"Two days ago we received a letter about you," he said. "It was anonymous. It claimed you were in Cedar House the day your grandmother died and that you stole some earrings. Are either of those facts true, Miss Lascelles?"
Her eyes widened but she didn't say anything.
"Since which time," he went on gently, "I have been told on good authority that your grandmother knew you were a thief. She accused you of stealing money from her. Is that also true?"
The colour drained from her face. "I want a solicitor."
"Why?"
"It's my right."
He stood up with a nod. "Very well. Do you have a solicitor of your own? If you do, you may give your housemistress the number and ask her to telephone him. If not, I'm sure she will be happy to call the one the school uses. Presumably they will charge it to the fees." He walked to the door. "She may even offer to sit in herself to safeguard your interests. I have no objection to either course."
"No," she said sharply, "I want the duty solicitor."
"Which duty solicitor?" He found her transparency oddly pathetic.
"The one the police provide."
He considered this during a prolonged and thoughtful silence. "Would you be referring to duty solicitors at police stations who act on behalf of persons who have no legal representation of their own?"
She nodded.
He sounded genuinely sympathetic. "With the best will in the world, Miss Lascelles, that is out of the question. These are harsh recessionary times, and you're a privileged young woman, surrounded by people only too willing to watch out for your rights. We'll ask your housemistress to contact a lawyer. She won't hesitate, I'm sure. Apart from anything else, she will want to keep the unpleasantness under wraps so to speak. After all, she does have the school's reputation to think of."
"Bastard!" she snapped. "I just won't answer your questions then."
He manufactured a look of surprise. "Do I gather you don't want a solicitor after all?"
"No. Yes." She hugged herself. "But I'm not saying anything."
Cooper returned to his seat. "That's your privilege. But if I don't get any answers from you, then I shall have to ask my questions elsewhere. In my experience, thieves do not confine themselves to stealing from just one person. I wonder what will happen if I call the rest of your house together and ask them en masse if any of their possessions have gone missing in the last year or so. The inference, surely, will be obvious because they know my only connection with the school is you."
"That's blackmail."
"Standard police procedure, Miss Lascelles. If a copper can't get his information one way, then he's duty-bound to try another."
She scowled ferociously. "I didn't kill her."
"Have I said you did?"
She couldn't resist answering, it seemed. "It's what you're thinking. If I was there I must have killed her."
"She probably died during the early half of the night, between nine o'clock and midnight, say. Were you there then?"
She looked relieved. "No. I left at five. I had to be back in time for a physics lecture. It's one of my A level subjects and I gave the vote of thanks at the end."
He took out his pad. "What time did the lecture start?"
"Seven thirty."
"And you were there for the start?"
"Yes."
"How did you manage to do that? You clearly didn't walk thirty miles in two and a half hours."
"I borrowed a bicycle."
He looked deeply sceptical. "What time did you arrive at your grandmother's, Miss Lascelles?"
"I don't know. About three thirty, I suppose."
"And what time did you leave the school?"
"After lunch."
"I see," he said ponderously, "so you rode thirty miles in one direction in two hours, rested for an hour and a half with your grandmother and then rode thirty miles back again. You must be a very fit young woman. May I have the name of the person whose bicycle you borrowed?" He licked the point of his pencil and held it poised above the page.
"I don't know whose it was. I borrowed it without asking."
He made a note. "Shall we call a spade a spade and be done with the pretence? You mean you stole it. Like the earrings and the fifty pounds."
"I put it back. That's not stealing."
"Back where?"
"In the bike shed."
"Good, then you'll be able to identify it for me."
"I'm not sure. I just took the best one I could find. What difference does it make which bicycle it was?"
"Because you're going to hop on board again and I'm going to follow closely behind you all the way to Fontwell." He looked amused. "You see, I don't believe you're capable of riding thirty miles in two hours, Miss Lascelles, but I'm quite happy for you to prove me wrong. Then you can have an hour and a half s rest before you ride back again."
"You can't do that. That's just fucking-" she cast about for a word "-harassment."
"Of course I can do it. It's called a reconstruction. You've just put yourself at the scene of a crime on the day the crime was committed, you're a member of the victim's family with easy access to her house and you thought you were going to inherit money from her. All of which puts you high on the list of probable suspects. Either you prove to my satisfaction that you did go by bicycle, or you tell me now how you really got there. Someone drove you, didn't they?"
She sat in a sullen silence, scraping her toe back and forth across the carpet. "I hitched," she said suddenly. "I didn't want to tell you because the school would throw a fit if they knew."
"Was your grandmother alive when you left Cedar House at five o'clock?"
She looked put out by the sudden switch of direction. "She must have been, mustn't she, as I didn't kill her."
"So you spoke to her?"
Ruth eyed him warily. "Yes," she muttered. "I left my key at school and had to ring the doorbell."
"Then she'll have asked you how you got there. If you had to hitch, she won't have been expecting you."
"I said I had a lift from a friend."
"But that wasn't true, was it, and, as you knew you were going to have to hitch back to school again on a dark November evening, why didn't you ask your grandmother to drive you? She had a car and, according to you, she was fond of you. She'd have done it without a murmur, wouldn't she? Why would you do something so dangerous as hitching in the dark?"
"I didn't think about it."
He sighed. "Where did you hitch from, Miss Lascelles? Fontwell itself, or did you walk the three miles along Gazing Lane to the main road? If it was Fontwell, then we'll be able to find the person who picked you up."
"I walked along Gazing Lane," she said obligingly.
"And what sort of shoes were you wearing?"
"Trainers."
"Then they'll have mud from the lane squeezed into every seam and crevice. It was raining most of that afternoon. The boys at forensic will have a field day. Your shoes will vindicate you if you're telling the truth. And if you're not..." he smiled grimly, "I will make your life a misery, Miss Lascelles. I will interview every girl in the school, if necessary, to ask them who you consort with, who's had to cover for you when you've gone AWOL, what you steal and why you're stealing it. And if at the end of it you have an ounce of credibility left, then I'll start all over again. Is that clear? Now, who drove you to your grandmother's?"
There were tears in her eyes. "It's got nothing to do with Granny's death."
"Then what can you lose by telling me?"
"I'll be expelled."
"You'll be expelled far quicker if I have to explain why I'm carting your clothing off for forensic examination."
She buried her face in her hands. "My boyfriend," she muttered.
"Name?" her demanded relentlessly.
"Dave-Dave Hughes."
"Address?"
She shook her head. "I can't tell you. He'd kill me."
Cooper frowned at the bent head. "How did you meet him?"
"Like what?"
"I'm not a slut. We love each other."
Her sexual morality had been the last thing on his mind but it was clearly at the forefront of hers. He felt sorry for her. She was accusing herself, he thought, when she called her mother a whore. "Does he own the house?"
She shook her head. "It's a squat."
"But he must have a telephone or you wouldn't be able to contact him."
"It's a mobile."
"May I have the number?"
She looked alarmed. "He'd be furious."
You bet your life he would, thought Cooper. He wondered what Hughes was involved in. Drugs? Under-age sex? Pornography? Expulsion was the least of Ruth's problems if any of these were true. He showed no impatience for the address or phone number. "Tell me about him," he invited instead. "How long have you known him? How old is he?"
He had to prise the information from her with patient cajoling and, as she spoke and listened to herself, he saw the dawning confirmation of her worst fears: that this was not a story of Montagues and Capulets thwarting innocent love but, rather, a seedy log of sweaty half-hours in the back of a white Ford transit. Told baldly, of course, it lacked even the saving attraction of eroticism and Cooper, like Ruth, found the telling uncomfortable. He did his best to make it easy for her but her embarrassment was contagious and they looked away from each other more often than their eyes met.
It had been going on for six months since the tarmac crew had relaid the drive, and the details of how it began were commonplace. A school full of girls; Dave with an eye for the most likely; she flattered by his obvious admiration, more so when the other girls noticed he only had eyes for her; a wistful regret when the tarmac was done and the crew departed; followed by an apparently chance meeting when she was walking alone; he, streetwise and twenty-eight; she, a lonely seventeen-year-old with dreams of romance. He respected her, he loved her, he'd wait forever for her, but (how big a word "but" was in people's lives, thought Cooper) he had her in the back of his transit within a week. If she could forget the squalor of a blanket on a tarpaulin, then she could remember the fun and the excitement. She had crept out of a downstairs window at two o'clock in the morning to be enveloped in her lover's arms. They had smoked and drunk and talked by candlelight in the privacy of the parked van and, yes, all right, he wasn't particularly well educated or even very articulate, but that didn't matter. And if what happened afterwards had not been part of her gameplan, then that didn't matter either because, when it came to it (her eyes belied the words) she had wanted sex as much as he had.
Cooper longed to ask her, why? Why she valued herself so cheaply? Why she was the only girl in the school who fell for it? Why she would want a relationship with an illiterate labourer? Why, ultimately, she was so gullible as to imagine that he wanted anything more than free sex with a clean virgin? He didn't ask, of course. He wasn't so cruel.
The affair might have ended there had she not met him by sheer mischance (Cooper's interpretation, not hers) one day during the holidays. She had heard nothing from him since the night in the van, and hope had given way to depression. She was spending Easter with her grandmother at Fontwell (she usually went to Fontwell, she told Cooper, because she got on better with her grandmother), and caught the bus to Bournemouth to go shopping. And suddenly there was Dave, and he was so pleased to see her, but angry, too, because she hadn't answered his letter. (Sourly, Cooper imagined the touching scene. What letter? Why, the one that had got lost in the post, of course.) After which they had fallen into each other's arms in the back of the Ford, before Dave had driven her home and realized (Cooper reading between the lines again) that Ruth might be good for a little more than a quick tumble on a blanket when he felt horny.
"He took me everywhere that holidays. It was wonderful. The best time I've ever had." But she spoke the words flatly, as if even the memory lacked sparkle.
She was too canny to tell her grandmother what she was doing-even in her wildest dreams she didn't think Mathilda would approve of Dave-so, instead, like a two-timing spouse, she invented excuses for her absences.
"And your grandmother believed you?"
"I think her arthritis was really bad about then. I used to say I was going somewhere, but in the evening she'd have forgotten where."
"Did Dave take you to his home?"
"Once. I didn't like it much."
"Did he suggest you steal from your grandmother? Or was that your idea?"
"It wasn't like that," she said unhappily. "We ran out of money, so I borrowed some from her bag one day."
"And couldn't pay it back?"
"No." She fell silent.
"What did you do?"
"There was so much stuff there. Jewellery. Ornaments. Bits of silver. She didn't even like most of it. And she was so mean. She could have given me a better allowance, but she never did."
"So you stole her things and Dave sold them."
She didn't answer.
"What happened to Dave's job with the tarmac crew?"
"No work." She shrugged. "It's not his fault. He'd work if he could."
Did she really believe that? "So you went on stealing from your grandmother through the summer term and the summer holidays?"
"It wasn't stealing. I was going to get it anyway."
Dave had indoctrinated her well-or was this Ruth herself speaking? "Except that you didn't."
"The doctor's no right to it. She's not even related."
"Dave's address, please, Miss Lascelles."
"I can't," she said with genuine fear. "He'll kill me."
He was out of patience with her. "Well, let's face it, it won't be much of a loss whichever way you look at it. Your mother won't grieve for you, and to the rest of society you'll be a statistic. Just another young girl who allowed a man to use and abuse her." He shook his head contemptuously. "I think the most depressing aspect of it all is how much money has been wasted on your education." He looked around the room. "My kids would have given their eye-teeth to have had your opportunities, but then they're a good deal brighter than you, of course." He waited for a moment then shut his notebook and stood up with a sigh. "You're forcing me to do it the hard way, through your headmistress."
Ruth hugged herself again. "She doesn't know anything. How could she?"
"She'll know the name of the firm that was employed to do the drive. I'll track him down that way."
She wiped her damp nose on her sleeve. "But, you don't understand, I have to get to university."
"Why?" he demanded. "So that you and your boyfriend can have a field day with gullible students? What does he deal in? Drugs?"
Tears flowed freely down her cheeks. "I don't know how else to get away from him. I've told him I'm going to Exeter, but I'm not, I'm trying for universities in the north because they're the farthest away."
Cooper was strangely moved. It occurred to him that this was very likely true. She did see running away as the only option open to her. He wondered what Dave had done to make her so afraid of him. Grown impatient, perhaps, and killed Mrs. Gillespie to hasten Ruth's inheritance? He resumed his seat. "You never knew your father, of course. I suppose it's natural you should have looked for someone to take his place. But university isn't going to solve anything, Miss Lascelles. You may have a term or two of peace before Dave finds you, but no more. How did you plan to keep it a secret? Were you going to tell the school that they were never to reveal which university you'd gone to? Were you going to tell your mother and your friends the same thing? Sooner or later there'd be a plausible telephone call and someone would oblige with the information."
She seemed to shrink in front of his eyes. "Then there's nothing I can do."
He frowned. "You can start by telling me where to find him."
"Are you going to arrest him?"
"For what?"
"Stealing from Granny. You'll have to arrest me, too."
He shrugged. "I'll need to talk to your grandmother's executors about that. They may decide to let sleeping dogs lie."
"Then you're just going to ask him questions about the day Granny died?"
"Yes," he agreed, assuming it was what she wanted to hear.
She shook her head. "He does terrible things to me when he's angry." Her eyes flooded again. "If you don't put him in prison then I can't tell you where to find him. You just don't understand what he's like. He'll punish me."
"How?"
But she shook her head again, more violently. "I can't tell you that."
"You're protected here."
"He said he'd come and make a scene in the middle of the school if I ever did anything he didn't like. They'll expel me."
Cooper was perplexed. "If you're so worried about expulsion, why did you ever go out and meet him in the first place? You'd have been expelled on the spot if you'd been caught doing that."
She twisted her fingers in the hem of her jumper. "I didn't know then how much I wanted to go to university," she whispered.
He nodded. "There's an old saying about that. You never miss the water till the well runs dry." He smiled without hostility. "But all of us take things for granted so you're not alone in that. Try this one: desperate diseases call for desperate remedies. I suggest you make a clean breast of all this to your headmistress, throw yourself on her mercy, so to speak, before she finds out from me or Hughes. She might be sympathetic. You never know."
"She'll go mad."
"Do you have a choice?"
"I could kill myself," she said in a tight little voice.
"It's a very weak spirit," he said gently, "that sees cutting off the head as the only solution to a headache." He slapped his hands against his knees. "Find a bit of courage, girl. Give me Dave's address and then sort things out with your headmistress."
Her lip wobbled. "Will you come with me if I do?"
Oh, good grief, he thought, hadn't he had to hold his own children's hands often enough? "All right," he agreed, "but if she asks me to leave I shall have to. I've no authority here as your guardian, remember."
Scold's Bridle Page 15