The Scold's Bridle

by Minette Walters

  There were tears in her eyes. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Granny’s death.’

  ‘Then what can you lose by telling me?’

  ‘I’ll be expelled.’

  ‘You’ll be expelled far quicker if I have to explain why I’m carting your clothing off for forensic examination.’

  She buried her face in her hands. ‘My boyfriend,’ she muttered.

  ‘Name?’ he demanded relentlessly.

  ‘Dave – Dave Hughes.’

  ‘Address?’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t tell you. He’d kill me.’

  Cooper frowned at the bent head. ‘How did you meet him?’

  She raised her tear-stained face. ‘He did the tarmac on the school drive.’ She read censure in his eyes and leapt to defend herself. ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I’m not a slut. We love each other.’

  Her sexual morality had been the last thing on his mind but it was clearly at the forefront of hers. He felt sorry for her. She was accusing herself, he thought, when she called her mother a whore. ‘Does he own the house?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s a squat.’

  ‘But he must have a telephone or you wouldn’t be able to contact him.’

  ‘It’s a mobile.’

  ‘May I have the number?’

  She looked alarmed. ‘He’d be furious.’

  You bet your life he would, thought Cooper. He wondered what Hughes was involved in. Drugs? Under-age sex? Pornography? Expulsion was the least of Ruth’s problems if any of these were true. He showed no impatience for the address or phone number. ‘Tell me about him,’ he invited instead. ‘How long have you known him? How old is he?’

  He had to prise the information from her with patient cajoling and, as she spoke and listened to herself, he saw the dawning confirmation of her worst fears: that this was not a story of Montagues and Capulets thwarting innocent love but, rather, a seedy log of sweaty half-hours in the back of a white Ford transit. Told baldly, of course, it lacked even the saving attraction of eroticism and Cooper, like Ruth, found the telling uncomfortable. He did his best to make it easy for her but her embarrassment was contagious and they looked away from each other more often than their eyes met.

  It had been going on for six months since the tarmac crew had relaid the drive, and the details of how it began were commonplace. A school full of girls; Dave with an eye for the most likely; she flattered by his obvious admiration, more so when the other girls noticed he only had eyes for her; a wistful regret when the tarmac was done and the crew departed; followed by an apparently chance meeting when she was walking alone; he, streetwise and twenty-eight; she, a lonely seventeen-year-old with dreams of romance. He respected her, he loved her, he’d wait for ever for her, but (how big a word ‘but’ was in people’s lives, thought Cooper) he had her in the back of his transit within a week. If she could forget the squalor of a blanket on a tarpaulin, then she could remember the fun and the excitement. She had crept out of a downstairs window at two o’clock in the morning to be enveloped in her lover’s arms. They had smoked and drunk and talked by candlelight in the privacy of the parked van and, yes, all right, he wasn’t particularly well educated or even very articulate, but that didn’t matter. And if what happened afterwards had not been part of her gameplan, then that didn’t matter either because, when it came to it (her eyes belied the words) she had wanted sex as much as he had.

  Cooper longed to ask her, why? Why she valued herself so cheaply? Why she was the only girl in the school who fell for it? Why she would want a relationship with an illiterate labourer? Why, ultimately, she was so gullible as to imagine that he wanted anything more than free sex with a clean virgin? He didn’t ask, of course. He wasn’t so cruel.

  The affair might have ended there had she not met him by sheer mischance (Cooper’s interpretation, not hers) one day during the holidays. She had heard nothing from him since the night in the van, and hope had given way to depression. She was spending Easter with her grandmother at Fontwell (she usually went to Fontwell, she told Cooper, because she got on better with her grandmother), and caught the bus to Bournemouth to go shopping. And suddenly there was Dave, and he was so pleased to see her, but angry, too, because she hadn’t answered his letter. (Sourly, Cooper imagined the touching scene. What letter? Why, the one that had got lost in the post, of course.) After which they had fallen into each other’s arms in the back of the Ford, before Dave had driven her home and realized (Cooper reading between the lines again) that Ruth might be good for a little more than a quick tumble on a blanket when he felt horny.

  ‘He took me everywhere that holidays. It was wonderful. The best time I’ve ever had.’ But she spoke the words flatly, as if even the memory lacked sparkle.

  She was too canny to tell her grandmother what she was doing – even in her wildest dreams she didn’t think Mathilda would approve of Dave – so, instead, like a two-timing spouse, she invented excuses for her absences.

  ‘And your grandmother believed you?’

  ‘I think her arthritis was really bad about then. I used to say I was going somewhere, but in the evening she’d have forgotten where.’

  ‘Did Dave take you to his home?’

  ‘Once. I didn’t like it much.’

  ‘Did he suggest you steal from your grandmother? Or was that your idea?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said unhappily. ‘We ran out of money, so I borrowed some from her bag one day.’

  ‘And couldn’t pay it back?’

  ‘No.’ She fell silent.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘There was so much stuff there. Jewellery. Ornaments. Bits of silver. She didn’t even like most of it. And she was so mean. She could have given me a better allowance, but she never did.’

  ‘So you stole her things and Dave sold them.’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘What happened to Dave’s job with the tarmac crew?’

  ‘No work.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s not his fault. He’d work if he could.’

  Did she really believe that? ‘So you went on stealing from your grandmother through the summer term and the summer holidays?’

  ‘It wasn’t stealing. I was going to get it anyway.’

  Dave had indoctrinated her well – or was this Ruth herself speaking? ‘Except that you didn’t.’

  ‘The doctor’s no right to it. She’s not even related.’

  ‘Dave’s address, please, Miss Lascelles.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said with genuine fear. ‘He’ll kill me.’

  He was out of patience with her. ‘Well, let’s face it, it won’t be much of a loss whichever way you look at it. Your mother won’t grieve for you, and to the rest of society you’ll be a statistic. Just another young girl who allowed a man to use and abuse her.’ He shook his head contemptuously. ‘I think the most depressing aspect of it all is how much money has been wasted on your education.’ He looked around the room. ‘My kids would have given their eye-teeth to have had your opportunities, but then they’re a good deal brighter than you, of course.’ He waited for a moment then shut his notebook and stood up with a sigh. ‘You’re forcing me to do it the hard way, through your headmistress.’

  Ruth hugged herself again. ‘She doesn’t know anything. How could she?’

  ‘She’ll know the name of the firm that was employed to do the drive. I’ll track him down that way.’

  She wiped her damp nose on her sleeve. ‘But, you don’t understand, I have to get to university.’

  ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘So that you and your boyfriend can have a field day with gullible students? What does he deal in? Drugs?’

  Tears flowed freely down her cheeks. ‘I don’t know how else to get away from him. I’ve told him I’m going to Exeter, but I’m not, I’m trying for universities in the north because they’re the farthest away.’

  Cooper was strangely moved. It occurred to him that this was ver
y likely true. She did see running away as the only option open to her. He wondered what Dave had done to make her so afraid of him. Grown impatient, perhaps, and killed Mrs Gillespie to hasten Ruth’s inheritance? He resumed his seat. ‘You never knew your father, of course. I suppose it’s natural you should have looked for someone to take his place. But university isn’t going to solve anything, Miss Lascelles. You may have a term or two of peace before Dave finds you, but no more. How did you plan to keep it a secret? Were you going to tell the school that they were never to reveal which university you’d gone to? Were you going to tell your mother and your friends the same thing? Sooner or later there’d be a plausible telephone call and someone would oblige with the information.’

  She seemed to shrink in front of his eyes. ‘Then there’s nothing I can do.’

  He frowned. ‘You can start by telling me where to find him.’

  ‘Are you going to arrest him?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Stealing from Granny. You’ll have to arrest me, too.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll need to talk to your grandmother’s executors about that. They may decide to let sleeping dogs lie.’

  ‘Then you’re just going to ask him questions about the day Granny died?’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, assuming it was what she wanted to hear.

  She shook her head. ‘He does terrible things to me when he’s angry.’ Her eyes flooded again. ‘If you don’t put him in prison then I can’t tell you where to find him. You just don’t understand what he’s like. He’ll punish me.’

  ‘How?’

  But she shook her head again, more violently. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘You’re protected here.’

  ‘He said he’d come and make a scene in the middle of the school if I ever did anything he didn’t like. They’ll expel me.’

  Cooper was perplexed. ‘If you’re so worried about expulsion, why did you ever go out and meet him in the first place? You’d have been expelled on the spot if you’d been caught doing that.’

  She twisted her fingers in the hem of her jumper. ‘I didn’t know then how much I wanted to go to university,’ she whispered.

  He nodded. ‘There’s an old saying about that. You never miss the water till the well runs dry.’ He smiled without hostility. ‘But all of us take things for granted so you’re not alone in that. Try this one: desperate diseases call for desperate remedies. I suggest you make a clean breast of all this to your headmistress, throw yourself on her mercy, so to speak, before she finds out from me or Hughes. She might be sympathetic. You never know.’

  ‘She’ll go mad.’

  ‘Do you have a choice?’

  ‘I could kill myself,’ she said in a tight little voice.

  ‘It’s a very weak spirit,’ he said gently, ‘that sees cutting off the head as the only solution to a headache.’ He slapped his hands against his knees. ‘Find a bit of courage, girl. Give me Dave’s address and then sort things out with your headmistress.’

  Her lip wobbled. ‘Will you come with me if I do?’

  Oh, good grief, he thought, hadn’t he had to hold his own children’s hands often enough? ‘All right,’ he agreed, ‘but if she asks me to leave I shall have to. I’ve no authority here as your guardian, remember.’

  ‘Twenty-three, Palace Road, Bournemouth,’ she whispered. ‘It was my mother who told you I was a thief, wasn’t it?’ She sounded desperately forlorn, as if she realized that, for her, there was no one left.

  ‘No,’ said Cooper compassionately. ‘More’s the pity, but your mother hasn’t told me anything.’

  When Sarah pulled into her driveway later that Friday afternoon, she was greeted by the unexpected sight of Jack’s car and Cooper’s car nestling side by side against the wall in cosy intimacy. Her first inclination was to turn round and drive away again. She hadn’t the stomach for a confrontation with either of them, even less for another baring of her soul in front of Cooper while her husband severed his remaining ties. But second thoughts prevailed. Dammit all – she banged her fist angrily against the steering wheel – it was her house. She was buggered if she was going to drive around for hours just to avoid her scumbag of a husband and a pompous policeman.

  Quietly, she let herself in through the front door, half-thinking that if she tiptoed past the studio, she could possess herself of the kitchen before they knew she was there. As her mother had once said, slamming the kitchen door on Sarah’s father: ‘An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but an Englishwoman’s kitchen is where he eats his humble pie.’ The sound of voices drifted down the corridor, however, and she knew they had possessed it before her. With a sigh, she fastened her dignity about her like armour plating, and advanced.

  Jack, DS Cooper and Ruth Lascelles looked up from their glasses of wine with differing shades of alarm and embarrassment colouring their faces.

  ‘Hi,’ said Sarah into the silence. ‘You found the ’83 Cheval Blanc with no trouble then.’

  ‘Have some,’ said Jack, reaching for a clean glass off the draining board. ‘It’s good.’

  ‘It should be,’ she said. ‘It’s a St Emilion, Premier Grand Cru Classé, and it cost me a small fortune when I laid it down.’

  ‘Don’t be so stuffy, woman. You’ve got to try them from time to time, otherwise you’ll end up with a collector’s item that’s totally undrinkable.’ He filled the glass and pushed it across the table, his eyes bright with mischief. She felt a surge of affection for the randy bastard – love, she thought, was the most stubborn of all the diseases – but hid it under a ferocious glare. ‘The consensus view amongst the three of us,’ he went on cheerfully, ‘is dark ruby colour, brilliant legs, and a very exotic nose – curranty fruit, cigar box and hints of herbs and spices.’

  ‘It’s a vintage wine, you moron. It’s supposed to be savoured and appreciated, not drunk at five o’clock in the afternoon round the kitchen table. I bet you didn’t let it breathe. I bet you just poured it out like Lucozade.’

  Cooper cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Blakeney. We did say we’d be happier with tea.’

  ‘You pusillanimous rat,’ said Jack with imperturbable good humour. ‘You drooled when I waved the bottle under your nose. Well, come on, old thing, you might as well try it. We’re all dying for second helpings but we thought it would be tactful to wait till you arrived before we opened another one.’

  ‘Your life expectancy would be nil if you had,’ she said, dropping her handbag and shrugging her coat to the floor. ‘All right. Give it here, but I can tell you now it won’t be drinkable. It needs another three years at least.’ She sat in the vacant chair and drew the glass towards her, covering it with one hand and swirling it gently to release the bouquet. She sniffed appreciatively. ‘Who smelt cigar boxes?’

  ‘I did,’ said Cooper nervously.

  ‘That’s good. The book says the bouquet should be smoky oak and cedar. Curranty fruit?’

  Cooper indicated himself again. ‘Me.’

  ‘Have you done this before?’ He shook his head. ‘You should take it up. You’ve obviously got a nose for it.’

  ‘Ruth and I sussed the herbs and spices,’ said Jack. ‘What’s the verdict?’

  Sarah took a sip and let the flavours play across her tongue. ‘Spectacular,’ she said finally, ‘but you’re bloody well not opening another bottle. The book says another three years, and I’m going by the book. You can use the wine box for refills. What are you all doing here anyway?’ Her eyes rested on Ruth. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘Ruth’s been expelled,’ said Jack. ‘We’re all wondering if she can live here with you and me until something more permanent is sorted out.’

  Sarah took another sip of her wine and eyed him thoughtfully. ‘You and me?’ she queried silkily. ‘Does that mean you intend to inflict your company on me again?’

  The dark face softened. ‘That rather depends, my angel.’
/>   ‘On whether or not I’m prepared to have you back?’

  ‘No. On whether I come back on my terms or your terms.’

  ‘My terms,’ she said bluntly, ‘or not at all.’

  He gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Shame,’ he murmured.

  Sarah held his gaze for a moment, then transferred her attention to Ruth. ‘So why were you expelled?’

  Ruth, who had been staring at her hands since Sarah came in, flicked a sideways glance at Cooper. ‘The Sergeant knows. He can tell you.’

  ‘I’d rather hear it from you.’

  ‘I broke the school rules.’ She resumed her study of her hands.

  ‘All of them or one in particular?’

  ‘Leaving school without permission.’

  ‘Times haven’t changed then. A friend of mine was expelled for sneaking down the fire escape and talking to some boys at the bottom of it. She was only caught because the rest of us were hanging out of the windows giggling. We were making such a row the housemistress heard us and expelled her on the spot. She’s a barrister now. Rather a good one, too.’

  ‘I’ve been sleeping with someone,’ Ruth whispered, ‘and the headmistress said I was a bad influence on the others. She said I was immoral.’

  Sarah raised enquiring eyebrows at Cooper, who nodded. ‘Ah, well, perhaps times have changed, after all,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I can’t imagine any of us having the courage to do anything so daring, not after we’d had it firmly dinned into us that a prospective husband could always tell if a girl wasn’t a virgin.’ She gave a throaty chuckle. ‘We knew a great deal about love bites and the bruising effects of frantic French kissing, and absolutely nothing about anything else. We were convinced we’d turn green or break out in pustules if we let a man loose below the neckline. It came as something of a shock to discover we’d been sold a lie.’ She took another sip of her wine. ‘Was it worth getting expelled for?’