Ding walked in the direction of the Ludford Bridge, her footsteps not quite as quick as they should have been, considering she was on her way to a tutorial and knowing that even if she jogged there, she was going to be late and Greta Yates was probably going to hear about it. But she couldn’t make herself go at a faster pace because she was caught up in a combination of thought and memory, reaching conclusions that made her more uneasy than she’d been in months. She finally understood that she’d been taken in by Finn Freeman. So had everyone else.
The truth was that despite using him to “get at” Brutus, she’d actually not given much thought to Finn aside from his inept approach as a lover. But now she saw that Finn’s ineptness had always been a clue to who he was, and she’d missed it. So she understood what she wasn’t intended to understand or even to know. The problem was, she hadn’t the first clue what to do about it.
She was considering this as she crossed the Ludford Bridge in the direction of the Charlton Arms. The Breadwalk was her chosen route, rising a good distance above the river just beyond the free house. This would take her quickly to Dinham Street, where her tutor held sessions with students in a former chapel that was now his house.
She was scurrying along when she heard her name called. It came from in front of her, and she saw that the caller was Chelsea Lloyd, of all people. Since as far as she knew Chelsea never got out of bed before ten in the morning and had made sure all of her lectures and tutorials reflected this, Ding knew something was up. Chelsea hurried towards her.
“Thank goodness,” she said. “I was waiting outside Mr. MacMurra’s house. Did you know there was a bloke sleeping rough under it? It’s got this open area that was part of a crypt or something and—”
“Were you waiting for me? Why?” Ding cut in. “I’m late so I got to walk fast, Chels.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” Chelsea hurried along at Ding’s side. “Francie wanted me to talk to you. She told me she tried to explain the Brutus thing but that you didn’t want to understand. God, are you in good shape or what? Can you slow down? I can barely breathe. Anyway, she’s ever so sorry about Brutus, Ding. It’s just how she is, you know? She just larks about, doesn’t she? And it’s not like you ever gave us a clue that Brutus meant something to you more than . . . you know.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Oh. Can we slow down?”
“I’m already late, Chels. And I’m in trouble with the college anyway so I got to get there. Was Brutus what she wanted you to talk to me about? Because if it is, you can tell her he doesn’t mean anything to me. He did, obviously, but now he doesn’t. The coast is clear or whatever.”
“Can I tell her you don’t want to scratch her eyes out any longer?”
“You can tell her whatever you want. Was that the message?”
“Whoof.” Chelsea was breathing hard. “I got to take up jogging or something. Anyway, no that wasn’t. I mean it wasn’t the message.” She had to drop behind when the path narrowed, shrubs and weeds growing thickly in an area that allowed more sun, but she didn’t stop talking. “She wants you to know the cops pinned her down last night. It was about Gaz Ruddock. They told her she got pointed out as someone who’d been seen with him.”
“So? That doesn’t exactly surprise me. It’s not like she hasn’t been with practically everyone, let’s face it.”
“Right. Yeah.” Chelsea hustled to catch Ding up. The river below them glittered in the sunlight. Birds soared out of the trees in the direction of the bridge, chirruping happily. “But she hasn’t ever been with him like you’ve been with him. If you know what I mean. He tried it with her, but you know Francie. Nothing puts the frighteners on her. And anyway, her parents know about everything she does: the drinking and the blokes and doing stuff with them. They’ve sort of washed their hair of her. So really, where did he think that was going to get him except, obviously, he doesn’t know her. Or he didn’t know her. And anyway that was, when? Last October?”
Ding did slow up then. Indeed, she stopped for a moment. Hand on her hip, she asked, “Is there a point to this, Chels?”
“Well . . . there is. See, thing is that the last thing in the world Francie wants to be is anyone’s bit of fun. I know. I know. You know that already. But the thing is, the cops kept pressing her and she rather . . . She lost it a bit.”
Ding resumed her pace. No matter what this inane conversation was about, she needed to get to her tutorial. She said, “Okay. Got it. She lost it.”
“Right. And when she lost it . . . she sort of told the cops to talk to you if they wanted the real story on Gaz Ruddock.”
Ding’s legs went to jelly. She turned to Chelsea. “Why did she say that? Chelsea, that puts me straight in things, it does.”
“Like I said, she lost it. She got caught up in stuff. And that’s what cops do, don’t they? They get you caught up. Look, she feels dead awful that she even mentioned your name to them, but she wanted you to know. And she did say something like how we’d all be dead chuffed if someone did something about Ruddock. And that sort of misdirects, doesn’t it? I mean, it takes them away from thinking about you. They probably don’t even remember she said your name, right? And it’s not like she made something up or anything.”
Strength returned to her legs and Ding swung back to the path, saying, “That just makes me feel so much better, knowing she didn’t make something up.”
“She’s sorry, Ding. Really, she’s sorry. She asked me to tell you as soon as I could, which, you see, is what I’m doing. She wanted to warn you and to give you a chance.”
“For what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. But I think she wanted to give you a chance to plan what to say. About Gaz Ruddock and everything else.”
LUDLOW
SHROPSHIRE
When Lynley knocked upon the door to the room that Barbara Havers had been assigned, the last thing he expected to hear from the sergeant as she opened it was “I’m sorry. Really. I did try to hand it off to you, Inspector. Remember?” before she admitted him.
As she stepped back from the door, he saw the cause of her embarrassment. A sitting room, a sofa, two chairs, a coffee table, and beyond that a bedroom with an en suite into which, he guessed, since he could not see it at the moment, his entire room could have fit. He took all this in and said to her, “You do know you now have absolutely no excuse for not practising, Sergeant.”
“Oh God, don’t tell her. Here. Look.” She dumped an overnight case onto the sofa and excavated through its contents to bring forth a pair of red tap shoes. “See?”
“I’m unconvinced. They look remarkably unworn.”
“They aren’t! I swear. Every night I’ve been at it. Whoever’s below me . . . ? I expect they think woodpeckers have invaded the building.” She threw the shoes in the general direction of the rest of her belongings and said, “I’ve cleared the bed.”
“I rest reassured. Let’s see what we have.”
Lynley reached for his spectacles in his jacket pocket. On the bed he divided in half the reports and the photographs. Together, he and Havers began to lay them out. He remarked as they did so, “I think what we’ve failed to see is that this was about getting individuals—in the plural, mind you—out of the way. One of them needed to be got out of the way permanently—”
“Druitt.”
“—while the other, Ruddock, needed to be temporarily out of commission in whatever way that could be made to happen. The IPCC looked at Druitt’s suicide that night in the Ludlow station and at what occurred in the aftermath to deal with the death. Your investigation with Isabelle—with the DCS—looked at that as well as delving round Ian Druitt’s life and times to see if someone might have wanted to eliminate him: anonymous phone calls, allegations of paedophilia, diaries, meetings with various people. You asked yourselves what he did, whom he knew, what he knew, and why he needed to be done away with if, in reality, he
wasn’t actually a suicide. You and I have taken things further but not far enough, because what we haven’t considered is both of them together: Ruddock and Druitt.”
“Druitt needing to be brought into the station,” Havers said, “but only if it could be managed that Ruddock was the one who brought him in.”
“Yes. Because the point was to keep Druitt in Ludlow, which couldn’t happen if any of the Shrewsbury officers fetched him to the custody suite there.”
“So once the paedophile message gets sent, someone starts monitoring things, waiting for the right moment for an arrest, and nineteen days later, there’s Uncle Bob. Ruddock does what he’s told to do, to fetch Ian Druitt, and then he’s got out of the way as well.” Havers was staring down at the photos that they’d laid beneath all of the documents. “But how?” she asked. “We know he made phone calls to the local pubs, but that was pure chance: that he’d need to do it. And calling round to the pubs isn’t going to take long enough for someone else to sneak in and kill Druitt anyway. Unless, of course, those phone calls were a fly in the ointment, something he had to take care of before the main event of poke-grab-and-whatever in the car park. But with who?”
Lynley looked at her, an eyebrow raised, waiting for her to work it out, which she did quickly. “Someone who’s made an arrangement with him, along the lines of tonight’s-our-night-so-be-ready-for-me-you-big-hunk-of-manflesh. So she clears the way and Druitt’s alone while she and Ruddock are panting and heaving in the car, giving someone else a chance to kill him.” She tapped her lip, frowning and then going on with, “But that means that Ruddock . . .”
“He’s left in a position he can’t possibly defend, believing that Druitt killed himself while he, Ruddock, was outside in the patrol car—”
“Bonking someone he can’t want anyone to know he’s bonking. Which means as far as the night Druitt died is concerned, our bloke Ruddock’s been telling the truth. He’s just not giving us the name of the woman involved. Bloody hell, sir. He’s not falling on his sword to be a gentleman, is he? He’s falling on his sword because he probably worked it all out directly it happened. And if he makes a wrong move now, which is pretty much a move in any direction, isn’t it, he’s done for. Because he knows what happened and he also knows there’s not a shred of evidence for it.”
“So it’s easier for the PCSO just to go along and agree it was a suicide. I daresay he was in a panic enough when he rang 999 because at first he probably thought it was a suicide until he put everything together.”
“But now everything’s falling apart. No wonder he’s been making all those calls to Worcester.”
“No wonder indeed.”
Havers looked at the items on the bed, then back at him. “But where the hell does that take us, sir? We’ve not moved an inch. We don’t have evidence.”
Lynley picked up two of the photos and held them side by side. He said, “That’s not quite it, Barbara. We do have evidence. It’s here somewhere. We just have to find it.”
WANDSWORTH
LONDON
Isabelle hadn’t intended to take another day. Of course, she hadn’t actually intended to take the previous day, either. But things had got away from her, as happened occasionally in life. In her case, one thing had simply led to another until going into work was out of the question and leaving a message declaring illness was the only available alternative.
Upon first rising from bed, she’d felt herself fully recovered from all previous physical difficulties. It was far earlier than her normal time to be up and about, and she considered this a positive sign. She’d gone to the kitchen and started the water for coffee, pausing first to pour her morning orange juice dressed with just a touch of vodka. She downed this, but afterwards she felt, oddly, not quite one hundred percent. It was, she reckoned, a case of not having had a decent meal in at least forty-eight hours.
With this on her mind, she decided an egg was in order. She’d always enjoyed a soft-boiled egg accompanied by granary bread, lightly toasted. So she took a pot and an egg and did her bit with them on the cooktop. The bread was a tiny problem in that mould had established a foothold on one side of it, but she merely cut that off and popped it into the toaster. By that time, the water for her coffee had boiled and as she’d already done her bit with the coffee beans, she saw to that next. She paused then. Another orange juice sounded good. It tasted just a bit off to her, so she helped it out with another splash of vodka. And then a lovely cup of coffee.
She’d been doing quite well with it all. She’d been doing positively grand. She’d forgotten to time the egg, but a glance at the kitchen clock told her it had probably been in the water long enough and anyway the bread was toasted and buttered and waiting.
It was the egg that did her in. When she tapped it round the top and lifted the shell, she saw that she’d miscalculated. The egg was so undercooked that dipping her spoon into it brought forth only a slithering mess. At the sight of this, her insides did a flip-flop that not even a large bite of toast—quickly taken and just as quickly chewed and swallowed—could cope with. Everything rose. Orange juice, coffee, toast. She ran to the bathroom and began vomiting.
What followed was a headache, which she hadn’t had upon waking but which, after sicking up her aborted breakfast, she had in throbbing, blinding spades. It wasn’t something two, four, or twenty paracetamol would be able to cure. But she was determined to get past it on willpower alone in order to get herself to work that day. She needed a lie-down first, though. So she staggered to her bed and lowered herself, whispering that this was mind over matter and the matter in question was merely a collection of blood vessels inside her brain. She turned on her side and clutched a pillow to her stomach. Ten minutes, she thought.
But that didn’t do it, and Isabelle knew there was only one way out of her physical ailments. It involved vodka.
She told herself that surely she was enough of a woman to master this situation. It took an effort of will to get into the kitchen, but she managed it. She calculated that a mere few shots of Grey Goose would not lead to another day of oblivion. So she had them.
When the phone call came, it awakened her. She saw the time. More than two hours had passed. Her first thoughts took her to the Met, Dorothea Harriman, Hillier, and Judi-with-an-i, despite the fact that she was not yet terribly late for work. She swung to a sitting position, felt her stomach heave, and grabbed her mobile.
It wasn’t anyone from New Scotland Yard, however. It was Bob. He said, “No need to panic, Isabelle, but something’s happened to Laurence.”
She pressed her fingers to her temples. She knew that she had to sound normal. She said, “Wha’s go . . . ing on?”
A pause. Then, “He’s taken something of a tumble at school, and we’ve brought him to A & E. At least, I’ve brought him. Sandra’s with James. He was rather upset, as you can imagine.”
“A & E? God. Is he broken?” That wasn’t at all what she meant. She clutched one hand beneath her chin as if this would make her words come out properly.
Another pause. This one was longer before Bob said, “He’s managed to give himself a hairline fracture of the skull. He was going at things a bit rough—well, he’s a boy after all—and he fell from one of the flint-stone walls on the edge of the property where he wasn’t meant to be in the first place. He was unconscious—”
“Oh Christ.”
“—but that was brief. They rang for an ambulance and here we are.”
What to say or do when her words weren’t coming out correctly and she could barely move from her bed? She said, “Sh’ll I . . . ?”
He said, “He’s going to be fine. We’re meant to watch him closely over the next several weeks and definitely keep him quiet, but there’s nothing they can do beyond let his skull heal up.”
“Oh God.”
“The thing is, Isabelle, he’s asking for you. He’s got himself into qui
te a state about it—very unlike Laurence, I know, as one would expect this more of James—but he’s calling for you. At first I thought he meant Sandra, of course—”
Of course? she thought.
“—because he was asking for Mummy, which is generally what both boys call her, as you know. But when she came to A & E, he made it perfectly clear that he wants you.”
She was meant to jump to her feet. She was meant to go to him at once. Nothing was meant to stop her. She knew that just as she knew she was fully incapable of doing anything at all. She said, “Oh. Bob . . . I’m so . . . Can you say him . . . tell him . . .”
“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” he asked sharply. “Are you at work? No. You can’t be. Of course you can’t be.”
“I haven’t. I’m ill. I think it’s flu. I’ve been sick and now my head—”
“Isabelle, stop it. Just bloody stop it.”
“Please. Please tell . . . I’m going to be there. Please tell him Mummy’ll come to him as soon as she’s able.”
“And when might that be?” He didn’t wait for a reply and, clearly, he didn’t want one. “I’m not making excuses for you. He’s not stupid. Neither is James.”
“Bob. Bob. Least put him on the phone.”
“Have you any idea what you sound like? I’ve no intention of allowing him to hear you like this.”
“But tell him—”
“I’m telling him nothing. Get yourself together, Isabelle. When you finally do, you can tell him yourself.”
He rang off and she was left calling out his name, asking for Laurence, asking for James, declaring she was well and fit and on her way even as she knew she could no more drive to Kent than could she fly there. She sank back onto the bed. She would, she would, she would, she told herself. She just needed rest, another day . . .
She rang the Met and was able to leave a message because thankfully Dorothea either wasn’t there yet or was not at her desk. Then, because she could do nothing else, she went to the kitchen. She staggered there. Her head was thundering and her limbs were quaking. Upset, she thought. Worried, she thought. Laurence there in A & E with a fractured skull, crying for his mummy and of course she was beside herself with concern, which was all this was.