‘That is hardly surprising. The woman was dead.’
‘If you say so.’
‘What do you know about Robert Allsopp?’
‘Who’s he?’
‘When did you last see Romy Cheney? When did you last speak to her?’
Gwen Stott turned to her solicitor. ‘Do I have to answer that?’
‘It would be better if you do.’
‘Well, I can’t, can I?’
‘Why not?’ McKenna asked.
‘Because I can’t remember!’ she said scathingly. ‘Most people can’t remember dates and times off the top of their heads, especially from years back.’
‘Did you expect to see her again? Had you made any arrangements with her?’
‘We never made plans like that. I’ve already told you. You don’t listen, do you? She used to ring up when she was coming.’
‘I see.’
‘Have you finished, Chief Inspector?’ the solicitor asked.
McKenna ignored him. ‘Did you like Romy Cheney?’ he asked Gwen Stott.
‘I did at first. She was very glamorous. Different and sort of exciting … a lot more interesting than most people.’
‘And later?’
‘Well, my husband said she was a bad influence, making me discontented, which wasn’t hard with the sort of life I have to lead with him … I couldn’t make up my mind if he was right, or just being spiteful and mean-spirited, afraid she’d show me what I was missing.’
‘Your husband thought she was a fake.’
She chewed her bottom lip with small mean teeth. ‘He might’ve been right about her being a bad influence. She put into practice what other people only dare dream about … things a lot of people would be too scared to think about, let alone do … Romy Cheney took people for a ride,’ she said. From the corner of his eye, McKenna watched the tape counter snapping towards zero. ‘People got carried away by her, did what she suggested, believed what she said … then she dumped you like a bag of rubbish. She dumped a man like that before she moved here. She latched on to people, played with them, used them up, then dumped them.’ Memory tore at her features, set her eyes alight. ‘She picked you up, like you were a hitch-hiker, and along she comes in her big posh car to take you for a ride … fast and exciting and dangerous. Then she opens the door and pushes you out on to the road, and you’ve got nowhere to go except further down the road where she left you, because you don’t know the way back, and you’re desperate to catch up with her again to hitch another ride….’
‘Did you kill Romy Cheney?’ McKenna asked.
‘You’ll never prove I did.’ Her face lost all its animation. ‘Nobody’ll ever tell you.’
‘And you cannot prove you didn’t. What were these things she did that others dare not even dream about?’
Gwen Stott laughed. ‘You wouldn’t understand if I told you. You couldn’t understand. I’d have to show you, and you won’t let me, will you?’
‘No, I won’t. I won’t hitch a ride with you anywhere.’ He watched her fidget with the hem of her skirt, pulling it over her knees, while knowledge muddied the eyes watching him. He saw himself like Alypius at the Gladiators’ Fight, more vicious and brutal, debased and greedy for simply having been in her company, in danger of being intoxicated by the same heady lusts.
She rounded suddenly on the solicitor. ‘You shouldn’t let him say I can’t prove I didn’t kill her,’ she accused. ‘It’s his job to prove I did.’ The tape clicked to a halt, the machine whining in a breathy silence.
Chapter 38
‘That,’ Dewi Prys observed, ‘is the biggest load of eyewash I have ever heard.’ He turned to McKenna. ‘How you could sit through it is beyond me, sir.’
‘Didn’t notice the solicitor complaining,’ Jack said. ‘All money in his pocket, isn’t it?’
‘You didn’t ask her about the money, sir,’ Dewi added.
‘He didn’t ask her about the car, either. Or Jamie Thief,’ Jack said.
‘It’s amazing how a person can say so much and tell you nothing,’ Dewi commented.
‘Well, she said her husband’s a dead loss,’ Jack said. ‘Not that we hadn’t figured it out for ourselves, without her help. And she said her marriage is a disaster, so we know how she feels about that, but none of it’s any use where Romy Cheney’s concerned.’
‘It could be,’ Dewi said. ‘Knowing how Mrs Stott looks at life might explain why she kills people.’
‘We don’t need psychological claptrap like that, Prys.’
‘You don’t know it is claptrap,’ Dewi countered. ‘You don’t know why Mrs Stott did whatever she did.’
Jack smiled, rather patronizingly. ‘Take my word for it. When we get to the bottom of this, if we ever do, we’ll find the same reason we always find.’
‘And what might that be?’ Dewi asked.
‘Greed,’ Jack said. ‘Pure simple greed. You can dress it up in the finest words you can think of, but that’ll be what it amounts to.’
‘We can’t say she killed Jamie out of greed,’ Dewi said.
‘She didn’t,’ Jack agreed. ‘She killed him to shut his mouth. Of course, if she’s not going to be asked about it, we’ll never know, will we?’
McKenna lit another cigarette. Jack glanced disapprovingly at him. Dewi said, ‘Didn’t you get the impression she was too pat, sir? Like she’d almost rehearsed every word?’
Jack nodded. ‘Like her husband. A great long yarn about nothing you can get your hands on. Then again, she’s had plenty of time to think up a story if anyone ever asked, hasn’t she? Nearly four years.’
‘Mind you,’ Dewi said, ‘she did a fair bit of bad-mouthing people. Her husband, Trefor Prosser, Romy … even her own kid, if you can credit that. If you believe the woman, Christopher Stott’s a pervert, like his friend Prosser.’
‘Takes the attention off her, doesn’t it?’ Jack said. ‘And gives her an excuse if by any remote chance we ever make anything stick.’
Dewi chuckled. ‘Teflon Woman!’
‘Gwen Stott could teach most of the villains I’ve ever come across a thing or two about giving the police the runaround,’ Jack said. ‘What we need now is a big fat clue falling out of the sky, tying everything up nice and tight, like they used to have in those Greek plays.’
‘The only thing likely to fall on us is another load of shit,’ Dewi said. ‘Seems to be all we ever get out of life, doesn’t it?’
McKenna stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. ‘Have you two quite finished? If so, perhaps you wouldn’t mind doing some work.’ He picked up the tape recording, put it in an envelope, and placed the envelope in the safe, slamming the door.
‘What shall we do, sir?’ Dewi asked.
‘Whatever you were doing before.’
‘I’ve finished that.’
Jack stood up, stretching. ‘I’m off home unless there’s something urgent. You haven’t forgotten I’m off tomorrow, have you?’
‘Are you?’ McKenna focused his eyes. ‘Why?’
‘I’m taking Emma and Mrs McKenna to the airport.’
‘Oh,’ McKenna said.
‘Well, then….’ Jack walked to the door. ‘I’ll say goodnight.’ Dewi made to follow him.
‘Stay where you are, Dewi Prys,’ McKenna ordered.
‘Sir?’ Dewi stood obediently to attention before McKenna’s desk.
McKenna fidgeted with his lighter, flicking the flame on and off. ‘Gwen Stott is no fool.’
‘No, sir.’
‘That being so, we must not let her make fools of us.’
‘No, sir,’ Dewi conceded.
‘Therefore, we do not spend too much of our valuable time asking her this and that. And getting whatever answer suits her.’
‘No, sir.’
‘We make sure we have the answers we want without having to ask her.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So we firstly decide what those answers must be. Which means deciding what the questions are.
’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The questions to which we require answers concern two things: the death of Romy Cheney and the death of Jamie Thief.’ McKenna put his lighter down. ‘Everything else is incidental. And,’ he added, an edge of anger to his voice, ‘if we’d spent a bit less time footling around chasing shadows and bloody cars, we might not be sitting here now still asking the same bloody questions we were asking weeks ago. And Jamie might still be alive.’
Dewi sat down. ‘We can get her for killing Jamie. There’s forensic evidence, the taxi-driver, Jenny saying she wasn’t at home when it happened … I don’t see how we’ll ever be able to prove she killed the other one. I mean, even with all the circumstantial evidence in the world, all we can say is she pinched the woman’s furniture and car and money.’
‘You don’t listen, do you?’
‘To what, sir?’
‘To what Gwen Stott actually said.’ McKenna looked at a sheet of paper on the desk. ‘When I asked her if she had killed the woman, she said, and I quote: “You’ll never prove I did. Nobody’ll tell you”. Tell me what you infer from that statement.’
‘She killed Romy Cheney and somebody else knows about it.’
‘Precisely. I think the crucial bit is her use of the word “tell”. There’s no implication that the person or persons in the know can’t tell us, so she couldn’t mean Jamie, because he’ll never tell anything to anybody ever again.’
‘She might just be careless about the way she speaks.’
‘Yes, she might.’ McKenna eyed Dewi, an expression of near despair in his eyes. ‘But as we’re right out of other options, we might as well see if this person exists.’
‘And where do we start looking?’
‘You can talk to Mary Ann, and I’ll talk to Stott again. And Prosser, because she hates him. She almost spits vitriol when his name crops up.’
‘She hates her husband, too.’
‘No, Dewi. She merely despises him.’
Envy. Hatred. Contempt. Dewi drove from the yard behind the police station, thinking of feelings powerful enough to kill, of which he had no personal experience and the hope he never would. Gwen Stott, on the evidence of her recorded statement, sheltered only the cruelty of despair and inadequacy in her heart, sour bile where a drop at least of the milk of human kindness should trickle. She resented her daughter, despised her husband, and had been deranged by envy of Romy Cheney and her expensive trappings. Or had she simply found in Romy Cheney something worthy of the love denied her husband and daughter, Dewi wondered, and killed when that most precious gift was derided and spurned?
Relationships made costly demands upon people. Some could not afford to pay, others merely forgot to read the small print to the contract: Jack Tuttle in debt to anxiety because his wife planned an innocent holiday; McKenna in arrears to unpaid instalments of the emotions forcing him out of marriage and away from a wife who neglected to pay her own debts to her origins; comradeship between Jack Tuttle and McKenna near bankrupted by friendship between the women. Dewi sighed over the carelessness, the sheer negligence with which people ran their life, a moment’s thoughtlessness or stupidity creating havoc for years to come, much as Jamie’s mother gambled, when she could ill-afford the wager, up against the wall of a public house with her boyfriend. Wages of sin, he thought, and all of it down to sex in the end: nothing more, and nothing less.
Turning on to Beach Road, almost blinded by sunshine glittering off a sea mirror-smooth, cracked and cracking around its edges where the waters lapped against the shore and underbelly of the pier, he told himself it was wrong to judge with hindsight, but knew he might never forgive if McKenna, shortchanged by his wife, had been too preoccupied with his own losses to make sure no one cheated Jamie. Would Jamie still be alive if Denise McKenna were a more loving wife, who knew her place in the scheme of things and was content with the place? Too much to expect of the high and mighty Mrs McKenna, he reflected bitterly, who started life in a council house in the valley, but wanted to climb to the mansion in the mountains without the surplus baggage of children and responsibility, and devoted all her time and most of her husband’s money to the equipment for her grand ascent.
Pulling down the sun visor, he took his Rayban sunglasses from the glove compartment. To his left, the sea glinted, ripples upon the water smashed to a dazzle of diamond-bright light. Jamie’s life-blood ebbed and flowed with the tides of that sea, hosed off the autopsy table, into the sewers, spuming into the waters of Menai Straits with the rest of the city’s effluence: a scandal in this day and age to find human turds running atop the tides, used condoms and streamers of lavatory paper eddying against the shore and washed up on the embankment below Britannia Bridge by a heavy swell. On those days when Eurus blew spitefully in Bangor’s face, the stench burnt off the waters was enough to sicken the strongest gut. The city’s rats scavenged rubbish tips and newly sown crops, but fed also at the shores of the Straits before dropping back into the waters and up sewer outlets, their leavings taken by the fish. Dewi thought of Jamie’s life-blood drifting on the tides, a drop here, a drop there snatched by a hungry sea creature and gulped into the food chain, Jamie’s genes reborn without end in the bodies of fish and rat and man and woman; and knew he would never again eat of the sea’s bounty.
Accelerating along the new road out of Bangor, car windows down, sunshine glinting off the bonnet, he gazed at the distant mountains, their blue haziness a promise of fine weather. He would, with luck, have the weekend off duty, and thought he might ask the very pretty girl on the supermarket checkout to drive out with him on Sunday. Watching the speedometer creep over the limit, he vowed to himself not to make a mess of his own relationships, to make only selective dalliances, and dreamed of a sunny spring afternoon in those hazy mountains and an evening in the deep blue dusk and singing mountain silence, a sweet blonde girl by his side and the scent of her skin on his hands.
Turning into Salem village, he parked beyond the school gates and strolled towards Mary Anne’s cottage, sniffing the air. Beneath the scent of sun-warmed flowers in cottage gardens, a fresh tang off the sea, still there curled that smell of decay, of something rotten in the heart of the village. He rapped on Mary Ann’s front door, and waited, rapping again before peering through her parlour window at vague static shapes in the dimness behind her curtain nets. Waiting a little longer, in case she had to come in from the privy in the back yard, he rapped once more before wandering off down the lane.
Wrought-iron gates under the lych closed and fastened with a chain and padlock, Dewi thought it a sorry commentary on social order when sanctuary was denied to the needy. He leaned against the gates for a while, holding on like a child, peering up the walk of close-ranked yew trees, their branches locking overhead to form a dark tunnel towards the west porch. He had no recollection of recent marriage or christening in this church, a place seemingly fit only for the burial of the dead, of cold dark sorrow with no room at its heart for human joy or hope. Letting go of the pitted iron bars, he walked slowly down the path beside the graveyard, quietness growing with every step he took, even the cawing of rooks silenced. The air lay heavy in his lungs, almost like dank water, sweetish and decayed. Each footstep echoed loud in his head, a snapping twig underfoot a gunshot in the stillness. He saw not a living soul and heard only his own breath and tread.
John Jones stood amid the weeds and overgrown meadowgrass on his patch of land, nettles standing almost as tall. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ he demanded.
‘Not to get downwind of you, John Beti. That’s for sure.’
‘Does your Paddy boss know you’re out without the grown-ups, then?’ John Jones painted a sneer on his face.
‘Oh, shut up! You get on my bloody nerves.’
‘Is that a fact?’ John Jones stuck his thumbs into his belt, legs straddled.
‘Where’s Beti?’
‘Out.’
‘Where’s Mary Ann, then?’
‘How the fuck should
I know? I’m not her fucking keeper.’
‘You’ve got a dirty mouth, John Jones.’
‘What you going to do about it? Fist me in the gob like you tried before?’
Dewi looked up and down the path, hoping for Beti’s twisted shadow to precede her, to hear her peasant feet hopping from clod to clod, but the world remained empty of all but himself and John Jones and the silent rooks hooked to high branches above them.
‘What d’you want with Beti Gloff?’ John Jones demanded.
‘Nothing I’d tell you about.’
‘Well, then, Mr Policeman, you’d better fuck off back where you come from, hadn’t you?’
Dewi regarded the weasel figure among the nettles, fronds of hemlock brushing against John Beti’s dirty britches. Late afternoon sun broke through trees here and there, a shaft of gold light picking out the sharp end of John Beti’s nose, glinting on the buckle of a dark leather belt strapped around his middle. Thumbs stuck in the belt, fingers gnarled and dirty like the rest of him splayed each side, he stared back. About to walk away, something rooted Dewi to the muddy ground, some little thing shifting in memory. John Jones began to fidget under his scrutiny.
‘Didn’t your mam learn you it’s rude to stare, Dewi Prys?’
Dewi wrestled with the wisp of a thought playing hide and seek like a mouse beneath the wainscotting. John Jones stuck his sharp fingers into Dewi’s chest. ‘Bugger off, Prys. You get on my fucking nerves.’
‘I’ll be back.’
‘Oh, yes? You and whose army?’
‘Tell Beti I want to see her,’ Dewi said, walking past a rotted gate askew on its hinges, away from John Jones and temptation. He turned, looking once again. ‘D’you know what I wish on you?’
‘More of the fucking horrible life I’ve already got, most probably.’
Dewi laughed. ‘A rat’s dick, John Beti. That’s what I wish on you!’ Still laughing, he walked up the path, the voice of John Jones and its foul imprecations slithering through the trees behind him.
Chapter 39
Simeon's Bride Page 32
