Although he kissed Abra and asked her how she was feeling, she made no response. Hollow-eyed, she just stared ahead of her while more tears fell to mingle with the tracks of those that had fallen earlier.
‘Abra? Sweetheart? Talk to me. Please don't shut me out again.’
She looked at him as if she didn't recognise him. ‘Don't shut you out?’ she repeated in a dull little voice from which all her previous sparkle had vanished. ‘You shut yourself out when you made clear that you didn't want our baby – my baby.’ Even more dully, she added, ‘You got your wish.’
Not knowing what he could do or say for the best, he simply reached for her hand and gripped it tightly. At least she didn't pull it from his grasp.
The quiet of the small side ward was broken as the voice of a little boy echoing along the corridor. The child could have been no more than three. He ran into the ward and launched himself at a middle-aged woman in the bed by the door, shouting, ‘Hi Gwan, is me,’ chased by his out-paced and furiously ‘shushing’ mother.
‘Don't shout so, Jamie. I told you. You have to be quiet. This is a hospital. It's full of sick people.’
‘Is Gwan sick, Mummy?’
‘No, darling. She's just had a baby.’ She lifted the toddler off the bed and held him over the glass crib. ‘Take a look at your new uncle.’
Clearly astonished that he should have an uncle who was smaller than he was, the little boy stared down at the new infant. But whatever else it did, his astonishment silenced him and the small ward returned to the peace it had enjoyed before the child's arrival.
In the restored quiet, Maggie stood up. ‘I'll leave you two alone. You need to talk.’
Rafferty wanted to beg her to stay. He didn't know what to say to this new, subdued Abra.
‘I'll just be outside,’ Maggie told him, as if, yet again, she had second-guessed him.
He nodded. ‘Thanks Mags. I appreciate you being there for Abra.’
The thought – somebody had to be – entered Rafferty's head.
When Maggie had gone, warily, Rafferty questioned Abra. ‘Did the doctors say why you lost the baby?’
Abra gave a forlorn little shrug. ‘Just one of those things, was what they said. It's not unusual, apparently. But why did it have to happen to our baby. My baby?’ Again, she immediately corrected herself, before she burst into floods of noisy tears.
Rafferty put his arms round her and hugged her tight. ‘Perhaps it was for the best,’ he ventured. ‘Often these things happen – or so I understand – because the baby hadn't formed properly.’
‘I know that,’ she muttered against his shoulder. ‘They told me that. But they didn't seem to understand that that was even more upsetting to know. Why hadn't it formed properly? Is there something wrong with me?’
‘Of course there isn't. The doctors would have said. Don't go blaming yourself, Abra.’
But it seemed she did blame herself. Of course she also blamed him.
Rafferty, relieved she had condescended to talk to him at all and desperate to make amends, asked her what he could do to gain her forgiveness.
She told him.
Rafferty
got a not unsympathetic Llewellyn on the phone and begged a favour before he went in search of the ward sister. As he had explained to Llewellyn, there were some things even more urgent that murder investigations.
He was aware, even if Abra seemed not to be, that foetuses of such short gestation didn't merit a birth certificate, never mind the funeral or death certificate which Abra seemed to expect him to organise.
Fortunately, the ward sister confirmed he was in time. Once he had explained what he wanted, she brought him along to the sluice room, pointed out the abortive foetus and left him to say his goodbyes as he had requested.
As soon as the ward sister had left, Rafferty hunted in his jacket pockets and found a large evidence bag. Gently, he eased the tiny foetus into it and hid it under his jacket.
Conscious he had badly failed Abra over the baby's short life, he was determined he wouldn't fail her at its death. He was certainly unable to bring himself to tell her that, to the authorities who decided such things, a miscarried foetus of only a month or two's gestation wasn't considered a viable human being and did not merit certificates or a funeral.
The
arrangements took a while, several visits, some more hurried phone calls and a few threats, but finally they were in place.
Two hours later, he hustled Father Kelly and his righteous indignation into the nearest gents’ toilet. But even the blustering Father Kelly, faced with Ma Rafferty's ‘persuasion’, evidently realized that protest was futile, so he soon stopped complaining and accepted the inevitable.
‘You can get ready in here, Father,’ Rafferty told the priest. ‘I'll just go and prepare Abra.’
Father Kelly and all his paraphernalia were Rafferty's make amends ‘gifts’ to Abra. It was fortunate that he had arrived at the hospital in time to prevent the removal of the tiny, bloodied remains of their child.
He had even obtained a birth certificate; not a real one, obviously. But the computer-buff Llewellyn had certainly come up trumps in the short time available after Rafferty's desperate pleas had persuaded him to agree to some creative graphics on his computer. The birth certificate certainly had the look of the real McCoy, which was all that mattered.
The death certificate, somehow, he had felt unable to request. Perhaps if he hadn't been so quick to deny their child's existence, he wouldn't feel so constrained about faking this also.
He had even, with his ma's assistance – and owing to what blackmail he didn't ask – managed to persuade Father Kelly to give the tiny remnants of their child a proper funeral Mass. They would have the full ceremony at another time, for obvious reasons. But today, he was to give a much shortened version for Abra's sake.
Rafferty checked quickly up and down the corridor to make sure there was no one in authority in sight before he hurried to the Gents’, retrived the robed-up Father Kelly and hustled him along to Abra's little ward before anyone in authority had a chance to spot them.
Once there, he pulled the curtains round the bed and whispered to Father Kelly that he would have to keep his voice down.
Dull-eyed at first, Abra's face slowly became more animated. She cried when she saw the tiny white coffie that Father Kelly had obtained from the local funeral director which he had secreted in a large sports bag.
Rafferty wondered that no one had questioned the incongruity of such an item in the hands of the florid, overweight and evidently unsportsmanlike priest.
Although their child had not sufficient form to be actually dressed in the doll's frilly frock that stood in for a Christening robe that Rafferty had begged from his youngest niece, he handed it to Abra and she laid it tenderly over the barely-there remains of what should have been their child.
Then, on his knees, Abra's hands enfolded in his, Rafferty bowed his head for the Last Rites as the irrepressible old rogue, Father Kelly, intoned the soslemn words.
It was fortunate they had such an obliging man for a parish priest, he mused as the priest droned on Father Kelly loved sinners as his ma had reminded him. But as she had also remarked, of course Father Kelly loved sinners – wasn't the priest the great sinner in the parish?
Rafferty didn't know what sins the priest had committed, though it was clear his ma did and that was all that mattered. But old sinner or not, Father Kelly could be portentously solemn when the occasion demanded.
In a voice hushed with reverence, he intoned, ‘He that is born of woman has but a short time to live … In the midst of life, we are in death … Earty to earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust…’
Rafferty
had found the little service, very upsetting and deeply moving. So, for that matter, had Abra, although, she, at least, seemed to find some solace in the old ritual.
As Abra said to him afterwards, ‘Our child had life, even it if was only for a short time, within me. I needed to acknowledge that life. I needed the world, too, to acknowledge that our little Joseph had existed.’
Misty-eyed, Rafferty said, ‘You called him after me?’
‘Well, yes, of course. But you knew that already.’
She held out the fake Birth Certificate and handed it to him.
Rafferty took it and looked. Then he smiled. ‘Of course I did. What else would we call our first-born son?’ He sent up a silent ‘thank you’ up to Llewellyn, his sensitive, computer literate DS for thinking of this. Then he handed the paper back to Abra, before he took his last little gift out of his bag.
This final gift was a bottle of champagne, still chilled from its immersion in the bucket of ice in which it had made its journey to the hospital. And as he handed flutes to Abra and the suddenly bright-eyed Father Kelly, he said, ‘It might be the Jews who believe that each death should be a celebration of life, but as a lapsed Catholic, I applaud the sentiment.’
He poured the wine, first in to Abra's glass, then in to Father Kelly's, finally, in to his own, before he raised his glass and said, ‘To our son Joseph, short though his life was.L’chaim.’
Abra and Father Kelly paused for only a heartbeat, before they clinked glasses and added, ‘L'chaim.”
Before the echo of their voices had died away, Rafferty sent up a tiny vow of his own. Next time, he promised, next time, I'll do it right.
It
was much later that night; after Father Kelly had departed with the tiny coffin that contained their child concealed in the large sports bag he had brought with him, after Abra, with little Joseph's ‘Birth Certificate’ clasped to her chest, had finally fallen asleep, that Rafferty returned to his flat. He had gone to bed and had eventually managed to quieten his mind after all the stresses of the day.
He had just and had begun to doze off, when his sleepy brain threw up a new thought that the niggle about Clara Mortimer's murder. H and her estranged husband's confession zoomed back to the forefront of his mind. But this time, Mortimer's confession sat in uneasy alliance with something else that brought a frown to his forehead. And he wondered why the incongruity of this now recollected evidence hadn't struck him before..
He was instantly wide-awake again. He could only assume it was because he was at his most relaxed at the end of an emotionally fraught day that his brain finally released its grip on the golden nugget.
And although, as yet, he only had a misty grasp as to why he couldn't yet begin to guess what had prompted the selfish Harry Mortimer had decided to make his's unselfish ‘confession’, he now knew, almost for certain, that Mortimer hadn't killed his estranged wife. Or at least he thought he did.
But Rafferty believed that come the morrow, some serious questions tomorrow were likely to confirm it. And as he recalled Llewellyn's reminder that, to conclude the paperwork, they ought to interview Mrs Toombes's elusive fisherman husband, he felt confident that this need to revisit their apartment would provide sufficient excuse to question Mrs Toombes again and hopefully, this time, get her to tell them the truth.
Chapter Fifteen
Mrs Toombes, now
she had her husband home, seemed far more relaxed and happy than she had been at their first meeting.
As Llewellyn and Rafferty entered the Toombes's living room with its overloud TV, Rafferty knew his previous night's conviction that Mrs Toombes would repay further questioning had been correct.
Although they had, ostensibly, come to interview Mr Toombes in order to tidy up the paperwork, Rafferty was more than ever convinced that Mrs Toombes was the one to whom they should direct their questions.
While Mrs Toombes twittered around them, Rafferty wondered why he hadn't thought to bring up such an obvious question earlier in the case. On their previous visit to the apartment he had considered the TV too loud for comfort, but had thought no further on the subject. Now, though, as its loudness hit him again, he felt even more convinced he had the answer.
The difficulty, he thought, as Mrs Toombes ushered them in to her living room, was to get her to admit it.
She introduced them to her husband.
At least, Rafferty assumed the man sitting with the broadsheet newspaper thrust before him as a protective measure against Mrs Toombes's endless twittering and the over loud TV, was Mr Toombes. But as the TV over-rode his ears’ hearing ability, he had to guess the man's identity.
Rafferty smiled a greeting and awaited clues.
Whoever the man was, he, at least, noticed Rafferty's protective wince and curled up ear lobes, for he reached across for the zapper to turn the TV to off.
Grateful for the sound of silence, his sensitivities at fever pitch, suspecting he was reaching critical mass in the current investigation, but newly awakened to the woman's own sensitivities, Rafferty asked. ‘Mrs Toombes, you remember telling me about the man who rang your entry-phone early on the morning of Mrs Mortimer's murder?’
'Yes, of course I remember,' she told him sharply. 'I told you before, young man, that I don't have a problem with my memory. How could I possibly forget the events of that day?'