The House of Women (36 page)

‘
When I dropped my files.’ Biting her lower lip, she watched her hands, flexing the thin fingers beneath their ugly bracelets. ‘I had to write a sort of holiday diary for college, so I took my files to work, and when I came home, I went upstairs, and Phoebe’s cat ran across the landing and right under my feet, and I tripped up. Everything fell all over the place, and Uncle Ned came to help me pick them up.’ A scowl disfigured her face, and her fingers clenched. ‘He was so nosy! He looked at every piece of paper, wanting to know what I was doing with forms for cars in my files, and I said they weren’t mine, I was just keeping them for somebody, so he said the only person I’d put myself out for was Jason, and I had to finish with him, because he’d get me into awful trouble.’ She fell silent, then added: ‘Then he said he’d made a vow never to cover up for anyone ever again, because it led to so much grief, and I still don’t understand what he was talking about. And,’ she went on, scowling again, ‘if Phoebe kept that animal under control, like Mama’s always telling her, none of this would’ve happened. She’s lucky I didn’t kick its teeth in, and Jason said if it wasn’t so fat, he’d stick it in the microwave.’

‘
What did you do with the Epsom Salts?’ McKenna asked.

‘
Eh?’ Her eyes turned slowly to meet his. ‘Oh, they didn’t work. Nobody even had the bellyache. I mixed them in the butter, because it was nice and soft. Mama’s always forgetting to put it back in the fridge, like she forgot about the milk you were asking about. That’s why it tasted sour.’ She smiled again, almost innocently. ‘I don’t eat butter, you see. Solange says that kind of fat can kill you.’

11

Leaving Mina guarded by a policewoman, McKenna returned to the station, where, in one of the interview rooms, Jason challenged his interrogators, harsh overhead lights flattening out the contours of his face and making dark holes of his eyes. ‘He’s fucking stupid, a fucking liar, and a fat fucking sweaty arsehole generally,’ Jason commented.

‘
Whether he is or isn’t, your workmate saw you seal up that carton with yards of parcel tape,’ Dewi said. ‘Then you locked it in one of those big steel cages inside the depot, and put the key on your bunch.’

‘
I’m always sealing cartons and putting them in cages.’ Jason smirked. ‘It’s part of the job, so things don’t get nicked.’

‘
So how come this one is crammed to the gills with Ned Jones’s letters and papers and address book and photos?’ Dewi asked.

‘
Search me!’ Jason shrugged. ‘Mina Harris gave it me. Why don’t you ask her?’

As McKenna listened to questions and denials, tossed back and forth like balls over a net, the ruined card game came to mind, and he thought, fancifully, that the Queen of Spades overlooking the Knave of Diamonds had been symbolic, of death looking over the shoulder of greed.

*

Diana Bradshaw was in his office again, staring blankly at the wall, her arms wrapped around her body as if she were cold.
‘Has that bastard told you what he did with my car?’ she asked. Her skirt was ruckled, her shirt listless, and he noticed the pale trail of an embryonic varicose vein meandering down her left leg.

‘
The substance of his comment was confined to saying we’d be fools to set any store by the vicious, untruthful allegations being made against him, especially by Mina,’ he said. ‘According to Jason, she’s good for just one thing, and only that until somebody better comes his way. As for your car,’ he added, ‘you could always ask him yourself.’

‘
Don’t be funny! I’d wring his bloody neck!’ She smiled, then sighed, unsure what to do with herself. ‘That poor girl! How could she be so stupid? Does she realize what she’s done?’

‘
I don’t know. I’m not qualified to form an opinion. I’ve asked for a full psychiatric evaluation as soon as she’s fit to be examined.’

‘
Phoebe thinks she’s completely mad, and utterly stupid,’ Diana said. ‘But she’s a strange creature herself, isn’t she? She said Mina carved herself up to make Jason sorry for being horrible, but she doesn’t think she intended to kill herself because she cut across the veins. Apparently, you cut down to make a proper job of it.’

‘
How does she know why Mina did it?’

‘
She told her, before you arrived. She wanted Phoebe to call Jason on his mobile, so he could see the fruits of his labour.’ She crossed her legs, massaging the discoloured flesh. ‘I suppose the psychiatrist will diagnose classic dysfunctional inadequacy resulting in sociopathic tendencies and the inability to relate cause to effect, and when we’ve charged her with manslaughter, some other psychiatrist will decide she was the innocent dupe of a real sociopath who preyed on an overriding need for love and approval stemming from her classically dysfunctional background and deprived family circumstances, so we’ll go around in circles for quite a long time, and unless we can attach Jason to the drug and prove the powder he gave Mina was the tetracycline which killed Ned Jones, we’re on a hiding to nothing from the start, aren’t we?’

‘
Not necessarily,’ McKenna said. ‘We’ve yet to hear what Jason’s mother has to say, and she’s in a very bad mood, because she was looking forward to an evening in front of the telly after the rigours of trawling Llandudno shops, and is not best pleased to find herself and all seven of her offspring currently occupying our interview facilities. We thought it best to bring in all of them, although Jason and his younger sister are the only ones who haven’t yet flown the coop.’

‘
Isn’t she the one who won a wet-T-shirt competition at the local night club?’ Diana grimaced. ‘Prys was talking about it.’ She thought for a moment, then said: ‘Where’s Mr Lloyd?’

‘
Long gone, like a lot of these fathers.’

‘
They remind me of torn cats, sowing the seeds of more irresponsibility and viciousness. I’m not very optimistic about nailing Jason.’

‘
Forensics should be finished with the carton soon. We only need to find his prints on some of the contents, and we’re home and dry.’

‘
As he’s already said he’s been everywhere in the house, that wouldn’t constitute more than circumstantial evidence.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m going home. I told my husband I wouldn’t be long, and that was hours ago.’

‘
He must be used to your unsocial hours by now,’ McKenna said mildly. ‘What does he do for a living?’ She looked sharply at him. ‘Don’t you know?’

‘
I know virtually nothing about you.’

‘
I am surprised! Rowlands seems to think he knows everything, and I can’t believe he hasn’t told you.’

‘
Bits and pieces of biased information aren’t the best foundation for conclusions, especially when they might have been embellished in the telling. Truth is often the first casualty in human transactions.’

‘
What did our masters tell you about me?’

‘
Nothing. It was all about me.’ He related Monday’s conversation with the deputy chief constable, then added: ‘And what did you hear?’

‘
Another cynical and expedient invention. They said you weren’t particularly ambitious, so delayed promotion wouldn’t be a problem.’

‘
Looks like we’ve both been fitted up, doesn’t it?’

‘
You were,’ Diana said. ‘I deserved dismissal for what I did.’

‘
Then why did you do it?’

She flushed.
‘Wouldn’t it be more to the point to ask why I wasn’t sacked?’

‘
Insider trading isn’t the worst offence.’

‘
Is that what you call it?’

‘
You took advantage of some knowledge for your own benefit. It happens.’

She rubbed her forehead.
‘Can I tell you why?’ Before he could respond, she went on: ‘I’m not trying to make myself feel better, but we women seem obliged to confess. Men are much better at living with lies.’

‘
Not always. Ned wasn’t.’

‘
In my view, he’s the exception which proves the rule. Professor Williams hasn’t let untruth get in his way, whereas I can’t function properly because the falseness keeps tripping me up. In the long run, it’ll do the same to others.’ She smiled faintly. ‘I’ve a fairly good idea why you disappeared all day on Thursday, and I don’t blame you.’

‘
I still had to come back. We don’t have many choices.’

‘
Not if we want to eat and have a roof over our heads.’ She took a deep breath. ‘A couple of years ago, my husband began having black-outs, dropping things and tripping over nothing. The doctors suspected a brain tumour, but it turned out to be multiple sclerosis. He used to be a dental surgeon, and now he’s in a wheelchair, dying slowly instead of quickly.’ She sighed. ‘Thank God we don’t have children to worry about.’

‘
I’m sorry. I really am.’

Picking at the chipped veneer on the desk, she said:
‘There’s a theory about this kind of thing, you know. A butterfly stretches its wings in Indonesia or somewhere, and a little while later, there’s a disaster on the other side of the world. When I bought that house, I’d no idea you even existed, but you’ve suffered because of it. You see, with only one salary, we couldn’t afford to adapt our old house for my husband as well as pay the mortgage, so when this place came on the market, so cheap, I snapped it up without a second thought.’ She paused, and sighed again. ‘And I realized later how easily everything can fall apart. First it was our plans, then our prospects and security, then my morality. I was terrified, not because I might be unable to keep the wolves from the door, but of not having a door between us and them in the first place. His private pension isn’t very high because of his age, and his state benefit’s taxed to almost nothing because of my income, and I know poverty is always relative, but I’m still afraid of the future, especially as I only escaped dismissal by the skin of my teeth. I’ve no illusions about prospects, here or anywhere else. I’ll be shunted from place to place until I cave in and resign. I’ve seen it happen to others.’

‘
It must have been a dreadful shock for your husband when you were disciplined.’

‘
He doesn’t know. He thinks the house was pure luck, and I’m on career development, so he’s very pleased, and that’s how I want things to stay.’ She dragged her fingers through her hair. ‘I know it’s tempting to sanctify the terminally ill, but he’s a wonderful person, and a marvellous husband, and I don’t want anything to spoil what little time he’s got left.’

*

Checking on the interviews, McKenna found Jason’s cocksure insolence still in full flaunt, then went to hear what Mrs Lloyd was minded to disclose to her interrogators, announcing his presence to the blinking red eye of the tape recorder.

Face mottled, mouth opening and shutting like a fish gasping for air, she turned her bleary eyes on him, and choked back a sob.
‘I’ve told on him! I said I would, and I have. He’s been doing it for years.’ She twisted in the chair, as if her body pained her for betraying her child. ‘Ask Dr Ansoni if you don’t believe me. He knows I don’t take all the tablets he gives me.’

The contents of her big patchwork shoulder bag
were strewn over the table, three brown glass bottles standing upright amid a litter of purse, keys, tissues, lipsticks, used bus tickets, useless lottery tickets, and other jumble.

‘
Did you tell Dr Ansoni why you needed so many prescriptions?’ McKenna asked.

‘
He knows!’

‘
But did you
tell
him?’

She dabbed her eyes with a balled-up tissue.
‘I couldn’t, could I? He’d’ve stopped my tablets.’

‘
For the tape, Mrs Lloyd, please say exactly what you mean.’

‘
Jason’s been taking my tablets.’

‘
And what’s he done with them?’

‘
I don’t know!’

‘
What d’you think he’s done with them?’

She looked helplessly from McKenna to the uniformed sergeant at his side, then to the solicitor beside her. He smiled, murmuring words of encouragement in Welsh, and she sighed so deeply her body seemed to deflate.
‘Dr Ansoni gives me tablets to help me sleep, and for when I’m depressed.’ She paused, working her mouth to make it speak. ‘I didn’t realise at first, and then I was worried to death, thinking I was taking more than I thought, so I told my eldest girl. She said to count them every time I took one, and write on the bottle, and even then I wasn’t sure because it’s easy to forget something like that, isn’t it?’

McKenna smiled his own encouragement.

‘My girls must’ve been talking about it, because my eldest said the youngest’d seen Jason with his fingers in the bottles, and hadn’t liked to say because she didn’t know if I knew, and she was scared Jason’d thump her.’ She patted her eyes again. ‘He was always hitting her when they were little. He pulled her hair out by the roots sometimes, when he was really angry.’

‘
Has he threatened you?’ McKenna asked.

She shook her head, rather tentatively.
‘I got hold of him, and said it’d got to stop, else I’d tell Dr Ansoni, and he’d tell the police.’ She frowned, hindsight perhaps revealing her inadequacy. ‘Only Jason said Dr Ansoni wouldn’t dare, because he’s his doctor, too.’

‘
Did Jason say what he’d done with the tablets?’

She chewed her mouth.
‘My eldest reckons he’s been selling them round the estate, but I told her he wouldn’t, because he knows it’s wrong. There’s too many kids taking things these days, and they look so pale and lost and frantic it makes you want to weep.’

‘
We’re interested in some capsules,’ McKenna said, ‘like little bullets which come apart in the middle.’

‘
I’ve been told,’ she said. ‘I had some red and yellow ones for my chest, after that flu bug in the spring, and there should be most of them left, only I can’t find the bottle.’

‘
Mrs Lloyd had twenty-eight capsules of tetracycline in early April,’ the sergeant reported. ‘A week’s supply, but she only took them for a couple of days because the drug made her ill.’

‘
I had the most awful upset stomach, so I rang Dr Ansoni and he said to stop them. He gave me some little white tablets instead.’

‘
So at least half the capsules are missing?’ McKenna asked her.

‘
I suppose.’

‘
We’ve requested fourteen tetracycline capsules from the pharmacy. Once these have been emptied into a plastic bag, the girl can be asked to make a comparison with what she was given.’ The sergeant looked through his notes. ‘Nothing else we took from the house contains tetracycline, and the tablets in Mrs Lloyd’s bag are anti-depressants, paracetamol, and hypertensives.’