Blood on the Bones (28 page)

Rafferty pulled into the side of the road just past the convent. But, although he levered up the hand brake and turned off the engine, he made no attempt to get out of the car.

'Strangely, the danger came from the very son she thought she had escaped for ever. The son she must have believed was no longer a danger to her. Because, on learning the truth about his natural mother from his aunt after so many years, and realising how his own mother had lied to him, he must have been traumatised. Not only by the second rejection of him when he came to see her at the convent, but also by the fact that she had compounded that rejection with a dreadful deceit.

'He must also have been furious at the realisation that he, her only natural child, had never had the opportunity to call her 'mother'. Ironic that 'Mother', although a title denied to him, was one regularly, freely, used by the rest of the convent community.

'Bodham, now in his middle years, never married, childless and without anyone in the world to call his own, furious and upset, must have contacted Mother Catherine demanding to see her a second time.

‘Forewarned by a phone call from her dying sister of the reason for Bodham's insistence: that her thirty-year-old lies were about to come out, Mother Catherine would have specified a time for a visit while the other nuns were attending one of the more lengthy daily Offices. She must have intercepted him at the gate and let him secretly into the grounds to speak to him privately.’

Rafferty imagined she had hoped to dissuade her son from claiming her as his mother as it would reveal her double deceit to the world: that she wasn't pure in mind, body or spirit. And that she had, in fact, adopted, for her own ends, the identity of a holy nun who had died in harrowing circumstances in order to make her illegitimate son think she was dead.

But, as he quietly explained, her hastily put together attempt at deception ultimately failed and her son knew all. He was a threat to her reputation, her holy life and her newly elevated position as Mother Superior. With turmoil threatening everything she had made of her life since her disastrous early pregnancy, she had reverted to the impetuous, act first, think later, person she had been in her youth.

‘I think she must have distracted him in some way, got him to turn away from her and, before she knew what she was going to do, her son lay dead at her feet, his skull caved in by a handily placed rock.’

Rafferty knew he could no longer put off the dénouement. He tapped Llewellyn on the shoulder, said, ‘Come on,’ and climbed out of the car. They walked, silently, side by side, to the main door of the convent. Sister Ursula must have seen their faces through the grill, for she hobbled towards them, more bent over than ever, and opened the door to their summons. She gazed sadly at them, but didn't speak.

It was the first indication that Rafferty's earlier feeling of unease was about to be validated.

He glanced at Llewellyn. Both instinctively quickened their pace as they approached the corridor that led to Mother Catherine's office. As they turned the corner, Llewellyn nodded towards the office door and the crowd of brown-garbed nuns gathered at its entrance.

It was then that Rafferty acknowledged that his foreboding earlier that morning had been correct. He could only surmise that, after he had questioned them again, Sisters Rita and Perpetua had been sufficiently intrigued to repeat the question he had put to them to the rest of their community.

Certainly, to judge from the unseemly and unaccustomed noise pouring forth from the gaggle of nuns clustered outside Mother Catherine's office as they approached, the ‘something’ that both Llewellyn's voices and Rafferty's had anticipated in an all too awful inevitability, had come to pass.

As was confirmed only a few seconds later.

The letter clutched in Sister Rita's, rough, gardener's hand, was pretty explicit. It had been addressed jointly to Sister Rita and Rafferty.

There was a second letter, addressed to the Bishop of the Diocese, clutched in Sister Rita's other hand. She hadn't attempted to open that one.

Sister Rita not being one to stand on ceremony, hadn't waited to share the contents of the first letter with Rafferty, its co-addressee. But when she saw him, Llewellyn hovering at his elbow, she handed it over without a word.

And as Rafferty swiftly scanned the handwritten sheets, with Llewellyn peering over his shoulder, he knew that his conclusions had been correct in every aspect.

‘It's a terrible, grievous thing, to lose a child.’ Rafferty's speed-reading slowed at this point. 'And I was distraught at having to give my baby up. But times were so very different when I gave birth to my son. It was a shameful thing to bear an illegitimate child back in the fifties.

'But, even more shaming than bearing an illegitimate child, is for that mother to know that she is responsible for her own child's death.

‘Whatever the times or the mores of society, that will always be an unforgivable act. I have begged God's forgiveness. Maybe, with his infinite mercy, He will forgive me. But I cannot forgive myself. I deserve eternal damnation. And I know the only way I can be certain of such a totally deserved punishment is to commit the sin of self murder. In this way, I hope to spend all eternity in atonement for my wickedness.’

Rafferty gazed for a few moments, through the open office door, at Mother Catherine's body. It was slumped across her desk, in one of the uncomfortable chairs that Rafferty's rear end remembered so well.

She had removed her veil and habit and wore ordinary clothes. Presumably, as she faced death, she had been willing to acknowledge that she no longer had the right to wear the robes of a religious.

‘Let's get the scene locked up, Dafyd,’ Rafferty instructed. He turned to address the sisters, whose expressions exhibited varying degrees of shock. Even now, he wasn't sure whether their shock was for the deceit practised on them by the ‘Mother’ Catherine they had all looked up to so much, or whether it was for the unbearable thought that she would spend all eternity paying for her sins.

Strangely, or, perhaps, not so strangely, he found himself taking refuge in religion. And as he again adopted the role of priest to the sisters, he found not one of them questioned his authority.

‘Sisters,’ he said. ‘May I suggest you take yourselves to the chapel to pray for her immortal soul?’

Quietly, led by Sister Rita, they trooped up the corridor, their sandals slap-slapping in a sadly muted harmony on the stone slabs of the floor.

‘As I said earlier,
I rather suspect she wanted to be caught,’ Rafferty commented again, several hours later as, with the body of the Prioress removed to the mortuary, he and Llewellyn packed up the gear in their borrowed office at the convent before heading back to the station.

'Why else leave a clearly pricey watch on the dead man's wrist? Why mention it when she must have suspected I would find out she hadn't seen it? And then, why put him in a grave so shallow that it was inevitable some animal would disturb it? Why duck out of accompanying Sister Rita to the grave herself to confirm the facts when she could have deputed any of the older nuns the task of calming the hysterical novice, Cecile? And why were the missing spare set of keys to the convent not replaced?

'If they had been taken by either Father Kelly or Dr Peterson, both men had ample opportunity to replace them. The fact that they remained missing from their hook so long after the murder encouraged me to speculate on the reason why. I could only conclude that the killer wanted to be caught and was providing me with clues to their identity.

‘And who more likely than a guilt-ridden religious to act in such a way? Now you know why I felt certain down to my lapsed Catholic bones that one of the sisters was the killer.’

Rafferty was careful to keep to himself the fact that he had only found answers to all these questions long after his religious prejudices had already prompted him to latch on to one – any – of the sisters as the guilty party.

But at least this murder and the woman who had inflicted such a violent death had cured him of his brief flirtation with the Catholic faith. Never again would he allow it to tempt him back to the fold. He still hadn't told Llewellyn of his near conversion and he didn't do so now. As Abra had advised him in what seemed a lifetime ago, there were some things a man was best advised to keep close to his chest.

‘You want to know what I think, Dafyd?’ Rafferty didn't wait for the Welshman's response, aware, even after his latest successful search for the truth, that his intellectual sergeant didn't always find his thoughts either impressive or admirable. 'I think that what she had done truly horrified her. How could it not? Her mind must have been in turmoil when her dying sister warned her that her son would be in contact and would turn up at the convent again. And that this time, he would not swallow the lies she had previously told him.

'If she did have some sort of religious vocation, which I have my doubts about, she must have suffered a 'crisis of faith'. How could she not, after what she had done? And then there was her fear of exposure and the revelation of the many deceptions necessary after her hasty, ill-thought-through adoption of Sister Catherine's identity.

'I suppose, too, before the murder, she had been worried about losing the position of 'Mother', which with the death of Mother Joseph, seemed as guaranteed as anything can be in this life.

'But after she killed her son, I think all these things were eclipsed by her distress at what she had done. I imagine, when her son raged at her for her dreadful deceit, she must have suffered some kind of brainstorm. After all, she had lived a lie for years. It must have been a dreadful strain for her. I think it was that final stress of her son's bitter accusations that made her forget her God, pick up that heavy rock and bring it crashing down on his head.

'Almost as soon as she had hit him she must have been overcome by horror at what she had done, not able to believe that the man lying at her feet was dead, her only child, and that she was responsible. Worse, that her killing of her own child was a sin that no amount of praying could ever put right.

‘Hardly surprising that she should feel that taking her own life, although yet another sin under her Catholic faith, was the only suitable retribution. That old ‘eye for an eye’ syndrome. She had taken another's life, so she had to sacrifice her own. It just took her a while to build up to it.'

‘The Catholic faith is a harsh one, is it not?’ Llewellyn observed quietly after they had carried their final boxed-up statement forms and other police investigatory paraphernalia to the car and put them in the boot. ‘With a harsh, demanding, unforgiving doctrine.’

Llewellyn put his hand on the handle to the vehicle's boot, but before he closed it, he told Rafferty, ‘I have some insight now into why you have chosen to remain lapsed all these years.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Rafferty muttered. It wasn't an invitation.

Nor was it one that Llewellyn took up. Instead, he changed tack entirely.

‘I've been meaning to ask you about those blackmail letters you received. Did you manage to find some resolution there, too?’

‘Don't worry about them, Dafyd. They've been squared away. The letters and the blackmailer both.’

It was the second resolution. Fortunately, it was one that Llewellyn chose not to question him about further.

It occurred to Rafferty as they climbed in the car that a man would be a fool indeed not to also square away his and Abra's futures.

He didn't want to risk her being enticed way by a man who was slightly less of a fool than himself.

And although he acknowledged that his ma had saved his bacon, his sanity and his career, he still found the thought of having two Mrs Raffertys in his life a traumatic one. Certainly, it was a decision not to be taken lightly.

But, then again, he acknowledged as he turned the car and headed for the police station, and even though marriage lines had never stopped anyone straying, he wasn't a man to shy away from a challenge.

Geraldine Evans
has been writing since her twenties, but never finished anything. It was only hitting the milestone age of thirty that concentrated her mind. She then wrote a book a year for six years, only the last of which (
Land of Dreams
), was published. As well as her popular Rafferty & Llewellyn mystery series, she has a second mystery series, Casey & Catt and has also had published an historical novel, a romance and articles on a variety of subjects, including, Historical Biography, Writing, Astrology, Palmistry and other New Age subjects. She has also written a dramatization of
Dead Before Morning
, the first book in her Rafferty series.

She is a Londoner, but now lives in Norfolk England where she moved, with her late husband George, in 2000.

Blood on the Bones
is the ninth in her 15-strong humorous Rafferty & Llewellyn mystery series. She is currently working on the next in the series. She also hopes to put out a tenth ebook later in 2013.