Verdict Unsafe (42 page)

She closed the door on them. They could find him. Maybe he really was mending her car, but there had been nothing wrong with it when she had driven it. After he’d rung her up from the police station, told her to take it back to the garage, to put it away, just in case anyone had seen him drive away from the park. He didn’t want it seen.

She had known, as soon as she had heard about Drummond, why her car had been gone from the garage; why all she had seen when she had opened the door had been someone else’s property, neatly stacked along the wall of her private hell. She had made him tell her.

And when the interview about the burglaries had taken such a long time, he had had to ask her to take the car back. It was parked in a street off Epstein Drive. She had picked it up, driven it back. He had come home eventually, and he should have been glad that it had worked, that he was free of Drummond forever, and no one any the wiser.

But he had just taken the cab out. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. And he had known that it wasn’t going to work from the moment he had pulled the trigger. And she knew why he had gone to the garage, why she mustn’t stop him. He
couldn’t go on like that; he had wanted to die ever since it had happened, ever since Drummond had raped him.

It had been a long time since he’d gone; it must all be over. But she hadn’t been able to go and see. She couldn’t have brought herself to open that door. Not again. She had been so relieved to see Chief Inspector Lloyd.

She would ring Steve. Once they had found him. He would understand why she hadn’t stopped him.

Judy was having her birthday meal at last. Candlelight and Lloyd’s seduction table lamp were all that lit the room, and the tension between them had gone at last. They had talked, as they had a perverse tendency to do in their most intimate moments, about work.

Judy had automatically pulled the hose from the exhaust pipe as soon as Lloyd had opened the garage door, but it had been too late; Drummond had claimed what she hoped and prayed was his final victim. But there was no guarantee of that.

They had pieced it together. Jarvis had teamed up with Lennie, had allowed Lennie to rob him blind, to use his cab for immoral purposes, to do what he liked with it, in return for two things: Ginny, and someone to blame when his luck ran out.

But then Drummond had come home, and Ginny had shown him the gun. Jarvis had been a soldier, and a gun was a quick and efficient way of bringing about Drummond’s destruction; the seed had been sown, and he hadn’t wanted Lennie to take the blame for the burglaries anymore, because they were going to give him his alibi.

That night, Wednesday night, he burgled Keith’s house. He unlocked the front door, left pots and pans piled up against it. At a few minutes after nine, he unplugged the video, the television, everything he would usually steal, and piled it up at the back door, left it unlocked, and went back to his cab driving.

If the burglary had been discovered before the firework display that was to mask the sound of the shots, then perhaps the
murder would not have happened when it had. But it would have happened, of that Judy was certain.

Jarvis had driven to Malworth, to pick up his fare, the one who had eventually decided to stay the night. And he had seen Drummond leave the block of flats opposite, followed him, watched him dumping clothes in a less jealously guarded bonfire than the symbolic Parkside Regeneration bonfire. If he had had any doubts about carrying out his plan, then surely what he must have heard on the early morning news had made the decision for him.

On Friday morning he went to Ginny, and took the gun in the moments when he was alone in the room. Then he rang Colin Drummond, promised him the information that everyone present at the trial knew he most wanted, arranged to meet him at nine o’clock in the underpass. Sometime in the afternoon, while she was at work, he drove his wife’s car to a street close to the semiburgled house. At twenty to nine that evening, he left his cab outside number seventeen Epstein Drive, and ran to his wife’s car. He drove back to Malworth, left the car in the desolate and deserted park, an hour before the two or three street girls gathered, and went into the underpass to wait for Drummond.

Drummond had been on time; Judy had seen him. He had walked along the underpass to, as Lloyd had said all along, his terrorist-style death, passing the barely conscious and terrified Ginny, who had pressed herself into the shadows at the sound of his footsteps. Jarvis had carried out the execution, taken Drummond’s mobile phone and had gone back up the banking to his car. Judy had heard his running feet just before she had found Ginny. He had made what Lloyd called his Neighborhood Watch call first; he had rung Stansfield police station and reported that he could see a light moving around in seventeen Epstein Drive, whose owners, he knew, were on holiday. Then he had hung up, and had keyed three nines and thrown the phone down in the open space, so that Handel’s music booming over from the bonfire would alert the emergency operator as to where the emergency was, and everyone would know exactly
when
Drummond had died.

He had thrown the gun into the bushes, had got back into his wife’s car, and had driven through Malworth’s deserted streets back to Stansfield, back to the street close to Epstein Drive, and had left the car. He had watched from a safe distance, then had made himself known to the constable attending the burglary, got into his cab, and driven away. Sooner or later, they would get him for the burglary.

And, as far as Jarvis ever knew, it had worked. He didn’t know that Keith had been recording something; he didn’t know that Lloyd’s taste in television programs had found him out. When he had shut himself up in that garage to end it all, it was in the belief that he had been successful, that he had done what he had had to do. But it hadn’t made him well again.

Judy was glad they had got there too late; sometimes, you just had to let sick people take their own way out.

Lloyd touched her glass with his; she smiled. The candlelight flickered, casting dancing light in Lloyd’s blue eyes.

He put his glass down. “Sooner or later,” he said, marginally adjusting the position of the pepper grinder, “they’re going to drop the Chief from Chief Supers and Chief Inspectors.”

“I know,” said Judy.

“So Case will be a superintendent, and you and I will both be inspectors.” She nodded.

“And they probably won’t need two CID inspectors. And Bell’s a long way off retiring, so they won’t be needing any other kind of inspector, either. And … chances are, I’ll have to take early retirement.”

“Yes,” she said. “You’ll get a lump sum as well as your pension, won’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh,” she said. “I was just thinking that it would be just what you’d want, really. To start married life.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “How much of that wine have you had?” he asked, his lips brushing her skin as he spoke.

“One sip.”

He clasped his fingers in hers, and they held hands tightly for a long moment before he let her go, his face grave.

“Your handcuffs or mine?” he asked.

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