The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  Ding placed one of her hands flat on the filthy sofa. The other she kept balled in her lap. She said, “What’re we supposed to be lying about?”

  “The deacon. The one who died. He had our surname in his diary and that’s proving quite titillating for the police.”

  “Is that why they know you?”

  “Don’t try to misdirect me. You had seven meetings with him. You used our name. We’re going to talk about that and then you’re going to tell the police, who will exit stage left from my life.”

  “No way,” Ding said.

  “Don’t argue with me. Just take a moment to thank God I didn’t turn you over to them three minutes ago.”

  “I didn’t mean . . . Mrs. Lomax, I never used your name for anything. I never talked to the deacon. I didn’t even know who he was. If Missa told you that . . .” The girl didn’t seem to want to finish the sentence.

  Rabiah did it for her. “Missa lied,” she said. “Is that what you wish to tell me? And exactly what bloody reason would she have for lying?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know why she was talking to him.”

  “Don’t you take me for a fool. I know something about friendship between women and what I know is that very good friends—let’s go so far as to call them best friends—do not have secrets from each other. What I also know is that you and my granddaughter were best friends. And then all of a sudden she wanted to leave Ludlow and that was that. And now I discover that she might have had a very good reason for wanting to leave, with that reason sitting in this room, guilty of using our surname in God-knows-what scheme that she had going on.”

  “That isn’t true!” Ding protested. “I never did anything. And I keep getting accused . . . and I don’t know . . .” Unaccountably, she began to weep. “Nothing works and now there’s Monica and every single night he keeps wanting more and it’s like I can’t ever stop even if I want to.”

  Rabiah knew hysteria when she saw it. She said, “Good Lord, child. What’s happening here?”

  “You talk to Missa if you want to know,” Ding cried. “If anyone’s lying about anything, it’s her.”

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Barbara Havers did not want to get anything wrong, so she hesitated once they’d exchanged words with Rabiah Lomax. She knew she had to take massive care in how she relayed her information to Lynley because she wasn’t entirely certain it was accurate. Lynley wouldn’t act hastily once he heard what she had to say—he never did that—but the fact remained that one false move on their part might put the wind up.

  When Lynley said, “There’s another coincidence for you, Sergeant,” she replied with, “What’s that, sir?”

  He looked rather surprised that she needed to ask, saying, “Do you find it at all odd that Rabiah Lomax has just turned up at the home of Finnegan Freeman?”

  She said, “Oh that.”

  “What do you expect it’s about? She’s not there to sign him up for scouting, I daresay.”

  “What I reckon is that we’ve got too many bloody coincidences at this point for them to be coincidences.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  “She wants talking to again.”

  “Hmm. Yes. Although since she’s now hauling in her solicitor, I doubt we’ll manage much information from her. Did you hear what she said to the girl?”

  Barbara nodded. He’d given her the entrée she needed, so she decided to use it. “As to that, sir, there’s something else.”

  Since they’d been nearly across the street when they’d accosted Rabiah Lomax, they’d walked the rest of the way to the river and were looking over the water at a family of swans, which allowed Barbara to access her Players and light up. Lynley automatically moved upwind.

  She sucked in some smoke. “That girl Mrs. Lomax was talking to? Dena Donaldson, right? She called her Ding? I’m not one hundred percent on this ’cause it’s been ten days or so and it was dark. But that girl Ding . . . ?”

  “What about her, aside from the name. It reminds me vaguely of my mother’s, by the way. Her name is Dorothy but she’s always been called Daze. I’ve never thought to ask why.”

  “Why would you since you call her Mummy? Or Mother. Or Mater. Or whatever you lot call your madres. . . . Anyway, that girl Ding? I think I’ve seen her before.”

  “Hardly earthquake material, Sergeant, Ludlow’s centre not being particularly large. Unless, of course, it’s the where and when of seeing her that’s the important bit. Where was it?”

  “In the car park behind the police station.”

  Lynley turned his gaze from the river to her. “Indeed?”

  “She was the one who got out of Gary Ruddock’s patrol car, sir. It was at night so, like I said, I can’t be one hundred percent on this, but she sure as hell looks like her.”

  Lynley gazed from Barbara to the house into which the girl and Rabiah Lomax had disappeared. His expression was speculative.

  Barbara warmed to her topic. “He’s gone wobbly whenever it comes to the women in his life, Inspector. First, he told me he doesn’t have a woman. Then he tells us he does but she’s married and he’s more or less love-bound or whatever to protect her. And now there’s this girl. And we see her going into a house—presumably where she lives—which is also the house where Finnegan Freeman lives, which is also the house that sits seriously near a quick route to the police station. And that smells like three-day-old fish, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’s certainly not fragrant,” Lynley noted. He went on to point out, “However, as you said, it was night when you caught a glimpse of her.”

  “And it was shadowy where he’d parked. I’ll give you that, so I could be mistaken. But when she got out of the car, the light inside it went on, as per usual. Then he got out. He said a few words. Then she got back in. It was like first she decided to give him the romantic heave-ho, but then he said something that made her reconsider. So she climbed back in and he did as well and the rest is whatever they got up to after that.”

  “The question,” Lynley said, “is whether Ruddock is lying about the married woman or whether he’s having more than one relationship. In either case, the fact that he told you from the start that he had no one in his life . . . How did that come up, Sergeant?”

  Barbara thought back to recapture the moment. She said, “A tattoo. It’s uppercase C-A-T, for Catherine. I asked him was he an animal lover, but he said Cat was his mum and he’d grown up in some dodgy cult in Ireland where the babies got taken early from their mums and they lived totally separate from them so they had to have tattoos so the boy babies didn’t have sex with their own mums later on. Or with their sisters. It gave me the shivers, that story. P’rhaps I should’ve checked it out, but I reckoned I needed to do . . . well, whatever the guv told me. You know.”

  Lynley seemed to take all of this in with an unexpected lack of surprise. He turned from the river, crossed his arms, and leaned against the wall that separated them from one of the weirs. He said, “Poor Oedipus. Had he only had the same. It would have saved him from so much trouble. But, of course, they thought they’d dispatched him, didn’t they?”

  Barbara was used to his literary and historical musings. She let this one pass. She dropped her cigarette to the ground and put it out with her shoe. He eyed it, eyed her, and she sighed. She picked up the dog-end and stripped it, allowing the unsmoked flakes of tobacco to float away on the breeze.

  “What I’m thinking is this,” she said to him. When he nodded, she went on, “If the PCSO is involved with that girl, then someone besides the girl herself and the PCSO is going to know it.”

  “How do you arrive at that?” Lynley asked her.

  “The simplest way, sir. If I saw them together, someone else has to have seen them together as well. At some time. In some place. We just need to find that person, and I’ve a good idea wh
ere to look.”

  BLISTS HILL VICTORIAN TOWN

  SHROPSHIRE

  Since motorways had never sliced a hideous incision into the Shropshire countryside, there were very few direct routes to anywhere, and that was certainly the case with the route to Blists Hill Victorian Town. The place lay just west of Ironbridge, which itself had been built along the River Severn, leaving it unfortunately exposed to the river’s periodic flooding. Blists Hill, on the other hand, stood at a much higher elevation, reached through a thick woodland of oaks, chestnuts, and sycamores that unfurled their fresh spring leaves in such a way that sunlight dappled the road. The inspiration of an enterprising individual who had seen a unique use for brick blast furnaces, an abandoned mine shaft, and an ingenious inclined plane that had once lifted boats from the river to the Shropshire Canal, Blists Hill had been created as a tourist attraction and an educational centre. It featured an entire town circa 1900.

  It was here that Rabiah drove once she left Ding in Temeside. She hadn’t been to the place in years, and on her arrival she saw from the crowded conditions in the car park that it hadn’t lost its popularity as a destination for day trippers and pensioners as well as an opportunity for schoolchildren to see in person what their teachers droned on about at the front of their classrooms.

  Rabiah joined the queue to purchase a ticket. While she could have phoned ahead and arranged for her granddaughter to meet her and sign her onto the property as a guest, she wished for the element of surprise. So she handed over the exorbitant amount required—had they never heard of decent concessions for pensioners? she wondered—and she accepted a street plan of the place although she didn’t actually need one.

  Rabiah knew where to find Missa. She’d heard from the girl’s mother instantly once Missa had informed her that, despite having been talked into giving West Mercia College another chance after the Christmas holiday, she’d made her final decision and was adamant about it. College and uni were not for her.

  “She’s decided candle making is a fine career,” Yasmina had declared bitterly over the phone. “Can you not talk some sense into her, Mum?”

  At least it was a step up from the fish and chips shop, Rabiah had wanted to point out, but a lighthearted response would not have been helpful in the situation. So Rabiah had attempted to reassure her daughter-in-law that all young people went through stages and this, no doubt, was one of them. But Yasmina hadn’t believed that for a moment, and Rabiah could not fault her for this since Yasmina herself had never gone through a single stage other than the one that had taken her to her goal of practising paediatric medicine. While it was true that an unplanned pregnancy had slowed her progress, that was all it had done. So for Yasmina’s own daughter to eschew a formal education in favour of a life dipping wicks into tallow was inconceivable. “Something’s happened to her thinking,” Yasmina had told her. “She says it has nothing to do with Justin, but I don’t believe her. He’s brought her back here somehow. He’s said something. He’s done something. He’s threatened to . . . Oh, I don’t know. Please talk some sense into her, Mum, because Timothy and I have tried and we’ve got nowhere.”

  Rabiah had done her part, but it had come to nothing. At the time, though, she’d had little knowledge at her fingertips. Now, at least, she had Missa’s claim versus Ding’s claim and the certainty that something was being hidden from her.

  Since Blists Hill featured demonstrations of late-Victorian life in a factory town, various craftspeople plied their “trades” in purpose-built locations. Hence the streets accommodated tinsmiths, harness makers, ironworkers, and blacksmiths, as well as grocers, bakers, butchers, and bankers, all in suitable buildings. Among them was the candle maker’s shop, at the midway point of the main thoroughfare.

  The shop was illuminated only by sunlight coming from two windows and the open door. When Rabiah entered, she became one of ten observers who were listening to Missa’s explanation of the process. It looked deadly tedious, the sort of activity that Rabiah would have lasted one eight-hour workday doing: the attachment of long wicks to narrow dipping boards, the immersing of those wicks into a rectangular vat of tallow, the wait for the wicks to dry, the second, third, fourth, and what had to be one thousandth dipping in order to build up tallow on the wick to have enough to burn. If there was a more boring activity on the face of the planet, Rabiah could not have said what it might be.

  She worked her way into a position from which she would be seen once Missa looked up from her work. Her granddaughter was garbed in a cotton gown of the period, which was covered by a heavy pinafore apron to protect her costume from dripping wax. She was explaining to the observers that the candlemaker’s job was generally done by a man, since most women of the period would have been teachers or shop assistants or wives and mums. When one of the watching children said, “Miss, c’n I ask you a question?” Missa looked up and saw Rabiah. Rabiah was relieved to be greeted with a delighted smile. She pointed to her watch and made a movement that simulated having a cup of tea, and her granddaughter nodded. Rabiah took heart from this.

  Instead of the refreshment pavilion, though, Rabiah went first to the blacksmith’s shop. There, she saw that Justin Goodayle, Missa’s longtime boyfriend, was completing a demonstration of horseshoe making. There wasn’t a horse present to be shoed, but there was a roaring fire inside the forge as well as all the tools needed to make just about anything out of the pieces of iron that lay about the smithy. Some items, she saw, had already been fashioned. In addition to horseshoes, the business ends of rakes, hoes, shovels, and pitchforks sat in display cases and hung from the wall. Additionally, iron hooks of various sizes formed a jumbled pile upon the floor.

  Rabiah waited as Justin’s small audience moved off to another location. He saw her then and said hello, over the noise from the forge. Like Missa, he looked quite pleased to see her.

  “I’m having a break.” He removed his heavy leather apron and a pair of anachronistic safety glasses. His flannel shirt bore perspiration rings, and his face was damp with sweat. Rivulets of this ran from his forehead down his cheeks and into his neatly trimmed beard. He removed a kerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.

  He’d always been a nice-looking boy, Rabiah thought, and he’d grown into a very handsome young man. He had a wealth of beautiful chestnut hair that he wore long and tied back, perhaps in the fashion of a Victorian-era blacksmith, his brown eyes were deeply dark and soulful, and his expression was utterly appealing. He was big and burly, as one would expect of a blacksmith, with muscular arms and a broad chest. She imagined the local girls found him quite swoonworthy.

  She said, “If it’s your break, c’n an old lady buy you a cup of tea?”

  “No old lady round here that I can see,” was his reply. “But if the handsome woman talking to me would like to treat me to a cuppa, I wouldn’t say no.”

  “Flatterer,” she said. “You must be negotiating for a scone as well.”

  “I was thinking cake,” he admitted.

  She laughed as he joined her. He was careful about seeing to it that the smithy was secured, and he offered her his arm in a gentlemanly fashion as they walked to the refreshment pavilion. It sat just opposite a Victorian fairground, and once they’d secured their tea and a slice of lemon sponge for Justin, they found a table within viewing distance of the stalls serving as games of chance where, for a Victorian tuppence, children could try their luck in order to win sweets, muslin bags of marbles, and garishly painted figures rendered in plaster.

  “So.” Rabiah lifted her cup of tea. “Are you pleased to have Missa home again?”

  “I am that.” Justin dug into his cake.

  “It must be nice for you, then, having her put away college and uni for a simpler life.”

  “I wasn’t ever against her going to uni,” he said with a glance at her. “Whatever Missa wants is what I want for her. But I won’t lie. I’m that glad she’s give
n it up. She wanted to back in December, you know. But she got talked out of it by her mum.”

  “Yasmina told me at the time,” Rabiah said. “To be honest, none of us were ever sure why she wanted to give up on it.”

  “She told me she couldn’t cope with the science course. I s’pose it’s difficult for some people, eh? But a science course is no real matter to her future, is it. I’ll be supporting us and there’ll be our kids and she’ll want to be at home with them anyway.”

  “You two have plans, then,” Rabiah noted. “Missa’s not told me. Do her parents know?”

  “What?”

  “The plans. You, Missa, children . . . ?”

  “Oh. Well, not yet. I mean . . . We’ve been together so long, me and Missa, that her mum and dad won’t be surprised, will they? Meantime, I’ve got more saving to do. I mean us to have our own place. Not before we marry, ’course. We wouldn’t do that. Missa wouldn’t ever . . . Well, she’s not one for that sort of thing. Before marriage, I mean. Her mum’s made sure. Not that I think it’s a bad thing, mind you. Not to, I mean. But Yasmina—Dr. Lomax—told her about it all. You probably know that, eh? So Missa’s always said there won’t be any of it till afterwards.”

  Rabiah took a moment to sort through this. Justin was an open book, but he often communicated in ways that only he understood. She said, to clarify, “You mean no sex before marriage because of what happened to Yasmina and my Tim?”

  Justin squirmed a bit and shot her a glance. “Missa says the wedding night’s meant to be special. She says a white wedding is a white wedding. I’ve got to respect that, don’t I?” He squinted in the sunlight and directed his attention to a young couple passing by, their hands in the back pockets of each other’s jeans. They paused and locked lips. Justin looked away. “Don’t much like it,” he admitted. “I’m red-blooded as the next one. Sometimes me and Missa . . . Well, none of that. It’ll all happen soon enough, and I can wait.”