Love Lies Bleeding

Chapter One

Chapter One

‘And that's all this young woman said?’

At Llewellyn's bemused question, Rafferty nodded. ‘Yep, Dafyd,’ he confirmed. That's all.’

Unsurprisingly, his logically minded Welsh DS found his recounting of that morning's incident in the daily life of police station reception folk somewhat bizarre.

The university-educated Llewellyn, who had read his way through all the most infamous murder trials in the annals of British justice and injustice, and who had presumably assumed, on joining the police service, that he was going to pit his wits against some of the most cunning killers on the planet, even now still found it hard to accept that, in the main, murderers were not very bright and thus easily caught.

This latest one, at least, although being more willing than most to confess to her crime, prompted a piquant curiosity that was out of the ordinary murder run. Because, after collapsing unconscious at Rafferty's feet, the hastily summoned police surgeon-c*m-pathologist, Sam Dally, had taken charge, carted her off in an ambulance and imposed an embargo on her being questioned at all.

Not, from what Dally said, that she was in a position to provide answers. According to their tame — or not so tame — medic, although now conscious the young woman who had made such a dramatic entrance was as out of it as one of the undead.

‘Surely she said something else before she collapsed?’ Llewellyn persevered with his touching belief — in spite of plentiful experience proving the contrary — that other people were not unreasonably perverse, but behaved as logically as he did himself. ‘Who confesses to murder and then says nothing more?’

With a perverse satisfaction of his own, Rafferty replied, ‘Her for a start.’

Admittedly Llewellyn was right, in that, once embarked on a confession, murderers generally didn't want to stop till they had poured it all out.

‘Illogical, I know. But seeing as Sam says she's in this deep-trance state — now, what was it he called it?’ he wondered aloud to himself. ‘Catalonia would it be? No. That can't be right.’

‘Catatonia?’ Llewellyn suggested, in a tone so dry, Rafferty's forehead creased as he suspected the better-educated Llewellyn of mocking his ignorance.

But whether he was or not, the Welshman's poker face didn't betray him and Rafferty conceded, ‘Yeah, could be. It has a familiar ring to it. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘Dally reckons our murdering zombie lady's retreated from reality. Hasn't said another word since she collapsed, not even the usual demand for a solicitor, which, given her confession, is unusual, seeing as the guilty ones invariably scream far more loudly for a brief than the innocent ever do. We don't even know who she is as she had no handbag or purse with her. Seems she just “did the mortal deed” — if deed she did — left her home and the husband, and came here wearing just what she stood up in.

‘Dr Dally, who was here at the time about some other matter, took one look at her and insisted she was carted off to hospital. He said he'd be surprised if she didn't develop a fever or something after the drenching she received. Of course, Dally being Dally, the knower of all things, he was happy to tell me his prediction was proved right when I rang the hospital. Apparently, she's running a high temperature and not responding to their questions. No way we can interview her.’

Llewellyn's Welsh-dark eyes gazed contemplatively at Rafferty. ‘So, what now?’

Rafferty pulled a face as, reluctantly, he dragged a pile of files towards him. ‘As this young woman's still in a world of her own, I suppose we wait until Dally says otherwise. What else can we do?’

‘But if she has attacked her husband and he's bleeding to death in their home, waiting is hardly an option,’ Llewellyn pointed out.

‘And neither is sneaking into the hospital and snatching a picture of her in her sickbed so we can give it to the media and ask the public: “Do you know this woman?” The human-rights lot would have a field day if we did.’

That was an argument guaranteed to put a stop to Llewellyn's questions. Dafyd Llewellyn, although a man of strong morals and high principles, was a firm believer in human rights; even those of young women who claimed to have committed the ultimate sin.

‘Anyway’ Rafferty added, ‘I very much doubt he's still bleeding. If I'm any judge, from the amount of blood on her dress, her husband is already long beyond our help.’

Rafferty gazed at the pile of files he had just dragged towards himself. He sighed as he opened the first of these and took in the thickness of its contents. More bureaucratic bumph from Region, he thought. When did they think he was going to get any real police work done?

More than willing to abandon, even if only temporarily, the close-typed script of yet more politically correct gobbledygook, he looked up at Llewellyn and said, ‘But on the plus side, at least we know one thing about her — that she's not from the psychiatric hospital, which Bill Beard thought favourite. I rang them, and all their patients are present and correct. I've had Jonathon Lilley ringing around the others in the area, NHS and private. None of their patients is missing, either. If she wasn't lying in the hospital, doing this zombie impression and with her bloody clothes bagged and tagged, I'd wonder if me and Beard didn't have a mutual hallucination and conjured up this self-confessed husband killer to liven up a slow morning.’ He leaned back in his chair — at least it put a distance between himself and the paperwork — and said, ‘Anyway, you're meant to be the clever one.’ Still smarting from the suspicion that Llewellyn had got one over on him with the catatonia thing, he added slyly, ‘If you're so bright, you tell me how we should proceed.’

Llewellyn looked thoughtfully at him for several seconds. Then he too sighed, pulled half a dozen of the files from Rafferty's pile, walked across the room to the desk in the corner and sat down before he said, ‘I suppose you're right. We wait.’

When Rafferty arrived home that evening, he and Abra, his girlfriend, decided to have a quiet night in. During dinner he told her about the dramatic confession made by their visitor that morning.

‘Poor woman,’ said Abra, instantly all sympathy, much to Rafferty's chagrin. ‘She must have been desperate,’ Abra continued. ‘I suppose she was worn down by some brute of a husband. Probably been beating her up for years.’

It sounded as if Abra thought all men were beasts. It was another unwanted reminder that she was still nursing a grievance against him over their difficult time back in June when she resented what she regarded as his lack of support. He was only too aware that she thought he had let her down. With hindsight, he agreed with her.

Rafferty, although his conscience pricked, felt honour-bound to spring to the defence of the male of the species.

‘Well no, I doubt it — or rather, I suppose he might have been beating her up, but the timescale's unlikely. She can't be any older than her early twenties. Something of a stunner, too,’ he murmured half to himself in appreciative, if unwise, remembrance. ‘It's hard to believe any man would want to rearrange a face as beautiful as that. I felt rather sorry for her, actually.’

Abra's gaze narrowed at this and Rafferty realised his admiration of the young woman might have been better kept to himself. Why was it, he wondered, that women always hated it when you praised the good looks of other females?

‘Sounds like she's brought out the Sir Galahad in you,’ she commented with a sharp little edge to her voice as, with a clatter, she began to stack their plates. ‘I'd watch that tendency, Joe. It could be compromising in a policeman.’

Rafferty immediately tried to downplay the young woman's attractions. With what he thought a nicely judged throwaway air, he commented, ‘She's a bit on the thin side for me.’ As he realised his words were insufficient to soothe the little green god after the words of praise that had gone before, he gave them some support. ‘Anyway, there's not much chance of me being compromised just yet as Sam Dally had her removed to hospital after she collapsed and promptly pronounced her incommunicado.

‘Though I can't say I'm surprised she collapsed after making her announcement. Probably one of these bulimics or anorexics we hear so much about now, as she was pretty much a bag of bones. No man wants a stick insect for a partner.’

‘Mm. Strange they were bones you seemed to like well enough a minute ago.’

As his self-defensive measures hadn't worked, Rafferty decided teasing might work better. ‘Not jealous are we?’ he asked. ‘Just a little bit?’

‘Should I be?’ Abra countered.

‘Of course not. What could you possibly have to be jealous about? I've only just met the woman and then she totally ignored me, preferring the more mature charms of Bill Beard.’

Abra gave another indeterminate little ‘Mmm’ before adding, ‘If she doesn't ignore you next time you see her, maybe you should let Dafyd do the questioning? It might be safer. After all, eating-disorder thin Lizzies learn plenty of devious tricks to make sure they get their own way and stay thin. And you already sound a little too susceptible to her slender attractions to me.’ With that, she stalked off to the kitchen, whence Rafferty soon heard several more crashes and bangs.

‘Me and my big mouth,’ he muttered to himself as he decided it might be politic to offer to load the dishwasher and make the tea.

In the end they only had to wait three days before they were able to see the young woman who had made such a dramatic entrance; Rafferty had hoped for longer, as it was clear he still had some way to go to get back in Abra's good books after his thoughtless behaviour back in June. He could do without another murder case right now, with all the extra hours and accusations of neglect likely to spring from it, which he remembered with such painful clarity from his marriage to Angie, his late first wife — particularly as Abra had clearly elected to take a dislike to their suspect ...

He supposed he ought to be thankful the young woman had confessed. It would make his life simpler — in theory at least. But in practice, once one of the legal types that bedevilled his life had got hold of her, she'd retract. Most of them did.

But he had to admit he was curious about the girl. And when the hospital rang to say that she had started to respond to their attempts to communicate with her, he wasted no time in finding Llewellyn and hurrying them both off to see what she had to say for herself.

When they arrived at the hospital, they were directed to the first floor. They found their mysterious young woman secluded in a side ward. As previously arranged by Rafferty, she had a bedside guard round the clock, just in case she decided to disappear for real rather than into another catatonic trance.

As Constable Lizzie Green rose at their entrance, Rafferty nodded and told her to wait outside.

Against the much-laundered white pillow, the young woman's skin looked even more washed out than it had at her collapse. In spite of having been non compos mentis for much of the last seventy-two hours, she had deep mauve shadows under her eyes and looked exhausted and as fragile as a porcelain figurine that might shatter into a thousand pieces at any moment.

As he looked at this frail and ethereal creature who had claimed to have committed murder, Rafferty was beginning to think he and Beard had shared a mutual hallucination. In a moment he'd wake up and find it had all been a dream. But as the young woman lying so still in the bed failed to dissolve before his eyes, he pulled up a chair and sat down.

‘I'm Detective Inspector Rafferty,’ he began before he introduced Sergeant Llewellyn. ‘Perhaps you could tell us your name?’

To Rafferty's surprise, as he had half expected her previous state of catatonia to have affected her memory, she answered without hesitation.

‘My name's Felicity Raine.’

‘Mrs?’

This time she hesitated. Her lack of readiness to claim the title was unsurprising, if the ‘Mr’ half of the marital pairing really had died at her hands. But then she nodded and said, ‘Yes. But, of course, you already know that.’

That ‘of course’ indicated that she had clear recall of the events of three days earlier and that he had been one of the witnesses to her claim to having murdered her husband. But although she was talking, she was clearly still barely in this world. Her voice was slow and uncertain, as if she had only recently learned to speak.

‘And your address, Mrs Raine?’

She provided this information in the same slow, flat monotone with which she had provided her other details. It was almost as if she was experiencing the world through some kind of protective mist that made it seem shadowy and not quite real. Of course, that might just be due to the shock she must be experiencing if she had just killed her husband, whether deliberately or otherwise.

As soon as she had told them her name and the address she shared with her presumed dead husband, Rafferty gave the nod to Llewellyn and his sergeant hurried off, clutching his mobile, to arrange the uniforms to check the address out for the bloody corpse of her partner. On his way out, he sent Lizzie Green back in to act as a witness in case Mrs Raine decided to blurt out a repeat of her previous confession.

After giving her the statutory caution, Rafferty asked gently, ‘Do you remember coming into the police station three days ago?’

Felicity Raine, her expression troubled, nodded.

‘And what about what you said when you got there? Do you remember that?’

Again she nodded.

‘And was it true? Did you murder your husband?’

There was that hesitation again, Rafferty noted. She looked confused and her answer, when it came, was spoken in tones even more dazed than before, as if she couldn't, herself, quite believe what she was saying or take in the enormity of what she had done.

‘I suppose I must have done. Yes.’

She gazed at Rafferty from troubled eyes and said, ‘It's odd and you'll think me dreadfully callous, I'm sure, but I can't remember killing him. Isn't that strange?’

Her long slender fingers clutched each other, as, in an anguished voice, she all but pleaded for an answer from Rafferty. ‘How can I have forgotten? You'd expect the memory of such an act to be a vivid one. But I can't remember it at all. All I remember is finding myself stretched out on top of Ray, both of us covered in blood.’

She shook her head. ‘I suppose I must have shut my mind off. Afterwards.’ She shuddered then, as she added in a whisper so faint that Rafferty had to strain to hear what she said, ‘The doctor said I was suffering from shock. Delayed shock. No doubt, memory of it will come back to me in time.’

‘Can you tell me why you killed him? How?’

‘As to the why—’ she broke off and stared sadly at him from the large, luminous grey eyes that Rafferty remembered so well. ‘Raymond — my husband — and I had been arguing a lot lately,’ she said in a voice so low that again Rafferty had to lean close to the bed to hear her. ‘Nothing I did seemed to please him.’

When she said nothing further for a moment, he thought she had relapsed into her previous state of fugue. She stared beyond him as if she no longer saw him and had already forgotten the second half of his question.

He prompted her before she disappeared back into the nether world. He wanted to hear it from her own lips; it was the only way, he thought, that he would be able to dispel his doubts. ‘And how did you kill him?’

‘A knife. With a knife.’ She shuddered again. Her eyes rounded in horror as she added, ‘There was so much blood. It was all over him, all over me. How could I do that when I loved him so much?’

Rafferty shook his head. He had no answers for her.

She looked down, as if she expected still to be wearing her blood-stained dress, and frowned at finding herself in a hospital gown.

‘My clothes,’ she began fretfully.

‘Don't worry about them for now. We've got them safe.’

‘I see. Thank you. It's just — just that my husband gave me that dress for my last birthday. I don't want anything to happen to it.’

As Rafferty watched, the expression in her eyes turned from tragic to appalled, as it hit her that this was one dress she would never want to wear again.

After that, a silence fell between them, broken only by Llewellyn's return. As he entered the small hospital room, his gaze met Rafferty's and he gave a brief nod.

Llewellyn's confirmation that Felicity Raine's husband was dead made her claim that she had killed him the more believable. But as he gazed at her delicate face and the figure so slender it barely left a trace under the dark blue duvet, Rafferty was again conscious of a glimmer of doubt. For, in spite of the bloodied state of her when she had turned up at the police station, in spite of her own anguished confession, her slender figure made it difficult for him to conjure up a picture of her knifing anyone, much less the husband she professed to love. Apart from anything else, it was so unusual for a woman to use a knife as the means to kill that the number of such cases made up a tiny percentage of female killings.

She seemed to have retreated into herself again, Rafferty noticed. He wasn't too worried about it, though. For now, he was content with just the bare facts. They could get the rest later.

He followed Llewellyn out to the corridor. ‘So, let's hear it,’ he invited.

‘It's just as she told you,’ Llewellyn replied, grim-faced. ‘According to Hanks, when he and Tim Smales broke in they found Mr Raine sprawled out on his back on the living-room floor, covered in blood. The knife was still in his chest.’

Rafferty frowned. ‘She attacked him from the front

Llewellyn nodded.

Rafferty took a moment or two to absorb the information, then he asked, ‘little chap, was he?’

‘No. Actually, I asked Hanks the same question and he said he was tall and muscular.’

Rafferty frowned at this discovery. He gazed through the window of the small side room to the patient in the bed. This case was rapidly becoming more bizarre, more surreal with each succeeding discovery, he thought. It seemed this was a thought that Llewellyn shared. He too let his gaze settle on Felicity Raine and his next words echoed Rafferty's thoughts.

‘To look at her, you wouldn't think she would have the strength to kill him. Mrs Raine is slender, seven and a half stone if that, and can be no more than five foot three or four.’

Rafferty nodded. ‘And looking as if butter wouldn't melt.’ In the face of the evidence, he pushed his doubts aside, hardened his heart and said firmly, ‘But melt it did.’

He instructed Lizzie Green to stay with Mrs Raine and set off towards the stairs. ‘I suppose we'd better go and find out when she's likely to be released into our custody. If she has killed her husband, I want no one to be able to claim later that she wasn't fit for questioning.’