‘Talk about having your hopes dashed!’ Jack stalked McKenna’s office. ‘The first decent lead we get, and what happens? Turns out to be a dud. Just like all the rest!’
‘Maybe we can’t see the wood for the trees,’ McKenna said. ‘Like John Beti never noticed her body before … that is, of course,’ he added, ‘if John Beti and his wife are to be believed.’
‘D’you think we’ll get the cash to have a mock-up of the head made?’
‘No, but if nothing else, it looks as if we’re trying.’
Jack riffled the papers in Romy Cheney’s file. ‘We’d best keep quiet about the old woman. Beti made us look a bunch of fools.’
‘I hear she’ll be in the local paper this week.’
‘Let’s pray she says nothing about that bloody car, then.’
‘D’you think she really believes it’s the same one?’ McKenna asked. ‘Still?’
‘Swears on all the graves in all the graveyards this side of Chester, as well as her mother’s,’ Jack announced. ‘She’s got to be wrong! The man in Turf Square bought the car from a neighbour some months back.’
‘And where did the ornament come from?’
‘He can’t remember,’ Jack said. ‘He thinks his wife bought it for the kids from a service station … says he never really noticed it until I asked.’
Mary Ann was utterly scathing. ‘I told her!’ she said. ‘Over and over, and now she’s done what I told her not to. Led you right up the garden path, hasn’t she, Michael?’
‘You heard, did you?’
‘Heard?’ Mary Ann exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t do anything else, could I? Comes screeching in here last night after she’d rooted young Dewi out to look at this car, and sits where you are now, huffing and puffing, and telling how she was scared out of her wits – not that she’s got that many – afeared the man would come and get her because she’d seen the car that woman had. I tell you, all this attention she’s been getting from reporters and such like has turned her brain, and that wouldn’t take much doing. After all,’ she continued, handing McKenna a mug of tea, ‘she’s never had any attention off anyone before, any pleasure, so you can’t blame her. I told young Dewi you’d all be fools to take notice of her. She’s rabbiting on day and night about this Simeon, reckons she’s scared to walk home on her own after dark because he’s everywhere in the woods, and staring at her, if you believe a word she says.’
‘Have you seen him?’ McKenna asked. ‘Has anyone?’
‘Of course not.’ Mary Ann puffed on her cigarette. ‘It’s one of them gippos. I’ve told Beti, but will she have it? And now she’s even got the vicar believing her. That silly devil’s talking about doing an exorcism round the cottage and in the woods. He’s as bad for the attention as Beti, only he’s got no excuse, ’cos he’s got a permanent audience every Sunday.’ She frowned. ‘Beti’s more to be pitied than condemned, I suppose, but that doesn’t excuse her making a nuisance of herself. Now then, Michael, how are you settling in to your new house? I hear a stray cat’s moved in with you.’
Leaning on the stone wall by the lych gate of the village church, looking into the graveyard, McKenna thought of death, that of others as well as his own. Less than a mile down the road lay the big council cemetery, the smoke blackened chimney-stack of its crematorium poking up into the sky. Sometimes, driving past, he imagined the grey smoke curling from the chimney was the detritus of his own bones and flesh, a burden disposed of furtively by Denise. He wanted to be buried on a bleak hill overlooking the Irish sea, but there was no one but her to know of that wish, no one to care if his spirit joined the other restless souls thwarted in death as they were in life.
High in the sky, the sun burned warm and bright, yet the church crouched in deep tree shadows, its yard awash with a thin sheet of dewy mist billowing gently between broken and crooked gravestones, exuding chill and dampness. Buried here, McKenna thought, he would perforce rise and walk, this patch no bed for a Christian soul. Before him, an angel spread wide wings over the grave of some forgotten worthy, marble drapery rising from a tangle of bushy overgrown shrubs, pitted and lichen-stained and livid against the backdrop of dark moss-stained trees, its eyes staring vacantly and coldly into his.
Rooks cawed and chattered in high branches, dead leaves rotted underfoot, small things scurried about him unseen as he walked down the stony path hugging the graveyard wall towards Beti’s cottage. He walked with his head lowered, watching the few yards of earth before his feet, afraid that if he raised his eyes, he might look into those of Simeon the Jew.
The cottage huddled in the woods, no smoke rising from its single chimney, no light of life behind either of its mean little windows. McKenna struggled up the overgrown path, long brambles reaching out to snag his trousers, for all the world like Rebekah’s skeleton fingers clawing through time. He rapped on the door, and waited. No one came to answer him, and he left, almost running, taking the path to its other end only some few yards further. He stood on the pavement by the gateway panting, some ordeal survived, and walked back the half-mile to where he had left the car.
Wil Jones, as frustrated in his own way with the comings and goings around Gallows Cottage as was Trefor Prosser, had a contract to fulfil, a time limit written in which would cost him money if breached, and this morbid interest in a two-hundred-year-old body interfered with his work. The trench dug out, Wil agreed not to lay the drains until historians from the university completed their survey of Rebekah’s grave.
Standing at a bedroom window, he watched the people scratting round, as he called it, in the trench. Forced indoors, he and Dave began decorating, although Wil wanted to put that finishing touch last of all, and could not settle while other work remained undone. He wondered about the thin, dark-haired man, standing just inside the trees, watching, as he was himself, the activity at the trench.
Dewi tried to read the fax as it came off the machine, rolling too fast for him to catch more than one line out of three or four. He waited patiently, then glancing at the cover sheet, sat down to read. Apart from himself, the office was empty.
‘The chief inspector’s in Caernarfon,’ Jack said.
‘P’raps you should see this then, sir.’
Jack took the fax from Dewi, read through its two pages, and said, ‘Oh, bloody hell!’
McKenna, arriving back well after five o’clock, found Jack waiting in his office, where he had waited for over an hour, thinking of nothing in particular, noticing how the once white venetian blind and the once magnolia walls had all assumed an ochrish hue. The room was always chilly, because McKenna opened the windows summer and winter, claiming the smell of stale cigarette smoke unbearable.
‘I thought you’d have left by now, Jack.’
‘I thought I’d wait for you,’ Jack said.
McKenna sat on the corner of the desk and lit a cigarette. ‘Crime continues apace in Caernarfon. A spate of car thefts last weekend …’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t think anyone in Caernarfon could afford a car worth nicking, would you….? Anything turn up here?’
‘Fax from Yorkshire Police.’ Jack handed over the paper.
McKenna read the terse paragraphs and put the paper back on the desk. He wandered over to the window, looking at the sliced-up view of road and bus shelters and the side wall of the telephone exchange. ‘Well, that’s that, then.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ McKenna said, ‘I was relying on something turning up to point us in the right direction … but it’s not going to happen, is it? Parents dead of old age. Ex-husband dead in a car crash, only he wasn’t quite her ex, only separated … no brothers or sisters.’ He picked up the fax again, and read the last page. ‘Yorkshire say no known relatives…. So what’s left? Nothing.’
‘I thought you were keen on fingering Allsopp?’
‘I can’t, can I?’ McKenna sat down. ‘Nobody saw hide nor hair of him round here, and we can’t start demanding to know where he was every minute of every day between three and four years ago.’
‘Maybe her husband finished her off, then got his comeuppance.’
‘He was dead before she moved in with Allsopp,’ McKenna said. ‘Must be where she got her money from. Insurance and whatnot.’
‘We’ve only got Allsopp’s word for when she moved in.’
‘We know when she rented the cottage. She was alive then, and for a while after…. No, Jack, this isn’t going to be one of our successes.’
‘I think you’re being defeatist,’ Jack said. ‘And who’s going to bury her?’
‘The council,’ McKenna said. ‘A pauper’s funeral, like Mozart. Open-ended coffin and a bag of quicklime.’
‘Surely not!’ Jack was horrified.
‘No, Jack,’ McKenna sighed. ‘We’re a tad more civilized these days. She’ll have a nice discreet hygienic cremation. You can contact the coroner’s office tomorrow and arrange for the inquest to go ahead. I don’t expect Eifion Roberts needs her any longer.’