The Punishment She Deserves

  Barbara climbed the steps. She was sober enough to note that the police station—despite its present disuse—was hung with a CCTV camera that was pointed upon the steps she’d just climbed as well as upon the pavement and at least part of the street. She also saw what hung to the left of the front door, which was a phone receiver above which potential callers were informed that lifting the receiver would connect them to the operations and communications centre, where what would be asked was: the location of the station at which they were standing, their name, their contact number, and their address. “Any communications about the 2003 Sexual Offences Act need to be made at one of the following stations,” the message concluded. Barbara read those stations and saw from the list that not one of them was Ludlow.

  This gave her pause. The allegations against Ian Druitt fitted into the 2003 act. She wondered if the person making the report to the operations centre had been informed of that. Indeed, she wondered again as before why the operations centre had moved on an anonymous message at all, considering that the basic requirements of identity, phone number, and address had evidently not even been met. However, if the location of the intercom had been identified by the previous investigation, it stood to reason that the digital recording from the CCTV camera pointed at the steps could have shown the person who had used the intercom, once the time of the phone call and the time from the CCTV camera were noted. But all of this went no distance at all to explain why the police station’s external phone had been used in the first place when surely a call box somewhere in town could have served the same purpose.

  Barbara left the front door, went down the steps, and had a longer look at the station. Several windows on the upper floor were cracked open, which confirmed what CC Wyatt had told them: patrol officers whose beat included Ludlow still used the station when they were out and about. The place was dark now, save for lights on the ground floor that appeared to illuminate the former reception area.

  In the back of the building, there was a car park designated for official use. Here, she saw, a single police car sat in deep shadow, parked at some distance from the building. It stood in a corner with its front end pointing forward into the car park as if a quick response from someone might be necessary. She was about to turn away from this and continue on her route when she saw that the vehicle was not unoccupied. Movement from within on the driver’s side caught her attention, and from where she stood she managed a glimpse of what looked like a man who’d adjusted his seat so that he could lean far back. Considering the hour, the place, and the situation in Shropshire vis-à-vis policing, she reckoned she was looking at one of the patrol officers assigned to police a large area that included Ludlow. He was having a kip while, no doubt, a fellow patrol officer kept up appearances by cruising through some of the other towns. When naptime was finished, the other officer would rouse this one by radio. An exchange would be made, another kip enjoyed, after which their policing would resume. It wasn’t unheard of despite its being unprofessional. But Barbara concluded that the more cutbacks fell upon the shoulders of the local rozzers, the more those cops would cease caring about doing the job as well as it should have been done.

  QUALITY SQUARE

  LUDLOW

  SHROPSHIRE

  “The nephew, is it?” Francie Adamucci asked Chelsea Lloyd. She did one of her signature moves, the one with her hair: casually flipping it off her right shoulder while allowing the rest of it to drape sexily over the left side of her face. “Really? The nephew? He’s seriously too young.”

  “Which means you fancy th’other, I expect?” Chelsea gestured sloppily with her lager—it was at least her fourth, but who was counting?—aiming vaguely at Jack Korhonen. He was waiting for the foam to allow more Guinness into a pint for a bloke who looked about one hundred and eighty-three years old. “I hear he’s married, Fran.”

  “I hear that doesn’t make a difference.”

  Ding listened to her two mates having yet another typical Francie-Chelsea conversation. No matter where a discussion between them began, if they were drinking it always came down to who fancied which male in the immediate vicinity. In this case, there were only three in their line of sight: the old gent eagerly grabbing up his Guinness, the middle-aged owner of the Hart and Hind, and his twentysomething nephew, whose name Ding could never remember. There were others here and there in the pub although the pickings were virtually nonexistent. Ding reckoned Jack Korhonen won Francie’s interest by default.

  She’d come out with her friends because she couldn’t stand to remain in Temeside. Finn had been forced out to dinner with his mum, after which he’d come home in a mood so foul Ding had not wanted to be anywhere near him. As for Brutus . . . She’d decided to take his interpretation of friends with privileges straight to heart, which was why she’d joined Fran and Chelsea.

  “You did not! You never!” This came from Chelsea, who spoke behind her hand like a fifteen-year-old, all astonishment or whatever.

  “Of course I did,” Francie told her. “God, Chels, what’s the point of fancying someone if you don’t make a move?”

  “But he’s . . . God, Francie, he’s, like, I don’t know . . . forty or something?”

  “It was just a bonk,” Francie said indifferently. “It’s not like I’m planning to marry the bloke.”

  “But what if his wife—”

  “Separate lives.” Francie mentioned this in a dismissive tone that indicated the wife was a rather boring issue for her. “They own the pub together and they live together, different bedrooms in the same house. She goes her way and he goes his.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  Chelsea’s enormous blue eyes grew, if possible, more enormous. “Are you thick or something? That’s what married blokes always say when they want it!” Her expression grew shrewd as she considered what Francie had been telling them. “I don’t believe you. Where exactly was this heavenly bonk with Jack Korhonen s’posed to have happened?”

  “Don’t be such a dim bulb. It happened where bonks always happen in this place. Everyone knows ’bout the rooms above.” And to Ding, “Ding knows, don’t you, Ding?”

  Ding didn’t need to reply since living proof was just coming down the stairs behind the bar in the persons of two suspiciously bright-eyed individuals: a curvy girl in a leotard and her male companion, from whose fingers dangled a room key with a fob the size of a shoe. He handed this over to the Korhonen nephew along with what appeared to be two twenty-pound notes. The nephew nodded, gave the couple a grin, and placed the money not in the till but rather in what looked like a miniature coal scuttle behind it. Quickly enough another couple took the room key in hand and climbed the stairs.

  “OMG,” was Chelsea’s reaction. “Don’t they even change the sheets?”

  “They were clean enough when we used them,” Francie told her.

  “Clean enough isn’t clean at all. You could get some gross disease!” When Francie shrugged—a girl who didn’t have time to consider diseases—Chelsea shook her head. “I do not believe you. I mean, what d’you want with an old man, Fran?”

  “Like I said. I fancied him. Still do, in fact. And I wanted a bit of a laugh. It’s only sex, Chels. If I didn’t have to swot for an exam tomorrow, I’d have a go with him tonight as well.”

  Having said this, she downed the rest of her lager. Ever her cohort, Chelsea did the same, as Francie asked Ding if she was ready to leave. But Ding wasn’t ready, so she said she’d stay and she’d see the other two girls in the morning.

  This was agreed to and the girls went on their way, leaving Ding at the bar asking for another lager from the nephew while also eyeing the pub owner and wondering why Francie Adamucci—who, let’s face it, could have any bloke she winked at—would allow Jack Korhonen to poke her.

  He wasn’t bad looking, Ding had to admit. While he had salt-and-pepper hair, he had plenty of i
t and it curled appealingly. If his beard was also greying, it was neatly trimmed and attractive on him. He wore trendy specs whose round frames gave him an elfin appearance. But he used braces instead of a belt. These were seasonal or holiday-oriented or political, and Ding had always thought—when she thought about Jack Korhonen at all, which was hardly ever—that wearing braces made the bloke seem ancient. Definitely too ancient to want to bonk. Unless, of course, he was a wizard in bed.

  Ding considered Jack, and her consideration led inexorably to Brutus. Was he a wizard in bed? No. At eighteen years old, what boy could possibly be, even someone like Brutus, who was going at sex like someone thinking women were about to disappear from the earth? But Jack Korhonen . . . a man whose age had given him decades of experience . . . His sexual expertise had to be either what Francie had been told or what she’d learned firsthand from experience. Else she’d be taking note of the nephew—did any of them actually know his name? Ding asked herself—which she hadn’t done, not even when Chelsea had said she fancied the boy. All of this amounted to evidence, Ding decided. If Francie Adamucci fancied Jack Korhonen, there was going to be a very good reason.

  She saw that he was glancing in her direction. He would do, naturally, as not only was she a paying customer, but she was also the only female alone at the bar. She cocked her head and met his gaze with hers. She lifted her lager to her lips and drank. When she put the pint back onto the bar, she ran her tongue over her upper lip to remove the nonexistent foam.

  The nephew moved from the bar to several of the tables that had been abandoned by other college students who, like Francie, had exams or papers that wanted writing or early lectures or tutorials. He set about gathering glasses and wiping moisture rings from tabletops, and in doing so he didn’t see that another couple had descended the stairs.

  Jack Korhonen dealt with them: key returned, money handed over, money deposited, and off they went into the night. He turned from that coal scuttle depository and came to the bar to gather the glasses left by Francie and Chelsea. He said to Ding, “Friends abandoned you, eh?” and while she could have allowed that to be the conversation starter about Francie and Chelsea, she opted instead for, “I didn’t think you were the one who handled the rooms.”

  He said as he doused the glasses in whatever substance cleaned them beneath the bar, “Which rooms?”

  “You know.”

  “Fact is, I don’t. What about the rooms?”

  “Oh really, Jack.” She surprised herself when she used his Christian name, knowing that it signalled something but at the same time still not entirely sure that she wanted to signal anything just yet. “That bloke just gave you back the key. With money as well.”

  “What bloke?” he asked. “What key? Are you hallucinating? Or is it fantasising?”

  Then he gave her what she could only call the Look. It consisted of a very slight upturn of his lips, an even slighter flare of his nostrils, and a dropping of his eyes to her chest and a subsequent raising of his eyes to her face.

  She understood that he was testing. She leaned over the bar to shoot him some additional cleavage. She ran her index finger round the rim of her pint. She said, “You’re having me on, aren’t you? Francie tells me you use those rooms yourself.”

  “Does Francie indeed?” He was drying the glasses. His nephew brought a plastic tub of more glasses to the bar. Jack didn’t acknowledge him with so much as a glance. He said, “Francie’s been naughty, then. I thought she’d keep our little secret.”

  “And I wager you have lots of little secrets.” Ding ran her finger round the rim of her glass another time. She lifted that finger to her lips and slowly sucked it into her mouth.

  Jack eyed her. “Girl, you best be careful with that. Blokes’ll get the wrong idea if you keep it up.”

  “What makes you think it would be the wrong idea?” Ding asked him.

  He was silent for a moment before he said, “If you’ve got yourself into that frame of mind, it’s not a problem to accommodate you.” It took only three seconds for him to slide onto the bar the room key he’d just been given by the latest couple to have used one of the two rooms upstairs. “Or,” he said, “are you just a tease? You have the look of a tease. Come down to it, I wager off you’d scarper.”

  “I’ve never been a tease,” she said.

  “Your words, not mine,” was his reply. He moved off and took up the tub of glasses. As he did so, the nephew rejoined them. He eyed the room key, then he eyed Ding, then he eyed his uncle. He left the key where it lay.

  Ding took two deep draughts of her lager. She was pleasantly lit up and she asked herself what was the harm, really. It’s what everyone did. And in her particular case it was a statement that needed making.

  She’d thought that she and Brutus had actually had something. She’d thought that when he’d told her that they would only be friends with privileges, it would be easy enough to alter the relationship into something more. But now she knew that was nowhere near to being likely. So she closed her hand over the key.

  She saw that its fob said it fitted room 2. All she would need to do was to climb the stairs and find the door. She also saw that Jack Korhonen was watching her, his expression a dare: Was she a tease or was she the real thing, like Francie Adamucci?

  She took up her lager and made for the stairs. She shot him a look. There was no doubt in her mind what he would do.

  Two ceiling fixtures in the upstairs corridor shed dim light to direct the way to the pub’s two bedrooms. Between them an open door displayed what would be a shared bathroom for anyone stopping overnight, but she reckoned sharing that bathroom during overnight stays was a rare occurrence since the pub owner would be making far more money from letting the rooms out on an hourly basis to anyone wishing to have a bonk.

  Behind the door that bore the number 1, she could hear both grunting and moaning along with the rhythmic mating call of mattress springs. As she passed, a girl’s voice cried, “Yes, oh my God!” and the mating call intensified, turning her cries into short, pleased shrieks.

  Ding paced past, gulping more of her lager. It was her intention to down the rest of it. For once she was feeling absolutely free.

  She paused in the loo. Wisdom suggested that she use it. As she did so, she heard the grunting from room 1 more clearly. She wondered how long it would take him to finish and at what point sheer exhaustion might bring on an unsatisfactory conclusion for him. For the girl, it seemed the encounter had been a smashing success. She was no longer shrieking but had grown silent as her partner labored on.

  To flush or not? Ding asked herself. She thought not. She didn’t wish to embarrass the couple in room 1—although something about the entire room-for-hire situation at the pub suggested they weren’t the type to be embarrassed—and she also didn’t want to distract the boy from what was seeming to be his extended efforts. So she tiptoed out from the bathroom and made her way to room 2, where she let herself in as quietly as she could.

  The scent assailed her, coming at her like a hostess overeager to welcome her company’s arrival. It was a blend of unwashed female, undeodorized male, sex, unlaundered sheets, and a heavy application of room spray that failed to cover the other odours. No one had thought to open a window, and Ding went to do so. It was, she discovered, painted shut and with panes so filthy that she could barely distinguish what it overlooked, which was the cobbled way of Church Street, its streetlamps shedding cones of light on two art galleries and a cheese shop.

  She turned from the window to look at the room. She hadn’t switched on the lights, so she saw in the semi-darkness that the furniture had been kept to a minimum: a chest of drawers, a seat-sagging armchair, a full-size bed, one bedside table with lamp. Above the bed some sort of print hung, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She could tell by the precision of its hanging that it probably had been nailed in place. There were no other decorations, and the b
ed itself was mattress only, as someone had rid it of its ill-smelling sheets, which now were balled up in a corner.

  On the top of the chest of drawers stood a large basket filled with potpourri, which she discovered smelled mostly of dust, and next to this was the air scent bottle, which she took up and sprayed till there was none left. Then she downed the rest of her lager. Then she sat in the armchair and waited.

  He was there more quickly than she expected, not ten minutes after she’d climbed the stairs. He didn’t knock but merely came into the room. He coughed at the smell, saying, “Jesus Christ! D’you have a thing for lavender?”

  He made no mention of the room’s overall condition. He merely shut the door and, like her, did nothing to illuminate the space. Instead, he slid the braces from his shoulders, pulled his shirt from his trousers, and crossed the room to her. He said, “Not a tease, eh? Am I meant to take that for the truth?”

  “You can take it any way you want. You didn’t drag me up here, ’s I recall.”

  He chuckled. “You’re a bit of a thing, aren’t you? College girl or something else?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Don’t think a thing other than not wanting to get myself stitched up for having a fifteen-year-old to bed. How old’re you then?”

  “Eighteen. What about you?”

  “I like you,” he said.

  “That’s not what I wanted to know.”

  “Oh, I expect it isn’t. But that’s all I’m saying. C’mere then,” and he drew her to her feet and was kissing her before she was prepared for him to do so. He certainly knew how to kiss, she discovered. He kissed in a way that made her want him to go on kissing her into next week. As he did so, he took her hands and put them under his shirt and put his own on her hips to pull her closer and then on her waist and then up and up till he had her bra unhooked and was squeezing her nipples just to the edge of pain and then releasing them the very moment before she cried out as if he knew and he certainly knew and it was pure pleasure shooting down her body just where he wanted that pleasure to go.