Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  ‘You don’t listen either, do you? I can manage.’

  The girl tugged again at her mother’s sleeve. ‘Can we go and see him? Please!’

  ‘No!’ Gwen Stott rounded on her daughter. ‘No, no, NO!’

  Temper cooled, Jack lounged in McKenna’s office.

  ‘I feel sorry for that man,’ McKenna observed. ‘Whatever he is, he doesn’t deserve her. She’s a cold woman, Jack. Hard as nails.’

  ‘Maybe living with him made her that way. If he’s been courting Trefor Prosser, it can’t’ve done her self-esteem much good.’

  ‘Well, if he has, I can’t say I blame him. I’d rather cuddle up to Trefor Prosser than Gwen Stott any day.’

  ‘Are we going to interview her? Sounds like she’d be a mine of information.’

  ‘No she wouldn’t. She’d just carp and whine and sneer and bad-mouth her husband and daughter. She showed her true colours where the girl’s concerned. That woman has a swinging brick where other folk have a heart, Jack. Just imagine how your girls would feel if we turned up out of the blue and said you were in the nick and likely staying there. I really don’t know if we shouldn’t tell social services to poke their noses in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case she starts taking it out on the girl now the husband isn’t around to be a whipping boy.’

  Dewi Prys stood at the door of one of the detention cells in the basement, breathing in the cold metallic scent, like that of blood, of every cell in the world. Stott, the only detainee, resembled every prisoner: shocked and cold and desperate and diminished. Dewi wondered fleetingly if the act of taking another’s liberty, however briefly, however much warranted, was not the most diminishing act one human being could perpetrate against another, apart from taking life itself.

  ‘Have you had tea, Mr Stott?’

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll have something later, then.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Haunted eyes, red-rimmed in darkly shadowed sockets, stared at him. ‘Has—’ Stott caught his breath, as if he would choke. ‘Has my wife been told?’

  Dewi sat on the one chair, opposite the bunk where Stott hunched. ‘The chief inspector went to see her a while back.’

  Stott was silent for long moments. ‘I don’t expect she’ll come to see me, will she?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. You can have visitors any time. Well, any reasonable time. Not midnight, for instance.’

  Stott smiled weakly. ‘I won’t hold my breath, Constable. Could my daughter come?’

  ‘We’d need a policewoman sitting in on account of the girl being so young. How old is she?’

  ‘Nearly fifteen.’ The man stared unseeingly. ‘Thank God she’s not a baby…. I don’t know how she’ll cope as it is…. And I don’t expect her mother will be any help.’ Bitterness twisted at his mouth, sparkled in his eyes. He focused his gaze on Dewi, and said, ‘What am I to be charged with?’

  ‘I don’t really know, sir. You see, not saying anything at the interview screwed things up a bit in that direction.’

  ‘The solicitor told me not to.’

  ‘I’m not criticizing, sir. It just makes things more difficult. I mean, we know some things about that car, but as you won’t tell us the rest, we have to find out what we need to know from other places.’

  ‘I see.’

  Dewi waited, but nothing was volunteered. ‘I’d better be off. Is there anything you want to be going on with?’

  Stott looked down at his hands. ‘Can I have a wash? I’ve no soap or towel or anything. Or pyjamas.’ He looked up, eyes wet with unshed tears. ‘Shall I have to sleep in my clothes?’

  ‘No.’ Dewi suddenly loathed himself and the job he did. ‘I’ll sort things out now. Would you like something to read?’

  ‘Thank you, yes.’ The words were almost whispered. ‘Constable? Could you do something else for me, if you’re allowed? I’ve got a sister in Rhyl. Could you see if Jenny – my daughter – can go and stay with her?’

  ‘What are you doing, Prys?’ Jack accosted Dewi, temper heating beyond his control, fuelled simply by the sight of this bête noire of a youth, reading numbers off the back of his hand as he punched them on to the telephone.

  ‘Making a telephone call. Sir.’

  ‘I can see that! Stop being clever, Prys. Who’re you calling?’

  ‘Stott’s sister.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he asked me to.’

  ‘Because he asked you to? What are you, a bloody nursemaid?’

  ‘He’s worried about his daughter.’

  ‘Worried about his little girl, is he? He should’ve thought of that before he got himself mixed up with killing and blackmail and thieving.’

  Dewi put the receiver in its cradle. ‘We don’t actually know he’s mixed up with anything. People are supposed to be innocent until proved otherwise.’

  ‘Jesus! Not you as well!’

  ‘Not me as well as who else, then?’

  ‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that or I’ll have you on a disciplinary charge! Whether or not you’re McKenna’s blue-eyed boy.’

  Smiling to himself, Dewi picked up the telephone again. ‘I don’t think I’m anybody’s blue-eyed boy, sir. Maybe it’s just on account Mr McKenna and me see eye to eye on a lot of things.’

  ‘You’re an arrogant little sod!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Dewi agreed. ‘If you say so, sir,’ he added, then turned away, to speak to the woman who answered his summons.

  Christopher Stott dozed fitfully in his cell, strange noises intruding upon him, the smell about the bedding, the floor, the walls and himself noxious in his throat and nostrils. Occasional sounds came from the building: the slam of a door, a voice raised in anger or mirth, quenched by distance and thickness of wall and the door behind which he lay. A truck or late bus roaring down the main road rumbled through these subterranean corridors and cubicles like earth tremors, shaking the very air, leaving acrid diesel fumes to eddy with the other smells. He stared up at the ceiling, the light dim in its wire cage, the sweating walls scarred with names and dates and words and wounds of abuse, his body cramped and chilled in its little cot. He thought of his wife and his daughter and Trefor Prosser, thoughts surveyed so often their landscape and its limits held no novelty, no promise but perpetual imprisonment, then saw the strangers who had found their way in, through a gate he had never noticed, and wondered if they might have the strength and power he so dreadfully lacked to rid the landscape of its monsters.

  McKenna went downstairs as the town clock struck two, and as the bell of the cathedral clock added its more sonorous tone. He sat in the kitchen, a mug of tea on the table, a cigarette in his hand, surveying his own repetitive thoughts, so trapped within their little cage they brought nothing but a leaden tedium, creeping into his bones like a fatal disease. Denise, calling upon him earlier, bubbled with a brew of tales: of the holiday she would take the following week, of her plans to move, to sell at a garage sale what neither she nor he wished to keep, and of Jack Tuttle, jumping hither and thither as his wife, poised on the edge of a small liberation, tweaked at the strong ropes binding her marriage together.

  He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old, wondering if he would be engaged in similar activity, disengaged still from all but futility, in twenty years time, or thirty, or forty. He returned to bed well after dawn reddened the eastern sky, falling asleep to the screech of gulls, the clacking of the duo of nesting jays in the trees below his window. He dreamed he was become an old man, crabbed and skinny and wrapped in papery flesh, as rickety as the chair in which he crouched before a mean fire, chewing upon thoughts of Denise, the old flame guttering in the corridors of time whilst he waited for Death, the only visitor likely to call.

  Walking back from Safeways late on Sunday morning, a plastic carrier bag of groceries and cat food in each hand, McKenna saw storm cloud advancing from the east, moved sluggishly along by a chill little wind
to build castles in the sky behind Bangor Mountain. Yellow gorse on its crest glowed livid, newly blossomed trees began to bend and thresh as the wind poked at their limbs with mean thin fingers. Large raindrops splashed on the pavement before his feet, turning to a downpour, to sheets of water billowing down the valley, long before he toiled up the hill to his house. As thunder growled and rumbled behind the mountain, McKenna thought of God, irreverently; of God and Mrs God in the throes of marital disharmony, tearing apart their mansion in the skies, dividing up the loot of vanquished love. Lightning flashed and crackled over the rooftops as he hurried homewards panting for breath, sensing electricity in the air enter his body and pull its balance awry.

  Dewi telephoned late in the afternoon, when the day had fallen to twilight, the power lines to Nature, leaving McKenna and those areas of the city visible from his windows drowned in sombre purple-grey, drenched with rain, and lit by dancing forks and shards of brilliance as the storm surged back and forth from land to sea like a tide.

  ‘You got a power cut as well, sir?’ Dewi asked.

  ‘I do hope you didn’t call simply to ask me that.’

  ‘No, sir. I just wondered, that’s all. Somebody wants to see you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Kimberley. She’s Mrs Stott’s sister-in-law.’

  ‘What’s her involvement?’

  ‘She’s Mr Stott’s sister, sir. I just said.’

  ‘You said she was Mrs Stott’s sister-in-law.’

  ‘Same difference, sir. Are you coming?’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ McKenna looked out at the storm, gathering itself behind the easterly tip of Anglesey for another onslaught, Puffin Island almost obliterated in an eerie darkness where sea and sky and land merged. ‘Can’t you deal with her?’

  ‘I could, I suppose. She’s been to see her brother. She brought the girl with her. Poor little thing looks like she’s not stopped crying since we arrested Stott. Mrs Kimberley actually asked for the most senior officer available.’

  ‘Isn’t Superintendent Griffiths there?’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t know the ins and outs of things like you, does he, sir?’

  ‘I don’t seem to have much choice, do I?’ The power returned as he went upstairs to look for the cat, who had hidden from the storm beneath his bed, from where she refused to be coaxed.

  ‘The worst thing about my brother is that he can be weak. He’s easily influenced, easily intimidated, and God knows that wife of his could scare the Devil!’ Serena Kimberley, except in height, resembled her brother only remotely, her build strong and muscular, the oak to his sapling whippiness, her personality more defined, her attitude infinitely more assertive. ‘You’ve no idea what that woman has made him suffer, and now she’s doing the same with Jenny.’

  Jenny was out of sight and earshot, in the canteen with a policewoman and Dewi Prys.

  ‘My brother hasn’t done anything, you know,’ Serena added, and McKenna thought Christopher Stott might have spent his whole life both protected and ruled by women; by his mother, his sister, his wife, and possibly by Romy Cheney: willingly ruled, the price of protection from the world. And now the Devil had sent in the bailiffs.

  ‘Mrs Kimberley, I appreciate your position,’ he said. ‘But Mr Stott has doubtless said why he was arrested.’

  ‘You haven’t charged him with anything yet.’

  ‘Not yet, but we shall.’

  ‘The car?’

  ‘Probably. And other things.’

  ‘The other things being to do with that woman’s death.’

  ‘Mr Stott was in possession of her car for some considerable time after she died. Possibly before she died. He’s not telling us.’

  ‘D’you mind if I smoke?’ Serena pulled cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of her jacket. ‘Look, Chief Inspector, I’d be lying if I said I knew what’s been going on. I don’t see much of Chris, because I will not visit the house, and he doesn’t get much chance to visit me. Gwen objects. She objects to Jenny staying with me, but it’s the only time the girl gets a holiday. Gwen objects to most things that give people a bit of pleasure because she’s a miserable bitch. She’s like Death, the great leveller, cutting everything and everybody down to the meanest size.’

  ‘What’s she done to you?’

  ‘To me? Nothing. I wouldn’t give her the chance. Or the satisfaction.’ She smoked, enjoying the tobacco in her lungs. ‘I’ve seen her do enough harm to Chris, and now Jenny … Gwen has no joy in her heart, you know. If she ever had a soul to start with, it withered long ago, and she drags other people into her misery.’

  ‘Did you know anything about Mrs Cheney?’

  ‘Not until this weekend.’ She stubbed out her cigarette, and immediately lit another. ‘That nice young man with Jenny now called me on Friday, and I came over right away, and had one almighty row with Gwen. She said the most horrible things you could imagine, and Jenny was near frantic, so I bundled the child’s things into a bag and took her home with me.’

  ‘Didn’t her mother mind?’

  ‘Yes.’ Serena looked McKenna squarely in the eye. ‘She minded very much indeed. She threatened to report me to the police for kidnapping her child, so I told her she should be arrested for cruelty. She’d been slapping Jenny around, because Jenny wouldn’t stop asking about Chris.’

  Self-disgust overwhelmed McKenna, because he had left the child alone with the mother when all the signs were there for any fool to read. Trefor Prosser was acquiring companions on his conscience, whilst he learned nothing.

  ‘Jenny’s a little more settled,’ Serena continued. ‘Our doctor gave her a sedative on Friday night. She insisted on visiting Chris, even though I don’t think it’s a good idea for a girl to see her father in a police cell.’

  ‘It’s better than not seeing him at all.’

  ‘How long are you planning to keep him locked up?’ Serena tapped ash from her cigarette into an over-full ashtray on the desk. ‘He’s terribly worried about Jenny, you know. She’s the only reason he’s stayed in that ghastly mockery of a marriage.’

  ‘I know you said Mrs Stott slapped her daughter on Friday, but I would imagine they were both under considerable stress at the time.’

  ‘Who are you making excuses for, Chief Inspector? I think Gwen is so deranged, in the true sense of the word, that she comes over as boringly and utterly sane, as if madness is sort of circular. I think she’s bloody dangerous, and I think her husband and child are terrified of her.’

  ‘But you don’t know why?’

  ‘I was hoping you might be able to find out.’ She lit another cigarette, looked at its glowing tip, then stubbed it out. ‘I smoke too much most of the time, let alone when I’m under stress. Chris and Jenny had a long talk, and Chris said Jenny wanted to talk to you because you’d understand. Don’t fail her, Mr McKenna. Both her parents have, in their own way, and that’s what’s eating into Chris like acid. I can’t pat myself on the back either. You’re the only hope left to the child.’

  Chapter 28

  Jennifer Stott perched tensely on the edge of a chair in McKenna’s office, anticipating one final ordeal before relief from whatever torment she had endured. McKenna saw his office become a confessional, and prayed he might offer the girl more of use than the platitudes of vicarious absolution. She wore jeans and a white sweatshirt, her hair hanging loose and pretty around a face where youth might still expunge sadness.

  ‘My mother knew Mrs Cheney,’ Jenny said. ‘She used to visit Gallows Cottage. I went with her once, because Mrs Cheney invited me, and Mummy said I had to go even though I didn’t want to.’ She paused, rubbing a smut from the toe of her white boots. ‘I didn’t like the cottage. It’s a shivery sort of place.’

  Serena prompted her. ‘Don’t leave it there, Jenny. Tell Mr McKenna everything you can remember.’

  ‘Mummy and Daddy used to have terrible rows about Mrs Cheney.’

  ‘Yes?’ McKenna coaxed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Dad
dy didn’t like her. He said she was a bad influence, making Mummy dissatisfied with everything.’

  ‘Where did your mother meet Mrs Cheney?’

  ‘At the castle. She went to a party with Daddy, and Mrs Cheney was there. And afterwards, Mrs Cheney kept telephoning Mummy and inviting her out and things like that…. She said I should call her Romy, but I wouldn’t because she was grown up and nearly as old as Mummy. Mummy said it was wrong to call her Auntie Romy, because she wasn’t my aunt.’

  ‘You must remember, Chief Inspector,’ Serena said, ‘Jenny was only ten or eleven at the time.’

  ‘Yes,’ McKenna said. His hands fidgeted with the papers on the desk.

  ‘I don’t mind if you smoke,’ Jenny told him. McKenna looked at the eyes gazing gravely into his, eyes which, unlike those of her mother, held the light of life and the darkness of pain.

  ‘Tell me, Jenny,’ he said, ‘do you remember anything about the car? the grey Scorpio car.’

  ‘It’s Mrs Cheney’s. She used to drive it very fast.’

  ‘Did your mother ever drive it?’

  ‘She can’t drive.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘He wouldn’t go near it. They had awful rows about that, as well.’

  ‘Do you remember anything in particular about the inside of the car?’

  She looked towards the window, at the rain-stained wall of the telephone exchange. McKenna had pulled up the Venetian blind to let in as much natural light as possible. ‘It smelt a bit. Cigarettes and garlic. Mrs Cheney was always eating things with garlic in them.’

  ‘Didn’t keep Gwen away, did it?’ Serena muttered.

  Jenny’s voice droned on, as if her aunt had not spoken. ‘It was very untidy inside. Mummy was always saying Mrs Cheney was a sloven. I had to look it up in my dictionary. There were a lot of mucky fingermarks, and Mummy said it was because Mrs Cheney was always reading those big newspapers that the print comes off, and never washed her hands afterwards…. Mrs Cheney put my present in the car. Mummy said I ought to give her something for inviting me to the cottage, so I bought her a furry toy, and she hung it up in the back window. Mummy was very rude and said it looked bloody silly.’