The Scold's Bridle

by Minette Walters

  ‘She’s pregnant,’ said Jack flatly. ‘I said you’d know what to do. JE-SUS!’ He threw the fork like a lance into the middle of the lawn, his bellow of rage roaring into the air. ‘I-COULD-KILL-THE-FUCKING-BASTARD!’

  Sarah put a hand on his arm to calm him. ‘How many weeks is she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘I didn’t ask. I wish to God you’d been here. I did my best but I was so damn useless. She needed a woman to talk to, not a clumsy sod who started out by telling her what nice people men are. I gave her a lecture, for Christ’s sake, on male decency.’

  She hushed him as his voice started to rise again. ‘She wouldn’t have talked to you if she hadn’t felt comfortable with you. How long’s she been asleep?’

  He looked at his watch. ‘A couple of hours.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll leave her a little bit longer, then I’ll go and see her.’ She linked her arm with his. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve eaten.’

  ‘No.’

  She drew him towards the house. ‘Come on then. Things always look worse on an empty stomach.’

  ‘What are we going to do, Sarah?’

  ‘Whatever’s best for Ruth.’

  ‘And to hell with all the other wretched girls who get broken in the future?’

  ‘We can only take one step at a time, Jack.’ She looked desperately worried.

  ‘O vile, intolerable, not to be endur’d!’ Ruth is crying again and it is driving me mad. I simply cannot bear it. I want to take the wretched child and shake her till her teeth rattle, smack her, hit her, anything to stop this petulant whining. My anger never goes away. Even when she’s silent, I find myself waiting for her to begin.

  It is so unjust when I went through the same thing with Joanna. If she would only show some interest in her daughter, it wouldn’t be so bad, but she does everything she can to avoid her. In desperation this morning, I tried to put the scold’s bridle on Ruth’s head, but Joanna convulsed at the sight of it. I called Hugh Hendry out again and this time he had the sense to prescribe tranquillizers. He said she was overwrought.

  Would to God they had had Valium in my day. As always, I had to cope alone . . .

  Twelve

  DS COOPER’S CAR had barely drawn to a halt in Mill House driveway later that evening when Jack wrenched open the passenger door and folded himself on to the seat. ‘Do me a favour, old son, reverse out slowly with as little noise as possible and drive me a mile or two down the road.’ He nodded approval as Cooper eased into gear. ‘And next time, phone first, there’s a good chap.’

  Cooper, apparently unconcerned by this somewhat disrespectful behaviour towards an officer of the law, manoeuvred backwards through the gate, pulling the wheel gently to avoid crunching the gravel. ‘Doesn’t she trust me?’ he asked, changing to first gear and driving off in the direction of Fontwell.

  ‘Not you personally. The police. There’s a lay-by about half a mile ahead on the right. Pull in there and I’ll walk back.’

  ‘Has she said anything?’

  Jack didn’t answer and Cooper flicked him a sideways glance. His face looked drawn in the reflected light from the headlamps, but it was too dark to read his expression.

  ‘You’re obliged by law to assist the police in their enquiries, Mr Blakeney.’

  ‘It’s Jack,’ he said. ‘What’s your name, Sergeant?’

  ‘Just what you’d expect,’ said Cooper dryly. ‘Thomas. Good old Tommy Cooper.’

  Jack’s teeth gleamed in a smile. ‘Rough.’

  ‘Rough is right. People expect me to be a comedian. Where’s this lay-by of yours?’

  ‘A hundred yards or so.’ He peered through the windscreen. ‘Coming up on your right now.’

  Cooper drew across the road and brought the car to a halt, placing a restraining hand on Jack’s arm as he switched off the engine and killed the lights. ‘Five minutes,’ he said. ‘I really do need to ask you some questions.’

  Jack let go of the door handle. ‘All right, but I warn you there is very little I can tell you except that Ruth is scared out of her wits and extremely reluctant to have anything more to do with the police.’

  ‘She may not be given a choice. We may decide to prosecute.’

  ‘For what? Stealing from a member of her family who didn’t even bother to report the few trinkets that were taken? You can’t prosecute Ruth for that, Tommy. And anyway, Sarah as legatee would insist on any charges being dropped. Her position’s delicate enough without forcing a criminal record on the child she’s effectively disinherited.’

  Cooper sighed. ‘Call me Cooper,’ he said. ‘Most people do. Tommy’s more of an embarrassment than a name.’ He took out a cigarette. ‘Why do you call Miss Lascelles a child? She’s a young woman, Jack. Seventeen years old and legally responsible for her actions. If she’s prosecuted she will be dealt with in an adult court. You really shouldn’t allow sentiment to cloud your judgement. We’re not talking just trinkets here. She took her grandmother for five hundred pounds a month ago and didn’t bat an eyelid while she was doing it. And on the day of the murder she stole some earrings worth two thousand pounds.’

  ‘Did Mathilda report the money stolen?’

  ‘No,’ Cooper admitted.

  ‘Then Sarah certainly won’t.’

  Cooper sighed again. ‘I guess you’ve been talking to a lawyer, told you to keep your mouths shut, I suppose, and never mind what Hughes does to anyone else.’ He struck a match and held it to the tip of his cigarette, watching Jack in the flaring light. Anger showed itself in every line of the other man’s face, in the aggressive jut of his jaw, in the compressed lips and the narrowed eyes. He seemed to be exercising enormous self-control just to hold himself in. With a flick of his thumbnail Cooper extinguished the match and plunged the car into darkness again. Only the glow of burning tobacco remained. ‘Hughes is working to a pattern,’ he said. ‘I explained as much of it as we have been able to find out to your wife this morning. In essence—’

  ‘She told me,’ Jack cut in. ‘I know what he’s doing.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Cooper easily, ‘then you’ll know how important it is to stop him. There’ll be other Ruths, make no mistake about that, and whatever he’s doing to these girls to force them to work for him will get more extreme as time goes by. That’s the nature of the beast.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘He does force them, doesn’t he?’

  ‘You’re the policeman, Cooper. Arrest the sod and ask him.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we’re planning to do. Tomorrow. But we’ll have a much stronger hand if we know what to ask him about. We’re stumbling around in the dark at the moment.’

  Jack didn’t say anything.

  ‘I could get a warrant for Miss Lascelles’s arrest and take her down to the station. How would she stand up to the psychological thumbscrews, do you think? You might not have realized it but she’s different from the other girls Hughes has used. She doesn’t have parents she can rely on to protect her.’

  ‘Sarah and I will do it,’ Jack said curtly. ‘We’re in loco parentis at the moment.’

  ‘But you’ve no legal standing. We could insist that her mother was present during questioning and if it’s of any interest to you the only thing Mrs Lascelles was concerned about last night was whether her daughter’s expulsion had anything to do with Mrs Gillespie’s murder. She’d break Ruth for us if she thought it would help her get her hands on the old lady’s money.’

  Jack gave a faint laugh. ‘You’re all piss and wind, Cooper. You’re too damn nice to do anything like that, and we both know it. Take it from me, you’d have it on your conscience for life if you added to the damage that’s already been done to that poor kid.’

  ‘It’s bad then.’

  ‘I’d say that was a fair assumption, yes.’

  ‘You must tell me, Jack. We won’t get anywhere with Hughes if you don’t tell me.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve given my word to Ruth.’

  ‘Break it.’
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  Jack shook his head. ‘No. In my book a word, once given, cannot be taken back.’ He thought for a moment. ‘There’s one thing I could do, though. You deliver him to me and I’ll deliver him to you. How does that grab you as an idea?’

  Cooper sounded genuinely regretful. ‘It’s known as aiding and abetting. I’d be kissing goodbye to my pension.’

  Jack gave a low laugh. ‘Think about it,’ he said, reaching for the handle and thrusting open the door. ‘It’s my best offer.’ The smoke from Cooper’s cigarette eddied after him as he got out. ‘All I need is an address, Tommy. When you’re ready, phone it through.’ He slammed the door and loped off into the darkness.

  Violet Orloff tiptoed into her husband’s bedroom and frowned anxiously at him. He was swathed in yards of Paisley dressing-gown and reclined like a fat old Buddha against his pillows, a mug of cocoa in one hand, a cheese sandwich in the other, the Daily Telegraph crossword on his knees. ‘She’s crying again.’

  Duncan peered at her over his bifocals. ‘It’s not our business, dear,’ he said firmly.

  ‘But I can hear her. She’s sobbing her heart out.’

  ‘It’s not our business.’

  ‘Except I keep thinking, suppose we’d done something when we heard Mathilda crying, would she be dead now? I feel very badly about that, Duncan.’

  He sighed. ‘I refuse to feel guilty because Mathilda’s cruelties to her family, imagined or real, provoked one of them into killing her. There was nothing we could have done to prevent it then, and as you keep reminding me, there is nothing we can do now to bring her back. We have alerted the police to possible motive. I think we should leave it there.’

  ‘But, Duncan,’ Violet wailed, ‘if we know it was Joanna or Ruth, then we must tell the police.’

  He frowned. ‘Don’t be silly, Violet. We don’t know who did it, nor, frankly, are we interested. Logic says it had to be someone with a key or someone she trusted enough to let into the house, and the police don’t need me to tell them that.’ The frown deepened. ‘Why do you keep pushing me into meddling, anyway? It’s almost as if you want Joanna and Ruth to be arrested.’

  ‘Not both of them. They didn’t do it together, did they?’ She grimaced horribly, screwing her face into an absurd caricature. ‘But Joanna is crying again, and I think we should do something. Mathilda always said the house was full of ghosts. Perhaps she’s come back.’

  Duncan stared at her with open alarm. ‘You’re not ill, are you?’

  ‘Of course I’m not ill,’ she said crossly. ‘I think I’ll pop round, see if she’s all right, talk to her. You never know, she might decide to confide in me.’ With an arch wave she tiptoed off again, and moments later he heard the sound of the front door opening.

  Duncan shook his head in perplexity as he returned to his crossword. Was this the beginnings of senility? Violet was either very brave or very foolish to interfere with an emotionally disturbed woman who had, quite clearly, loathed her mother enough to murder her. He could only imagine what Joanna’s reaction would be to his wife’s naïve assertions that she knew more than she’d told the police. The thought worried him enough to force him out of his warm bed and into his slippers, before padding downstairs in her wake.

  But whatever had upset Joanna Lascelles was destined to remain a mystery to the Orloffs that night. She refused to open the door to Violet’s ringing and it wasn’t until the Sunday at church that they heard rumours about Jack Blakeney returning to his wife and Ruth being so afraid to go home to Cedar House and her mother that she had chosen to live with the Blakeneys. Southcliffe, it was said, had asked her to leave because of the scandal that was about to break around the Lascelles family. This time the furiously wagging tongues centred their suspicion on Joanna.

  If Cooper was honest with himself, he could see Dave Hughes’s attraction for young middle-class girls. He was a personable ‘bit of rough’, handsome, tall, with the clean, muscular looks of a Chippendale, dark shoulder-length hair, bright blue eyes and an engaging smile. Unthreatening was the word that leapt immediately to mind, and it was only gradually in the confined atmosphere of a Bournemouth police interview room that the teeth began to show behind the smile. What you saw, Cooper realized, was very professional packaging. What lay beneath the surface was anyone’s guess.

  Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Jones was another where the packaging obscured the real man. It amused Cooper to see how seriously Hughes underestimated the sad Pekinese face that regarded him with such mild-mannered apology. Charlie took the chair on the other side of the table from Hughes and sifted rather helplessly through his briefcase. ‘It was good of you to come in,’ he said. ‘I realize time’s precious. We’re grateful for your co-operation, Mr Hughes.’

  Hughes shrugged amiably. ‘If I’d known I had a choice, I probably wouldn’t’ve come. What’s this about then?’

  Charlie isolated a piece of crumpled paper and spread it out on the table. ‘Miss Ruth Lascelles. She says you’re her lover.’

  Hughes shrugged again. ‘Sure. I know Ruth. She’s seventeen. Since when was sex with a seventeen-year-old a crime?’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘What’s the hassle then?’

  ‘Theft. She’s been stealing.’

  Hughes looked suitably surprised but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Did you know she was stealing?’

  He shook his head. ‘She always told me her granny gave her money. I believed her. The old bitch was rolling in it.’

  ‘Was? You know she’s dead then.’

  ‘Sure. Ruth told me she killed herself.’

  Charlie ran his finger down the page. ‘Ruth says you told her to steal silver-backed hair brushes, jewellery and valuable first editions from Mrs Gillespie’s library. Similar items, in fact, to what Miss Julia Sefton claims you told her to steal from her parents. Small bits and pieces that wouldn’t be missed but could be disposed of very easily for ready cash. Who sold them, Mr Hughes? You or Ruth?’

  ‘Do me a favour, Inspector. Do I look the sort of mug who’d act as a fence for an over-privileged, middle-class tart who’d drop me in it quick as winking the minute she was rumbled? Jesus,’ he said with disgust, ‘give me some credit for common sense. They only take up with me because they’re bored out of their tiny minds with the jerks their parents approve of. And that should tell you something about the sort of girls they are. They call them slags where I come from, and thieving’s in their blood along with the whoring. If Ruth says I set her up to it, then she’s lying to get herself off the hook. It’s so bloody easy, isn’t it? I’m just scum from a frigging squat and she’s Miss Lascelles from Southcliffe girls’ school. Who’s going to believe me?’

  Charlie smiled his lugubrious smile. ‘Ah, well,’ he murmured, ‘belief isn’t really the issue, is it? We both know you’re lying and that Ruth is telling the truth, but the question is can we persuade her to stand up in court and tell the whole truth? You made a bad choice there, Mr Hughes. She doesn’t have a father, you see, only a mother, and you probably know as well as I do that women are far harder on their daughters than men ever could be. Mrs Lascelles won’t protect Ruth the way Julia’s father protected her. Apart from anything else, she positively loathes the girl. It would have been different, I suspect, if Mrs Gillespie were still alive, she would probably have hushed it up for the sake of the family’s reputation, but as she isn’t I can’t see anybody championing Ruth.’

  Hughes grinned. ‘Well, go ahead then. Prosecute the thieving little bitch. It’s no skin off my nose.’

  It was Charlie’s turn to look surprised. ‘You don’t like her?’

  ‘She was okay for the odd screw, no great shakes but okay. Look, I told you, they only make out with me because they want to get back at their folks. So what am I supposed to do? Tug my forelock in gratitude for the use of their very ordinary bodies? I can get as good if not better down the nightclub of a Saturday.’ He grinned again, a captivatingly wicked grin, guaranteed to melt
female hearts but totally lost on Jones and Cooper. ‘I do the business for them, give them their thrills, and I only complain when they try and lay their fucking thieving on me. It really gets up my nose, if you want the truth. You’re such bloody suckers, you lot. A pretty face, a posh accent, a sob story, and, bingo, get Dave Hughes down here and give him the works. You just won’t accept that they’re slags, same as the prozzies on the streets in the red light district.’

  Charlie looked thoughtful. ‘That’s the second time you’ve called Miss Lascelles a slag. What’s your definition of a slag, Mr Hughes?’

  ‘The same as yours, I guess.’

  ‘A vulgar, coarse woman who sells her body for money. I wouldn’t say that was a description of Miss Lascelles.’

  Hughes looked amused. ‘A slag’s an easy lay. Ruth was so bloody easy, it was pathetic.’

  ‘You said she was no great shakes as a screw,’ Charlie carried on imperturbably. ‘That’s a very revealing admission, don’t you think?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It says more about you than it does about her. Didn’t she fancy you? Did you have to force her? What is it you like doing that she didn’t like you enough to go along with? I find that fascinating.’

  ‘I’ve had better, that’s all I meant.’

  ‘Better what, Mr Hughes?’

  ‘Lovers, for Christ’s sake. Women who know what they’re doing. Women who handle themselves and me with more fucking finesse. Screwing Ruth was like screwing blancmange. It was me had to do all the work while she just lay there telling me how much she loved me. It pisses me off, that, it really does.’

  Charlie frowned. ‘Why did you bother with her then?’

  Hughes smiled cynically at the all-too-patent trap. ‘Why not? She was free, she was available, and I get horny like the next man. Are you going to charge me with doing what comes naturally?’