‘What part of Africa?’ Rafferty asked. ‘Did he say?’
‘Well, yes he did. It was one of those places that's changed its name. Someplace that now begins with a ‘Z'. I don't rightly remember. It might have been Zaire. Or maybe Zimbabwe. Unless there's another country on the continent beginning with a Z.’
Rafferty glanced at Llewellyn. Father Kelly had mentioned that it had been Zaire where Sister Clare had been murdered all those years ago. He could only suppose that Peter Bodham had wanted to travel there to learn the facts at first hand from some villager of the time. If that was still possible given the lapse of years and the usual African death rate.
‘As I said,’ Mitchelson continued. 'One day he'd been totally set on going to Africa. He'd even got some foreign currency. Then a few days later, he simply dropped the idea. I was surprised because Peter was one of those determined people who when they decide on something invariably carry it through.
'It can't have been a shortage of money that made him change his mind, either. Because he'd been made redundant from his job only a couple of months before, so had his redundancy cash in hand as well as savings. Not that he was what could be called extravagant with his money when he was employed. He'd never gone on holiday in the three years I knew him, yet he was filled with the idea of taking this expensive trip to Africa. That's why it's so odd that he should change his mind about the trip shortly before he was due to travel.'
Rafferty questioned him about Peter Bodham's previous employers and Llewellyn noted the details.
‘How did he seem when he told you about the trip? Was he excited?’
‘No. That's the curious thing. Although, as I said, he was determined on going, the thought of the trip didn't seem to excite him at all. Rather the reverse. And then, as I said, a day or so before he was due to set off, he told me he wasn't going after all. Even more oddly, cancelling his trip did seem to excite him. I wondered if his decision to cancel the trip might have had something to do with the letter he received that morning.’
Rafferty questioned Mr Mitchelson as to when the letter had been received and what else he could remember about the it.
The man shrugged. 'It came early in September. It was just an ordinary letter, you know, in one of those small white envelopes. I was down in the lobby when the postman arrived and noticed him placing it in his mailbox. The address was handwritten rather than typed. It was unusual for Peter to get personal correspondence, which is why I remembered it. But he never told me what was in it to get him so hyper.'
‘What else can you tell us about Mr Bodham? Was he married or did he have a regular girlfriend?’
Mr Mitchelson shook his head. ‘Peter had lived here three years. He'd never had a girlfriend in all that time. I suppose you could say he was a loner, like me. Kept himself to himself. Even more so when he lost his job. He was never any trouble, not like some tenants I've had in the past. I felt we'd become friends of a sort.’ For some reason he looked awkward at the admission.
‘What about other friends? Work colleagues from his last job?’
Mitchelson shrugged. ‘I never saw any. I told you, he was a loner. He didn't seem to be close to anybody, so it's hard to imagine who could want him dead.’
That was the last thing Rafferty wanted to hear. But he was still hopeful that Bodham's flat would yield some clues. He thanked the landlord, borrowed his key and let himself and Llewellyn into the dead man's home.
‘What do you think about this Michael Mitchelson, Bodham's landlord?’ Rafferty asked once they were in Bodham's flat with the door closed. ‘I wondered if he's so upset about Bodham because his late tenant was behind with his rent. But then another possibility occurred to me. Mitchelson said they'd been friends. Do you think they might have been rather more than friends?’
Llewellyn shrugged. ‘It's possible, I suppose. Mr Mitchelson did say that Peter Bodham hadn't had a girlfriend in all the time he'd known him. Shall I assign one of the team to look into their relationship?’
Rafferty nodded. ‘Put Mary Carmody on to it. She's good at drawing people out and she's got a strong bladder, which is just as well. It's the sort of assignment which demands the ability to drink tea by the gallon. And our Mair can drink any sort of tea going, weak, strong, sugared and un-sugared and look as if she's enjoying it. A rare skill.’ Rafferty pulled on some gloves, and said, ‘Right, give Carmody a bell, get those checks organised and then we can get on with this search.’
Bonham's home wasn't large. There was just a living room, a single bedroom and a kitchenette with bathroom off. Peter Bodham hadn't troubled to stamp his identity on the place; it looked more like a largish hermit's cell than a home. There were no pictures or ornaments of any kind and not much in the way of furniture, beyond a bureau, a couple of armchairs, a nest of three cheap occasional tables and a dining table with two chairs which stood against the window wall and which housed a computer. The computer was the only expensive item. The room looked the comfortless hermit's cell that Rafferty had already described.
He nodded at the computer. ‘We'll take that back to Elmhurst with us, Dafyd. You can study its innards at your leisure. Meanwhile, let's get on and check the rest of this place.’
They divided the room search. Rafferty made a start in the living room while Llewellyn took the bedroom. After putting on some protective gloves, Rafferty opened the cheap bureau and found just the usual files for household bills, utilities and so on. He'd only been checking through these for a minute or two, wanting to be certain he'd missed nothing, when Llewellyn called through from the bedroom.
‘Inspector.’
Rafferty walked the couple of paces through to the bedroom and asked: ‘What have you got, Daff?’
Dafyd tapped his fingers on a lever arch file and indicated several more that were stored in a large, plastic box. ‘According to these notes, the late Mr Bodham was researching his family tree.’
Rafferty nodded. ‘That agrees with what Mother Catherine and Father Kelly told us.’
They sat down and studied the paperwork the late Peter Bodham had amassed. There was a surprising amount of it. It was clear that most of it had been printed out from various genealogical websites. They found papers confirming that Bonham had been adopted at birth. There were also two death certificates, one for each of his adoptive parents. Both had died within a few months of each other, earlier in the summer; perhaps that had been what had prompted Peter Bodham to make what looked a determined search for his birth family.
Rafferty was momentarily distracted by a photograph on the window sill. He hadn't noticed it before and it was only when the breeze through the draughty window had blown the curtains back that the photo had caught his eye. It was a head shot of a young man with unusually vivid green eyes. A middle-aged man and woman were on either side of him; presumably his adoptive parents.
‘Reckon this is our victim?’ he asked Llewellyn. It certainly looked a good match for Professor Amos's recon.
Llewellyn took the photograph and studied it for a moment, then, with his usual logic, he said, ‘The quickest way to find out is to ask the landlord,’ as he made for the door.
As the landlord lived across the hall from Bodham's flat, Llewellyn was back in five minutes.
‘The landlord confirms that Peter Bodham and the man in the photograph are one and the same,’ he said.
While Llewellyn was speaking to the landlord, Rafferty had been studying the paperwork that Peter Bodham had amassed. On Llewellyn's return, he handed several pieces of this paperwork over.
'Looks like he was stymied on the family tree front. He's managed to find his original birth certificate – or so he must have thought. And though the woman named as the mother bears the same name as the late Sister Clare - Annemarie Jones as was, it's a name that goes way beyond common. But at least it explains his visit to the convent. If he thought Sister Clare was really his mother he must have been shattered when both the diocesan office and Mother Catherine confirmed she had
long since died.
'There's no father mentioned on the birth certificate. And I found a letter from a woman he thought was a maternal aunt, who insists he's got the wrong family and that her sister, Annemarie Jones, was not his natural mother.'
It was the only personal letter amongst Peter Bodham's meagre and otherwise soon searched possessions. Unlike the letter that Mike Mitchelson had mentioned Bodham receiving, its envelope had an August, not a September, postmark. There was no trace of the later one.
Next, Rafferty handed over a newspaper cutting. It was a death notice and apparently reported the death of Peter Bodham's correspondent; a Mrs Sophia Ansell, the woman he had believed to be his maternal aunt.
'Shame this woman's dead. She might have been telling the truth, of course, and that her sister wasn't Peter's natural mother at all.
‘Equally, she might have lied to him to keep a family secret. Either way, we're unlikely to find out now. Unless we can get permission for an exhumation for DNA purposes on such flimsy proofs, it looks like we may have overcome one dead end only to find another.’
He stood up. 'See if you can find some carrier bags, Dafyd. Along with the computer and the photograph, I want to take all this paperwork back to the station so we can study it at our leisure. But before we do that and once we've dropped this stuff back at the station, we'll pay a visit to the address of Bonham's late correspondent and speak to the neighbours. Maybe if this Mrs Ansell was lying when she told Bonham her sister, Annemarie, wasn't his natural mother, any old neighbours might be able to shed some light one way or the other.'
Rafferty's excitement about their latest discoveries was tempered when they returned to the station and he saw what he had no trouble in recognising another of the blackmailer's missives. It was sitting, impertinently, right at the top of his in tray.
Warily, keeping one ear cocked for Llewellyn, who had stopped off in the Incident Room to check if there had been any further developments, Rafferty ripped the envelope open and quickly scanned its contents.
Inexplicably, the blackmailer had again failed to make any demands, financial or otherwise. This strange new strain of ‘no demand’ blackmail was disconcerting. It alarmed rather than reassured, especially as its taunting nature had increased since the first letter. He didn't know what to make of it. What did this creature want?
But he didn't have time to dwell on this latest worrying missive. When he heard Llewellyn's light tread in the corridor, he quickly stuffed both letter and envelope in the pocket in which he kept the previous one. He said nothing, but his mind raced as they headed back to the car. He still had no real idea of the blackmailer's identity: he had so far failed to come up with a plausible approach to questioning his previous fellow members of the Made in Heaven dating agency. Even his cousin, Nigel, had been unable to help him decide how best to act.
But even if he somehow managed to come up with a believable excuse to approach his ex fellow dating agency members, meeting them again would require him to once more don the disguise he had found it necessary to adopt in order to investigate the two murders that had occurred during that previous case. And as that would require that he again grow a beard and wear the prescription glasses of his late father that had almost blinded him before, he wasn't keen.
Broodingly, as he handed over the keys to the car to Llewellyn and climbed in the passenger side, he thought his only option would be to wait until the blackmailer did play his demand card. There was bound to be one eventually as he suspected his tormentor was providing himself with further sport by making him wait to learn what his demand turned out to be. He would just have to bear his soul in patience till his tormentor got bored and made his demand. He would then see then if he could meet it.
He now rather regretted having given Abra carte blanch to redecorate the flat. The makeover had put a serious dent in his limited savings. He could only hope that the blackmailer's demands, when they did finally arrive, weren't beyond his means to meet. Because if they were, he suspected that Abra's previous calm acceptance of his foolish behaviour in April might just change to something less calm and restrained.
Chapter Sixteen
To Rafferty's relief, when he and Llewellyn spoke to the long-standing neighbours of the Jones' family, it was to discover that the Annemarie Jones who had lived at the old family address in Mercers' Lane, behind East Hill, had indeed gone on to become a nun. It had been the talk of the neighbourhood at the time, as Mrs Smithson, the elderly woman who still lived in the next door terrace confirmed once the three of them were seated round her kitchen table, the tea had been poured and Rafferty had led up to this question.
‘I must say, I didn't expect her to go through with it,’ Mrs Smithson told them as she sipped her tea. ‘I was surprised when I heard that she was serious about it. Annemarie had always been an impetuous sort of girl, given to sudden enthusiasms. I assumed this interest in religion would be another such.’
Mrs Smithson, when questioned, admitted she knew nothing of any early pregnancy. But even given the disparity between Sister Clare's family address and the address given on Peter Bodham's birth certificate, it struck Rafferty as unlikely in the extreme that the two women weren't one and the same. And now that Mrs Smithson had confirmed that her Annemarie Jones had become a nun…
Rafferty thought it probable that Annemarie had turned to religion after giving up her baby; such a devastating loss would tend to make any young woman more seriously inclined, particularly back in 1957, the year Peter Bodham was born. At that time, the moral climate and the attitude to unmarried mothers and their illegitimate offspring was far less tolerant than it was today. Annemarie had been not quite eighteen at the time. She must have felt very alone.
Mrs Smithson told them that Sophia Ansell, the eldest of the Jones' family daughters and the one who had written to Bodham denying the family connection, had inherited the family home and had lived in it till her death.
‘It's a shame this Mrs Ansell died so recently,’ Rafferty quietly remarked to Llewellyn as he accepted a second cup of tea from Mrs Smithson. ‘If we could have spoken to her we might have been able to get her to tell us more about the family.’
Although Mrs Smithson was certainly in her eighties, there was clearly nothing wrong with her hearing. For she gave him a curious look and carefully replaced the brown earthenware teapot on the table before she said, ‘But surely you know there was a third sister?’
‘A third sister? No,’ Rafferty admitted, ‘we didn't know.’
‘Well, there was. Still is, come to that. If you want to know more about the family, you can always speak to Rosalind. Rosalind Wilson, Rosalind Jones as was. She's still alive. I even have her address.‘
Slowly, Rafferty lowered his tea cup to its saucer.
Like her late sister, Rosalind Wilson was as adamant in the spoken word as Sophia Ansell had been in the written, that Annemarie had not given birth to an illegitimate child and was certainly not Peter Bodham's natural mother. Only she was more verbose in her denials.
Less laid-back in her entertaining that Mrs Smithson, Mrs Wilson had chosen to entertain them in her lounge rather than her kitchen. Her house was semi-detached, but of the older, more roomy sort than the cubby-holes that modern builders erected. Unlike the friendly and gossipy older woman, she didn't offer to make them tea.
Perhaps, Rafferty thought, after he had explained the reason for their visit, her natural affront that he should imply the stigma of illegitimacy applied to a member of her family, was sufficient to remove the basic social graces. Or perhaps she just didn't like entertaining policemen in her home. The way Rosalind Wilson sat, stiff-backed in her armchair, wearing an outraged expression, seemed to confirm this possibility.
‘I assure you, inspector, my sister, Annemarie, did not give birth to an illegitimate baby as a young woman. The very idea.’
Clearly, Mrs Wilson was of the mind-set that such things might happen to other women's sisters, but they certainly did not happen to her
s.
Perhaps she thought she had been a bit too vehement in her rejection of the idea, because now she softened and provided a more reasoned argument. ‘Don't you think I would have known if she had? How could I not? We lived in the same house. Shared the same bedroom even. I admit we weren't close – she was always closer to our elder sister, Sophia – but we were sisters. Why anyone would want to tell you such wicked lies when Annemarie's been dead for thirty years, I can't imagine. But when I find out who they are, they'll get the stiff end of my tongue.’
Rafferty studied Rosalind Wilson, from her neatly French-pleated subtly red-tinted hair to the stylish, tailored trousers and well-cut linen top. He got the impression that, after his phone call arranging their visit, she had dressed so smartly to make them understand that she was a respectable woman from a respectable family. He also got another impression: that the stiff end of her tongue would be very stiff indeed.
He admitted to himself that she seemed unshakeable in her conviction, even genuinely sincere in what she was saying. But during their conversation she had not only revealed herself to be an extremely garrulous woman, who would use ten words where three would suffice, she had also admitted that, at fifty nine, she was the youngest of the three Jones sisters. Seven years younger than Annemarie the middle sibling, she had admitted she and Annemarie hadn't been close, so it was quite possible that she would have been kept in ignorance of Annemarie's teenage shame.
Many young girls at the time, pregnant with illegitimate babies, had been packed off to distant aunts, cousins or whatever to await the birth, long before any pregnancy would be visible. Some, as Llewellyn had said, had even ended up in the old county asylums, it being a prevalent belief back then that young women who became pregnant out of wedlock were mentally below par, not to say degenerate and needed locking up.
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