Lynley said, “If we could have a word, Dena.”

  “Why?”

  “For the sake of curiosity.”

  “About what?”

  “Rabiah Lomax.”

  She remained where she was. She looked at them in turn. She said, “I haven’t done anything. I don’t see why I need to talk to you.”

  “You don’t need to. We’re merely requesting. You can deny the request.”

  “Which,” Havers added, “would make us wonder why.”

  “A great many things are centring on this house,” Lynley said. “You might be able to clarify at least one of them, and we’d be in your debt.”

  Dena didn’t look as if she were anywhere close to being on board with that idea, but she came slowly down the stairs. She was not a tall girl, Lynley noted. She was shapely, however, and quite pretty as well, although at the moment her face was pinched.

  She joined them and said, “All right. What do you want me to clarify?”

  “Thank you,” Lynley said. “You can clarify your relationship to Rabiah Lomax.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she appears to be on the periphery of what we’re here looking into.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “Accepted.”

  She said nothing to this. Havers said, “So if you wouldn’t mind . . . ?”

  “I know Missa. Her granddaughter. Missus Lomax came over here yesterday ’cause she had a message for me from her, from Missa.”

  “Odd that it couldn’t have been given by phone,” Havers noted.

  “Missa had a necklace off me. She forgot to give it back. Mrs. Lomax brought it.”

  “Was it a message or the necklace?” Lynley asked.

  “What? It couldn’t’ve been both?”

  “What was the message?” Havers asked.

  Dena cocked her head and observed the sergeant. She said, “I don’t think I have to tell you that. It was personal, and I don’t expect it has anything to do with why you’re here. She had a boyfriend, she broke up with him, they’re back together. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “What about you?” Havers said. “You have a boyfriend ’s well?”

  “Not at present.”

  “Not even Gary Ruddock?”

  “Who?”

  “The PCSO. I saw you with him one night at the police station. In a car, actually. What was that about?”

  Dena’s gaze flitted from Havers to Lynley back to Havers. She said, “I don’t even know that bloke. All I know is he comes round the Hart and Hind whenever there’s the tiniest complaint about the noise because everyone round there goes to bed, like, at half past seven. But there’s no way I would be in a patrol car with him. Okay? So I’ve answered your questions and if you don’t mind, I’m going back upstairs. I’ve got a—”

  “Lecture, right,” Havers said. “The whole boiling kettle of you are real scholars, aren’t you?”

  They watched the girl go back up the stairs and heard a door shut. The roar of water into the bathtub began a moment later.

  Havers said to Lynley, “Swear to God that was the girl with Ruddock, sir.”

  Lynley said, “It’s impossible to be certain, Sergeant. At night. The car in the shadows anyway.”

  “Right. Except for one thing.”

  He glanced at her. She looked oddly happy. “What’s that?” he asked her.

  “I never mentioned a patrol car. She’s the one who said it was.”

  He directed his gaze up the stairway again. He nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll need someone to confirm,” he said.

  “Right. I know who can probably do it. We just need to find him.”

  WORCESTER

  HEREFORDSHIRE

  Trevor Freeman hadn’t the first clue who would be ringing him at such an hour of the morning. It wasn’t even half past six. But then he saw the name of the caller on his mobile’s screen, and his skin jumped uneasily. He pushed away the bedcovers, grabbed his phone, said, “Finn? You all right?” In answer, he heard what sounded like a combination of shouting and sobbing.

  He could understand nothing. He said, “Slow down. I can’t understand you. What’s happened? Has there been an accident? For God’s sake, Finn, take a breath. Are you sitting? No? Sit down. Find a place. Sit down. I’m here. Just put yourself in order.”

  He waited. He heard noises: snuffling, shuffling, heavy breathing like a runner’s, and then the story. It came from his son in fits and starts but he got the gist of it easily enough: New Scotland Yard, the same detectives who’d come to Worcester to speak with Clover, something to do with pots and pans and his bedroom, and then the claim, the accusation, the grilling, the whatever the hell you wanted to call it and it was easy enough—wasn’t it easy—when it did not involve your son. By the end of Finn’s fractured recitation of the facts, Trevor felt a claw grab his lungs. He got himself together enough to calm the boy, which was mostly an attempt to reassure him that his father was going to handle this.

  “Dad, he lied. He lied.”

  Trevor didn’t know if he meant Gaz Ruddock or Ian Druitt. He said, “I’ll see to it, Finn. You’re not to do anything. Do you understand?”

  “That whole bit about the kids . . . I only ever did what I was meant to, Dad . . . I wouldn’t . . . Why would anyone say . . . And now they think . . . and they’ve got it in their heads I went to the police station . . . I didn’t do anything, not a fucking thing.”

  “Let me handle this, Finn. Will you trust me to do that?”

  “What? What?”

  “Just wait. Don’t do anything. I’ll be in touch.”

  “I want to fucking—”

  “Right. I know. I’d feel the same. But keep your distance. Trust me.”

  When he rang off, he could feel that the claw twisting a path to his bowels. Dimly he heard the radio below in the kitchen. Morning news was playing. She was still at home. But of course she would be. Twenty-five minutes after the hour. She would not have left for work yet. He started for the bedroom door, realised he was naked, and searched round for his shorts on the floor. As he was doing this, the radio snapped off, footsteps followed, and then the sound of the front door opening and closing and he understood she had left the house.

  He dashed to the window. But her back was to him and she was inside the car before he had the presence of mind to bang on the glass. Then he grabbed up his shorts, pulling them on and racing down the stairs, but she was gone before he got the front door open because ever the security buff, she had double-locked it and the key wasn’t on its hook.

  She’d hidden it from him! She’d expected this. She’d known it was coming, and she wasn’t intending to be there to face the consequences of what she was bringing down upon them all.

  He ransacked the single drawer in the entry table that served the purpose of holding their day’s post till they could get to it. The key wasn’t there. Then into the kitchen and shoving things round the work top. Then at last the table, where the key lay in the basket of paper table napkins and God, he hadn’t put it there, he swore it, she had to have done it. He grabbed it and made for the door and ran outside to the street, where his car was parked.

  It was when he tried to insert the key that he saw how badly his hands were shaking. So were his knees and so were his arms and what was it that was causing him to quake like a child alone in the dark: anger, fear, terror, anxiety, despair . . . Could one shake from despair?

  He set off after her. She was a creature of habit. Weren’t they all when it came to the routes they took to their jobs? It wasn’t a time for a leisurely drive. It was a case of get there the fastest and easiest way, which, in Clover’s case, meant the A38.

  When he reached that road, he switched on his hazard lights. He used the horn. There was one dual carriageway on the route and when he came up
on it, he pulled into the right lane and pressed the pedal to the floor. He’d caught her up within five miles as she was driving sensibly, not at all like him. She pulled over at the first opportunity. It wasn’t a lay-by, just a broader than normal stretch of verge edged by poplars. There, they both got out of their cars, he with his mobile, which he waved at her, she looking puzzled as well she would since there he was shirtless, shoeless, wearing only his shorts, the cool morning air making his bollocks shrink.

  She said, “I have it in my bag, Trev. That must be yours. You should’ve just rung me, and you would have known.”

  “It’s all gone to hell,” he told her. “Whatever the two of you are up to, it’s all gone to hell.”

  She blanched at his tone. “What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”

  “What’s going on is our son. He’s just phoned me. I’ve never heard him in the state he’s in.”

  “Is he . . . Did he . . . ?”

  “Those two London detectives appeared at his bedside like the ghost of whatever Christmas you want it to be. They woke him out of a sound sleep, dragged him into the kitchen, and grilled him.”

  “My God.” She looked at the phone he still was holding. Then she looked beyond him at the traffic that continued to whizz by far too close to where they were standing, and she drew him between their two cars. “What did he say? Where is he? He wasn’t arrested, was he?”

  “When I could understand him between the shrieks and sobs—”

  “He’s at home, isn’t he? He hasn’t been arrested, has he?”

  “The cops came to talk to him about what he’s been up to with the six-year-olds or eight-year-olds or however old they are in that fucking after-school club that you bloody insisted he take on as a social duty. Your London coppers—”

  “They are not my coppers.”

  “—have apparently concluded that Druitt’s concerns about Finn must have had to do with Finn and children. So what I want to know is, did you know this from the first?”

  “Know what? That the London police were going to—”

  “Bollocks to the London police. Did you know that Druitt’s phone calls to Gaz were about Finn’s behaviour round the children? Is this what everything’s been about between you two?”

  “I’ve tried to explain it to you, Trevor. This is about the Met, start to finish. I know how they think and I know how they work. The first time round when they were in Ludlow, I tried to tell Finnegan that he wasn’t to speak to them without someone there, but he wouldn’t listen and now here we are. This is exactly what I feared.”

  “What? That the cops would decide our son’s a child molester?”

  “Of course not! It was the Metropolitan Police, full stop. I never wanted him to face them alone for any reason but he wouldn’t see the importance of that. He thought he would be a match for them, for whatever they had to ask him, because he thought it was all about Ian Druitt and children. And it was about that and about the IPCC investigation and I bloody well thought we were through with it all. Yet here they are again and—”

  “He thinks you set them on him, you and Gaz. Now why would he think that, Clover?”

  “Stop being ridiculous. Look, you’re shivering. Can we at least get into one of the cars if we’re going to go at it?”

  “Don’t do your usual.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Which is trying to position me where you want me to be. Which, as we both goddamn know, you’re expert at doing.”

  She raised her hands as if she wanted to make them into fists or pull her hair out or seek guidance from the heavens. She said, “Trevor, why would I set the Met on our son? I’ve spent his life trying to protect him from himself, so why at this goddamn eleventh hour would I decide the effort’s just too much trouble and have at him, London, because I give up?”

  “Because that makes one hell of an excellent smokescreen,” he said. “Especially if you know there isn’t a shred of evidence against him, so it won’t matter what happens to him in the short term since you’re looking at the long run.”

  She took this in with a slow inhalation. She was, he knew, either garnering inner reserves of calm or merely trying to look like someone garnering inner reserves of calm. She said, “You say directly what you’re implying.”

  “There are things you don’t want anyone knowing—including me—and this is one hell of a good way to accomplish that.”

  “‘Things’? What things?”

  “You tell me, Clover. I’m sick and tired of being played for a fool.”

  “That’s what you think?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  She stepped towards him. She spoke directly into his face. “You listen to me,” she hissed. “I didn’t want him at West Mercia College, but I agreed to it. I didn’t want him in accommodation, but I agreed to it. Yes, I’ve had doubts that he can ever manage his life on his own, but I went along with what he wanted and what you wanted. And now just look where we are. God knows what he’s said to those Met detectives. God knows what they think. I would like you—just for once, Trevor—to see that what’s going on just now has nothing to do with my relationship with our son or my relationship with anyone on the planet. If you want to stand there and accuse me of interfering in Finnegan’s life, you might also want to take a look at your own bloody focus on every interaction he and I have ever had. And that probably includes how I changed his nappies. We’ve been at loggerheads over him since the day he was born, and I suggest you look at that. I also suggest you look at where we are now because of it. Now I’m going to work to see what can be done about all of this because you and I can at least agree on one bloody thing regarding Finnegan’s life.”

  “Which is what?” he demanded.

  “Which is that there isn’t a shred of evidence that Finnegan did anything to anyone at any time. That’s what needs to be dealt with first. As to the rest of it”—she gestured between the two of them—“we shall have to deal with that later.”

  She turned then and strode back to her car. She’d left it running, so it was a simple matter for her to drive off and leave him standing there, unsure which of them had scored how many points.

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  Barbara Havers had expected to engage in something of a search through the centre of town to find Harry Rochester. She was surprised, therefore, to see him crossing the Ludford Bridge as she and Lynley were heading in the direction of Broad Street’s climb up to the mediaeval heart of the town. She pointed him out to Lynley, who pulled over to the kerb, saying, “You take this, Sergeant. I don’t think it needs both of us.”

  When she climbed out of the car and called out to the dosser, he gave her a jaunty wave with his flute. He called back, “This is early hours for you, isn’t it, Barbara?”

  “You, too,” she said. “Can I have a word?”

  “Certainly.”

  They met at the foot of the bridge on the Ludlow side. Barbara greeted Sweet Pea, who was, as always, obediently at Harry Rochester’s thigh. The Alsatian’s tail wagged when Barbara said her name, but she waited at her master’s side to be greeted.

  “Are you already so early at work?” Harry said to Barbara.

  “I’m generally engaged with a pillow in a meaningful way at this hour, but we had something needed doing early. Where’re you coming from? You and Sweet Pea having an early morning stroll?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “We spent the night above the river.”

  “Get tossed from the centre of town?”

  “No, no. When the weather improves, Pea and I sometimes like a bit of nature on the occasional evening. There’s something of an open area along the Breadwalk with quite a nice view of the castle. And it has the added benefit of being off the path far enough that I can leave my belongings there—such as they are—and go about my day unburdened. Or I ca
n pick them up in the evening and choose a spot lower down on the bank. On this side of the river, of course, as there’s too much of a bluff on the other.” He vaguely indicated an area beyond the Charlton Arms. “Are you familiar with the Breadwalk?” he said, settling in for a natter. “People from town take exercise there. Strolling, biking, running, walking their dogs. It’s a very good route between the bottom of Dinham Street and here.”

  “A shortcut?”

  “Yes. And what I find fascinating is its history. It’s called the Breadwalk because the workers who used it in ages past were paid not in coin but in bread. This was to keep them from drinking down their wages on their way home and arriving there with no food for their families. Not a bad idea, when you consider man’s weakness for the drink.”

  “But a bit annoying if one has a plan to put something away for one’s golden years, eh?”

  “Well, yes, there is that little problem, isn’t there, although I’m not certain anyone actually lived long enough to have golden years in those days. Would you like to accompany us, Sergeant? Pea and I were heading up to Castle Square.”

  “With something to flog?”

  “Alas, not today. We’re interested in the stalls as it’s a food market morning and we’re feeling peckish. And—which is particularly interesting to Pea, here—the sausage caravan will be present. It’s early for them to be selling yet, but we’d like to pay a very quick visit to the Spar to pick up a few supplies of a personal grooming nature being held for me at the till. I wouldn’t say no to finding a copy of the Guardian as well, although the news is always a day old and bad anyway, so one does occasionally ask oneself what the point is. But one feels the need now and then and today I feel the need.”

  “Premonition?”

  “I hope not, as my premonitions are generally disaster laden: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, entire towns falling into the sea. That sort of thing. Are you with the inspector?”