Love Lies Bleeding (21 page)

Strangely, in her eagerness to incriminate Felicity, Stephanie Raine seemed blind to the fact that she herself had even more opportunity than Felicity to use her own computer to order the drug.

Though, why would she? Rafferty asked himself. No one they had questioned had said other than that she doted on Raymond. And no one, other than Elaine Enderby, the Raines’ close neighbour, had commented that Stephanie's behaviour towards Raymond had been ‘inappropriate’. But then, in passing their home as she must often do, she would have the opportunity others lacked to hear unguarded conversations during the bright summer evenings.

Unless Raymond had spurned some far from maternal advances from Stephanie, he really couldn't see that Stephanie would have a good enough motive for wishing him dead. There again, while Elaine Enderby hadn't said Raymond had dismissed her affection, she had said that he seemed amused by it.

But if rejected lust hadn't been a factor, he thought it unlikely that, for Stephanie, the cash on its own would be a sufficient spur for murder. She clearly didn't lack for money and, equally clearly, her love for Raymond seemed sincere, even if it was inappropriate.

But then Felicity, like Stephanie, also claimed to love the dead man. The killing of a spouse was a far more regular occurrence that the killing of one's grown-up stepchild, but even so …

Of course, as he remarked to Llewellyn after he had thanked and dismissed DC Jonathon Lilley, the sooner they accessed Stephanie Raine's computer, the sooner they might be able to discover if in fact the drug
had
been ordered from it. To this end, he suggested they get themselves over to Stephanie Raine's home immediately.

Somehow, in spite of their previous, less than friendly encounter, Rafferty had a feeling, whether or not his suspicions about the dinner-party conversation were proved correct, that Stephanie Raine would welcome this visit.

‘Tell
me, Mrs Raine,' Rafferty asked Stephanie. ‘Do you own a computer?’

Unsurprisingly, she nodded, clearly happy to confirm it.

‘We'd like to check it, if we may. We have yet to find the source of the Mogadon in your stepson's body and as my officer has now checked every other computer owned by any known friend of your stepson and his wife, I wondered whether anyone might have had access to your machine and used it to order the drug from the internet.’

‘Felicity, you mean?’ she murmured with an air of innocence while she directed a wide-eyed stare at him.

Rafferty, unwilling to gratify the woman's spite, said nothing. He didn't need to, for Stephanie Raine was racing ahead all on her own.

With an eagerness in her voice that she clearly found difficult to suppress, she told them, ‘Felicity certainly had access to my computer. She and Raymond were often here for lunch and so on, so she would have had plenty of opportunity to order anything she liked on my machine.’

‘Where do you keep it?’ he asked.

‘It's upstairs.’ Stephanie hurried towards the door and said, ‘Come along. I'll show you.’

After gaining Stephanie Raine's permission, Llewellyn turned the computer on.

Rafferty noted that the password was not conveniently stored on the hard drive, but had to be typed in each time the internet was accessed via the internet service provider -which, in Stephanie's case, was AOL. Given Stephanie's declared carelessness, this struck him as an odd thing for her to do.

‘Could you let me have your password, please, Mrs Raine?’ Llewellyn asked, careful to follow Rafferty's instruction that he not give Stephanie Raine the satisfaction of discovering from them what she might — or might not — have forgotten during what sounded to have been an evening of drunken pleasure.

‘Of course. It's “rayray”. All lower-case. Perfectly easy for Felicity to guess, particularly as it was my pet name for him.’

Fortunately, Stephanie didn't seem to have an addiction to sending emails or signing herself up for regular bulletins from various sites, so Llewellyn's check through her emails didn't take long ‘Here it is,’ he said, after another ten minutes. He printed out the confirmation of the order for the Mogadon.

It was, Rafferty noted, ordered in Felicity's name and with her credit-card details. Would this turn out to be another nail in her coffin? Rafferty wondered. Another prison door slamming on her future?

But, as Stephanie had been happy enough to point out when she had been doing her best to convince them that Felicity would have ready access to her computer, the same surely applied to Stephanie when it came to having ready access to Felicity's handbag and credit card. It was unlikely that Felicity would feel the need to take her bag with her when they went into the dining room to eat.

‘So when was this order sent?’ he asked Llewellyn as he peered over his shoulder.

‘The order was sent at one p.m. on Saturday the twenty-third of July,’ Llewellyn told them.

That was just over two weeks before Raymond's murder and three weeks after the dinner party, Rafferty worked out. He again peered over Llewellyn's shoulder. ‘And what about the delivery address? Was it the same?’

Llewellyn shook his head. ‘No. The drugs were delivered to Mr Nicholas Miller at his home here in Elmhurst. Felicity's handyman/gardener,’ Llewellyn reminded him.

‘How could I forget?’ How could he forget, either, that Miller was also
Stephanie ‘s
handyman/gardener? And possibly, given Elaine Enderby's comments about the ‘extras’ Miller provided his lady customers, he fulfilled a role that was something more than either.

‘’Can you remember who visited the house that day?’ he asked Stephanie. ‘And who could have had access to your computer at the time the order was made?’

As if aware that she had already betrayed an unattractive eagerness to tie Felicity's name to any wrongdoing, she hesitated, then said, ‘I'll have to check my diary. It's in my bag downstairs. I'll just go and get it.’

She was back in less than a minute. ‘Yes, here it is. I threw a barbecue that day. Everyone was here. I remember the weather was gorgeous.’

‘When you say “everyone”, would that include all the guests at your dinner party?’

‘Of course.’ After a slight pause, she couldn't resist adding, ‘Including Felicity.’

Rafferty, unwilling to gratify her desire that he share her eagerness to condemn, said quietly, ‘Perhaps you could let me have a list of their names?’

‘Certainly. The guest list is downstairs.’

They trailed after her down the stairs to the living room where she opened a small desk, rummaged through a wallet file with pockets labeled
INSURANCE, INVESTMENTS, UTILITY BILLS
and so on, then rummaged through further, as-yet-unfiled piles of chaotic paperwork that were promptly consigned to the floor in front of the filing cabinet, before she finally managed to produce the list.

There were thirty names on it, Rafferty noted. All would have to be questioned.

‘And did Felicity — or anyone else — spend any time alone upstairs?’

Before Stephanie had a chance to reply and further damn her daughter-in-law, Michelle burst into the room. She shot Stephanie a look of dislike and before Stephanie had the chance to say anything, told them that Felicity had certainly
not
gone upstairs that day; she had used the downstairs bathroom and that once only.

‘You're sure about that, Mademoiselle Ginôt?’ Rafferty asked. ‘You must have been busy with so many guests.’

‘Non.
Madame, she hire the caterers. I do nothing but relax.’

‘Even so, I presume everyone would be mingling. You could not have watched Felicity Raine all afternoon,’ Llewellyn objected.

‘What is this
minglingT

‘It means
mêler,
Michelle,’ Stephanie told her, adding triumphantly, ‘And you're right, sergeant, Michelle could not possibly have watched Felicity all the time.

Michelle opened her mouth, but Stephanie forestalled her.

‘You spent most of the barbecue flirting outrageously with my guests,’ she told Michelle. ‘I remember because I had to speak to you about it. You were an embarrassment.’

Michelle pouted, but said nothing further.

‘Let's
get over to Nick Miller's home,’ Rafferty said after they had left Stephanie Raine and Michelle Ginôt to indulge their simmering hostility. Tm keen to find out about this delivery he took in and whether he noticed Peter Dunbar watching the Raines’ home. One of them must have done, and with Felicity denying that either she or Raymond noticed him, we might have better luck with her handyman.’

‘Surely he'll be at work,’ Llewellyn protested.

‘Well, I know that,’ Rafferty retorted. ‘But I need to find out where he's working, don't I? With a bit of luck his wife will be at home. It's worth a try, anyway.’ He paused, then said, ‘Remind me. Where is it he lives again?’

Llewellyn told him.

‘OK. But put your foot down, Dafyd. And that's an order. I'm starved. We'll get some lunch as soon as we've spoken to Mr Miller.’

Nick
Miller's home and garden were far from being good adverts for his business, Rafferty noted as he walked up the weed-littered path and knocked on the wooden front door with its worn varnish. His own father had been the same, he remembered; if it hadn't been for his ma, who could turn her hand to most things, the Rafferty family home would have looked sorely run-down.

Mrs Miller looked as neglected as her home and garden. She was very thin, with straggly bleached blond hair as much in need of a colour job as the front door. Her clothes looked threadbare and seemingly as worn down by life as the rest of her.

She gazed at them from lacklustre eyes. ‘Yes?’

‘We wanted to speak to Mr Miller.’ After introducing Llewellyn and himself and showing her his warrant card, Rafferty said, ‘It's in connection with the murder of Mr Raymond Raine.’

She immediately bridled and demanded, ‘What's that got to do with my Nick?’

‘Nothing, as far as I'm aware. But we need to speak to him urgently about another aspect of the investigation.’

‘He's out. Working.’

‘So where am I likely to find him?’ Rafferty asked.

She frowned. ‘Let me see. It's Tuesday today, isn't it?’

Rafferty nodded.

‘You'd better come in. I'll have to check his diary.’

They followed her down a dim hallway to a back living room that was as uncared-for as the rest of the house.

She walked across to a cupboard in the corner, opened a drawer and pulled out a diary. Flipping through the pages, she crossed back to Rafferty. ‘Right. Well on Tuesday mornings he does a Mrs Tindall at Rose Cottage, in Springmeadow Lane. He usually finishes there around one o'clock.’

It was after 12.30, Rafferty noted from the clock on the mantelpiece. Just in case he missed him at Rose Cottage, he asked, ‘And what about Tuesday afternoons? Who does he work for then?’

‘His regular Tuesday-afternoon customer died last week. I can never remember the new one's name. Hang on,’ she said as she flipped through the diary. ‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘It's a Mrs Johnson that he goes to on Tuesday afternoons now.’ She handed the diary to Rafferty, who took the opportunity to flick through the entries for the rest of the week.

All of Nick Miller's clients were female, he noticed, and he recalled that Elaine Enderby had mentioned this little titbit. Interesting. He found himself wondering what the recently deceased customer had died of and before he closed the diary and returned it, he ‘accidentally’ let it slip open to a date a couple of weeks earlier to check the name of the previous Tuesday-afternoon client.

To his surprise, he saw that it was Sandrine Agnew. But Ms Agnew hadn't died a week ago. He had spoken to her himself on Thursday evening. As far as Rafferty was aware, she was still very much alive. He hoped so, anyway, as he wished to question her and the other guests to get their take on Stephanie Raine's dinner party.

So why, he wondered, had Nick Miller told his wife that Sandrine Agnew was dead? And why had Ms Agnew accepted her premature demise and the loss of her gardener? Reliable gardeners and handymen weren't so thick on the ground that you allowed one to remove you from his client list without protest. Unless she had found someone she preferred and had been willing to lose his services? Or perhaps, given her presumed lesbian sensibilities, it was simply that she had found the mucho macho Miller too much to stomach on a regular basis?

‘Tell me, Mrs Miller, do you and your husband act as a kind of
post restante
for his customers?’

‘Post what?’

‘It's just that we noticed that one of his customers ordered some goods and gave this as the delivery address,’ he explained.

‘Oh that. Many of Nick's customers are away from home a lot and miss important parcels. He just lets them use this address for convenience as I'm mostly at home to sign for anything that needs a signature. My Nick's a very obliging man.’

From her expression, Rafferty guessed that Mrs Miller's husband was altogether far too obliging to his lady customers for his wife's liking.

‘And have you signed for anything in the last few weeks?’

She shook her head. ‘But often I wouldn't need to. And the postman, and the delivery couriers of the firms that Nick's customers order goods from regularly, know to leave things in the greenhouse round the back if there's no one in. We never bolt the side gate. Anyone can go round and collect their parcels.’

Which meant that whoever had ordered the Mogadon would know they would have no problem picking it up without being seen, as long as they chose their moment carefully. Another glance at the clock told him he'd better get moving if he didn't want to chase over to the other side of town where Miller's new afternoon client lived.

As
they parked up, they saw Nick Miller's muddy blue van at the kerb and Miller himself balanced on a ladder on the pavement, stripped to the waist and wielding a set of expensive electrical hedge-cutters.

Miller was what Rafferty suspected his ma would call a ‘fine figure of a man’, with his flat stomach and the tanned and muscular physique that rippled in a way guaranteed to please the ladies as he wielded the cutters.