“Or a realist.”
For a moment, there was a silent impasse, one of them unable to think of a suitable riposte, the other feeling no more words on the subject were required. For Rathe at least, although he suspected it applied to Newsome, it was a relief when the waiter came to take the food order. Newsome took the menu in his hands and Rathe noticed the slight shake of the fingers as he did so, the last dying remnants of the man’s display of suppressed emotion. When the menu was put before him, Rathe declined the offer.
“Thank you, but I have very little appetite,” he said with a smile. He rose from his chair and offered his hand to Edward Newsome. “I know you prefer to eat alone.”
Newsome took Rathe’s hand and gave it a cold, feeble shake. “Perhaps it is best.”
Rathe left money for the wine, despite Newsome’s prosaic objections, and left the restaurant. Outside, he leaned against the wall and drew deep breaths of the cold, cleansing air into his lungs. For several moments, he remained there, his mind wandering without fixing on any one, single thought. As he walked away at last, his brain refused to settle and he felt as though he was as far away as ever from understanding what was happening between Elizabeth and Edward Newsome and whether or not their lives were in fact destined to end in murder.
* * *
It was early evening before Rathe was able to make contact with Michelle Leverton. She had refused to allow him to come to her home, stating a preference for neutral territory on the grounds that people couldn’t be too careful when dealing with strangers. Rathe had bowed to her caution and allowed her to choose whatever rendezvous she thought best. She had given him the name of a small wine bar near Westminster, one which he did not know, but he had assured her that he would be there. Seven o’clock sharp.
“Give us both time for something to eat, unless you want to buy me dinner too,” she had said.
“I’ll see you at seven o’clock, Miss Leverton,” Rathe had replied, with no smile on his lips or in his voice.
He had made sure he was early for the appointment, but she was there before him nevertheless. She would not have been difficult to identify, even if she had not told him she would be sitting at the far edge of the bar. The place was filled with couples or parties of friends, so that the solitary woman drinking without company but looking almost pathologically at her watch then towards the door was an obvious social juxtaposition.
Michelle Leverton was pretty rather than beautiful. He guessed she was ten years or so younger than Edward Newsome, but he knew that he found the age of women from their looks alone to be deceptive. Her hair was a dark brown, tinged with artificial red, which contrasted with the deep blue of her eyes. Her lips were glossed but not ostentatiously so, and her clothes suggested elegance rather than openly personified it, as though she took the view that a gaudy show of wealth or sophistication was an ironic misunderstanding of the nature and allure of either. She wore minimal jewellery but what there was betrayed the same appreciation for an understated stylishness. She had had a drink already, the empty glass to her left with its melted ice and washed out lemon at the bottom testifying to the indulgence. A replenished glass was in front of her but, as he introduced himself and took the seat beside her, he offered as a matter of politeness to buy her a third.
“Bacardi and Coke, please,” he was surprised to hear her say. “Thanks.”
He ordered the drink and a Merlot for him, conscious that her eyes were on him and had not left his face from the moment he had approached her. He felt the crimson shame of unease creep along the back of his neck and into his cheeks and, for a fleeting moment, he wondered how high on her lists of priorities Michelle Leverton had placed fidelity. The idea was followed at once by a sense of regretful inevitability that at some time in the future Edward Newsome might find himself alone and deprived of love from either of the women who sought to claim him as their own.
“You spoke to Edward this afternoon, Mr Rathe,” Michelle said now, as he handed over the money for the drinks. “He said you’d been fishing for Elizabeth.”
He was irritated rather than disgusted by her seemingly confrontational manner, which seemed at odds with her attractive and tasteful appearance. “If I was doing any fishing, Miss Leverton, I was doing it for myself.”
“Why?”
The eternal question which Rathe had asked himself so many times before. Why did he get involved in matters which weren’t his concern? An image of a hanging, innocent man and the gravestone which Rathe visited so often flashed across his mind, as though it was the obvious answer to the question, but Rathe could not believe that what drove him into these situations was something so transparent. But when he tried to find a more complex answer, his mind refused to co-operate.
“I have my reasons,” was his reply.
“I don’t see why the lives of people you don’t know would have anything to do with those reasons.”
Rathe turned round on his stool and faced her. “If someone told you they thought they were about to be murdered, would you walk away just because they were a stranger?”
She gave it almost no thought. “Probably. I’d tell them to go to the police and move on.”
She saw it as a sensible option; Rathe could only see it as evidence of the difference between the two of them, although he felt no need to say so. Instead, he sipped some wine but it did nothing to sweeten the sour taste in his mouth.
“I know the answer to this, Miss Leverton,” he said, unable to keep the regret from his voice, “but do you think Edward Newsome wants to kill his wife?”
She drank some of the Bacardi, not quite draining the glass, and looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “Of course not.”
“Is that an honest reply, or a biased one?”
“Honest,” she declared, with perhaps more emphasis than it required. “You’ve met him. Do you think he could kill someone?”
Rathe raised his eyebrows, taken aback by the question which he had not anticipated and, more crucially, which he had not yet considered. Now, he thought back to Edward Newsome and tried to imagine him sliding a knife between Elizabeth’s ribs, or placing a gun to her temple, his hands around her throat, his silk tie around her neck, a pillow across her face, crushing her skull with the nearest object to hand. No, he could imagine none of those things. That was the truth of it, now that he confronted the question. But, in equal measure, he could envisage Newsome grinding up a bottle of sleeping pills and stirring them into a warm drink or a glass of wine. He could imagine that without any difficulty.
“I think so,” he said, with his eyes drilling into hers. “Yes. Unfortunately, I think I can imagine anybody doing it in the right circumstances.”
“Even yourself?”
“Possibly.”
She smiled at him and drank some more. “What a sad way of looking at the world.”
“Perhaps it’s just that I see the world differently to you.” He sipped some of his own wine. She was already nearing the end of her drink and he had barely begun his. He saw no reason to try to keep up with her. “Are you going to tell me why you think I’m wrong about Edward?”
“It’s just impossible to believe,” she said, in a tone of voice which sounded as if she was tired of having to repeat it, making Rathe wonder how often she had had to say it to herself before she was convinced of it. “How well do you know him, Mr Rathe?”
“I only met him briefly at a party last night,” he confessed. “I spoke to him for the first time at lunch today.”
She sneered at the confession with a sly grin. “People think he’s uncaring, unfeeling, cold. Did you think that when you met him?”
“I can understand why people might think it.”
“That’s because you only see what he shows you. We all do that, don’t we? We’re different people to our lovers than we are to our colleagues, or even to our parents. Edward doesn’t show you the love, tenderness, intelligence, humour that he shows me because he’s got no reason to. He isn’t a man
who wears his heart on his sleeve. I look at you and I see what I think is a sadness in your eyes. You’ve got the look of a man who lives under a heavy burden. I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to, but Edward would never give any hint of it if he was carrying it instead of you. Just because a man doesn’t display his emotions, and keeps them private for himself, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them.”
Rathe nodded, despite himself. “Fair point, duly accepted. So are you telling me that he’s too sensitive to be able to commit murder?”
She drained her glass and ordered another, Rathe waving away the offer of a second. “It’s much easier to believe that his wife is delusional. You know about the loss of their child, of course. She’s never got over it. You only have to speak to her to know that.”
“People do seem to think she has some sort of obsession with death because of it, which is fuelling these fantasies of murder.”
Michelle stirred the ice in her new Bacardi. “I don’t say what she suffered isn’t tragic. And I don’t say I’m proud of what Edward and I have done to her. But she needs help with her grief, Mr Rathe, and her refusal to do anything about it has driven Edward away.”
“Cause and effect, is that it?”
She looked at him, her expression daring him to contradict her. “Put bluntly, yes.”
“So, if their daughter hadn’t have died, Edward wouldn’t have wanted to leave Elizabeth for you?”
“If she’d got help when he asked her to, he might not have. But who can tell for sure? Perhaps when we met, we would have happened anyway, even if the death of their daughter hadn’t been a factor one way or the other.”
Rathe was silent for a moment before he made any further comment. “Forgive me, Miss Leverton, if I say that sounds like a callous and cynical attempt to absolve yourself of any blame at all.”
Her eyes flashed fire. “Who the hell do you think you are, you sanctimonious bastard? Wading into people’s lives without knowing the first thing about any of them and making judgements like that about people you‘ve never met? What gives you the right?”
Rathe did not look at her during her outburst. He was conscious of other people’s attention turning to him but he ignored the temptation to return the stares, disregarding the burn of embarrassment on the back of his neck.
“What gives you and Edward Newsome the right to indulge in your own selfish desires and justify your actions by blaming a broken woman’s personal grief?” His voice controlled his anger, but it was far from easy. “What give you the right to sleep at night under the blanket of assurance that you have done nothing wrong when the one woman who truly has done nothing culpable lies awake in turmoil, grief, and fear? Don’t pretend to me that you’re insulted by what I say, Miss Leverton, and don’t presume to be possessed of any sense of moral cleanliness. Because you don’t have the right to either response to what I’ve said.”
He rose from his stool and pushed away his half-drunk wine. She had offered no reaction to his words but she had had the affront to continue to stare at him whilst he delivered his judgement on her. He had expected, perhaps even hoped, that he might shame her into looking away, but he had failed. Even now, standing over her as he was, she was not prepared to avert her glare from him.
“If I thought for one moment I’d succeed,” he continued, “I’d do my best to convince Elizabeth Newsome to divorce her husband so that you could have him. Because, for me, you deserve each other. And if I’m any judge of character, even if you did get him to yourself, I’d say that sooner or later Edward would be left alone, once your interest in him waned. And I think that would be pretty quickly. But it’s academic, isn’t it? Because I doubt Elizabeth will divorce him under any circumstances. And why do you think that is, Miss Leverton?”
He had leaned forward so that his face was only inches from hers. The sudden claustrophobia of the situation choked her but, simultaneously, it seemed to compel her to reply.
“Her bloody religion,” she spat with a gasp. “That’s why.”
But Rathe was shaking his head. “No, you don’t understand at all. It’s not so much the religion, Miss Leverton, but the strength of character in Elizabeth Newsome which drives her to preserve her faith when it would be so much easier to betray it. Ask yourself whether you’d have the same fortitude as that in similar circumstances, to be able to live with a clear conscience, even at the price of your own sanity and happiness.”
Michelle Leverton set her jaw in defiance. “Of course I would.”
Rathe gritted his teeth in contempt, hissing out his reply. “Really? Then do the right thing for all concerned and walk away from the Newsomes and don’t look back. Let them mend and heal, even if it means you’re temporarily broken. Try to find half the dignity and courage this so-called delusional woman has and do what you have to do to make this situation right. Why don’t you get yourself another drink, Miss Leverton, and have a think about that?”
Even as he walked away from her, Michelle Leverton couldn’t take her eyes off Anthony Rathe. Once he had disappeared in the crowd and she had seen the bar doors swing open and closed, she still stared at the space where he had been, as though she could still see him sitting there in judgement of her. His words echoed in her brain, even when she tried to use the hum of camaraderie and the background music of the bar to drown them out. In the end, she realised that she might only silence his words in her head by drowning them in more Bacardi. She finished her drink and ordered another, disregarding the quickening of her pulse and the stares of strangers which bore into her, seemingly from all directions.
But she could deal with the staring and the increasing sense of drunkenness. She might have another drink after this one, and another after that, if she felt like it, and screw them all. Let them stare. She didn’t care; but she did care about the fact that it was easier to swallow more drink than it was to admit to herself that Anthony Rathe had been right. She knew what the right thing to do was, just as she knew that she could never do it, because it would mean accepting defeat. And she never lost.
Yes; Rathe had been right about her. Somehow, even in that short space of time he had known her, he had got the measure of her and she was shocked by it, perhaps even terrified by hearing it said so bluntly and so honestly to her. So she ordered another drink without starting the one she had, because she knew that the only way to bury the truth he had hissed at her was to silence it in those endless cold glasses which seemed to stretch out in front of her, waiting to do their job.
* * *
Three days later, Rathe’s mobile delivered a summons. It was a call from Cook: short, terse, and tinged with suppressed anger. “A car’s on its way for you. Be ready in 10 minutes.” Nothing more, nothing less. The journey seemed to last for ever and it had nothing to do with distance or time: it was the unease which Rathe felt in every pore of his body, an ominous sense of tragedy which was complemented by the anxiety within him at Cook’s brusque, hostile tone of voice.
He was driven to a modest but respectable house in one of the northern suburbs of the city. The details of the house and the area were to some extent lost on him, because he was distracted by the initial procedural trappings of murder. The flashing blue lights, the ghoulish spectres of the forensic officers and their soulless protective suits, the lengths of official tape cordoning off the house and its small, neatly trimmed lawn. Sitting in that taciturn, junior detective’s car, Rathe felt as though he was being delivered back to the scene of a crime he had himself committed, but the notion was a ludicrous and momentary fantasy, brought on by the confusion of his situation and the rapid series of thoughts which were hurtling across the landscape of his mind. He had feared murder as soon as Cook had called, but this house was not the place he had expected the crime to have been committed. This was not the house he had been in three days previously; it wasn’t the house in which he had talked to Elizabeth Newsome about the fear of death and the cruel depths of grief. This place, this home which had been converted int
o a crime scene, was a house Rathe did not know.
He was led up the garden path, his mind silently laughing at the irony of the fact. He wondered how many of those paths he had been led up, and down, over the last few days. As his brain regained some of its control over itself, he began to think that he knew whose house and whose murder he had been summoned to discuss. If he was right, he knew that there would be an easily identifiable suspect and, if guilty, he wondered how far down how many garden paths that apparently delusional woman had taken him. He had believed her; unable to explain why, but he had believed her. And all the time, he thought now she had been laughing at him, manipulating him, drawing him into her net of deceit and revenge. And he had fallen for it, tumbled down to his knees in the face of her pleas for help, guilelessly accepting her version of events whilst she sniggered at his unwitting co-operation in her plot, setting him up as a character witness in the hope of some sort of insanity defence. It was all so clear, so obvious, but he hadn’t seen it until this moment. By the time he reached the front door of the murder house, Anthony Rathe had almost no thoughts beyond his own fury, not only at his own gullibility but also at Elizabeth Newsome’s treachery.
Cook was in the hallway when Rathe walked through the front door. For a moment, the two of them looked at each other as though they were strangers, two gladiators awaiting a tournament with dispassionate apathy for the other’s life.
“Where is she?” asked Rathe.
“Who?”
“Michelle Leverton.” Rathe rolled his eyes around the hallway. “This is her house, isn’t it? She’s in here somewhere, lying dead. Right? That’s why I’m here.”
Cook shook his head. “You’re here so I can tell you to your face what a bloody fool you’ve been. What do you think you’re doing, Rathe? You got lucky on a couple of cases over the past few months, I’ll give you that. But that doesn’t give you the right to play with people’s lives.”
I’m not playing with anybody’s life,” countered Rathe.
“I told you not to have anything to do with Elizabeth Newsome,” barked Cook, his spittle flecking Rathe’s cheek with scorn. “I warned you. Christ, I came close to begging you. But you couldn’t help yourself, could you?”
When Anthony Rathe Investigates Page 14
