The Scold's Bridle

by Minette Walters

  ‘No.’ A tear ran down the girl’s face and on to the table. ‘I don’t know what to do. I want to go to university.’

  ‘Surely the most sensible thing would be to go back to Cedar House and your mother. She’ll have to find you another school.’ Why had Cooper brought her here anyway? Or was it Jack who’d brought her?

  Cooper rumbled into life. ‘Her boyfriend’s liable to cut up rough, once I’ve had a word with him, and Cedar House will be the first place he goes looking. It’s an imposition, I know, but off-hand I couldn’t think of anywhere else, not after the way the school dealt with her.’ He looked quite put out. ‘She was told to pack a suitcase while they ordered a taxi to take her home, so I said, forget the taxi, I’ll take her. I’ve never seen the like of it. You’d think she’d committed a hanging offence the way they carried on. And the worst of it was, they wouldn’t have known anything about it if I hadn’t persuaded her to tell them herself. I feel responsible, I really do, but then I thought they’d give her some credit for being honest and let her off with a caution. It’s what I would have done.’

  ‘Does your mother know?’ Sarah asked Ruth.

  ‘Jack let me phone.’

  ‘Is she happy about you staying here?’

  ‘I don’t know. All she said was she’d heard from Miss Harris and then hung up. She sounded furious.’ Ruth kept her head down and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  Sarah made a wry face at Jack. ‘You’ll have to be the one to tell her then. I’m not exactly flavour of the month at the moment, and I can’t see her being very pleased about it.’

  ‘I’ve already tried. She hung up on me, too.’

  It was on the tip of Sarah’s tongue to ask why, before she thought better of it. Knowing Jack, the answer would be as teasingly illusive as the answer to life itself. What puzzled her more was the speed with which events, like the ball in a pinball machine, had taken such an unpredictable course. This morning she’d had only another solitary weekend to look forward to – and now? ‘Well, someone’s got to tell her,’ she said irritably, isolating the one fact she could get to grips with. She looked at the Sergeant. ‘You’ll have to do it. I’m quite happy for Ruth to stay but only if her mother knows where she is.’

  Cooper looked wretched. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we involved social services,’ he suggested, ‘asked a third party to intercede, as it were.’

  Sarah’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m an extremely amenable woman on the whole but I do resent my good nature being taken advantage of. There is no such thing as a free lunch, Sergeant, and I’d like to remind you that you have just drunk some very expensive St Emilion of mine which, at a conservative estimate and allowing for inflation, costs well over seven pounds per glass. In other words, you owe me one, so you will not shuffle your responsibility and this child’s future on to some overworked and underpaid social worker whose only solution to the problem will be to place her in a hostel full of disturbed adolescents.’

  Cooper’s wretchedness grew.

  ‘You have also, by underestimating the old-fashioned ethics that still exist within girls’ boarding schools, caused a young woman approaching the most important exams of her life to be expelled. Now, in a world where the renting out of a woman’s womb is still the only reliable method that men have discovered to replicate themselves, the very least they can do in return is to allow their women enough education to make the life sentence of child-rearing endurable. To sit and stare at an empty wall is one thing; to have the inner resources, the knowledge and the confidence to turn that wall into a source of endless stimulation is another. And that’s ignoring the positive influence that educated and intelligent women have on succeeding generations. Ruth wants to go to university. To do so, she must pass her A levels. It is imperative that Joanna finds another school to accept her PDQ. Which means someone’ – she cocked her finger at him – ‘namely you, must explain to her that Ruth is here, that she is here for a good reason, and that Joanna must come and talk it through before Ruth loses her opportunity to take her education as far as it can go.’ She turned her gaze on the girl. ‘And if you dare tell me now, Ruth, that you’ve given up on your future, then I’ll put you through the first mangle I can find and, I promise you, the experience will not be a pleasant one.’

  There was a long silence.

  Finally, Jack stirred. ‘Now you begin to see what Sarah’s terms consist of. There’s no allowing for human frailty. I grant you, there are pages of subtext and small print dealing with the awful imperfections that most of us suffer from – namely, inadequacy, lack of confidence, seeing both sides and sitting on fences – but they are grey areas which she treats with insufferable patience. And, take it from me, you allow her to do that at your peril. It undermines what little self-respect you have left.’ He beamed fondly at Cooper. ‘I sympathize with you, old son, but Sarah’s right as usual. Someone’s got to talk to Joanna and you’re the one who’s run up the most debts. After all, you did get Ruth expelled and you did drink a glass of wine that cost over seven quid.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘I hope Miss Lascelles can put up with the pair of you. I know I couldn’t. You’d have me climbing the walls before you could say knife.’

  The ‘pair’ wasn’t lost on Sarah. ‘How come you know so much more about my domestic arrangements than I do, Sergeant?’ she asked casually.

  He chuckled amiably, pushing himself to his feet. ‘Because I never say never, Doctor.’ He winked at her. ‘As someone once told me, life’s a bugger. It creeps up behind you and gets you where you least expect it every time.’

  Sarah felt the girl start to tremble as she pushed open the door of the spare room and switched on the light. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s downstairs,’ she blurted out. ‘If Dave comes, he could get in.’

  ‘Not my choice. Geoffrey Freeling’s. He turned the house upside down so that the reception rooms would have the best views. We’re slowly turning it back again, but it takes time.’ She pushed open a communicating door. ‘It has its own bathroom.’ She glanced back at the girl, saw the pinched look to her face. ‘You’re frightened, aren’t you? Would you rather sleep upstairs in my room?’

  Ruth burst into tears. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she wept. ‘I don’t know what to do. Dave will kill me. I was all right at school. He couldn’t have got in there.’

  Sarah put her arms about the other’s thin shoulders and clasped them tightly. ‘Come upstairs,’ she said gently. ‘You’ll be safe with me. Jack can sleep in here.’

  And serve the bastard right, she thought. Ho, ho! For once, sod’s law was on the side of the angels. She had been toying with the ethics of medical castration but was prepared to compromise on a cold bed and a grovelling apology. It was a very partial compromise. She was so damn glad to have him back she felt like doing handsprings.

  Joanna moved to the flat in London last week and for the first time since her abortive attempt at marriage I am in sole possession of Cedar House. It is a victory of sorts, but I have a sense of anticlimax. The game, I fear, was not worth the candle. I am lonely.

  It occurs to me that in some strange way Joanna and I are necessary to each other. There is no denying the understanding that exists between us. We do not get along, of course, but that is largely irrelevant in view of the fact that we don’t get along with anyone else either. There was some comfort in treading the mill of clichéed insults that trundled us quite happily through our lives, so worn and over-used that what we said to each other passed largely unnoticed. I miss the little things. The way she pursued Spede about the garden, taking the wretched man to task if he missed a weed. Her waspish remarks about my cooking. And oddly enough, as they always used to irritate me at the time, her long, long silences. After all, perhaps companionship is less to do with conversation than with the comfort of another human presence, however self-centred that presence might be.

  I have a terrible fear that, by pushing her out to fend for herself, I ha
ve diminished us both. At least, while we were together, we checked each other’s worst excesses. And now? The road to hell is paved with good intentions . . .

  Eleven

  IT WASN’T UNTIL late the following afternoon, a Saturday, that Sergeant Cooper felt he had enough information on Dave Hughes to make an approach viable. He was pessimistic about bringing charges of theft, but in respect of Mathilda’s death there was some room for optimism. Ruth’s mention of a white Ford transit had rung bells in his memory and a careful sifting of the statements taken in and around Fontwell in the days after the body was found had produced a gem. When asked if he’d seen anything unusual the previous Saturday, the landlord of the Three Pigeons, Mr Henry Peel, had said:

  I can’t swear it had anything to do with Mrs Gillespie, but there was a white Ford transit parked on my forecourt that Saturday afternoon and evening. Had a young lad in it, as far as I could judge. Stayed ten minutes the first time then drove off towards the church and picked someone up. I saw it again that evening. I pointed it out to my wife and said some wretch was using our forecourt but not using the pub. I can’t give you the registration number.

  Underneath in a PC’s handwriting was a short note:

  Mrs Peel disagrees. She says her husband is confusing this with another occasion when white vans were there twice in one day, but her recollection is that the vans were different. Three of our regulars drive white vans, she said.

  Cooper talked the problem through with his Detective Chief Inspector. ‘I need to question Hughes, Charlie, so do I take a team with me, or what? According to the girl, he’s living in a squat, so he won’t be alone, and I don’t fancy trying to winkle him out from under a mob of squatters. Assuming they let me in at all. It’s bloody rich, isn’t it?’ he grumbled. ‘Somebody else’s property and they can take it over lock, stock and barrel. The only way the poor sod who owns it can get it back is to pay through the nose for an eviction order, by which time he finds they’ve turned the place into a cess-pit.’

  Charlie Jones’s squashed face wore a permanently lugubrious expression which always reminded Cooper of a sad-eyed Pekinese. He was more of a terrier, however, who, once he got his teeth into something, rarely let go. ‘Can we charge him with theft on what Miss Lascelles has told you?’

  ‘We could, but he’d be out again in a couple of hours. Bournemouth have him on file. He’s been brought in three times and he’s walked on each occasion. All similar offences to this one, i.e. persuading youngsters to steal for him. It’s a clever scam.’ He sounded frustrated. ‘The children only prey off their families and, so far, the parents have refused to co-operate when they discover that Hughes’s prosecution will involve their daughters in a prosecution, too.’

  ‘So how come he was brought in in the first place?’

  ‘Because three indignant fathers have independently accused him of forcing their daughters to steal and demanded that charges be brought. But when the girls were questioned, they told a different story, denied the coercion and insisted that the thieving was their own idea. It’s a real honey, this one. You can’t do him without the daughters, and the fathers won’t have the daughters done.’ He smiled cynically. ‘Too much unpleasant publicity.’

  ‘What sort of backgrounds?’

  ‘Middle class, wealthy. The girls are all over sixteen, so no question of under-age sex. Mind, I’m sure these three and Miss Lascelles are only the tip of a very large iceberg. It sounds to me as if he’s got the whole thing down to a very fine art.’

  ‘Does he coerce them?’

  Cooper shrugged. ‘All Miss Lascelles said was, he does terrible things when he’s angry. He threatened to make a scene at the school if she did anything he didn’t like, but when I asked her about it in the car on the way to Dr Blakeney’s, in other words after that particular threat had lost its sting because she’d already been expelled, she clammed up and burst into tears.’ He tugged his nose thoughtfully. ‘He must be using some form of coercion because she’s terrified he’s going to find her. I wondered if he makes videos of them but when I asked Bournemouth if they’ve found any equipment on him, they said no. Your guess is as good as mine, Charlie. He’s got some hold on these girls, and it must be fear because they’re desperate to get shot of him the minute they’re found out. But precisely what’s involved, I don’t know.’

  The Inspector frowned. ‘Why aren’t they afraid to name him?’

  ‘Presumably because he’s given them permission to shop him if they’re caught. Look, he must know how easy it would be for us to track him down. If Miss Lascelles hadn’t proffered the information, all I had to do was ask the headmistress for the tarmac firm and take it from there. I think his MO goes something like this: target a girl who’s young enough and cosseted enough to warrant her parents’ protection, win her over, then use some sort of threat to make sure she accuses herself along with him when she’s caught. That way he’s as sure as he can be that charges won’t be brought and, if they are, he’ll take her down with him. Perhaps his threat is as simple as that.’

  The Inspector was doubtful. ‘He can’t make much out of it. How long before the parents notice what’s going on?’

  ‘You’d be amazed. One of the girls was borrowing her mother’s credit card for months before the father queried the amount his wife was spending. It was a jointly held card, the balance was paid off automatically out of the current account, and neither of them noticed that it had increased by upwards of five hundred pounds a month. Or if they did, they assumed the other partner’s expenditure was behind it. It’s a different world, Charlie. Both parents working and earning a good screw, and enough money sloshing around in the coffers to obscure their daughter’s thieving. Once they started looking into it, of course, they discovered she’d sold bits of silver, jewellery that her mother never wore, some valuable first editions of her father’s and a five-hundred-pound camera that her father thought he’d left on a train. I’d say Hughes is doing very nicely out of it, particularly if he’s running more than one of them at the same time.’

  ‘Good grief! How much has Ruth Lascelles stolen then?’

  Cooper took a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘She made a list of what she could remember. That’s it.’ He put it on the desk. ‘Same pattern as the other girl. Jewellery that her grandmother had forgotten about. Silver-backed hairbrushes from the spare room that were never used. China ornaments and bowls that were kept in cupboards because Mrs Gillespie didn’t like them, and some first editions out of the library. She said Hughes told her the sort of thing to look for. Valuable bits and pieces that wouldn’t be missed.’

  ‘What about money?’

  ‘Twenty pounds from her grandmother’s handbag, fifty pounds from the bedside table and, a few weeks later, five hundred out of the old lady’s account. Went to the bank as cool as cucumber with a forged cheque and a letter purporting to come from Mathilda, instructing them to hand over the loot. According to her, Mrs Gillespie never even noticed. But she did, of course, because she mentioned the fifty-pound theft to Jack Blakeney and, when I tackled her bank this morning, they told me she had queried the five-hundred-pound withdrawal on her statement, and they advised her that Ruth had drawn it out on her instructions.’ He scratched his jaw. ‘According to them, she agreed that it was her mistake and took no further action.’

  ‘What date was that?’

  Cooper consulted his notes again. ‘The cheque was cashed during the last week in October, Ruth’s half-term in other words, and Mrs Gillespie rang the bank as soon as she got the statement, which was the first week in November.’

  ‘Not long before she died then, and after she’d made up her mind to change the will. It’s a bugger that one. I can’t get the hang of it at all.’ He thought for a moment. ‘When did Ruth steal the fifty pounds?’

  ‘At the beginning of September before she went back to school. She had some idea apparently of buying Hughes off. She said: “I thought he’d leave me alone if I gave him some money.”
’

  ‘Dear God!’ said Charlie dismally. ‘There’s one born every minute. Did you ask her if Hughes put pressure on her to cash the five hundred at half-term?’

  ‘I did. Her answer was: “No, no, no. I stole it because I wanted to,” and then she turned the waterworks on again.’ He looked very rueful. ‘I’ve left the ball in Dr Blakeney’s court. I had a word with her on the phone this morning, gave her the gist of what Hughes has been up to and asked her to try and find out why none of the girls will turn QE against him. She may get somewhere but I’m not counting on it.’

  ‘What about the mother? Would Ruth talk to her?’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘First, you’d have to get her to talk to Ruth. It’s unnatural, if you ask me. I stopped off last night to tell her the Blakeneys had taken her daughter in and she looked at me as if I’d just climbed out of a sewer. The only thing she was interested in was whether I thought Ruth’s expulsion meant she’d killed her grandmother. I said, no, that as far as I knew there were no statistics linking truancy and promiscuous sex to murder, but there were a great number linking them to poor parenting. So she told me to eff off.’ He chuckled happily at the memory.

  Charlie Jones grunted his amusement. ‘I’m more interested in friend Hughes at the moment, so let’s break this down into manageable proportions. Have Bourne-mouth tried getting the three families together so that the girls gain strength from numbers?’

  ‘Twice. No go either time. The parents have taken legal advice and no one’s talking.’

  Charlie pursed his lips in thought. ‘It’s been done before, you know. George Joseph Smith did it a hundred years ago. Wrote glowing references for pretty servant girls, then found them placements in wealthy households. Within weeks of starting work they would steal valuables from their employers and take them faithfully to George to convert into ready cash. He was another one with an extraordinary pulling-power over women.’