Blood on the Bones (14 page)

‘As yet, these allegations are unsubstantiated,’ Llewellyn told him. 'But it's interesting that every one of the callers who rang on the matter said the same thing. Though, I must say that I can't see what possible connection these rumours can have to our current case. Even if one of the sisters at the convent had need of such a service back in her youth, why would they have come to Dr Peterson?

‘Apart from any other consideration, all the older nuns, bar the late Sister Clare, lived many miles away, so even if they had need of the skills of a doctor in Dr Peterson's line, they would scarcely approach him. It would be local knowledge and word of mouth an unwillingly pregnant woman would need in such circumstances. And she wouldn't get that by travelling half way across the country to a completely strange place and then hoping for the best.’

Rafferty smiled. ‘As ever, your logic is without flaw.’ He grabbed his jacket. 'And much as I don't like having to drag a man back forty years in his life and ask him to explain his doings then, I suppose we have no choice. Most people, over the years, move so far on from their youthful selves that they're unrecognisable as the same people.

‘Still, we'll see what he's got to say for himself, even though, like you, I can't see that what he might or might not have done forty or more years ago can have to do with our murder.’

Rafferty sensed Llewellyn's intelligent brown gaze settle on him as they walked down the corridor to the stairs and the car park. He sensed a criticism coming. He wasn't wrong, he realised moments later, when Llewellyn voiced his thoughts.

‘Strange,’ the Welshman quietly commented, ‘that you don't appear to harbour the same reservations about the ancient history of the sisters or Father Kelly.’

Pulled up by Llewellyn's comment, Rafferty glanced sideways at his colleague as they reached the first floor landing. ‘No, I don't, do I?’ he asked elliptically.

Of course Llewellyn knew nothing about the ‘Road to Damascus’ moment he'd experienced as he'd stood outside the convent's walls. And Rafferty, now that his earlier surprise at the experience had worn off, reverted to type and put the experience down to the fact that he hadn't had any breakfast. Fighting desperately to shrug off this new-found and unwanted ‘God’ thing, he added, ‘Call it retribution of the less than Divine sort.’

‘Payback time for youthful punishments received?’

‘Perhaps.’ Rafferty muttered, even though now he felt much less inclined to indulge the urge to get a bit of his own back on the Church. But preferring to keep his own counsel on the matter, he added, 'Or maybe it's just that I find more to empathise with in a young doctor trying to save frightened girls from the perils of the back street abortionist back in the sixties than I do with a gaggle of nuns who spend their lives on their knees rather than doing something socially useful.'

He wished it were still true. He felt a hypocrite now, for saying it. For, in truth, he was finding much in the simple lives of the sisters to envy. Even if he was now inclined to shy away from again making such an admission to himself.

‘Whatever happened to ‘Judgement is mine, sayeth the Lord'?’

Rafferty, already anticipating his mother's judgement on the case and surprised that she hadn't yet confided it to him, was not in the mood to listen to his sergeant's also.

Anyway, he didn't know what Llewellyn was complaining about. Weren't they about to check out the doctor's past life and past doings, just as they had been doing and continued to do to those of the sisters? He would be less than human if, previously at any rate, some of the checks had appealed to him more than others. But that didn't mean he wouldn't be as thorough as possible in all of them.

In a voice that brooked no argument, Rafferty said: ‘Judgement, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. And as I'm the one doing the beholding–’

They reached the car park and he got in the car. Llewellyn climbed in the passenger seat. Not another word was spoken till they reached Dr Peterson's Orchard Avenue surgery. Which suited Rafferty just fine.

Dr
Stephen Peterson had just come to the end of morning surgery when Rafferty and Llewellyn arrived. The waiting room was empty. The receptionist rang the doctor on the internal line to advise him of their arrival and gave them the nod to go through to the office.

Dr Peterson was every bit as tall and broad as Llewellyn had indicated. He looked to Rafferty, to be about six foot three and around seventeen stone. Even though he must be somewhere the wrong side of sixty-five and past the usual retirement age, he looked more than able, as Llewellyn had said, to heave corpses around without too much difficulty.

Had he, though? Rafferty speculated. And if so, why?

The doctor didn't look pleased to see them. Rafferty guessed he would look even less welcoming when he learned what they wanted to question him about.

‘I've already told your sergeant here all I know about the body you found in the convent's grounds, which is precisely nothing,’ Dr Peterson began irritably. ‘I don't know what else you think I can–’

Rafferty held up his hand. ‘Please doctor. Actually, it wasn't about the body found at the convent that we wished to talk to you about.’

‘No? What then? Whatever it is, I hope it won't take too long.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I'm doing some filling-in and am due at the hospital in twenty minutes.’

‘This shouldn't take more than a few minutes of your time, doctor,’ Rafferty reassured him, adding the proviso: ‘provided, that is, you're co operative and answer our questions.’

Dr Peterson's lips pursed at this, but he contained any further inclination to temper. Instead, he asked shortly: ‘And your questions are?’

Rafferty hesitated, glanced at Llewellyn, then said, ‘We've received some allegations about you.’

‘Allegations?’ Peterson's thick grey brows almost met in the middle. ‘What sort of allegations? And what could these allegations possibly have to do with the dead man found in the convent's grounds?’

‘As for your last question, I suppose I have to say that that remains to be seen. But as for these allegations, they concern a time in your life when you were a young doctor. Over forty years ago. To before the 1967 Abortion Act, to be precise.’

Dr Peterson paled. The thin, aesthetic face which was such a mismatch with his muscular body, took on an anguished cast and he slumped heavily into his chair. ‘Very well. What do you want to know?’

‘These allegations, all of which took the same line, say you carried out illegal abortions as a young medic. I just want you to confirm or deny the allegations and we'll be on our way.’

To his surprise, Peterson didn't even attempt to deny them. Instead, he became aggressive once more.

‘And what if I did?’ he demanded. ‘You've no idea of the butchers that were out there back then. Nor of the young girls who died of sepsis or who were permanently maimed at their hands.’

His voice turned sombre and suddenly, all the aggression went out of him. ‘My elder sister died under the ‘care’ of one such. She wasn't quite eighteen. She died in agony. I know, because I listened to her cries of torment.’

‘Why wasn't she in hospital receiving treatment and pain relief?’

D Peterson's face contorted into a humourless mask. ‘Well might you ask, inspector.’

A haunted smile played briefly about the doctor's face, then he said, ‘You're too young to know the social atmosphere of the time. It was rigid, unforgiving. My parents were ‘respectable'. They would have been mortified if the shame of my sister's illegitimate pregnancy had become common knowledge. If they had taken her to hospital everyone would have known what she'd done.’

He raised a face still traumatised by past ghosts for their inspection. ‘And they couldn't have that, you see. Their ‘respectability’ demanded that she suffer in secret, died even, to protect it.’

Appalled at the man's revelations, Rafferty strove to get a grip. He knew he needed to challenge Dr Peterson, find a way through the defences of his still present pain, if he was to obtain answers.

‘But your parents must have known the reason for your sister's death would become common knowledge,’ Rafferty pointed out, wincing at his own brutality. ‘The death certificate–’

‘The death certificate said my sister died from the complications of influenza,’ Stephen Peterson told him flatly, as his face contorted into lines of bitter and pain-filled memory. ‘My father had gone to school with the family GP,’ he wearily explained. His tired, matter-of-fact manner, seemed to imply that they should have understood this, at least. ‘And my parents knew he would help them cover up my sister's shame.’

‘I see.’ Rafferty did see. Only too clearly. Diffidently, he asked, ‘Is that why you decided to become a doctor?’

Stephen Peterson nodded. He even managed a smile, but it was a smile totally devoid of humour and merely emphasised the scored lines that gave his face such a cadaverous appearance.

‘I was on a mission, I suppose. I was an idealist. An idealist who wanted to save the world. I thought I could make a difference. And I did, for some.’

His voice dropped and they had to strain to hear the rest. ‘But not enough. Not nearly enough.’

He sighed, bent his head with its still thick salt and pepper hair and propped it on his hands, kneading his eyes with his forefingers and thumbs, before he dropped his hands into his lap and looked back up.

He met their gaze squarely, one after the other, then said with a return of his former vigour: 'But I don't understand your interest in my idealism so late in the day. It's not as if the dead man found at the convent could have had any connection with my life back then. I doubt he was even born. I thought the newspaper report said he was believed to be somewhere around his mid to late forties?'

Rafferty nodded. ‘But it's only a rough estimate. You're a doctor, so I imagine you're aware, that over a certain age, such estimates can be out by around ten years.’

Peterson nodded a vague assent to this statement. Then he said, 'But even if the dead man was fifty-odd rather than forty something, he would still have only been a child when I was a young doctor.

'No one with a grievance from that time has contacted me. So, if, as I presume, the implication is that I killed this man after he turned up accusing me of causing the death of his mother, sister, or other family member, in order to save myself from exposure, then you're way off the mark. Even if such a person had turned up and accused me of such a thing, it's half a lifetime ago.

‘Besides, apart from any other objection to this man's death being anything to do with me, his body was found in the grounds of the convent, rather than my back garden. I might be the sisters’ GP, but they haven't cut me a key for ease of access.’

An ironic mockery entered his voice as he added, ‘You can't seriously believe that I was so worried that the British Medical Council would be so interested in raking over old gossip that I felt it necessary to kill some hate-filled vengeance-seeker from four decades ago.’

Rafferty thought it probable that the doctor was right about the latter. Didn't the BMA usually prefer to bury their heads in the sand when it came to one of their own being accused of malpractice or even worse, as in the recent, infamous multiple murders of his patients by Dr Harold Shipman?

Rafferty frowned and looked down at the once again seemingly penitently bent head of Dr Peterson, as he acknowledged, that, when it came to the dead man, they only had the doctor's word for it that their cadaver hadn't contacted him and threatened him and his good name.

But even if he had, and the doctor had been provoked into attacking and killing him, it still didn't explain why the dead man had ended up buried in the grounds of the convent.

There again, though, as Rafferty silently grappled with his silent arguments, they only had the doctor's word for it that he hadn't been the one who had helped himself to the convent's spare keys.

Strangely, now that he'd explained himself, to his own satisfaction, at least, Stephen Peterson didn't seem particularly perturbed by their visit or by the provoking implications of their questions.

Perhaps he'd shed some of his idealism along the way and acquired instead, a protective layer of realism? Certainly, his remark about the inertia of the BMA indicated the possibility, Rafferty thought as he gazed at the doctor's bowed head.

But, whatever he'd acquired, it apparently didn't include the proclivity to breaking down and confessing. So he and Llewellyn said their goodbyes and headed back to the car and the station.

‘Well, he didn't exactly try very hard to conceal the illegal abortions, did he? He was amazingly open, even gung ho about them,’ Rafferty remarked as they waited to join the traffic on the roundabout at the shopping centre to the north west of Elmhurst.

Quietly, Llewellyn said, 'I suppose, after what happened to his sister, it's easy enough to understand that. And given his tragic experience, who's to say, in the same circumstances, that the rest of us wouldn't have copied his example and done our best to help young girls in similar straits? I've read enough about that period to know how unforgiving was society if a young woman made a single lapse from the expected virtue. Many a young girl, even as late as the sixties, ended up in a psychiatric hospital, often for years, if she fell pregnant outside marriage.'

Rafferty had heard enough, too, as he had eavesdropped on some of the conversations his ma had had with her female cronies amongst the neighbours. The conversations on which he had eavesdropped had not been ones for the fainthearted.

And, as he considered the latter, with all the in-built revelations about pain, suffering and death that he had, as a youth, overheard, it was some minutes before he felt able to make another comment.

In fact, he found he had to draw several deep breaths, before he could say anything else at all: 'Still, just because he freely admitted his culpability over the illegal abortions when we challenged him about them, doesn't mean he mightn't have other guilty secrets he's less keen to share. Take the location of the body, for instance.