Blood on the Bones (2 page)

‘Would you like me to contact Dr Dally and the Scene of Crime team? Or will you do it?’

Rafferty waved a hand. ‘You do it.’ No way did he want to give Sam Dally a chance to laugh at his predicament. Certainly not until he'd figured out how he was going to handle it. He gazed into space as Llewellyn turned his back and picked up a phone. ‘Nuns,’ he muttered again, under his breath this time. What were a bunch of penguin dressers doing getting mixed up in a suspicious death?

And what had he done to deserve getting dumped with a case in a Roman Catholic convent? he asked himself self-pityingly. Of all the locations for their latest corpse to turn up, this really was Divine punishment at its most inspired. Any location that held even a sniff of Catholicism was normally a place to be given a wide berth by the long since and gladly lapsed Rafferty. It was grim to think he'd now have to voluntarily return to his religious roots.

Then he gave a fatalistic shrug. One thing at least: the nuns' cadaver would help take his mind off his unwelcome letter, if only insofar as a second trauma lessens the pain of the first one.

It was some minutes later, after several low and discreet exchanges, when Llewellyn put the phone down and turned round.

‘I managed to contact Dr Dally,’ he reported. ‘He's confirmed he'll shortly make his way to the scene.’

Rafferty nodded grimly. ‘I bet he can't wait. I could hear him laughing from here.’

Sensibly, Llewellyn refrained from making any comment on Dally or his amusement and just continued. ‘The SOCOs are also on their way.’ Quietly, he added, ‘As I suppose we ought to be.’

As his sergeant walked to the door and held it open. Rafferty's fatalism wore off. Now his mouth drooped downward as if he'd suffered a mini stroke. But the only stroke he'd suffered was another one from a supposedly loving God. Morosely, he thought: Oh let joy be unconfined. Because, between his unwelcome letter and the news of the suspicious death at the local RC convent, Rafferty knew deep down to his lapsed Catholic soul, that Sam Dally wasn't the man not to make the most of his opportunity. Purgatory awaited. Several sources of Purgatory, in fact.

And as Llewellyn said: 'Shall we go?', Rafferty knew that these several Purgatories were impatient for his arrival.

He shrugged heroically, like a man with an urgent appointment with the hangman, said: ‘Why not?’ Even though he could think of a round dozen reasons 'why not', he mentioned none of them.

Instead, slowly, as though doom really did dog his heels, he rose from his chair, grabbed his jacket against the lowering October skies, and followed Llewellyn from the office to meet his fate, muttering ‘Nuns!’ in tones of growing horror as he went, and fingering the letter in his pocket that seemed so hot with threat that he imagined he could feel it burning its way through the material of his jacket to singe his flesh.

Certainly, that morning's letter had already made his day far from pleasant. The suspicious death in the Catholic convent seemed likely to complete the job the letter had started. He only hoped he'd enjoyed whatever murky sins he'd indulged in a previous life. Because whatever sins he had committed in that incarnation, he suspected he was shortly to pay for them in this one.

The rich black soil
had been disturbed, by a fox or some other scavenging animal, Rafferty assumed. Its scavenging had exposed the left arm of the corpse in its shallow grave. It was over this limb that one of the nuns had stumbled as she walked in the convent's grounds, head presumably bent deep over some devotional book.

The fast-fading light of the mild, early October evening would have provided a gentler, more welcome illumination. Denied such gentleness by the powerful police lighting that left nothing to the imagination, Rafferty stared at the grave and the stark and gruesome remains of the partially disinterred corpse. Its pared to the bone white forearm protruded from the earth and pointed accusingly to the sky, as if blaming the Almighty for his current predicament.

But even Rafferty couldn't blame the Almighty for the fact of the man's death or its location. It had been a human hand, not that of God, which had struck the killing blow and then set about concealing the body.

The bite marks left by the snacking fox were clearly visible on the bones of the forearm above the heavy, man's watch with its cracked glass. Even after its immersion in the damp soil, it was still possible to see that the watch had been an expensive one as PC Lizzie Green had said. Maybe it had been a gift and would have an inscription on the back marking some birthday or wedding anniversary?

Rafferty supposed he could hope that the latter proved to be true. But he wasn't about to bank on it.

The hands of the watch had stopped at twelve o'clock, he noted. Twelve noon? Or twelve midnight? he wondered. Had the man been killed at the witching hour, when handsome princes once again became frogs and smart carriages metamorphosed back to pumpkins? This man would be returning to nothing at all but the soil and oblivion. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. A tiny shiver passed through his body at the thought. Unless, that was, Paradise existed and he was one of the Chosen, in which case the immortals had already claimed him as their own and left his soul's shell for them.

But the religious incantations for this man's death would certainly have to wait, even if some god or devil had already whisked his soul off to eternal reward or punishment. And as his fingers thrust into his jacket pocket and he touched that morning's letter, Rafferty was unwillingly reminded of its existence. The discovery of the convent's cadaver had brought only a temporary amnesia and again his fingers drew back as if they, perhaps like their cadaver, felt the flames of Lucifer's hellish pit.

The letter and the threats inherent in the writer's taunting words would also have to wait, he reminded himself. Because before he was again likely to find the solitude necessary to consider a possible course of action, he had another investigatory show to get on the road. And before religious rites, eternal dust, or his letter, could demand attention, Rafferty knew that their well-murdered cadaver wasn't the only body likely to be subjected to indignities at the hands of Sam Dally.

Rafferty jerked his head at Llewellyn. They walked away from the shallow grave, leaving more room for the scene of crime team and Lance Edwards, the photographer, to do their work. They followed the tape-marked path already set up by Lizzie Green and Tim Smales in order to keep the trampling of the gravesite and its contamination to a minimum. Ducking under the outer tape, Rafferty nodded a ‘well done’ to young Smales as he marked them down on his clipboard as leaving the scene. He and Lizzie Green had made a good job of securing the grave site. Timothy Smales was finally growing into the job, Rafferty realised. He no longer sulked if given a task he didn't fancy. He just gritted his teeth and got on with it. But then he'd had a good teacher.

The best, most experienced teeth gritter in the station, was Rafferty's thought as his teeth ground together even harder as his several-stranded future opened itself uninvitingly before him. Once again, he forced himself to put one of these strands out of his mind and concentrate on the latest problem; at least, he thought, unlike the other, murder was within his compass and might, therefore, be open to a reasonably speedy resolution.

Lizzie Green, as the more experienced officer, had, after getting Smales organised into securing the scene, also ensured that Sister Rita, the nun who had found the body, was kept isolated so she couldn't confide anything more about the corpse than she might have already revealed to the rest of the religious community. As Smales had confirmed on their arrival, the nun was being kept suitably cloistered by Lizzie until Rafferty and Llewellyn were ready to speak to her.

Rafferty gazed around him, studying the scene. All round the eight foot high walls surrounding the convent's grounds clung the evergreen pyracantha, a climber with sharp thorns currently wearing the brilliant scarlet berries of autumn. He had been careless and had already experienced the sharpness of the thorns for himself. He had a gash across the back of his hand to prove it and to remind him to be more wary in future.

As if the vicious talons of the firethorn wasn't enough of a barrier to intruders, in front of the climbers were grouped the equally thorny berberis. The rich red and maroon of its leaves concealed the many little stiletto-sharp barbs. Together, these two razor-edged plants could usually be expected to deter even the most determined would-be burglar.

Rafferty wondered how many of the local villains appreciated that the high walls and all that thorny security were indicative, not of the rich plunder awaiting the more daring thief, but only of the nuns' desire to be shut away from the world.

Because, of course, there weren't any riches. Or at least none of the sort likely to be appreciated by Elmhurst's more light-fingered residents. Unlike so much of the rest of the Catholic Church, with its fabulous Vatican, bishops' palaces and extravagant, priceless and glorious art, the sisters lived simply. As Rafferty had noticed on his arrival and passage through the community's home, their lives were austere in the extreme. They truly embraced their poverty instead of applying to it mere lip service. He found it quite humbling. But as he knew that such an emotion was unlikely to be helpful at the start of the inquiry, he glanced at Llewellyn and asked, ‘First thoughts, Daff?’

Llewellyn hesitated and Rafferty instead supplied his own first thoughts. ‘Under other circumstances, I'd have strong suspicions that this was an inside job, given the height of the walls and the other deterrents. But–’

‘But even you find it hard to conceive of holy nuns being guilty of murder?’

Rafferty shrugged. ‘Something like that, I suppose.’ But it wasn't even that, not really. He knew the religious over the years had gone in for plenty of violent acts against people who disagreed with them; they were still at it in the twenty-first century. He supposed the current lot of Catholic Holy Joes and Josephines were equally as capable of violence as their counterparts in other religions.

No, he thought it was more a case that man needed something to believe in, something to hold onto in a world where change tended to be too rapid and way too ugly. He smiled. ‘We'd better start from the basic fact that the sisters are all human beings first and nuns second and proceed from there.’

Llewellyn nodded, presumably pleased by the rare logic encompassed in his inspector's pronouncement.

Rafferty sunk into contemplation. From where he stood, he could see the entirety of the convent's extensive rear grounds. But if the detached house and its large grounds was the sisters' one extravagance, it was a necessary one because the building was home to a small community of women, although he was not yet certain of the precise numbers. The spacious grounds, too, were essential for a group of women who were almost entirely self-sufficient.

The body and its shallow grave had been found by the right hand side wall. It was close to what Rafferty had taken to be a shed, but which Llewellyn had discovered was one of the convent's two hermitages, where the sisters could pray in solitude. Small and without any form of heating that Rafferty had been able to discern, they must be as cold as charity in the depths of winter. He could only suppose God kept them warm, in spirit at least, if not in body.

The convent's small apple and pear orchard, heavy with ripe fruit, was between the right hand side wall and the wall facing the back of the house. A large glasshouse, shed and soft fruit plot were near the centre of the grounds. The vegetable plot, at the back of which was to be found the second hermitage, took up almost the whole of the left hand side of the grounds.

Next, Rafferty directed his attention fifty yards away, towards the main building of the Carmelite Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, just in front of which, a little gaggle of brown-habited, black-veiled nuns, with horrified fascination, were observing the scene of crime team at work.

The SOCOs moved slowly, deferentially almost, as if they were observing some religious rite of their own, one that required an attention as rapt as a nun's devotions. Which it did, of course, if they were to miss no possible clue as to who had placed their cadaver in the soil.

As Rafferty watched, Mother Catherine, the Prioress or, as he thought of her, the Mother Superior, to whom he had spoken briefly on his arrival, made her brisk way across the grass from the main building to where the other nuns were standing. As the sun fought its way briefly through the increasingly dark clouds, it glinted on her tinted spectacles and seemed to galvanise her into action. She clapped her pitifully scarred hands and, with a flapping motion, as if she was encouraging a flock of unruly chickens to take roost for the evening, tried to persuade the gaping nuns back to their duties. But such was the sisters' goggle-eyed fascination with this dramatic departure from their normal routine that her silent entreaties met with only a limited response.

The dead man could count himself a lucky corpse in one way, Rafferty reflected, in the brief moments before the lapsed nature of his Catholicism caught up with him once more. Since the dead man's body had been found in the grounds of the RC convent, whether he had been a sinner or not, whether he wanted them or not, whether he was a Believer or not, he would have prayers in plenty for his soul's passing.

Rafferty didn't feel quite so blessed. He disliked being forced to face his Catholic demons – if such they could be called. Neither did he like being obliged to call the community's matriarch 'Mother'. He had assumed he had long since put all that religious mumbo jumbo behind him. He never even called his own mother 'Mother'. Well, apart, that was, from when he was trying to display his disapproval for some behaviour of hers and ma was being stroppy – which, come to think of it, was most of the time.

Another thing to be regretted was the fact that, although this was an enclosed order of nuns, which he hoped would limit the potential suspects, they were also a silent, contemplative order; their days and a fair chunk of their nights, too, he presumed, were given over to prayer. How on earth could he encourage the usual title-tattle that was so invaluable during a police operation if none of the usual tittle-tattling gender indulged?