The House of Women (22 page)

10

Waiting for a while at the road junction, McKenna watched Robin trudging into the twilight, his hobbling figure shrinking and fading, and as he drifted out of sight around a bend, McKenna realized this landscape would be diminished with his passing. He gunned the motor and went after him, headlights catching the tramp full in the back and casting his shadow huge on the wayside boundary wall. ‘Get in. Your foot looks bad.’

‘
I won’t argue.’

‘
And ask the people at the farm for a dab of surgical spirit and a plaster. If that blister gets infected, you’ll be laid up, then Martha won’t get the hole in her roof mended.’

‘
I’m sure Mr Ingram could arrange for it to be done,’ Robin said. ‘Maybe he’ll take his daughter to Ned’s funeral, then the whole world can see them.’

‘
Will you go?’

The old man shrugged, staring into the distance.
‘If I’m in these parts when he comes home, not that a funeral makes a difference. The world’s already a colder place for knowing he’s gone from it.’

*

Instead of turning in his tracks after leaving Robin by the farm gate, McKenna drove south to Dolgellau, and lingered over dinner in a restaurant packed with tourists, thinking of distances and savouring the horizons and perspectives he had viewed today, for they diminished his own narrow perspectives and blurred the close horizons of his failures. Acknowledging a great unwillingness to relinquish the day, he paid the bill and gunned the motor of Dewi’s car once more.

In his own, he would see only what surged into brief life in the headlights, but now, he thought, he was face to face with the night. As the road plunged into Coed y Brenin, the air was awash with the scent of pine, and he heard rustlings and the crackle of branches, then stamped on the brake when a small deer erupted from the trees and shot in front of him. Dense pockets of mist obliterated the road without warning, throwing the glare from the headlights back in his face and chilling his body, and he felt adrift, simultaneously free and in peril, for there was not a soul in the world who knew where he was, except perhaps the old tramp, who could have but an inkling.

He passed the gate where he had parted company with Robin, and saw Trawsfynydd power station in the distance, blazing with energy of its own making and casting its brilliance across the poisoned lake. About to take the Porthmadog turning, he changed his mind, and set out for the Crimea Pass, slate tips as big as mountains on either side, headlights bouncing off the broken walls and blind gables of wayside cottages and lighting the eyes of wandering night creatures. As he reached the high ground, a pair of Tornado jets streaked overhead, red and green lights flashing on wingtips and tail, and glancing westwards, he saw them bank steeply, flame shooting from the afterburners, then heard engines screaming above the whine of the slipstream. One after the other, they pursued him the length of the Pass, a pinpoint of heat from the laser sights hovering between his shoulder blades and boring into the back of his skull, until he slid from view beneath the densely wooded slopes overhanging Betws y Coed.

His own car, dull creature that it was, was neatly parked a few yards from his front door, with Dewi asleep in the driver
’s seat, a dreamy expression on his face. His back and shoulders aching, McKenna roused him. ‘You should’ve gone home.’

Dewi glanced at his watch.
‘I only left work half an hour ago. We’ve been paperchasing again.’ He checked his car for signs of injury, set the alarm, and followed McKenna into the house.

The cats shot into the kitchen as soon as McKenna opened the back door. He left it open, to dissipate the heat of the day trapped in the small room, and set about feeding and watering his animals, while Dewi sat by the kitchen table, yawning. When the kettle screeched, he rose to brew the tea.
‘That stain’s coming back on your carpet, sir. I told you it would.’

‘
So I must ask myself,’ McKenna said, rinsing his hands, ‘if you’re ever wrong.’

‘
Not often.’ He yawned again. ‘And if I am, I keep quiet about it.’ He splashed milk into two mugs. ‘However, Ms Bradshaw’ll find it harder to cover up
her
blunders, ’cos they’re bigger. People are taking against her already, so she’s getting a hard time. She’d been called back twice before I left.’ He poured the tea. ‘Some yobbos from Gwalchmai thought they’d have a free bus ride to Bangor, and the driver very bravely chucked them off at the next stop, so they started heaving bricks at his windscreen.’

‘
Nothing new,’ McKenna said, searching for an ashtray. The cats looked up, irritated by his restlessness.

‘
And there was another fight outside Kentucky Fried Chicken. A patrol car got its window kicked in ’cos the mob was trying to get at the prisoners in the back seat.’

Ashtray located, McKenna subsided into a chair.
‘Pressure works both ways, and when she starts pushing back, you’ll learn a lot about the human pecking order.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘The lower down you are, the nastier it gets.’

‘
As you say, sir, it works both ways, as I told Mr Rowlands earlier.’ He smiled. ‘How was the car?’

‘
Very exciting, but I gave Robin Ddu a lift, so it might need fumigating.’ He laughed at the expression on Dewi’s face. ‘For once, he was quite clean, even if he is still full of strange ideas and tall stories.’

‘
So are you any the wiser for your trip to the back of beyond?’

‘
Annie Harris was there. She and Gladys fleshed Ned out a little, and filled a few gaps in the family history.’ He fell silent, remembering. ‘But there’s clearly no property worth killing for. The house is a near ruin.’

*

After an hour of tossing and turning and thumping pillows in search of a cooler patch on which to lie, McKenna gave up the unequal struggle and went downstairs.

The cats were asleep on the hearthrug, twitching now and then in their dreaming, as Gertrude Jones
twitched in her dim world. He opened the back door to the fragrant night, then sat at the parlour table playing solitaire, and, in the midst of the pointless turning of cards, was awestruck by the possibility that all human endeavour was an involuntary assault on life’s naturally recurring tedium. Even this futile activity, he realized, flicking the stack again, held no satisfaction if it resolved itself without effort. Exposing the Queen of Hearts, he placed her neatly atop the King of Spades: red on black. The Queen of Clubs lay with the King of Diamonds: black on red. In the next row, the Queen of Spades sneered at him, defying resolution. Sneering back at the cold, two-dimensional figure which so resembled Solange Williams, he obliterated her contemptuous face with the Knave of Diamonds, almost pitying the professor.

FRIDAY, 24 AUGUST

1

‘
WHAT’S ALL THIS?’ Diana Bradshaw demanded, jabbing a finger at the sheets of paper strewn across McKenna’s desk. ‘Have you nothing better to do?’

‘
We were trying to work out what Ned wrote on his chest, and how.’ He picked up one of the sheets to show her. ‘As you can see from the note on the top, this is how “FE” looks written with the left hand. And this is how, it looks written with the right.’ Shuffling the pile, he found another example. ‘This is —’

She held up her hand to silence him.
‘Who did these?’

‘
Dewi Prys, ma’am. We sat him in a chair and pinned the paper to his chest.’

‘
That’s hardly replicating the circumstances in which Edward Jones scratched himself, is it? And whether he wrote “FE” or “EF” is irrelevant. Neither means anything.’

‘
It’s possible he intended to write
ferch
.
’

‘
But you’ll never know, so you’re wasting time.’

‘
Point taken, ma’am.’

A tiny breeze, risen off the sea during the night,
swirled hot draughts and the stench of paint about the room, disturbing the sheets of paper. Diana moved a chair nearer to the window, and sat with her face in shadow.

‘
Was there something you wanted?’ McKenna said, into a lengthening silence.

‘Not particularly. I presume you heard about last night’s hooliganism? Some of it was rather unpleasant.’

‘
Legal recreation’s hard to come by for youngsters without cash in their pockets, so they resort to anything that might alleviate the tedium of hopeless poverty.’

‘
You sound like a book at times.’ Humour flickered briefly in her eyes. ‘In my opinion, the sociological view of criminals as victims is dangerously misguided. Not only do they make victims of others, but life is actually much simpler. The Welsh have a reputation for trouble-making, which they earned by drinking to excess, settling their differences with fist-fights, and pandering to notoriously over-sexed women, and
that’s
why the cells are full this morning.’

‘
They’ll empty before the day’s out, one way or another.’ He massaged his shoulder, his body haunted by the memory of being thrown from a horse. ‘Local miscreants apart, we must make a decision today about George Polgreen. I can’t support a charge against him, because there are too many others with an interest in Ned, and too much we don’t know about his background.’

‘
Finding out about his background was supposedly the reason for going to wherever it was you spent all yesterday.’

‘
I had to eliminate certain possibilities,’ he said. ‘The terms of his father’s will could provide motive for despatching any member of the family, only there’s no property worth getting out of bed, let alone killing for.’

‘
Then I think the case should go on the back-burner, don’t you?’

‘
And the search warrant on the Harris house?’

She shifted uneasily.
‘Is it really justified?’

‘
The magistrate thought so when it was issued, and he isn’t easily convinced.’

‘
I’ll think about it.’ She rose, smoothing her skirt. ‘And I’ll decide about Polgreen when I’ve reviewed the evidence.’

‘
Don’t leave it too long,’ McKenna warned. ‘He has a good lawyer.’

*

‘She ripped up the warrant,’ Rowlands said. ‘I thought you knew.’

‘
I can always get another,’ McKenna pointed out. ‘Have you asked the pathologist about scripts for the Lloyds and Polgreens?’

‘
I left a message.’

‘
Then while we’re waiting, we’ll have a proper look at those papers on the professor.’

‘
Why? They don’t make any more sense than they did before Dewi finished sorting them.’

‘
We’ll look. Where is he, anyway?’

‘
Getting ready to go with uniform to a demo at Welsh Water. Joe Public’s voicing objections to a rumoured drought order.’

‘
And where’s Janet?’ McKenna asked.

‘
You tell me.’

Dewi had rationalized the welter of paper in the five old shoe boxes into neat
bundles, each indexed, and fastened with a coloured clip. Culled from newspapers and journals published in Britain, Germany, France, Austria and America, and beginning with the first announcement of Williams’s discovery of the mediaeval manuscripts, the huge wad of press cuttings ran through to a very recent review of his latest academic paper. In a slimmer bundle, McKenna found copies of the originals in Middle Welsh, attached to articles about the age-old practice of copying and recopying, with translations into English, French and German, some in the rather spidery hand he recognized from Ned’s workbooks.

‘
Ned was more of a linguist than I realized,’ he said, comparing a German translation with the original.

‘
Can you read German?’ Rowlands asked.

‘
Not well enough to know if Ned improved on the other. How about your French?’

‘
It’s quite good, but as I can’t read Welsh at all, I wouldn’t know tit from tat.’

The third bundle, listed as
‘Other Copy Manuscripts’, was a collection of prose and poetic texts in Middle Welsh and Latin, in various hands and styles on various types of paper. His memory of Latin long gone, McKenna deciphered the Welsh, hearing the music of the poetry in his mind, his attention caught by a twenty line verse in the alliterative style of
cynghanedd
, where a child bemoaned his fate as the bitter harvest of his mother’s seeds of love, which in their ripening broke her heart. ‘Some of this is beautiful,’ he said. ‘I wonder where it comes from?’

‘
We could consult the expert, and give ourselves an opening for asking him why Ned collected this stuff.’ Leafing through a bundle described as ‘Miscellaneous’, Rowlands added: ‘I can read a couple of these. They’re in English. “If you have a friend, then keep him. Let not that friend your secrets know, for if that friend becomes your foe, then all the world your secrets know.” That’s Ned.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ll bet this is Phoebe: “Clyde and Bonnie sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes sex, then maybe marriage, or just daft Bonnie with a baby carriage.” She’s no budding Tennyson, is she?’ He handed the sheet to McKenna, then began to read the next pages. ‘And these are off a computerized fortune telling programme, saying what’s in store for Ned, Phoebe, George, Annie, Edith, Bethan, Bonnie and Clyde, the professor and the lovely Solange, and Tom, AKA Phoebe’s cat.’

‘Is Ned’s death predicted?’

‘
No.’

‘
George’s arrest?’

Rowlands shook his head.
‘Not a hint of looming disaster for anyone. At worst, Mina’s warned to beware of deception.’ He tossed aside the stapled sheets, and picked up the last bundle, scanning Dewi’s index. ‘These are “Historical Records”. Some are in English, but the Welsh and German ones’ll make more sense to you than me.’

Separating the bundle, he kept those he could read for himself, while McKenna discovered how, against all odds, thoughts and dreams committed to paper might survive history
’s chaos. Like other pages inscribed with trivia or world-changing moment, the mediaeval manuscripts Williams unearthed had criss-crossed Europe, in the custody of bards, scribes, foot-soldiers, pirates, monks, spies, merchants and refugees, then lain unread and overlooked for centuries, before chance brought them once more to light. ‘Do you realize,’ he said, ‘everyone who ever touched those manuscripts left their mark on them?’

‘
It’s a miracle they survived,’ Rowlands commented. ‘There’s an article here about a tenth century book of Welsh laws which was found intact in 1945, in the bombed out ruins of a Berlin library.’

‘
A hair’s breadth from destruction!’ McKenna’s imagination took flight. ‘Suppose someone had used Iolo’s manuscripts as a spill to light a fire or a candle, or wrapped them around a wedge of cheese or a paddle of butter?’

‘
Tough, especially on Iolo!’ Rowlands lit a cigarette, gesturing to the computer predictions. ‘Those won’t do much for his twenty-fifth century counterpart, will they? Stuff from a machine isn’t quite the same as what comes out of a person’s head.’

‘
Computers will think for themselves long before then. Bangor’s own boffins have already invented a teachable microchip.’

‘
Then let’s hope they can keep it under control. I saw this TV programme about software sort of giving birth all by itself to new generations of something, and it was bloody frightening.’

‘
Computers are modern mythology,’ McKenna said. ‘Every culture makes its own to explain the inexplicable, which is why Ned said that what went into the making of Llys Ifor would bring it to ruin.’

‘
Red Indians believe things and places create their own spirit from what the parts absorb in the making,’ Rowlands added. ‘It’s either good, or bad, depending.’ He grinned. ‘So Bradshaw’s car is probably harbouring gremlins galore under its bonnet.’

‘
Like the other half million vehicles getting nicked every year,’ McKenna said, making neat bundles of the scattered papers, ‘Any luck with the cross index yet?’

‘
Not that you’d notice, but something might click, like the computer giving us Iolo’s first wife. D’you intend to see her, or obey Bradshaw and put everything on hold?’

‘
We’ll tie up some loose ends first, and see what pattern the knots make.’

‘
A nice tight noose round Polgreen’s neck, I imagine,’ Rowlands commented. ‘I can think of quite few who went to the gallows on less circumstantial.’

‘
Rather than fret about history repeating itself, see Iolo about these papers Ned was hoarding, and take Janet with you, so she can throw in the odd reference to her father to raise the tone of the proceedings.’

Stubbing out his cigarette, Rowlands asked:
‘Aren’t you worried about her? She looks ghastly.’

‘
Short of frog-marching her to Ansoni’s surgery, what can we do? She may look worse than she feels, anyway. Apart from throwing up every so often, she’s functioning quite normally.’

‘
You don’t think she’s just soldiering on to the bitter end? Is she that kind of person?’

‘
I don’t know. The life she’s led so far wouldn’t put her to the test.’

‘
Well, we’ll see what she’s made of soon enough. Women can change out of all recognition when they’re pregnant. They’re the oddest creatures, you know. Completely unpredictable.’