The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  “But there’s something else, guv.” Havers traded Isabelle the map for the filing folders and from one of them she took out a document that they’d found among Druitt’s possession: the list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of everyone associated with the after-school children’s club that Ian Druitt had established. One of the addresses was actually in Temeside. It belonged to someone called Finnegan Freeman.

  “See,” Havers said, “the idea of an eager female slipping in from somewhere to meet Ruddock got me looking at the map to see how she could’ve managed it. And the fact that one of the routes she could’ve used came from Temeside got me looking at the list of kids in the club, ’cause it sounded familiar. I mean the Temeside part of it. And there was the name and the address.”

  “We’re back to paedophilia then?” Isabelle allowed herself to sound as weary as she felt. “And this is our victim, whose parent crept up from the river—”

  “Oh no, not our victim.” Havers indicated the list again and pointed out that Finnegan Freeman’s name was the only one without parentheses following it, with those other parentheses containing the names of the parents of the boy or girl in question. “When I spoke to Reverend Spencer—remember?—he told me there was always an older kid who helped out at the club. I reckon this is him, this Finnegan Freeman, because no parents for him are on the list. That being the case and considering that the IPCC looked only at the film from the night Druitt died—”

  “What else were they supposed to look at since he died at the station?” Isabelle asked. She was holding the map and she saw that a tremor was in her hand. She was quick to drop the map to her side.

  “They didn’t look at what got recorded from the night of the anonymous phone call,” Havers said. “If we examine things with that phone call in mind, it seems to me that we can reckon whoever made the call wanted Druitt arrested and questioned. We agree on that, right?”

  Isabelle made a somewhat royal “continue, please” gesture, a sort of rolling of her hand that Havers took as she intended it, for she plunged merrily on. “So what if the person who made that phone call wanted him arrested in order to get him into the station in order to give him the chop? What if that person had done his homework and knew that on certain nights Ruddock had the evening off from caring for the old gent he lives with and—”

  “What old gent? Where the devil are you heading with this?”

  “The old gent isn’t important. Just a bloke Ruddock cares for in exchange for room and board and some cash. So what if someone knows that when he has some free time—which we can assume is on some kind of regular schedule—Ruddock takes his lady friend to the nick’s car park for a bonk? And what if this someone also knows the lady friend, our bonkee. What if the two of them cooked up a deal in which the someone waited for an arrest to be made of Druitt—post the anonymous phone call that this someone had already made—and when this occurred the bonkee was sent to clear Ruddock out of the station in order to give the someone time to get to Druitt?”

  Isabelle couldn’t take her eyes off Havers, so convoluted did she find her scenario. She said, finally, “Sergeant.” And then she breathed for a moment in-out and in-out and in again in order to say, “We can ‘what if’ this into next week. We can ‘what if’ this into next year.”

  “Right. I know. I understand. But the point is, guv, that the IPCC didn’t look into this part of things because the IPCC didn’t know about Ruddock and his lady friend in the car park.”

  “Because,” Isabelle said and she dug into her lack of resources for a patience she did not possess, “the IPCC were here to look into a suicide in the police station and there was nothing in what they found—and there is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing—that indicates this was a murder. That ought to tell you something, so why doesn’t it?”

  Havers was silent, although the left side of her mouth jumped in such a way that she must have been biting her cheek. This, admittedly, was fairly admirable in someone who had never before seemed to believe that controlling herself was a requirement of her line of work. The sergeant looked towards the hotel as if waiting for confirmation of her ideas, perhaps from Peace on Earth. She looked to the castle where, blessedly, the lawn mowing had ceased and the gardener was—unfortunately—adding petrol to fire it up again. Then she said carefully, “Due respect and all that, guv? Sometimes when there’s nothing to be found as proof, it’s because something’s been missed or something’s there in order to hide what isn’t there.”

  “You’re attempting to make a point, so make it.”

  “It’s like I said: the CCTV recording on the night of the phone call was never looked at. And no one’s talked to this Finnegan kid, who just happens to live nearby. I’m not saying either of these points mean anything. I’m just saying they could mean something and they were overlooked. And isn’t that why we’re here . . . more or less?”

  God, Isabelle thought. They were never going to get out of Ludlow. They would be going at this into eternity when she needed to be back in London, where she could fight Bob and Sandra properly. But she knew the maddening sergeant was right. She might have been bending the facts like the limbs of a Chinese contortionist, but the basic truth was the basic truth. No one had spoken to this Finnegan Freeman and apparently no one had watched the film of the night of the anonymous phone call.

  She couldn’t avoid the thought, then, of Clive Druitt and the threats he’d made about his team of solicitors. He and they were out there somewhere, waiting for whatever report she and Havers came up with. To avoid a lawsuit and the kind of attendant rotten publicity that policing didn’t need, she was going to have to make certain that every cobweb in every corner had been located, looked over, and swept away. And the cobweb that had been the thickest from the first was the one declaring Druitt a paedophile.

  There was nothing for it. She had to agree. They were going to have to watch the film taken on the night of the phone call. They were also going to have to speak to Finnegan Freeman. But that did not turn out to be the worst of things. For Havers next picked up what Isabelle had not earlier noted: Druitt’s diary.

  “There’s this as well,” she happily announced.

  ST. JULIAN’S WELL

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Rabiah Lomax had just stepped out of the shower when the phone began ringing. She decided to let it go to message and wrapped a bath towel round her. It was just the way she liked her bath towels: large, fluffy, warm from the towel rack, and as white as the soul of a virgin. She was sinking into the blissful enjoyment of the terry’s embrace when she heard a woman’s disembodied voice say “. . . of the Metropolitan Police,” which gave her pause to reconsider her plan of not answering the call. She went into the bedroom where the nearest phone was, and said into it, “Metropolitan Police, is it?” assuming one of her fellow morning runners was having her on. Only today Rabiah had been salivating over that scrumptiously delicious black actor whose unusual name she could never recall. He was, at present, starring in a gritty police drama, and this caller would be one of the runners setting her up as a result of that post-run conversation. So she said, “D’you work with that black bloke with the odd name? Could you send him along as I’ve been the victim of a crime and I need him to comfort me.”

  The voice said, “I beg your pardon? This is Detective Chief Superintendent Isabelle Ardery of the Metropolitan Police. To whom am I speaking?”

  Rabiah reconsidered. The voice did sound official.

  “We need to speak to you if your surname is Lomax,” the woman went on.

  Well, no one she knew would beat a dead horse, so Rabiah said, “What’s this about?”

  “I assume your name is Lomax?”

  “Of course it is. What was your name?”

  The woman repeated it. Ardery, she said. Detective Chief Superintendent. Metropolitan Police. If Ms. Lomax would remain at home, the police
would be with her directly. Would that be convenient? Within the next ten minutes?

  A call from the police was hardly ever going to be convenient, but Rabiah didn’t see that she had a choice, so she said a half hour would be preferable as she’d just returned from a run and wished to shower. She’d need to dress afterwards and all the et ceteras, so a half hour—no, let’s make it an hour—would be sufficient. The Met officer said that would be fine and rang off directly she had Rabiah’s address.

  Naturally, Rabiah didn’t need that much time since she’d already showered and she certainly didn’t wear enough makeup to require more than two minutes at most to see to her face and another thirty seconds to comb her hair—most of that eaten up by trying to find a comb—but what she did need was time to phone her solicitor. She’d seen enough police dramas to understand the foolishness of ever talking to the coppers alone about anything without legal counsel.

  She went for her personal phone directory and punched in the number of Aeschylus Kong. Years ago, she’d chosen him to write her will purely because of his name. Who could possibly resist the temptation of meeting someone so interestingly monikered?

  She was put through to him as soon as she uttered Police are coming. In a moment she heard Aeschylus’s reassuring tenor. It said, “Rabiah. How good that you have phoned in this most curious situation. It pleases me that you understand the way of wisdom regarding the police and phoning one’s solicitor.” He always sounded like a combination of an eighteenth-century gentleman, Confucius, and a fortune cookie. “I shall be there as soon as I can manage. In the meantime, should they arrive in advance of me, do not speak with them at all.”

  “Shall I leave them on the doorstep or let them in the house?”

  “The doorstep is preferable but courtesy suggests entrance.”

  Confucius, she thought.

  He went on with, “Entrance is safe as long as they understand that you will not be having a conversation with them prior to my arrival.”

  “Won’t that look suspicious?”

  “Of course. But have you anything to hide from the police?”

  “Aside from the body beneath the patio?”

  “Hmm. Yes. Well, if they come with shovels, do not allow them into the house.”

  She also liked him because he knew when a joke was a joke.

  He told her he’d be there soon, and she went back to the bathroom to finish drying herself off. She ran a comb through her hair, vigorously rubbed her face with sunblock as always, threw some colour onto her skin, and went for something to wear. She generally wore tracksuits when she wasn’t fancying herself up, and she wasn’t about to fancy herself up for the police. So she chose her lime green one and reached for her sandals. She was putting them on when she saw that the nail varnish on several of her toes was chipped. She muttered “Oh blast,” and went for the varnish remover. She absolutely loathed chipped varnish. She needed a pedicure, so she took a moment to ring her girl in Craven Arms for an appointment. Becky didn’t like women wearing toenail varnish till June—she wanted everyone’s nails to breathe from November onward, she claimed, although Rabiah didn’t think toenails needed to breathe at all—but Rabiah didn’t have time to argue with her on this subject, so she lied and said it was a manicure instead. They could have their toenail argument when she showed up.

  She was energetically removing the remains of the varnish when her doorbell rang. It rang two more times before she got to it because it was out of the question that she would open it to the police only half varnished and chipped at that. When she finally jerked the door open, it was to see a tall blonde reaching to have another go with the bell while beside her stood a companion female who would barely have scraped five foot three on a good day.

  They could have been anyone, Rabiah thought, since they weren’t wearing uniforms. But police detectives on the telly didn’t, did they, so there was no reason to suppose these two would.

  The tall one said, “Ms. Lomax? I’m Detective Chief Superintendent Isabelle Ardery,” and presented her identification while she tilted her head towards her companion and said she was Barbara Havers, although Rabiah did not catch her rank since she was examining Ardery’s ID and trying to decide why the photo on it made her look ten years older than she appeared to be in person.

  She handed the identification back to Ardery and considered how she had jumped to a conclusion that was clearly antifeminist. A woman had phoned, yes, but Rabiah had expected her to be the inferior officer to a man, and this despite having in her possession every season of Prime Suspect on DVD.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” Ardery said and waited for what she obviously expected: an invitation inside the house. This made Rabiah want to leave both of the detectives on her front step till Aeschylus arrived, but instead more than six decades of social breeding forced her to hold the door open and admit them.

  She led them into the sitting room, where she informed them that her solicitor was on his way. Both of the women looked surprised. She said, “It’s the telly. I can never work out why they don’t ask to ring their solicitors if the police want to speak with them.”

  “Speeds things up if they don’t,” was the reply given by the shorter woman, Havers.

  “How?” Rabiah asked in spite of herself.

  “Moves the drama right along. They can get to a confession or a clue or whatever sooner if there’s no solicitor.”

  Ardery said pleasantly to Rabiah, “Have you a clue for us?”

  “Not when I don’t know why you’re here. I was heading to the kitchen. What appeals? Coffee, tea, mineral water, juice? It’s grapefruit. I’m a victim to grapefruit in whatever form it comes, although I’m having a coffee just now. I’ve not had breakfast. I can forget that, but I must have my coffee.”

  The superintendent said, “Ah. Coffee takes more time, of course. Mineral water is fine for me,” and the other woman agreed that mineral water was just the ticket for her as well.

  Rabiah was assembling her tray of drinks when the doorbell sounded again. She went to admit Aeschylus Kong. He gave his usual formal greeting that was part bow from the waist and part handshake, his left hand over his right breast as if his heart had moved there during the night. He said, “Rabiah, if only everyone were as wise as you,” and she told him where he would find the coppers. She asked him if he wanted a coffee.

  He said a coffee would be splendid, black with one sugar. She returned to the kitchen as he joined the women from the Met. She could hear him introducing himself.

  The higher-ranking officer, Ardery, did the honours for their side. The other officer, Rabiah overheard, was a detective sergeant.

  When Rabiah returned to the sitting room with the tray of drinks, she saw that everyone was still standing as if in anticipation of her arrival. Aeschylus was looking out at the back garden, the woman called Havers was flipping through a Rockette scrapbook, and Ardery was examining one of the photos from the mantel of the fireplace. Rabiah couldn’t see which one it was, but what she could see and did note was that the DCS handed it over to the other copper, who gave it a look, gave the DCS a look, then put the photo back on the fireplace mantel. When she did so, Rabiah saw it was the photo of Volare, Cantare, the consortium of pilots she was part of, standing in front of the glider they had purchased together. Considering the detective’s interest, Rabiah wondered if the glider constituted stolen property.

  When everyone had a coffee or mineral water, Aeschylus suggested that they all sit. He said to the police, “You have a wish to speak to my client, I understand,” as he brushed his hand along his perfectly groomed head as if it wanted his attention.

  “We’re rather surprised that she felt she needed a solicitor,” Ardery replied.

  “That would be upon my advice, which I would give to any client who rang me and told me the police wished to speak to them. You must not, as a result, presume her guilty of anything.
”

  “We don’t,” Ardery said. “I merely find it odd that, not knowing what the subject of our call was going to be, she would phone her solicitor.”

  Aeschylus made a movement of his hands, opening them briefly in a gesture that looked rather welcoming. He said, “What is it that we can do for you?”

  “Your client is the only Lomax in the phone directory. She’s listed as R. Lomax.”

  “R for Rabiah, yes,” Aeschylus agreed. “Women should always use only their initials in any directory. On their bills as well. It’s an issue of safety. Please go on, Superintendent.”

  Rabiah saw the other woman—Havers—take a notebook out of her shoulder bag along with a mechanical pencil. She was curious about why her words or those of Aeschylus Kong were going to be noted, but she didn’t ask about it. If asking was going to be necessary, she had little doubt that her solicitor would do the job.

  “Are you acquainted with Ian Druitt?” Ardery asked her.

  Rabiah glanced at Aeschylus, who nodded, so she said, “He’s the bloke who died at the police station a few months ago.”

  “Remember that, do you?” Havers asked the question, looking up from her notebook.

  “It was in the newspaper for days and on television news,” Rabiah said.

  “Were you acquainted with him?” Ardery asked again.

  “I’m not religious.”

  “So you know that he was a clergyman.”

  Rabiah was about to reply when Aeschylus touched her hand briefly and said, “The fact that he was a clergyman was also in the newspaper, Superintendent. And it was mentioned on regional news as well. I, too, who am also not religious nor a member of any congregation, know that he was a clergyman. All of that was made public knowledge at the time of the man’s death.”