Love Lies Bleeding Extract A Rafferty and Llewellyn Crime Novel

Prologue

'Look at that daft mare.'

DI Joe Rafferty's chin narrowly missed connecting with the reception counter as
Constable Bill Beard grabbed his head-propping arm and inadvertently pulled it from
under him.

At the best of times, Beard, the station's self-appointed grey-sage, treated the
younger officers who had attained superior rank with an over familiar lèse majesté.
But this, thought Rafferty indignantly, even for Beard, was a lèse too far.

But he had hardly got the first word of his protest out before Beard waved his
complaint aside much as he might swat away a particularly annoying probationer,
and pointed the podgy forefinger of his other hand across the reception desk of the
police station's entrance and voiced the inviting suggestion, 'Fancy being out of your
head at nine in the morning.'

Cajoled away from his annoyance by Beard's proposal, Rafferty murmured, 'Mm,' and
expectantly awaited the pleasant chink of bottle against glass.

Chance would be a fine thing, he realised moments later as chinks came there none.
Instead, the unpleasant clunk of a cold Monday morning on sober duty impinged on
his unwilling psyche.

Breathing out on a disappointed sigh, his gaze followed Beard's pointing digit and he
peered, squint-eyed through the rain-lashed glass. He picked out the fate-favoured
young woman who had attracted Beard's interest just as she stepped off the
opposite pavement.

Bill was right - the young woman's gait did seem uncertain. Her road sense was even
more so, he realised with a wince moments later, as the furious blast of a horn
followed the screech of brakes. Without looking, she had lurched into the road in
front of a white van. Fortunately, she had stepped off the pavement just a couple of
seconds after the lights at the pelican crossing changed to green, so the van hadn't
had a chance to pick up speed.

As with many drunks, she appeared to have a guardian angel on twenty-four-hour
standby, for the van juddered to a halt on bouncing springs just inches from her
body. The driver, an unshaven youth of around nineteen, lowered the grimy side
window. Through the gap, he thrust a face that shock had turned a paler shade of
white than his grubby van and directed a tirade of abuse after her.

But the young woman continued on her unsteady path across the road, accompanied
by the screech of more brakes from the oncoming traffic on the other side,
seemingly as oblivious to these as she was to the van driver's curses and to the fact
that she had narrowly avoided a close encounter of the deadly kind.

Though a tiny part of him admired her disregard for the conventions that one
shouldn't be the worse for drink before the hour had even hit double figures, Rafferty
acknowledged that Bill's phrase 'daft mare' hit the spot. Although it was pouring with
rain all she wore was a thin multi-coloured summer dress and a crimson, crocheted
cardigan of more style than substance, which she clutched across her dress with a
taut fist. She had no umbrella and the torrential downpour had plastered her hair to
her skull.

Bill gave the long-suffering sigh of the endlessly put upon. 'What do you bet but she's
another one of those sad souls from the psychiatric hospital? Get 'em in my
reception regular, I do. One old dear is always begging for a shilling, as if
decimalisation had passed her by entirely.'

Rafferty, having endured plenty of stints on reception in his younger, uniformed days,
knew better than to accept the bet. Instead, he was about to rush out, do his shining
knight act and rescue the clearly oblivious damsel from further death-defying acts as
she continued on her unsteady, if determined, path across the road. But before he
had taken two steps, she reached the pavement on this side without further near
misses.

Rafferty realised he had been holding his breath. He exhaled with relief even as he
wondered whether Bill's guess as to her current abode was correct.

The asylum had been built in the middle of open countryside half a mile or so beyond
the market town of Elmhurst, in keeping with the Victorians' belief that insanity
should be kept at a decent distance from respectable normal citizens.

But gradually the town had crept up to the hospital's gates, a process hastened in
recent years as the large, once self-sufficient asylum sold off large plots of its land to
developers and sent most of its patients out to receive the dubious benefits of 'care
in the community'.

As Beard had said, it was a regular occurrence to see the remaining patients
wandering aimlessly in the town. Often, as if drawn by some unseen cord, they made
their way to the police station, perhaps believing that its reassuring blue lantern
would offer them sanctuary from life itself.

Experience had brought a shoulder-shrugging detachment to Beard and he confided
matter-of-factly, 'I have another regular – young girl she is - about the same age as
that one. Early twenties, I'd guess, or thereabouts, who carries a doll around with her
everywhere she goes. God knows what brought that about. I could understand it if
she was an old un, as it was the normal thing back in their youth that their babies
would be taken from them if their bun in the oven was put in at the wrong regulo, but-
'

Bill broke off, grabbed Rafferty's arm again and said with weary triumph as the girl
reached the door to the police station, 'There, what did I tell you? She is coming in
here.'

As the slender young woman tried to push the heavy door, she must have realised it
needed both hands and all her weight to open it, for she released her firm grip on the
cardigan. No longer tightly clutched, the cardigan fell open. Even through the
drenching it had received, the bloodstains on her thin summer dress were clearly
visible. The entire upper area of the bodice was so stained with blood that the
dress's pattern was entirely obliterated.

Rafferty's mouth fell open. Believing she must have suffered some dreadful injury, he
again stepped forward to offer assistance. But the comment Bill snorted in his ear
made him pause.

'Bet you this one's come in to report she's just murdered her husband.'

Rafferty hesitated. After almost thirty years in the force, Beard had seen everything
there was to see. Nothing fazed him; certainly not damsels in distress, even if they
were as beautiful as Rafferty now saw this one was.

Forestalled by Beard's comment and the belated realisation that anyone with chest
injuries that had bled so profusely would hardly still be walking around, he waited, his
previously sleepy pulse now racing as the dazed-looking young woman, her shoes
click-clacking irregularly in tune with her unsteady steps, crossed the black and
white mock marble flooring.

It seemed to the waiting Rafferty to take her an age to reach the desk. While he
waited, he studied her appreciatively. For, in spite of being drenched by the chill rain
of an unseasonably cold August morning, the weather had been unable to damage
the beauty of her delicately boned face and deadly pale but flawless skin. Slender as
a fairy's wand that could be blown over by the merest puff of wind, she swayed
slightly before their mesmerised gaze as she fixed the uniformed Beard with large,
grey eyes luminous with a tragedy curtained only by swooping dark lashes.

Rafferty, overcome by her beauty, took a gallant's step forward and offered a hand to
assist her. To his chagrin, she didn't seem to see it, or him. As if her life depended
upon it, her gaze remained firmly fixed on the reassuringly uniformed bulk of the
older man.

Finally, she reached the desk. With both hands, she clutched the varnish-worn wood
in a death grip, again ignored Rafferty, and with a yearning desperation in her face,
gazed across the desk that separated her from Beard and in a voice that cracked
with horror, whispered, 'I think I've just murdered my husband.'

Rafferty had time to notice only Bill's exhalation of satisfaction at being proved right
twice in one morning, before she collapsed at his feet.

Chapter One

'And that's all this young woman said?'

At Llewellyn's bemused question, Rafferty nodded. 'Yep, Dafyd,' he confirmed. 'That's
all.'

Unsurprisingly, his logically minded Welsh DS found his recounting of that morning's
incident in the daily life of police station reception folk somewhat bizarre.

The university-educated Llewellyn, who had read his way through all the most
infamous murder trials in the annals of British justice and injustice, and who had
presumably assumed, on joining the police service, that he was going to pit his wits
against some of the most cunning killers on the planet, even now still found it hard to
accept that, in the main, murderers were not very bright and thus easily caught.

This latest one, at least, although being more willing than most to confess to her
crime, prompted a piquant curiosity that was out of the ordinary murder run.
Because, after collapsing unconscious at Rafferty's feet, the hastily summoned
police surgeon cum pathologist, Sam Dally, had taken charge, carted her off in an
ambulance and imposed an embargo on her being questioned at all.

Not, from what Dally said, that she was in a position to provide answers. According to
their tame – or not so tame – medic, although now conscious the young woman who
had made such a dramatic entrance was as out of it as one of the undead.

'Surely she said something else before she collapsed?' Llewellyn persevered with his
touching belief - in spite of plentiful experience proving the contrary – that other
people were not unreasonably perverse, but behaved as logically as he did himself.
'Who confesses to murder and then says nothing more?'

With a perverse satisfaction of his own, Rafferty replied, 'Her for a start.'

Admittedly Llewellyn was right, in that, once embarked on a confession, murderers
generally didn't want to stop till they had poured it all out.

'Illogical, I know. But seeing as Sam says she's in this deep-trance state - now, what
was it he called it?' he wondered aloud to himself. 'Catalonia would it be? No. That
can't be right.'

'Catatonia?' Llewellyn suggested, in a tone so dry, Rafferty's forehead creased as he
suspected the better-educated Llewellyn of mocking his ignorance.

But whether he was or not, the Welshman's poker face didn't betray him and Rafferty
conceded, 'Yeah, could be. It has a familiar ring to it. Anyway,' he added, 'Dally
reckons our murdering zombie lady's retreated from reality. Hasn't said another word
since she collapsed, not even the usual demand for a solicitor, which, given her
confession, is unusual, seeing as the guilty ones invariably scream far more loudly for
a brief than the innocent ever do. We don't even know who she is as she had no
handbag or purse with her. Seems she just "did the mortal deed" – if deed she did –
left her home and the husband, and came here wearing just what she stood up in.

'Dr Dally, who was here at the time about some other matter, took one look at her
and insisted she was carted off to hospital. He said he'd be surprised if she didn't
develop a fever or something after the drenching she received. Of course, Dally being
Dally, the knower of all things, he was happy to tell me his prediction was proved
right when I rang the hospital. Apparently, she's running a high temperature and not
responding to their questions. No way we could interview her.'

Llewellyn's Welsh-dark eyes gazed contemplatively at Rafferty. 'So, what now?'

Rafferty pulled a face as, reluctantly, he dragged a pile of files towards him. 'As this
young woman's still in a world of her own, I suppose we wait until Dally says
otherwise. What else can we do?'

'But if she has attacked her husband and he's bleeding to death in their home,
waiting is hardly an option,' Llewellyn pointed out.

'And neither is sneaking into the hospital and snatching a picture of her in her
sickbed so we can give it to the media and ask the public: "Do you know this
woman?" The human rights lot would have a field day if we did.'

That was an argument guaranteed to put a stop to Llewellyn's questions. Dafyd
Llewellyn, although a man of strong morals and high principles, was a firm believer in
human rights; even those of young women who claimed to have committed the
ultimate sin.

'Anyway' Rafferty added, 'I very much doubt he's still bleeding. If I'm any judge, from
the amount of blood on her dress, her husband is already long beyond our help.'

Rafferty gazed at the pile of files he had just dragged towards himself. He sighed as
he opened the first of these and took in the thickness of its contents. More
bureaucratic bumf from Region, he thought. When did they think he was going to get
any real police work done?

More than willing to abandon, even if only temporarily, the close-typed script of yet
more politically correct gobbledegook, he looked up at Llewellyn and said, 'But on
the plus side, at least we know one thing about her – that she's not from the
psychiatric hospital, which Bill Beard thought favourite. I rang them, and all their
patients are present and correct. I've had Jonathon Lilley ringing around the others
in the area, NHS and private. None of their patients is missing, either. If she wasn't
lying in the hospital, doing this zombie impression and with her bloody clothes
bagged and tagged, I'd wonder if me and Beard didn't have a mutual hallucination
and conjured up this self-confessed husband killer to liven up a slow morning.'

He leaned back in his chair – at least it put a distance between himself and the
paperwork - and said, 'Anyway, you're meant to be the clever one.' Still smarting
from the suspicion that Llewellyn had got one over on him with the catatonia thing,
he added slyly, 'If you're so bright, you tell me how we should proceed.'

Llewellyn looked thoughtfully at him for several seconds. Then he too sighed, pulled
half a dozen of the files from Rafferty's pile, walked across the room to the desk in
the corner and sat down before he said, 'I suppose you're right. We wait.'

When Rafferty arrived home that evening, he and Abra, his girlfriend, decided to have
a quiet night in. During dinner he told her about the dramatic confession made by
their visitor that morning.

'Poor woman,' said Abra, instantly all sympathy, much to Rafferty's chagrin. 'She
must have been desperate,' Abra continued. 'I suppose she was worn down by some
brute of a husband. Probably been beating her up for years.'

It sounded as if Abra thought all men were beasts. It was another unwanted
reminder that she was still nursing a grievance against him over their difficult time
back in June when she resented what she regarded as his lack of support. He was
only too aware that she thought he had let her down. With hindsight, he agreed with
her.

Rafferty, although his conscience pricked, felt honour-bound to spring to the defence
of the male of the species.

'Well no, I doubt it – or rather, I suppose he might have been beating her up, but the
timescale's unlikely. She can't be any older than her early twenties. Something of a
stunner, too,' he murmured half to himself in appreciative, if unwise, remembrance.
'It's hard to believe any man would want to rearrange a face as beautiful as that. I
felt rather sorry for her, actually.'

Abra's gaze narrowed at this and Rafferty realised his admiration of the young
woman might have been better kept to himself. Why was it, he wondered, that
women always hated it when you praised the good looks of other females?

'Sounds like she's brought out the Sir Galahad in you,' she commented with a sharp
little edge to her voice as, with a clatter, she began to stack their plates. 'I'd watch
that tendency, Joe. It could be compromising in a policeman.'

Rafferty immediately tried to downplay the young woman's attractions. With what he
thought a nicely judged throwaway air, he commented, 'She's a bit on the thin side
for me.' As he realised his words were insufficient to soothe the little green god after
the words of praise that had gone before, he gave them some support. 'Anyway,
there's not much chance of me being compromised just yet as Sam Dally had her
removed to hospital after she collapsed and promptly pronounced her
incommunicado.

'Though I can't say I'm surprised she collapsed after making her announcement.
Probably one of these bulimics or anorexics we hear so much about now, as she was
pretty much a bag of bones. No man wants a stick insect for a partner.'

'Mm. Strange they were bones you seemed to like well enough a minute ago.'

As his self-defensive measures hadn't worked, Rafferty decided teasing might work
better. 'Not jealous are we?' he asked. 'Just a little bit?'

'Should I be?' Abra countered.

'Of course not. What could you possibly have to be jealous about? I've only just met
the woman and then she totally ignored me, preferring the more mature charms of
Bill Beard.'

Abra gave another indeterminate little 'Mm' before adding, 'If she doesn't ignore you
next time you see her, maybe you should let Dafyd do the questioning? It might be
safer. After all, eating disorder thin Lizzies learn plenty of devious tricks to make
sure they get their own way and stay thin. And you already sound a little too
susceptible to her slender attractions to me.'

With that, she stalked off to the kitchen whence Rafferty soon heard several more
crashes and bangs.

'Me and my big mouth,' he muttered to himself as he decided it might be politic to
offer to load the dishwasher and make the tea.

In the end they only had to wait three days before they were able to see the young
woman who had made such a dramatic entrance; Rafferty had hoped for longer, as it
was clear he still had some way to go to get back in Abra's good books after his
thoughtless behaviour back in June. He could do without another murder case right
now, with all the extra hours and accusations of neglect likely to spring from it which
he remembered with such painful clarity from his marriage to Angie, his late wife -
particularly as Abra had clearly elected to take a dislike to their suspect.

He supposed he ought to be thankful the young woman had confessed. It would
make his life simpler – in theory at least. But in practice, once one of the legal types
that bedevilled his life had got hold of her, she'd retract. Most of them did.

But he had to admit he was curious about the girl. And when the hospital rang to say
that she had started to respond to their attempts to communicate with her, he
wasted no time in finding Llewellyn and hurrying them both off to see what she had
to say for herself.

When they arrived at the hospital, they were directed to the first floor. They found
their mysterious young woman secluded in a side ward. As previously arranged by
Rafferty, she had a bedside guard round the clock, just in case she decided to
disappear for real rather than into another catatonic trance.

As Constable Lizzie Green rose at their entrance, Rafferty nodded and told her to
wait outside.

Against the much-laundered white pillow, the young woman's skin looked even more
washed out than it had at her collapse. In spite of having been non compos mentis
for much of the last seventy-two hours, she had deep mauve shadows under her eyes
and looked exhausted and as fragile as a porcelain figurine that might shatter into a
thousand pieces at any moment.

As he looked at this frail and ethereal creature who had claimed to have committed
murder, Rafferty was beginning to think he and Beard had shared a mutual
hallucination. In a moment he'd wake up and find it had all been a dream. as the
young woman lying so still in the bed failed to dissolve before his eyes, he pulled up a
chair and sat down.

'I'm Detective Inspector Rafferty,' he began before he introduced Sergeant
Llewellyn. 'Perhaps you could tell us your name?'

To Rafferty's surprise, as he had half expected her previous state of catatonia to
have affected her memory, she answered without hesitation.

'My name's Felicity Raine.'

'Mrs?'

This time she hesitated. Her lack of readiness to claim the title was unsurprising if
the 'Mr' half of the marital pairing really had died at her hands. But then she nodded
and said, 'Yes. But, of course, you already know that.'

That 'of course' indicated that she had clear recall of the events of three days earlier
and that he had been one of the witnesses to her claim to having murdered her
husband. But although she was talking, she was clearly still barely in this world. Her
voice was slow and uncertain, as if she had only recently learned to speak.

'And your address, Mrs Raine?'

She provided this information in the same slow, flat monotone with which she had
provided her other details. It was almost as if she was experiencing the world
through some kind of protective mist that made it seem shadowy and not quite real.
Of course, that might just be due to the shock she must be experiencing if she had
just killed her husband, whether deliberately or otherwise.

As soon as she had told them her name and the address she shared with her
presumed dead husband, Rafferty gave the nod to Llewellyn and his sergeant hurried
off, clutching his mobile, to arrange the uniforms to check the address out for the
bloody corpse of her partner. On his way out, he sent Lizzie Green back in to act as a
witness in case Mrs Raine decided to blurt out a repeat of her previous confession.

After giving her the statutory caution, Rafferty asked gently, 'Do you remember
coming into the police station three days ago?'

Felicity Raine, her expression troubled, nodded.

'And what about what you said when you got there? Do you remember that?'

Again she nodded.

'And was it true? Did you murder your husband?'

There was that hesitation again, Rafferty noted. She looked confused and her
answer, when it came, was spoken in tones even more dazed than before, as if she
couldn't, herself, quite believe what she was saying or take in the enormity of what
she had done.

'I suppose I must have done. Yes.'

She gazed at Rafferty from troubled eyes and said, 'It's odd and you'll think me
dreadfully callous, I'm sure, but I can't remember killing him. Isn't that strange?'

Her long slender fingers clutched each other, as, in an anguished voice, she all but
pleaded for an answer from Rafferty. 'How can I have forgotten? You'd expect the
memory of such an act to be a vivid one. But I can't remember it at all. All I remember
is finding myself stretched out on top of Ray, both of us covered in blood.'

She shook her head. 'I suppose I must have shut my mind off. Afterwards.' She
shuddered then, as she added in a whisper so faint that Rafferty had to strain to hear
what she said, 'The doctor said I was suffering from shock. Delayed shock. No doubt,
memory of it will come back to me in time.'

'Can you tell me why you killed him? How?'

'As to the why-' She broke off and stared sadly at him from the large, luminous grey
eyes that Rafferty remembered so well. 'Raymond – my husband - and I had been
arguing a lot lately,' she said in a voice so low that again Rafferty had to lean close
to the bed to hear her. 'Nothing I did seemed to please him.'

When she said nothing further for a moment, he thought she had relapsed into her
previous state of fugue. She stared beyond him as if she no longer saw him and had
already forgotten the second half of his question.

He prompted her before she disappeared back into the nether world. He wanted to
hear it from her own lips; it was the only way, he thought, that he would be able to
dispel his doubts. 'And how did you kill him?'

'A knife. With a knife.' She shuddered again. Her eyes rounded in horror as she
added, 'There was so much blood. It was all over him, all over me. How could I do that
when I loved him so much?'

Rafferty shook his head. He had no answers for her.

She looked down, as if she expected still to be wearing her bloodstained dress, and
frowned at finding herself in a hospital gown.

'My clothes,' she began fretfully.

'Don't worry about them for now. We've got them safe.'

'I see. Thank you. It's just – just that my husband gave me that dress for my last
birthday. I don't want anything to happen to it.'

As Rafferty watched, the expression in her eyes turned from tragic to appalled, as it
hit her that this was one dress she would never want to wear again.

After that, a silence fell between them, broken only by Llewellyn's return. As he
entered the small hospital room, his gaze met Rafferty's and he gave a brief nod.

Llewellyn's confirmation that Felicity Raine's husband was dead made her claim that
she had killed him the more believable. But as he gazed at her delicate face and the
figure so slender it barely left a trace under the dark blue duvet, Rafferty was again
conscious of a glimmer of doubt. For, in spite of the bloodied state of her when she
had turned up at the police station, in spite of her own anguished confession, her
slender figure made it difficult for him to conjure up a picture of her knifing anyone,
much less the husband she professed to love. Apart from anything else, it was so
unusual for a woman to use a knife as the means to kill that the number of such
cases made up a tiny percentage of female killings.

She seemed to have retreated into herself again, Rafferty noticed. He wasn't too
worried about it, though. For now, he was content with just the bare facts. They
could get the rest later.

He followed Llewellyn out to the corridor. 'So, let's hear it,' he invited.

'It's just as she told you,' Llewellyn replied, grim-faced. 'According to Hanks, when he
and Tim Smales broke in they found Mr Raine sprawled out on his back on the living-
room floor, covered in blood. The knife was still in his chest.'

Rafferty frowned. 'She attacked him from the front?'

Llewellyn nodded.

Rafferty took a moment or two to absorb the information, then he asked, 'Little chap,
was he?'

'No. Actually, I asked Hanks the same question and he said he was tall and
muscular.'

Rafferty frowned at this discovery. He gazed through the window of the small side
room to the patient in the bed. This case was rapidly becoming more bizarre, more
surreal with each succeeding discovery, he thought. It seemed this was a thought
that Llewellyn shared. He too let his gaze settle on Felicity Raine and his next words
echoed Rafferty's thoughts.

'To look at her, you wouldn't think she would have the strength to kill him. Mrs Raine
is slender, seven and a half stone if that, and can be no more than five foot three or
four.'

Rafferty nodded. 'And looking as if butter wouldn't melt.' In the face of the evidence,
he pushed his doubts aside, hardened his heart and said firmly, 'But melt it did.'

He instructed Lizzie Green to stay with Mrs Raine and set off towards the stairs. 'I
suppose we'd better go and find out when she's likely to be released into our
custody. If she has killed her husband, I want no one to be able to claim later that
she wasn't fit for questioning.'