“Has he had to roust drinkers from round the Hart and Hind since I’ve been gone?”
“Not that I’m aware of, but of course it’s possible, young people being who they are and the college nearby.”
“He’s not popped anyone into the patrol car, then?”
Harry gazed at her and then at Lynley. His eyes, Lynley saw, were intelligent and frank. He said, “I hope the poor lad isn’t in trouble. He’s quite a decent bloke even though he won’t allow us lot”—he gestured to his companion vendors on their blankets—“to do our bit here. But that’s on the demand of the mayor and the town council. No one blames him for following their orders.”
Lynley wasn’t sure where Havers was going with this. He wondered if she had a plan for the conversation. It seemed she did, at least in some respect, because after another few words between her and Harry, she told him good-bye, advised him to keep an eye out on the goings-on round Ludlow, and handed him her card so that he could phone her if anything interesting popped into his head.
As they headed back towards Griffith Hall, she said to Lynley, “He sees a lot, that bloke. He told me a bit about the PCSO carting drunken college types to wherever, and I’d already seen him—Ruddock, this is—doing whatever-it-was with a young woman inside his patrol car at night. He’s said he has no girlfriend or partner—Ruddock, this is—so he’s had me wondering. Like I told the guv, if he was out in the nick’s car park making surreptitious nasties with some young thing in his car, anyone could have got inside the place to do away with Druitt. And Ruddock would hardly want someone to know that’s how it happened.”
When they walked into the entry of Griffith Hall, a young man who actually was not Peace on Earth held a hand up to stop them as he completed a phone call, after which he said, “You’ve had a message,” to Havers, and he handed over a folded piece of foolscap, which the sergeant unfolded and read, saying to Lynley, “The PCSO stopped by. If we need him for anything, we’re to ring. He’s ready to help.” She looked up from the paper and added, “I expect you’ll want to meet him, sir.”
“I will,” Lynley told her.
The receptionist then said to them both, “There’s a gentleman waiting for you in the residents’ lounge. I did tell him I wasn’t sure when you would return, but he wished to wait.”
The gentleman turned out to be Clive Druitt. He rose from midmorning coffee as they joined him, saying, “Are you the Met officers? My MP told me two were on their way.”
He told them he’d brought Ian’s belongings with him just in case they wished to go through them another time. The other officer—“that woman,” as he called her, and Lynley could see Havers’s hackles rising at the term—had assured him that she and a sergeant had gone through everything once, but he had a “feeling about that one,” he did. Earlier when he’d met her near Kidderminster, her breath . . . Well, never mind. She’s off the case now?
Lynley’s “Not exactly” didn’t do much to reassure the older man. But he had no wish to hear anything about Isabelle’s breath because he knew quite well where that could lead between him and Havers and he didn’t want to go there. Instead, he thanked Clive Druitt for making the trip and he asked—as he’d done before—whether his son had possessed a PC, tablet, or desktop computer.
“Ian?” Clive Druitt said with a short laugh. “Not bloody likely. He was hopeless with technology. He did have a desktop computer years ago, but he drove it into the ground when he figured he’d delete a few items that he wasn’t using. Ended up deleting the entire operating system. That was it as far as he was concerned.”
“No email account, Facebook page, LinkedIn, or whatever?” Havers asked.
“He would have done all that on his mobile. Which wasn’t amongst his things, by the way. I’d like to know what happened to it.”
“We have it,” Lynley told the man. Peace on Earth appeared at this juncture, offering midmorning coffee, fizzy water, orange juice. “Just someone to carry these boxes up to my room,” Lynley told the young man.
“Best put them in my room, Inspector,” Havers said. “More space if we mean to have another go with them.”
“I damn well hope you do,” Clive Druitt said. “I hope you mean to have another go with everything. I want nothing swept under the carpet this time.”
“We aren’t certain that happened earlier,” Lynley replied. Before Druitt could argue the point, Lynley told the man he’d like to have the birth dates of every member of the immediate Druitt family as well as the phone number of each. He explained that there was probably going to be a code to unlock Ian’s phone and, people being people, there was every chance that the deacon had used numbers that came from one of those sources.
Druitt asked when he needed those numbers. Lynley politely told him now, if he didn’t mind. Havers took out her notebook and mechanical pencil, her expression becoming immediately fascinated with whatever Druitt intended to reveal. His revelations included a phone call to his wife, as it seemed he knew only the birth date of their first child and he was even a bit unsure about that. Fortunately, his wife was not, and he repeated the numbers as she gave them to him so that Havers could make note of them. He listened to his wife for a moment after the recitation was completed and then he told Havers that Ian had been awfully fond of his great-aunt Uma, and here were the relevant numbers for Aunt Uma as well.
Once he’d rung off with his wife, he said sharply, “What’re you after with Ian’s phone?” to Lynley.
“It’s all procedure. We’ll be putting in a request for his phone records as well, but what you’ve given us might give us a leg up in advance of getting them.”
“My son was a clean liver,” Druitt said. “Anything different you’re told about him is a lie.”
He took up a quite large padded manila envelope then, and he handed it to Lynley. It contained, Lynley saw, a billfold, a Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, an address book, and a sheaf of bills that Ian Druitt’s father had paid after his death. Havers fashioned a receipt to give him and when she handed it over, Druitt rose, saying, “If there’s nothing else I can do for you . . .”
There was one thing, Lynley told him. They were attempting to find Ian’s car, but while they had the keys to it, they didn’t have the make, model, or year. Could Mr. Druitt help them with that? Did he have the car, by any chance?
He did not. But he told them how to identify it: It was a Hillman, vintage 1962, light blue in colour, and there was considerable rust on the rear wings round the wheel wells. Period transfers decorated the rear window, celebrating the Kinks, mostly, but there were several enthusing over the Stones as well. He didn’t know the number plates, but there couldn’t have been too many vehicles like it in town.
And then, taking his own car keys from his pocket, he ended with, “Someone murdered Ian. As I stand in front of you and swear to it: Someone murdered my son.”
Lynley said as gently as he could manage, “It’s very difficult to fake a suicide by hanging.”
“Someone,” Druitt asserted, “managed to do it.”
LUDLOW
SHROPSHIRE
Brutus hadn’t even created an excuse. That made it worse. Yes, Ding had been having it off with Finn, and yes, Finn was one of their housemates. But it wasn’t as if Finn and Brutus were friends.
Ding totally knew that Brutus had selected Francie. Probably, he’d even tracked her down, challenging himself with: “Let’s see if the dish with the big ones’ll get it on with me.” But the other part was: “If this is how you want it, Ding, see how it can be?” which was also pure Brutus. And that was seriously unfair, because he just didn’t get it. But not getting it didn’t excuse him, because when he brought Francie back to the house when they could have gone to Francie’s home or to her car or even to somewhere on the banks of the Teme, Ding knew that Brutus was sending her a message. Fine and all right, was the conclusion she came to. If that
’s how Brutus wanted things to be, then that’s how things were going to be. But they weren’t going to be that way with her friends, no matter what he thought.
She wanted to have a word with Francie. She knew it would be easy enough since between spontaneous rounds of bonking anything with the right equipment when the mood was upon her, Francie was a creature of habit. So once Ding had cooled off sufficiently to put behind her the sight of Francie on her knees at Brutus’s crotch, Ding knew where to find her: at the life drawing class.
This was tucked at the back of the Palmers’ Hall Campus in Mill Street, one of the three areas in town where classrooms and lecture halls were located. Here the art studios shared space with the photography classrooms and digital printing labs along with the areas set aside for media studies. The bottom half of the windows for life drawing were papered, as was the window in the door. This was, Ding knew, to afford models a modicum of privacy from anyone wishing to peer inside.
When Ding opened the door, the instructor approached her, hands held palm upward in a universal halt gesture. Ding said to the rather imposing woman, who wore a medical lab coat splodged with paint and smudged with charcoal, that she needed to have a word with Francie Adamucci. The instructor said, “She’s occupied. You’ll have to wait for a break. And do your waiting outside, please. This is a private class.”
“She won’t mind. It’s important.”
“I’ll mind.”
“It’s fine with me, Ms. Maxwell,” Francie called out from the dais upon which she stood in three-quarters profile, absolutely naked, a wreath on her head and a shallow basket of fruit balanced against one hip. “I know her. It’s fine with me if she wants to stay.” She neither moved her head nor altered her pose as she spoke, as if with the wish of demonstrating that Ding’s intrusion into her session of nude modeling would not affect her.
Ms. Maxwell said, “As long as she doesn’t distract you.”
“She won’t,” Francie said. “Will you, Ding?”
Ding assured the instructor that she would be brief and be gone, and she was given leave to approach the model. She realised when she reached Francie, however, that this might not be the best of times since she wanted to be eyeball to eyeball with her friend and that wouldn’t happen while Francie was modelling. Plus, seeing Francie naked was disheartening. She was voluptuous, a complete contrast to Ding, who had all the right parts, just not like these.
Unlike a lot of modern girls, Francie didn’t strip herself of her pubes. Her bush was trimmed neatly to the shape of a shield, but there was none of the excessive waxing that turned young women into little girls, underwear models, or porn stars. Instead, Francie announced that if some bloke didn’t like the look of a real woman, then to hell with him. She wasn’t about to do things to her body in order to appeal to some juvenile’s wet dream fantasy. She did draw the line at body hair elsewhere, however. Hairy armpits and hairy legs? Even hairy toes? Hairs on the nipples? She wouldn’t have that. There was being a real woman and there was being a real woman, she would say. Whatever that meant.
Ding got as close to the dais as she could. She said in a quiet tone, “I just want to know if it was him or you.”
Francie didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “The idea, d’you mean?”
“We’ll start with whose idea it was and we’ll go from there.”
“It didn’t mean anything,” Francie said. “Brutus is a cutie but it’s not like . . . I mean, I don’t want him, Ding. He’s . . . what? Is he even eighteen years old? What would I want with an eighteen-year-old?”
“You’re not saying, though, are you?” Ding hissed.
“Huh? What’m I not saying?”
“Whose idea it was. That’s what I want to know first.”
“Idea? All right. Let me think.” Francie’s brow furrowed for a moment as she thought about what had occurred in Brutus’s room, or at least she pretended to think about it. She finally said, “It’s that . . . I’m not sure.”
“Oh, that’s rich, that is. I’m expected to believe that?”
“Well, you know me, don’t you?” When Ding made no reply to this, Francie sighed and said, “All right. I’ll try.” And then after a moment of putative trying, “He was on the river kayaking.”
“Alone?”
“He had some random girl with him. No clue who she was.”
“What did she look like?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like I studied them or anything. Maybe she was sort of round in the shoulders. Oh yes. I do remember she had a terrible haircut. She was wearing a tank top—I remember that as well—and truly hideous running shorts from what I could see of them when she got out of the kayak. Baggy in the arse. And the color? Appalling. Like mushy peas gone bad.”
Ding rolled her eyes. Trust Francie to note the girl’s haircut and her wearing apparel. “Get on with it, then,” she told her.
“I was on Ludford Bridge. I was crossing over from home, and I heard someone call out my name and there they were: Brutus and Baggy Arse. She had on those specs that change colours in the sun? And, oh yeah, she was wearing this necklacey thing, something super large, like it was an Olympic medal or something?”
“Allison Franklin,” Ding said. The description was fair enough to know.
“Whatever,” Francie said. “So like I said, I heard someone yelling hello and I waved and said something like, ‘You’re looking all muscly and scrumptious’ or whatever.”
“Do you ever let up?” Ding asked her.
“I don’t mean anything.” Francie gave her a quick glance that earned her a sharp word from Ms. Maxwell. “I didn’t mean anything. It was just something to say. Only Brutus? He took it like an invitation or something because he asked me to wait. He said he wanted to talk to me about our biology lab.”
“You aren’t studying biology. Neither is he.”
“Which is why I reckoned he was sending me some kind of message. Like maybe he wanted to give this girl the chuck and I was meant to help him do it by playing along. And who could blame him with those hideous shorts she had on. Some girls need to be super careful what they show to the world, you know? Anyway, turned out I was right. Brutus gave her some tongue and a hand on the arse when they got out of the kayaks, p’rhaps to show her he was all hers or something. No clue there. Then off she went so he and I could study biology in a serious way. Only it wasn’t that kind of biology, obviously.”
Ding was beginning to feel hot. The room was warm anyway because of Francie’s nudity—her nipples were nonetheless erect—and she could see that some of the art students were sweating. As for her, the heat came from her outrage because she could feel it like a coal in her stomach. She said more loudly than she intended, “So it was his idea? Your idea? Whose, for God’s sake?”
Francie gave her a look then. She asked Ms. Maxwell if they could have a brief break. The basket of fruit was getting heavy, she said. Five minutes? Ten?
Ms. Maxwell agreed to five and Francie set down the basket and stepped off the dais. There was a cover-up for her to put on, a striped seersucker affair with a belt. She didn’t bother with it, remaining nude instead. She walked Ding over to one side of the room, where various cubbies held canvases, drawing pads, and other accoutrements of drawing and painting.
“Look,” Francie said, “you always said you and Brutus aren’t exclusive. So I didn’t think it mattered.”
“Whose idea,” Ding snapped.
“Probably both of us. Ding, I don’t know.”
“Then tell me what happened. Exactly.”
Francie shifted her weight. One smooth hip jutted out. Unselfconsciously, she scratched her pubes. She said, “I think I asked him what was with the biology bit? He said something like he just felt like he wanted something different. He gave me that grin of his—let’s face it, he’s rather adorable even if he is too young for my taste—and I said differe
nt what or how or who? He gave me another one of those grins and he did that thing when he brushes his hair back and sort of looks at you like—”
“I know his routine,” Ding told her. “Finish up.”
“So we went to the house. We had a spliff and a snog. That’s it.”
“Oh, come on.” Ding’s voice rose. Three nearby male artists looked up from their work. She whispered, “You were on your knees and that wasn’t about praying for world peace.”
“Well, of course I was going to blow him,” Francie said. “But it wasn’t serious. We were there and he was . . . he was that Brutus person he can be, and it seemed like—”
Francie stopped suddenly. Ding’s eyes had filled. She was furious with herself for reacting in any way, let alone for being upset.
Francie said, “Ding! OMG. It’s not like the two of you have ever been exclusive, is it? And it didn’t mean anything. It was only a bit of fun, it was only sex, him and me and twenty minutes if it was even that long.”
“You mean . . .” Ding’s lips were so dry she thought they might split as she went on to say, “You mean that after I slammed the door on you two, you actually . . . You went on? Like, you’re caught in the act but that didn’t matter?”
“But why should it? And we’d gone up there to . . . I don’t know what to say. Dingie, you’ve told me about the lads at Cardew Hall. That delivery bloke with the jars for your mum? That other one in the back of the church over Easter? And what about the one doing the roof of the stables? Wasn’t any of that true?”