The Punishment She Deserves

  “They were in Ian Druitt’s car,” Lynley told her.

  “Were they indeed? Was he being naughty?”

  “Or careful,” Barbara pointed out.

  “Of course, of course. But how can I help you with Ian and his condoms?”

  “Possession of them indicates use,” Lynley said.

  Flora chewed on this one and its implications. Barbara said, “What the inspector means is were you and Ian Druitt lovers?”

  “Good gracious, no. I did tell you and the other officer that between us there was simply no frisson, did I not? I doubt he looked upon me as anything other than his landlady. For my part, I never gave a thought to him as anything—perhaps I should say anyone—I would want in my bed. I don’t mean to imply there was anything wrong with him, mind. He was quite a lovely chap. But the truth is that aside from there being no chemistry between us, sex with one’s lodger does bring up the dicey issue of what next? Does one still expect to have the rent paid on time? Was this a one-off or can one expect a repeat performance and if so, when? So if Ian was carrying condoms about with him, I was not his intended . . . hmm . . . beneficiary?”

  “Did he ever mention any other ‘beneficiary’ to you?” Lynley asked.

  “Even clothed as someone you might not have suspected was a ‘beneficiary’ at all?” Barbara added.

  “Well, that’s rather difficult, isn’t it,” Flora said. “Ian knew so many people. Not only through the parish and the church but also through all his activities. Really, it could have been anyone.”

  “Male and female?” Lynley asked.

  “Goodness. I have absolutely no idea. But if he was engaged with someone—you know what I mean—then he was the absolute soul of discretion. He never mentioned a name or received a phone call or even a letter or a card in the post. And when I packed up his things after his most unfortunate death, I surely would have seen something—a pressed flower? a theatre stub? one half of a cinema ticket?—to indicate he had a lover.”

  “A married woman?” Lynley asked Flora Bevans.

  “I suppose that could be the case,” she said. “Although again, Inspector, there was no sign.”

  “Someone underage?” Barbara offered.

  “Oh dear. One hates even to think of Ian in that capacity: a man of God and a young girl. I always felt completely safe with him in the house, you know.”

  “No one’s suggesting that he was engaged in criminal behaviour,” Lynley reassured her.

  “Well . . . except for the paedophilia thing, sir,” Barbara said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Oh, I can barely stand to talk about that. I don’t believe it. I can’t picture Ian doing anything of the sort. I do wish I could be more help to you. But from everything I saw and heard and overheard—well, the house is small, as you can see—regarding Ian, I can give you nothing save the fact that he seemed to be a complete man of God. I hope I’m not wrong.” She sighed, put her hands on her thighs, and stood. “I am sorry not to be of more help,” she concluded. “You’ve trekked all this way out here for nothing.”

  Barbara dug round in her bag for a card to give the florist, and she handed it over with the usual remark about ringing if anything came to her mind. She and Lynley stood as well. They were heading towards the front door when it occurred to Barbara that Flora Bevans might be able to aid them with something else. She asked the florist whether Ian Druitt had known the date of her birth. He’d lived with her for some years, after all.

  Flora responded with, “What an odd question. But yes, he did know,” and when Barbara asked her for it, she told her.

  Before the florist could enquire about why the police wanted her birthday, Barbara flipped her notebook closed and said, “Thanks. I’ll remember to send you a card.”

  They were out in the street before she tried the relevant numbers on Ian Druitt’s locked phone. She smiled and looked up from the phone to Lynley.

  “Bingo,” she said.

  BROMFIELD

  SHROPSHIRE

  Since they were on the Bromfield Road, they drove from Flora Bevans’ house into Bromfield itself, where a secondary road near the post office took them to what one could reliably find in any village in the country: a pub. The journey took all of eight minutes, two of which were spent overshooting the lane upon which the pub was established and thereby requiring Lynley to find the rough tractor entrance to a farmer’s field, where he could execute a three-point turn. During all of this, Havers devilled with Druitt’s mobile phone, which, of course, had not been used since the night of his death.

  She finally said to him, “Treasure trove, sir. God bless smartphones. As the song says, ‘We’re in the money.’ Where did it come from, that song, by the way?”

  “The larger question is where you might have heard it,” Lynley pointed out to her. “It’s not 1950s rock ’n’ roll, after all.”

  “It can, however, be tap-danced to,” she informed him.

  “Ah. As to that, Daidre wished me to enquire how it’s going. The tap dancing, that is.”

  “Daidre? Why the bloody hell . . . ?”

  “She’s one of the intrigued, Sergeant. As am I, I hope you recall. How is it all going? I ask because daily I fear a phone call from Dee Harriman. I’ll need something to report in order to remain in her good graces.”

  “Tell her I’m a dead cert when it comes to the heel drop, but the Irish is slaying me. Umaymah remains the better bet if Dee doesn’t want egg on her tap shoes on the night in question.”

  “Remind me when it is, Sergeant Havers.”

  “In your dreams, Inspector Lynley. Not a bloody chance.”

  The pub, they discovered, was not only the local watering hole but also a gathering spot for an ambitious male knitting group that appeared to be taking instruction from a pensioner who looked as if he’d spent most of his life on the sea, so weathered was his skin. They seemed to be working all on the same kind of project. This could have been an extremely long sock or a rather short scarf. It was difficult to tell, although the colours chosen by the knitters suggested something of a military nature. Their lesson was accompanied by a good amount of libation. It appeared to be adding a great deal to their enjoyment, if the noise was anything to go by.

  As Lynley and Havers took a table, the sergeant pulled her notebook from her bag once again. She said to him, “Did you know these lovely gizmos”—and here she waved the mobile in the air—“keep a record of your calls directly on ’em for a couple of months back without you having to ask anyone to send them to you? Calls made and calls received and calls missed and messages left. And since, as we know, this particular mobile hasn’t been used since the night Ian Druitt died, we’re sitting pretty. Or at least prettier than we would have been with an older-type phone. Anyway, if you’d put on your country pub persona and fetch me a lemonade from the bar, sir, I’ll see what’s what with the whos, the whys, and the howevers.”

  “Anything else?” he asked her before turning towards the bar.

  “I wouldn’t say no to a packet of something edible. Salt-and-vinegar crisps if they have ’em. Pork rinds’ll do in a pinch. There’s the lad.”

  Lynley shuddered but did her bidding. In the minutes that it took him to get the attention of the publican, purchase a lemonade, a packet of crisps, and a cup of coffee—which extended the wait since the coffee had to be made—and return to their table, Havers was able to go through the first few weeks of Ian Druitt’s phone calls. She was using her notes to compare the phone numbers with those she’d compiled from the deacon’s various church and volunteer activities as listed in his diary. She was onto the fourth week as Lynley set his purchases upon the table.

  “Ta,” she said to him. “Dig into the crisps if you’ve a mind, Inspector.”

  “I shall pass,” he told her.

  “Could you do the honours anyway?”

/>   He opened the bag and handed it over to her. She unceremoniously dumped its contents onto the tabletop, oblivious to germs, bacteria, social diseases, and the remains of meals. She tucked in directly. Lynley reckoned that, at this point in her life, Havers had an immune system worthy of advanced scientific study.

  As she munched, she reported on her findings. “We’ve got Mr. Spencer, a woman I spoke to earlier from the Neighbourhood Watch programme, Flora Bevans, the two crime victims listed in his diary, his dad, and the bloke who heads up the feral cat catch-and-release group. There’re some other calls to and from numbers I don’t have in my notes, and I’ll ring them and see what’s what when I’ve finished with the first of the two months we’ve got.”

  Lynley nodded as he stirred some questionable-looking sugar into his coffee, trying to avoid the bits that were clotted together from wet spoons having previously been dipped into the bowl. He said, “So far, then, there’s not a lot of joy to be had?”

  “Could be the case, sir. But there’s something missing and there’s also another phone number that I wouldn’t expect to be here.”

  “Indeed? Continue.”

  She shoved a handful of crisps into her mouth, munched, and washed them down with a gulp of lemonade. She said, “First, unless one of these phone numbers is attached to Rabiah Lomax’s mobile—assuming she has one—there’s no phone call either received or made that deals with her. That’s curious, you ask me, since she had those sessions with Druitt and one would think she’d need to ring him about an appointment.”

  “It could be that she contacted him prior to this two-month period you’ve got on his phone, Barbara. If she did that in order to set up her first appointment, there wouldn’t be a reason to ring him again, would there?”

  “I s’pose,” Havers agreed, “assuming that at the end of each appointment, she set up the next right there in his presence. On the other hand, could be she’s been lying to us.”

  “It does remain a disagreeable fact of our employment that someone is usually lying about something. What else, then?”

  “Gary Ruddock.”

  “What about him?”

  “In the weeks I’ve looked at so far, Druitt rang him five times. And during that same period on his end, Ruddock rang Druitt three times.”

  “Did he indeed?”

  “I reckon we ought to take that one on board and stow it with the baggage since he claimed barely to know the bloke.” She reached for another palmful of crisps and munched happily. “Seemed to me, sir, Ruddock went dead quiet when the Freeman kid was brought up. I wonder if he was hoping we’d move off that topic before he had to address it.”

  “Or to answer questions about him. The boy, I mean.”

  “Right.”

  “There’s something not quite as it should be in what he said about Druitt, then.”

  “Ruddock? Too right. And here’s what it is for me, Inspector: One phone call between him and Druitt . . . ? Okay, whatever, it could be dismissable. But eight? That’s dressed in neon lights, that is.”

  “We can’t discount Druitt and the victim volunteer bit, however. It stands to reason that Ruddock might well have put him in touch with several victims of crimes.”

  “He might have done, but there would’ve had to be a real crime spree in Ludlow since the calls back and forth span something like . . .” She referred to the phone. “Eleven days.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Could be it’s to do with the boy, then. Finnegan.”

  “The guv thought he was a piece of work. Could be he was up to something and Druitt knew what it was. Or Ruddock knew what it was and told Druitt to keep an eye out on the sly.”

  “Drug dealing, housebreaking, muggings, graffiti, tagging, street fights—”

  “We know he was into karate.”

  “—chopping watermelons in half with his index finger?”

  She raised her eyes heavenward. “Whatever, sir. But I got to say it: There’s things about this bloke—the PCSO—that’re starting to make me feel like a dormouse’s running round my insides. There’s these dodgy bits we keep coming across, starting with when the DCS and I were here.”

  “Elucidating that point . . . ?”

  She ticked items off an imaginary list on the tabletop. “The CCTV camera in front of the station being shut down long enough to have its position moved; whatever Ruddock might’ve been doing with a girl in his patrol car on the night Druitt died; Ruddock claiming he has no relationship with a female when he clearly has something going on with her of the patrol car; Ruddock saying he left Druitt alone in that office while he was making phone calls to pubs; and now Ruddock not mentioning he and Druitt spoke by mobile. And there’s prob’ly more. I’m thinking we’ve not got all there is to be had from Gary Ruddock, sir. You ask me, we need thumbscrews.”

  “You might well be right,” Lynley said. “But it seems that at the moment we have only one available to us.”

  “One thumbscrew? What is it, then?”

  “The PCSO’s mobile phone. Since Druitt’s mobile is something of a revelation, Ruddock’s might be the same.”

  Havers thought about this before saying, “We could go for his phone records. But that’d take days, wouldn’t it, assuming we could warm the cockles of some magistrate’s heart enough to get a warrant for virtually no reason. And even with a warrant, it’ll still take even more days to get the records, right? So do we have enough time from Hillier to be going that route?”

  “You won’t find me arguing that we do. I daresay we’ll have to go at this directly. And more creatively. Since the constable has announced himself eager to help in any way he can, I suggest we take him up on his offer.”

  Havers shot him an incredulous look. “You’re saying we ask him to hand over his phone?”

  “I am. When you think about it, how can he refuse? If we structure our conversation with him correctly, our request to look at his phone will be inevitable. Indeed, he might well offer it to us without our even having to make the request.”

  She took a moment to consider this before she said, “You’re a bloody wily one when you want to be, Inspector.”

  “I like to think wily is my middle name.”

  “I’m on board, then.” She flipped her notebook closed and returned it to her bag. She put the mobile with the notebook. Then she wiped the salt-and-vinegar crisp crumbs from the table onto her hand.

  For a horrifying moment, Lynley thought she might actually consume them as she’d done the crisps: from the unhygienic surface of the table. She caught his expression and said, “Please. I draw the line somewhere, Inspector.”

  He said, “Thank God,” as she added, “I just don’t do my line-drawing here,” and licked the crumbs from her palm.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  While Barbara liked Lynley’s proposed direct approach to putting their maulers on Gary Ruddock’s mobile, she wasn’t sure how well it was going to work. The PCSO didn’t know that they were in possession of the dead man’s smartphone, of course, so that was to their advantage. On the other hand, since Ruddock had already indicated that he knew there was a connection between Finnegan Freeman and Ian Druitt, she didn’t really see how going over a record of his phone calls to and from the man was going to serve the purpose of dealing with all the bits that were looking dodgy about the bloke.

  A quick call to the PCSO told them that he was not in the police station at the moment. Although he sounded just a bit surprised to hear that the Met detectives wished to speak with him again, he was otherwise cooperative. He told Barbara that, at present, he was at the mobile home centre just outside Ludlow Business Park. One of the vehicles had been broken into. Did they want to meet him there? It was just off the A49. Or he could meet them back at the station. Unfortunately, it was locked or he’d tell them just to wait inside till he got there.

  They
chose the station, and Ruddock said he’d meet them there as soon as he could. He reckoned an hour would do it since he needed to finish up at the mobile home centre.

  While Lynley drove them back into Ludlow and then to the nick, Barbara used the time to continue ringing the numbers registered on Ian Druitt’s phone. She continued this as they waited for the PCSO’s arrival, and the time allowed her to discover Druitt’s connections with the head teachers from three nearby primary schools, all of whom were recommending youngsters for the children’s club; requests he’d made to parents of children in that club for transportation to a gymnastics exhibition; communications with the parish organist; a request for a change in the choral music made by one of the choir members. She was also able to track down various calls he’d made to his father, his mother, and three of his siblings about a celebration of his paternal grandmother’s ninety-fifth birthday. Several other numbers went directly to automated voice mail when she rang them, giving her no option but to request a return call from whoever it was who owned the phone.

  When she finished her work with the mobile, Lynley told her that he had a conversational plan for Gary Ruddock that would make the PCSO’s handing over his mobile to them inevitable. In the final moments before Ruddock’s arrival, he explained it to her, and when Ruddock at last drove into the car park, they set upon that task.

  Barbara said to the PCSO as they joined him, “Can we sit and have a natter, Gary? We’ve come across a few new details, me and the inspector.”

  “’Course,” Ruddock said. “I’m that happy to help,” and he took them into the former lunchroom, where he and Barbara had sat before. He told them to hang on a moment so that he could fetch another chair. This one turned out to be a desk chair that he rolled down the corridor.

  Lynley was the one to tell him that they were in possession of Ian Druitt’s smartphone. He’d left it in the vestry, Lynley said, the night that Ruddock had gone to St. Laurence Church to fetch him to the police station. Ruddock nodded. He waited for more.