“I think she is.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“I don’t know a single thing for sure. I don’t blame you if you’re unwilling to take me at my word, but it’s all I have to give you.”
It appeared to be enough for the moment—that pathetic “word” she was offering him—and he went on his way to Blists Hill to work. He told her he would ring Rabiah. Over and over if that’s what it took.
Forty minutes later, she heard a car stop in front of the house. She hurried to the window in time to see Timothy get out of it. He paused to lean his head against its roof.
She went to the door. They opened it simultaneously: he from the outside on the top step, she from the inside in the silence of the entry. Because she was looking for it without wanting to look for it, she saw the blood. It speckled the left shoulder of his shirt, the right sleeve of it as well.
“A policeman was sent to Rabiah,” she told him. “He asked her for a picture of you.”
He looked utterly ragged. “I took care of things.” He headed towards the stairs.
She planted herself in front of him and said, “What have you done?”
“I just told you.”
“You must tell me. Did you hurt someone?”
The look he gave her was so contemptuous that she took a backwards step from it. “No more than Missa’s been hurt,” was his answer. He pushed past her and went up the stairs.
She shut the front door. Above her, she could hear him walk into the bathroom. She heard the water running into the basin, too briefly for him to do anything but fill the glass he kept next to the cold-water tap. She dashed up the stairs. She knew exactly what he was planning to do, but she swore to herself that he would not do it now. They were meant to talk to each other.
She was too late. He’d managed to get more pills and he was shaking two of them into his palm. She knocked them from his hand, crying, “Talk to me!”
He didn’t react other than to shake two more into his hand. His fist clenched over them in such a way that she knew she wouldn’t be able to wrest them from him.
“We’ve talked enough,” he said to her. He slapped his palm against his mouth, downed the two pills, and left her.
She followed him to their bedroom, crying, “Why are you doing this? One daughter dead, another sodomised, a third afraid to come home, and this is what you do? I come to you. I beg you. I need you. All of us need you and this is your response?”
Timothy said nothing. He let the silence go on as if with the wish that she would be able to hear what she herself had said. Which she could not, of course, because what she’d said was no longer there. Which was, of course, the problem with speaking at all.
“You think that everything”—he gestured in the direction of the bathroom, by which she knew he meant his pills—“started with Janna. You see everything rolling along nicely in our family until her illness. We didn’t cope with that well, did we, and then she died, and in your eyes we coped even worse.”
“You did everything you could not to feel. You still do anything not to feel.”
“No,” he said. “I did not do everything and anything. But it seems that way, because in your eyes there is only one way to grieve and that’s your way. What’s gone wrong with us—you, me, the girls—is contained in your belief that you have some mystical power over everything that you consider an ‘aspect’ of your life. And the biggest ‘aspect’ of your life is every person in it and every circumstance that occurs.”
“What a terrible thing to say to me when my entire life has been devoted—”
“Your life has been devoted to manipulating everyone in it. You haven’t seen any of us as people. You’ve seen only how you could play us like chess pieces. But you can’t look at that because if you saw it, you’d have to do what you want me to do and what you think I don’t do: grieve and feel and . . . I don’t know . . . howl at the moon at night in sheer rage because of what’s happened and how it’s all gone wrong.”
“Blame me, then. Make me at fault. Because if I am, it’s so much easier for you to walk away from us all and live with yourself afterwards.”
He frowned. He rubbed his forehead. He tapped his fingers hard against it. “Yas,” he said, “this isn’t about fault. This is just what is.” He went to the bed then. He lay upon it, turning his back to her. Within a minute, he was asleep.
And she was left with what she was left with: words forming accusations, accusations demanding guilt, guilt demanding reparation.
LUDLOW
SHROPSHIRE
When Lynley rang him that morning, Ruddock at once asked about the boys. “One of the Shrewsbury officers stopped at the station to use a computer yesterday,” he explained. “He told me what happened. I tried to get on to the Freemans half the night, but they’re not answering calls. Are the boys all right? Is Finn all right?”
“My sergeant was at the hospital with the family most of the afternoon,” Lynley said. “This is Finn’s family. We’d like to speak to you.”
“Jesus. You’re not thinking I attacked those two?”
“The attacker’s been described, and he had reason. Or at least we presume that’s what he believed.”
“What kind of reason—”
“That’s what we’d like to talk to you about. Shall we come to you? We’re happy to do that.”
No, no. Ruddock said he would meet them at the station as they’d done before. Could they give him thirty minutes . . . ?
They could give him fifteen, Lynley told him. If that wasn’t possible, they were going to have to come to him. They would need his address.
He’d be there in fifteen minutes, Ruddock said. Lynley admitted to himself that over the phone Ruddock sounded normal: open about his attempts to ring the Freemans, speaking easily about the boys, ready to be helpful.
Once the crime scene team had allowed it on the previous day, Lynley and Dena Donaldson had done a search of Bruce Castle’s room to find the clothing that she had thrown at him. Luckily, Bruce had merely kicked both the skirt and the top under the bed. Unluckily, they had lain there among various puffs of slut’s wool ever since. Unluckier still, months had passed since Missa Lomax had worn the clothes, and during that time they’d not only been hung in Ding’s clothes cupboard without protection, but they’d also been handled by Ding herself, along with Brutus—or at least his feet. But Lynley had a feeling they might come in useful, so when he and Ding had located them, he placed them in an evidence bag supplied by SOCO.
During this time, a photograph of the Lomax family had been fetched from Rabiah Lomax and shown to Ding. She was openly reluctant to identify Missa’s father as the man who had beaten both Finn and Brutus. She said, “It’s only that I saw him for maybe . . . I don’t know . . . five seconds?” but when they explained that there would no doubt be fingerprints on the fire poker as well as on the front door, she was able to see that her word alone wasn’t what was going to make or break an arrest of the man who’d assaulted her housemates. So then it was merely a nod, and “I feel that bad about it, see.”
Then Ding’s mother had showed up to fetch her to Much Wenlock, crying, “Ding! Oh, Ding! When I think what might have happened to you as well . . . ,” and hugged her and kissed her and escorted her to the car she’d driven. She said, “Thank you,” with a fervency that suggested she believed Lynley had done something to save the day when all the day saving had actually been accomplished by Ding herself. Had she not arrived at the house in Temeside when she had, one of the two boys probably would be dead.
He’d returned to the hotel at that point. He not only wanted to wait in order to hear from Havers and be told exactly what they were dealing with, but he also wanted to think. Barbara had certainly been right in her assessment of Gary Ruddock, but in the absence of compelling evidence, he had to consider how they were going to pin anything on
him.
When Havers returned from Shrewsbury, she’d shared all the details she’d amassed from the hospital. They were few enough, as Finnegan Freeman remained unconscious. Brutus, on the other hand, had been able to describe the bloke he’d encountered as he’d left his room on the way to the loo. “Sounds like Timothy Lomax again,” Lynley commented.
He told her about Ding’s identifying Lomax as the man who’d entered their house. Thanks to an observant neighbour called Keegan, he said, they had the fire poker that had been used on both boys. Tossed over the wall that blocked access to the weir near to the Ludford Bridge, he told her. SOCO had collected it for fingerprinting.
Back at the hotel, they’d agreed to sleep on everything and meet in the morning. They would go to the police station then to learn why there had reportedly been no evidence on the undergarments of a girl who had been sexually assaulted.
Thus, they made their way there, within the time frame that Lynley had given Ruddock over the phone. The PCSO showed up within moments of their own arrival. He was well groomed, neatly dressed as usual, and he looked well rested.
Lynley removed the evidence bag from his own car. He saw Ruddock’s gaze flick to it, but the PCSO voiced no questions. He nodded to them both, unlocked the station, and said, “Coffee?”
They both accepted. It would give them time to study the man. Had he not offered, they would have made the request anyway.
In the erstwhile lunchroom, they chose the two plastic chairs available. Lynley put the evidence bag on one of them; Havers hung her lumpy shoulder bag from the back of the other. Then she said, “I’ll just fetch . . . ?” and took herself off to retrieve the desk chair from the office in which Ian Druitt had died. When she rolled it into the lunchroom, she did so wearing the latex gloves that Lynley had instructed her to don.
Ruddock had busied himself with the Nescafé, the mugs, the appropriate accompaniments of sugar and, with apologies, a powdered substance that he called “whitener,” at which point he turned with a smile. The smile disappeared when he saw the latex gloves on Havers.
Lynley said in a disciplinary fashion, “Sergeant, you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Fingerprints, DNA, the whole bit,” Havers replied stoutly. “If he sat in this chair, there’ll be evidence of it and evidence is what we need.”
Ruddock said, “D’you mean Ian Druitt? He didn’t sit in it. It was a plastic one was in the office, like I said before when you asked me about the SOCO pictures.”
“Let’s lay that aside for the moment,” Lynley said to Havers.
“With those scuff marks smeared on the floor? With what we know now? You’re joking, Inspector.”
“C’n I ask what’s going on?” Ruddock at last looked wary.
“Just sit for a moment,” Lynley said to Barbara. “We’ll get to things as they come.”
She said huffily, “Oh too bloody right.” She sat, not in the desk chair but on the plastic one. First, however, she took her shoulder bag from the plastic chair and removed her notebook and pencil. Lynley changed the location of the evidence bag from his chair to the table. Ruddock’s eyes flicked to the bag, then away from it.
He said, “Something’s happened. If you lot want my help, you’re going to have to tell me what it is. All I know is that yesterday Finn Freeman and that other boy—”
“Brutus,” Havers said. “He had his arm broken by some bloke shouting that his daughter’d been raped. He reckoned one of the two boys did it: Brutus or Finn.”
“Why’d he reckon that, for God’s sake?”
“Because it happened in the house.”
“Jesus. When?”
“In December. After exams, this was. Binge drinking going on up in Quality Square that had to be dealt with cause the neighbours were complaining like they do. Everyone pissed to brainlessness. Since you carted the group to Temeside, I s’pose you remember?”
Ruddock said, “I’ve dumped that lot in Temeside easy a dozen times since autumn. If someone’s saying I did the same that night, I probably did.”
“This night was rather different,” Lynley said, “because Ding ran off. Dena Donaldson, this is. That left the rest of them: Finn, Brutus, and a girl who didn’t live there but who also didn’t want to go home drunk. She’s the girl who was raped. She told Ding about it but no one else, at least not at first. Please sit down, Mr. Ruddock.”
“The coffee . . . ?”
“I think I’ll forgo it. Barbara?”
“As well.” She tapped her pencil against her notebook. She’d opened it to a pristine page.
Ruddock took no chances with pouring the coffee. Hands shaking? Could be, but it was difficult to tell. He said, “I’ll do the same, then,” and sat in the rolling desk chair. It moved a bit. He braced his feet on the floor.
“That would be why it had to be plastic,” Havers noted to Lynley, indicating Ruddock’s feet. “But we reckoned that earlier, eh?”
“We did,” he replied.
Ruddock said nothing. One of his feet tapped on the floor, but when he seemed to realise that Havers had her gaze fixed upon his shoes, he stopped. He said, “I’ve my rounds to do this morning, so how can I help you just now?”
Points for bravado, Lynley thought. He said, “Aside from Ding, the raped girl told Ian Druitt about what happened that night. She saw Druitt a number of times—”
“Seven times, sir,” Havers put in.
“—and it took a bit for him to get the story from her as she’d been seeing him for another reason entirely. After what happened, she’d wanted to end her enrollment in the college, not returning for the spring term. She’d been talked out of that by her parents, but her coursework began to suffer, which, through various means that we don’t need to go into here, brought her to Mr. Druitt’s attention.”
Ruddock nodded. “That makes sense. He was a sympathetic ear from what I’ve heard.”
“Hmm. Yes.” Lynley took the evidence bag, removing it from the table and setting it on the floor.
Havers said, “We spoke to the girl as well, Gary. Yesterday, this was. It was a rough go for her, but as she’d finally told her parents what happened, it made things a bit easier for her to talk about it to us. Now, in the general course of things, you wouldn’t expect—all those months later when she told Ian Druitt about the rape—that there would be any evidence of it. I mean, there’d be sod all on her body and everything else would be compromised from here to Jerusalem, if you know what I mean. Only . . . see, this girl’d never been drunk before that night and she was ashamed cause she thought she’d brought the rape on herself. So she wanted a reminder—although you ask me, it was more like a . . . what’s one of those things that religious fanatics beat themselves up with, sir?”
“A scourge,” Lynley said, his gaze fastened on Ruddock. “A cat-o’-nine-tails. That sort of thing.”
“Right,” Havers said. “But she didn’t have a real scourge, did she? And anyway, people would’ve noticed if she started going round with blood seeping through her T-shirts and all that from using scourges on the back like people do. So she kept the underwear she was wearing that night, just like it was. She put it in a drawer and—although she didn’t say this to us—I expect she brought it out now and then to give it a look just to remind herself what a tart, scrubber, minge bag, cow, or whatever she’d been that night. Some girls do that, you know. And this girl? Seems like she was brought up to do it.”
“She gave her underthings to Ian Druitt,” Lynley said. “When he reported back to her, it was to say that he’d been told there was no evidence on them.”
“Which we reckon accounts for all those phone calls between you and the deacon,” Havers said. “Sympathetic bloke like you said he was, he’d want to bring someone to justice if that person had raped this girl like she claimed. So he’d ring you to see where the forensic exam of her knickers an
d tights had got to. You’d tell him at first that there was no news, but he’d keep ringing, wouldn’t he? Eventually you would have to say too bad, so sad and all the rest. And because you’re an officer of law, Gary—because that is what you bloody are, right?—Ian Druitt would assume you were telling the truth, which meant that either the girl had cooked up the whole story for some reason or it had actually happened, leaving no evidence. And in either case, no matter what she said to anyone else after Druitt, it would have been her word against the word of whoever it was did this to her, especially if there wasn’t any proof. Like you said, I mean.”
“What she didn’t tell Ian Druitt, however,” Lynley added, “was this, Gary: While the undergarments were hers, the outer garments belonged to someone else. And that person—for all these months—kept them quite safe. She gave them to us yesterday.” He touched his fingers to the evidence bag.
“We reckon the rapist’s DNA is on them,” Havers said. “What’s your opinion on the matter, Gary? We’d like to have it from you. We’ve sorted Druitt’s death, by the way. Sir?”
And Lynley gave him the caution, slowly and clearly. Ruddock offered no reaction to this aside from fingers tightening on the arms of the desk chair.
Lynley said to him, “Ian Druitt knew the identity of the girl who’d been raped. He knew about the evidence she’d kept. He passed that evidence on to you and then he relied upon you to do what you were meant to do.”
“Which,” Havers added, “would have been to log it in, put it into the system, send it off for an analysis that was going to show—”
“I had to protect him,” Ruddock broke in. “I was told to protect him. I’d’ve lost my job if I didn’t protect him.”
“Are you talking about Finnegan Freeman?” Lynley asked.
“She asked me directly he came to Ludlow just to keep an eye out, so what could I do? Say no to the deputy chief constable? How could I do that? Would you do that? Would anyone? So when I found out . . . when Druitt told me what happened inside that house . . . I did what I could.”
The Punishment She Deserves Page 72
