In Guilty Night Page 3

  ‘Why are you sulking, Prys?’ Jack demanded.

  ‘I’m not sulking.’

  ‘Are you not?’ Jack regarded the sullen face. ‘What are you doing, then? Dealing with a severe case of constipation?’

  ‘It’s not fair!’ Dewi burst out. ‘Why couldn’t I drive Mr McKenna instead of slogging over the computer all afternoon? And I’ve got to sit in while you talk to that stinky git in the interview room.’

  ‘Had your nose pushed out of joint by our little lady detective, have you? Afraid of being elbowed out of the chief inspector’s favour?’ Jack grinned. ‘For all people reckon you’re quite the most handsome young copper Bangor’s ever been lucky enough to have patrolling its mean streets, I’m sure WDC Evans is much more congenial company, because she has attributes, Dewi Prys, you’ll never have and wouldn’t want. And apart from that, some jobs need a woman officer, as you well know.’

  ‘That’s very snide, Mr Tuttle. You’re implying Mr McKenna might be fancying her. Janet Evans is younger than me.’

  ‘She’s pretty enough, she’s over twenty-one, and she’s single. Could do him a world of good.’

  Christened David Fellows, reared in a frilly suburban villa along the coast, and well on the road to perdition before he was out of school, the man known in his middle years as Dai Skunk sat tidily on an upright chair in the interview room, sipping from a mug of tea.

  ‘I had a bath this morning,’ he announced to Jack and Dewi. ‘So you can both stop breathing through your mouths.’

  Dewi snickered, then winced as Jack’s heavy shoe caught his ankle bone.

  ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ Jack asked.

  Fellows shrugged. ‘Some little queen squealing to a big butch copper, I suppose. Gives you an excuse to persecute me. Not that you need one, even though I never do anything illegal. Our kindly government changed the law quite a long time ago.’

  ‘And a sorry day that was,’ Jack observed, dreading the onslaught of the sickly odour. Once told by McKenna that a rare and obscure medical condition might be its cause, he labelled rampant homosexuality neither obscure nor a medical condition, but simply a vile perversion. Fellows, short and painfully thin, swallowed the last of his tea, and wiped his lips on a grubby handkerchief.

  ‘Do I need a solicitor?’

  ‘You’re not under caution. You can have a brief if you want.’

  ‘I’ll save myself some money, then. Aren’t I too trusting?’

  ‘We’re interested in an exchange of information,’ Jack said. ‘We have some information about you. You can tell us whether it’s true or not.’

  ‘Mr McKenna said we had to lean on people,’ Dewi pointed out.

  ‘Did he?’ Fellows leaned forward, sending his smell ahead like an advance scout. ‘That should be exciting!’

  ‘Pack it in!’ Jack warned.

  ‘The bigger the aversion, the harder you’re leaning on the closet door.’ Fellows smiled as rage turned Jack’s face thunderous. ‘Too bad you’re not my type, isn’t it? I prefer them a bit younger, like your pretty friend. Look at those lovely blue eyes and that gorgeous black hair!’

  ‘Just how young d’you like your playmates?’ Jack asked quietly.

  The smile died in Fellows’ red-rimmed eyes, and he began to rub the side of his neck. ‘You snidey git! You’ve got me here because of that boy you found on the railway line.’

  ‘He was on the run from Blodwel, and we’re told you might’ve let him rest his weary head at your place.’

  ‘I don’t know any kids from there.’ Fellows rubbed his skin viciously. ‘Who told you I do?’

  Jack took Arwel’s photograph from the file, and placed it on the table and, as Fellows looked, his restless hand stayed itself. ‘Oh, God! Wasn’t he beautiful?’ His hand came to rest beside the picture, fingers smearing blood on the table. ‘What a bloody terrible waste!’

  ‘You’ve made your neck bleed,’ Dewi said, watching a crimson globule well from the dark lesion below Fellows’s ear. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  The other man looked at his hand, then wiped the blood from his neck with the grubby handkerchief. ‘Only my badness coming out.’ He smiled wryly, all flirtatiousness gone. ‘Don’t you know I’ve got AIDS? My name’s been changed to Dai Death.’ Looking once more on Arwel Thomas, he added, ‘I wouldn’t even breathe on a beautiful boy like him.’

  Janet sat again at the table in the back parlour of the Thomas home, McKenna beside her on a chair which sagged painfully under his buttocks. Peggy Thomas hunched in her armchair, and the thin pot-bellied man she had wed leaned against the mantel, cutting off heat from the meagre fire. In the other armchair, hands clasped so tight colour bled from the knuckles, was a girl who looked little older than Arwel. Unable to take his eyes from her, McKenna wondered how the parents, lacking even the distinction of true ugliness to mark them from the herd, produced the beautiful boy eviscerated on the autopsy table, and this girl. Perfectly proportioned, slender and fine-boned, hair and skin pale and luminous, her loveliness was that rarity demanding awe. She looked up suddenly, dark saddened eyes gazing into his, and he imagined her body brittle under the weight of sweating urgent lust. Janet’s voice broke into the nightmare.

  ‘We’re terribly sorry to bother you again.’

  Tom Thomas grunted. ‘What’s done is done.’ He gestured to the figure of his daughter. ‘She’s Carol.’

  ‘There’s just Carol and Arwel, is there?’

  Peggy nodded. ‘Just these two.’ She favoured Carol with a look full of emotion, pity, or its spiteful twin, there in abundance.

  ‘When did you last see Arwel?’ McKenna said.

  Staring at her daughter, Peggy said, ‘Three months ago. We went to a case conference or something.’

  ‘And how often had you seen him before then?’

  ‘Twice since he went to Blodwel.’ She chewed the inside of her mouth. ‘Eight months back, just before Easter.’

  ‘After the first time,’ Tom intervened. ‘Mr Hogg told us not to come again ’til he said, because Arwel went off his head when we left.’

  ‘He said the kids had to settle in, and family visits upset things,’ Peggy added.

  ‘Didn’t you mind?’ Janet asked. ‘Didn’t you think you had the right to see your own son?’

  She shrugged. ‘They know what they’re doing, don’t they? That social worker in town said Mr Hogg’s very clever with kids like Arwel, so it’s not for us to go against him, is it?’

  ‘And Arwel had no home leave?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Mr Hogg said he hadn’t earned enough points.’

  ‘Enough points?’

  ‘Blodwel’s got a points system. When kids behave themselves, they earn points towards home leave and outings.’

  ‘Behaviour modification,’ Janet said.

  ‘Something like that.’ Tom moved away from the fire, releasing thin tendrils of warmth into the rest of the room. Rubbing his hands down his buttocks, he leaned against the window-ledge.

  ‘But didn’t you want to see Arwel?’ Janet persisted. ‘Was he happy at Blodwel? Was he miserable? He might’ve gone up the wall because he was upset and homesick.’

  Tom rounded on her. ‘He got what was coming to him!’

  ‘People keep telling us that,’ McKenna said quietly. ‘Why, do you think?’ He turned to Carol. ‘Why should Arwel deserve to die?’

  She stared at him mutely, violet eyes dark with pain, their colour mirrored in the shadows beneath the sockets.

  ‘He was a bad lot, wasn’t he?’ Rancour soured the man’s voice. ‘Don’t know where he got it from. We’ve always done our duty by them.’ He too stared at his daughter. ‘And she’s going the same way. Two rotten apples!’

  Carol scrambled to her feet, looked at her father, lounging against the window-ledge, then at McKenna, before walking out of the room. He heard the pad of feet on the staircase, then the thud of an upstairs door.

  ‘Little madam!’

  ‘Has Caro
l been in trouble as well?’ Janet asked.

  ‘Depends what you call trouble,’ Peggy said. ‘Can’t keep her hands off the men.’ She chewed her mouth. ‘No better than the tarts down town. She’s got the same look in her eyes. Makes me ashamed to be called her mother!’

  ‘Perhaps the men can’t keep their hands off her,’ McKenna said. ‘They couldn’t keep their hands off Arwel, either.’

  ‘Little bastard!’ Tom spat. ‘Flaunting himself!’ He turned accusingly to his wife. ‘And she must’ve known. Little bitch probably put him up to it!’

  Janet jumped up. ‘You don’t mind if I look through Arwel’s things, do you? You don’t need to bother getting up. I’m sure Carol can show me.’

  ‘When is it, then?’ Peggy asked McKenna as the door shut behind Janet.

  ‘When is what, Mrs Thomas?’

  ‘The funeral. Want to get it over and done with, don’t we?’

  ‘Miserable, bloody bitch!’ Janet plunged a spoon through the froth on her coffee, as if it were a knife through the cold heart of Peggy Thomas. ‘Miserable, mean, black-hearted bitch!’

  McKenna gazed through the café window, at empty pavements and the new bus station erected over the funeral pyre of a small department store.

  ‘She’s too bloody mean even to cry for him!’ Janet snatched another cigarette from McKenna’s packet. ‘If Carol goes with men, d’you blame her? Can you blame Arwel? There’s no human comfort in that godforsaken hole!’ She gulped the coffee, cringing as hot liquid scorched her throat. ‘And not an ounce of love!’

  ‘Did you talk to Carol?’

  ‘No.’ Janet drained her cup. ‘She didn’t say a word. Shuffled in front of me like a zombie, showed me Arwel’s room, and disappeared. One of the neighbours said Carol works at the hardware shop on High Street, so I thought I’d try to get her on her own.’

  ‘She’s a High Street star,’ McKenna said. ‘Like the thousands of pretty girls standing behind counters day in and day out, inspiring fantasy and romance like the silent film stars. That pert little minx from the supermarket who walked out with Dewi for a while is another one. I expect people dream about them, wonder what they do, who they do it with.’

  ‘Carol’s definitely a star.’ Janet smiled. ‘Ethereal and untouchable.’

  ‘Not according to her mother.’

  ‘I don’t understand that woman. My mother’d be down on me like a ton of bricks if she thought I was putting it about. That miserable bitch just slags off her daughter to the whole world. God knows what goes on when Carol’s alone with her.’

  ‘More of what we saw today, I imagine.’ McKenna lit his own cigarette, then placed it carefully in the ashtray while he picked up his cup. Numbness seeped from his arm, chased by the promise of real pain. ‘How d’you rate Tom Thomas as a child abuser?’

  ‘You can’t tell by looking, can you? He didn’t seem worried. Surely he would be?’

  ‘So what was he feeling?’

  ‘Nothing very much, because he’s a miserable sod, like his wife’s a miserable bitch. They’ll grieve more about not winning the lottery, because nothing touches them. They’re almost sub-human.’

  ‘Don’t adopt the same judgmental attitudes you condemn in others, Janet. The Thomases and millions like them live in the dark shitty world others make for them.’ He dragged on the cigarette. ‘Tom and Peggy Thomas are as human as you. Hitler carried his own brand of political correctness to its logical conclusion, and look what happened to the rest of us for letting him.’

  Jack yawned massively.

  ‘Don’t you think you should go home?’ McKenna asked. ‘In case you fall asleep while you’re driving.’

  ‘I’ll go soon,’ Jack said.

  ‘What’s going on downstairs?’

  ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem,’ Jack said evasively.

  ‘We’ve got a bloody big problem,’ Dewi said. ‘Dai Skunk’s got AIDS, and he bled all over the interview room.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate! He was rubbing a mole on his neck, and it bled a bit. There’s a smear on the table.’

  ‘Sir, you panicked like hell, and rang Dr Roberts screaming for help. Then you got hold of that lot who charge us a small fortune for cleaning up when some poor sod spreads his brains all over the place. You’ve even had the furniture taken away for incineration.’

  ‘Did you call HQ?’ McKenna asked.

  ‘Of course I did!’ Jack snapped. ‘Who d’you think gave the go-ahead?’

  ‘Sounds as if everything’s taken care of,’ McKenna said.

  ‘And what about us?’ Jack demanded.

  ‘Oh, you’re safe enough. Dai only breathed on you.’

  ‘He fancied Prys.’

  ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ Dewi said. ‘He’d already said you’re too old for him.’

  ‘He’s running true to form,’ McKenna said. ‘AIDS or not. What about Arwel?’

  ‘Never set eyes on him, he says,’ Jack said. ‘And not inclined to grass up anyone in particular, although he did say most of the men in North Wales are at it like jack-rabbits with each other and any bit of fresh meat coming on the market.’

  ‘He says we should be chasing the reverends, because all that reformist guilt gives them a taste for the innocence of childhood,’ Dewi added. ‘And he said tourists’ve never come here just for the scenery, because we’re famous for our butches and queens.’

  ‘Maybe it’s something in the water.’ McKenna massaged his chest, trying to ease the pain tightening muscle and tendon as it passed through his body, his lungs unable to expand in their rigid case of rib and sternum and clavicle. He drew a deep panicky breath.

  ‘You OK, sir?’ Dewi stood up. ‘I’ll get some aspirin, shall I?’

  ‘Dai Skunk scared me half to death,’ Jack said, as the door closed. He shivered. ‘He’s changed his name to Dai Death.’

  ‘He won’t be bothering us much longer. You could look into your heart for some compassion.’

  ‘He’s brought it on himself.’

  ‘Like Arwel?’ McKenna asked. ‘We all bring things on each other.’

  ‘He’s corrupt. He’s corrupted others. He may well kill others.’

  ‘Someone corrupted him when he was as young as Arwel. He once told me of the pain and blood and terror.’

  ‘So why did he keep on doing it?’

  ‘He also told me of the lust and joy, of having a nerve touched at the very heart of his being, as if someone touched his soul. That was the sickness he caught. AIDS is only a secondary infection.’

  ‘How come all these social workers, as well as his parents, didn’t have a clue what Arwel was doing?’ Dewi asked.

  ‘Teenagers have secret lives,’ Jack said.

  ‘Establishing a separate identity is a normal part of growing up,’ McKenna added.

  ‘I remember.’ Dewi smiled. ‘I’ll bet Arwel’s mates knew.’

  ‘We need to find them. Janet’s going to talk to Carol tomorrow,’ McKenna said. ‘Dewi can come to Blodwel with me this evening.’

  ‘I doubt they’ll let you through the door,’ Jack commented.

  ‘We’ll see. Anything else from Eifion Roberts?’

  ‘Not much. He says Arwel was carried rather than dragged to the tunnel, so we’re probably looking for two people, because it’s quite a haul from the track overhead and down the embankment.’ Jack perused a sheet of notes. ‘He’s noted unusual muscular development in the thighs, buttocks, lower back, shoulders and belly. He’s thinking about that.’

  ‘What sort of unusual?’

  ‘Out of proportion.’ Jack yawned again. ‘Overdevelopment in comparison with the general musculature.’

  ‘Go home, before we have to put you on a hurdle.’

  ‘Soon.’ Jack rummaged again through the notes. ‘Transport police’ve questioned all the drivers, conductors and railwaymen working from early morning on, but either they weren’t looking, or it was too foggy and dark. The engine driver’s neurotic about slowing to a dead cra
wl in the tunnel since he nearly ran his express into a concrete sleeper some comedian left on the track.’

  ‘Newspapers, radio and TV are asking passengers to contact us if they saw anything,’ Dewi added. ‘And notices are up in all the stations between Holyhead and London Euston, and in Liverpool and Manchester.’

  ‘Is the crime scene search finished?’

  ‘Enough litter to fill the old quarry pit in Bethesda. Forensics wanted to know what they’re supposed to be looking for,’ Jack said. ‘I said we’d tell them when we knew.’

  McKenna went home to feed his cat, and to swallow two of the analgesics provided by the hospital, Dewi’s aspirins fallen within minutes to the mighty force of pain invading his body. Denise had visited, filling his refrigerator with expensive food, and his house with her presence, and he already regretted giving her a key. Caught at a weakened moment, guard relaxed, he let her encroach once again.

  The cat whined and grizzled around his ankles, complaining of loneliness and neglect and weather unfit for adventure. Her claws had shredded more of the tattered cover on the armchair.

  ‘Why don’t you go out, little one?’ He stroked her ears and back. ‘You’re getting stir-crazy.’ She jumped on his lap, burrowing under his good arm, and fell asleep, twitching only once when the telephone rang.

  ‘I hear you plan to breach the Blodwel fortress,’ Eifion Roberts said. ‘D’you want some extra artillery to help undermine the foundations?’

  ‘We’ve fired warning shots across their bows already. Didn’t do much good.’

  ‘Don’t mix metaphors.’

  ‘Why don’t you go and annoy somebody else?’

  ‘In pain, are you? Well, I did warn you. Did Jack Tuttle say I called? I’ve been thinking about that unusual muscular development, and searching the anatomical tomes …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘… but it was thinking about your arm gave me the clue. Horses and so forth. I’d wager young Arwel did a deal of horse-riding.’