by Jill McGown
“I presume you checked out this alibi?” he said.
“No, sir. The whereabouts of his wife and children are unknown to him, and my attempts to trace them have so far failed.”
“You have made the attempt, then? I suppose that’s something. When were you given this information, Inspector?”
“During my interviews with both Turner and Burbidge on Thursday the fourth of November,” she said. “I was also told, and have since confirmed, that Burbidge had been working undercover at the farm where Lucy Rogerson was later raped.”
Case flicked his pen backward and forward between his fingers, the only indication that he was a very angry man. But Judy knew one when she saw one, despite his still calm delivery. “And you withheld this information?” he said.
“I didn’t consider it relevant, sir.”
The pen stopped, and he pulled it into his fist. “This I must hear,” he said. “Why didn’t you consider it relevant?”
“I was interviewing Matt Burbidge because he had been seen in the vicinity of the flat where Marilyn Taylor was raped and murdered,” she said. “I checked his alibi, which was confirmed, and I had no reason to doubt it. The rest did not seem to me to be relevant to my inquiries.” She had been rehearsing this ever since Lloyd had made her realize that Bobbie would admit the rape now that Drummond was dead.
“Finch was with you, wasn’t he?” he said. “Did he also regard the rest as irrelevant?”
“Sergeant Finch asked Burbidge to accompany us to the station to answer further questions. When he refused, Sergeant Finch was of the opinion that we should arrest him. I overruled him. It is entirely my responsibility.”
“Too damn right, it’s your responsibility,” said Case. “You ignored vital evidence pointing to him as a suspect in the Chalmers rape. The man had no alibi, and refused to cooperate. It was your duty to arrest him, Inspector.”
“On what grounds, sir? Bobbie Chalmers had stated quite categorically to me and my senior officer that she had never been raped. I had no reason to think that she would alter her stance. Therefore I had no grounds for arresting him, and I instructed my sergeant accordingly.”
Case’s eyes widened slightly.
“Now that I have learned that Bobbie has made an official complaint of rape, I have passed on the relevant information,” Judy continued. “The lack of an alibi is only relevant once there’s a crime to go with it. I don’t believe that I’ve done anything wrong, sir.”
The pen made a dull clicking noise as it was tapped against Case’s bottom teeth, and he looked out of the window. The tapping stopped; he swung his chair around and looked up at her again. “Very clever, Inspector,” he said. “Very clever. And I suppose you’ve got an answer for not passing on the information about the Rogerson girl?”
“Burbidge’s connection with Lucy Rogerson has become relevant as we now have a live complaint of rape to investigate. Since it is similar in every detail to the other rapes committed at that time, presumably the reopened inquiry is no longer merely window dressing.”
“Oh, no, you don’t!” He threw the pen down. “You’re not dragging me into this, Inspector.”
“into what, sir?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, sit down, woman! And stop talking like a bloody computer!”
Judy sat down, taking out her cigarettes. “Do you mind?” she asked, lighting one without waiting for an answer, wishing her hand wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t used to sticking her neck out like this. She wasn’t used to sailing quite so close to the wind. She needed a cigarette.
“Why are you shopping him now?” Case asked.
“I’m not shop—”
“You must think you can’t keep the lid on this any longer,” he said, talking through her. “That this way you can get out from under.”
“I’m not shopping anyone!” Judy said angrily. “I don’t have to get out from under anything!”
Case shook his head. “You’re working to your own agenda, Inspector,” he said. “Credit me with some intelligence.”
Judy acknowledged the grain of truth in that with a slight nod. “I stretched the rules,” she said. “Because Matt Burbidge didn’t rape these women. Drummond did. I hoped I might be able to keep Matt out of it. But I can’t, not now that Bobbie’s admitted that she was raped.”
Case reached over and took one of Judy’s cigarettes out of the packet. “Give me your lighter,” he said.
Judy watched him draw in smoke and release it in a calming blue stream.
“I ought to be reporting this entire conversation to the DCC,” he said.
“Why aren’t you?”
“Because I think you would win, like you did with Drummond’s complaint about you. But I believe now more than ever that Drummond was fitted up for these rapes, and that his statement to you was a fake.”
“Sir—” Judy began, but he held up a hand.
“Don’t say anything, Inspector,” he said. “When I get you, it’s going to be on something you can’t talk your way out of. You can go.”
It was useless. He had her down as a double-dyed villain, and nothing was going to change his mind unless she could prove that Drummond was the rapist. She got up, picked up her cigarettes and lighter, then put them down again, and left his office. If she’d started the man smoking again, she could at least leave him the requisites. He was on the phone, demanding to know Lloyd’s whereabouts, before she had closed the door.
Carole had come downstairs once Lloyd had left, but whatever she had been going to tell him, she had obviously changed her mind. Rob drank his whisky and poured himself another.
“Don’t drink too much,” Carole said, as the doorbell rang again. “You don’t want to get Breathalysed.”
Right now, he wasn’t sure he cared.
Carole got up to answer the door, and came in with DC Marshall in tow.
“I’ve already had a visit from your Chief Inspector,” said Rob. “I’ve told him everything I know—including the bits I didn’t tell you.”
“Is that right, sir? That’s very interesting, but … it’s not why I’m here.”
“Oh?” said Rob, feeling the adrenaline rising. “Why are you here?”
“I understand you took a Mr. and Mrs. Gloucester to Stansfield railway station at …”
Rob was barely listening. He had been waiting for this. He had thought that he would be stopped last night. Or picked up on the rank. He had thought when Lloyd came that it would be about the burglary; so had Carole. That was why she’d stayed upstairs. She hadn’t wanted to see him getting arrested. But it hadn’t been about the burglary. This was.
He was being asked about some of the other runs he’d done to stations and airports. He was being asked if he realized that all these people had been burgled while away on holiday, and that he was the only factor they had in common. He was being asked if Marshall might take a look around the house.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.
Carole was looking stiff with worry.
“Do you garage your cab, Mr. Jarvis?”
“No,” said Rob. “It’s on the road twenty-four hours a day.”
“But you do have a garage?”
Carole made a little sound; Marshall realized his faux pas. “I do beg your pardon, Mrs. Jarvis,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking. Might I take a look in there, Mr. Jarvis?”
Rob saw no reason to spin it out, especially in view of the effect it would have on Carole if he made Marshall go and get a search warrant. He took out his keys, and walked around with Marshall to the garage where the stuff from Tuesday night’s burglary, the stuff Carole had seen when she opened the garage door, was sitting.
So Carole did see him being arrested. He told her not to worry. She would, of course.
“Do you feel up to answering some more questions?” asked the policewoman.
It was almost worth getting beaten senseless for all this, thought Ginny, as she stiffly got off the bed. She had been in the hands of the p
olice more times than she could possibly count, and they had treated her like something they’d found on their shoes, mostly. Some of them were OK, like Inspector Hill. But most of them were like Lennie said.
“Yeah,” she said, enjoying being the one who said what was what, for once. “All right.”
Sergeant Finch was waiting for her, to take her to the interview room. They walked down a corridor, past offices with open doors. Typists, people listening to tapes with headphones on. And a big room, with a blackboard, and stuff pinned up on the walls. Chief Inspector Lloyd was in there with a tall man, and Ginny saw the poster they were pinning up of a girl standing at some sort of shop counter with a bottle of milk in her hand.
“What’s she done?” she asked, as a gray-haired man pushed past them into the room.
Sergeant Finch stopped, and frowned. “Who?” he said.
“Lloyd!” the gray-haired man shouted. “A word. Now.”
“Her,” Ginny said, and pointed to the poster. “Rosa.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HE TRIED TO MAINTAIN HIS OLD CAR AS BEST HE could, given his financial situation, but Matt always looked gratefully upon the emergency stopping lane as he went down the hill to the ferries at Dover. So far, the brakes had held out, and they did again today, as he drove toward the terminal, checking his watch yet again, hoping that something would delay the ferry’s departure.
The white cliffs, which looked gray and a little dirty when you were close to them, towered over him as the lights of the ferries came into view, moving up and down fairly ominously on a choppy, dark sea, the P & O funnel visible. But as he arrived, he could see no lines of cars, moving or otherwise; he was halted, and had to watch helplessly as the gangway and the Pride of Calais parted company.
Case had obviously found Ginny’s revelation interesting enough to merit his presence at her interview, and to delay whatever he had been going to talk to Lloyd about.
“I’ll lead,” he’d told Lloyd brusquely as they had followed Ginny and Tom into the interview room, and now Ginny sat wide-eyed, unsure of why her innocent remark had caused such a stir.
“Do you recognize this woman?” asked Case.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s Rosa, like I said.”
“Chief Superintendent Case is showing Mrs. Fredericks a photograph of Mrs. Rachel Ashman,” said Tom.
Ginny frowned at him. “It’s not Mrs. Ashman,” she said, shaking her head. “She got raped—she’s the one who killed herself. This is Rosa.”
Lloyd had the file in front of him. Rachel Olivia Selina Ashman. He had only been peripherally involved in the rape inquiry, because the first one had taken place in Stansfield. Had he been investigating, he liked to think that he would have got on to her initials. But Matt Burbidge had known her, and this photograph had been up on the wall in Malworth for almost two months during the inquiry. He couldn’t not have seen it. Lloyd leaned his elbows on the table, leaning his chin on clasped hands. He didn’t like the turn things were taking.
“I don’t understand,” Ginny said.
Lloyd opened his mouth to explain, but Case had no time for that, and went briskly on to his next question.
“You told the court you saw her after she had been with Drummond,” he said. “Did she speak to you?”
“Yeah.”
Case sighed. “Well, what did she say, girl?”
Ginny looked at Lloyd. “He said I hadn’t got to say,” she said. “I don’t want to get into trouble.”
Lloyd frowned. “Who said?” he asked. The Malworth Mafia, he supposed. Matt Burbidge had visited Ginny; he had doubtless put pressure on her to keep quiet.
“Him in court. Drummond’s lawyer. He said not to say what she said to me.”
Ah. Lloyd smiled. “It’s just in court that you can’t say what someone has told you,” he said. “You can tell us.”
“Well,” she said. “She came into the club going on about Lennie. She was mad at him ’cos he’d clouted her for doing Drummond without a condom.”
Lloyd closed his eyes, then opened them and looked at the little girl opposite, his mouth pressed to his hands. He could feel Case’s eyes on him, could feel waves of discomfort coming from Torn, which was why he chose in these circumstances to look at Ginny, painful though it was to look at her battered face. Its expression was merely perplexed, as ever.
“She tried to get some off me, but I said no. So she said she was packing it in,” said Ginny. “I thought she meant just for that night, but she never came back.”
No, thought Lloyd. Because she had popped into the service station for some milk, and had been viciously raped. Her husband had said that she had been at home all night. Why? Because he knew what she had really been doing? He had had a fall from scaffolding in a building site, and he had not been employed through official channels. No tax, no insurance equalled no sick pay, no compensation. Living on the subsistence level of government handouts, he might have been prepared to let his wife do that in order to hang on to his home. But not necessarily. There was no reason to assume that he knew. They had had a small child, and he had been in no state to be left in charge of one. He could just have been covering for that, thinking that the social services might be let loose on him. His wife could have been deceiving him, too, about her evening employment, turned to in desperation, perhaps. In which case, did he need to know?
They would have to decide what to do about Mr. Ashman. But all that Lloyd had to worry about now was that Mrs. Ashman had been raped, and not necessarily by Drummond. Not anymore. And if Drummond had not raped these women, then he couldn’t have given Judy that statement. Everyone knew that; no one said it.
But he had to have given her the statement, so it had to have been Drummond. And this was a coincidence? Lloyd didn’t believe in coincidence. Not to this extent. He hadn’t believed in any of the coincidences surrounding Drummond’s arrest; he didn’t believe in this one.
Nothing had been said for some time; Case seemed to be leaving the floor to him now.
“Ginny,” he said. “The night Drummond was arrested for assaulting you, you had been at Malworth police station for a long time.”
“Yeah.”
“Did anyone speak to you while you were there?”
“No. They just put me in a cell and left me there. Then someone came and said I could go.”
“Didn’t that surprise you?”
“A bit.”
“You weren’t offered some sort of deal? Told they would let you go if you did them a favor?”
“Well, not at the police station,” she said, in the tones of one who thought him a little simple. “In the park, they did. If you went with some of them they wouldn’t nick you.”
“Did PC Burbidge ever take advantage of you like that?” asked Case.
“No. He just nicked me.”
It was a relief to know that they occasionally did what they were paid to do at Malworth, thought Lloyd. “I didn’t really mean that,” he said. “I meant did they ask you to do something else for them?”
She frowned, and then her eyes narrowed. “You mean did I set Drummond up for them!” she said, her voice rising. “Look—that sod raped me, and I’m fed up with people saying he didn’t! He had a knife—he scared the shit out of me and he raped me! He fucking well raped me—all right?”
“You’ll mind your language while you’re in here,” said Case.
“Aw, shut up!” said Ginny.
Lloyd smiled into his clasped hands. That’s what he should have said, rather than going into a tirade against him. It was much more effective. And he saw what Judy meant about Ginny. Only real, honest-to-God resentment could produce that reaction.
“Anyway,” Ginny went on. “He reckons he was only in the alley ’cos he stopped for a slash. How was anyone supposed to know he’d do that?”
Lloyd smiled openly this time. “Good point, Ginny,” he said. They should have had Ginny prosecuting at Drummond’s trial; she was sharper than Whitehouse, obvious
ly.
It was Tom who remembered what he had intended asking Ginny in the first place. “Ginny,” he said. “Can you tell us who was in your house, upstairs, between the time you showed Rob Jarvis the gun and the time you realized it was missing?”
“A regular Thursday lunchtime and Rob Jarvis yesterday morning.”
“Who’s the regular?”
“He works for the people we got the house from,” she said. “Was he alone in the room at all?”
“Yeah—when you came to the door asking which cab firm Lennie drove for.”
“So—I can’t think why he’d want to, but he could have taken the gun, couldn’t he?”
She shook her head. “He was handcuffed to the bed,” she said seriously.
Lloyd smiled happily. He thought he would like to spend his life interviewing Ginny.
“What about punters on Wednesday and Thursday evening?” asked Tom, still grinning.
“There was Matt Burbidge, and he wasn’t really a punter. Lennie had me working out of the van at the park.”
“Was he alone in the room?”
“No.”
“Was anyone else besides you and Lennie upstairs alone, and not handcuffed to the bed?” Tom asked.
“Just Inspector Hill,” she said. “When they were searching the house.”
“Interview terminated, fifteen thirty-five hours,” said Case. “Finch—take Mrs. Fredericks for a cup of tea—or something.”
Tom, looking even more anxious than Ginny, shepherded her out of the room, and closed the door.
“I hope you’re not going to say what I think you’re going to say,” said Lloyd.
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it yet, Lloyd,” said Case, opening the door and bellowing to a passing minion to get DC Marshall here on the double.
“As I see it,” he said, taking out cigarettes, “four people had access to that gun. Lennie and Ginny Fredericks, Jarvis, and Inspector Hill. So let’s start eliminating them, shall we?”
Lloyd wished Judy’s name didn’t keep cropping up in this inquiry. And why were they taking Ginny’s word for it that the gun went missing at all?
