Blood on the Bones Read Free Page B

convent, whether he had been a sinner or not, whether he wanted them or not, whether he was a Believer or not, he would have prayers in plenty for his soul's passing.
    Rafferty didn't feel quite so blessed. He disliked being forced to face his Catholic demons – if such they could be called. Neither did he like being obliged to call the community's matriarch 'Mother'. He had assumed he had long since put all that religious mumbo jumbo behind him. He never even called his own mother 'Mother'. Well, apart, that was, from when he was trying to display his disapproval for some behaviour of hers and ma was being stroppy – which, come to think of it, was most of the time.
    Another thing to be regretted was the fact that, although this was an enclosed order of nuns, which he hoped would limit the potential suspects, they were also a silent, contemplative order; their days and a fair chunk of their nights, too, he presumed, were given over to prayer. How on earth could he encourage the usual title-tattle that was so invaluable during a police operation if none of the usual tittle-tattling gender indulged?
    However, the Prioress, Mother Catherine, seemed to consider the current unique circumstances warranted a breach of the usual silence, for when the sisters, being as filled with curiosity as the rest of humanity, failed to obey her flapping commands, she supported her arm signals with orders of the vocal kind. Rafferty heard her voice carry clearly as she admonished her charges.
    ‘A little Christian charity, if you please, sisters. A man is dead. A child of Christ. He is entitled to some dignity in death, not to be stared at in his nakedness by women who should know better. Come. We must pray for his immortal soul.’
    ‘Amen to that,’ Rafferty muttered, thankful she was taking her flock off before he was obliged to order her to do so. He always hated to have an audience at a scene of crime. Though it amused him that she had just assumed the dead man was a follower of Christ. For all she, or any of them, knew, in life, he might have prayed to Buddha or some other deity. Or no one at all, of course, which, in an increasingly irreligious Britain, was probably the most likely option.
    Beside him, he felt Llewellyn stir as if in disapproval of his flippant remark and he glanced at him. But, although Llewellyn didn't say anything, he didn't have to. Apart from his ma, Rafferty had never met anyone who could convey disapproval or irritation with just a few almost imperceptible shifts of facial muscles. And while Llewellyn's subtlety was a natural part of him, his ma's was not. As a mother of six, she had discovered the hard way that shouting was mostly counter-productive and, along the way, she had learned to conserve her energy.
    Llewellyn had never possessed Kitty Rafferty's original, primitive, urge to shout and holler. Sometimes, Rafferty regretted it.
    He knew where he was with shouting and bawling. It was what he had been used to for so long. He found these subtle manifestations of disapproval harder to counter or defend against.
    Rafferty scowled – a far from subtle muscle shift. It was all right for Llewellyn. His present location was unlikely to make him feel as off-kilter as it made Rafferty. Flippancy would, he suspected, as he watched the nuns' departure and thought again of the letter in his pocket, be his only crutch in the days and weeks that loomed ahead.
    Already – even without the letter and the anxiety it engendered – he was experiencing a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Even here, out in the open, with a fresh breeze scattering the first fallen leaves of autumn, he imagined he could smell the overpowering scent of incense. It was making him feel nauseous. Suffocated, even. And the investigation hadn't even properly begun yet.
    Of course, that smell was linked in his mind with the Catholic ritual he had so loathed as a child and a youth: the breast-beating of confession; the expectation, no, the