“No!” Barbara could see that something terrible must have happened, but she hadn’t the first clue what it might be. She went on with, “I did everything. Just like you said and you even said that I . . . you said . . . I didn’t . . .” Barbara couldn’t get her mind round what she wanted to say, so flummoxed was she by what was happening. She forced herself to get under control. She said at last, “If you want me to sign, you’re going to have to tell me why. Because I know that Hillier was waiting for you, so I know that something has—”
“Did you hear me?” Ardery jerked open the centre drawer of her desk. She pulled out a handful of pens. She threw them at her. “You’ve crossed the last bloody line with me, in your entirely miserable career of crossing lines. You’ve stepped out of order for the last time you will ever—”
“No! What did I do? I didn’t—”
“I said sign this!” Isabelle strode round the desk. She grabbed a pen up from the floor. Then she grabbed Barbara’s hand and forced her fingers round it. She shoved Barbara’s chair closer to the desk. “Now sign! Or is this just another order you intend to disobey? Because you know better, don’t you, because you’re some kind of omniscient policing god, because no matter what you’re told to do or how you’re told to do it or when you’re told to do it or how anything is meant to be done, if you, Barbara Havers, don’t happen to agree with it because it is not to your liking and your will, you don’t intend to do it. Now sign!”
“But you’re not . . . Stop it!” Barbara pushed her away. She started to rise. Isabelle pushed her back down. She shrieked, “I’ve had enough of you! Everyone here has had enough! Do you actually think you can bring the entire Metropolitan police force under a microscope and not be found out? Are you honestly that stupid?”
“Microscope? What’s . . . ? Why won’t you tell me?”
A voice entirely unexpected cut into this, saying, “Leave her, Isabelle. She did nothing.”
They both swung round to see that Lynley had joined them. Ardery shouted, “Who gave you leave to enter this office? You get the hell back to where you belong. If you do not—this very instant—I’ll see you hauled in front of—”
“Barbara didn’t do it,” Lynley said with that preternatural calm that seemed second nature to the bloke. “She doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you dare run interference for her.”
“You can put her on the rack and it won’t make a difference, guv,” he said. “I’m the one who sent it.”
“Sent what?” Barbara cried. “Where? What?”
“The first report,” Lynley said. “The one you were told to amend by the DCS. I sent it to Clive Druitt, who turned out to be a very easy man to locate. My guess is that he’s been to see his MP and his MP has been to see Hillier and what’s happened is that we’ve been accused of either a cover-up or a monumental lapse in judgement.” And with a look at Ardery, “Which is it, guv?”
Her answer was an icily enraged, “You supercilious bastard. Who the hell do you think you are? Have you any idea at all what you’ve done?”
Instead of replying, Lynley said to Barbara, “Perhaps it’s best if you leave us, Sergeant.”
“You stay where you are,” Ardery said. “I’m not finished with you.”
Lynley had been standing by the door, but now he crossed the room to join them. He and Ardery were eyeball to eyeball. What ran between them would have kept a refrigerator operational for at least a month, Barbara reckoned. “As I said,” Lynley explained in what sounded to Barbara like his most reasonable tone, “she had no idea. She gave me the report to read. She was concerned about having been told to exclude part of it. She wanted my opinion. I gave it.”
“Oh, did you,” Ardery said with a sneer. “And exactly what would Lord Asherton’s high, mighty, and excessively lofty opinion have been?”
“He told me to do like you told me, guv,” Barbara said hastily. “So I revised the report. You read the new one, didn’t you? I left out the part about—”
“Get out! Both of you! Get out!”
As Ardery strode behind her desk again, Barbara decided she needed no further invitation from the DCS. She surged to her feet, found herself slipping on one of the pens that Ardery had thrown at her. She felt Lynley steady her. She made hasty tracks for the door and was heading for safer climes as behind her Lynley was saying, “You’ve got to see reason, Isabelle. If you can’t—”
And as Barbara shut the door, Ardery broke into his words with, “You haven’t the first clue what you’ve done! But that doesn’t matter to you, does it? Nothing matters but how you see things, you insufferable piece of upper-class irrelevance.”
The door shut now, Lynley’s response was only a murmur that Barbara couldn’t understand. Ardery’s next comment was, on the other hand, delivered at maximum volume. “Don’t you put that on me. Don’t you bloody ever. You think nothing of intruding upon the lives of others because your own life . . . your own miserable life . . . who you are and what that’s meant to every step you’ve ever wanted to take—”
Another murmur from Lynley, which was followed by, “I won’t listen to another word of this. Get out before I ring for security. You heard me, didn’t you? Have you gone deaf? I said get out!”
Barbara dashed away at this. En route, she saw that Dorothea had already done the same thing.
VICTORIA
LONDON
She escaped into the ladies’ first. Her heart was still pounding so hard that she could feel it hammering against her eardrums. She needed a moment. Two. The entire morning. Whatever. She wished like the devil that she could have a fag but she didn’t want to risk it, although on another day she might have done so, bellowing the smoke into the toilet and hoping that continually flushing would suffice to cover her crime, which she knew it would not. But now that seemed like professional suicide in a bowl with whitebait. So instead she ran the water in the basin and thought about dunking her head into its meagre flow.
She was fairly well staggered by what Lynley had done. It wasn’t the first time he’d put his career out there on the chopping block, but it was definitely the first time he’d done so in such a way that could be interpreted as underhanded. Underhanded was not his style. He was more a bloke who threw down gauntlets in public. Barbara reckoned it came with the title, running through his noblesse oblige blood like he was the Scarlet Pimpernel. She couldn’t imagine how the assistant commissioner was going to react when he learned that DI Lynley was behind the original report’s being sent to Clive Druitt. Apoplexy came to mind, however.
By the time she got herself back to herself in the ladies’ and had made it to her desk, the entire department was abuzz. Lynley had returned and was at his own desk, the door to his office open and the man himself looking as unruffled as she’d ever seen him. She shot a look at her fellow sergeant Winston Nkata, who cocked his head and shrugged. She went to Lynley.
He was about to pick up his phone, but he stopped when he saw her in the doorway. One raised eyebrow said, Yes, sergeant? in that mild manner she’d come to know. She said, “Sir. I don’t . . . Why did you do it? This could . . . I mean . . . It’s not like . . .”
He half smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at a loss for words.”
“Then why?”
He lifted a hand and then dropped it. It was one of those born-to-the-purple gestures that he made every so often. It said, What else could I possibly have done? but as far she was concerned, he possibly could have done half a dozen other things. So she said, “Well?”
His reply was, “Everything needs to come into the light of day, Sergeant. That’s all this is. Isabelle—the DCS—knows this at heart. Believe me. She does know this.”
Barbara nodded. She understood. He wasn’t talking merely about the two differing reports.
VICTORIA
LONDON
It was just after noon when Lynley received the message that he’d known would be coming. He was surprised it had taken so long, as he’d reckoned that once he’d reached his own office it would be merely a matter of minutes before Judi MacIntosh would be giving him the word from on high: a sort of angel Gabriel without the trumpet. As it was, however, things in Tower Block had apparently begun with the assistant commissioner being called upon the carpet inside the commissioner’s office. According to Judi, who served them both and relayed the information to Lynley in a modified murmur suitable for the confessional, considerable conversation had taken place between the two men behind the closed door. So she’d thought it best to do Lynley the favour of pretending that he—Lynley—was actually not present in Victoria Block when, after his words with the commissioner, Hillier had barked a demand for DI Lynley’s immediate appearance. She’d reckoned, she informed Lynley, that Sir David had needed about an hour to cool off, so she’d only just now informed the AC that Dorothea Harriman had finally announced Lynley’s putative return. So, Judi said in conclusion, if she could possibly tell Hillier that Lynley wouldn’t at all mind stepping over to Hillier’s office . . . rather soon . . . ? Lynley said he would be there at once.
Isabelle would have given Hillier the word, of course. Her feet were doubtless being held to the flames, so Lynley couldn’t blame her for wanting to pass the joy of the heat along to him. If Hillier was frothing at the mouth and ready to go for her throat—not to mix too many metaphors, Lynley thought wryly—there wasn’t much else she could do save what she had done: track down the source of the report that had been sent to Clive Druitt.
He couldn’t blame her. He couldn’t even say she’d been in the wrong to tell Havers to eliminate from the official report the information that a gap between an anonymous phone call and an arrest suggested that an investigation into the allegations made against Ian Druitt had, might have, or should have occurred. That fact had not been germane to what had been Isabelle’s assignment in Shropshire. But it had been germane to the overall issue of someone’s death in custody, which was why Lynley believed it had needed to be included in Isabelle’s report.
When Lynley entered the assistant commissioner’s office, Hillier jerked his head at a chair, saying only, “Enlighten me, Inspector. I’m trying to work out which part of this entire manure pile we’re walking through at the moment represents the worst of the bollocksing up that’s gone on in the past several weeks. What’s your opinion on the matter?”
Hillier was not a man to ask a subordinate’s opinion about anything. He was more the type to set off the bomb first and question its accuracy later. Lynley knew that the assistant commissioner was, thus, waiting for the wrong answer to be issued so that he could take a subsequent action that he’d already decided upon. The difficult part was trying to suss out what that action was going to be. What fell upon his own head was not an anxious issue for Lynley. What fell upon Barbara’s head was.
He said, “You’ve been told that I posted Barbara’s initial report to Clive Druitt.”
“Holmes, you amaze me,” Hillier responded drily. His narrow-eyed expression did not alter with the words.
“I agreed with DS Havers.”
“Are you telling me that posting this report was her idea?”
“I’m not. She didn’t bring the matter up. She was concerned about being ordered to alter her report, and she wanted my advice. To give it, I read both the reports. It seemed clear that the nineteen-day gap between the anonymous call and the arrest of Ian Druitt suggested something that wanted looking into. That was the area of our agreement.”
“Indeed.” Hillier said the word not in acceptance but rather in assessment of Lynley’s decision-making process.
“Barbara’s thinking—and mine as well—was that the IPCC either noted the time gap and decided it wasn’t relevant to their investigation or, what’s more likely, they didn’t notice the time gap at all. It seemed to me that leaving out that detail had the potential to make the situation far worse than it was already.”
“Did it.”
“What, sir?”
“Did it seem that way to you? And if it did, the real question is why you didn’t speak to your immediate superior about all of this ‘likely’ business of yours, which apparently has been plaguing your otherwise tranquil mind.”
Hillier folded his hands together on the top of his desk, displaying buffed fingernails and a gold signet ring. He regarded Lynley evenly. It came to Lynley suddenly how quiet it was inside the assistant commissioner’s office when the door was closed. There was a churchlike silence within. The only sound breaking that silence when they themselves were not speaking was the siren of an emergency vehicle down in the street.
“She was the one who’d given the order, sir. She’d actually left Sergeant Havers no choice in the matter. A man has died in custody—”
“Does it astonish you that I already know this?” Hillier cut in sharply.
“—and it’s my belief that the father of that man deserves a full account of what went on. Or, in this case, what did not go on, which was someone looking into the nineteen-day gap or even mentioning it. Putting that one detail into the report was all that was ever necessary.”
Lynley could have gone further to point out that Isabelle’s complete refusal to consider the detail important or at least to acknowledge its existence was worrying. But just as he did not want Barbara Havers to have to suffer for a decision that he had made, so also did he not want his actions to have consequences for Isabelle.
He wasn’t reassured at all when Hillier shoved himself away from his desk and stood, looking out of the window behind it. From his own position, Lynley could see only the clear blue sky. Hillier would see more: the lushly green tops of the trees that rose above the buildings along Birdcage Walk.
Hillier said, “She’s impressively cocked this up. You know that, of course.”
“Sir, I disagree,” Lynley said quickly. “From the first, she merely wanted to make every point clear so that in the event of solicitors becoming involved—”
“I’m not talking about Havers,” Hillier cut in, “although God knows she’s the bloody queen of creating cock-ups. And believe me, this has to be a first when it comes down to a question of who cocked up what. No, I’m talking about Ardery. This is down to her. Something’s gone completely to hell with that woman, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
Lynley wasn’t enamoured of the plural pronoun and hoped Hillier was using the royal and oft political we. He said nothing, waiting for clarification.
“Christ, but I was an idiot to name her permanently to DCS. Sacking her now . . . what a bloody nightmare that would be. I’d throttle Malcolm if he were only here to present his neck.”
Lynley followed this train of thought to its logical destination. Malcolm was Malcom Webberly, who formerly had occupied Isabelle’s position. His sudden retirement after a hit-and-run accident and Lynley’s refusal to take on Webberly’s job permanently when it was offered to him had placed all of them in the position they occupied now. That position could only be described as precarious, and he felt a rush of alarm that his actions might be the cause of Isabelle’s being sacked.
So he said, “Her point was well taken, though.”
Hillier turned from the window. The light was behind him now, making his expressions more difficult to read. “Whose?” he asked.
“DCS Ardery’s. In her eyes, she and Barbara were in Shropshire solely to look into the IPCC’s report. Full stop. The doctored report—”
“Pray God don’t use that term, Inspector. Things are bad enough as it is.”
“The second report that Sergeant Havers wrote reflected that: what the DCS’s initial orders were.”
Hillier returned to his chair, sat, fingered a pen on his desk. He said, “You can’t have it both ways. Either you’re out of order for passing alon
g that initial report or Ardery is out of order for having Havers revise it. Which do you choose?”
Clever trap, Lynley thought. He said, “It’s a matter of two points of view, sir.”
“That’s your choice?”
“There isn’t a choice. There is no choosing. There is merely reflecting the two points of view.”
Hillier snorted derisively. “You’re a pretty one, aren’t you.”
“Sir?”
“You’ve an answer for everything, including this, which has taken a member of Parliament to the Home Office to register a complaint in advance of God only knows what lawsuit, frivolous or otherwise. I’ve managed to buy us a ten-day reprieve, but after that . . . and with no satisfactory result . . . heads will roll. Do you understand?”
Lynley wasn’t at all happy with where this appeared to be leading. “Satisfactory?” he asked. “What are we talking about?”
“We’re talking about what you’re going to do, Inspector. You didn’t actually assume that you could project yourself into this situation without consequences.”
Lynley then saw where this was going. He knew how well he deserved it. Still, he tried to forestall with, “Sir, I’ve had a holiday cancelled already because—”
Hillier laughed outright. “I’m meant to care about your holiday, am I?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “You’re going to Shropshire, Inspector Lynley. You’re going to shovel this pile of manure back into the wheelbarrow it came from, and if you have to use a teaspoon to do it, that’s what you’re going to use. Is that clear? You’re taking Sergeant Havers with you. If together you can’t deal with this matter in the next eight days—allowing one for travel and one for report writing when you return—you’ll both be answering for it. As will DCS Ardery. Am I being clear?”
There was nothing for it but what he said. “You are, sir.”
“Delighted to know it. You may leave. And I don’t want to hear from any of you until this matter is resolved. To my satisfaction, by the way. Certainly not to yours.”
The Punishment She Deserves Page 28
