In Guilty Night (6 page)

‘Mr McKenna expecting you, is he?’ Dewi asked, his mouth as cold as the wind.

‘No.’

‘He’s expecting me.’

‘Lucky Mr McKenna.’ Janet turned on her heel. ‘I’ll see him in work.’

Waiting for McKenna to answer the door, Dewi stared at the retreating figure, shapely even under her thick garments, and thought it sad that a sharp mind and an acid tongue should sour the charms of the sweetest-looking woman.

‘Normally,’ Jack Tuttle observed, ‘the whole world’s up in arms if a boy of fourteen gets murdered.’

‘This isn’t normally,’ McKenna said. ‘This is a boy on the run from a children’s home, and in the eyes of the world, a bad lot.’ He put the photographs and exercise book on the desk. ‘I want these crosswords copied and handed out, and solved as quickly as possible.’

‘There’s not much point Mr Tuttle having them,’ Dewi said. ‘He can’t speak Welsh.’

‘He can speak English a lot better than you can,’ Janet observed.

In a lengthening silence, McKenna watched the three officers, assessing the mischief set in motion by bringing Janet into the already fraught relationship between Dewi and Jack. ‘We have a nasty, thankless and very important job to do. Should any of you let personal feelings interfere, in any way,
the consequences will be serious. I trust I make myself clear?’

‘Nobody’s repaired the wall yet where those two coaches crashed in the summer,’ Dewi said, changing down to first gear to take the car up the precipitous hill past St Mary’s. ‘Mr ab Elis’ll never make Lord Lieutenant of the county if he’s dodgy with the kids, will he?’ A magpie fluttered suddenly in front of the windscreen, eyes bright and hungry. ‘One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, and four for a boy.’ He tapped out the metre of the old rhyme on the steering-wheel. ‘Can you see its mate, sir? I can’t help but wonder why a posh bloke like Elis should be wanting to associate with a bad boy like Arwel was supposed to be.’

‘People like him do a lot of charity work,’ McKenna said. ‘He might have been the only oasis in the desert of Arwel’s life.’

‘Most folk never do owt for nowt. Why should he be any different?’

McKenna shuddered as pain, dormant since he woke, suddenly ground its teeth around his bones.

‘The weather won’t help,’ Dewi observed. ‘The milk bottles’d frozen to the doorstep this morning. Mam had to pour warm water over them. There’s a full moon in a few days, so we’ll probably have some snow.’ Turning left on to a narrow unmade lane, he slowed to a crawl, car wheels crunching through drifts of brittle golden leaves. ‘Our posh bloke lives at the end of the lane, and I just hope he’s not blinding along in his big posh Range Rover, because I can’t see a bloody thing over these hedges, and neither can he.’

‘How d’you know he’s got a Range Rover?’

‘Traffic copped him doing a ton on Port Dinorwic bypass a while back. He got off with a warning, which isn’t surprising with the connections he must have. He’s also got a big posh horsebox, tractors and whatnot, and a great big, shiny, super-posh, custom-built, Italian sports car his wife drives most of the time. You know who she is, don’t you?’

‘A county councillor,’ McKenna said, weary already of the intricate nexus of relationships which formed the local power group, and which he must carefully and tactfully unravel in search of sickness and depravity rotting the tight-woven fabric.

‘Madame Rhiannon Haf ab Elis is chairperson of the social services committee no less, most likely best mates with Ron and his missis, too.’

‘And probably the obvious connection between Elis and Arwel.’

‘That’s as may be, but who’s to say that’s where it begins and ends?’ He let the car coast down the lane. ‘That’s Bedd y Cor, sir. Weird calling your house a “dwarf’s grave”, isn’t it?’

Slated roof misty with dew, the house stood on a natural terrace, fronted by lawns and shrubbery, and the glimpse of a formal garden. A grove of winter-bare oak and ash, and the rising hillside, shielded its back from mountain storms. Acres of pasture and heath swept towards the foothills, grazed by horses swaddled in crested rugs.

‘Mam says it was long house in the old days, and a near ruin when the Elises bought it,’ Dewi added. ‘I looked them up in
Who’s
Who
this morning. Her family’s riddled with the sort of money that breeds like maggots on a corpse. He’s director of this, that and the other, and probably got shares in half the world, but I don’t expect he’s ever done a day’s proper graft in his life. I wonder if the money’s what the Yanks call old or new?’

‘You read too much pulp fiction, Dewi Prys. Money is money, and old or new, it buys the same. Mr ab Elis’s money has bought some very fine horse-flesh.’

‘It might’ve bought some very fine human flesh as well, sir, but I daresay that came a lot cheaper.’

Leaving Dewi by a huge five-barred gate of weather-bleached wood, McKenna walked down the drive towards the house, feet crunching on finely raked gravel. Moss-grown boulders and rocky outcrops strewed the undulating landscape around what was once a yeoman’s dwelling, the character of which the Elises’ restoration had destroyed nothing. Set on an east-west axis, like so many older houses, only north and south-facing walls bore windows. The east wall faced the hillside, where a silvery tumble of water seemed to disappear beneath the foundations. An enormous oak tree, its trunk arched by centuries of prevailing winds, touched the other, and spread its branches over the roof. White paint gleamed on cob walls and squat chimneys, flashed with shale to throw off the rain. Riotous with autumn colours, the north wall was garbed from roof to footings with Virginia creeper, and McKenna imagined the house in summer, canopied by the oak tree, like the house built of leaves in an ancient Welsh poem. Old barns in the adjoining field had been converted to stables and feedstore and
garage, their yards laid with smooth cobbles, their roofs yellowy-green with lichen.

A girl who spoke with the harsh accent of Arwel’s home town opened the door, and took him through a hall floored with worn stone slabs, down a passageway where the slabs were covered in coarse druggeting, and to a room which looked out over the gardens and down the hillside.

Russet leaves draped the window like a frame around a tranquil winter landscape, blazing logs in a huge stone fireplace filled the air with heat and sweet woody scents, lit pale-leather furniture and pearly-grey carpet, and walls and ceiling of a colour so subtle McKenna felt adrift in room without angles or demarcation. Seated on the edge of an armchair, good arm cradling the bad, he examined the painting above the mantel, where a dark-robed figure drifted in desolate twilight between sea and strand, and surveyed the shelves of fine limed oak built in the chimney alcoves, where old buckram- and leather-bound books were stacked beside a brass-bound casket of burnished wood. Against the far wall, away from the heat, matching shelves housed racks of records and compact discs, and the most expensive hi-fi console he had ever seen.

Fidgety, wanting to smoke, he stood up and walked to the shelves, leaving tracks in the lush carpet pile, and tilted his head to read the book titles. Many were biographies of Beethoven, in German and English, the others devoted to Mozart and Salieri, Dittersdorf and Gassmann, Handel, Spohr and Benda. He leafed through the yellowed pages of an arcane text on counterpoint, and wondered what delayed Elis. Perhaps he played with time, McKenna thought, hoping to subvert its momentum as these composers had done, and thus recreate the time-space in which Arwel Thomas still lived and no questions needed to be asked.

He looked again at the painting, troubled by the feelings it evoked, then made new tracks towards the other picture, a chalk portrait hung to catch the best light, sepia-toned like the pages of the text. He felt a draught as the door behind him opened.

‘Beethoven, at the age of fifty-one.’ The voice was cultured and soft. ‘A marvellous face, don’t you think? Of course, the original is still in Bonn.’ Elis smiled wryly. ‘All the money in the world can’t buy some things. Do sit down. Mari’s bringing coffee.’ Tall and muscular, he wore a heavy woollen jumper,
riding breeches splashed with mud, long wool socks, and his wealth without ostentation.

The girl followed him into the room, and put coffee and a silver ashtray on a delicate painted table, offering no deference to Elis, but simply a beguiling smile as he thanked her.

‘I do apologize for keeping you waiting. I was grooming my horse.’ Pouring coffee into fine china cups, pushing McKenna’s within hand’s reach, he asked, ‘What have you done to yourself?’

‘Dislocated my shoulder.’

‘That must be painful. What happened?’

‘A tumble.’

‘We don’t bounce so well as we get older, do we?’ He stood by the fireplace, fumbling with cigarette and lighter.

‘That’s a fine painting,’ McKenna observed. ‘Who’s the artist?’

‘Caspar David Friedrich, who died a near madman. An excess of vision, I suppose, like his contemporary. They make you suffer with them, don’t they? Friedrich with his solitudes, Beethoven with his music.’

‘Perhaps we should accept suffering as one of the great structural lines of human life,’ McKenna commented. Elis sat opposite, frowning. ‘Perhaps,’ McKenna added, ‘we should find it sufficient to rejoice in their vision.’ He gazed at Elis, at the trembling hand holding the coffee cup. ‘And much as I would like to discuss music and art, Mr Elis, I didn’t come here to seek your opinions on either.’

‘I know.’ The cup clattered on the saucer, slopping liquid. Dabbing at the spill with a napkin, Elis said, ‘Arwel didn’t turn up as usual, so I called Blodwel. They said he’d absconded.’

‘And how often would he come here?’

‘Every weekend. Sometimes, he’d arrive without warning on a schoolday. I always let them know, and no one ever told me to send him back.’

‘We’ve been told the children aren’t allowed out unaccompanied.’

‘Have you?’ Elis said wearily. ‘You’ll no doubt hear other half-truths, as well as blatant untruths.’

‘How did you know him?’

‘I try to use my own good fortune for the benefit of others.’ Elis smiled bitterly. ‘Look what I managed to do for Arwel.’

‘Please keep to the point, Mr Elis.’

‘I take children out of care, as my predecessors hired from
the workhouse. Mari came a couple of years ago, after spending childhood in so many foster homes everyone lost count. She was thrown out of care the day after her sixteenth birthday. Not what I call good parenting, but who am I to cast the first stone?’

‘Arwel, Mr Elis.’

‘Early in the summer, I asked Social Services if any of the Blodwel children might like to help with the horses. Doris brought Arwel.’

‘And you let him look after valuable bloodstock?’

‘Mari’s from Caernarfon. She said he was a decent boy. And I,’ Elis added fiercely, ‘never found anything to prove her wrong. He was that rare person without fear of horses. They seemed to liberate him. He loved and respected them, and they responded in kind.’

‘You taught him to ride?’

‘And to groom and feed and muck out, to recognize injury and sickness.’ Elis tossed his cigarette in the hearth. ‘He was gifted with horses, Mr McKenna. Almost fey.’

‘Did you take him out?’

‘We went to Chester Races in early July, to Newmarket later that month, to Valley Air Show in August, to the first National Hunt meeting at Bangor on Dee last month, then to Aintree for the day, because he wanted to see the Grand National course.’ Elis smiled, pain forgotten. ‘I think he decided to be a jump jockey the first time he galloped a horse.’ Pain returned to rampage through his composure. ‘That was the last time I saw him.’

‘Did you pay him?’

‘Children in care aren’t allowed to earn. I sent Hogg a cheque for a hundred pounds each month, to be put in Arwel’s savings account. He deserved much more, but Hogg said he was spoilt already, the others would be jealous, and boys like him didn’t deserve privileges in any case. I gave him cash every so often, and told him to keep quiet.’

‘Did he ever discuss his family? Or Blodwel? His friends? His hopes and dreams and fears?’ McKenna sipped his coffee.

‘He was quite reserved, even shy, except with the horses, but I never expected his confidence in any case, because I’m forty-one, and to Arwel’s generation, that’s almost inconceivably old. Like most youngsters, he was a little secretive, but never devious, and he liked quietness, and privacy. He read quite a lot, too.’ Elis looked at the bookshelves, frowning. ‘I’m
sure he left one of his books here. Mari should know where it is. He talked to her a lot and I often heard them giggling in the kitchen. I think she took a fancy to him.’

‘Hardly surprising. He was a very beautiful boy. His sister is equally beautiful.’

‘Yes, I know.’ The voice was quiet, the eyes downcast, the hands trembling violently as if in the throes of delirium.

‘You know the family?’

‘In his greater wisdom, Hogg banned family contact. Arwel was desperate to see them, so I took him one Sunday afternoon. I don’t think I’d recognize the parents if I fell over them.’ Elis paused, to light another cigarette. ‘Carol was in that horrible back parlour, standing in front of the window. The sun was behind her, and I thought she must be made of light.’

‘According to her parents, she’s wholly of the flesh.’

Elis stared at the painting over the mantel. ‘To see them all together was like witnessing a law of nature; Carol and Arwel the light to their parents’ darkness, each necessary to the other, neither able to vanquish the other. At least, I thought so. How else could I believe there may be justice and reason in the world?’

‘Nature is prone to accidents of beauty as much as to those of genius and idiocy.’ McKenna stood up, pain cavorting from neck to knee. ‘Would it be possible to see Mari now?’

Elis glanced at his watch. ‘She’ll have gone shopping, but I’ll give you her number. Don’t look so astounded! She has a self-contained flat in the house, because this is her home for as long as she wishes. The only relative is an aged grandmother in Caernarfon, whom Mari visits from time to time.’