“If he killed himself,” Barbara said. “’Cause all along—and you have to admit it—what’s looked like suicide could’ve been murder. With someone buzzing the call centre about paedophilia just as a means to get him into the station.”
Ardery picked up her bag from the terrace and took a few moments to stow her mobile. She seemed to be buying time to garner patience. Finally, she said, “We aren’t here to explore that, Sergeant. How many more times do I have to repeat this? Now, I’ve placated you and your concerns by interviewing Finnegan Freeman, from whom I gained absolutely nothing aside from a heated declaration of Ian Druitt’s innocence—hardly unexpected, you’ll agree—along with the limited entertainment of also speaking with his dizzy housemate, who kept referring to another housemate called Brutus, who she would love me to believe conveniently or otherwise knows nothing about anything.”
“Brutus?”
“Bruce Castle, and that is not the point. The point is that this could go on forever, and we do not have the time, the luxury, or the funds to make it go on forever.”
“I understand that, guv. Really. I do. But I still think—”
“For God’s bloody sake, there is no ‘I still think.’ There is simply what happened on that night, what DI Pajer did in the aftermath, and what the IPCC did once the matter was turned over to them.”
Barbara saw that the DCS was about to rise, and she knew she had to stop her because there was something else. It was only a small detail, but in any investigation the devil, as they say, was in those details. She said, “I’m on board with all that, guv. I’ve read and reread and counterread those reports. Which is why when I looked at the CCTV films with Ruddock, I realised that the IPCC watched the film for the phone call night and they watched the film for the murder night. But what they didn’t watch was the film from six days before the phone call, because there’s no mention of that in their report. And six days before the phone call, the film shows the camera was moved so that the caller could make the call later without being seen. My point is that if they missed that, they could’ve missed something else. Like something in the phone call, which is why I was heading up to Shrewsbury to listen to it.”
“Did they listen to it? Did they find a single thing unusual in it? Yes to the first and no to the second. So what is it that you expect to hear since you already have the transcript of the call? A Greek chorus in the background identifying the caller? And even if the caller is identified—which, of course, he isn’t—what does that prove?”
“I don’t know. I admit that. But I did see Ruddock in the car park the other night making the big nasty with—”
“Stop that at once! Talk like a police officer!”
Barbara was hasty with her switching of gears. “I saw Ruddock with a girlfriend—which, by the way, he says he doesn’t have in the first place, a girlfriend, that is—in a patrol car. Just like he was, mind you, the night we got here, because that night I saw what I thought was one of the patrol officers having a kip in the car but now I think it had to be Ruddock with the girl, because I could see this bloke leaning back in the seat looking very comfortable, and I reckon that means that she was doing a gob job on him.” And when Ardery’s face reflected outrage and she opened her mouth to speak, Barbara added in a flash, “I mean fellatio. She was performing fellatio.”
“And this means what? That while Officer Ruddock was enjoying some young woman’s sexual ministrations in the nick’s car park on the night of Druitt’s death, someone else got inside the place, murdered Druitt, and got back out without being seen and without—as we’ve already discussed, by the way—leaving a trace of evidence behind? Nothing suggests that. Nothing even hints at that. The man killed himself for whatever reason he had, the autopsy confirms that, and there’s an end to it. We can play this game of he was or he wasn’t, he did or he didn’t into the next decade, but the reality is that sometimes people kill themselves for reasons we cannot work out: a deep depression they’ve been hiding, a spiritual crisis, a psychological wound, a sudden diagnosis of disease, a life change that they can’t contend with, mental instability. And when that happens, no one—and especially the family—wants to believe it was a suicide because suicides result in everyone connected to that person having to examine themselves for a reason it happened, and believe me, no one wants to do that. People would often rather die than have to look at themselves when—”
Her sudden stop caused Barbara to say, “What?”
Ardery stood. She took up the strap of her shoulder bag. “Nothing,” she said. “We’re finished here. Be packed and ready to leave in the morning.”
LUDLOW
SHROPSHIRE
“Barbara.” Lynley’s voice on the phone was at its most reasonable. He’d heard her straight through to the end of her tale without interruption, and his tone told her that he now had something thoughtful to say. She hated that. She wanted him to declare, “By God, I’ll see to this at once, Sergeant.” Pretty dim of her, she realised. By God, I’ll see to this at once, Sergeant was hardly Lynley’s style. He said, “I don’t need to remind you why you’re there, do I?”
She said, “I know why I’m here, sir. Believe me, Herself keeps making sure I know it. But the thing that—”
“If ‘the thing that’ is asking you to step out of order in any way,” he cut in, still maintaining that tone of patience, “what you must ask yourself is whether that’s truly necessary, because it seems to me that the moment you and the PCSO set off to Shrewsbury—”
“Sir, the call centre in Shrewsbury would have—”
“The moment you set off to Shrewsbury to listen to a recording, the transcript of which you already have, is the very moment you did just that.”
“What?”
“Began to step out of order. We’ve been over this before, Barbara. If you continue on this path, you know where it’s going to lead.”
There were distant voices in the background. There was the sound of a phone ringing as well. There was the sudden interruption of Dorothea Harriman speaking from the doorway of Ardery’s office, where Lynley was, at present, acting as guv. Barbara heard her say, “Acting Detective Chief—” before Lynley stopped her with, “Give me five minutes, Dee.”
And then he said to Barbara, “We don’t need to explore this another time, do we, Sergeant?”
Well, yes. They did need to do just that, Barbara thought. She said, “She keeps banging on about our brief, Inspector, which is bloody well blinding her to what’s hanging in front of her eyes.”
“And that is what? I ask because, from what you’ve told me, the only thing hanging before her eyes is doing what she was told to do by Hillier. Unless something new has occurred, she’s under orders that she received from Hillier himself. Has anything new occurred? Anything indeed to warrant this phone call you’ve made to me?”
“I don’t know,” Barbara admitted. “But maybe. Could be. See, there’s this CCTV camera that got its position moved and what I’m thinking is that if the IPCC report doesn’t mention that—which it doesn’t—then it’s reasonable to conclude that the IPCC report might have missed something else.”
“I venture to say that if that’s the case, what they missed is not going to be on the recording of a phone call. Barbara, the IPCC will have gone over that call in every possible way. They will have interviewed every person connected even remotely to what happened up there. I’m going to make a leap here and assume that’s what they did and you’ve been given every relevant report dealing with all of this.”
“I’ve seen things that they didn’t see, sir, because what I’ve seen has happened since their report was filed.”
“But Barbara.” Now Barbara could hear that Lynley was at last striving for patience: busy man, busy day, and why can’t you just get on with things, Sergeant, without having to ring me for a pep talk that you shouldn’t bloody need?
“Sir,” sh
e said.
“You’re not there to reinvestigate, reinterpret, reevaluate, or any other re. You know why you’re there and if Isabelle is telling you—”
“Isabelle, Isabelle,” Barbara said before she could stuff a sock down her throat. Quickly, she added, “Sorry, sir.” He didn’t reply at once, so she added what, in her heart, she knew was the real reason behind her call to Lynley. “She’s drinking, Inspector.”
Silence met this. She let it hang there. She knew he was processing what she’d said. Finally, “What do you mean by drinking?”
She said, “What do you mean what do I mean? You know what I mean. Something’s going on with her and she’s trying to drink her way out of it. I’m sorry to tell you this, but it’s a fact pure and simple.”
“Rarely pure and never simple,” he murmured.
“What?”
“Never mind. She’s allowed a drink when she’s not on duty, Barbara.”
“Believe me, I’m not talking about a drink in the singular, sir. She’s shooting it down—I’ll wager she’s got it in her room—and it’s getting in the way of her being able to see things clearly.”
“That’s a very serious allegation.”
“It’s not an allegation. It’s a sodding fact.”
“Has she made an unreasonable demand of you? Has she avoided looking at the paperwork you’ve been given? Has she assigned you the bulk of the work while taking herself off duty?”
“No,” she said. “But at the same time—”
“Then what is it that’s concerning you, Barbara? Because it seems to me that what’s concerning you is that you cannot bend her to your will.”
“I just want to—”
“This isn’t about what you want. Do you not see that what you’re doing just now is exactly what put you in the tenuous position you find yourself in the first place?”
“I know. That’s why I’ve rung you.”
“To do what? To say what? Barbara, you must know my hands are tied.”
“But—”
“What?”
You were lovers, she wanted to say. That means you have influence and I’m begging you to use it. But she could not say that because there was the fact of crossing lines and the other fact of crossing lines that one could never uncross. So she was silent.
He went on; he was reason itself. “There is no but. There is only doing what you were assigned to do. From everything you’ve said, it seems to me that Isabelle—that the DCS—is doing exactly what she was told to do and that’s making certain the IPCC report is complete and unbiased so that she can give this information to Hillier, who can then pass it on to the MP who asked for the investigation, who can in turn explain to the father of the dead man that there is nothing more to be done and he has everyone’s utter sympathy.”
Still she was silent, finally at a loss as to how to argue her side in things.
He said, “Are you still there, Barbara?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Please hear me. All you have to do at this point is merely to stay in order. Surely that can’t be as difficult as you’re making it.”
“It’s only that . . .” She could hear the defeat in her voice and she wanted to expunge it but she no longer knew how. “It’s only that her drinking is out of hand, sir.”
“Do you know that or do you think that?”
“I think it,” she said.
“Could your thinking be at all influenced by what you want to do and what she’s telling you directly not to do?” When she didn’t reply, he said, “Barbara?” and she was forced to hear the kindness in his voice, that enduring quality about him that always declared the man to be a gent.
“S’pose,” she said.
“So there it is, isn’t it?”
“S’pose,” she admitted. “Only . . . what’s to do?”
“You know the answer to that. What’s to do is to obey her orders and I believe you can do that for what remains of your time together.”
She said heavily for the third time, “S’pose,” and was once again the recipient of the man’s infuriating compassion. He said, “You don’t have to like this, Barbara. No one is asking that of you, least of all me. You must merely soldier on.”
“Sir,” she said. “Yes, sir.”
But when they rang off, she thunked herself onto the nunnish bed in the nunnish room into which she’d been thrust by bloody Isabelle. She’d wanted Lynley to intercede, to take her part, to play the bridge over her sodding troubled waters, to do something anything who even bloody knew what, and she was mightily disappointed. At the very least, she wanted him to ring the DCS, making a suggestion that would allow her—Barbara Havers—to go exactly in the direction that she wished to go. Barbara knew this. She admitted it. She owned it. But she also desperately wanted him to understand that it was the DCS who was blotting things this time, and not Barbara Havers. That, however, was not going to happen, and now she could only do what she could do.
She went to the phone. She got herself connected to Ardery’s room. She told the DCS that she would be skipping dinner. Dead knackered, she told her.
Very well, was the reply. Just be packed and ready for London in the morning.
LUDLOW
SHROPSHIRE
Isabelle had placed her suitcase on her bed, but she hadn’t started to pack it yet. She was waiting for the ice she’d requested to be brought to her room, and she wasn’t going to begin anything till she’d made herself a nightcap. She’d insisted upon a bucket of ice this time, not three or four cubes languishing dispiritedly in a cereal bowl. Surely, she’d said to the omnipresent Peace on Earth, the hotel has an ice bucket for champagne and the like. Yes? Good. That would do.
She’d had one nightcap already, downstairs in the residents’ lounge cum hotel bar, and she wasn’t planning on leaving the hotel. She was fully in control and unaffected by the wine she’d drunk over dinner and the brandy she’d had afterwards. Another vodka and tonic wouldn’t hurt her.
When Peace showed his face with ice bucket in his hands, Isabelle thanked him briefly and went about her business. Yes, vodka and tonic would be just fine, she decided. It would sit on top of the earlier vodka, the wine, and the brandy, but these had already moved nicely through her system, soaked up by the food she’d eaten below in the dining room.
She made her drink. She took it to the sofa that her room provided her. She sat, she drank, and she thought about the investigation: how she saw it and how the maddening Havers appeared to be determined to see it.
It seemed to Isabelle that every one of the sergeant’s concerns was either inconsequential or dismissible. Why were the Crown Prosecutors not called in? Because the police complaints commission had decided that there was no criminal conduct involved. With no criminal conduct the CPS had nothing to prosecute. Why did Ruddock not remain in the room with the deacon? Because no one had told him to do so and he was never informed that the deacon had been accused of anything. What he had been told—verified by the IPCC—was that patrol officers would turn up eventually to fetch the man to Shrewsbury. As to the CCTV camera’s having been swivelled in advance of the phone call: What was the point of making an anonymous phone call if a film was taken with your mug caught front and centre?
They had, Isabelle concluded, gone far beyond what Hillier had sent them up to Shropshire to do. They’d tracked down the Lomax from the deacon’s diary and they’d spoken to Finnegan Freeman from the deacon’s list of children’s club members. They’d met up with Reverend Spencer and had a chat with Flora Bevans. They’d even interviewed the forensic pathologist despite having her full report in their possession. They could carry on in the vein that Havers appeared to want, but that was not why they’d been sent.
She downed the rest of her drink and rose. She experienced a moment of dizziness. On her feet too quickly after having been seated. Must
watch that.
She was crossing the room to deal with her belongings when her mobile rang. She went for it and glanced at the number. Her dander rose. She was sick and tired of having to deal with Bob, his coming life of bliss in New Zealand, and his intention of ripping her own sons farther away from her than he’d already done. She took the call and said into the phone, “What else do you want? A pound of flesh?” She slurred the last bit. She straightened her spine. She walked to the window and opened it as Sandra’s voice said, “Ah. Is it vodka or have you moved on to whiskey?”
Isabelle let the fresh air hit her face. She said, “What do you want?”
“That’s a telling question, wouldn’t you say?”
“What. Do. You. Want. Sandra.”
“I’d expect you’d see the number, take note of the time, and ask at once, ‘Has something happened to one of the boys?’ Or even to Bob, for that matter, once you heard my voice.”
“Oh, you’d expect that, would you? I, apparently, have not yet attained your level of sainthood.” The s was difficult.
“It’s not sainthood, Isabelle. It’s motherhood.”
God, she was a bitch. “I’m not sure how you dare to say that when you know exactly what your husband”—Isabelle said the word like a sneer. She couldn’t help it—“has done to deny me any sort of motherhood I might have otherwise had.”