The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  “There you have it,” Ardery said.

  Barbara had no clue what they “had.” Ardery was continuing, however.

  “I was in a church last night—”

  Eyebrows lifted on both their parts.

  “—near the river. I’d gone for a walk, ended up close to Putney Bridge, and there was a church holding evensong. It was all quite formal: the choir, the priest, the praying and the singing.”

  Barbara rolled her eyes at the idea that Ardery was getting religion. But Lynley seemed to understand that she was heading towards something.

  “It was the priest, Tommy,” Ardery said. “The priest or deacon or whatever he was. I saw him but it didn’t register at first. Everything he was wearing was green.”

  Barbara had never been a churchgoer—even at Christmas, Easter, or during national tragedies. She was not a believer. But Lynley did not have a full chapel on his property for nothing. Not only were his ancestors and members of his more immediate family buried there, but services were held there as well. And he was part of a line of Asherton earls who’d been setting examples for the underlings for something like three hundred years.

  Which was why she wasn’t entirely surprised when he said, “My God. It was Lent when he died. He would have been wearing purple.”

  The DCS said, “It never occurred to me that the colour might have made a difference, but I was curious, so I went home and had a look online. Red is the one most rarely used, Tommy. Pentecost, saints’ days, confirmation, ordination. I had a further look and it wasn’t a saint’s day.”

  “And prior to Easter, it wasn’t Pentecost either,” Lynley said. “I should have seen that in the photos, guv.”

  “No matter,” Isabelle said. “We’ve got him, I daresay.”

  “It looks that way,” was Lynley’s reply.

  He rang off then and looked at Barbara. His expression was speculative, but Barbara felt speculation was not in order now.

  She said, “It’s like we always say, sir.”

  “What’s that, Sergeant?”

  “No one thinks of everything.”

  IRONBRIDGE

  SHROPSHIRE

  Yasmina heard him upstairs. He was banging doors and drawers and cupboards as if he were a burglar searching for valuables. When she found him, he’d gone into the bathroom. This was strange, as it seemed to her that he would have gone there first.

  She knew what he was after, naturally. He didn’t know just yet that when he hadn’t returned home on the previous night, she’d taken action. But he was fast reaching that conclusion if his frantic search through a drawer that held first-aid supplies was anything to go by. This must be his second time through the bathroom, then, she realised. He would have done the medicine cabinet earlier before going on to the other rooms and at last returning here.

  “I threw them away,” she said from the doorway.

  “Well of bloody goddamn course you did. What else should I possibly have expected?”

  He pushed past her and went to their bed. He sank down, head in his hands, palms on his skull. He grabbed his own hair and jerked it back and forth. He finally looked up and said, “Can you never leave anything alone?”

  “I’m sorry about Sati,” she said. “When I hit her—”

  “You mean when you punched her, Yasmina. You do not mean ‘hit her’ because that isn’t what happened. Hitting her would have been bad enough, hitting your child because she doesn’t want to do what you would have her do. But punching her? Do you have any idea what can come of that? Or are you relying on her making up a story when the head teacher asks her what happened to her face? He’ll do that, you know. It’s what he’s actually meant to do. Will she say she ran into a door? I expect that one’s never been used before by a child terrified of being taken into care.” He laughed wildly, got off the bed, and walked to the window. His posture suggested he wanted to drive his fist through the glass, but he swung round on her instead and she flinched.

  She said, “Timothy, Sati wouldn’t—”

  “Shut up for once. All Sati has to say is what actually happened to her and no one is going to believe any story that you cook up to explain how our daughter ended up with her face beaten in.”

  She advanced on him but remained out of his reach. “I didn’t beat in her face! I didn’t intend to hit her at all!”

  “It’s rote. You’re just like your father. What you did to Sati? That would have been his reaction.”

  This was something . . . but it wasn’t true. She said, “I’m trying . . . Timothy, all my life I’ve tried to—”

  “Don’t begin to say you’ve tried to do your best or any other rubbish you might want to trot out as an excuse for what’s happened. And I’ll do you a favour and do the same. Here’s what it is, Yasmina: You haven’t tried and I can’t blame you because neither have I. I could have stopped you or laid down the law or made threats or whatever else a man’s meant to do to bring sanity into his home and I didn’t because you made it simple for me to step aside. So that’s what I did and, believe me, I do not fucking want to have to face that.”

  “I want my children back,” Yasmina said. “I’m meant to protect them.”

  “From what, exactly?”

  “Bad things,” she said as she sought an answer that would encompass what she felt when she considered their children. “Ruining their lives, making mistakes. That’s my job. But you won’t see that. And really, why should you? It’s easier to blame me for everything when all I’ve ever wanted is what’s best for us all.”

  “Determined by who? No, don’t answer. I already know. So does Missa. So does Sati, now.” He headed for the bedroom door.

  She stepped in front of him. “You can’t say that I—”

  He pushed her aside. “You haven’t been listening because that’s your stock-in-trade. I’ve already told you I’m to blame as well. You were just doing what had been done to you. I don’t have that excuse.”

  He left the room, but she followed him. Down the stairs he went with her on his tail. She said, “What was ‘done to me,’ as you put it, was seeing to it that I was educated well, that I found a course in life. If it constitutes some kind of failure that I want to do the same for my children, then I’m guilty.”

  He was at the bottom of the stairs and he turned, a fist clenched on the rail. “I swear to God, you don’t see anything. Your family rejected you, Yasmina. Not a single one of them has spoken to you in twenty years. And why? Because you made one mistake. You got pregnant. . . . No. That’s not fair. I made you pregnant, and they were completely unwilling to see that one mistake might not ruin an entire life.”

  “It made life more difficult. I don’t want life to be difficult for my daughters.”

  “Really?” he asked. “How’s that working for you, then?”

  She made no reply. How could she, when she saw at last that they were going round and round and would continue to do so?

  “You’re going to end up with nothing, Yasmina,” he told her. “Me, though? I’m not going there with you.”

  He headed for the door. She said, “Your mum told us—”

  “Stop it,” he cut in. “Just bloody stop it.”

  Which was when the front door opened. Rabiah entered. Missa was behind her.

  “Thank God,” Yasmina cried, dashing down the rest of the stairs. But then she saw, and she asked, “Why have you not brought Sati with you?”

  “Sati’s not meant to hear.” Rabiah drew Missa into the entry and closed the door.

  Yasmina felt a distinct prickling of dread worse than anything she’d felt since just before receiving Janna’s fatal diagnosis. She could see from her face that Missa had been weeping. She could see on Rabiah’s face that whatever Sati was not meant to hear was going to be said by Missa.

  Suddenly Yasmina did not want to listen. What swept over
her was a tsunami of knowledge that told her one clear thing: Whatever had been on her daughter’s mind for months had nothing to do with Ironbridge, Justin Goodayle, or marriage.

  Rabiah led Missa into the sitting room. She sat next to her on the sofa and told Yasmina and Timothy to sit as well. Yasmina took one of the wingback chairs. Timothy came into the room, but he remained standing.

  “I got badly drunk on cider.” Missa directed her words down to her lap, where she’d clenched her fists together.

  The tsunami of knowledge altered to one of relief. This was what Missa hadn’t wanted to talk about! She’d known how upset her parents would be that she’d got drunk because she’d also known her uncle’s history, her father’s history, and her great-grandfather’s history. She had been told from the first how dangerous drinking was in their family and she had always been fully on board with the facts of how dangerous drinking could become for her. Yasmina said, “Missa, darling, darling. You’ve no cause for—”

  Rabiah snapped, “Let her go on,” in a tone so harsh that Yasmina backed deeply into her chair.

  Missa looked at her grandmother. Rabiah nodded. Yasmina wanted desperately to tell her that nothing could ever alter her parents’ love for her, that all she’d done was what children do as they grow up. They experiment just as she had done and that was the only thing that had happened.

  “I didn’t know what cider would do, so when he kept ordering me another and another, I drank it because of how good it tasted. At first I was only a little light-headed, but that didn’t seem to matter because it was . . . well, it was fun and I thought about breaking out of who I always am and at least trying something new because you know how I’ve always hated to do that. And then I was terribly drunk, only I don’t even remember that part of it, that’s how drunk I was. I don’t remember much of anything except that . . .”

  Even across the room from her in a wingback chair, Yasmina could sense Missa’s tension. Rabiah smoothed the girl’s hair behind her ear. She murmured something Yasmina couldn’t catch.

  Missa drew a shallow breath. She lowered her head. “I slept on the sofa. I don’t even remember how I got there. I only remember that when I woke up it was completely dark in the room. And he . . .” She raised one of her clenched fists and pressed it beneath her right eye. “He was on top of me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe. And then . . .” Her shoulders shook. Yasmina could tell that not only was she weeping but also that she didn’t want her parents to see that she was weeping.

  “You must tell them, Missa,” Rabiah said. “They need to know so that they can begin to understand.”

  Timothy took a step forward, as if he intended to go to her. Rabiah stopped him at once with, “Sit down and stay down. Now,” and he did so at once. There was a second wingback chair not far from Yasmina and that was where he sat, on the edge, though, as if he would spring into action at the least provocation.

  Nonetheless, he spoke gently, saying, “Missa, talk to us. Please.”

  She raised her head. Yasmina drew in a breath because on her daughter’s face she saw at last the profound suffering she’d been hiding for months. Missa said, “I wasn’t dressed when I woke up. I mean my skirt, my tights, my . . . I didn’t know that at first but then he started shoving his . . . It was . . . I wanted to fight him but I was on my stomach and he put his hand over my mouth and he jerked back my head and then he was . . . he put his . . .”

  “Oh God!” Yasmina covered her mouth.

  “I could hear him grunting and grunting and it hurt so much it hurt so much . . .”

  Timothy surged to his feet. “Who?” he demanded. “Who was it? Who?”

  “Mum,” Missa said, with tears falling that she didn’t even seem to be aware of, “Mummy. It hurt so much and I wanted it to stop and I couldn’t do anything . . . And Gran, don’t make me, don’t make me. Please.”

  Rabiah put her arms round the girl. Yasmina tasted the blood from where she’d bitten down on her fingers as Missa was speaking.

  Timothy began pacing the floor. He said, “Who was it? You tell me.”

  “She doesn’t know, for God’s sake,” Rabiah said. “She’s never known.”

  He swung on her. “What about you? She says she was on the bloody sofa, Mum. Someone got into your house and did this to my daughter and do you understand? Inside your head is the name, so think!” He approached her. He grabbed her face and he squeezed as if it were a piece of fruit that he wanted to crush.

  Missa cried, “Don’t!”

  Rabiah shook him off. “You’re not understanding.”

  “Don’t tell Justie.” Missa made it a plea. “Please, you can’t tell Justie. I talked and talked about being a virgin and how I wanted to wait because of what happened to Mum and how she got pregnant and how that made things so difficult for her because she wasn’t ready and you weren’t ready and . . .” She turned to her mother. “Mummy, I’m still a virgin, aren’t I? Because of how he did it, I’m still a virgin, yes?”

  Yasmina felt every particle of the horror attached to that moment. “This was why you wanted to come home,” she said. “But I was the one who knew better than anyone . . . And all along, my dear God, this was why.” She wanted to slap herself repeatedly. She understood the inclination of women to chop off their hair in mourning and pour ashes over themselves from head to foot. Could she have at the moment, she would have done so. “Oh, blessed God, Missa,” she cried. “Tell me, please. What can I do?”

  Rabiah was the one to answer. “You can listen to the rest of it. Both of you.”

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Lynley’s thought was that he should have seen it sooner. He couldn’t blame Havers. She wasn’t a churchgoer as far as he could recall, and although there had been a funeral service for her father, how would she be expected to know that there was meaning behind the colours worn by the clergy? On her own admission, Isabelle was not a member of any congregation either. But he? He couldn’t say he believed in anything divine, but he’d attended church services until he was at university. Once he’d ended his long estrangement from his mother, he’d also attended at her side when he was in Cornwall. So he should not only have seen that the stole on the floor next to Druitt’s body was red, he should also have realised what that meant.

  He gave Havers time to put herself together while he returned to his own room and thought about their next move. They had an assortment of half-mad evidence that told them it was highly likely and practically assuredly murder, but while what they had might suffice to reassure Clive Druitt that his son had not committed suicide, it did not take them closer to an arrest, a charge, and what Druitt wanted and justice demanded: a prosecution. If he and Havers handed over what they had to the Crown Prosecution Service, the sheer incredulity of any barrister involved would end up shaming both the West Mercia police who’d allowed this to happen upon their patch and the Met who’d trotted up here in an attempt to pour oil upon the waters surrounding a rich man who had every right—as Lynley now knew—to be hauling in either a legal team or a national journalist with a bent for humiliation-producing investigative reporting. He could even hear the first question from the prosecutors that he would be called upon to answer should he present the CPS with what they had: “And a red stole on the floor proves what, exactly?” with the additional, “For all you know, Detective Inspector, the victim might well have been colour blind. Come back when you know that and when you also know why anyone might want to kill the man.”

  He and Havers could, Lynley knew, only look at each detail as it came up. They had little enough time and no manpower, so their next move had to be something that shed light. He was listing potential actions in his head as he went down to the breakfast room to meet Havers. She was waiting for him at reception, her expression telling him that a meal was the last thing on her mind.

  She said, “Let’s haul him in, sir.”


  “We’re not quite there yet,” was his reply, and he could see at once that this did not please.

  “Sod it. What else do we need? A bloody dagger with his fingerprints on it?”

  “That would be helpful,” he said. “But first we need to speak to the vicar.”

  “And this would be for what bleeding reason?”

  “He’ll let us into the vestry.”

  “And we need to get into the vestry another time for . . . ?”

  “For the assurance that what we think was done actually could be done. At the moment, we have nothing but supposition.”

  Arranging to have another look at the vestry was a matter of making a single phone call. The vicar said he would happily meet them at the church at a time of their choosing. They set off after breakfast, up the mild rise of Dinham Street and through Castle Square.

  As he’d promised, Christopher Spencer was waiting for them inside the church, happy to help them. When Lynley asked the vicar if he might leave them alone in the vestry, he looked mildly surprised, but after a moment of contemplation he said of course, showed them back to it, and told them he would be waiting in the St. John’s Chapel.

  Before he left them, Lynley asked the man if his deacon had been colour blind. Spencer reassured them that Ian Druitt was not, as far as he knew. He’d certainly never donned the wrong vestments. And that would indicate he saw colours normally, wouldn’t it? he asked.

  Did the vicar know that Druitt had ostensibly used a red stole to hang himself? Lynley wanted to know.

  Spencer did not. And he wouldn’t have noticed a red stole missing, as the next time it was worn would be Pentecost, which hadn’t yet arrived. After that, the vicar left them to it.

  “We know Druitt was finishing up a service when Ruddock arrived to arrest him,” Lynley said quietly when they were alone. “We also know that he removed his vestments and stowed them prior to setting off.”

  “Does a deacon do evensong in full fig?” Havers asked. “Does a vicar, for that matter?”