When Anthony Rathe Investigates

by Matthew Booth

  “I’m sorry, darling,” she drawled, “did we disturb you?”

  “You been crying?” asked the boy, his suspicious eyes flickering from his mother to Rathe.

  Elizabeth dabbed away whatever remained of her tears. “It’s nothing. Honestly, Sean, it’s fine.”

  “Who’s this?”

  The stranger stepped forward, holding out his hand. “Anthony Rathe. I’m a… friend of your mother’s.”

  Sean looked back to Elizabeth, ignoring Rathe’s outstretched hand. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Don’t be rude,” hissed his mother. “We’re just talking, that’s all.”

  “Dad at work?”

  “Of course he is. Where else would he be?”

  “Anywhere these days.” Sean Newsome looked back at Rathe. “Does Dad know he’s here?”

  Rathe knew that his welcome had been outstayed and he found his presence there now to be an embarrassment. He stepped forward, rubbing his hands together as though the action might wipe away the uneasiness which had overcome him. “Look, I don’t want to intrude any longer and I should let you get on with your day.”

  Elizabeth held out a hand to stop him. “Honestly, Mr Rathe, you don’t have to go.”

  “I think he does,” muttered Sean.

  “Don’t be so rude,” his mother hissed again, a flame of unease bursting onto her cheeks.

  Rathe was now at the door himself. “No, really, I do have to be going. I’ve stayed too long as it is.”

  Elizabeth followed him out of the room, leaving Sean alone in the living room, his head bowed and his fists clenched.

  “I’m so sorry about Sean,” Elizabeth said at the front door, her hand perched on the handle.

  “Don’t give it a second thought.” Rathe moved her hand away, as though he might never escape the house if he did not make his own move to do so. He had opened the door and stepped into the porch before she spoke once more.

  “Do you believe me?” she asked. “About Edward, about everything?”

  Rathe lowered his gaze to the stone steps beneath his feet, trying desperately to find a suitable answer. Did he believe her? It was difficult to be convinced, he knew that, but he retained that reasonable doubt which he had striven to demonstrate so many times in his professional career. Elizabeth Newsome might not be the paranoid mad woman people said, but she struck Rathe as being far from straightforward. He found her intense, plausible, persuasive; but, simultaneously, he found her fears hypothetical, melodramatic, and unsubstantiated. She was looking at him with those pleading eyes once more and he felt unable to give her any satisfactory answer.

  “Do you believe me, about Edward?” she asked once more, leaning against the door-frame like a defeated woman, who knew his answer without him giving it.

  Despite himself, and notwithstanding her conviction that he did not accept her fears, he looked at her in those desperate eyes and spoke words over which he had no control and from which there was no return.

  “Yes, Mrs Newsome,” Rathe declared. “I believe you.”

  * * *

  After his assurances, Elizabeth Newsome had been more than willing to give Rathe details of her husband’s place of business and mobile phone number. Arranging to meet the man had not proved as onerous as Rathe had anticipated and he wondered for a moment whether it was because Edward Newsome had no reason to be afraid of meeting Rathe or whether he was curious why a stranger was requesting a meeting at all. Newsome had simply asked what the purpose of Rathe’s request was, to which Rathe gave a suitably vague response, and what time and venue Rathe would prefer. Not wishing to jeopardise his position when Newsome had been so amenable, Rathe left the details of the meeting to him.

  “I normally have a glass of wine and a late lunch at Marcello’s,” Newsome had said. “Do you know it?”

  Rathe was well aware of the small Italian bistro off Northumberland Street, so he agreed that he would see Newsome there at two that afternoon. It was close enough in time not to seem as though Newsome were putting off the interview, but far enough away for Rathe to question what he hoped to achieve by it. Rathe doubted he could simply come out and ask the question directly and, furthermore, there was the difficulty that any question he asked might seem to be both intrusive and offensive. But, as the morning lapsed into the afternoon, Rathe decided that what was said between them was of less importance to him that the opportunity of engaging with Newsome himself and assessing the type of man he was. There was often nothing like personal experience and, as his mind lingered on the point, Rathe began to grow impatient to meet the man who he had been told was devoid of emotional responses and yet who may or may not be contemplating murder.

  Rathe was punctual for the appointment, but Newsome was already waiting outside the bistro when he arrived. The man greeted him with a smile, admittedly brief, and a handshake which was firm and authoritative. Rathe could tell at once that his suit was not bespoke but it was expensive enough to give the impression of it and the matching tie and handkerchief at least carried the suggestion of sartorial etiquette. His eyes were attentive behind the wire-framed spectacles, never once leaving Rathe’s own probing glare, but there was no warmth in them and the small, trim beard could not disguise the pursed aloofness of the mouth once that brief smile had vanished. He was shown to a table in the far corner of the restaurant without any prompting, confirmation of his regular presence there, but it did not strike Rathe as being done with any intention of exhibitionism. Any display of egotism from Edward Newsome struck Rathe as unlikely from the outset. It was simply a routine task between waiter and diner which was carried out every day of the week, whether there was company present or not.

  They ordered a Chardonnay each on Newsome’s recommendation, Rathe preferring a red wine but not wishing to insult his host, and waited for the drinks to arrive before they began to talk beyond superficial conversation about the restaurant and their previous respective visits and the contents of the menu. When the wine arrived, Newsome leaned forward in his chair and clasped his fingers together. It seemed like a natural stance for him to take, a sign that the meeting could commence now that he was ready for it to do so.

  “I’ve heard of you, Mr Rathe,” said Newsome, his voice gentle, almost feminine. “There was a time when one couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing your name somewhere in it.”

  Rathe looked anywhere but into those expressionless eyes. “It’s not a time I like remembering.”

  “No, I can imagine it isn’t. After what happened to that young man who killed himself… ”

  The reference seemed to make Kevin Marsden appear before Rathe’s eyes, as though the dead, decayed boy himself had walked in to poison the genial and sophisticated atmosphere of the restaurant. Rathe concentrated on the glass of wine, on its subtle smell of flora and the delicate taste of citrus fruit, hoping that both combined would wash away the bitter, foul stench of the unwanted memory.

  “I didn’t come here to talk about Kevin Marsden or what happened to him,” Rathe said, refusing to apologise to this man about any of the past.

  Newsome sipped some wine. “No, I dare say you didn’t, but then I can’t imagine what you did come here to talk about.”

  “I appreciate this must seem a little strange to you.”

  “I’d say that was putting it mildly.”

  Unbidden, Cook’s words about Edward Newsome came back into Rathe’s brain. Cold, he had said, difficult to get to know: Rathe could understand that point of view, even after so little time in the man’s presence. There was something odious about his quiet tone of voice, his patronising manner and cool politeness, all made the worse for those dead eyes which drifted around the room and back to Rathe’s face with a tired regularity.

  “It’s only because I believe you’re a friend of Terry and Andrea Cook that I agreed to meet you at all,” Newsome was saying. “Otherwise, I prefer to lunch alone. It’s my private time.”

  Rathe smiled, not too slyly. “Do you always
lunch alone?”

  Something in his expression captured Newsome’s attention. “I’m sorry?”

  “Don’t be,” said Rathe. “I was just asking whether it is entirely unheard of for you to have a lunch companion.”

  Newsome lowered his hands to his lap and leaned back in his chair, as though his understanding of Rathe’s implied meaning had forced him backwards. “I saw you last night talking to my wife at the Cooks’ party, did I not? I see she has been talking to you about certain matters.”

  “Is any of it true?”

  “Those matters are private, Mr Rathe. They are not your concern now and there is no reason why they should be your concern in the future.”

  Rathe drank some wine, suddenly desperate for some cleansing of the dryness of his mouth. “Your wife is in great pain, Mr Newsome, and it’s a pain you’re causing her.”

  My wife is indeed in great pain, Mr Rathe, but the root cause of her pain is not my fault.”

  “She has told me about Michelle Leverton.”

  If Newsome was surprised or unnerved by the news, he did not betray it. “She had no right to do so, since it’s private business, but as long as she has confided in a stranger, I see no reason to deny it.”

  “But you don’t think it’s any cause of pain for your wife?” Rathe pointed out, his eyes fixed on Newsome, refusing to allow the man any sanctuary from his close examination of his reactions.

  “I didn’t say that, Mr Rathe. I said that my relationship with Michelle is not the root cause of Elizabeth’s depression.”

  “I presume you’re talking about the loss of your daughter,” Rathe said, his voice softening when his eyes would not. “I’m sorry for that.”

  Newsome did not acknowledge the gesture of condolence. “You cannot take my wife at face value, Mr Rathe. Grief has twisted her point of view to such an extent that reality and fantasy are too easily blurred for her. Whatever she has confided to you is true only in her own head. I have tried to convince her of it, to make her see sense, but I’ve failed. I’ve asked her to get help, professional therapy, which I would have paid for, but she throws it back in my face. I may have fallen out of love with my wife, Mr Rathe, and you may condemn me for that, but I have not stopped caring for her and seeing her drown under the pressure of these paranoid imaginings of hers is as painful for me as it is for her.”

  It was the closest Rathe had come to having any form of sympathy for the man. He was right: finding a new love did not necessarily mean depriving all feeling for the lost one, particularly where there were children involved. Rathe was not a father, and never expected to be one, but he felt that he was empathetic enough to understand that special bond in others and he felt sensitive enough in his own self to know that such a bond might transcend almost every other emotional tie imaginable. And yet, it had been said that Edward Newsome was a man who felt the need to erase all memories of his past life once he moved into a new phase. How could he, Rathe, reconcile what appeared to be two contradictory versions of the same man? Perhaps the answer was obvious, one which had to be put down, perhaps, to Elizabeth Newsome’s potential distortion of the truth.

  “I haven’t got over Jane’s death but I have come to terms with it, Mr Rathe,” Newsome was saying, bringing Rathe back out of his labyrinth of thought. “I can think about it without tears at least, if not without any sadness. Elizabeth can’t do the same, as I have said, and it has driven me away. Whether you accept it or not, that’s how I see things. Yes, I fell for Michelle and I want to be with her more than anything in the world, but, in many ways, Elizabeth’s reaction to Jane’s death has acted as a catalyst for those feelings. And now, on top of all that misery, there’s this lunatic idea of murder.”

  “You’re saying you and Elizabeth need to share equal blame for what has happened?”

  Newsome nodded. “But I can live with the pain I feel as a result of all this. I can do that because I have to. But Elizabeth refuses to accept any complicity in it. Instead, she accuses me of wanting rid of her. Can’t you see this pre-occupation she has with death? It’s all to do with Jane, it all stems from us losing her, I understand that; but Elizabeth can’t see the upset and pain she’s causing to others by allowing herself to be consumed by it.”

  “The upset she causes to you, for instance?”

  Newsome shook his head. “No, not to me. I’ve said I’m as much to blame as her. I mean to our son, to Sean. He’s the only innocent in this, Mr Rathe, and he shouldn’t be allowed to suffer for any of it. Michelle, Elizabeth, me, we all have our roles to play in the present mess we call our lives, but Sean has never caused anybody any sadness. Elizabeth is so blinded by her own paranoia, she can’t see what she’s doing to the only child she’s got left.”

  Rathe had begun to frown, partly because he himself had not thought of the surviving Newsome child or his reaction to the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, and partly because of the sudden display of emotion from this aloof, austere man. He wondered how long Newsome had kept those feelings beneath his proud mask of noble stoicism and, further, how often he had come close to saying those same words to his wife. Perhaps he had thought they would be ineffectual or maybe, like his wife, he had found it easier to say to a stranger, even one whom he had shown no predilection to respect or to trust.

  “Does Sean know about you and Michelle?” Rathe asked.

  “With Elizabeth raving about it almost daily, how could he not?”

  “What about the accusations of murder?”

  Newsome did not answer straight away. His eyes flickered behind the lenses of his glasses as he fought with his internal battle for privacy and honesty.

  “Tell me the truth, Mr Newsome,” urged Rathe. “It has to be said at some point, so make it now.”

  Newsome looked at Rathe, as though seeing him for the first time. “He overheard us, arguing, a few days ago. We had no idea he was there. He does that. Appears from nowhere in the room behind you, not making a sound. As a child, he would have nightmares and creep into our room, wanting comfort but not daring to wake us. So, he would kneel beside one of us and stare at us, willing us to wake up. When we did, we saw him, glaring at us, with fear in his eyes. But he was so silent, so quiet, we never heard him come into the room.”

  Without hesitation, Rathe recalled the way Sean Newsome had appeared in his mother’s living room that morning. “What did he overhear that day?”

  “Elizabeth was blind with rage,” Newsome recalled. “She had found a prescription of mine, sleeping tablets. All this bitterness with her, with Michelle, with all of it… I haven’t been sleeping, so I got pills for it. Elizabeth thought I was going to use them on her.”

  “She said you were stockpiling them.”

  Newsome shook his head, laughing in desperation. “It’s nonsense, you have to believe that.”

  “She says you’ve never had trouble sleeping before.”

  Now, a flash of the old repressed anger returned to the eyes. “I’ve never been under this sort of stress before.”

  “When she found the pills,” Rathe said, ignoring the small outburst of emotion, “she confronted you, right? Did she ask point blank what you intended to do with them?”

  Newsome was shaking his head before Rathe finished talking. “She didn’t ask anything. She accused. Outright.”

  “And Sean overheard?”

  Newsome had regained his composure. He removed his spectacles and cleaned them on his handkerchief, as though wiping away the mist of upset which had temporarily clouded his vision and betrayed the heart beneath the stone. “Every word of it.”

  “Presumably you told him it was his mother’s hysteria,” said Rathe without any trace of denunciation.

  “Of course, I did. But she has told him the opposite. God knows what he believes.” They fell silent for a moment, whilst each of them regained their thoughts and considered how best to proceed. It was Newsome who spoke again first, his voice once more laced with the cool arrogance which had struck Rathe at o
nce when they had met. “Let me ask you a question now, Mr Rathe. I presume my wife has shared with you these fears she has of me trying to murder her. I assume that is why you are sitting here talking to me right now.”

  “Yes, she has.” Rathe saw no reason to deny it.

  “Speaking as a barrister, a lawyer, did she offer you anything which you might feel able to accept as conclusive proof of her accusations?”

  This time, Rathe saw no opportunity to deny it, even if he had wanted to. “Not in a legal sense, no.”

  Newsome considered Rathe for a moment, curious about the slight sense of evasion about the answer. “But she gave you some cause to believe her?”

  “Do you think I’d be sitting here if she hadn’t?” Rathe asked, serving the question with more ice than it required.

  Newsome conceded the point. “Perhaps we’d best stick with the idea of legal proof, then. She offered no physical or tangible evidence that I might be trying to murder her. No example of an attempt which failed, for example?”

  “None.”

  Newsome leaned forward for emphasis, his voice constricted into a hiss of fury. “Because there is no proof. None!”

  “You do have a motive for murder, if you were inclined that way,” Rathe felt duty bound to say.

  “My wife’s religion makes life seem like a prison, I won’t deny that.”

  “She said the rosary is a tie which binds you to her forever.”

  “Till death do us part?” Newsome was scornful. “Perhaps I do see it like that. But what I feel for Michelle is strong enough for religion not to be a problem.”

  “You’re saying you can wait for nature to take its course and free you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Michelle willing to make the same sacrifice?”

  More emphasis: “Yes.”

  Rathe smiled and sipped some of the wine. It was excellent. “Forgive me, but isn’t that a little idealistic, not to say naïve?”

  Newsome’s eyes narrowed. “Only to a cynic.”