Rafferty & Llewellyn Boxed Set Books 5-8 (eBook)

British Detectives

Geraldine Evans (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019 | 1. Auflage
932 Seiten
Solo Books (Verlag)
9780000146267 (ISBN)

Infos

For Readers who like mysteries without a lot of gore, humorous mysteries, and police procedurals.

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Absolute Poison

Superstitious British Detective Joseph Rafferty is having a bad week - not an unusual occurrence - and he can't help feeling trouble comes in threes.

Rafferty's premonition turns out to be accurate when a company manager is found dead at his desk. The tyrannical Barstaple had known full well that he was hated by most of the office. But did he really deserve to be poisoned? And so horribly.

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Dying For You

Detective Inspector Joe Rafferty manages to become chief suspect in his own double murder investigation. And all he'd been doing was looking for love...

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It had been his sergeant's wedding that had brought home to him that, far from still being the 'Jack the Lad' of old, he was not only lonely, but in danger of turning into a sad old git. So, with his fortieth birthday on the horizon, he decides it's time to take the initiative. To this end, he signs up with the Made in Heaven dating agency. Wary of Ma and his colleagues discovering his shameful secret, he borrows a fake ID. It's just unfortunate that the first two women with whom he strikes up a rapport should wind up murdered and with himself - or rather his alter ego - in the frame for the crimes.

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Bad Blood

A robbery gone wrong, Detective Joe Rafferty thought, when the latest murder victim, wealthy widow, Clara Mortimer was found battered to death in her home. Then Rafferty learned she wasn't a widow at all-and her estranged husband was living in the same block under a false name. But that's not the only suspicious aspect of the case: Clara Mortimer's family add another complication, not eased either by their several deceptions or by the difficulties in Rafferty's personal life, which, as always, seems to be guided by a malign fate and makes him take his eye off the investigatory ball. But could he help it if his automatic reaction when his live-in girlfriend Abra said she might be pregnant, wasn't exactly New Man?

Their investigation brings Rafferty and Llewellyn face to face with just how down and dirty families can be. And not just the families of murder victims.

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Love Lies Bleeding 
A most unlikely killer is British Detective Joe Rafferty's immediate thought when the slender and bloodied Felicity Raine stumbles into the police station and confesses to murdering her husband. Rafferty thinks her even more unlikely a murderer when he meets her in-laws, and catches them out in several deceits. There is something peculiar going on, he is convinced. Because although Felicity isn't due to receive any financial benefit from her husband's death, others in the Raine family certainly are.

Textauszug

BRITISH ENGLISH USAGE AND SPELLING

These novels use British English spellings and slang, so please be aware there are differences in language use. You will find a handy list of translations at the end of the last book in this boxed set.

‘THERE'LL BE ANOTHER one along in a minute—wasn't that what they said? Inspector Joseph Rafferty gazed at the very dead old lady in the bed and mused that usually it was in respect of buses, not bodies.

But this week the bodies were bunched like the rush-hour double-deckers on Elmhurst's congested streets. The first death had been of a World War Two veteran whose suicide note had derided the notion that this was land fit for heroes to live in. This old lady was the second suicide. And it was still only Wednesday morning. Rafferty, chockful of Irish superstition, felt he could be forgiven for becoming equally chockful of the conviction that they wouldn't get through the rest of the week without a third. As he remarked to Sergeant Llewellyn, in his experience, bad things always came in threes. It was a depressing thought.

Almost as depressing as the February weather, which, like the previous autumn, was as grey and dank as a dirty floor-cloth. Even the jolly holly bush, with its urgent tap-tappings at the window, seemed to have had enough and to want to come inside for a warm. Hardly surprising the suicide rate was up.

Unlike the first suicide, on Monday, this one hadn't left a note. Not that there was anything unusual about that. Rafferty knew that only about a quarter of suicides left notes.

Pity stirred again as his gaze shifted from the aged cadaver in the bed to the stiffly posed sepia wedding photo on the mantelpiece. It showed a pretty young bride with glossy midnight black hair, her arm possessively linked with that of the darkly handsome brylcreamed groom.

Next to the wedding photo was another picture, presumably the bride and groom again, though now much older and unsmiling. Middle age hadn't changed the bride that much; in the later photo it was still possible to trace the girl she had been. Not so the groom. Middle age had transformed the slim young man into a bald gnome, red of cheek and jowly of jaw. There were pictures of a boy, too, presumably their son. His hair was fair, and although he shared her dark eyes, his were solemn, not laughing like his mother's.

Rafferty sighed. The son would have to be found and notified. He dragged his gaze from the picture gallery, and the smiling bride, and back to the bed; to the old lady the bride had become.

The glossy black cap of hair was now thin, wispy, and grey. The slender hands, now calloused and work-roughened, were clasped neatly together outside the covers. Rafferty's gaze flickered over the scarred dresser with its empty pill bottles, and the jug and glass both now scummy with clouded water, and he reflected on what it must be like to get so old and lonely that killing yourself became an attractive alternative to going on.

After routinely checking the body for any sign of life, he turned away, and commented flatly to Llewellyn, ‘There's nothing for us here.’

As soon as the words were out, he was struck by how callous they sounded, and felt ashamed. He realised he hadn't even asked her name before dismissing her and her passing. The trouble with such lonely deaths was that they inclined him to melancholy for days. Experience had taught him that the only hope of escaping the glooms was by spending as little time as possible at the scene. Now he asked quietly, ‘Who was she? Do you know?’

‘The neighbours only knew her as Dodie.’

Rafferty nodded, and beckoned Llewellyn onto the landing where the air was less redolent of death. ‘The neighbours hadn't known her for long, then?’

‘Some six months or so, I understand. Would you like me to check?’

Rafferty shook his head. ‘No. It doesn't matter.’ He added, more or less to himself, ‘Six months, and all they knew was that her name was Dodie.’

He wasn't altogether surprised. Half the street of terraced houses was boarded up to prevent squatters and vandals gaining access to empty properties. What had once been a friendly community was now an itinerant neighbourhood, the sort of place where your neighbours came and went without making a ripple in your life. Apparently, in this case, without even discovering more about you, your family and background than your first name. It was a sad indictment of modern life and did nothing to reduce Rafferty's gloomy feelings. ‘She must have some papers,’ he remarked, and called down the stairs for Constable Smales to have a look for some. His voice, echoing loudly down the narrow stairs in this house of the dead, sounded oddly intrusive.

Llewellyn, unlike Rafferty, generally managed to retain a certain objectivity under such circumstances. ‘Doctor Arkwright should be able to tell us more. The neighbours were at least able to tell me he was the old lady's General Practitioner as well as their own.’

Rafferty nodded. Old Doctor Arkwright had been practising in the town for around a third of a century, so would be able to put a surname to their suicide as well as provide details of any other family she might have had. ‘Get on to him, Dafyd. Tell him what's happened and get him over here.’

‘YOU'RE LUCKY YOU CAUGHT me,’ Doctor Obadiah Arkwright told them when he arrived twenty minutes later. ‘I'm off to Scotland for a fishing holiday later today.’

He sounded tired, Rafferty noticed, and badly in need of his break. Obadiah Arkwright must be approaching seventy, but he was still an impressive-looking man; tall and saturnine of face, a tendency which age had made more marked, with an air of authority worn as easily as his ancient, Sherlock Holmes style overcoat.

‘Nice secluded spot,’ Arkwright went on. ‘As far from the joys of civilisation as it's possible to get without either leaving the country or breaking the bank.’ He paused. ‘Upstairs, is she?’

Rafferty nodded, and he and Llewellyn followed the doctor up the narrow stairs to the bedroom.

The doctor approached the bed and stared down at his late patient. After a quick examination he stood back and sighed. ‘Poor woman. Of course, I know she's been depressed lately, but I never thought her the type to take this way out.’ His quick gesture took in the bottle of empty sleeping tablets on the dresser.

‘I thought we were all that,’ Rafferty quietly remarked. ‘All it needs is the right circumstances.’

‘Not thinking of copying her example, I trust?’ Arkwright asked, giving him an old-fashioned look.

But then he was an old-fashioned kind of doctor, Rafferty mused; the sort who had once existed in their hundreds. The sort whose patients clung to life as though not daring to leave it till the doctor had given his permission. The sort, too, who felt it their duty to check their patients officially off their list and on to that of an even higher authority.

Rafferty forced a smile. ‘Not me, doc. Wouldn't dare. I might be a lapsed Catholic, but I'm still as leery of mortal sin as the biggest bible-thumper.’

‘What was her name, doctor?’ Llewellyn asked.

‘Mrs Pearson. Mrs Dorothy Pearson.’

Glad to get a confirmed identification, Rafferty advised, ‘I've had young Smales looking to see if he could find any personal papers in the house, but there are none. Looks like she had a grand clearing out before she took the overdose.’

‘Doesn't surprise me,’ said Arkwright. ‘Mrs Pearson was a very private sort of person. Alone in the world, too. Probably didn't fancy strangers raking over her things. Her only son died earlier this year; not, in my opinion, that he was much of a loss.’ The doctor raised expressive hands, then let them drop. ‘But there, I suppose for her, her son's death was the final straw. She's been alone for some time. She lost her husband years ago and then—’

He broke off as Sam Dally, part time police surgeon cum pathologist, arrived with his usual noise and bustle. The grim little bedroom with its four to five-day-old corpse was too small for all of them. Arkwright acknowledged Sam Dally, said his goodbyes and left. Rafferty and Llewellyn, after accompanying him down the stairs, waited in the living room for Sam to confirm their findings. He didn't take long. Nor, when he returned downstairs, did he pause to indulge in his usual ghoulish banter. Rafferty guessed that for Sam – who had lost his wife of thirty years to cancer only a month ago – the prospect of his own solitary old age was getting too close for comfort. He was certainly more irascible than usual, and briskly confirmed that Mrs Pearson had certainly been dead for the best part of a week. ‘Early part of the weekend would be my estimate,’ Dally added. ‘Friday night probably, or Saturday morning.’

Rafferty had already guessed as much. His brief look under the bedclothes had revealed the tell-tale signs; the body swollen with gases, the skin blisters, the leaking fluids, the smell. He swallowed hard and waited for Sam to continue.

‘Suicide, of course,’ said Dally. ‘Classic. Pills and whisky, but without the whisky. Don't suppose the poor bitch could afford that.’ He gazed around the shabby living room with its clean but worn square of...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.1.2019
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-13: 9780000146267 / 9780000146267