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RAFFERTY WONDERED HOW long Shore had been listening outside the door. Not that it really mattered, because, judging from the furious look he directed at his wife, he'd certainly heard enough. Hilary's shocked expression told him that she realised it, too. Her face had drained of colour. She stared at her husband, as if mesmerised, like a rabbit caught in a car's headlights, incapable of doing anything except shake her head in useless denial.
'I don't know what game you think you're playing,’ Shore told her, 'but I'm going to put a stop to it. I knew you were jealous of Barbara, but I didn't think even you would make up such lies about her now she'd dead.'
He turned to Henry. 'Barbara and I were not having an affair. God knows how much I wanted her, but she turned me down flat. So you can hate me if you want, but you've no reason to hate Barbara, whatever this bitch says.'
Surprisingly, this information failed to remove the look of utter misery from Henry's face.
Charles Shore was reputed to be a man of swift decision, and, as he fixed his wife with a basilisk stare, his next words confirmed it. 'Now that I've dealt with your lies, I'll deal with you. I want a divorce,' he told her. 'And if you know what's good for you, you'll agree and not make me wait for my freedom.'
Hilary gasped, but she recovered swiftly. 'Damn you, Charles, you can't divorce me. I won't let you. I know too much about you and—'
He didn't bother arguing with her. Quietly, he warned her that if she tried to threaten him, he had the power to make her wish she had never been born. She seemed to believe him, for her face became suddenly haggard, and although her eyes glittered with frustrated fury, she kept her mouth shut.
'God, how did I ever manage to persuade myself I loved you?' Charles seemed to marvel at his own folly. He slumped down on the white sofa beside Llewellyn, as if, now that the decision to split had been made, it had drained all his usual vitality. 'You're nothing but a vindictive, amoral, and over-priced slut. From the first time I set eyes on Barbara, I realised I'd short-changed myself by marrying you. She intrigued me, enchanted me. She had qualities that I'd never encountered in a woman before, kindness, honesty, goodness, with a natural beauty that didn't need cosmetics, because it came from within. She seemed chaste, untouchable as a nun, and I wanted her.'
He glanced round at their stunned expressions and laughed. 'I know, it's ridiculous, isn't it? The thought of the wheeling-dealing Charles Shore falling so desperately in love takes some believing. All my life, I've chased profit, success, the next mega deal, and I never realised there could be something even more exhilarating—love.
‘Of course, as soon as I met her, I wanted her for myself. I tried to convince Harry that she was nothing but a gold-digger, but he wouldn't listen, unfortunately. When that failed, I even offered them a home here after their marriage so that she would be near me. I loved her so much.' He closed his eyes, as if he didn't want to witness their expressions as with difficulty, the admission, 'And she preferred Henry,' was torn out of him. 'Can you even begin to imagine what that did to me?'
Softly, Rafferty questioned him. 'But if you loved her, why did you—?' He broke off and glanced guiltily at Llewellyn. Me and my big mouth, he thought.
Shore frowned. 'Go on—why did I what?'
'Well, we've discovered that Mrs Longman suspected your chemical firm of discharging into the river several years ago. I gather it happened shortly after she met you and it's been suggested that—'
'That I might have been doing it again?' With a weary expression, Shore brushed his hair back from his brow. 'Tell me, Inspector—have you found a shred of evidence to suggest that might be true?'
Rafferty glanced at Llewellyn before he told him. 'No, not so far.'
'Nor will you. Because there isn't any.'
'Then why did you buy up the local newspaper group?' Rafferty suspected it was to gag any opposition to his doings.
'I'm a businessman, Inspector. I buy businesses. And, in case you hadn't noticed, amongst other interests, I own several newspaper groups; that one was just a natural expansion, and its purchase had been planned for some time. It had nothing to do with any cover-ups, whatever you might think. I loved Barbara, I tell you, and when I promised her my firm wouldn't pollute the river, I meant it. How was I to know when I first met her that she was so involved with Green politics? Once I knew how strongly she felt about such things, I made sure she would have no reason to regard me as an enemy. Anyway, even if I had polluted the river recently and Barbara found out about it, do you really think that would be a reason for me to kill her?'
Rafferty took a deep breath, ignored Llewellyn's restraining glance, and plunged on. 'It might. If she got in the way of your political ambitions. Especially once you knew you had no chance with her.'
Shore took his accusation surprisingly well. 'I don't think you've ever been deeply in love, have you Inspector?'
Rafferty was about to deny it. But then, as he thought back over his life, over his early and mostly unhappy marriage to Angie, he realised Shore was right. 'No,' he admitted. 'I never have.'
Shore nodded. 'I thought not. Because, if you had, you would know I could never have hurt Barbara. Never. Besides, I'd already decided not to stand for selection a day or two before her death. Not that I expect you to believe that. I've no proof. And for the record, I wanted Barbara so much, I was prepared to wait as long as it took to get her.' With an unconscious arrogance, he told them, 'I always get what I want in the end.'
He made no further attempt to defend himself. Instead, he leaned back and closed his eyes. His skin had a grey tinge, and he looked much older than his thirty years, as if the strain of concealing his true feelings for Barbara from her husband, his wife, and the police, the pain of her rejection, and then the trauma of her violent death had suddenly become too much for him. He seemed much more human, much more vulnerable and suddenly Rafferty felt dreadfully sorry for him. Gesturing to Llewellyn, he made for the door.
Once safely out of earshot, Llewellyn asked, 'Did you believe Shore when he said he wasn't having an affair with Mrs Longman?'
'I don't know. I get the impression he had always thought love was for wimps like Henry, but whether he bedded her or not, his first grand passion obviously hit him hard. I should think Shore would be used to having any woman he wanted—probably despised them for it. He would have plenty of opportunities on his business trips. I doubt he was the man to disregard opportunity when it presented itself and, whatever his wife says, I'm sure she was well aware of the other women, and was prepared to put up with them. Obviously she sensed some stronger emotion than mere lust this time, and it frightened her. That's probably why she was in such a rush to tell Henry the news.'
Llewellyn nodded. 'Shore insists she was lying when she told Henry that he and Barbara were having an affair. But why would she lie?'
'Use your common sense, Taff. She knew her husband and his skill in getting his own way; and he wanted Barbara. Whatever Barbara felt about it was irrelevant. By convincing Henry the two were having an affair, she probably hoped to encourage him to take Barbara away, out of Shore's orbit. Maybe, she even hoped Henry would have a brainstorm and kill her. But whether she suspected there was a chance of getting rid of her rival quite so finally, she's managed to turn Longman into suspect number one.
'Anyway, we'll hopefully find out if anything was going on between Shore and Henry's wife from that agency. You can drive up there this afternoon. And apart from finding out if Mrs Shore was telling the truth about her visit there, check when she arrived and left and exactly what the agency found out. I want all the juicy details—if there are any.'
***
WHEN LLEWELLYN STILL hadn't returned from the London agency by 7.00 p m, Rafferty decided to have an early night; the first for nearly a week. As soon as he reached home, he ran a hot bath and a cold whiskey. Shedding his clothes, he eased himself into the hot water with relief. Bliss.
He sipped the Jameson's whiskey and sank lower, letting his eyes close and his mind drift, hoping that, this time, the conditions would be more conducive to intuitive deductive leaps. But something his mother had said broke his purposeful repose, and he sat up slowly and opened his eyes, as it occurred to him that her words had inadvertently prodded him into coming up with the most unlikely theory yet on the murder. As if he didn't have enough of those to keep him busy for a month of Sundays. How many more he would have to go through before he nailed the killer?
What was it Ma had said? Something about red roses symbolising love and yellow roses symbolising the waning of love. Was it possible that other flowers also had meanings? According to the botanists at the lab, the flower in the dead woman's hands had been a marigold, a cultivated marigold which would not, therefore, have grown wild in the meadow. Before, he had dismissed its presence there as one of those inexplicable things that every case seemed to throw up, but was it possible it could have more significance than that? And if so, for whom in this case did flowers hold the most significance? Who else but Thomson? He and Barbara had fought over flowers—had she died over them, too?
Rafferty opened his eyes, and as he gazed admiringly at the DIY tiling surrounding the bath, he asked himself sardonically, if there was anything in the theory, how likely it was Thomson would use a flower to express his feelings? Not very, he decided. And if that was the case, could the flower really be a clue of any sort? Anyway, what sort of message would the farmer be likely to have for Barbara? "Up yours" seemed the most likely, and Rafferty doubted that any flower held such a meaning.
There was something else against the theory, he realised. Why would Thomson decide to kill her now? Presumably, the protection on the wild flowers had been in place for years. Why would Thomson suddenly become enraged by Barbara's insistence that he abide by it? Besides, Rafferty had a vague idea that the EU actively encouraged farmers to leave fields uncultivated. Didn't they have some policy called "Set Apart" or "Set Aside", that compensated them for the trouble entailed in doing nothing to stop a particular piece of land reverting to nature? He wasn't exactly sure what it covered as the European Union and its endless regulations had never greatly interested him.
He realised the whole thing sounded about as likely as the Taxman giving refunds to good payers, and he dismissed the idea. He had been right the first time—the cultivated marigold was just one of those inexplicable things the fates liked to throw in the path of the investigating policemen. Why did his Ma have to put these ideas in his head? As if he didn't have enough to think about. He drank some more of his whiskey, turned on the hot tap with his toes, and sank lower in the water. With a sigh, he decided he at least ought to check out the compensation angle.
***
'WHAT DID YOU FIND OUT at that detective agency?' Rafferty asked as soon as Llewellyn came through the door the next morning. 'Did they confirm what Mrs Shore said?'
'The chap I spoke to – when he eventually returned to the office, and after a little persuasion – confirmed she was there, and why. But the receptionist thought she arrived well before her appointment time. She said it was more like 1.30 p m than 2.00 p m. She remembers, as Mrs Shore said she was in a hurry, and insisted on seeing Mr Skeets, one of the partners, straight away. She was out again after only ten minutes.'
Rafferty raised his eyebrows. 'In a hurry to resume her leisurely window shopping, no doubt. And her with no money to spend.'
'There's something else odd about her visit. According to this Skeets chap, although Charles Shore had apparently met a blonde several times in town, it wasn't Barbara Longman. He said there was no suggestion of any illicit liaison between her and Shore, which certainly supports Charles Shore's version. Skeets was insistent that he told Mrs Shore there was no foundation for her suspicions about that, at least.'
Rafferty nodded. 'What sort of an outfit are they?'
'They're quite a small concern, only a two-man business, but they struck me as being efficient.'
Rafferty gazed thoughtfully into space. 'It's my guess that she believed her position as Shore's wife was threatened. Of course she was aware of the depth of her husband's feelings for Barbara, and whether Barbara gave him any encouragement or not, Shore is an attractive man. I'm sure if he set out to charm, few women would be able to resist him. Certainly I doubt if his wife thought so. She judges other women's motives by her own, and I'm sure she felt that no woman in her right mind would stay with a man like Henry when they had the chance to land Charles Shore.
'She simply couldn't believe that Barbara wouldn't prove as grasping and manipulative as she is herself. So she came up with a plan to remove Barbara from Charles's orbit. All she had to do was to convince Henry that Charles and Barbara were having an affair. I imagine she worked on him for weeks before she "broke the bad news". And once that was done, she knew just how to make him keep quiet about it. She terrified him into believing that if he found the guts to challenge Barbara, she would leave him. In such a situation, Hilary would have been confident that the indecisive Henry would not only be incapable of any firm action, but that he would be only too happy for Hilary to make his decisions for him. She was even in the process of organising him another job.'
'And then Barbara was murdered.'
'As you say, and then Barbara was murdered. I wonder which one of our little ménage killed her?'
'You think it was definitely one of those three?'
Rafferty shrugged. 'What do you think? Hilary Shore was certainly in an all-fired hurry to leave that agency. Can she really have been in such a rush to telephone Henry? Or had she decided that killing Barbara was a great improvement on her original plan? If she left the agency at 1.40 p m, she had time to return to Elmhurst, leave that telephone message, and kill Barbara, before driving back to London for her appointment with Mrs Armadi, especially at the speed she drives. Her voice is deep enough to be taken for a man's over the phone. As for Henry and Charles, they were on the spot, with no alibi worthy of the name. Maybe, for once, Henry managed to make a decision all on his own and act on it?'
'What about Shore?'
'A man like that doesn't fall in love with such a bang more than once in a lifetime. He had never wanted anything in his life as much as he wanted Barbara. And she rejected him. Do you remember what his sister said about him?'
Slowly, Llewellyn nodded. 'That if he couldn't have something, he was quite capable of destroying it.'
Rafferty nodded. 'It's possible Charles Shore, like his father before him, decided that, "the fact that I wish it is reason enough for doing it". Or, in his case, "If I can't have her, nobody else will."'
Llewellyn sighed and sat down rather heavily. 'And all we have to do is find out which possibility is the right one and then prove it.'
Rafferty gave him a suspiciously bright smile. 'That's all. Got it in one.'
Had Charles, spurned by Barbara as he had been by the puppy in his youth, chosen to destroy her, Rafferty wondered again? He was certainly ruthless enough and—if he had lied about deciding to remove his name from the Tory Party selection list, he would have a double motive for getting rid of her.
Then there was Henry; weak, ineffectual, indecisive Henry. No wonder he hadn't seemed overjoyed at the prospect of Barbara having a baby; after what Hilary had told him, he couldn't have been sure it was his. Although he had claimed to have felt too sickened by Hilary's disclosures, too bound by his promise to think about tackling Barbara, the pregnancy made it more likely that he had done so—with devastating results. Henry had a great capacity for hiding from reality. If he had killed her, he would hide from the truth, might even manage to convince himself that he hadn't done it.
As Rafferty had concluded earlier in the case, the discovery of his wife's supposed infidelity would be the one thing likely to stir him out of his lethargy. The one thing likely to kindle in him sufficient rage to overcome his natural indecision. He would, presumably, know where Mrs Griffiths kept her car keys. He could have disguised his voice as easily as anyone else. And he would know that the au pair had a habit of borrowing Shore's mobile phone, and that she would be blamed when it went missing. It was possible they had taken Henry's weak character a little too much at face value. Because, although such people were often afraid of expressing their own anger, fearful of the consequences to themselves if they should dare to give way to it, when something enraged them beyond bearing, they were likely to go completely out of control.
The trouble with that scenario was that Rafferty still found it hard to imagine Henry in the role of murderer. His picture of an out of control Henry didn't jell with him calmly leaving that telephone message. The two simply didn't go together. If such a rage had taken hold of Henry, it would spill out of him in an unpremeditated fashion. He would come out of his brainstorm to find his faithless wife dead at his feet, and would probably be so stunned by his own actions that he would be completely incapable of concealing his guilt.
Rafferty turned to the third of the trio and found himself considering Hilary Shore with rather more interest than he had hitherto taken in her. If, out of that entire household, Charles Shore was the member most capable of murder, his wife ran him a very close second. She could easily be taken for a man on a telephone. She hated Barbara, feared Charles's obsession with her, and she had a lot to lose. If she had suspected that Charles hoped to divorce her in order to marry Barbara, she would presumably get a generous settlement. But Rafferty suspected that whatever she received it wouldn't be enough for her. She liked the prominence she had as Charles's wife. She liked rubbing shoulders with politicians and society people, knowing the women envied her and the men wanted her. Without Charles, she was nothing out of the ordinary. Her looks, like her personality, were of the shallow variety that was dependent on youth. Without Charles, she was a nobody; a failed actress of little talent and fast-fading looks. Shore had been the important one, the one it would pay their friends and acquaintances to keep in with. If he demanded his ex-wife be shunned, then shunned she would be. She would receive no more elegantly designed invitations to chic dinner parties, no more first nights, or weekends at the stately piles of aristocrats, and Rafferty was sure such things were very important to Hilary.
Even if Charles wasn't vindictive enough to insist she be cold-shouldered, Rafferty suspected that Hilary had merely been tolerated because of her husband. She was a selfish, shallow woman, whom maturity had failed to improve. If she lost Charles, she would fall back into that obscurity from which he had plucked her.
From what Charles had said, Barbara had knocked him sideways. He had never experienced such a depth of love for anyone. In dying, Barbara had taken away the hope that she would change her mind. Without that hope, the longed for reward of her love, would he have bothered to put himself and his children through the upheaval of a divorce? If he hadn't overheard his wife's lies about Barbara, he might easily have left things as they were, and simply thrown himself even more into his business life.
Rafferty suspected Hilary Shore would have been willing to risk a great deal to ensure the status quo, to avoid a life where she could expect to be either shunned or patronised. How ironic if, in order to keep her husband and her position, she had killed Barbara, but had then lost it all, anyway.
Rafferty glanced up from his musings to discover that Llewellyn was staring into space, a more morose expression than usual on his face. He deduced that his sergeant's thought processes had followed a similar line to his own and had also failed to come up with a conclusive reason for pinning a murder on any one of them.
'Cheer up, Dafyd. It could be worse. We nearly had another theory on the murder to add to the growing pile, but I managed to work out, all by myself, that it was a non-starter.'
He explained the theory about the marigold that his Ma had sparked off and how he had, at first, believed it could put Thomson more firmly in the frame. He kept to himself the message about Llewellyn's choice of yellow roses as a birthday gift for Maureen—he might be glad of that little pearl the next time Llewellyn got uppity.
'No-one can say I'm not prepared to consider all the angles,' Rafferty grinned. 'But I think that one's a little off the wall, as our American cousins say. Can you imagine a man like Thomson saying anything with flowers? The Poet Laureate, he's not. Though, to clear his name off the list once and for all, I'll get onto the Ministry of Agriculture and find out exactly where Thomson stood with regard to that meadow. I want to see if he received any compensation for not being able to use it. If he did, he had no axe to grind, and therefore, no reason for murdering that particular victim.'
'Still, it's an interesting idea,' Llewellyn remarked, as if anxious that Rafferty's least likely theory shouldn't have too easy a death. 'And a countryman would be more likely to be familiar with the language of flowers. Learned at his mother's knee, perhaps?'
'Have you seen his mother?'
Llewellyn shook his head. 'She was out when I called to question Thomson, if you remember.'
'Terrible old woman. If she'd lived a few hundred years ago, she'd have been burnt as a witch. Even so, I doubt she'd have much knowledge of something like the language of flowers.' He snorted. 'She seemed to find the English language difficult enough. The only use either of them is likely to have for flowers would be to poison someone with 'em. A dose of deadly nightshade would be more in their line.'
'Mmm.' Llewellyn stroked his jaw, gazed thoughtfully into space, and proceeded, to Rafferty's dismay, to launch into another lecture. 'Bit obvious perhaps? Especially when there are other, more seemingly innocuous plants she could use. It's surprising how many ordinary plants and flowers are poisonous. For instance, did you know that the leaves of tomatoes and rhubarb are dangerous when eaten? Even the superfluous parts of the common old potato can do unpleasant things to the stomach.'
Irritated, Rafferty wondered if there was a subject Llewellyn didn't know something about. Better still, one that he wasn't prepared to lecture him on?
So much for his attempt to inject a bit of cheer into the proceedings. Conscious that they were no further forward in catching the murderer than they had been from day one, and that both Superintendent Bradley and the media were becoming daily more critical of his handling of the case, Rafferty had no qualms about pricking the Welshman's knowledge bubble. 'As the victim was smothered, not poisoned, I don't see that it much matters, do you?'
Llewellyn chose to ignore Rafferty's sarcasm. 'Charles Shore's mobile phone went missing before the murder,' he began. 'I know his wife took it for granted that the au pair had borrowed it, as it was found in her room, but it could just as easily have been taken by another member of the household and put in the Italian girl's room to hide the fact. It might be worth checking what numbers were called on it the day of the murder.
Dammit, thought Rafferty, he'd meant to do that. It was annoying that he'd forgotten all about it.
'It's certainly a coincidence that it went missing the day before the murder,' Llewellyn went on. 'I'll have a chat with the au pair and...' Rafferty grinned as his sergeant's voice petered out.
'Have you just remembered that our Carlotta eats innocent young Welshmen for breakfast? Perhaps Mrs Griffiths will agree to chaperone you? Go on,' he teased. 'You'll be safe enough. After all,' he added, mischievously, 'you're practically engaged to Maureen.' At this, Llewellyn's lugubrious countenance looked even more worried, and Rafferty exploded, 'Oh, for Christ's sake! All right, I'll speak to the wretched girl. While I'm doing that, and in order to clear Thomson off the suspect's list once and for all, you can contact the bureaucrats at the Ministry. I want you to ask about the EU Set Aside Policy. See if Thomson lost out financially by being unable to plant crops in that meadow.'
He'd intended to ring them himself, but the prospect of playing pass the parcel – him being the parcel – with a lot of bureaucrats was more than he could stomach. Anyway, Llewellyn probably had a contact there from his university days. 'If you're right and she didn't borrow the phone, then whoever did, could have been the person who left the message for Barbara Longman.'
'That possibility had occurred to me, sir,' said Llewellyn. 'And, apart from Mrs Griffiths, who was the only person who would know where to find her when she left the house?'
'The person who left the message,' Rafferty replied obligingly. 'It's worth looking into, as we haven't been able to trace this so-called chap from the Conservation Society who was supposed to have left the message. All their members and their friends and relations deny phoning here that afternoon.'
He took the car keys from Llewellyn. 'Seeing as you're going to be idling at the office while I've got the unenviable task of chatting up the lovely Carlotta, when you've persuaded the servants at Whitehall to be civil, you can also find out which company Charles leased his mobile phone from. Get on to them and ask them to check their records for the numbers rung on it last Thursday. It'll be interesting if the Shores' home number does show up.'
Before Llewellyn had a chance to even open his mouth, Rafferty decided to pass on his Ma's grievance now rather than later. He thought it was about time he got some satisfaction out of this blasted case. 'By the way, what on earth possessed you to buy Maureen yellow roses for her birthday? Surely, with all that useless knowledge you've got stuffed in your head, you know they symbolise the waning of love?'
Llewellyn's jaw dropped.
Happy that he'd had the final word for a change, Rafferty turned and closed the office door firmly behind him before the Welshman managed to find his voice.
