Bad Blood (26 page)

He told Rafferty that he hadn't tried this ploy when men answered the bell – he was bright enough to realise that on the whole, elderly men were far less sentimental about their grandchildren and wouldn't hesitate to challenge such a statement. But the elderly ladies, many of whom, because of modern marriage break-ups, to their regret, often saw little of their grandchildren, were far less likely to challenge him.

Unwilling to admit that they didn't recognise the voice of one of their own grandchildren who had become a stranger, they would seldom question him further.

It was a particularly clever psychological ploy. It played on people's anxieties, loneliness and sentimentality. It made use of the elderly ladies’ natural worry that their seldom seen grandchild must be in trouble to turn up out of the blue. This worry, in turn, would bring another emotion – one even more likely to encourage them to open their doors: that, in trouble, their grandchild had turned to them for help, a thought no doubt helped along by joy at feeling useful once more.

Although he had yet so speak to Harry Mortimer again, either to question him further or tell him that his confession wouldn't save the boy, Rafferty suspected that Harry had discovered his grandson had been doing drugs and was deeply in debt to some seriously nasty people. Doubtless, he had suggested to Clara that, together, they might be able to rescue their grandson from the curse of drugs that gripped him.

Rafferty also suspected that Harry, in all innocence, had suggested he would speak to Charles and try to persuade him to go to see her, so that she could attempt to use the softer, grandmotherly words to persuade him from the wrong path he had taken.

But before he could do so, Charles's desperation had prompted him to try out his robbery ploy once again, with tragic results. Because Clara Mortimer would have been expecting her favourite grandson to turn up on her doorstep; which was exactly what he had done, of course. But what she hadn't understood was that Charles Ogilvie, far from being ready to seek help for his addiction and debts, was merely continuing with the method he had thus far successfully hit on to enable him to feed both.

Charles Ogilvie admitted he had been drawn to the sheltered housing block confident that therein he would find at least one elderly woman who would buzz him in when he said the magic words: ‘Hi Gran. It's me.’

But this time the ploy had resulted in death and tragedy, because as it turned out, Clara Mortimer wasn't the only one in for a nasty surprise. As Charles had confessed to Rafferty, it had only been after he had hit the old woman and she had fallen to the floor that he had realised why their conversation had been so mutually incomprehensible that he had struck her in frustration.

As he had admitted, it had been then that he had noticed the photograph that her body had been blocking from his sight. Instantly, he had recognised the child he had been and after a second or two puzzling out what the woman whose flat he had come to rob was doing with a picture of him, it was but the work of further moments for his memory to tell him of the identity of the second person in the photo.

To his dawning horror, he had realised the other person in the photo was his once-adored grandmother out on a seaside jolly with her grandson. And that he had just murdered her.

To his eternal shame, he told Rafferty, he had fled and left his grandmother to die.

Rafferty was appalled by Charles Ogilvie's tale. But the events he now had reason to believe had followed the violence, somehow managed to appal him even more.

And with the given that he believed Charles's horrified denial that he had dragged his victim round the room, Rafferty was left with only one conclusion. Clara Mortimer, realising she was dying and to save her grandson from receiving the punishment he deserved, had, somehow, managed to drag her dying self around her living room, smearing her blood as she went, in a desperate attempt to remove Charles's fingerprints before she succumbed to the blow and loss of blood.

‘Mr
Mortimer.’ Rafferty entered the cell. ‘You're free to leave.’

‘What?' Harry Mortimer stared at him, his eyes sunk back in his gaunt head. But-‘

‘We know you didn't kill your estranged wife.’

‘But I did,’ he insisted. ‘By now you must have checked and learned how much money Clara had. She always hated the idea of writing a will. She was strangely morbid about the idea. You haven't found one, I take it?’

Rafferty shook his head.

‘There you are then. It sounds as if I'm about to become a rich man. Money, Inspector, don't they say that's the greater motivation of all for murder?’

Rafferty wasn't surprised this realisation should be uttered in a flat tone that revealed such riches would bring Mortimer little joy.

He came further into the small cell. ‘Your estranged wife's murder wasn't about money – or at least not in the way that you imply. We know what happened, Mr Mortimer. It's pointless you insisting on your guilt any longer. You should know that we've charged your grandson, Charles Ogilvie, with murder.’

At this news, Harry Mortimer slumped down on the cell's thin mattress. But the slumping only lasted a matter of seconds. Then he straightened himself and managed a terse rejoinder. ‘Do I get to hear what evidence you think you have?’

Rafferty shrugged. ‘I don't see why not.’

After he had explained the reason for his conclusions, Harry Mortimer once more slumped back, his face even more Mick Jagger-cadaverous than before.

‘Convinced we can prove your grandson's guilt now, sir?’ Rafferty asked.

Mortimer gave a defeated nod.

‘Now, I'd like to ask you something,’ Rafferty told him. After Jane's revelation, if only to satisfy himself, he wanted confirmation of his guess from Mortimer.

‘Why did you make that confession? What possible reason could you have had? You were about to inherit a large amount of money or, at least, had reasonable expectations that you would. You had – and now still have, a rich and rosy future to look forward to. Even if you don't inherit and your daughter gets your late wife's money, I doubt she would see you go short.’

Harry Mortimer shook his head and began to laugh, though the laughter held more than a hint of the macabre about it.

‘Of course, you don't know. There's no reason why you should, I suppose. I'm dying, Inspector. I've got six months, if I'm lucky. I decided to ‘confess’ the day after I received the doctor's verdict. I was already ‘going down’. I saw no reason why young Charlie should have to go down, too. If it achieved nothing else, I thought my confession would draw the police fire from him.'

Rafferty gave a slow nod at this. It was just as he had thought.

‘All their lives I've let down Charlie, my daughter, the two younger kids and Clara, too. I thought, approaching death, I could at least try to remedy some of the wrongs I had done them all.'

He shrugged. 'Call it guilt, if you will; guilt for how my daughter turned out, guilt for not being there sooner for Charlie. If I hadn't been selfishly self-indulgent all my life; having flings with other women, gambling, never taking any responsibility, Clara and me might have made a go of the marriage and remained together. Who knows, maybe if we had, she wouldn't have been so severe on Jane that she rebelled.

‘I've put myself first all my life,' he told Rafferty. ‘Attempting to take my grandson's guilt on to my own shoulders was the first unselfish act in a totally selfish life. You could say I wanted one of my last acts on this earth to be a wholly unselfish one.‘I wanted to help my grandson. Can you blame me for that?'

Rafferty shook his head.

'I hoped the knowledge that he had murdered his own grandmother because of his drug habit might straighten him out.’

‘Maybe it might in the short term,’ Rafferty said. ‘But do you think it would really help the lad in the long run to know he had got away with murder? And such a murder? To my mind, it would be more likely to increase his problems than lessen them. Maybe better to have him feel he'd received the due punishment of the law by serving a prison sentence for his crime; that way he might eventually manage to put it behind him, straighten himself out and start fresh. By taking the blame and confessing to his crime you'd have given him a double load of guilt to bear – not only his grandmother's murder, but your sacrifice of whatever remains of your life. Given that he was weak enough to begin taking drugs in the first place, do you really think he – or his shoulders – are strong enough for such burdens?’

Mortimer looked shaken by Rafferty's words. ‘Perhaps not; I hadn't thought of it in that way.’

‘Perhaps you should do so,’ Rafferty said. ‘But before you do, let's get you out of here. Your daughter's waiting for you.’

Mortimer blinked. ‘You're letting me go? I assumed you'd charge me with wasting police time, at least.’

Rafferty shook his head. ‘No, Mr Mortimer. In the circumstances, I think we have rather more time to waste than you have. Go back to your family and do your best to support each other while you still can.’

And as he led Harry Mortimer out, Rafferty knew he also would do well to take his own advice.

As Rafferty read
Charles Ogilvie's confession in all its sad delusion and guilty rhetoric, he reflected that the killing of Clara Mortimer was a very modern murder; could such a tragedy really have occurred at any other time in history?

Modern times, with their split and broken families gave so many people vastly different experiences to those of generations fifty, even thirty years earlier. In many ways, between modern lives and lives in the fifties there existed a gulf as great as that between the fifties and the Middle Ages.

The fifties' drugs of choice for the greater number had been beer and Woodbines, not the skunk, cocaine and ecstasy that brought their accompanying loss of self-control, delusion and paranoia.

No – Rafferty nodded to himself – this was a modern murder all right. Briefly, he wondered how many more such murders there would be. He suspected that in these days of my grandson, the stranger; my brother, the stranger and my husband, the stranger, such sad family murders would become ever more common.

But he had no time now to reflect on the sad experiences of the Ogilvie/Mortimer families; he had a sad event of his own to attend.

For today was the day of his baby's funeral and he was due to go and pick up Abra from his sister, Maggie's home, where she had insisted on staying since her release from hospital.

After the funeral Mass, Abra having still not forgiven him, chose Kitty Rafferty's company on the walk to the graveside. Rafferty's sister, Maggie, fell in to step beside him.

She squeezed his arm and asked, 'How are you feeling?'

Rafferty shrugged. 'Much as you'd think. What about you? How are you getting on with Mrs Newson?'

'I'm not,' Maggie told him.

'Don't tell me you've come to blows already?'

'No. But that's only because she's not been round to see little Joey.'

Rafferty, about to bury his own little Joey, had been touched that Gemma should decide to name her son after him. But his sister's words astonished him so much that they almost succeeded in emptying his mind of all other thoughts.

'Not been round? Given Linda Newson's determination that she wasn't going to be shut out, I'd have thought it would take her getting knocked over by a bus for her not to insist on her 'rights'. Are you sure she hasn't been in an accident?' he asked. 'At the very least, she must be laid up with a bad dose of flu.'

Maggie shook her head. A faint smile played about her lips. 'No, it's not that. I suspect she's given in to Wayne's emotional blackmail.'

She explained. 'Ma heard from one of her friends whose daughter knows the Newsons that young Wayne didn't like his mother visiting his son. Apparently, he feared he would get dragged in and persuaded to acknowledge his responsibilities. He didn't fancy that, so he gave his mother an ultimatum. It was either him or the baby. He told her if she didn't give up seeing little Joey, he'd go and live with his dad.'

Rafferty snorted. 'You'd think she'd be glad to get rid of the little git.'

He might have only met Wayne Newson once, but it was enough. That brief encounter had made clear to him that Wayne's mother had spoilt her son rotten.

'You and I might think 'good riddance', Joe, but Mrs Newson thinks the sun shines out of Wayne. He's the pride of his mother's heart. Anyway, she's decided to stick with the child in the hand, so to speak.

'Of course, she didn't admit any of this to me. Still, it's a relief to think she won't be ringing my doorbell several times a week, demanding 'her rights' to see little Joey.'

Rafferty, thinking of his own lost child, observed, 'Still, it must be upsetting for her, Mags. How would you feel it you couldn't see your first grandchild?'

'You're right. Of course, you're right.' Maggie sighed. 'It's just that I've been so caught up in the demands of the baby and consoling Gemma and Abra who have both been inclined to be weepy, that I haven't been able to spare Mrs Newson much thought. I'll send her some of the latest snaps of him and drop a note in to let her know how well he's doing.'

Feeling guilty that his behaviour towards Abra should have served to increase his sister's burdens, Rafferty managed only a weak 'That's the spirit, sis,' just as they reached the graveside.