Verdict Unsafe (33 page)

“Yeah,” she said, enjoying being the one who said what was what, for once. “All right.”

Sergeant Finch was waiting for her, to take her to the interview room. They walked down a corridor, past offices with open doors. Typists, people listening to tapes with headphones on. And a big room, with a blackboard, and stuff pinned up on the walls. Chief Inspector Lloyd was in there with a tall man, and Ginny saw the poster they were pinning up of a girl standing at some sort of shop counter with a bottle of milk in her hand.

“What’s she done?” she asked, as a gray-haired man pushed past them into the room.

Sergeant Finch stopped, and frowned. “Who?” he said.

“Lloyd!” the gray-haired man shouted. “A word. Now.”

“Her,” Ginny said, and pointed to the poster. “Rosa.”

HE TRIED TO MAINTAIN HIS OLD CAR AS BEST HE could, given his financial situation, but Matt always looked gratefully upon the emergency stopping lane as he went down the hill to the ferries at Dover. So far, the brakes had held out, and they did again today, as he drove toward the terminal, checking his watch yet again, hoping that something would delay the ferry’s departure.

The white cliffs, which looked gray and a little dirty when you were close to them, towered over him as the lights of the ferries came into view, moving up and down fairly ominously on a choppy, dark sea, the P & O funnel visible. But as he arrived, he could see no lines of cars, moving or otherwise; he was halted, and had to watch helplessly as the gangway and the
Pride of Calais
parted company.

Case had obviously found Ginny’s revelation interesting enough to merit his presence at her interview, and to delay whatever he had been going to talk to Lloyd about.

“I’ll lead,” he’d told Lloyd brusquely as they had followed Ginny and Tom into the interview room, and now Ginny sat wide-eyed, unsure of why her innocent remark had caused such a stir.

“Do you recognize this woman?” asked Case.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s Rosa, like I said.”

“Chief Superintendent Case is showing Mrs. Fredericks a photograph of Mrs. Rachel Ashman,” said Tom.

Ginny frowned at him. “It’s not Mrs. Ashman,” she said,
shaking her head. “She got raped—she’s the one who killed herself. This is Rosa.”

Lloyd had the file in front of him. Rachel Olivia Selina Ashman. He had only been peripherally involved in the rape inquiry, because the first one had taken place in Stansfield. Had he been investigating, he liked to think that he would have got on to her initials. But Matt Burbidge had known her, and this photograph had been up on the wall in Malworth for almost two months during the inquiry. He couldn’t
not
have seen it. Lloyd leaned his elbows on the table, leaning his chin on clasped hands. He didn’t like the turn things were taking.

“I don’t understand,” Ginny said.

Lloyd opened his mouth to explain, but Case had no time for that, and went briskly on to his next question.

“You told the court you saw her after she had been with Drummond,” he said. “Did she speak to you?”

“Yeah.”

Case sighed. “Well, what did she
say
, girl?”

Ginny looked at Lloyd. “He said I hadn’t got to say,” she said. “I don’t want to get into trouble.”

Lloyd frowned. “Who said?” he asked. The Malworth Mafia, he supposed. Matt Burbidge had visited Ginny; he had doubtless put pressure on her to keep quiet.

“Him in court. Drummond’s lawyer. He said not to say what she said to me.”

Ah. Lloyd smiled. “It’s just in court that you can’t say what someone has told you,” he said. “You can tell us.”

“Well,” she said. “She came into the club going on about Lennie. She was mad at him ’cos he’d clouted her for doing Drummond without a condom.”

Lloyd closed his eyes, then opened them and looked at the little girl opposite, his mouth pressed to his hands. He could feel Case’s eyes on him, could feel waves of discomfort coming from Torn, which was why he chose in these circumstances to look at Ginny, painful though it was to look at her battered face. Its expression was merely perplexed, as ever.

“She tried to get some off me, but I said no. So she said she was packing it in,” said Ginny. “I thought she meant just for that night, but she never came back.”

No, thought Lloyd. Because she had popped into the service station for some milk, and had been viciously raped. Her husband had said that she had been at home all night. Why? Because he knew what she had really been doing? He had had a fall from scaffolding in a building site, and he had not been employed through official channels. No tax, no insurance equalled no sick pay, no compensation. Living on the subsistence level of government handouts, he might have been prepared to let his wife do that in order to hang on to his home. But not necessarily. There was no reason to assume that he knew. They had had a small child, and he had been in no state to be left in charge of one. He could just have been covering for that, thinking that the social services might be let loose on him. His wife could have been deceiving him, too, about her evening employment, turned to in desperation, perhaps. In which case, did he need to know?

They would have to decide what to do about Mr. Ashman. But all that Lloyd had to worry about now was that Mrs. Ashman had been raped, and not necessarily by Drummond. Not anymore. And if Drummond had not raped these women, then he couldn’t have given Judy that statement. Everyone knew that; no one said it.

But he
had
to have given her the statement, so it
had
to have been Drummond. And this was a coincidence? Lloyd didn’t believe in coincidence. Not to this extent. He hadn’t believed in any of the coincidences surrounding Drummond’s arrest; he didn’t believe in this one.

Nothing had been said for some time; Case seemed to be leaving the floor to him now.

“Ginny,” he said. “The night Drummond was arrested for assaulting you, you had been at Malworth police station for a long time.”

“Yeah.”

“Did anyone speak to you while you were there?”

“No. They just put me in a cell and left me there. Then someone came and said I could go.”

“Didn’t that surprise you?”

“A bit.”

“You weren’t offered some sort of deal? Told they would let you go if you did them a favor?”

“Well, not at the
police station,”
she said, in the tones of one who thought him a little simple. “In the park, they did. If you went with some of them they wouldn’t nick you.”

“Did PC Burbidge ever take advantage of you like that?” asked Case.

“No. He just nicked me.”

It was a relief to know that they occasionally did what they were paid to do at Malworth, thought Lloyd. “I didn’t really mean that,” he said. “I meant did they ask you to do something else for them?”

She frowned, and then her eyes narrowed. “You mean did I set Drummond up for them!” she said, her voice rising. “Look—that sod raped me, and I’m fed up with people saying he didn’t! He had a knife—he scared the shit out of me and he raped me! He fucking well
raped
me—all right?”

“You’ll mind your language while you’re in here,” said Case.

“Aw, shut up!” said Ginny.

Lloyd smiled into his clasped hands. That’s what he should have said, rather than going into a tirade against him. It was much more effective. And he saw what Judy meant about Ginny. Only real, honest-to-God resentment could produce that reaction.

“Anyway,” Ginny went on. “He reckons he was only in the alley ’cos he stopped for a slash. How was anyone supposed to know he’d do that?”

Lloyd smiled openly this time. “Good point, Ginny,” he said. They should have had Ginny prosecuting at Drummond’s trial; she was sharper than Whitehouse, obviously.

It was Tom who remembered what he had intended asking Ginny in the first place. “Ginny,” he said. “Can you tell us who was in your house, upstairs, between the time you
showed Rob Jarvis the gun and the time you realized it was missing?”

“A regular Thursday lunchtime and Rob Jarvis yesterday morning.”

“Who’s the regular?”

“He works for the people we got the house from,” she said. “Was he alone in the room at all?”

“Yeah—when you came to the door asking which cab firm Lennie drove for.”

“So—I can’t think why he’d want to, but he could have taken the gun, couldn’t he?”

She shook her head. “He was handcuffed to the bed,” she said seriously.

Lloyd smiled happily. He thought he would like to spend his life interviewing Ginny.

“What about punters on Wednesday and Thursday evening?” asked Tom, still grinning.

“There was Matt Burbidge, and he wasn’t really a punter. Lennie had me working out of the van at the park.”

“Was he alone in the room?”

“No.”

“Was anyone else besides you and Lennie upstairs alone, and
not
handcuffed to the bed?” Tom asked.

“Just Inspector Hill,” she said. “When they were searching the house.”

“Interview terminated, fifteen thirty-five hours,” said Case. “Finch—take Mrs. Fredericks for a cup of tea—or something.”

Tom, looking even more anxious than Ginny, shepherded her out of the room, and closed the door.

“I hope you’re not going to say what I think you’re going to say,” said Lloyd.

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it yet, Lloyd,” said Case, opening the door and bellowing to a passing minion to get DC Marshall here on the double.

“As I see it,” he said, taking out cigarettes, “four people had access to that gun. Lennie and Ginny Fredericks, Jarvis, and Inspector Hill. So let’s start eliminating them, shall we?”

Lloyd wished Judy’s name didn’t keep cropping up in this inquiry. And why were they taking Ginny’s word for it that the gun went missing at all?

Marshall arrived at the door, breathless, and still trying to swallow something. “You wanted me, sir?” he said to Case.

“Jarvis,” Case said, lighting his cigarette. “What’s happening with him?”

“He’s been arrested for burglary, sir. We found the stuff from the last job in his garage, and he admitted it. He’s not been processed yet, so I thought I’d grab a bite—”

“Fine,” said Case. “Before you carry on with your meal, tell Finch to bring ex-Constable Matthew Burbidge in to help us with our inquiries into the rapes.” He shut the; door in Marshall’s face, and turned to Lloyd.

“So now we’re down to three,” he said. “And one of them was seen entering the underpass where Drummond was shot dead, and she’s beginning to look like she had a very good motive.”

Lloyd didn’t dignify that with a response, but he hadn’t been expected to respond; Case carried on, and Lloyd listened with mounting dismay to what he was being told.

“Now do you accept that she’s mixed up in this business?”

Lloyd shook his head. “No,” he said. “No. She feels guilty about Matt Burbidge getting the sack—she was just trying to keep him out of it, as she said.”

“Of course she was trying to keep him out of it,” said Case, crushing the cigarette out in the tinfoil ashtray. “Matt Burbidge knew Rosa—he would have known that Drummond was a client of hers. And if he knew that Drummond had been with her earlier that evening, he would know that Drummond’s—and only Drummond’s—DNA would be found, if any was found at all. That’s how you rig a DNA test.”

“But how could he know that?” said Lloyd. “At that point there had only been one rape, and we had no reason to suppose the rapist didn’t ejaculate like everyone else!”

“The rapist knew.”

Lloyd’s eyes grew wide. “Matt Burbidge?” he said. “Is that why you asked Ginny if he’d gone with her?”

“Yes. It might have shed some light, if we could have found out how he functioned. Why didn’t he tell us who Rosa was?”

“It was Judy who
told
us he knew Rosa, so she was hardly covering up for him there!” said Lloyd. “And the fact that Drummond was with Mrs. Ashman earlier in the evening does not preclude his having raped her
later
in the evening.”

“You’re clutching at straws, man!”

Lloyd stood up, wishing, as ever, that he was taller, as he looked into the other man’s eyes. “Drummond gave Judy that statement,” he said slowly, a space between each word. “I know he did.”

“How
can
you know?”

“Because she says so.” Lloyd sat down again. “And that means that
he
raped those women,” he went on. “No one else.”

“Right now, who raped them is not our greatest concern,” said Case. “Right
now
, who murdered Drummond himself is. Now—there’s blood in Fredericks’s van that he won’t account for, and his wife admits having been in possession of the gun that killed him. If and when we find the gun, it may tell us more. And we had better find that sixth cartridge in their house, or I don’t see how we can hang on to them.”

He slammed the door on his way out, and Lloyd sat for a moment, staring at it as he thought. If Lennie or Ginny had killed Drummond, the obvious motive would be that he had come looking for Ginny, beaten her up for helping set him up for his arrest, and that one of them had shot him. He’d like that scenario better if he even half believed it himself.

He was on his way to talk to Judy when he saw Tom coming along the corridor toward him.

“Sir?”

Tom never called him sir. Guv, boss—Lloyd, off-duty. Never sir. Lloyd knew he wasn’t going to like whatever was coming. “What’s happened now?” he asked.

“The DNA results were faxed through a little while ago,”
said Tom. “You wanted to see them as soon as they came in.” He handed Lloyd the typewritten sheets, pointing to a marked paragraph. “That’s the bottom line, sir,” he said.

Lloyd read it, closed his eyes, read it again, and looked at his sergeant. “Thank you, Tom,” he said. He patted him on the shoulder. “I know you must have tried to talk her out of it,” he said.

“Sir,” said Tom, unhappily.

“Look—press Ginny about this gun,” said Lloyd. “I want to know if it really did go missing. We haven’t found the other cartridge, have we?”

“No. Or the gun. They’ll start looking for it again at first light.”