Bad Blood (4 page)

‘That's fine. You've been very helpful,’ Rafferty assured her. He consulted his hastily scribbled notes. ‘I understand a Miss Amelia Frobisher found the body?’

For some reason this comment caused Rita Atkins's lips to purse. She gave a stiff nod.

‘Miss Frobisher's in Apartment 2B?’ Rafferty questioned.

Rita Atkins nodded again. ‘It's across the corridor from Mrs Mortimer's apartment, though I doubt Amelia Frobisher will be able to tell you much about Clara's life. They didn't speak. Not lately, anyway.’

‘Really? Do you know why that was?’

As he had intended, the question acted as a spur for Rita to show off her knowledge.

‘Several things spring to mind.’ She smiled and displayed small, pointed teeth. They were as stained and dingy as her dressing gown. ‘For one thing, Amelia Frobisher accused Mrs Mortimer of stealing Freddie Talbot, her gentleman friend. She hadn't, of course, as Clara Mortimer made clear. It was quite a longstanding relationship until Mrs Mortimer moved here. Then, Amelia's gentleman friend cooled and switched his attentions to Mrs Mortimer with what Amelia must have felt was an insulting alacrity. To add insult to injury, Mrs Mortimer not only made plain that she wasn't interested in Fancy Freddie as I call him, she rejected him publicly in the entrance foyer. It must have been about a month ago. I was dusting the pictures in the entrance lobby. I can still remember her exact words. She said, ‘For goodness’ sake, you sad man. Go back to Amelia Frobisher. She might be grateful for your attentions, I'm not.’

Humiliating for Talbot, thought Rafferty, especially when the put down had obviously been witnessed by the warden.

‘Amelia Frobisher, as the longest resident, has always taken it upon herself to act the grand dame hostess to new residents.’ With another sniff, Rita Atkins went on. ‘She's always organising outings and pushing the other residents to sign up for them. I suspect she must get a discount on the tickets and pocket the difference. She even organises birthday teas for the other residents in her apartment as if she and they were proper family. Clara Mortimer would have none of it. She had rebuffed her several times. Amelia resented her for it. I heard her call Clara standoffish to her face once. Clara just cut her dead. Clara received no more invitations after Freddie Talbot, Amelia's beau, transferred his affections, particularly as he failed to do what Clara had suggested and go back to Amelia. Not that she would have taken him back. Amelia's too full of pride and vanity to so humiliate herself.’

‘I see.’ Whether Clara Mortimer had had good reason to have a down on Amelia Frobisher, it was clear, from the relish with which she related the gossip, that Rita Atkins felt she owed Amelia Frobisher a spiteful thrust or three.

Beside him, Llewellyn asked, ‘Did you go on these outings, Mrs Atkins?’

‘Me? No.’ Her lips turned down. ‘I'm only the warden of the block. I was never invited. I didn't get a birthday tea, either. Not that I wanted them any more than Mrs Mortimer. But, as I said, Amelia Frobisher likes to give herself airs. And Grand Dames don't socialise below their own pecking order.’

Nice to get on with the neighbours, Rafferty thought, as he digested the apartments’ tittle-tattle. And for all Amelia Frobisher's attempts to play happy families with the other residents – attempts that struck Rafferty as more indicative of Miss Frobisher's own loneliness than Grand Dame tendencies – she seemed to have conjured up more resentment than true family feeling.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘As warden, you must spend more time in the entrance lobby than the other residents. Have you seen any strangers hanging about lately?’

She shook her head. ‘None, apart from the occasional group of yobs who used to hang about the park. But I haven't even seen any of them lately.’ She gave a down turned smile and told him slyly. ‘When the rich shout the police tend to come running. The yobs certainly seem to have got the message. I suppose they've found somewhere else to make a nuisance of themselves now.’

Rafferty made no attempt to defend his colleagues. It was a fact of life that those who shouted loudest invariably got the most attention, whether it was the police who were being shouted at or local big wigs. Certainly, he couldn't imagine his superintendent, Long Pockets Bradley, permitting his officers to be neglectful to those of wealth and influence.

‘Did you hear any odd noises this morning?’

‘No, not this morning.’

As she said this, an ugly flush crept up Rita Atkins‘s neck and blended with the red patches still adorning her cheeks. It gave her an unhealthy raddled look. Worried that this sudden deeper flushing might indicate the deliberate concealment of evidence, Rafferty questioned her more sharply.

‘You're sure you didn't see or hear anything? Anything at all?’

‘No. I told you I didn't. As a matter of fact, I woke late this morning as I slept through my alarm.’

Doubtless, the alcohol she had downed the night before had been the cause, thought Rafferty, who had himself suffered a few similar unscheduled lie-ins.

‘To return to something you said earlier,’ Llewellyn broke in. ‘I believe you said there were several things that had caused resentments between Miss Frobisher and Mrs Mortimer?’

Rita Atkins nodded with every appearance of relief at getting off a subject that clearly embarrassed her..

‘What were the others things?’

Rita gave Llewellyn another smile, one even wider than before.

Rafferty guessed that, notwithstanding Clara Mortimer's violent death, supplying answers to their questions about the late Mrs Mortimer and who might have reason to bear a grudge against her had quite made her morning.

‘You want to ask Amelia Frobisher about the mat,’ she said.

As Rafferty and Llewellyn exchanged another bemused glance, she explained. ‘The garish welcome mat at the entrance was another cause for resentment. Amelia made it, but Clara Mortimer complained to me about it. Naturally, I had words with Miss Frobisher.’

Rafferty gained the distinct impression that Rita Atkins had thoroughly enjoyed these ‘words’. She must have considered it the down-trodden's revenge.

‘I told Amelia Frobisher that the mat had to go. Apart from contravening one of the covenants governing the block, it's a danger to life and limb.’

Having tripped over it himself, Rafferty found himself nodding agreement. ‘So why is it still there?’ he asked.

‘Because Amelia Frobisher doesn't take kindly to being told what to do, certainly not by me. We've had a regular tussle about it since. Every time I remove it, she puts it back. I'd burn the wretched thing if I didn't think she'd make another one even more hideous.’

‘I see.’ Rafferty stood up. ‘Thanks for your help, Mrs Atkins. We may need to speak to you again,’ he told her as he and Llewellyn made for the door, eager to escape the warden's musty little cell.

Her tone now surly, with discontent creeping in at the edges, she told them abruptly, ‘You know where to find me.’

‘Wonder what's made her so prickly,’ Rafferty mused as Rita Atkins closed her apartment door behind them. But as they opened the door leading to the large, airy and sweet smelling entrance hall, the contrast hit him and he gained a sudden insight into how Rita Atkins must feel. Because, if, like Rita Atkins's as she went about her cleaning duties, he had to walk through the door that separated her dim and musty den from the magic kingdom, he could imagine people would soon have reason to think he had as many prickles as a thorny hedge.

Llewellyn, of course, provided a logical answer to his musing.

‘Apart from the obvious fact that she had a deep resentment towards Miss Frobisher and her Grand Dame ways, I presume it was part of Mrs Atkins's job to keep a check on the welfare of the residents. Maybe she thought, by finding the body, Miss Frobisher had usurped her role. It's often the case that people with limited responsibilities become territorial about those duties.’

Rafferty nodded at this. Curious to see what Amelia Frobisher had to say for herself, he turned towards the stairs. However, before he had advanced two steps, Dr Sam Dally arrived with his usual bustle.

As Rafferty escorted him to the victim's apartment, he filled him in on what they had so far learned.

‘It's clear to me the way your mind's working, Rafferty,’ Dally remarked. ‘You think the old lady let in someone she knew and was then knocked on the head and robbed by this person.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Rafferty protested, sensitive about his reputation for leaping to conclusions early in a case. Of course, Sam, like Llewellyn, was unaware that he'd sworn off such behaviour. ‘We don't know yet if any money or valuables are missing, though as the victim seemed to have kept herself to herself and was apparently all but estranged from her family, I don't know how we can be sure either way. Certainly, the apartment doesn't look as though it's been ransacked, though the intruder might easily have panicked when he realised he'd killed her, before he had a chance to do so.’

They reached Clara Mortimer's apartment. With several huffs and puffs, the generously proportioned Sam Dally lowered himself to his plump knees beside the body and began his examination.

Rafferty, with so much to think about at the busy start of another murder inquiry, had forgotten about the victim's pitifully staring, undamaged eye. Now, he tersely demanded of Lance Edwards, the photographer, if he had finished taking pictures of the body. When Lance nodded, Rafferty suggested Dally shut the staring orb.

‘Giving you the evil eye, is she?’ Dally asked. ‘Probably wondering what kind of fist you'll make of finding her murderer. God knows your successes have been a bit thin on the ground lately.’

‘Don't you start with the rub-my-nose-in-it reminders, Sam,’ Rafferty tersely demanded. ‘Superintendent Bradley never lets up on them.’

The pity of it, from Rafferty's point of view, was that he
had
solved his last case. Only his involvement vis-à-vis its solution had been a little too close for comfort. Certainly, too close to encourage him to confide in the superintendent or the gossipy Dally. Only Llewellyn and the Deputy Assistant Chief Constable Jack Mulcahy were in on the secret. And as their careers would also be on the line if their knowledge of his involvement ever got out, they had a mutual need to keep their mouths shut. The drawback was that he had to continue to take the snide ‘failure’ comments.

Mercifully, Dally's recently flourishing love life had tempered his natural inclination to sadism and now his fat fingers drew the lid down over the victim's remaining and increasingly milky eye. He even straightened the rucked-up skirt after he'd taken her rectal temperature.

‘When do you reckon it happened?’ Rafferty asked a few minutes later when Dally had tested the temperature of the room and done his calculations.

‘I'd say no more than three hours ago. The undamaged eye's only beginning to go cloudy and the lividity isn't yet complete. Rigor's only evident in the eyelids and jaw so far. All indications point to a timescale of no more than three hours ago, possibly less.’

It was now just after ten in the morning; that would put her death at no earlier than 7.00 a m. Clara Mortimer must have been an early riser to be up, dressed and ready for the day at such an hour – unless she had been expecting an early visitor…?

Given her seeming preference for a solitary existence, that seemed unlikely, but the possibility couldn't be discounted.

'What do you think the assailant used for a weapon?'

'Some blunt instrument,' Dally replied. 'A cosh or something similar.'

Rafferty nodded. As it struck him as unlikely that Clara Mortimer would own a cosh, it seemed probable that her murderer had brought the weapon with him and although they had yet to make a thorough search of the apartment, it seemed equally likely that the murderer had taken the weapon away with him.

Once Dally had departed and the Coroner's Officer had given permission for the removal of the body to the mortuary, Rafferty headed across the landing to Amelia Frobisher's apartment. After Rita Atkins's revelations about the love-lorn ‘Fancy’ Freddie Talbot, he was curious to see this second, scorned, female member of the ageing love triangle for himself.

Amelia Frobisher's door
opened immediately to their knock. Rafferty wondered if she had been waiting behind it with her eye glued to the spy hole.

Perhaps aware that her response to their knock might imply an unseemly prurience given that Clara Mortimer's attacker had left her with her skirt around her thighs, after Rafferty had introduced Llewellyn and himself, Amelia Frobisher covered her haste by adopting the superior air of one to whom prurient thoughts were foreign. And although only around five feet six and disadvantaged by her lack of stature, this didn't stop her trying to look down her long nose at them in true grand dame style.

After studying them for some moments through popping, pale blue eyes that indicated some thyroid problem, her inquisitiveness about her neighbour's murder overcame any inclination to aloofness and she ushered them inside with a speed that indicated her curiosity could abide no more delays.

Miss Frobisher‘s apartment - like Miss Frobisher herself - was as different again from Clara Mortimer‘s and Rita Atkins‘s as it was possible to be. The décor of the apartment tended to the fussy, as did the clothes style of Miss Frobisher. Perhaps she shared the late Duchess of Windsor's belief that you could never be too rich or too thin, for Amelia Frobisher was thin to the point of emaciation. Her chosen outfit of frilly, three-quarter sleeved blouse and A-line skirt with another frill adorning its hem, only served to emphasise her stick-like figure.