Absolute Poison
| Absolute Poison |
| Rafferty & Llewellyn [5] |
| Evans, Geraldine |
| UK |
| (2002) |
Detective Inspector Joseph Rafferty is having a bad week -- two pensioner suicides already and he can't help feeling trouble comes in threes. Also niggling in his mind is the fact that Llewellyn, his posh sergeant, has brought a 'bargain' suit from Rafferty's mother. Sure to be stolen goods, the suit is bound to drop Rafferty in it when the holier-than-thou Llewellyn wears it on his wedding day.
Rafferty's first premonition turns out to be accurate when a company manager is found dead at his desk. The tyrannical Barstaple had known full well that he was hated by most of the office. But did he really deserve to be poisoned?
Rafferty thinks his week has been trying enough. But then someone else is poisoned and from bad to worse becomes worse again. And when you take the 'bargain' suit into the equation, the week really has gone to Hell in a handcart. And taken Rafferty with it.
Dead Before Morning
Down Among the Dead Men
Death Line
The Hanging Tree
Absolute Poison
Dying For You
Bad Blood
Love Lies Bleeding
Blood on the Bones
A Thrust to the Vitals
Death Dues
All the Lonely People
Death Dance
Deadly Reunion
Kith and Kill
‘Well, this was a real find. Geraldine Evans knows how to make a character leap off the pages at you.’
—Lizzie Hayes, Mystery Women
‘An ingeniously constructed plot, deft dialogue, well-drawn characters, and a few humorous touches, make this an enjoyably intriguing read.’
—Emily Melton, Booklist
Absolute Poison
A Rafferty & Llewellyn Mystery
by
Geraldine Evans
Absolute Poison
Copyright © 2002, 2011 by Geraldine Evans
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, locations, or events is coincidental or fictionalized.
Except for text references by reviewers, the reproduction of this work in any form is forbidden without permission from the author.
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Absolute Poison
A Rafferty & Llewellyn Mystery
PROLOGUE
“There'll be
another one along in a minute”—wasn't that what they said? Inspector Joseph Rafferty gazed at the very dead old lady in the bed and mused that usually it was in respect of buses, not bodies.
But this week the bodies were bunched like the rush-hour double-deckers on Elmhurst's congested streets. The first suicide had been of a World War Two veteran whose suicide note had derided the notion that this was a land fit for heroes to live in. This old lady was the second suicide. And it was still only Wednesday morning. Rafferty, chockful of Irish superstition, felt he could be forgiven for becoming equally chockful of the conviction that they wouldn't get through the rest of the week without a third. As he remarked to Sergeant Llewellyn, in his experience, bad things always came in threes. It was a depressing thought.
Almost as depressing as the February weather, which, like the previous autumn, was as grey and dank as a dirty floorcloth. Even the jolly holly bush, with its urgent tap-tappings at the window, seemed to have had enough and to want to come inside for a warm. Hardly surprising the suicide rate was up.
Unlike the first suicide, on Monday, this one hadn't left a note. Not that there was anything unusual about that. Rafferty knew that only about a quarter of suicides left notes.
Pity stirred again as his gaze shifted from the aged cadaver in the bed to the stiffly posed sepia wedding photo on the mantelpiece. It showed a pretty young bride with glossy midnight black hair, her arm possessively linked with that of the darkly handsome brylcreamed groom.
Next to the wedding photo was another picture, presumably the bride and groom again, though now much older and unsmiling. Middle age hadn't changed the bride that much; in the later photo it was still possible to trace the girl she had been. Not so the groom. Middle age had transformed the slim young man into a bald gnome, red of cheek and jowly of jaw. There were pictures of a boy, too, presumably their son. His hair was fair and although he shared her dark eyes, his were solemn, not laughing like his mother's.
Rafferty sighed. The son would have to be found and notified. He dragged his gaze from the picture gallery, and the smiling bride and back to the bed; to the old lady the bride had become.
The glossy black cap of hair was now thin, wispy, and grey. The slender hands now calloused and work-roughened, were clasped neatly together outside the covers. Rafferty's gaze flickered over the scarred dresser with its empty pill bottles and the jug and glass both now scummy with clouded water, and he reflected on what it must be like to get so old and lonely that killing yourself became an attractive alternative to going on.
After routinely checking the body for any sign of life, he turned away and commented flatly to Llewellyn, “There's nothing for us here.”
As soon as the words were out he was struck by how callous they sounded and felt ashamed. He realised he hadn't even asked her name before dismissing her and her passing. The trouble with such lonely deaths was that they inclined him to melancholy for days. Experience had taught him that the only hope of escaping the glooms was by spending as little time as possible at the scene. Now he asked quietly, “Who was she? Do you know?”
“The neighbours only knew her as Dodie.”
Rafferty nodded and beckoned Llewellyn onto the landing where the air was less redolent of death. “The neighbours hadn't known her for long, then?”
“Some six months or so, I understand. Would you like me to check?”
Rafferty shook his head. “No. It doesn't matter.” He added, more or less to himself, “Six months and all they knew was that her name was Dodie.”
He wasn't altogether surprised. Half the street of terraced houses was boarded up to prevent squatters and vandals gaining access to empty properties. What had once been a friendly community was now an itinerant neighbourhood, the sort of place where your neighbours came and went without making a ripple in your life. Apparently, in this case, without even discovering more about you, your family and background than your first name. It was a sad indictment of modern life and did nothing to reduce Rafferty's gloomy feelings. “She must have some papers,” he remarked and called down the stairs for Constable Smales to have a look for some. His voice, echoing loudly down the narrow stairs in this house of the dead sounded oddly intrusive.
Llewellyn, unlike Rafferty, generally managed to retain a certain objectivity under such circumstances. “Doctor Arkwright should be able to tell us more. The neighbours were at least able to tell me he was the old lady's General Practitioner as well as their own.”
Rafferty nodded. Old Doctor Arkwright had been practising in the town for around a third of a century, so would be able to put a surname to their suicide as well as provide details of any other family she might have had. “Get on to him, Dafyd. Tell him what's happened and get him over here.”
“You're
lucky you caught me,” Doctor Obadiah Arkwright told them when he arrived twenty minutes later. “I'm off to Scotland for a fishing holiday later today.”
He sounded tired, Rafferty noticed and badly in need of his break. Obadiah Arkwright must be approaching seventy, but he was still an impressive-looking man; tall and saturnine of face, a tendency which age had made more marked, with an air of authority worn as easily as his ancient, Sherlock Holmes style overcoat.
“Nice secluded spot,” Arkwright went on. “As far from the joys of civilization as it's possible to get without either leaving the country or breaking the bank.” He paused. “Upstairs, is she?”
Rafferty nodded and he and Llewellyn followed the doctor up the narrow stairs to the bedroom.
The doctor approached the bed and stared down at his late patient. After a quick examination he stood back and sighed. “Poor woman. Of course, I know she's been depressed lately, but I never thought her the type to take this way out.” His quick gesture took in the empty bottle of sleeping tablets on the dresser.
“I thought we were all that,” Rafferty quietly remarked. “All it needs is the right circumstances.”
“Not thinking of copying her example, I trust?” Arkwright asked, giving him an old-fashioned look.
But then he was an old-fashioned kind of doctor, Rafferty mused; the sort who had once existed in their hundreds. The sort whose patients clung to life as though not daring to leave it till the doctor had given his permission. The sort, too, who felt it their duty to check their patients officially off their list and on to that of an even higher authority.
Rafferty forced a smile. “Not me, doc. Wouldn't dare. I might be a lapsed Catholic, but I'm still as leery of mortal sin as the biggest bible-thumper.”
“What was her name, doctor?” Llewellyn asked.
“Mrs Pearson. Mrs Dorothy Pearson.”
Glad to get a confirmed identification, Rafferty advised, “I've had young Smales looking to see if he could find any personal papers in the house, but there are none. Looks like she had a grand clearing out before she took the overdose.”
“Doesn't surprise me,” said Arkwright. “Mrs Pearson was a very private sort of person. Alone in the world, too. Probably didn't fancy strangers raking over her things. Her only son died earlier this year; not, in my opinion, that he was much of a loss.” The doctor raised expressive hands then let them drop. “But there, I suppose for her, her son's death was the final straw. She's been alone for some time. She lost her husband years ago and then—”
He broke off as Sam Dally, part time police surgeon cum pathologist arrived with his usual noise and bustle. The grim little bedroom with its four to five-day-old corpse was too small for all of them. Arkwright acknowledged Sam Dally, said his goodbyes and left. Rafferty and Llewellyn, after accompanying him down the stairs waited in the living room for Sam to confirm their findings. He didn't take long. Nor, when he returned downstairs, did he pause to indulge in his usual ghoulish banter. Rafferty guessed that for Sam—who had lost his wife of thirty years to cancer only a month ago—the prospect of his own solitary old age was getting too close for comfort. He was certainly more irascible than usual, and briskly confirmed that Mrs Pearson had certainly been dead for the best part of a week. “Early part of the weekend would be my estimate,” Dally added. “Friday night probably, or Saturday morning.”
Rafferty had already guessed as much. His brief look under the bedclothes had revealed the tell-tale signs; the body swollen with gases, the skin blisters, the leaking fluids, the smell. He swallowed hard and waited for Sam to continue.
“Suicide, of course,” said Dally. “Classic. Pills and whisky, but without the whisky. Don't suppose the poor bitch could afford that.” He gazed around the shabby living room with its clean but worn square of cheap carpet, the cramped, dark kitchen off and added in lacklustre tones, “I can't imagine there'll be any grasping relatives to fight over the family heirlooms.”
“No.” Rafferty reflected that even his ma, with her love of ‘bargains’, would find little here to interest her.