The Punishment She Deserves

  And now Missa. And the alteration in her that illustrated to her mother that there was more than one way to lose a child. But loss of many kinds had hardened Yasmina’s resolve, so when it came to Missa, she wasn’t about to accept it. She could see how the girl’s future was going to play out if she—Yasmina, her mother—did nothing to force the issue of her fractured decision making out into the open.

  Timothy opposed her. “She needs to find her way through this, and you can’t find it for her, no matter how much you want to,” he said. But if nothing was done to stop it, Missa’s “way” was going to lead her directly to becoming exactly what Yasmina saw in the clinic every day: a too-young mother with a very big belly, a runny-nosed child in a pushchair, and another holding on to her skirt. “That’s who she’ll be if she ends up with Justin Goodayle,” Yasmina said to her husband. “You don’t want to admit it because you like the boy. I like him as well, but not as a husband for our daughter.” His response was, “Keep this up, Yas, and you’ll drive her straight into marriage with Justin.”

  Yet why would that be the case? Yasmina wondered. All she’d ever wanted for her girls was that their paths into wholesome careers not be like her own: made excruciating through the loss of her nuclear family and difficult through unexpected pregnancy. At least, she thought, they didn’t have that to concern themselves with . . . unless Missa had got herself pregnant during her months at West Mercia College, unless Missa had had an abortion, unless Missa was now pining for the baby . . . or perhaps she was still carrying the baby . . . or if not that then—

  Yasmina knew she was driving herself mad by spending too much time inside her head. So when she left the clinic, she stopped at the market in Buildwas Road and spent half an hour pushing a shopping trolley up and down aisles with the hope that whatever she put into it could transform itself into a meal that she might prepare for the family’s dinner.

  The supermarket was not far from New Road, where the Lomaxes lived. Their sturdy brick house with its double-glazed windows backed into a hillside overgrown with ivy and shrubbery. Its length followed the course of the narrow lane. This climbed in the direction of the town church, above a well-travelled riverside street called the Wharfage, which was the main route between Ironbridge and its neighboring village Coalbrookdale. The Lomax house looked down upon the Wharfage and upon the River Severn that flowed to its south.

  They had the luxury of a garage, but when Yasmina arrived home, she saw that her mother-in-law’s car was blocking access to it. She squeezed her vehicle as far off the roadway as she could get it, after which she wrestled the carrier bags from the backseat. She wasn’t in the best frame of mind by the time she got into the house.

  Rabiah, she saw, was at the kitchen table with Sati, and they appeared to be working on Sati’s school prep. This was an additional irritant. “She’s meant to do that on her own,” Yasmina said to her mother-in-law.

  Rabiah’s response was a mild, “You need a lovely long bath and a cup of tea, my dear. I’ll see to things down here. Use bubbles, please.”

  “What I need is to start dinner, Mum, and what Sati needs is to do her school prep by herself.”

  Rabiah rose from the table and gave Yasmina an affectionate pat on the shoulder before she took the carrier bags from her. “She can’t do it if she doesn’t understand it in the first place. What’s the point of having a pensioned maths teacher for a gran if I can’t help her?”

  “She’s only explaining things to me,” Sati said. “You let Missa explain things, Mummy.”

  “That’s because Missa can be counted on not to give you the answers,” Yasmina said. “I’m going to ask to see your work, my girl. And it had better be in your writing and not your grandmother’s.”

  “Scoot along,” Rabiah told her, clearly unoffended. “I’m putting the kettle on. What d’you have here? Ah. Lamb. Perfect for kebabs and how fortunate is that since kebabs are virtually the only thing I know how to make.”

  “You do goose at Christmas, Granny,” Sati pointed out. “You do roast beef as well. And turkey.”

  “Holiday meals are simple,” Rabiah said. “It’s the daily business that defeats me, which is why I stick with tomato soup and soldiers. Lentil soup as well, I suppose, when I feel like going wild. At any rate, finish your prep and you can help me while your mum has a soak in the tub. And I do mean it, Yasmina. I’ll bring you your cuppa and if you’re not in the tub with mounds of bubbles, I shall be quite annoyed.”

  Yasmina knew when her mother-in-law had become the unmovable object. Since she hadn’t considered what to do with the lamb and the other items she’d purchased, it was nothing to her to have Rabiah turn them into kebabs. Besides, a bath sounded quite lovely. A bath, a cup of tea, silence, and peace.

  She had sunk into the bubbles when she discovered that while she would have the bath and the tea, what she would not have was the rest of it. Rabiah knocked on the bathroom door and when Yasmina told her to enter, in she came bearing not one but two mugs. She handed one mug to Yasmina, kept the other, and settled herself on the loo’s seat.

  “Ah.” Yasmina didn’t trouble to hide the weariness in her voice. “As I feared.”

  “Well, you can’t have thought I just stopped by to help Sati with her school prep. We need to talk, you and I. Some London coppers have been sent up to Ludlow to have another look into the death of that deacon fellow. D’you know who I mean? He was a suicide while in police custody.”

  Yasmina sipped her tea. It was too weak, a characteristic of Rabiah’s lack of skill at teabag dousing. The only cure for this had always been to have Yorkshire Tea on hand. Boiling water, approximately two seconds, and the brew was so strong that one’s teeth stood in danger of losing their enamel. Anything else in Rabiah’s hands was more like drinking slightly darkened water.

  “You can’t have come up here to tell me about the London police, Mum,” Yasmina said. “And yes, I remember the ‘deacon fellow.’ It was everywhere, that story.”

  “What wasn’t everywhere was the name Lomax associated with the man,” Rabiah told her. “And since that particular Lomax did not belong to me, I concluded it belonged to Missa. Has she told you that she knew him? No? Let me carry it further. Lomax was in the deacon’s diary seven times. So she had regular meetings with him. And, by the way, this is the second visit I’ve had from New Scotland Yard, so something’s going on and I daresay it’s serious. I’ve fended them off for now but I doubt they’re going to remain fended.”

  Yasmina wanted to rise from the water at all of this, but natural modesty prevented her, as her mother-in-law had known it would do. Rabiah’s suggestion of bubble bath had been inspired. Yasmina was covered by the foam and hence a prisoner of this conversation. All she could do was stare at Rabiah: that distinguished unlined face of hers, those frank brown eyes, the sinewy body of a distance runner. All she could think was that Missa had been lying to her for months upon months and that every time Yasmina thought she’d got to the root of what was on her daughter’s mind, she discovered she knew nothing at all.

  “You’ve spoken to Missa?” Yasmina said.

  “I stopped at that Victorian place first, before coming here. I spoke to Justin, and I spoke to her. He tells me he was never against her going to college and uni, by the way. I get the impression he thinks his cooperation with the college and uni thing constitutes your—what do they call it? that quasi-religious word? Oh yes. Your imprimatur on future nuptials between Missa and him.”

  “What did Missa tell you?”

  “About rendezvousing with this clergyman? At first she tried to claim it was her friend Ding using our surname. Once we worked our way through that little tale, she told me that someone put him onto speaking to her about leaving college. She thinks it was her tutor. She says, like you, her tutor was opposed to her leaving and when the clergyman—Druitt, that’s the name—contacted her, she reckoned the tutor had arranged i
t. Had he?”

  Yasmina knew what Rabiah was asking her. She also knew that Rabiah would not approve. But the truth lay in between what Yasmina had done and what subsequently occurred, so she told it. “I did speak to her tutor, Mum. Missa’s story kept changing. I had no choice.”

  “What story? About why she wanted to leave the college?”

  “First she told me it was Sati and what she called Sati’s ‘need’ for her at home because of Janna’s—” Still, she could not utter those words. She attempted to cover her inability to make that agonising death final by carefully setting her tea to one side. She reached for the soap as if intending to wash. “That was at Christmas, and Timothy and I quashed it. But after she returned to Ludlow to give college another try, she claimed something had gone wrong in her brain. She said she couldn’t concentrate. She believed she’d developed dyslexia or attention deficit disorder because none of her science coursework made sense to her any longer. She said she was going to fail. I told her that one does not develop a brain disorder unless one has had a head injury. She didn’t want to hear that, naturally. All she wanted was to come home. So I spoke to her tutor. And yes, I already know, Mum. Missa would have hated my interfering. So I asked him not to tell her that I’d contacted him, but it didn’t matter. Missa had already spoken to him about leaving and he was as concerned as I was.”

  There was a pristine washing flannel on top of a stack of freshly laundered towels, and Rabiah handed this to her and said, “So he . . . what? Rang the vicar?”

  “He told me that he’d contacted a college counsellor. I was worried she wouldn’t get to Missa in time to keep her there, so I asked her name and I rang her myself. I left a message. Twice, this was. That was all. She never phoned back.”

  Rabiah nodded. Wisely, she made the next connection by saying, “Does Tim know about all this?”

  Yasmina didn’t like what was implied by the questions. She said, “I don’t keep secrets from Timothy,” and couldn’t stop herself from adding the bitter words, “although he thinks he’s getting much better at keeping secrets from me, Rabiah.”

  Rabiah instead of Mum sent the message that if her mother-in-law wanted to go in this next direction, Yasmina was willing to do so, but it would not be an easy conversation. Rabiah said, “We can’t discuss whatever Tim’s up to just now. This octopus he’s carrying round on his shoulders . . . ? He must face it and you can’t force him to do that.”

  “Believe me, things have progressed much further than a tumble from the wagon,” Yasmina told her. “But don’t worry. We shall continue to muddle along till someone somewhere counts up their pills and begins to ask questions.” And then when she saw the stricken look on Rabiah’s face, she added, “I’m sorry. Mum, I’m sorry. But it was just that your question . . . No, let me answer it. I told Timothy what I intended to do: that I would be phoning Missa’s tutor. He told me I was interfering. And when she did leave the college in March, he put it down to me. I forced her hand, he said. If I’d’ve just let her find her way, she would have found it on her own. Everything would have come right in the end.”

  “Now that’s a fairy tale,” Rabiah said.

  “If it is, Timothy’s the one writing it,” Yasmina told her.

  ALLINGTON

  KENT

  The drive to Kent was as deadly as Isabelle Ardery had assumed it would be, considering the time of day and Kent’s proximity to London, and although she’d known it would be difficult for her, the traffic turned out to be more than her nerves had bargained for. Ultimately, she pulled into a lay-by. There she attempted to calm herself. She chose deep breathing, trying to free her mind of its snarl of thoughts, which were taking her in every possible direction: from the dog’s dinner she’d made of her time in Ludlow to the dog’s dinner she’d made of her marriage to the dog’s dinner she was making of her life. She sat motionless, putting her will into her skin in order to keep it from crawling up her bones in the direction of her vocal cords, which would require her to scream. She gripped the steering wheel and watched the traffic crawl by.

  She should have taken the train. It would have been packed, but at least it would have got her to Maidstone without exposing her to every single one of her weaknesses. Just now, she couldn’t afford to be exposed to any of them. She wanted her wits about her because she needed to get out to Bob’s house while she actually had his agreement to see and speak to the boys alone. True, she would have to see them in the back garden of Bob and Sandra’s house in case James became “overwhelmed” again, as Bob had put it. But Isabelle was willing to accept this condition because it was essential to her that she be allowed to talk to the twins.

  She’d had a fortifying drink before leaving the Met. After she’d downed it, she’d gone to the ladies’, where brushing, flossing, and gargling—and then doing it all a second time—had resulted in her not being able to catch the scent of anything on her breath save mint when she cupped her hands and exhaled into them. She’d also chewed mint gum and sucked on mint breath lozenges as she drove. But the ghastly traffic had taken its toll. There in the lay-by she sat in her car and felt the longing, the abject need, and the growing inability to think of anything else no matter how she tried.

  She had it with her. It was there in the glove box as always. She also had with her the toothpaste, the toothbrush, and the mouthwash. This meant, as she well knew, that she could—

  She told herself that she would not. She pulled out of the lay-by when there was an opening in the traffic and set off again. Twenty minutes later, however, she saw the sign for a Welcome Break. As it was growing ever later, she followed the route into the car park, and there she pulled into a parking bay and placed a call to Bob from her mobile. It was very brief and he was quite nice about everything. She told him traffic was far worse than she’d imagined it would be, so she wouldn’t be in Allington when she thought she would. That was quite fine, he told her. One certainly couldn’t do much about traffic, eh?

  The phone call finished, she stared at the Welcome Break’s main building. It was a large one, and she knew that there would be various options for food inside, as well as coffee sellers. But either coffee or tea would only make her nerves worse. She settled on looking for something to eat.

  Inwardly, though, she rolled her eyes at the idea of food, coffee, tea, and her nerves. When it came to nerves, after all, how long would it really take to settle them? She had what she needed there in the car and after two—or perhaps three—airline bottles of vodka . . . No. Not three. She was not that far gone. Two would be fine because two would do what it took to stop her hands from shaking because shaking hands would frighten the boys, especially if the shaking became worse than—she held them up in front of her—it was at present.

  As quickly as she could manage it, she downed two of the small bottles of vodka. She let them settle into her and reached to close the glove box upon the third. But at the final moment, she took that one into the palm of her hand as well. She drank it down. The relief was enormous.

  Since she did have with her the rest of what she needed, she locked up the car and went into the building, where she found the ladies’. There, she repeated the brushing, flossing, and gargling that had served her purposes at New Scotland Yard.

  Her business completed, she went into a smallish M & S food hall, and there she purchased a muffin to serve as her dinner. This she ate on the way back to her car. She felt one hundred percent better.

  Bob and Sandra lived not far from the lock on the River Medway, and when Isabelle pulled in front of their large, cantilevered and tile-cladded cottage, she did her best not to compare it to her own basement lodgings south of the Thames. There, she was fixed between HM Wandsworth Prison and Wandsworth Cemetery. Here they were fixed beside an orchard of fruit trees, in a home shaded by an enormous hornbeam, with a river offering a pleasant vista for them to enjoy from their back garden.

  The flagstone path s
he followed to the front door was swept neatly, with beds of yellow, white, and pink primroses on either side of it. She surreptitiously checked her breath when she got to the porch, and she smoothed her hair, which allowed her to discover that somewhere along the way she’d managed to lose one of her earrings, not an easy thing to do as her ears were pierced. Quickly, she removed the other before ringing the bell above a wrought-iron stand that held a fern so lush that it looked edible.

  Laurence answered the door, crying, “Mum!” and “Mum’s here, James,” over his shoulder. His father appeared behind him in an instant, saying, “Ah, here you are,” as he did his best—she saw—not to look as if he were checking her for signs of inebriation.

  Sandra showed up as well, before Isabelle had walked more than six feet into the house. Isabelle greeted her in a friendly fashion, but she couldn’t help looking round for James. Laurence called out to his brother once again, and James finally showed his face by peering round the doorway to the dining room where for some reason he’d decided to lurk. Before Isabelle could speak to him, Sandra said, “Come say hello to your mum, darling,” and held out her hand to the boy. James joined her then, and she put her arm round his thin shoulders, bending to murmur something to him that Isabelle couldn’t hear.

  She did her best not to feel indignation, but what she truly wanted was to grab her son—her son, not Sandra’s—and do some of her own murmuring into his ear, although what she would murmur was something she couldn’t come up with. Instead, she said to him, “Hello, darling. Laurence and I are going to chat to each other in the garden. Will you come?” When he made no reply, she schooled herself to feel nothing. She said only, “Well, if you decide you want to, do come outside.”