Love Lies Bleeding (28 page)

Sandrine's dignity was punctured by neither Felicity's threat to make a statement of her own nor by her ridicule. Instead, it strengthened her as she responded with the simple truth. ‘Oh, I have looked at myself, Felicity, many times. But I wonder have
you
similarly looked at
yourself
and seen what is really there? I think not.’

Felicity
Raine had done her best to spread the police's suspicions among her family, friends and acquaintances. Quite deliberately, she had planted clues to put doubts about her early, readily confessed guilt into their minds, whilst ensuring their suspicions of those around her grew stronger.

First, she had implicated Stephanie, who would benefit financially from Ray's death, by using her computer to order the drugs she had needed in order to subdue Raymond so she could murder him in what she had hoped the police would consider an unlikely, unwomanly scenario.

Then she had implicated Nick Miller, the gardener/handyman whose services and
‘poste resîante`
greenhouse both Felicity and Stephanie used, the Miller who was something of a ladies’ man to judge from his strictly female — attractive female — client list. No wonder Sandrine Agnew had either removed herself or been removed from it once they'd had the chance to take stock of one another.

She hadn't even scrupled to leave her ex-husband out of the list, though admittedly he had met her more than halfway by watching the house hoping to speak to her — doubtless encouraged in both this act and his hope that they might get back together by Felicity herself, when she had telephoned him and planted the seed.

Sandrine Agnew, the best friend and would-be lover, who had supported her staunchly throughout the investigation, was another one of those callously used and exploited by Felicity. Rafferty suspected she had deliberately encouraged Sandrine's obsession with her, promising they would leave the area and set up home together once Felicity was free and the case was over. This promise had encouraged Sandrine to promote the lie that Raymond had beaten his wife — though whether she knew it was a lie or had been duped over this by Felicity as she had been over so much else …

But Felicity had never had any intention of setting up home here or anywhere else with the plain and dumpy Sandrine Agnew; it was that deceit which had ultimately been her downfall. Arrogantly, she had dismissed Sandrine and Sandrine's love as of no importance to her.

Rafferty was astonished when he remembered he had been concerned for Felicity Raine's mental, emotional and physical health in prison should he not manage to find sufficient proof of her innocence.

Now, as the echo of the words she had used with callous cruelty to taunt Sandrine Agnew seemed to reverberate in the high-ceilinged hospital room, he thought Felicity would in reality do very well in prison. With her manipulative character, feminine wiles, beauty and acting skills, she would probably end up the governor's pet and would shortly probably be all but running the place — to her advantage, of course.

Two
days later, out of hospital and back in prison on remand after Sandrine Agnew had given her damning statement, Felicity Raine seemed at last to face the fact that the game might be up.

‘How could you imagine I could possibly have loved such an unprepossessing creature as Sandrine, inspector?’ she asked Rafferty when he and Llewellyn paid another visit to her there. ‘If only you knew how suffocating and embarrassing I found her love. Michelle was right about that.’

‘Why did you encourage it, then?’ he asked. But, of course, he already knew the answer to that question, for Felicity had used Sandrine Agnew, much as she had used everyone else in her life.

But it seemed that even though Felicity Raine appeared to have accepted her fate, she still preferred to disguise her true nature behind the air of an
ingénue
. For now she opened her limpid grey eyes wide and stared at him from their hypnotising depths.

‘Encourage it?’ she asked softly. ‘Is that what you think I did?’ She wrinkled her smooth brow as though in thought. ‘I suppose it could look that way. I hadn't realised. It's my own fault, I suppose. I was too friendly when we first met. I hadn't realised how lonely and clinging she would be. When I did, it was too late and she was attached to me like a limpet.’

‘You always had the option of telling her plainly — of being cruel to be kind.’

‘True. But somehow, each time I nerved myself up to do it, Sandrine was going through some life crisis or other.’

Lightly, she touched her slightly rounded stomach, and commented, ‘And now, I have a new life to consider.’

She was still play-acting, Rafferty realised. Only this time she was playing the role of the Madonna. Felicity Raine had missed her way, he thought, and instead of the great dramatic actress she might have been, she had taken on the even more dramatically demanding role of murderer.

Strangely, even now, Felicity seemed to think her dramatic skills might be enough to enable her to achieve a reversal in her currently unattractive fortunes, for she gave a rueful smile. ‘I realise now, of course, that she must have sensed my air of tension, guessed what it presaged and set out her little emotional bombs. I fell for it each time. And now …’ Artfully her voice faltered and to his horror, Rafferty realised she could still make the doubts about her guilt return. With some difficulty he managed to suppress them as Felicity continued. ‘Now, she is getting her revenge by lying about me.’

Sandrine Agnew wasn't a liar, that much was plain, as plain as the woman herself. Ms Agnew was too transparently honest in her words and emotions to lie convincingly — unless it was to come to the aid of an adored lover. But he doubted she would be willing to offer Felicity her support again.

Now, of course, he knew that even if Felicity
had
made a pretence of trying to prise off Sandrine's clinging, love-sick grip, she wouldn't have tried very hard. Indeed, she must have deliberately set out to nurture the love that Sandrine, in her heart, must have known was merely love's masquerade.

She had needed Sandrine to add to the numbers of those required to muddy the waters of her guilt and the case against her sufficiently to ensure the police dropped the charges. Then, gloriously pregnant, she would be home free and all set to take charge of the bulk of the Raine family fortune held in trust for her child. At least that had been the plan. He thought even the self-deluding and devious Felicity must now realise her grand plan lay in ruins.

And as he considered the baby in her womb, he thought, Poor child. What an inheritance this infant would get. Although he hadn't managed completely to disprove Felicity's fabricated pretence that Raymond had been violent towards her, deep in his heart Rafferty knew that this had been yet another deceit.

Hadn't it been enough for her to kill the poor man, he wondered, without also casting him in the role of wife beater?

Maybe the diary entries Elaine Enderby had told him she made each time she saw Felicity with fresh bruises, together with Raymond's business diary, would go some way to proving that Felicity's ‘bruises’ had been self-inflicted. Safe in the knowledge that Stephanie would have no reason to visit when she knew Raymond was away, Felicity's deception was kept strictly for those who would be taken in by it.

Rafferty had checked back with Raymond's business diary and discovered that Felicity's bruises and black eyes only appeared in public after Raymond had left for some business event or other. Miraculously, these marks of violence had vanished by the time Raymond returned home, usually several days later. Elaine Enderby had remarked on what good healing skin Felicity had. ‘Just as well in the circumstances,’ had been her sad comment, he recalled.

But, of course, there had been nothing fortunate about this miraculous healing ability, as he had discovered.

With his interest in history and old buildings and with the prod to initiative provided by Llewellyn's finding of the secret drawer in the desk in Raymond's study, Rafferty had suggested the team might usefully employ themselves in some more judicious measuring and tapping of the Raines’ sixteenth-century home.

Sure enough, they had eventually, with the help of the local architectural historian, found the priest's hole. Concealed within this tiny, claustrophobic chamber, they had found Felicity's extensive, professional make-up box. Makeup bruises she had removed before Raymond returned home and questioned her about them.

One thing he
had
apparently questioned, though, was the unreasoning dislike he sensed their near neighbour, Elaine Enderby, had felt for him.

Mrs Enderby had told them Raymond Raine had even had the ‘temerity’ to ask her why she was always so cool towards him and, mysteriously — to him, at least — she had replied, ‘You know why.’

Raymond hadn't pursued his questioning any further. According to his stepmother, he had just put Elaine Enderby 's inexplicable and barely contained dislike down to a mix of jealousy and hormonal upheaval brought by the menopause and had metaphorically shrugged his shoulders and left it at that.

Seemingly, Felicity Raine's whole life had been a lie. A life of duplicity in which she had married her deluded first husband for his money, as her own father had suggested. She certainly hadn't scrupled to leave Dunbar when he lost it. She had killed her second, wealthy husband, once she had become bored with him and his obsession with business and his neglect, as she saw it, of
her.

The final straw, as Felicity had clearly seen it, was when, digging through Stephanie's financial documents — which were as carelessly safeguarded as was her computer password — she had learned, pretty much together, Rafferty believed, that she was pregnant and that she would inherit nothing from Raymond but through their mutual child. The rage of the adult child spoiled and indulged by the mother and ignored and neglected by the father had, he believed, engulfed her and she had decided that, this time, her wealthy husband had to die. That way, he imagined, she had felt she would need to make no more marriages that required her to give her actress skills a good work-out.

Now, Rafferty found himself wondering if the car accident Peter Dunbar had mentioned he had been involved in several years before, while still married to Felicity and before his business fell apart, might not also be down to Felicity Raine. Perhaps, if that
had
been attempted murder, it was fortunate for Dunbar that he
had
lost his business — maybe it had saved him from any further attempts on his life.

Raymond Raine, of course, hadn't been so lucky.

Finally, when Rafferty
had began to despair that such a thing would ever come to pass, there came some good news from Wales. Abra rang to tell him that the charges against Gloria had been dropped.

‘Really?’ Rafferty exclaimed. ‘But that's great news. How did it come about? Because when I spoke to him that Welsh DI seemed determined on pursuing the case.’

‘Ah, but he didn't count on someone going above his head. At least, that's what I understand must have happened. When he rang Gloria to tell her she wasn't to be charged, he was practically spitting feathers. He muttered darkly about plots and evidence being “got at”.’

‘Well, I can't imagine who can have gone above his head. It certainly wasn't me. And it can't have been Dai Jones either, as I never did manage to contact him.’

‘Oh. I forgot,’ said Abra. ‘That's what I meant to tell you, but Gloria and I have been celebrating so much it slipped my mind.

‘Dai Jones turned up at Gloria's home. Seems he's just moved house, but, apart from friends and family, he hadn't got around to notifying any official bodies, which explains why you couldn't contact him. Anyway, it turns out that
he
was the one who managed to get everything sorted, via a superintendent friend of his.’

‘Mm. Someone must have told him all about it, I suppose,’ Rafferty concluded. And as he thought about it, he suspected he knew just who that someone was likely to be.

Abra's next words confirmed it.

‘As I said, this Dai Jones came to see me and Gloria. He took me aside and told me that
Dafyd
of all people had contacted him and asked him to intervene, though he told me to keep this information from Gloria.’

‘Wonder how Dafyd found out about it? Anyway,’ he said, ‘who cares how it was sorted or who by? Let's just be thankful that it has been. So,’ Rafferty asked eagerly, ‘when are you coming home?’

Abra laughed and repeated the phrase that Michelle Ginôt had all but made her own. ‘Will the day after yesterday be soon enough?’

‘No. Not at all. But I suppose it will have to do.’

‘Well,
of course it was me,’ Llewellyn said. ‘Don't you think I'm aware that my mother's been going through a difficult stage in her life?’ he asked Rafferty when the latter questioned him and asked him to confirm that he
had
been the one to contact Dai Jones and ask him to intervene to prevent his mother's prosecution.

‘She had a similar memory lapse earlier in the year. Fortunately my friend, ex-DI Dai Jones, was still working then and he dealt with it in an appropriately sensitive manner. He called me and when he realised that my mother was unwell, he simply told her to see her GP and didn't go ahead with the charge against her. It wasn't even necessary for me to go up to Gwynedd to help resolve the problem, although obviously I did go to check that my mother was all right. But to this day, she doesn't know that, between us, Dai and I smoothed things over on both occasions. It was the only thing, the humane thing, to do in the circumstances. Just don't let my mother know I intervened,’ he warned Rafferty.

‘Mum's the word,’ Rafferty agreed.

‘Anyway, after that last occasion, I asked one of my mother's neighbours to keep an eye on her for me. I did't like doing it,’ Llewellyn admitted. ‘It felt too much like spying. But, I thought, if I was to nip any similar problems in the bud, I had no choice. So when her neighbour — who's got a cousin working as a constable in the local police station — learned about this latest charge, she rang me and I immediately rang Dai Jones. So you see, your mission of mercy wasn't really necessary.’