The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  Rabiah said to her, “Why would I tell him? What must you think of your grandmother even to consider the idea?”

  “It’s only that if he knew about it all . . . I mean, I can see how you would think he might not want to marry me then.”

  “I would think that? How absurd.”

  “Mum, then.”

  “Equally absurd. If we know nothing else about life in general and our family in particular, we do know that Justin is devoted to you, has always been, will always be. And this includes your mother, Missa, despite what you might think of everything she’s done regarding you, Justin, your marriage, university, and God knows what else. His love for you has never been in question. Perhaps in your own eyes? Never in ours.”

  Rabiah could tell that Missa took this in and thought about it during their drive from Ludlow. That had always been one of her strongest characteristics, as well as one of her weakest: She considered what other people thought, even when she should entirely dismiss what other people thought.

  Knowing her daughter-in-law as she did, Rabiah expected Yasmina to come dashing from the house the moment she and Missa arrived. She reckoned Yasmina would have been watching from a window. Indeed, she thought she caught a glimpse of her as she pulled up in front of the house. But she did not come out, and when Rabiah rang the bell it was Timothy who answered the door.

  He took Missa into his arms. For a moment. Missa stood statuelike, but then she returned the embrace. Arm round her shoulder, Timothy led her inside. He said, “Thanks, Mum,” and Rabiah followed them.

  Yasmina was in the sitting room, closer to the kitchen than she was to the entry. She held out a hand towards Missa but she dropped it quickly as if determined not to give the wrong impression.

  Unsurprisingly, knowing the child as Rabiah did, Missa said, “I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve caused.”

  Which was enough to move Yasmina forward although she still seemed hesitant. She said, “Not one thing in all of this can be laid at your feet. I want you to see that.”

  Missa made no reply to this. She seemed confused by her mother’s words. She looked first to her father, then to Rabiah.

  There was silence then. Into it, Rabiah’s mobile rang. She frowned at the number, which she did not recognise. She answered with a quiet, “What is it?” and heard the voice of the Scotland Yard detective, speaking about the assault upon Missa, the arrest of Ludlow’s PCSO for the crime, and the death of Clover Freeman, who was one of the PCSO’s superior officers. Although she had questions aplenty, she did not ask Inspector Lynley. She merely said, “Thank you. I’ve brought Missa to Ironbridge. Do you need her?” He said he didn’t think so, at least not just yet, but he would be in touch.

  Everyone’s gaze was upon her as Rabiah returned her mobile to her bag. She said to Missa, “The police community support officer in Ludlow has been arrested by the Met detectives. He was the one, my dear.” She did not look at Timothy as she spoke. Whatever he had done on the previous day, they would have to deal with it later. He did drop his arm from Missa’s shoulder at that, though. He walked to the sofa and there he sat, his hands dangling limply between his legs.

  Missa said to her grandmother, “The night it happened, when I was drunk . . . He was who took us home. But he left, Gran. We thought . . . I thought he’d gone to fetch Ding. She’d made him so angry. She wouldn’t do what he said. I thought when she ran, he went after her.”

  “Perhaps he did, but I don’t expect he found her. He came back at some point and entered the house.”

  “I shouldn’t even have been there. I shouldn’t have been drunk.”

  Yasmina said, “You’ve just laid this at your own feet, Missa. Do not do that.”

  “I knew better, Mum.”

  “What you knew was that your exams were completed, and you were meant to have a nice evening.”

  Missa lowered her head. It was as if she couldn’t take in—let alone accept—what her mother was trying to tell her.

  Yasmina closed the distance between them. “Missa, can you bear to look at your mum? If you can’t, looking at me is not required. But I hope you’ll listen.” She didn’t wait for a sign from her daughter before she continued. “I wish to hand you your life. With an open heart, I do so want to do that. I ask only one thing in return if you can manage it: that you forgive me one day. Not now. I don’t even want that now because if you give forgiveness now, it will be given because you think you’re meant to please me when in the deepest part of your heart you know that you aren’t, which is what you’ve tried to tell me for so long. The sins I committed against you, Missa, were committed out of love, and I hope you will see that someday. But make no mistake, because I make none when I say this to you: the things I did and said and wanted and insisted upon? They were sins all the same.”

  “Mum, I never meant . . .”

  “Faced with the mummy you’ve had for all of your life?” Yasmina said. “Believe me, Missa, you did what you needed to do.”

  Yasmina held out her hands to Missa. Rabiah silently urged the girl to take them, to make just one move to let her mother know that something of what they’d never had as mother and daughter might be constructed between them now. She did not do so. Instead she said, “C’n I ring Justie?”

  Yasmina lowered her hands but her expression remained open, willing, and loving. She said, “Justin will be relieved if you ring him. Ask him to come for you if you would like that.”

  Still, Missa looked as if she needed more permission. She glanced at her father. He nodded. She glanced at Rabiah, who said, “He’s that anxious for your call, Missa.”

  “Shall I ask him to fetch Sati home, then, Gran?”

  Yasmina was the one to reply. “Only if Sati wishes to come.”

  Missa left them, then. Rabiah waited till she heard her footsteps on the stairs and, after a moment, her bedroom door close. She herself said nothing to her son and his wife. She merely waited for what needed to be said, and she prayed that there was enough courage left in the family for the words to be given voice.

  Timothy rose from the sofa. He said to her, “I expect one of them gave you a card when they spoke to you?”

  “The woman did,” Rabiah said. “The detective sergeant.”

  He nodded and held out his hand. “I’ll ring her, then.”

  “When they asked for the photo, there was nothing I could—”

  “That’s down to me, Mum,” Timothy said. “It’s time I got myself sorted, wouldn’t you say? Whatever step’s meant to be taken now, I’m the one meant to be taking it.”

  WORCESTER

  HEREFORDSHIRE

  Once the Met police left Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, Trevor had rung Clover’s mobile again and again with the same result. He’d also begun ringing Gaz Ruddock, but there was no joy to be had doing that either.

  He’d kept all of this from Finn. After the London detectives had put in their appearance at the door to his son’s room, Trevor had determined to remain with Finn until he could work out not only what was happening but also that the boy was safe in every way, one of which was safe from being interviewed. As the hours had passed, though, it became progressively more difficult for him to remain calm. Something was happening, or surely Clover would have rung him to reply to his many calls to her. That she hadn’t done so thrust Trevor into a morass of terrifying suppositions. When his mobile finally rang late in the evening, he grabbed it up and headed for the doorway to the corridor. Finn was dozing, and he wanted nothing to awaken the boy.

  His caller turned out to be the same London detective who’d come to the hospital in search of Clover. He asked Trevor’s whereabouts first and then requested a meeting with him in Worcester. To Trevor’s reply that he was still in Shrewsbury with Finn, the man said that their encounter needed to be in Worcester, at his home. Was there still an officer in the corridor outside Finnegan’s door? the ma
n enquired. To Trevor’s affirmative reply, the detective then pointed out that Finn would be safe.

  “I’ve not been able to reach Clover,” Trevor told him.

  That was, Inspector Lynley told him, the reason he wished to speak to him in Worcester. He himself was, along with his sergeant, at police headquarters in Hindlip. They’d just finished up a meeting with the chief constable. DCC Freeman had not been at headquarters, by the way. As things had developed, she’d gone from Shrewsbury to the Long Mynd.

  “What the devil?” Trevor said. “Are you saying she went gliding?”

  Lynley, however, wasn’t saying anything other than to express his intention of speaking further to Trevor in Worcester. When could Mr. Freeman manage to get there? he asked politely.

  So there was little choice if Trevor wanted more information.

  The two London officers were waiting for him when he arrived. They were in a car that looked nothing at all like something any police officer ought to be driving. He might have remarked upon the vintage motor had not he at once clocked the expression on the officers’ faces.

  He turned his head away, trying to ward off what was to come. He led them to the front door and inside the house. He switched on lights in the entry. He did the same in the sitting room. He went to the cabinet in which they kept spirits. He opened it, stared at its contents, and wondered what he would imbibe that might obliterate the reality he was about to face.

  They waited, the Met detectives. When he turned from the cabinet, they were both watching him with a gravity he would not be able to dispel with a drink, with questions, with a report about Finn’s progress, with anything. So he said because he knew what was coming, “How?”

  “Her glider crashed almost at once when it was launched,” Lynley said.

  “Someone did something to it?”

  “She released it too soon from the launching cable,” Havers said. “She’d seen me, Mr. Freeman. She understood why we were there.”

  “I’m very sorry,” this from Lynley.

  “Was she . . . ?”

  “She lived briefly after the crash, but not long enough to speak. Would you like to sit down?”

  “Finn. I must . . .” He was suddenly angry. “This is why I had to come home? You couldn’t be bothered to come to Shrewsbury to tell me so I wouldn’t have to leave my son alone? It was so sodding important that . . . Why? What are you saying about my wife?”

  They seemed to be willing to give him a moment, and he took it. He needed to do so because the walls shimmered, and the spot where their family photos were hanging suddenly went to black in his vision. One of the two officers took his arm. When he regained his sight, he saw it was Lynley, who urged him to sit.

  The London detective began speaking then. Trevor had no choice but to listen. He tried to tell himself that everything had been unknown to him. But wasn’t the truth that early on he’d known without wanting to ask directly?

  They spared him nothing. When Lynley paused, the woman Havers continued. So by the end of the recitation, he knew what Gaz Ruddock had done to the girl inside Finn’s house in December, what he’d managed to persuade Clover into believing about the crime, how this related to the unfortunate Ian Druitt and to vital evidence and to an orchestrated arrest and an orchestrated suicide and all of it done because Clover Freeman could not believe that her son might have been not only innocent but also ignorant of the crime that had occurred on a night when he and his mates were drunk.

  When they laid out for him what he thought was every possible horror, they ended with what he did not expect. “We’ve searched the glider and the vehicle she took to the airfield,” Lynley said. “We’ve had a team going through all the buildings up there as well. CC Wyatt gave us access to her office, and we’ve done a search there. This—the house here—is our last hope of finding what we’ve been looking for.”

  He hadn’t been married to Clover for more than twenty years to miss the detective’s intention. He said, “Why the hell would she keep evidence here? That doesn’t make sense if she believed Finn . . .” But then he saw that, to Clover, it would have made perfect sense if she believed Finn had assaulted the girl.

  “With your permission, we’d like to have a look round,” Lynley said.

  It took them more than three hours. Trevor wouldn’t have thought it possible for a search of the premises to require that much time, but they were as meticulous as they were thorough. They found what they were looking for, at long last, in the attic. Clover had kept the girl’s tights and underwear in the evidence bag into which they’d been placed by Ruddock. She’d buried them in a cardboard box, among Finn’s baby clothes. The irony of her choice was not lost on Trevor.

  He said dully, “We’d always hoped . . . ,” but there was no point in completing the thought. So instead he said to the officers, “How can you use this? Now, I mean?”

  Lynley seemed to understand the implication because his reply was, “The chain of evidence is destroyed, of course. Your wife and Ruddock both saw to that. But the DNA on here will, we believe, put a full stop to the matter, especially when it comes to your son.”

  Havers added with a gesture towards the bag, “Once he knows we have this—with his DNA and not Finn’s on it—Ruddock’ll have something of a job explaining things. Especially as the girl in question isn’t one he ever had anything to do with before that night. She’d never even been drunk, so she’d never been carted off by him, so she’d never been one of the girls who let him into her knickers to avoid being taken home to her parents. Under other circumstances he could have used that to excuse the DNA, you see.”

  “Are you saying Ruddock didn’t know the girl he assaulted?”

  “Yes,” Lynley said. “That’s what we think.”

  Havers put in, “He was dead cheesed off at Ding Donaldson, see. He went back to the house later, saw a girl on the sitting-room sofa, and since it was so dark he either thought it was Ding and he meant to punish her for running off or he didn’t care one way or the other who he did it to, as long as he did it to someone.”

  Trevor took this in. He knew he ought to be experiencing something at this point—anything, really—but all of it was simply too much. He could barely feel his limbs when he moved, let alone feel his emotions.

  He said, “I don’t know how I’ll tell Finn. Am I meant to say that right to her death his mum intended to have some kind of power over him? Right to her death, she saw him as a rapist?”

  Lynley seemed to consider the possibilities before he replied with, “You might tell him she was human, as we all are. You might say that she believed something false that she was told by the PCSO and from that mistaken judgement on her part, everything else came.”

  “Why would she believe Gaz Ruddock and not her own son?” Trevor asked. He directed the question to himself, really, and he went on to give himself the answer as well. “She was afraid to ask him directly, wasn’t she? She could tell at that point he wasn’t about to be the person she wanted him to be, and since she didn’t know who he was in the first place . . . It was easy enough for Gaz Ruddock to tell her. Christ. Christ.” Trevor’s voice broke.

  “Will you be all right here by yourself, Mr. Freeman?” The woman, Havers, was the one to ask this.

  He got himself together so that he could answer and then act. He said, “I won’t be alone. I’m going back to the hospital to be with Finn.”

  IRONBRIDGE

  SHROPSHIRE

  Yasmina was grateful that her mother-in-law remained. Once Timothy had made the phone call to the Scotland Yard detectives, once he’d been told that a patrol car would be sent to fetch him, once that car had come and he’d been taken, Rabiah’s iron self-control had deserted her. Ages of grief had poured out of the woman. Every why she had never voiced demanded a reply that Yasmina could not give her.

  Sati and Justin had not arrived till after Timoth
y had been taken, so there was a small blessing in that as Sati did not have to watch her father being arrested. As it was, she came into the house tentatively enough, as if fearing the worst from every quarter, and Yasmina’s heart grew sore when she saw the child’s expression and her reflexive step to hide behind Justin.

  As for Justin, he’d entered in a state that said he was more than ready to know exactly what was occurring in the Lomax family. He’d said, “It’s time you lot made a few things clear,” in a tone that declared he’d had enough of them all.

  Yasmina couldn’t blame him, but she said nothing, and at that point Rabiah was not present. Missa was, though, and she said, “It’s down to me, Justie. Can we go for a walk?”

  That left Yasmina with Sati, the two of them watching each other across a chasm that only one of them was meant to breach. Yasmina said to her, “I have failed you, Sati. But from this day, no more.”

  Sati watched her, not quite comprehending. Yasmina could see her confusion in her lovely eyes and how they moved in her face, directing her gaze towards avenues of escape. She—Yasmina—had bought and paid for this reaction. She said to her, “Sati, listen to me. I want to hand your life to you.”

  Sati drew in on her lower lip.

  “I hit you . . .” Yasmina stopped herself. “No, that isn’t what I did. I punched you in anger. It happened in an instant and I have to tell you that I meant to do it. In that moment I wanted to hurt you. I thought if I did that you would see . . . I don’t even know now what I thought you would see. That I’m right? That you’re wrong? Who knows any longer. But what I did? It was viciously wrong and I have no excuse. And I tell you now that I will never attempt to come up with one. When you are years older and you remind me what I did for whatever reason that you remind me? Know in this moment, Sati, that as long as I have my actual wits about me, I will never deny what I did nor will I ever say that it was excusable.”

  Yasmina knew that what she was saying was probably too much for any twelve-year-old girl to take in, especially a twelve-year-old girl who’d been through as much as Sati had been through in the last two years of her young life. But these things needed to be said if they were ever to make the start they needed to make to repair their lives.