Bad Blood (25 page)

Rafferty nodded at this and couldn't help but think her sharp rebuke about not having a problem with her memory, was a defensive mechanism to camouflage her true problem.

'Now, I want you to think carefully,' he said conscious of the need to speak as tactfully as possible about the problem he suspected she strove hard to conceal. 'Is it possible you misheard what the man said?'

'Certainly not. I know what I heard.'

Her defensive response encouraged his belief that he was right. But how to get her to admit it? Fortunately, he discovered as Mrs Toombes's husband lowered his newspaper that he didn't have to.

'Are you sure about that, my dear?' he asked his wife. 'You know what a trial you find that intercom.'

In an aside to Rafferty, he added, 'My wife's hearing isn't what it was, Inspector.'

Mr Toombes's laugh boomed out as he turned to his discomfited wife. 'Remember that time you misheard one of the neighbours on the phone?'

He turned back to Rafferty, ignoring his wife's frantic signals that he keep quiet. 'She thought he was selling something, but all he'd done was forgotten his key to the apartment block. It was summer holiday time and hardly anyone was home. The poor man complained to me afterwards that he had to hang around outside for two hours before another neighbour came home and let him in.'

'That was different,' Mrs Toombes protested. 'The man was a terrible mumbler.'

Mr Toombes shrugged, said, 'I never had any trouble understanding him,' and retreated behind his newspaper.

'Mrs Toombes?' Rafferty repeated. Gently, conscious that the fact her husband had embarrassed her was the more likely to encourage her to dig her heels in, he said, 'Your neighbour, Clara Mortimer, died a brutal death. I'm right in believing you want her killer caught?'

'Of course I do, young man. Why ever wouldn't I? We none of us can sleep safely in our beds till he's apprehended.'

'That's why I'm asking you to think very carefully. What you tell me now could make the difference between us catching her killer – or not. It's important.'

Mrs Toombes seemed torn between her unwillingness to admit to an affliction considered an elderly one and her desire to do what was right.

Hoping to help, Rafferty repeated the words she had told him the man had said to her.

‘Yes, that's right,’ she confirmed. But her confirmation lacked her previous conviction. ‘I ran, Esme', is what he said.’ Belatedly, she admitted to the hearing difficulties her husband and the overloud TV had already revealed.

‘The line was a bit crackly. I find these entry phones a bit of a trial, to be honest, as my husband had just told you.’

Mr Toombes broke in with another insensitive husbandly guffaw.

‘A bit of a trial?’ he repeated. To Rafferty he confided, in a loud aside, as if his wife, from her seat a yard from him, would be unable to hear him. ‘She's as deaf as a post. We have to have the TV on so loud I'll be as deaf as she is before my next birthday. Surely you told the inspector that your hearing's not to be relied upon?' he demanded of his wife.

Humiliated, her carefully concealed poor hearing now out in the open, Mrs Toombes turned even more defensive. Earnestly, she appealed to Rafferty. ‘So many people, nowadays seem to slur their speech, don't you find, Inspector?’

As the supportive husband, with a 'Harrumph,' had once again retreated behind his newspaper, Rafferty found himself nodding sympathetic agreement at the same time as his heart began to race.

‘Anyway, as I told you before, this man seemed to be looking for someone called Esme. I admit I wasn't sure that I had heard correctly, so, after I had told him there was no one here of that name, I was about to ask him to repeat what he had said. But I didn't get a chance. He just hung up on me. So rude. Isn't that so, Ernest?’

Mr Toombes sighed, shook his newspaper and turned over the page. 'As you say, my dear, but that's modern times for you.'

Rafferty sat forward. He tried to conceal his eagerness as he said again, ‘I want you to think carefully, Mrs Toombes.’

This brought a worried look and another glance for guidance towards her husband.

But Mr Toombes must have sensed the glance for, once more, he determinedly retreated behind his newspaper with a lot more ‘Harrumphing’ that left no doubt she was on her own.

Rafferty sighed inwardly and asked, ‘Is it possible that what the man actually said was-?’

Immediately he had told her what he suspected the man had said Mrs Toombes's face lit up as though someone had just turned on a lamp inside her head. She began to nod, delightedly.

Without even glancing towards her unsupportive husband, she exclaimed, ‘Of course. That must be it. I can see it now. It makes much more sense. But how sad. You are clever, Inspector, and you didn't even speak to him. I feel so foolish now. However did you guess?’

‘There's no need to feel foolish,’ Rafferty assured her. ‘I had a murder to solve. You didn't. And it occurred to me that what that man said might just be the key to the case.'

And now that her husband and, sheepishly, Mrs Toombes herself, had just confirmed his belated suspicions about her poor hearing, he knew his instincts had been right.

'I suspected the killer must have used some ploy to gain entrance to Mrs Mortimer's home, so I just let my mind play about with possibilities. Of course, now that I've been able to put this idea together with your evidence...' He broke off before his insensitive tongue ran away with him.

He didn't add that if Mrs Toombes had admitted when he had first questioned her that her hearing was impaired, he might have started wondering much earlier if what she had claimed the man had said was accurate, which might well have led him to a speedier solution.

But he had the solution now – and that was all that mattered.

‘How
sad’ had been Mrs Toombes's response when Rafferty had queried whether the man who had rung her intercom could have actually said, ‘Hi Gran, it's me’, rather than the 'I ran, Esme,' that Mrs Toombes had previously insisted she had heard.

Naturally, she now assumed that one of Clara Mortimer's grandsons had killed her.

She was right, of course, but not in the way she had thought. For Rafferty believed Charles Ogilvie hadn't deliberately targeted his own grandmother. He believed the claim of his mother and sister that Ogilvie didn't even know his grandmother's new address.

When Rafferty had questioned Clara Mortimer's elder grandson about his whereabouts at the time of her murder, Charles Ogilvie had seemed nervous, evasive; Rafferty had thought at the time that the young man had been trying to shield someone; his mother, for instance.

How wrong he had been, he realised, because it was now apparent that rather than Charles Ogilvie being the provider of protective alibis, it had been his mother and grandfather, the two feckless family members, who had together concocted an alibi in order to protect him.

Had Harry Mortimer feared they would learn the truth if they continued to question his sensitive and immature grandson? Was that what had prompted his 'confession'?

Rafferty had thought there must be something more; for, in spite of Mortimer's claim to having murdered Clara, Rafferty hadn't believed him. Why would the man who admitted to having led a totally selfish life suddenly sacrifice himself?

He had already pondered long and hard about Harry Mortimer, his confession and its timing. In spite of his protests about 'responsibility', Rafferty didn't believe that people like Harry Mortimer who had been selfish all their lives ever really changed – not unless some life-altering event wrought the alteration.

Nor had he understood why Jane must have agreed to allow the father she adored to sacrifice himself. It was only now, as he recalled Harry Mortimer's gaunt features and compared them to the well-fleshed groom he had been in his and Clara's wedding photograph on display in Mary Soames's home that he began to wonder if the man was ill – terminally ill.

Was Mortimer making one grand gesture to make amends to his daughter and grandson for all his previous failures? It would explain his sudden character change.

The big, strapping man in the wedding photo that Mary Soames had shown them wasn't the same man at all. Harry Mortimer was now a gaunt shadow of his former self, his face as cadaverous as the corpse Rafferty was beginning to suspect Mortimer was soon to become.

Now, with the solution to the investigation in his grasp, Rafferty realised he had seen death in Mortimer's eyes. But it wasn't the death of his wife that he had seen there, but Mortimer's own.

And if he was right in his suspicions, there was one way to find out.

'But
you can't arrest Charlie!' Jane screamed at them when Rafferty and Llewellyn revealed the reason for their latest visit. 'My father's already admitted he killed her.'

'And how do you know that, Mrs Ogilvie? Unless you agreed he would do so before he spoke to us? Before the disease that is killing him claimed him?'

'You know about that?' she asked in a shocked whisper, before she realised her mistake and broke off.

'You've already admitted that you haven't seen or spoken to your father since yesterday morning,' Rafferty pointed out. 'So unless you and he concocted this story between you before your father made his confession to us, I don't see how you could have known about it.'

Jane's eyes darkened as she searched frantically for a response.

At their accusation, Jane had thrust herself protectively in front of her eldest son as if she intended to provide a physical barrier. But now she moved aside, grasped the terrified-looking Charles's arm and dragged him forward, with the beseeching cry, 'Look at him. Look at my smart son. How can you think he would kill his own grandmother?'

'I don't suppose he meant to,' Rafferty replied. 'But I believe he was desperate. He admitted to me himself that he had some debts.'

As he recalled the expensive mirror smashed to smithereens in the entrance lobby to Clara Mortimer's apartment, Rafferty remembered a conversation he had had some time previously with a member of the drug squad. This man had told him that, in their paranoia, drug addicts developed an aversion to mirrors and often smashed them. It was as if, his informant had revealed, they were unable to stand the sight of their own weakness reflected back at them.

Mary Soames, it was, who had told him that Aurora'father, Earl Ray had been a bad influence on the children; and so he had been, for Charles at least. Though Hakim could have been no more than four and protected by the innocence of his tender years, the same couldn't be said for Charles. So much older than his two half-siblings, he would have been at a vulnerable age when his mother took up with the bad lad drug dealer. What was more likely in that ill run menagerie than that the boy would be encouraged to experiment with the drugs from which Ray made his precarious living?

Rafferty addressed his next remarks to Charles Ogilvie. 'I'd guess you owed money to some pretty nasty people. Drug dealers who were threatening violence if you didn't pay up. But you couldn't pay up, could you? You'd lost your job.

'In your desperation, you hit on the idea of robbing elderly ladies, people who were even more vulnerable than yourself, in order to get the money to pay the dealers off. But your victims needed to be not just elderly and vulnerable, but wealthy and vulnerable. What would be the point in targeting the elderly poor who had no more money that you had yourself?

'You found your answer in the private sheltered blocks in the town that catered for the well-off old folk of the area. Elmhurst's not that large; I imagine you soon realised there were no more than two or three such sheltered apartments worth targeting.'

Rafferty had noted Charles Ogilvie's trembling hands and generally washed out appearance and had put it down to shock at his grandmother's violent death. Now though, put together with the rest, the young man's pallid looks made sense.

Rafferty turned back to Jane. 'You said your son wouldn't kill his own grandmother, but he didn't know Mrs Mortimer was his grandmother. You told me yourself that he didn't even know where she lived. Thanks to the family estrangement, he hadn't seen her since he was a young lad. And isn't it true what they say? That one old lady looks much the same as another, with their white hair, wrinkles and old fashioned clothes?'

Rafferty took a stab in the dark. 'I imagine it was only when he saw the photo of himself that he realised the identity of the woman he had just killed.

'It must have been an awful realisation,' he said to Charles. 'You loved her once. Maybe a part of you remembered the happy times you'd had with her. It must have made your current problems and lifestyle seem even more tawdry. Was it that which made you smash the mirror?'

Charles began to weep. And although his mother tried to get him to shut up, through the sobs that wracked his slim frame, he tried to justify his actions.

'I couldn't stand myself,' he admitted. 'After what I'd just done, that mirrored reflection brought me face to face with the reality of my life and what I'd become. I had to make it go away. Smashing the mirror seemed the only way.'

After further questioning, Charles Ogilvie broke down even more and admitted he had hit on the ‘Hi Gran, it's me,’ ploy as a means to gain entrance to such places as the sheltered Parkview Apartments block. He just rang bells and when an elderly lady answered, said simply, ‘Hi Gran. It's me.’