That evening, as on so many nights, Rafferty sat alone in his flat. He was in a maudlin’ mood as he brooded over several nightcap glasses of Jameson's. How many others were, like himself, he wondered, sitting alone and lonely right now?
Was Ralph Dryden one of them? Strange to think he might be sharing the solitary midnight hour with the property developer.
Loneliness, as he had discovered, made people especially vulnerable; highflying career women — and men – who had no one to go home to as well as pretty young women like Jenny and Estelle. Why else would they have joined a dating agency?
How many of them lacked friendly neighbours who took an interest or a close-knit family such as he had? Admittedly, his family as often caused him grief as gave him pleasure or support, but at least they were there.
Community was mostly a forgotten concept, he informed the television newscaster with a sweep of his arm that wastefully distributed whiskey over the carpet. How many like him, he demanded of the Anglian newsreader, were forced to have one-sided conversations with the one-eyed and self-absorbed friend in the corner of the room? Solitary lives encouraged lonely people into dangerous waters where sharks – and worse basked while they awaited their prey.
The dating of strangers was an everyday occurrence. Local papers, Sunday papers, internet sites, all had their columns of sad people striving to make themselves sound appealing; it was what had put him off going that route. Dating agencies provided a service from strangers to introduce strangers to other strangers. And some of these strangers were – as this Lonely Hearts case proved – very strange indeed...
Given such brooding melancholy, it wasn't surprising that when he finally stumbled his way to bed that Rafferty had another nightmare; one of the worst yet. The pictures in his head had been so vivid, the battered and slashed bodies of the two victims so bloodily graphic, that, already worried about his fading memory of both party nights, he had begun to wonder if he had killed the two girls and was in a state of denial. As well as the headaches and nightmares from which he woke sweat-drenched and with the shakes, he'd been having the occasional blackout when he'd come to and find a mug of tea beside him that he couldn't remember making and food in the fridge which he couldn't remember buying. He wondered if he was going mad. Because worst of all, in his nightmares, the face of the killer was now his own.
He sat up and turned on the bedside light. And as he stared into the room's corners where the light didn't reach, he worried again that it had been Nigel, his alter ego, who had been the last person to see both girls alive. The thought was preying on his mind more and more. The blackouts made him realize he could no longer remember where he had been around the time of the girls’ murders – had he been the one to follow Jenny to the Cranstons’ lonely car park and kill her? His previous recollection of saying goodbye to Estelle had vanished also. It was strange that he could remember, if vaguely, earlier episodes of both evenings yet now could no longer remember these crucial times. It was almost as if his mind was protecting him from knowledge he would rather not have.
He broke into a cold sweat as he asked himself, could I have killed them? Could that, rather than the high-minded, almost knightly desire to avenge the two victims, be the real reason why he was so protective of his secret and his cousin and was doing his damndest to divert suspicion?
It was true what he had told Llewellyn; he had been getting a lot of headaches. He had put them down to wearing his father's spectacles as the headaches hadn't started till he had begun to wear them. But he now wondered if the main cause of these headaches wasn't the bang on the head he had mentioned to Llewellyn? Funnily enough, he remembered telling Llewellyn that the bang on the head had happened before the murders, while Llewellyn was still on honeymoon. But was that true? Or was his previous conviction that this was so simply another example of his mind's subconsciously-protective games? But whatever explanation was the right one, it was certain that now he could no longer recall precisely when it had happened.
Between his headaches and his increasingly wakeful nights, his recollection of so much was becoming confused. He would have made an appointment with his doctor if it hadn't been for the murders. Now, with the episodes of amnesia, he was scared what he might reveal during an examination.
He didn't know how much longer he could keep up the twin penances of this investigation and his own sorry deceptions. Sometimes, all the lies and evasions sickened him. Once or twice he'd felt on the verge of confessing all to Llewellyn. The only thing that stopped him was the belief, deep in his soul, that in spite of his doubts, his real fears and his nightmares, he was guilty of nothing worse than being an unlucky fool. It was only after he awoke from yet another nightmare that the doubts and fears began again and he recalled the insistence of psychologists that we were all capable of murder…
Suddenly, desperately afraid, anxious to drown out such thoughts, Rafferty threw back the bedcovers, crossed to the living room and turned the TV back on.
Against his better judgement and desire, he dropped off to sleep again, stretched out on the settee. But it was a blessedly dreamless sleep. He woke late, feeling dazed and sluggish. Somehow, he dragged himself into work, accompanied by the thought that a few short weeks ago all he had to worry about – well apart from his failure to get to grips with another murder case – was the suit Llewellyn intended to wear at his wedding. It seemed pretty small beer now.
But Rafferty, who always thought of himself as a pessimist with an optimist ever striving to break free, let the optimist have a fleeting glimpse of the open prison door with the reminder that he had got out of that problem okay in the end – before Superintendent Bradley arrived in his office like a man-o-war in full battle array and proceeded to blast the optimist's trapdoor to freedom with salvoes of fault-finding.
‘You're expected to be an efficient manager of manpower, Rafferty,’ he told him. ‘It's our ultimate resource. Yet now I find you've been squandering it as if it cost nowt, on an endless round of unnecessarily repeated interviews. How many times does a so-called witness have to write a statement saying they saw bugger all before you're satisfied? It can't go on, I'll tell you now. I'm a Yorkshireman and believe in plain-speaking, as you know.’
Rafferty did know. He could take a fair guess at what came next, too. ‘What will Region say?’ Rafferty muttered to himself seconds before Bradley.
‘What will Regions say about such a waste of resources?’ Bradley was visibly palpitating at the thought. ‘I want some results, Rafferty. I don't want to be forced to ask for further funding when you've carelessly frittered away what you had; it reflects too badly on me – us. Just give me some results man, that's all I ask. I know you pushed for us to go the DNA route on those party guests. But I don't want to do that unless I have to, it's bloody expensive. Anyway, it shouldn't be necessary if you were conducting the investigation in a competent manner. Detectives detect, Rafferty. At least they did in my young day. We didn't need all this new-fangled assistance to help us find our man. Just do the job you're paid to do. You know I'll back you to the hilt and beyond if you do.’
And pigs might fly, thought Rafferty as the optimist within pulled his squashed fingers from the trapdoor and with a quiet whimper, nursed their pulsating ache against his chest. But not a plain-speaking Yorkshire porker like you, he mouthed after the door-banging superintendent.
In search of sympathy, Rafferty went to the Lonely Hearts Incident Room.
He was aware he looked rough, his eyes bloodshot, the skin beneath them deeply marked with fatigue; the several curious glances his appearance attracted from the team were deeply worrying. Worried that during each absence from the station something revealing might be discovered, each time he returned to work he felt a sense of foreboding as he waited for all hell to break loose.
Had something been discovered overnight or even before his late arrival? Had Smales shown another piece of untimely initiative? Had Kylie Smith, Kayleigh Jenkins, or both rung in to find out why he
hadn't acted on their alibi retractions and arrested Nigel?
Nothing was said this time at least. But Rafferty noticed that even Llewellyn was giving him concerned looks. Was Llewellyn merely worried about his physical appearance Or was he, too, beginning, like Rafferty himself, to suspect he might actually be the murderer made flesh?
Llewellyn was sharp. Though not given to listening to canteen gossip, he usually managed to keep abreast of who on the team was doing what and why.
His altered appearance, his uncharacteristically devoted study of the paperwork and his previous – until Bradley had ordered otherwise – equally unusual reluctance to leave the confines of the station unless it was to venture far from the main witnesses, would be enough for Llewellyn's head to fill with questions. He had only to consider exactly when Rafferty had changed both his appearance and his behaviour and he couldn't help but make the connection.
The dangers of such a connection being made were increased when Bill Beard popped into the Incident Room to have a word with one of the team. Beard, who had been at the station longer than anyone in the room, considered himself something of an institution – a privileged institution – and rarely stood on ceremony. He certainly didn't when he placed himself foursquare in front of the board with the identikits of ‘Nigel Blythe’ pinned to it and observed, in front of the entire team, that the photo-fits looked a bit – no, quite a lot – like Rafferty.
If he was expecting some laddish response from Rafferty he was disappointed. For Rafferty was struck dumb. Worse, all the heads in the room swivelled, first to study the photo-fit and then to study Rafferty.
The worst of it was Rafferty knew he hadn't reacted naturally. At any other time, on any other case, he'd have made a joke about his many criminal forebears who had kept both the hangman and the crew of Australian-bound prison ships in full employment. But this time he'd just stood there not saying a word, with his easily-read features doubtless proclaiming guilt from every pore.
Everyone in the Incident Room went strangely quiet after that. Rafferty, desperate to get away from eyes that, after studying him curiously, now seemed to his guilty conscience to be doing their best to avoid meeting his gaze, hurriedly handed over to Llewellyn and left the room.
In the solitude of a cubicle in the Gents’ toilets, Rafferty convinced himself that several pairs of those eyes had looked at him as if they were reassessing his reason for his recently-altered appearance. He had, when he had first adopted the disguise and confounded such intimates as his Ma, Llewellyn and Maureen, congratulated himself on the success of his altered looks. Now it occurred to him that if – when Llewellyn or one of the smarter officers on the squad proved dogged enough to trace his family connection to Nigel, they might just look at him and his disguise and come up with the old two plus two answer.
And as he sat, staring at the biro and knife-cut comments and jokes on the grimy walls, he admitted his own surprise that his deception hadn't been discovered long since. Surely, he thought, by now Llewellyn had mentioned the name of Nigel Blythe to Maureen and heard her astonished response? But if he had, Llewellyn had said nothing to Rafferty. The suspense, the strain of waiting to be found out, was getting to him. He was overcome with the desire to remain locked in his little hermit's cell in the Gents’ till it all, somehow, went away.
But after half-an-hour's brooding solitude, Rafferty knew that wasn't going to happen. If it went away it would only be because he made it do so. But at least his lengthy lavatory-languish had given him some respite and time to engage in a game of ‘What If?’ which resulted in the tiniest oddity about the case forcing itself from subconscious hibernation into the half-light of his dim cubicle.
It had been the gossip-loving Lancelot Bliss, he thought, who had made the comment that was currently tickling Rafferty's curiosity. It might be nothing, of course. Probably was. Even so, it was the first lead he'd had. Maybe Bliss would be able to enlighten him further. He seemed to know everything else about all those with a connection to the dating agency.
Rafferty felt a shiver run through his body. And knew it was the first stirrings of hope. He hurriedly left the toilet and made his way to his office where he flicked through the list of the party attendees and found Lance Bliss's phone number.
In the way of such things, that one oddity had reminded him of another. The two of them added up to one very interesting pointer to guilt. Mercifully, it wasn't pointing at him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Unfortunately, Lancelot Bliss seemed to have become elusive. After trying the doctor's consulting rooms and learning it was one of his studio days, Rafferty obtained the studio number. But Bliss, busy recording his TV show, was unable to come to the phone. Rafferty left a message, but when forty minutes later, Bliss still hadn't got back to him he rang the studio again only to learn that Bliss had left. Next he tried the doctor's mobile, but it was turned off. His medical secretary told him Bliss wasn't expected in at all.
And although he rang the mobile number repeatedly throughout the rest of the day, Bliss failed to respond. Surely, a doctor like Bliss would make certain he could be contacted at all times? So why was he so determinedly out of reach now?
After leaving messages at all the locations at which he thought Bliss might turn up, he put the man from his mind. He could do no more about him for the moment. He had left Llewellyn in charge of the Incident Room and now Rafferty decided to remain quietly in his office, hoping that since his faulty memory had released one piece of information, others would follow.
But further pieces of information proved as elusive as Bliss. In the end, he decided to stop badgering his mind and wait for it to throw up facts when it was ready.
By the end of the day he had read the latest reports in between ringing Bliss, who remained as untraceable as any other titbits of memory.
Rafferty remembered he was expected at his ma's that evening. He'd promised to do a bit of weeding and some late spring pruning. He considered putting her off, but perhaps some physical work would free up his reluctant brain. Besides, he knew, if he didn't go, he would only sit brooding at home into the early hours, allowing his hopes to rise that he might be on the way to solving the case – and all on the basis of a couple of scraps of remembered conversation which might turn out to be of no importance at all. And might even – given his shaky recall – not even be accurately remembered.
His ma looked him up and down when he arrived. ‘Whatever have you been doing to yourself?’ she asked. ‘You look like something the cat dragged in.’
‘I've not been sleeping well,’ Rafferty admitted.
‘It's this unsettled life you lead, Joseph, all this dashing off chasing murderers and interrogating practiced liars can't be good for a person. A man needs some stability, some certainty in his day-to-day affairs. I don't suppose you've been eating properly either?’
Rafferty, who had hardly been eating at all, though he'd been drinking plenty, was about to deny this, anticipating she would use any such admission to arm her insistence that what he needed was a wife.
But to his surprise, she said nothing of the sort. Instead, she made him sit down by the fire and wouldn't hear of him tackling her garden until he'd had an hour's rest, a cup of tea and a sandwich. She didn't torment him with questions, either, but let him sit quietly while she got on with her knitting.
With all his troubles, Rafferty had almost forgotten ma's first great-grandchild was due in a few months. But the rapidly-growing little lemon cardigan dangling from his ma's knitting needles reminded him. It was a shock to realize that young Gemma's baby would make him a Great-Uncle and elevate him to the generation that was supposed to set an example, not turn into a signpost showing the way to Folly Road.
It gave him something else to think about during the two hours he spent on the garden, pruning, weeding, and generally doing the heavy work that his ma was no longer able to manage.
An inquisitive blackbird flew down while he was working and stared at Rafferty from a di
stance of two feet, his head on one side as if to enquire what Rafferty was doing in his garden.
‘I suppose you want me to find you some worms?’ Rafferty asked it. The blackbird didn't deny it, so Rafferty dug his spade into the soil of the shrub border. He struck one of the slug baits his ma had dotted around the garden. Filled with beer, her baited jam-jar trap had worked a treat; it contained two bloated and very drunken slugs. He eased them out, whacked them with a spade and tossed them towards the blackbird, who bobbed his head as if in thanks, seized one of the fat slugs and flew off.
Half-an-hour later, Rafferty eased his aching muscles and stood back to admire his efforts. The garden looked good and he felt pleasantly tired after his exertions. He put the tools away, washed and returned to the living room, where he sat down and prepared to let his ma spoil him. Yes, he said, he was more than willing to stay for a bit of home cooked supper. Anticipating his arrival, his ma had shopped for and cooked one of his favourite meals: steak and kidney pie with more vegetables than he could eat, with apple crumble and custard to follow. Although he had intended going home after the meal, instead, pleasantly full, he sat down and gave his digestive system a chance to work. And as he watched a film on TV with his ma, a curious thought sidled into his brain.
At first, he doubted the conclusion the thought brought him to, but when he put it together with the other scraps he had earlier recalled, the more it seemed to him that he might be on to something at last, something tangible.
Though the possibility excited him, it couldn't fight the heavy meal or the mental, physical and emotional tiredness and he dosed off. To his horror, when he woke from the midst of another nightmare, it was to find his ma staring at him.
‘Whatever's wrong, Joseph? You were screaming out something that sounded like, ‘My God, the blood, the blood. What have I done?’ She sat beside him on the sofa and asked plaintively, ‘What have you done? I know something's badly wrong.’
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