Blood on the Bones

by Evans, Geraldine

  The letter and the threats inherent in the writer's taunting words would also have to wait, he reminded himself. Because before he was again likely to find the solitude necessary to consider a possible course of action, he had another investigatory show to get on the road. And before religious rites, eternal dust, or his letter, could demand attention, Rafferty knew that their well-murdered cadaver wasn't the only body likely to be subjected to indignities at the hands of Sam Dally.

  Rafferty jerked his head at Llewellyn. They walked away from the shallow grave, leaving more room for the scene of crime team and Lance Edwards, the photographer, to do their work. They followed the tape-marked path already set up by Lizzie Green and Tim Smales in order to keep the trampling of the gravesite and its contamination to a minimum. Ducking under the outer tape, Rafferty nodded a ‘well done’ to young Smales as he marked them down on his clipboard as leaving the scene. He and Lizzie Green had made a good job of securing the grave site. Timothy Smales was finally growing into the job, Rafferty realised. He no longer sulked if given a task he didn't fancy. He just gritted his teeth and got on with it. But then he'd had a good teacher.

  The best, most experienced teeth gritter in the station, was Rafferty's thought as his teeth ground together even harder as his several-stranded future opened itself uninvitingly before him. Once again, he forced himself to put one of these strands out of his mind and concentrate on the latest problem; at least, he thought, unlike the other, murder was within his compass and might, therefore, be open to a reasonably speedy resolution.

  Lizzie Green, as the more experienced officer, had, after getting Smales organised into securing the scene, also ensured that Sister Rita, the nun who had found the body, was kept isolated so she couldn't confide anything more about the corpse than she might have already revealed to the rest of the religious community. As Smales had confirmed on their arrival, the nun was being kept suitably cloistered by Lizzie until Rafferty and Llewellyn were ready to speak to her.

  Rafferty gazed around him, studying the scene. All round the eight foot high walls surrounding the convent's grounds clung the evergreen pyracantha, a climber with sharp thorns currently wearing the brilliant scarlet berries of autumn. He had been careless and had already experienced the sharpness of the thorns for himself. He had a gash across the back of his hand to prove it and to remind him to be more wary in future.

  As if the vicious talons of the firethorn wasn't enough of a barrier to intruders, in front of the climbers were grouped the equally thorny berberis. The rich red and maroon of its leaves concealed the many little stiletto-sharp barbs. Together, these two razor-edged plants could usually be expected to deter even the most determined would-be burglar.

  Rafferty wondered how many of the local villains appreciated that the high walls and all that thorny security were indicative, not of the rich plunder awaiting the more daring thief, but only of the nuns' desire to be shut away from the world.

  Because, of course, there weren't any riches. Or at least none of the sort likely to be appreciated by Elmhurst's more light-fingered residents. Unlike so much of the rest of the Catholic Church, with its fabulous Vatican, bishops' palaces and extravagant, priceless and glorious art, the sisters lived simply. As Rafferty had noticed on his arrival and passage through the community's home, their lives were austere in the extreme. They truly embraced their poverty instead of applying to it mere lip service. He found it quite humbling. But as he knew that such an emotion was unlikely to be helpful at the start of the inquiry, he glanced at Llewellyn and asked, ‘First thoughts, Daff?’

  Llewellyn hesitated and Rafferty instead supplied his own first thoughts. ‘Under other circumstances, I'd have strong suspicions that this was an inside job, given the height of the walls and the other deterrents. But–’

  ‘But even you find it hard to conceive of holy nuns being guilty of murder?’

  Rafferty shrugged. ‘Something like that, I suppose.’ But it wasn't even that, not really. He knew the religious over the years had gone in for plenty of violent acts against people who disagreed with them; they were still at it in the twenty-first century. He supposed the current lot of Catholic Holy Joes and Josephines were equally as capable of violence as their counterparts in other religions.

  No, he thought it was more a case that man needed something to believe in, something to hold onto in a world where change tended to be too rapid and way too ugly. He smiled. ‘We'd better start from the basic fact that the sisters are all human beings first and nuns second and proceed from there.’

  Llewellyn nodded, presumably pleased by the rare logic encompassed in his inspector's pronouncement.

  Rafferty sunk into contemplation. From where he stood, he could see the entirety of the convent's extensive rear grounds. But if the detached house and its large grounds was the sisters' one extravagance, it was a necessary one because the building was home to a small community of women, although he was not yet certain of the precise numbers. The spacious grounds, too, were essential for a group of women who were almost entirely self-sufficient.

  The body and its shallow grave had been found by the right hand side wall. It was close to what Rafferty had taken to be a shed, but which Llewellyn had discovered was one of the convent's two hermitages, where the sisters could pray in solitude. Small and without any form of heating that Rafferty had been able to discern, they must be as cold as charity in the depths of winter. He could only suppose God kept them warm, in spirit at least, if not in body.

  The convent's small apple and pear orchard, heavy with ripe fruit, was between the right hand side wall and the wall facing the back of the house. A large glasshouse, shed and soft fruit plot were near the centre of the grounds. The vegetable plot, at the back of which was to be found the second hermitage, took up almost the whole of the left hand side of the grounds.

  Next, Rafferty directed his attention fifty yards away, towards the main building of the Carmelite Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, just in front of which, a little gaggle of brown-habited, black-veiled nuns, with horrified fascination, were observing the scene of crime team at work.

  The SOCOs moved slowly, deferentially almost, as if they were observing some religious rite of their own, one that required an attention as rapt as a nun's devotions. Which it did, of course, if they were to miss no possible clue as to who had placed their cadaver in the soil.

  As Rafferty watched, Mother Catherine, the Prioress or, as he thought of her, the Mother Superior, to whom he had spoken briefly on his arrival, made her brisk way across the grass from the main building to where the other nuns were standing. As the sun fought its way briefly through the increasingly dark clouds, it glinted on her tinted spectacles and seemed to galvanise her into action. She clapped her pitifully scarred hands and, with a flapping motion, as if she was encouraging a flock of unruly chickens to take roost for the evening, tried to persuade the gaping nuns back to their duties. But such was the sisters' goggle-eyed fascination with this dramatic departure from their normal routine that her silent entreaties met with only a limited response.

  The dead man could count himself a lucky corpse in one way, Rafferty reflected, in the brief moments before the lapsed nature of his Catholicism caught up with him once more. Since the dead man's body had been found in the grounds of the RC convent, whether he had been a sinner or not, whether he wanted them or not, whether he was a Believer or not, he would have prayers in plenty for his soul's passing.

  Rafferty didn't feel quite so blessed. He disliked being forced to face his Catholic demons – if such they could be called. Neither did he like being obliged to call the community's matriarch 'Mother'. He had assumed he had long since put all that religious mumbo jumbo behind him. He never even called his own mother 'Mother'. Well, apart, that was, from when he was trying to display his disapproval for some behaviour of hers and ma was being stroppy – which, come to think of it, was most of the time.

  Another thing to be regretted was the fact that, although
this was an enclosed order of nuns, which he hoped would limit the potential suspects, they were also a silent, contemplative order; their days and a fair chunk of their nights, too, he presumed, were given over to prayer. How on earth could he encourage the usual title-tattle that was so invaluable during a police operation if none of the usual tittle-tattling gender indulged?

  However, the Prioress, Mother Catherine, seemed to consider the current unique circumstances warranted a breach of the usual silence, for when the sisters, being as filled with curiosity as the rest of humanity, failed to obey her flapping commands, she supported her arm signals with orders of the vocal kind. Rafferty heard her voice carry clearly as she admonished her charges.

  ‘A little Christian charity, if you please, sisters. A man is dead. A child of Christ. He is entitled to some dignity in death, not to be stared at in his nakedness by women who should know better. Come. We must pray for his immortal soul.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Rafferty muttered, thankful she was taking her flock off before he was obliged to order her to do so. He always hated to have an audience at a scene of crime. Though it amused him that she had just assumed the dead man was a follower of Christ. For all she, or any of them, knew, in life, he might have prayed to Buddha or some other deity. Or no one at all, of course, which, in an increasingly irreligious Britain, was probably the most likely option.

  Beside him, he felt Llewellyn stir as if in disapproval of his flippant remark and he glanced at him. But, although Llewellyn didn't say anything, he didn't have to. Apart from his ma, Rafferty had never met anyone who could convey disapproval or irritation with just a few almost imperceptible shifts of facial muscles. And while Llewellyn's subtlety was a natural part of him, his ma's was not. As a mother of six, she had discovered the hard way that shouting was mostly counter-productive and, along the way, she had learned to conserve her energy.

  Llewellyn had never possessed Kitty Rafferty's original, primitive, urge to shout and holler. Sometimes, Rafferty regretted it.

  He knew where he was with shouting and bawling. It was what he had been used to for so long. He found these subtle manifestations of disapproval harder to counter or defend against.

  Rafferty scowled – a far from subtle muscle shift. It was all right for Llewellyn. His present location was unlikely to make him feel as off-kilter as it made Rafferty. Flippancy would, he suspected, as he watched the nuns' departure and thought again of the letter in his pocket, be his only crutch in the days and weeks that loomed ahead.

  Already – even without the letter and the anxiety it engendered – he was experiencing a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Even here, out in the open, with a fresh breeze scattering the first fallen leaves of autumn, he imagined he could smell the overpowering scent of incense. It was making him feel nauseous. Suffocated, even. And the investigation hadn't even properly begun yet.

  Of course, that smell was linked in his mind with the Catholic ritual he had so loathed as a child and a youth: the breast-beating of confession; the expectation, no, the demand, that one believed without question; the authoritative nature of it all. None of these had appealed even then to the rebellious youthful Rafferty. In his maturity they held even less appeal.

  But soon now, he would need to begin to question the sisters themselves. And although he was conscious that it wasn't a duty he could shirk indefinitely, it wasn't one he was looking forward to. He had always thought nuns an unnatural species, set apart from the rest of humanity, a species with whom he suspected he would not find communication easy. Why, he questioned, would any woman voluntarily agree to being shut away from the world, as this enclosed, Carmelite order, were? He had never understood it, doubted if he ever would, in spite of the fact that he had aunts who had become Brides of Christ on both sides of his family.

  How many such Brides did one God need? he wondered. And what on earth did he do with them all?

  Briefly, a smile flickered around his lips as humour came to his aid, and he thought that God must, by now, be finding Heaven a veritable Hell, and must also regret his growing harem, assuming all his Brides, the silent ones and the rest, were allowed to speak once in Heaven. Poor old God must get nagged 24/7.

  ‘Is there something about our latest unfortunate cadaver that amuses you, Rafferty?’

  Rafferty emerged from his uneasy musings to find that Dr Sam Dally, the pathologist and his own, unkind, earthbound deity, had arrived and was standing at his elbow struggling to enclose his rotund body in its protective gear. His smile faded immediately at the thought that some of his previous blasphemy might have earned him his current reward. ‘No,’ he replied feelingly. ‘Nothing at all is amusing me.’ Not now, anyway, he added silently to himself.

  By now, Lance Edwards, the police photographer had taken all the shots he needed. The SOCOs had carefully sifted and bagged most of the soil surrounding the body, along with the shucked off casings of insects with their telling life cycles. And as Rafferty and Llewellyn, again acknowledged by Smales, returned to the scene accompanied by Dally, he saw that now the cadaver lay open to their unhindered scrutiny.

  Apart from the bite marks of the animal, which had left their indentations on the skeleton's forearm, even after the usual cycle of insect activity, the body still retained a fair amount of flesh, which, Rafferty supposed, indicated their corpse had not been in the soil for any great length of time.

  Whoever had killed and buried him had removed all his clothes, presumably to make any identification more difficult if his body should one day be disinterred.

  He hadn't been buried too deeply, either, which made the latter event more likely. As the day's events proved. Strange that the killer had neglected to remove the watch, which, although damaged by autumnal damp and the attentions of scavengers, as Rafferty had already noted, still retained sufficient of its original elegance to make clear it had been a costly timepiece.

  Perhaps the watch had just been overlooked? Killers invariably made some error in their haste to cover up their crime. And given the number of women in the community and their presumed self-sufficient busyness about the house and grounds, the killer couldn't have had much time to murder his victim, strip and then bury him.

  Maybe the watch had been a gift as an earlier brief burst of optimism had allowed him to hope? Maybe, Rafferty allowed himself another small glimmer of confident expectation, maybe they would get lucky and the watch would have an inscription on the back?

  Get real, he told himself, as Sam, with difficulty, bent his plump body over his latest patient and began his examination. Such a nice, juicy lucky plum is not likely to fall into your lap; certainly not on this case, which was already beginning to feel like some deliberate punishment doled out by The Almighty.

  If such it was, the deity was unlikely to make the investigation one easily solved, as Rafferty acknowledged with a sigh.

  Beside him, hearing the sigh, and undoubtedly sensing some of Rafferty's lapsed Catholic angst, Llewellyn murmured tentatively, ‘I could do the preliminary interviews, if you'd prefer?’

  For a moment, for several moments, Rafferty was tempted by the offer. But something, maybe some stray tenet of his lapsed faith, wouldn't permit him to be led to the temptation of the easy option. Not now. And certainly not here.

  He straightened his back and strengthened his resolve in order to force out the ‘No,’ he wished could be a ‘Yes'. He glued on a false smile as he replied, ‘Grist for the mill, Dafyd. Grist for the mill for a lapsed lily like me.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Llewellyn murmured. 'Or maybe not. I suppose it depends on whether or not one believes one can truly escape one's upbringing.' He paused, then added, ‘I believe it was the Jesuits who said: ‘'Give me a child till the age of seven–'’

  ‘'And I will give you the man'', Rafferty finished for him. ‘Yes. I'm familiar with the quotation. And much as I hate to admit it, those boys knew what they were talking about.’

  He rather wished they hadn't. But he was damned if he was goin
g to let himself be easily spooked by a few nuns' habits and the smell of incense. ‘Are we not all brothers and sisters under the skin?’ He nodded towards the convent door through which the sisters had disappeared in response to the Mother Superior's admonishments. ‘It should be interesting to take a peek under theirs.’ And at least, this time, unlike his previous, unwilling, interaction with the Catholic Church, this time he would be doing the interrogating.

  But, in his current unwelcome situation, Rafferty found this small consolation.

  Chapter Three

  Trying to encourage within himself some enthusiasm for the task ahead, Rafferty permitted himself no more prevarications. Pausing only to tell Sam Dally to send a uniformed officer to find them when he had finished examining the body, he strode with a brisk step towards the back entrance of the Carmelite Monastery through which the sisters had disappeared, conscious of Llewellyn, like a determined whipper-in, following on behind.

  Momentarily forgetting his whipper-in, he muttered the question that had been puzzling him since his arrival at the scene: ‘Wonder why it's called a monastery rather than a convent?’

  But, of course, the oracle that was the university educated Llewellyn, had heard and as he moved up to Rafferty's side, he proceeded to enlighten him.

  ‘I believe it's connected to the fact that the Carmelites were originally just a male order and–’

  Annoyed with himself that he'd carelessly invited a lecture on top of the day's other torments, Rafferty tuned Llewellyn out and studied the building. It was a relatively modern one; Edwardian rather than medieval, from the outside it looked more like a pleasant country home rather than a house of prayer; the convent that had originally stood on the site having been torn down by Henry VIII when he indulged his sixteenth century wrecking spree of England's religious buildings. Elmhurst's Priory, another casualty of the times, although not razed to the ground like the earlier convent, instead, to this day, remained an enormous, impressive ruin. It provided a stark, rather eerie welcome to visitors approaching the town from the west.