A Thrust to the Vitals
| A Thrust to the Vitals |
| Rafferty & Llewellyn [10] |
| Evans, Geraldine |
| UK |
| (2006) |
Returning to Elmhurst many years after his involuntary departure, Sir
Rufus Seward doesnt get the chance to make amends for the past: hes
promptly murdered with a wood chisel. Rafferty and Llewellyn are on the
case, but when Raffertys younger brother is in the frame for the murder,
Rafferty finds himself torn between protecting his family and finding
the real killer...
A Thrust to the Vitals
A Rafferty & Llewellyn procedural
Geraldine Evans
In Loving Memory of my Darling Husband, George. This One’s For You, Sweetheart.
Originally published in hardback by Severn House Publishers Ltd
A Thrust to the Vitals
A Rafferty & Llewellyn procedural
Geraldine Evans
Copyright Geraldine Evans 2007
Discover other titles by Geraldine Evans at
http://www.geraldineevans.com
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This book is a work of fiction. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination.
Except for text references by reviewers, the reproduction of this work in any form is forbidden without permission from the publisher.
Cover Design by Cheryl at www.ccrbookcoverdesign.com
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Other Books By Geraldine Evans
About The Rafferty & Llewellyn cozy procedural series
Chapter One
It was just another day, yet another murder inquiry. And then Rafferty’s mobile rang. It changed everything.
‘JAR? That you?’
Detective Inspector Joseph Aloysius Rafferty immediately recognised his younger brother, Mickey’s voice, even though it sounded a bit strange. ‘What do you want, Mickey? Now’s not a good time.’ Rafferty frowned as he watched the white-suited forensics team bustle busily around him at the murder scene, their practised routine ensuring they didn’t get in one another’s way even if he got in theirs.
It was one o’clock in the morning and Rafferty was having trouble keeping his eyes open. The last thing he needed right now was a phone call from a member of his family. A call at such an hour was unlikely to herald good news. But Mickey was his brother, so he relented and said, ‘Come on, then. Spit it out. What can I do you for?’ And then braced himself for trouble.
From the other end of the line came a swiftly-indrawn breath. It made Rafferty’s frown fiercer. These facial gymnastics attracted the interest of his sergeant, Dafyd Llewellyn. Rafferty turned away from this scrutiny as Mickey said, ‘I just heard on the local radio that you’re in charge of the Seward murder investigation.’
Bloody hell, Rafferty thought. The dead man’s not even cold yet. Who let that cat out of the bag? But the suspects for this violent death were too numerous for him to even consider issuing reprimands right and left. News of the murder must have gone round the four-star, 100-bedroom, Elmhurst Hotel and Conference Centre venue like nits round a nursery school. It was impossible to keep a clamp on the wagging tongues of so many.
His brother’s voice interrupted the tail end of these thoughts and forced Rafferty from his wool-gathering.
‘Sorry, Mickey. What did you say?’
‘Christ, Joe. Can’t you listen? This is important.’
‘So’s my murder investigation,’ Rafferty retorted. ‘And I’d quite like to get back to it.’ Actually, what he’d rather do was go home and retire to bed with a nightcap. But chances were that wouldn’t be on the cards for hours.
Shoulders slumped, he leaned back against the nearest wall. Grumpily, he told his brother, ‘Spit it out so I can get started organising one more triumph for British justice, there’s a good lad.’
‘That’s just it,’ Mickey told him, his voice sounding increasingly tense. ‘I’m scared this case might turn out to be yet another
in
justice. You asked me what you could do me for. I’m worried, once your inquiry gets started, that you might think you have
reason
to do me for something. That something being this murder.’
Aghast, Rafferty felt a deep foreboding followed by an unwillingness to delve any further. But Mickey’s words gave him no choice and he demanded, ‘What are you on about?’ But before his brother could reply, Rafferty became conscious of the many listening ears surrounding him. Telling Mickey to hold on, he slipped from the murder scene in the plush penthouse suite of the Essex market town’s Elmhurst Hotel. He found a quiet corner in the corridor where he could see and be forewarned of all the comings and goings before he put the mobile back to his ear. Then, he said, in a harsh whisper, ‘Christ, Mickey, don’t tell me you were a guest at last night’s civic reception for our esteemed prodigal, Sir Rufus bloody Seward?’
Please don’t let him tell me that, Rafferty prayed to his long-ignored God. Fortunate it was that God chose not to ignore him, because his prayers were answered in the positive with an immediate and unexpected speed when Mickey said, ‘ No. I wasn’t at the party.’
Rafferty brightened, but only for a moment, because his brother barely paused for breath before he rushed on to tell him, ‘I know you won’t believe this, but I got an invite from Seward himself. I didn’t go. But, seeing as he was here in Elmhurst, I took the opportunity to go to see him late on in his hotel suite when the party was all but over.’
‘You did what?’ Rafferty realised he was shouting. Worse, he’d attracted odd looks from a couple of the uniformed officers guarding the outside door to the murder suite. They quickly averted their eyes when they caught sight of his scowling countenance. He was thankful to realise that his words sounded less incriminating than admonitory, as if he was giving some unfortunate a bollocking. Even so, he forced himself to calm down. He even managed to find a tight smile for Dr Sam Dally as he emerged from the lift, rolled in that familiar, bouncy way on the thickly carpeted hallway towards Rafferty and raised an eyebrow in greeting.
Rafferty told his brother to hang on again. He waited as Sam struggled to insert his generous body into his protective coveralls and disappeared into Seward’s suite. It was too public here, he thought, to be having this conversation — too close to the police and forensic bustle that surrounded the discovery of recent, violent death. The thought made him even more uneasy. His uneasiness forced him to lower his voice again till it was all but inaudible. But his brother, with his fear-heightened senses, still managed to hear him. Rafferty hoped no one else could.
But, never mind not having this conversation
here
; Rafferty thought it was undoubtedly a conversation he shouldn’t be having at all.
‘What on earth did you go and see Seward for?’ Rafferty was becoming more seriously concerned for his brother as admission followed admission. ‘It’s not as if you were ever best buddies, is it? Even at school, you always hated his guts. And with good reason, as I recall.’
Rufus Seward had always been a bully. And Mickey, having, in his youth, been small and skinny for his age, had been a natural target for Seward’s nastiness.
Rafferty had protected his younger brother as much as he could, but bullies always found their moment and it wasn’t as if he had been in a position to guard his brother all the time: they were different ages and therefore in different classes. Besides, Rafferty had been raised to stand up for himself, and part of him expected Mickey to be able to do likewise without help from him.
‘I—I had something I wanted to discuss with him. A bit of business…’
Mickey sounded awkward and Rafferty wondered, even as his unease grew and developed love handles, why his little brother felt it necessary to lie. He’d never been any good at it; it was a trait they shared. What possible business could his brother, a poor carpenter, just like Jesus, have with Sir Rufus Seward, the local bad boy prodigal made good?
Sir Rufus Seward had returned to his home town in triumph to receive Elmhurst Council’s civic honours and acclamations by the bucketful after his knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List.
This was the same Rufus Seward, who, in his youth, had made Mickey’s life – and those of so many others smaller and weaker than himself – a misery, until, fortunately for Mickey, Seward’s other physical pursuits had caused him to be all but chased out of town by a posse of angry fathers of tearful teenage girls.
In the intervening years, Seward had made his pile. He had returned to Elmhurst only the day before, for the first time since his involuntary departure, to receive his home town’s accolades after his ennoblement.
Sir Rufus’s civic honours had been awarded with all the dignity and pomp even his self-regard could desire. He had also received another, unanticipated honour: the attentions of a murderer who, unlike our own dear Queen with her gentle shoulder-tapping sword, had thrust a sharpened carpenter’s quarter-inch wood chisel deeply and far from gently, through Seward’s back and into his heart.
A clammy hand seemed to clutch Rafferty’s own heart. It gave it such a sharp squeeze that the organ paused in its beat for a few worrying seconds, before it resumed its thud, thud, thud again.
As a carpenter, Mickey worked with such chisels. They were the daily tools of his trade. He also had reasons — several of them — to hate Rufus Seward. If Rafferty had been any other copper, after his brother’s admission that he had been in Seward’s suite on the evening of his murder, he would have concluded Mickey had means, motive and opportunity in plenty and slap the cuffs on him. Fortunately for Mickey, if not for himself, as his brother had said,
Rafferty
was in charge of the investigation.
Last night’s reception had been attended not only by those who had peopled Seward’s past, but also by the great and good who had peopled what had been his present. And, from what Rafferty had learned from uniformed’s early questioning of the few guests who remained, Seward, during the party, had not hesitated to rub a number of his guests’ noses in his success. It must, if the reported accounts concerning his behaviour from several of the more unguarded attendees were anything to go by, have left some of the party guests feeling the urge to plunge something sharp between Seward’s meaty shoulders. For all his wealth and success, the man, like the boy, had been both a bully and a poor judge of people. Certain it was that he had badly misjudged someone, otherwise that someone wouldn’t have given into the plunging urge.
Rafferty could only pray that guilty someone hadn’t been his little brother. Because he knew — who better? — how much rage Mickey nursed in his heart against his youthful persecutor. Mickey also had a temper; one he hadn’t always managed to govern.
Now Rafferty, in an attempt to dispel his growing anxieties, did some confiding of his own. ‘You’re not the only family member with cause to be worried about Seward’s murder,’ he told Mickey. ‘You’ll never guess who else amongst our relatives received an invite. Only “dear” Nigel.’
‘Not Slimy Nigel?’
‘The very same.’
Nigel Blythe or Jerry Kelly, the name he had held before he had spurned it as being too common, was cousin to the Rafferty brothers, whom he considered himself a cut above.
‘Trust him to slime himself an invite to such a swanky do.’
‘Mmm. Muck, brass and Nigel always did form a natural, unholy trinity.’