ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE

One

Detective Inspector Joseph Rafferty entered the saloon bar of The Railway Arms and looked around to see if there was anyone in that he knew. He couldn't see any familiar faces but there ws a good crowd in and he had to sidle his way througth the throng to the bar. He recognized a few regulars and he said hello. Andy Strong the landlord was behind the counter and asked Rafferty if he wanted his usual.

Rafferty nodded. ' Please. The short usual rather than the long one.' He felt in need of a livener and he watched as Andy put the glass under the Jameson optic pushed it up and measured out a double. Rafferty kept an eagle eye out always wary of short measures - not that Andy was a landlord who had ever been cautiond for short-changing his customers but you could never be sure.

'Not seen you for a while Joe nor Abra for that matter,' Andy said as he put the glass on the bar and took Rafferty's money. 'You two had a falling out?'

'You could say that. At least Abra's had a falling out with me.'
'What happened? Been playing away?' he asked over his shoulder as he rang up the money in the till before turning back and handing Rafferty his change. Andy was ex-army and tended to be straight to the point in his manner. It went with the epauletted shirt and short back and sides.

'No. Nothing like that. Abra thought I was trying to cheese-pare on the wedding arrangements. We had a big bust-up and now she's not talking to me.

'So she decided to do without the groom is that it?'

''Got it in one.' Morosely he sipped his whiskey. A roar went up from the public bar. 'Noisy in here tonight.'

'Got a stag party in. They're getting more raucous by the minute. I'll have to turf them out if it carries on.'

Andy could handle himself. He kept fit and was a regular at the gym. He and Vivienne - Viv - his wife kept a well-run pub and it was rare for the police to be called out to any kind of trouble. Anothr customer in the public bar claimed the landlord's attention and he left Rafferty to his lonely supping.

The news about the stag do made him maudlin, wondering when - if - he'd have a stag party of his own. It was one part of the wedding hullabaloo that he'ed actually looked forward to being free of the stiff starchy speechifying and extortionate charging of so much of the rest of the marital rite of passage. Perhaps given the circumstances the nearest he'd get to a stag do was asking to be invited to join this one.

Abra, his fiancee, had proved intransigent after their row. If that was she was still his fiancee. All along he'd expected her to see sense about being extravagant over their wedding but it hadn't happened. And now look where they found themselves. Raffrerty downed the rest of his Jameson's and ordered another from the barmaid. At least Abra hadn't gibven him the engagement ring back which surprised him as she'd had plenty of time to do so. Where there was a ring there was hope he told himself though he was no longer sure this was true.

He sipped the second whiskey more slowly, conscious that he couldn't continue to drink his sorrows away as he'd been doing. But it had been two months now and Abra still wouldn't speak to him. He'd called round to her flat and rung her repeatedly, but she had refused to talk to him. He didn't know what else to do to get her back, though his police partner, Dafyd Llewellyn, Abra's cousin, had offered his services as a mediator. But for that to work Abra needed to agree to met him.

It was his own fault, of course. He knew that. If he hadn't tried to keep their wedding costs within reason, he wouldn't be having this lonely drink while listening to some other soon-to-be groom celebrating his stag night.

They were getting even more raucous. Rafferty could hear them clearly through the wooden partition that separated the two main bars. They were now singing some rude rugby ditty. Out of the corner of his eye Rarffrerty saw the landlord lift the bar counter and shout to them to tone it down a bit but it didn't seem to have any effect; the singing continued as loudly as before.

One of the regulars came over to talk to Rafferty and they exchanged football lore for the next five minutes, thrashing away at the winners and losers of the Premiership, but Rafferty's heart wasn't really in it and his football buddy wandered back to his other friends soon after leaving Rarferty free to stare disconsolately around him.

The Railway Arms was a true piece of Victoriana from its decorative plate glass mirror behind the bar to the carved wood embellishing the booths. By some miracle it hadn't been altered by the mad modernizers like several of the other historic pubs in the town. It was one of Rafferty's favourite watering holes and he often popped in after work for a quick one. It was on the way home and the service was always good, not like some of the town's other pubs where bored barmaids took their own sweet time to serve or even notice you.. He was here much later than usual tonight as he had got tired of his own company in his flat. He'd just come in for the last knockings and would only stay till chucking out time. Just long enough to take the edge off the loneliness and enable him to sleep without bad dreams about Abra finding a rich man who was eager to marry her and who indulged her most extravagant marital excesses.

The booths - some four of them lined the walls of the saloon bar - had benches that were made of mahogany. Say one thing for the Victorians they didn't stint - their backs were intricately carved with designs of the famous steam trains of the day: The Flying Scotsman, The Great Western, The Rocket and The Papyrus. The booth seats were crimson plush recently redone. The curtains that had once screened each booth were long gone. In their place were small swing doors about a third the length of the door-sized gap. They gave an illusion of privacy at sitting down head level.

Pictures of Elmhurst in the Victorian railway heyday lined the walls, full of uniformed railwaymen from the stern-visaged stationmaster proudly displaying his pocket watch like a badge of office to the young lad dogsbody with his pale face and spindly limbs. Other pictures showed carriages lined up to collect the gentry off the London train.

The whole pub was a peon of praise to a long-gone era and its glorious over-the-topness. The Victorians when they believed in doing something did it to the hilt and beyond. Theirs had been an age in British history that Rafferty strongly admired: tenacious, go-getting, ambitious. Sometimes he thought it was an era he would have liked to have been part of. But then he remembered that his family were Irish peasants on both sides. There would have been no proud brandishing of the flag across the Empire for him. He was more likely to die in agony of gangrene in some disgusting field hospital in the Crimea before Florence Nightingale - with her up to date ideas about hygiene arrived.

The stag-night boys were getting louder, the rugby songs ruder. A couple of women who had been sitting in one of the window seats got up and left in a marked manner muttering about drunken yobs. Rafferty grinned and walked across to claim one of their abandoned seats. The pub was busy and he was lucky to get it; he just beat a couple to the place.

The RailwayArms was the handiest pub for the station of course and some of the commuters came in from the trains and forgot to go home. It was a good-sized pub with two large bars and a small snug to the rear. It wsn't the oldest pub in Elmhurst having been built when thr railway was run through the town but it was comfortable with clean, well-kept toilets. As an ex-army man Andy Strong was a stickler for brass and blanco.

It quietened down a bit. But then five minutes later, he heard shouting from the other bar. He was seated near the partition and could hear it clearly.

'What the bloody hell are you doing here? You weren't invited.'

'Free country son. A free house too. I can come in here if I choose.

'Bloody old bastard. Why don't you sling your hook? I don't wany you gatecrashing my stag do. Go home why don't you? You're pissed.'

Rafferty waitrd for the argument to continue. Instead they sidestepped the row and went straight for the fisticuffs. He heard the crunch of a fist connecting with flesh and bone and then the crash of falling chairs.

It seemed the landlord had had enough for he bellowed loud enough to raise the dead. 'Right. That's it. Out the lot of you. I've my other customers to consider.

There were some more raucous shouts from Andy's boisterous customers then the bar doors banged and the place quietened down considerably.

Rafferty returned to the study of his whiskey. He supposed he ought to go, too. Back to the empty flat. It wasn't a pleasing prospect and had become less pleasing the longer it had gone on. But if he stayed he'd only have more to drink and would have to leave his car in the pub car park with all the trouble of fetching it in the morning.

He was just shrugging into his jacket when he heard more shoutintg.

'Hey Andy,' someone calld to the landlord fom the door of the public bar. 'One of your customers is curled up drunk in your yard. You' d better shift him and pour him into a taxi before someone runs over him.'

Muttering, Andy Strong raised the bar counter again and followed the customer out. He was back inside two minutes and came sraight across to Rafferty. 'You're a copper,' he said. 'Trained up in first aid and so on. Only I've got a customer in the car park and I can't rouse him. Will you come and have a look?'

Rafferty sighed, finished his drink and followed the landlord out and round the side of the building to the car park. It was surprisingly quiet; they could have been outside a country pub the night was no peaceful. It was surprising they could hear none of the noisy hubbub of the bar.

The weather was still mild though a slight breeze had blown up. It ruffled his hair though it had no effect on Andy's grey regulation short back and sides, which was as disciplined as the rest of him and stayed put whatever the weather. There was a row of lights illuminating the part of the yard nearest the pub but the darkness increased the further they got from the building the cars' shadows stretching out lengthily and adding to the gloom of the yard.

The landlord threaded his way through the darkness with a sure and confident step. He rounded a couple of parked cars and pointed. 'There he is.'

Rafferty stared over Andy Strong's shoulder for several seconds but the parked cars shadowed the spreadeagled body and he could make out little. 'Hang on' he said. 'I'll get my torch from the car.' He hurried across to his vehicle and rummaged in the glove compartment for a little before his fingers found the hard surface of the torch. He was back in a couple of minutes. He edged past the landlord and shone the torch over the man on the ground. He had thought the sudden light would help rouse the man from his stupor but it had no effect. He knelt down and felt for a pulse.

'I've already done that,' Andy told him. 'I couldn't feel anything.'

Nor could Rafferty. He stood up again and played the torch slowly over the man's body which he was beginning to suspect was actually a corpse. He was certain of it when he saw the slit in the man's jacket right between the shoulder blades and what looked like blood seeped around the edges of the slit. 'He's been knifed,' he said, the thought of his lonely flat receding and becoming more attractive as the possibility of reaching it vanishd into the distance. He'd have to call the team out.