Deadly Reunion (3 page)

The Senior Common Room was at the front of the house and their borrowed office was at the back. From where he stood, Rafferty could see cricket and rugby pitches stretching to the middle distance. At the edge of his vision was what looked like tennis courts and Jeremy Paxton had mentioned they had a swimming pool in one of the outbuildings. All in all, they seemed to do very well for themselves.

They had interviewed all the reunees and they had all said much the same. Even the ever-rebellious pig-hater, Sebastian Kennedy hadn't strayed from the general line, which was that nothing out of the ordinary had happened on the day that Adam Ainsley had gone for a run and never come back.

When questioned as to why nobody had commented on his absence at dinner, they had all claimed they had assumed the dead man had either gone to his room or decided to eat in the town. According to Giles Harmsworth, and the others had said the same, Adam Ainsley had been in a funny mood all morning and – considering this was a reunion – had been pretty unsociable towards most of the group. And when Rafferty had commented on this, Harmsworth and the rest had claimed the dead man had never been any different.

‘Always got in a humour on the slightest pretext', had been Harmsworth's take on this. ‘We thought nothing of it.'

‘So none of you went to see where he was when he didn't show up for dinner that evening?' Rafferty persisted.

‘No. We had no reason to.'

The school's dormitories, for the older pupils at least, were made up of two-bed rooms. The dead man had been sharing with Sebastian Kennedy, but as Kennedy had been steadily depleting the school's wine cellars during the evening, he had – or so he claimed – failed to notice that Ainsley was still not in their room at midnight, which was the time Kennedy had finally staggered off to bed.

‘What do you think, Dafyd?' Rafferty asked once they were finally alone. ‘Do you reckon they're colluding for some reason?'

Llewellyn shook his thinly handsome face. ‘No. They're too disparate a group. I can't see that Giles Harmsworth or Victoria Watson would agree to conceal a crime.'

‘Unless they did it,' Rafferty chipped in.

‘There's always that possibility, of course. But we have no evidence as yet that this was anything other than a suicide.'

‘Come on! How likely is it that anyone of sound mind would choose such a method?'

‘We don't know that he was of sound mind – we found antidepressants in his room. And maybe he didn't know what symptoms the poison would cause and thought he would just go to sleep. As I said, we've no evidence that he didn't kill himself.'

‘We've no evidence that he did, either. And given that he must have been a well-educated man seeing as he attended Griffin School, would he really not have taken the trouble to find out what the poison did to the body before he did the business? And, taking that into consideration, if he did kill himself, hemlock seems a particularly peculiar method to choose, given that it paralyzes the limbs and Ainsley used to be a professional sportsman. Why not just use pills and whiskey?'

Llewellyn gave a tiny shrug. Rafferty was pleased to see that, for once, his educated sergeant had no arguments against his theories. They had been through the dead man's things and there had been nothing – apart from the anti-depressants – to indicate that suicide was a possibility, though he got Llewellyn to make a note to check with the dead man's doctor. No one had said that he seemed other than they remembered him from the days when they had been cooped up together for weeks at a time and got to know one another intimately. No suicide note or suspicious substances had been found. Though, on the other hand, as Rafferty regretfully acknowledged, neither had there been anything to indicate that Ainsley felt he had reason to fear for his life from one of his fellow reunees. Why would he have attended the reunion if that had been the case?

They had found nothing of any interest at all. Yet it must be one or the other as accidental death was surely out of the question.

Adam Ainsley had, after a career as a professional rugby player, studied to become a sports coach and was now employed as a Physical Education teacher at another private school; this much he had learned from the other reunees. He had been twice divorced and at the time of his death had been single, with no known romantic entanglements. From the various comments from his former classmates, the dead man had been a popular boy with the girls at the school and had cut a swathe through most of them. His moody, Byronesque manner clearly finding favour with the fair sex. And, given his sporting prowess, he had been equally popular with the boys.

To listen to the surviving reunees, the wonder was that anyone should have wanted to do away with such a popular young man. But someone had. Rafferty was convinced of that, in spite of Llewellyn's mention of suicide. And he would find out which of them it was, no matter how many expensive legal types they conjured up between them.

TWO

G
iven that Dr Sam ‘Dilly' Dally had performed the post mortem late on Tuesday and the toxicology reports hadn't come through until the afternoon of the next day, it was eight in the evening by the time Rafferty and Llewellyn finished questioning the seven suspects amongst the reunees. They had also questioned the cook, Mrs Benton, who had got on her high horse when Rafferty had asked her if she had any idea how hemlock might have found its way into either Ainsley's vichyssoise soup or his chicken salad.

‘That food was perfectly all right when it left my kitchen,' she had insisted, bosom and grey curls bouncing indignantly. ‘Has anyone else died or been taken ill? No,' she answered her own question. ‘Of course they haven't. It's that lot out there you need to interrogate.' She stabbed her right index finger in the direction of the dining hall where the seven suspects had been joined by the other reunees for their evening meal. To judge from the racket going on beyond the serving hatch, the news of the day was still being avidly discussed, but Rafferty noticed that the seven were being given a wide berth. As though conscious of their leper status, they huddled together for warmth. Even the oh-so-confident Giles Harmsworth and the bad boy, Sebastian Kennedy, seemed subdued and kept their heads bent over their melon and Parma ham starter.

Mrs Benton reclaimed Rafferty's attention. ‘Thirty years I've worked at this school and some of that lot were vicious thugs back then; it seems they're no better now. Yes, it's them what you want to question, Mr Detective, not me. I've always been a good, honest woman, never done anything wrong in me life, not like that lot. That Giles – the one who's now ‘something in the City', he's not as holier than thou as he'd have you believe. Teacher's pet and a snitch is what he always was. I don't suppose he's changed much and it won't be long before he's confiding something to you. It just better not be about me, that's all or I'll fetch him a clout round the ear, big and self-important as he is, that he won't forget in a hurry. And that Kennedy boy, he was always a troublemaker. Lives on a trust fund, or so I gather. The saying that the Devil finds mischief for idle hands is true enough. And another thing. You want to ask yourselves why it was that too handsome for his own good bloke, Adam Ainsley, was the one who was poisoned. He always had the girls after him. You mark my words, this'll be one of them crimes of passion that the Froggies go in for. I always thought he'd come to a sticky end.'

Rafferty had, in spite of her unhidden antagonism, questioned the cook thoroughly, though she'd inadvertently told them as much about several of the suspects as any snitch. He thought he could discount Mrs Benton and Tom Harrison, the groundsman cum caretaker, from the list of suspects, as even though Mrs Benton had admitted little liking for the dead man or a number of his fellow reunees and had prepared Ainsley's last meal on this earth, he couldn't see how she could have poisoned him without taking out some of the rest of the table; each table's soup was served up in a tureen from which it was ladled out into the individual dishes at the table. The same applied to the salad. The lemon sponge that they'd had for pudding would have given no opportunity for doctoring. And, however chippy her personality, he didn't have Mrs Benton tagged as a psycho. Harrison, the groundsman, had been in the kitchen earlier in the day, for his elevenses, and could have added hemlock to the ingredients for the meal. But again, like Mrs Benton, he would have had to have no qualms about taking out whoever was unfortunate enough to share Ainsley's table.

Mrs Benton had explained that one person at each of the dining hall's eight-seater tables would come to her hatch and collect each course. For the suspects' table, it had been the Senior Common Room peacemaker, Victoria ‘Brains' Watson, who had collected the food and dished it out. This would then be passed along the row, first on one side and then on the other. Adam Ainsley had been sitting at the far end of the table on the opposite side from Victoria. From this, Rafferty had concluded that any one of four people would have had the best opportunity to slip something in Adam Ainsley's food. There was Victoria ‘Brains' Watson, who had served up each portion; Giles Harmsworth; the over-serious Alice Douglas; and Simon Fairweather, the quiet young man who, beyond mentioning that he was a civil servant at the Home Office, had had little to say for himself, even at the interview. This left the other three as less than prime suspects: Sebastian Kennedy, Sophie Diaz and Asgar Sadiq. It seemed unlikely but possible that either Kennedy, Ainsley's left-hand neighbour, or Gary Sadiq, Ainsley's neighbour across the table from him, might also have had a chance to slip a foreign substance in his food. Anyway, they would all remain on the suspects' list for the present.

Rafferty had brought in some more uniforms to help question the other hundred reunees. Although it didn't seem they would have had the opportunity to poison Ainsley, Rafferty had the feeling that the cause of this murder – if murder it was, as it might turn out that Llewellyn was right and they could still be labouring over a suicide – lay deep in the past when they had all been teenagers together. So they might well have useful information. The motive for murder was, he thought, going to take some digging out. But at least, for now, he was more than happy to simply burrow into the surface memories of each of them. Any deeper digging would have to wait until they'd separated those who'd been amongst Adam Ainsley's intimates, whom Rafferty and Llewellyn would question more deeply, and the rest.

Paxton, beyond supplying them with their room, the map of the school and the list of the reunion's attendees and their home addresses, had been able to provide them with little other information. Of course, he had been in post for less than a year. Rafferty made a mental note to find out the name and current address of the school's previous headmaster, who had, according to Paxton, been
in situ
for several decades and who had certainly been in his post when the current reunees had attended the school.

They returned to the station and while Llewellyn typed up the interviews of the seven suspects, Rafferty sat and made a list of chores for the next day. If he was to find out about possible vendettas, soured love affairs and the like, he would need to go and see Adam Ainsley's parents, who lived in Suffolk. And he would need to send somebody to question Adam Ainsley's two ex-wives. For that he thought a woman's touch was called for and Mary Carmody, the motherly, thirty-something, sergeant sprang immediately to mind. People confided in her; even Superintendent Bradley tended to seek her out in the canteen and bend her ear over budgetary worries and insubordinate inferiors – not that Mary had betrayed his confidence – but Bradley's earnest stance over the tea cups and Mary's motherly, head on one side air, had given it away. That, and the fact that, even when he was whispering, Long-Pockets Bradley had something of a booming voice. Quietness wasn't in the man. Yes, he'd despatch Mary with Llewellyn, who was diffident with women, to one ex, and he'd take the other himself.

As for the suspects, the number of these was thankfully small, as after speaking to the cook and the seven reunees, he couldn't see that anyone else but those on the same table as Adam Ainsley would have been able to administer the hemlock. Coffee and biscuits had been served on the reunees' arrival on that first morning, but that was all. Their first – and only, as it turned out – meal all together had been the lunch. And he thought it almost certain that the hemlock must have been administered that Tuesday lunchtime in Ainsley's meal, as it was too far-fetched to imagine he would accept any part of the plant from anyone. What possible reason could be given for proffering such a thing? No. It was the not-so-magnificent seven who were in the frame.

Rafferty yawned and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was ten o'clock. It had been a long day and tomorrow would probably be longer. ‘You get off home,' he told Llewellyn once he had typed up the statements from the seven suspects. ‘We'll make an early start in the morning.'

After Llewellyn had said goodnight and left, Rafferty spent some time wondering how he was going to explain to Abra that they were about to have some unexpected houseguests. She wouldn't be any more pleased than he was himself, especially as she still had hopes of persuading him to get started on the decorating, which the presence of guests would make impossible.

How to break it to her, though? Could he perhaps claim that Ma was celebrating a special birthday that required the attendance of the wider Rafferty and Kelly families? He shook his head. No. Abra was the one who remembered all the family birthdays; he hadn't had to trouble since they'd started living together. She'd know that Ma wasn't anywhere near a particularly special birthday.