Deadly Reunion

by Geraldine Evans

  ‘It was a day much like the reunions have been in previous years. I come every year,’ he added. ‘I noticed Adam was quiet at lunch, as though he had something on his mind. But he’s always tended to be a bit moody, so I didn’t take any notice. He set off on his run straight after lunch and the rest of us just lounged around the common room getting reacquainted until lunch had been digested. I’d brought my laptop with me, so I was able to get on with some work. I think Victoria and Alice had a game of tennis around three and Gary – Asgar – Sadiq went swimming in the school’s pool. Kennedy seemed to be happy to just lounge around, listening to music and drinking that never-ending supply of lager he brought with him.’

  ‘Was there a lot of milling around during lunch?’

  ‘Not during lunch, no.’ He smiled, showing perfect teeth. ‘It was the rule, when we were at school, that once we were seated, we stayed put, apart from the servers. And we all seemed to continue the tradition even though there’s no Mr Barmforth any more to glower and yell out, ‘You, boy!’ The gleaming smile faded. ‘I imagine that means that the only suspects for this crime are the seven of us that were seated at Adam’s table.’

  ‘If what you say is correct, yes, it would seem so. And nothing out of the ordinary happened? No arguments, for instance?’

  Harmsworth smiled again. ‘I don’t know as I’d call arguments unusual, Inspector. I’ve had spats with Kennedy off and on since we got here. He always did like winding people up. But other than that, no, I can’t think of anything.’

  ‘Can you tell me who used to be particular friends with the dead man and whether they’re still friends?’

  ‘Adam had his own clique – the other sporty types. And they all attracted the girls. None of them have attended this year, though usually two or three come to the reunion. I suppose I could be called the school swot, along with Victoria and Alice, so we weren’t as popular with the opposite sex. I always thought Adam was very obvious, with his muscles and so on, but it seemed to appeal to the girls. I recall that both Sophie and Alice had a crush on him at one time.’

  Rafferty nodded. ‘And what about enemies? Did Mr Ainsley have any that you know of?’

  Harmsworth frowned, then shrugged. ‘No one that I can recall. Certainly nothing serious. There were the usual spats at school and Adam had his share, but that’s all.’

  And so it went on. The other six reunees said much the same as the late afternoon wore into evening and the remaining coffee went cold.

  The call from Sam Dally had been the second unwelcome phone call of the afternoon for Rafferty. His ma had been on earlier and had told him to get one of his spare bedrooms ready.

  Rafferty had been expecting this. It had only been a matter of time, he told himself. His ma still liked to poke her nose into his life and since his June marriage to Abra, she must be consumed with curiosity to see for herself how wedded bliss was going; staying with them over several days was the only way to indulge this curiosity that would fully satisfy Ma. Rafferty, facing what couldn’t be avoided, had given a tiny sigh and said, ‘That’s all right, Ma. When do you want to come and stay?’

  But it seemed he’d misjudged his woman. His ma wasn’t requisitioning one of his bedrooms for herself after all, as she was quick to tell him.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Joseph. Sure and why would I want to come and stay with you when I’ve got a perfectly good house of my own not half-a-mile away from you?’

  ‘What do you want it for then, Ma?’ he had asked in his innocence. ‘Do you want to store a pile of Bring and Buy stuff for Father Kelly?’ As long as it wasn’t his ma’s illicit ‘bargains’ she wanted him to give houseroom to. He’d draw the line at that.

  ‘No.’ She paused and Rafferty wondered what was coming.

  For once, Ma seemed a trifle diffident. It was unlike her. His ma was nothing if not forthright.

  ‘The thing is son, you know I’ve got some long-lost cousins coming to stay?’

  ‘Yes.’ His ma had first mentioned this a month ago. But he couldn’t see that it would affect him. Beyond a courtesy meal out with them, it was unlikely, between his new wife and this new case, that he’d see much of them. But now, as his ma explained, he learned that this family reunion had snowballed. His ma had been on the internet – not so much a ‘silver surfer’ as a dyed brown one – and it turned out that she’d unearthed not only the known-about Irish and American cousins and their wives or husbands, but also Canadian, Antipodean and South African ones. The Aussies, no doubt, being Raffertys, would have descended from family who had got there via an ‘assisted’ passage courtesy of the Crown.

  Rafferty was dismayed as he guessed, rightly, what was coming. He hated having people to stay. He never felt his home was his own with others in the house. And the couple his ma wanted to foist on him – for all that they were family – were total strangers to him. The thought of sharing a bathroom with people whose habits were an unknown quantity was unnerving.

  ‘Sure and most of them are pensioners like meself,’ she told him in wheedling tones. ‘Can’t afford fancy hotels.’

  ‘They don’t have to be fancy, do they? Bed and breakfast would do, surely? Or the YMCA these days has nice rooms as cheap as you’ll find anywhere.’

  ‘And haven’t I told you,’ a faintly cross tone entered his ma’s voice, ‘they haven’t the money for hotels of any description. The air fare’s enough for most of them. And then, they’ll need spending money. And they’re family, Joseph. Family I’ve not seen for a long time.’

  ‘Can’t one of the girls put them up?’ This was a rearguard action and not one he expected to hold the tide. But he had a plentiful supply of siblings and he thought that, between them, his two brothers and three sisters should be able to accommodate several cousins, especially if they farmed their kids out at their friends’ houses.

  ‘The girls have no room, you know that. Besides, even if they were able to foist the kids on someone for the duration, Maggie and Neeve are in the middle of decorating.’

  His sisters could be as crafty as all their sex. Rafferty wished he was up to his eyelashes in magnolia emulsion. It would give him the excuse he needed. But once back from their honeymoon after their move to the semi from Rafferty’s flat, he’d delayed making a start on doing the place up and had made excuse after excuse to Abra when she suggested he pulled his finger out and got on with it. But he’d never suspected that his ma’s invitation to her American cousins would snowball to the extent of the fifty guests that she casually mentioned she was now expecting over for the family reunion party that had been born out of the small get-together originally planned. How could he have anticipated that the casually stated and half-heard idea that his ma was expecting four guests would expand to fit his two spare rooms and more? Because he doubted that Ma would stop at liberating just one of his spare bedrooms, even though there was only a bed in one of them. She’d find a bed for the other from somewhere and would then expect him and Mickey and Patrick Sean to lug it around to his house and up the stairs.

  ‘It’s only for two weeks, son,’ she said, wheedlingly. ‘You’ll hardly know they’re there.’

  Two weeks! To Rafferty, it seemed like eternity stretching before him. He hadn’t inherited his ma’s sociable gene and while he enjoyed a good craic as much as the rest of the family, he preferred to keep his home to himself. So he hadn’t said ‘yes’. But then, he hadn’t said ‘no’, either and that was all the encouragement Ma needed. Still, he had consoled himself as he prepared to set off for Griffin School, this murder would keep him busy and out of the way and these cousins that his ma had saddled him with were likely to be out doing the sights for most of the time. Between his work and their sightseeing, it was unlikely their paths would cross much.

  The Senior Common Room was at the front of the house and their borrowed office was at the back. From where he stood, Rafferty could see cricket and rugby pitches stretching to the middle distance. At the edge of his vision was what looked like tenn
is courts and Jeremy Paxton had mentioned they had a swimming pool in one of the outbuildings. All in all, they seemed to do very well for themselves.

  They had interviewed all the reunees and they had all said much the same. Even the ever-rebellious pig-hater, Sebastian Kennedy hadn’t strayed from the general line, which was that nothing out of the ordinary had happened on the day that Adam Ainsley had gone for a run and never come back.

  When questioned as to why nobody had commented on his absence at dinner, they had all claimed they had assumed the dead man had either gone to his room or decided to eat in the town. According to Giles Harmsworth, and the others had said the same, Adam Ainsley had been in a funny mood all morning and – considering this was a reunion – had been pretty unsociable towards most of the group. And when Rafferty had commented on this, Harmsworth and the rest had claimed the dead man had never been any different.

  ‘Always got in a humour on the slightest pretext’, had been Harmsworth’s take on this. ‘We thought nothing of it.’

  ‘So none of you went to see where he was when he didn’t show up for dinner that evening?’ Rafferty persisted.

  ‘No. We had no reason to.’

  The school’s dormitories, for the older pupils at least, were made up of two-bed rooms. The dead man had been sharing with Sebastian Kennedy, but as Kennedy had been steadily depleting the school’s wine cellars during the evening, he had – or so he claimed – failed to notice that Ainsley was still not in their room at midnight, which was the time Kennedy had finally staggered off to bed.

  ‘What do you think, Dafyd?’ Rafferty asked once they were finally alone. ‘Do you reckon they’re colluding for some reason?’

  Llewellyn shook his thinly handsome face. ‘No. They’re too disparate a group. I can’t see that Giles Harmsworth or Victoria Watson would agree to conceal a crime.’

  ‘Unless they did it,’ Rafferty chipped in.

  ‘There’s always that possibility, of course. But we have no evidence as yet that this was anything other than a suicide.’

  ‘Come on! How likely is it that anyone of sound mind would choose such a method?’

  ‘We don’t know that he was of sound mind – we found antidepressants in his room. And maybe he didn’t know what symptoms the poison would cause and thought he would just go to sleep. As I said, we’ve no evidence that he didn’t kill himself.’

  ‘We’ve no evidence that he did, either. And given that he must have been a well-educated man seeing as he attended Griffin School, would he really not have taken the trouble to find out what the poison did to the body before he did the business? And, taking that into consideration, if he did kill himself, hemlock seems a particularly peculiar method to choose, given that it paralyzes the limbs and Ainsley used to be a professional sportsman. Why not just use pills and whiskey?’

  Llewellyn gave a tiny shrug. Rafferty was pleased to see that, for once, his educated sergeant had no arguments against his theories. They had been through the dead man’s things and there had been nothing – apart from the anti-depressants – to indicate that suicide was a possibility, though he got Llewellyn to make a note to check with the dead man’s doctor. No one had said that he seemed other than they remembered him from the days when they had been cooped up together for weeks at a time and got to know one another intimately. No suicide note or suspicious substances had been found. Though, on the other hand, as Rafferty regretfully acknowledged, neither had there been anything to indicate that Ainsley felt he had reason to fear for his life from one of his fellow reunees. Why would he have attended the reunion if that had been the case?

  They had found nothing of any interest at all. Yet it must be one or the other as accidental death was surely out of the question.

  Adam Ainsley had, after a career as a professional rugby player, studied to become a sports coach and was now employed as a Physical Education teacher at another private school; this much he had learned from the other reunees. He had been twice divorced and at the time of his death had been single, with no known romantic entanglements. From the various comments from his former classmates, the dead man had been a popular boy with the girls at the school and had cut a swathe through most of them. His moody, Byronesque manner clearly finding favour with the fair sex. And, given his sporting prowess, he had been equally popular with the boys.

  To listen to the surviving reunees, the wonder was that anyone should have wanted to do away with such a popular young man. But someone had. Rafferty was convinced of that, in spite of Llewellyn’s mention of suicide. And he would find out which of them it was, no matter how many expensive legal types they conjured up between them.

  TWO

  Given that Dr Sam ‘Dilly’ Dally had performed the post mortem late on Tuesday and the toxicology reports hadn’t come through until the afternoon of the next day, it was eight in the evening by the time Rafferty and Llewellyn finished questioning the seven suspects amongst the reunees. They had also questioned the cook, Mrs Benton, who had got on her high horse when Rafferty had asked her if she had any idea how hemlock might have found its way into either Ainsley’s vichyssoise soup or his chicken salad.

  ‘That food was perfectly all right when it left my kitchen,’ she had insisted, bosom and grey curls bouncing indignantly. ‘Has anyone else died or been taken ill? No,’ she answered her own question. ‘Of course they haven’t. It’s that lot out there you need to interrogate.’ She stabbed her right index finger in the direction of the dining hall where the seven suspects had been joined by the other reunees for their evening meal. To judge from the racket going on beyond the serving hatch, the news of the day was still being avidly discussed, but Rafferty noticed that the seven were being given a wide berth. As though conscious of their leper status, they huddled together for warmth. Even the oh-so-confident Giles Harmsworth and the bad boy, Sebastian Kennedy, seemed subdued and kept their heads bent over their melon and Parma ham starter.

  Mrs Benton reclaimed Rafferty’s attention. ‘Thirty years I’ve worked at this school and some of that lot were vicious thugs back then; it seems they’re no better now. Yes, it’s them what you want to question, Mr Detective, not me. I’ve always been a good, honest woman, never done anything wrong in me life, not like that lot. That Giles – the one who’s now ‘something in the City’, he’s not as holier than thou as he’d have you believe. Teacher’s pet and a snitch is what he always was. I don’t suppose he’s changed much and it won’t be long before he’s confiding something to you. It just better not be about me, that’s all or I’ll fetch him a clout round the ear, big and self-important as he is, that he won’t forget in a hurry. And that Kennedy boy, he was always a troublemaker. Lives on a trust fund, or so I gather. The saying that the Devil finds mischief for idle hands is true enough. And another thing. You want to ask yourselves why it was that too handsome for his own good bloke, Adam Ainsley, was the one who was poisoned. He always had the girls after him. You mark my words, this’ll be one of them crimes of passion that the Froggies go in for. I always thought he’d come to a sticky end.’

  Rafferty had, in spite of her unhidden antagonism, questioned the cook thoroughly, though she’d inadvertently told them as much about several of the suspects as any snitch. He thought he could discount Mrs Benton and Tom Harrison, the groundsman cum caretaker, from the list of suspects, as even though Mrs Benton had admitted little liking for the dead man or a number of his fellow reunees and had prepared Ainsley’s last meal on this earth, he couldn’t see how she could have poisoned him without taking out some of the rest of the table; each table’s soup was served up in a tureen from which it was ladled out into the individual dishes at the table. The same applied to the salad. The lemon sponge that they’d had for pudding would have given no opportunity for doctoring. And, however chippy her personality, he didn’t have Mrs Benton tagged as a psycho. Harrison, the groundsman, had been in the kitchen earlier in the day, for his elevenses, and could have added hemlock to the ingredients for the meal. But
again, like Mrs Benton, he would have had to have no qualms about taking out whoever was unfortunate enough to share Ainsley’s table.

  Mrs Benton had explained that one person at each of the dining hall’s eight-seater tables would come to her hatch and collect each course. For the suspects’ table, it had been the Senior Common Room peacemaker, Victoria ‘Brains’ Watson, who had collected the food and dished it out. This would then be passed along the row, first on one side and then on the other. Adam Ainsley had been sitting at the far end of the table on the opposite side from Victoria. From this, Rafferty had concluded that any one of four people would have had the best opportunity to slip something in Adam Ainsley’s food. There was Victoria ‘Brains’ Watson, who had served up each portion; Giles Harmsworth; the over-serious Alice Douglas; and Simon Fairweather, the quiet young man who, beyond mentioning that he was a civil servant at the Home Office, had had little to say for himself, even at the interview. This left the other three as less than prime suspects: Sebastian Kennedy, Sophie Diaz and Asgar Sadiq. It seemed unlikely but possible that either Kennedy, Ainsley’s left-hand neighbour, or Gary Sadiq, Ainsley’s neighbour across the table from him, might also have had a chance to slip a foreign substance in his food. Anyway, they would all remain on the suspects’ list for the present.

  Rafferty had brought in some more uniforms to help question the other hundred reunees. Although it didn’t seem they would have had the opportunity to poison Ainsley, Rafferty had the feeling that the cause of this murder – if murder it was, as it might turn out that Llewellyn was right and they could still be labouring over a suicide – lay deep in the past when they had all been teenagers together. So they might well have useful information. The motive for murder was, he thought, going to take some digging out. But at least, for now, he was more than happy to simply burrow into the surface memories of each of them. Any deeper digging would have to wait until they’d separated those who’d been amongst Adam Ainsley’s intimates, whom Rafferty and Llewellyn would question more deeply, and the rest.