Simeon's Bride

by Alison G. Taylor

  ‘Had you been looking?’

  ‘Dunno, really. I reckoned they’d tip her in the river or bury her … I found her on the Sunday morning when I were out. Beti goes to chapel of a Sunday morning.’

  ‘Tell me why you were out,’ McKenna said. ‘To get the record straight.’

  ‘I were setting rabbit traps, if you’ve got to know. And I didn’t fucking catch any, so you can’t do me for it.’

  ‘Where was she?’

  ‘Hanging off the fucking tree where you found her! Where d’you think she was?’

  ‘And when did you take the buckle?’

  ‘Some time after.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? I’ve said! No use to her, was it?’

  ‘And what state was the body in?’

  ‘Jesus! Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘I’m asking you to tell me.’

  ‘She was crawling, ’cos she was hung like a fucking pheasant, and the bloody maggots dropped off on me when I took the buckle. Her eyes were gone by then … crows or magpies, I suppose. Dunno which.’

  ‘Did you take anything else?’ McKenna asked. ‘Did you go into Gallows Cottage at any time, and take anything?’

  ‘Maybe.’ John Jones stared at the table. ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘I went round the place after that bitch cleared it out. Christ! You should’ve seen her heaving stuff into the back of a van like fucking Tarzan, and Jamie Thief standing gawping.’

  ‘What did you take?’

  ‘Some fancy jacket and skirt she’d left on the floor. I reckoned they were good enough for somebody, so I took them to Beti.’

  ‘And what did she do with them?’

  ‘Gave them to that witch Mary Ann, on account she’s fatter.’

  ‘And?’ McKenna prodded.

  ‘And that Mary Ann throws a fucking wobbler, doesn’t she?’ John Jones announced. ‘Says you get evil luck for stealing off the dead, and chucks them back at Beti.’ He took another cigarette. ‘Beti makes me take them back to that cottage, so I stuffed them under a floorboard upstairs … stank they did, like the body in the woods.’

  ‘Are you telling me,’ McKenna asked, ‘that Mary Ann and Beti knew about the body all the time?’

  John Jones sniggered. ‘The whole fucking village knew, except for his holiness.’

  ‘Then why did no one tell us?’

  ‘Tell you? What for? She was dead, wasn’t she? Telling folk wouldn’t make no difference. Anyway, she were a fucking foreigner, and I reckon things happened on account of it. Folk don’t want to get mixed in with nothing like that ’cos they never know where it’ll end. Look at all the trouble now, just ’cos I told you.’ He paused, then snapped up his head. ‘Should’ve kept my stupid fucking mouth shut, shouldn’t I? The body wasn’t doing no harm.’

  ‘Why did you tell us then, John Jones?’

  The old man shivered. ‘Her! I reckon she must’ve seen me in the trees, or that Jamie Thief did and grassed me up. She set that gippo after me, everywhere I bloody go, day and fucking night! And I don’t know what she’s told him to do. Look what happened to Jamie Thief.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Didn’t fancy swinging off some fucking tree like the other one, did I?’

  ‘If you’d told us sooner,’ McKenna said quietly, ‘Jamie might still be alive.’

  ‘So what if he might be?’

  ‘You could’ve saved him, couldn’t you?’

  ‘What for? When’ve the likes of Jamie Thief been worth saving for anything?’

  * * *

  ‘Well, Jack,’ McKenna said, ‘your deus ex machina turned up right on cue. Not quite in the shape you imagined, I daresay.’

  ‘Didn’t it?’ He yawned. ‘Emma will have my hide. Have you seen the time?’ Grinning, he said, ‘Young Dewi really got more of an eyeful than he bargained for in that cottage, didn’t he? Should make him the star attraction in the canteen for months to come.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll want to discuss it,’ McKenna said. ‘He wanted to keep it out of the report, as much to save his own face as the old woman’s … Can’t somehow imagine her and John Beti having it off, can you?’

  ‘You can’t imagine a lot of people having sex,’ Jack said. ‘And not just because they’re as bloody ugly as those two. Oh, well, it takes all sorts … at least we’ve sorted out who did what to who, although convincing a jury’s another matter.’

  ‘It usually is. What time are you taking Emma and Denise to the airport tomorrow?’

  ‘Their flight leaves at midday, and they reckon to be in Rhodes in time to go out on the town.’ Jack fidgeted. ‘I can’t stop worrying about them, you know. You hear about dreadful things going on abroad, don’t you?’

  ‘Dreadful things happen everywhere. We should know that better than anyone.’

  ‘You’re a great comfort, aren’t you?’

  ‘Your wife is a big girl now. So is mine. I’m sure they’re more than capable of taking very good care of themselves.’

  ‘I know that,’ Jack fretted. ‘But suppose Em doesn’t want to? Everybody knows what hot sun and a drop of drink can do to the best intentions.’

  ‘If Emma knew what you thought, she’d be deeply insulted,’ McKenna said. ‘With every justification.’

  ‘I thought you’d’ve gone home by now, sir,’ Dewi said. ‘I saw Inspector Tuttle leave a while back.’ He sat down beside McKenna’s desk. ‘Those two in the cells are fed and watered and locked up for the night.’

  ‘Has Beti Gloff been told we’re keeping her husband?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Are we going to do anything about her and Mary Ann? Led us a bit of a dance, didn’t they?’

  ‘I’m more than tempted to drop a conspiracy charge on them,’ McKenna said. ‘And tomorrow, I shall tell Beti Gloff, with her lame legs and cross eyes and croaking voice, and Mary Ann, with her cups of tea and packets of biscuits and tales of yesteryear, exactly how lucky they are not to be joining John Beti and the other one in the cells.’

  ‘Bit of luck finding the buckle, I suppose. I could’ve done with finding it some way else, though.’

  ‘No, Dewi, it was a bit of very good detection. And there are much nastier sights waiting for you behind closed doors than two old people having sex,’ McKenna said. ‘What’s Gwen Stott had to say? Owt or nowt?’

  Dewi ran his fingers through his hair, a gesture reminiscent of McKenna’s own. ‘I dunno if it’s a good idea to have her and John Beti in the same building, never mind next door to each other.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘We all heard John Beti tell about her heaving furniture into the van. Like Tarzan, he said, didn’t he? It wouldn’t surprise me if she doesn’t tear the wall apart to get at him.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘I just sort of mentioned this and that. I went to ask what she wanted for tea, and she started rabbiting on about how Romy changed all of a sudden, stopped being her friend and so forth,’ Dewi said. ‘Then she comes out with this spiel about Romy making a web round her of all her deepest and darkest secrets, then attacking her like a spider goes for a fly trapped in the web. And she reckons Romy made her feel even more worthless than her husband does, and that’s saying something, apparently.’ He frowned. ‘She claims she took Romy’s name to get shut of the inadequacies other people say she’s got.’

  ‘Interesting,’ McKenna observed.

  ‘You think so, sir?’ I think it’s what Inspector Tuttle calls “psychological claptrap”. Anyway, I happened to mention we’d talked to John Beti, and she starts spitting words at me. John Beti, she says, is a filthy pervert Peeping Tom, snooping around the cottage and sniffing after Romy, who was too busy having it off with Jamie to notice overmuch.’

  ‘So?’ McKenna prompted.

  Dewi shrugged. ‘So I mentioned what John Beti’s been telling us, and she goes ape-shit. Sat staring at me with those awful cold dead eyes she’s got on her, and said, “Do you know something
, constable?” So I said, “What?” And she says, “Jamie Thief kept wanting more and more money to keep his mouth shut, so I sat on his chest and listened until he stopped breathing. And I’ll do the same to John Jones”. She fair made my skin crawl. She means it, you know.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt she does,’ McKenna said. ‘John Jones would be well advised to arrange to be dead of natural causes by the time Gwen Stott gets out.’

  ‘D’you reckon she’s mad, sir?’

  ‘No, I don’t, but she wants us to thinks she is, and I daresay some psychiatrist will be only too happy to oblige her way of thinking before the trial.’

  ‘D’you think she’ll get off with diminished responsibility, then?’

  ‘As Dr Roberts pointed out, mad or bad, she gets locked up,’ McKenna said. ‘To my mind, she lacks a conscience far more than Jamie Thief ever did. Let’s call it a day, now, shall we, Dewi? There’ll be a lot of sorting out to do tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not on duty this weekend, sir.’

  ‘I know that. Anything special planned?’

  ‘Oh, you know … the usual….’

  ‘You’ll no doubt enjoy yourself more than Jack Tuttle, whatever it is,’ McKenna grinned. ‘He was right about why that woman was killed. Plain greed, whatever fancy notions Gwen Stott would like us to believe.’

  ‘It usually is,’ Dewi said. ‘Folk always want something they think other folk’ve got: love, money … If it’s not one, it’s the other. Both, some times.’ He made a neat pile of the loose papers on McKenna’s desk. ‘Folk never learn not to be greedy, do they, sir? Never learn you can’t take and get away with it.’

  Walking up the hill to his home, McKenna hoped Dewi’s bright spirit would never be stifled by a web of greed spun by some golden-haired princess, that the boy’s wisdom would not desert him when most needed. A vain hope, he told himself, turning into his own street, for Dewi would fall into the same traps as other men, even the wariest: traps baited by life with the promise of all manner of magic.

  The cat kept her vigil behind the front door, wrapping herself around his ankles as soon as he stepped over the threshold, purring and talking. He carried her downstairs, and stood by the open back door while she quartered the little garden, checking her territory, beneath a sky alight with the hues of rare gems. Below the terrace on which the house so precariously balanced, dense thickets of trees and wild shrubs clothed the hillside, dark leaves tipped gold by a setting sun. McKenna looked over the city, at the slope of a roof, the angle of a gable, visible here and there in the secret gardens behind the shops and offices on the High Street, at flowers luminous in the near dark, smoke rising in a thin pencil line from some tall old chimney. A flurry of bats erupted from the trees, fluttering black against the sky, watched by the cat, who raised her head and stood alert, ready to spring. Over the mountain ridge to the east, a new moon hung dazzling in a deep blue sky, like the Grim Reaper’s sickle hammered from gold.

  Epilogue

  Afternoon sunshine blazed outside McKenna’s office window, swathes of shadow dappling walls and floors as a breeze stirred the branches of the ash tree. He placed Beti Gloff’s statement in a folder with statements from the other residents of Salem village, her evidence, like the rest, barely worth the paper upon which written. She knew nothing, suspected nothing: anyone saying otherwise, her husband included, simply allowing imagination to run riot. Mary Ann, equally ignorant and unsuspecting, was pungent in her condemnation of John Jones’s deceptions, his excesses of imagination, his innate stupidity, taking pains to deride his claims of persecution at the hands of a gipsy.

  Lighting a cigarette, he turned to Dr Rankilor’s report on Gwen Stott, noting from the covering letter that the report was not a definitive statement upon her competence or otherwise to stand trial, but merely a psychiatric assessment of her presenting problems. Before he completed reading the first paragraph, McKenna knew Dr Rankilor tilled the wholly familiar field seeded by Freud, gleaning a bumper crop. Gwen Stott was no heartless killer, no ruthless manipulator of people and money, but joined Romy Cheney and Jamie Thief in the ranks of that ever-growing army of victims, enlisted by unmet needs and the failure of all those to whom she entrusted her naive and trusting self.

  Her life one of impoverishment, both materially and emotionally, she escaped the cold fire of her family home into the empty frying pan of marriage to Christopher Stott, a man emotionally immature, inadequate and fearful, unable to provide in any way what his wife could rightfully expect, his uncertain sexual proclivities an insupportable insult and betrayal.

  Romy Cheney entered the equation at a critical time, to become catalyst and instigator of the chain of tragic events which followed, its first link forged the day she met Gwen, and found in her a strength, honed by adversity, she herself lacked. Romy, her own impoverishment cloaked with the trappings of material wealth, pursued Gwen with gifts and weekend breaks at the luxurious cottage, tales of riches and excitement, tantalizing and inevitably harrowing glimpses of a world where Gwen could book no reservation and must content herself with crumbs from the rich woman’s table. Quoting Freud, the report stated: unsatisfied wishes are the driving power behind fantasies; every separate fantasy contains the fulfilment of a wish, and improves on unsatisfactory reality. Allowed to inhabit Romy’s fantasy, Gwen’s own began to suffer erosion at the teeth of envy, an envy such as the homeless derelict might feel for one who dwelt in a mansion.

  McKenna stubbed out the cigarette burned to a broken column of ash, and stared through the window, eyes dazzled by sunlight bouncing off the wall of the telephone exchange. Dr Rankilor had style to his writing, he thought: too much perhaps, for it enticed him away from facts into the realms of speculation, of imagination, and ultimately, of romance.

  Friendship with Romy the bright lantern light in the narrow corridor of greyness down which her real life meandered, Gwen saw a turning here, a diversion there, hers for the taking if she heeded Romy’s advice, and travelled the remainder of her journey without the encumbrance of a husband. Romy presented the enormity of marital schism as of no consequence, for she had abandoned her own husband, and then her lover. Cajoled and persuaded to believe that people should be used only while useful, then discarded like worn-out garments, Gwen failed to see the warning signals, failed to understand, until too late, that Romy would sooner or later apply that same philosophy to their friendship. Realization dawned when the die was long cast and Gwen Stott thoroughly enmeshed in Romy’s silken, sticky web.

  On that cold November morning Romy turned on her, for no reason, with no warning, the purring cat unleashing claws and striking out to kill. She said terrible things to Gwen; taunted her, diminished her, sneered at her, tore her fragile dreams to bloody tatters and flung them like soiled rags at her feet, as if suddenly crazed, her mind perhaps turned by drink and drugs. Gwen panicked, driven mad in her own way by the knowledge of hope dead, of choice snatched away, of nothing left but return to the bitter raw bleakness of her marriage. Mrs Stott was distraught, Dr Rankilor wrote. She temporarily lost all control all understanding of consequence. Romy struck out at Gwen, pulled her hair and tore at her face with long sharp nails, while Jamie, there because Romy had taken him for her lover, tried to pull her away. She fell, striking her head against a corner of the hearth, and Gwen remembered only the terrible crunching sound of the impact, Romy sprawled stunned at her feet, and Jamie’s hysterical screaming.

  Jamie decided to kill; Jamie went for the barrow; Jamie picked up the limp form of the woman whose bed and body he so recently enjoyed, and bundled her into the barrow. Jamie pushed the barrow deep into the woods; Jamie bound her hands; Jamie tied the rope around her neck and around the branch, and braced himself against the trunk of the tree while he pulled and hauled the rope and its load off the ground. Jamie stayed up the tree, legs astride the gallows branch, smoking one cigarette after another, long after the body of Romy Cheney stopped jerking and dancing at the end of its rope. Gwen only watched, dazed and stup
efied and terrified beyond all comprehension, and Jamie went to his own grave three summers later with a worse name given to him by Gwen Stott’s malicious mouth than the bad one he gave himself.

  Jamie died by accident. Crazed himself with drink and drugs, greedy for more and more of the booty, he threatened to brand Gwen a killer if she refused his demands. When she found the courage to do so, he attacked her like a rabid dog. Dr Rankilor drew attention to the photographs taken of Gwen’s injuries: more than ample proof of her words, if proof were needed.

  For Gwen, the days and weeks following Romy’s death passed in that seamless stuporous fashion coming in the wake of any bereavement, when time is suspended, senses numbed, awareness obscured. Jamie insisted on taking Romy’s furniture and effects to the Stott house, saying the cottage must be empty, nothing left to raise curiosity about the tenant’s sudden disappearance. Finding the cheque book and credit cards when she packed away the detritus of Romy’s existence, Gwen realized she might still salvage some good from all the bad, not for herself, but for her child. A braggart as well as treacherous, Romy made no secret of her wealth or its origins, and Gwen convinced herself that Romy’s money was like all money, owned by whoever possessed it. Taking it into her own possession, salting it away for the rainy days of Jenny’s future, she spent only a few pounds on herself in the years since that terrible event, too fearful of discovery, of making holes in the only safety net available to her child. She watched helpless as Jamie’s never-ending avarice made the holes for her, until the time came when she could watch no longer.

  McKenna stubbed out yet another cigarette burned away, and turned to Dr Rankilor’s concluding paragraphs, an ending providing no conclusion, but raising further questions, opening up more ways to travel into the mind of Gwen Stott, pathways twisting and looping and overlapping and ending up where they began. Tortured by her memories of that dreadful day, ambushed at every corner since, she took Romy’s name perhaps through some bizarre logic, resurrecting the woman to avoid confronting the fact of her death. Or perhaps she stole the name and all its connotations to make a dustbin into which she tossed those things about herself she so loathed and despised. Romy had to die because Gwen Stott, like anybody else, must be rid of the person who evoked their shame; for nobody, Dr Rankilor wrote, would ever be able to say of Romy Cheney that her life was like the snowdrift, leaving only a mark but never a stain. Indeed not, McKenna thought, seeing Jenny and her father and Trefor Prosser stained indelibly with Romy Cheney’s dirt. And thus, Dr Rankilor continued, Mrs Stott simply rid the world of some rubbish, some poisonous waste, and what the world regarded as her scavenging of the body and death of Romy Cheney was but a form of atonement, of taking on the sins and badness of the woman, as the sin-eater takes of the feast laid out on the corpse, and atones once more for being an outcast.