The House of Women (34 page)

5

On his way to Merlin Security, Dewi made a detour to the hospital, and spent an age gazing at Janet’s silent shadowy form, a cold sick feeling wrenching at his heart. The image and its misery stayed with him when he emerged into the searing outside light, to make his way to the mortuary. Sun-parched bits of leaf and litter crackled underfoot on the narrow flagged path, and he waited respectfully while a tenanted hearse pulled away, followed by a pie and sausage van which had come around the corner from the kitchen area. As the door of the pathology building closed behind him, images from the world beyond began to dance in his sun-dazzled eyes, like magenta-tinted photographic negatives.

The ground floor offices were deserted. Rounding a corner, he passed a small coffin propped against a
‘Staff Only’ sign, and went into the autopsy room, where one of the technicians was swabbing the floor and whistling to himself, his tune competing with the hissing of air extractors under the shining tables empty of all but their worn black head-rests.

‘
I’m looking for the pathologist,’ Dewi said. ‘He should have some papers for us.’

‘
Who’s “us”?’ the other man asked, eyeing the visitor as if assessing the outcome of his trade.

Dewi fumbled in his pocket for identification.
‘Police.’

‘
Right. I’ll go see.’

Gazing around him, buttocks pressed against a huge steel draining board, Dewi decided the place resembled a catering
kitchen, provided it was unoccupied, provided he could ignore the strand of lank grey hair stuck to one of the head-rests, and provided he refrained from looking too closely at the tiers of pickled parts on a shelf attached to the wall, but boredom prevailed, and he wandered over. The specimens had an intricate beauty all their own, he thought, surveying the wonderful length of a man’s dissected penis, the flower of an excised carcinoma, and a prune skin like a splinter of wood, caught in a sac grown out of a bowel wall. At the end of the shelf, he found a tiny human foetus, no bigger than a baby mouse, cradled in a nest of tissue dark with haemorrhage, and was reading the label pasted to the front when the technician returned, a long piece of paper pinched in his gloved fingers.

Once more out in the
sunshine, eyes beguiled by different images, Dewi leaned against the hot metal of his sparkling car, learning from the length of paper that Jason Lloyd’s mother, assailed by ills of depressing proportion, depended on the medical profession for both mental and physical equilibrium. Fluctuating blood pressure exacerbated her varicose veins, dermatitis provoked other itches, and infections raged hard on each other’s heels through her throat, lungs, and other soft tissues. Scanning the list of prescriptions for tranquillizers and soporifics and antibiotics, he saw that her worn out uterus had fallen to the surgeon’s scalpel four years previously, and climbed into his swanky car with his mind’s eye overwhelmed with an awful image of Janet, open on a mortuary table with her dead baby nesting in her bloodied innards.

6

‘Will Mrs Lloyd remember what she does with her all her pills?’ McKenna asked, putting the paper on his desk. ‘She’s had six scripts for antibiotics in less than eighteen months, so it’s a fair bet she didn’t even finish each bottle, but I wouldn’t lay odds on her being able to lay hands on the left-overs.’

‘
She only had one script for tetracycline,’ Dewi pointed out.

‘
Is she one of your many acquaintances on the estate?’

‘
I don’t know her to speak to.’

McKenna glanced at his watch.
‘You’ve time to pay her a visit, and get to the depot before Jason finishes his lunch break.’

‘
What shall I say if she asks how we know about her tablets?’

‘
Use your initiative!’

7

The cathedral clock chimed the half-noon as McKenna unlocked his front door. One cat was curled around the cool porcelain pedestal of the washbasin, the other stretched out in the bath, and neither took any notice of him until he splashed a droplet of water on Fluff, and she twitched from head to tail with disapproval.

After he had eaten, he sat in the garden for a while, looking among the glossy ivy for the pine-marten
’s glory, and found his eyes beginning to close of their own volition. He blinked fiercely, and, glimpsing a movement from the corner of his eye, saw one of the feline choristers about to slink into the house. He let it go, too lethargic to bother, and tuned his ears for the outbreak of more territorial conflict.

8

‘Jason’s mam was out,’ Dewi reported, ‘and Jason’s still on a job, and won’t be finished before two. I didn’t bother waiting because he’s in the Pwllheli area. It’ll take him at least forty minutes to get back.’

McKenna yawned.

‘His dad was out, as well, so I had a word with the sister who won that wet T shirt competition at the Octagon. She said her mam keeps all her left-over pills, in case.’

‘
In case of what?’

Dewi shrugged.
‘In case she can’t get to the doctor, or he won’t give her more pills when she does get there, or she can’t afford a new prescription. I don’t know, do I?’

‘
Did you see the left-overs?’

‘
They’re all over the house. A couple of pills in one bottle, five or six capsules in another. Kitchen cup-boards, parlour mantelpiece, bedside table, and more in her handbag, according to the daughter.’ He pulled a notebook from his shirt pocket. ‘I made a list, but there wasn’t any tetracycline.’

‘
Double check on the trade names,’ McKenna said. ‘There’s a drugs directory somewhere among the junk you shifted into the main office. If you can’t find it, ring Dr Ansoni. When will Mrs Lloyd be home?’

‘
Late. She’s gone to Llandudno, shopping.’

*

McKenna was assessing the need to do some shopping of his own when Phoebe telephoned, edgy with anxiety. ‘Annie’s taken Mama and Bethan for a drive,’ she said. ‘She’s taking advantage of the car while she’s got it, and I can’t imagine how she’ll manage when you take it away. How will she get to school, and here? And how on earth will she be able to keep an eye on Auntie Gladys?’ Before he could respond, she rushed on. ‘She can’t afford another, because she still owes Mama for this one, and her mortgage eats a huge chunk out of her salary. I don’t think Mama’s got any more wads of cash to lend, either.’

‘
If we catch the perpetrator, she’ll probably get criminal injuries compensation,’ he said. ‘But tell her not to hold her breath.’

‘
She
could
make do with an old banger, I suppose. It needn’t cost more than a few hundred pounds, and it wouldn’t necessarily be less reliable, would it?’

‘
My first car was fifteen years old, and I never had a day’s worry with it.’

‘
Mama’s worried sick, you know. Could Annie get done for having a dodgy car?’

‘
Only if she knowingly bought a stolen vehicle.’

‘
Why don’t you say “car”? And what about driving it now she knows it’s nicked? What if your traffic cops chase her?’

‘
Stop fretting!’ McKenna said, smiling to himself. ‘I’m not surprised she calls you Cassandra.’

‘
It’s nothing to what she’s calling Clyde. I hope he’s gone before they get back.’

‘
He’s there?’ He glanced at the clock. ‘I thought he was at work.’

‘
Oh, he turned up about ten minutes ago, on his way to the depot, and he’s in a hell of a mood about something, so don’t be surprised if I ring back to say there’s been a shoot-out, like in the Bonnie and Clyde film. I just hope they don’t make too much noise about it, or leave too much of a mess. That film’s a real bloodfest, isn’t it?’

‘
You should be out yourself, instead of waiting around the house for second hand experiences.’

‘
I don’t want to go out. I’m writing.’ He heard her draw a deep breath. ‘Did you honestly like my story as much as you said? Only what you said made me feel so much better, because my teacher sort of put the mockers on things, and with Uncle Ned not around any more ...’

‘
I really liked it, Phoebe. What’s your new project?’

‘
I’m sorting out some ideas about Auntie Gertrude, and her dead lover and her dead baby. And about Llys Ifor, of course. I can’t see very far beyond it yet.’

‘
Perhaps there’s no need to.’

‘
It’s in my head day and night,’ she said, ‘always different and always the same, whatever time of day or night or season of the year I imagine, and whether or not Meirion and Auntie Gladys might have rearranged the animals, or the farm machinery, or the furniture, or themselves, or even Auntie Gertrude. How can one place positively
invade
your imagination, when there’s so much else in the world?

‘
Perhaps because it’s there, and so are you.’

‘
Isn’t that a bit Celtically metaphysical?’ He heard a pen scratching on paper, the faint sounds of voices in the background. ‘I’m going to write to my father for a word processor, then I could sort my ideas properly. Modern technology’s wonderful, isn’t it? George says people often get totally besotted with their computers.’

‘
Have you seen him?’

‘
He popped round last night to say he’s going home for the weekend. He’s still pretty upset, about Uncle Ned, and getting chucked in your cells, and I don’t think he feels safe in his flat any more, but I suppose people like him never feel safe, because they know too much about the past. It’s not a hundred years since the French were locking up naked black people in cages and showing them off like animals.’ He heard the tap of pen against teeth. ‘I could ask Mama to let him move into Uncle Ned’s rooms, couldn’t I? She’s had quite a change of heart about him, probably because he’s stopped making out like some real cool dude. He could give her a run for her money when it comes to being tense and neurotic, especially about the police.’

‘
Black people often suffer the sharp edge of policing.’

‘
Yes, he’s told me, and usually because they’re there and so are the police. I did think better of you, though I suppose you had no choice in the circumstances.’

‘
Quite.’

‘
Never mind. It’s water under the bridge, as Uncle Ned would’ve said.’ She paused again, and once more he heard the scratching pen, although the voices were silent. ‘When can we have his funeral?’

‘
Soon, I hope. We should have a date for the inquest next week.’

‘
George asked again about finishing his work. Mama’s got no objection, though it’s not really her decision, but nobody can finish it if you don’t find all his papers.’

‘
We’re still looking.’

‘
Where? Aren’t you out of possibilities?’

‘
Your mother said we could search the house, but we got a little side-tracked.’

‘
I’ve been in the attics, and I even turned over Minnie’s room when she was at work, but it’s clean.’

‘
Why did you do that?’

‘
She could’ve taken them,’ Phoebe asserted. ‘She’s pinched things before, and she could easily have sneaked in when he was asleep, especially if he’d taken one of his tablets. They made him dead to the world.’

‘
But why should she?’

He could almost see the shrug.
‘Because.’

The voices rose again, then a door slammed.

‘It’s a good job we haven’t any guns in the house,’ she commented acidly.

‘
What are they rowing about?’

‘
Don’t know and don’t care. They’re always rowing, because there’s nothing between them but sex and stupidity, and the nastiness that goes with all that. They don’t have anything to talk about. Anyway, I must go, I want to finish my writing.’ She chuckled. ‘It’s bizarre the way it takes over, as if it’s the most urgent thing in the world, bullying me into doing something every day, no matter how small.’

‘
Why?’

‘
Dunno, really, unless it’s because I might be dead tomorrow. I wouldn’t mean anything then, would I?’

9

In search of novelty, McKenna pushed his way through the crowded aisles of the new supermarket, then walked home, the ritualistic excitement of Saturday afternoon at the shops at its height, and the dead weight of cans and bottles in plastic carriers threatening to amputate the fingers of each hand.

Seeing no cans or packets prettified with the winsome face of one of their own among the shopping, the cats stalked off to sit on the parlour window ledge. He stroked their firm heads and springy ears, and thought if anyone saw him, as he often chanced a glimpse into the secret lives of others, he would seem like the lonely, ageing man he was, with only his pets left to treasure.

The telephone shrilled suddenly, and he was told that Phoebe had called the police station, upset and almost incoherent. When he tried to ring her, the line was engaged, and he drove away from his house with dry dirt and dust spraying from the tyres, and the knowledge that George’s innocence depended on the existence of another with death in mind.

The front door of the elegant house in Glamorgan Place stood wide open, a swath of colour draped over the threshold as the westering sun dragged the light of the landing window in its wake. The hall was empty, each ground floor room bereft of life, and rounding the dog-leg of the staircase, he almost fell over Phoebe
’s cat, hunched in a great mound of fur on the half landing. From one of the bedrooms he heard a child’s voice, sobbing quietly, and coming to a room summery with pinks and blues and pale watery green, he found Phoebe kneeling at her sister’s feet, and Mina slumped in a blue velvet chair. Her pale blue jeans and white blouse were splattered with deep, gaudy red, huge glistening beads of coloured glass rolled around her bare feet, and, trampled into a dark puddle on the green carpet, he saw a few long strands of gold. Her face was almost hidden by the swing of beautiful hair, and below wads of cloth binding her wrists, blood oozed, dripping slowly from the ends of her fingers.

‘
I called an ambulance,’ Phoebe said through her tears. ‘I rang, but you weren’t there.’

‘
How bad is it?’ Shamefully relieved the blood sacrifice was not hers, he crouched down, and lifted the limp hands in his own. Mina stirred, wincing with pain.

‘
There’s so much blood!’ Phoebe’s voice was awe struck. ‘The bathroom looks like a slaughterhouse.’

He pushed Mina
’s hair over her shoulders and away from her face, looking into her half-closed eyes.

Her skin was marble white, a bluishness seeping into the shadows beneath her eyes. She cried like a stricken animal when he lifted her arms above her head to staunch the flow of blood, and he saw himself in the abattoir, draining a carcase.
‘When did she do it?’

‘
I don’t know!’ More tears coursed down Phoebe’s cheeks, in the tracks of others. ‘I was writing. Clyde went soon after I spoke to you, and I thought I heard her go to the bathroom, but I’m not sure when, then Tom started wailing. He was on the stairs, and wouldn’t come down, so I went up. She’d locked herself in, and she wouldn’t answer. It took me ages to break the door open.’ She wiped a hand across her face, smearing her skin with her sister’s blood. ‘And I had to use her beads for a tourniquet. I couldn’t find anything else.’

‘
Why?’ McKenna asked helplessly, feeling Mina’s blood on his own hands. ‘Why did she do it?’

As the ambulance siren wailed outside, Phoebe scrambled to her feet, ungainly and noisy, and ran downstairs, leaving him alone with Mina. Shallow breaths rattled in her throat, and her flesh was beginning to chill.

He stood aside for the paramedics, his arm around Phoebe’s shoulders, then followed the stretchered body downstairs, Phoebe at his heels. Now on the landing window ledge, the cat was stippled with colour.

‘
What shall I do?’ Phoebe asked, her own breath rasping.

‘
I’ll take you to the hospital. How can we let your mother know? Has she got a mobile phone?’

‘
She can’t remember how to use it, so it’s never switched on.’