RAFFERTY & LLEWELLYN BOXED SET: BOOKS 1 - 4

by Geraldine Evans

  Rafferty's lips clamped shut and he fought to get his own temper under control. The desire to charge Bullock with something, even if it was only assault, was strong. Now, it looked as if he was to be denied even that small satisfaction.

  Although Mrs Penny, Smith's landlady had told them Smith had been at home at seven-thirty that evening, it was only a few minutes’ drive from his flat to the Bullocks' place. He could easily have gone out after she had left the house. Darren had said he had seen Smith leave the flats; he hadn't mentioned seeing him arrive. And, so far, no one else on the estate who had been questioned had admitted seeing Smith arrive either. It could have been as Bullock claimed and that Smith had turned up at the flat only a few minutes before eight and, finding no one home, had left immediately. And unless and until they found someone to say otherwise Bullock was off the hook.

  Brusquely, Rafferty thanked him for his time, turned on his heel and left, trailed by Llewellyn.

  It was only when they turned into the station car park that Rafferty finally remembered who it was that Bullock Senior reminded him of. It was Dobson, Fatty Dobson, his old junior school headmaster, and as ardent a sadist as Rafferty had ever encountered.

  Dobson and Bullock both shared that truculent, aggressive air, the menace not far below the surface; though Dobson's had been smoothed off by education. Instinctively, Rafferty sensed they also shared a pleasure in the infliction of pain and he wondered how many beatings Maurice Smith had taken at his stepfather's hands.

  Rafferty, one of the back row rebels as a schoolboy, winced as he remembered his buttocks’ sting after he had paid yet another of his frequent trips to the headmaster's study.

  About to remark to Llewellyn on the similarity between Dobson and Bullock, he wisely kept silent. Llewellyn wouldn't understand his instinctive feeling that Bullock was a thoroughly nasty piece of work; certainly a liar and a bully and probably worse. He doubted the Welshman had ever been on the receiving end of a vicious caning; he'd have been the school swot, at the front of the class, first with his hand in the air and first with the answers. He wouldn't understand Rafferty's instinctive dislike of Bullock at all.

  Rafferty recalled the aftermath of another beating he had suffered at Dobson's hands. It had been the last. The headmaster had never touched him again. The evening of the beating, he had been in the tin bath in front of the fire trying to soothe his wounds. This had been before they had been allocated the Council flat with its proper bathroom and he had been at that self-conscious age that demands privacy. The younger children were in bed, his father was up the pub and his mother, after he had insisted that he was old enough to bathe himself, had been banished to the kitchen. He had been climbing out of the tub when Ma had bustled in in her usual busy manner, his request for privacy either forgotten or suspected as a ruse to avoid clean ear inspection. Of course she had seen the scarlet stripes criss-crossing his buttocks. He'd never forgotten what followed.

  The next morning, she had marched him to the school, his brothers and sisters running behind in an awed silence and straight into the headmaster's study. Before Rafferty had realised her intentions, from the wall, she had grabbed the thinnest, most venomous of Dobson's instruments of torture, and set about the headmaster with it, lambasting him across his back, across his legs, across his quivering, jelly-buttocks. Dobson hadn't shown his face in the school for a week. Rafferty chuckled. The memory always amused him. His Ma had been lucky Dobson hadn't sued her for assault.

  'What's the joke?' Llewellyn asked, as he finished his careful parking manoeuvres.

  Rafferty glanced at him and his chuckles subsided. 'Nothing. I was just remembering an incident from my schooldays, that's all. You wouldn't appreciate the joke if I told you.'

  Llewellyn shrugged and climbed out of the car without further comment.

  The last of Rafferty's amusement vanished at the thought that, for Maurice Smith, there had been no "Ma" to stand up for him. According to the information they had on the family, the mother had been a weak, not over-bright woman and had been as much a victim of Bullock as her son. Bullock could have beaten Smith black and blue if he'd chosen and no one would have tried to stop him. And, Rafferty reminded himself, Smith's body had been black and blue, some of the bruising was confirmed as having occurred before death. And not long before death, either. Such a beating would certainly explain why Darren had said Smith had driven like a maniac. After a beating at the hands of a man like Bullock, it would be surprising if Smith was able to drive at all.

  Rafferty found himself wondering who was the real criminal in all this: Smith, or the stepfather who had treated him little better than a despised cur.

  The worst thing was, he realised as he followed Llewellyn into the Bacon Lane back entrance to the police station, that Bullock would get away with it. And it was his fault. He'd handled the interview badly. He should have brought Bullock to the station to question him. It was too late now. If he had been lying Bullock would have already contacted his mates from the nearest neighbour’s flat or, that failing, a public phone box, and primed them with what they were to say. And his mates, being no friends of the police, would undoubtedly be more than happy to back him up.

  Although he was beginning to share Llewellyn's feeling that it was unlikely that Bullock had actually killed his stepson or had any involvement in subsequent events, Rafferty felt it could be said that Bullock had effected a killing of sorts; a slow, long drawn-out killing of whatever spirit Smith had had, and in so doing, had created another monster.

  Rejected by society, rejected and beaten by the nearest thing he had to a family, Maurice Smith had still clung on, desperately seeking a sense of belonging. Had that desperation encouraged him to willingly open his door to his murderer? Massey, for instance? Hoping a plea for forgiveness, for understanding, would be heard, had he instead, been forced to plead for life itself?

  He climbed the stairs to his office and the endless paper mountain that always awaited his return. Perhaps he'd find out tomorrow when he had Massey questioned again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE NEXT MORNING, WHILE Mary Carmody and Hanks drove up to London to see Frank Massey, Rafferty, with no great hopes, went through the motions of checking Jes Bullock's alibi. He wasn't surprised when Bullock's friends confirmed his story. According to them, they had all been at the flat of Mick Coffey, another of Bullock's cronies, from about seven-forty till just before nine-thirty on Thursday night, when Bullock had left for the pub and his usual drink.

  Rafferty was disinclined to believe them, but he couldn't prove they were lying. Still keen to give Bullock his comeuppance, he had despatched Llewellyn and Lilley to question Coffey's neighbours. But again, as with their inquiries about Smith, the icy weather had kept most people indoors, so their questioning was fruitless. No one had seen Bullock either arrive at the flat or leave it. Nor had anyone seen or heard his car even though it was a sad and rusty Ford, and, according to Bullock's own neighbours, had an engine as wheezy as an asthmatic's chest.

  Still keen to charge Bullock with something, on their return, Rafferty sent Lilley out to try again.

  'You don't want me to go with him?' Llewellyn asked.

  'No. I've got another little job for you,' Rafferty told him. He nodded to Lilley and the young officer went out. 'You're coming with me to see Stubbs and Thompson to find out what alibis they come up with.'

  'I thought we'd already concluded that they hadn't—'

  'I know we've managed to talk ourselves out of suspecting that they helped Massey,' Rafferty broke in. 'But we haven't done the same if the scenario changes to them acting without Massey. He's not the only one still under suspicion, not by a long chalk.'

  'He's the only one to be caught out in a lie,' Llewellyn reminded him.

  'Exactly. The only one to be caught. But if the liars and thieves in the population only consisted of those caught out, what a wonderful place the world would be. Come on. Let's get it over with.'

  However,
it wasn't so easy to catch out Stubbs and Thompson in lies. Prompted either by innocence or canniness, they claimed to have recently discovered a mutual interest in angling and that they had gone night fishing the previous Thursday evening. Although they had no other witnesses but each other to back up their story, instead of telling tall fishermen's tales to add verisimilitude, each was smart enough to say they had caught nothing, thus ensuring that freezers empty of fish didn't weaken their lies.

  ‘If they were lies,’ Llewellyn had felt obliged to put in as they left Thompson's home after he had backed Stubbs' story.

  'Bit of a coincidence that they should both take up such an uncomfortable hobby recently. And in the middle of winter, too,' Rafferty retorted. Although far more favourably disposed towards them than to Bullock, Rafferty couldn't persuade himself to believe them either.

  Frustrated by stalemate on several fronts, Rafferty hoped their visit to the Figg family might produce something more than yet another exercise in futility. Unfortunately, even with the assistance of "Curly" Hughes, one of Burleigh's most experienced officers, they had been unable to get the Figgs to shift from their previous dogged stance.

  Of course, as Rafferty was aware, families like the Figgs knew how to use the law to their advantage; they'd had plenty of practise at it if what Hughes had told them was anything to go by.

  They had finally managed to speak to Tracey Figg. She had turned out to be timid, and, as Rafferty had feared, had not only looked to her father for the answer to each question, but, in general, appeared so cowed that she would have made a hopeless witness even if they succeeded in getting anything valuable out of her. But her parrot-like repetitions of her father's promptings was all they got and, like a cow chewing the cud in a favourite part of the field, she couldn't be shifted from it.

  Only nineteen, she already had three children—all with different fathers if the range of skin tones were anything to go by. She had a collection of bruises, too, which to judge by their coloration, were fairly recent. Of course, in a family like the Figgs, who were likely to hit first and ask questions after, if at all, violence was probably a way of life; the bruises didn't necessarily indicate that she had been persuaded to collude in the concealment of murder.

  The interviews, like Llewellyn's previous efforts, were conducted in the noisy squalor of the family's living room. And, as Rafferty had prophesied, one of the children had thrown up over Llewellyn's trousers just as Tracey had made her first stumble in the obviously rehearsed tale. And when the nauseous toddler had started up an unearthly wailing which set his siblings and cousins up in sympathy, they had beaten a hasty retreat to the relative peace and freshness of the yard.

  Rafferty paused long enough to check if any of the vehicles differed from those which Llewellyn had noted on his previous visit. They didn't. And none of them had been noticed as being parked near Smith's flat on the evening of his murder, either. Not that that proved anything, of course. That was the trouble, Rafferty fretted as he followed Llewellyn and Curly out of the Figgs’s yard. Proof — of anything — was in very short supply.

  'I did warn you what they were like,' Llewellyn muttered in aggrieved tones as he dabbed ineffectually at his trousers with a wad of tissues. 'I wouldn't be surprised if they coached those children to vomit to order.'

  'Very likely. You must admit it's an effective ploy. That and the bawling got rid of us pretty sharpish.'

  Hughes, brought along as the ‘local expert’ on the Figgs and their tricks, and reduced to red-faced fury when he had proved inadequate to the task, suggested hauling the family into the station one by one. After mopping his gleaming bald head, he said, 'we should be able to get 'em for something. If nothing else, those dogs of theirs look vicious. They're sure to have bitten someone.'

  Like Llewellyn, Rafferty had had enough of the Figgs. Anyway, given the family’s tendency to violence, he doubted they'd get anyone to come forward even as a witness to the viciousness of the Figgs’ dogs let alone anything else, so he vetoed the plan. 'Didn't you say the sons have a reputation for being handy with knives?'

  Curly Hughes nodded.

  'Would you like to get on the wrong side of such a tribe? If I was one of their neighbours, I'm damn sure I wouldn't. No. Thanks for the offer, but we'll leave it and concentrate on the Elmhurst end. At least, if the Figgs are involved, any witnesses we turn up there are unlikely to know them or their reputation and would be less likely to be shy at coming forward.'

  After dropping Curly Hughes off, they made their way back to Elmhurst. At the station, Llewellyn disappeared into the toilets to wash the Figgs from his trousers. Rafferty's rumbling stomach beckoned him to the canteen for a bacon sandwich and a consoling mug of tea. It was there that Llewellyn found him twenty minutes later.

  'Mary Carmody just phoned,' he said. 'Bad news, I'm afraid.'

  Rafferty grunted, 'That makes a change,' and carried on sipping his tea.

  'Frank Massey's gone missing.'

  Rafferty's tea slopped over the canteen's chipped table. He'd been complaining that the case had come to a standstill and he wanted something to break. But this wasn't quite what he had had in mind. Llewellyn's choice of words penetrated and he demanded sharply, ‘You said "missing". You don't mean—?'

  'No. He's just missing. An entirely voluntary disappearing act, according to Sergeant Carmody. When Massey didn't answer her knock, she persuaded his landlady to let her and Hanks into his room. His passport's gone and so have most of his clothes. His car is also missing. No one seems to have seen him since about eight last night, when his landlady saw him drive off.'

  Rafferty was relieved to learn that even if he'd despatched Carmody and Hanks to collect Massey when they first got the truth from Great Mannleigh nick, it wouldn't have made any difference. Now, at least, he realised why Massey had told them such a stupid, easily disproved lie. It had given him time; time to get away. And that was all he had wanted.

  'What about his books?'

  'Books?' Llewellyn frowned. 'She made no mention of books. Is it important? If so, I can get her on the radio.'

  'It'll keep. It's just that he was a book-lover, like you. They were his escape from reality, if you like. Or, perhaps,' Rafferty corrected, as he recalled some of their titles, 'they were a form of hair-shirt—a constant reminder of the past and his own failures. And if he's left them all behind, maybe it's because he no longer has a need for them in that way.'

  'They're symbolic, you mean? That the failures are a thing of the past, not the present.'

  'Could be.' Rafferty swallowed the rest of his tea at a gulp, thrust back his chair and returned to his office, Llewellyn at his heels. When he got there, he glanced at the wall clock. ‘One o’clock,’ he muttered as he did some swift calculations. 'If Massey left yesterday evening he's had, what? Seventeen hours or so to make good his escape. He could be anywhere. Still, at least his doing a bunk would seem to let his daughter out of the running, wouldn't you say? He'd hardly skedaddle and leave her to face the music alone if she was the one to kill Smith.'

  Llewellyn nodded. 'Sergeant Carmody said she spoke to Alice Massey again when they discovered the girl’s father was missing and she now believes Alice had nothing to do with Smith's murder. The girl's mother says they spent that evening playing scrabble and that Alice certainly didn't slip out at all. She was extremely shocked when she realised the reason for Carmody's questions.

  'Another point in the girl's favour is that when Sergeant Carmody went back first thing this morning to check the bus and train staff again, no one recognised the descriptions of Alice or her mother. They all swore they didn't see either of them travelling to Elmhurst on Thursday evening, at least. Jaywick's a small place and out of season strangers would be likely to be noticed and remembered.'

  Rafferty nodded. Mary Carmody was a good officer. And, even without Frank Massey's disappearance, if she was now convinced that Alice had had nothing to do with the murder, he would have been inclined to trust her judgeme
nt. Another point against Alice's involvement, he now realised, was her anger. If she had either killed Smith herself or known that her father had finally avenged her, that anger would surely have subsided. It hadn't. It was still bottled up inside her. One less ball to juggle, Rafferty muttered to himself.

  'Do we have any idea how much money Massey had with him?' he asked.

  'Carmody's checking that now.' Llewellyn paused. 'She did learn one thing that might be significant. According to Massey's wife, he and Elizabeth Probyn used to be very close at one time. They were all three at college together, I gather, though in different years. She claims her ex-husband and Elizabeth Probyn had an affair then. The implication being that Ms Probyn might have helped him get away.'

  Rafferty frowned. 'I can't see Elizabeth Probyn risking her precious career because of some ancient sentimental attachment between her and Frank Massey.'

  'Not so ancient, according to Mrs Massey. She seems to think that her ex-husband and Ms Probyn might recently have become friendly again. If it's true he might have confided his intentions to her.'

  Rafferty thought it unlikely and said so. 'Still.' He tapped his pen against his lips. 'We've got to cover all avenues, though I can't say I relish the prospect of questioning our esteemed prosecutor about her love life. How the hell do you tactfully ask her if she's into aiding and abetting murder suspects to do a bunk?'

  Llewellyn, aware that Rafferty frequently had trouble in the diplomacy department said, 'Perhaps I should—?'

  'No.' Rafferty shook his head. As he explained to Llewellyn, he felt he owed her the courtesy of questioning her himself. 'Not that she's likely to appreciate it. What about Mrs Massey herself? I don't suppose she had any idea where he might have gone? Or the daughter?'

  'None. Massey said nothing to either of them. And though Mrs Massey didn't have any idea where he might be, according to Carmody, she did express the hope that it was somewhere very warm.'