Blood on the Bones

by Evans, Geraldine

  His ma had the, to Rafferty, unfortunate habit of trying to rekindle what she called his ‘lost’ faith and was forever finding him religious books at the library. He wouldn't mind, but she also expected him to pay the library's fines when he forgot to return them. If she ever got an inkling that his rebuttal of Catholicism had just received a severe check…

  He curbed the thought instantly, in case a process of osmosis transferred the thought to his ma's head. Instead, he set about arguing his corner.

  ‘But a change of clothes and accommodation doesn't take the woman out of the nun. Or the propensity to sin out of her, either,’ he pointed out. He warmed to his theme. 'And presumably, they all lived in the wicked world before the veil beckoned, so, equally, all must also have been as familiar with the temptation to sin as the rest of us. They all have pasts – lives they led before they entered the cloister. And no one, not even a woman convinced she has a religious vocation, becomes a saint overnight, in the same way that no one becomes a wicked sinner over a similar timescale. Each level of sainthood or sinning has to be built up, bit by bit. Probably takes years of practise, which seems to me to indicate that for a fair chunk of their lives, the sisters are likely to have fallen well short of sainthood.' He repeated what he had already said to Llewellyn. And received an even more unwelcoming response. ‘Maybe the past caught up with one of them.’

  ‘As it has with you so often?’ his ma taunted. ‘I seem to recall that you did your best to wriggle out of self-induced trouble more than once. For instance, look at what happened only this April just gone-’

  Rafferty frowned warningly at her. But she had another, more urgent, argument she was keen to pursue, so she abandoned this reminder and continued with her religious inquisition. Thankfully.

  Because Abra knew nothing about what had gone on in his life back in April. Neither did she know about the blackmail letter he had received. And he would very much prefer it if both stayed that way.

  Rafferty risked a quick, assessing, glance at Abra. Her expression was thoughtful. Her gaze settled questioningly on his face, as if she was trying to discover clues to what his ma meant.

  He scowled inwardly, which was as much as he dared do. But all he needed was for his ma's comment to spark questions from Abra.

  Really, he thought, like Father Kelly, his ma knew way too many of his guilty secrets. But he refused to let that deter him from putting his point of view, even though he had never yet won a single debate or argument with his mother. Besides, he hoped it might yet distract Abra from pursuing any desire to question him herself.

  He waited for his ma to pause for breath. It took some time – once Kitty Rafferty got into her stride there was no chance of stopping her till she ran out of oxygen – but at last, he had his chance.

  'And as for the nuns being saints. Sainthood is as sainthood does, wouldn't you agree, Ma? I mean, look at St Thomas More as an example. He wrote scurrilous letters to Martin Luther, calling him all sorts of ugly, unchristian, names for daring to find fault with the Catholic Church – though the Lord knows, given its many and varied corrupt practises, there was plenty of fault to find.

  ‘Hardly a Christian turning of the other cheek. Yet that didn't prevent More being made a saint. See what I mean? Even saints aren't always one hundred per cent saintly.’

  ‘St Thomas More was defending his faith,’ his ma told him, indignantly. ‘Which he had every right to do. Maybe you'd find God smiled on you more often if you defended the faith a bit more. Or even practised it,’ she added tartly.

  Rafferty, accepting, at last, that he would never manage to persuade his ma that one of the holy nuns might be guilty of a greater sin than failing to defend their faith, decided not to waste his time in attempting the impossible any longer. He was too tired to take his mother on in an argument over religion. But he was convinced that it was in those years when one of the sisters' saintliness was in its lowest form – in their past lives, before they decided to take the veil – that he believed he was likely to find the richest pickings.

  ‘OK,’ he said, as if in capitulation. ‘If you don't fancy one of the sisters as a suspect, what about their GP, Dr Peterson? Or Father Kelly? You've always said the priest was the ‘Greatest sinner in the parish', Ma,’ he unkindly reminded her. ‘Maybe it's time you enlightened me on some of his other sins?’ he suggested. ‘Apart, that is, from the booze and the women.’

  But, for once in her life, his normally loquacious mother was discretion itself. And although Rafferty had guesses in plenty, he didn't actually know anything for sure. All he had was innuendoes, neighbourhood gossip and his ma's idle chitchat.

  Father Kelly's fellow Catholic priests had proved – during countless scandals and Rafferty's own questioning of the two who shared the Priests' House with Father Kelly in particular – that they were as good as his ma at keeping secrets and protecting their own.

  His ma had chosen an inauspicious time to copy Father Kelly's aversion to sharing secrets, whether those from the confessional, or any other sort.

  Rafferty could see that his ma was in a quandary. She clearly, desperately, wanted someone other than one of the sisters to be in the frame for the murder. The difficulty about that, of course, was that the only other viable suspects were her parish priest and a doctor.

  Clearly, the thought that the first was in some way implicated in a violent murder and unconsecrated, secret burial, was impossible for his ma to accept. Which left Dr Stephen Peterson as the least undesirable person in the frame. But the trouble was, for ma, that would never provide a neat solution to her dilemma. For ma revered the medical profession. She thought doctors were gods and always had.

  Rafferty wondered if she would still think this particular medical man quite so godlike if he revealed that he'd gone in for performing illegal abortions in his younger days.

  But as his ma had never taken a vow of silence to still her wagging tongue, and as he felt that Peterson was entitled to expect discretion for forty year old sins, his ma's quandary continued as he decided not to reveal this particular titbit.

  ‘There must be someone else,’ she insisted. ‘Someone you've missed.’

  Rafferty shook his head. He was amused to see his ma's forehead crease in evidence of furious thought. Clearly, she was determined to come up with another suspect for him to seize on. He knew, from the light of triumph that appeared in her eyes but moments later that she had managed to hit on such a suspect. He waited, curious to find out the identity of this person.

  ‘Big old house like that convent must need a lot of maintaining,’ his ma, the builder's widow, pointed out. ‘I know the sisters are pretty self-sufficient, but I don't suppose they're so self-sufficient that they are able to do all their own building repairs. You want to check if they've had any building work done recently, Joseph.’

  No I don't, he thought. He had plenty of suspects already without trawling for more.

  But his ma was right, of course, as he admitted to himself. Even if it pained her to need to pin the blame on someone in the building trade. It was the family business, after all and both Rafferty's younger brothers and most of his cousins and the uncles who hadn't retired, were involved in various aspects of the trade. It was a possibility he should really have thought of for himself, he silently confessed.

  It wasn't until Rafferty promised to further investigate this particular line of inquiry, that ma finally decided to postpone more debate on the subject, and allowed him to drive her home.

  After he had pulled up at the kerb outside her Council house, as usual, she managed to have the last word.

  ‘You'd do well to go to confession, my lad,’ she told him. ‘You with so many heavy sins blackening your soul.’

  ‘And what sins would they be, Ma?’ he asked. ‘It wasn't me who murdered the wretched man. All I'm doing is trying to find the killer. Even God doesn't condone murder, surely?’

  His comment received nothing more than a contemptuous sniff. She didn't dignify it
with a reply. Instead, she changed tack entirely and attacked from a totally different direction.

  ‘You're living ‘over the brush', for one thing,’ she informed him. 'And if you don't know that already, you should. Haven't I done my best to bring you up Christian?

  ‘For another, I don't suppose the baby that Abra lost earlier this year was intended to be the first of many. So fornication can be added to the list.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Rafferty scowled as his mother's words reminded him what it was that he'd so hated for years about the Catholic religion. His ‘Road to Damascus’ revelation now seemed a long way in the past.

  ‘And you take the Lord's name in vain way too often,’ she briskly informed him. ‘They're all sins, my son,’ she reminded him, more gently. ‘Whether you like it or not. Come the Day of Judgement you'll be called to account for them. All I'm saying is that you'd do well to get some of your sins squared away before that day comes.’

  Why aren't I surprised? Rafferty asked himself, as his ma's voice shook with the tiniest trace of a sob, and she added, ‘I don't want to think of you burning in Hellfire.’

  It wasn't an appealing prospect to Rafferty, either. But he said nothing. Sometimes, with his ma, when she had her religious hat on, it was the best way.

  Softly, before she got out of the car, she added another piece of advice. ‘And I'm thinking it might be a good idea for you to make another confession. One to Abra. About what happened back in April. I take it you've never told her?’

  Rafferty shook his head.

  ‘You should, is my advice,’ she told him. ‘Secrets between couples are never a good idea. Take my word for it.’

  Rafferty, after he had escorted his ma to her door, checked the house for burglars and said goodnight, was driving home when it occurred to him to wonder what secrets his ma might have concealed in her past.

  Once again the thought popped into his head to wonder whether his mother, in her lonely, youthful widowhood, might have been one of the silver-tongued Father Kelly's lady conquests. His ma, like Father Kelly, was more than capable of berating a person for their sins while their own sat comfortably upon them.

  He shook his head. It was something he found impossible to contemplate. Besides, while his ma's sins might sit as comfortably upon her as a cat upon a sofa, she had too much pride to be numbered among the multitude of women who were reputed to have warmed the priest's bed.

  But he wasn't to be left to wonder about his ma's secrets for too long. As he discovered when he got back to the flat he shared with Abra.

  He would have done well to take his ma's advice, Rafferty realised within half an hour of returning home. Especially as it clearly hadn't been her secrets to which his ma had so elliptically referred.

  Give Abra her due, he admitted. She had waited till their delayed, evening meal was over, given him ample time to 'confess', before she pulled from her jeans a letter he had cause enough to instantly recognise.

  Even so, she brought on galloping indigestion when she told him: ‘This fell out of your pocket when I picked your jacket up off the floor where you dropped it the other night.’

  Rafferty swore silently. For the first time he wished he was as careful about his clothes as his Beau Brummelesque sergeant.

  Llewellyn would never hang his clothes on the floor and leave Maureen, his wife, to find an incriminating blackmail letter.

  But then, of course, Llewellyn, his clever, logical, university-educated sergeant, would never be so foolish as to do something which might lead to threats of blackmail.

  ‘So?’ Abra said. And, try as he may, he couldn't miss the hurt in her voice as she continued, ‘You were going to tell me about this, weren't you, Joe? Is it, as your mother suggested, that you were just waiting for the right moment?’

  Chapter Ten

  At Abra's words, Rafferty clutched his aching belly with its shock-induced indigestion, and slumped on the settee. ‘Tell you about it?’ he said. ‘What's the point? From the sound of things ma's brought you pretty well up to speed.’

  Abra shook her head, gazed at him steadily and said,. ‘No. When I showed her the blackmail letter, she said I should speak to you about what happened in April.’

  Her face seemed to take on a feminist, ‘I will survive', harmony, which sent Rafferty's already down-plunging hopes reaching Titanic depths. Especially when she added in sad tones, ‘Which is what I'm doing.’

  As his dinner sunk more stone-like than ever, Rafferty began to splutter. ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Can you?’ Abra's expression left reason to doubt this. She looked sad. And he acknowledged that he had hurt her. Again.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Abra invited, as she sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. ‘You can begin by explaining why you told me nothing about whatever it was that you got up to in April. But before you do that, tell me, did my cousin, Dafyd know all about it?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  But clearly, his hasty answer had warned Abra that he might be being economical with the truth.

  ‘So when did he find out about your mysterious secret?’

  ‘It wasn't till later. Till near the end of the investigation.’

  ‘OK. I'll buy that.’ She said nothing further, but simply sat, arms folded and waited for him to begin.

  Stumblingly, Rafferty related the sorry tale of his signing up for the Made in Heaven dating agency and why it was that he had decided that using his cousin, Nigel Blythe's, name as an alias had seemed like a good idea.

  ‘Apart from any other consideration, you know what a fuss ma would have made if she'd found out. And then there were my colleagues at the station to think about. I'd have been the butt of their jokes for weeks if they'd discovered what I'd done.’

  As he drew his confession and his excuses to an end, Abra at first said nothing. Then, in a hurt voice, she asked, ‘Have you got any other secrets you've kept from me? The odd axe murder, for instance?’

  ‘No. there's nothing more, I swear.’ And there wasn't. Nothing that he could recall, anyway. Though, in his family, there were generally so many secrets of the criminally-edged variety, that he couldn't hope to remember them all.

  ‘So why didn't you tell me all about it?’ Still sounding hurt, in that voice that made Rafferty squirm, she added softly: ‘I suppose I was the only one who knew nothing?’

  ‘No. That's not true,’ he protested. ‘Apart from Dafyd, who figured things out for himself during the case, only Deputy Assistant Chief Constable Jack Mulcahy and ma knew about it. No one else. And the way things panned out, I didn't really have any choice about telling the last two. Believe me, I'd have sooner not.’

  ‘Aren't you forgetting someone else?’ Abra waved the letter under his nose. ‘Apparently your blackmailer knows all about it, as well.’

  Rafferty gave a mournful nod. ‘Him, too, of course.’ And the Lonely Hearts’ case victims' murderer, he silently reminded himself. But he said that to himself rather than Abra.

  ‘So, what are you thinking of doing to counter this blackmailer's threat?’

  Rafferty shrugged. I was thinking of lighting a few candles in Father Kelly's church, he felt like saying. The bit of the universal

  God that hung around in that particular holy enclosure must, he thought, be an understanding sort, given that, unlike himself, the old priest always seemed to get away with his sins.

  But he said none of this. Instead, he admitted, ‘I don't know. Yet. But I'm exploring a few possibilities.’

  ‘That must mean you've got some inkling as to who might be responsible for this letter,’ she was quick to point out.

  There were even fewer flies on Abra than on her smart cousin, Dafyd Llewellyn, Rafferty thought, as he admitted, ‘Let's just say there are one or two’ – or ten – ‘who come to mind as possibles.’

  Abra frowned at him for a few more seconds. Then she sighed heavily, rose and crossed decisively to the cupboard in the corner and removed a bottle of Jameson's and two glasses.<
br />
  ‘Maybe a dram or two of this will help your head free up the identities of a few more potential suspects.’

  Rafferty doubted it. He'd already travelled that particular path to enlightenment several times without reaching a firm destination. But at least, if whiskey provided no answers, it brought a welcome anaesthesia.

  He held out his hand for the glass. Besides, it was how he was to neutralise the blackmailer that was what he needed to know. He already had his ten most likely suspects lined up, all in a row.

  As he sipped the warming whiskey, it struck him that Abra had taken his revelations with an astonishing calm. He was just congratulating himself on being saved the expected rants, raves, slamming doors and sulks when he realised they might have been preferable.

  Because an Abra who reacted so calmly was simply another anxiety to add to his growing collection. What was she planning? Please God, he pleaded. Don't let her have put her head together with ma's and come up with some nefarious plot to save me from myself. If she does, I'm likely to end up in even more lumber than I'm in now, he thought.

  But it seemed more a case that Abra had been brooding about the blackmail letter and his confession, rather than going over any ma- inspired plot for flaws. For later, when they had retired to bed, she became very quiet, which was unlike her. Usually, after a few drinks, she became talkative.

  She waited until they had extinguished the bedside lights before she suddenly blurted out: 'Why didn't you tell me about all this before,

  Joe? And why didn't you tell me about the two dead women you took such a shine to?'

  In the darkness, Abra's voice sounded small and distressed as if tears weren't far away.

  Rafferty sat up, turned the bedside light back on, and reached for her. Cuddling her close, he kissed her hair, breathing in its fragrance. 'I'm sorry, sweetheart. I didn't mean to upset you. That's the last thing I want to do, now or ever. And yes, OK, I did take a shine to those women, but it's you that I'm living with. You that I love.

  ‘I suppose,’ he admitted, ‘ that I hoped to deal with it on my own without troubling–’