Charles Ogilvie blanched. His skin went the colour of tallow. And at his mother's repeated urging that he take on the unwelcome duty, he blurted out, ‘But you're forgetting, Mum, I haven't seen her since I was a kid. How can I identify her?’
Jane frowned at this. She pursed her lips as the realisation dawned on her that there was no escaping the duty of identifying her mother.
‘Silly of me. I forgot.’
Rafferty intervened. ‘It does need to be someone who is familiar with the deceased.’ He addressed his next remark to Jane. ‘I understand you last saw her around a week ago?’
Jane flushed, tossed her stringy blonde mane and unwisely blurted out the first thing that came into her head. ‘I suppose you've heard all about the falling-out Darryl had with my mother?’
‘There was something of the sort mentioned,’ Rafferty murmured as he took in the look of venom Jane's unthinking remark extracted from her toy boy. There were more undercurrents here than in the River Thames, he thought.
Angry colour enlivened Jane's previous washed out pallor. ‘Those old women – got nothing better to do than poke their noses into my business; judging me, always judging me, just like–'
Her angry voice broke off abruptly, though the heightened colour in her previously pale cheeks remained as a reminder that Jane had a ready temper.
Her boyfriend also didn't look the type to turn the other cheek. The half smirk that seemed to be his normal expression had, at Jane's revelation about the row, been replaced by a ferocious scowl.
As if unaware that, in confirming the aggressive Darryl had had a recent falling out with her murdered mother she had placed him squarely at the top of their suspect list, Jane sat, staring blindly into space.
But perhaps her staring wasn't so blind. Perhaps now she was seeing that her bitterness against her mother was up against the final, slamming door of death, because Jane's next words revealed remorse that the estrangement between herself and her mother should reflect badly on Clara Mortimer.
‘Whenever I visited Mum I would feel eyes watching me, scrutinising me from behind their oh-so-clean nets, damning me for not being more like they expected Clara's daughter to be. I always thought they kept such a look out so they could know who had visitors and who didn't and do a bit of crowing. Spiteful old bitches. Just so they could get one over on each other.’
From where he was leaning, oh-so-casually against the doorpost, Darryl Jesmond put aside his scowl, ran his hand through his blond streaked, floppy, light brown hair and remarked with a faint smile that held more than a hint of self-satisfaction, ‘Yeah, I felt that, too – eyes watching me every time I visited. It gave me the creeps to think of all those old wrinklies using me to enliven their dreams.’
Rafferty suspected that, secretly, Darryl had got a kick out of it. If the ladies of the sheltered apartments had watched him, as he claimed, it would only confirm for Darryl how justified was his self-love. He certainly hadn't expressed any concern for Jane in her bereavement.
This thought seemed to strike Jane at the same time it struck Rafferty, for she rounded on Darryl.
‘You!’ she said scornfully. “It's always about you, isn't it? I'm the one who's just lost her mother,’ she reminded him.
‘Yeah,’ he drawled carelessly. ‘Like it's as if you gave a toss for the old bag.’
Jane, about to make another retort, clenched her lips tight shut on whatever she had been going to say, as if realising with what fascination the police audience were following the exchange.
Rafferty, regretfully accepting that they were to hear no more intriguing revelations, took the opportunity the sudden silence afforded to answer Jane's earlier complaint.
‘Just to reassure you, I don't listen to tittle-tattle,’ Rafferty told her.
‘No?’ Clearly she didn't believe him. ‘You must be the only person in the world who doesn't then.’ She put her still-dry tissue in her pocket and stood up. ‘Hadn't we better get along to the mortuary? I'll need to break the news to my other children also, so the sooner I identify her, the sooner I can do so.’ She took her son's hand in a grip so fierce that Charlie visibly winced. ‘I'll do the identifying, but I want you to accompany me.’
For a moment or two, it looked as though Charles would refuse his mother's demand.
Rafferty would have excused him on the grounds of youth alone and was surprised Jane didn't insist Darryl Jesmond accompanied her. Unless you were PC Smales, whose uniform demanded his attendance, a mortuary was no place for the young.
Rafferty was about to say something along these lines when Charles visibly swallowed past the lump in his throat and gave his reluctant agreement.
Once
Jane had identified Clara Mortimer's body and she and her son had returned to the car for the journey home, they both became very quiet. In spite of his grown-up executive suit Charles looked even younger than the twenty odd years Rafferty gave him by the time their painful duty was concluded.
It was only as Rafferty pulled up outside her front door that Jane Ogilvie released the flood of emotions that must have been simmering inside since learning of her mother's death – or possibly, Rafferty guessed as he listened to the stored resentments pour out – for years before that.
‘Jane – why did she have to call me that? Jane. Plain Jane. I've always resented her for it and for the fact that she'd never thought I might be plain. I was teased with that Plain Jane tag all through my schooldays and beyond. But Mum – Mother, as she always insisted I call her, never understood that not everyone had her stiff upper lip stoicism.’
She directed a defiant stare at Rafferty, who had half-turned round in the front passenger seat and challenged him. ‘I suppose you think I'm an awful daughter? You must do if you've been listening to the spite those old women at the apartments must have poured in your ears all morning.’
‘I've generally found there are two sides to every story,’ he told her quietly.
‘Yeah, right. And you don't listen to gossip, either, do you?’ She gave an unladylike snort and for a few moments she seemed to retreat into private memories which, moments later, she decided to share with the motherly Mary Carmody, whose warm maternal features so often invited unwise confidences.
‘I suppose I started becoming rebellious when I was about thirteen. I'm not sure even now if I got pregnant that first time with Charles when I was in my late teens just to spite my mother. I spited her all right. She didn't talk to me for six weeks. She was like that, my Mother. She'd give you the silent treatment. Unfortunately for her, she didn't realise I preferred the silent treatment to the reproachful criticisms which I got when I was merely exasperating her. Anyway, my boyfriend, Charlie's dad, married me and I became Mrs Ogilvie. I was respectable then.
‘The marriage didn't last, of course; perhaps I didn't want it to as such conformity was way too pleasing to my mother.’
Beside her, in the back seat of the car, as if worried she might be incriminating herself, her son tried to quieten her
‘Mum, you shouldn't talk like that. Not afte–' Charles took one glance at Rafferty and broke off.
Not after her mother had died such a violent death, Rafferty imagined Charles Ogilvie had been going to say. It was good advice, too. But it had no discernible effect on his mother, who continued her unwise outpourings.
‘After me and my husband split I took up with different men. I had a fling with an Arab man and got pregnant again with my little Hakim Mohammed. By the time I'd had the third kid, my daughter Aurora, with the local bad lad black drug dealer, the silent treatment was beyond her. She refused even to see me after that, never mind speak to me.’
Jane gave a humourless laugh. ‘I was an embarrassment, you see, a social embarrassment. I'd pissed on her image of herself, brought her down. She can't … couldn't, forgive that.’ Her voice now little more than a whisper, she added, ‘And now…now, she never will.’
As if her son's words of warning had at last penetrated, Jane stared at them from eyes that dared them to criticise her. Their very challenge revealed more of her vulnerability than copious tears ever could.
‘Apart from having and bringing up my kids – that's the only thing I've ever achieved in life – hurting her. In two generations, I've managed to drag her family line down from the manor house and its gentle living, where she started life, to this squalid squat.’ She nodded towards the peeling, vandalized front door of her ‘borrowed’ flat, ‘and two half-caste grandchildren.’
For a moment, her face slackened as if in realisation that such an achievement wasn't up there with climbing Everest. Then, as if shrugging off this acknowledgement, she bared stained smoker's teeth in a Grim Reaper's smile, and said, ‘The squat could be erased from the family history, but the half-caste family line can't. She might have denied two of her grandchildren in life, but in death she can't deny them. The obituaries won't let her. My two youngest kids’ surnames are their own testimony.’ It was clear she believed it to be a triumph of sorts.
Rafferty felt like asking her if she didn't think it was time that she grew up and took responsibility for her own actions. But he said nothing, not least because he was honest enough to admit to himself that, in wrestling with his own concerns about responsibility, he wasn't exactly rushing to embrace the mature grown-up world himself.
When Jane's complaints finally ran down, she stared at her closed front door, then, with an air of reluctance, she climbed from the car. And as she opened the door and it was rushed by two youngsters; a pretty young mixed race girl around twelve or thirteen and a handsome youth in his mid-teens, whose proud features proclaimed his Middle Eastern paternity, Rafferty offered Jane the silent commiseration he had been unable to voice before. After a full night shift, Jane Ogilvie must be exhausted; yet now she faced the task of breaking the grim news to her two younger children.
Hit by an attack of conscience after his earlier feelings of dislike, Rafferty got out of the car and offered to leave Mary Carmody with her in order to provide the support it was clear Darryl Jesmond wouldn't supply. But his offer was curtly declined and as the WPC who had collected the two younger children from school came to the door, she was unceremoniously bustled out and the door was all but slammed in their faces.
‘Well honestly,’ remarked young WPC Allen. ‘The manners of some people.’
‘She has just had a shock,’ Mary Carmody gently reminded the younger officer. She glanced at Rafferty. ‘But, even so, I don't think she or the boyfriend merit removal from the suspect list just yet, do you, sir?’
Rafferty shrugged and gave his best imitation of the cautious Llewellyn. ‘It's early days. It wouldn't do to jump to any hasty conclusions.’
This comment brought a stunned silence, not only from Mary Carmody – who knew of his famous predilection for leaping ahead of the game and the evidence, but also from WPC Allen, who was a recent addition to the strength, but who had obviously made it her business to tune in to canteen gossip.
Rafferty, with his newly adopted caution about such matters, felt put out that no one had even noticed it. To hide this, he remarked acerbically, ‘Well, if the recently-bereaved Mrs Ogilvie doesn't require our services, I'm sure we're all got plenty to be getting on with.’
Acknowledging the dismissal, WPC Allen shot a rueful glance at Mary Carmody and made for her car.
After a moment's hesitation, Mary Carmody did likewise, leaving Rafferty to bring up the rear. And as he climbed in the passenger seat having concluded that his walk to Mercer's Lane had given him enough exercise for one day, he couldn't help but reflect that after being in Jane Ogilvie's company for the best part of an hour, it would be a relief to get back to the murder scene.
As Carmody pulled away from the kerb, Rafferty gazed thoughtfully out the window. It was clear that Clara Mortimer's daughter had an enormous chip on her shoulder. Was it justified, he wondered? Or was she truly the grown woman who refused to grow up that she appeared to be? Couldn't she see that the person most damaged by her rebellious behaviour had been herself?
But, as Rafferty turned and stared back at the peeling front door of Jane Ogilvie's flat, he was filled with a profound sadness for Clara Mortimer that her immediate family had shed barely a tear at her passing.
Chapter Four
On arrival back
at the police station, Rafferty hurried to his office. He was anxious to read the preliminary reports from the house-to-house teams.
But as he discovered, these early reports added up to very little, which wasn't altogether surprising as Sam Dally had said Clara Mortimer had died around 7.00 a m: a time when most people would either have been still in bed or just getting up and preparing themselves for another day.
Disappointed, he headed back to the scene, hoping Llewellyn's interviews of the other residents might have unearthed something more interesting.
He found Llewellyn outside the Priory Way apartment block organising yet another team. When he saw Rafferty, he dismissed the officers, made a brief note on the sheaf of papers he held on the clipboard he kept handy in his car, and walked towards him.
As Llewellyn explained what had so far been accomplished Rafferty nodded his approval. Llewellyn had done well in his absence. Not only had the teams he'd organised nearly finished the house-to-house in the streets in the immediate vicinity, they had also discovered the identities of the early-morning dog-walkers in the park opposite the block and had already spoken to several of these as well as the apartments' gardeners and interviewed almost all of the rest of the residents of the sheltered apartments.