Verdict Unsafe

by Jill McGown

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” she said, a little surprised that her voice wasn’t shaking like her legs were. “Bobbie Chalmers can still bring charges against Drummond, and you saw him ten minutes after he had raped her. I believe you hit him because he said something that made you know he’d just raped someone. Not hints and jibes. Something much more. Something you couldn’t admit to, not after you’d lost your temper and beaten him up.”

  “Sorry,” said Matt. “You’ll have to solve your own cases, Detective Inspector. I can’t help you.” His face was still thrust into hers. “Still, you don’t need to solve cases, do you? You can make Superintendent the same way you made Inspector—on your back.”

  “That’s enough,” said Tom.

  “It’s nowhere near enough. She knows what I’m talking about.”

  “I just need something I can give my boss to persuade him that it’s worth pursuing,” Judy said.

  Matt gave a forced laugh. “Your boss?” he said. “Just keep shagging him, sweetheart, and you’ll persuade him. He’ll swallow anything you say, like he did the last time.”

  “I don’t mean Lloyd,” Judy said steadily. “I’ve got to convince DCI Case now. Do you know him?”

  Matt nodded, his eyes still six inches from hers. “The Hard Case, they call him. You’ll have your work cut out with him, darling—he hates women.”

  “He’s all for letting sleeping dogs lie,” Judy said. “So if Drummond said anything at all about Bobbie, I need to know what. He’s murdered her flatmate, Matt. I need to know.”

  Mart’s eyes widened slightly, then dropped from hers, and he sat down.

  Judy wished that she could. But dearly gained advantages had to be held. She didn’t speak, offered up a silent prayer that Tom wouldn’t, either. There was a long silence, but Matt did speak again. It wasn’t what she had wanted to hear.

  “I really can’t help you,” Matt said heavily. “Drummond didn’t say anything about the rapes. Baz told you the truth.”

  “Would you be prepared to let us take a saliva sample for DNA testing?” asked Tom again.

  “No,” said Matt.

  “Will you come to the station to answer further questions?”

  “No. You’ll have to arrest me if you want me to do that.”

  “Right,” said Judy. “Let’s go, Tom.”

  Tom frowned, clearly unhappy, but he left with her. He didn’t speak until they were back in the car, when he sat at the wheel, making no attempt to drive off. “Judy,” he began. “Ma’am,” he amended. “We should be taking him in for questioning.”

  “Why?” said Judy.

  “You know why! His wife’s whereabouts are conveniently unknown, so we can’t check his alibi for the night Bobbie was raped. And why was she leaving him, anyway? He lied about what Drummond said that night—all he did was get up Matt Burbidge’s nose, but he tied him in with the rapes. And his alibi for last night is Ginny Fredericks, who helped set Drummond up in the first place! He knew about Rosa, he won’t cooperate with the inquiry—you can’t walk away from all of that.”

  “I can.”

  “Guv.” Tom ran a frustrated hand through blond curls. “Inspector,” he tried. “Judy. You can’t.”

  She looked at him. “The issue’s quite simple, Tom,” she said. “Either you believe that Drummond gave me a description of raping Bobbie Chalmers that will stay with me for the rest of my life, or you believe that he was innocently bombing around in the fog without lights, and I wrote it all down for him and told him to sign it or I’d have him beaten up. That’s his version. If you believe it, by all means, go and arrest Matt.”

  Tom’s shoulders sagged. “Oh, this isn’t fair, guv,” he said.

  “I know.”

  She knew. But she had done enough to Matt Burbidge, and she certainly wasn’t going to arrest him on suspicion of committing rapes she knew damn well Colin Drummond had carried out.

  Tom reluctantly started the engine, and she could feel the waves of perfectly understandable resentment as he looked at her. “Can we at least check with Ginny and Lennie about a couple of things?” he asked, through his teeth. “Or are they off-limits, too?”

  “No,” she said. “We’ll talk to Ginny first.”

  Ginny, too, had to get out of bed to answer the door to the police, but she hadn’t been sleeping. She pulled the negligee around her slight body, and ran downstairs as the knocking echoed through the house. She opened the door on the chain.

  “What the hell do you want?” she said through the crack to the man with the fair curly hair who stood on her doorstep, and then saw Detective inspector Hill. She wasn’t too bad, for a copper. Not as bad as some. “Oh—it’s you,” she said, and closed the door over, releasing the chain, opening it again more fully.

  “Did you see Matt Burbidge last night?” the man asked.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Yeah.”

  “When? How long for?”

  She looked at Di Hill. “About ten,” she said. “For half an hour.”

  DI Hill smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “Is Lennie here?”

  “No,” said Ginny. “He drives a cab—I told you.”

  “Whose cab? We need to speak to him.”

  Oh, Jesus. She couldn’t very well not tell them. They’d find out anyway. But Lennie would skin her if he knew she’d sent them. Still—Inspector Hill was all right. She would keep it to herself. “ABC Cabs, they’re called,” she said. “But there’s only the one cab really. Don’t tell Lennie you got it from me. I’ve got to go,” she said, closing the door, putting the chain back on, and shivering as she ran back upstairs to the by now quite worried man who lay handcuffed to the bed.

  * * *

  Rob was also being visited by the police, which wasn’t something he really wanted right now. Detective Constable Marshall was an amiable Scot with a slow delivery who explained that he was checking up on Stansfield cabs which had had runs into Malworth yesterday evening. Would he be right in thinking that Mr. Jarvis had had one?

  “Last night? Yes,” said Rob. “I was there twice. I took a fare there early in the evening, and was asked to go back to pick her up at ten-thirty.”

  “Whereabouts in Malworth, sir?”

  “Parkside. Lloyd George House.”

  “And … how long were you there?”

  “Forever. I arrived, went to the door. Some bloke asked me to wait, so I waited, then I went to the door again, he asked me to wait again, and then he came out, gave me a fiver for my trouble, and said the lady wouldn’t be leaving after all. I was there about twenty minutes.”

  He gave Marshall the flat number.

  “And did you see anything while you were waiting? Anyone else around? Any other traffic?”

  “No.” Rob shook his head.

  “About ten minutes after that, a taxi was seen in the vicinity of Stansfield boating lake,” said Marshall. “Would that have been you, by any chance?”

  “Might have been,” said Rob. “I come in from Malworth on that road, and turn left for the rank.”

  “Did you see anyone in the vicinity of the bonfire?”

  “No, sorry. But I wasn’t looking at it.”

  “No. Well—thank you for your time, Mr. Jarvis.”

  “That’s all right,” said Rob, seeing him out, closing the door.

  Most of what he’d told him wasn’t true, but Marshall wasn’t to know that.

  “Can you pick up at the rear entrance to …”

  Lennie listened to his instructions, and acknowledged that he was on his way. Jarvis was in some sort of cooperative where individual cabdrivers clubbed together to pay for a radio control. Whatever number people dialed, they came through to it, and the appropriate cab was sent. But if it couldn’t go, one of the others did, so you hardly ever had to tell a customer you were booked up. It was a pretty good system, really, because you got bookings as well as being hailed, and they were sometimes l
ong-haul, on which Lennie could make a lot of money.

  He pulled up and saw a couple walking toward him. They were in the back before he recognized them; they had looked like real people, at a distance. “Bloody hell,” he said.

  “And a very good afternoon to you, too,” said Finch. “We want to ask you a few questions, Lennie.”

  “Is it going to take long? Only F ve got a job to do.”

  “I know,” said Inspector Hill. “I still can’t get over it. What do you know about a prostitute called Rosa, Lennie?” She sat down directly behind him, on one of the folding seats.

  “Never heard of her.”

  Finch smiled. “This can take a very few minutes in your cab, or a very long time at the station,” he said.

  “OK, I’ve heard of her. She worked up the Ferrari for a while a couple of years back.”

  “What was her surname?”

  “I never knew.”

  Inspector Hill tapped him on the shoulder, and he twisted further around to look at her.

  “Lennie,” she said. “We’re very short staffed at the station. We’ve got a murder on our hands, and it could take simply hours to get around to interviewing you. We know you pimped for her, we know you denied all knowledge of her before, and we don’t care. Just tell us all about her now, there’s a good boy.”

  “I don’t know all about her! I saw her one night, walking up and down by the park railings, and she had no idea. I mean, she just didn’t know how to go about it. So, I had a word. Took her to the Ferrari, showed her off a bit, told her the do’s and don’ts—I looked after her.”

  “You’re an example to us all, Lennie,” said Finch. “What was her surname?”

  “I don’t know. She told me to call her Rosa, and I don’t suppose that was her real name. And that was all I ever knew about her. I don’t know where she lived, I don’t know zip. She’d see me at the Ferrari, and I’d keep an eye on her when she was with the Johns. She was only on the game a few weeks—she wasn’t a pro.”

  “Did she give up because of the rapes?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe because of me. One night she tells me she’s done a punter without a condom because she’d run out. Well—I had to give her a talking-to, didn’t I?”

  “Your usual conversational style?” asked Inspector Hill.

  He twisted around again to look at her. “I smacked her, yes. And told her to get a pack of three from the toilets in the Ferrari. She tried to sponge some off Ginny—said I was making a fuss about nothing, because he couldn’t make her pregnant anyway. They think if they’re on the pill, they’re laughing. Christ, they’d all be HIV positive in five minutes if you let them.”

  Finch shook his head, smiling. “The world would be a poorer place without you, Lennie,” he said.

  “Anyway, she was mad at me because I’d clouted her, and that was the last time I saw her.”

  “All right,” said Inspector Hill, opening the door. “You can get on with your work now, Lennie.”

  “Hang on,” Lennie said. Very few people knew about him and Rosa. Ginny. Rosa herself. And Matt Burbidge. He’d grassed him up, the sod. Well, two could play at that game. “Matt Burbidge,” he said. “He used to be one of your lot. The one who gave Drummond a kicking?”

  “What about him?”

  “He came to see Ginny last night,” he said. “And told her to stick to her story. He seemed to think that she’d set Drummond up for the cops, and he didn’t want her telling anyone any different.” He looked at Inspector Hill. “And it was worth fifteen quid to him to tell her that in private,” he said.

  It was the first time in his life Lennie had volunteered information to the police. Serve the bastard right for shopping him. He drove to Rob’s, picked him up and drove home, told Ginny she would be working the park again.

  She knew better than to argue with him, but she complained. Just as loud, just as long. There was more custom tonight; he was working her even harder than he had last night. And she complained even harder. All bloody night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Friday 5 November

  MATT FINISHED WORK AT NINE O’CLOCK IN THE morning, and drove home to his empty house and his empty life. He had spent all night thinking about his visit from the police, wondering how much they knew, how much was guesswork. She was the last person he had expected to be on the reopened inquiry. He had assumed that she would be under investigation like all the others.

  He had had no time to prepare, no ready answers, hadn’t even realized that that was why they were there until it was too late. The truth had had to do once or twice when Finch had fired the bullets that woman had made for him.

  He read for a while; the morning paper, full of Drummond still because of the rape and murder. He tried to sleep, but the sunshine was distracting, and anyway every time he even looked like drifting off, someone would let off a firework. And his head was swimming with questions and answers and memories and regrets, and he just kept waking up again.

  Finally, he got up and made himself some lunch. He wished Isabelle was here, and the kids. He remembered her horrified face when she found out; he had tried to explain, but it had been no use.

  He was supposed to be sleeping. He had a long night ahead, and an even longer day tomorrow.

  * * *

  Rob waited until he heard the front door shut before he got up, not wanting to find himself having yet another discussion with Carole.

  He hadn’t really slept; he was always a bit hyper if he had anything planned. In the army, they had laughed at him because he got so worked up before they went out on border patrol, or even maneuvers. At first, they had thought he was scared, but they had found out that it wasn’t that. It was anticipation, like a child on Christmas Eve. The mere fact that something was planned for a particular time made him want that time to come around.

  He had thought that his visit to Ginny might relax him, but it hadn’t. And now he could feel the familiar restlessness; he wanted the day to hurry up and leave the sky to the darkness that he had grown accustomed to. He liked the night; he liked the solitude.

  He made himself coffee, which would just make him more hyper, he knew, put on a CD, and plugged in the headphones. He would listen to loud music. That usually helped.

  Lloyd read the reports of the morning’s endeavors. The house-to-house had turned up nothing more, but they hadn’t really expected it to; they had already got a great deal more from the residents than they usually did. But, as he moved through the reports, he discovered that none of it had been of much use. The taxi driver had turned out to be the husband of Mrs. Jarvis, the first of the previous rape victims, which had caused a bit of a stir. They had checked out the unlikely possibility of his having raped his own wife and everyone else, but it had proved to be an impossibility, much to everyone’s relief, He had been guarding some fortified police station in Northern Ireland when the first three rapes had been committed, sleeping, eating, and patrolling with a dozen other people twenty-four hours a day. And Marshall said that his story about his fare had checked out—his intended passenger had indeed been persuaded to stay the night by her host.

  Unlike Judy, Lloyd thought. And last night, she had taken the department out for a birthday drink; he had left early, the company of drunken police officers having never appealed. He had thought she might come up to the flat afterward, but she hadn’t.

  And it could, of course, have been any of Stansfield’s many taxis which had been seen near the boating lake; it seemed possible to Marshall that Lloyd’s informant had merely seen the taxi leaving, and had thought mistakenly that the person leaving the clothes had got into it. Lloyd wasn’t so sure about that. He might have a word himself with Mr. Jarvis.

  Judy had been to see Matt Burbidge, who had furnished them with details of where he had been between ten and eleven o’clock, which had been checked. He had been with Ginny Fredericks, and though Lennie Fredericks had indicated that this was not for the usual purposes, but rather to tell her to “stick
to her story,” Judy was satisfied that he was there, and she was taking no further action. She had made a note to the effect that Burbidge had known of the prostitute Rosa’s existence, and had not made this known, due to resentment over his suspension and dismissal. This knowledge would not have helped trace her.

  They were going through the motions, of course. No one seriously thought that Jarvis or Burbidge or anyone else had raped and murdered Marilyn Taylor. Drummond had, and Lloyd just had to keep his fingers firmly crossed about that one tiny piece of evidence that they might, just might, have found. The clothes that he had hoped to burn had indeed been worn during the assault on Marilyn Taylor, but forensics couldn’t tie them to Drummond; Lloyd was trying to trace their origins, but he had grave doubts about that yielding anything worthwhile.

  The summons to Detective Chief Superintendent Case was one he could have done without; he went upstairs slowly, wishing for the first time ever that his senior officer was a thirty-year-old whiz kid with a degree in corporate strategy.

  “Come!”

  Lloyd went in; Case was writing something in one of the files he always seemed to have on his desk, and didn’t look up. Lloyd sat down, without being invited to. He just let Case make something of it.

  He looked up. “A bit of a bombshell from HQ,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s about DI Hill,” said Case. “She can’t be involved in either the murder or the reopened rape inquiry, at least for the moment.”

  He didn’t look too cut up about it. Lloyd frowned. “Why?”

  “It seems that Drummond’s made an official complaint about her conduct following his arrest.”

  “But Judy wasn’t at Malworth when Drummond was arrested,” said Lloyd.

  “She took a statement from him some hours afterward, though, didn’t she? That’s what his complaint concerns. I don’t know all the details, but I gather that she’ll be getting a visit from the complaints investigation team. They don’t seem too worried about it at HQ. They expect her to come out of it smelling of roses, apparently.”