Down Among the Dead Men (eBook)

British Detectives

Geraldine Evans (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
192 Seiten
Solo Books (Verlag)
978-0-00-012805-8 (ISBN)

Infos

'I have fallen in love with her slow-paced but interesting books.'

A Little Laughter. A Little Mayhem. A Little MURDER...

When beautiful Barbara Longman is found dead in a meadow, uprooted wild flowers strewn about her, and, in her hand, a single marigold, British Detective Joe Rafferty at first believes the murder may be the work of the serial killer over the county border in Suffolk.

But then he meets the victim's family - and after liaising with the Suffolk police, he rapidly comes to believe that the mystery killing is the work of a copycat...one much closer to home; someone among the descendants of the long-dead family patriarch, Maximillian Shore.

Everyone, it seems, had a motive: Henry,  the grieving widower; the victim's brother-in-law Charles Shore, the ruthless tycoon; Henry's first wife, the Bohemian Anne, who has lost the custody of her teenage son to the saintly Barbara.

Even the long-dead patriarch, Maximillian Shore, seemed, to Rafferty, to have had some involvement in the murder, though how, or why, Rafferty doesn't understand, until he finally grasps the truth behind the reason for the killing. A truth sad and dreadful, and which had been evident from the start, if only he had had the eyes to see.

RAFFERTY & LLEWELLYN BRITISH MYSTERY SERIES

Dead Before Morning #1

Down Among the Dead Men #2

Death Line #3

The Hanging Tree #4

Absolute Poison #5

Dying For You #6

Bad Blood #7

Love Lies Bleeding #8

Blood on the Bones #9

A Thrust to the Vitals #10

Death Dues #11

All the Lonely People #12

Death Dance #13

Deadly Reunion #14

Kith and Kill #15

Asking For It #16

The Spanish Connection #17

WEBSITE/BLOG: https://geraldineevansbooks.com

Textauszug

A woman of about fifty opened the door to their ring. The housekeeper, Rafferty guessed. Deep lines were scored from her nostrils to her mouth and her lips were puckered, as if life had sapped her dry. Her eyes, though were sharp and bright with curiosity.

Her appearance only served to increase Rafferty's sense of foreboding. For, in an attempt to bridge the intellectual divide between Llewellyn and himself, he had recently embarked on some self-education, starting with what he chose to regard as the lighter classics, and the grim housekeeper reminded him strongly of Mrs Danvers.

In case the resemblance to the Manderley housekeeper should extend to the personality as well, Rafferty was at his most formal as he introduced himself and Llewellyn. 'We'd like to see Mr Henry Longman, please,' he requested, putting away his warrant card. 'It's about his wife. We have some news for him.'

'I see.' Her gaze flickered over him, and although she didn't question him, Rafferty got the impression she guessed they didn't bring good tidings. Silently, she ushered them inside.

'You're Mrs...?'

'Mrs Griffiths. I'm the housekeeper here.'

Rafferty nodded. Been here for years, he imagined. She had that air about her that suggested she would know all the family secrets.

They followed her down the hallway. On the walls on either side were what appeared to be hand painted pictures of flowers. The hallway was too dark for Rafferty to read the inscriptions under the flowers, but the paintings were exquisitely executed, and even Rafferty, whose knowledge of flowers was scanty, had little difficulty in recognising several of the more distinctive flowers; pansies and marigolds and delphiniums.

As they passed the last of the paintings, the perfume from a massed arrangement of late roses greeted them and Rafferty paused to admire the display. Palest pink, each petal was touched with yellow, and their spicy fragrance provided much more of a welcome than had the housekeeper. The flowers looked fresh, as though they had only been picked the day before, yet already, several bright petals lay scattered like fallen tears on the polished mahogany table and, in a return to the fanciful earlier mood, Rafferty imagined they wept for the dead fairy nymph in the meadow. He gave an appreciative sniff and murmured, 'Beautiful.'

Obviously Mrs Griffiths wasn't a nature lover, for her lips tightened and she observed tartly, 'Beautiful maybe, for those who haven't got to keep clearing up petals from all over the floor.' She met Rafferty's glance with an uncompromising stare and said no more.

The old mahogany panelling, that looked as if it had been there since the house was built, made the hall depressingly dark, and the flowers provided a delightful and much needed splash of colour and scent. Rafferty was surprised that such a high flier as Charles Shore hadn't torn out all the morbid panelling years ago, or at least stripped off the old varnish. Perhaps, he mused, he was fostering a lord of the manor image, but if so, the ugly Victorian mansion was hardly appropriate.

'Mr Henry's upstairs,' Mrs Griffiths informed them. She opened a door to the left of the hallway. 'Perhaps you'll wait in the library while I tell him you're here?' Unsmilingly, she shut the door on them.

There were more roses in the equally gloomy library. By way of contrast, these were yellow, flushed with pink, and had the sweet soapy scent of a freshly scrubbed infant. The room should have been bright and airy with its high ceilings and large windows, but, like the hall, the panelling defeated other architectural merits. Perhaps in the winter, with a fire crackling merrily in the grate, the room would shed its melancholy atmosphere, but somehow Rafferty doubted it and now, the oppressive heat, the heavy old-fashioned furniture and the dark wood walls, all combined to give him the sensation of being enclosed in a king-sized coffin. Striding over to the windows, he flung one open to its full extent before gazing around the rest of the room.

As a bit of light relief from the panelling, floor to ceiling bookshelves covered one entire wall and part of a second. He'd never seen so many books outside a public library. There were literally hundreds of them, all with rich dark green leather bindings, and gold lettering, that echoed the geometrical patterns of the crimson rug that covered the middle of the floor.

'Keshan,' Llewellyn commented, as he followed Rafferty's gaze. 'Persian,' he enlarged, when Rafferty still looked blank. 'Made of silk. Much sought after now, I believe. There's an old Persian saying, "The richer the man the thinner the carpet”.'

'Prefer a nice Wilton myself,' Rafferty retorted. Aware he had uttered a heresy, he turned away and studied the stacks of books. The dismal thought occurred to him that he might have to get through as many as those before he could match Llewellyn, knowledge for knowledge and quote for quote.

More books were scattered on assorted tables. Whoever had stocked the library had certainly had a lively interest in other people's business, he realised, because as he roamed around the shelves, he noticed that there were a great many histories and biographies of well-known people; Chaplin, Abraham Lincoln, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, all the greats from every sphere were represented here, politicians, sportsmen, industrialists, writers. Unsurprisingly, given that the Shore family's entrepreneurial skills had gained them the bulk of their wealth, biographies of businessmen seemed to predominate.

School-books were strewn on the long table under the windows; an open exercise-book showed no more than half a dozen badly spelled and ungrammatical lines, scrawled in an immature fist. The older boy's extra holiday work, Rafferty guessed. Poor little sod, he thought wryly, reminded of his own extra-curricular reading tasks, he didn't seem to have got very far with it. It appeared that, like himself, the boy wasn't much of a scholar.

Suddenly becoming conscious of eyes staring at him, Rafferty raised his head to the portrait which hung between the windows. It was a magnificent piece of work. It dominated the room and, although like the house, the oil colours were sombre – workhouse grey and mourning purple – the personality of the subject fairly leapt out of the canvas.

There was no mistaking the family patriarch; it was old Maximillian Shore to the life. Rafferty guessed that it must have been done not long before his murder, because he remembered exactly the same uncompromising features staring out from newspapers after his death. Almost biblical in appearance, his was the sort of uncomfortable face that caused a lapsed Catholic like Rafferty to seriously consider his sins. Under black brows fairly bristling with Old Testament fervour, the fierce grey eyes that had demanded his attention, stared contemptuously back at him, as if taking in every detail of his unruly auburn hair, his carelessly tightened grass green tie, and scuffed, down at heel black shoes.

Feeling censured, Rafferty looked down at the inscription beneath the portrait, but was irritated to discover that this was in Latin and he was unable to read it. As he remembered that the old man's background was no more grand than his own, he raised his eyes to Shore's disdainful countenance and exclaimed cuttingly, 'Latin! You're a pretentious old twat, that's what you are.'

Llewellyn came to stand beside him and – naturally – read the inscription on the portrait with ease. '"Hoc volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas"—The fact that I wish it is reason enough for doing it,' he translated, 'from Juvenal's Satires. A more literal translation might go something like, "This I will, thus I command; let my will serve as reason". Pretty apt choice for Maximillian Shore, wouldn't you say, sir? From what you told me about him, I gather he was something of a tyrant.'

'Oh, yes,' Rafferty snapped. 'It's exactly what I'd have chosen myself.' It was ironic, he reflected, that, although he was a Catholic, the only Latin he knew was from the assorted hymns he used to sing as a schoolboy, at Benediction on Friday afternoons. Like a gathering of parrots, he and his classmates had chirruped away, without the least idea what they were singing about. The religious classes had been mostly conducted on similar lines, and he recalled the rows he'd had with his mother because he refused to believe something was true just because a humourless man in a black frock told him so. Such independence of mind was probably the reason he'd ended up a policeman instead of a builder, like the rest of his family, he concluded. Though, of course, his ma had had something to do with the choice. He still wasn't sure whether to be pleased or sorry, but when his sergeant insisted on putting his Latin prose through its paces, the thought of a building site, even on a freezing winter's morning, appeared surprisingly attractive. At least there, the only impressive gift for language he'd be exposed to would be the crew's rich and unabashed fluency in Anglo-Saxon.

Scowling at the portrait and its inscription, Rafferty, more to shut Llewellyn up than from any great interest, picked up a book about Lloyd George from the table and flicked though it, only to shut it hastily as he heard a hesitant throat clearing from the doorway. Expecting a thrusting executive type, he was surprised to see some kind of handyman hovering there instead, clad in an old shirt, covered in a colour kaleidoscope of what looked like paint stains. It gave him a raffish, Bohemian...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.12.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 0-00-012805-8 / 0000128058
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-012805-8 / 9780000128058