Blood on the Bones Read Free Page A

Daff?’
    Llewellyn hesitated and Rafferty instead supplied his own first thoughts. ‘Under other circumstances, I'd have strong suspicions that this was an inside job, given the height of the walls and the other deterrents. But–’
    ‘But even you find it hard to conceive of holy nuns being guilty of murder?’
    Rafferty shrugged. ‘Something like that, I suppose.’ But it wasn't even that, not really. He knew the religious over the years had gone in for plenty of violent acts against people who disagreed with them; they were still at it in the twenty-first century. He supposed the current lot of Catholic Holy Joes and Josephines were equally as capable of violence as their counterparts in other religions.
    No, he thought it was more a case that man needed something to believe in, something to hold onto in a world where change tended to be too rapid and way too ugly. He smiled. ‘We'd better start from the basic fact that the sisters are all human beings first and nuns second and proceed from there.’
    Llewellyn nodded, presumably pleased by the rare logic encompassed in his inspector's pronouncement.
    Rafferty sunk into contemplation. From where he stood, he could see the entirety of the convent's extensive rear grounds. But if the detached house and its large grounds was the sisters' one extravagance, it was a necessary one because the building was home to a small community of women, although he was not yet certain of the precise numbers. The spacious grounds, too, were essential for a group of women who were almost entirely self-sufficient.
    The body and its shallow grave had been found by the right hand side wall. It was close to what Rafferty had taken to be a shed, but which Llewellyn had discovered was one of the convent's two hermitages, where the sisters could pray in solitude. Small and without any form of heating that Rafferty had been able to discern, they must be as cold as charity in the depths of winter. He could only suppose God kept them warm, in spirit at least, if not in body.
    The convent's small apple and pear orchard, heavy with ripe fruit, was between the right hand side wall and the wall facing the back of the house. A large glasshouse, shed and soft fruit plot were near the centre of the grounds. The vegetable plot, at the back of which was to be found the second hermitage, took up almost the whole of the left hand side of the grounds.
    Next, Rafferty directed his attention fifty yards away, towards the main building of the Carmelite Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, just in front of which, a little gaggle of brown-habited, black-veiled nuns, with horrified fascination, were observing the scene of crime team at work.
    The SOCOs moved slowly, deferentially almost, as if they were observing some religious rite of their own, one that required an attention as rapt as a nun's devotions. Which it did, of course, if they were to miss no possible clue as to who had placed their cadaver in the soil.
    As Rafferty watched, Mother Catherine, the Prioress or, as he thought of her, the Mother Superior, to whom he had spoken briefly on his arrival, made her brisk way across the grass from the main building to where the other nuns were standing. As the sun fought its way briefly through the increasingly dark clouds, it glinted on her tinted spectacles and seemed to galvanise her into action. She clapped her pitifully scarred hands and, with a flapping motion, as if she was encouraging a flock of unruly chickens to take roost for the evening, tried to persuade the gaping nuns back to their duties. But such was the sisters' goggle-eyed fascination with this dramatic departure from their normal routine that her silent entreaties met with only a limited response.
    The dead man could count himself a lucky corpse in one way, Rafferty reflected, in the brief moments before the lapsed nature of his Catholicism caught up with him once more. Since the dead man's body had been found in the grounds of the RC