16 MAY
LUDLOW
SHROPSHIRE
There didn’t seem to be a single area of her life that wasn’t fractured. She was like a wall mirror hit by a stone, with a hundred fault lines cobwebbing out from a single point of contact. This made it so difficult to get up in the morning that there were times when Ding didn’t get up at all. And the fact that her undoing had been effected by her own hand resulted in her not having the false respite of being able to blame someone else.
She’d made it clear to Brutus that more than one person could engage in the friends-with-privileges life. She’d done so with Finn. She’d been drunk and he’d been stoned and the whole encounter had been wretched to the absolute extreme. But—as she’d hoped—Brutus met Finn coming out of her bedroom the next morning and Finn’s “Me too, Brucie” had required no further explanation since Finn was naked and he’d laughed and thrust his hips forward suggestively. And just in case Brutus didn’t understand, he’d also asked, “Ding put out for you like that? Why the hell are you trying to get it some place else?”
That very night, then, Brutus had brought Allison Franklin home. He’d led her up the stairs, and she’d held back, giggling tittering whispering murmuring whatevering her faux reluctance even as she’d cast a triumphant glance into the sitting room where Ding was trying to get rid of the snow on the ancient television she’d brought back months ago from Cardew Hall. Finn was supposedly helping her, which was all about a running commentary having to do with girls, technology, and demands that she let him “see to it, for fuck’s sake, Ding.”
Ding heard the front door open, she heard it close, and then she heard Allison Franklin’s breathless, “I can’t, Bruce. Really. She’s here, isn’t she?” She tried to ignore this, but it was impossible, especially with Finn saying loudly, “Keep the orgasmic howling to a minimum, you lot, and we’ll do the same,” as Brutus led Allison towards the stairs.
Ding’s eyes met Brutus’s eyes. His expression was blank and she made hers indifferent. Up the stairs the two of them went. They didn’t come down them till the following morning.
She hadn’t expected this to be so excruciating. Distracting herself seemed like the only option. The easiest distraction available turned out to be the one that came knocking on her bedroom door nearly every night following the first one. Each time she let Finn in, and she did things to him that kept him coming back for more.
After the third time, Brutus confronted her. They weren’t at home. She was in Castle Square on her way to a lecture. That, luckily, gave Brutus very little time to say what he wanted to say.
It was this: “I got to talk to you, okay?” And without pausing for her to reply because, obviously, he could see her face hardening and anyway even if he couldn’t, he knew how reluctant she would be even to say hello, “You’ve made your point.”
“What point?” She aimed for sounding arch. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. If it’s me and Finn—”
“There isn’t any you and Finn. Not like there’s a you and me.”
“You’ve got some bloody nerve.”
“Come on, Ding. What you’re doing with Finn . . . it isn’t even who you are.”
She wanted to shove him onto his bum at that. She wanted to kick his shins and do everything else an eight-year-old would do because Brutus knew her better than anyone, and she hated him for it.
“We’re friends with privileges,” she told him. “Me and Finn. And I can’t see it’s any of your business.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Ding. You know you’re doing this to get at me. I fuck Allison, so you’re fucking Finn. You wouldn’t even be doing it with him if you didn’t know Allison and I were doing it.”
“Oh, that’s how you see it? You’re inside my head? Or is it just that what you do can’t apply to anyone else?”
“It can apply wherever it wants to apply.” He shifted his weight, and he ran the heel of his palm back through his tousled hair. He was, as always, dressed like a male model, so it was little wonder that it took no effort for him to pull girls. “It’s just that . . . Look, it’s not like I don’t like you, Ding. I mean ‘like you’ as in really like you. I do. But the rest of it . . . ? The exclusive bit . . . ? I keep trying to tell you it’s not how I’m made. I just need more.”
“Oh, I got that,” she told him. “I discovered it’s not how I’m made either. I s’pose I owe you for that, don’t I? There’s lorries full of advantages in spreading the joy all round, and I wouldn’t ever have worked that out if you hadn’t shoved that cow Allison down my throat. Whoops. Not exactly right, is that? It’s your tongue you were shoving down her throat, and the rest of you, you were shoving some place else.”
He made an expression of distaste, saying, “See? Even that. It’s not you. You’re not like that. Let’s call a truce.”
“You don’t know what I’m like.” Her voice rose. “You want a ‘truce’ but what you really want is me just waiting, hanging about, hoping you get tired of her so you’ll maybe come back and do me the favour of being your Temeside fuck so you don’t have to go to the trouble of bringing Allison home.”
“That’s not true.” Brutus blushed, however, so Ding knew how closely she’d hit the mark.
“Oh right,” she said. “Which part of it, Brutus? No, don’t even answer. The trouble isn’t bringing Allison home to fuck, is it? The real problem is waving her off afterwards. You can’t get rid of her the way you want to. Isn’t that it?” She laughed. Even to her ears it sounded a little hysterical, but she felt the triumph of knowing she was correct. “Oh God, it must be a total nightmare! She’s expecting to spend the night and you’re expecting her to dress and be gone only you can’t actually tell her that, can you? Thanks for the shag, darling, now if you don’t mind . . . What a problem you’ve got!”
She expected him to stalk off after that, but he didn’t do so. Instead he watched her and he waited till she was finished. Then he said, “You can’t work out what that means, can you?”
“What?” she said. “What what means, Brucie?”
“That I stayed.”
“Where?”
“With you. In your room. All night. In bed. I stayed because you’re different, you’re not one of the others. I stayed because I cared. I care.”
But there was something not right in his voice. Ding could hear it, just the edge of something very close to panic, so bloody close. She knew then exactly why he was talking to her there in Castle Square. She bloody knew what he wanted from her and how he was lying in order to get it.
She kept her fury going for the rest of that day. She knew she would need it in order to do what she’d decided to do. When she arrived back at the house in Temeside, she went to her room. She dragged out of the cupboard what she’d tried and failed to toss into a wheelie bin nine days earlier. She’d got as far as holding the two articles over a pile of smelly rubbish, but she couldn’t do it. She’d wanted to. She’d seen the necessity. But at the final moment, she’d stayed her own hand. She could keep them hidden away, she’d told herself. Surely, she’d be able to wear them again one day, wouldn’t she?
Now she opened the carrier bag into which she’d folded the skirt and the spangly top. She removed them, spread them lovingly on the bed. Then she waited.
When Brutus came home, she heard his entrance because once again he brought that simpleton Allison with him. She could hear the murmurs and the quiet laughter—no giggling this time—and the pause for a prefatory snog in the corridor and then the door of his room and how it opened and closed and that was what she was anticipating.
She gathered up the clothing. She strode to his room. She didn’t knock. She opened the door, threw the clothing inside, and said, “I protected you. So do what you bloody want with this.”
Then she saw that Allison Franklin wasn’t the girl Brutus had brought home this time. It was Francie Ada
mucci, all bright-eyed and on her knees, her hands in the act of unzipping his trousers.
“Ding!” Francie said with a laugh as she went about the business she’d been engaged in. “Want to join us?”
HINDLIP
HEREFORDSHIRE
Every tedious part of her earlier trip to West Mercia Headquarters was repeated. Barbara and Lynley began with the interminable wait at the distant reception building, made just long enough to challenge their patience. Then came the drive to the headquarters’ main building, past all the CCTV cameras and through the expanse of open land. After that, there was a break in the action for something new as Lynley sought a parking bay that was suitably distant from all other vehicles. This was done, Barbara knew, to preserve the one-million-pound paint job—copper in colour and every inch of it polished lovingly by hand—on his motor. Following that, however, the former process resumed. They were made to wait in the reception hall while Chief Constable Wyatt proved to them that the Met was as unwelcome today as the Met had been before.
After ten minutes, however, Lynley put an end to the wait. Approaching the enormous reception counter, he said to one of the civilians there, “The chief constable has more than made his point. Now as my detective sergeant is quite familiar with the route to his office, you can let him know we’re on our way up, or we can surprise him. It’s entirely up to you. Sergeant?” He nodded towards the stairway.
Barbara beat a happy path there while, behind her, she heard first a protest and then a hasty phone call being made, after which a voice cheerfully called out, “Oh yes. Do go up. The chief constable is expecting you.” At that point she was already at the top of the stairs with Lynley just behind her.
She went to the same grand doors she’d been through before. This time, one of them stood open and as she went through it, CC Patrick Wyatt was coming across the room in her direction. His face was granite.
He said, “See here—”
To which Lynley replied with, “We can agree at once, Chief Constable: You’ve no time for us. We’ve no time for you. Shall we get on with it or argue who’s more affronted by this situation?”
Oooh, Barbara thought. He was using the Voice. He rarely did that because he knew that when it came to being a duck out of water, he was the duck and it didn’t make any sense to emphasise that. But every so often, such emphasis was necessary and the Voice was required. Upon hearing it, the other paused in surprise. It was the pause that Lynley sought.
Into it, he said, “We’re not here to make your people look bad, sir, and we’re certainly not here because we volunteered. The IPCC overlooked a detail when they investigated your Ludlow situation, and our job is to get to the bottom of that. Our presence has nothing at all to do with your force and everything to do with the IPCC.”
Well, Barbara thought, this wasn’t entirely true, but it did the job of catching the CC off guard, adding to what the Voice had started: instead of putting him on a defensive footing, the CC was now at least partially disarmed.
“Go on.” Wyatt made no move to usher them farther into the office. But his granite face altered just round the eyes and his head turned a fraction as he unconsciously presented them with more of his ear.
Lynley said, “May I?” but he didn’t wait for permission to shut the door. He didn’t ask to sit, as this would give the CC an opportunity to refuse him.
Barbara took careful note of the nature of this pissing contest. She kept her mouth shut because between herself and Lynley, she knew which one of them was the bull, and this particular shop was filled with the kind of porcelain she was only too expert at smashing to bits.
They needed to know, Lynley explained to Wyatt, exactly who did what and when during nineteen days that had stretched between the paedophile call made from the Ludlow police station and the arrest of the deacon of St. Laurence Church. Nineteen days comprised quite enough time for at least a cursory look into the allegations made against Ian Druitt, but the IPCC had made no mention of any look at all. What could Chief Constable Wyatt tell them about that period of nineteen days?
Learning that the Met was making a second incursion into his patch, the chief constable had apparently prepared himself for this meeting, but he had little enough information to share: The IPCC had mentioned nothing in their report about an investigation because there had been no investigation. Had the anonymous call constituted information about a possible murder, the matter would have been taken differently. But this was a single call about a clergyman who had only just been given a public award in Ludlow. The call centre operator had done exactly what was required: logged the call in. When the log was read by the officer on duty, that officer made a judgement that anyone would have made: It was a crank call phoned in by someone who either was jealous or had an axe to grind with Ian Druitt.
“But surely you’re not saying paedophilia is something that goes disregarded,” Lynley said.
“Of course not,” Wyatt replied. “But absent the ghost of a whisper of wrongdoing other than a phone call made—by the way—to the wrong calling centre, which is another matter entirely, have you a suggestion as to what the force was supposed to do?”
Wyatt went on to tell them that the closest manned station—in Shrewsbury—could have brought Druitt in for questioning immediately, yes. But failing a lengthy investigation into what appeared to be a nasty crank phone call, such questioning would have consisted of “What do you have to say about this, sir?” to which Druitt would have replied “It’s absolute rubbish.” After that, if there was sufficient manpower—which there was not—officers might have begun the process of interviewing every man, woman, and child with whom the clergyman had come into contact in the years he’d been part of St. Laurence parish.
“But the fact is that we don’t have the manpower,” Wyatt concluded. “What we do have is a single murder squad in the area and they’re responsible for assaults, rape, and every other violent crime that happens on their patch. We’re meant to make due. So I hope you see why an anonymous message about a deacon from St. Laurence Church would fall rather low on the list.”
They did, of course. But . . . there remained the small matter of the arrest of Ian Druitt nineteen days later. If there had been no investigation based on the message, why had he been arrested at all?
“You must admit,” Lynley pointed out, “something more must have come up. What my sergeant was able to learn from the PCSO in Ludlow—”
“Gary Ruddock,” Barbara added. Wyatt shot her a look. She was undeterred. “He told me he got the order from his sergeant. But his sergeant would’ve got the order from somewhere else, especially if there wasn’t ever an investigation, right?”
“Have you any idea who gave that order to the PCSO’s sergeant?” Lynley asked.
“I try not to micromanage, Inspector. I’ve told you what I can. Any more information will need to come from the PCSO’s sergeant. Since she gave the order to pick up the clergyman, only she can tell you what prompted her to do so.”
Her name? was Lynley’s next question.
She was called Geraldine Gunderson and the Met officers could get the rest of her details from reception.
MUCH WENLOCK
SHROPSHIRE
Havers lit a cigarette as they walked from the main headquarters building to the Healey Elliott. She began sucking down the smoke like someone determined to enjoy her final moments before execution. “The more I learn about what’s gone on, the less makes sense,” she said from within a cloud of smoke. “Nineteen days without an investigation and then the bloke’s arrested. You ask me, someone knows something, and I expect that someone is sitting behind us in that building.” She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder. “And whatever it is, no one wants the Met to dig it up.”
Lynley couldn’t entirely disagree. Irregular didn’t begin to describe the arrest and subsequent death of the deacon of St. Laurence Church, Ludlow. But as to
the what, the who, and the why of it all, he had difficulty assigning any of those to West Mercia Headquarters.
He said, “I wouldn’t want to be in the CC’s position. The cutbacks he’s coping with are bad enough. On top of that he’s been saddled with a death in custody, which he assumes the IPCC have investigated and found unfortunate but not criminal. He thinks that’s the end of it, then suddenly the Met turns up in the person of you and the DCS. He goes through that, thinks it’s finished, and then he learns the Met’s to arrive a second time. He digs up everything he can and tells us what he knows, but we still have questions that he can’t answer. It’s pressure on pressure. One can’t blame him for wanting it to end.”
They reached the car and stood on either side of it while Havers finished her fag. She said, “I’m chuffed you can be so philosophical, sir. Especially since you’ve lost your holiday in Cornwall for a second time.”
He looked beyond her towards an activity ongoing that appeared to involve police cadets and riot gear, which was not an especially reassuring sight. He said, “Yes. Well. It wasn’t shaping up to be the holiday of my dreams anyway.”
“Things not going swimmingly in the relationship department?”
“Daidre’s become something of an expert at coming up with excuses.”
Havers tossed the fag on the ground and tramped on it. “What d’you reckon she thinks you have in mind, taking her to Cornwall: planning to dump her down one of those abandoned mines you lot have scattered round the countryside?”
“That could be what concerns her, I admit,” Lynley said wryly. He unlocked the car. They both climbed in.
When they were buckled up and he’d turned on the ignition, Havers said, “As ever, sir, you’ve got your work cut out. I mean, it’s not like I don’t keep saying.”
“You do. But I remain ever sanguine.”
“One of your finer qualities. But can I just say . . . ?”