In Guilty Night (24 page)

‘Healing slowly. A friend says I’m an uncomfortable reminder of human frailty, accident and sickness prone.’

‘So was he.’ Elis nodded towards the Beethoven portrait, and rose, taking a silver casket from the shelf beside the fireplace. Unlocking the clasp, he said, ‘I went mainly to collect this.
Rhiannon wouldn’t tell you because she deplores my spending thousands of pounds on an old letter.’

McKenna took the stained and yellowed paper, its fabric rough to his fingers, its edges frail and crumbly, the script fading and blotched with damp and age and careless spatters of ink. Elis sat beside him, the scent of fresh cold air and horses about his hair and clothing. ‘Utterly atrocious handwriting, isn’t it? Almost illegible.’

‘A lock of Beethoven’s hair was sold at auction recently.’

Elis nodded. ‘I had first refusal. People in the right places know my interests.’ He retrieved his precious relic, and placed it carefully in the casket. ‘The hair’s gone to an American university. Modern science will soon be able to tell the world if he was treated for syphilis.’

‘Would it matter? Even Geothe didn’t escape what he called the “phantom spawned in poisonous slime”. Rather as we regard AIDS, I suppose.’ McKenna watched the other man. ‘We don’t yet know if Arwel was HIV positive, but someone perhaps thought he was, and killed him out of fear or rage. Perhaps the other boy couldn’t bear waiting to know if his life would be haunted by a poisonous phantom.’

‘Which other boy?’

‘Don’t you know? Mrs Elis has probably been told. Last night, Tony Jones had what one might call a noble Roman death in a bath of hot water. He opened the arteries behind his knees with a splinter of tile, and the staff on watch noticed nothing until they saw the water turn red.’

‘Oh, God!’ Elis slumped forward, covering his face with his hands. ‘Oh, God!’

‘Did you know him?’

‘Arwel was pally with him.’

‘Did he ever come here?’

‘No. Rhiannon flatly refused. She said Tony was such a blabbermouth he should be called Papageno, and made to wear a padlock on his mouth.’

‘And what might he blabber about?’

‘I don’t know! She said he was the biggest troublemaker at Blodwel.’

‘I’d better ask her.’ McKenna ground out his cigarette. ‘Is she in?’

‘I think so.’

McKenna rose. ‘By the way, you were stopped for speeding recently. Who was the passenger?’

‘Eh?’ Elis looked up, his face grey.

‘Who was the young fair-haired passenger in the Range Rover?’

‘Carol. I was taking her home.’

Rhiannon flushed. ‘I didn’t know!’

‘Shouldn’t you know when a child in the council’s care commits suicide?’ McKenna asked.

‘Rhiannon will be told when she’s needed to provide an acceptable explanation for the unacceptable,’ Elis said acidly. ‘I’ve told her that people use her and their associations with her.’

‘Why did you believe Tony Jones was a troublemaker?’ McKenna asked her.

‘Ronald Hogg said so, and she believes everything he says.’

‘I asked your wife.’

‘Can you call me a liar, Rhiannon?’ Elis sighed. ‘But you won’t learn until Hogg and his cronies use your trust against you like a knife.’

‘Why d’you dislike him so much?’ Rhiannon demanded. ‘He does a horribly difficult and thankless job to the best of his abilities. It’s not his fault when wilful stupid children come to more grief. They wouldn’t be in care if they were normal.’

‘What’s normal?’ Elis asked. ‘My instincts revolt against Hogg, and those same instincts have always held good with horses.’ He lit a cigarette, then tossed the packet to McKenna. ‘If you’d taken the trouble to get to know Arwel properly, you’d know he was a very normal teenager, underneath all the damage inflicted by Hogg and a lifetime without love.’

‘You think your love and your money solve everything, don’t you?’ Rhiannon asked.

‘They can both help.’

‘They didn’t help Arwel very much, did they? Especially not the love.’

Colour drained from Elis’s face, leaving dark stains under the eyes.

‘I am not here to referee your fighting,’ McKenna said.

‘My husband wanted to adopt Arwel Thomas,’ Rhiannon said. ‘He couldn’t understand my objections; my perfectly normal objections!’

‘Did Arwel know?’ McKenna asked. ‘Did the Social Services department? Did Hogg?’

‘There’s been no formal application,’ Elis said. ‘Rhiannon and I were still discussing the matter.’

‘Did you tell anyone, Mrs Elis? Did you discuss the proposal?’

Her voice held defiance. ‘I did not, because I would never agree, and my husband knew that. He just wouldn’t accept it.’

‘They’re not real, are they?’ Jack said. ‘They take on these kids like other people get a cat or a hamster.’

‘Money turns their brain,’ Dewi said. ‘They think they can buy folk like you or me buys a newspaper.’

‘It’s a pity nobody bought you a grammar book,’ Janet commented.

‘It’s an even bigger pity nobody bought your pa a book on decent Christian compassion,’ Dewi countered.

‘What’s my father done to you?’ Janet demanded.

‘Nothing, ’cos I wouldn’t give him the chance.’ Dewi turned to McKenna. ‘I’m not causing trouble, sir, but some things stick in your craw.’

‘What things?’ Janet’s voice grated on McKenna’s ears.

‘You dodged chapel last Sunday morning, didn’t you?’ Dewi asked her. ‘Missed your pa handing out blessings to the new mums and their offspring, and he does a nice line in blessings when the mum flashes a wedding ring in his face. But if she can’t, the sanctimonious Pastor Evans lets her walk out front with the rest, then pretends she doesn’t exist. He did that to Sian from our street. Can you imagine how she felt?’

Janet flushed. ‘She should’ve thought of that before she stood up in chapel, or, better still, before she opened her legs to half Bangor!’

‘Daddy wouldn’t like to hear you talk like that,’ Dewi said.

Janet jumped up, and rushed to the door. ‘Daddy can go to hell! And so can you!’ The door slammed, and her footsteps rattled along the corridor.

‘Why d’you do it?’ McKenna asked. ‘Why d’you wind her up?’

‘She needs sorting,’ Jack said. ‘She’s got ideas above herself, which isn’t surprising, her being the only child of a posh minister. She’s very judgmental, and very prone to moralizing, which is probably why Carol Thomas won’t give her the time of day.’

‘Has anyone seen Thomas senior yet?’ McKenna asked.

‘I’ll try again later, sir,’ Dewi said. ‘I missed him yesterday. Shall I ask Carol what she was doing in Elis’s car at midnight?’

‘No.’ McKenna fidgeted with his lighter. ‘I’ll talk to her again. We’re going to Blodwel later. That’s more urgent.’

‘To hear another load of hogwash?’ Jack asked. ‘Has anybody
told us the truth about anything yet?’ He coughed, rubbing his throat. ‘D’you think Rhiannon killed Arwel to scupper the adoption idea?’

‘She doesn’t need to resort to murder,’ Dewi commented. ‘She’s enough clout to scupper anything. Maybe she’s the reason the Blodwel kids won’t talk to us.’

McKenna sighed. ‘We scare those kids. We’re just another face to the authority making their life a misery, and not their salvation, so don’t judge Janet too harshly.’

‘Shall I send her out with Mountain Rescue when she’s cooled down?’ Jack asked. ‘They’re concentrating on the Betws Garmon area, on the assumption Gary’s responsible for that garage break-in last night.’

Beyond the cottage window, rain swept through the valley, lashing trees cowed by the weight of wind and water. Empty soft drinks cans littered the mantelshelf, biscuit and sandwich wrappings overflowed the waste bin, and Gary, smoking a stolen cigarette, fretted again with the problem of ridding himself of his leavings without revealing his presence. Colicky pains from too many fizzy drinks wrenched at his stomach, his gut was leaded with constipation, and, too long without a bath or clean clothes, he found his flesh and odour offensive. The cold unventilated air inside the cottage held each and every smell, accentuating the sourness of his body, the staleness of food wrappings, the acrid scent of tobacco.

Holding the cigarette behind his back, he stood by the window, looking at an unchanged scene of empty lane, tumbledown walls, and mountains ghosted with streamers of mist. Rumps turned to the wind, scores of sheep grazed the fields below, fleeces dripping.

Time, he thought, had reached a dead-end, all urgency and energy evaporated, perhaps like his own journeying, terminating in this dark little cottage at the top of this steep little lane. He leaned against the window, breath condensing on the grass, roaming an inner landscape infinitely more bleak, reflecting on the company he had kept, Arwel’s ghost beside him. Their experiences were the same, yet each experienced the terror and confusion and black despair uniquely, Gary debased by the same men Arwel pitied for their miserable pleasures, dictated by pain and sin. Arwel kept some life-sustaining joy flaming in the crucible of his imagination, whispering to Gary in the long dark nights when neither could sleep that even though Fate’s
malign daughters savaged them now, their kinder sisters must be waiting in the shadows. The cigarette burned itself out in his fingers while he stirred these other thoughts, smouldering now in his own imagination.

He had let those malign harpies invade his mother’s life, simply because his childhood journeying ran out of magic and into the real world. She wanted only the peace of knowing her son was happy, but the son became an affliction and, in despair and ignorance, she handed him over to the other woman, who sent him rocketing out of innocence and into a world where everything he believed himself to be was called into question. Dropping the burnt-out stub in the wastebin, Gary wondered about the woman who dwelt behind the sour face and plain name, and for whom even Arwel could find no pity. She took him riding in her car to places his mother would not imagine in her wildest nightmares, singing to the radio, clicking her nails on the steering-wheel in time to the music, wearing black shoes with pointed toes, the back of the thin high heels scuff-white from driving.

‘Where am I going?’ Gary asked, as the car bumped over a little bridge.

‘To meet a friend.’

The narrow lane wound upwards between tall thorny hedgerows, grey in the light of a Hunter’s moon drifting over the mountain ridge. Imagining grains of silver moondust on the mountain tops, wishing he could be anywhere else on earth, Gary said, ‘I don’t like your friends. Arwel doesn’t, either. Neither does Tony.’ The car veered as she looked at him, and he prayed it would crash.

‘My friends like you.’ She changed gear, making the engine whine like the night wind. ‘And don’t waste your sympathy on those two. They’re as hard-faced as those mountains you like so much.’

Pushed out of the car into a night so bitter the air seared his nostrils, he walked the dirt track to the other car, from which different music throbbed, to meet a man whose name he would never know, but who charted every inch of his body, explored every orifice, and pinpointed the nerve which seduced a pain so terrible it became a pleasure, setting his innards on fire. Remembering the man, the little presents he gave, wrapped in paper as silvery as the mountain moonlight, Gary trembled with shame. After each encounter, in the chipped mirror above the bedroom washbasin, he scoured his reflection for signs of
what the woman and her friends would make of him. As she watched him enter the other car, his body fleetingly silhouetted, did she ask herself where she might be sending him? Did she wonder what might be done to him? Had she ever known the terror of conscience?

The man took him on another journey, along by-ways hidden from view even in daylight, simply darker threads in the tapestry of night, and the car took the curves and bends and rises and sudden dips as if it knew the way all by itself. The eyes of a wandering cat glittered in the depth of a hedgerow, and a horse straddled the crest of a field, like a silver unicorn in the frosty moonlight. Gary stared at configurations of stars luminous in a cloudless sky, while the music pounded in his head, and the car plunged under a tunnel of trees, headlights bleaching trunks and tangled branches, before roaring out towards the face of the moon.

‘I’ll give you a lovely present,’ the man whispered. ‘Afterwards.’

Staring at the luminous dashboard clock, Gary wished he could force time on to that afterwards, for there was no hope of turning anything back. The car came to rest, front bumper crushing a little thicket of straggly bramble, and greed elbowed all humanity out of the way.

‘I am hunting your soul,’ the man whispered, and began his coursing once again, pursuing a soul which would never be run to earth, for this was no sport. It ran for its life before each encounter, twisting and turning, beyond horizons of pain, swifter than the moon-white mountain hare on moon-white mountain snow, and ever more elusive. ‘I like this song. It makes me think of you. Listen!’

The seconds hand of the dashboard clock seemed to jerk with each word, each relentless beat.

‘Good
boys
go
to
heaven,
but
the
bad
boys
go
everywhere.’

‘You could go anywhere, and have anything you want,’ the man said, feeding his shame, while the nighthawk hovered in the sky above, waiting his turn to scavenge.

Jolted from his reverie by movement at the bottom of the lane, Gary stumbled away from the window, legs numbed and icy cold. He crouched beneath the sill, watching the old farmer stomp back and forth from his truck to the sheep troughs in the field, bales of fodder hump-like on his shoulder. The sheepdog in the back of the truck suddenly lifted its muzzle, as if scenting the malodorous presence in the cottage, then yelped as the
sheep began running down the field. When the farmer drove away, Gary returned to his vigil, and wondered if the mist in his view rasped like harsh cloth on flesh as it brushed the face of the crags, if the tiny spears of grass felt its weight like one body upon another, and if the mist itself, pierced by a sharp bitter thorn, knew the same shocking pain.