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ANNE LONGMAN OPENED the door after their third ring. She seemed ill at ease today; the previous strained vivacity was missing, as was the bright hit or miss make-up. Something else was missing, as well, Rafferty realised. The smell of whisky. He assumed she was out of booze, and wondered if that alone explained her nervous state.
They followed her down the short hallway to the untidy living room, but when Rafferty attempted to question her, she flared up at him.
'For God's sake, can't you wait till I find a cigarette? Or is this country turning into another police state?'
Rafferty and Llewellyn exchanged glances. Ignoring them, she prowled from one end of the room to the other, like a caged tiger, her expression increasingly desperate as, one by one, jacket pockets and discarded cigarette packets were investigated and found to be empty.
'Damn.' The lid slammed on a cheap redwood box—presumably the last hope.
Rafferty, until recently a thirty a day man, tried to help. 'If you want to dash out to the tobacconist on the corner, we can wait five minutes.'
'Don't you think I would if I had any money?' she snapped. 'I'm broke. My allowance isn't due till tomorrow and, knowing that bastard brother of mine, it'll be late.'
Suddenly, as though recognising she might be alienating possible rescuers, her demeanour changed. She laid a hand on Rafferty's arm and gave him a devastating smile.
'With all that red hair, you must have your share of bad habits,' she murmured. 'For pity's sake, tell me smoking's one of them.'
Rafferty smiled ruefully. 'Sorry. I gave them up.'
Instantly dismissing him, she directed her smile at Llewellyn, but one look at the Welshman evidently sufficed to convince her that he was a paragon of clean-living virtues. She scowled, slumped in one of the worn armchairs and eyed them with dislike. 'Pity you didn't send the Vice Squad. Isn't it just my luck to get two policemen with not a decent human weakness between them?'
Rafferty, unwilling to be lumped together with Llewellyn as a Percy Prim, felt the urge to defend himself. But, as he watched her nicotine stained fingers beat an erratic tattoo on the arm of the chair, he realised he might as well save his breath. Anne Longman was more concerned with her own deprivation than his manly pride. He realised something else as well. Deprived of her twin crutches of whisky and cigarettes, she might just let something useful slip.
'What do you want, anyway?' she snapped. 'If it's about my whereabouts when Henry's little bride was murdered, I still can't be any more definite than I was before. How many more times must I tell—?'
'Until you remember, Mrs Longman,' Llewellyn asserted.
Their chats to the neighbours had elicited the information that Anne Longman had broken up with her last boyfriend some three weeks earlier. Apparently the split had been so acrimonious – with raucous arguments and smashed crockery – that she had declared herself off men. There certainly hadn't been any male friends visiting recently, according to the old lady next door. She had told them that all Anne's relationships tended to break up in a similar manner.
The neighbour hadn't been able to tell them whether Anne had been at home on the day of Barbara's murder. But the rest of what she had said certainly lessened the possibility that one of her past boyfriends would have been willing to either make phone calls for her or offer to chauffeur her all the way to Essex. As, in Rafferty's estimation, this information dropped her a little further down the list of suspects, he broke in before Llewellyn's officious manner put her back up. 'We'll leave that for the moment, though there is something else you might be able to help us with,' he told her.
She gave him a sulky look. 'Oh?'
'It's nothing to worry about. It's just that Charles told me your father had written a large number of theoretical papers which he'd hoped to publish.' He sensed, rather than heard Llewellyn's sigh, but went doggedly on, anyway. 'The manuscript was kept in the library, but it seems to have disappeared.' He didn't mention Mrs Griffiths’ conviction that the manuscript had been destroyed, but went on, 'I wondered if you might know what happened to it?'
'Me? Why should I know what happened to it?' Her eyes narrowed. 'Who told you I did?' Rafferty's hopes rose as it became obvious that she was lying, and, as though she realised that her denial had been less than convincing, she immediately tried frankness. 'All right, so I did take it. What of it?'
She flopped back on the armchair and gazed at him with defiant eyes. 'I've as much right to it as my dear little brother. I thought I might be able to get Daddy's opus published. But there was no hope of that. From the parts of it I was able to read, most of it was case history stuff, the sort any practising psychiatrist would have reams of.' She laughed suddenly. 'A lot of it was in some kind of code—father liked his little secrets. I couldn't figure the code out, but it must have been used for the juicier bits or else why would father put himself to so much trouble? Anyway, I knew that no publisher would be interested in publishing an amateur's little theories, juicy or not, especially as the coded sections were probably libellous.' She pulled a face. 'Pity, as I could have done with the money.'
Excited to discover that old Max Shore had felt the need to encode his work, and certain he was onto something definite at last, Rafferty asked eagerly, 'Do you still have the manuscript?'
She looked at him assessingly, as if weighing all the angles, then she shook her head. 'No. I put it back in the library. But it had vanished last time I looked for it. God knows where it's gone.' With a half-teasing smile for Rafferty, she commented, 'You know, you've intrigued me, Inspector. Do tell me what possible use you think my father's old theories might be to you.'
After Llewellyn's criticism, Rafferty was defensive of his reasons. 'It was just an idea I had. Nothing of great importance. Anything that might help me solve this crime interests me, that's all.'
'What possible connection could my father have with Barbara's death?'
Feeling foolish, in face of so reasonable a question, he was forced to confess that he didn't know.
She gave a malicious smile. 'Sounds to me as if you're clutching at straws, Inspector. Barbara and my father never even met. Surely you know he died all of fifteen years ago?'
Rafferty nodded. He'd told her why he was interested in her father's papers, but he was damned if he was going to let her interrogate him, and he got up to go. He paused halfway to the door. 'Talking of your father, have you any idea who might have murdered him? I gather there were several theories at the time.'
'Obviously, you've read the police reports, Inspector. I don't imagine I can tell you any more than they can. There was certainly no shortage of suspects. My father's portrait might give the impression that he was more upright than Moses, but you shouldn't let it fool you. He made enemies with the greatest of ease. You don't get to be as wealthy and successful as quickly as he did, without taking the trouble to discover where someone was most vulnerable. Of course, that Old Testament face of his made it easier to get under people's guard and cheat them. My father had no scruples, Inspector. He would stop at nothing to increase his empire. I called it his Attila complex.'
She returned to her armchair and with a lazy grace, swung her legs over one of the arms, displaying plenty of shapely thigh. She had a certain wanton charm about her, a reckless youthful bravado that was beguiling, and Rafferty couldn't help but stare as she stretched her body languorously, just like the cat he had likened her to earlier. Surprisingly, considering her drinking habits, she had kept her figure and it seemed to be giving Llewellyn the fidgets. But the Welshman wasn't the only one affected by her, Rafferty admitted to himself. He got the impression she was fully aware of the effect she had on them and was amusing herself. No wonder she'd managed to persuade Henry up the aisle so easily, he thought. Henry, poor fool, wouldn't have stood a chance, wouldn't have realised that she was more suited to being a mistress than a wife.
Anne Longman still wore the look of the cat who had been at the cream as she showed them out. She stood at the door and watched them walk away and, as Rafferty glanced back, he got the impression that, like a teenager, from her early marriage to her conveniently poor memory, she got a kick out of cocking a snook at authority. Unfortunately, it was an attitude he felt a sneaking empathy with. Wasn't he a bit that way inclined himself?
Llewellyn didn't waste any time in reminding him that she still hadn't given them a satisfactory explanation of her whereabouts on the day of Barbara's murder. And as her neighbours had been unable to tell them anything incriminating, as a defence it was pretty effective. As with the other suspects in the case, it put the onus to prove otherwise squarely on them.
***
DWARFED BY THE RED double decker London buses and hemmed in by black taxis, tourist coaches, and the gathering gloom of a threatening thunder storm, Rafferty blocked out the trapped feeling by forcing his mind to pick over what Anne Longman had said. If nothing else, the visit had given him more of an insight into Maximillian Shore, but he still wished he understood why the man preoccupied him so much. What could he have to do with this case? What possible connection could there be with current events?
There was his autobiography, of course, but he'd read that and couldn't see that there was anything in it likely to bring on a murder now, fifteen years after publication, especially as it had been Barbara Longman, rather than one of the Shores, who had died. He was more interested in Shore's theoretical papers, as their disappearance inclined him to the conviction that they must hold some significance. At least if he'd read them, he might be able to discount and forget them. And it was certainly intriguing that he had felt it necessary to write part of them in code.
Broodingly, Rafferty cast his mind back, and as he reviewed Anne Longman's comments and Charles Shore's half-forgotten and somewhat disparaging remarks about them, a possible connection came to him, a connection so obvious, so exciting and potentially explosive, that he wondered he hadn't thought of it before. Rafferty glanced at Llewellyn and decided against confiding in him yet. He was discovering that it saved an ego bruising if he tried to think his ideas through before having them threshed by the Welshman's combine-harvester intellect.
Was it possible, that in his younger days, Maximillian Shore had been a blackmailer? His daughter had said he always seemed to know where a man was most vulnerable. She had also said that he had no scruples and had become wealthy surprisingly quickly. How else could he have done it? He'd been a poor immigrant, just escaped from the Nazi bloodbath in Europe, young and alone in a strange land, not speaking the language too well, if at all. How had he not only survived, but thrived?
After reading his autobiography, Rafferty felt he had learned something of what influences had contributed to Shore's success. He had seen and experienced all manner of evils; probably his own life had hardened him to the suffering of others. After all, had there been anyone to care one jot about what he'd been through? Experiences such as his often put a canker in a man's soul. Would he be likely to worry about the morality of it if blackmail could help transform him from a storm-tossed orphan, at the mercy of every jagged rock, to a king in an impregnable castle of wealth? Rafferty thought that, after such experiences, a man would be prepared to do whatever was necessary to safeguard himself from similar persecution in the future.
Shore's autobiography revealed that, as a youth, he had worked in a newspaper office. What better place for a lad with ambitions? In those distant days, with their obligingly discreet newspaper barons, there would be secrets in plenty, secrets that the general public never learned, secrets that could ruin a person. An observant young man, clever enough to keep his ears and eyes open and his mouth shut, could learn a lot. Had Shore achieved his ambition by stumbling fortuitously on the shameful secret of some wealthy man? Had he mined such a secret with the ruthlessness he would have observed daily in the camps? Mined it till it was played out, and then gone on to the next, wilier now, more adept at winkling out the dark vices and secret susceptibilities that made powerful men vulnerable to little men like himself.
Maximillian Shore had been a man who enjoyed power. What could provide more power than a knowledge of others' weaknesses? Accumulating money had been like a religion to the man, Rafferty realised, and that made the possibility even more likely that, in his younger days at least, he'd been a blackmailer.
Was that how his interest in theorising had begun? Had he developed a fancy to launder his own dirty little habit once he was established and successful? He wouldn't have been able to bring himself to destroy the material that had given him wealth and power. Where safer then to keep such explosive stuff than with the later theoretical papers that most of his family had no interest in reading? Charles had been amused by his little hobby, despised it even, perhaps, deep down, pleased to have a reason to feel superior to the father he had probably feared; his father, the dabbler in theories that no-one wanted.
Charles Shore had apparently thought so little of his father's theories that he hadn't made any effort to keep them safe, had assumed they had gone on the gardener's bonfire, and hadn't seemed particularly concerned about the possibility that they had been destroyed. Would Maximillian have confided to his son the probable truth about the source of the family wealth? As Rafferty pictured the old man's proud face, he thought it unlikely.
It was even more unlikely that Maximillian had confided in the wayward Anne. She had said she had taken the papers hoping to have them published. But on reading them, had she unravelled the coded secrets and had an even better idea? Had she tried to make use of the secrets her father had accumulated? Her anger when he had mentioned the manuscript made Rafferty believe that she had tried—and failed. Any man Maximillian could have blackmailed would probably already have been middle-aged at the beginning of his blackmailing career. Presumably, most of them would be long dead by now—just like Shore.
But, as the papers seemed to have disappeared, he couldn't prove anything, either way. Not that he thought there was any mystery about how that had happened. Rafferty could imagine Anne Longman throwing them out in a drunken rage when they failed to earn her the fortune she sought, rather than replacing them as she claimed to have done.
As another thought occurred to him, he sat rigidly in the passenger seat, frightened to move in case it vanished as rapidly as it had come before he got a handle on it. But what if she hadn't been lying when she said she had replaced them? What if, on failing to crack the code, she had lost interest? She wasn't the type to persevere. What if Barbara had discovered Shore's incriminating papers after Anne had replaced them? The indefatigable Barbara, who made everything her business, might well have come across them, in her enthusiasm for improving on the Shore housekeeping. She would have found deciphering the code easier than would Anne. From what they had learned of her, she would have had the patience, perseverance and intelligence to accomplish the task.
Of course, if he was right, he would have to abandon his favourite theory that one of the family had killed her. What possible secrets could they have had a decade and a half ago? Charles would have only been fifteen, Anne eighteen, and Henry not much older when Maximillian had died. Any blackmail material that Barbara might have discovered would have been on outsiders, mostly long-dead outsiders at that.
Rafferty persisted. But, what if one or two were still alive? What if Barbara had, in all innocence, let one of Maximillian's few still-living victims know she was aware of their awful secret? What if she had attempted to reassure whoever it was that their long-buried secret wasn't about to be dredged up by her, and had failed to convince? Could a simple misunderstanding have been the reason for her murder? Maximillian’s victim’s would be old, possibly hard of hearing. It could have been that way, Rafferty reckoned. With her moralistic ways, she would be likely to attempt to right a wrong, but, equally, would probably handle the guilty secrets of others badly.
Sure now that he was onto something, Rafferty determined to make another attempt to locate the papers. He would tackle Mrs Griffiths himself when they got back. From what Anne had said it was evident that – whatever had happened to them since – they hadn't been destroyed at the time of Shore's death, as Charles had implied.
***
'THINK, MRS GRIFFITHS,' Rafferty implored. 'If Barbara removed the papers during a spring clean in the library, but decided they were worth keeping and didn't throw them away, where would she be likely to put them?'
She pursed her lips, though whether from annoyance at his persistence or from deep thought, Rafferty couldn't tell. 'Well,' she eventually admitted. 'They're certainly not in her bedroom, as I've given it a thorough going over, sorted through her clothes and things for Mr Henry and there was no sign of any such papers. They might be in one of the outhouses. Mr Charles hasn't bothered with them, and she used to keep a lot of her own stuff stored in them; furniture and so on, from the flat she lived in before she married Mr Longman.' Her thin lips parted in the semblance of a smile. 'There's a lifetime's rubbish there for you to hunt through.'
Rafferty groaned silently. Still, he'd started now and he wasn't going to give Llewellyn the satisfaction of thinking he wasn't up to the challenge. Besides, although he had checked and eliminated the possibility of one of the local taxi firms being used by the murderer, he had yet to eliminate the other possibility. He could kill two birds with one stone and look for a pushbike or similar vehicle while he checked for Shore's manuscript.
***
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, tired, filthy, and in a thoroughly bad temper, Rafferty conceded defeat.
They'd been through all the outhouses. They'd found rats and garden tools and old car tyres. They'd even found Henry's portrait of his wife. It was surprisingly good, and though it was unfinished, Rafferty gained a clear idea of Barbara's personality. She gazed calmly out of the portrait, exuding an air of wholesomeness, determination and devotion to duty that a nun might envy.
They found plenty of papers too; enough to convince Rafferty that the sole responsibility for the depletion of the Amazonian rain-forests rested with the Shore family. But of Maximillian Shore's theoretical manuscript, there was no sign.
He surveyed the last of the outhouses with distaste. It was the same hotchpotch as the others had been; ancient flowerpots with great cracks down their sides—apparently too valuable to throw away, a wheelbarrow with a wheel missing, a canoe with a broken paddle, fishing tackle, great sacks of fertiliser, seemingly brought here and then abandoned, a bike with no handlebars—surprisingly, in this house of children, the only one they'd come upon, and, regretfully, Rafferty put away his mental picture of a furiously peddling Henry. The shed's only saving grace was that it was the smallest of the three outhouses.
'That's it, then,' he admitted, unwillingly confirming Llewellyn's opinion that they'd been on a wild goose chase. 'Obviously this is where they stash their more useful rubbish.'
There were no great stacks of papers to be gone through anyway; he wasn't sure whether to be pleased or sorry about that. The blasted manuscript was obviously long gone.
The shed had a funny smell, composed of an esoteric mixture of damp earth, rotting wood and long-dead tiddlers jettisoned in the bottom of the torn fishing nets. Another, more elusive odour was mixed with the rest, but Rafferty couldn't pinpoint it, until he spotted the damaged Airfix Spitfire resting in the canoe. With a nostalgic sigh, he picked it up. It still gave off a faint scent of glue and immediately plunged him back years. How many happy hours had he spent as a lad, putting these old kites together? Now youngsters preferred to sniff the glue.
The discovery of The Spitfire made him feel suddenly, inexplicably happy. He forgot the frustrations of the case, as he experimentally hefted the plane, and with a boyish grin, he guided it through an intricate flying manoeuvre, unable to resist providing the sound effects. 'Bandits at twelve o'clock. Bandits at twelve o'clock. Okay, Algy, let 'em have it. Rat a tat a tat.'
Llewellyn heaved a long-suffering sigh as he watched Rafferty's antics. 'Hadn't we better get on?' he suggested, making purposefully for the door. 'The smell in here is affecting my sinuses.'
Rafferty snorted. It was the first he'd heard about any sinus trouble. But it sounded like just the sort of ailment Llewellyn would be afflicted with. He had to accept, however, that the Welshman had a point. The stink from the nearby Tiffey added to the other aromas to make a pretty powerful stench. Reluctantly he abandoned the Spitfire and followed Llewellyn outside.
It came as no surprise to him to discover that the Welshman had managed to remain relatively clean through all their rag-and-bone scavenging, though – if the disgruntled expression on his face was anything to go by – anyone would think that Rafferty had personally dipped him head first in the cesspit.
'You should have listened to Mrs Griffiths,' Llewellyn accused, unerringly voicing Rafferty's own conclusion. 'As I suspected before we started, we've been wasting our time. I can't understand, why, if you're so interested in this manuscript, you didn't arrange for properly equipped officers to tackle the job.'
'I told you. It was just an idea of mine,' Rafferty defended himself. Honestly, he muttered, with Llewellyn's carping, it was sometimes difficult to remember which of them was supposed to be the superior officer. 'It wasn't something I could expect Bradley to sanction. You know what a tight-fisted old—'
'Well, what next?' Llewellyn broke in, with a touch of asperity. 'Those papers are obviously long gone. Though what you hoped to—'
Irritated, Rafferty forget his previous advice to himself and blurted out his suspicions about Maximillian Shore. 'If he was into blackmail and Barbara Longman found the evidence and contacted the victim, it would certainly be a motive for the blackmail victim to get rid of her.'
'That's true,' remarked Llewellyn.
Rafferty glanced suspiciously at him. Something in the Welshman's demeanour gave him the uneasy feeling that Llewellyn's combine-harvester brain was about to make clear of what chaff his latest idea was made. He wasn't wrong, he discovered, a few seconds later.
Because, as Llewellyn told him, if she had been killed by a virtual stranger, it was extremely unlikely the murderer would have known her well enough to use the wild flowers in the meadow as a lure. Which logic, not only put paid to Rafferty's latest idea completely, but, as an unwanted bonus, ensured that Llewellyn well and truly had the hump.
After looking down at his dusty suit with an expression of distaste, the Welshman complained cuttingly, 'if you had thought to share your theory with me in the first place, we could have been saved all this menial labouring.' He sniffed the air and briefly closed his eyes, as though he offended his own sense of smell. 'I smell like a...like a...'
His imagination obviously wasn't up to describing what he did smell like, but Rafferty's wasn't so limited. With a gratification bordering on the sadistic, he proceeded to rub the usually meticulously groomed Welshman's offended nose in it. 'You stink like a particularly smelly old goat, Dafyd, my son,' he observed with relish. He sniffed. 'So do I. A couple of old goats perfumed by rotting fish.'
In spite of his attempted humour, the day's failure and Llewellyn's sour mood deflated him, and his shoulders slumped. 'If it makes you feel any happier, I'll admit I was wrong, okay? Come on, let's go home. Today's been a dead loss all ways round. Perhaps tomorrow will bring a change of luck.'
