The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  “Nothing really. But if we’re dotting and crossing things . . .”

  “As I’ve said before, we’re not here to make this into a murder enquiry. We’re here to look at two investigations into a suicide. We can’t keep going back and forth on this point as it’s going to mire us in minutiae and we can’t afford that as Hillier hasn’t given us the time.”

  “Got it,” Havers said. “Like before. But since we have a little time—just now, I mean—I’ve got the deacon’s address ’cause the vicar handed it over. And it’s strange, don’t you think, that he didn’t want to live with the vicar and his wife?”

  “No, I do not think it’s strange. And you’ve already made this point. So let me ask you this: Would you want to live with the vicar and his wife?”

  “Me? ’Course not. But if I was a deacon at the church and I needed a room and they had one on offer and the church was, like, twenty yards away . . . ? Why not take it? If nothing else, it’d be a real money saver. But he didn’t want to live with them. Could be there’s a reason. And in the two investigations, guv? There’s not a single word about where the bloke lived.”

  Isabelle sighed. Really, Havers was a most exasperating woman. “All right,” she said to the sergeant. “I see where this is heading. Your feeling is that we must search out this address and scrutinise the property for . . . what? A skeleton in the basement? A skull in the barbecue? Never mind. Don’t answer. Just give me the bloody address.”

  BURWAY

  SHROPSHIRE

  Ian Druitt had lived outside of Ludlow on a small housing estate comprising two cul-de-sacs and an unnamed lane. The houses were semi-detached, each with a garage on the side. At Ian Druitt’s house, a yellow van stood in the driveway with its side panel open. Upon the panel was painted a skillful depiction of high-end ceramic pots and urns, burgeoning with greenery and flowers. Along with this were the words Bevans’ Beauties, a phone number, a website, and an email address. A woman in camouflage dungarees and a short-sleeved T-shirt was loading enormous bags of potting soil into the vehicle. Around her neck a kerchief was tied, and on her head sat a hat with a brim looking large enough to shade her and several passersby.

  “This was the address?” Isabelle said to Havers, who checked her notes a second time. When Havers nodded, the conclusion was before them. Ian Druitt had not lived alone. Then the woman turned from the van, and Isabelle saw she was of Druitt’s age. Somehow this seemed surprising.

  By the current standards in which people of sixty-five were called middle-aged as if they were going to live to be one hundred thirty years old, this woman was a veritable youth somewhere in the vicinity of forty. She was wearing sunglasses of John Lennon vintage and style, and she pushed these up her nose and ceased her work as Isabelle and DS Havers approached her. Isabelle could see that she’d already stuffed the van with the sort of pots featured on its exterior, as well as dozens of summer plants of various types.

  Isabelle introduced herself and Havers. Both of them showed the woman their police identification. She looked unsurprisingly confused by this intrusion of New Scotland Yard into her life. But she said in a perfectly friendly fashion that she was Flora Bevans and added, “I know. It’s a joke. Flora. It’s like my parents already knew.”

  Isabelle told her that the vicar of St. Laurence Church had given this address as Ian Druitt’s, and they quickly learned from Flora Bevans that Ian Druitt had been her lodger. It turned out that she was a member of St. Laurence’s church choir, and from one of the elderly members—“You know how women can be with matchmaking?”—she’d discovered that while Ian Druitt was living at the vicarage with Mr. Spencer and his wife, he’d not liked to disturb them with his music and so he was seeking another place to live.

  “I had an extra room and I can always use the cash, can’t we all,” she said frankly. “I reckoned that if his music got too loud for me, I could just remove my hearing aids. So I mentioned it to him, he came over and had a look, and there you have it. There was nothing between us,” she added pointedly. “Chemistry and all that? It wasn’t there. But he was a lovely bloke. And he kept the bathroom like a picture from a magazine, which, you ask me, is a hell of a lot to expect of a man. There’s only one. Bathroom, I mean. We shared it and we shared the kitchen and aside from learning not to slam the bloody door when he got in late, we were fine from the start.”

  “‘Got in late’?” Isabelle asked it at the same moment as did Sergeant Havers.

  Flora Bevans said, “That man was plugged into every possible organisation that came along. Twenty-four hours were never enough for Ian.”

  “We’ve been told he received an award for that,” Havers noted.

  “Oh yes. And quite proud of that plaque, he was. I’d show it to you, but his family came for all his belongings once the dust settled on how he died. Poor bloke.” She removed the kerchief from round her neck and used it to blot her face, although it wasn’t a particularly warm day and she was not perspiring. She went on to say, “One feels somehow responsible. Suicide. I wouldn’t’ve expected it. He was a man of God, and men of God are supposed to have . . . what would one call it? . . . more spiritual resources, I suppose. It was a shock. He didn’t come home that night, as far as I could tell, but I’d no idea he’d been taken off to the gaol. And then word got out about why he’d been taken to gaol, and that was all rather dreadful. I don’t mean just for me, having possibly had a paedophile under my roof. I mean his family as well. I felt terrible for his family. Distraught doesn’t describe how they were when they came to collect his things. And who could be surprised by that? One hates to learn something dreadful about a family member at the best of times. But to learn a family member—a clergyman, mind you—has been messing children about . . . That would be absolutely crushing.”

  “Did you believe he was actually doing that?” Havers asked.

  “Oh, what do I know?” Flora said. “When you consider the wives who haven’t a clue that their husbands are Peter Sutcliffes cruising the streets with blood-dripping hammers in the boot of the car or whatever he had, what’s a landlady actually supposed to know about her lodger? It’s not as if the man did anything here in the house, God forbid. But I must say that if Ian was doing whatever he was suspected of doing, I don’t have the least idea where he found the time. Come to think . . .” She knotted her eyebrows.

  “Yes?” Isabelle said.

  “I’ve still got his diary. I’d forgotten all about that. I should have handed it over to someone—the man had appointments every hour of the day—but it never crossed my mind till now. You probably want it, don’t you? Or perhaps I should send it along to his dad? He kept it in the kitchen and when I packed up his belongings, it slipped my mind that the diary was still where he kept it under the phone.”

  The diary would open the door to more than Isabelle particularly wanted to get into. But Havers responded before she herself could say anything, and of course the maddening woman said that the diary would be just the ticket thank you very much.

  “Come along then.” Flora Bevans headed to the front door and ushered them inside.

  They found themselves in a small, square entry hung with photographs of what Isabelle assumed were Flora Bevans’ planted urns. The woman was quite an artist if the pictures were anything to go by. Isabelle’s idea of a planted urn was ivy and the hope that it didn’t die should she forget to water it for a few weeks.

  Flora took them to a nicely appointed and neatly kept kitchen, where she opened a drawer and brought out the diary, which she handed over. It was standard enough: days of the week and hours of the day, with an inspirational quotation at the top of each page. Havers began to flip through it. From where she was standing, Isabelle saw that it was packed with appointments, as Flora had suggested. While Havers studied these, Isabelle became aware of raucous noise that was coming from the back of the house. It was the unmistakable sound of children playing: shouti
ng, thumping, laughter, and the occasional adult voice raised to get someone’s attention.

  “School’s just beyond the garden,” Flora told her. “It’s a little chaotic three times a day but it’s heaven on the weekends and during holidays. The most peaceful neighbourhood in town, you ask me. I think Ian found it so, as well.”

  Havers raised her head from the diary. “You can’t hear them from the front of the house,” she noted.

  “Hmm, no. That’s correct,” Flora said. “My bedroom’s above the street so I don’t hear them. Ian had the back bedroom, so he got the brunt of the noise if he was here when the children were in the schoolyard.”

  “Can we have a look?” Havers asked. She added, “That okay, guv?”

  Isabelle nodded. Flora took them up the stairs. There she said they could have a look round—not that there was a lot to see—but she herself had to get on with her work, if they didn’t mind. No need to lock up when they left, she told them, as she never locked her doors because there was absolutely nothing worth stealing.

  Inside the dead man’s bedroom, they made two discoveries. The first was that the schoolyard noise would have been quite an assault if one wished for peace and quiet during the day. The second was that the bedroom window afforded a complete view of the schoolyard where, on the tarmac, a hundred or so boys and girls were at play in the springtime sunshine. The children looked roughly the age of third-formers and like most children that age, they were very efficient at raising hell as they jumped rope, dodged balls, threw markers for hopscotch, and engaged in a quite rough activity that looked like a rugby scrum but turned out to be a group of boys attempting to stamp on a helium balloon. All of this was watched over by a scowling woman, arms crossed, who was wearing a police whistle round her neck.

  “Wonder if this’s what made him go for the room here.” Next to Isabelle, Barbara Havers murmured the observation upon joining her at the window. She went on with, “Nice view if you want to daydream what you could do to one of ’em if only you could get yourself and your mitts over the wall without being seen, eh?”

  The children in the schoolyard, Isabelle saw, seemed close to the age of her own sons. They played just as determinedly as did the twins, and with just as much abandon. She’d known from the first that twin boys would be an enormous challenge for a mother like her. But she had never once thought or intended or wished to lose them. But What you’re doing to them when you’re like this hadn’t been enough to stop her. That was the worst of her sins. God knew there were others.

  “. . . could get his jollies just standing here as well, I expect,” Havers was saying meditatively. “There’s that to be thought of. And no one would be any the wiser.”

  Isabelle roused herself. “What?”

  “You know. Jerkin’ the gherkin, guv.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Havers was hasty with, “I meant . . . sort of . . . having one off the wrist . . . ?”

  Isabelle took this in. “Ah. Masturbation as he watched the children?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s a good spot for it with the school just behind the house like it is. And who would know, right? Flora’s out and about with her pots and plants, he’s got the place to himself, he hears the kids, and there you have it: Willy wants a handshake.”

  “Sergeant Havers, are you generally this colourful with DI Lynley?”

  The sergeant grimaced. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Because,” Isabelle continued, “I can’t honestly imagine DI Lynley being equally colourful with you.”

  “Oh, dead right, ma’am. He wouldn’t. Silver spoon and all that. He’d have his tongue cut out first. Only it wouldn’t even occur to him anyway. I mean, to be colourful. It’d more or less get in the way of his upbringing, if you know what I mean. That is, well, everyone knows he’s a born gent so no one likes to . . . you know . . . see what he’ll make of the . . . I s’pose you’d call it the seamier side of . . . whatever.”

  “I see.” Isabelle knew Lynley fairly well. They’d been lovers for a time and, while it was true that he was the personification of gentlemanly discretion, there were certain aspects of a man’s upbringing that went by the wayside if a woman was determined enough. And as Isabelle had been determined enough with Thomas Lynley, she’d heard more from him than, she expected, Barbara Havers was ever likely to do, albeit nothing remotely like the sergeant’s own comments. She turned back to the window and said to Havers, “I don’t disagree. About the possibility of Ian Druitt’s sighting of the children. We both know by now that anything’s possible when it comes to humanity.”

  There was nothing in the room save the furniture: a bed, a chest of drawers, and a narrow desk with a single central drawer, a chair. The drawers in the chest held nothing, the same applied to the desk’s single drawer, and on the walls nothing hung. A small hole in the wall above the bed suggested something had been placed there at one time, and considering the monastic nature of the room, Isabelle could picture a crucifix.

  There was nothing more to take note of as far as Isabelle could see. The diary seemed to prove the point that had been made about Ian Druitt by more than one person: he was an inveterate volunteer. This was more exhausting than was it suspicious, Isabelle thought. They were, as a result, finished here in Shropshire.

  Of course, this was not how Sergeant Havers saw matters, since she said as they descended the stairs, “I expect we ought to go through all that lumber the dad gave to you. It might match up to what he’s got set up in his diary, eh? ’Specially if there’s information like files and such. I mean, this would be just for consistency. Just to make certain we’ve touched on everything.” And she added as if with the expectation that Isabelle would protest, “I expect the dad’ll be looking for that. Don’t you think?”

  No, Isabelle thought. She didn’t think. But Havers did have a point regarding Clive Druitt. And there was now the matter of that bloody diary. She sighed and said, “And what do you recommend as the best way to do the matching up, Sergeant?”

  “Those boxes from his dad? We might find something there that got overlooked.” When Isabelle didn’t reply at once, the sergeant added, “I c’n look through it all on my own, if you’ve something else on, of course.”

  What Isabelle had on was vodka and tonic, very light on the tonic. But she could hardly order Havers to go through the boxes of Druitt’s clobber alone while she removed herself to another location. So she agreed that the boxes asked to be gone through, and now that they had the miserable man’s diary that was something additional they had to consider, since it constituted an object related to the dead man that the previous investigations had apparently overlooked.

  So she said, “Let’s get on with it then. We can do everything at the hotel and perhaps Peace can manage a sandwich for us.”

  As things developed, Ian Druitt’s belongings were mostly nonstarters. They carried the boxes of his things into the hotel, lined them up on the floor in the residents’ lounge, and began to unpack them while Peace on Earth cooperatively supplied them with marginally edible ham and boiled egg sandwiches. Isabelle ordered the vodka and tonic she desired and instructed Havers to indulge herself if she wished. The sergeant, however, appeared determined to remain abstemious, venturing as far as fizzy water and no further. She was, however, willing to indulge in a packet of crisps to accompany her sandwich.

  They made their search through the boxes a division of labour. Isabelle began with one that contained a portable CD player and an eclectic collection of music, from classical to American country. There was also an iPod as well as a stand from which it, too, could provide tunes for the deacon.

  Next to her, Havers was unpacking a box that appeared to contain Druitt’s nonreligious clothing. As fitting for one devoted to the religious life, he hadn’t appeared to own a great deal, and unsurprisingly everything was neatly folded, of muted colours, and generally undistinguished. Tuck
ed among them and perhaps to protect it, Havers found a wooden cross, plain with no corpus upon it. Its wood was fine and polished, however, and on the back of it was a small plaque indicating it was “To Ian with love from Mum and Dad” and a date, presumably the day he became a deacon of the church. At the bottom of this box, a filing folder held a list of male and female names, addresses, and phone numbers presumably representing the membership of the after-school children’s club as the given identities of men and women in parentheses after each name suggested the parents of children in the club. And beneath the filing folder a newspaper lay along with a stack of what appeared to be advertisements of appearances for some kind of band called Hangdog Hillbillies. Each of these bore a different venue, a different date, and a different picture of the band. Ian Druitt, it turned out, was a member and the pictures depicted him playing the washtub bass. Other members appeared to play variously the banjo, an old washboard, spoons, and guitar. They also appeared to wear costumes in keeping with the name of their group, for they were dressed in what appeared to be deliberately shabby clothing, and the next box that Isabelle opened contained various outfits that Ian Druitt must have worn: from faded dungarees to bib overalls, to boots, to work-worn T-shirts, threadbare work shirts, and various kinds of hats.

  The kept newspaper turned out to be another copy of the Ludlow Echo, featuring Druitt’s Man of the Year story. Havers read it thoroughly, as Isabelle had not, and she read out the deacon’s volunteer life: member of the catch-sterilise-release feral cat group, leader of the Ludlow Boys’ and Girls’ Club, member of the Victim Volunteers Society, architect of the developing Street Pastors Programme, director of the choir of St. Laurence parish. He also seemed to participate in visiting shut-ins, the elderly, and those living in convalescent homes.