Deadly Reunion

Chapter One-4

‘WHAT DO YOU THINK, Dafyd?’ Rafferty asked once they were finally alone. ‘Do you reckon they’re colluding for some reason?’

Llewellyn shook his thinly handsome face. ‘No. They’re too disparate a group. I can’t see that Giles Harmsworth or Victoria Watson would agree to conceal a crime.’

‘Unless they did it,’ Rafferty chipped in.

‘There’s always that possibility, of course. But we have, as yet, no evidence that this was anything other than a suicide.’

‘Come on! How likely is it that anyone of sound mind would choose such a method?’

‘We don’t know that he was of sound mind – we found anti-depressants in his room. Perhaps he didn’t know what symptoms the poison would cause and thought he would just go to sleep. As I said, we’ve no evidence that he didn’t kill himself.’

‘Given that he’d attended Griffin School, he must have been a well-educated man. Surely, he would have taken the trouble to find out what the poison did to the body before he did the business?’

‘The depression—’

‘That aside for a minute. Even if he did kill himself, Hemlock seems a particularly peculiar method to choose, given that it paralyzes the limbs. I can’t see a professional sportsman, even a retired one, choosing such a method. Why not just use pills and whiskey?’

Llewellyn gave a tiny shrug. Rafferty was pleased to see that, for once, his educated sergeant had no arguments against his theories. They had been through the dead man’s things and there had been nothing – apart from the anti-depressants – to indicate that suicide was a possibility. He had got Llewellyn to make a note to check with the dead man’s doctor. Not one of the reunees had said that he seemed other than they remembered him from the days when they had been cooped up together for weeks at a time and got to know one another intimately. No suicide note, or suspicious substances had been found. Though, on the other hand, as Rafferty regretfully acknowledged, neither had there been anything to indicate that Ainsley felt he had reason to fear for his life from one of his fellow reunees. Anyway, why would he have attended the reunion if that was the case?

Suicide. Or murder. It must be one or the other as accidental death was surely out of the question.

Adam Ainsley had, after a career as a professional rugby player, studied to become a sports coach and was now employed as a Physical Education teacher at another private school; this much he had learned from the other reunees. He had been twice divorced and at the time of his death had been single, with no known romantic entanglements. From the various comments from his former schoolmates, the dead man had been a popular boy with the girls at the school and had cut a swathe through most of them. His moody, Byronesque looks, clearly finding favour with the fair s*x. And given his sporting prowess, he had been equally popular with the boys; at least the other sporty boys.

To listen to the surviving reunees, the wonder was that anyone should have wanted to do away with such a popular young man. But someone had. Rafferty was convinced of that, despite Llewellyn’s mention of suicide. And he would find out which of them it was, no matter how many expensive legal types they conjured up between them.