Love Lies Bleeding (27 page)

How skilfully she had managed to spread the net of suspicion outwards from herself, to her mother-in-law, Raymond's cousin Mike, Sandrine Agnew and her deluded ex-husband. Even Nick Miller, the handsome gardener, had felt the fearful breath of suspicion.

Her second husband she had falsely had labelled a wife beater, making the lie the more convincing by denying it and applying appropriate theatrical make-up to provide the black eyes and the bruises.

No wonder, Rafferty thought, that she had begged him not to go to see her father; for it had been the information that she had trained as a make-up artist and worked in the theatre that had acted as an irritant in Rafferty's brain, causing the first stirrings to make him wonder whether, as the unlikely Gloria Llewellyn had been caught out in a crime, maybe the equally unlikely seeming Felicity might also turn out to be guilty as charged.

Rafferty gazed steadily at the still-smiling Felicity. ‘It seems congratulations are in order,’ he said. ‘And not only for your pregnancy, I think. You've been very clever.’ But not, he hoped, clever enough to get away with murder.

‘Clever?’ she echoed as she gazed up at him from eyes that were limpid grey pools of innocence. ‘What do you mean, inspector?’

‘Allow me to explain. You managed to almost make me believe in your innocence, in spite of all the evidence. I even defended you. And although my suspicions against you have been growing for some days, the discovery that you're pregnant really clinches it. But then, of course, all the wicked things you have done would have purpose — unless you enjoy evil for its own sake — only if you had reason to believe you would inherit Raymond's share of the trust. And as the only way you could do that was by having Raymond's baby—’

He broke off as he heard a gasp behind him. He turned and saw an ashen-faced Sandrine Agnew standing behind him. He hadn't heard her approach the semi-curtained trolley. She must have tired of waiting for Rafferty to return and tell her she could spend some minutes with Felicity and -given her status as a volunteer at the hospital — no one had tried to prevent her approaching the cubicle.

Now she hissed at Felicity, ‘Pregnant? How can you be pregnant? You told me you hadn't slept with Raymond for months. You hated him, you said. You told me you were longing to leave him and come to live with me.’

A look of alarm crossed Felicity's face. ‘Be quiet, Sandrine,’ she ordered.

‘What is the matter?’

Unnoticed during the hubbub of Sandrine Agnew's distressed questioning of Felicity, a curious Michelle had joined Rafferty, Llewellyn and Sandrine around Felicity's trolley.

‘How are you, Felicity?’ she asked before she took in the red stains on her dress and, with typical French grasp of such matters, she exclaimed, ‘You were
enceinte?

‘She is still
enceinte,
from what I've just heard,’ Sandrine told her in a voice faint with hurt and betrayal.

Felicity was quick to soothe her friend's distress. She glanced down; again her hand went to her stomach. ‘Yes. I'm pregnant. But I wasn't sleeping with Raymond — not willingly, anyway. You know how violent he could be. He raped me, forced himself on me.’ She gave a convincing sob and let a steady stream of tears flow down her pale and tragic face.

The tears convinced Sandrine, who seemed only too keen to be convinced. The previous look of suspicion vanished immediately. ‘Oh my dear,’ she murmured as she put a tender hand over Felicity's. ‘Don't upset yourself. We can bring up the baby together.’ Sandrine's plain face suffused with the rosy glow of pleasure. ‘We'll be a proper little family.’

Rafferty knew he was losing any control he might have had over this bedside scene. At Felicity's ready lies, Sandrine's anxieties were willingly thrust aside. He knew he had to do something, say something, if he was to have any chance of preventing Felicity, through her child, from getting her hands on Raymond's majority ownership of the Raine family fortune.

Over my dead body, Rafferty swore. He was determined to trap her into telling the truth for once. That way, the Crown Prosecution Service would have no cause to either drop the charges against her altogether, or lower them from murder to manslaughter, as he suspected they yet might. He couldn't be sure what they had would be enough to secure a conviction or even ensure that she stood trial. He knew that he must try to get her to convict herself from her own mouth. If he failed, even if she did still face a courtroom in a manslaughter charge, he couldn't be sure that Felicity's acting skills and air of vulnerability wouldn't sway a jury. He knew there was a more than average chance that Felicity Raine would succeed in getting the entire case against her overturned, if indeed it even went that far.

Rafferty shook his head. No. He was not going to allow that to happen. Felicity Raine was as ruthless a killer as Rafferty had ever met; she deserved the rope around her pretty neck, but as that was no longer possible, for the crimes — both criminal and moral — that she had committed, she should serve sufficient time behind bars to ensure the bloom went from her skin and the natural gold of her hair faded till it needed artificial assistance. That way, she would be less likely to so easily find more victims in the future …

And after unashamedly browbeating Michelle Ginôt into telling him the truth, Rafferty believed he knew just how he could achieve his aim. And now, even as Felicity raised her tear-stained beauty beseechingly towards Sandrine and told her, ‘It's you that I love and want to be with. It's only thinking of our plans that keeps me sane while I'm waiting for the police to discover my innocence,’ Rafferty put his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out the gold and diamond necklet that he had retrieved from Michelle and that she had confessed she had unhooked from Felicity's neck and stolen the first time Felicity had shared her bed in the little flat over the garage.

He held it up so they could all see it richly glittering under the harsh hospital lighting. Its very glitter seemed to speak of betrayal and sin.

‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked Felicity as he continued to hold the necklet up high.

For an infinitesimal moment, Felicity's gaze narrowed, then, as though calculating what, from her point of view, would be the best answer, she admitted it.

‘Yes. Of course. It was Raymond's wedding gift to me. I lost it some weeks ago, before Raymond's– ‘

For the first time, it hit Rafferty how Felicity's sentences, when she mentioned her late husband's name, would always drop off in that delicate manner, as if to imply the word ‘murder’ could no more sully her lips than the act of murder could sully her hands.

It was just another of her little tricks, of course, like using her theatrical make-up training to create her own bruises and black eyes. Like gulling Elaine Enderby and the infatuated Sandrine Agnew into helping to create the tapestry of deceit that branded Raymond a wife beater.

When he had questioned Elaine Enderby he had discovered, as he had prodded her memory and her diary, that co-incidentally Raymond had always left home on some business trip around the times of these injuries. Likewise, Felicity's bruises had always vanished shortly before his expected return.

It was only a small matter, but it had niggled him sufficiently to consider what it might imply. As did the pretty Michelle's apparent lack of male suitors. Man-like and British, it had never occurred to him that the French girl might be other than heterosexual. And when Stephanie Raine had said that Michelle's flirtatious behaviour at the barbecue had been embarrassing, he had assumed it had been the
men
with whom Michelle had flirted. How Stephanie had laughed at his naive assumption. His ears were still blushing from the humiliation.

Rafferty swung the delicate little necklace in the air and said, ‘It certainly disappeared, but you didn't lose it, Mrs Raine; it was stolen from you. Stolen as a keepsake by Michelle Ginôt the first time you and she became lovers.’

For a brief second, Rafferty had managed to surprise Felicity sufficiently to get through her defences to her black, murderous heart. And Sandrine Agnew had seen it. He watched as Sandrine, puzzled at first, then anxious, looked from Felicity to him and back again.

‘Felicity,’ she said uncertainly, ‘is it true what the inspector said? That you and Michelle were sleeping together?’

‘Don't be silly, Sandrine,’ Felicity responded as, from beneath her thick lashes, she darted an anxious glance towards Michelle. ‘Of course it isn't true. The inspector's playing games because he knows his case against me is falling apart. You must know it's you that I love and want to be with. I wish you'd make some effort to find Raymond's real killer,’ she said to Rafferty, ‘because I can't stand much more of this. And now, in my condition, all this stress is unlikely to be good for my baby.’

As he saw Sandrine's anxiety fade for the second time, Rafferty knew he was losing the advantage he had gained by producing the necklet. At Felicity's ready reassurance, Sandrine had been only too willing to suspend disbelief. Frantically he sought the words that would enable him to regain the upper hand. But before he could think of anything to say that might sufficiently disconcert Felicity into blurting out even part of the truth, Michelle Ginôt added the spark that was guaranteed to rekindle the hot embers of Sandrine Agnew's jealousy.

Michelle pouted and rounded on Felicity with full Gallic outrage,
‘Alors,’
she said, in her voice all the contempt of generations of French for perfidious Albion. ‘You did not it lose it, Felicity. Do not keep lying to your naive friend.
Sandrine est vraiment crédule, n'est-ce-pas? Et toi, tu es très cruel.’

Strangely, Michelle's mongrel mix of French and English sounded more sincere and truthful than all Felicity's language-fluent lies.

‘I steal it,’ Michelle insisted. ‘I undid it from your neck last time you were in my bed, just as
l'inspecteur
said. I wanted a keepsake I could wear close to my heart. But now—’

Michelle spat at Felicity with all the earthiness of her peasant forebears. Her aim was remarkably accurate. The stream of spittle hit Felicity full in the face.

‘Now, I want nothing of such keepsakes. I am glad
l'inspecteur
he take it from me. When I remember you lauging and telling me how
odieux
you found the love of the fat and gauche Sandrine, I think — I think, what it is that you must say about
me’

Sandrine's previous rosy glow at the thought of playing happy families with Felicity and her baby faded. Now she went deathly pale. Abruptly, she pulled her hand away from Felicity's as though scalded. ‘No,’ she said in a voice suddenly breathy with shock and pain.

For the briefest moment, Felicity's ready tongue failed to come up with a response to Michelle's claim. But she quickly recovered her wit.

‘Surely you can't believe what Michelle claims?’ Felicity whispered, in a breathy little voice of her own, as though equally stricken. But this time her fluent lies were not so readily believed.

Sandrine glanced from face to face before she asked, ‘Have you doubly betrayed me, Felicity? Did Raymond really rape you, as you claim? Or were you sleeping with him as well as with Michelle while you held me at arm's length? What of the promises you made to me when you asked how you might best get rid of your husband?’

‘Be
quiet,
Sandrine,’ Felicity ordered again, fear clearly evident in her voice. ‘Do you want to ruin everything?’

Sandrine Agnew gave a bitter laugh. ‘Ruin everything?’ she repeated. ‘For me, everything is already ruined. And I'll
not
be quiet,’ she told Felicity.

Sandrine deliberately turned her back on Felicity and her pleas and faced Rafferty. ‘I wish to make a statement,’ she said. ‘I colluded fully with Mrs Felicity Raine in planning the murder of her husband.’ Her face almost crumpled but visibly she got hold of herself.

'I wanted Felicity to leave him, you see. I didn't want his money, but apparently
she
did, which explains why she put me off time after time, saying he would never let her leave him and that we would have to kill him if she was ever to be free of him and his abuse.

‘Yet, it is clear to me now that, all the time she fobbed me off with more lies and promises, she was trying to become pregnant by him so she could inherit his fortune through his child.’

‘Shut up, you stupid, fat bitch!’ Felicity shrilled, as her demure and delicate air collapsed in the face of Sandrine's simple honesty.

Sandrine Agnew, Felicity's previously adoring puppy, turned red, then white. Before either Rafferty or Llewellyn could stop her, she had flown at Felicity and hit her with such force that Rafferty suspected this time she would have a black eye for real.

They managed to drag Sandrine away.

‘You — bitch,’ she echoed Felicity's name-calling in a barely heard whisper of horror. ‘You lied to me. Yes. Lied like you lied to all the rest.’

Sandrine pulled her arms away from Rafferty's and Llewellyn's restraining hands and with a dignity Rafferty could only admire, she said, ‘I am ready to give my statement now, inspector.’

‘Sandrine! No!’ Now it was Felicity's turn to be the supplicant. ‘Don't, I beg you, tell lies just because my behaviour has hurt you.’

‘But they won't
be
lies, Felicity, will they? We both know that. And I'll be making a statement and telling the truth because of what you have done to other people, not just me. You are capable of loving no one but yourself. I see that now. I suppose, in my heart, I always knew it, always suspected things between us would come to a swift end once I had served my purpose. And I was right. Wasn't I?’ she challenged.

As if recognising that Sandrine's statement would certainly cast plenty of doubt on her claimed innocence, Felicity became hysterical.

‘Make your statement, then,’ she screamed. ‘Maybe I'll make one too, and tell the police how you bullied me into going along with your plans for Raymond. I didn't want to, but you forced me. I was frightened of you. But it's true that I never loved you. How could someone like me have ever loved someone like you? Take a look at yourself, why don't you?’