Love Lies Bleeding (14 page)

As they got out of the car and examined the other vehicle, Rafferty observed that the Renault's road tax was out of date and that the wear on all four tyres was below the minimum legal requirement.

‘What do you bet he hasn't got any insurance or a current MoT either,’ Rafferty remarked as they crossed the pavement and knocked on the door of number 45.

At first, there was no answer. After peering through the letterbox, Rafferty was about to knock for the third time when the door was abruptly wrenched open and a tired-looking, unshaven man in his late thirties demanded, ‘What do you want?’

The man, whom Rafferty presumed was Peter Dunbar, looked bleary-eyed. Given what Llewellyn had learned about his habits it seemed likely he was suffering from the effects of a raging hangover.

He certainly barked at them, before they could answer his question, in a voice furious enough to suggest he was currently suffering the usual morning-after punishment: ‘I was asleep. You woke me up.’

Rafferty took in the crumpled shirt and trousers, neither of which looked particularly clean and which spoke eloquently of the too-familiar memory of nights spent comatose on the settee during his own miserably unhappy marriage, and said, ‘I'm sorry, sir.’ It was now well after eleven in the morning. ‘Work nights, do you?’ he enquired with every appearance of solicitude, which his own well-remembered and deadly stints of working through the long, dark hours while others slept ensured was sincere.

The man scowled and muttered, ‘No.’

‘You
are
Mr Peter Dunbar, sir?’

A wariness entered Dunbar's eyes. Rafferty guessed it had just dawned on him who they were and why they might have reason for calling on him.

‘Yes. I'm Peter Dunbar. Who are you and what do you want?’

‘Several things, actually.’ Rafferty answered the second question first. ‘But let's not chat here on the step. I imagine you know why we're here. Perhaps we could come in?’ He took his warrant card out and held it under Mr Dunbar's nose before the man could voice any further objections.

Rafferty was interested to note the colour draining from Dunbar's blotchy red face. And although he was aware that the most innocent of witnesses exhibited signs of anxiety at having the police turn up on their doorstep, Peter Dunbar could not be included in such a category. At the very least, he was guilty of stalking the Raines around the time the wife-stealing Raymond was murdered. Certainly, if Dunbar
was
innocent, his reaction was way beyond the norm.

They followed Mr Dunbar as he turned abruptly on his heel and led the way down the dim, narrow hallway, which was lit only by the daylight filtering from the open door of a tiny kitchen at the rear.

Rafferty glanced around as they reached the back room. He couldn't help but note that Peter Dunbar's home looked — and smelled — as unkempt as the man himself. The furniture seemed to consist mostly of piles of cartons and tea-chests. It was as though, having made the effort to remove himself and his possessions from his previous, marital, home, Dunbar had not only run out of interest but also out of the energy required to unpack.

Almost hidden behind the piled-up boxes was an expensive-looking dark brown leather settee. It looked completely out of place in this tiny terrace, being more than a cut or two above it in terms of quality, and had obviously been purchased for a much larger room.

Rafferty found himself wondering if Peter Dunbar's recent financial downturn hadn't gone even deeper than Llewellyn had suspected. Had Raymond Raine — apart from stealing Dunbar's wife — also had something to do with that descent? Was that why Dunbar had been sitting outside the Raines’ home at various odd hours?

If Dunbar's status
had
dropped as drastically as his current circumstances indicated, it would explain the incongruity of the large and expensive leather settee crouched in the back room of a small and scruffy terrace. And if Raine
was
the architect of Dunbar's emotional and financial free-fall … ?

As Peter Dunbar seemed to have lost his manners along with any previous good fortune, Rafferty didn't wait for the invitation to sit down that he guessed wouldn't be forthcoming, but pushed a couple of cartons out of the way, perched on the settee and gestured to Llewellyn to pull out his notebook and sit down.

As Rafferty watched, Peter Dunbar underwent several more colour changes. He suspected that for Dunbar the appearance of the notebook rendered their visit wholly official and completely unwelcome.

‘I imagine you'll have read about the recent savage murder in Elmhurst?’ Rafferty began conversationally.

Dunbar's head jerked up at the question. It was several seconds before he was able to put any kind of an answer together. ‘What? No. I don't buy newspapers.’ He pointed towards the nearest pile of cartons. ‘And I haven't unpacked the TV yet.’He thrust his hands deep in his pockets and leaned back against the nearest piled cartons as though keen to display an air of casual interest, and asked, ‘What murder is this?’ But the involuntary frown on his brow and the anxious flutter of the muscle in his cheek belied his relaxed stance. It indicated that he knew more about the murder than his quick denial proclaimed. But, of course, they already had reason to suspect this was so.

‘You surprise me,’ Rafferty commented, equally casually. ‘I'd have thought you'd have heard about it — especially after we learned of your recent interest in the house belonging to the murdered man.’

Peter Dunbar's eyelashes began an involuntary blinking at this, but he said nothing in response, so Rafferty continued.

‘Naturally, we assumed you must have known the victim or his wife. Or perhaps it was the house itself that interested you?’ he suggested drily, though his glance around the room suggested he thought the latter unlikely.

Rafferty's last suggestion seemed to cause Mr Dunbar grim amusement. Not surprising, perhaps, given the size and opulence of Mr and Mrs Raine's home compared to Dunbar's current abode.

‘You and your car were seen, Mr Dunbar, your registration number noted, covertly parked outside the home of Mr and Mrs Raymond Raine on a number of occasions shortly before Mr Raine was murdered,’ Rafferty informed him before he could attempt any further denials. ‘Perhaps — as we have since learned you used to be married to Felicity Raine, as she now is — you'd like to tell us what you were doing there?’

Dunbar slumped back, more heavily this time, against the piled-up cartons, his elbows digging deep into the top of a carton marked
FRAGILE
. He didn't seem to hear the ominous sound of what could only be breaking crockery.

‘I suppose you'll find out,’ he said finally in defeated tones. ‘If you must know, I was hoping to catch Felicity alone. I wanted to try to persuade her to come back to me.’

Rafferty and Llewellyn exchanged glances at this.

‘Persuade her to come back to you?’ Rafferty repeated. ‘Did you have any reason to believe that was likely?’

Dunbar nodded. ‘She rang me. She wanted to apologise for leaving me so abruptly. She told me she felt guilty. But there was something in her voice that made me feel she wasn't happy. That gave me hope that she might consider coming back to me. We were happy once,’ he told them with a wistful note in his voice that indicated he needed to convince himself as much as them that this had been so. ‘I thought it was possible we might be again. I hoped—’

He broke off abruptly, almost choking on these last words. His breathing became so laboured that Rafferty stared at him in alarm. But Dunbar quickly got a hold on himself and waved away Rafferty's concern.

‘I'm all right. I just get these attacks sometimes. The doctor told me they were caused by stress.’

Something else Dunbar might reasonably blame on Raine, was Rafferty's first thought. The damage Raymond Raine had caused Dunbar was piling up much like the unpacked removal cartons.

‘I'm sure she would never have left me but for my unfortunate business reversals. After they occurred, I started to drink. Felicity didn't like it, of course. I suppose I wasn't very pleasant to live with. I'm not surprised she was caught by Raymond Raine's blandishments. He caught her, caught both of us, at a vulnerable time in our lives, in our marriage.’ He tailed off after these revelations.

‘I see. And did you manage to speak to Mrs Raine?’

‘What?’

‘You said that was the reason you'd been parked outside their house,’ Rafferty reminded him.

‘Oh. Right. Sorry. No, I didn't get to speak to her, although I saw her several times. But each time she vanished up the lane before I managed to pluck up the courage to call her name.’ His shoulders hunched. ‘I was scared she'd reject me, I suppose. Scared I'd imagined what I thought I heard in her voice when we spoke on the phone. After all, it was only a brief conversation.’

‘What about
Mr
Raine?’ Rafferty asked. ‘Did you see him?’

Dunbar shook his head.

Rafferty wasn't sure he believed him, but, for the moment, he didn't question him further about it. He was more interested in discovering if Dunbar would admit to being parked in the lane on the morning of Raine's murder. Neither Elaine Enderby nor her husband had been able to confirm this important point; it being Jim Enderby's usual day off, the pair had enjoyed a lie-in.

‘And was one of the several occasions when you saw Mrs Raine on the morning of her husband's death? Around seven, seven thirty last Monday it would have been.’ Given Peter Dunbar's apparent emotional turmoil, he thought he might be in with a chance of a straight, possibly revelatory, answer. And so it proved.

‘No,’ Dunbar revealed. ‘I didn't see her that morning. I -I must have nodded off. I remember waking with a start and a terrible crick in the neck after being slumped against the front passenger seat half the night.’

At least he'd admitted he'd been in the vicinity at the time Raine was murdered, thought Rafferty. His shot in the dark had paid off. Now he told Dunbar, ‘You must realise, with Mr Raine murdered, that your behaviour looks suspicious? You had reason to hate him, to wish him some permanent harm. After all, you've admitted he stole your wife.’

Dunbar said nothing.

‘When was it that your marriage broke up?’ Llewellyn quietly interposed into the silence.

‘Nearly eighteen months ago.’

Rafferty raised his eyebrows. Raymond Raine hadn't wasted much time. He and Felicity had been married only fifteen months. The late Mr Raine's haste struck Rafferty as unseemly. It seemed likely it had struck Peter Dunbar that way also. And now someone had hastened Raine into the next world. He found himself wondering again about the possible reasons for Felicity Raine's prompt confession to the crime. Had she had some reason
other
than her belief in her own guilt? Perhaps the desire to protect the hapless ex-husband from whom she had allowed herself to be ’stolen’?

‘By the way,’ Rafferty said, ‘maybe I ought to mention that your road tax is overdue, twelve months overdue, in fact. Perhaps you haven't noticed as you've been busy with your house move — I know how these things can be overlooked.’

Dunbar looked startled that the conversation should move from the murderous to the mundane. There was more than a trace of relief there as well.

‘Is it?’ he asked. ‘I — I hadn't realised. I hardly drive any more, you see, not since my accident. It was a bad one,’ he revealed. ‘And although it was several years ago now, I still haven't regained my confidence. Every time I climb behind the wheel, it brings it all back.’

Rafferty nodded. The accident and its on-going psychological problems could explain why Dunbar smelled the worse for drink when he drove himself to watch his ex-wife's home. Clearly, he needed to psych himself up in more ways than one …

He asked conversationally, ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Six months? Seven?’ He shrugged. ‘I really can't recall exactly.’

Six or seven months and he still hadn't managed to unpack. Felicity leaving must really have hit him hard; hard enough to make him want to kill his rival? Rafferty wondered.

There again, he thought, seeing as Dunbar had failed to find the energy to unpack his belongings during a period of six months or more; failed, too, to update the address on his driving licence and credit cards; failed to change his tyres or renew his MOT, it seemed unlikely he would be able to summon the energy to commit murder.

Llewellyn had revealed that Dunbar's previous home, the one he had shared with Felicity, had been in one of the more upmarket areas of Habberstone, a busy market town four miles west of Elmhurst. Rafferty knew the area well. It seemed Dunbar had not just lost his wife. To judge by his current downsizing, he had lost everything.

‘I think you must know the drill by now, Mr Dunbar,’ Rafferty said as he stood up. ‘Please produce your driving licence and other documents at the police station within the next few days.’ Not one to kick a man when he was down, he added some advice: ‘You might care to renew your tyres and MOT before you do so.’

Peter Dunbar nodded and asked, ‘Is that it?’

He looked surprised when Rafferty confirmed it, a surprise not to be wondered at in the circumstances.

They let themselves out.

‘It's
fortunate for him that Mrs Raine confessed so promptly to her husband's murder.’ Llewellyn repeated Rafferty's earlier thought as they climbed in their car. ‘Even though she's since retracted, it's given him time to pull together a half-plausible tale to explain his presence near the murder scene. I, for one, certainly didn't believe his comment that he knew nothing about it till we told him today.’

Rafferty nodded as he started the car up, drew out and headed back to the station. ‘And talking about that confession, having met her rather pathetic ex, doesn't it make you wonder if she had another reason — other than actual guilt, I mean — for making it in the first place? A guilty conscience can often inspire self-sacrifice of the most stupendous kind.’

As he concentrated on the road, Rafferty sensed Llewellyn's serious dark gaze directed questioningly at him. Not for the first time in their working relationship, he felt the need to defend his latest theory.