Love Lies Bleeding (15 page)

‘It's not impossible, Dafyd,’ Rafferty remarked. ‘After all, if she hadn't left him for Raymond Raine, Raine would still be alive and her ex-husband wouldn't be living out of cartons and reduced to camping outside her home. Maybe, if she feels partly responsible for the way things have gone for him, guilt might encourage her to take the blame for the killing herself rather than have her ex-husband go down for the crime.’

Llewellyn still said nothing and Rafferty pushed him for a response. ‘You saw him. He looks a broken man. I thought for a while there that he lacked the energy to commit murder, but maybe I'm wrong. I realised I was assuming the inability to summon the necessary energy to sort out mundane household admin means that inability would apply when it came to something more emotionally charged. And jealous rage, even in a broken man, can be the spur to do something drastic when the blood's up. And if he
did
kill Raine, she would realise what her leaving had done to him. She must also have realised that, in the state he's in, her ex wouldn't be likely to survive long in prison.’

Llewellyn, the oracle of logic, spoke at last. ‘Surely,’ he commented, the dismissal of Rafferty's theory evident in his voice, ‘that would be taking guilt over a broken marriage a little far?’

‘Maybe,’ Rafferty admitted. ‘But it could also explain Felicity Raine's convenient amnesia about the event itself.’

‘I rather thought Dr Dally had already done that. Didn't you say—?’

Rafferty broke in before Llewellyn could finish his sentence, unwilling to have his sergeant use his own words to contradict his theory.

‘I want you to go back to the old address Dunbar shared with Felicity. Talk to the neighbours again. I'd like to find out a little bit more about his and Felicity's marriage.’ Certainly, he thought, more than they'd known about it before Llewellyn had discovered its existence.

That had been careless, Rafferty acknowledged. Especially as they had already known how short was the duration of the Raines’ marriage. Ray Raine had been thirty-two when he died and Felicity twenty-eight, although she looked much younger. In these days of marriages that barely lasted past the honeymoon, they were both of an age to have had previous relationships. Broken marriages too often caused another tragic breakage: that of life itself.

‘While you're doing that, I'm going to arrange to question Felicity Raine again. In light of this latest discovery, I want to talk to her about Dunbar, ask her if she was aware he was watching her, her husband and their house. I'm curious to see what her reaction might be.’

Mrs Raine's legal representative, as Rafferty had anticipated, had quickly seized on her poor memory and general vagueness about her husband's death to persuade her to retract her confession. Part of Rafferty had felt a sense of relief at this. His uneasiness about this confession had grown with the passing of the days since Raymond Raine's murder. At least with the retraction, Felicity Raine would receive a full and thorough trial, should it even go that far, to establish what had really happened on that fateful morning.

She had already appeared before Elmhurst's magistrates and been remanded on a charge of murder to the largest women's prison in the district, it being better equipped than smaller local prisons to look after those, like Felicity Raine, who were considered at risk of self-harm and who were kept on suicide watch.

Rafferty was beginning to regret the murder charge. He had discussed it with the Crown Prosecution briefs earlier and they had agreed that it might now be wise to change the charge to one of manslaughter. What would they say in view of the latest evidence? he wondered, though he had a fair suspicion they would want to drop the case altogether.

Maybe, he thought, several days' experience of being a prisoner might have delivered the short, sharp shock that would trigger greater recall. Especially when she learned that they now knew about her ex-husband.

Felicity
Raine, seated across the table from Rafferty and Llewellyn, looked slimmer and paler than ever. She seemed fragile, full of nerves, and jumped at the slightest sound. Prison could do that to people, Rafferty knew. And the delicate Felicity Raine, who had the appearance of not being present at all half of the time, didn't appear particularly well equipped to cope with the worst of life's downsides. Altogether, her air of ethereal fragility had increased worryingly. She seemed to have no more substance than a will-o'-the-wisp that might vanish if he blinked. He was surprised she had agreed to see them without her legal representative being present.

He started gently. ‘Why didn't you tell us you'd been married before?’ he asked after they'd exchanged a few strained pleasantries.

She blinked and looked at him as if she didn't understand the question. But as she realised what he had asked, the ethereal look turned to one of watchful wariness, followed by a brief explanation. ‘I'm sorry, but I don't understand what relevance my previous marriage has to my present situation.’

‘Do you not?’ Rafferty sat back, folded his arms and contemplated her for a few moments. ‘It struck me that it might have a lot of relevance, especially as your ex-husband seems to have taken to watching you and the late Mr Raine.’

‘Watching me? Peter?’ She shook her head. ‘You must be mistaken.’

‘No mistake. He was seen, sitting in his car behind that little copse of trees opposite your house, on several occasions just before your husband's death.’

Strangely, Rafferty noted he had shied away from using the word ‘murder’. It seemed altogether too brutal a word to use in Felicity Raine's fragile state. ‘Surely you noticed him?’

‘No.’

The brief reply, without any further curious questions, made Rafferty think he might be on to something with regard to her ex-husband's possible connection to the murder of her latest spouse.
Was
her previous ready confession an attempt to protect Dunbar? One prompted by feelings of guilt for having left him for Raine?

‘Now, I have to say that I find it strange that you failed to spot him. Your neighbour and her husband noticed him on several occasions; Mrs Enderby even noted the part of his registration number that she could see and was still thinking about calling the police when she was distracted from this all too belated intention by the police activity outside your house.’

‘Well
I
didn't see him inspector. I think I might notice if my ex-husband was stalking me. It seems unlikely.’

‘Stalking? I don't think I said anything about
stalking,
Mrs Raine.’

She gave the faintest of shrugs. ‘What you said, the way you said it — what other inference could there be?’

‘Funny, because that's what I wondered. Perhaps it wasn't you he was watching — or
stalking,
to use your own word. Maybe it was your husband he was stalking?’

She tried to laugh off his remark as absurd, but her laugh sounded shaky. She glanced at him under her lashes, quickly, like a fawn fearing the hunter is getting too close, then looked quickly away again.

‘Is it such a funny idea, though? After all, Mr Raine had stolen his wife.’

‘Stolen?’ She had the nervous habit of repeating his words back at him, he noticed. ‘I wasn't
stolen
inspector. No one steals another human being unless they're kidnappers or terrorists and I can assure you that Raymond was neither. I went with him of my own free will. I divorced Peter of my own free will. No coercion was used.’

‘All right then. Not
stolen
as such, but enticed away.’

This time her laughter was merrier and more convincing. It sounded like the treble of a small and delicate bell or the chuckle of a brook over smooth pebbles.

‘You make Raymond sound like some fairy or goblin,’ she told him, still smiling. ‘He wasn't. I wasn't lured away by hypnotic spells or some pied piper's haunting tune, but by a man, a strong man I thought would take care of me better than—’ She broke off.

‘Better than your first husband had managed? Was that what you were going to say?’

‘I suppose.’ Again, she glanced quickly at him then away again. She admitted, 'I was weak. When my first husband's business went under, he found it difficult to cope. He felt a failure; he felt ashamed, I suppose, but mostly he felt angry. I didn't know what to do. I felt a failure too, you see. I couldn't help him. Not that he wanted my help. He seemed to feel that the fact that he might need it was even more degrading than his business failure.

‘We drifted for weeks, months, making each other more and more unhappy. Then Raymond came along and made it clear he wanted me and wouldn't take no for an answer. It was as if a weight had been lifted from me. Suddenly, I didn't feel crushed by life, by demands and responsibilities I couldn't meet. I'm not a strong person, inspector.’

This time she met his gaze squarely, without looking away. ‘I need someone beside me who is stronger than me. Not all women, even today, can be confident career types.’

Rafferty nodded. Tell me — I know you didn't have any form of employment during your marriage to Mr Raine, but, given your ex's business downturn, did you work at all during your first marriage?’

She nodded. ‘I had a part-time job when I was with Peter. Nothing very grand. I tried to get more hours, go full-time, when Peter's business failed, but although I did increase my hours, my earnings were never going to make up for the loss of his. The fact that I had even sought more hours in order to bring in a greater income seemed to anger him more than please him. I felt I was in an impossible situation.’

Rafferty, like a dog after a particularly juicy bone buried he couldn't recall just where, returned to one of his earlier areas of exploration. ‘You said before that you didn't notice your ex-husband sitting in his car watching the house you shared with Mr Raine?’

She shook her head.

‘What about Mr Raine?’

‘What?’

Rafferty was interested to note that the wary look was back in her eyes. ‘I know you said that he hadn't noticed him either, but Mr Raine was a busy man, in and out of the house every day, following his business interests. I find it hard to believe that a man as sharp as Mr Raine wouldn't have noticed his love rival parked suspiciously behind the trees.’

‘Well, if he did, he didn't mention it to me, which strikes me as unlikely.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I rather think he'd have noticed him, whether or not he chose to keep such information from you. Maybe he didn't want to upset you and thought he'd deal with your ex himself?’

Felicity Raine didn't attempt to agree or disagree. All she said was, ‘As I told you, I don't know if Ray noticed him or not.’ She gave a grim little smile. ‘Do you know something, inspector? With you trying to blame my ex-husband for Ray's death, I'm beginning to wish my solicitor hadn't persuaded me to retract my confession.’ She sighed. ‘I must have killed Ray. No other explanation makes sense. Maybe I should retract my retraction. Accept my guilt for Ray's death and speed up the punishment of the court and my own period of atonement. At least, if I did that, I'd save Peter and others the trauma of being suspects in a murder investigation.’

‘It's never a good idea to make such critically important decisions when you're upset,’ Rafferty advised her. ‘Speak to your solicitor again. Listen to his advice. Promise me you'll do that?’

She hesitated for some seconds. Then she nodded and said, ‘Very well. But we both know what his advice will be, don't we? And I'm really not sure that it's advice I either want or should take any more.’

After an involuntary little shiver, she said, ‘If you've nothing more you want to ask me, if I may, I'd like to go back to my cell now.’

‘Certainly, but before you go, perhaps you'd satisfy my curiosity on something?’

For the briefest second she hesitated, before she gave a quick nod.

‘You've retracted your confession, which is, of course, your right. But I wondered why you let yourself be persuaded to do so. You seemed sure enough of your guilt at first.’ Though, even as he said it, Rafferty remembered it wasn't true; but Felicity failed to contradict him and he plunged on. ‘What's happened to make you change your mind?’

She gave another little shrug. ‘It's nothing that I can put a finger on, exactly. I can't really explain, beyond saying it's just that it's all so vague. When I told my solicitor that I'd suffered a period of unconsciousness before I came to and found myself and Ray — like that, he managed to convince me that it brings in a large element of doubt that I
did
kill him.

‘In fact the further away I get from that day, the more the whole thing seems like a dream. Or a nightmare. It's certainly seemed as if all this has been happening to someone else. Sometimes,’ her voice cracked, ‘sometimes,
I
don't feel real.’

Maybe it
was
truly just a nightmare for her and she hadn't killed her husband at all.

Since the lab had discovered that the two pints of milk that had been delivered on the morning of Raine's death had been tampered with and a quantity of crushed sleeping tablets inserted into both, the question of whether Peter Dunbar might have had a hand in this tampering was increasingly on Rafferty's mind. After delivery, the milk had probably sat on their doorstep for some minutes; long enough for anyone to tamper with it. And Dunbar had been there, on the spot, and with who knew what black thoughts curdling his soul.

Llewellyn, of course, had pointed out that Felicity might well have tampered with the milk herself in order to render her husband unconscious so she could kill him.

The post-mortem had revealed around a pint of milk in the dead man's stomach and Felicity Raine had openly revealed when questioned earlier that her husband invariably drank a pint of milk every morning. She told them he liked to line his stomach in preparation for the boozy lunches that were a regular feature of the fashion industry. She had also admitted that she didn't follow her husband's custom, having no boozy business lunches to attend. Her morning beverage was black coffee with either toast or cereal.

Certainly, as he had pointed out to Llewellyn, the blood test had revealed Mogadon in her system, sufficient to render her slight figure as unconscious as that of her husband. Though she might as easily have taken them
after
the deed, which, again, Llewellyn hadn't been slow to point out.