‘He told South Wales police to see Tony, then said he wasn’t surprised Tony killed himself because most kids in his position end up dead one way or another.’
‘Poor little devils!’ Eifion Roberts shivered again. ‘And what can anyone ever do to make it better?’
The two cats slept side by side before the fire. Glancing around the parlour, McKenna found nothing amiss, and went to the kitchen to heat a casserole Denise left in the freezer after his accident. His arm ached, and his collar-bone ground against other bone as stones in the roadside wall ground against each other. Sitting at the kitchen-table, watching the microwave’s electronic display, he wondered what happened afterwards to the energy thawing and heating his food. Perhaps, he thought, cutting slabs of fresh bread, it went on to cook his innards, for he could not envisage such primal force owning the intelligence to distinguish between cold dead animal meat to roast, and warm living human meat to shun. Energy, he decided, was like the gene, intent only on survival, and wondered if Eifion Roberts ever puzzled over a mysteriously microwaved gut or gullet.
They had tramped lanes and sheep tracks and village streets, past shop windows where Gary’s face smiled prettily under the legend HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?, down the narrow muddy path beside the river, and along the main road beyond the village, stumbling over tussocky verges under a sky luminous with distant stars.
‘I’m having a rest,’ Eifion Roberts had announced, sitting on another tumbled wall. He took out his flask and drank deeply, before handing the flask to McKenna. ‘Why don’t we call it a day?’ He pointed to the lower slopes of the mountains beyond the little village. ‘See those lights twinkling and bobbing? That’s your lot and Mountain Rescue, doing the job properly. We’re just farting around, ’cos you’re worried sick and can’t settle. You shouldn’t feel guilty about what other folk do.’
McKenna had lit a cigarette, smoke and raw cold mountain air burning his throat. ‘We panicked him.’
‘It could be pure coincidence. Gary could be living it up in the Smoke for all you know. I doubt he’s still round here. You’ve had near saturation cover in the media, never mind posters up all over the county.’ Dr Roberts coughed, and patted his chest before pulling his scarf tighter around his throat.
They had walked another mile deeper into the mountain pass, pressing against rough walls as cones of light against trees and rock preceded the occasional car, the weight of darkness and mountain pressing from both sides and above as the sky dwindled to a narrow ribbon of lighter darkness between the crags, before turning back, like empty-handed hunters in the night, Eifion Roberts pale and weary as an old man.
The cat purred around his legs while he ate, the other animal by the kitchen door, eyes large with hunger. Even in distress it was beautiful, fine-boned and elegant, eyes alive with intelligence. Part Siamese, McKenna decided, and looked down at his own, who resembled a little fur pudding. Thinking of Jack Sprat and his wife, his thoughts drifted from cats to Ronald Hogg, thin and less than elegant, stripping children’s souls of the fat and the lean. Doris Hogg was another pudding, a stodgy unappetizing confection, indigestible as sin. He wiped the last of the gravy with a piece of bread, and wondered at the horizons of the strange landscape to which the loneliness he mistook for solitude had brought him.
‘St Mihangel’s called, sir,’ Dewi said. ‘Arwel’s funeral is on Tuesday at two-thirty in the afternoon.’
‘It’s hardly likely to be two-thirty in the morning, is it?’ McKenna snapped.
‘It’s not our fault we couldn’t find Gary,’ Dewi protested. ‘Between us and the volunteers and Mountain Rescue, there were thirty odd people, and we walked miles. We looked everywhere there is to look.’
‘You’d have found him if you had.’
‘Perhaps we’re searching the wrong area,’ Janet ventured. ‘The mountains cover hundreds of square miles. He could be anywhere.’
‘And he could very well be dead!’ McKenna snarled.
‘We weren’t to know he’d leg it, sir,’ Dewi said. ‘And I’ve lost count of the times we’ve been back and forth pestering anybody who might know where he’s gone.’
‘It may not be our fault at the moment, Constable Prys, but when Gary’s body, or what’s left of it, is found in the spring, stuck in a mountain gully with only a dead sheep for company, it will be our fault!’
Dewi jumped up. ‘I’ll own for what I do or don’t do, but I won’t carry the can for the rest of the world!’ He went to the door, eyes bright with anger. ‘It might be our job to shovel the shit the rest of the world drops, and the rest of the world thinks that’s all we’re good for, but I’m damned if I’ll take the blame ’cos the shit’s there in the first place!’ The door shuddered as he wrenched it open, shuddered again as he slammed it shut.
Janet coughed. ‘Will St Mihangel’s minister take the service, sir? The Thomases are chapel, and St Mihangel’s is church.’
‘If God Himself took the service, through the person of your righteous father, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference, because the Thomases are heathens, like the rest of the bloody Welsh!’
‘We do understand, sir,’ Janet said gently. ‘It’s horrible for all of us, but you’re responsible for everything.’
‘You are patronizing me, Constable Evans. I am not a “case” to be analysed, nor am I an errant member of your father’s flock!’
‘I wasn’t!’ Janet too rose from her seat, eyes awash with tears. ‘We’re doing our best, but you change like the weather, and we don’t know where we are from one minute to the next.’ The tears spilled down her flushed cheeks. ‘I can’t say right for saying wrong, can I? You’re just like my bloody father!’
Dewi assaulted the bastion of McKenna’s displeasure with bacon sandwiches, a pot of tea, and an apology. ‘And Janet’s gone to see Gary’s mother again.’
Showing him a memo faxed from headquarters, McKenna said, ‘The accountants have computed time and manpower expended on Gary, so we stop looking unless more concrete evidence turns up.’ He took a sandwich from the plate. ‘And they took the trouble to compute his probable safety, correlated with the number of juveniles who go missing each year, and are presumably tagged on city streets, in hostels, or detention.’
‘He might just be on the run, and perfectly OK.’ Dewi licked melted butter from his fingers. ‘But I reckon he ran ’cos he’s scared of Hogg.’
McKenna wiped his own fingers on a paper napkin. ‘We should discuss Hogg, Dewi, because Superintendent Griffiths raised a very legitimate objection about the extent of gossip likening Hogg to Adolf Hitler, and was particularly irritated to see you goose-stepping round the squadroom with your arm raised in the Nazi salute singing “Ronnie rules the bloody world” to the tune of Deutschland über alles.’
Dewi choked on the remnants of his sandwich.
‘Don’t give a repeat performance, will you?’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He poured tea, passing McKenna a new china mug flaunting roses and bright green leaves. ‘Is there anything special you want doing? All the paperwork’s up to date.’
McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘If you’re not too tired, see if you can get any more sense out of the Thomases, then bring Carol back here. I want to talk to her.’
‘It’s a waste of time talking to the parents, sir. They don’t give a toss about those kids, else they’d’ve taken Arwel back home when he said Hogg was beating him up,’ Dewi said. ‘Arwel would still be alive if they’d believed him.’
‘I’ve told you before not to judge people too harshly. What could they do? Kidnap the boy? Social Services were calling all the shots.’
‘They could’ve done something!’ Dewi insisted. ‘Most folks’d thank God on bended knee for children like Arwel and Carol. Look at what Elis was landed with.’
‘Elis might deserve his punishment; Carol and Arwel might deserve Tom and Peggy. There’s always far more to see than what people lay in front of you, and in any case, we only know the Thomases after the
event, when they’re trying to come to terms with Arwel’s degradation and death, and their own part in it.’ McKenna lit another cigarette. ‘Before all this, they muddled along, like millions of others.’
‘I suppose.’ Dewi stacked plates and mugs on the tray. ‘But if there’s any bad in that lass and her brother, I reckon somebody else put it there, and the parents had most opportunity.’ He picked up the tray. ‘I wonder what Hogg’s parents were like? D’you think he just crawled out from under a lump of slate one night?’
‘I expect Mr and Mrs Hogg Senior were perfectly ordinary people,’ McKenna said. ‘Just like Alois and Klara.’
Dewi frowned. ‘Alois and Klara who?’
‘Guess.’
Jack sniffed. ‘Fancy traipsing round those mountains. I’m surprised Eifion Roberts didn’t have a heart attack.’
‘I rang to ask after your health,’ McKenna said. ‘I don’t want another lecture.’
‘Who’s given you a lecture?’
‘Who hasn’t?’
‘People expect the killer handed over on a plate, like John the Baptist’s head.’ Jack coughed. ‘I reckon you’ve done everything humanly possible in the circumstances. Arwel wouldn’t be the first unsolved death, you know, and he won’t be the last.’ He coughed again, more raspingly. ‘God! My chest’s bad. I hope these antibiotics shift the bugs before Tuesday.’
‘We’re expecting a lot of media interest.’ McKenna rubbed the nagging pain in his shoulder. ‘People like a good funeral even better when there’s somebody posh to gawp at, though nobody seems to know about our interest in Elis yet.’
‘Nobody’s interested in Arwel, so Elis doesn’t need to use his clout and cash to get injunctions against nosy-parker journalists.’ Jack coughed again. ‘That’s another way rich folk buy poor ones with no comeback. How’s your shoulder, by the way?’
‘Hurting like hell.’
‘Doris probably sat up all night making your voodoo doll, and now she’s ramming pins in it,’ Jack said. ‘God, it’s a miserable world, isn’t it? Never mind, the longest night’s on its way, then after Christmas, the days start stretching. We keep hoping, don’t we?’
‘Only because day follows night and spring follows winter,’ McKenna said. ‘Or so we’re led to believe.’
‘Happiness follows despair, as well, if you don’t die waiting.’
‘Is sickness making you appreciate the interdependency of opposites?’
‘I’m stretching my intellect round that Goethe biography you lent me. Some of his ideas are really fascinating.’ Jack coughed again, a breathy sound rattling in his lungs and echoing in McKenna’s ears. ‘I know he was just a poet, but it makes you wonder if poets can’t divine the truth, long before the scientists can prove it. Mind you, if the greatest bard in Wales divined the truth about Arwel’s death, we’d never prove it, would we?’
Mari answered the telephone at Bedd y Cor, and snarled at McKenna like a wounded cat.
‘When will Mr and Mrs Elis be back?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘I’m sure you do know, Mari.’
‘They’ve gone to see the boy. They were late leaving because of the other things.’
‘Ask Mrs Elis to call me tomorrow, then.’
‘Why? Haven’t you done them enough harm yet?’
‘Carol’s waiting outside, sir.’ Dewi sat down, frowning. ‘I didn’t manage to talk to the parents. I thought he was drunk at first, ’cos he’s rambling and slurring his words and lurching round, but apparently he’s had tablets off the doctor. She’s like a cat on hot bricks, really agitated and all breathless, so I asked what was wrong, and he said: “What the bloody hell d’you think’s wrong?” He called me a stupid fart or some such.’ Two little spots of colour erupted on his cheeks. ‘Ignorant sod!’
McKenna fidgeted with a pen. ‘And Carol?’
‘She’d taken to her bed yesterday evening and not moved since. They actually seemed worried about her.’
‘Then why didn’t you leave her there?’
‘She wanted to come, sir. I didn’t force her.’
‘Are you ill?’ McKenna asked.
Dressed in faded jeans and worn grey sweater, Carol sat in an old upholstered chair from Owen Griffiths’ office. She shook her head, the luminous hair swirling about her pallid skin and starved features.
‘Why were you in bed?’
‘I’m tired.’
‘What’s wrong with your parents?’
‘Apart from Arwel getting murdered, me getting pregnant, and them being sodding useless?’ She looked down at her hands, balled in little fists in her lap. ‘They know about yesterday, and think you’ll put me in court, or Doris will.’
‘Who told them?’
‘Mam guessed when she saw the stain on Arwel’s shirt. She’s not as stupid as she looks.’ She frowned. ‘My father’s really stupid, though.’ The frown disappeared, leaving her face blank. ‘Arwel’s not there any more. Mrs Elis had him taken away, so I told the social worker to sod off.’
‘I know all about it,’ McKenna said.
‘No, you don’t. You’ll never know about anything like this.’ She stared at him gravely. ‘Will I be charged with common assault on a bitch as common as muck?’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘I told you why.’
‘You said Doris owes for not protecting Arwel.’ McKenna lit a cigarette, thinking Carol’s baby had already known far worse than the taint of tobacco smoke. ‘What was she supposed to protect him from?’
Carol’s hands unfurled, like claws. ‘Social Services said Mam was a lousy mother for neglecting Arwel, so they took him away and gave him to that bloody bitch, and now he’s dead!’
‘You think little enough of your parents.’
‘That’s between them and me!’
‘Perhaps you should blame yourself instead of Doris,’ McKenna suggested. ‘I think Arwel told you everything, hoping you’d put a stop to his agony. He thought the sister he worshipped wouldn’t fail him like everyone else. But you did, didn’t you?’
‘No!’
‘I think you decided to use Arwel’s suffering for your own profit.’ He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. ‘You’ve set yourself up nicely for a few years, but you got him killed.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about you and your beautiful brother.’ McKenna leaned back in his chair. ‘Arwel was irresistible, like a rare flower, but one after the other, men pulled off the petals, until there was nothing left.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘But your body’s like a rich pasture, and you can grow a perfect child for people too impoverished by nature to make their own. Or are you just harvesting their guilt?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Carol demanded again.
‘Rhiannon Elis offered you a ticket out of poverty,’ McKenna said. ‘In exchange for what? Does she get the baby? Or is she paying the first instalment on the price of your silence?’
Carol levered herself out of the chair, and pulled on her jacket. ‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ McKenna said. ‘If you won’t, you’re as good as accusing Elis of killing your brother.’
‘You’re doing the accusing! You and them sodding social workers think you know bloody everything, don’t you?’ She dragged at the jacket zip, catching the jumper in its teeth. ‘Oh, you’ll be sorry!’ she breathed. ‘You’ll wish you’d never been born!’
She plunged from the room, and by the time McKenna reached the corridor, the fire door at the head of the staircase was closing behind her. He ran downstairs and rushed outside, but the street was deserted, as if night had consumed the girl and her unquenchable light.
‘You shouldn’t have secrets. They ricochet, like stray bullets.’ Eifion Roberts sat on McKenna’s sofa, nursing the black cat. ‘You’re involved in a conspiracy of silence with Doris Hogg, and she’s the last person to be involved with in anything. Look where your conspiratorial theories’ve led now. Carol’s got enough grief, w
ithout being told she’s liable for Arwel’s death.’
‘I’m not blaming her,’ McKenna said. ‘She didn’t kill him.’
‘You can’t actually be any more sure about that than about anything else in this world. She’s capable of it.’ The black cat raised its head, and nuzzled the pathologist’s hand. ‘I think you’ve lost your grip. There’s more crap silting up your brain than there is in Menai Strait, because you let Elis and Rhiannon beguile you with their nonsense. They’re unhappily married, Michael. As prosaically and tediously unhappily married as you were. There’s nothing special about their misery.’
‘Rhiannon thinks Elis killed Arwel.’
‘How d’you know she’s not just looking for a way to get shot of him? She’s probably very bitter. You’re bitter about the years wasted hoping things with Denise would turn out good. If Elis loved his wife half as much as he loves his self-pity, she’d be a very happy woman, and I expect she’s realized that.’
The black and white cat rubbed around McKenna’s ankles, then jumped on his lap. ‘Child abusers frequently suffered abuse themselves,’ he said. ‘I can’t ignore that fact.’
Dr Roberts stroked the black cat’s ears. ‘D’you know, I think Elis is too lazy to bother with the subterfuge of abusing children. He spends most of life sitting on his backside. On horses, at the piano, listening to music, in his posh vehicles, at board meetings. What does he achieve with his time?’
‘He’s probably chronically depressed.’
‘Self-pity does that. We often find the person we’ve grown into wasn’t worth waiting for, and can’t cope with the disappointment of knowing nothing better’s likely to show up.’ The cat rolled over, paws in the air. ‘Elis and his maundering’s enough to make Beethoven turn in his grave. He wanted to write wonderful music, so he did, regardless of the poverty and disease and death snapping at his heels. Elis does bugger all except whinge, but I doubt he’ll understand the waste even on his deathbed. He’ll find somebody else to blame.’ Rubbing the cat’s belly, the pathologist added, ‘Somebody profited from Arwel’s death, you know, and it’s probably the same person who profited from him and Tony when they were alive.’
In Guilty Night Page 27
