When Anthony Rathe Investigates

by Matthew Booth

  “Exactly, in the hope of the possibility of renewed business between them,” said Rathe, turning back to Shelly. “Again, the clue came from Carla Malone. She mentioned that she could find a voice… my voice… attractive on the phone. It made me think. The phone naturally distorts a voice to a small degree. If you disguise it as well… ”

  “It wasn’t a young kid,” Cook said. “It was a woman. You.”

  She nodded, the fight extinguished, the glass of her façade shattered. “I knew Harry wouldn’t miss the chance. Why would he? He’d wanted to go into business with Lovett for months. And when Lovett denied fixing up the meeting, I was sure people would think Mack was lying about where he was.”

  “Which they did,” confessed Cook.

  Rathe was still holding Shelly by the shoulder. “What did you use? A knife from here?”

  “I bought one. Standard kitchen knife.” Now she did turn to face him. “I killed them both, Mr Rathe. That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it? That’s the truth you want to hear because you think it’ll make me seem less guilty in your eyes. As if confessing it will somehow wash away the fact of it.”

  Rathe shook his head. “No, Shelly. I want you to confess it because it’s the right thing to do. Because, although Mack deserves prison, he doesn’t deserve it for something he didn’t do. That’s not how it can be allowed to work. If we let it work like that, we’re no better than the people we want to see put away. So, no, that’s not why I want you to confess. I want you to confess because it’s the only decent thing to do now. Because we have to show people that the right way can work. You have to show that to Danny. Lenny only ever showed your son how to live the wrong way. If you don’t confess now, you’re doing exactly the same thing. But if you tell Danny the truth and you accept what that truth means for you personally, you can teach your son a better lesson than any amount of murder or retribution can.”

  She smiled at him. Slowly, she removed his hand from her shoulder, raising her own palm to his cheek. “You’re so naïve, Mr Rathe.”

  He smiled back. “Perhaps. But I can live with that, because I think I’m learning something else all over again.”

  “Such as?”

  His dark eyes closed for the smallest fraction of a second. “Hope.”

  It was some moments after that before she turned to face Cook. The detective had been staring at his shoes, unsure where else he should look, but now, sensing her eyes on him, he raised his gaze to her.

  “Inspector Cook,” she said. “I’m ready to confess now.”

  * * *

  As he had expected, Rathe found Kathy Marsden at her son’s grave.

  The morning was crisp, the air chill but not hostile, and the skies showed no threat of rain. The cemetery was deserted and it struck him once more how peaceful he found it. There was a serenity, a respectful silence about it which he found curiously comforting, as though he might only feel at ease with the dead. These thoughts hung heavily in his head, so that his chin sank to his breast as he approached her. She was on her knees, cleaning away dead leaves from Kevin’s headstone, replacing the decaying flowers with fresh sprays of colour. She did not hear him walk up behind her and he startled her as he knelt down beside her and handed over his own small bunch of flora.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to alarm you.”

  She shook her head. “Too engrossed in what I was doing, Mr Rathe. Nothing for you to apologise for. They’re lovely, but you needn’t have,” she added, taking the flowers from him.

  “I know. I wanted to.” The silence which he allowed to fall seemed, to him, rather awkward and he broke it as swiftly as he felt able. “I’d hoped to find you here anyway. I wanted to tell you something. I think it’s important, and I wanted you to know.”

  “Oh?” She remained busy with her task, not raising her head to look at him.

  “I helped a friend this week. The same policeman I told you about before.”

  “He’s a friend now, is he?” she said. He thought she was mocking him, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “I don’t know.” He smiled. “I think so. In a way. But what I wanted to say was that I helped him find the truth about a crime. A crime somebody had committed and blamed an innocent man for. Well, when I say innocent… Of this particular crime, he was innocent. Am I making sense?”

  Now, she did raise her head and her wind-rouged cheeks spread as she smiled. “Perfect sense, Mr Rathe. And it’s good. What you’ve done, it is good.”

  “The man we cleared was evil, though. He was a killer, a drug dealer, a violent monster. But he hadn’t done what he was convicted of. My friend argued that justice should be blind and I agreed.”

  “And?” she said, as she rose to her knees.

  “Were we right?”

  Kathy Marsden removed her green-fingered gloves and pushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “Your eyes look brighter, Mr Rathe, than when I last saw you. How are you sleeping?”

  He frowned, tilting his head to one side. “Fairly well.”

  “And how would you have slept if this villain you’re talking about had rotted in prison, or died in prison, and you knew he was innocent but did nothing about it?” She waited for an answer but, in reply, he looked at his shoes. “How did you feel about Kevin, for instance?”

  “Point taken.”

  She placed a hand on his breast. “What you feel in there is what determines if you are right. And you must learn to trust it, instead of allowing your head to cripple you with blame and doubt. I say this to you every time we meet.”

  “Perhaps I need constant re-assurance.”

  She laughed, louder than he had expected. “In that at least, Mr Rathe, you are not an isolated soul.”

  She allowed him to walk her back to her car. He helped her pack away the brushes and tools she had used to plant the new flowers and clear away the old. The bag of dead leaves and broken stems he placed in the waste bin provided, whilst she changed her Wellingtons for her comfortable, flat heeled shoes.

  “What do you have planned for the rest of the day?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Nothing. A long walk perhaps. Enjoy the air.”

  “You need a hobby, Mr Rathe. A man should have a hobby if he cannot find a wife.”

  Rathe shook his head, smiling. “I can’t imagine me being successful with either, somehow.”

  But his thoughts went back to Shelly Voss. He wondered what her life, and his, might have been like if she had met him twenty years ago, as she herself had asked. He wondered why he had wanted her to keep her palm on his cheek, to keep his own hand on her shoulder, to keep her close beside him. In that brief moment, he wondered many things, but he knew that they would only ever be intangible alternatives to his reality, moment of truth in a parallel world but nothing more than daydreams in this one. Goodbyes said, he watched Kathy Marsden drive away. He had not asked her what she was doing that afternoon and, almost as soon as he realised it, he felt rude and selfish.

  He turned his head and looked down at Kevin Marsden’s grave. His mind wandered through the corridors of his memory’s prison, peering in through the open cell doors of recollection and regrets. A vivid image of Shelly Voss came into his mind, but her face was only partially visible through the bars of the jail he imagined her in. Kathy Marsden had said he had done the right thing; perhaps he had. But the associated pain was harder than ever to bear. He took one more look at Kevin Marsden’s grave before he turned away and began to walk.

  Ties that Bind

  Rathe had begun to think of excuses to leave the party and go home when the woman began to talk to him. He had seen her throughout the evening, her lowered eyes and clenched fingers around the wine glass seeming to echo Rathe’s own discomfort at his presence there, but she had made no previous attempt to attract his attention until she approached him as he stood in the corner of the room, forming half-hearted pretexts to escape.

  Rathe recognised that he was being churlish. After all, the invit
ation from Cook hadn’t been offered with any trace of insistence that Rathe accept, which meant he might easily have declined without causing offence, and so the fact that he had accepted surely meant that his present discomfort was, if anything, more of his own making than Cook’s. The invitation had been offered in an almost perfunctory phone call the previous evening, in itself an unusual occurrence, and Rathe had known at once from Cook’s hesitant voice that the call had been deferred several times during the course of the day.

  “It’s my wife’s idea, this,” Cook had said. “To invite you. I said you’d probably have something else on. Some opera you had to go to or something. Some art gallery you wanted to visit.”

  Rathe had smiled to himself. “When have I ever said I was interested in opera?”

  “Took it for granted.” Cook’s shrug of the shoulders had been perceptible even over the phone. “Can’t see you being into proper music.”

  “And your wife thought to ask me to come?”

  “She suggested it. It’s her birthday, so I suppose she can invite who she likes, right?”

  Rathe had grinned once more. “I won’t come if it’ll embarrass you.”

  “No skin off my nose, either way. All I did was promise Andrea I’d ask you, which I’ve done. You do what you want.”

  “Where and when?”

  Cook had paused. “You mean you’re going to come?”

  And it had been then that Rathe had forgotten the genial indifference between them during the call, displaced now with a stark question of fact about whether he would attend go or not. It had become now a formal decision to make rather than the simple catalyst for gentle mockery at Cook’s expense. Which meant that when faced with it, despite himself, Rathe had felt unable to decline without seeming discourteous.

  The evening had not been as tortuous as he had feared. He had been to more uncomfortable gatherings in his time. He recalled the endless Chambers functions he had been forced to attend, listening to sycophantic solicitors fawning over their latest victories whilst the egos of the barristers concerned were oiled with those platitudes of admiration. Similarly, he had watched as the clerks had poured wine and whisky down the throats of prospective new clients or rival barristers prime for poaching and he could remember listening to the banter between them which was no better than that between any used car salesman and his latest gullible customer. Those occasions had never sat easily with Rathe, even when he was on the receiving end of the plaudits. In those days, he had relished the applause of both his peers and those who had instructed him, but the forum of the networking drinks events had never appealed to him.

  So, despite his unease, Cook’s party was unlike any of those business evenings which Rathe had endured in his time. There were perhaps twenty people in attendance, none of whom Rathe knew, all scattered throughout the Cooks’ home and spilling out into the back garden when necessary. It was a cool evening, not too cold to prohibit any time to be spent outside, and Rathe himself had welcomed the cool breath of the fresh air when he had stepped onto the patio earlier in the evening. The house itself was larger than he had imagined and he wondered whether it was an innate snobbery inside himself, of which he should be ashamed perhaps, which had presumed that a policeman of detective inspector rank might only have been able to afford a small, modest house. It was a neat home, tastefully decorated, although Rathe assumed that the furnishings and the style were Mrs Cook’s work rather than her husband’s. It seemed a house which was proud of its feminine touch and there was no sense of the moral dirt through which Rathe knew Cook walked on a daily basis, as though the tidiness and the gentility of the house were a refuge from, or an antidote to, that cruel and lethal world which Cook’s job demanded he inhabit. It was a home which spoke of hard work and self-sacrifice, the dwelling of people who had grown up with very little but who had striven to have better in their adult lives. There were no silver spoons in the Cook household, but there was a fine dinner service which had been bought and paid for by grit and determination to succeed. Rathe had thought back to his own upbringing, to the privileges he had enjoyed and the luxuries which his background had afforded to him, and he had felt at once that something important in his own life had been missing as a result, something which Cook knew and understood but which he, Rathe, might only ever be able to see in others.

  He had been introduced to Andrea Cook upon his arrival, having handed over the bottles of Merlot and Pinot Grigio to Cook. He hadn’t been sure what food was being served, he had explained, so he had thought it best to take no chances. Andrea herself was impressed by his thoughtfulness and she had smiled at him with what he took to be genuine gratitude. She was attractive, understated but natural, with dark hair which he suspected she had had styled for the occasion. She had shaken his hand with warmth and showed him into the living room so that he could help himself to a drink.

  “Terry’s talked about you a fair bit over the last couple of months,” she had said, “so I thought tonight would be a good excuse to meet you.”

  Rathe had been embarrassed by her revelation and, as he looked over to Cook, he had seen his discomfort reflected in the detective’s face. “It’s very kind of you to invite me, Mrs Cook.”

  “Andrea, please. And you’re… ?”

  “Anthony.”

  “Like Hopkins,” she had sighed. “One of my favourites. Such a lovely voice he’s got ‒ and so have you. It’s so… ”

  But the words had failed her, so Cook had taken advantage, thrusting the bottles of wine in her hands. “Let the man get a drink, Andrea, and you go sort these out, eh?”

  She had bustled off with a coy smile back at Rathe and a cold glare at her husband. Cook had waited until she was out of the room before he had opened a bottle of lager and handed it across to Rathe. “I’m sorry about her. Drank a bit of fizz before everyone turned up. Always sends her stupid.”

  “It’s her birthday,” Rathe had replied. “Let her be stupid.”

  Cook had smiled, drinking some of his own beer. “You can come and deal with her in the morning, then, when she can’t get out of bed and wails that she’s never drinking again.”

  It was thoughts like these which had been replaying in Rathe’s head when he began to think it was time to go home. He had not seen Cook for some time, the duties of host extending beyond private conversations with Rathe, and he had not made any special effort to cultivate new acquaintances. He was not socially inclined to do so at the best of times and he felt certain that any connections he might make that evening would be transient only. Rathe had no need or desire for such passing friendships. At last, he had decided that he would have one more drink and then be on his way. It was almost as soon as this decision was made and the final bottle opened that he saw the woman approaching him.

  She was perhaps Cook’s age, certainly no older, but her dark hair was prematurely grey and her blue eyes heavy with unease. Rathe could never have thought her attractive: she was too thin, her features too stern, her lips too compressed, her stare too wild for such a consideration, but he had a distinct impression of vulnerability which he felt it was impossible to ignore. She drained her glass of wine as soon as she was beside him and she began to turn the empty glass in her hand. It took a moment for Rathe to grasp her unspoken invitation.

  “Allow me,” he said at last, pouring more wine into her glass.

  “Thank you.” She waited for him to stop pouring and then sipped at the drink. He doubted she wanted it in all truthfulness. “You look about as happy to be here as I am.”

  Rathe smiled. “I’m not very good at parties.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around. You’ve not been to one of Andrea’s things before, have you?”

  He shook his head. “First time.”

  “I thought so.” She looked around the room. “You don’t know anybody here at all?”

  “Only… Terry.” It felt strange to him, using Cook’s first name, but he doubted the usual use of the surname alone would b
e appropriate.

  The woman turned to him, her eyes now blazing with a different emotion than anxiety. Rathe frowned involuntarily at the intensity of what he took to be desperation in those blue eyes, as though they were screaming silently for his help. “I hoped you’d say you knew nobody. Sometimes, you see, it makes it easier, confessing something to a stranger. Do you know what I mean? There are no preconceptions, nobody dismissing you as paranoid.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand… ”

  She closed in on him, her long fingers like talons closing around his wrist. “I want you to understand. I want someone to understand.”

  “I’m not sure I can help you, Miss… ?”

  “Elizabeth Newsome.”

  “Anthony Rathe,” he returned, by way of obligatory introduction.

  “Ask anyone here about me, Mr Rathe, and they’ll tell you I’m mad. They all think I am losing my mind. I know they talk about me behind my back and I can live with that, but only because I know what’s really happening. I know the truth.”

  Rathe had the sudden desire to be anywhere but in the Newsome woman’s company. His mind filled with places from his past, both distant and immediate – his former Chambers, the Old Bailey, his parents’ front room on Christmas morning, family holidays by Mediterranean shores, Cook’s office, the headmaster’s office, the Marsden grave, the arms of any one of the beautiful girls there had been – all of them preferable to the presence of this woman. Her fingers around his wrist were as tight as they were unwelcome and, when she spoke, he could smell the stale wine on her oppressive breath.

  “That man over there, by the window,” she was hissing. “He’s my husband. Edward.”

  Rathe followed her glare and saw a tall, austere man in his late forties, straight-backed and impressive, with luxurious black hair swept back from an intelligent brow and cold, angular features enhanced by a neatly trimmed beard. There was something sneering about his expression, an arrogance which Rathe found both irritating and distasteful. His suit was expensive but the man wore it like a uniform, as though it was a symbol of his importance rather than of his deference to elegance.