Love Lies Bleeding

by Evans, Geraldine

  Llewellyn looked thoughtfully at him for several seconds. Then he too sighed, pulled half a dozen of the files from Rafferty's pile, walked across the room to the desk in the corner and sat down before he said, ‘I suppose you're right. We wait.’

  When Rafferty arrived home that evening, he and Abra, his girlfriend, decided to have a quiet night in. During dinner he told her about the dramatic confession made by their visitor that morning.

  ‘Poor woman,’ said Abra, instantly all sympathy, much to Rafferty's chagrin. ‘She must have been desperate,’ Abra continued. ‘I suppose she was worn down by some brute of a husband. Probably been beating her up for years.’

  It sounded as if Abra thought all men were beasts. It was another unwanted reminder that she was still nursing a grievance against him over their difficult time back in June when she resented what she regarded as his lack of support. He was only too aware that she thought he had let her down. With hindsight, he agreed with her.

  Rafferty, although his conscience pricked, felt honour-bound to spring to the defence of the male of the species.

  ‘Well no, I doubt it — or rather, I suppose he might have been beating her up, but the timescale's unlikely. She can't be any older than her early twenties. Something of a stunner, too,’ he murmured half to himself in appreciative, if unwise, remembrance. ‘It's hard to believe any man would want to rearrange a face as beautiful as that. I felt rather sorry for her, actually.’

  Abra's gaze narrowed at this and Rafferty realised his admiration of the young woman might have been better kept to himself. Why was it, he wondered, that women always hated it when you praised the good looks of other females?

  ‘Sounds like she's brought out the Sir Galahad in you,’ she commented with a sharp little edge to her voice as, with a clatter, she began to stack their plates. ‘I'd watch that tendency, Joe. It could be compromising in a policeman.’

  Rafferty immediately tried to downplay the young woman's attractions. With what he thought a nicely judged throwaway air, he commented, ‘She's a bit on the thin side for me.’ As he realised his words were insufficient to soothe the little green god after the words of praise that had gone before, he gave them some support. ‘Anyway, there's not much chance of me being compromised just yet as Sam Dally had her removed to hospital after she collapsed and promptly pronounced her incommunicado.

  ‘Though I can't say I'm surprised she collapsed after making her announcement. Probably one of these bulimics or anorexics we hear so much about now, as she was pretty much a bag of bones. No man wants a stick insect for a partner.’

  ‘Mm. Strange they were bones you seemed to like well enough a minute ago.’

  As his self-defensive measures hadn't worked, Rafferty decided teasing might work better. ‘Not jealous are we?’ he asked. ‘Just a little bit?’

  ‘Should I be?’ Abra countered.

  ‘Of course not. What could you possibly have to be jealous about? I've only just met the woman and then she totally ignored me, preferring the more mature charms of Bill Beard.’

  Abra gave another indeterminate little ‘Mmm’ before adding, ‘If she doesn't ignore you next time you see her, maybe you should let Dafyd do the questioning? It might be safer. After all, eating-disorder thin Lizzies learn plenty of devious tricks to make sure they get their own way and stay thin. And you already sound a little too susceptible to her slender attractions to me.’With that, she stalked off to the kitchen, whence Rafferty soon heard several more crashes and bangs.

  ‘Me and my big mouth,’ he muttered to himself as he decided it might be politic to offer to load the dishwasher and make the tea.

  In the end they only had to wait three days before they were able to see the young woman who had made such a dramatic entrance; Rafferty had hoped for longer, as it was clear he still had some way to go to get back in Abra's good books after his thoughtless behavior back in June. He could do without another murder case right now, with all the extra hours and accusations of neglect likely to spring from it, which he remembered with such painful clarity from his marriage to Angie, his late first wife — particularly as Abra had clearly elected to take a dislike to their suspect …

  He supposed he ought to be thankful the young woman had confessed. It would make his life simpler — in theory at least. But in practice, once one of the legal types that bedevilled his life had got hold of her, she'd retract. Most of them did.

  But he had to admit he was curious about the girl. And when the hospital rang to say that she had started to respond to their attempts to communicate with her, he wasted no time in finding Llewellyn and hurrying them both off to see what she had to say for herself.

  When they arrived at the hospital, they were directed to the first floor. They found their mysterious young woman secluded in a side ward. As previously arranged by Rafferty, she had a bedside guard round the clock, just in case she decided to disappear for real rather than into another catatonic trance.

  As Constable Lizzie Green rose at their entrance, Rafferty nodded and told her to wait outside.

  Against the much-laundered white pillow, the young woman's skin looked even more washed out than it had at her collapse. In spite of having been non compos mentis for much of the last seventy-two hours, she had deep mauve shadows under her eyes and looked exhausted and as fragile as a porcelain figurine that might shatter into a thousand pieces at any moment.

  As he looked at this frail and ethereal creature who had claimed to have committed murder, Rafferty was beginning to think he and Beard had shared a mutual hallucination. In a moment he'd wake up and find it had all been a dream. But as the young woman lying so still in the bed failed to dissolve before his eyes, he pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘I'm Detective Inspector Rafferty,’ he began before he introduced Sergeant Llewellyn. ‘Perhaps you could tell us your name?’

  To Rafferty's surprise, as he had half expected her previous state of catatonia to have affected her memory, she answered without hesitation.

  ‘My name's Felicity Raine.’

  ‘Mrs?’

  This time she hesitated. Her lack of readiness to claim the title was unsurprising, if the ‘Mr’ half of the marital pairing really had died at her hands. But then she nodded and said, ‘Yes. But, of course, you already know that.’

  That ‘of course’ indicated that she had clear recall of the events of three days earlier and that he had been one of the witnesses to her claim to having murdered her husband. But although she was talking, she was clearly still barely in this world. Her voice was slow and uncertain, as if she had only recently learned to speak.

  ‘And your address, Mrs Raine?’

  She provided this information in the same slow, flat monotone with which she had provided her other details. It was almost as if she was experiencing the world through some kind of protective mist that made it seem shadowy and not quite real. Of course, that might just be due to the shock she must be experiencing if she had just killed her husband, whether deliberately or otherwise.

  As soon as she had told them her name and the address she shared with her presumed dead husband, Rafferty gave the nod to Llewellyn and his sergeant hurried off, clutching his mobile, to arrange the uniforms to check the address out for the bloody corpse of her partner. On his way out, he sent Lizzie Green back in to act as a witness in case Mrs Raine decided to blurt out a repeat of her previous confession.

  After giving her the statutory caution, Rafferty asked gently, ‘Do you remember coming into the police station three days ago?’

  Felicity Raine, her expression troubled, nodded.

  ‘And what about what you said when you got there? Do you remember that?’

  Again she nodded.

  ‘And was it true? Did you murder your husband?’

  There was that hesitation again, Rafferty noted. She looked confused and her answer, when it came, was spoken in tones even more dazed than before, as if she couldn't, herself, quite believe what she was saying or take in
the enormity of what she had done.

  ‘I suppose I must have done. Yes.’

  She gazed at Rafferty from troubled eyes and said, ‘It's odd and you'll think me dreadfully callous, I'm sure, but I can't remember killing him. Isn't that strange?’

  Her long slender fingers clutched each other, as, in an anguished voice, she all but pleaded for an answer from Rafferty. ‘How can I have forgotten? You'd expect the memory of such an act to be a vivid one. But I can't remember it at all. All I remember is finding myself stretched out on top of Ray, both of us covered in blood.’

  She shook her head. ‘I suppose I must have shut my mind off. Afterwards.’ She shuddered then, as she added in a whisper so faint that Rafferty had to strain to hear what she said, ‘The doctor said I was suffering from shock. Delayed shock. No doubt, memory of it will come back to me in time.’

  ‘Can you tell me why you killed him? How?’

  ‘As to the why—’ She broke off and stared sadly at him from the large, luminous grey eyes that Rafferty remembered so well. ‘Raymond — my husband — and I had been arguing a lot lately,’ she said in a voice so low that again Rafferty had to lean close to the bed to hear her. ‘Nothing I did seemed to please him.’

  When she said nothing further for a moment, he thought she had relapsed into her previous state of fugue. She stared beyond him as if she no longer saw him and had already forgotten the second half of his question.

  He prompted her before she disappeared back into the nether world. He wanted to hear it from her own lips; it was the only way, he thought, that he would be able to dispel his doubts. ‘And how did you kill him?’

  ‘A knife. With a knife.’ She shuddered again. Her eyes rounded in horror as she added, ‘There was so much blood. It was all over him, all over me. How could I do that when I loved him so much?’

  Rafferty shook his head. He had no answers for her.

  She looked down, as if she expected still to be wearing her bloodstained dress, and frowned at finding herself in a hospital gown.

  ‘My clothes,’ she began fretfully.

  ‘Don't worry about them for now. We've got them safe.’

  ‘I see. Thank you. It's just — just that my husband gave me that dress for my last birthday. I don't want anything to happen to it.’

  As Rafferty watched, the expression in her eyes turned from tragic to appalled, as it hit her that this was one dress she would never want to wear again.

  After that, a silence fell between them, broken only by Llewellyn's return. As he entered the small hospital room, his gaze met Rafferty's and he gave a brief nod.

  Llewellyn's confirmation that Felicity Raine's husband was dead made her claim that she had killed him the more believable. But as he gazed at her delicate face and the figure so slender it barely left a trace under the dark blue duvet, Rafferty was again conscious of a glimmer of doubt. For, in spite of the bloodied state of her when she had turned up at the police station, in spite of her own anguished confession, her slender figure made it difficult for him to conjure up a picture of her knifing anyone, much less the husband she professed to love. Apart from anything else, it was so unusual for a woman to use a knife as the means to kill that the number of such cases made up a tiny percentage of female killings.

  She seemed to have retreated into herself again, Rafferty noticed. He wasn't too worried about it, though. For now, he was content with just the bare facts. They could get the rest later.

  He followed Llewellyn out to the corridor. ‘So, let's hear it,’ he invited.

  ‘It's just as she told you,’ Llewellyn replied, grim-faced. ‘According to Hanks, when he and Tim Smales broke in they found Mr Raine sprawled out on his back on the living-room floor, covered in blood. The knife was still in his chest.’

  Rafferty frowned. ‘She attacked him from the frontV

  Llewellyn nodded.

  Rafferty took a moment or two to absorb the information, then he asked, ‘Little chap, was he?’

  ‘No. Actually, I asked Hanks the same question and he said he was tall and muscular.’

  Rafferty frowned at this discovery. He gazed through the window of the small side room to the patient in the bed. This case was rapidly becoming more bizarre, more surreal with each succeeding discovery, he thought. It seemed this was a thought that Llewellyn shared. He too let his gaze settle on Felicity Raine and his next words echoed Rafferty's thoughts.

  ‘To look at her, you wouldn't think she would have the strength to kill him. Mrs Raine is slender, seven and a half stone if that, and can be no more than five foot three or four.’

  Rafferty nodded. ‘And looking as if butter wouldn't melt.’ In the face of the evidence, he pushed his doubts aside, hardened his heart and said firmly, ‘But melt it did.’

  He instructed Lizzie Green to stay with Mrs Raine and set off towards the stairs. T suppose we'd better go and find out when she's likely to be released into our custody. If she has killed her husband, I want no one to be able to claim later that she wasn't fit for questioning.’

  Chapter Two

  The home of Felicity and Raymond Raine was situated in a quiet country lane lined with the wild flowers of an English summer: As they got out of the car, Rafferty recognised the deep red blooms of great burnet, the pretty pink of Campion and the dense white clusters of meadowsweet. Its strong perfume rose up to greet him as he brushed past.

  It was a large, attractive old house of higgledy-piggledy construction. With its ‘double pile’ design and several gables as well as the small-paned windows, Rafferty guessed it dated back to the sixteenth century. Sometime, long ago, before such things had to be passed by planning committees, a previous owner had built two side extensions off the main house which only added to its picture-book prettiness as they rambled off in a picturesque fashion, as if keen to demonstrate their independence from the main structure. The currently whitewashed walls even had the requisite strongly perfumed old-fashioned roses climbing up trelliswork either side of the stable door, which was currently propped open to ease the many comings and goings of the police team.

  After PC Smales noted their arrival on his clipboard, Rafferty and Llewellyn climbed into their protective gear, slipped under the crime-scene tape and entered the house.

  With the fragrant scents of the roses and meadowsweet still lingering in his nostrils Rafferty gasped as, in their place, an altogether stronger smell invaded his senses. The flower perfumes couldn't compete with the pungent, sickly-sweet aroma of three-day-old death. And after the beauty of the outside, the scene that met their eyes as they entered the living room was like a take from a horror movie. Although aware that this wasn't make-believe, part of Rafferty was still waiting for some invisible director to shout, ‘Cut!’

  As Llewellyn had said, Raymond Raine lay sprawled on his back on the now-bloodied dove-grey carpet. The knife sticking out of his chest looked like one commonly used in kitchens. It was large, with a black handle decorated with an ornate pattern in brass-work.

  The fact that he was lying on the floor some distance from either of the large settees caused Rafferty to shake his head as again he wondered that the petite Felicity Raine had managed to overpower such a well-built man. Now if he had been asleep on the settee … Unless she had drugged him first? But the post-mortem would tell them if that was the case.

  The room was tastefully furnished in a pleasing mix of modern and antique furniture. A beautifully carved chest that Rafferty guessed was Elizabethan stood under the casement window. The plain, white-painted walls of the room made the dark wood appear to glow even more darkly. Rafferty just had time to make these brief observations before Dr Sam Dally arrived.

  ‘God,’ he complained, as if offended that the daily grind should force such sights upon his delicate sensibilities, ‘the place looks like an abattoir.’ He sniffed. ‘Smells like it, too. And even if they do say the female is more deadly than the male, it's hard to believe that little slip of a thing did this.’

  ‘Not you t
oo, Sam,’ Rafferty complained. Although as Abra had rightly suspected, part of him felt sorry for Felicity Raine, who seemed more confused than evil, he was coming round to the belief that she had murdered her husband. They had her confession and all the circumstantial evidence backed it up. It was seldom they had such a straightforward case and Rafferty was determined not to let his own pity or Llewellyn's and Dally's remarks influence him. Like most men, they would be susceptible to a pretty face.

  Besides, Rafferty reminded himself, you have the pretty face of Abra at home. He wanted to keep her sweet and, to encourage her to be sweeter than she was currently being, he had organised a special evening for them both, so was relieved not to have a difficult murder case to solve right now. He certainly wasn't about to look this particular confession gift horse in the mouth, or any other part of its anatomy.

  As Dally set about his examination of the dead man, Rafferty and Llewellyn, side by side and with an unspoken but obviously shared destination, left the living room and its bloody cadaver and went into the hall in search of the kitchen.

  As Rafferty had already observed, the Raines’ home was detached and spacious. It consisted of the roomy lounge they had already seen; as well as a formal dining room nearly as large, with a long, dark table that could seat ten; a breakfast room at the back, on the sunny side of the house, its used dishes from the morning of Raine's death still on the table; and a smaller study across the hall from the dining room, which facts Rafferty's quick door-opening and closing revealed as he searched for the kitchen.