The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  It was the lowest drawer on the right. Generally, it took something of an effort to open it, as it did now for Isabelle. He continued to listen until he heard what he didn’t want to hear. Something hit the top of her desk. Some ten to fifteen seconds passed and something else hit the top of her desk. She would, of course, sweep them both into her bag when she was finished.

  He looked down at his shoes and considered everything for a moment. Then he went in search of Barbara Havers.

  Part II

  Nothing fools you better

  than the lie you tell yourself.

  —Raymond Teller of Penn & Teller

  15 MAY

  WANDSWORTH

  LONDON

  Isabelle had spent the night on the sofa rather than in the bedroom, so when she awakened, her back ached, her neck was stiff and sore, and her head was throbbing. She awakened not because an alarm went off and not because the television—which had been blaring all night—suddenly disturbed her, but because she was powerfully thirsty and in need of the loo.

  When she got to her feet, she saw that she was still in the clothes she’d worn to Maidstone for a dinner with her sons. This had taken place at a Pizza Hut because she’d been stupid enough to allow James and Laurence to choose their favourite spot for a meal. She’d been picturing something quite special, with the twins dressed to the nines, as she herself would be. What she hadn’t pictured were queues of customers, plastic tables, sticky chairs, fluorescent lighting, and an argument over everything-on-it versus mushrooms-and-olives-only. What she also hadn’t pictured was who else was present: Bob and Sandra, seated far enough away from the boys so as not to hear Isabelle’s conversation with them but close enough to watch the interaction should things not go as swimmingly as they were intended to go.

  A dinner out was, Isabelle had argued, the least Bob and Sandra could agree to. They’d won everything, they were leaving, her boys were lost to her. She wanted to talk to the twins about what happened next in their relationship with their own mum, she told Bob.

  Things had not gone the distance into court. A very long and apparently very frank phone call from Bob’s solicitor to Sherlock Wainwright had taken care of that. Cleverly, Bob had waited till “You’ve given me no choice, Isabelle,” and when he’d reached that no-choice point, he’d laid out every additional fact he’d not yet given his solicitor. These facts his solicitor passed along to Sherlock Wainwright, who was not happy when he heard them and understood exactly how much Isabelle had not told him about the roots of her divorce.

  He’d said over the phone, in the remonstrating tone of a school’s head teacher, “So you can accept what your former husband is offering as the best arrangement you’re going to get in the circumstances, or you can sack me and find another solicitor. But the reality is clear: it’s going to come down to this again and again, no matter who represents you. I’m going to advise you to agree to Bob’s terms. You’ll be better off because what you don’t spend on solicitors’ fees in carrying this forward uselessly you can then spend on airline tickets to New Zealand.”

  She so wanted to continue to fight, but she knew that Bob had the upper hand. She’d given it to him, after all. For what did she have left, aside from the career he threatened to destroy if she didn’t comply with his wishes? So she’d agreed, she’d requested a dinner with the twins, and thus they had all ended up at a Pizza Hut in Maidstone.

  She could almost hear the conversation that Bob had had with the boys in order to influence their choice of dining establishment. “She says to choose your very, very favourite place,” he would have said because he knew what their choice would be, and he also knew there would be no wine or lager and certainly no vodka available to Isabelle there.

  The boys were nervous, despite apparently being quite at home in Pizza Hut. Laurence squirmed as if he’d outgrown his underpants, and James kept glancing across the room towards Bob and Sandra as if hoping for rescue. Isabelle had done her best to engage the twins in conversation: about what they were going to do together when she came to New Zealand to see them, about the school they were going to attend, about what they’d learned in advance about the country where they were going to live. No poisonous anything. Did they know that? Overrun with furry opossums, though. Had they seen a picture of one? Surfing, swimming with dolphins, and a special beach with a hot spring beneath it where you could dig a shallow pit and watch it quickly fill with warm water. Were they excited about going there?

  Her every question was answered by Laurence while James kept ducking his head and shooting looks at Bob and Sandra. Finally, in exasperation, Isabelle slapped her hand on the tabletop and spoke to him sharply about attending to her. He burst into tears, at which point Sandra rushed over to him with a “Darling, darling, here’s Mummy.” Isabelle felt herself get so red hot that she thought the top of her head would explode. Sandra scooped James from his seat and told the boy that Mummy would take him home straightaway, and Isabelle knew that to protest would be to cause further trouble that she would pay for in the end.

  Sandra left with a sobbing James in tow, Bob remained as if worried that Isabelle would cause a disturbance with Laurence at its centre, and Laurence himself—ever the peacekeeper—explained to Isabelle that James was only “a bit scared about starting school in New Zealand and being the slowest in the class and having the other kids laugh at him.” To Isabelle’s assertion that James was not slow, Laurence had replied with, “Fact is, Mum, he is.”

  They’d finished their meal rather hurriedly and Laurence had refused her offer of a sweet. She could tell that he was anxious to get home to James, and she might have been pleased to see this degree of fraternal affection and loyalty had the dinner not turned out to be such a balls-up. The very moment Laurence pushed his plate away from him, Bob was there at the table with a jovial “Ready-o, then?” to Laurence and a quiet “We’ll take a taxi” to Isabelle’s offer to drive them home.

  When Laurence headed towards the door, Bob did have the grace to say to Isabelle, “Sorry about Sandra. She’s a bit overprotective when it comes to the boys. She was out of her seat before I could stop her.”

  Isabelle found his regret difficult to swallow: an apology, of all things, from the very man who was in the midst of destroying her life. So she said, “Is this how you plan our future to look?”

  He said, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’m never to have private time with my sons. Meaning it’s all to be arranged so that I remain a distant figure to them: no mother at all but instead some stranger who drops into their lives now and then merely to upset the flow.”

  Bob looked towards Laurence, who, Isabelle saw, was watching them anxiously, as if expecting them to come to blows. He turned back to her and said, “You can’t see that you made a choice, can you?”

  He didn’t wait for a reply, instead moving to join Laurence and placing his hand on the boy’s thin shoulder to lead him out to the street where they would find a taxi. For Isabelle’s part, she returned to London. She felt as if a portion of her insides had been bitten out by an unseen ghoul, and she told herself that she deserved something in recompense for the disasters of the evening. She pulled the vodka from the freezer where she kept it, she poured herself three fingers of it, she added a splash of cranberry juice, and she carried both the bottle and the concoction to the sofa. There, she switched on the television, found a costume drama featuring tricorn hats, swarthy miners banging round underground stone tunnels, and some bloke with a naked chest and admirable pectorals scything wheat in a field. She sank onto the sofa and watched without watching and certainly without thinking. She drank until she could no longer think.

  The television was still at an unmerciful volume when she awoke, this time to the morning news. She searched for the remote and finally found it inexplicably inside one of her shoes. She turned off the sound on the weather report and stumbled to the bathroom. There she grima
ced at the condition of her hair and her makeup, examined her bloodshot eyes, and began to shed her clothes with one hand while with the other she looked for eye drops. When she found them, she also found that her hand was shaking too badly to put them in. She decided a shower was in order.

  She stood beneath it and wondered what time it was and gave herself a mental shake for not having checked. Making short work of the shower—most of the time she simply stood beneath the water and allowed it to beat on her head and shoulders and down her back—she found her watch after something of a search, where she had apparently left it, which was inside the freezer where the vodka had come from. The vodka itself was still on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and she did her best not to look at it or think about it as she went to the bedroom for fresh clothing.

  Clothed, she returned to the bathroom. Most of dealing with her face had to do with removing shine and adding colour. Not a problem at all, but then she came to her eyes, the need for the eye drops, the additional need for shadow and mascara, and her shaking hands, which had not stopped shaking since needing a shower was not what the shaking was about.

  She decided that a bit of the hair of the dog was in order. It would set her to right, and she needed it anyway because she otherwise would not be able to make her appearance what it had to be for her working day. Beyond that, she deserved it as well. She’d had nothing at all to drink with James and Laurence on the previous night. If nothing else, she was absolutely owed.

  CHALK FARM

  LONDON

  It was something of a relief to get back to Pop-Tarts, Barbara Havers decided. Those Ludlow breakfasts had been true artery cloggers. The eggs alone had been enough to do her in. Adding bacon, toast, great slashings of butter, jam, mushrooms, baked beans . . . It was a sodding miracle that she’d survived long enough to throw a chocolate fudge Pop-Tart into the toaster. She accompanied this with a large mug of PG Tips combined with a dash of milk and two lumps of sugar. Without the slightest twinge of guilt, she fired up her first fag of the day and experienced a moment of bliss. But she was going to need more of everything to wake herself up, she decided. Last night had been an epic experience: dinner after their tap-dancing class in the company of Kaz and Dorothea.

  She’d tried to beg off once she saw that Kaz meant to accompany them. She reckoned that begging off was what she was meant to do. After all, Dorothea had come to the class dressed in something very like a Catwoman costume, and Barbara was certain that she wasn’t the only member of the class to conclude that Dorothea’s choice of clothing—tight in every right place with a neckline screaming ooh la la—was intended to attract the attention of their instructor.

  But Dorothea insisted Barbara accompany her. She declared that they were a team—she and Barbara—and for this reason where one of them went, the other was intended to go. In this case, that meant to dinner. With Kaz.

  It turned out that Dorothea had her reasons, these being the outcome of the audition for the July dance recital. She had made the cut—no surprise there—but, alas, Barbara had failed to impress, being instead assigned a place in a group number that she fully intended to miss. For her part, Dorothea had been given a partner in the person of the talented and determined Umaymah. Barbara’s overwhelming relief at her own failure was something she’d done her best to hide. She’d said quite solemnly to Dorothea, with an effort at disappointment, “It’s better this way,” but Dorothea wasn’t having that.

  Hence, the dinner. Hence the ensuing conversation during which Dorothea pointed out to Kaz that her “choreography” called for rather more bumping and grinding than Umaymah’s husband—not to mention her father, her brothers, and all her male relatives—was going to be happy about. Barbara shot her a “What choreography?” look, but Dorothea ignored her in favour of casting her blue-eyed gaze upon their instructor and then curving her lips in what could only be called a come-hither-darling-man smile.

  Twice Barbara tried to leave them. It was only too obvious to her that, at least in Kaz’s eyes, she was a fifth wheel on a lopsided cart. But Dorothea stopped her. She finally relented only when Barbara pointed out that preventing her from going to the ladies’ was going to cause embarrassment to them all. Once released from the table at which Dorothea had cleverly sat her so close to the wall that she couldn’t move without the cooperation of her dining companions and everyone at the next table, she made her escape. It was only when she was finally on the Tube that she sent Dorothea a text telling her, “My arches have fallen. Kaz wants you alone. Be a good girl.” But still, she arrived home later than she would have liked, and unable to sleep due to the thought of possibly having to bump and grind in tap shoes while in the presence of other human beings, she finally picked up her battered copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and turned to the Shakespeare section for more quotable quotes pertaining to murder. She’d been sticking with the tragedies, most recently working her way through Othello and wondering when she’d encounter a situation in which smoting someone thus could be talked about. She reckoned that taking the circumcised dog by the throat wasn’t ever going to happen. Pondering all this, she’d at last fallen asleep. But it had seemed a matter of moments only before the 1812 cannons blasted her out of bed.

  She was just wiping the remaining crumbs from her second Pop-Tart off her plate when her mobile rang. She’d left it on the table next to the daybed that nightly was transformed into the spot where she and Morpheus met up, and she gave it the eye and willed it to stop playing the opening bars to the Twilight Zone theme music. It finally did after ten rings but in fewer than five seconds the entire routine began again. Reckoning that this would only happen time and again until she got to work, Barbara heaved herself to her feet and went to answer it.

  To her hello, she heard Dorothea Harriman’s breathless voice saying, “Detective Sergeant Havers?”

  “If you were expecting someone else, I hate to disappoint,” Barbara told her. “So did the earth move?”

  Dorothea responded in a whisper with, “Word of warning. She’s in a twist.”

  “And we’re speaking of?”

  “Who else? Her nibs. She wants to see you the moment you step onto the premises.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “It’s to do with the assistant commissioner. That’s all I know. Between you and me, that’s all I want to know.”

  Barbara rang off. A command performance in the DCS’s office immediately upon her arrival in Victoria Street did not sound like the manner in which she preferred to start her day. She cursed first and sighed second. Then she put another Pop-Tart into the toaster.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Barbara’s options for getting to Victoria Street quickly from Chalk Farm were nonexistent. She had a choice between the enduring horrors of street traffic or suffering a ride on the notoriously unreliable Northern Line. But at least with the Northern Line she’d be able to save on the congestion fee, so she got herself from Eton Villas to the Chalk Farm Tube station like an Olympic medalist in the fast walk competition.

  The wait at the Underground station was bad. The crowd that grew on the platform was worse. The ride was worst of all, as the masses of people inside the carriages were a terrorist’s dream. They ignored one another as per usual, jostling about like kittens struggling for a nursing position while also attempting to text, read their newspapers, listen to tinny-sounding music via earbuds, and in one case eat what smelled like a sardine sandwich.

  Nearly an hour had passed by the time Barbara reached St. James’s Park station. She dashed to the street and headed towards the looming grey mass of New Scotland Yard that rose like a barricaded monolith before her. There, she waited impatiently for the security hoo-ha to be completed: a labyrinth of queues, X-rays, more queues, and inspections that every year became more complicated. Finally, she reached the lifts.

  She was charging towards Isabelle Ardery’s office when the D
CS opened the door and snapped at Dorothea, “I thought I told you she was to get here directly. So where the hell is she?” And then, before Dorothea could reply, Ardery spied Barbara and said, “Get in here,” before she spun on a heel and went back inside.

  Barbara exchanged a look with Dorothea. Dorothea murmured, “The assistant commissioner was waiting in her office when she got here. Closed doors and massive shouting.”

  Bloody bleeding hell was what Barbara thought.

  She went inside the office, not knowing what to expect and fearing that she was about to come face-to-face with Hillier at his most Hillieresque. But the DCS was in the office alone, standing rigidly behind her desk. She barked, “Shut the goddamn door,” and Barbara instantly did so.

  As she crossed the room, Ardery took up a filing folder. “Sit,” she told her. When Barbara took the chair in front of the DCS’s desk, she was, apparently, close enough to satisfy because the DCS threw the folder directly at her. “You’re finished,” she said. “Sign it.”

  Barbara gaped at her. “What’s going on?”

  “Sign it and get the hell out of my office. Pack up your desk. If you take so much as a paper clip that doesn’t belong to you personally—”

  “Guv!” Barbara cried. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t you bloody say another word. Sign the paperwork and be glad it’s only a transfer to the north and not what you deserve, which is to be given the sack, with me making certain that no police force on the planet would ever be willing to take you on, even as a cleaner. Do you understand me?”