When Anthony Rathe Investigates

by Matthew Booth

  Rathe held out his own hand towards her, forbidding her to move any closer to her son. Now, he was between them, like a bridge between hatred and grief. “You hated Michelle first, Sean, and then you hated your mum’s faith. Between them, they ripped your family to pieces when really it should have been putting itself back together after Jane’s death.”

  “The way you saw it, son,” Cook said, “the girl and the religion were both to blame.”

  “But you knew you couldn’t hope to destroy one,” Rathe concluded, “so you murdered the other.”

  “Right.” Sean looked across at him and then back to his mother. “Right… ”

  Elizabeth dropped her hands in defeat. Her eyes drifted around the room, barely making sense of it all, before they came to rest on the crucifix on the wall. Through her tears, she managed to find the words which she knew she should not say but which she likewise knew she could not keep inside.

  “Sean, I can’t betray God… ”

  The son she had lost lifted his head and glared into her face. “There is no God, Mum. If there is, I hate Him.”

  * * *

  Rathe and Cook were sitting at the bottom of the garden, looking at the fish. There was a bottle of single malt on the stone flags between them. Each man cradled a generous tumbler full of the stuff, but only Rathe’s was tempered with a single, large ice cube.

  “Have you heard from either of them?” he asked.

  Cook nodded. “Edward’s staying with Elizabeth. She offered him the divorce, but he knew she didn’t mean it, so he refused. Reckons they’ve got a reason to stay together now.”

  “Meaning Sean?”

  “Need to be there for him, that’s what they say.” Cook sipped the whisky. “If it weren’t for them both… ”

  Rathe listened to the ice in his glass crack under the influence of the amber liquid. “Edward told me that Elizabeth never thought about the impact her delusions had on Sean.”

  “And he was right.”

  “Do you think he thought of the effect his affair with Michelle Leverton had on the kid?”

  Cook considered the question for a few seconds in the stillness of the night which hung around them. Finally, he decided that the best answer he could give was no answer at all. Rathe thought he might know what the reply was which had formed in the detective’s head and, for a reason he could not define, Rathe felt certain it was the same negative answer which had taken shape in his own mind.

  “Maybe they are both to blame, then,” said Rathe. “Perhaps none of them were ever truly innocent.”

  “We’re only ever responsible for ourselves. No one else.”

  “Do you believe that?” asked Rathe. He lifted his glass and drank. “Or is it this stuff talking?”

  “No idea,” mumbled Cook, drinking some of his own whisky.

  They remained in silence for a little longer, neither one knowing what to say, but both wanting some words to be spoken. They allowed a few more seconds to pass, watching the fish move amongst the darkness of the water.

  “It would have happened anyway,” said Cook, at last. “Michelle Leverton’s death, I mean... Sean Newsome would have killed her even if you hadn’t gone poking about in the mud. Right?”

  “I expect he would, yes.”

  Cook exhaled some air. “It’s thoughts like that which make me glad I’ve got my fish.”

  Rathe nodded and drank his whisky. “It’s thoughts like that which make me glad I don’t like opera.”

  The Quick and the Dead

  Anthony Rathe had been sitting alone with his memories for the last half an hour. He had been provided with the glass of Pinot Noir which he had ordered but he had not tasted it as yet. He had hardly registered the waiter placing it down in front of him, although he knew that he had mumbled some words of gratitude. The people who passed his table barely glanced at him, as though the sight of a man drinking alone in a hotel bar was something so common that it failed to arouse anybody’s curiosity. Whether that said anything about the modern world or not was a question which Rathe might have enjoyed debating at any other time in his life, but now he gave it even less attention that those same people gave him. His mind was elsewhere, drifting back over time, taking reminiscences and reliving them as though they were his reality of this moment, as though months and years had not drifted away since the events which he now remembered had actually taken place.

  It had been the phone call which had started it, a call which he had had no right to expect and certainly no reason to anticipate. Her voice on the other end of the line had brought Rathe’s past crashing into his present with such a fierce tidal wave of memory that he almost failed to understand anything she had said to him. He had stammered questions about why she was phoning him after all this time, about what she wanted from him, about whether she had known how much he had missed her, or how deeply she had affected him when they had spoken last. But she had not been prepared to discuss any of it. The call had to be brief, she said, and all it could be for now was a request she had to make of him which he would either accept or reject. The call was to be that simple. No more, no less. She had asked him to meet her that afternoon in the Artesian bar of the Langham Hotel at three and, as he reflected now that he always would have, he had accepted the invitation without hesitation.

  The choice of bar was no accident. The first time he had taken Alice Villiers out for a drink, he had taken her to the Artesian. Eager to impress, with all the arrogance of those days demanding that nothing less than extravagance would do to demonstrate his worth, he had ordered cocktails and led her to the mauve settees which were placed beneath the grand chandeliers which descended from the high ceiling. He and Alice had stayed there for hours, their plans to move on for food or a different bar were soon forgotten. They had drunk, they had chatted, they had laughed. They had forgotten that outside the long, broad windows of the hotel bar, London had a life which it was living still, despite them, no matter how much they might have thought that they were the only people alive at that moment. How much champagne they had drunk, he could not remember now; but he could recall Alice’s horror at the bill and his casual, yet drunken superiority as he shrugged off the three figure sum with an easy smile and pompous glint in his eyes.

  Those days seemed so far away. He sat now with the solitary glass of wine in front of him. The settees were still mauve and the chandeliers were still grand, but the Anthony Rathe who sat in their company would have been unrecognisable to the conceited version of himself who had blithely paid that tab and walked out of the bar with the girl on his arm and the world at his feet. Now, the settee seemed pale when once it had seemed so vivid. The chandeliers were ostentatious, rather than magnificent. And the wine sat untouched where once the champagne had flowed.

  He was watching the entrance to the bar, scrutinising every face which passed through it, half-afraid that he might not recognise her when she walked into the room, or that he would be so pre-occupied with his memories that his brain would not process her face in time and that she would see the blank, soulless shell of the man she once knew and turn on her heels and vanish from his life once more. As it was, the moment she walked in, scanning the room for his face, Rathe felt every other patron of the bar, every other person in the room with him, fade away into nothing. For a split second, he forgot once again that London had a life which it lived for itself, a life which had nothing to do with him, because in his world there were only two people alive.

  Rathe felt that he had changed in the six months since she had last seen him. Mentally, he was sure he had. The Marsden disgrace had stripped his soul bare and left it to rebuild itself. It had done just that, but it had never been the same. It had lost the bravado, the self-belief, the innate confidence that water could be turned into wine with a clever twist of words and flash of legal trickery. It was a change for the better, Rathe knew that, but with it he felt sure there had been a change in his physical appearance. He felt his dark eyes had become heavier, weighed down by s
omething he might have told himself was regret, the spark of confidence extinguished in them. He felt his lips had become permanently pursed, the external display of an inner pain. He felt that with the loss of his arrogance, a fire had gone out of his cheeks, leaving them paler, more sallow, as though his entire expression was a ghost of its former self.

  If he had changed, two things struck him at once. Firstly, Alice had not noticed any change in him, because when she spotted him sitting there facing her, she smiled at him and began to move towards him. Secondly, if he had altered in any way over the months which had passed, it was clear to him immediately that those same months had left Alice Villiers entirely unaffected. Her blonde hair still hung over her shoulders, bouncing as she walked, like a field of wheat in a summer breeze. Her features were still curiously feline, not conventionally beautiful but undeniably alluring, their attraction being not in the way they were designed but in the manner in which they held your attention. Her eyes were a vivid green, alert and inquisitive, but with a certain spark of mischief which Rathe remembered would intensify with wine. Her smile now was brief and uncertain, but it brought back to Rathe’s mind the almost childish shyness of her full smile, always accompanied with a dip of the head, as though the act of laughing was something for which she expected to be mocked. There had been a small gap in her front teeth, not so wide as to be noticeable, but pretty enough to be heartbreaking when she was forced to display it.

  He rose to greet her, uncertain whether he should shake her hand or bend to kiss her cheek. One was too agonisingly formal, the other too obvious a temptation to go further. In the split second before she took the decision out of his hands and offered her cheek for the kiss, Rathe had a foolish, momentary fear that he did not even know what to call her. For all their time together, she had been his Ally, but the past six months had turned them into strangers and such a familiarity seemed in that instant to be unwarranted.

  “Thank you for doing this,” she said, sitting down and placing her handbag at her feet. “I’ve no right to ask it of you.”

  Rathe had no reply, so he pointed to the bar. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Please,” she said. The sudden awkwardness of the situation she had forced them into struck her, seemingly for the first time, and she looked around the room, at the bar, and the other guests, just so she didn’t have to look Rathe in the eyes. “Wine. White. Any kind.”

  “Right,” he replied, making a move towards the bar.

  “Thank you, Anthony,” she said softly, and Rathe thought he heard the sound of ice breaking.

  The drinks brought, he sat down once more opposite her, conscious that he felt still that her proper place was beside him, but knowing that it was a thought which could only be known to him. He had no idea why she had contacted him now, without any warning, and he had forbidden himself to hope. Instead, he sat in silence, waiting for her to explain, his eyes never once leaving her face. She drank the wine, composing herself, but she found it difficult to look at him. Perhaps, he wondered, his face had altered after all.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” Alice said. “I couldn’t cope with it.”

  “I don’t suppose I made it easy.”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t just you. It was the papers, the phone calls, the prying questions.”

  He knew what she meant. After Kevin Marsden’s suicide, Rathe had been approached for comment, the most frequent question being whether he felt any guilt about it. He had responded with typical disdain at the idea. His words were in most of the newspapers and in almost every legal journal. Rathe’s fame at the time had made it inevitable that the media would hang on every one of his misjudged, conceited words. When the internal enquiry into the case revealed that Marsden had been innocent, that the evidence had been fabricated as well as circumstantial, Rathe had understood that it had been his own advocacy alone which had made that false and unstable evidence seem undeniable and complete. It was his own rhetoric which had driven the boy to his end and, once he saw the truth of it all, those same condescending words of arrogance came back to haunt Rathe. After that, the requests for comments were made with sneers, the plaudits had become condemnations, and the frailties of the criminal justice system were painted as being orchestrated by Rathe alone, as though he had been responsible for the police, the jury, and the sentencing simply because he had made a public display of switching from defence to prosecution in an effort to win yet more public glory. The policemen who had fabricated the evidence never seemed to be approached for any explanation, paid off with early retirement or premature death by alcohol consumption, their faces never appeared on television, in print, or online. That privilege was reserved almost exclusively for Anthony Rathe.

  “You have to do something about it,” Alice had said. He could hear the words now, as clearly as he had heard them then.

  “Do what? What can I say to make them understand?”

  She had been intense in her reply. “I don’t know, but anything is better than nothing. Because we can’t keep hiding away from it. You have to get up and do something.”

  “And if I can’t?” he had asked.

  “Why can’t you?”

  And then he had said the words which had given life to a belief which he felt now that he might never dispel. “Because maybe they’re right. Maybe I am responsible for what happened to him… ”

  It had been the beginning of the end. Alice had been unable to live with his defeatism, his increasingly internal existence, his deepening sense of shame and regret. When she had left, he had not blamed her. She had a choice not to live with his guilt; he had no such option.

  “What did you do with yourself?” Alice asked now. “After I’d gone?”

  Rathe shrugged, running his index finger along the rim of his wine glass. “Drank. For a long time, I drank. Ignored any phone call that wasn’t you.”

  She didn’t need him to say that he must have ignored every phone call he received then. “We couldn’t have survived it, Anthony. Not how we were. How you were.”

  He didn’t have to accept that, but he knew that she was entitled to have her own point of view, so he simply said, “No.”

  She looked down at her lap. “Has there been anyone else? Since… ?”

  He waited for her eyes to return to his before he replied. “No.”

  She heard the tone of voice, as though the question need never have been asked. “Nor for me.”

  For a moment, Rathe thought he should reply, but in that same fragment of time, his mind abandoned him and he could think of nothing to say.

  “Do you still think it was your fault?” she asked, instead. “What happened to the Marsden kid?”

  In the pause which followed, she saw from his expression that the core root of their shattered romance was still alive inside him. As if to register his disapproval, as well as her refusal to try to convince him otherwise, she drank some more of the wine.

  Rathe, for the first time, did likewise. “Is this why you asked me here, Alice? To go over all this again?”

  The truth was that they had never really gone over any of it, not with any honesty on either side about how it had all made them both feel. Alice had wondered more than once whether she should contact him, but something had always held her back. She had never known precisely what it was, but she had a feeling that it was her own personal sense of shame at abandoning the man she had professed to love at the time when he needed her most. Was that not something about which she should feel guilt? And had that guilt stopped her from confronting the fact that she had walked away from him when he was at his lowest because of some selfish sense of preservation? His tone of voice now made it clear that he did not want to discuss it any further if he could help it. Perhaps his remorse was so profound that it would never leave him; if so, she thought that each day must be a battle for him, an effort to evade his own sense of injustice, so that any reminder of what it was he was trying to bury in his subconscious would be unwelcome.

/>   “No, it’s not,” she replied, shuffling forward in her chair. “I wanted to talk to somebody about something and I… And I didn’t know who else I could trust with it. I suppose you don’t think I’ve any right to say that.”

  “What is it?” Rathe asked. He remained motionless, resisting the temptation to move closer to her, as she had moved nearer to him.

  “The other day I had a phone call from a man called Roger Gilchrist. Ever heard of him?”

  “No.”

  Alice reached down for her handbag and drew from it a folded piece of A4 paper which she handed to Rathe. He took it from her and opened it. He was looking down at a screenshot of the home page from a website. Rathe didn’t know much about technology, but he could tell that the site wasn’t anything fancy. Its purpose was practical rather than aesthetic. There was a Google map image showing an address near the British Museum, a photo of the London skyline at midnight, and a series of services provided by the company. Several phone numbers and links to Twitter and Facebook. Across the top of the page, there was a series of tabs: “Services”; “Fees & Charges”; “About Us”; “Contact Us”; and so on. Above the tabs was a name: RPG Investigations Ltd.

  Rathe handed the paper back to Alice. “Private detectives?”

  She nodded. “Gilchrist is the owner, the top man.”

  “What does a private detective want to speak to you about?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” she replied. “He said it was too delicate to talk about on the phone. But he said it was important, personal and private, and he had to see me as soon as I could arrange it.”

  Rathe frowned, drinking some wine whilst his mind began to stir. “Are you sure it was really him, really Gilchrist?”

  Alice nodded. “I said I’d phone him back on the main number on the website. I asked to speak to Gilchrist and my call was put through. When he answered, it was the same voice.”

  “Did you arrange to meet him?”

  “Tomorrow at seven.”

  “Where?”