by Jill McGown
Lloyd reached over, stopped the tape. “It’s off,” he said. “But you are still under caution, and I will give anything you say in evidence if it’s pertinent to this inquiry.”
Burbidge nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.
DI Hill looked a bit pale, Ginny thought. She hadn’t seen her yesterday—maybe she’d been sick. Lennie had gone out the minute she’d arrived, saying he’d be back in an hour, if the inspector could stay that long.
“I don’t need a baby-sitter,” she had said, but DI Hill had said she didn’t mind staying.
“I’m not going to fall over now,” Ginny said. She felt better today. Her face still ached, but her eye didn’t feel so bad, and at least it was sort of open now.
“Forty-eight hours you’ve to be watched, it says on that card,” said DI Hill. “And you should really be in bed.”
“I don’t want to be in bed. I spend half my life in bed.”
That made the inspector laugh. “Speaking about that,” she said. “Tell me about Rosa.”
“I didn’t know she was that Mrs. Ashman.”
“I know. Tell me what you did know about her.”
Ginny shrugged. There wasn’t a lot to tell. She had come in to the Ferrari one night with Lennie, and then she had started coming most nights. She hadn’t had many punters. Drummond was her only regular. And of course that DCI from Malworth, but he never paid her for it, so she didn’t make much money. Ginny hadn’t been surprised when she had packed it in.
“The night she packed it in,” said the inspector, “she spoke to you. What did she say?”
“I told them yesterday. She was mad at Lennie for smacking her. Do you want a cup of tea or something?”
“I’ll make it,” the inspector said, and got up and put the kettle on. “What exactly did she say, Ginny?” she asked, and sat down at the table again. “Tell me everything she said.”
“She said he’d hit her for doing Drummond without a condom. She thought it was stupid, because it wasn’t like he could get her pregnant.”
The inspector was leaning forward slightly. “Why couldn’t he?” she asked.
“That’s what I said. And she said he couldn’t come while he was doing it. He had to, like, come out and do it himself, or he just lost it.”
DI Hill sat back, smiling. “Are you saying that he suffered a sexual dysfunction whereby seminal emission during coitus could not be achieved?” she said. “That self-stimulation was his only alternative to loss of penile erection?”
Ginny stared at her. “You what?” she said, getting up automatically when the kettle boiled, so used to making Lennie endless cups of tea that she could have done it in her sleep.
“Did you hear them going on like that in court?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. I didn’t know what they were on about.” Ginny made tea, brought it to the table, got two mugs. “Is it important?”
“Well, it’s done wonders for my hangover,” she said.
“Is that what’s up with you?” said Ginny. “I was wondering.” She frowned as she got the milk and sugar. “What’s it mean, then? All that stuff about sexual thing?”
“It means,” the inspector said, “that he couldn’t come while he was doing it.”
“Why didn’t they just say that?”
She smiled. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Should I have said? In court?”
DI Hill shook her head. “They wouldn’t have let you,” she said. “You’re not allowed to tell them what Rosa told you.”
“Oh, yeah. But I can tell you. Mr. Lloyd said.”
“Yes. Did she say anything else?”
Ginny poured the tea. “Not really. She was telling me about him—we were having a laugh about it. She said she reckoned he’d been wanking off for so long he couldn’t do it any other way. We thought he’d gone, but he hadn’t. He was playing one of the machines. And he walked out, all red in the face. Served him right.”
The inspector had gone serious again. “He heard you and Rosa laughing about him?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Did Rosa leave straightaway?”
“No, she stayed and had a drink. There wasn’t much doing—I wasn’t working, either. She was a good laugh. She went about eleven, I think, because one of my—” Ginny broke off. She hadn’t worked it out, not until now. “He followed her, didn’t he?” she said. “Because we were laughing about him? He followed her, and—” She didn’t finish the sentence. “She was a good laugh,” she said.
The inspector leaned close again. “Ginny—did he attack you again? Did he do that to you?”
“No!”
“Listen—if you tell us exactly what happened, and how it happened, it could be self-defense. Even if Lennie shot him. Even though you tried to cover it up. But you must tell us now, Ginny. You must tell us now.”
“It had nothing to do with Drummond!”
“Then who beat you up? Lennie didn’t—I don’t care what he says.”
“It was a punter.”
The inspector sighed, and picked up her tea. “You make a good cup of tea, Ginny,” she said.
She should. She got enough practice.
Matt had told Lloyd about going to work undercover on the farm, about living and working there for a month. About seeing Lucy every day, and talking to her. She had flirted with him. She wasn’t interested in the young lads—it was very flattering. He was forty. She was seventeen. And she—well, she didn’t want some teenage boy mauling her; she wanted someone with a bit of savvy, someone … like him. He had had an affair with hen He had been the first. People would say he’d seduced her, but it hadn’t been like that. She had …chosen him. To initiate her into the ways of the world.
He didn’t say all that to Lloyd. But he tried to explain that he hadn’t seduced her. Not really. He had carried on seeing her after he’d left the farm. And he had been with her, in the barn, that evening. He had left her, had walked down the track towards the road, where his car was. He had seen Drummond, only obviously he didn’t know who he was at the time. He had been checking something on the bike. Matt had noticed the registration, the way policemen did, automatically.
And that night, when he had come on duty, he had discovered that moments after he had left her, Lucy had been raped. Just like the other two. The first woman had said that it was someone on a motorbike.
“You knew who it must have been, and you kept quiet about it?” said Lloyd incredulously.
Matt nodded. “Yeah,” he said. Lloyd would have done the same in his position. Anyone would. “I had no excuse for being at that farm! Isabelle was already suspicious because I kept going out—I’d started seeing Lucy when I was there on duty! I’d have lost everything if I’d said.”
“You did lose everything,” said Lloyd. He wasn’t looking at Matt; he was looking out of the high window in the interview room, almost on tiptoe, as though there was something really interesting going on out there, and he was bored with the conversation.
“Only because your lady friend couldn’t keep her mouth shut,” Matt said.
Lloyd shook his head. “You blame Judy? Have you tried looking in the mirror?”
“The only thing I don’t blame her for is my wife walking out on me,” said Matt. “That was Drummond’s fault. She’d followed me—she knew I was going to the farm. She thought it was Lucy’s mother I was seeing until Lucy got raped and Mick Rogerson told us that she’d been with someone just before, but she wouldn’t say who he was.”
Lloyd turned from the window, frowning. “He told you that?”
“Yes, well He’s a mate of mine. I worked there before I joined the police. His father had the farm then. He and I were best mates.”
“And you seduced his daughter?”
“No! She came on to me! She’d been away at school. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of years. She was— grown up. It wasn’t my fault. Why should I get landed because someone raped her? I went to see her after, and—explained the sit
uation.”
“You put pressure on her to keep quiet about you?” Lloyd looked horrified, just like Isabelle had.
My God, Matt had just told him that his lady friend was framing him for murder, and he’d taken that in his stride. But everyone had to make a fuss about what he’d done.
“Not pressure. Just—you know.”
“She was seventeen,” Lloyd said. “She had just been brutally raped. And all you could think of was saving your own skin?”
“You sound just like Isabelle! That’s why she left me. But what was the point of my name coming into it? What good would it have done?”
Lloyd still looked like Isabelle had done. Matt gave up. “And that night, I tried to stop her leaving, but I couldn’t,” he went on. “I got back to the car, we saw a bike pass us, and we gave chase. When I saw who it was I tried to get him on something, anything. Anything that would give the rape inquiry a chance to get their hands on him. A blood sample. If he was drunk, we could get a blood sample. But he wasn’t drunk. We couldn’t hold him. So I—I just ….” He looked at Lloyd. “I would have killed him,” he said. “If Barry hadn’t got me off him, I would have killed him. My wife had just walked out on me because of him.”
Lloyd didn’t speak.
“So I told some of the lads that he’d said he was the rapist. And I told them about Rosa. And that if she’d been working the night she was raped, then there was a fifty-fifty chance they’d get something on her that pointed to Drummond, because she didn’t have all that many customers. They said they would get him. I was suspended, and the next thing I knew he was under arrest for raping one of the other girls at the Ferrari. I heard later that they’d arranged for that to happen. I had nothing to do with that.”
“Highly commendable.” Lloyd sat down.
“Now I don’t believe he was the rapist,” said Matt.
“Who else could have raped Lucy?” asked Lloyd. “You saw him.”
Matt shook his head. “Maybe he was just a Peeping Tom,” he said. “Watching us.”
“And maybe you raped her, and Drummond wasn’t there at all.”
“No. I didn’t rape Lucy, I didn’t rape Chalmers, and I didn’t rape and murder Marilyn Taylor. It isn’t my blood on Drummond’s jeans—it can’t be, not if it matches anything you found at the scene, because I was never there.” Lloyd would have to believe it, sooner or later. Matt had raped no one. And someone was stitching him up. “But if you get a DNA sample from me,” he went on, “it’ll match up with the unidentified one from Lucy, and then everyone will know about that.”
“We don’t publish the results,” Lloyd said.
“No? Maybe not, not if I was an ordinary member of the public. But I’m not. I’m an ex-cop. It would get around in no time flat.”
Lloyd didn’t seem too bothered about that. “Someone rang Drummond, saying they could tell him about Rosa,” he said. “Was that you?”
“No.”
“You went to see Ginny—did you take a gun from her?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you still want to kill Drummond?”
“No.” No. He’d rather hoped that Drummond would have a go at Judy Hill again, but he thought it politic not to say that to Lloyd, if there was a chance of getting out of this without too much damage to his reputation. At the moment, he was the man who had had a go at a rapist, and been sacked for it; if they found out the rest, he’d be the man who was knocking off a seventeen-year-old kid when he should have been working, the man who walked away from her and left her to a rapist, the man who got her to cover up for him.
“Where were you at nine o’clock on Friday night?”
“I was getting the car ready for France. I was filling her up, and—” Matt remembered, and pulled out his wallet. “Look,” he said, pushing a receipt across the desk to Lloyd. “I paid for my petrol at one minute to nine.”
Lloyd looked at the receipt, and raised his eyebrows. “I could commit a murder at four o’clock in the morning of the twenty-seventh of February in the year two thousand and fifty, if one of the receipts I once got was used as evidence,” he said.
“It’s a petrol station—it’s got cameras, like they all have. I’11 be on there, with the time and the date. You can check.”
“I will. And you’re giving us a saliva sample, like it or not.”
Carole doggedly prepared Sunday lunch; Rob was in bed.
Lennie didn’t have the cab; Rob said he’d ended their arrangement. He’d have to, Carole supposed, if he was going to prison. She supposed he might—he had burgled an awful lot of houses. Stephen had said they must wait and see what was going to happen before they did anything. She must carry on as though nothing had happened.
So she was making Sunday lunch. Just as though nothing had happened.
What else could she do?
“Thanks,” said Lennie.
“You’re welcome,” said Inspector Hill. “She’s a lot better today.”
“Yes.”
He closed the door and looked at Ginny. She was, he supposed, a lot better. She didn’t look ill, not like she had yesterday. But she still looked battered, and he would never forgive himself for that.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked.
He took a breath, and said the three words as though they might poison the air by being spoken. “The Job Center,” he muttered.
She frowned. “It’s Sunday.”
“Yeah, well—they’ve got cards in the window. I just thought I’d—you know—have a look.”
He hadn’t even understood half of them. “Must be conversant with …” seemed to consist purely of things he’d never heard of, mostly initials. Anyway, he had a record; most people wouldn’t look at him even if he could work a computer, which he supposed was what you had to be conversant with, and he couldn’t. Ginny had got one in her job lot of goodies from the Co-op, and it just sat there.
But maybe he could get a real job as a cabby. He’d liked it, driving around, talking to people. And he could still do the odd deal on the fare, if he was careful not to get caught. They didn’t all own their own cabs. He’d ring around, tomorrow.
They’d be all right, he told Ginny. He’d get something.
All that stuff in Lennie’s house still bothered Judy; Marshall said he had asked Jarvis if Lennie was in on the burglaries and had been given an unequivocal and heartfelt no. But that wasn’t top of her agenda at the moment; she went back to the station anxious to talk to Lloyd, who wasn’t, of course, in his office, and went to her own office through an empty CID room. She looked in vain for aspirin, and decided that her head wasn’t bad enough anymore to merit a run to the supermarket chemist.
Her door was knocked on and opened in his more usual fashion by Tom. “They’ve found the gun, guv,” he said.
“Good,” said Judy. “Has it gone to forensics?”
“Yes, but there’s something else.”
Judy sighed. “Lloyd’s right,” she said. “Every lead we get is followed by a but. But what?”
“The sixth cartridge had jammed in the mechanism. So there’s no reason to suppose that he wasn’t killed where he was found.”
Judy was uncomfortably aware that the missing cartridge had been the only thing that stood between her and real, helping-with-inquiries suspicion; she could practically feel Case licking his pencil and turning to a new page in his pocketbook.
“Do you know where Lloyd is?” she asked Tom as he was leaving.
“Out checking Matt Burbidge’s alibi.”
“Another theory? Great.”
Lloyd came in as she spoke, and Tom left. “Mother alibi,” he said. “Burbidge was filling up with petrol when Drummond was murdered. Another theory stillborn.”
Judy looked at him glumly. “The best theory I’ve heard yet is the one where I did it,” she said. “But—Ginny made me feel a lot better.” She told him about Rosa’s more down-to-earth description of Drummond’s dysfunction.
Lloyd listened, nodding.
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“And when he heard Rosa laughing about him with Ginny, he waited for her to leave, followed her,” she went on. “Then when he was charged, he found out that she wasn’t called Rosa at all—she was known as Mrs. Rachel Ashman, and no one knew she had been working as a prostitute. And since he’d been with her earlier, he could see a way of getting the DNA evidence discounted.”
“But he couldn’t admit to knowing that Rosa and Mrs. Ashman were the same person,” Lloyd said thoughtfully. “So he insisted that all the victims had to give evidence so he could ‘recognize’ her when she went into the witness box.”
“Quite,” said Judy, sighing as she realized what must have happened next. “And when Mrs. Ashman knew who had been charged, she knew that would happen.”
“Do you think she knew it was Drummond who had raped her?”
Judy shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. But what she did know was that he’d tell the court that she worked as a prostitute, that he’d been with her earlier that evening. Everyone would find out what she had been doing. Her husband would find out.” She looked away. “And she killed herself sooner than let that happen,” she said.
“Which rather foiled young Mr. Drummond’s plan,” said Lloyd.
Judy looked back at him. “That was why he had to bring his visits to Rosa out into the open,” she said. “He had to say she existed, or no one would ever make the connection. And he had to have a reason for wanting her found—so he said that she would prove that he functioned quite normally. She wasn’t in a position to contradict him, was she?”
“But he overestimated Malworth’s devotion to duty,” said Lloyd. “And he wasn’t in a position to prompt them without incriminating himself.”
A little silence fell; it was Lloyd who broke it.
“But once he was out,” he said slowly, “and it was over— why was he still so keen to meet someone who had information about Rosa?”
“He still wanted the connection made,” said Judy. “By someone other than him. He wasn’t satisfied with the DNA evidence being given too much weight—he wanted it discounted. He wanted the compensation to increase, and the press and TV to give him even more airtime. Poor innocent Colin, mistaken for a rapist. How much do you suppose his story would have been worth?”
