Chapter Seven-1
1018 Words
Chapter Seven
LLEWELLYN EXPELLED a long held-in sigh as the door closed behind them. His eyes curtained by the fall of thick black lashes, he gave himself a little shake, and the controlled expression was back in place, the deep emotions that had flickered across his features safely stowed away once more. 'An unhappy man,' was his taut comment. 'He loved her very much, in his own way, you could see that.'
Rafferty was about to disagree, then he realised his sergeant was right. Love came in all shapes and sizes, he, of all people should know that. His expression bleak, he began to flick through the diary once more as they made for the car.
Back to normal, Llewellyn found a mournful quote to enrich the experience still further. '"Love is a sickness full of woes",' he began. But Rafferty's involuntary groan caused him to break off mid-flow. 'Samuel Daniel, 1562—1619,' he muttered under his breath.
'Miserable git. Bet his family held one hell of a coffin-dancing Wake when he popped his clogs.’
‘Curious that Wilks didn't come straight back when he didn't find his daughter,' Llewellyn remarked after a brief silence. 'It would be more usual for parents to share the shock of such a discovery together.'
'You saw them. There was precious little attempt at comforting one another. They live only half a mile from the hospital,' Rafferty went on thoughtfully. 'Discovering that his daughter's on the game would be enough to make any man mad with rage.' At least he assumed so. Not having ever experienced the dubious joys of fatherhood, he had only his imagination on which to draw. It was certainly a strong motive for murder. 'He could have followed her—he'd been tinkering with the car when his wife found the diary and called him into the house. Perhaps, when Linda ran out, he picked up a spanner without thinking and followed her.'
'He couldn't have done it, of course.' Back in his stride with a vengeance, Llewellyn threw cold water over the idea with the ease of long practise. 'Linda was found inside the hospital grounds, not outside. Where would he get a key to that gate?'
'Perhaps he didn't need one.' Rafferty’s head rose from his perusal of the diary, pleased he'd succeeded in coming up with a theory that Llewellyn wouldn't find so easy to fault. 'Maybe the person she was meeting let her in and left the door unlocked by mistake?'
He tapped the slim book with a forefinger. 'Or perhaps, if she had a regular customer at the hospital, he might have given her a key. Her father did say she was going to see a medical man that night, and there's no reason why she shouldn't occasionally earn some money locally.'
Llewellyn nodded thoughtfully. 'And her father pushed through after her once she’d unlocked the gate? You could have something there, Sir. Wilks is the type to have a complete brainstorm. All that determined respectability is unnatural.' He gave Rafferty an inscrutable glance. 'As Freud said—'
'Never mind what Freud said,' Rafferty broke in before Llewellyn had a chance to start on all that psychological mumbo-jumbo. 'We'd do better finding out what her prospective flatmates have to say. Now that we've got her name and photograph I'll get on to the media. I shouldn't think we'll have long to wait before her girlfriends contact us.' He sent up a silent prayer for forgiveness after his comforting lies to Mrs. Wilks. 'I agree the father's a possible suspect, but at this stage, we can't afford to concentrate our investigations too much on one person.'
Llewellyn looked down his nose at this as Rafferty conveniently forgot his previous enthusiastic concentration on Melville-Briggs. Rafferty ignored him.
'Her girlfriends might know if Linda did have a regular customer at the Elmhurst Sanatorium, particularly if they were on the game themselves.' He opened the driver's side door of the car and was about to get in, when he saw Llewellyn's unhappy expression and relented. 'All right, you drive,' he said, handing the keys over and walking around.
Rafferty opened the passenger side door and climbed in, chivvying Llewellyn as he fumbled with the ignition key. 'Hurry up man,' he grumbled. 'Let's get back to the station. We've got a lot to do.' He brandished the photograph of Linda. 'I want you to get copies made of this and give them to the house-to-house team. They'll have to start over again now. And I'll want posters of her put up at bus and train stations. I want everyone within a twenty-mile radius to know her face. Get the photo off to the Met. She presumably found most of her johns there and it’s possible there's someone in town who knew her in both identities.' Certainly better than her parents seemed to, he added silently to himself.
Llewellyn was still applying his logical mind to Rafferty's previous idea. 'If her father did do it, why would he strip her?'
Rafferty glanced back at the house as Llewellyn started up the car. Someone had been watching them. As he turned his head, he just caught a quick movement as the nets were twitched back into place.
'He said she dressed like a tart. Perhaps he thought, naked, she looked more respectable, more innocent than she ever could in her working gear. If it was him, I wonder what he did with them. He wouldn't have been able to burn them easily with no open fires in the house. Perhaps he buried them or threw them in the sea? It's only about a fifteen-minute walk from their house. I want you to notify the search teams to be on the lookout for anything washed up by the tide.'
Llewellyn slipped in a little philosophical comment as he slid the gear stick into first. 'He'll blame his wife for the girl going to the bad, of course. That type always does.'
'Well, he's got to blame someone. I bet your friend, Freud, would agree it's human nature. Especially if he did do for the girl. And who else is there to blame?'
Perhaps, he mused, if Linda's mother had been a different sort of woman, her father would have been a different sort of man and Linda would still be alive. But of course, he reminded himself, you could say that about anyone.
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