A Thrust to the Vitals

by Evans, Geraldine

  ‘It came through the post. Rufus Seward invited me himself.’

  Rafferty’s eyebrows rose in disbelief at this. He hadn’t questioned the likelihood of this earlier as time had been too pressing to start an argument. But he did so now. ‘Oh, come on. Don’t take me for a fool. Not exactly likely, is it?’

  Mickey bristled. ‘Likely or not, I’m telling you that’s what happened. He even enclosed a note with it.’ Mickey paused as if his recollection had failed him, then he stumbled on. ‘It said he had sent the invitation because he felt guilty about the way he’d treated me in the past when we were both youngsters and that since his knighthood he had come over all noblesse oblige, or something.’ Mickey shrugged, and clearly in need of the alcohol, he picked up his glass and downed the remaining contents in one swallow. ‘Anyway, he was keen for me to agree to let bygones be bygones.’

  Rafferty – given Rufus Seward’s character – thought the last highly unlikely, but he managed not to raise his eyebrows again, it would only encourage Mickey’s drunken truculence to increase even further. ‘So where is this note?’

  Mickey gestured towards the log fire, burning merrily to ward off the chill December morning. ‘I threw it in the grate.’

  Of course you did, thought Rafferty. ‘When did you receive the invitation?’

  ‘The day before the party.’

  ‘It must have been a last-minute invitation,’ Rafferty observed quietly, hoping to tone the proceedings down a little. ‘All the other invitations went out weeks earlier.’ But then, he supposed, the vast majority of the other attendees were VIPs whose engagements were always organised well in advance. Seward’s diary already had dates pencilled in for the end of the next year. ‘I checked the guest list. Your name doesn’t appear on it.’

  Apart from that of Superintendent Bradley, who had already said he was unlikely to make it, Mickey’s was the only name not on the list. Even Nigel’s made an appearance, which, to Rafferty’s amazement, indicated that his cousin really must have been a bona-fide guest after all.

  Mickey shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about that. But, thinking about it, it doesn’t altogether surprise me. Seward would hardly be likely to shout about the fact he had sent me the invitation. His note might have claimed he wanted to apologise, but I didn’t think it likely he would be keen to eat much humble pie. I can’t see Seward becoming so humble no matter how sorry he might be. Anyway, I had an invitation. I showed it to one of the two security blokes on the door of Seward’s suite, and he let me in.’

  ‘From what I understand after questioning the security men and that guest you met in the hallway, you’d had a few drinks before you arrived.’

  Mickey shrugged, but didn’t trouble to deny that he’d needed the fuel of Dutch courage to get him there.

  ‘You’ve admitted you went there to have a showdown with Seward. Did you relish the opportunity to hear him apologise and maybe make him grovel a bit?’

  Mickey glared at him but made no other response. He didn’t need to. Rafferty already knew that Seward had concocted some damaging lies in their youth, lies that had resulted in Mickey losing the young love of his life to Seward himself. ‘For all the claims you said he made in his note, I don’t suppose he was magnanimous enough to actually apologise? People like Rufus Seward rarely feel the need, in my experience.’

  It was more likely that Seward had invited Mickey, as he had invited the other humble invitees from his youth, merely to boast about his success and humiliate him all over again, though Rafferty found enough tact to keep this thought to himself.

  Only Mickey had ruined the sport by turning up late when nearly all the guests had gone.

  ‘You’re right,’ Mickey told him. ‘He didn’t apologise, but that was more a case of couldn’t than wouldn’t.’

  Rafferty frowned as an unpleasant suspicion took wing. ‘Don’t tell me you’re saying he was already dead when you went into his bedroom?’

  ‘I won’t then.’

  ‘Don’t play stupid games, Mickey. Was he dead or wasn’t he?’

  Mickey nodded. ‘He was well dead. On the way to hell, I hope.’

  Exasperated, Rafferty demanded, ‘So why didn’t you tell someone about it?’ Clearly, Mickey had not done so: if he had, he would scarcely have had the chance to leave the scene. The only plus factor was that his brother’s identity was still unknown, though for how much longer that happy state of affairs would last… ‘Did you touch him at all? Or anything in the room?’

  Mickey shook his head. ‘Only the doorknob. I was too shocked to think of wiping it.’

  Rafferty supposed that was something. At least forensics wouldn’t find Mickey’s clothing fibres or DNA on the body. Not that they needed to in order to link him to the scene. Apart from the possibility he had shed a hair or two from his head and left fingerprints on the doorknob, three witnesses had already reported him as showing up drunk shortly before Canthorpe found the body, one of them, Ivor Bignall, with the additional, damning information that he had demanded to speak to Seward. They had also provided pretty good descriptions; descriptions that were likely to be improved before the day was out and after the three had had the opportunity to work on them with the police artist.

  It was suspicious, too, that Mickey should have left only minutes after arriving at the party. That he had left shortly before the body was found made Mickey’s defence even more problematic. He had certainly done a damn good job of incriminating himself. As circumstantial evidence went, it was doubly damning.

  More in sorrow than anger, Rafferty said, ‘You realise, that by running away, you lost your one chance to be quickly exonerated? Your best chance to be proved innocent?’

  His brother’s already downcast face drooped some more. Mickey’s brow was furrowed in lines of misery, the belligerence now nothing more than a fading memory. He told Rafferty, ‘I suppose I panicked. You’re right: I’d had a few drinks - more than a few - before I went to see him. I needed them. The bully who made my life a misery as a boy had become a man of substance. And although I had intended to have it out with him, I admit I felt a bit overawed, a bit out of my depth in such plush surroundings. A bit antagonistic, too, if you want the truth. Besides, don’t you think I could see what it would look like, with him slumped over his desk, clearly dead and with a sharp implement like a carpenter’s chisel imbedded in his back? Especially given our history of animosity.’

  Clearly reluctant to make such a damning admission, even to his big, police inspector brother, Mickey’s chin slumped several more notches as he quietly added, ‘I even recognised the make — it’s one I use.’

  This was getting better and better, thought Rafferty grimly. In need of some reassurance himself, he asked again, ‘Did anyone else at the party see you, other than the security men and this guest who directed you to Seward’s bedroom?’

  ‘No. I’ve already told you that once. How many more times? But all three got a good look at me. They’re sure to recognise me again.’

  Rafferty didn’t trouble to contradict him. Mickey was right; the security men and Ivor Bignall had got a good look at him. They had certainly provided a good description of Seward’s late visitor. Even Rafferty, not the greatest ace at recognising faces, would have felt a frisson of familiarity when he saw the first, hastily constructed photo-fit the police artist had worked up with Bignall and the others, even if he hadn’t already been primed by Mickey about his presence at the scene. But without this prior knowledge, Rafferty suspected that the self-serving denial of a brain unwilling to co operate would probably have obligingly worked its usual magic. The woeful inadequacy of such a denial would, of course, very quickly have been brought up against cold, hard reality, the sort he was now facing, the sort which he had to sort out. Somehow. For all their sakes.

  ‘What are we going to do, JAR? You’re in charge of the case. You’ve got to help me.’

  His younger brother’s voice, high-pitched and frightened into a too-late sobriety, broug
ht Rafferty out of his reverie. As the eldest of six siblings, he had always taken the big brother approach when any of the younger ones were in trouble, so naturally he wanted to help Mickey. Of course he did. It was just that, for the moment, he couldn’t for the life of either of them, see how. The best he could do for the moment, was get him out of harm’s way, then hope that luck and inspiration came up with the rest. And, up till now, no likely helpmeet in even this most basic of endeavours had occurred to him.

  But desperation brings its own salvation. For, just as despair began to grip him by the throat, the identity of the person most likely to help him — to a brief salvation at least — came to Rafferty.

  ‘Pack a bag,’ he told Mickey. ‘If we’re to keep you away from the notice of other, less helpful, policemen, you’re going to have to do a vanishing act.’ He took out his mobile. ‘I know just the person who can help us stash you out of the way for a few days.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Algy Edwards.’

  ‘That crook? Surely you can think of someone else who can put me up for a while?’

  ‘I can’t, as it happens. It’s Algy or no one. Besides, while I admit that Algy might be a bit dodgy, his heart’s in the right place.’ Rafferty prayed he wasn’t proved wrong about that. He prayed, too, that Algy hadn’t got rid of his limited property portfolio as they hadn’t spoken for some time.

  His third prayer was that a few days was all it would be. Or need to be.

  While an increasingly agitated Mickey packed a bag as instructed, Rafferty phoned Algy, who was one of a group of the assorted, somewhat dodgy acquaintances of his long-lost youth. He was calling in a favour. He just hoped it was a call-in that he didn’t come to regret.

  Twenty minutes later, they drew up in Mickey’s girlfriend’s Renault at a caravan site further up the Essex coast. Mickey’s girlfriend was someone else Rafferty knew he would have to square away, but she would wait as she was currently staying round the corner from the flat looking after her sick mother. He filed the thought away to think about later. Maybe, by then he would have come up with some believable tale?

  Fortunately, the site where the bitterly complaining at the early phone call, but eventually obliging, Algy Edwards had a caravan wasn’t one of those sites that catered for year-round caravan hire. Neither did it have any residents permanently on site. Rafferty had made sure to check on both points before settling on it.

  From what they could see of it in the gloom, the place looked deserted, desolate, even. Which was just what Rafferty had been hoping for. At last, he thought, something was going right. He immediately cursed himself for a fool and crossed his fingers for the second time since he had been brought abreast of Mickey’s situation.

  In the raw, pre-dawn hours of the December morning, there was a forlorn air about the place. It reminded Rafferty of one of those old Wild West ghost towns that featured in so many of the cowboy films of his youth. It lacked only the windblown tumbleweeds to complete the impression of a place long since abandoned by man. But what it might lack in tumbleweeds, it didn’t lack in appropriate sound effects: somewhere close, he could hear a creaking door that, presumably assisted by the rising wind, was spookily effective. It certainly sent a shiver up his spine, so he could guess what it did to his already more than spooked little brother.

  It was still too early for the sun to have struggled over the horizon. The only illumination was provided by the Renault’s headlights. Between the lights, the shifting misty miasma coming off the sea and familiar to those with a nodding acquaintance with the chill, pre-dawn hour, and the caravans themselves, which seemed like huge, crouching beasts ready to spring on the unwary, the whole scene contained an atmosphere so eerie and filled with such hidden menace, that it made the skin crawl.

  Their arrival at this quiet, bottom-clenching, sometime sanctuary — not to mention the unsettling caravan monsters that had them surrounded — not surprisingly, appeared to comfort Mickey not one jot. He hadn’t once troubled to question Rafferty about their destination during the journey, presumably having questions of even greater magnitude to occupy him.

  But now, somehow, in the Stygian gloom, light must have dawned, for Mickey spluttered, ‘B—but you can’t leave me here!’

  The horrified quiver in his voice made it all too plain that he was aghast at the prospect. As Rafferty would have been, he admitted to himself, had their positions been reversed. But it wasn’t as if either of them had a choice in the matter — time had been limited and options even more so. The dodgy Algy Edwards and his less than luxurious caravan was the best Rafferty could do in the circumstances.

  Aware that he had to be tough for both their sakes, he just said bluntly, ‘Quit moaning. At least it’s quiet and out of the way.’

  ‘So was Dracula’s castle,’ Mickey muttered, but I wouldn’t want to stay there, either.’

  Rafferty hardened his heart. ‘You’re staying. Get used to the idea. It’s this or a cell in the police station. As long as you don’t use a light or do anything else to draw attention to yourself, it’s likely that no one will notice you’re here.’

  Reminded of the police cell alternative, Mickey shut up.

  As they began hunting along the rows of caravans for the one belonging to Rafferty’s sometime friend, they left the Renault’s lights behind. Rafferty fumbled his way in the darkness, stubbed his toe on a gas canister and cursed. He finally persuaded the torch he had taken from the car to provide a half-hearted light. Flickering and inadequate as it was, with its begrudging assistance, he squinted at each of the caravans’ numbers, trying to find the one he sought so he could stash Mickey and get back to the station before someone started searching for him in earnest.

  The torch’s batteries were clearly running on empty and its light fluttered and died just as he at last located the right caravan. Plunged into the total darkness that is night-time in the country, he fumbled with the key, which they had collected en route, and managed to open the caravan door.

  Mickey followed him, stumbling up the steps and adding his own blue curses to Rafferty’s.

  From behind him, Rafferty heard his brother muttering to himself — ‘If this is the best you can do—’ The rest trailed off, presumably, as Mickey, again considering the alternative that Rafferty had so bluntly pointed out, thought better of finishing the sentence.

  Oh, wise little brother, Rafferty thought. He had begun to grin in perverse appreciation of their plight when he banged his nose on a cupboard. He swore again instead and decided he would, after all, comment on his brother’s base ingratitude.

  ‘Yes, actually, this is the best I can do. If you can do any better for yourself, feel free. What did you expect?’ he demanded of the shadowy contours, which were all he could see of his brother. ‘A top-notch hotel like the Elmhurst, smack in the centre of town and convenient for all amenities?

  ‘I suggest you get real, bro. Surely you’ve grasped by now that you need to lie low? This, unfortunately, is what lying low means, whether you like it or not.’

  The inescapable truth of this utterance must have suddenly struck Mickey with some force, for he fell silent and, feeling behind him in the gloom to ensure he didn’t land on his arse on the floor, he slumped heavily on one of the caravan’s side banquettes. With his head in his hands, he said, ‘God, I sincerely hope it is only for the few days you said.’

  So did Rafferty. Because Abra would be home by Sunday night and expecting him to have organised the romantic dinner he had promised her before she left for Dublin.

  Having finally plucked up the courage — with recourse to the Dutch stuff his brother had earlier so freely imbibed — Rafferty had proposed. Somewhat to his surprise, Abra had accepted. The girly weekend had been long-planned and un-getoutable-of, so, to make up for its interrupting their own celebrations, they had promised each other some quality time on Abra’s return. Rafferty had been deputed to find the time to get this celebratory quality time organised.

  Now, with
this latest murder inquiry and the unwelcome complication of Mickey’s involvement, Rafferty knew he would be hard-pressed to honour that promise and keep both Abra sweet and his brother safe. Especially if, as seemed only too likely given the many distractions, he failed to promptly put a name to the real murderer.

  Maybe he would be able to find a restaurateur willing to provide them with a celebratory engagement meal at midnight? Their ‘Cinderella’ celebration, he could call it. Of course, Abra, being Abra and sharing more than a smidgeon of her cousin Llewellyn’s logic, would remind him that Cinders’ perfect evening ended at midnight, rather than began then.

  Rafferty felt a bout of hysterical laughter fighting to break free. But as he glanced again at his head-in-hands brother, the urge to laugh vanished as suddenly as it had come. He was beginning to feel that life had turned him into some kind of hydra-headed monster with all the heads striving to control the direction he took. He certainly felt he had no control over anything right now.

  The only thing he knew for sure was that each and every one of these heads was going to make increasingly unreasonable demands on him in the days and weeks to follow.

  In need of some light relief from the doubts that he would be able to rise to any of the challenges the fates had thrown before him, Rafferty eased his weary bones on to the banquette opposite where Mickey was slumped. And as his brother seemed to have nothing further to say on any subject, he returned to contemplating his Cinders evening with Abra. He supposed that, if Abra found fault with his logic, he could always do his Blarney-Stone spiel and say-‘Sure and begorra, and isn’t it Oirish I am? And don’t we always do things in a fey, charming and about-face way from all the other eejits?’

  Abra would laugh. Hopefully. Though, as a prompt, he might first have to offer her the moon, the stars and a Caribbean honeymoon. Women could be so mercenary.

  Thinking about women, Rafferty knew there was one other female in his life who would expect him to pull his finger out — Ma.