Rafferty & Llewellyn Boxed Set Books 5-8

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

‘BY THE WAY,’ LLEWELLYN said as they got in the car much later that morning and headed for Aimhurst and Son’s offices to interview the staff. ‘We were too busy earlier for me to mention it, but Maureen and I have set a date and venue for our wedding.’

Rafferty’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. He had congratulated himself too soon. The fates had obviously decided to make an example of him. Llewellyn’s news meant the iffy suit had a definite date set for its airing. It explained why Llewellyn had been throwing out so many high-minded quotes. Rafferty had noticed their number went up or down according to whether Llewellyn was happy or miserable.

Still, not to panic, he told himself. Knowing Llewellyn’s no-rush mentality, the date was probably months away. He managed to choke out his congratulations.

Llewellyn gave him one of the tiny smiles that were the equivalent of a huge grin from anyone else and confided, ‘It was what you said that prompted us.’

Me and my big mouth, thought Rafferty. He prayed he’d get laryngitis next time he felt tempted to give advice against his own best interests. Conscious that his ready tongue had got him into enough trouble already, he managed to avoid giving voice to another of the opinions that were always ready to trip off its tip. Admittedly, it was pretty unromantic to arrange your wedding date right at the start of a murder enquiry, but he was damned if he was going to be the one to say so. He thought he’d said more than enough on the subject of marriage already.

‘Yes,’ Llewellyn added. ‘We’ve been thinking seriously about it and finally made our minds up. We’ve compromised on a register office ceremony and will ask our respective churches for blessings afterwards. Maureen had a day off today and went to Elmhurst Register Office to make the arrangements. She rang me just before we left the office to let me know that the date at least is organised.’

Rafferty tried to look pleased at the news. After all, he had been the one to get the romance off the ground. He immediately crunched the gears. To cover his gaffe, he attempted a joke. ‘So, when is it? Christmas in the year 2005?’ Llewellyn had a well-

deserved reputation for caution. Rafferty had relied on it, dammit. ‘Remind me to put a note in my five-year diary.’

‘It’s a little earlier than 2005, actually. It’s March. March 29th this year.’ Llewellyn paused. ‘You know, I haven’t been in a Marks and Spencer store for some years. I know they have a reputation for quality, but I didn’t realize before that it extended to superior suits at reasonable prices. You should ask your mother to look out for a new one there for you.’ Rafferty sensed the pained glance Llewellyn directed at his old brown suit. ‘You’ll want to look smart for the wedding, especially as Superintendent Bradley’s been invited.’

A chilly breeze seemed to flutter around Rafferty’s heart at Llewellyn’s latest revelation. The fates were really going for the jugular this time. The news about Bradley was all he needed. ‘Long-Pockets’ Bradley could price anything at a hundred yards, and if Llewellyn wore his iffy suit Bradley would be bound to ask where he’d got it. No way would he be taken in by the fake Marks and Sparks tag. ‘Who decided to invite him?’

‘Maureen’s mother. When Maureen rang her to tell her the news she was so pleased her mother didn’t quibble about it being a civil ceremony that she agreed to let her make a start on the invitation list.’ Llewellyn directed another of his little smiles at Rafferty. ‘I gather Superintendent Bradley was the first name she thought of. She’s already dropped his invitation round. She knows him from the Masons’ dinner dances. Apparently, Maureen’s father’s a member.’

I might have known it, Rafferty thought. Maureen’s mother, Claire Tyler-Jenkins as was, snob and social-climber second to none, would consider it as natural as breathing that, with ambitions to the future, she should invite her prospective son-in-law’s big white chief to the wedding. Why didn’t that possibility occur to me? he asked himself with dismay. He hadn’t exactly endeared himself to the old man and for months Bradley had been looking for a reason to get rid of him. He was unlikely to worry if the means to that end put paid to Llewellyn’s career as well as his own.

Absorbed in his plans, Llewellyn rattled on happily, oblivious to the consternation he had caused. Rafferty heard not a word. A heart-thumping panic had blocked most of his senses and his automatic pilot took over the driving. It wasn’t difficult for him to imagine the sequence of events after Bradley learned not only of the bargain basement price of the wedding suit and its claimed and unlikely provenance, but that his ma had supplied it. He stifled a groan. The Marks and Sparks label wouldn’t fool him for a minute, suspicious-minded git that he was. Somehow Rafferty doubted St Michael would extend his saintly protection under such circumstances. Visions of interrogations, suspension, court rooms and prison chased one another remorselessly across his inner vision; not just for him, but for Llewellyn as well. It would certainly get his and Maureen’s marriage off to a flying start.

Preoccupied by this uncomfortable thought, Rafferty turned off the roundabout into Aimhurst and Son’s forecourt, parked and got out before the still chatty Llewellyn had time to notice his distracted air.

Constable Smales was on the door, his boyish complexion still green-tinged from his recent post-mortem attendance. Rafferty, at the moment feeling empathy with all the troubled souls in the world - even Smales - spared him a sympathetic glance.

Smales told him that, as he had requested, the employees had been gathered in the ground floor staff room to await his arrival. Rafferty could, of course, have contacted them the previous evening and told them to stay at home, but he had felt it would be more helpful to the case to get them together on the premises and, hopefully, talking revealingly to one another.

Rafferty nodded at Smales and walked into the reception area. Hal Gallagher was hovering beside WPC Liz Green and immediately he opened the staff room door for Rafferty to enter.

As soon as he stepped into the room, Rafferty felt the tension in the air. He had warned Hal Gallagher and Albert Smith the security guard to say nothing to the staff about the murder as he wanted to gauge their reactions when they learned of it. Although he suspected it was too much to hope that the murderer - if he did turn out to be one of the staff - would react in an obvious way, there might just be something.

But if any of the staff harboured an emotion stronger than curiosity it was well concealed. Of course, with so many police officers on the premises they would be aware that something major had occurred.

As he gazed round at the faces Rafferty could discern nothing more than a heightened excitement at this interesting change to the normal routine, plus an expectation that he was the man who would provide the answers. Nobody looked guilty, fearful or even remorseful. Of course it was reasonable that whoever had killed Barstaple felt no guilt or remorse. After all, if the victim had been a dog he’d have been put down years ago as being too mean-spirited and spiteful.

Apart from Gallagher, all four of the remaining office staff were present and each of them stared at him with varying degrees of curiosity.

‘Are you going to tell us what’s going on?’ A young blonde woman demanded. ‘Nobody will tell us anything.’ She glanced round at her colleagues and her, ‘I think we’ve a right to know,’ brought several agreeing nods.

She was an attractive girl with a sensitive oval face, shapely figure and a gleaming bob. Rafferty automatically straightened his shoulders and sucked in what Sam Dally insisted was the beginnings of a paunch. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘And you are Miss-?’

‘Luscombe. Linda Luscombe.’

Rafferty flipped open his notebook but wasn’t surprised to discover that he was unable to decipher his scrawled notes.

Llewellyn came to his rescue and extracted the required information from his own notes which he had efficiently and speedily lifted from the staff files before they had left the office. ‘Miss Luscombe is here on work-experience from the local college, sir.’

Hal Gallagher stepped forward. ‘Perhaps I should get the introductions out of the way?’ At Rafferty’s nod, he worked his way round the room, naming each of the staff. He finished with Rafferty and Llewellyn and introduced them in turn.

Now that the formalities were over the staff stared at him impatiently. ‘Right,’ said Rafferty. ‘I’d better start by telling you why you’ve all been gathered to wait in your own staff room.’ Bluntly, he told them, ‘I’m afraid there’s been a murder on the premises.’

This produced gasps of astonishment and a certain amount of ghoulish thrill though nothing more suspicious as far as Rafferty could judge. He waited for the excited buzz to die down before adding, ‘Mr Clive Barstaple was found dead in his office yesterday evening.’

This shocked them and it was a few seconds before the questions came at him.

‘How?’

‘Who did it?’

‘When exactly?’

Nobody asked ‘why?’, Rafferty noted.

After the first shocked questions a warier silence took over. From the covert glances it was clear they were examining motives, opportunities, possible alibis. He guessed the last point might pose them a few problems. As he had already concluded, in this investigation the time of death was of less significance than was usually the case. It was who had had the opportunity to doctor the yoghurt pot, or more importantly, substitute it that were the questions here. He doubted any of them would have an alibi that covered the entire time from its purchase, its placing in the fridge - the timing of both of which they had still to establish - and its consumption and the substitution of the discarded pot for another.

Linda Luscombe at nineteen had the resilience of youth and recovered far more quickly from the news than her middle-aged colleagues.

‘Are we allowed to know how he died?’

Rafferty could see no reason not to tell them. They were likely to find out soon enough from the security guard. ‘He was poisoned, Miss Luscombe.’

The colour drained from her face. ‘God. I shared Clive’s - Mr Barstaple’s lunch yesterday. If it was in that whoever killed Clive might have murdered me as well.’

Her claim was confirmed by Bob Harris, a grey-faced, worried-looking man of about 50. ‘That’s true. They were both eating in his office around 12.30. I-I had intended to take my lunch from 12 till one,’ he rambled on. ‘But Mr Barstaple called me into his office just as I was going for lunch. I was with him till just after 12.30 and decided not to bother going out after all.’

‘Oh, Bob, how upsetting for you.’ The woman Hal Gallagher had introduced as Amy Glossop had a thin, embittered face. After her comment, she glanced round at the other members of staff as if looking for approval. Instead, she got stony expressions of dislike. It seemed to spur her on. ‘Of course, I left just before noon and didn’t realize you weren’t able to meet your wife after all. You poor thing.’ The sympathetic smile she directed at Harris appeared designed specifically to turn the knife. It certainly made Bob Harris look sick and caused Linda Luscombe to glare at her, a glare that said ‘shut up’ as clearly as words.

Amy Glossop gave a glance of injured innocence around the room. ‘I’m sorry. Have I said something I shouldn’t?’ The innocence was as patently false as the sympathy. And, as she went artlessly on, sticking the knife in a little deeper, Rafferty wondered what the inoffensive Harris could possibly have done to her.

‘It’s just that we all know how much yesterday meant to you. I hope Eileen didn’t take it too badly.’ Amy Glossop turned to Rafferty and explained, ‘Bob here had an important date with his estranged wife yesterday lunch time. Such a shame he had to stand her up.’

Miss Glossop’s staff file claimed she was forty-five, Rafferty remembered, but she looked older. And while he thought it possible that someone of Amy Glossop’s age could still be naive enough to unwittingly let them know that her colleague had an additional reason to dislike his interim manager, he doubted this was so in her case. There was something about her thin lips and narrowed, bird-bright eyes that told him her comment had been calculated.

It seemed, from their expressions, that the rest of the staff thought so too. He sensed a certain drawing back from the woman. As the room was small this was more mental than physical, but it was obvious that Amy Glossop had noticed it, too. For a moment the veil lifted, and raw misery briefly peered out before being as quickly hidden. She hugged herself defensively as though she, rather than Bob Harris had been the victim here.

Bob Harris looked even sicker than before. On the surface, Harris looked too defeated a man to have the energy to plan his own death, never mind anyone else’s. But Rafferty had learned in the course of his career that appearances could be deceptive. Harris and the rest had been Barstaple’s prey; he had stalked them as a fox stalks a rabbit. But, back the weakest prey against a wall and they’ll turn on you. Hadn’t Crippen been meek, mild, cowed, just like Harris? For Crippen, love had been sufficient spur to find the courage for murder. Added to his presumed anxiety about his continued employment, love could have been the spur in Harris’s case, too. As Llewellyn had pointed out, it was possible Barstaple’s murderer had been too blinded by hatred and misery to think as far as the possible consequences of ridding themselves of their immediate persecutor.

Rafferty questioned him further. ‘You say you didn’t go out to lunch as you had intended?’

Harris flushed. ‘No. I-that is, as Ms Glossop told you, I had arranged to meet my wife just after midday. As that had fallen through, I didn’t bother.’ Rafferty, who was always ready for his lunch, found this admission curious and his frank stare prompted Harris to provide a further explanation.

‘My appetite had gone,’ he said. ‘I suffer from stomach ulcers. If I don’t eat at set times they begin to play up and I don’t feel much like eating at all. I forced a glass of milk down.’

Rafferty nodded. But he couldn’t help wondering whether, in addition to the delay in eating and the upset over missing his lunch date the conversation with Barstaple had ruined his appetite. He wondered what Harris and Barstaple had discussed. But that discovery could come later. For the moment, he wanted to set the scene, get the current crop of suspects fixed in his mind as individuals and find out who was where at what time. He turned back to Linda Luscombe.

‘You said you shared Mr Barstaple’s lunch. Was this a regular thing?’

‘No.’ She pulled a face. ‘He normally went out for lunch. I learned yesterday that he was on a diet.’

‘You weren’t aware of this before yesterday?’

‘No. I go to college and yesterday was my first day back.’

‘So, what did you eat?’

‘Just the prawns. Clive had some yoghurts in the fridge and he had a pot later, but I don’t like yoghurt. At least, I presume he ate the yoghurt. He was about to open it when he had a telephone call - a long involved call and I came out of his office and left him to it. I suppose he ate the yoghurt later.’

Unlucky for his killer, Rafferty reflected as he recalled Sam Dally’s comment. Or was it? Barstaple was still dead. Could it really matter to the killer that the delay had made pinpointing the source of the poison that much easier?

Maybe Llewellyn was right, and he was crediting the killer with more intelligence and cunning than they actually possessed. It was possible, he supposed, though that didn’t explain the removal of the poisoned yoghurt and its substitution; that smacked of a certain intelligence, a sly determination to muddy the waters.

Rafferty glanced round at the sea of faces. It was time to glean a few facts. ‘Can any of you remember when Mr Barstaple placed the yoghurts in the fridge?’

They looked at one another and, as if my mutual decision, they all shook their heads. All but one. Amy Glossop seemed to have rallied. Certainly, she had no difficulty with her memory.

With a half-defiant look at the rest, she told him, ‘He brought them in last Friday morning. Six of them, all different flavours. He’d done the same for the last few weeks since he started his diet. It had become quite a routine for him.’

‘That’s helpful,’ Rafferty told her. ‘Thank you.’

At this, Amy Glossop glanced at her colleagues, her expression smug, taunting even, the thought ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’, clearly etched.

They all ignored her, as if determined not to give her the satisfaction of knowing she had just provided information that could be dangerous for one of them.

He turned back to Linda Luscombe. This was the first hint they’d had of any woman in Barstaple’s life. He was curious to see how deep the relationship went. ‘Had Mr Barstaple ever taken you out to lunch?’

‘Sometimes.’ The admission was reluctant. ‘He could be quite insistent.’

‘She means he was into s****l harassment as well as all the other kinds.’

This comment was drawn from Marian Steadman, whom Gallagher had introduced as the office first-aider, with the smiling comment that she doled out sympathy along with the Band-Aid.

Marian Steadman was 33. Rafferty was surprised the information from her staff record should immediately pop into his head. Attractive in an understated way, her open features were as different as possible from those of Amy Glossop. Even though she seemed to have no patience for evasion of any kind, she also had something of a maternal quality about her, as though she made a habit of taking on other people’s troubles as her own. She reminded him of his Ma, as did the forthright suggestion which followed.

‘Why don’t you tell him, Linda?’ she encouraged. ‘Let him know just what sort of man Clive Barstaple was.’

Linda shook her head. All at once she looked very young, very vulnerable.

Marian Steadman was evidently made of sterner stuff. Her voice brisk, she told Rafferty, ‘Linda is a single mother. Her own mother, who used to look after her little girl during the daytime, recently remarried and moved away, so she’s had to somehow find the money for child-minders. Clive Barstaple knew this and used it to pressurize her into being nice to him in exchange for promising her a job. That’s the sort of man he was.’

More in sorrow than anger, she added, ‘When I started here, Aimhurst and Son was a good firm to work for, a real family firm. Old Mr Aimhurst was a lovely man, a man of principle, firm morals, but caring, too. He’d never have taken on someone like Clive. God knows I didn’t wish him dead, but it’s not really surprising that it’s come to this. Not really surprising that everyone here hated him.’

This brought a murmur of denial from her colleagues and she turned and quietly asked them, ‘Do you really think there’s any point in trying to pretend otherwise?’ She shot an oblique glance in the direction of Amy Glossop and added, ‘The inspector will find out the situation here soon enough.’

Rafferty smiled and told her, ‘I appreciate your honesty.’ He paused. He liked to verify so-called facts from as many sources as possible, so now he went on, ‘And this change has come about since the takeover and Mr Barstaple’s appointment?’

Marian Steadman nodded. ‘I suppose we all knew our jobs were in danger and that there would probably be a certain amount of weeding out in spite of young Mr Aimhurst’s assurances to the contrary.’

As Rafferty noted the careful downplaying of the rationalization, she went on. ‘But it was the way Clive went about his brief that was so - distasteful.’ She frowned then as though searching for the best way to make him understand. ‘He went out of his way to undermine an individual’s confidence; whatever one did, he’d manage to find fault; pick, pick, pick. And then he made everyone terrified of falling sick. Take Bob Harris for instance.’

Rafferty was beginning to wonder if Harris was the office fall-guy. He glanced at the tight, pain-pinched features of Harris as Marian Steadman went on. ‘He had an in-patient’s appointment for an operation last month - one he’s been waiting on for over a year. But he had to cancel. He didn’t dare take the time to get his ulcers sorted out because he knew it would give Clive the excuse he wanted to get rid of him. The man was an out and out tyrant.’