Verdict Unsafe (17 page)

“Get in the fucking van!” he said, delivering a blow to the back of her head. “Now!”

Matt strolled into the alley. “Can’t get the staff these days, can you, Lennie?” he said.

Lennie let go of Ginny and turned, looking Matt up and down. “Joined the Foreign Legion, have you?” he asked.

Matt hated the uniform, aping as it did a police uniform except that it was black. He felt like some sort of fascist soldier. “Watch your lip, Lennie,” he said.

Lennie smiled. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Half an hour of your wife’s time.”

“Yeah? It’ll cost you thirty.”

Matt shook his head. “You must be joking,” he said.

“That’s what she charges. Take it or leave it.”

What
she
charged. The money went straight to Lennie, useless parasite, and God help Ginny if she tried to hang on to a couple of quid. “It wasn’t too long ago she thought a fiver was big time,” said Matt.

“Times have changed.”

Hadn’t they just. Matt looked at Ginny, sullen and silent,
leaning against the van. He’d just seen Lennie in action—he didn’t want to let the kid in for any more of that. Trouble was, he couldn’t pay thirty quid for her; he hadn’t got that sort of money. But there was something desperate about Lennie’s air that made him think that he could beat him down without too much difficulty. “Ten,” he said.

“Twenty.”

“Ten,” he repeated. “That’s more than she’s worth.”

“Fifteen.”

Matt gave him the money; Lennie unlocked the door and went into the house, jerking his head at Ginny, who pushed herself away from the van and brushed past him, taking off her jacket and hanging it over the stair post as she went up ahead of Matt. She started taking off the rest as she got into the room.

“You can keep your clothes on,” Matt said, closing the door. “I just want to talk.”

“Aw—I’m no good at that sort of thing,” she said from inside the thin, sleeveless top she was pulling off over her head.

Matt frowned, then his brow cleared. “No,” he said. “Talk. As in I want a word with you.”

She pulled her top back down. “Why’d you pay fifteen quid for it, then?” she asked, her voice heavy with suspicion, her eyes alarmed.

Matt sighed. “Because I don’t suppose Lennie knows about your part in that little charade with Drummond,” he said. “I don’t want you on my conscience.”

“You what?” Her eyebrows drew together in a total lack of comprehension.

“As far as Lennie’s concerned, I’m here for a screw, and you don’t tell him any different or he’ll knock your head off. Understand?”

She nodded uncertainly, her brows still meeting.

“Now. They’re holding an inquiry into Drummond’s arrest. You’re going to get policemen asking you what happened that night in Hosier’s Alley.”

She understood one word, at least. “Cops? Here? Lennie’ll go spare!”

“Well, I can’t do anything about that. They’ll ask about what
happened in Hosier’s Alley with Drummond. They’ll go on about perjury and perverting the course of justice, but they can’t prove a thing.”

“What?”

Dear God. This was the hardest fifteen quid he’d ever spent. “They’ll tell you that you can go to prison,” he said. “But don’t let them scare you. They can’t prove anything if you just stick to your story.”

“What story?”

Matt sank down on the bed, and prepared to start again. Maybe Lennie did earn his money after all.

The ten o’clock news was all Drummond, as the six o’clock had been. Carole watched despite herself; she longed to switch it off, to stop listening, but she couldn’t.

She had finally left the garage, and knocked on a neighbor’s door. She had vague memories of ambulance men and urgency. Then she had opened her eyes to find Rob, still in uniform, at one side of the hospital bed, and a policewoman, not in uniform, at the other.

She had had to lie to the police about where she had been, and she had been relieved, so relieved when the spotlight had moved on to someone else. Relieved, she had eventually realized, that someone else had gone through that hell. She had gone to counseling more because of the guilt she felt about that than because of the attack itself.

But her lies had come back to haunt her, and she had had to tell the truth in the end. Rob hadn’t done any of the things she had imagined he would do, and that had just made her feel guiltier than ever. He hadn’t flown into a rage, hadn’t hit her, hadn’t called her names. He had understood, had confessed to the odd infidelity of his own in Ireland. Separated, lonely … it happened, he had said. He had truly understood.

They had had a happy marriage, once. But he was right; she had been lonely, with him away so often and for so long. And she had met someone. It had got more serious than she had intended. Even so, she would probably have finished it when
Rob had come home from Ireland. But that wasn’t how things had worked out.

When the police had come back, almost three months later, wanting to know where she had been, she had been so scared. Drummond’s statement said that he’d followed her from Malworth, they had said.
Had
she been in Malworth? The DNA wasn’t Drummond’s. Did she know whose it was? On and on, until she had had to tell them, and then poor Stephen had had to get involved and have his private life investigated until they eliminated him as a suspect. His marriage had broken up; he’d given his wife the house, and now the Child Support Agency were taking more money from him. He was living in a flat in a high-rise, all because of Drummond.

Rob had come out of the forces, and had bought a secondhand taxi with his money from the army and a loan from the bank. Her physical injuries had healed, and the strong-mindedness which allowed her to reject the memory of the rape had eventually made it possible for her to want to resume relations with Rob. But that was when it had all gone wrong.

Rob couldn’t. Not wouldn’t—couldn’t. He had tried. He had wanted to, naturally, after months of being patient. But he just couldn’t. Nothing happened when he tried to make love to her. She had been raped. Defiled. And he couldn’t handle that. To start with, they had kept trying, but after six months of it Rob had started working at night so that he didn’t have to share her bed, didn’t have to face it. He had changed, become cold and hard and uncommunicative.

And a few months after that, he had apparently discovered that he
could
do it with Ginny. When Carole had finally realized that, she had reasoned that if he was all right with someone else, then she could leave, let him find someone else. She didn’t tell him she knew about Ginny, but she had suggested that they divorce, so he could find someone else. He had said that she was his wife, that he didn’t want someone else, and that was an end to it.

Ginny was a stopgap, obviously. He still thought things would be all right between them. But they wouldn’t. Not now. Not now that she didn’t love him anymore.

*   *   *

Rob glanced at his watch as he indicated the right turn into Parkside across the six-lane carriageway, and waited at the break in the central reservation. On his left was the turnoff that took you into Malworth proper, and in between sat the park, a dark, cold and dismal no-man’s-land. He could see a couple of hookers hanging around on the far side, leaning on the railings, waiting for customers. He had to wait long minutes for on-coming traffic, even at this time of night, his fingers tapping impatiently on the steering wheel. At last, the road was clear, and he went down the B-road that now took you into what was left of Parkside, past the dark tower of the bonfire, to the squat block of fiats. He left the engine running, and got out of the cab.

Lennie sat smoking at the kitchen table, waiting until Matt came down and let himself out, then he crushed out his cigarette, picked up her jacket, and took the stairs two at a time to hurry Ginny up. She would be wasting as much time as she could up there to delay going out.

He frowned. She was sitting on the bed, fully dressed. The bed was made. And nothing about the room suggested that anything had ever been any different. “What did Burbidge want, if he didn’t want to get laid?” he asked, intrigued to know what Matt Burbidge’s sexual preferences were.

She looked at him, the big dark eyes a little in awe of his powers of observation, a little scared, a little puzzled, then resigned. “Don’t hit me, Lennie,” she said.

There was something surreal about living with Ginny. “Why would I hit you?” he asked.

“Matt said you would.”

“I won’t hit you,” he said, totally bamboozled, but taking the line of least resistance. “What did he want?”

“He said I had to stick to my story.”

Lennie frowned “What story?”

“That’s what I said,” Ginny replied, her face perplexed.

Sensing that this would be a long job, Lennie put out a hand and pulled her up from the bed. “Tell me in the van,” he said, thrusting her coat into her hands. “We’re wasting time.”

*   *   *

Judy switched off the news, which had had Drummond all over it, which hadn’t helped. The rest hadn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs, and then the local news had had nothing
but
Drummond. He would be in his element with all this attention. Wasn’t that why he had done it? Why he had confessed? They were giving him exactly what he wanted, and a cash bonus into the bargain.

No one had set the vicious little bastard up. He had assaulted Ginny, and now he was threatening to finish the job, and there was damn all she could do about it until he did. Hotshot Harper had a lot to answer for.

But she had enjoyed his company. And sitting there, listening to him explain his point of view, it had even seemed reasonable. But sitting in Ginny’s house, looking at her, knowing what Drummond had in mind for her … no.

She thought again of Ginny’s house, bristling with mod cons and soft furnishings, and shook her head. There was no way Ginny was making enough for all that, not in Malworth. And Lennie? Driving a taxi? It was hard enough to believe that he was turning an honest penny doing anything, but he certainly wouldn’t be making very much out of it if it wasn’t his taxi. She tried to work out what Ginny would be making a week, given what she knew of Malworth’s overstaffed red light district, and what she would be likely to command now that she had a room to offer rather than the back of Lennie’s Transit. Not enough.

It had been partly a desire to find out why their circumstances had taken such a turn for the better that had made her stay at Ginny’s, and partly, she knew, a desire not to go to Lloyd’s. She had seen his face when she’d told the Chief Super about the self-defense classes; she had known there would be a row. She had thought it would be about Drummond, about her so-called overreaction. But Lloyd could always take her by surprise.

Hotshot had taken her by surprise, too. She wished he hadn’t been so easy to be with. She wished she wasn’t thinking about
him. She wished she could be sure that he had had nothing to do with her reaction to Lloyd’s fairly run-of-the-mill wild accusation of infidelity. He did that sort of thing all the time when he was angry. But it had hit home.

She had only had lunch with the man in the police canteen, for God’s sake. It wasn’t exactly a candlelit dinner for two.

She would go to bed. No she wouldn’t, because the phone was ringing. Lloyd, to apologize. Poor Lloyd. He always ended up apologizing, and that wasn’t really very fair.

“Hello,” she said.

“Judy?” Her guess had been right, but she hadn’t guessed what he was going to say. “There’s been another rape,” he said. “And …” He paused. “There isn’t an easy way to say this,” he said. “It was Bobbie’s flatmate. And she’s dead. I don’t have details—just that it happened in the flat.”

Marilyn. Who had called them out two years ago when Bobbie had arrived home to that very flat and had passed out from the carbon monoxide that had poisoned her as she had been raped in the exhaust stream of her car. Otherwise they might never have heard about Bobbie’s assault. And they might not have the slender thread they did have with which to link Drummond to the rapes. Marilyn, who had helped Bobbie through it, who had been great, who had put her own life on hold, was dead.

“I’ll see you there,” she said, finding her voice at last.

Flat two, Balfour House, was swarming with uniforms, scenes-of-crime officers, detectives, photographers, all the dismal circus that attended a suspicious death, when Judy got there. In the room itself, Tom was telling the photographer what he wanted; Lloyd was talking to the FME outside the door, and he acknowledged Judy’s presence with a slight nod.

Judy looked into the neat room, at the young woman who lay sprawled on the bed, at the injuries that she had seen five times before, and looked away, first at Tom, then at the rest of the room. One drawer was open; the fingerprint man was dusting it for prints. No chance, she thought. Drummond isn’t that stupid. Had he been looking for something?

She had a look around the rest of the flat: the other bedroom,
also tidy; the bathroom; kitchen; living room. Nothing disturbed, except for the telephone table in the corridor, knocked over, and the telephone smashed, stamped on, probably. There had been no break-in; he must have come to the door. Marilyn had in all probability opened the door to a masked man and, unable to pass him, had picked up the phone and been overpowered as she had tried to ring for help. Then she had been dragged, ordered, whatever, to the bedroom.

“Mm,” said Lloyd, when he joined her, and she gave him her initial thoughts on what had happened. “Why would he take her into the bedroom?” he asked. “Why not do it here, in the corridor? No windows. Farther away from the neighbors—less likelihood of the sound traveling—which it did, at some point, or the neighbor wouldn’t have got suspicious. All he had to do was put out the light and he would have had his preferred environment of total darkness.”

“She might have got away from him, briefly,” Judy said. She tried to visualize the scene, though her entire being wanted not to. “While he was disabling the phone, probably. He would be between her and the door, so she couldn’t get out. But she ran along to her bedroom, and tried to shut herself in. He was too quick for her.” She looked at Lloyd. “And he raped and murdered her on her own bed,” she added bitterly. “Will Case take Drummond seriously now, do you suppose?”