At lunchtime, when a spiteful north-easterly wind, the back end of recent storms lashing its tail like an angry cat about to spring, splashed squally rain against the windows of Eifion Roberts’ laboratory, he abandoned all notions of an afternoon’s sailing on the Straits.
The post-mortem on the unknown woman was undemanding, cause of death apparently throttling at the end of a rope. The rope, grown thin with time, its running noose tightened almost horizontally around the neck by the weight of her body’s descent, shedded bits of stringy fibre on the bench where it now lay. Dr Roberts photographed and X-rayed the body, giving particular attention to an old and complex fracture he found on the left ankle bone. Too little flesh remained, except for where clothing had protected her from the elements, to show evidence of injury prior to death. The skull, stripped almost clean, by birds and nature and insects, bore no fracture. Putrefaction was long complete; the internal organs shrivelled, almost mummified. He removed, with tremendous care, the major organs and uterus, sealing them in jars ready for dissection.
Emrys, his assistant, carefully unwound the belt which had bound the woman’s wrists. Made of dark brown cowhide, without ornamentation of any kind, it was three and a half inches wide, its colour bleached where rain and sun and wind had touched. Someone had cut off the buckle, leaving a jagged end.
Spread on a table, the woman’s ragged garments gave off a faint scent. Dr Roberts sniffed at the clothing, trying to place the smell in memory. Redolent of funerals, but not the scent of death, it was a dry mustiness catching in the throat, and would, he thought, make him feel terribly and inexplicably depressed if it became too cloying.
Emrys looked up from a thick manual detailing garment makers and labels. ‘The clothes are German in origin, Dr Roberts,’ he said. ‘Only problem is, they’re sold through at least a hundred outlets in Britain. Middling expensive, but nothing special.’
‘Bugger!’ Eifion Roberts fingered the garments. ‘Not much hope of finding out where she bought them, then?’
‘I’ll fax some photos to Germany, anyway. They should be able to tell us when they were made, where they were sold … might narrow it down a bit.’
‘Fat chance! When did we last strike gold with that line of enquiry? Women’s clothes, they’re like I don’t know what…. Like grains of sand, they are, millions and millions of the bloody things. Makes you depressed just thinking about them…. We’d need Princess Di on the slab before we stood a chance of getting an ID off her clothes.’
Emrys smiled. ‘If Princess Di went missing for as long as this lady, somebody might notice.’ He fingered the belt. ‘I’ll send a photo of this as well. It’s very good quality leather.’
Dewi’s two colleagues returned to Bangor in mid-afternoon, with odds and ends of information, but nothing apparently relevant or of real interest.
‘They’ll have to go out again tomorrow,’ Jack said to McKenna. ‘Half the village was off somewhere for the day.’
‘Any decent programmes on TV tonight?’ McKenna asked. ‘Because if not, we’ll send a team out from the evening shift. Nothing like entertaining people of a dull Sunday evening.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Pity none of the missing women had an injury like the one Dr Roberts found on this lady’s ankle.’
‘Hard graft time again then, isn’t it?’ Jack said.
By late afternoon, each police force reporting missing women had received a faxed package of description, X-rays and photographs of teeth, injury and sinuses, and a request for enquiries to be made of hospitals, doctors and dentists in their areas. Dr Roberts tentatively, as he told McKenna, put the dead woman’s age at between twenty-five and forty-five, but probably around thirty-five. She had probably, but only probably, he emphasized, been dead some eighteen to forty-eight months, but most likely somewhere in between.
‘May as well put the file in pending now, Jack,’ McKenna said. ‘If it wasn’t for the bound wrists, we’d simply have an unfortunate suicide. Where’s young Dewi? He should have been back with the others.’
‘He called in a while ago. He’s talking to some of the old women in the village. Reckons they might know something useful.’
‘Doubt it. Still, no harm in trying … has anyone talked to Jamie Thief yet?’
‘Sorry, no. Slipped my mind with all the excitement.’
‘He’ll keep. You get off home, Jack. We’ll start again in the morning.’
Driving home, Jack wondered how McKenna would avoid Denise when excuses about pressure of work were finally exhausted, and why so many policemen’s marriages ended in disaster, with bitterness and drunken violence sadly commonplace. Management maintained a bland public image, fed on the misapprehension that admission of imperfection would damage public confidence. Complaints against the police multiplied, but became muddied and obfuscated, the complainant often victimized, while the media railed about accountability, made allegations of rank-closing and wilful disinformation. Word had travelled about the woman’s bound hands, as Jack knew it would: two London journalists simply insulted him when he refused to comment on possible terrorist involvement.
Emma was pleased to see him, last night’s anger dissipated. Jack was less than delighted to find Denise McKenna draped elegantly across the sofa, sipping white wine, looking as if she intended to stay, questions about her husband, his whereabouts, hanging unspoken between them.
The inspector was too abrasive, too dismissive of things not neatly fitting his own views, Dewi told himself, relieved to find Jack Tuttle gone. He liked and respected McKenna, even if others said the chief inspector was difficult, too prone to heed his imagination.
‘Sorry I’m late back, sir. Been talking to the old ladies in the village.’
‘And?’
‘They had a lot to say, but then, they always do…. Beti took me to Mary Ann’s. Then Faith and Mair Evans turned up, probably’ – Dewi looked up and grinned – ‘because they saw me going into Mary Ann’s and couldn’t wait to nosey-parker. Anyway, they were jangling about this and that, then Faith says did I know about the woman who lived at Gallows Cottage some time back, and Mary Ann says, “I told you! Didn’t I tell you last night? Didn’t I say she’d gone the same way as the other one?” So I said, “What other one?” and nobody took a blind bit of notice of me for ages ’cos they were going on about what happens to women living at Gallows Cottage. Fair made my flesh crawl with their tales, sir.’
‘And where’s Gallows Cottage?’
Spreading a large-scale map of the estate on the desk, Dewi traced his finger along the seaward boundary, bringing it to rest on a small spur of land jutting into the Straits. ‘The cottage is here, at the edge of the woods, according to the ladies. They reckon you can’t see it except from the sea, and if you don’t know about it, you’d never find it. It’s almost as old as the village church, and it’s called Gallows Cottage, they say, because women who live there end up swinging off a gibbet somewhere.’
McKenna pulled a notepad in front of him. ‘Who was the woman living there recently?’
‘They don’t exactly know, which rankles … she was definitely a foreigner – er, a foreigner like from England, sir. No idea what she was called. Beti says she saw her the odd time, in a car. No one knows anybody who spoke to her. Beti reckons she was about thirty odd, fair haired.’
Making notes in his loose, rapid handwriting, McKenna asked, ‘How long ago?’
‘They can’t make up their minds. From what they said, three years ago – three years ago last autumn. Beti said the weather was turning cold when she first saw her, and doesn’t remember seeing her during the spring or summer.’
‘Well,’ McKenna observed, ‘the time ties in with what Dr Roberts has come up with so far. Did you see the cottage?’
‘No, sir. There’s a path through the woods from the village, but it’s quite a long way and none of the old ladies would come with me because it was getting dark and they reckon it’s haunted. There’s a track you can get a car down, but that starts on the estate somewhere.’
‘What kind of car did this woman have?’
‘Beti doesn’t know. Modern, she says, then says all modern cars look the same to her. She thinks it was some sort of grey colour, but she can’t be sure of that either, on account of the light being poor ’cos of all those trees and the time of year.’
McKenna sat smoking. ‘Tell me about Gallows Cottage,’ he said.
‘To tell the truth, sir, I feel a bit of a divvy going on about ghosts and what-have-you….’ Dewi sounded uncomfortable. ‘I mean, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything, does it?’
‘Don’t know yet, do we? Who’s to say someone didn’t decide to recreate history or whatever it was the old ladies were talking about?’
‘Bit far-fetched, sir, if you ask me,’ Dewi commented. ‘Anyway, centuries past, this man and his wife lived at Gallows Cottage. He was called Simeon the Jew, and his wife was called Rebekah, and they had a baby daughter. Nobody seems to know what he did for a living, but one day, he came back from wherever they went in those days, and found the baby dead. Fallen down the stairs, so the wife reckoned.’
‘Nasty. What happened then?’
‘Dunno, sir. Not exactly,’ Dewi said. ‘But next thing anybody knows, Rebekah’s up at Caernarfon getting tried for murdering her baby. She’s found guilty, so they cart her off to Twt Hill and string her up. Then, legend has it, Simeon comes along and cuts her down. Nobody tries to stop him on account of they’re all scared of him ’cos he’s foreign, and he takes her body away and disappears. Not a word of what happened to him after. Never seen again. And nobody knows where Rebekah is buried.’
‘Probably threw her body in Menai Straits and himself after it, Dewi,’ McKenna said. ‘Poor bugger didn’t have much to live for, did he?’
‘Well, no, sir. I suppose not. Not if you look at it like that. But it’s not the end of the story, not quite. Simeon’s said to have done a fair bit of cursing when they hung his wife, and also threatened to walk. Like in ghosts walking,’ Dewi said. ‘Haunting. They say he threatened to walk the earth ’til he found his wife again. That’s what the old ladies were getting at, you see. They reckon Simeon lit on this woman living at Gallows Cottage, decided she’d do, and strung her up in the woods so he could have her soul … say her hands were tied up because Rebekah’s would’ve been when she was topped at Twt Hill. Mary Ann says any woman living at the cottage is likely to go the same way,’ he added. ‘She says the place should be burnt down ’cos it’s cursed.’
‘I daresay our terrorist friends would oblige if they were asked,’ McKenna grinned. ‘Has anyone ever seen Simeon?’
‘Well, a few of them would have you believe he’s around, but they’re bound to, aren’t they? It’s a good yarn, sir, especially for a dark night, or some poor sod just moved into the village.’ Dewi paused, frowning slightly. ‘There’s a funny atmosphere in that village. It’s a sort of woman’s world, if you understand what I mean, and the men don’t count for much. I didn’t hear a word about John Beti actually finding the body. To listen to Beti and the others, you’d not know he existed.’
‘We men don’t count for much anywhere, Dewi. It just suits the women to let us think we do.’