’re saying she wasn’t killed by somebody local?’

  ‘I’m saying she wasn’t killed because she provoked passion. But she may well have provoked fear or greed or envy, and therefore more than enough hatred to fuel the will to kill,’ McKenna said. ‘Think about it.’

  Jack rubbed his hands over his jaw. ‘I can’t think straight about anything much at the moment.’ He stared at McKenna. ‘This is a real human tragedy, isn’t it? Big enough to kill Margaret Bailey, big enough to ruin the life of whoever murdered her….’ After a moment’s thought, he added, ‘And ruin the killer’s family.’

  ‘You think so, do you?’ McKenna asked. ‘You think it’s a terrible human tragedy?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  McKenna eased himself off the desk, turning to pick up his briefcase. ‘Depends, doesn’t it? You could argue all human tragedy is trivial in the extreme. After all,’ he added, checking the briefcase lock, ‘what difference does one tragedy or ten million make to the turning of the earth and the flow of the seasons and the moon and stars in the sky?’

  Profoundly shocked, Jack said, ‘How can you say such things?’

  ‘How can I?’ McKenna asked. ‘I’m simply putting words to a thought.’ He looked at Jack. ‘If it bothers you, just forget I said anything.’

  Low-voiced, Jack said, ‘I can’t, can I? You can’t unthink a thought once it’s come, and no more can you get rid of a thought once somebody else puts it into your head.’ After a long pause, he added, staring hard at the silent McKenna, ‘And you can’t ever wash away the effect of the thought, can you? Any more than we can unlearn how to split the atom.’

  Jack heard the sound of the fire door at the head of the stairs closing behind McKenna before he began to think about the veiled warning not to neglect Emma.

  ‘I am not staying in, Denise,’ Emma said to the distraught woman on her doorstep. ‘This is the first time we’ve had an evening out as a family for ages.’ Upon Denise’s ashen face, Emma thought, surely lay the scars of tears as hot as molten glass. ‘Look, why not come with us?’ she suggested. ‘Take your mind off things. We’re only going to see a film suitable for fourteen year olds, and you can come back for supper.’ Emma took her arm, pulling Denise into the house. ‘And I don’t know where Michael is, so stop fretting, and relax for a few hours. You never know, Denise, you might have a new perspective on things afterwards.’

  They were already seated in the car when one of the twins said to Denise, ‘Your husband’s very sweet, isn’t he, Mrs McKenna? He came round for supper the other evening, and we enjoyed it so much!’

  Chapter 15

  At work for 7.30 in the morning, Wil fidgeted for almost an hour before the lorry bringing the septic tank made its way down the track to Gallows Cottage. Rain had fallen overnight, the light sandy soil in the trench blotted with dark patches of water. Wet
grass in the garden squelched under his boots, little beads of water garlanded the low eaves of the roof. All being well, Wil said to himself, he would finish on schedule, provided no more bodies emerged from ancient resting places, nothing happened to encourage the police to tear the place apart.

  Leaving Dave to supervise unloading the tank, he went upstairs into the back bedroom, where the floorboards were loose, and kneeling, began to prise the boards from their moorings. The planks came up with a small flurry of gritty dust and a crackling of splintered wood. He put them to one side and stuck the hose end of the vacuum cleaner into the cavity. The whine of the motor drowned out the throbbing of the lorry’s engine pulsing stinking diesel fumes into the clear morning air as the tank was slowly unloaded and positioned. He could hear the dust and debris of centuries rattling up the hose, then that strange plopping sound of something too big blocking its inlet. Cursing under his breath, he found a bundle of dirty cloths stuck to the end. He yanked it away, and threw the bundle to one side, then pushed the hose back again.

  The planks fitted beautifully into the clean space. He had nailed them back to the joist, vacuumed the floor, coiled up the cleaner and put away his tools in the right places in his box before he looked at the bundle again, and then only to glance casually, picking it up to take downstairs to the rubbish bin. The pattern caught his eye when he dropped it on the kitchen floor, and the rags scattered a little. The cloth on the outside of the bundle was dirty and faded, that on the inside quite clean, except for grubby marks here and there where the vacuum cleaner had caught.

  Wil put the kettle on, adding extra water for the lorry driver, lit his pipe, and sat on a crate. He picked up the bundle and untangled it, spreading out on the kitchen floor a woman’s skirt, in pale silvery-grey wool, and a jacket, the fabric woven with dusky faded flowers on a background to match the skirt. The jacket was fastened with tarnished buttons, once bright and gilded.

  Seated at the table of an empty kitchen, listening to the silence of his house, Jack wondered how much fallout was yet to come from the firestorm of McKenna’s marital disaster. Never had he seen a person turn as Denise had last night, like a woman possessed by demons, screeching, clawing at the air, calling Emma foul names. Bundled off to their room in total mystification, the twins’ bewilderment became a screaming adolescent rage to add to Denise’s banshee wailing. Emma screeched too, at Jack, blaming him for the fiasco because he refused to let her tell the twins about the McKenna marriage, maintaining it was none of their business.

  Last night dragged eventually to some horrible conclusion, time almost stultified, as after a bereavement. Denise left – he could not remember when – her skirt hanging out from the door of the car, the car veering on to the lawn before plunging through the gate. Emma simply refused even to look at him, and locked herself in with the twins, their voices cadences of sound, ebbing and breaking like the sea on shingle, until they were stilled. Emma slept in their room, coming out surreptitiously, like an animal venturing from the safety of its den, to go to the bathroom, where Jack heard the shower splash briefly and the lavatory flush. He lay awake, anger pushing adrenalin through his body, until rosy light began to colour the eastern sky, then dozed restlessly, wide awake long before the alarm clock summoned him at 7.30.

  On the afternoon shift, Dewi Prys slept soundly until past eleven, when his mother’s voice eventually broke up his dreams. He ate his breakfast-cum-lunch, drank two mugs of tea, read the local paper, smiling at the tale of Beti and her ghost, marvelling that she looked much less hideous in the photograph than in real life, and walked down to the shop to buy groceries for his mother.

  The main road through the council estate was busy, with cars and buses and vans, young girls with babies making their way from the morning mother and child clinic, where local doctors kept an eye on the youngsters, most of whom came into the world without benefit of a father’s name to their birth certificates. It was beyond Dewi’s understanding why girls barely out of childhood themselves could not wait before clamping the shackles of motherhood around their future, chaining hope to the railings of tedium. He walked slowly home, passing pushchairs and prams and girls in jeans and padded coloured jackets, their hair tangled by the wind, their faces bright with lipstick and eye colour. The babies, anonymous little lumps in quilted suits, some clean and rosy faced, others whey-faced, dirty and thin, already scavenging off the state for every crumb, every drop of milk, which passed their lips, were, he realized, the next generation of Jamies and his ilk, misery-makers of the future. The baby boys would grow up to spawn fear into the hearts of the law-abiding and more babies on to the girls; the lowest social classes overbreeding, overweighing the fragile balance of a society teetering like a seesaw with too great a burden at one end; too many in need and not enough to make the wealth to keep them.

  He passed a pretty, fair-haired girl, tall on her black high-heeled shoes, slender legs clad in denim, and looked briefly at the child in the pushchair she guarded. The baby, large and aggressive, looked as if aware the world owed it a living, and was already learning how best to call in the debt. But for the child, the girl might have taken Dewi’s fancy, and he wondered about the men who gave not a second thought to taking on another’s offspring, those he met almost every day at work: vicious, stupid, bestial humanity wearing its customary familiar face.

  Jamie Thief lived but four doors down from Dewi’s nain. Dewi called on the old woman on his way to work, to take a meat pie his mother had baked. Jamie was on the pavement as he came out of his grandmother’s house, closing the door of a shiny grey Ford Scorpio.

  Dewi sat with Jamie in the squad room, empty save for the two of them. As whey-faced as any baby from the estate, eyes red-rimmed and watery, Jamie pulled hard on a thin cigarette.

  ‘When’s your birthday, Jamie?’ Dewi asked. ‘Soon, isn’t it?’

  ‘None of your sodding business!’ Jamie snarled. Dewi watched the shaking hands.

  ‘What’re you on? Dope? Speed?’ Dewi asked. ‘You look a mess. Did you know that? From where I’m sitting, you look like you might be six feet under long before you get to your next birthday.’

  Jamie made no response. He sat stony-faced, staring at the small patch of floor between the toes of his Nike baseball boots. Dewi remembered sitting in this same room countless times, watching Jamie stare at the floor and Doc Marten boots on his feet. Times changed, and fashions changed, but the likes of Jamie stayed the same, new ones growing up to join the mob each day. McKenna once told Dewi that the world must be balanced between good and bad, neither able to exist without the other, the social function of criminals so crucial that their absence would force society to pass laws to bring them into existence. Staring at Jamie, Dewi wondered where that process might begin, and realized the greater importance of knowing where it would end.

  ‘Why’ve you brought me here?’ Jamie demanded. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  Dewi grinned. ‘Jamie, you’ve always done something. There’ll be a whole string of things you’ve done waiting for us to find out about sooner or later.’

  ‘You always did talk a load of crap, Dewi Prys.’

  ‘We want to know about the car. That’s all.’

  ‘I’ve told you! How many more times do I have to tell you? I borrow it now and then. No crime in that, so hard bloody luck!’

  Dewi wrote ‘borrows the car now and then’ in his notebook, while Jamie tried to read the words upside down. ‘Who d’you borrow it from?’ he persisted.

  ‘A mate.’

  Dewi added ‘from a mate’ to his notes.

  ‘Why’re you writing it down?’ Jamie demanded.

  ‘We write everything down, you know that, Jamie. So you can’t come back at us and say you never said whatever it is. And so you can’t make out in court we beat a confession out of you.’

  ‘I’m not confessing anything!’

  ‘Did I say you were?’ Dewi smiled. ‘Shall I get us a panad?’

  ‘I don’t bloo
dy want a drink! I want to get out of here!’

  ‘All in good time. Mr McKenna’ll want to talk to you about the car.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to ask him that yourself. Not for me to tell you, is it?’

  Jamie jumped to his feet. ‘I’m going!’

  ‘Sit down, unless you want to be arrested,’ Dewi ordered. Jamie sank on to the chair, once again locked into the ghastly ritual, neither he nor Dewi Prys able to escape the consequences of their role in life.

  Jack walked into the squad room, and saw the pair seated at the table. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘I brought him in to talk to Mr McKenna, sir.’

  ‘Well, Mr McKenna’s not here, so you may as well send him away.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better talk to Jamie, then,’ Dewi said. ‘I found him with the Ford Scorpio, so I thought we’d better do something about it.’

  ‘You what? Not that bloody car again!’

  ‘It’s the same car, sir. We should sort out why Jamie gets to borrow it. And who he borrows it from, if you get my drift.’

  Jack looked from Jamie to the young police officer, and wondered which of the two was the bigger thorn in his flesh. ‘All right, Prys.’ He sat on the edge of the table, sharp creases in his trousers pulled taut over his thighs. ‘Who d’you borrow the car from, Jamie?’

  ‘I’ve already told him.’ Jamie gestured towards Dewi. ‘He’s too bloody thick to understand. Typical copper, isn’t he?’

  ‘Jamie says he borrows the car from a mate. I was just about to ask him again who the mate might be.’

  ‘Give me a name, Jamie. Stop farting about!’

  Bravado returned to Jamie. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything. I want my brief.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Jack’s eyes narrowed. ‘And why should you want some piddling bloody solicitor to hold your hand? What’ve you done you don’t want us knowing about?’