The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  But he’d said enough, so Sati backed into the corridor, her fists bunched beneath her chin as Yasmina got Timothy into the bathroom. She glanced back at her daughter before she shut the door. “I’m so sorry,” Yasmina said. “Sati, darling, I’m so sorry.”

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  She was provoking in at least half a dozen ways, but Lynley knew that when it came to her considerations about a case, Barbara Havers could be absolutely trusted. So when they’d carried on their post-churchyard conversation as they walked back to Griffith Hall on the previous night, he’d listened to what she had to say once they were in agreement over the various screws, bolts, and spanners that were being thrown into the workings of their investigation.

  She’d begun with, “Trouble is, she’s too tall, sir.”

  “Francie A-d-a-m-u-c-c-i, as she terms herself?”

  “The very same. They’re both blonde and they’ve both got that college-girl-in-need-of-a-decent-hairstyle thing going on—” to which he lifted an eyebrow and she went on with, “All right, I know. Who’m I to talk, eh? But you know what I mean. All these girls’re walking round like refugees from the 1960s. All they need is wreaths of flowers and tickets to San Francisco or whatever. My point is that despite both of them being blonde, that’s where the resemblance ends. Their body types are completely different. The girl I saw with Ruddock was short. I could compare her height to the door of the car since she was standing next to it. This girl Francie . . . ? Willowy, tall, bosomy, whatever. You know what I mean: your basic nightmare for the rest of womankind. Now, I know it was dark, but when the girl I saw got out of the car, the light went on and I clocked her face and it wasn’t that girl.” At which point she’d jerked her thumb in the direction from which they’d walked. “And anyway, there’s the fact of the patrol car in the first place.”

  “That Dena Donaldson brought up the patrol car when you’d only said a car, full stop.”

  “That means something. And what it means is that she’s been with Ruddock. So you ask me, someone’s not giving us all the facts. Dena, Francie A-d-a-m etcetera, or even Harry Rochester, who might’ve seen Dena but who’s now pretending he saw Francie for some reason. You see that, don’t you?”

  What Lynley saw was that time was running out and soon Hillier was going to be demanding a result that wouldn’t put the lot of them into the water boiling in the Home Secretary’s office. So he said before they’d reached the hotel, “When it comes to giving us all the facts, Sergeant, I daresay it’s more than one someone. I’ll ring Nkata in the morning.”

  Which he did, as soon as he was certain the other detective sergeant would be at his desk. When he heard Nkata’s distinctive voice—that blend of West African and the Caribbean via Brixton—he said, “Might I call upon your research skills, Winston? We’ve a bit of a muddle up here.”

  “Say what,” was Winston’s friendly reply.

  Lynley gave him a list of names, at the top of which was Harry Rochester and at the bottom of which was Christopher Spencer, the inclusion of whom was largely the result of desperation. At the end, Nkata whistled. “Tha’s goin to require some time. What am I lookin for?”

  “Anything in their pasts that seems dodgy. Just now we’re most interested in Harry Rochester, but if any of the rest of them have sneezed without covering their mouths, let us know. Can you fit this in today?”

  “Can do. I got a bit of other research goin on but that’ll—” He stopped because, as Lynley heard, someone was speaking to him. He said to that person, “Yeah. It is. He jus’ gave me a bell,” and then into the phone again, “Dee Harriman wants a word, Inspector.”

  When he heard her voice saying, “This is like divine intervention, Detective Inspector Lynley,” Lynley responded with what he considered great loyalty, “As far as I can tell from her general level of exhaustion in the morning, Barbara’s practising nightly, Dee. Or perhaps she’s doing it before breakfast. I admit to not asking her exactly when she’s channelling Ginger Rogers. But she’s apparently wearing her metatarsals—or is it her phalanges?—down to the bone. But wait. Do forgive me. In either case those are bones, aren’t they. At any rate, she’s intent upon turning in a stellar performance at the dance recital. And do make sure I have the date in my diary because despite her every threat, I intend to be there.”

  Dee said, “I fully expect you, so if you’re joking . . .”

  “I dare not joke about an opportunity to see Sergeant Havers in tap shoes, believe me.”

  She laughed and said, “It’s going to be brilliant. You’ll see. She’s going to be brilliant. But that’s not why I wanted to have a word.”

  “Ah. The divine intervention meant what, then?”

  There was a moment’s pause. Then Dee spoke sotto voce and it seemed she’d moved away from Nkata’s desk or at least turned her back on the DS. She said, “She rang in again. Ill, she said. She’s never ill, Detective Inspector. What should I do?”

  “DCS Ardery.”

  “Who else?”

  “Perhaps it’s better to say she’s never been ill before now, Dee.” He made his voice easy, but worry tightened his fingers on his mobile. “And now she is.”

  “What should I do? You haven’t said.”

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  “She left a message. Again. But someone’s going to ring her—at any moment, Detective Inspector—or someone’s going to ring me and ask about her. And I don’t quite know what to say. Or what I should do. Perhaps if you rang her? I’m that concerned, you see. You’re going to say that I shouldn’t be or that it’s not down to me if she’s ill or whatever, but if you could hear how she sounds on the phone. And it seems to me . . . You know. I mean, am I meant to come out and tell you what I think, Detective Inspector Lynley?”

  “What is it you think?”

  “You know. I know that you know because there’ve been times when voices carry even if the door is shut and I don’t intend to eavesdrop and it’s not like I’m even doing it at all, and I’ve also seen you waiting outside her office door and listening and—”

  “Dee.”

  “Sir?”

  Lynley considered what he wanted to tell her. Dee Harriman’s loyalties ran deep and in all directions, including towards Isabelle Ardery. Because of this, Lynley knew she meant well. He said, “We’re without power here.”

  “Right. Yes. But I thought if she knew that other people know . . . I mean . . . Although I s’pose she knows that at least you know, doesn’t she?”

  “And what good do you see that doing?”

  In her pause, he heard other voices in the background. The day was in full swing in London. Dee wasn’t wrong in her concern, as someone was going to have to take matters in hand eventually. But it wasn’t going to be Thomas Lynley. It couldn’t be. Nor could it be Dorothea Harriman. She said, “None, I s’pose. So I . . . do what, exactly?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “God, I’m not meant to report her, am I?”

  “You’re meant to do your job,” he told her. “She’s left you a message that tells you she’s ill. You believe she isn’t, and you may well be right. But as you don’t know and as she hasn’t told you—”

  “She’s not going to tell me she’s having a morning after or she’s currently too addled to show her face round here!”

  “—all you can to is merely report what you’ve been told, if and when you’re asked.”

  “And if I’m not asked?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “But this can’t go on, Detective Inspector.”

  “It won’t go on. These things never do.”

  They rang off then. Lynley had been sitting on the edge of his prison-cell bed as he made the call, and now he looked down at his shoes. They wanted a serious polishing, he noted. Unfortunately, he’d brought no p
olish with him although even if he had done, he doubted he’d do a job on them acceptable to Charlie Denton. He considered ringing him, just to enquire how the Mamet was going. And then he considered ringing Daidre. But she had deep concerns of her own: her birth parents and her siblings and her mother’s final journey. Still, he wondered what it meant that he hadn’t heard from her, that—thrust back into a world she’d believed she’d left forever—she was now confronting her worst memories without him. He was forced to ask himself why she didn’t need him in a moment like this. He went on to ask himself the obvious: Did people actually need each other at all?

  He couldn’t answer that question, so he didn’t try.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  When Ding awakened, she was alone in her bed as she’d been all night. This constituted one of the very few times she’d been alone in however long it had been because she couldn’t actually remember, but it must have been two weeks after autumn term had begun, since that was when she first hooked up with Brutus. And although he’d begun doing it with other girls within five weeks or so from the start of term, he’d ended up in her bed nonetheless, save for the nights when she’d refused him from sheer outrage that he was so . . . so completely Brutus about everything.

  She’d also not had sex with Finn or with anyone on the previous day or during the previous night. That was certainly not impressive, but what was impressive was that she’d been able to go to sleep and then wake up without being in a twist about it. In the past, she would’ve become instantly consumed with the question of who she was going to “be with” next as if “being with” someone—which, let’s face it, was always a euphemism for fucking them—had something to do with who she really was.

  She still had very little idea of that: who she really was. But at least she could now trace a path from the child she’d been to the adolescent and then the young adult she’d become. In this, she saw that she’d always been running. She hadn’t known why, but she’d always felt like someone quite desperate to get to a destination that she couldn’t identify. And because she couldn’t identify the destination she was actually seeking—let alone recognise it when she arrived—she’d ended up seeking the one that was most familiar to her over and over again, even if she hadn’t known why it was familiar to her in the first place.

  When she saw her father’s naked dead body, she thought, she must have decided at some level that everything he was in that terrible moment had to do with that thing between his legs. In that moment of seeing him dead and naked, she must have reached a conclusion of some kind, because that was the only way she could explain to herself the disgust she’d felt each time some bloke let her know how important it was to him to have her do something—anything really—that involved his penis.

  So, she thought as she lay in bed with her gaze upon her bedroom ceiling, if that was the case, where was her true fury coming from, especially the fury she felt towards Brutus and the various girls he’d snogged with, bonked, or been blown by since she’d known him? She’d held them in contempt as well, but where did that come from and what did it mean?

  She considered this and the answer dawned on her slowly but oh so visually that she knew at once what it was about. She could see their faces when they were with him: Allison, Monica, Francie. She could see what played on their features and she knew what it was: enjoyment, pleasure, whatever you wanted to call it. But it was something she herself could not feel. That’s what it was. Allison giggling, Monica looking like a satisfied cat, Francie inviting her to join in the fun because it was fun to Francie and it always had been, whereas to Ding . . . She’d fucked them or sucked them or wanked them while waiting, just waiting, for when she could tell herself that only she saw what a miserable creature the male of Homo sapiens was.

  She got out of bed. She rooted round in a drawer till she found clothing she could have worn for yoga but instead wore to slop round the house. Once she’d donned it, she left her room. Finn’s door was closed. Brutus’s was also. She approached the latter and knocked.

  “Bru?” she called. “Can I have a word?” She heard a bit of muffled conversation but that was it, so she said, “It’s not a big thing, Bru. No worries, ’kay?”

  That seemed to do it. She heard bedsprings creak, and then in a moment Brutus opened the door. The fact that he sheltered the inside of his room from her view told her that he probably had a new girl with him. He slid into the corridor and shut the door behind him, saying, “Yeah? What?”

  He sounded wary. He gave a look in the direction of Finn’s room and then back at her. She saw he’d put on boxer shorts but nothing else.

  “Can I talk to you?” she said. “It won’t take long. Can you come to my room for a minute?”

  “You and me aren’t—”

  “It’s not about us,” she cut in quickly. “We both know that there isn’t an us anyway. But I got to ask you something and it’s better inside.” She tilted her head towards her bedroom.

  He said with an obvious attempt at patience, “Ding, I explained things over and over. There’s no more ways to explain it to you.”

  “It’s not about that. There’s one thing you never tried to explain because I never asked and that’s what I want to talk about. But like I said, it won’t take long.”

  He sighed and said, “Okay, but wait a second.”

  He ducked back into his room—more like a slither so he could get in without opening the door more than ten inches—and in a moment Ding could hear the murmur of voices, his and a girl’s. She felt the hurt of the unnamed girl’s presence, but she understood that what she felt was not about Brutus but rather about herself, which it had been from the first.

  When he came out again, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He followed her to her room and remained inside by the door.

  She said, “It’s not like I’m going to jump you or anything.”

  He said, “I know, but I needed to tell her . . .”

  “Got it.” She realised as she spoke that it didn’t matter. Who the girl was, why she was there, what they’d done together . . . none of it truly and actually mattered. She said, “It’s okay and everything, Bru. I get it now. We’re not so different, you and me. We come at things different, but that’s all it is.”

  “Right.” If anything, he looked even warier.

  She said, “Anyway, it’s not about that. I got to ask you something about last year, in December, that night it snowed bad and we got so pissed at the Hart and Hind.”

  He frowned. “It snowed lots of nights. And we got pissed lots of nights.”

  “Right, but it’s that night we went to the Hart and Hind with the plan, you and me. We drank cider instead of lager. It’s that night, Brutus.” She waited for recognition to dawn. When it didn’t, she said, “Only the thing was that we didn’t plan it to be as bad as it got. Finn was there as well. But he was drinking Guinness while the rest of us stuck with cider and you remember how we got wrecked? We didn’t intend to—you and me, at least—but that’s what happened.”

  He nodded slowly. “I remember. Yeah. That was dead stupid, wasn’t it?”

  “It was worse than stupid. It was really bad. I mean it got really bad. It’s why things’ve been like they’ve been.”

  “What things? Ding, you’re not making any sense.”

  “I haven’t said anything to anyone. But now I need to know. My mind’s been totally destroyed for ages and I’m trying to straighten it out so what I want to know is where you were. See, I woke up that night and you weren’t here, and like you said, you always spent the night with me if we . . . you know . . . if we did it at night and not during the day or whatever. Only that night I woke up and you weren’t here and you never came back. Where were you?”

  He still looked confused, as if wondering why all these months later she would want to know something so meaningless. But he said, “I was hugging the loo.�
��

  “What?”

  “I got up to pee. Only . . . I was bloody dizzy and then I started feeling like I was going to sick up on the floor. I made it to the loo and we got seriously acquainted—me and it—and I must’ve blacked out because I remember thinking I’d just rest a sec on the bathroom floor in front of the loo and next thing I knew, Finn was pissing over my head only it wasn’t completely over my head. You know Finn. Anyway, he holds the drink better ’n I do and he wasn’t drinking cider in the first place.”

  Ding raised her fingers to her lips. “The bathroom,” she said. “You were in the bathroom that night when I woke up?”

  “Till Finn showed, yeah. But by then it was light outside and I went to my room and that was it. Ding, what the hell’s going on?”

  She shook her head because she wasn’t sure. She thought she had been. But the ground had shifted, and she had to think what she was meant to do.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  “Straight from the first—when I was here with the DCS—that bloke’s laid out half-truths, sir. He’s left out details and he’s painted things this way first and that way later. Then it’s been ‘Oh, did I forget to mention my assortment of phone calls to the husband of the deputy chief constable and to Ian Druitt as well? And oh, yes indeedy-o, I’m acquainted with Finnegan Freeman and did I not ever mention that Mr. Druitt had concerns about him? And I’m also rather more than acquainted with a girl who just happens to live in the same house with Finnegan.’”

  Barbara and Lynley had taken themselves onto the hotel terrace, where the coolness of the morning precluded anyone deciding to breakfast al fresco. Nor were they doing so. But daily more visitors were arriving in Ludlow, and daily Griffith Hall was housing them. Lynley had quietly told Barbara about his phone call to Nkata, and she wanted him to ring the DS another time and add Gary Ruddock to his list. Once she’d begun to argue this point, Lynley had taken her out to the terrace. Now they stood above the lawn and out of view of both the breakfast room and the lounge. Two gardeners were working among the shrubbery and the flowers, but they were at a distance, so the conversation between Barbara and her superior could go unheard.