Dead Before Morning

by Geraldine Evans

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

   

  The nursery school was quiet; it was 6.00 p.m. and the toddlers had long since gone home. Rafferty had had a word with the elderly caretaker who lived in the flat above and he had gone off, quietly grumbling to himself. They waited in the ground-floor play-room. Large and airy, it was decorated with a jolly Disney cartoon mural, its colourful characters seemed mocking and, for once, Rafferty managed to look even more long-faced than his sergeant.

  In the silence, they heard footsteps approaching down the linoleum-covered hall, but instead of the door to the nursery opening, the suddenly increased roar of the traffic told them that the front door had been opened. Seconds’ later the roar slackened off again as the door shut with a soft click.

  Rafferty and Llewellyn exchanged a questioning look that turned to alarm as the unmistakable whish-wishaw of air-brakes hurriedly applied was followed by a deathly silence. They rushed to the street door.

  The body lay mangled under the front wheel of a huge Juggernaut. The driver was in his fifties. White-faced and shaking uncontrollably, he clutched the small silver crucifix around his neck as he told them in a dazed voice, 'did it deliberately. Looked straight at me and made the Sign of the Cross before stepping off the pavement.' He brought his sleeve across his suddenly wet eyes. 'I couldn't do anything.' Shock was clearly taking a hold for he kept repeating, over and over, like a stuck CD, 'I couldn't do anything.'

  Rafferty checked the pulse, but he had guessed before he tried that he would find none. He told Llewellyn to ring for an ambulance, left the distraught driver to the tender mercies of the caretaker, and walked over to the car. He took out the car rug from the back seat. Normally used to protect the covers from the destructive tendencies of his myriad nephews and nieces, he now had a more urgent use for it.

  'Noblesse oblige', he murmured softly as he laid the red tartan over Lady Evelyn. Its bright colours made the pooled blood seem less gory. In an odd contrast to Linda Wilks's death, although Lady Evelyn's body was a mess, her face hadn't been touched. It looked as composed in death as it had in life. He thought she'd have been glad about that.

  Unlike her late husband, Lady Evelyn accepted that all privilege had its penalties. She had tried to protect her family—the honour of its glorious past and her hopes for its future. But she had failed and had realised that her continued existence would be a liability to her line. Predictably, she had done the honourable thing.

  Llewellyn returned. 'The ambulance is on its way.'

  Rafferty nodded and settled the rug more cosily around the body, tucking it in so no draught could touch her.

  'Messy method to choose,' Llewellyn remarked mournfully.

  Rafferty didn't look up from his study of the tartan-shrouded figure on the ground. 'For her it was the cleanest way, the best way. She must have guessed why we had come and didn't want a verdict of double murder and suicide – might blot the family escutcheon – whatever that is.'

  'It's a shield for a coat of arms,' Llewellyn told him, dispensing information a little more solemnly than usual.

  Rafferty nodded. 'It'll be labelled accidental death, of course, she knew that.'

  'Here on earth, perhaps,' stated Llewellyn sombrely. 'But she was a Catholic. Whatever label is applied won't alter the fact that her God would know the truth of it.' With a shake of his head, he turned away. 'Did you ever hear of Bloody Mary, Inspector?'

  Bemused, Rafferty stared at his sergeant. 'The drink?'

  'No. The Queen.'

  Rafferty's face cleared. 'Henry VIII's elder daughter, you mean?' He had heard of the lady. Llewellyn wasn't the only one with an interest in the past, he reflected grimly as he guessed what his sergeant was about to say.

  Llewellyn nodded. 'If you remember your history, duty ruled her life, much as it must have ruled Lady Evelyn's. She was a Catholic, too, and she felt it was her duty to rid the country of heretics. Hundreds died in the Smithfield fires. Their deaths were no less repugnant because they died from one woman's dutiful desire to glorify God. He wouldn’t have condoned their deaths any more than he would condone the ones for which Lady Evelyn was guilty. Murder is murder, however high-principled the murderer.'

  Llewellyn was right, as usual. Lady Evelyn had murdered two people, but Rafferty still felt more pity than righteous anger. Even if he couldn't condone her actions any more than God would, he felt he could understand why she had done it.

  Poor, sad, disillusioned lady, the burden of her duty was, to her, equally heavy and equally strong—the upholding of the family honour. After all, God had looked after the Melvilles for five hundred years and countless deaths, insurrections and wars. But, even with God's help, no-one held onto their property during the dangerous years after Henry VII's death and the religious turmoil that was to come without getting plenty of blood on their hands. In comparison two murders must seem a trifling matter.

  'Didn't you tell me that the Latin of her family motto translated as "Honour above all"?' he asked his sergeant.

  Llewellyn gave a slow nod.

  'She must have thought God would understand and approve,' said Rafferty softly. 'She sacrificed herself for the dynasty. The next link in the chain was her son, but from what Gilbert said, he was a weak link. Unless he married a strong woman who shared Lady Evelyn's ideals all that she had worked for risked being broken up.

  ‘I imagine she pushed him into the engagement with the Huntingdon girl. She held the family purse-strings, of course, she probably used that to persuade him to agree.' Rafferty still gazed at Lady Evelyn's shrouded form. 'You'll see, first he'll postpone the wedding – out of filial respect naturally – but somehow I doubt if another date will ever be fixed. Next, he'll put the Hall on the market. Now he's got the money he can start indulging his own dreams instead of his mother's. I imagine he'll find that mechanic of his, Harry, far less demanding than all that rich blue Huntingdon blood.'

  As Llewellyn nodded agreement, Rafferty realised how dreadfully lonely Lady Evelyn must have been. Perhaps it might have been different if her husband had loved her, for who would give all their love to a building – however magnificent – if they had a human being worthy of their cherishing?

  In the end, her obsession had taken over her life, wrecking it, as well as the lives of several others. Such was the nature of obsessions, of course. Ultimately, they were always destructive. That was why they were so dangerous.

  Rafferty knew the servants all slept in a separate annexe over the old stables of the Hall and now he pictured Lady Evelyn in her echoing and empty home, carefully drawing up a tapestry of murder, stitch by stitch until she had made her own shroud.

  With a sigh, he stood up. Now he could hear the sirens in the distance. A few minutes’ later, the ambulance drew up and the attendants gathered up Lady Evelyn's body. Rafferty found his shoulders straightening and his hands making the sign of the cross automatically, as he had been taught to do as a boy in the presence of death.

  With a start, he realised that, with the case over, he no longer had a valid excuse for avoiding his mother and Maureen, the ‘good catch’

  His shoulders slumped. Feeling as he did, that was the last thing he needed right now. Families, he shook his head sorrowfully; they really could be bloody murder.

  What he needed was to cleanse his mind and refresh his spirit in the best way he knew. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would visit a building site, the new one at Colchester. The gaffer of the masons laid his bricks with a deft rhythm that soothed the soul and Rafferty felt sorely in need of such balm.

   

  EPILOGUE

   

  'It was something that my mother said that made me realise the truth,' Rafferty remarked to Llewellyn several days later as he gestured to his sergeant to move into the passenger seat and got behind the wheel.

  ‘Jailhouse’ Jack and Deirdre's wedding was over, thank God and he only had the reception to get through. He'd arranged for Llewellyn to pick him up around the corner from the church. L
uckily, he'd been able to sneak away before the photographer was able to record the relationship for posterity, discarding his button-hole on the way.

  'She mentioned a mother's pride in her first-born son. How much greater, do you think, would that pride be for an only son?'

  Had he suspected all along and not let the suspicion rise above his subconscious? He hadn't wanted to believe Lady Evelyn was the murderer; neither had Llewellyn. It was only the second time he had felt himself in sympathy with his Welsh sergeant since he had met him. That embryonic empathy was the only good thing to come out of the case. Neither of them had thought Lady Evelyn capable of what looked like a particularly vicious crime. But of course, she hadn't killed the girl that way from choice. It had been essential. It must have sickened her as much as it had them.

  Llewellyn returned to Rafferty's last comment. 'But the son wasn't even threatened. It was Sir Anthony who was being blackmailed and faced with exposure.'

  Llewellyn's investigative nose had still to learn in which direction to wrinkle, reflected Rafferty. After turning on the ignition and nosing the car bonnet out on to the road, he explained, 'You forget—the son was getting married. Sir Anthony chose the wrong time to confide his little difficulty to his wife. Miranda Raglan, even with the drugs she craved, was hardly a stable woman. If her demands had been met and she kept quiet about Sir Anthony's unprofessional conduct, it was unlikely she would continue to do so and Timothy's long-planned wedding was still four months off. Lady Evelyn must have known that anything could have happened in that time.'

  Llewellyn absorbed this in silence and Rafferty went on. 'When Lady Evelyn discovered that Miranda Raglan was threatening her husband with exposure, she knew that her son's forthcoming marriage was in danger and that she couldn't permit. I imagine it was what she had hoped for for years—the uniting of two old and aristocratic families. It would have made up for much. She had engineered it thus far, ignoring her son's inadequacies as a bridegroom. If she failed to bring this marriage off, she knew she might never manage to get him up the aisle.

  'She wasn't a fool; she had eyes to see and ears to hear the rumours about her son. Her mother's love didn't blind her to the truth about his sexual preferences. But she knew, too, that a homosexual is as capable of fathering a son as any other man—a son to continue the Melville line. That was of greater importance to her than even her son's happiness.'

  He was, after all, only one link in the chain that went back centuries, he reflected. It would have been unthinkable to a woman like Lady Evelyn to let her son be the one who broke the chain and brought the dynasty to an end. He put his foot down, biting back the wry grin when he sensed Llewellyn wincing beside him. 'Take it easy, Taff. I'm barely doing sixty.'

  'But it's a fifty mile per hour limit,' Llewellyn pointed out, a hint of reproof in his voice.

  He was right, of course. In that infuriating way of his, he usually was. Rafferty eased his foot back from the accelerator. Still, they had plenty of time and it wasn't as though he was in any great rush to reach his destination. He went on with his explanation. 'She had been largely able to ignore her husband's womanising; her son's future in-laws wouldn't have blinked an eye at that, but what they would have blinked both eyes at was a real scandal. And Miranda threatened to blow the lid off a scandal that would bring nothing but shame. She had to be stopped.'

  According to Miranda Raglan, Sir Anthony had acted as a high-class supplier, using his London consulting-rooms and the hospital as covers, very profitable covers, for a still more lucrative trade—drugs. On the surface, his wealthy lady patients returned to him time and again out of loyalty, but in reality, they had no choice. He had got them hooked on very powerful drugs; no wonder they were so faithful, thought Rafferty. They were totally dependent on him and them.

  They'd never be sure now, of course, but Rafferty suspected that Lady Evelyn had dosed his tea with some of the tranquillisers in Sir Anthony’s pill bottle. Melville-Briggs had badly misjudged three of the women in his life and had paid the ultimate price.

  'He thought he had everything under control; his wife, his secretary, his ex-mistress. When Miranda Raglan threatened to crack the golden eggs and scatter the flock of fat geese with them, he became badly frightened,' Rafferty went on. 'Under all that brash self-confidence he was just another weak man who needed the shelter and support of a strong wife and he confided in Lady Evelyn. From that moment, he was a dead man. But first, she had to remove the worst threat to her son's marriage—Miranda Raglan.'

  'But—' Llewellyn broke in.

  Rafferty was well into his stride now and he waved him to silence. 'Gilbert wasn't the only one practised in forgery. According to him, Lady Evelyn used to act as her husband's secretary when he first set up in practice. She was used to signing his letters for him, probably wrote them too. I imagine she wrote his signature better than he did. She was the one who wrote Miranda that note arranging to meet her at the hospital, not Sir Anthony. As she had never set eyes on Miranda, she killed the wrong girl.'

  'But Lady Evelyn was at The George all night,' Llewellyn said. 'How could she—?'

  'Simple. She wasn't centre stage all night, in the way that her husband was. She had only to slip out for half an hour; ten minutes to drive to the hospital, ten minutes to kill the girl and clean up and ten minutes to get back. She made sure she kept a low profile that evening so that she wasn't missed. Somehow that seemed out of character. She was the wife of the Chairman, she was the one who had done all the work. Usually, they would have presented a united front, both prominent, papering over the cracks in their relationship—she for the sake of her son and Sir Anthony for his own sake.

  ‘Funnily enough, Sam Dally remarked that that evening she had seemed subdued and content to stay in the background and Sam just put it down to Sir Anthony's bad mood at their being late. I imagine she engineered the flat battery so they'd be late and wouldn't have to park in the hotel car park under the door-man's eye. She could slip out of one of the side entrances and get the car without anyone noticing she'd gone.'

  'But why on earth did she choose that particular night? Wouldn't it have been better to wait for an occasion when she wasn't so restricted by time and circumstances?'

  'On the contrary, that night was the only possible time. She had to be sure that her husband wouldn't be likely to disturb her. I doubt if he bothered to give her advance warning of his movements. She could be sure he was safely at The George. Of course the limited time meant she had no opportunity to change her clothes.

  'You know, at the beginning of the case, I dug back into her family history –- oh, not because I suspected her then,' Rafferty admitted when he sensed Llewellyn's scepticism, 'but because I was interested. Her family have always been staunch Catholics—quite a few members in the past joined religious orders. It seemed likely that the attics at the Hall would be stuffed with costumes of all kinds. It's my guess that she covered her own clothes with the monk's habit to protect them from the blood.’

  The lights turned red and he pulled up, revving the car engine unconsciously, until he caught Llewellyn’s pained expression out of the corner of his eye.

  'So the drunk wasn't merely hallucinating?'

  Rafferty shook his head, pulled away from the lights and drew up to the next road junction, glad of an excuse to avert his face. The less Llewellyn knew about that little episode, the better. Luckily, Llewellyn didn't know that Jack was the drunken witness to Lady Evelyn's arrival for her rendezvous with murder. Not that he was likely to blab, in fact, Rafferty realised suddenly, he'd never met a more close-mouthed copper. It was another thing in his favour.

  For the first time, he wondered whether the dapper little Welshman might not suit him very well after all. The bridal pair was toying with the idea of staying in England, and if they did, Llewellyn's discretion might just turn out to be an asset.

  The weapon used for the murder had puzzled him for a long time; until the scattered keys had jogged his memory and reminded
him of the weapons of war displayed in the great hall at Elmhurst. The mace had been amongst them and he'd remembered that he'd read in the guide book he’d borrowed from the public library, that it had been used at the Battle of Bosworth by Lady Evelyn's illustrious ancestor, Edward Melville. Rafferty suspected the symbolism of using so archaic a weapon to kill one of her family's enemies would mean much to her.

  They hadn't got the results back yet, of course, but Rafferty was sure that when they did, they'd find that the blood-stains on the mace were not just those from ancient foes, but from a modern victim as well—Linda Wilks.

  It had been a tragic coincidence that she had been where Lady Evelyn had expected to find Miranda Raglan; one of those bizarre twists of fate that had so often dogged Rafferty's own footsteps. He wondered if, in her death throes, she had recognised that she was about to be a star at last? The star victim in a murder hunt.

  'Your speed's creeping up again, Sir.'

  Rafferty glanced at the speedometer and eased back once more. 'I'm surprised you didn't choose to go into the traffic division,' he remarked caustically. 'Think of all those speed junkies you could collar.'

  Llewellyn made an odd noise in his throat. To his astonishment, Rafferty realised that his sergeant was actually laughing. 'What's so funny,' he demanded.

  'It's just that I did apply for traffic, but they turned me down.' His voice sounded deceptively innocent as he went on, 'Perhaps the superintendent thought that with the police image being so important, the division would be better served if I stayed in CID and acted as your personal speed trap, Sir.'

  'Very droll.' Things were looking up, he reflected, his sergeant had actually cracked a funny. Rafferty shot him a curious glance, but although Llewellyn's face had fallen back into its normal Sphinx-like immobility, he was beginning to realise that there was a lot more to the Welshman than met the eye.

  'You were explaining about the murder, Sir,' Llewellyn reminded him.

  Rafferty was quite willing to let himself be drawn back to an exhibition of his own cleverness. Smugly, he went on. 'When I wondered if she could have done it, I worked backwards and it all fitted. Several people have commented on her efficiency and great organisational skills. I asked myself how likely it was that Lady Evelyn could possibly have forgotten to get her chauffeur to change his weekend off, particularly for an occasion that had been planned so long in advance.

  ‘I wondered if she could have done it deliberately and if so why? I realised it was essential to her plans that the chauffeur wasn't available. Not only because she needed to get away from The George without anyone noticing, but she also needed the use of a car that wasn't conspicuous—one that she could drive and the Bentley was a manual. She could only drive automatics. It all fitted.'

  He pulled into the car park and turned off the ignition. He looked down at his no longer quite so smart brown suit and sighed, aware that, as usual, in spite of his tasteful Day-Glo orange tie, his sergeant managed to outshine him in the well-groomed stakes.

  'As for removing the girl's clothes; it was a precaution, nothing more. She knew Miranda would be unlikely to wear mass-produced chain-store clothes; she would dress expensively, in clothes that would be much more easily traced. In the dark and with the need for speed, she wouldn't have stopped to examine whether the girl was wearing designer labels or not.

  ‘Forensic found small traces of blood in the boot of her car. She probably stuffed the mace and the clothes in a plastic rubbish bag and left them there overnight, but because she was rushing, she didn't have time to be as careful as she should have been. I imagine she burned the clothes in one of those great hearths at the Hall. She had to remove all signs of her victim's identity so she couldn't be traced back to Sir Anthony. That's why she removed Linda's face and smashed her teeth. Once the victim's identity was known, the possibility of her being linked with Melville-Briggs was much greater, especially as she knew that the post-mortem might reveal the existence of powerful drugs—drugs only available from a doctor.

  'It never occurred to her to remove the fingerprints. Of course, her intended victim didn't have a criminal record, Miranda's sort never do. She'd have been careful to check up on that and with her husband's contacts in the police force it wouldn't have been difficult. I wonder how she felt when she discovered she'd killed the wrong girl.'

  'It's strange how Sir Anthony appeared so confident through all of this,' Llewellyn remarked. 'It's almost as though he knew nothing about the murder.'

  'I don't believe he did,' said Rafferty. 'Think about it. Do you seriously imagine Lady Evelyn would confide her intentions to a man who had proved himself so unreliable, so untrustworthy? She probably told him she'd bought Miranda off and that he'd seen the end of her.

  ‘You were right when you said he was the type to get somebody else to do his dirty work for him,' he added expansively and thought he glimpsed a gleam of gratification in Llewellyn's eye. 'She must have been desperate to find Miranda when she realised she'd killed the wrong girl, but, for once, Miranda Raglan used her brain. She'd booked into that seedy hotel where she was unlikely to bump into anyone who knew her and Lady Evelyn couldn't find her.

  ‘I reckon that's when she brought forward the murder of her husband.'

  Sir Anthony was used to the adoration of women; he wouldn't expect his previously accommodating wife to want him dead. Was it possible she'd felt some concern for other possible victims of her actions? After all, she couldn't be sure that Sir Anthony would be the only victim. He had to accept that it was unlikely. Those in the grip of an obsession allowed nothing to deflect them from their course, not even the lives of others.

  'It's my belief that she had hoped that by removing her husband the blackmailer would back off and everything would be as it was before,' Rafferty began again as they sat in the car while he continued his explanations. 'She wasn't to know that by now Miranda Raglan was past reasoning. Her supply of pills was running low and she was starting to get the horrors—he'd been giving her some extremely powerful drugs. She'd signed on with another doctor, but he wouldn't prescribe anything like the strength of tablets she needed.'

  Now he resolutely put the unhappy Lady Evelyn from his mind. He leaned over and picked up the package from the back seat before getting out of the car and slamming the door. He shoved the parcel under his arm and gestured at the imposing white-stone facade of The George. 'We've got a bit of a family do on.' He hadn't mentioned it to Llewellyn before, but somehow, secrecy didn't seem quite so important now.

  'You've got a lot of relatives, haven't you, Sir?' Llewellyn commented.

  ‘Too bloody many.’ And all of them banes to his police career. Especially Jailhouse Jack.

  'I often wondered what it would be like being one of a large family,' Llewellyn remarked. 'I was an only child.'

  He sounded strangely wistful and Rafferty glanced at him in surprise. 'Speaking as one of six, that's a subject on which I am an expert,' he said with feeling. 'It's heaven and hell, love and hate, but mostly it's messy, noisy and totally lacking in any privacy. You wouldn't have liked it,' he told Llewellyn decisively. 'You wouldn't have liked it at all.'

  Llewellyn sighed. 'I suppose you're right.'

  To Rafferty’s surprise, the wistful look was still there. Was it possible that Llewellyn was human after all? Just another lonely human being who secretly rather longed for some disorder in his neat and regimented existence in spite of his denials?

  Rafferty had fully intended getting rid of his sergeant once they had reached The George, reckoning on taking a taxi back. But now some instinct made him pause.

  Perhaps because Llewellyn was so different from himself, he'd misjudged him? He'd already discovered a little of Llewellyn's family background and pretty bleak it sounded. How could he, with his rumbustious, but loving family, imagine what Llewellyn's only child life of nannies and boarding schools and university had been like? What did he know of anybody's life when all was said and done? Look how wrong he'd been abo
ut Lady Evelyn.

  Llewellyn had mentioned that he was the son of a minister of the Methodist Church. Rafferty had already discovered one of the grim duties expected of Llewellyn as a boy; now he found himself wondering what else the Welshman had been expected to go through?

  Had he been forced, like a lot of church kids, in order to set an example, to spend half his school holidays at the services? Had he never gone fishing for newts in the nearest pond, bringing them home triumphantly in a jam-jar? Had he never kept green caterpillars in a match-box, waiting for them to change magically into butterflies? Had his youth been the joyless one Rafferty imagined it to be? Spent joining in doleful hymns shut inside a damp church while the world and the birds outside were singing sweeter songs? If so, it was no wonder if his youth and capacity for joy had atrophied. Perhaps it was time somebody tried to remedy that.

  Rafferty wasn't really surprised, when he heard his voice saying, 'I don't know about you, Taff, but I, for one, am ready for a drink. I did say you were invited, didn't I?'

  Llewellyn frowned. 'No Sir.'

  But much to his surprise, Llewellyn accepted the belated invitation with something approaching alacrity. And as they strode together towards the brightly-lit hotel, Rafferty wondered if his second good deed in a week might not receive a suitable reward. For if Llewellyn really was lonely and looking for a mate, that was one area where he could help. He opened the door to reception with a flourish. 'After you, Taff.'

  He'd always liked a wedding—as long as it wasn't his own and the discovery of his sergeant's unsuspected secret fancy for family life put new heart into him. His mother tended to collect lame dogs and to Rafferty's mind, they didn't come any lamer than Llewellyn.

  Perhaps this was the opportunity he'd been waiting for—the ingenious answer to his present little problem. Perhaps his mother would agree with him that his sergeant's need for a wife was far more urgent than his own and likely to demand her single-minded attention. He certainly hoped so.

  He gave Llewellyn one of his brightest smiles. Maureen would be here. Hadn't his Uncle Pat told him that she had always had a soft spot for the serious intellectual type? Like Llewellyn, for instance.

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  Geraldine Evans is the multi-published author of the Rafferty & Llewellyn procedural series, the Casey & Catt procedural series, as well as various other works. Her previous publishers include Macmillan, St Martin’s Press, Worldwide, Hale and Severn House.

  Dead Before Morning, her first mystery novel and the first book in her 15-strong Rafferty & Llewellyn series, was taken from Macmillan’s slush pile and published, both in the UK and the US. It was the beginning of a long and successful career as a mystery author.

  She is now an indie author, after taking the decision to go independent in 2010.

  Geraldine Evans is a Londoner, but moved to Norfolk in the UK in 2000.