Tears now brimming in her eyes, she drained her glass. “Families have secrets. Some of them are known by everyone, some of them known only by the people directly involved. Whatever he did at university was one of the second. Only mum, dad, and Richard knew the full story.”
“But you knew some of it.”
She nodded quickly, as though the knowledge of it was her own personal sin. “I don’t know for certain. All I ever had were overheard snippets of conversation and whispers behind closed doors. I was too scared to talk about what I heard, Mr Rathe, but I know I got the gist of what my brother had done.”
Rathe’s voice lowered to match her own. Their words were barely audible over the crackling of the fire across the room. “Which was?”
She looked at him with those clear, blue eyes, but they were now blurred with fear and pain. “I think he raped and killed a girl… ”
* * *
Rathe found himself back amongst the dead.
His journey back from Oxford had been uneasy, the implications of Hilary Preece’s words making for sinister and intrusive fellow passengers. Looking back, he would realise that he could recall no details of the journey itself, although the information which Temple’s sister had given him was clearly marked out in his mind. He had called Cook, his head pounding with thoughts, and it had taken no more than a few sharp words on his part for the inspector to cut short his cynical rants.
“I don’t care right now if you think I’m interfering, inspector,” Rathe had said. “I don’t care if you want to spend your time plotting my arrest for wasting police time. I don’t care about any of it. But I do care about the fact that when he was a student, your murder victim may well have committed a serious crime himself. And I care that you don’t seem to be fussed one way or the other about that.”
The voice on the other end of the line had been drenched in suppressed venom. “I don’t give a rat’s arse what you care about, Rathe, so don’t think otherwise. But don’t ever think I don’t take my job seriously. Now, you calm down a bit, sonny, and tell me what you’re on about.”
And Rathe spoke, telling the whole story he had learned from Hilary Preece, ending his tale with a request that Cook find out what he could about Temple’s university life. Cook had listened, grunting once or twice, before putting the phone down with a curt assurance that he would investigate. No thanks had been given. After the call, Rathe had felt at a loose end. He tried to accumulate the knowledge he had gained, but he couldn’t separate it all into anything resembling a coherent whole. In the end, he had walked back to the dead.
He saw Kathy Marsden at the graveside of her son, tending to the flowers which she had replaced just before he arrived. He approached her quietly, his hands in his pockets, but she heard his footsteps all the same, turning round to face him as she got to her feet. Her eyes were saddened and her complexion pale, but he had the sense that she was as upset at seeing him as she was at the tragedy which had bound them together.
“You’ve still not forgiven yourself, Mr Rathe,” she said.
“I don’t think so.” He looked down at the flowers. They were a splash of colour amongst the cold stones of the cemetery. “I’ve been trying to help a friend. I don’t know whether I’ve been trying to ease my conscience by doing it. If I have, would that make me selfish?”
“I don’t think selfishness is the problem,” she replied. “I think it is something worse.”
“Guilt?”
“Partly. But isn’t your guilt mixed with self-pity?”
Her words struck him as brutal, but perhaps it was only the bitter sting of honesty. The church loomed in the distance, so similar in structure to St Augustine’s but smaller, and free from its association with murder. “I want to make amends. That’s all. To you, to Kevin. I just don’t know how to do it.”
“Kevin doesn’t need you to make amends.” She caressed the top of her son’s gravestone. “And nor do I. It would be easy for me to blame you, Mr Rathe, because blaming my son for his own death is so very difficult to do. But he killed himself, he took himself away from me. If there is blame, isn’t it on Kevin himself?”
“Do you believe that?”
She sighed. “I don’t know what I believe. But what I know for sure is that you must learn to stand back from your own conscience. You must forgive yourself. Look, at the church over there, Mr Rathe. Isn’t this the place for you to forgive yourself?”
In reply, she was greeted with silence. He did not speak for some moments and, when she looked at him to invite some response, she saw those dark eyes fixed ahead of them both. She had grown used to his expression of regret, so that she was taken aback when she saw the alert and exultant glare with which he had fixed upon the church. His lips had parted and his breathing had become shallow. She repeated his name several times, but he seemed not to hear her. At last, he turned to her, his eyes still widened in what she thought was nothing short of triumph.
“Forgiveness,” he murmured. “Asking for forgiveness… ”
Kathy Marsden shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
His mobile chirped into life before he could answer. “Cook?”
The inspector’s voice on the other end of the connection had lost some of its acidity towards Rathe. “I’ve got Temple’s university record right in front of me. Confirms the sister’s story. There was some trouble with a girl, but it looks as though it never went any further than an internal investigation. He was kicked out, but no criminal charges were brought.”
Rathe was nodding. “No. That’s the point, there wouldn’t be. I’m starting to understand now.”
“I think I might know who the girl was too, Rathe,” said Cook, flatly.
“So do I. Was she in Temple’s year by any chance?”
“Started on the same day. Same course.”
Rathe closed his eyes. So, he had reached the end at last and the truth was known. “I’ll see you in ten minutes. We should finish this together.”
“Fine by me.” And the call was terminated.
Kathy Marsden had listened to Rathe’s side of the conversation with increasing confusion. “What’s happening, Mr Rathe? What did all that mean?”
Rathe turned to face here, with what might have been salvation in his eyes. “Murder, Mrs Marsden. It means murder, committed in the face of absolution.”
* * *
“I hadn’t expected to see you again so soon, Mr Rathe.”
“Nor had I.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“Inspector Cook, a drink?”
“Too early.”
“And you’re on duty, of course.”
“No, just too early.”
They were standing in Lanyon’s study. The barrister was standing behind his desk, his various legal papers scattered across the top of it, a collection of bankers boxes and lever arch files dotted across the floor. A working lawyer’s study. To Rathe, who was standing in the centre of the room with his hands behind his back, it brought back memories of the professional life he had left in ruins. The recollection was unwelcome and uncomfortable. Cook was standing to one side, leaning against a fitted bookcase, one ankle crossed over the other, his fingers playing with a manilla file which he held in his hands, those crucial details of Temple’s career at university hidden within it.
“Am I to assume that you are here in a professional capacity, Inspector Cook?” Lanyon asked now.
Cook grinned. “I’m here for the entertainment, Mr Lanyon. This is Mr Rathe’s show.”
Lanyon looked across at the younger man. “I’m afraid I’m lost.”
Rathe walked over to the desk and took up a silver framed photograph of a young woman, no more than eighteen years of age in the image itself, the face of a woman with only a short time to live. There was no indication in those pale blue eyes and the brightness of the smile of the horrors which were to befall her, no suggestion in her blithe expression of the violence which was
to come her way.
“Your daughter,” said Rathe.
“I told you, I don’t like to talk about her.” Lanyon’s voice was flint.
“You told me that the dinner party you held the other week was for her fortieth. That would make her of a similar age to Richard Temple.”
“Would it?” Lanyon had no intention that his words should be taken as a genuine question.
Rathe replaced the photograph on the desk and fixed his gaze on Lanyon. “From the very beginning, I couldn’t understand why Temple had been murdered in a church. I asked Cook the question: whoever murdered Temple, whether that was Nicholas Barclay or someone else, could have done it anywhere. So why in the church, specifically? You mentioned to me that you thought Temple had undergone some change of personality, after his argument at your party with Barclay. In fact, he had experienced some sort of religious conversion.”
Lanyon held out his hands in acceptance of this explanation, sitting down as he did so. “There you are, then. If he’d found God, it’s perfectly natural he should be in a church.”
Rathe nodded. “But why would his killer be in the church? True, he might have followed Temple there, like Barclay had done, but I tend to think he didn’t.”
“Why?”
“You said it yourself,” Rathe smiled. “Temple was looking at your family photographs with you when Barclay approached him. After Barclay’s drunken outburst, you said Temple was restrained, disinterested in confronting Barclay and having the argument.”
“He was.” Lanyon looked across at Cook. “Does this nonsense have any point at all?”
Cook did not meet the man’s gaze. Rathe turned away from the desk as he continued to speak. “Earlier today, a friend of mine was talking to me about forgiveness, specifically seeking forgiveness in church. That reminded me of Temple’s words to you and Barclay about admitting one’s sins and seeking absolution for them.”
Lanyon scoffed. “I can see why it would.”
“That’s when the importance of the murder taking place in the church struck me. Temple was in St Augustine’s because he wanted to confess a sin. The mistake I had made was in assuming that the murderer chose the location, that somehow he had lured Temple there, possibly on account of his conversion, but I was wrong. It wasn’t the murderer but the victim who had chosen the church for an assignation. That was why Temple lit the candles, because he had arrived first and was preparing for his personal confession.” Rathe turned on his heel, facing his quarry once more. “His confession to you.”
Lanyon stared at Rathe with suppressed anger in his eyes. “You’d better be sure of what you’re saying here, Mr Rathe.”
Rathe was defiant. “I am. Positive. Temple asked to meet you in the one church to which he could gain entry in private. There, he begged you for absolution and he did it before the God he had grown to worship. Your response was to take up one of the altar candlesticks and beat his brains out of his skull.”
Lanyon’s face flushed with rage. “Get out of my house. How dare you make such an accusation without a shred of evidence?”
Rathe remained impassive. “Because it is true.”
Lanyon’s fury intensified. “I’m warning you, Rathe. Get out or I shall make steps to throw you out.”
Cook stepped forward. “I don’t think so, Mr Lanyon.”
The barrister looked from one to the other, suddenly aware that his route to the study door was blocked by the two of them. He was cornered, and his eyes grew wild at the realisation. “I refuse to listen to any more of this.”
“Tough,” snapped Cook.
“I spoke to Temple’s sister,” continued Rathe. “She told me of his peculiar attitude to women, his inability to deal with them and his fear of them. She said that his reaction to that social deficiency was to try to control women, to mould them into something he could understand. But his efforts could become violent. As they did with Adele, your daughter.”
Lanyon’s eyes remained fierce, but the tears which welled up within them were impossible to conceal. As they fell, his anger gave way to grief and he fell into his chair, sobbing, his head dropping into his hands. When he spoke once more, Rathe’s voice was softened by compassion.
“Temple’s sister thought he had raped and killed a girl. She was only half right. He had attempted to forge a relationship with Adele, when they were both at university together. But it had gone wrong, like so many of his attempts at a relationship.”
Cook opened his manilla file. “This is a complete record of Temple’s time at Lancaster University and the admission records for the year 1995, the year he started there.”
“I asked Inspector Cook to obtain them this afternoon,” Rathe explained.
Cook handed over one of the sheets. There were two damning lines of fluorescent green across the page. “I’ve highlighted two names.”
“Richard Temple and Adele Lanyon,” confirmed Rathe. “They were there at the same time, on the same course. Their paths crossed but Temple’s character and his sexual immaturity came between them. Setting in motion all this grief and violence.”
Lanyon took the page from Cook, but his face showed that he was barely registering the names he read. “She never said who it was. In all the months after it happened, she never told me his name. I don’t think she could ever bring herself to say it.”
“When Temple saw your daughter’s photograph at your party that night, he recognised her at once,” Rathe explained. “I doubt he would have said anything if it had not been for his new faith. That conversion caused a second tragedy, because it paved the way for his murder. He felt he had to confess his sin to you in order to achieve grace.”
“But all he did was get himself killed,” said Cook. “By you.”
Lanyon was shaking his head. “This sister of his thought Temple had raped and murdered my daughter, but you say she was only half right about that. Let me tell you, you’re wrong about that, Rathe. He killed Adele.”
“She killed herself,” Cook said.
“But only after what Temple had done to her,” Rathe said. The memory of Kathy Marsden’s words came back to him, the recollection of Kevin Marsden dying because of what Rathe had done to him.
Lanyon seemed not to have heard them. “I found her, lying in the bath, the water tepid, but the steam on the windows showing how hot it had been at first. It is the blood I see most vividly. Staining the water, the tiles, her arms. Ever seen the effects of a razor against someone’s wrists? All that blood she lost, all that blood I cleaned up alone… it was all on his hands.”
“And it all came back to you, those images of Adele, when Temple tried to confess what he had done.”
The anger was resurgent. “I don’t care about his God, his beliefs, his hope to cleanse his own conscience. I don’t care about it now and I didn’t then. Not even when he turned to me with tears in his eyes. All I could see what his face over my daughter’s, his sweat merging with her tears, his lust tearing apart her innocence.”
“You took no weapon with you,” murmured Rathe. “You didn’t plan to kill him, because you didn’t know what he had to say. You had no reason to connect him with what had happened to your daughter.”
Lanyon’s mind was not in the present but in the past, his eyes peering back through time to the moment of his own sin. “I don’t remember hitting him. One moment he was turning his back to face the altar as he spoke, to face his God; the next, he was lying at my feet, motionless. I felt exhausted all of a sudden. I stared at him for some seconds, I don’t know how long, and then I came to my senses. I panicked, I suppose, and wiped my fingerprints off the candlestick, desperate to be away from the place.”
There was quiet, a harsh and unpleasant denial of words. None of them could have said how long it had lasted, none of them sure what the others were thinking. In the end, with an impassive glance to Rathe, it was Cook who spoke.
“Not much more to say, is there?”
The prolonged silence which followed spoke
for itself.
* * *
“Do you feel any better?”
Rathe smiled, despite himself, unsure how best to reply. The sound of the tea being poured into his cup seemed to him to be as loud as a waterfall in some distant place of beauty. But he was in her small house, cheaply and vulgarly furnished, the distinct smell of an absent dog most prevalent in his senses. The tea was too weak, almost entirely milk and water, with only the vague suggestion of a brew of leaves. She had offered him cake, but he had refused. He was no lover of sponge and cream but, in any event, the slab of confection which she had put before him seemed too dry to be edible. He had refused with a smile which he had hoped was both gracious and apologetic.
“Not really,” he said now. “Do you think I should?”
Kathy Marsden gulped her tea, rather than sipping it. “Yes. You identified a killer whom the police might not have spotted. Doesn’t that matter?”
He looked down at the insipid brew. “Of course. I can see it does.”
“So why don’t you feel better?”
Rathe had no swift answer to that. He put the cup down on the tray and leaned back in the chair she had offered him, trying not to betray the discomfort he felt in it. “I kept thinking about something you’d said. About me not being responsible for Kevin’s death. Lanyon said the opposite about Temple. He believed – no, knew – that Temple had murdered his daughter. By extension at least.”
Kathy leaned forward towards him. “So?”
He forced himself to face her. “Why isn’t that the same as me and Kevin?”
Her expression gave him a succession of responses: empathy, anger, frustration, regret, perhaps some emotions he had never experienced and could never identify. Rathe had never been a parent and he doubted that mix of gift and curse would be given to him now. Were there some sensations only those privy to the phenomenon of parenthood could feel?
“Because it isn’t,” was the only reply she could give him. He waited for her to offer him more words of reassurance, but she did not oblige.
“I should go,” he said instead.
She walked him to the door and he stepped out onto her small driveway, suddenly becoming conscious that he might not belong here amongst the terraced houses and the small, inexpertly preened gardens, although his superciliousness seemed out of place in that specific moment.
When Anthony Rathe Investigates Page 5
