Although it was not yet five in the evening, there had been no secretary in the outer office. Had he had to let his staff go as well as his house? Dryden seemed desperate to make light of things and reassure them as if they were worried shareholders instead of disinterested policemen. It was as if he feared that more than his financial security rested on their believing him.
‘It's just a blip in the old cash-flow,’ he said. ‘Bit of strategic retrenching till the apartments sell. Nothing that more aggressive marketing won't put right.’
Rafferty thought the reassurance was as much for Dryden as for them.
They didn't stay long. Just long enough to question him about Isobel. ‘It's been implied that Isobel Goddard has another talent at her fingertips other than poor typing,’ Rafferty began.
Dryden just stared at him, saying nothing, though his body hunched.
‘Aren't you interested in knowing what that talent might be?’
Dryden shrugged. ‘Not particularly.’
Rafferty decided to pretend to greater knowledge than he possessed. ‘Of course you know Isobel well, don't you, sir? I imagine you're familiar with her usual methods of extracting money from the men in her life.’
That caused Dryden to sit up. He met Rafferty's gaze with all the practiced innocence of someone who had successfully gone through the Fraud Squad's wringer on several occasions. ‘I don't know what you mean, inspector.’
‘No? You're obviously one of the fortunate few then.’
It was clear that Ralph Dryden wasn't to be surprised into an admission. He was obviously too preoccupied with his own troubles to be pinned down on other matters, so after promising him they would return when he was in a state of mind more conducive to providing answers, they left and returned to the station where they wrote up their reports before Rafferty made his lonely way home.
That
evening, as on so many nights, Rafferty sat alone in his flat. He was in a maudlin’ mood as he brooded over several nightcap glasses of Jameson's. How many others were, like himself, he wondered, sitting alone and lonely right now?
Was Ralph Dryden one of them? Strange to think he might be sharing the solitary midnight hour with the property developer.
Loneliness, as he had discovered, made people especially vulnerable; highflying career women — and men – who had no one to go home to as well as pretty young women like Jenny and Estelle. Why else would they have joined a dating agency?
How many of them lacked friendly neighbours who took an interest or a close-knit family such as he had? Admittedly, his family as often caused him grief as gave him pleasure or support, but at least they were there.
Community was mostly a forgotten concept, he informed the television newscaster with a sweep of his arm that wastefully distributed whiskey over the carpet. How many like him, he demanded of the Anglian newsreader, were forced to have one-sided conversations with the one-eyed and self-absorbed friend in the corner of the room? Solitary lives encouraged lonely people into dangerous waters where sharks – and worse basked while they awaited their prey.
The dating of strangers was an everyday occurrence. Local papers, Sunday papers, internet sites, all had their columns of sad people striving to make themselves sound appealing; it was what had put him off going that route. Dating agencies provided a service from strangers to introduce strangers to other strangers. And some of these strangers were – as this Lonely Hearts case proved – very strange indeed...
Given such brooding melancholy, it wasn't surprising that when he finally stumbled his way to bed that Rafferty had another nightmare; one of the worst yet. The pictures in his head had been so vivid, the battered and slashed bodies of the two victims so bloodily graphic, that, already worried about his fading memory of both party nights, he had begun to wonder if he had killed the two girls and was in a state of denial. As well as the headaches and nightmares from which he woke sweat-drenched and with the shakes, he'd been having the occasional blackout when he'd come to and find a mug of tea beside him that he couldn't remember making and food in the fridge which he couldn't remember buying. He wondered if he was going mad. Because worst of all, in his nightmares, the face of the killer was now his own.
He sat up and turned on the bedside light. And as he stared into the room's corners where the light didn't reach, he worried again that it had been Nigel, his alter ego, who had been the last person to see both girls alive. The thought was preying on his mind more and more. The blackouts made him realize he could no longer remember where he had been around the time of the girls’ murders – had he been the one to follow Jenny to the Cranstons’ lonely car park and kill her? His previous recollection of saying goodbye to Estelle had vanished also. It was strange that he could remember, if vaguely, earlier episodes of both evenings yet now could no longer remember these crucial times. It was almost as if his mind was protecting him from knowledge he would rather not have.
He broke into a cold sweat as he asked himself, could I have killed them? Could that, rather than the high-minded, almost
knightly
desire to avenge the two victims, be the real reason why he was so protective of his secret and his cousin and was doing his damndest to divert suspicion?
It was true what he had told Llewellyn; he had been getting a lot of headaches. He had put them down to wearing his father's spectacles as the headaches hadn't started till he had begun to wear them. But he now wondered if the main cause of these headaches wasn't the bang on the head he had mentioned to Llewellyn? Funnily enough, he remembered telling Llewellyn that the bang on the head had happened before the murders, while Llewellyn was still on honeymoon. But was that true? Or was his previous conviction that this was so simply another example of his mind's subconsciously-protective games? But whatever explanation was the right one, it was certain that now he could no longer recall precisely when it had happened.
Between his headaches and his increasingly wakeful nights, his recollection of so much was becoming confused. He would have made an appointment with his doctor if it hadn't been for the murders. Now, with the episodes of amnesia, he was scared what he might reveal during an examination.
He didn't know how much longer he could keep up the twin penances of this investigation and his own sorry deceptions. Sometimes, all the lies and evasions sickened him. Once or twice he'd felt on the verge of confessing all to Llewellyn. The only thing that stopped him was the belief, deep in his soul, that in spite of his doubts, his real fears and his nightmares, he was guilty of nothing worse than being an unlucky fool. It was only after he awoke from yet another nightmare that the doubts and fears began again and he recalled the insistence of psychologists that we were all capable of murder…
Suddenly, desperately afraid, anxious to drown out such thoughts, Rafferty threw back the bedcovers, crossed to the living room and turned the TV back on.
Against
his better judgement and desire, he dropped off to sleep again, stretched out on the settee. But it was a blessedly dreamless sleep. He woke late, feeling dazed and sluggish. Somehow, he dragged himself into work, accompanied by the thought that a few short weeks ago all he had to worry about – well apart from his failure to get to grips with another murder case – was the suit Llewellyn intended to wear at his wedding. It seemed pretty small beer now.
But Rafferty, who always thought of himself as a pessimist with an optimist ever striving to break free, let the optimist have a fleeting glimpse of the open prison door with the reminder that he had got out of that problem okay in the end – before Superintendent Bradley arrived in his office like a man-o-war in full battle array and proceeded to blast the optimist's trapdoor to freedom with salvoes of fault-finding.
‘You're expected to be an efficient manager of manpower, Rafferty,’ he told him. ‘It's our ultimate resource. Yet now I find you've been squandering it as if it cost nowt, on an endless round of unnecessarily repeated interviews. How many times does a so-called witness have to write a statement saying they saw bugger all before you're satisfied? It can't go on, I'll tell you now. I'm a Yorkshireman and believe in plain-speaking, as you know.’
Rafferty did know. He could take a fair guess at what came next, too. ‘What will Region say?’ Rafferty muttered to himself seconds before Bradley.
‘What will Regions say about such a waste of resources?’ Bradley was visibly palpitating at the thought. ‘I want some results, Rafferty. I don't want to be forced to ask for further funding when you've carelessly frittered away what you had; it reflects too badly on me – us. Just give me some results man, that's all I ask. I know you pushed for us to go the DNA route on those party guests. But I don't want to do that unless I have to, it's bloody expensive. Anyway, it shouldn't be necessary if you were conducting the investigation in a competent manner. Detectives detect, Rafferty. At least they did in my young day. We didn't need all this new-fangled assistance to help us find our man. Just do the job you're paid to do. You know I'll back you to the hilt and beyond if you do.’
And pigs might fly, thought Rafferty as the optimist within pulled his squashed fingers from the trapdoor and with a quiet whimper, nursed their pulsating ache against his chest. But not a plain-speaking Yorkshire porker like you, he mouthed after the door-banging superintendent.
In
search of sympathy, Rafferty went to the Lonely Hearts Incident Room.
He was aware he looked rough, his eyes bloodshot, the skin beneath them deeply marked with fatigue; the several curious glances his appearance attracted from the team were deeply worrying. Worried that during each absence from the station something revealing might be discovered, each time he returned to work he felt a sense of foreboding as he waited for all hell to break loose.
Had something been discovered overnight or even before his late arrival? Had Smales shown another piece of untimely initiative? Had Kylie Smith, Kayleigh Jenkins, or both rung in to find out why he hadn't acted on their alibi retractions and arrested Nigel?
Nothing was said this time at least. But Rafferty noticed that even Llewellyn was giving him concerned looks. Was Llewellyn merely worried about his physical appearance Or was he, too, beginning, like Rafferty himself, to suspect he might actually be the murderer made flesh?
Llewellyn was sharp. Though not given to listening to canteen gossip, he usually managed to keep abreast of who on the team was doing what and why.
His altered appearance, his uncharacteristically devoted study of the paperwork and his previous – until Bradley had ordered otherwise – equally unusual reluctance to leave the confines of the station unless it was to venture far from the main witnesses, would be enough for Llewellyn's head to fill with questions. He had only to consider exactly when Rafferty had changed both his appearance and his behaviour and he couldn't help but make the connection.
The dangers of such a connection being made were increased when Bill Beard popped into the Incident Room to have a word with one of the team. Beard, who had been at the station longer than anyone in the room, considered himself something of an institution – a privileged institution – and rarely stood on ceremony. He certainly didn't when he placed himself foursquare in front of the board with the identikits of ‘Nigel Blythe’ pinned to it and observed, in front of the entire team, that the photo-fits looked a bit – no, quite a lot – like Rafferty.
If he was expecting some laddish response from Rafferty he was disappointed. For Rafferty was struck dumb. Worse, all the heads in the room swivelled, first to study the photo-fit and then to study Rafferty.
The worst of it was Rafferty knew he hadn't reacted naturally. At any other time, on any other case, he'd have made a joke about his many criminal forebears who had kept both the hangman and the crew of Australian-bound prison ships in full employment. But this time he'd just stood there not saying a word, with his easily-read features doubtless proclaiming guilt from every pore.
Everyone in the Incident Room went strangely quiet after that. Rafferty, desperate to get away from eyes that, after studying him curiously, now seemed to his guilty conscience to be doing their best to avoid meeting his gaze, hurriedly handed over to Llewellyn and left the room.
In the solitude of a cubicle in the Gents’ toilets, Rafferty convinced himself that several pairs of those eyes had looked at him as if they were reassessing his reason for his recently-altered appearance. He had, when he had first adopted the disguise and confounded such intimates as his Ma, Llewellyn and Maureen, congratulated himself on the success of his altered looks. Now it occurred to him that if – when Llewellyn or one of the smarter officers on the squad proved dogged enough to trace his family connection to Nigel, they might just look at him and his disguise and come up with the old two plus two answer.
And as he sat, staring at the biro and knife-cut comments and jokes on the grimy walls, he admitted his own surprise that his deception hadn't been discovered long since. Surely, he thought, by now Llewellyn had mentioned the name of Nigel Blythe to Maureen and heard her astonished response? But if he had, Llewellyn had said nothing to Rafferty. The suspense, the strain of waiting to be found out, was getting to him. He was overcome with the desire to remain locked in his little hermit's cell in the Gents’ till it all, somehow, went away.