Verdict Unsafe (35 page)

She found his card, dialed the number.

“I’m sorry, I’m not available to take your call at the moment …”

She listened to the message, waited for the tone.

“I think I need a good lawyer,” she said. “Tonight.”

LLOYD SAT AT HIS DESK, LOOKING AT, BUT NOT SEEING, the papers in front of him. He hadn’t meant it. He hadn’t meant it. Judy would rather he had accused her of murdering the man than of falsifying a statement.

His wildest dreams could just about accommodate her having killed Colin Drummond. Deciding after what had happened to Marilyn Taylor that enough was enough, taking the gun, going after him, making sure he never raped or murdered again. But she wouldn’t have lured him to his death, wouldn’t have shot him in the back of the head, wouldn’t have let Ginny or Lennie or anyone else come under suspicion. If ever Judy was going to take the law into her own hands, she would do it with a flourish. And everyone would know it. It would be an honest murder.

He
couldn’t
imagine her falsifying a statement, not in any kind of scenario his mind could conjure up. Dishonesty wasn’t in her makeup. He knew that, so why had he said it? To hurt her. And like Lennie might have done with Ginny, this time he had gone over the top.

He had told Tom to keep working on Lennie and Ginny, but Tom had said he thought the gun really had gone missing. Ginny wasn’t a convincing liar, he’d said. And she was pretty convincing about the gun. And if it really had been stolen before Lennie even knew she hadn’t taken it back as instructed, then three of Case’s four people were eliminated, leaving Judy.

But then … there weren’t only four people who had access to the gun, he thought. Jarvis may have been burgling a house,
but his wife hadn’t. And if Jarvis took the gun home, then she could have found it. She had as much motive as he had.

Lloyd headed out once again for the Jarvis house.

He must be getting near the end now.

“Seventeen Epstein Drive,” said Marshall.

“That was last night’s,” Rob said. “A time-share in Spain.” He looked at Marshall. “You still don’t know, do you?” he said.

“What’s that, Mr. Jarvis?” said Marshall, ticking off the address.

“Well,” said Rob, almost enjoying this now that it had finally happened, “I was hiding, not to put too fine a point on it, in the garden of the first house up the side road when your guy was talking to the people across the street.”

The house was on a comer plot, with a gate on to the road running up the side. He had parked right outside the gate, not unnaturally.

“He was bound to search the gardens, and I’d be crouching down behind someone’s forsythia when he did, so—I took a chance when he had his back turned.”

Marshall was listing the stuff he’d taken from the houses he’d done while he spoke.

“I went back to the cab,” he said. “Your officer spoke to me.”

Marshall’s head shot up.

“He was very polite,” Rob went on. “I assured him I had seen nothing suspicious.” Marshall didn’t look pleased.

“But I thought it was one thing fooling him—it would be another story when the CID got to hear about it. I mean, I was the only person at the scene, and I had transport parked at the gate. I was expecting a visit from you hourly,” Rob said. “But I guess he didn’t bother telling you.”

“Interview terminated eighteen fifty-two hours,” said Marshall. “I will remove these tapes, Mr. Jarvis. You should sign both—”

Someone was in for a rollicking, thought Rob, as Marshall’s manner grew positively brisk with annoyance.

*   *   *

Ginny was being asked question after question. Lennie always said just to say no comment, but she wasn’t good at that. And no matter how many times she answered, Sergeant Finch would ask again and again.

“Who gave you the beating, Ginny?”

“A punter.”

“How did you end up in the underpass?”

“I—I ran away.”

“From the punter.”

“Yes!”

“How? How did you get away from him?”

“Lennie came—” She stopped, flustered. She hated Sergeant Finch. “No comment,” she said, and then remembered that she could tell them to stop the interview altogether. So she did.

More police. Carole had lost count. It was as bad as— She switched her memory off instantly, just like she had done before. Nothing had changed.

“DCI Lloyd, Stansfield CED,” he said.

That was the one who’d come in between DC Marshall’s visits. She’d heard him tell Rob.

“Can you tell me where you were at nine o’clock yesterday evening?” he asked, as they went into the sitting room.

“In Malworth.”

He nodded. “Anywhere near the bonfire?”

“Yes, since you ask. Why?”

“Colin Drummond was killed in the underpass at nine o’clock yesterday evening,” he said. “The underpass, as you may know, was also near the bonfire. Would you know anything about Mr. Drummond’s death, Mrs. Jarvis?”

“No—only what I’ve seen on the news.”

She sat down. “Please,” she said, indicating a seat, but he didn’t sit.

“He was shot with a pistol that may have gone missing from the house of a Mr. and Mrs. Fredericks,” he said. “Do you know anything about that?”

“No.”

“Which? That they had a pistol, or that it had gone missing?”

“Neither.”

“Your husband knew about it,” he said.

He was walking around, looking at the pictures she had on the wall. From her better days, when she could buy prints simply because she liked them, and hadn’t had to count the pennies. He would think they’d been bought with money from the burglaries. She was still trying to come to terms with that. All that stuff in the garage. She had said that they ought to get window locks, when a burglary seemed to be being reported every week, in the summer. “Good idea,” Rob had said. And all the time …

“I said, your husband knew about it.”

“I didn’t know about it.”

“Mrs. Fredericks thinks your husband took it,” he said. “Have you seen a pistol in his possession? Or anywhere that he might keep such a thing?”

“No. And I wouldn’t have the first idea where he would keep such a thing,” she said.

“Were you at the firework display when the emergency vehicles arrived?”

“I saw them, but I wasn’t actually at the bonfire,” she said. “I was visiting a friend in the area. We watched from a balcony.”

“Could I have the name of your friend?”

Almost exactly the same words. She was doing it to him again. She was sending the police around to Steve again, because of Drummond, again. “His name is Stephen Morgan,” she said.

His eyebrows lifted very slightly.

“Yes,” she said. “That is who I was with before I was raped. I’ve no doubt you’re having to go through the files again. I’m sure his name is fresh in your memory.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

“I—I didn’t carry on seeing him,” she said, defending herself. “I tried, I swear to God, I tried to make my marriage work again.”

“Mrs. Jarvis, it really is no business of mine—”

“You can’t know! You can’t know what
it
was like!” She
was crying now, pouring out to this total stranger all the helplessness, all the disappointment, all the frustration, all the guilt.

He came and sat beside her on the sofa, his arm around her shoulders, trying to calm her, but she wouldn’t, she couldn’t stop. She hadn’t been able to talk to anyone, not even Steve. It would have been a betrayal. But this man—he didn’t know Rob, he had no stake in her life or his. He could listen. Someone had to listen.

“And when … when I realized he was seeing Ginny twice a week, I thought that meant he could live a normal life with someone else, but he wouldn’t—he just … he said we were married until death parted us.”

“Is he a religious man?” asked Lloyd.

“No!” she said. “No. I would have understood if he was, but he’s not. He’s just obsessed! Truly. It’s like an illness—it is an illness. He thinks Drummond’s waiting for us to split up, that he’ll know that he caused it, that he made Rob—” She wiped her face, her nose. “He was burgling houses to make ends meet!” she cried. “Because he wouldn’t sleep with me, and he wouldn’t let me go into the spare room, even! He worked at night, even though he was earning next to nothing, so that he could pretend that it was just circumstances. Because he slept in the mornings, and I worked in the afternoon, and he was out again in the evening—that was why we didn’t have sex! Not because he couldn’t—” She made a real effort to calm down.

“Then I started seeing Steve again,” she said. “And I knew that I still wanted to be with him—we still wanted to be together. I tried to tell Rob I wanted to leave, but—” She shook her head. “Last time, he said he’d kill me sooner,” she said. And she told him about last night, about the terrible trauma of simply opening her garage door, of the discovery that the garage was being used to store other people’s domestic goods, of how that felt almost like being raped all over again. She was sure he would think her melodramatic, but that was how it had felt.

“Anyway. That’s where I was. Steve’s.”

“Thank you,” he said, getting up. “I will have to check with him,” he added gently.

“I know,” she said.

Just like last time.

“You came home and found Ginny being beaten up, didn’t you, Lennie?”

“No comment.”

“She very nearly told us,” said Finch. “But she stopped herself in time.”

Poor kid. This was wearing him down. He didn’t know how Ginny could possibly withstand it, the state she was in. But she must be doing all right. Not for much longer, maybe.

“You’ve told her to tell us lies, Lennie. Why?”

“No comment.”

But Finch didn’t give up very easily, and Lennie was getting more fed up with saying no comment than he was with hearing it. Now, he was being asked for the millionth time who had beaten Ginny up.

He looked at Finch, trying to gauge how much he knew, how much was guesswork, how much Ginny had let slip. “She was with a punter,” he said, tiredly. “He beat her up.”

“We don’t buy that, Lennie. Why would she protect a punter who did that to her? Why wouldn’t she give us a description? Why would she be seeing a punter you knew nothing about?”

“No comment.”

Matt had been picked up in the bar, while he waited for the first ferry he’d been able to switch to.

Now he sat in the back of a police car with a silent constable for company, and another at the wheel, going the opposite way around the M25, still choked with traffic.

They didn’t dare speak, these two, in case they inadvertently asked him a pertinent question, and started the time clock ticking. They had arrested him, and they had to be careful if they didn’t want Stansfield CID breathing fire. He had never paid much attention to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act when he had been on their side of the fence—no one at Malworth had—but he knew its provisions, and they knew he did.

He would get his eight hours free from questioning. And then he’d be ready for the bastards.

Judy poured the last drops of one bottle of wine into her glass, and went to the fridge for another, topping up her glass with it.

She couldn’t remember ever having done this before. It had taken until now to take hold. But now, things did seem to have softer edges, even life, which had never been such a bitch. She had regretted ringing Hotshot as soon as she’d done it; she had rung back, wishing there was an erase button on telephones. She had told him to disregard her previous message. And then she had set about getting drunk.

Lloyd hadn’t rung, hadn’t done anything. She lit a cigarette as her doorbell rang. They didn’t have modern things like door phones in these old flats. Just a row of bell pushes. Lloyd? she wondered, as she went out, and made her way carefully downstairs. No. He’d have used his key. Unless he was throwing his hat in first. But that wasn’t like Lloyd. Maybe he didn’t want to come in. Maybe he’d come to give her back her keys. She wouldn’t blame him if he had. She opened the door.

“Hotshot,” she said, relieved, disappointed, confused, embarrassed, but not surprised.

“I found a message on my answering machine,” he said.

“I rang back,” she said. “I told you to forget it.”

“I didn’t listen to anymore messages after that one,” he said, with a smile. “Can I come in?”

“Isn’t it a little unethical?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Unless it offends your ethics, of course.”

“I don’t have any, apparently.”

“Good—that makes everything much simpler.”

She let him in, and went past him up the stair. “This way,” she said.

He followed her into the flat, and closed the door. She saw him looking at the wine bottles, and at her. “Do you want a glass?” she asked.

“Well, I think someone had better join you.”

She found a glass and knelt by the coffee table to pour him
some wine, spilling a little, which she brushed away with her hand.

“Cheers,” he said, sitting down.

She sat on the floor. It seemed easier than getting up again. “Why did you invite yourself to lunch with me?” she asked.

He smiled. “Because I fancy you,” he said.

“Oh, sure—and that’s why you tried to get me suspended?”

He frowned. “Oh,” he said. “Drummond—he went through with it, then? I didn’t act for him. I didn’t believe a word of it.”

Judy drank some more wine. “I thought what you believed didn’t matter?”

“It doesn’t. Not when I’m defending him. Providing he gives me no reason to disbelieve him. But I don’t have to represent him if I think he’s a lying little sod, so I didn’t.”

Judy smiled. “Good,” she said, and then felt her lip tremble, and the tears come back.

“Hey, come on,” he said, and joined her on the floor, putting his arm around her. “What’s happened?”

“I … I’m probably going to be charged with falsifying a statement, and neglect of duty, and murder,” she said.

“Nothing serious, then?” He smiled. “That’s good.” He leaned back, his elbow on the sofa. You didn’t think of barristers sitting on the floor, not when you saw them in court with their wigs and gowns and everything. “I think you’d better tell me, don’t you?” he said.