The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  “That’s not the point,” Ding said. “You knew me and Brutus . . . and we live together, Francie.”

  “But not like in living together. And I didn’t think it would bother you. Really. Do you think I would’ve done it . . . And we didn’t do it all the way like that. Not to finish because he couldn’t. Not in my mouth, that is. So I had to—”

  “Stop it!” Ding shrieked then, and her hands flew up as if on their own accord to cover her ears.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Francie cried. “If I’d known he actually meant something to you . . .”

  “He doesn’t. I thought he did, but he doesn’t.”

  Francie looked away in the direction of the door. Ms. Maxwell was striding purposefully towards them. She said in a rush, “I didn’t mean anything by it. And what I said about the threesome? It was just what popped into my head. But I saw your face and I knew straightway that you were upset only I didn’t know exactly why because of all the blokes at Cardew Hall and . . . Are there any other blokes, Ding? Is it just Brutus? Because if it is, I’ll want to die right here because I wouldn’t’ve meant ever to hurt you. It was me being stupid. That’s all it was.”

  “Ladies, if we can draw this tête-à-tête to a conclusion . . .” Ms. Maxwell’s voice was heavy with meaning.

  “Ding. Dingie . . .” was the last Ding heard as she rushed for the door. She was beginning to cry and she didn’t know why and she didn’t want even to hazard a guess about where the tears were coming from. For the truth was that she had never misled Francie about the various blokes at Cardew Hall and what she’d done with them and where. There were more, even, than she’d ever told Francie. But the additional truth was that Brutus had always meant something more to her. Only, she knew who he was and she knew what he was and she didn’t know what to do about either.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Lynley took on the search for Ian Druitt’s Hillman while Havers remained at the hotel with his mobile phone, a charger provided—as they had hoped—by reception, and a list of the birthdays and the phone numbers of all members of his immediate family, to include Aunt Uma as well. For his part, Lynley decided to begin with the close environs of St. Laurence Church on the remote chance that Ian Druitt had managed to park nearby, in a place that was not marked by any restrictions.

  He set off from the hotel and headed towards Castle Square once again. He found it quite crowded now. Three nearby tour coaches had recently deposited their loads of visitors at the top of Mill Street, and a number of them had invaded the market for a look at the bric-a-brac stalls.

  Rather than attempt to work his way through the throng, Lynley kept to the pavement and only crossed the square at its east end. There he saw that Harry Rochester and his fellow floggers were in the process of being moved along by the town’s PCSO. This would be Gary Ruddock, he reckoned: a solid-looking bloke of some six feet tall with a thick but fatless waist and round face. He appeared a bit older than Lynley had anticipated. He’d assumed the officer would be round twenty-one or so, but this man looked closer to thirty. He and Harry Rochester were in conversation. It didn’t look either unpleasant or aggressive.

  Lynley didn’t approach them but instead crossed over the square behind them and entered the environs of St. Laurence Church. The route took him down one of the town’s cobbled streets—little more than the width of the ancient carts that would have been used by merchants who served the castle’s inhabitants—and deposited him in College Street, opposite the church. Midway along its route, he saw the first of the available parking spots. But he also saw the restrictions posted as Mr. Spencer had indicated: The parking in the street was reserved for residents; visitors were restricted to two hours only and would be towed thereafter. The street itself was residential, a mixture of plaster-fronted and redbrick buildings heading northwards into Linney Street. Here, too, were residences, of slightly later vintage than those near the church, overlooking the River Corve. Here, too, the parking was restricted and the signage indicated again what would happen to violators of the restrictions. Had Ian Druitt parked anywhere in the immediate vicinity of the church, then, his Hillman would have been towed away, possibly the very same night that he died.

  Before ringing the phone number given on the warning signs, Lynley decided to check the closest car park to be certain. His town plan showed it behind West Mercia College, accessed on the north side of Castle Square. A short walk on a pleasant day, he thought.

  Returning to the square put him once again on the edge of the market, where he saw that the blanket floggers had now dispersed. The PCSO he caught sight of at the far west end of the square, where a small white caravan stood. From this, various types of grilled sausages were filling the air with the idea of lunch.

  Ruddock was in conversation with a man who appeared to be the caravan’s owner, and he was indicating some sort of instructions about the placement of a sandwich board that listed the food options and their prices. It was apparently blocking access to West Mercia College’s grounds, because when the officer walked on, the sign was moved, although the bloke moving it didn’t look especially happy about having to do so.

  Lynley turned away to seek out the car park, which was easy to find behind the college buildings. As there was a Pay and Display machine, he reckoned the Hillman would have been removed long ago had it been here in the first place. Nonetheless, he thought it best to check. The car park was crowded—students’ vehicles, he supposed—but as it wasn’t an enormous area, it didn’t take him more than ten minutes to walk it. There was nothing there as old as a 1962 Hillman, although a Volkswagen camper van in wretched condition came fairly close.

  The phone number for the towing service was, as before, posted in several locations. Rather than going on to check the car park near the town’s library, Lynley decided to ring the service for the location of whatever impound facility they used. He had luck with this, for there was one impound yard only, and he was told he could find it two miles to Ludlow’s northeast on the A4117 beyond Rockgreen. He would recognise the place by the large, revolving pink elephant in front of it. God knew why the yard owners had chosen that device, but no one looking for the place ever got lost.

  Lynley rang the impound yard next as there was no point in trekking out to it—even to see the revolving pink elephant—if the Hillman wasn’t there. But a conversation with the telephone receptionist, followed by an interminable wait during which he spied two college students exchanging cash for a small plastic bag of what was doubtless an illegal substance, gave him the information he was looking for. Yes, they had a 1962 Hillman in the impound yard. Was he the owner?

  No, Lynley told them. He was the police. The owner was dead and they were seeking his vehicle.

  Who’s paying the fine, then? There’s a towing charge and an impound charge, you know.

  Lynley said he would pay it. It was easier than going through the legal manoeuvres necessary to wrench the vehicle from the impound yard’s grasp without paying.

  As the location was out of town and since he wanted to take possession of the vehicle, Lynley rang for a taxi to cart him there. He waited at the top of Mill Street, and soon enough the taxi showed up, driven by a grandmotherly sort with the vehicle’s radio playing classic—but mercifully soft—rock ’n’ roll.

  They wound through the town, the driver informing him there was no direct route to Rockgreen. Thus he was more or less a victim to “Where the Boys Are” followed by “Judy’s Turn to Cry” followed by “Johnny Angel.”

  The revolving pink elephant came into view in the midst of “Tell Laura I Love Her.” Lynley paid the driver and wondered how he’d managed to escape such teenage angst. But then, he’d had larger things to concern him when he was sixteen years old: a dying father, a mother having an affair with his cancer specialist, a lost soul of a younger brother, and his own confusion and grief.

  Inside the impou
nd yard, he went to a caravan that appeared to serve both as living accommodation and as an office for the owners of the place: a couple in the vicinity of seventy wearing matching boiler suits with their names embroidered upon them. He was Totally Roger and she was The Absolute Lucinda, who seemed to do double duty as the receptionist. Lynley showed his warrant card, told the couple what he was after, explaining once again that the owner of the Hillman—one Ian Druitt—had died in March. The name meant nothing to either Totally Roger or The Absolute Lucinda, but the fact that Lynley was a Met officer did. They went round a bit in the area of “So what’d he do, this bloke?” (Roger) and “Were you lot after him?” (Lucinda), and they seemed reluctant to part with the vehicle unless some kind of additional proof could be offered that DI Lynley was indeed authorised to relieve them of it. Lynley wondered at the fact that they would even want to keep the ancient vehicle on their premises, but he reckoned that they had few enough chances to make the police dance round for them, so he indicated that he could get formal authorisation to take the vehicle, but it was likely that doing so was going to rob them of two months’ payment for having stored it if they went that route.

  That decided matters in a quick fashion, and after The Absolute Lucinda ran Lynley’s credit card through its paces, Totally Roger showed him the way to the Hillman. The wily couple had already moved it to the end of one of the rows of vehicles. They’d known they were on the losing side of the situation, and they’d decided to play it for what they could get.

  Lynley thanked Roger and looked the vehicle over when the man left him to it. He saw that the Hillman’s tyres were virtually threadbare and there was quite a dent in the front right wing, but otherwise the car was exactly as Clive Druitt had described it: old, rusting round the wheel wells, and decorated with 1960s transfers on its rear window. The original owner had been a concertgoer, it appeared. He’d memorialised his attendance at various musical venues, but Clive Druitt had been correct: the Kinks were first in that person’s heart, followed by the Stones.

  Lynley unlocked the vehicle and swung open the driver’s door. By its condition, he saw the upholstery was as original as the rest of the vehicle appeared to be. It needed repairing or replacing. Seams were split on the driver’s seat and the upper part of the back seat’s cushion bore a lot of damage from the sun.

  Lynley sat inside and tried the ignition. The Hillman, unburdened by modern electronics that wore on a car’s battery, started without difficulty. He drove it to one side of the impound yard, shut it off, and began a more thorough look through it.

  He began with the boot, where he discovered that Ian Druitt was not exactly neat in his automotive habits. Aside from the tools to change a tyre (although there was no spare tyre at all), Druitt had a collection of ratty-looking wool blankets stored inside. On top of these and to the side, five tins of motor oil suggested that the Hillman burned more than its fair share. Three more tins were empty and waiting for someone to discard them. Smashed into the back of the boot was an ancient pullover, and beneath it a sticky roller for removing lint sprouted a very thick beard of animal fur. This was explained by the presence of two humane traps, both of which were marked with tags that read “Feral Cat Rescue” with a phone number beneath it.

  There was nothing else inside the boot save dust and dirt, so he went next to the car’s interior. Ian Druitt, he saw, had used the Hillman as a mobile office of sorts. On the backseat, Lynley found manila filing folders in a cardboard container designed for this purpose. They were arranged in no particular order, and among them he discovered receipts for maintenance work done on the vehicle over the years; handbills for Hangdog Hillbillies—the whimsical looking musical group that, according to Havers’s report, he had been part of; Internet searches for street pastors programmes in larger cities and towns in the UK; another Internet search on victim volunteers programmes; a record dating back ten years of petrol purchases, including the day of purchase and the cost of purchase and the mileage on the vehicle at the time; a collection of sermons given by various notable Anglican leaders; and a book of the collected poetry of William Butler Yeats with a place mark at “The Second Coming.” Beneath this box was a large UK A-Z circa twenty years earlier, with dog-eared pages attesting to its use. He flipped through this but there was nothing unusual about it: no X marking a spot that indicated a special destination that Druitt had had in mind.

  Oddly, the floor of the backseat held a galvanised washtub, and placed so it leaned at an angle from the floor to the ceiling of the vehicle was a broomstick with no actual broom straw but rather with a heavy string attached to it. Lynley frowned at this and wondered for a moment, until he understood this was the deacon’s contribution to Hangdog Hillbillies: a washtub bass.

  He flipped the passenger seat back into position, sat in it, and opened the glove box. Here he discovered that Druitt had worn prescription sunglasses, which he carefully kept in a leather case. There were also folded documents attesting to his ownership of the vehicle and his possession of insurance. An RAC membership card had been pushed to the back, and a brochure for National Trust Properties indicated that he might have been interested in the nation’s religious, architectural, or aristocratic history. What was most interesting, though, was the first indication they’d had that the man might have been sexually active. A container of condoms was part of the glove box’s contents. When Lynley opened it, he saw that half of the original twenty were missing.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  The one thing Barbara knew for certain at the end of her first hour with Ian Druitt’s mobile phone was that the UK would have fallen to Nazi Germany had she been sent to do anything at Bletchley Park. In DI Lynley’s absence she’d used every birthday, trying to unlock the device. She’d done them forwards, then she’d done them backwards. She’d also mixed them up, a spontaneous idea that resulted in her complete confusion. She went from there to the street addresses Clive Druitt had provided her, and still there was no joy to be had. To keep the bloody thing from locking up on her, she’d shut it down and rebooted it after each third attempt, but ultimately she called it quits. She’d then turned to Ian Druitt’s engagement diary, and she’d worked backwards from the deacon’s death in order to compare the names in the diary with Ludlow’s telephone directory in an attempt to ring every person whose surname indicated an appointment had been at least made, if not kept, by or with the deacon.

  Not every name was in the local directory. She reckoned the individuals who went along with the names were either domiciled in another part of Shropshire or they were simply ex-directory. Those people she’d managed to track down, however, seemed open enough about their connection to Ian Druitt. It ate up several hours, but Barbara was able to unearth a few details that, while not necessarily intriguing, at least added to their knowledge of Druitt’s movements in the weeks before he died.

  When Lynley arrived back from his search for Druitt’s auto, she was outside of the hotel at the far end of the car park, giving herself a smoking break. It was with some amusement that she greeted the sight of the detective inspector rumbling onto the premises in a rattling Hillman. The only time she’d ever seen him in such an automotive disaster was on the very few occasions when she’d been able to entice him into her Mini. That he’d pollute the seams of his bespoke suit by exposing them to the interior of Druitt’s motor was a particularly enjoyable sight.

  He parked near her and climbed from the vehicle. She said to him, “That’s the motor, eh? It sounds worse than mine, and I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “Its interior is remarkably similar as well,” he told her. “Save the empty takeaway cartons, of course. The deacon appears to have taken his meals at home.”

  “Or he used rubbish bins.”

  “There is that.” Lynley hoisted a few items out of the car.

  “Find anything of an evidentiary nature?” she asked.

  “A fully lived lif
e, but not much else.” He said he’d leave her to her habit, and told her that he would wait for her in the residents’ lounge.

  She sucked down the rest of the fag quickly. When she went inside, he was laying manila folders out on a coffee table and telling Peace on Earth—who seemed to be rather too curious as he hovered round the room—that a cup of tea would be the very thing, lapsang souchong if they had it, Assam if they didn’t.

  “Earl Grey?” Peace on Earth asked hopefully.

  That would be fine, Lynley told him. To Havers, he said, “Sergeant? Earl Grey? Or will that wash away the less-than-salubrious effects of your cigarette?”

  “Amusing,” she said. “I like PG Tips,” she told Peace on Earth. “But I’ll swill Earl Grey if I have to.”

  When the young man went off to see to the tea, Lynley asked about Barbara’s progress with the smartphone. She said it had been more or less a white flag exercise for her. On the other hand, she told him, she did have something of a success with the deacon’s appointment diary and the Ludlow telephone directory.

  She’d stowed her notebook inside her bag while she was out indulging her habit, so she excavated for it, flipped it open, picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue, and began. She’d spoken to two sets of parents of children in the after-school club, she said, because Druitt apparently scheduled meetings with parents—as noted in his diary— before a child’s first attendance at a gathering of the club.

  “They loved him to bits,” she told Lynley. “Far as they were concerned, not a hint of anything going on ’cept guidance, school prep, outdoor activities, games, and the like.”

  Druitt had also met with an individual from Birmingham, she went on. This was a woman who had begun an effective street pastors programme there to help the city cope with young people out in the streets late at night. “Clubbing, binge drinking, drugs,” she said. “The regular thing. Only now, they have a sobering-up centre for them. The street pastors go out, gather ’em up, and bring ’em back to where they serve up soup and coffee and tea and sandwiches and whatever else. The deacon was trying to set up a system like that here. I expect Gary Ruddock was on board with that—we’ll need to have a word there—because he was the one having to do it all and probably would’ve been dead chuffed to have some helpers.”