The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  ROYAL SHREWSBURY HOSPITAL

  NR SHELTON

  SHROPSHIRE

  That they made it to Royal Shrewsbury Hospital in astounding time was owing to Clover’s getting them there in a patrol car. She’d commandeered an officer who was happy to go at the road as if the devil were on his tail, sirens blaring and lights spinning. He’d barely braked at the entrance to casualty before they were out of the car and bounding towards the doors.

  “My son,” Trevor said to a receptionist behind the check-in counter. When she didn’t look up at once, he slapped the counter’s surface and said, “Where’s my son?”

  Then Clover was next to him and from the corner of his eye, he saw she had her police identification in her hand. She was wearing her uniform, so this seemed unnecessary. But it got them action enough when Clover said, “Deputy Chief Constable Freeman. Our son’s been assaulted in Ludlow.”

  Reception jumped to. She picked up a phone and said into it, “George, is that copper still with? The one kid’s parents are here.” Then to Clover, “Name? I mean yours.”

  Clover looked as if she wanted to reprimand the receptionist since she’d already given her name and accompanied it with her police rank, but she merely said, “Clover Freeman. Trevor Freeman. Our son is Finnegan.”

  “Freeman,” reception said into the phone. “Right. I’ll tell them.” And then to Clover, “An officer’s coming out to have a word.”

  “Why can’t we see him? What’s happened to him?”

  Trevor well understood her panic. Clover would know perfectly well that having an officer come out to “have a word” was how the worst possible news was passed along to the parents of a youthful victim.

  It was probably only two minutes that they had to wait, but time slowed as it does in the midst of a nightmare. Then the last person he expected to see came from within the depths of the hospital. It was the woman detective sergeant from the Met, Havers. She carried a notebook as if with the intention of interviewing them, which Trevor knew that Clover would not countenance.

  She joined them, saying, “He’s alive,” for which Trevor was so grateful he thought his knees would give out.

  “What happened?” Clover asked. “How bad is he?”

  “Not sure how bad his injuries are.” Her tone sounded as if she was making an attempt to be quite careful with what she told them. “As to what happened, it looks like a break-in. My guv’s with the girl who rang it in and there’s another officer there as well.”

  “Gaz Ruddock?” Clover asked.

  Havers knitted her brow as if the question were not only unexpected but also revealing. She said, “Not Ruddock. It’s the patrol officer who got called from the centre. I’ve been talking to the other lad—This is the housemate. Know him, do you?—and from what he’s said he got attacked by some bloke swinging a fire poker or a tyre iron, he’s not sure which. He reckons someone got into the house by means of the front door not being locked.”

  “Christ. Why won’t they lock that bloody door?” Trevor cried.

  “Kids. Yeah. Well. It wasn’t a break-in in the usual sense. The boy—” She glanced at her notebook—“Bruce Castle he’s called. He came out of his room to use the loo and this bloke started swinging the poker thing at him. He lifted his arm to protect himself like you do, and that was that. His arm was smashed. He yelled for your son to ring 999 but before that could happen, the intruder had got into your boy’s bedroom and was on him.” She lifted her head, and for a moment Trevor thought she was finished. But instead she seemed to study them intently before she added, “Bruce says this bloke was shouting about someone getting his daughter drunk, stripping her, then raping . . .”

  Trevor heard nothing after raping. He looked at Clover. For a moment his ears were filled with roaring as a number of what had appeared to be disparate pieces slid into place. This was what Clover had been intent upon hiding. This was what she must have learned at some point on the twenty-sixth of February. This would demand any number of phone calls between Gaz and her. This is what she had been dealing with ever since.

  Trevor came round as Clover was saying, “. . . talked about a daughter? So the intruder was an older man? Was Bruce able to give you a description?”

  “Fairly good one. I reckon he’ll recognise the bloke when we bring him in.”

  “You know who it was.” Clover spoke sharply.

  Havers waited a moment before replying, as if assessing Clover’s tone. “Since the bloke was shouting about his daughter being raped, I reckon once we know who the daughter is, we’ll know the attacker.”

  Trevor got himself together enough to say, “Are you saying my son—our son—”

  “Have you taken a statement from Finnegan yet?”

  “Emergency staff are still working on him.”

  “And the girl who made the call?”

  “Like I said, my guv’s with her. She’s the girl who lives there as well.”

  “Did she—”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Clover cut him off, and Trevor felt the anger like a band round his forehead that tightened and tightened, not only at this public slighting of him but also at his allowing this sort of thing to happen again and again, resulting in where they were at the moment. Clover added, “May I ask how you happened to be on the scene?”

  Again that unnerving pause, in which the sergeant tapped her pencil against her notebook. Trevor became aware of the life of A & E going on round them: another trolley being rushed through the corridor, a white-coated Indian woman calling out from a doorway for a series of drugs and procedures.

  Havers finally said, “My guv and I had gone to interview the girl. Dena. Called Ding? D’you know her?”

  “About the rape?” Trevor asked.

  “We’ve met her,” Clover said, “but we don’t know her well. She wasn’t also attacked, was she?”

  “She wasn’t at home when it started. It was all going on when she got there.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant.” And then with a turn to Trevor, she said, “Darling, let’s have a word with the staff.”

  She took his arm, and they walked back towards the reception counter with Trevor saying tersely, “Darling, let’s have a word? That’s the bloody conversational conclusion that seems reasonable to you?”

  She drew him to one side, quite near to the wall. She spoke in a voice that sounded low with fury. “I have no intention of getting into anything here, and neither should you have. We need to know what happened and—”

  “We just got bloody told what happened: Someone got into Finnegan’s house, and that someone believes his daughter was raped. Or did you miss that part?” When she looked away from him, he wanted to force her somehow to meet his gaze. Instead he said, “This is what you’ve been protecting him from, isn’t it? For months now, you and Gaz. You think Finnegan set out to get a girl drunk and when he had her completely defenseless, he raped her. You actually believe our son—”

  She whirled to him. “Stop it,” she hissed. “Stop it, just stop. Do you have any idea how often it happens? There you are in your precious fitness centre with absolutely no clue what goes on in the rest of the world. Well, let me tell you: This is going on everywhere. Brainless girls drinking too much and brainless boys taking advantage of that. Sometimes it’s only drink involved and sometimes it’s more. Sometimes it’s something slipped into the drink to speed things along. Do you not understand that?”

  “What I understand is that you appear to see Finn as someone who could do this in the first place.”

  “I see it because it happens!” She spoke fiercely, and her expression told Trevor she’d be happy enough to beat her point into his head with her fists. “Perfectly nice boys talk to other perfectly nice boys and they cook up a plan or they see this sort of thing reported on the Internet and they think, Shall we give it a try? So they take a decision and they don’t th
ink there might actually be consequences because boys that age never think there might be consequences to anything they do. And when they do something like this, something that’s completely beyond the pale like this, and it’s reported, then their lives are shattered. I’m talking about his life, Trevor, Finnegan’s life. Do you understand now? We—you and I, his parents—can’t lift a finger to protect him if he’s charged with this. We can find him a solicitor and we can make absolutely bloody sure—if he will even let us, which is seriously open to doubt as it has always been—that he will not say a word to anyone else when he’s alone with them. But that’s it. And if there’s evidence involved in what he’s been accused of—because, believe me, there is no girl alive who wants to be sodomised, so there will be evidence—then a solicitor means nothing because there is also no solicitor alive who can fight DNA no matter how good he is.”

  Trevor had heard it all without hearing because everything halted when she said the word sodomised. She apparently read his reaction on his face because she said, “Yes. That’s what happened. Are you happy to know it?”

  “How the hell . . .” Trevor licked his lips. They were dry as stones. “How the hell do you know all this. Christ, Clover, did Finn tell you?”

  She looked beyond him, to the wall, before she replied. Then it was to say, “Ian Druitt turned evidence over to Gaz.”

  “Druitt?”

  “Druitt. Now do you see what we’re dealing with?”

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Once the patrol officer had left to fetch the photographs for Inspector Lynley from Mrs. Lomax, the detective took Ding upstairs to gather what she would need for a few days at home. She knew that her mother would be hurtling down from Much Wenlock in order to cart her back to Cardew Hall, and she understood that she was going to have to cooperate as fully as she could with the detective in order to escape having to live there permanently. So she would look at the photos fetched from Missa’s gran and if Missa’s dad was in any of them, Ding was going to have to point to him if indeed he was the person who’d broken Brutus’s arm and mangled Finn’s head. As for Cardew Hall itself, it wasn’t as if a sudden understanding of her nightmare reaction to the place had altered anything. She still had come upon her father’s naked body strung up to a bedpost. She still had buried everything inside her head and for years acted as she’d acted because of that. Having to stay there with her mum and stepdad while things were being sorted here in Ludlow was going to be bad enough. Having to live there till she got to university was something she knew she couldn’t cope with.

  Lynley instructed her to be careful and not touch anything as they went up the stairs. Everything, including every surface, he said, held potential evidence. Inside, he asked her to look round first to see if anything had been disturbed. When she told him that it looked the way it always looked, he handed her a pair of latex gloves and said that she could take three changes of clothes. She had a duffel and as quickly as she could, she stuffed into it what she thought she might need. He waited quietly, and she could feel him watching her every move. When she glanced his way, his expression told her that although he could be compassionate, he wasn’t about to sign on as her friend.

  They went outside when she had her belongings gathered. They paused in what went for the front garden, which was just the concrete square upon which she and Brutus stood their bicycles. She was glad enough to be out of the house, but less glad when she saw that a small crowd had gathered across the street.

  A gent that Ding recognised as their next-door neighbour was among them, she saw, and he crossed over quickly as she and Lynley emerged. There was no crime scene tape yet—no one apparently had had the time or perhaps they didn’t carry it about in their cars—so he started to come onto the property. His name rose to her brain unbidden: Mr. Keegan, he was called.

  Lynley stopped him with, “This is a crime scene, sir. You’ll need to stand back across the street.”

  Mr. Keegan said that he had information. He was fertilizing his roses just over there—he indicated the next tiny plot of garden—and he saw the bloke in question making a run for it, heading in the direction of Old Street. He was carrying a stick or something, he was. Mr. Keegan couldn’t quite see as the bloke was at a distance by then and he himself wasn’t wearing his distance specs, but whatever it was the man was carrying, he well could have thrown it over the wall and into the river. It might be in the water as they spoke, and it also might be on the bank. He added, “Watch the telly, I do, so you lot might want to do a search. Not the girl, ’course. You and th’other coppers.”

  That was extremely helpful, Lynley said politely. An officer would inspect the entire area as soon as SOCO arrived.

  Mr. Keegan looked dead pleased at that, a citizen doing his duty, not to mention making a contribution to whatever the coppers intended to do to resolve what had occurred in the house.

  Ding said, when Mr. Keegan crossed back to the other pavement, presumably to watch whatever proceedings he reckoned were going to happen next, “Do you know if Finn . . . ? Will he be okay?”

  Lynley appeared to be waiting for Mr. Keegan to be among the other onlookers once again before he turned to Ding and said, “My sergeant will ring me once there’s news. Tell me about the end of term in December. Do your best not to leave anything out.”

  “But you said that Missa . . . ?”

  “We need to hear every version, Ding. Sergeant Havers will be talking to Bruce—to Brutus—at the hospital. She’ll talk to Finn as well, if he’s able.”

  “So you’ll know if someone’s lying.”

  “So we have every possible bit of information.”

  She gave him the details as she recalled them: the large gathering of college students at the Hart and Hind on a snowy night. Freezing cold, it was, but Jack Korhonen—“he’s the publican”—always put out heaters for the smokers and for the overflow as well since he wouldn’t want to lose the business. They’d arrived early enough to get a table inside—“least, Brutus got there early enough”—and Finn arrived round forty-five minutes later.

  “How did you get there?”

  Missa’s gran had arranged for a car because of the weather and all that and so they wouldn’t have to worry about getting back home at the end of the evening if they were . . . well . . . sort of lit up. Mrs. Lomax wanted Missa to have a nice time because she mostly studied and—being honest?—she’s so dead prim and proper, and it was time for her to have a bit of fun. That’s what Ding thought and it seemed to her that Mrs. Lomax thought the same.

  “I don’t think she’d ever been inside a pub,” Ding said. “Missa, I mean. Her dad’s something like a drunk, I think. She doesn’t say much about it but I got that idea and one time she said her uncle’s the same. She was way seriously concerned about how drinking might get to her as well, so she never did. Drink, I mean. Never.”

  “What was different about that night?”

  “We wanted—this is me and Brutus—we wanted her to loosen up a bit. We did it for a lark. We didn’t mean anything by it. And it wasn’t like her gran didn’t want her to live it up or whatever. She even said. Like ‘live a little’ or something. See, all Missa ever did was study, and of course her marks were super amazing because of it. And there was her boyfriend ’s well, I s’pose.”

  “A college boyfriend?”

  “Oh no, not from the college. This is her at-home boyfriend. They were meant to be taking a break from each other while she was here at college, but it didn’t work that way since he rang her, like, every day and he texted her . . . I don’t know . . . p’rhaps six times a day?”

  “How did she feel about that? Did she tell you?”

  “Not really. I know her gran wasn’t, like, totally on board with the idea of the bloke. Missa told me that, something like ‘at least I’m not at Gran’s’ one time when he rang her. It seems like everyone in her family wants he
r to . . . I don’t know . . . meet someone else? And she wasn’t going to do that, was she, if she didn’t break away from him for a while, you know?” Ding was still holding her small duffel. She set it at her feet. Then she picked it up again because she found she needed to do something with her hands and this was as good as anything. She said, “Anyway, that was part of what we wanted to do, me and Brutus. We wanted her to see there was fun to be had if she just let herself have it. So we told each other we’d have a go with cider and see if she liked it. And she did and she was on her way to having a fun evening but then Brutus kept on.”

  “‘Kept on’?”

  “Sorry. He kept on giving her cider. She would drink one and there would be another in front of her. When Finn got there, he joined in—except he was drinking Guinness, not cider—and we all got pissed out of our minds. Which is how we were when Gaz Ruddock showed up.” She twisted the canvas handles of the duffel as she recalled the evening and how it unfolded and knew how much she was responsible for and how little she wanted to be responsible for. “I think he was there to check on Finn or something like that because when Finn saw him, he got all . . . super annoyed. But then Gaz saw me and how I was and he grabbed onto me and said, Right, then, I’m taking you home to your mum ’cause it’s time she learned what you’re up to in Ludlow.”

  “Did he intend to take you home, or was this more of the usual, as you explained yesterday?”

  “I reckoned it was worse this time ’cause he talked about my mum. For things to work for him, though, he had to take everyone home since it would look dead odd if we all were pissed and he chose only me to cart off. So he grabbed the lot of us. Only there wasn’t room enough in the back seat so he put me in the front, which is how I made a run for it once we got to Temeside. The rest of them he shoved into the house—”

  “Missa as well?”

  “I expect she didn’t want to go home to her Gran in that condition only I didn’t know that, see, because I was running fast as I could away from him. I just didn’t want to have to . . . you know . . . with him.”