She pointed out the name MacMurra, which appeared several times in the lead-up to Ian Druitt’s death. This, she said, was one Declan MacMurra and the relationship there had to do with cats.
“Catch, neuter, and release?” Lynley said. “There’re traps in the boot of Druitt’s car.”
“MacMurra’s, those are,” Barbara told him. “He asked me about ’em when I phoned. Big cat lover, he is.”
She went on with Randy, Blake, and Stu, the sole Christian names in the diary. These were members of Hangdog Hillbillies, as it turned out. She only worked this out when she was looking through one of Clive Druitt’s delivered boxes. There was a handbill with the names of the other musicians: Randy on banjo, Blake on guitar, Stu on percussion. No surnames, though, so she couldn’t track them down, although she reckoned she and Lynley could go to one of their venues where they’d probably find someone who knew their full names if that was necessary.
Spencers in the diary was obvious, as Druitt had written it on the dinner hour three times. Two other names turned out to be individuals whom the deacon had checked on in the custody suite at the Shrewsbury station.
Lynley picked up one of the manila folders at this. It had been among several others that he’d removed from the carton he’d brought in from Druitt’s Hillman. He said, “He has information here about the Independent Custody Visiting programme.”
“Everyone told me last time I was here that the bloke was a volunteering machine.”
“Anything else from the names in the diary?”
“Three are shut-ins who belong to the parish. One was in hospital at the time. Four are victims of crimes. Not big stuff, this. Petty crimes, although one was a mugging that involved a head wound.”
“That’s another volunteer programme he’s got information about,” Lynley told her. He fingered through the folders and handed her one. “Victim volunteers,” he said. As she opened it and gave the contents a look, he added, “It is curious, though.”
“What is?”
“Even by the standards of a man of God, it does seem like an extraordinary amount of volunteering.”
“That’s what me and the guv thought first time through.” Barbara reflected on everything she’d learned on her earlier trip to the town and added, “Mr. Spencer told me Druitt couldn’t manage to pass the tests to become a full priest or whatever they’re called, sir. He took it five times and it was still no go, owing to his nerves. Could be this”—she gestured at what they had before them—“was his answer to not being able to serve God and his fellow man the way he wanted to serve.”
Lynley nodded, but he looked thoughtful. He said, “There were condoms in the car as well. A box of twenty. Ten were left. What does that suggest to you?”
“He could’ve been handing them out to the lads round town. I mean the older boys, sir. That’s more or less in character, don’t you think?”
“Anything else?”
“The obvious. He had a lady friend somewhere and was being careful. Odd though.”
“That he had a lady friend?”
She shook her head. “That we haven’t run into her name. Or even a whisper about her. On the other hand . . .” She lifted the deacon’s diary and said, “Here’s something, sir. There’s this Lomax person. A woman.”
“You suspect the condoms have to do with her?”
“Not hardly. Unless he liked grannies. The guv and I met her. She looks round seventy.”
“So where does she take you?”
“She’s in his diary seven times, she is. She told me and the guv she was meeting with Druitt ’cause her family was in a crisis and she needed to talk to someone about it.”
“Is that unreasonable? He’s a clergyman, after all.”
“Yeah, but she told us herself she wasn’t religious and she was vague when it came to how she connected with him in the first place. Plus there’s this, sir: Druitt didn’t counsel anyone. I mean, all the people I’ve talked to so far? Every single one of them? They said he was a lovely bloke and all the rest but none of them went to him to get themselves counselled, spiritually or otherwise. And the Lomax woman? She had a solicitor there when we talked to her. You ask me, there’s something in that needing another look.”
“Let’s see about looking, then,” Lynley said.
ST. JULIAN’S WELL
LUDLOW
SHROPSHIRE
When Rabiah Lomax opened the door and found Officer Dowdy—whose name she could not recall—and her companion, Mr. Well Dressed, standing on her front step, she gave brief thought to ringing Aeschylus, but she didn’t do so. She had other things that she needed to see to on this evening and primary among them was ringing the members of the Maintenance and Repairs Committee to lasso the lot of them into a meeting. Sending for Aeschylus would require her to wait for Aeschylus. She decided it would be far easier to handle these two herself and shoo them on their way.
Officer Dowdy was the one to speak, saying to her, “Mrs. Lomax, can we have a word, please? This is DI Lynley. Sorry, but we’re back in the traces. We’d like to confirm a bit of this and that with you. D’you want to ring your solicitor?”
That was an interesting twist, Rabiah thought as she racked her brains for the woman’s name. When did coppers ever begin with an invitation to bring on the legal advocates? Certainly not on any telly programme she’d ever seen. Usually, they wanted the opposite. She said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t remember your name.”
“Barbara Havers,” Dowdy said. “Can we have a word?”
“Has something happened?”
“Should something have happened?”
“I hardly know. I certainly don’t have any further information to give you about Mr. Druitt. Is that why you’ve come?”
In pear-shaped tones that matched his clothing, which, while beautifully made, also screamed worn-by-a-retainer-for-a-year to make the items look suitably lived-in, the detective inspector said, “Sergeant Havers and I have been asked to look into something related to Mr. Druitt’s death.”
“Didn’t you lot do that once already? I don’t know what I could add to what I’ve already told you.”
Sergeant Havers said, “You did give us a bit of information, right. But then something more came up and here we are. Can we come in?”
Rabiah looked behind herself, almost as a reflex since she couldn’t have said why she did it. She said, “I suppose,” and she didn’t attempt to make her voice sound friendly.
She stepped back to give them entry. She made no offer of refreshments, and she wasn’t happy when Sergeant Havers asked her for a glass of water. The other officer made the same request, which made her immediately suspicious, as this smacked of an advance plan of some kind. She wanted to tell them that they could take themselves off to a shop and purchase a bottle of water each, but she reckoned it might start all of them off on the wrong foot. So she went to fetch the water—two glasses, each half full—and she joined them in the sitting room. She was just in time to see the sergeant returning a framed photo to the fireplace mantel. A glance told her what it was: once again the photo of the glider pilots’ consortium jauntily standing in front of the craft they’d purchased.
“Here we are, then.” Rabiah handed each of them a glass. Neither drank. They were, she decided, trying to unnerve her. She was determined not to be unnerved. “How can I help you this time round?”
The detective inspector gave the merest of nods at the sergeant. If Rabiah hadn’t been directing her gaze to him as the superior officer, she wouldn’t have caught it at all, so slight a movement it was. The sergeant said, “Right, then. We’ve spent a bit of time contacting everyone in Mr. Druitt’s diary. That would be the diary that has your name in it. Now we haven’t made contact with every single name—he was one busy bloke—but a pattern’s emerged and we’d like to ask you about it.”
“I doubt I can
shed any light on a pattern in someone’s diary, Sergeant.”
“P’rhaps yes, p’rhaps no,” she said cheerfully. “Turns out Mr. Druitt had his fingers in a massive pile of social-responsibility pies. Also turns out that the individuals he saw—the names we ran down from his diary, I mean—all fit into one or another of these pies.” She used her own fingers as she named them, and Rabiah could tell she was doing it to make a point. “We’ve got the children’s club kiddos and their parents, a street pastors programme, a crime victims programme, the custody visitors programme that took him up to Shrewsbury to make certain the cells were all squeaky clean, the church choir, and the Neighbourhood Watch where he lived. We’ve also got meetings with the mayor and with three town councillors.”
Rabiah tried to look interested in this information. She could feel a pencil line of perspiration breaking out along her hairline, though. She said, “I’m not sure what your point is or indeed why you’ve come calling. Have you been here for days interviewing everyone in Mr. Druitt’s dairy?”
“Good question, that,” Sergeant Havers acknowledged with a jaunty single-finger salute from her forehead. “I did this bit by phone since every name—’cept the mayor and the town councillors—was only in the diary once.”
“Your point still escapes me,” Rabiah said.
“It’s this: When we were here last—me and my main guv, DCS Ardery, this was—you told us that you and the deacon met because you were talking over a family situation.”
“That’s correct. That’s what I said and that’s what we did.”
“Right. But the odd thing we came up with is that Mr. Druitt didn’t ever meet with anyone about family problems. I guess you could argue, ’course, that family problems’re why some of the little ones prob’ly got sent to the children’s club, eh? But all of this made me wonder if there’s anything about your explanation that you want to change?” She finally paused to take a sip of her water. The other officer, Rabiah noticed, still had not touched his.
“What explanation is this?” Rabiah asked. Her voice sounded too faint. That wouldn’t do.
“The explanation telling me and my guv—DCS Ardery, like I said—that you and Mr. Druitt were talking about your family. Seven times talking about your family.”
Rabiah knew it was time for her to come up with something more specific and she wished desperately that she’d made notes of what she’d told them initially. But she hadn’t done, so she had no choice save to bluff her way forward and get them out of her life. She said, “Mr. Druitt and I spoke about my elder son.”
“Makes you special, that,” the sergeant said, “you being the only person he counselled.”
“I suppose it does make me special,” Rabiah countered. And after a pause during which she recognised that the police were waiting for something more from her, which she was perfectly determined not to give them, “Is there anything else, then?”
“P’rhaps you c’n tell us what you spoke about regarding your son?”
Surely, Rabiah thought, the woman had it in her notes. She wanted to tell her to bloody look through them but she wanted them gone from her house more. She said, “I did tell you. It was a family situation.”
“And there’re so many,” the sergeant said. She looked solemn and anticipatory at the same time. “What was this one?”
“I don’t see how it’s the business of the police,” she said.
“Oh, it’s not at all. Except, ’course, the bloke you talked to about your family situation turned up dead.”
“Are you implying there’s a connection? As I’ve said, I spoke to him about my son David.”
“He would be the one whose daughter died?”
“No. That’s Tim,” she said before she understood what had just occurred.
The sergeant nodded. “Got it,” she said. “Only last time we were here you told us it was that one—the one whose daughter died—who was being talked about. A user, he is. Drugs? Alcohol? What you will?”
Rabiah said, “Both of my sons are users, Sergeant. One is recovering and one is not. I probably talked to Mr. Druitt about both of them during those seven meetings he and I had since Tim’s daughter had died and David’s wife and children had recently left him. One doesn’t cease being involved in one’s children’s lives simply because the children are grown. You’ll understand that at some point if you don’t understand it now.” She rose then and settled her hands on her hips. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
The sergeant looked at the inspector. He’d remained watchful and unnervingly silent, but all the time he’d kept his gaze on Rabiah. Despite a smallish scar that marked his upper lip, he was a handsome man, quiet and solemn in just the way she’d always thought a man should be: seen, admired, perhaps flirted with, and without opinions that wanted declaration.
He finally spoke the first words he’d uttered since coming into the house: “Nothing else just yet,” he said.
ST. JULIAN’S WELL
LUDLOW
SHROPSHIRE
Lynley could tell when Havers was about to start pulling on the bit. There were generally two signs. The first was her gait, which altered from her usual saunter to something akin to a charge, heading into the wind when there was no wind. The second was her expression, which could either telegraph the triumph of gotcha! or the absolute knowledge of what had to be done next to make gotcha! a proximate certainty. As they headed towards his car, she was demonstrating both gait and expression.
“You saw her, right?” Her voice was low, and she looked round furtively, as if expecting someone with a recording device to jump out of a nearby window box.
“I did. But I’m uncertain where the coincidence takes us.”
She halted in the middle of the street. “How about to the fact that it’s not a coincidence?”
He glanced back at the house: well kept, tidy, nothing sinister about it, a house like the others in the street. He said, “Rabiah Lomax and Clover Freeman are in a photo together, posing along with eight or ten individuals in front of a glider, which I assume they all pilot. I’m presuming they’re a club of some sort?”
Havers ignored the question because, as it turned out, she had a piece of information that she was determined to give him. “Yes, yes, but forget Rabiah Lomax. It’s not about her. It’s about the other.”
“Clover Freeman.”
“Nancy Scannell.”
“Who?”
“Nancy Scannell, sir. She’s in the same picture. With Clover Freeman. And Mrs. Lomax. She’s one of the pilots. She’s also the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy on Ian Druitt. She’s who called his death a suicide. So do you see now?”
What Lynley saw was that Havers could well be too excited by half. In fact, he saw that Nancy Scannell’s membership—if it could be called that—in the glider group was less coincidence than the coincidence of Clover Freeman and Rabiah Lomax both being members. He said, “Barbara, think about it. How is this significant? It makes perfect sense that two individuals who are professionally acquainted might discover a commonality between them. Is there a gliding airfield round here?”
“Up on the Long Mynd, yeah. And when we went up there—me and the guv—we went to talk to Nancy Scannell. That’s where she wanted to meet us ’cause she was helping someone launch a glider that day. And then later we discovered that Rabiah Lomax was part of the same glider group. They all own the glider together. Which, you ask me, is totally coincidental in a seriously noncoincidental way.”
“Nonsense,” Lynley argued. “I doubt there’s more than one airfield for gliding in Shropshire. So if there’s a local centre for the sport, it’s even more likely that these two women—professionally related, Barbara—would discover they share a mutual interest in gliding. They might well have run into each other at the airfield. Or there could have been a notice on a bulletin board asking for interes
ted parties to contact someone about purchasing a glider together. They could have discussed the idea of ownership. Or they could have hit upon it separately, only to discover at the first meeting of potential owners that they both are pilots and that they both wanted to be part of the group. My point is that there are a number of explanations, and none of them can actually be labelled suspicious.”
“But my point is—”
“The point is that it’s just that: a point of interest. Something to be noted for now, but that’s all. It may be useful, but it may be a wild hare, and I trust you know better than to follow it simply because you can apply a label to it.”
She looked away from him and he could see from the set of her face that she was prepared to argue the point a few more rounds. He stopped her with, “Check your phone. Let’s see if Ruddock has tried to make contact.”
They’d rung the PCSO before setting off from the hotel, but the call had gone directly to message. Havers had asked him to ring as soon as he could. She hadn’t told him why.
During their conversation with Rabiah Lomax, however, she’d put the mobile on mute. She brought it out now as directed.
She said to Lynley, “Nothing yet. So don’t you think we ought to—”
“What I think is that we need to take care not to get ahead of ourselves. One thing at a time, Sergeant.”
“Time,” she said. “Isn’t that just it? Isn’t that exactly what we don’t have?”
“We’re not at the point of desperation, Barbara.”
Her expression, however, suggested otherwise.