“That’s it, then? Nothing involving him and students male or female or in between?”
“Not an itch to scratch. I did unearth why he’s got this problem in the first place, though.”
“The claustrophobia?”
“Yeah. It’s a rough one, ’s well.”
Lynley walked to the window and opened the curtain. In the morning light, he could see part of the castle. He noted that the banner announcing Titus Andronicus had lettering in which the uppercase letters both transformed into pools of blood beneath them. At least the audience would be forewarned, he thought.
He said, “Is it relevant to what we’re dealing with here?”
“Prob’ly not.” Nkata went on to tell him: A father who was a genius when it came to electrical engineering; that father’s belief in his genius being passed on to his son; an expectation that the type of genius would manifest in an identical fashion; when it did not, frustration attended by the determination that the son’s lack of aptitude in science was actually a case of malingering. “Turns out his dad decides the way to show the kid th’importance of electricity is to give him total darkness. Where they lived, he could only find what he wanted by putting him in a clothes cupboard when his marks in science weren’t what Dad thought they should be. Tha’s where he spent midterms and holidays. Up till he went to university, but by then damage was done.”
Lynley heard all this with a hardening of his spirit. “Someday I’ll get to the bottom of what’s actually wrong with people’s thinking, Winston.”
“Good luck with tha’, sir,” was Nkata’s reply.
“How did you learn all this?”
“The clothes cupboard? Tracked down the sister. Point is, like I said, he’s got no paddle in this partic’lar canoe, ’n a manner of speaking. Nothin to hide and less to prove.”
As in all the hotel rooms, there was an electric kettle, and Lynley set it to boil water for a cup of early morning tea as they continued to speak. He said, “Have you the time for another, then?”
“I c’n work it in here and there. Who’s on?” he replied.
“Gary Ruddock, the PCSO. Apparently, he has a background that might be illuminating, according to what he told Barbara when she was here earlier. A cult in Donegal. I’ve no idea whether it’s worthwhile to have a go with that, but Hillier rang me earlier and should he ring again as he’s likely to do, having something to give him would probably save him from self-defenestration.”
“Sir?”
“Throwing himself out of his office window.”
Nkata laughed. “I’m on it, then. Be in touch.” And he rang off.
Before the third call hit his mobile, Lynley was able to dress, descend the stairs, and have breakfast with Havers, who swore on the life of her pet cat—an animal that Lynley knew very well she did not possess—that she’d spent an hour practising in order to overwhelm Dorothea Harriman with her dancing expertise. When that third call came, they were on their way to the police station. As he was driving, Lynley took the phone from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to Barbara.
She looked at its screen. “It’s herself,” she said. “You want . . . ?”
He didn’t. Isabelle Ardery was the last person he wished to speak to, as there was no depending upon what kind of condition she was in. He said, “Let it go to message. We can listen to it later.”
“My thought as well,” she replied.
They’d told Ruddock that another look at the office in which Ian Druitt hanged himself was in order. The PCSO had seemed surprised by this request, but he’d agreed to meet them at the station in advance of his regular walkabout. He was there when they arrived, although instead of waiting for them in the car park, he’d left the station door open for them. They found him in the former lunchroom, tinkering with an old microwave.
“Sounds like you’re making progress,” were his first words to them. “Now if I could do the same with this bloody thing . . .” He placed his hand on top of the old oven. “Thing’s an antique, more or less, but sometimes it still does the job,” he said.
Lynley said they’d just have a quick look at the office where Druitt died and then they’d be on their way.
“You know where it is,” Ruddock said. He didn’t appear to feel the need to go with them.
The office was as it had been before, although not as it had been in the photos. A rolling desk chair was in place of the plastic chair that had been in the office the night Druitt died. That was, however, the only change.
The bulletin boards gave them no additional information, nor did a waste-paper basket or the small gouges in the walls where frames had hung. There were marks on the lino where other furniture had once stood, but the shape of the marks suggested filing cabinets, possibly two sets of bookshelves, potentially a credenza as well. Other than that, the fact that the lino had seen hard use was not surprising, considering the age of the building. Havers remarked, “Looks like someone else was doing their dancing practice round this place, you ask me.”
“Ah, you see? You’re not alone.”
He was examining the venetian blinds when she said, “We didn’t see this first time we were here, for what it’s worth, sir,” although she sounded far less than hopeful.
Lynley turned to find that she was squatting at the desk’s kneehole, having pulled the rolling chair away from it. He went to see what she’d found. Scuff marks, he saw, of the sort that rubber-heeled shoes would make over time when one pushes back from a desk. He looked from them to her.
She said, “All right. I know. Could be someone gave up fags and was beating his feet on the floor. Did you do that, by the way?”
“When I gave them up?” he said. “No. I gnawed on my fingernails for two years.”
“See? There you go, sir. I’m sticking with them, I am. Wreaking havoc on my manicure is not going to happen.”
She stood. They went to the cupboard door from whose knob the deacon had strung himself. It was sturdy, not the type of knob that would have been made loose by having to hold the weight of a man. From there, they surveyed the room again.
“Dead men and tales,” Havers said with a sigh.
“Would that were not the case,” Lynley said.
They returned to the lunchroom. Ruddock had the back of the microwave removed. He looked up from his work and appeared to register something on one of their faces because he said, “No luck, then?”
“We’re not certain,” Lynley told him. “There’s something that could be odd.”
Ruddock set his screwdriver to one side. “What’s that, then?”
Lynley told him about the photos taken by SOCO in the immediate aftermath of the deacon’s death. “What can you tell us about the chair?” he asked Ruddock, going on to explain: the overturned chair, the fact that it was a plastic one, the additional fact that it was not a desk chair, and that—come to think of it—it probably wouldn’t have been a suitable height for someone working at the desk at all.
After a moment for thought, Ruddock shook his head. “I never thought anything about that chair. It was what was in the office when I put him there. I mean, he had to sit on something and that was in the room. There wasn’t anything else. I know how it got overturned, though. I had to stretch him out on the floor for CPR. I shoved the desk out of the way and the chair probably toppled. I was . . . Well, I suppose I panicked.”
Considering that he’d already confessed to what he’d been doing out in the car park, this was hardly surprising. But there was still that issue of the woman he’d been with.
Lynley said to him, “Gary, we’ve a witness to your having college-age girls with you at night. In your patrol car, this is. Can you tell us about that?”
The PCSO seemed to hesitate. Then he said, “I expect that’s to do with the drinking. When they’re pissed enough, it’s always seemed dangerous for them to be out
in the streets on their own. I stow them in the car and get them back where they belong. Doesn’t happen every time I’m dealing with bingers, but it does happen, so I’m not surprised someone saw me with them.”
“This would be a her, not a them,” Barbara pointed out.
“Well, I deliver ’em home one by one,” he said, “so I’d end up with one—a her or him—at the end since most of the students round here live with their parents or in small accommodation like a bedsit or a room that’s let in someone’s home.”
“Is this part of the job?” Lynley asked him. “Asked to do this by the town council or the mayor?”
“Just seems sensible. A way to avoid future trouble. Plus, it helps nip things in the bud. With the drink, I mean. I don’t like to see the kids heading down that rabbit hole, if you know what I mean. It’s easy to do at that age, and I reckon if their parents see them blotto often enough, they’re going to do something about it. It’s not part of my job, though. Obviously.”
“Is Dena Donaldson one of the drinkers?” Lynley asked.
“Oh, she is, that one. She’s called Ding, by the way. She’s one of the kids who lives in accommodation instead of with her parents. She’s got a real problem with the drink, she does, and last thing she wants is me telling tales to her mum and dad. I keep her in order by making sure she knows that I’m one hair away from carting her home to them.”
“You’ve been seen with her in the car park here,” Lynley said. “At night, this is.”
“Not surprising, that. I’ve brought her here more ’n once to have a word. It’s not like I want to drag the girl to her parents’ house, what with the distance as they don’t live local and with trying to be a decent cop . . . I mean helpful the way local constables’ve always been? So I’ve brought her here for a lecture on what’s going to happen if she doesn’t bloody stop it all, like she’s probably going to die, if you know what I mean. And while things’ve improved—I mean she’s let up a bit—sometimes the drink gets away from her. And there we go again.”
“That sounds like something beyond the call of duty,” Havers pointed out.
“When the kids drink, they cause problems. Town residents make an issue of it. They get on the phone and there you have it. I’d like to put a stop to it all, and I’m doing what I can.”
“Like Mr. Druitt.”
He cocked his head, as if unsure what the reference meant.
Havers said, “He wanted a street pastors programme here. Picking up the kids when they’re pissed and giving them coffee and soup and whatever? He didn’t manage to get far with that, though.”
“That’s only part of the shame of his dying, you ask me,” Ruddock said.
CHURCH STRETTON
SHROPSHIRE
Along with the vast highland moors of the Long Mynd, the volcanic rolling Stretton Hills created a valley into which the Victorian town of Church Stretton sat. It resembled what it once had been: a nineteenth-century health resort where ailing individuals once had come to take the mineral waters of the area. Over more than a century, however, the town had greatly altered, morphing from a spa for the sickly into a centre for the hale and hearty. With rucksacks on their backs and collapsible hiking sticks in their hands, these enthusiastic individuals now climbed the heights of the Long Mynd, looking for the views that stretched well into Wales.
When Barbara Havers saw the country walkers gathered in the streets, she said irritably, “Better them than me. What’s happened to people? Where are the good old days?”
“True,” Lynley said and she could hear the sardonic tone he employed. “Those good old days of gout and tuberculosis were far better, Sergeant.”
“Don’t you start,” she warned him. “What’m I looking for again?”
“It’s called Mane Event. M-a-n-e.”
“I hate clever names ’s well. Have I mentioned that?”
“Do you need a cigarette? Is that what this is about?”
“It’s about him, it is. She was with him, sir. That girl. Dena, Ding, whoever.”
“He didn’t deny it, Havers. And it does seem we know the reason why. If, of course, he’s telling the truth.”
“So is he lying about the other? The married one, or whatever she is?”
“Possibly. His mind must be whirling now, though.”
“All those phone calls to Trevor Freeman, sir? They could be a good way to hide the fact that he was bonking the wife and using the husband’s phone to make arrangements. How many people check their own phones for calls that’ve come in to someone else? Would you think of that? I wouldn’t. ’Course, you have Denton to worry about, eh? Him making and getting calls on your mobile from New York. Broadway on the line and all that. Or Hollywood.”
“There’s always Hollywood to consider,” Lynley agreed. “There it is, by the way.”
“The Mane Event? Sorry, sir. Got distracted.”
When they walked into the place, Barbara decided that to call it a hair salon would be stretching things. While it did contain two chairs suitable for cuts and colouring, having more than one stylist working at once would certainly turn a workday into a battle of elbows. The salon barely contained the client and stylist it currently held.
This was where Nancy Scannell had said she would meet them for their conversation. Lynley had told her that a hair salon wouldn’t actually make the top ten on his list of choices for the coming interview, but she had explained it was this or waiting till after her court appearance later that day. As it was, she’d practically had to sell her firstborn child in order to set up this appointment. Getting in to see Dusty often took weeks. Not everyone could cut hair that curled like hers. And it was time for her summer do.
The do was doing when they arrived. The forensic pathologist was in the chair, Dusty was fluttering round with two pairs of scissors and a comb between her teeth like a flamenco dancer with a rose. Hair was flying hither and yon. It seemed that Nancy Scannell had decided to go short, and Dusty was dead chuffed to accommodate her. She also wanted to colour it, they learned, once the comb was removed from between her lips. Scannell had apparently said no, but Dusty was after a compromise that involved “just a wee streak of magenta, then. Nothing outrageous. You’ll love it. You’ll look ever so ‘with it.’” The pathologist wasn’t having this, however. She liked the grey in her hair, she said. She’d certainly earned it during her marriage and the less said about that, the better.
Dusty gave Barbara and Lynley a glance, most of her attention on Barbara’s own hair. The stylist said, “What’ve you done to yourself? Did you use a paring knife?”
“Nail scissors,” Barbara told her.
“Can’t help you, ’m afraid. Too dead short. You’ll have to come back when it’s grown out more.”
“I’ll make a note of that in my diary,” Barbara said. Then to the pathologist, “This is DI Lynley, Dr. Scannell.”
“So I thought,” she said. “Let’s get to it.”
“Here?” Lynley, Barbara reckoned, had probably assumed that, while they had arranged to meet the pathologist at her hair salon, they would certainly decamp for their conversation elsewhere.
“How it has to be if you want it today,” Scannell said. Then she added to Dusty, “Have the earbuds?”
“Oh. Right. Hang on, then.” Dusty fished in a nearby drawer and brought forth the earbuds, which she then plugged into a mobile phone, apparently accessing music to prevent eavesdropping. Within seconds her head was moving to a beat. It made no difference to her expertise with the scissors, it seemed, for onward she went, clipping and sculpting and assessing the style as the rest of them chatted.
“We’ve been to the office in the station where Ian Druitt died,” Lynley told the forensic pathologist. “We’ve been through your report. We’ve also studied the autopsy pictures. How confident are you that Druitt was a suicide?”
She aske
d him to hand the pictures over, saying, “It’s been a good many months.” Barbara saw Dusty’s expression become intrigued as she sneaked a glance at the SOCO shots over the pathologist’s shoulder. Then she averted her gaze and was all business once again.
Scannell said, “The religious thing he used? It made the scene and the body trickier than normal.” She indicated the red stole on the floor near to the body. “Fabric doesn’t mark the skin the way another sort of ligature would in a suicide: a leather or canvas belt, a length of robe, a flex of some kind. This thing . . . what’s it called? I knew at one time but my memory’s getting more cluttered every year.”
“A stole,” Lynley said.
“Ah. Right. Anyway, it marked the skin . . . Here, you can see in the photos from the autopsy . . . the petechiae are just visible. The bruising is faint, but it climbs the neck at the angle indicating self-harm. I told your sergeant this when she was last here, at the gliding centre this was, not at the salon.”
“Was the body strung up when you saw it?”
“The officer made it a wretched scene to gain much from. He’d done CPR on the man—one can hardly blame him for that—so of course he had to get him off the doorknob and he had to remove the stole from his throat. But had he not done, there really wouldn’t have been a different conclusion. Faking a death by suicide nearly always gets discovered.” She looked up at them from the chair. “And I take it that’s what you’re trying to do with this: discover something. I wish you luck with that, but I still stand by my original report of suicide. Enough signs were there to declare it: from the contortions of the face to the bulging eyes to, as I said, the petechiae. Not every possible sign, naturally, but every possible indicator in an unexplained death is rarely present, as doubtless you already know.”
“We’ve read your report,” Lynley said. “We can agree that the face and the neck are particularly indicative of suicide in the fashion he committed it. The abrasions round the wrists appear to be consistent with the PCSO’s account of the arrest when he used them and why he took them off once they had reached the station. But since all of the signs of suicide weren’t there, what else might have been?”