Bad Blood (22 page)

‘I don't know what to do about it,’ Rafferty admitted. ‘Abra won't talk to me. Now don't look at me like that, Ma,’ he warned. ‘I admit I didn't react that well when Abra told me she thought she was pregnant. But her announcement did come out of the blue. She landed it in my lap without any kind of warning and then got upset because I didn't immediately get on to Mothercare and start ordering Babygros by the lorry-load.’

Glumly, he added, ‘And now, as I said, she won't even return my phone calls. So I don't know what I'm going to do. I wish I did.’

Quietly, she asked, ‘Do you want the baby?’

'Yes. No. Maybe.' Rafferty was astonished to find himself, in his answers, echoing Abra. He shrugged, added, ‘I don't know. Abra didn't even give me a chance to get used to the idea before she tore into me. I really don't know what to do for the best. And even if I did, what can I do when Abra refuses to talk to me? I get the impression I could propose marriage down on both knees with the red rose of romance clenched between my cheeks and I'd still get the bum's rush.’

‘Language, Joseph.’

His ma poured them both a second cup of tea, told him to fetch the biscuits and turn the oven on, while she pondered his predicament.

When he returned from his kitchen duties, he found his ma sipping slowly on her now cooled tea. Between sips, she told him, 'your trouble, son, is that you don't understand women. It's quite amazing really, given that you've a mother, three sisters, nieces and female cousins beyond counting. Fortunately, for you, I do understand the female mind.’

She set her mug down on the side table and leant forward decisively. ‘Now here's what I suggest you do.’

Rafferty had taken
his ma's advice on board and bombarded Abra with deliveries of flowers, wine, chocolates and humble petitions in equal proportions. But she was still ignoring him. Maybe if he–

‘Quiet times?’

Rafferty broke off from his reverie at Llewellyn's comment.

'What?' he asked.

Llewellyn sat down on the opposite side of the table in the police canteen. In front of him, with unnecessary tentativeness, he placed a healthy salad baguette and a plastic tumbler filled with what looked like grapefruit juice.

Rafferty pulled a face at this last item. How anyone could drink such bitter stuff…

It was a late lunch for both of them. It was almost 3.00 p m; apart from the canteen staff, himself and Llewellyn, the canteen was almost empty.

‘It's just that you've been rather introspective lately,’ Llewellyn remarked. He picked up the baguette but didn't bite into it. ‘I wondered if there was anything amiss.’ Llewellyn hesitated before he asked, with a degree of bluntness that was usually foreign to him, ‘You're not in trouble again, are you?’

Llewellyn was referring to the dilemma Rafferty had experienced back in April shortly before Llewellyn had introduced him to Abra, when he had risked having his collar felt and going down for a long stretch.

‘No,’ Rafferty was quick to reassure. ‘I'm not in the sort of trouble you mean.’

Delicately, Llewellyn put his baguette back on its plate. 'But your answer indicates trouble of some sort. Care to tell me about it?'

Clearly, his sergeant suspected he was going to have to pull Rafferty's coals out of the fire again.

Llewellyn's sensitive interrogation earned him a noncommittal shrug. There were no flies on Llewellyn, Rafferty conceded. But then, as Llewellyn had just pointed out, since he had more or less admitted to trouble of some sort, there didn't need to be.

‘Abra all right?’

'Yes,' was Rafferty's brusque reply. As far as he knew, he thought. It was a thought he didn't vocalise, but he couldn't keep back the sharp question. ‘Why do you ask?’ Had Llewellyn heard something? He wondered. ‘Have you heard something?’ he asked eagerly. Too eagerly?

Llewellyn's next words reassured him about this at least.

‘No. Why? What should I have heard?’

'Nothing. Of course, nothing.'

Llewellyn frowned, first at Rafferty, then down at his untouched baguette. ‘It's strange now I think of it, but Abra hasn't been in contact for some days. It's not like her. I got no answer when I tried to ring her.’

Join the club, thought Rafferty. He supposed it was some consolation to discover he wasn't the only male in Abra's life who was getting the silent treatment. Though in Llewellyn's case, Abra's lack of communication wasn't surprising, given that she believed herself pregnant. With Llewellyn and Maureen trying – and so far, failing – to conceive, Abra was unlikely to turn to her cousin and his wife if she wanted a shoulder to cry on.

Llewellyn took a sip of his juice before he observed. ‘It's unusual for her to leave more than a day or two between phone calls.’

Rafferty replaced his knife and fork on his plate with a clatter. His fry-up was already congealing. He'd gone off it anyway. ‘And your first thought was that I must have done something to upset her?’

Llewellyn looked taken-aback at this accusation. 'No. Of course not.’ Above his dark, Welsh eyes, his brows raised interrogatively. ‘Why would I think such a thing?’

Rafferty felt the intellectual Llewellyn's scrutiny dissecting him like a kipper. ‘Look’, he grunted. ‘We've had a row. All right? That's all. A row. Don't you and Maureen have rows?’

Llewellyn's expression became thoughtful as he pondered this, before he said, ‘We have discussions, certainly. I don't know whether you'd call them rows exactly.’

Rafferty nodded gloomily at this. He couldn't imagine the emotionally cool Welshman having a right upper and downer with the intellectual blue-stocking, Maureen.

Llewellyn's head nodded towards Rafferty's abandoned fry-up. ‘The row was obviously serious enough to put you off your food. Care to talk about it?’

‘No.’

Rebuffed, Llewellyn picked up his baguette again and took a bite.

They sat for several minutes in silence while Llewellyn chewed his way to the end of his lunch. Then he again gestured at Rafferty's barely touched meal and said, ‘If you're not going to eat that, perhaps we ought to head for Parkview Apartments? You said you wanted to speak to the other residents again. Unless–?‘

Unless nothing, Rafferty thought. ‘The residents will have to wait a bit,’ he informed Llewellyn as he jerked his chair back from the table with a teeth-clenching screech. ‘I've got to go out. Private business,’ he briefly explained. ‘I shouldn't be any more than twenty minutes or so.’ Unless he struck lucky, that was. ‘Wait for me.’

For
the third time in a day and a half, Rafferty stood on the doorstep to Abra's apartment block and rang the bell. And for the third time he received no response.

Frustrated, this time he tried ringing one of her neighbour's doorbells. When he again got no response, he rang a second, then a third, before he finally got one of Abra's neighbours to answer.

‘Police,’ he grunted down the intercom. ‘I'm checking on Ms Abra Kearney.’

‘Why?’ The disembodied northern voice demanded in the ‘not-backward-in-coming-forward’ manner, in which all true, Yorkshire folk took a positive pride. ‘What's she done?’

‘She hasn't done anything, sir. Someone's reported her missing.’

They hadn't, of course, but it was something Rafferty was seriously considering. From his point of view, the situation was getting desperate.

Not that reporting a grown woman missing was likely to raise the hue-and-cry or even wrinkle Abra out from wherever she was currently concealing herself. But at least it would provide him with a ready excuse to use official means to track her down.

‘Now you mention it, I haven't seen her myself for a few days, though I've seen the local florist several times.'

The spectre of complaint was clearly discernible in the Yorkshireman's tone.

'There's a veritable funeral parlour of floral tributes sitting outside her door,' the man confided. 'Not to mention other deliveries. They're cluttering up the corridor. Makes you wonder if she's got some deranged stalker after her.’

The man's flat accent rose several bars up the scale as excitement took a grip.

‘Do you think something's happened to her, then?' he asked. 'I know she's got a boyfriend,’ the neighbour confided again. ‘I only got a glimpse of him the once. Back end of April it would have been. But he certainly looked thuggish enough to be capable of anything.’

Rafferty grimaced. He had heard too many similar comments about his appearance back in April to appreciate one more. Nice to have the neighbour's vote of confidence, he thought, though he had to concede that the man had a point. Because at the back end of April he had still been waiting for his essential-at-the-time No 1 haircut to grow back, so, no doubt, he had merited the ‘thuggish’ description of Abra's neighbour.

This brief feeling of empathy vanished at the man's next words.

With a thrill in his voice, the neighbour asked breathlessly, ‘Do you think he's killed her?’

'No. Certainly not.'

From the silence that followed Rafferty's perhaps over-hasty denial, he guessed that the man was fighting a battle with the desire for celebrity. If so, it was a brief battle. He had reached no more than a count of three in what was no doubt an unequal struggle before the man threw in the towel to demand:

‘Ooh – will I be on that crime programme on the telly?’

Disgusted, Rafferty crushed the would-be telly-celebrity's hopes for his fifteen seconds of fame. ‘We have no reason to believe anything's happened to Ms Kearney,’ he tersely replied.

Disappointment replaced the thrill. And was as rapidly followed by disgruntlement as if Abra's concerned neighbour thought Rafferty had deliberately deceived him.

‘Then why are you looking for her?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘You've already said she hasn't done anything to interest the police. Now you say you've no reason to suspect she's at any sort of risk.’The voice performed another descant up the scales. ‘Haven't the police got anything better to do with my taxes than chase after a grown woman for no good reason? With all the crime–'

Rafferty cut him off in mid-sentence. ‘We have our reasons, sir,’ he told the intercom. ‘But thank you for your concern. I'll be sure to tell Ms Kearney about it when I locate her. She'll find it a comfort to know she has a neighbour with such community spirit.’

Abra's neighbour must have had some semblance of shame, for after Rafferty's tart comment, he slammed the receiver down with a crash.

Now what? Rafferty thought, as, back in the car, he considered his options. The consideration of these didn't take long. His ma's suggested floral bombardment hadn't worked. How could it when it was clear that Abra wasn't at her flat? The same applied to his other wallet-emptying gifts and his endless phone messages.

As far as he could see, he didn't have any options beyond reporting her missing. While Abra was determined to continue her vanishing act, all the options were hers.

But, in the meantime, he still had a murder to solve…

So he drove back to the station. And as his brain clicked back into ‘official’ mode, he recalled Llewellyn's reminder that they were meant to be conducting follow-up interviews with the late Clara Mortimer's fellow Parkview residents.

In his present mood, Rafferty felt little inclination to sit through a second re-enactment of the ‘Mat Wars’ of Rita Atkins and Amelia Frobisher. But, as he had already concluded with regard to his love life, this was another arena where choice wasn't in his bailiwick.

He glanced at his watch and was surprised to find it was after four o'clock. He headed for the station. No doubt Llewellyn would be there waiting for him, champing at the bit to get on with the investigation and with more ‘Abra’ questions that Rafferty was unable to answer.

As
he drove past Elmhurst's thirteenth century market cross with its usual aimless gang of jostling teenagers, Rafferty recognised Aurora Mortimer in the centre of the throng.

Like half the group, Aurora still wore her school uniform and had a heavy school bag at her feet, which told Rafferty she had not been home. But when he thought about her home, he couldn't blame her for preferring to hang around the streets instead.

In the brief seconds as he passed, he caught a freeze-frame moment of Aurora Mortimer's life; a bevy of aggressively shoulder thrusting local youths surrounded her, their expressions hungry as they competed for the attentions of the exotic Aurora.

Even in such a limited out-take from Aurora's life it was clear that, unlike her mother, Aurora would always be in control. Not for her, her mother's foolish, blundering rebellion again the control of others which merely meant the controller's identity, rather than the situation, changed.

It was apparent the young Aurora had the local males exactly where she wanted them. Her stance, with her gaze directed beyond the youths, said they would do until a male more worthy of her came along.

Rafferty could only hope, for Aurora Mortimer's sake, that she didn't decide this more worthy male was Darryl Jesmond.

Rafferty
picked up Llewellyn at the police station and, with the Welshman's body still emitting curiosity in silent waves they headed for the station car park.