To Rafferty’s surprise, Dorothea Bignall immediately contradicted her husband.
‘For goodness’ sake, Ivor, tell the inspector the truth. There’s no need to lie. I know you think you’re protecting me and defending my feelings, but I’m not quite the piece of Dresden china you seem to believe me to be. I won’t break, you know, if you tell them the truth. It really was all a very long time ago. But in case you don’t believe I’m able to cope with the revelation and continue to lie for my sake, I’ll tell the inspector all about it myself.’
Bignall made an abrupt, silencing gesture with his hand. Rafferty presumed he wasn’t used to her contradicting him, and so forcefully. It was a surprise to both of them. Maybe Dorothea Bignall wasn’t the timid mouse he had previously assumed her to be? And maybe it wasn’t his wife Bignall was trying to protect…?
Dorothea Bignall turned to Rafferty. ‘I was upset on the day of Rufus Seward’s civic reception. Ivor found me in tears in our bedroom.’ She paused, gulped in a lungful of air and then continued. ‘We’d been trying since a year or so after our marriage to have children. But I never once conceived in all the years that followed. I thought I knew why, but Ivor had no reason to suspect. He forced the truth from me when he found me in tears for no apparent reason.’
Her eyes glistened with unshed tears as if her memory had forced a reconstruction of the events, but she continued determinedly on in a room now silent but for her low voice and the crackle of the logs burning in the grate. ‘You remember I told you that Rufus Seward and I both attended St Oswald’s, the fee-paying boarding school?’ she asked Rafferty.
He nodded. Given the revelations he had so far heard about Rufus Seward and his behaviour, he was beginning to get a suspicion of where this was going. He stole a glance at Bignall. The big man’s face was a frozen mask, whatever he was feeling well concealed behind it.
‘While I was at the school, Rufus Seward raped me and I fell pregnant. My parents insisted on an abortion. Unfortunately, the abortion was botched and I got an infection. It damaged me rather badly. Much later, I was told that the damage the infection had caused made it almost impossible for me to have children. The day Ivor found me in tears was the anniversary of the day I murdered my child and removed any possibility of being able to give my husband the large family he wanted. I hadn’t been well that day and I suppose the anniversary combined with my ill-health to make me weepy.’
‘And you learned this on the day of Seward’s reception?’ Rafferty asked Bignall.
Bignall just nodded at this, as if he no longer trusted his voice.
Rafferty found it strange that the forceful Bignall had shown such restraint at the reception and had limited himself merely to a display of coolness towards Seward. If it had been me, Rafferty thought, I’d have punched Seward’s lights out. Or murdered him.
‘Did you speak to him about what he’d done to your wife?’
Bignall found his voice at last. ‘No, of course not. How could I? The evening of the reception was neither the time nor the place for such recriminations. It would have greatly upset my wife if I had brought up such a matter in public. Besides, it was only my wife’s word against Seward’s. There were no witnesses to the rape. Dorothea was ashamed and had told no one about it, not even her parents. They just assumed she had been careless with some boy, especially when she refused to reveal who the father was.’
‘Yet you still attended the reception? Why?’
‘I insisted, Inspector,’ Dorothea interrupted. ‘My husband had several joint business interests with Rufus Seward. Even for my sake, I wouldn’t allow him to risk a public falling out that might jeopardise these. Besides, this was a one-off occasion. I thought myself capable of getting through the evening, especially as I knew I was unlikely to have to socialise with Rufus Seward again.’
Was that because she thought it unlikely that Seward would again visit his home town? Rafferty wondered, or because she knew he was shortly to leave this life?
Bignall again insisted he had said nothing to Seward. ‘I intended to speak to him privately the next day. But by then it was too late, of course. The swine got away with what he did and I was never able to force him to confront his guilt.’
It all sounded a little pat to Rafferty. Had Bignall really managed to hold his fury in check all that evening after his wife’s tearful confession and the realisation that Seward was the reason he had never had the brood of sons his dynastic ambitions had craved?
It seemed increasingly unlikely to Rafferty the more he considered it. But until they had proof that Bignall was lying – and Bignall was saying nothing more, that much was clear — they had no reason to take him into custody.
‘Quite a revelation,’ Llewellyn commented as the Bignalls’ front door closed behind them. A chill and gusty wind had developed and they both hurried to get into the car and out of its path. ‘I’m surprised Mrs Bignall told us anything about the rape and its consequences when, on the face of it, it gives both her and her husband a strong reason for wishing Seward dead.’
‘True,’ Rafferty agreed as he started the car. ‘Either she hates her husband — I imagine he must sometimes be pretty overbearing — and wouldn’t be sorry to see him banged up or she really does love him and doesn’t think he did it. Still,’ Rafferty remarked, once he’d got the car in gear and rolling at a speed suited to the urgency of his yet to be accomplished deeds, ‘she can’t be sure which way we would jump. And as I said, old I’ve a Big’un must be a difficult man to live with. It strikes me that he might well blame her as much as Seward for the fact they have no children. He must also wonder why she chose to keep the rape and the rapist’s identity a secret. And the timing is strangely coincidental when you consider that Seward was murdered on the evening of the day Bignall finally learned the truth.’
‘It looks suspicious, I agree,’ said Llewellyn, struggling to strap himself in as the car careered round a bend, but I find it difficult to imagine a man like Bignall knifing someone in the back. As he said himself last time we spoke to him, it’s such a cowardly way to kill someone. Besides, apart from any other consideration, surely he would want Seward to see his face and understand the reason why he wanted him dead?’
‘Mayb, maybe not. It could be that Bignall thought a knife in the back was all a man like Seward deserved: a fitting death, given that Bignall must have thought Seward’s actions had knifed him in the back all those years ago.’
‘I still think the psychology of this murder is all wrong for Mr Bignall.’
‘Please, not that psychology stuff again,’ Rafferty protested. ‘Anyway, that angle, on its own, would provide a very good reason for Bignall to kill him that way,’ Rafferty pointed out as he moved up the gears after straightening up once past the bend. ‘By its very nature, such a cowardly means of murder would serve to make us more dismissive of Bignall as a suspect. You said yourself he’s an intelligent man,’ Rafferty reminded Llewellyn. ‘He’d have to be to have got where he is, with that beautiful house and substantial business interests. To me they’re a pointer that he’d be clever enough to work out the most psychologically unlikely way for him to kill someone and then to do it in just that way.’
Honestly, Rafferty thought, sometimes Llewellyn complicated the simplest things. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if Bignall had decided to do his best to get away with murder, why would a guy with his smarts choose to do the deed in a manly, face-to-face confrontation when he must have realised doing it the back-stabbing way would speak volumes to coppers like you and any possible profiler and point you and them in entirely the wrong direction? It would be the act of a fool.
‘And even if he wasn’t smart enough to manipulate the psychological aspect to his advantage, sometimes people just behave out of character. He’d just had one hell of a shock, remember. Here was a man whose greatest ambition, after he’d built his wealth, was to produce a brood of fine sons to pass it on to. But instead he has no one to inherit it but a barren wife – a wife who had
kept the true reason for her infertility a secret from him for years. Such discoveries would enrage any man. Imagine what they would do to a man with a desire to sire a dynasty.’
Rafferty grimaced as he failed to beat the red at the traffic lights. He pulled up with a sharpness that caused the car to judder, and turned to his passenger. ‘And then you’ve got to question why he agreed to attend the party at all after hearing such shocking news. Maybe the real reason was not to protect his business interests at all, as his wife claimed, but to get his revenge.’
The lights finally changed to green and Rafferty roared away.
Beside him, Llewellyn got a firm grip on the dashboard. But although clearly unimpressed by Rafferty’s incautious driving style, he didn’t allow it to distract him from putting forward some more arguments of his own. ‘I think Mrs Bignall told us the truth: that he felt he had no choice when his and Seward’s business interests were so entwined. Besides, he must have faced and accepted that they were unlikely to have children some time ago. It was an old wound that might well have healed with the years. Besides, I gained the distinct impression that it was Mrs Bignall rather than her husband who minded the most about their not having a family.’
‘Either way, you must see that Bignall accepting a fluke of nature is one thing, but this was something very different. Maybe we’ll find that he attended that party for another reason altogether, as I said, and that was that he had discovered another ambition: Getting away with murder.’
Rafferty turned into Bacon Lane, pulled into the rear yard of the police station and parked untidily across two bays. He shrugged as Llewellyn, in a pained voice, pointed this out to him. To himself, he felt a vague twinge of unease about his own conclusions, because although he didn’t doubt that Bignall was clever enough to come up with a method of killing that would point the finger away from himself, he was also clever enough to work out that it must, instead, point the finger at more vulnerable suspects. Would he really be willing for someone else to be convicted and serve a prison term for what he had done? Rafferty wondered whether he was reading him all wrong? Or was he, like Llewellyn, creating unnecessary complications when, in reality, it was a possibility that the eminently sane Ivor Bignall had been sent beyond reason into temporary madness? In which case, it was probable that he had given no thought to that aspect at all. Until it was too late.
Irritated by his own contradictory thoughts, Rafferty climbed out of the car, slammed the door and stomped across the yard to the station’s back entrance. And then he thought of his brother, hiding out further up the Essex coast, and caught something of Bignall’s supposed insanity himself. No brother of his was taking the rap for this crime. If Bignall was guilty, Rafferty was set on proving it. He mightn’t like doing it, he mightn’t like being the police officer who caged such a big and proud beast as Bignall, especially when the victim had used him so cruelly, but if it came to a toss up between Bignall and Mickey then it was no contest. Still, as he climbed the stairs to his office, Rafferty’s heart was heavy because he privately felt that whoever had killed Rufus Seward had done the world a favour.
Chapter Fourteen
It was after nine o’clock by the time they got back to the station. It was a little while later when Rafferty picked up his own car from the car park and headed for his Ma’s house.
After visiting the Bignalls’ beautiful manor house home and seeing again the elegance of the Christmas tree in their sitting room with its subtle silver and gold decorations, the eyeball-searing yuletide gaudiness that met him as he turned into his Ma’s road on the council estate almost caused him to stall the car. Although not normally one to flinch at such flamboyantly exuberant colours, even Rafferty admitted that the vision before his eyes was completely over the top.
Between his last visit and this one, Ma’s next door neighbour had surpassed herself. Still trailing his Ma — the proud possessor of twelve grandchildren and one great-grandchild — in the grandmother stakes, she had, it seemed, hit on a way of beating Ma in something.
The neighbour’s accomplishment really was a blinder in more ways than one because between the flashing, illuminated and mechanical Santa, the reindeer gambolling over the roof, the choir of gold-winged, haloed angels around the crib on the dirty pebbledash beneath who were in imminent danger of having their heads kicked in by the reindeers’ hooves, and the glowing primary-coloured lights that festooned whatever space remained, Ma’s neighbour had certainly won the year’s vulgarity cup.
But, as she sharply informed him when he went inside to pick up Mickey’s clean clothes and was foolish enough to point out her neighbour’s feat of one-upmanship, Ma had no desire to win such a trophy.
‘Christmas is about the birth of our Saviour,’ she told the son who was still considering transferring his allegiance to Old Nick. After she had banged about in the kitchen to make tea and fill another hot water bottle for Mickey, this theme continued. ‘It’s not meant to be turned into some kind of three-ringed circus with people coming from miles around to watch the show. I’m surprised you could get into the street. Since those monstrosities went up, by this time in the evening the road’s usually clogged with cars and gawpers.’
She snorted. ‘Her-next-door even comes out every evening around this time to take a bow as if she’s done something to be proud of.’
Rafferty just restrained a snigger. He didn’t doubt that his Ma’s feelings on the religious front were entirely genuine; she was a regular at St Boniface Catholic Church, but although religious, she also had a strong competitive instinct and liked to be a winner. And in spite of vigorously protesting that she had no desire to match her neighbour’s flashy show, she must hate being trumped by a woman who had never bested her in anything before.
This year, of course, Ma had the Mickey problem to contend with. She had confided to Rafferty that with all the anxiety his brother was causing her, she had really had no heart to put up her own Christmas decorations. She wouldn’t have bothered at all if it wasn’t for the grandchildren who expected their gran to do Christmas properly.
Rafferty could see that, in the circumstances, Her-next door’s blatantly colourful and offensively irreligious decorations must be even harder for her to stomach.
With the trip out to Mickey still to be made, Rafferty cut his visit as short as he could. He left Ma muttering darkly about ‘short-circuiting the entire street.’
He wasn’t sure whether this comment was indicative of worry that the neighbour’s Christmas decorations would bring this about or whether his Ma was actually plotting some kind of sabotage. He wouldn’t put it past her.
It was a worry he could do without right now. But, he assured himself as he left to pick up Mickey’s takeaway and other food, she wouldn’t have the technical knowledge to bring this about.
This comfortable thought was soon edged aside by the realisation that she hadn’t had a husband, two sons and other assorted relatives working in various aspects of the building trade for years without having picked up a trick or two…
The shops in the High Street were open late, as was usual at this time of year, in order to accommodate as many free spending customers as possible, and were lit up with their entirely commercialised version of Christmas. And unlike Ma’s neighbour’s innocent if vulgar exuberance, theirs showed their grasping, greedy desire to part their customers from every last penny. This year, he saw as he drove past, they had even gone in for a form of emotional blackmail that he had never noticed in previous years. A sign in one of the larger stores proclaimed in neon-lit letters a foot high: Why not spend that little bit extra this Christmas and purchase the gifts your loved ones will adore? Surely they’re worth it?
Not when the January credit card bills fell on the mat and induced half a year or more of penury, they’re not, he thought. But even Rafferty, who had believed himself immune from such blatant cash extraction tricks, found himself imbued with uncomfortable feelings of meanness and guilt as the traffic stalled and allowed t
hem to impart their message over and over again to their captive vehicular audience. Because the sign made him realise that he had yet to find time to buy Abra anything at all.
In previous years, his Ma and sisters had sorted out his Christmas list between them without consulting him. But this year, seeing as he was with Abra and their relationship had now been cemented by an engagement, they had taken it for granted that Abra would assume this responsibility. Rafferty had rather assumed it, too. But whether Abra realised this or not, he knew he could hardly expect her to buy her own present.
On an impulse, he indicated left and was just about to try to find a parking space and check in the window of the same jeweller’s where he had bought Abra’s engagement ring to see if he couldn’t get her a pair of matching earrings, when his mobile went. Still without a hands-free phone and guiltily aware that he was breaking the law, he pressed it furtively to his ear and cupped a concealing hand around it.
It was Mickey calling, complaining about something Rafferty couldn’t quite catch and demanding his immediate presence.
‘I can’t hear you,’ Rafferty bellowed into the phone. ‘You’re breaking up.’
‘There’s …storm…injured…dangerous. Come…’ Then the phone went dead.
Rafferty looked up through the windscreen at the night sky. He could see a few faint stars vainly trying to compete with the neon glow from Earth and asked himself, Storm? What storm?
He vaguely recalled hearing snatches of that morning’s weather forecast. He’d had more than enough other worries and hadn’t paid it much heed at the time, but now, he remembered that there had been a storm warning. Mickey was on a jutting-out part of the coast so the weather promised from the east would hit him first.
A Thrust to the Vitals Page 16