The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  “It is always about you, isn’t it?” Sandra said. “And you know quite well that this has been in the hands of the courts from the first.”

  “Oh right. Of course. Naturally.” Isabelle crossed the room to the bed. There on the bedside table sat the vodka, along with tonic and the ice. Her tongue felt dry. She would not submit. She said, “What do you want, Sandra? Have your say and be done.”

  “Are you aware that you’re slurring your words?” was Sandra’s reply. “Have you been drinking? But then, why do I even ask that question? You’re generally drinking, aren’t you.”

  “I’m about to ring off, as apparently you can’t hear me.”

  “You know you can’t win this,” Sandra said, finally changing her tack. “I want it to stop. It’s tearing Bob apart. It’s tearing the boys apart. Aren’t you the least concerned about that?”

  “Aren’t you the least concerned that Bob’s plan is to move them permanently away from their own mother? Oh, he’s offered very generous terms of visitation as long as visitation takes place in New Zealand.”

  “I’m glad you put the emphasis where it belongs, on generous. He’s offered to let them stay with you when you’re in New Zealand; he’s offered to let you take them on holiday with you when you’re in New Zealand. What more do you want? Where is this going to end?”

  “I want my sons within range of their mother. And this will end when I have exactly that.”

  “You can’t possibly think that any court in the land—”

  “You’ve already made that point.”

  “—is going to allow you to put a spanner into Bob’s advancement in his career.”

  “I’m not putting a spanner anywhere. He can advance as high as he likes anywhere that he likes, including Mars. What he can’t do is take my sons with him.”

  “His sons,” Sandra hissed. “Who have grown up in his household from the day of your separation, and we both know why. So don’t make me say it. It’s going to come out in court, you know: the drinking, the abuse.”

  “I did not abuse—”

  “How many teaspoons of vodka went into their bottles? Or was it tablespoons?”

  “Don’t you threaten me.”

  Sandra gave one of her classic sighs, illustrating how reasonable she was attempting to be with a madwoman. “I’m not trying to threaten you. I’m merely pointing out what’s going to come up in court.”

  “Let it, then. It’s his word against mine.”

  “The word of an alcoholic. Isabelle, you need to consider all of this. You need to think about whether you truly want it. I mean what’s going to come out in court, which is not going to make you look or sound like a doting mother, no matter how your solicitor spins it. The route you’re taking is going to do little more than amass fees from more and more solicitors.”

  “Which part of that is supposed to bother me? Put Bob on the phone.”

  “He’s with the boys. I expect you know it’s their bedtime, yes? He’s supervising.”

  “They’re nine years old. They don’t need supervising.”

  “Well, no one suggests you know your own sons. I’d like you to think about what I’ve said. You can consider either part: the fees that you’ll be paying for at least ten years or the ruin of your career that is going to come about once we lay out the truth in court. I’d think you’ll probably concentrate on the career. It’s always been more important to you than James and Laurence.”

  She cut the call directly she said the names of Isabelle’s sons. Isabelle’s body had turned to pure fury.

  She punched to return the call. It went directly to message. She cut it off. She rang the number again. Again it was message. She rang a third time. Again, the message. She grabbed the vodka and dashed it into her glass.

  The mobile rang. She grabbed it, answered, and shrieked, “Listen to me, you fucking little worm. If you think you can—”

  “Is that DCS Ardery?”

  The room began swimming. The voice was unmistakable. AC Hillier was ringing.

  She dropped onto the bed. She said, “Yesh. Yes. Sorry. I fought . . . I thought . . .” Get a bloody grip, she told herself. “I jusht had . . . I just had a go-round with my ex and his wife. Sorry. I thought one of ’em was ringing.”

  There was a pause. It was far too long. She’d thought he’d rung off, but then he said, “I’ve had a phone call from Quentin Walker.”

  Isabelle tried to squeeze from her brain a visual that went with the name. She couldn’t do it. She said, “Sir?”

  “The MP from Birmingham. Clive Druitt’s been on to him again. He’s agitating about the CPS. He’s insisting on a prosecution.”

  She wanted to say, So is Havers, but she didn’t wish the fish from that kettle to go swimming in the waters of this conversation. She said, “We haven’t found a reason the CPS would prosecute, sir. They could go for dereliction of duty, but as no one told the PCSO why the vicar . . . or the deacon . . . sorry . . . why he was being brought in, they don’t have a case against him.”

  “We need to give them something. I mean the MP and Druitt. A crumb would do. Anything you’ve come up with.”

  Isabelle tried to consider this but an ache had blossomed behind her eyes, and she wanted nothing more than to sleep, drifting off in a haze, having vodka-induced dreams. She pressed her fingers into her eyeballs.

  “Are you there, Superintendent?”

  She’d been drifting. She’d felt her body relaxing in the way she loved it to relax. Nothing there, nothing on her mind, bliss itself just out of reach, but she could reach it, she could, she could.

  She roused herself. “Yesh. Here. Yes, sir. Just thinking. We’ve got the dead man’s diary, which the complaints commission didn’t have before. But all it’s got inside is days and days of appointments. We can trace them all, but that’ll take some time, and I’m not sure that’s where we want to go anyway. So far, everything points to suicide. Havers found that the position of a CCTV camera had been changed prior to an anonymous call being made, but that’s it. The IPCC didn’t catch that, but it’s the only thing that they didn’t catch.”

  “Hmm. Yes. I see,” Hillier said. “That might do. Write a complete report when you get back to London. We’ll present it to Walker to give to Druitt.”

  “Will do.” In her room, Isabelle saluted. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. She must have been pulling at her hair while speaking with Sandra, she thought. It was tangled and looked filthy and she wondered when she’d last had a shower, as she couldn’t recall.

  “What about Havers?” Hillier said. “Anything yet?”

  Isabelle rose, went to the mirror, examined herself more closely, saw the lines mapping outward from her eyes. She said, “There’s nothing, sir. She was heading off to Shrewsbury at one point to listen to the tape of an anonymous phone call, but I called her back as I hadn’t told her to do anything other than have a look at the CCTV films.”

  “Had you given her an order?” he asked sharply.

  “Unfortunately, no. Not definitively.”

  Another pause. She could picture him shaking his head in disgust. But she couldn’t help the fact that Havers was keeping herself in impeccable order other than the misstep of her decision about Shrewsbury.

  Hillier said, “Well, we can’t bake a pie with that, can we, Superintendent?”

  “She’s being wily, sir. I expect she’s speaking with DI Lynley each night or each morning for a pep talk.”

  “Ah yes, Lynley,” Hillier said. His tone suggested that he wouldn’t mind sending Lynley off to Berwick-upon-Tweed as well. “Carry on then, Superintendent. I’ll want to see you tomorrow afternoon.”

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Barbara waited a good long while before she left the hotel. She had her bag and she had her fags, and no one could question her heading out for a
smoke and to scare up something to eat after not having had dinner.

  She had given thought to trekking over to Lower Galdeford Street, on the chance that PCSO Ruddock was having another go with his still unmentioned female companion in the car park of the police station in Townsend Close. But so far she’d made no progress arguing with Ardery over the issue of Ruddock, the patrol car, and his female companion in her attempts to stress what the PCSO’s dereliction of duty might have meant in the death of Ian Druitt. Besides, everyone knew he’d not been in the room with Ian Druitt. He’d said as much, and he’d explained what he’d been doing. But if the truth was that he’d been laying some pipe in the back seat of a parked patrol car, that was a far more serious matter than merely making phone calls to pubs from another office in the building. For if Ruddock had been shagging his lady friend in the patrol car, someone easily could have slipped into the car park, then into the building to murder the deacon, staging it as a suicide and scarpering afterwards.

  Of course, staging a suicide was the sticking point, according to Nancy Scannell’s examination of the body. Still, Barbara couldn’t remove from her mind the photo she’d seen of the forensic pathologist and her consortium of glider owners that Rabiah Lomax had displayed in her house. That meant something. Barbara could feel it down to the soles of her feet.

  So she was still on the trail of what had really gone on beneath the surface of what everyone claimed had gone on the night of Ian Druitt’s death. That trail just now was leading her the short distance across Castle Square and through the passage to Quality Square, where her plan was to duck into the Hart and Hind for a half pint of ale and a packet of crisps or a jacket potato if one was on offer. In the pub, she intended to engage in a bit of casual conversation with anyone besides the publican who might be able to confirm Ruddock’s claim that binge drinking had truly been going on the night of Druitt’s death, requiring him to make phone calls to the town’s pubs. She wasn’t entirely sure what it would mean when she had the information. It was, at least, something she could do.

  He was a nice enough bloke, Ruddock. Barbara didn’t want him to lose his job because of what had happened to Druitt. But even nice blokes make serious mistakes—she liked to think of herself as nice enough and she’d made a barrel of them—and it seemed to her that Ruddock wasn’t being completely honest about the exact nature of the mistake he’d made.

  Inside the pub, she sauntered to the bar. The place was virtually deserted.

  There were two barmen. The older of them came to take her order. It would be a half pint of Joule’s Pale Ale, she told him, and if they still had jacket potatoes like those listed on the blackboard, she’d have one of them as well. He told her the jacket potatoes had been in the warmer since noon and they had seen better culinary days at this point. She told him she didn’t care and if he had something to stuff them with, all the better. He said that, for stuffing, they were down to what the kitchen had in tins and how did she feel about sweet corn and butter? She said, “Bring it on. I’m not a picky eater.” His look-over of her suggested that he was only too aware of that.

  He saw to her half pint and then disappeared into the back where, she presumed, the kitchen was. As he did this, two individuals descended the stairs at the back of the pub beyond the bar. They were a boy and a girl—college age—and they carried a key with an overlarge fob. The boy handed this over, in addition to two twenty-pound notes, to the younger barman, who placed the money in a receptacle behind the till and returned the key to a spot beneath the bar. Interesting, Barbara thought.

  When the older of the barmen returned with her jacket potato and cutlery, she said to him, “Trying to evade the revenue men, or is it just something minor—for cash—you’ve got on the side?”

  “What’s that, then?”

  “Two blissful individuals of an age not to have another location for achieving bliss have just handed over a room key and some cash.”

  “Ah.” He gave her a wolfish grin. “Sometimes individuals like a bit of privacy. I provide it.”

  “By the hour, I expect.”

  “One does what one must to keep food on the table.” He treated her to a more assessing look than he’d done before, saying, “You’re the type to notice things, are you?”

  “With those two, it was a case of seeing, no noticing required.”

  He laughed briefly, said, “Typical, that is,” and went on to pull a pint for an older woman whose black beehive hairdo made her look like a refugee from the 1960s. He nodded at her, said, “Georgie still giving you grief there, Doreen?” and slid the pint in her direction.

  “I’m here, ain’t I?” was her reply.

  “You show him the door, luv, and I’m your man.”

  She laughed in a horselike fashion, displaying a set of teeth so crooked that an orthodontist would have had heart palpitations. “’F you say so, Jack,” was her reply before she took up the drink and returned to her table.

  Jack scooped up a dampish-looking rag from beneath the bar and wiped from it the rings of moisture from the people who had not yet discovered the purpose of coasters, which lay about everywhere. He said to Barbara, “I don’t know you, do I.”

  “Know all your customers, then?”

  “Generally,” he told her. “Good for business.” He extended his hand to her and said, “Jack Korhonen.”

  “Barbara Havers,” she replied. She tucked into the potato, which was, at least, steaming. The kitchen had been generous with the butter as well. The tinned sweet corn was tinned sweet corn, but with the butter added the entire concoction went down a treat once she threw on some salt, some pepper, some brown sauce, and a daub of mustard, and mooshed it all round. She said, “I asked here and there for a pub and got told this was the place to be.”

  “Expect that’s due to the location. Near to the college? That brings in the drinkers better’n naked ladies dancing round poles.”

  “Not so many here tonight.”

  “Midweek. And we’re closing soon.”

  The younger barman was cleaning off tables, carrying glassware to the bar. He brought a load over on a tray and he slid this to Jack, saying, “Things look finished for the night up above,” with an eyebrow lifted to indicate—it seemed—the rooms upstairs. “One hundred twenty pounds. Slow evening.”

  “Probably time to change the sheets,” Jack told him. They both laughed heartily at this. Then Jack turned to Barbara and said, “You didn’t say what your business was in town. Can’t be a holiday ’less you do your holidaying alone.”

  Well, the holidaying alone part would be true, Barbara thought, when she had time to take a holiday at all. She said, “Bit of a history buff,” since Ludlow appeared to be crawling with it.

  “History, is it?” Jack Korhonen said. “I expect you’ve come to the right place, then. History of what?”

  “What?” she asked him.

  “History of the universe, history of England, history of the Celts or the Angles or the Saxons? What sort of history?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Royal, particularly the Plantagenets.”

  “Real brawlers, that lot,” he said with a nod.

  “They liked their battles. I’ll give you that.”

  “Which of ’em interest you?”

  “Battles?”

  “Plantagenets.”

  That one put her into serious waters. She thought she might be able to name a Plantagenet, just. She could go with Edward since she did know that history was positively littered with Edwards. But she reckoned Korhonen’s next question would be which Edward, and if he asked that, she was going to be sunk. Not every Edward could have been a Plantagenet. Consider Edward VIII and the woman he loved. He was a . . . what? What the hell was he? A Windsor? Had they even begun using the name Windsor then? Or, for that matter, had he actually been an Edward VIII? Was she confusing him with Henry VIII, whom she absolutely knew
was not a Plantagenet if both sides of the blanket were thoroughly examined. Lynley had a first in history from Oxford, and he’d made that much clear to her. Or had he? Perhaps he’d been speaking of Henry VII? And why the bloody hell didn’t royalty branch out and try a few new names so history wasn’t so difficult anyway? King Kevin would’ve been just the ticket.

  She settled on saying, “Well, that’s just the trouble, see. I haven’t settled on which one of ’em. I’m having a thorough look at what’s left of the castle though. Tomorrow morning. Inspiration. One never knows.”

  “Ah. Edward the Fifth, then. ’Course, it could also be the Fourth as he must’ve lived there for a bit when he was a boy, before he was the Fourth, of course. Mary Tudor as well.”

  Good God, she thought. She needed to direct him away from her putative reason for being in the town. She said, “I s’pose I ought to wring the brain of some college type for inspiration, eh? Recommend anyone?”

  “Couldn’t possibly. Assuming you mean a lecturer, I wouldn’t know a college type if he shook my hand. Long as they’re here to order drinks, they c’n be whatever they want to be. It’s the great equaliser, I find, drinking is. Everyone from football hooligans to the royal family likes to have a tipple. Some of them like it too much.”

  “Bingeing? Colleges, unis, and bingeing always seem to go together.”

  He looked a little cagey at this. He began wiping the bar again and he went on to polish the taps. “On the odd occasion, true. Mostly we keep things under control.”

  “Not like in the cities, eh?”

  “Like I said, we keep it under control. And if things start going down the toilet round here, I’m luckier than the rest. Someone living in Quality Square always calls the coppers and one comes by to sort things for me. The rest ’f them?”—a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder seemed to indicate the rest of the pubs across Ludlow—“They have to sort it on their own. We had a street pastors programme for a bit: slew of do-gooders in the streets at night, gathering kids being sick in the gutters, getting them to where they’re meant to be. But that went tits up, so we’re back to sweeping up our messes individually.”