Deadly Reunion (7 page)

In the interim, Bradley had somehow found out that Simon Fairweather was at the Home Office – some arse-licker on the team, no doubt – and he interrogated Rafferty about the man and was far from satisfied with Rafferty's answers, which, seeing as Fairweather was quieter than a whisper, meant there was little to report.

‘But he must have said something,' Bradley protested. ‘Did he make any complaints, for instance?'

‘Not to me, he didn't. I don't think you need worry, sir. He doesn't seem the complaining sort.'

‘Not to you, perhaps.' God, thought Rafferty, the old bugger's sniffy today. ‘He probably prefers to take his complaints to a higher authority. He could be the sort who make their complaints on paper so they're always on your record.'

And you'd know, was Rafferty's thought.

Bradley seemed to have got himself in a bit of a lather on the subject of Simon Fairweather, though, for the life of him, Rafferty couldn't see what Fairweather could have to complain about. But he was perfectly happy to let Bradley stew about what memoranda might be finding their way back to the brass at Region. If he wasn't such an arse-licker himself, Rafferty might have felt sorry for him. But as it was, he set his mind to thoughts of the coming interview and what questions to ask the ex-Mrs Ainsley.

He made good time and reached the Somerset town of Carworth just after lunch. Llewellyn, the techno whizz-kid, had set the satnav for him and the computer had directed him faultlessly. It never did that when
he
set the gizmo.

The second ex-Mrs Ainsley turned out to be tall and willowy like her house, though with what Rafferty guessed must be surgical enhancement around the bosom region. They were never natural, he thought. They certainly weren't a matching set with the rest of her.

Stella Ainsley was surprisingly welcoming. He soon learned why. He had been right and the bitter recriminations against her former husband set in within five minutes. It was as if she couldn't wait to let the festering juices out.

‘He was like that song, you know? “He had one eye on the mirror and he watched himself go by”.'

‘Carly Simon.'

‘Was it? Anyway, he didn't have much love to spare for a real woman' – well as real as she got, with those bazookas, was Rafferty's irreverent thought. ‘He loved himself too much. He used to like to fix the car out front, stripped to the waist, though we had a perfectly good garage. He'd flex his muscles for every passing bimbo. A wife can only take so much of such behaviour. And when I came home and found him in bed with one of our next-door neighbours, it was the last straw. I kicked him out.'

‘How long were you married?'

‘Five years.'

‘You never had children?'

‘God no. Adam wasn't father material. He wasn't husband material, either, as I learned.' She bit her lip and hurried on. ‘I married him when he was still playing professional rugby and I don't mind admitting that I enjoyed those early days of our marriage. We were feted wherever we went. Adam lapped it up. He got rather depressed when it all ended and he looked round for another sport where he'd get the same adulation. He found one with the bimbo athletics.'

‘Did he ever talk about his schooldays?'

‘Did he ever. According to Adam, he was always first at everything: rugby, swimming, running. You name it and he won it. I got sick of it in the end when his subjects of conversation came down to little more than boasting or bemoaning his fate that he should have come down from the height of his fame to teaching sport to adolescent boys. Well, I imagine you can guess what it was like?'

Rafferty nodded. He could. Stella Ainsley reminded him of his late wife, Angie. He hadn't been able to do anything right for her. Getting her pregnant and the hasty wedding that followed were the highlights and it all went steadily downhill after that. They hadn't had children, either – the baby she had been carrying had died in the womb very early in the pregnancy. Or so she'd claimed. Rafferty, already caught on the hook, was just as pleased there were no more little hostages to fortune.

Stella Ainsley could recall few names from her late ex-husband's schooldays. Adam had apparently always been the star, the winner, with everyone else as also-rans. All in all, he'd learned little more than he already had, though he suspected there was further information she could give him.

Rafferty rang Llewellyn on his mobile once he got back to the car. ‘Any joy?'

‘The first Mrs Ainsley was quite forthcoming. She even recalled a few names from the past.'

‘More than my one managed. So who did she remember?'

‘Giles Harmsworth. She knew him, apparently and several of the others. She went to university with Giles and Asgar Sadiq.'

‘Did she now? And did she have anything nasty to say about either of them?'

‘She was of the opinion that Giles wouldn't have the nerve to drop hemlock into Adam Ainsley's food and then calmly eat his own lunch as if nothing had happened. She didn't know Mr Sadiq quite as well, but she did say that she checked on the Internet after we rang her and she said that hemlock, apart from being grown in Asia, is also quite commonly used as a poison on that continent.'

‘Is that so? Seems Mr Gary Sadiq has moved up the suspect pecking order. Remind me we must have another little chat with him this afternoon. I'll see you back at the cop shop.' Rafferty disconnected and settled down to the long drive home.

Asgar ‘Gary' Sadiq was a light-skinned Anglo-Indian, and he had spent most of his life in England as he had undergone all his schooling there.

‘A long way from home,' Rafferty commented. ‘What did you do during the holidays? Stay with your English relatives or fly back?'

Sadiq shook his head. ‘Neither. My mother's family disowned her when she married my father. And it was too far and too costly to return to India in the holidays. The fees cost all that my parents could spare. No I mostly stayed with school-friends. I stayed with Giles several times and Sebastian. I even stayed with Adam once, though it was an experience that neither of us chose to repeat.'

‘Oh? Why was that?'

‘I'm quite competitive. Adam had never had occasion to discover this at school, as we weren't competitive in the same things. But at his home we were thrown together more and we played games with his family. I beat him regularly at Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. He didn't like it. He was barely speaking to me by the end of the holidays. Neither were his parents – they didn't like their wonder boy having his nose put out of joint. Though they were more successful at concealing their antagonism than Adam was.'

‘Not a very nice experience. You must have been glad to get back to school.'

Sadiq gave a fatalistic shrug. ‘I've had worse.'

Rafferty wondered that Sadiq should choose to confide this little titbit. Admittedly, it could hardly be said to be cause for poisoning Ainsley all of seventeen years later. Unless he was being disingenuous and the rebuff had cut deep. Teenagers could be sensitive souls. Perhaps Asgar had been a particularly tortured teen, with homesickness and racism mixed into the brew. All would have been so much more painful with him so far from home and with little hope of seeing his family. Perhaps he had nursed Adam's rebuff all these years and this reunion had been the first chance he had had to get his revenge?

‘Have you been back to your home in India recently, Mr Sadiq?' Rafferty asked, curious to learn if Asgar had had opportunity to consult some Indian wise man about what plant would kill a mortal enemy in the way Adam Ainsley had been killed.

‘I live there now. I work in IT and India is a rising star. Rivals Silicone Valley in the States. I just came back here for the school reunion.'

‘Long way to come.'

‘Yes. But I often have to fly over to Britain on business, so it was little more expense to tag this reunion on the end of a round of meetings.'

‘Did Mr Barmforth, the last headmaster, keep you updated on who else would be attending the reunion?'

‘Oh yes. He always sent out a round robin email; Jeremy Paxton did the same when he took over. There's an Old Griffinites' club. A number of us meet regularly.'

‘What about Adam? Was he a member?'

‘No. We have a clubhouse in town, but I never saw him there. Admittedly, I couldn't manage to fly over too often. And this is the first time he's turned up for a reunion. I was surprised when I saw his name on Jeremy's round-robin email as one of the attendees.'

‘Did he say why he'd come this time?'

‘He just said he was curious about how we'd all got on, though I think, from reading between the lines, that he was bored with what he was doing. You know he worked as a sports instructor after he quit rugby?'

Rafferty nodded.

‘I got the impression he missed his life as a professional sportsman, though he didn't say as much. Didn't want to admit it, I suppose. He was always very fit, but he'd let himself get a bit flabby. Sure sign of lack of self-esteem, don't they say?'

Rafferty pulled in his incipient beer belly and said, ‘I wouldn't know.' Still, it was interesting that Ainsley seemed to have been letting himself go. He was currently single – neither he, nor the two ex-Mrs Ainsleys had said his love life was as red-hot as it had been when he was the school sporting hero or the professional rugby player.

‘I think he came to the reunion in the hope of putting out a few feelers about other work. But most of his peers went into professional careers – banking, lecturing, the medical or legal world. Or, like me, IT. Adam was never academic, so there was no way any of us could have fixed him up with a suitable job. I don't think he found the help he was seeking. He died an unhappy, frustrated man.'

Once Gary Sadiq had gone, Rafferty leaned back and said to Llewellyn, who had been taking notes, ‘So Sadiq had been aware that Adam Ainsley would be returning to Griffin. Asgar Sadiq is a Muslim, according to the school records in Paxton's study. Did he nurse a grievance all these years and seize his opportunity to get his own back, perhaps encouraged by Muslim fanatics in his homeland?'

Of course, Llewellyn wasn't slow to remind him that Sadiq hadn't been the only one to receive Paxton's round robin emails, which had listed Adam as an attendee at the reunion. All the reunees would have had them and could have planned accordingly; the hemlock alone indicated that planning had gone into this murder. And murder, Rafferty was convinced, this was, even though Sadiq had tried to paint a picture of a man on the brink of possible suicide. He had found time to have a chat with Ainsley's doctor and he had said that Ainsley hadn't struck him as being a suicide prospect. The anti-depressants had been prescribed as the reflex action of a hard-pressed GP, he admitted. He told them that he had thought Ainsley more frustrated and lacking ego-fuel than depressed. And for all that Adam Ainsley hadn't been academically bright, he had received an excellent education and was as capable of looking up poisons on the Internet as the next person. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that he would have selected the paralyzing hemlock as the means to his own destruction. Everyone they had spoken to had described Ainsley as proud of his physique and his physical abilities. And even if his body had become a bit more lardy than it had been in his youth, Rafferty had seen his corpse and he had still been what his ma would have described as ‘a fine figure of a man'. Somehow he doubted that a man prone to such self-love would choose to render himself a blind paraplegic at the end. After such an easy, successful life, he would choose an easy death.

‘Let's look at what we've got so far,' Llewellyn suggested. ‘We have Asgar Sadiq possibly nursing a grudge all these years after Adam Ainsley had given him the silent treatment. Though why he told us about it, if so . . . He had no need. Mr Ainsley's parents were hardly likely to give him away seeing as to reveal that Adam Ainsley had been piqued to be beaten by Mr Sadiq at Scrabble would have shown their son to be a petulant young man. We have Sophie Diaz whom he dumped when he learned she had slept with most of his classmates. We have Alice Douglas, who is supposed to have made moon eyes at Adam and been ignored. It's not much, is it? What else?'

‘Nothing else. Unless we count Mrs Benton, the cook and Harrison the groundsman. The first because Adam perhaps sneaked to the head about her lumpy custard and the latter because Adam had stubbed out one spliff too many on his manicured lawn. Hmm, you're right. We've not got a lot to go on. There must be more. And we'd better find it before the weekend or we're going to be chasing our tails all over the country. They're all due to go home on Sunday and we've not got the evidence to keep hold of any of them.'

After musing on this for a few moments, Rafferty suggested they went in search of lunch in the village before Llewellyn sought out Alice Douglas again. As he told the Welshman, he thought better on a full stomach.

Sebastian Kennedy and Simon Fairweather were in the pub in the village when they got there. When Rafferty and Llewellyn had got their drinks and ordered their lunch, Rafferty asked if they could join them at their table.

‘If you must,' said Sebastian Kennedy, the rebellious pig-hater, as he sat back and gave them an insolent, challenging stare.

‘Charming as ever, I see,' said Rafferty as he sat down.

‘That's the glory of being rich, Inspector. It allows a man to be as rude as he likes and there's no comeback. No one's going to sack you or refuse to employ you. No one's going to tear you off a strip or give you a bad work assessment or try to put you down. And it doesn't much matter if they do. Money's a great comforter.'