Rafferty hunched forward over his desk and asked, ‘And had he? Or is it just a case of unsubstantiated tittle-tattle? God knows all kinds of allegations come out of the woodwork during a murder inquiry. Most of them turn out to be nothing more than opportunistic spite, rather like the denunciations neighbour made against neighbour in the old communist states.’
‘As yet, these allegations are unsubstantiated,’ Llewellyn told him. 'But it's interesting that every one of the callers who rang on the matter said the same thing. Though, I must say that I can't see what possible connection these rumours can have to our current case. Even if one of the sisters at the convent had need of such a service back in her youth, why would they have come to Dr Peterson?
‘Apart from any other consideration, all the older nuns, bar the late Sister Clare, lived many miles away, so even if they had need of the skills of a doctor in Dr Peterson's line, they would scarcely approach him. It would be local knowledge and word of mouth an unwillingly pregnant woman would need in such circumstances. And she wouldn't get that by travelling half way across the country to a completely strange place and then hoping for the best.’
Rafferty smiled. ‘As ever, your logic is without flaw.’ He grabbed his jacket. 'And much as I don't like having to drag a man back forty years in his life and ask him to explain his doings then, I suppose we have no choice. Most people, over the years, move so far on from their youthful selves that they're unrecognisable as the same people.
‘Still, we'll see what he's got to say for himself, even though, like you, I can't see that what he might or might not have done forty or more years ago can have to do with our murder.’
Rafferty sensed Llewellyn's intelligent brown gaze settle on him as they walked down the corridor to the stairs and the car park. He sensed a criticism coming. He wasn't wrong, he realised moments later, when Llewellyn voiced his thoughts.
‘Strange,’ the Welshman quietly commented, ‘that you don't appear to harbour the same reservations about the ancient history of the sisters or Father Kelly.’
Pulled up by Llewellyn's comment, Rafferty glanced sideways at his colleague as they reached the first floor landing. ‘No, I don't, do I?’ he asked elliptically.
Of course Llewellyn knew nothing about the ‘Road to Damascus’ moment he'd experienced as he'd stood outside the convent's walls. And Rafferty, now that his earlier surprise at the experience had worn off, reverted to type and put the experience down to the fact that he hadn't had any breakfast. Fighting desperately to shrug off this new-found and unwanted ‘God’ thing, he added, ‘Call it retribution of the less than Divine sort.’
‘Payback time for youthful punishments received?’
‘Perhaps.’ Rafferty muttered, even though now he felt much less inclined to indulge the urge to get a bit of his own back on the Church. But preferring to keep his own counsel on the matter, he added, 'Or maybe it's just that I find more to empathise with in a young doctor trying to save frightened girls from the perils of the back street abortionist back in the sixties than I do with a gaggle of nuns who spend their lives on their knees rather than doing something socially useful.'
He wished it were still true. He felt a hypocrite now, for saying it. For, in truth, he was finding much in the simple lives of the sisters to envy. Even if he was now inclined to shy away from again making such an admission to himself.
‘Whatever happened to ‘Judgement is mine, sayeth the Lord'?’
Rafferty, already anticipating his mother's judgement on the case and surprised that she hadn't yet confided it to him, was not in the mood to listen to his sergeant's also.
Anyway, he didn't know what Llewellyn was complaining about. Weren't they about to check out the doctor's past life and past doings, just as they had been doing and continued to do to those of the sisters? He would be less than human if, previously at any rate, some of the checks had appealed to him more than others. But that didn't mean he wouldn't be as thorough as possible in all of them.
In a voice that brooked no argument, Rafferty said: ‘Judgement, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. And as I'm the one doing the beholding–’
They reached the car park and he got in the car. Llewellyn climbed in the passenger seat. Not another word was spoken till they reached Dr Peterson's Orchard Avenue surgery. Which suited Rafferty just fine.
Dr Stephen Peterson had just come to the end of morning surgery when Rafferty and Llewellyn arrived. The waiting room was empty. The receptionist rang the doctor on the internal line to advise him of their arrival and gave them the nod to go through to the office.
Dr Peterson was every bit as tall and broad as Llewellyn had indicated. He looked to Rafferty, to be about six foot three and around seventeen stone. Even though he must be somewhere the wrong side of sixty-five and past the usual retirement age, he looked more than able, as Llewellyn had said, to heave corpses around without too much difficulty.
Had he, though? Rafferty speculated. And if so, why?
The doctor didn't look pleased to see them. Rafferty guessed he would look even less welcoming when he learned what they wanted to question him about.
‘I've already told your sergeant here all I know about the body you found in the convent's grounds, which is precisely nothing,’ Dr Peterson began irritably. ‘I don't know what else you think I can–’
Rafferty held up his hand. ‘Please doctor. Actually, it wasn't about the body found at the convent that we wished to talk to you about.’
‘No? What then? Whatever it is, I hope it won't take too long.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I'm doing some filling-in and am due at the hospital in twenty minutes.’
‘This shouldn't take more than a few minutes of your time, doctor,’ Rafferty reassured him, adding the proviso: ‘provided, that is, you're co operative and answer our questions.’
Dr Peterson's lips pursed at this, but he contained any further inclination to temper. Instead, he asked shortly: ‘And your questions are?’
Rafferty hesitated, glanced at Llewellyn, then said, ‘We've received some allegations about you.’
‘Allegations?’ Peterson's thick grey brows almost met in the middle. ‘What sort of allegations? And what could these allegations possibly have to do with the dead man found in the convent's grounds?’
‘As for your last question, I suppose I have to say that that remains to be seen. But as for these allegations, they concern a time in your life when you were a young doctor. Over forty years ago. To before the 1967 Abortion Act, to be precise.’
Dr Peterson paled. The thin, aesthetic face which was such a mismatch with his muscular body, took on an anguished cast and he slumped heavily into his chair. ‘Very well. What do you want to know?’
‘These allegations, all of which took the same line, say you carried out illegal abortions as a young medic. I just want you to confirm or deny the allegations and we'll be on our way.’
To his surprise, Peterson didn't even attempt to deny them. Instead, he became aggressive once more.
‘And what if I did?’ he demanded. ‘You've no idea of the butchers that were out there back then. Nor of the young girls who died of sepsis or who were permanently maimed at their hands.’
His voice turned sombre and suddenly, all the aggression went out of him. ‘My elder sister died under the ‘care’ of one such. She wasn't quite eighteen. She died in agony. I know, because I listened to her cries of torment.’
‘Why wasn't she in hospital receiving treatment and pain relief?’
D Peterson's face contorted into a humourless mask. ‘Well might you ask, inspector.’
A haunted smile played briefly about the doctor's face, then he said, ‘You're too young to know the social atmosphere of the time. It was rigid, unforgiving. My parents were ‘respectable'. They would have been mortified if the shame of my sister's illegitimate pregnancy had become common knowledge. If they had taken her to hospital everyone would have known what she'd done.’
He raised a face s
till traumatised by past ghosts for their inspection. ‘And they couldn't have that, you see. Their ‘respectability’ demanded that she suffer in secret, died even, to protect it.’
Appalled at the man's revelations, Rafferty strove to get a grip. He knew he needed to challenge Dr Peterson, find a way through the defences of his still present pain, if he was to obtain answers.
‘But your parents must have known the reason for your sister's death would become common knowledge,’ Rafferty pointed out, wincing at his own brutality. ‘The death certificate–’
‘The death certificate said my sister died from the complications of influenza,’ Stephen Peterson told him flatly, as his face contorted into lines of bitter and pain-filled memory. ‘My father had gone to school with the family GP,’ he wearily explained. His tired, matter-of-fact manner, seemed to imply that they should have understood this, at least. ‘And my parents knew he would help them cover up my sister's shame.’
‘I see.’ Rafferty did see. Only too clearly. Diffidently, he asked, ‘Is that why you decided to become a doctor?’
Stephen Peterson nodded. He even managed a smile, but it was a smile totally devoid of humour and merely emphasised the scored lines that gave his face such a cadaverous appearance.
‘I was on a mission, I suppose. I was an idealist. An idealist who wanted to save the world. I thought I could make a difference. And I did, for some.’
His voice dropped and they had to strain to hear the rest. ‘But not enough. Not nearly enough.’
He sighed, bent his head with its still thick salt and pepper hair and propped it on his hands, kneading his eyes with his forefingers and thumbs, before he dropped his hands into his lap and looked back up.
He met their gaze squarely, one after the other, then said with a return of his former vigour: 'But I don't understand your interest in my idealism so late in the day. It's not as if the dead man found at the convent could have had any connection with my life back then. I doubt he was even born. I thought the newspaper report said he was believed to be somewhere around his mid to late forties?'
Rafferty nodded. ‘But it's only a rough estimate. You're a doctor, so I imagine you're aware, that over a certain age, such estimates can be out by around ten years.’
Peterson nodded a vague assent to this statement. Then he said, 'But even if the dead man was fifty-odd rather than forty something, he would still have only been a child when I was a young doctor.
'No one with a grievance from that time has contacted me. So, if, as I presume, the implication is that I killed this man after he turned up accusing me of causing the death of his mother, sister, or other family member, in order to save myself from exposure, then you're way off the mark. Even if such a person had turned up and accused me of such a thing, it's half a lifetime ago.
‘Besides, apart from any other objection to this man's death being anything to do with me, his body was found in the grounds of the convent, rather than my back garden. I might be the sisters’ GP, but they haven't cut me a key for ease of access.’
An ironic mockery entered his voice as he added, ‘You can't seriously believe that I was so worried that the British Medical Council would be so interested in raking over old gossip that I felt it necessary to kill some hate-filled vengeance-seeker from four decades ago.’
Rafferty thought it probable that the doctor was right about the latter. Didn't the BMA usually prefer to bury their heads in the sand when it came to one of their own being accused of malpractice or even worse, as in the recent, infamous multiple murders of his patients by Dr Harold Shipman?
Rafferty frowned and looked down at the once again seemingly penitently bent head of Dr Peterson, as he acknowledged, that, when it came to the dead man, they only had the doctor's word for it that their cadaver hadn't contacted him and threatened him and his good name.
But even if he had, and the doctor had been provoked into attacking and killing him, it still didn't explain why the dead man had ended up buried in the grounds of the convent.
There again, though, as Rafferty silently grappled with his silent arguments, they only had the doctor's word for it that he hadn't been the one who had helped himself to the convent's spare keys.
Strangely, now that he'd explained himself, to his own satisfaction, at least, Stephen Peterson didn't seem particularly perturbed by their visit or by the provoking implications of their questions.
Perhaps he'd shed some of his idealism along the way and acquired instead, a protective layer of realism? Certainly, his remark about the inertia of the BMA indicated the possibility, Rafferty thought as he gazed at the doctor's bowed head.
But, whatever he'd acquired, it apparently didn't include the proclivity to breaking down and confessing. So he and Llewellyn said their goodbyes and headed back to the car and the station.
‘Well, he didn't exactly try very hard to conceal the illegal abortions, did he? He was amazingly open, even gung ho about them,’ Rafferty remarked as they waited to join the traffic on the roundabout at the shopping centre to the north west of Elmhurst.
Quietly, Llewellyn said, 'I suppose, after what happened to his sister, it's easy enough to understand that. And given his tragic experience, who's to say, in the same circumstances, that the rest of us wouldn't have copied his example and done our best to help young girls in similar straits? I've read enough about that period to know how unforgiving was society if a young woman made a single lapse from the expected virtue. Many a young girl, even as late as the sixties, ended up in a psychiatric hospital, often for years, if she fell pregnant outside marriage.'
Rafferty had heard enough, too, as he had eavesdropped on some of the conversations his ma had had with her female cronies amongst the neighbours. The conversations on which he had eavesdropped had not been ones for the fainthearted.
And, as he considered the latter, with all the in-built revelations about pain, suffering and death that he had, as a youth, overheard, it was some minutes before he felt able to make another comment.
In fact, he found he had to draw several deep breaths, before he could say anything else at all: 'Still, just because he freely admitted his culpability over the illegal abortions when we challenged him about them, doesn't mean he mightn't have other guilty secrets he's less keen to share. Take the location of the body, for instance.
‘As the convent's medic, the body could be said to be practically buried in his back yard. And given that he, like Father Kelly, had the run of the place, either one could have helped themselves to the spare key from the key cabinet.’
As the flow of traffic slowed sufficiently to let Rafferty enter the roundabout, Llewellyn remarked, ‘Perhaps that would be all the more reason for him to bury it there. He's presumably an intelligent man. Nobody would think he would be so foolish as to bury a body in a place with such close connections to himself.’
‘Mm. Whatever he thought – I know what I think. And that's that it doesn't bring us any further forward.’
Rafferty thumped the steering wheel in frustration. ‘If only we can discover the victim's ID. His identity has got to be the key to his death. But until we have that key…’
Rafferty, although mostly lacking in reasons to be cheerful, at least had one cause for celebration. Because even though another working day was drawing to a close, his ma, unaccountably, had failed to get in touch with him and issue instructions as to how delicately he was to treat the holy sisters. It could hardly be that she hadn't by now heard the news, as the media, both print and TV, had seized on the discovery of the body in the convent with something approaching relish. He supposed that, for them, the story had it all: violent death, religion and presumed sexual repression.
Rafferty could only hope that no one tipped the media off about Dr Peterson's unorthodox and, at the time, illegal, early practises.
Because if they did and then also discovered what an old sinner was the nuns' priest, they would quickly put two and two together till they had come up with a complete, unabr
idged, unholy brew, that would put Rafferty and his investigation plumb in the middle of an extravagant media frenzy.
Tired at the end of another long day, Rafferty felt almost relieved to learn on his eventual arrival home that one of his many anxieties about the case was about to receive its validation.
For his ma was at the flat waiting for him.
Chapter Nine
It seemed that his ma had decided to wait to give Rafferty the benefit of her opinions as to how he should conduct his current investigation until she was able to catch him at home and speak to him in person, it being so much more likely that she would be able to sway him to her views in the flesh than over the phone.
Rafferty opened the door to his living room and saw her, sitting with Abra on one of the new armchairs in their recently updated living room, a mug of tea, unusually for Kitty Rafferty, ignored and skinned over on the small table in front of her.
His ma, as anticipated, when he was foolish enough to blurt out the possibility, was scandalised that he could even think of suspecting one of the holy sisters of murder. She even wagged her work-worn forefinger at him as she told him: ‘For shame.’
‘Why shouldn't I suspect one of the sisters?’ he demanded as he shrugged out of his coat and jacket, left them, still entwined, falling off the back of the settee, and threw himself on the second armchair. 'Or all of them, for that matter?
‘OK,’ he conceded as he saw his ma's scandalised expression, 'I agree, they may have more cause than the rest of us to suffer from housemaid's knee, but aren't the sisters human beings just like you and me?'
‘Well of course they're not,’ his ma told him, indignantly. ‘The very idea.’ Even her recently permed, unnaturally dark curls seemed to crackle with outrage at his remark. ‘They gave up the world and all its sins when they took the veil. They're the latest in a long line of holy women. A fact you might recognise if you ever read that book about the lives of the saints that I lent you.’
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