The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  She wanted to feel sorry for the girl with her cheating boyfriend and his expectations that she should be happy to accept however little he was willing to toss her way. And at one level, Rabiah did feel sorry for her. But she also decided to ignore Missa’s wishes in the matter. Rabiah would talk to Dena Donaldson. She was far from satisfied that she’d gotten to the heart of Lomax times seven in a dead man’s diary.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Ding had spent a restless night. Her conversation with Francie Adamucci had asked her to examine herself and to reach a conclusion about why she was so bloody overwrought about Brutus being with anyone when she—Dena Donaldson—had spent the last five years and counting doing practically the same thing in Much Wenlock, and with any bloke who looked at her twice. It’s who I am didn’t work as a rationale for the way she’d been going at life, though. That might have done the trick for Brutus, but it went nowhere when it came to her because it’s who I am suggested it’s who I’ll always be, and setting herself up as Shropshire’s foremost fuck machine was not what Ding had ever entertained as a lifetime ambition. One wouldn’t know that from what she’d done on the previous night, however.

  She’d gone out alone. She’d told herself that she needed a break from struggling with a paper she owed her tutor, but as she’d only written a single sentence of that paper, she moved straight off the idea of a respite from essay writing and from there she went to telling herself that the air would do her good because the room was stuffy and a brisk walk would help her organise her thoughts.

  Reality turned out to be somewhat different, as her brisk walk took her directly to the Hart and Hind, where she had not been—on her own, that is—since she’d run off from Jack Korhonen and room 2 upstairs from the pub. She wouldn’t have approached the bar itself had anyone known to her been inside the place. But no one had been, which meant that if she wanted a drink, she had to give her order to one of them: Jack or his nephew.

  She would easily have managed ordering herself a lager and making that all she did—aside from drinking it down—had the nephew remained behind the bar. But as she approached, Jack said, “Let me handle this, Peter. You see to the glassware,” which took the nephew off to clear tables.

  At that point, Jack said to her, “You best be explicit with what you want this time round. We don’t need to misunderstand each other again, do we?”

  She said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He said, “Let me put it this way, then. Are you here to wet your whistle or to wet something else?”

  “That’s incredibly rude.”

  “Isn’t it just. But rude works a treat for me, darling. Only question is does rude work for you? See, first time I saw you in here—months and months ago, this was—I reckoned you as a match for me. I thought, she’s a hot one, she is. It’ll only be a matter of weeks before she gives me the signal.”

  “Well, it wasn’t weeks, was it?”

  “True. It took a wee bit more time, but there it was all the same. You wet, me hard. And the rest.”

  “You’re not a gentleman, you know.”

  “On that, we see eye to eye. Is it a gentleman you want, coming in here alone, or is it something a bit more thrilling? Or is the truth that you’re a tease like before and when it comes to the rest of it, there’s something not quite right in your head?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me or my head.”

  “Proof is in the pudding, as they say. Could be the way I see you is different to how you see yourself.”

  “I’m fine, I’m just fine.”

  He nodded. “So you say. But ’f I were you? I’d want to prove it. See, girls your age? Oftentimes, they don’t know what they’re about. They get themselves into situations, don’t they, and all of a sudden the picture they thought they were going to paint isn’t the one they find themselves painting. When that happens . . . ? Well, you know. Off they scurry into the night.”

  Ding knew damn well what he was talking about. But that was then and this was now and things were not what they had been. She said, “You think that, Jack Korhonen, you just give me one of those keys. We can get this straightened out fast enough.”

  Jack turned to the Korhonen nephew who, to Ding’s embarrassment, had been close enough to hear the exchange. Jack said to him, “What d’you think, Peter, my lad? Should I give Little Missy here another chance?”

  “You don’t want to, I will,” Peter replied as he hoisted a plastic bin of glasses onto the bar.

  “Can’t have that,” his uncle told him. He reached behind the till, handed one of the room keys to Ding, and said, “Five minutes, darling. Be ready this time.”

  So she was: every thread removed from her body, standing in front of the window with her back to the glass and her face in the shadows. She found she wasn’t the least bit nervous. When it came to proving to herself who she was, Dena Donaldson was never nervous.

  When Jack came into the room, she walked to him. His hair was longish and thick, and she grabbed onto it with one hand and pulled his head to her mouth. As he kissed her, she felt for his dick. Hard already. Good, she thought. She would make it harder. She would make him want it in ways he’d never wanted it before and they would do it in ways he’d never done it before. So she set upon that course and she saw it through, and if the publican knew nothing else about Dena Donaldson by two in the morning, what he was absolutely sure of was that Dena Donaldson was not a tease.

  She went home sore. She staggered into the house and up the stairs, thinking she would be comatose in thirty seconds after all that had passed. But instead of that, she was left with, What’s wrong with you, Ding? She could fuck till she dropped from the face of the planet, but she could see that would not come close to answering the question.

  When she could no longer put it off, Ding groaned and rolled to the edge of her bed. She stuck her legs out and contemplated getting up and having a shower and perhaps going to a lecture. She was on her way to committing herself to those actions when her mobile rang.

  It was on the bedside table, so she answered it without checking to see who was ringing her. When she heard the voice, the name, and the occupation, though, she wished she’d let the call go to a message she could easily ignore.

  “Is that Dena Donaldson?” a woman’s voice asked. “This is Greta Yates, the college counsellor. You’re going to need to come to my office. If you have an interest in remaining here at West Mercia College, that is. Have you that interest?”

  Ding hadn’t, actually. But she had less interest in being rusticated. So she said yes, yes, yes, indeed. When did Ms. Yates want to see her?

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Barbara told Lynley they could walk to the police station easily enough, but it was his decision to drive. Who knew where their conversation with Gary Ruddock might lead them? was his reason. If they needed to track down someone or something once they spoke with the PCSO, it would save time to have the car available.

  When they left the hotel at half past eight, Barbara directed Lynley to the police station, realising as she did so that the required route via car instead of on foot would take them directly past the house in which Finnegan Freeman lived. She pointed it out as they cruised past. She also brought Lynley into the picture of what she’d discovered about someone’s being able to access the police station on foot—or by bicycle—from this location.

  Unlike the DCS, Lynley nodded thoughtfully as he took this on board. He said, “Good work, Barbara. That bit of information could turn out quite useful.”

  When they reached the station on the corner of Townsend Close and Lower Galdeford, they found the PCSO waiting for them, leaning against his patrol car in the car park. He held up a takeaway coffee in a form of greeting, and he came to be introduced to Lynley as soon as they’d parked.

  “I expect you’d like to see
inside the place,” he said, indicating the unmanned police station.

  Lynley said that having a look inside would be welcome, especially having a look at the office where Ian Druitt died. Ruddock said it was ready and waiting. The door, he told him, was already unlocked. Barbara could show him where the office was. He reckoned they might like to make their inspection without himself lurking in the background.

  Although there wasn’t much to see, Barbara appreciated this, as it would allow a more open conversation between Lynley and herself. So she led the way with Lynley following and Ruddock having a seat on the back steps, where he put on his sunglasses against the sunlight of what was clearly going to be a beautiful spring day.

  Barbara took Lynley to the office in which the deacon had died. As before there was little enough to see: the desk with its battered rolling chair tucked into the kneehole, an empty bulletin board, bits of tape still stuck to the walls where maps had probably once hung, the coat cupboard, and the doorknob that had served the purpose of ending Ian Druitt’s life. She told him what she herself had been told by Dr. Scannell: how suicide was managed in this way through the pressure exerted on the jugular veins, resulting in venous congestion, resulting in unconsciousness and death. Lynley observed as she spoke. He pulled out the rolling desk chair, but there appeared to be nothing untoward about it. He prowled the room, eyeing everything from the dust on the windowsills to the scuff marks on the lino.

  When they left the office, she took him to see the rest as well: the former lunchroom, the monitors behind the reception counter upon which the CCTV cameras could display their documentation of anyone’s coming and going, the computers used by patrol officers who came and went from the station during their duty hours, the other offices in which someone might have been lying in wait. She ended with taking him outside to show him how easily the position of the CCTV camera could be altered above the station’s main entrance.

  Their tour completed, they rejoined Gary Ruddock, who quickly rose from the back steps and dusted off the seat of his trousers. “Helpful at all?” he asked.

  “Everything helps, I find,” Lynley replied. He leaned against the brick wall of the station, his gaze on the car park. Barbara waited to see what sort of conversation Lynley had in mind to have with Gary Ruddock post their inspection of the police building. Lynley said, “I’ve had a look through Druitt’s motor. How well did you know him?”

  “Not especially well at all. I knew him to nod at in the street, saying hello and that sort of thing. And, ’course, I knew where to find him. I mean that he was connected to St. Laurence Church.”

  “That’s it, then?”

  “Pretty much, it is.” Ruddock joined Lynley in gazing at the car park. Then he added, “Is there something you reckon I ought to have known about him? Like . . . did you find something inside his car?”

  “Interesting question. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I don’t expect the bloke was dealing drugs on the side or anything, but as there was that phone call ’bout paedophilia . . .”

  “Do you mean pornographic photos or the like? No, there was nothing along those lines. Although . . . No one’s mentioned a relationship Druitt might have had, but he’s got a box of condoms in his glove box. I may well be stereotyping him, but the condoms do seem rather unexpected in the car of an unmarried church deacon.”

  “I expect he was giving them to young people,” Ruddock said. “He was round them a good bit, through the church and whatever else.”

  “He did know the Freeman boy,” Barbara pointed out. “The DCC herself told us that: how Finnegan helped out Druitt at the children’s club. Did you know about that, Gary?”

  He nodded. “Could be the condoms were for him, then. Or, like I said, for other lads his age. Kids get up to things, and I can see a churchman worrying about that.”

  “That makes sense if they weren’t Druitt’s,” Lynley noted.

  “How old is the Freeman boy?” Barbara asked. She answered her own question with, “Eighteen? Nineteen? I suppose Druitt could’ve learned from him that he and a girlfriend were up to the usual, only just like a lot of kids, he wasn’t using protection so it could have turned into a case of whoops. And Druitt was trying to prevent this.”

  Ruddock didn’t respond. His silence of a sudden seemed strange to Barbara. She rued that he’d donned sunglasses. She couldn’t tell if he was thinking this over or thinking of a way he could avoid thinking this over. In either case, she didn’t see what the actual need for silence might have been, aside from the fact that he didn’t want to get onto Finnegan Freeman since there was a known connection between Finn Freeman and the dead man, and the boy’s mother was a high-ranking official in the same police force as Gary Ruddock.

  “On a stretch,” she finally said, “it could also be that the allegations against Druitt were true. That he was messing about the children but wearing a condom to keep things tidy, if you know what I mean.”

  “There’s that as well,” Lynley said. “As unpleasant as the painted picture is, I might add, Sergeant.”

  “That anonymous message did bang in the direction of paedophilia,” Ruddock said.

  “Hmm, yes. Although one has some trouble with the idea of your garden paedophile using protection. Everything considered, it seems more likely that Druitt was handing out the condoms to older boys. Or he had a relationship with someone and we might want to suss out who that person is.”

  “But . . . Can I ask?” Ruddock seemed hesitant but plunged on when Lynley nodded. “Where does that lead you? I mean, the condoms and why Druitt even had them.”

  “To be honest, it probably leads nowhere,” Lynley said. “But it’s something to follow up on, and in the absence of anything else, I always like seeing where things will take us.”

  BURWAY

  SHROPSHIRE

  They decided to speak with Flora Bevans. Where there was evidence—in the form of the condoms—suggesting present lovers, former lovers, married lovers, vengeful spouses, arguments, conflicts, tears, and any one of the passions and the deadly sins, logic dictated it be investigated. If Gary Ruddock could only speculate about Druitt’s possession of the condoms, perhaps Flora Bevans could do more.

  While Lynley set a course out of town, Barbara combed through the notes she’d taken of the conversations she’d had with the individuals attached to those names in Druitt’s diary that she had been able to track down. There hadn’t been a ghost of a suggestion anywhere that the man had a relationship with anyone save his God, but then she hadn’t questioned any of these people on that actual topic. She was probably going to have to deal with them all again should Flora Bevans be unable to give them happiness on the subject of condoms.

  The Bevans’ Beauties van was in the driveway when they arrived, suggesting the florist was at home. To Barbara’s leaning upon the bell, the woman herself answered the door, her mobile phone pressed to her ear, and a finger already raised to tell her visitors she would be with them when she could. Her eyebrows lifted in surprise when she saw Barbara, and she said into her phone, “Hang on just a moment,” and then to Barbara, “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,” to which Barbara replied, “This is DI Lynley. Can we have a word?”

  Flora opened wide the door, saying, “Come in, come in. I’m just finishing up with an order.” She retreated towards the back of the house, saying into the phone, “You see, the size of the urn is more important than it would seem upon first consideration. If it overwhelms where it’s placed . . .”

  Barbara and Lynley had remained in the entry, and Lynley murmured, “Cremations?” to her.

  She frowned and said, “What?”

  He said, “Urns. Cremations.”

  “Oh. She does plantings, sir. Big pots and the like. Huge pots actually. For people’s front steps and, I reckon, for their back gardens as well. And inside their houses. And wherever.”

 
Flora Bevans joined them then, saying, “Sorry. I’ve been talked into a garden wedding, all the pots and urns to be fixtures in the garden afterwards, which means the bride must be pleased with the colours, the mother of the bride must be able to work with the colours afterwards as it is her garden, and the mother of the groom has—apparently—already chosen her kit for the affair and the flowers must not clash with that nor must they clash with the gown of the chief attendant, who is apparently going to be dressed in fuchsia. Appalling choice even for a summer wedding, but there you have it. Now. You’ve returned and I have a feeling this hasn’t to do with your ordering up a few urns for your terrace. Sorry. I cannot remember your name.”

  Barbara reintroduced herself and then Lynley.

  “Is this about poor Ian?” Flora asked. “Do you want to see his room again?”

  Barbara said to her, “We’ve come to talk to you about condoms, actually.”

  “Good heavens. Do come in. You have me in the dither of intrigue.” She ushered them into a sitting room, saying, “Please, sit. Shove those magazines onto the floor, Inspector. May I get you something? Tea, coffee, water? Oh! I didn’t see Jeffrey there. Excuse me. Let me post him elsewhere.”

  Jeffrey turned out to be a cat with fur that virtually matched the sofa’s upholstery. He was curled into a corner of it, and he looked up just before Barbara planted her bum on top of him. His expression indicated that he wasn’t pleased to see any of them. He protested with something between a meow and a trill as Flora gathered him up. But as posting him elsewhere consisted of placing him on the top of the largest cat tree that Barbara had ever seen, in order to give him a view of the street, he didn’t seem entirely unforgiving that his nap had been interrupted.

  Both Barbara and Lynley demurred on refreshments, so all of them sat. Flora said, “I don’t know how much help I can be. Condoms. Heavens, am I blushing just to say the word?”