Absolute Poison #5

PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE‘There'll be another one along in a minute’—wasn't that what they said? Inspector Joseph Rafferty gazed at the very dead old lady in the bed and mused that usually it was in respect of buses, not bodies.

But this week the bodies were bunched like the rush-hour double-deckers on Elmhurst's congested streets. The first suicide had been of a World War Two veteran whose suicide note had derided the notion that this was land fit for heroes to live in. This old lady was the second suicide. And it was still only Wednesday morning. Rafferty, chockfull of Irish superstition, felt he could be forgiven for becoming equally chockfull of the conviction that they wouldn't get through the rest of the week without a third. As he remarked to Sergeant Llewellyn, in his experience, bad things always came in threes. It was a depressing thought.

Almost as depressing as the February weather, which, like the previous autumn, was as grey and dank as a dirty floor-cloth. Even the jolly holly bush, with its urgent tap-tappings at the window, seemed to have had enough and to want to come inside for a warm. Hardly surprising the suicide rate was up.

Unlike the first suicide, on Monday, this one hadn't left a note. Not that there was anything unusual about that. Rafferty knew that only about a quarter of suicides left notes.

Pity stirred again as his gaze shifted from the aged cadaver in the bed to the stiffly posed sepia wedding photo on the mantelpiece. It showed a pretty young bride with glossy midnight black hair, her arm possessively linked with that of the darkly handsome brylcreamed groom.

Next to the wedding photo was another picture; presumably the bride and groom again, though now much older and unsmiling. Middle age hadn't changed the bride that much; in the later photo it was still possible to trace the girl she had been. Not so the groom. Middle age had transformed the slim young man into a bald gnome, red of cheek and jowly of jaw. There were pictures of a boy, too, presumably their son. His hair was fair and although he shared her dark eyes, his were solemn, not laughing like his mother's.

Rafferty sighed. The son would have to be found and notified. He dragged his gaze from the picture gallery and the smiling bride and back to the bed; to the old lady the bride had become.

The glossy black cap of hair was now thin, wispy, and grey. The slender hands now calloused and work-roughened, were clasped neatly together outside the covers. Rafferty's gaze flickered over the scarred dresser with its empty pill bottles and the jug and glass both now scummy with clouded water, and he reflected on what it must be like to get so old and lonely that killing yourself became an attractive alternative to going on.

After routinely checking the body for any sign of life, he turned away and commented flatly to Llewellyn, ‘There's nothing for us here.’

As soon as the words were out he was struck by how callous they sounded and felt ashamed. He realised he hadn't even asked her name before dismissing her and her passing. The trouble with such lonely deaths was that they inclined him to melancholy for days. Experience had taught him that the only hope of escaping the glooms was by spending as little time as possible at the scene. Now he asked quietly, ‘who was she? Do you know?’

‘The neighbours only knew her as Dodie.’

Rafferty nodded and beckoned Llewellyn on to the landing where the air was less redolent of death. ‘The neighbours hadn't known her for long, then?’

‘Some six months or so, I understand. Would you like me to check?’

Rafferty shook his head. ‘No. It doesn't matter.’ He added, more or less to himself, ‘Six months and all they knew was that her name was Dodie.’

He wasn't altogether surprised. Half the street of terraced houses was boarded up to prevent squatters and vandals gaining access to empty properties. What had once been a friendly community was now an itinerant neighbourhood; the sort of place where your neighbours came and went without making a ripple in your life. Apparently, in this case, without even discovering more about you, your family and background than your first name. It was a sad indictment of modern life and did nothing to reduce Rafferty's gloomy feelings. ‘She must have some papers,’ he remarked and called down the stairs for Constable Smales to have a look for some. His voice, echoing loudly down the narrow stairs in this house of the dead sounded oddly intrusive.

Llewellyn, unlike Rafferty, generally managed to retain a certain objectivity under such circumstances. ‘Doctor Arkwright should be able to tell us more. The neighbours were at least able to tell me he was the old lady's General Practitioner as well as their own.’

Rafferty nodded. Old Doctor Arkwright had been practising in the town for around a third of a century, so would be able to put a surname to their suicide as well as provide details of any other family she might have had. ‘Get on to him, Dafyd. Tell him what's happened and get him over here.’

‘You're lucky you caught me,’ Doctor Obadiah Arkwright told them when he arrived twenty minutes later. ‘I'm off to Scotland for a fishing holiday later today.’

He sounded tired, Rafferty noticed and badly in need of his break. Obadiah Arkwright must be approaching seventy, but he was still an impressive-looking man; tall and saturnine of face, a tendency which age had made more marked, with an air of authority worn as easily as his ancient, Sherlock Holmes style overcoat.

‘Nice secluded spot,’ Arkwright went on. ‘As far from the joys of civilisation as it's possible to get without either leaving the country or breaking the bank.’ He paused. ‘Upstairs, is she?’

Rafferty nodded and he and Llewellyn followed the doctor up the narrow stairs to the bedroom.

The doctor approached the bed and stared down at his late patient. After a quick examination he stood back and sighed. ‘Poor woman. Of course, I know she's been depressed lately, but I never thought her the type to take this way out.’ His quick gesture took in the bottle of empty sleeping tablets on the dresser.

‘I thought we were all that,’ Rafferty quietly remarked. ‘All it needs is the right circumstances.’

‘Not thinking of copying her example, I trust?’ Arkwright asked, giving him an old-fashioned look.

But then he was an old-fashioned kind of doctor, Rafferty mused; the sort who had once existed in their hundreds. The sort whose patients clung to life as though not daring to leave it till the doctor had given his permission. The sort, too, who felt it their duty to check their patients officially off their list and on to that of an even higher authority.

Rafferty forced a smile. ‘Not me, Doc. Wouldn't dare. I might be a lapsed Catholic, but I'm still as leery of mortal sin as the biggest bible-thumper.’

‘What was her name, doctor?’ Llewellyn asked.

‘Mrs Pearson. Mrs Dorothy Pearson.’

Glad to get a confirmed identification, Rafferty advised, ‘I've had young Smales looking to see if he could find any personal papers in the house, but there are none. Looks like she had a grand clearing out before she took the overdose.’

‘Doesn't surprise me,’ said Arkwright. ‘Mrs Pearson was a very private sort of person. Alone in the world, too. Probably didn't fancy strangers raking over her things. Her only son died earlier this year; not, in my opinion, that he was much of a loss.’ The doctor raised expressive hands then let them drop. ‘But there, I suppose for her, her son's death was the final straw. She's been alone for some time. She lost her husband years ago and then—’

He broke off as Sam Dally, part time police surgeon c*m pathologist arrived with his usual noise and bustle. The grim little bedroom with its four to five-day-old corpse was too small for all of them. Arkwright acknowledged Sam Dally, said his goodbyes and left.

Rafferty and Llewellyn, after accompanying Dr Arkwright down the stairs, waited in the living room for Sam to confirm their findings. He didn't take long. Nor, when he returned downstairs, did he pause to indulge in his usual ghoulish banter. Rafferty guessed that for Sam – who had lost his wife of thirty years to cancer only a month ago – the prospect of his own solitary old age was getting too close for comfort. He was certainly more irascible than usual, and briskly confirmed that Mrs Pearson had certainly been dead for the best part of a week. ‘Early part of the weekend would be my estimate,’ Dally added. ‘Friday night probably, or Saturday morning.’

Rafferty had already guessed as much. His brief look under the bedclothes had revealed the tell-tale signs; the body swollen with gases, the skin blisters, the leaking fluids, and the smell. He swallowed hard and waited for Sam to continue.

‘Suicide, of course,’ said Dally. ‘Classic. Pills and whisky, but without the whisky. Don't suppose the poor b***h could afford that.’ He gazed around the shabby living room with its clean but worn square of cheap carpet, the cramped, dark kitchen off and added in lacklustre tones, ‘I can't imagine there'll be any grasping relatives to fight over the family heirlooms.’

‘No.’ Rafferty reflected that even his Ma, with her love of suspect ‘bargains’, would find little here to interest her.

The funereal weather and the discovery of another lonely death were more than enough to get a man down. But thoughts of Ma and her ‘bargains’ reminded Rafferty that he had yet another reason to be gloomy; one that had, like the weather, been getting him down since Christmas. Unfortunately, unlike the weather, the cause of the other low depression was going to require some input from him. And as he walked back down Mrs Pearson's path, dodging puddles as he went, Rafferty reflected that a solution was as far away as ever.

Needless to say, his family were at the root of his problem. When weren't they? he murmured. Without his knowledge, his Ma had persuaded Llewellyn to buy one of her dubious ‘bargains’—a suit of quality as superior as its provenance and price were inferior. A suit which Rafferty had good reason to believe had formed part of an insurance fiddle by a tailor down on his luck.

Ignorant of both the suit's likely provenance and Ma Rafferty's back of the lorry bargain-hunting propensities, Llewellyn had snapped up the suit. And, as Rafferty had afterwards learned, intended its first outing to be on the occasion of his wedding to Rafferty's cousin, Maureen.

Rafferty climbed in the car and wondered again how he was going to dissuade the Welshman from wearing the suit without revealing it was bent; a task made no easier given the first-class quality of its tailoring and the Beau Brummel tendencies of his sergeant.

With anyone else, of course, this wouldn't be a problem. With anyone else all he'd need to do would be to have a discreet word. Not with Llewellyn though. Oh no. Nothing so simple. In fact, there was a distinct possibility that if he shared his suspicions the morally-upright Welshman would shop Ma out of a sense of duty. Rafferty wished he didn't find it so easy to imagine Llewellyn explaining, quite kindly, that the law applied to everyone, even the mothers of detective inspectors.

Yet if he didn't tell Llewellyn, there was a good chance that someone at the wedding would admire the suit and ask Llewellyn where he had bought it. There were sure to be a fair number of their police colleagues at the reception and if one of them sniffed out the truth and it got back to Superintendent Bradley. But that possibility didn't bear thinking about.

It seemed a petty problem after the morning they'd had. But then, Rafferty had found that life was generally made up of an endless variety of such problems. Maybe it was the last in a long line of them that had prompted Dorothy Pearson to give up the struggle and bow out.

The unwitting catalyst of Rafferty's latest little poser climbed in the car beside him. After they had watched the mortuary van pull away, Llewellyn asked, ‘Back to the station, sir?’

Rafferty nodded absently and sank back into his thoughts. For the umpteenth time he'd tried to make Ma see the error of her ways, but, as usual, his attempt had failed miserably.

‘A suit's a suit,’ she'd said. ‘One's much the same as another. Though, seeing as you made such a fuss about its lack of labels, you'll be happy to know I sewed a Marks and Spencer tag in it.’

‘St Michael?’ Rafferty quoted the name of the store's old garment label. ‘Patron Saint of Clothing? Oh well,’ he had remarked tartly, ‘that's my mind put at rest. No danger of anybody mistaking it for dodgy gear while St Michael's on guard duty.’

‘It's only doing Dafyd a favour, I was,’ Ma had told him indignantly. ‘There's no need to get on your high horse. Sure and he'll have expense enough with this wedding without paying over the odds for a suit that Maureen's Ma won't turn her nose up at. At least he'll have no worries on that score.’

‘That'll be a comfort to him when he spends his honeymoon on remand in Costa Del Pentonville,’

‘Pentonville?’ his Ma had snorted. ‘Don't be ridiculous. As if I'd sell Dafyd a suit likely to send him to prison.’

Rafferty had said no more, realising it was a waste of breath. Ma was incorrigible. She would never give up her love of ‘bargains’, policeman son or no policeman son. His only consolation was that, as the wedding date had yet to be settled, he had time on his side. Anxious to confirm this happy state of affairs still existed, Rafferty adopted a casual tone as he asked Llewellyn, ‘named the day yet?’

Llewellyn didn't reply till he had negotiated the busy junction by Elmhurst mainline train station. Then he said, ‘It's not that simple. Maureen's a Catholic, like you. I'm a Methodist. And as my late father was a Methodist minister, my mother's sure to expect me to marry in that faith.’

Rafferty grinned. ‘You mean Ma hasn't managed to convert you to Catholicism yet?’

Llewellyn shook his head.

‘Must be losing her touch. Of course, these days her mind's taken up with other things than our love lives. She can hardly put it to anything else but my niece, Gemma, and the prospect of becoming a great-grandma in the summer. I'd take advantage of that if I were you,’ Rafferty teased, confident that the Welshman's in-built dislike of haste would preclude him doing any such thing, ‘and fix up a quick register office wedding before she's back to normal.’

Rafferty said no more. But now he relaxed back against his seat happy that religious differences and Llewellyn's natural caution would ensure the wedding was a long way off. It meant he had plenty of time to resolve the problem of the groom's dodgy suit.