A Thrust to the Vitals Read Online Free Page B

superiors – though, I suppose, since his knighthood, only royalty would be so regarded – and saves his bile for those not in a position to answer back. Not a likeable man, by all accounts.’
    Rafferty had nodded. Even if he hadn’t already been, from personal knowledge, well aware of that fact, he would have got a hint of Seward’s reputation from the reported comments of the few guests who had chosen to linger long after the party was scheduled to finish and who had been herded from the scene once the police had arrived at Marcus Canthorpe’s summons on finding the dead body of his employer. These guests had received the reward deserved by all such late-lingerers — nasty questions and unwanted invitations to linger even longer. Some of the replies, fortunately for the investigation, had been of the unguarded nature that copious quantities of alcohol invariably encourage.
    Seward, like Rafferty and his two younger brothers after they had moved to Essex from their south London home, had attended the local RC secondary modern. But Seward, to give him his due, had been smart even then and had been destined for higher things. It had only been his early idleness that had caused him to attend the secondary modern in the first place, rather than the grammar school. But, in his final year, he had obtained a scholarship to St Oswald’s, the nearby fee-paying boarding school with an excellent reputation.
    He hadn’t wasted the opportunity. Nor had he hesitated to crow about it. Even now, twenty-five years later, Rafferty could recall his younger brother’s resentment at Seward’s boasting of his scholarship success and Mickey’s relative ‘failure’, as Seward called it, in merely managing to get signed up to attend the local technical college. No, Seward had not been a nice man.
    Rafferty, being a year older than both his brother Mickey and cousin Nigel, had seen less of Seward’s youthful arrogance than had been displayed to his two relatives. And, as a teenager, Rafferty had been both taller than his younger brother and cousin and handy with his fists, so Seward had had the sense not to tangle with him in the way that he had so enjoyed tangling with those younger or smaller than himself of whom, Mickey, of course, had been one.
    But, while the grown-up Mickey might not have Seward’s money or worldly success, he did have a craftsman’s skills in carpentry, painstakingly acquired during the City & Guilds course he had taken at the local college during his apprenticeship. And even though his brother had managed to put himself in an extremely unfortunate position over Seward’s violent murder and his self-evident failure to bring it to anyone’s attention before he scarpered with the words ‘chief suspect’ inevitably trailing behind him, what Dally the pathologist had said about the number of people who would be glad to assist Seward to even greater, heavenly, glory, was true enough. It provided Rafferty with the only solace currently on offer.
    Of course, he had yet to meet Seward’s unwillingly lingering guests, though, from all the reports he had so far heard, they sounded a pretty uncongenial lot.
    Okay, finding yourself involved in a murder scene when all you had expected to do was drink and stuff your face, would be a shock to anyone. Still, given that Sir Rufus had known and associated with some characters who were, by repute, as unpleasant and ruthless as he was, Rafferty felt it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that at least one of them would be revealed to have nursed a magnate-sized grudge against the dead man. It might yet let his idiot brother off the hook.
     

Chapter Three
    After having a quick word with the rest of the team, Rafferty led Llewellyn away from Seward’s suite. Outside, in the corridor, he found Reynolds, the hand-wringing night manager, hovering as close to the suite as the uniformed guardians of the door permitted. As soon as he emerged, Rafferty was met, once again, by the man’s