The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  After the first five, Havers had politely requested permission to step outside the building for a fag. Isabelle gave idle thought to ordering her to remain where she was, but she had to admit that on the drive north, during which she had deliberately not paused for anything save petrol and then the use of a lavatory at one of the service areas, Havers had been a model of cooperation. She had even dressed with care, although where on earth she’d found the hideous cardigan she was wearing—grey decidedly did not become her nor did the pills that dotted the garment like an outbreak of smallpox—would remain a mystery. So to the query about a single cigarette, Isabelle nodded. She told the sergeant to be quick about it, and so the sergeant was.

  A uniformed female officer came to fetch them at long last. They went up a grand staircase and through great double doors at one side of a large landing. Behind these doors was what had probably once been the drawing room of the former great house. A large room with spectacular windows, it retained its ceiling of impressive plasterwork, the original chandelier still hung from a medallion ornamented with a plethora of plaster fruit, and an enormous marble fireplace still possessed its huge caryatid-supported mantel on which two wedding photographs and a plaque of some sort were displayed.

  Once told that the chief constable had only stepped out of the office for a moment and would be with them presently, Isabelle crossed her arms and stifled what she felt like saying, which was along the lines of “He’s already made his point.” Instead, she forced herself to consider the room and its past as a drawing room. The furniture made it difficult to imagine groups of period pieces arranged artfully for coffee, tea, and polite postprandial conversation. The chief constable’s desk took up a vast amount of space, and an institutional bookshelf behind it offered a score of unattractive three-ring notebooks with covers of plastic or of canvas. These were held in place by stacks of manila folders in various degrees of disintegration. On top of the folders sat a collection of dust-covered wrought-iron toys and three cricket balls held in a basket. To one side of the room a coffee table stood between two heavily curtained windows. Five chairs surrounded this, and a glass jug of water along with five glasses suggested that this was where they were going to have their meeting with the chief constable.

  Sergeant Havers had gone to one of the windows. Doubtless she was wishing she were outside where she could suck down another fag. Doubtless also, she was hungry. Isabelle herself was famished, but food was going to have to wait.

  Both of the office’s doors opened simultaneously, as if two unseen footmen were without on the landing and doing the honours. A uniformed man looking vaguely like the Duke of Windsor ten years into his marriage to Wallis strode inside. He didn’t extend a welcome. Instead, he said, “Superintendent Ardery,” and gave Havers a glance that plainly indicated that an introduction to her was not going to be required.

  He didn’t give his name, but Isabelle didn’t allow her hackles to rise at this, nor at his mistake about her rank. She already knew his name anyway: Chief Constable Patrick Wyatt. She would correct him about her rank in due time.

  He also didn’t invite them to sit. Instead he said, “I’m not happy you’re here,” and he appeared to be waiting for her response.

  She cooperated. “And I’m not happy to be here. Neither is Detective Sergeant Havers. Our intention is to be as brief as possible in order to craft a report for our superiors and then to be gone.”

  This appeared to thaw the chief constable slightly. He gestured to the coffee table with its five chairs and he said, “Coffee?” to which Isabelle demurred. She shot a look at Havers, who did likewise. Isabelle said that the water currently on the table was fine, thank you very much indeed. She didn’t wait for the chief constable to pour. She took a seat and did the honours all round. Havers also sat. She sipped. Her expression said she was expecting hemlock, but as this was the only liquid available she would at least die slaked.

  Wyatt finally joined them, and Isabelle went at their situation directly. “Sergeant Havers and I have been put in a difficult position. It’s not our intention to blacken anyone’s reputation up here.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” Wyatt took up his water, gulped it all down, and poured himself another glassful. Havers, Isabelle noticed, looked relieved that he hadn’t keeled over after downing the first.

  “Cutbacks are making a hash of things everywhere,” Isabelle said. “I know you’ve taken an enormous hit—”

  “Our ‘hit’ is that we’re down to eighteen hundred officers policing Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Worcestershire. We’ve not a single bona fide constable walking a beat any longer, and entire towns are now in the hands of police volunteers and the Neighbourhood Watch. At this point, it takes—minimally—twenty minutes for one of our officers to arrive at a crime scene. And that’s only if the poor sod isn’t already dealing with something somewhere else.”

  “It’s not that much different in London,” Isabelle said.

  Wyatt harrumphed and shot a look at Havers as if she were the embodiment of what cutbacks in policing had reduced the world to. Havers met his look but said nothing. She didn’t appear cowed.

  “I want to make a few things clear,” Wyatt said. “On the night of the incident, an ambulance was dispatched at once when the first call came through. When it was clear to the paramedics that the man could not be revived, the call centre was informed and the duty detective inspector was sent in. Not a patrol officer first, mind you—had there even been one available, which there was not—and not a duty inspector. The force incident manager sent a detective and that officer went to Ludlow straightaway. She initiated an investigation at once, and in due course she phoned the complaints commission.”

  “In due course?”

  “Within three hours. This followed her inspection of the scene and her interview with the paramedics and the officer present at the station, as well as the arrival of the Home Office pathologist. Everything was done by the book.”

  “I appreciate that information,” Isabelle told him. The West Mercia police had adhered to an understandably foreshortened version of standard procedure. Receiving the news from the paramedics, they had cut to the chase instead of sending a patrol officer followed by a duty inspector followed by a detective. A death in custody was going to require special handling, and the officer on duty at the control centre, having taken note of the contents of the 999 call, would have known this at once.

  She said, “Was a parallel investigation going on, then, while the IPCC was investigating?”

  “An investigation into how the cock-up occurred in the first place? Yes, there was,” Wyatt told her. “Both investigations were thorough. Both reports were shared with the victim’s family, and the IPCC’s report was made available to the public and the press. To be frank, why the Metropolitan Police have decided to intrude at this point is beyond my ken.”

  “We’re here as reassurance for a member of Parliament. He’s taking considerable pressure from the dead man’s father.”

  “Bloody politics.” The phone on Wyatt’s desk rang, and he stood to answer it. He said only, “Speak,” and then listened to the reply. “Send her up at once,” was his next statement.

  He went to the bookshelves behind his naval destroyer of a desk, gathered a stack of manila folders, and returned with them to his chair, where he placed them on the coffee table.

  Isabelle glanced at them but did not take them up for a look. There would be plenty of time for that later. For now, she wanted to be put into the picture from the CC’s point of view. She said, “We know the death occurred at the Ludlow station. We know the place was unmanned on the night of the death. But what’s the actual situation there?”

  “We’ve had to close down stations in all three counties,” Wyatt told them. He gestured to a large map on the wall between the two windows of the room. It hung just above where they were sitting, and Isabelle recognised it as compri
sing Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Worcestershire. “In Ludlow’s case, the station’s unmanned, but it’s not unused. Officers stop in when they’re out on patrol, in need of computers, or establishing an incident room.”

  “Is there a custody suite?”

  He shook his head. There was no place in the building for suspects in a crime to be held under lock and key. Nor were there interview rooms, although it wouldn’t be entirely irregular for someone to be taken there to be questioned if a patrol officer felt it necessary.

  “We’ve been told that a patrol officer didn’t make the arrest, that a PCSO did the job.”

  Patrick Wyatt confirmed this. The individual who’d died inside the Ludlow police station had been taken there by a police community support officer. He’d been informed by his guv that the regular patrol officers would be driving down later from Shrewsbury when they finished dealing with a string of burglaries. Eight homes were involved along with five businesses in two different towns, and the Shrewsbury patrol officers had been assisting the very few detectives that could be mustered to attend the scenes of the crimes. They’d reckoned four hours before they could get to Ludlow.

  “Why the rush to bring him in?”

  The CC didn’t know, since the order to bring in the alleged paedophile would have come from the PCSO’s own superior, who’d be in charge of all the support officers in the area. What he could tell them was that a phone call had been made accusing Ian Druitt of child molestation. It had been made anonymously. It had come into 999 and not 101, and it had been made from the external emergency intercom at the Ludlow police station.

  “External intercom?” came from Havers. Isabelle saw that the sergeant had produced a fresh-looking notebook from her shoulder bag along with a mechanical pencil.

  At all closed or unmanned police stations, Wyatt informed her, external intercoms now allowed members of the community to be put in touch with the control room that handled emergencies as well as major crimes.

  “So because of that call, someone was dispatched at once?” Isabelle asked. “Surely it was something that could have waited a few hours, even a day, for a patrol officer to be free.”

  Wyatt didn’t disagree. He said that he reckoned this unfortunate circumstance had been the result of a confluence of two issues: the extent to which the regular patrol officers were involved in the burglary situation and the fact that the call involved paedophilia, which was an accusation that the police had learned over time to take very seriously.

  A knock sounded on the chief constable’s office door, and he strode to admit a woman with a dress sense not dissimilar to Barbara Havers’s. Wyatt introduced her: Detective Inspector Pajer. She looked frazzled. While her smooth black hair was cut in an attractive style that cradled her oval face and fell to her jaw, beneath her eyes there were unappealing bags, which were darkly fleshed. Her lips were so chapped that they looked painful. Her hands were reddish, as if from rough work. Had she not been carrying a briefcase, Isabelle might have assumed she’d come to clean the office.

  DI Pajer said, “It’s Bernadette,” to Isabelle as she crossed the room, offered her hand first to Isabelle and then to Havers. She took one of the vacant seats. She poured herself a glass of water without being bidden. Then she opened her briefcase, brought forth a stack of labelled filing folders, and waited as the chief constable joined them.

  Pajer folded her hands on what she’d brought with her and said, “Before we go into anything, I’d like to be told the brief.”

  “Your work isn’t being questioned, Bernadette,” Wyatt explained.

  “Due respect, sir? If I’m asked to headquarters in order to speak to officers from the Met, I suggest that’s not the case,” Pajer replied.

  Thus Isabelle understood that Pajer was the detective inspector who’d been on duty the night of Ian Druitt’s death. It was her investigation—along with the IPCC’s—that she and Havers had come to look into. Much as she’d done for Wyatt, Isabelle explained the politics of the situation to Pajer, ending with her intention to be on the road back to London as soon as possible.

  Pajer listened, nodded, and placed her filing folders on the coffee table near to those Wyatt had already put there. She began to share her information.

  Present when she arrived at the Ludlow station, she said, were the paramedics who’d worked on Ian Druitt and the PCSO who’d arrested him: one Gary Ruddock. The body had been moved, and the ligature Druitt used had been taken from his neck.

  “What was the ligature?” Isabelle asked.

  Here Pajer took from a file the photographs taken of the scene. Among them was one of a long band of scarlet material perhaps four inches wide. This, she told them, was a stole. It was part of the vestments worn by clergymen when doing a service.

  “Was the dead man a clergyman?” Isabelle asked.

  “He was. You’ve not been told?”

  Isabelle glanced at Havers, whose lips had formed an O. She, like Isabelle herself, had to be wondering why this was a detail they hadn’t been given in London. She said, “I see. Please go on.”

  According to the arresting PCSO, Druitt had just completed evensong when Ruddock arrived to fetch him to the station, and he was in the vestry of St. Laurence Church in the midst of removing his vestments. Evidently, he put the stole into a pocket of his anorak.

  “Could Ruddock have pinched it?” Havers asked. “When he fetched the deacon, I mean.”

  DI Pajer had considered the possibility, she told them. But she thought it very unlikely. For pinching the stole suggested some kind of plan, and it was a matter of pure chance that the PCSO had been the one charged with hauling in Druitt. And of course, he would know—as they all did—that a death while in custody was going to trigger not one but two investigations.

  It seemed that Pajer had done everything as it was meant to be done. She’d rung for a Home Office pathologist; she’d removed the paramedics and Ruddock from the scene; she’d taken their statements separately; she’d phoned for the scenes of crime officers as a precaution and when they’d arrived, they’d taken clothing, fingerprints, and everything else necessary should it be decided that a crime had been committed rather than a suicide having occurred. She had not made that determination. She’d merely done what she was supposed to do, given the circumstances she found herself in. It was all, she said, in the material she’d brought with her. Each interview she’d conducted: from the operator at the call centre who’d taken the PCSO’s panicked call to the paramedics who’d used the paddles to try to shock Druitt’s heart back to beating.

  “And the IPCC?” Isabelle enquired.

  Pajer confirmed that she’d rung for a complaints commission investigator directly upon the Home Office pathologist’s formal look at the body. The IPCC had sent someone the next day. She was the first person who was interviewed, after which the investigator went on from there.

  It was clear to Isabelle that this was the conclusion of Pajer’s remarks. The DI replaced the photos into their folder and centred it along with other files on the table. She also gave Wyatt a look asking if that would be all, since she was—as they all were—increasingly overburdened.

  Wyatt said to Isabelle, “If you’ve no further questions . . . ,” and DI Pajer started to rise.

  Isabelle said, “I’m wondering if anyone made certain that this PCSO—Ruddock—was truly the only available choice to arrest Ian Druitt.”

  Wyatt said sharply, “‘This PCSO’ has been a good officer, and he’s taken what’s happened damn hard. Not only because someone died on his watch but also because he knows what that means for the rest of his career. His brief was to take the man to the station and to wait for the patrol officers who would remove him to Shrewsbury. And that’s exactly what he did.”

  “Why didn’t he just take him directly to Shrewsbury himself?” This from Havers again, pencil poised for the CC’s reply.

 
; “Ruddock did what he was told to do by his superior,” Wyatt told them. “That would be the local sergeant in charge of all the West Mercia PCSOs. I assume DI Pajer has also interviewed this individual,” with a look at Pajer.

  She said, “The problem—you’ll read it in the report, of course—was that Ruddock also had to deal with an incident of binge drinking in the town.”

  “Do you mean he left the police station once he fetched Druitt?” Again, from Havers.

  “Of course he didn’t leave the station!” Wyatt declared.

  “But then how—”

  At this, the chief constable stood, in the act of examining his watch. He said, “We’ve given you all the time we have. Everything you need to know is in the files, and I assume you’re meant to read them. Would that be correct?”

  Of course it would, Isabelle thought. But she said nothing as, obviously, the chief constable knew the answer already.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Ding had spent the afternoon just outside Much Wenlock, watching her mum play tour guide to the few paying visitors who actually wanted to have a look at the Donaldsons’ mausoleum of a house. Ding hated this. It wasn’t so much that she had to put up with strangers breathing on the family silver—especially as there was no family silver—but rather it was that she had to put up with her mother’s desperation to please. This showed itself in the ridiculous stories she concocted about what she’d decided to refer to as the King James Room, the Queen Elizabeth Chamber, and the Roundheads Hall. Ding gritted her teeth practically down to her gums each time she heard her mother say, in artificial pear-shaped tones, “Now it was here in 1663 . . . ,” because this signalled the launching of the Capture of Cardew Hall and God only knew what else because Ding tried not to hear anything more of it. Most of the time she succeeded since her job was to remain in the entry hall in order to sell tickets to tourists and to take money for her mother’s homemade chutneys and jams. At least the chutneys and jams were the real thing, although Ding wouldn’t have put it past her mother—in a bad year for fruit—to purchase a few cases of Sainsbury’s strawberry jam and just repurpose it as her own.