Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  ‘And how might you know?’

  ‘I went to Mary Ann’s on the way back. She and Beti reckon he’s in a caravan near Dorabella Quarry. They say he’s been using it as a bolt hole for ages.’

  ‘Why don’t they tell us these things? They could’ve saved us no end of trouble.’

  ‘Same reason most folk keep quiet.’ Dewi grinned. ‘Shall we go and get him?’

  ‘It’s late, Dewi. And I’m tired.’

  ‘Yes, but he might not be there in the morning.’

  Dewi drove, McKenna beside him in the front seat fighting the desire to fall asleep.

  ‘Not much traffic around, sir,’ Dewi observed.

  ‘Probably because most people have the sense to be indoors on a wet Sunday night, if not tucked up in bed fast asleep.’

  The car swished along the wet road, engine running smoothly. ‘I’ll bet you,’ Dewi said, ‘a good few folk’d change places with us right now.’

  ‘And why should they want to?’

  ‘For the excitement.’

  ‘You reckon this is exciting, do you?’

  Dewi laughed. ‘It will be when we land on Jamie! It’ll be the biggest excitement he’s had in a long while.’

  Once a viaduct carrying the railway line from Dorabella Quarry to the port, the bridge fell to industrial decay, leaving only a few feet of its span balanced on either end of slate-faced ramparts. Ugly and ill-proportioned, the red-brick cottages fronted the road beneath the old bridge, windows dark and shrouded. Dewi drew the car on to the verge. ‘I’m not sure where the caravan is, and I don’t know how we get to it, but we shouldn’t need to wake people.’

  ‘We might not,’ McKenna said. ‘There’s no telling what Jamie might do. If he’s there, that is.’

  Dewi shut the car door with a quiet click. ‘Soon find out, won’t we?’ He swung the torch beam on the ground, on beads of rain clinging to grass stems, a huge black slug glistening by his foot. ‘Ugh! I hate slugs. Never get that slime off your shoe when you tread on them.’

  ‘Got your handcuffs, Dewi?’ McKenna asked, watching a snail with its house on its back trailing in the wake of the slug.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  McKenna leaned against the car, pulling up his coat collar against chilly tendrils of mist and damp. ‘I’ll tell you what we haven’t got, and that’s the warrant.’

  ‘So? That’s for us to know and him to find out, isn’t it? I shan’t tell him.’

  Walking fast and quiet along the grass verge, Dewi searched for a gate or gap in the thorny hedge. ‘The caravan must be in those trees.’ He pointed to a darker mass against the night black sky.

  ‘Into the field, then,’ McKenna said. ‘You can go first. I’m not dressed for adventuring.’

  Dewi pushed into the hedge, parting branches to make way for McKenna, who stopped to disentangle his coat from a thorn, and heard a whistling and rustling surging towards him. ‘There’re rats on the move, Dewi,’ he warned. ‘Keep still.’

  The tide of rats washed down the road, coats gleaming dully like oily water, then flooded into the blackness on the opposite side. ‘The council must be dumping rubbish tomorrow,’ McKenna said, watching the last of the tide ripple out of sight.

  Climbing the steepening rise of the field towards the copse, Dewi said, slightly out of breath, ‘How do they know? The rats, I mean. How do they know where to scavenge?’

  ‘Same way the rat we’re after knows where to look,’ McKenna observed. ‘Jamie always knows where to scavenge profitably, where there’s a bit of human misery to benefit him. It wouldn’t surprise me,’ he added, stumbling on a tussock of grass, ‘if he killed Romy.’

  ‘Why would he?’

  ‘For profit. The car, money, whatever she had he wanted.’

  ‘But he didn’t get the car. There’s no sign of Jamie getting anything, and I’ve never known him be satisfied with nothing.’

  McKenna was tetchy. ‘We don’t know what he got. Maybe he’ll tell us when we find him.’

  ‘He’s never told us before. He’s not likely to change the habits of a lifetime now, is he?’

  The copse came upon them unexpectedly, its shadows overwhelming the two men. They stood by an oak tree, its knobbled trunk slimy with moss, rain dripping cold down McKenna’s collar. Whispering night sounds and the pitter patter of droplets falling from trees to earth punctured the silence, the air in the copse heavy and still, almost viscous. The torch beam fanned tree shadows over the ground, catching a glint of metal beyond. The caravan, once painted white and blue, now scabrous and rusting, listed on small pillars of bricks. In total darkness, one uncurtained window grimy and smeared, McKenna thought it bore the look of abandoment, of being vacant of life. He tried the door, and almost fell as it swung outwards, askew on its hinges. A stale odour wafted out, shot through and rippling with other scents.

  ‘Sir?’ Dewi’s voice, a harsh whisper, cut across the stillness.

  ‘Don’t touch anything.’ McKenna stepped into the body of the caravan, rocking as it teetered slightly with his weight. He took the torch from Dewi and lit the narrow space with powerful light. Dewi came up close behind, his rapid heavy breathing booming in McKenna’s ear.

  McKenna saw nothing save the pictures in his head, the models in an exhibition of human tragedy. Romy Cheney, swung from a branch, long and thin and sinuous in the wind, black clothes draped around the Modigliani figure. Lame Beti, brutally ugly, escaped from a Breughel canvas and alive through the centuries. Jamie elegant and silent, marbled flesh and eyes milky in the torchlight, one long-fingered hand resting on a dirty mat at the side of the bunk, the other splayed over his chest, like the poet Chatterton, but dead in a filthy caravan in North Wales instead of a dirty garret in Grays Inn; captured at the moment of death, bodily degradation still invisible, only the squalor of his circumstances pointing the way forward.

  Eifion Roberts, subdued by night and weariness, sat beside McKenna in the car. Arc lights glared blue-white inside the copse, lantern lights flickering in and out of the trees, shadows flitting behind them and through them. Rain came down hard, drumming on the roof of the car, washed in rivulets down the windscreen.

  ‘He’s not been dead long, Michael,’ the pathologist said. ‘Not more than twelve hours or so. He’s not even cold.’ He smiled slightly. ‘The first half-decent corpse I’ve had off you for some time.’

  ‘What was it? Suicide?’

  ‘Doubt it. Carelessness, perhaps … won’t know ’til I cut him up, but there’s all the signs of a drug overdose.’ The pathologist rubbed his hands together. ‘Bloody miserable night, isn’t it? There might be some bruising round the face and neck, but it’s hard to tell with those lights. They make too many shadows. If there is bruising, it wouldn’t be all that unusual in an OD.’

  ‘He’s been on drugs for years.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. The pathologist coughed. ‘Odd, though. As far as we know, he only peddled the hard stuff. Preferred to take something safer.’

  ‘You amaze me,’ Dr Roberts said, with a touch of his usual asperity. ‘For someone in your position, you talk a load of crap at times. There aren’t any safe drugs! Not marijuana, not speed, not ecstasy, not alcohol, and certainly not that muck you fill your own lungs with. You’re a fool to yourself, McKenna. You’ll go to an early grave.’ He climbed out of the car, easing his bulk upright. ‘I’m going to my bed. I’ll see to young Jamie in the morning.’

  ‘He’ll never be anything but now, will he?’ McKenna said.

  ‘Anything but what?’

  ‘Young … He won’t grow old.’

  ‘You’re very maudlin. I daresay the world might be a better place for the likes of Jamie not growing old in it. It’s not true what they say about the good dying young, because he certainly wasn’t. Born bad, that one, corrupted in the womb … I’ll call you tomorrow.’ He took a few paces towards his own car, then turned back, leaning in to speak to McKenna.

  ‘If you take my advice, as one who knows about these things
, you’ll go to your bed as well. You look about ready for the knacker’s yard. That lad in the caravan’s got more colour in his cheeks than you have.’

  McKenna shrugged.

  ‘If you hadn’t been at such a low ebb with one thing and another, you wouldn’t’ve been ill in the first place.’ He slid back into the car. ‘You shouldn’t be at work. Barely out of hospital, and here you, are out on a night like this.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Are you? What was it that psychiatrist said about Prosser? Something about ‘psychic distress’, wasn’t it?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it’s perhaps as well he can’t see you now, isn’t it? I’ll tell you something.’ Dr Roberts eased his bulk, shifting to find comfort. ‘Folk’ve been very worried about you in recent weeks.’

  ‘Why? Who?’

  ‘I’m not saying who. Just say people close to you. They’ve been fretting you might, as the saying goes, do something daft. More than one person’s been worried you might end up face down in the shit at the bottom of the Straits.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You don’t see at all,’ Eifion Roberts said. ‘You think people should mind their own business, you think they’ve no right to say anything. But some people actually care about you, even if you don’t give a toss for anyone except yourself and that stray cat warming your bed where a real woman should be. And,’ he continued relentlessly, ‘if you weren’t half eaten up with all this maundering and self-centred navel-gazing you love so much, maybe you’d be doing your job properly, and maybe we wouldn’t be traipsing round tonight in the pouring bloody rain dragging that lad’s body out of the rathole he died in.’

  McKenna waited in the car, shivering from damp and cold and sheer fatigue, the heater turned full on, engine humming gently and blowing streams of fumes from the exhaust to spread like a layer of dewy mist over the greasy road. He fell asleep, and woke to see Dewi’s face pressed against the window. Opening the door, Dewi brought the scents of rainwashed night with him, and the musky odour of death.

  ‘Look at these, sir.’ He pulled a handful of sealed transparent evidence bags from the pockets of his waterproof. ‘Four packets of drugs, probably heroin or cocaine, three hundred and seventy quid in tenners, and a cheque book, and Jamie never had a bank account in his life. Only problem is, there aren’t any cheques left and the stubs aren’t filled in.’

  McKenna stifled a yawn. ‘You’ll have to ask the bank in the morning. What else did you find?’

  ‘Bugger all really. A few clothes that could do with a wash, bits of food, about a ton of empty lager cans, fags … Jamie travelled light, you might say.’

  ‘I should imagine his sins weighed more than enough to carry around.’

  ‘I know we all bad mouth him, and he’s only had himself to blame, but it’s a bit pathetic in there. Dirty and damp, his few bits and pieces … a nasty place to die, sort of poverty-stricken and demeaning, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Some would say it’s as much as he deserves.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, would you, sir?’

  ‘No, and I hope you never come to feel like that about people.’ McKenna took a cigarette from the packet, then pushed it back unlit. ‘I think we should leave the others to it and get some sleep. There’s a lot to do tomorrow.’

  ‘What about Jamie’s mam?’

  ‘We should tell her, shouldn’t we?’ McKenna said. ‘And what good will it do to go upsetting her in the middle of the night, Dewi? Jamie’s dead. He’ll still be dead in the morning, no less and no more so than he is now … Leave her in ignorance a while longer, eh?’

  ‘But what if she hears about us being here in the night? You can’t have a crap round here without the whole world knowing how long you sat on the pan.’

  ‘I’ll send someone to see her as early as possible. There’s nothing to tell her yet, except he’s dead.’

  ‘D’you think he killed himself?’

  ‘Dr Roberts thinks he may have overdosed by accident. Jamie’s never struck me as suicidal. Murderous, yes, but not suicidal.’

  Dewi stared unseeing through the windscreen. ‘I’ve known him all my life,’ he said. ‘We played together when we were so high. Now he’s gone, snuffed out just like that. I’ve only known old people die before, except little Barry John, and he was a mongol kiddie, so we all knew he’d never make old bones … I feel as if part of me’s gone with Jamie. His mam won’t care, you know, sir. She never did. My nain reckons that’s why he turned out bad. She probably won’t even bury him properly.’

  McKenna put his hand on Dewi’s arm. ‘She might not be able to afford a decent funeral. You can’t blame people for things they can’t help. You can only judge people by what they can or can’t do, not what they simply do or don’t do.’

  Dewi turned, and McKenna thought there were tears in his eyes. ‘No? Who do you blame, then? Why should some get off taking the rap, and not the others? It’s not fair. Where’s the justice in that?’

  Chapter 30

  By 8.30 on Monday morning, McKenna had briefed a team of officers to execute the search warrant on Stott’s house in Turf Square. The Scorpio car, removed from an abusive owner shortly after first light, lodged at the garage of divisional headquarters until required as evidence.

  ‘Evidence of what?’ Jack grumbled. ‘Our incompetence? And why wasn’t I called out last night? I get the feeling you don’t want me know what’s going on.’

  ‘I’ve already told you why. You said you wanted to relax as much as you could.’ McKenna regarded the surly angry face of his deputy. ‘Not much point in both of us being too tired to stand up, is there? I want you to take charge of the search. You know what to look for.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I say so!’

  ‘I’m surprised you’re not sending wonderboy.’

  ‘Dewi Prys has other things to do.’

  ‘Oh, so you know who I mean, do you?’

  ‘Your attitude is bordering on insubordination.’

  ‘So what? You don’t give a toss for discipline! You let that little fart get away with murder at my expense.’

  ‘If you have problems in your relationship with colleagues, I suggest you ask yourself why.’

  Fury mottled Jack’s face. ‘Oh, it’s my fault, is it? What about you favouring him? How d’you think that looks? Eh? I’ll tell you how. It makes me look a bloody fool!’

  ‘Dewi Prys has the makings of a very good detective. But he’s young I can put up with a bit of cheek now and then, while he does his job as well as he does.’

  ‘Oh, I see!’ Jack stormed. ‘You’re saying I don’t do mine well, are you?’

  McKenna twiddled his pen, staring at the wall behind Jack. ‘You’re an inspector. Dewi’s a constable.’ He focused his eyes on Jack. ‘You should know better then to behave like this, and you should have learnt not to let yourself be riled by a bit of mouthiness.’

  ‘That’s bloody unfair, and you know it!’

  ‘You’re not on the receiving end of the damned feuding between you and him, are you. I’m sick to death of it! And I blame you because you overreact most of the time.’ McKenna paused, then held up his hand as Jack opened his mouth to speak. ‘And don’t tell me I have no interest in discipline. I was under the impression you at least were a mature adult, and that discipline as such should not be an issue. And certainly not an issue allowed to interfere with the course of any investigation.’

  ‘Have you finished?’ Jack snarled.

  ‘No, I haven’t. Not quite.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘I think your domestic life may be affecting your judgement, and I think you ought to take stock of the situation as a whole. In fact, it might be useful for you to take some leave while Emma is away.’

  ‘Is that an order?’

  ‘Not at this moment. Whether or not it becomes so is entirely up to you.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Exactly what it appears to mean.’

&
nbsp; Jack paled. ‘You’re trying to get rid of me, aren’t you, because I don’t fit in with your cosy little clique! Because I’m not pally-pally with the superintendent and I don’t suck up to the bloody councillors, and I can’t speak your horrible peasant gibberish! Have you any idea how I feel when you talk about things in Welsh and I haven’t a sodding clue what’s going on? You do it on purpose to make me feel left out, don’t you? Well, I’m getting the message! You don’t want me here, but you haven’t got the guts to tell me to my face!’ He wrenched open the door. ‘You Welsh are all the bloody same! You smile in someone’s face while you’re sticking a knife between their shoulder blades.’ He drew an angry rasping breath. ‘I’m not surprised you never catch the arsonists and bombers! You’re a bunch of sodding anarchists, and it wouldn’t surprise me if you don’t plant the bombs yourselves! Language of the hearth!’ he sneered. ‘We all know what that means in English, don’t we? Terrorism and arson and bombing!’

  McKenna heard him blunder off down the corridor, the soft thud as the fire door at the head of the staircase shut itself. He closed his own door, and stood at the window waiting for the search party to drive out of the police station. The ash tree growing outside his window, he noticed, was beginning to cut off rather too much light. Jack’s car screeched suddenly from the driveway, narrowly avoiding collision with a Purple Motors’ bus and its cargo of early shoppers. McKenna stared at the wall of the telephone exchange, the cherry tree on the lawn in front dropping pink blossoms on to grass littered with drink cans and chip paper and crisp packets, and asked himself why he had deliberately set out to wound Jack, wondering what perverseness, what malice, put the words in his mouth. Words, he thought. Only words, without purpose or intent left to themselves, merely a collection of symbols. But once uttered, once given life, such innocent words could leap and fight, crash into each other, trip from innuendo to meaning to becoming powerful and purposeful, overpowering their creators and becoming an end in themselves. Perhaps he was trying to divest himself of all those people who intruded into his consciousness, bore significance in his life, and who, therefore, tethered him, tied him about with bonds of friendship and love and all the pain those bonds might cause if the flesh struggled against them. First Denise, now Jack, because Jack was tied to Emma, and Emma to Denise, and all of them weaving ropes and ties around McKenna’s spirit, as if that spirit were a maypole, and he feared strangulation from its pretty dancing ribbons.