The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  She looked at her watch, which she still wore, thank God. She saw that it was just after five. She frowned then because she realised this meant that either her watch had stopped—which it clearly hadn’t as the second hand was still in motion—or time had somehow gone backwards or it was actually the next morning. In any case, what she needed to do was go back to sleep for two hours, since rising from the sofa seemed completely impossible at the moment. But before that, she decided, she could ring her own office in order to leave a message for Dorothea Harriman. She would tell her that she was ill. After all, her head was muzzy and when had she last taken a sick day anyway?

  She couldn’t remember and she doubted Dee Harriman was keeping track.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Considering the hour, Lynley was impressed to find Barbara Havers waiting outside for him. She’d apparently taken a decision to give her hair a trim at some point during the previous night. When he gave it a look—admittedly askance—she said, “I reckon I needed a second mirror to see the back and sides. Live and learn,” to which he replied, “An admirable motto, although asymmetry has its own appeal.”

  She made a gesture towards the castle ruins across the street, saying, “Ever notice how much we like our heaps of stone, sir? I wager we’re the only country in the world that has telly programmes about this or that pile of rubble, eh?”

  “Havers, I’m duly impressed,” he replied. “Has your television viewing undergone a change?”

  “Not hardly,” she said. “Just got a new battery for the remote.”

  “My hopes are summarily dashed.”

  “Oh, I know this one’s got to do with the Plantagenets, sir. Last time I was here that bloke Harry was going on about the Yorks riding out from the castle, and I know they’re part of that clan. He didn’t say which of ’em, though. And as I’d already gone all to smash with the Edwards, I didn’t want to enter into any more royal discussions, if you know what I mean.”

  “Ah. Yes. Well, you could have named quite a number of Edwards, as Ludlow was batted back and forth amongst the group like an historical tennis ball. Ultimately, of course, it ended up in the lap of the usurper. Like everything else, including the privilege of defining the narrative, as things turned out.”

  “Sir?”

  “Henry Tudor. History is written by the winners, Sergeant. Shall we be off?”

  Aside from a single milk float doing its duty, there was no one out on the streets at this early hour. It was a matter of minutes only to reach the house in which Finnegan Freeman lived. At the front door Lynley rang the bell. When no one answered, he gave the door a decent banging. When that proved insufficient unto the day, he tried the knob.

  The door was unlocked, and inside the building all was silent. The air bore the scent of burnt eggs, sort of a charcoal-fading-to-sulphur odour, the source of which turned out to be a pan sitting on the lowest step of the stairway. This held what appeared to be petrified scrambled eggs covered by a skin of Fairy Liquid.

  Havers went towards the back of the place, where a door indicated the kitchen was. She shook her head at Lynley to indicate no one was inside busily seeing to the bacon and toast. She held up a finger and entered the room, and he heard the sound of cupboards opening and shutting. Knowing Havers, he understood that anything was possible—including her deciding to cook herself a meal—but she emerged soon enough with two lids from cooking pots, and he saw her intention at once. He glanced into the sitting room to verify its emptiness, and they headed for the stairs, careful not to upset the egg pan and spill its contents onto the floor.

  Above, there were three bedrooms and a family bathroom only. Again, there was no one about. The first door they tried was locked, but the second was not. Lynley swung it open quietly, saw the figure sprawled out on the bed, and heard Havers murmur next to him, “Not exactly Prince Charming, is he.”

  True. Finnegan Freeman was not an attractive sleeper. His mouth hung open, he snored faintly, and the underpants he had on looked as if they could do with a day’s soak in bleach.

  Softly, Havers walked across the room as Lynley followed her inside. With the window closed, the air was hot and it smelled of sweat and copious emissions of a gaseous nature. He watched as Havers took up a position. She looked towards him with eyebrows raised. He nodded. She set to with the lids, shouting “Wakey-wakey-wakey!”

  That did it. Finnegan rolled off the bed. He landed in a karate pose. He yelled, “Eeee-yah!” and switched to another pose, a sight to see in his underwear.

  Havers lowered the lids, saying, “Bloody hell, that’s all you’ve got?”

  Lynley had his warrant card out. He said, “DI Thomas Lynley. New Scotland Yard. We rang the bell but no one answered. The door wasn’t locked, by the way.”

  “You lot need to watch that,” Havers added. “Not that it looks like you have anything to steal but you’d hate to come home and find Goldilocks in your bed. Or maybe not.”

  Finnegan was still in something of a crouch. He rose from this as he snarled, “She sent you! She fucking sent you!”

  “Goldilocks?” Havers asked. “No. We tend to go our own way, me and the inspector, here. So whoever ‘she’ is—and I reckon it’s your mum, the DCC—she didn’t do any sending of anyone anywhere. D’you want to get dressed?”

  “I’m not going with you lot anywhere.”

  “This is just a natter, Finn. We can do it here with you in your smalls and all of us lined up on the bed like the see-no-evil monkeys, or we can toddle down to the kitchen or the sitting room and chunter there. Kitchen’s my recommendation as you might like a cuppa and I’m happy to be mother.”

  “I want my privacy. I’m getting dressed.”

  “I’ll remain with him, Sergeant,” Lynley said. “If you’ll replace the cookery items and put the kettle on . . . ?”

  She nodded and left them. Lynley saw a chair in the corner of the room and brought it to the door, which he closed. He sat.

  “I got to have a piss,” Finn said to him.

  “Dress first, please. Let’s not make this difficult, Finnegan.”

  “It’s Finn,” the boy said.

  “Finn. Shall I sort out clothing for you?”

  “Oh yeah. Like I need you to do that.” He scooped up clothing from the floor. Jeans and a T-shirt, which he donned without ceremony. He approached Lynley with, “Now you want to get out of the way?” and Lynley accommodated him although he did follow the boy to the bathroom. On his way there, Finn yelled, “Coppers are here, you lot! Hide the pickings from last night’s break-ins.”

  He went into the bathroom, leaving the door open to the entertaining sight of him peeing forcefully and accompanying this with an explosive passage of gas. Finished, he left the toilet unflushed and his hands unwashed. Lynley made a mental note not to shake with him at the end of their colloquy.

  Finn shoved past him, saying, “You’re breaking the law, you are. Don’t think I don’t know it. And I know my rights ’s well. You can’t just walk into someone’s house like you did. This is just like breaking and entering, this is. This is like kidnapping. This is like . . . this is like. . . . What d’you lot do at night? Watch telly to see how cops’re meant to act? Why didn’t you kick in the door, then, just like some stupid private eye. You think you can intimidate anyone, anytime, anywhere, and they’re not going to step up and do something straight back at you. Well, you are so fucking wrong when it comes to me. I know how things’re meant to work.”

  “I expect you do. Shall we go to the kitchen?”

  One of the other bedroom doors opened. Bruce Castle, Lynley thought. That had been the boy’s name. Behind him lurked the same girl from the previous day: Monica-who-doesn’t-live-here. She was biting on the side of her index finger.

  Bruce said, “Freeman, when’re going to sort out this thing you have happening with all the coppers in your
life? What’s going on round here is getting annoying.”

  “Sod you and whoever the hell she is. And where the fuck is Ding?” He strode to the last of the doors and banged upon it. “You got someone in there, Ding? He doing it better than me or Brucie?”

  Lynley took the boy by the arm, saying, “You’ve made all the necessary points, Finnegan.”

  Finn jerked away. “It’s Finn. And you touch me again, I’ll break your collarbone.”

  “Interesting skeletal choice,” Lynley noted. “Are you ready for your tea now?”

  Finn shot him what Lynley reckoned went for his best withering look and led the way to the stairs. These he banged down with grumblings suitable to the moment. In the kitchen, they found Havers, who had sorted out three mugs and a box of PG Tips. She said, “Milk’s gone bad but there’s something resembling sugar.”

  “I didn’t say you lot could have our tea, did I?” Finn demanded. “I know my rights. You don’t just bloody get to help yourself to—”

  “We’ll all use the same teabag,” Havers told him. “I could go next door and borrow some water for the kettle as well, but I expect you’d like us to be gone, so why don’t you start cooperating?”

  He threw himself into one of the three chairs that served as a table in a corner of the room. Above it hung a bulletin board, pinned to it a schedule of cleaning duties meant to be fulfilled by the housemates. It was, obviously, something that the group of them ignored. This was especially true in the kitchen, where the sink was full of used and unrinsed crockery, the cooker resembled a science experiment gone badly wrong, cupboards gaped open, and work tops held an assemblage of tins and boxes and bags.

  The kettle clicked off and Havers did the honours with the single teabag, as promised. She brought the mugs to the table. Finn said, “I want sugar, I do,” and Havers handed him a bowl of something grey and solid, chunks of which he had to pry out with a teaspoon.

  “So what d’you want?” Finn said to them. Surprisingly, he did not slurp his tea, although Lynley had steeled himself to hear the boy’s lips flapping against the liquid. “I c’n give you exackly five minutes. I’ve a lecture to go to and you can’t make me skip it. And don’t think you can trap me because you can’t. I’m not stupid, you know. And anyway, I know my—”

  “Rights. Yes. You’ve made that clear. We can’t hold you here, although something tells me that there isn’t actually a lecture at this hour in the morning.”

  “Early bird and the worms, sir,” Havers noted.

  “Hmm. Yes. But I rather doubt that applies here.”

  “What do you want?” Finn demanded. “She sent you, right?”

  “Your mum?” Havers said.

  “Who bloody else.”

  “Why would she send us?” Lynley asked.

  “You ask her. Like you think I would know?”

  “She didn’t send us. That’s not how it works. We’d like to speak with you about Ian Druitt.”

  “Why do I keep having to talk about Ian? I’ve said what I’ve said and there’s nothing to add. He was a good bloke, he was nice to everyone, he never put a finger on any of those kids. All of that was a bloody lie and no wonder someone reported him on the sly like he did because no one’d put his face in the light and say it about Ian. No one.”

  “Interesting that you know the anonymous call came from a man,” Havers said.

  “What? You think it was me made the call? I don’t even know who you’re s’posed to ring if you want to tell rubbish like that.”

  “That’s interesting, that is, since your mum’s a copper,” Havers noted.

  “Like I’d tell her if I thought bad about Ian, which I didn’t and I don’t and I never will.”

  “What if Ian thought ‘bad’ about you?” Havers said.

  The boy lifted his tea. He did slurp then. “What’s that mean when it’s on the news?”

  “There were apparently some concerns about you,” Lynley told him.

  “Turns out,” Havers added, “Mr. Druitt wanted to speak to your parents.”

  “No fucking way,” Finn said. “Ian didn’t even know my parents. He didn’t even meet them, ever.”

  “We’re on board with that,” Havers said. “He was asking round for their phone numbers.”

  “Who told you that shit?”

  Havers held up her hands in a whoa gesture, saying, “Privileged information, that. But I can guarantee—and so can the inspector here—that he wanted a word and the subject was you.”

  “That’s rubbish. If Ian had a problem with me, he would’ve talked to me directly. That’s how he was. And he didn’t have a problem with me, ’cause I did exactly what I was meant to do. I was meant to help the kids with this and with that when they came to the meetings and that’s what I did. I was meant to show them the Internet for school prep and how they could use it and that’s what I did. I was meant to organise games for them and make them teams for competitions and the like and that’s what I did.”

  “Nice. Right. All the rest. But it seems Ian Druitt wasn’t concerned with what you were meant to do. Seems he was concerned with what you might’ve been doing that you weren’t meant to do.”

  “Like what? Selling drugs? Talking up weed? Giving them E? What about teaching ’em how to crawl through doggy doors so we could rip off houses together?”

  “All interesting possibilities,” Havers acknowledged. “Which seems the likeliest to you?”

  “The word Mr. Druitt used was impact,” Lynley said. “He expressed concern over the impact you were having on the children.”

  “Far as I know, I was meant to have an impact,” Finn said.

  “Could be yes, could be no,” Havers said. “Could also be that when Mr. Druitt said impact, he was using a . . . what’s the fancy word, sir?”

  “Euphemism,” Lynley replied.

  “Right. That’s it. There being all sorts of impacts, if you know what I mean,” Havers said to the boy.

  Finn was silent. Outside, Havers’s early birds went about their business with the worms, cheeping brightly as they did so. A car started with a roar as someone used its engine ill, possibly thinking this was actually good for it. Finn looked from Havers to Lynley and back to Havers. He slouched further in his chair, put his hands round his mug of tea, and said, “Why don’t you spit out what it is you got to say so I can toss you from the premises?”

  “If Mr. Druitt developed concerns about your interactions with the children in the club,” Lynley said, “that’s what he may have wanted to speak to your parents about.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s more than one kind of interaction,” Havers said. “There’s the kind you’ve already described: where you play big brother to a collection of nippers who look at you and think you’re the next King Arthur. And then there’s the kind you might prefer no one to see or to know about. And if someone saw those interactions, that could be unpleasant all the way round.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re on about,” Finn said.

  Havers said, “Here’s what it is, Finn. We’ve got this web of facts and figures and who knew what and who did what and what happened next. And we keep getting led back to the centre of the web, where the spider is. And that spider keeps looking exactly like you.”

  “We’ve also learned that your father asked the PCSO here in town to keep an eye on you,” Lynley told him. “So it looks as if he—your father, that is—had his own concerns.”

  “No way.” Finn licked his lips. His tongue looked grey. His gaze shifted to Havers. Then back to Lynley. He looked like a boy whose bravado had suddenly been stripped from his body.

  “Which part no way?” Havers asked. “Because I expect you can see what it looks like from our perspective.” She gestured aimlessly to her right, saying, “I also expect you know how easy it is to tiptoe up Weeping Cross Lane—p
ractically outside your front door this is—and from there to the nick with no one the wiser, ’specially at night. You can saunter right into the car park, you can, and not be caught on CCTV, since it doesn’t work. You can even go in the back door of the station. And if Gary Ruddock is doing what he sometimes is doing with his lady friend in a patrol car—”

  “Gaz doesn’t even have a girlfriend. He whinges about that often enough.”

  “—then you can pretty much do anything at the police station, including ringing the call centre—”

  “I told you! I got no idea about that stupid anonymous whatever-it-was about Ian and it wasn’t true anyways!”

  “—or even locating Mr. Druitt one night last March and giving him the chop since Mr. Druitt might have seen something he wasn’t supposed to see.”

  “What? No way! Who spun all this for you? Was it Gaz? ’Cause if it was, he was lying. Or Ian was lying. Or some little kids who got their feelings hurt by me and I don’t even know it is lying. But here’s what it is: I don’t have to talk to you anymore and I’m not going to. You got that? Because this is all rubbish and I’m not listening to it and whatever anyone’s said about me is a filthy lie.”

  He shoved his chair back with a scrape on the lino that it wouldn’t soon recover from, and stamped out of the room. At first it looked as if he intended to do a runner when he opened the front door. But then he shouted, “You lot get out! I know what you’re doing and I’m not playing. Get out!”

  When neither of them moved from where they were in the kitchen doorway, he slammed the front door closed so forcefully that the windows shook in the kitchen. He pounded up the stairs and did the same to his bedroom door.

  “That’s some protest.” Havers started to head for the front door herself when above them, a door opened, footsteps padded on the landing, and then a girl’s voice said, “Finn? Are they gone?” Gentle knocking on his door. “You in there, Finn? What did they want?”

  Havers looked at Lynley. He held up his hand. They waited. Silence and then the girl herself came down the stairs. She saw them and stopped dead. She wore a thin cotton nightdress that she clutched virginally at her throat. Dena Donaldson. She began to turn to go back up the stairs.