Speculation and imagination exhausted, Dr Rankilor turned to romance, suggesting that Gwen Stott unconsciously wished for Romy’s death, and thus failed to save her from Jamie’s depredations. For Romy exposed the canker within Gwen’s own family, the terrifying bogey of incest, all the more terrifying once Gwen understood that her daughter played the dual role of victim and seductress, slipping eel-like from one to the other. A classic scenario, the psychiatrist wrote, where only the mother could effect rescue. That such rescue was merely another fantasy, Gwen could not know until the tragic repercussions began reverberating about her head.
Lighting his third cigarette, McKenna let words and pictures run through his mind, underscored by Gwen Stott’s words telling him that Romy picked her up, took her for a ride, then abandoned her on the road. Which road, he wondered? And what escoriating injury did Romy inflict upon her friend when she pushed her from the speeding car, left her bouncing and tumbling on the hard surface of that unknown road? He put Dr Rankilor’s report away before its tentative siren call evoked compassion, and scrawled notes on a large sheet of paper to remind himself that nowhere did Dr Rankilor make any mention of John Jones, because John Jones was the fly in the psychiatrist’s soothing balm, the nasty little fly poking up his head from the great woodpile of rationalizations and justifications and defences for the indefensible.
The cigarette burned away between his fingers while he thought of the notions fashioned by Dr Rankilor, who seemed, like himself, unable to bring Gwen Stott into focus. Like a person seen in the mirror, she was a visual fallacy, and each person who looked saw only another reflection of the original untruth, as if the image and its untruthfulness were reflected infinitely in two parallel mirrors. Only Gwen Stott could find the reality, because she knew where it festered behind the image, and McKenna knew she never would, because there was nothing she needed or wanted to see.
Pulling down shirtsleeves and fastening cuff buttons, he stacked the huge pile of papers on his desk, took his jacket from its hanger, and left the office for a city quiet with the emptiness of a Sunday afternoon, only a few bored youths and their gaudy girls lounging on the pavement outside Woolworths. Saturday’s litter skipped down the street, harried by a rising westerly wind, sunlight glittered on rooftops, highlighting dirt on the pavements, weather-worn paintwork on old window frames. The sharp tang of gorse blew from the mountain, lemony and fresh, as McKenna, jacket unbuttoned, strolled to the end of High Street, on to Beach Road, and down to the pier; one third of a mile of ornate ironwork and timber striking out into Menai Straits. Standing at the pier-end, the sea running fast beneath his feet, he took off his glasses, afraid of losing them to the snatching wind. Across the water, the shores of Anglesey looked near enough to touch, the mountains behind him sharp and clear against a pale-blue sky. Westwards, Menai Bridge spanned the Straits, graceful and precise, a mathematical formula proved in stone and iron.
On the terrace of the pier restaurant, he ate chicken sandwiches and strawberry gâteau, drank two cups of coffee and took Denise’s letter from his inside pocket. He put his glasses on to read, pausing here and there at some word or phrase among the many scrawled in her rather untidy hand on crinkly blue airmail paper. Cigarette burnt down in the ashtray, he stubbed it out and lit another, gazing out to sea at dark swathes of shoals under the running tide, gulls wheeling and diving, early tourists taking their turn on the pier. Off Beaumaris, a small flotilla of yachts tacked into the wind, sails full, like ice-cream cones bobbing on the sea, and in the far distance, the grey whaleback shape of Great Orme lay in the water against a cold eastern sky. He stared, some wisp of a recollection flickering along the edge of memory like a sputtering flame. Trying to catch the tail, hold it still long enough to look, he was left thinking only of a dreamscape on the edge of the world, glimpsed and gone.
Bill paid, letter folded safely in his pocket, he walked back up Beach Road and onwards to the council cemetery, through its high wrought-iron gates, crunching along gravel pathways to wander among the graves. Beyond rows of headstones, trees tossed on the wind, leaves full out and bright as new paint, their scent on the air. Seated on the hard slats of a bench, he looked at another aspect of the mountains seen from the pier, this view a backdrop for the smoke-stained chimney of the crematorium. Wispy smoke and a mirage of white-hot heat from Romy Cheney’s remains singed the air above the chimney three days before, her funeral graced by the village rector, himself and Dewi, and Eifion Roberts, gossipy with a man from the council. Robert Allsopp offered to pay for the funeral, receiving in return the little carton of ground wood and bone ash to scatter on a patch of Derbyshire moorland, there for it to swirl on the winds, be trodden under the hooves of a thousand sheep, washed into gullies by torrents of rain, and buried deep under the snows of winter. Romy Cheney needed no memorial, McKenna thought, for she lived too vividly in the memory of Jenny Stott ever to be decently forgotten, as the dead should be with time. He thought of her hanging among the trees of Castle Woods, feeding nature as carrion nourishes, her worldly wealth scavenged by human vultures, and felt not the smallest twist of grief.
Allsopp identified the buckle without hesitation, anonymous technicians and scientists identified the scrapings from under Jamie’s nails as the flesh of Gwen Stott, the six fingerprints from Jamie’s squalid caravan as her own, and matched the many signings of Romy Cheney’s name with Gwen Stott’s script, wrapping around the woman a neat and tidy parcel of guilt. John Jones remained incarcerated, insistent on the protection of thick walls and locked doors, enjoying notoriety, expecting only a slap on his scrawny wrist for the little theft.
McKenna ground out his cigarette end, scuffing it over with gravel, and walked towards a grove of trees beside the river, hearing the rush of water below the fall of land. He might meet Beti Gloff, he thought, out on her interminable perambulations, or Mary Ann escorted by her son to view her husband’s grave. Running them to earth the day Denise flew to Rhodes, he confronted the two women in Mary Ann’s sour kitchen, where they cackled amid the teacups like the witches John Jones said they were. Neither cared very much about what he had to say: Beti Gloff shrugging her humped back in silence, Mary Ann favouring him with the observation that God’s Will was God’s Will, and who was he or she to argue with that?’
Legs aching a little, he found another seat on a low marble bench in the shadow of the trees, the river behind him fast and full with rain from the mountains, unmown grass damp underfoot, sprinkled with daisy heads open to the sun. He thought of Christopher Stott, Jenny and Trefor Prosser, sure there was yet more bad to come, despite Prosser’s newfound optimism, Stott’s belief that rust ate into his own chains at last. Jenny remained the hostage, her future bleak, the mother who should embrace and protect her locked away with fantasies for comfort.
He pulled Denise’s letter from his pocket, wind crackling through the pages, one small gust threatening to carry them whirling high into the trees and out of his grasp for ever. No salutation, no “Dearest”, as she would have once written, not even his name, but merely a date scrawled under “Athens”, and over a long, gossipy woman’s letter, interrogations between the lines, cattiness sharpening words as vacant of sensibility as her heart was devoid of that yearning which filled the gulf between reality and the ideal. He refolded the pages, realized she would return in two days’ time, knowing she had become a figment of her own imagination, and the wife he desired a figment of his own. He thought of all the women in his world, these soldiers of Trefor Prosser’s “monstrous regiment”, and thought there were no words more true than those of the Russian woman who said: ‘What is women’s life about if not legends, gossip and rumours?’
Gravel turned underfoot as he walked slowly towards the cemetery gate, cramp dragging at his legs, evening chill pinching his neck and finger ends. He wondered where Rebekah’s murdered baby might rest, little bones crumbled to nothing, and saw the raw black earth of a new grave still making a mound over its coffin, flowers withering yellowy-b
rown and sour-smelling around its edges, and felt a jolt in his belly, for Jamie lay below the black earth, his place marked by a lopsided wooden cross painted untidily with a number. Standing at the foot of the grave, McKenna recalled the dismal hurried service in the cemetery chapel, a hasty interment while he and Dewi waited apart from the tiny group of mourners, watching Jamie’s mother, thin in dusty black, her face faded by misery, clutch the arm of the man people said begat her son, but who married her sister. Losing Jamie was almost like losing a friend, he thought, for if nothing else, Jamie was the known devil, and no one could know who might come to take his place in the scheme of things, fill the hole left by his passing. Would the family give him a headstone as soon as the earth stifling him hardened and flattened itself? And what might be inscribed upon it? He turned to follow the progress of a grey squirrel suddenly bounding from behind a marble cherub, watched it scuttle towards the trees, hoping no twisted sense of humour had “Jamie Thief” engraved on marble or black granite or purple slate. The squirrel disappeared from view in the long grasses, and turning back, McKenna looked straight into the eyes of the man who stood at the head of Jamie’s grave, sunlight striking brilliant lights in long black hair hung about an ashen face, wind lifting ruffles about the throat. Breath frozen in his lungs, McKenna tore his eyes away from those steeped in the darkness and despair of centuries, and stumbled blindly up the path, straining to hear the footsteps behind him, knowing there would be not the slightest whisper of sound as the man came close enough to lay his dead cold hands around McKenna’s neck and breathe the grave-smell in his face.
Copyright
© Alison Taylor 1995
First published in Great Britain 1995
This mobi edition 2011
ISBN 978 0 7090 9337 4
Robert Hale Limited
Clerkenwell House
Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.halebooks.com
The right of Alison Taylor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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