Verdict Unsafe

by Jill McGown

  Lennie sat smoking at the kitchen table, waiting until Matt came down and let himself out, then he crushed out his cigarette, picked up her jacket, and took the stairs two at a time to hurry Ginny up. She would be wasting as much time as she could up there to delay going out.

  He frowned. She was sitting on the bed, fully dressed. The bed was made. And nothing about the room suggested that anything had ever been any different. “What did Burbidge want, if he didn’t want to get laid?” he asked, intrigued to know what Matt Burbidge’s sexual preferences were.

  She looked at him, the big dark eyes a little in awe of his powers of observation, a little scared, a little puzzled, then resigned. “Don’t hit me, Lennie,” she said.

  There was something surreal about living with Ginny. “Why would I hit you?” he asked.

  “Matt said you would.”

  “I won’t hit you,” he said, totally bamboozled, but taking the line of least resistance. “What did he want?”

  “He said I had to stick to my story.”

  Lennie frowned “What story?”

  “That’s what I said,” Ginny replied, her face perplexed.

  Sensing that this would be a long job, Lennie put out a hand and pulled her up from the bed. “Tell me in the van,” he said, thrusting her coat into her hands. “We’re wasting time.”

  * * *

  Judy switched off the news, which had had Drummond all over it, which hadn’t helped. The rest hadn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs, and then the local news had had nothing but Drummond. He would be in his element with all this attention. Wasn’t that why he had done it? Why he had confessed? They were giving him exactly what he wanted, and a cash bonus into the bargain.

  No one had set the vicious little bastard up. He had assaulted Ginny, and now he was threatening to finish the job, and there was damn all she could do about it until he did. Hotshot Harper had a lot to answer for.

  But she had enjoyed his company. And sitting there, listening to him explain his point of view, it had even seemed reasonable. But sitting in Ginny’s house, looking at her, knowing what Drummond had in mind for her … no.

  She thought again of Ginny’s house, bristling with mod cons and soft furnishings, and shook her head. There was no way Ginny was making enough for all that, not in Malworth. And Lennie? Driving a taxi? It was hard enough to believe that he was turning an honest penny doing anything, but he certainly wouldn’t be making very much out of it if it wasn’t his taxi. She tried to work out what Ginny would be making a week, given what she knew of Malworth’s overstaffed red light district, and what she would be likely to command now that she had a room to offer rather than the back of Lennie’s Transit. Not enough.

  It had been partly a desire to find out why their circumstances had taken such a turn for the better that had made her stay at Ginny’s, and partly, she knew, a desire not to go to Lloyd’s. She had seen his face when she’d told the Chief Super about the self-defense classes; she had known there would be a row. She had thought it would be about Drummond, about her so-called overreaction. But Lloyd could always take her by surprise.

  Hotshot had taken her by surprise, too. She wished he hadn’t been so easy to be with. She wished she wasn’t thinking about him. She wished she could be sure that he had had nothing to do with her reaction to Lloyd’s fairly run-of-the-mill wild accusation of infidelity. He did that sort of thing all the time when he was angry. But it had hit home.

  She had only had lunch with the man in the police canteen, for God’s sake. It wasn’t exactly a candlelit dinner for two.

  She would go to bed. No she wouldn’t, because the phone was ringing. Lloyd, to apologize. Poor Lloyd. He always ended up apologizing, and that wasn’t really very fair.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Judy?” Her guess had been right, but she hadn’t guessed what he was going to say. “There’s been another rape,” he said. “And …” He paused. “There isn’t an easy way to say this,” he said. “It was Bobbie’s flatmate. And she’s dead. I don’t have details—just that it happened in the flat.”

  Marilyn. Who had called them out two years ago when Bobbie had arrived home to that very flat and had passed out from the carbon monoxide that had poisoned her as she had been raped in the exhaust stream of her car. Otherwise they might never have heard about Bobbie’s assault. And they might not have the slender thread they did have with which to link Drummond to the rapes. Marilyn, who had helped Bobbie through it, who had been great, who had put her own life on hold, was dead.

  “I’ll see you there,” she said, finding her voice at last.

  Flat two, Balfour House, was swarming with uniforms, scenes-of-crime officers, detectives, photographers, all the dismal circus that attended a suspicious death, when Judy got there. In the room itself, Tom was telling the photographer what he wanted; Lloyd was talking to the FME outside the door, and he acknowledged Judy’s presence with a slight nod.

  Judy looked into the neat room, at the young woman who lay sprawled on the bed, at the injuries that she had seen five times before, and looked away, first at Tom, then at the rest of the room. One drawer was open; the fingerprint man was dusting it for prints. No chance, she thought. Drummond isn’t that stupid. Had he been looking for something?

  She had a look around the rest of the flat: the other bedroom, also tidy; the bathroom; kitchen; living room. Nothing disturbed, except for the telephone table in the corridor, knocked over, and the telephone smashed, stamped on, probably. There had been no break-in; he must have come to the door. Marilyn had in all probability opened the door to a masked man and, unable to pass him, had picked up the phone and been overpowered as she had tried to ring for help. Then she had been dragged, ordered, whatever, to the bedroom.

  “Mm,” said Lloyd, when he joined her, and she gave him her initial thoughts on what had happened. “Why would he take her into the bedroom?” he asked. “Why not do it here, in the corridor? No windows. Farther away from the neighbors—less likelihood of the sound traveling—which it did, at some point, or the neighbor wouldn’t have got suspicious. All he had to do was put out the light and he would have had his preferred environment of total darkness.”

  “She might have got away from him, briefly,” Judy said. She tried to visualize the scene, though her entire being wanted not to. “While he was disabling the phone, probably. He would be between her and the door, so she couldn’t get out. But she ran along to her bedroom, and tried to shut herself in. He was too quick for her.” She looked at Lloyd. “And he raped and murdered her on her own bed,” she added bitterly. “Will Case take Drummond seriously now, do you suppose?”

  Lloyd nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.” He looked down the corridor. “But why did she run into the bedroom?” he asked, and went into the bathroom, shutting the door, locking it. He came out again, and looked at her. “Why not the bathroom? It’s right here, it has a lock that might have kept him out. If she got away from him at all—why not run in there?”

  Judy thought about that, and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “It’s a little puzzle,” Lloyd said.

  Lloyd thought the answers to little puzzles solved the big one. Judy had learned to believe it. But there was no big puzzle about who had murdered Marilyn—what they had to do was prove it. “I’ll work on it,” she said, and sighed. “Meanwhile, someone’s got to tell Bobbie, and it had better be me.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Lloyd said. “There’s not much I can do here that Tom can’t do.”

  He was giving her moral support. He did it all the time, automatically. He was always there when she needed him. And she’d walked out on her birthday dinner.

  In the car, she apologized for that.

  “It’ll keep,” he said. “Until we’re more in the mood.”

  Telling Bobbie what had happened was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. The landlord of the Ferrari got Bobbie a brandy; the landlady got them all a cup of tea, and went
off to make up a bed for Bobbie. She had to stay with them for as long as she wanted, she said.

  “Someone will have to tell her boyfriend,” Bobbie said dully.

  “Where does he live?” asked Lloyd.

  “Stansfield.” She was staring straight ahead, her eyes wide and blank with grief. “But … he works away. On the gas-rigs. Two weeks on, two weeks off—” She broke off, and took a long time before she spoke again. “He only left last night,” she whispered. “I don’t know which one he’s on, just that it’s off the Essex coast. His name’s Des Hewitt. Someone has to—”

  “We’ll deal with that,” said Lloyd. “We’ll find him. Don’t worry.”

  Judy looked at the shattered girl and knew that she was right back where she had been two years ago, after the rape. And she knew that she would never have a better chance. “Bobbie,” she said quietly. “We’ve got to stop Drummond. Please, please give us a blood sample.”

  Bobbie Chalmers turned her eyes painfully to Judy’s. “What for?” she asked, her voice just audible.

  “To compare with the blood found on Drummond’s jeans,” said Judy. “I told you this afternoon, remember? It’s yours, Bobbie, and we can prove it.”

  She shook her head slightly. “No,” she said. “It can’t be mine.”

  The defenses were torn and ragged, but they were still in place. Judy had met her match in Bobbie before; she was meeting it still. Because Bobbie was a survivor, and Drummond had just made it clear to her what she had to do to stay alive.

  “I wasn’t raped,” she went on. “And I never said I was.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Thursday 4 November

  MIDNIGHT. LENNIE SAT IN THE FRONT OF THE TRANSIT, elbows on the steering wheel, chin in his hands, an eye open for the cops, an ear open for Ginny, in the back with a punter. He had counted every penny he had; it would have been more if that randy bugger hadn’t kept the cab off the road all morning. Please God, let it be a busy night.

  The John emerged, and drove off. After a minute Ginny came out, and Lennie opened the door.

  She got in, pulling the fur jacket around her as she shivered. Lennie took the money from her, and he drove off, back to the pitch.

  “Lennie—let’s pack it in. I was there for hours before I got him—there aren’t enough punters.”

  “The other two are doing all right.”

  “Well, it’s their pitch, isn’t it? They’ve got regulars.”

  He pulled up, and leaned across her, opening the door. “Out,” he said. “And try looking as if you want to fuck them, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t want to! I want to go home!”

  He raised his hand, and she scuttled back to the pavement as a car inched its way along. It picked up one of the others, and Lennie swore, and drove back to the discreet parking place that hid the van from the road. Half an hour passed, and she arrived with one on foot. And as soon as she was on her way back to the pitch, she was complaining again, and didn’t stop when they got there.

  Business at last became reasonably brisk, but she was still complaining all the time, and started saying she wanted to go home as soon as the cars began to thin out, and the rush hour was over. But he made her work until the trickle of cars dried up altogether. She’d got a regular tomorrow and one Friday lunchtime, and whatever he could skim off the taxi takings. He was well short of what he needed, but there would be no more trade tonight, and Ginny finally got her wish.

  “I’m fucking freezing,” she announced, as she got in, slamming the door, huddling into her jacket. “It isn’t fair. You said I wouldn’t have to do this any—”

  “Shut it, Ginny,” he said. “Just shut it, all right?”

  Ginny lapsed into silence, and Lennie drove her home.

  Lloyd caught sight of Freddie as he made his way through to the sealed-off room where white-suited people looked for, and hopefully gathered, evidence.

  “The FME pronounced life extinct at eleven-twenty,” Lloyd said. “She’s left notes about temperature readings and so on. She said the girl was very recently deceased when she saw her.”

  “Good.” Freddie looked at his watch. “One-fifteen,” he said. “Two hours since she examined the body. Anything else?”

  “The emergency call was made at ten forty-five—one of the neighbors. She heard noises that worried her a bit, but when it went quiet she didn’t think anymore about it. Then she heard the front door slam and saw someone leave. Wearing black—she just saw his back view, but it worried her, in view of recent events. That’s when she tried to raise Marilyn, and when she couldn’t, she called us.”

  Freddie nodded, and went into the room at the end of the corridor to begin his task. Lloyd knew that he was secretly delighted to be about to get his hands on a fresh corpse, but Freddie had attended sex-crime scenes with Lloyd before, and knew now that it was politic to disguise his pleasure.

  Tom came back from the neighbors, all awake now, and coming out of their flats to see what was going on. For once, they had some information. Someone had heard a diesel engine running outside for about twenty minutes, and had looked out to see a black cab parked over by Lloyd George House, the block of flats on the opposite side of the street. She couldn’t be sure of the time, but she knew it was after ten and before eleven. She couldn’t say whether or not there had been anyone in it. Black cabs were from Stansfield; Malworth didn’t have them.

  “I’ll get Marshall to check on cabs in the morning,” said Tom. “The driver might have seen something.”

  A man on his way back from the pub, crossing the busy road in preference to using the underpass, had almost been run over by someone on a motorbike, going too fast, at about quarter to eleven, he thought. No description of the bike, no vehicle registration number. The rider was wearing black, and a crash helmet that entirely covered his face.

  Judy had found a couple from the neighboring block who had been out walking their dog, and had seen someone in dark clothes running toward the underpass. About ten twenty-five, they decided, so they doubted if he had had much to do with it.

  “The wife of the couple said she thought she recognized the man running to the underpass,” said Judy. “He works as a night security guard at Northstead Securities—you know? The bank across the road from my flat?”

  Lloyd didn’t know the bank opposite her flat, but he didn’t really want to draw attention to his lack of knowledge of her flat and its environs. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Right.”

  “Sir?” A constable came over. “Drummond’s been picked up,” he said. “He was seen in Stansfield, on his bike—he said he hadn’t been anywhere, just riding around.”

  Judy detailed Tom to talk to the security guard, find out if he had seen a motorcyclist. Lloyd then allowed her to drive him to the station, trying not to peer over at the speedometer as she pulled out onto the bypass and gathered speed. He wanted to get there just as much as she did.

  Drummond had cooperated fully, they were told. Had agreed to help with their inquiries, had come to the station without a murmur. He had asked if he could ring his parents, and had done so from a mobile phone.

  That explained how he could follow Judy and call her up wherever she was, Lloyd thought, as they settled themselves down in the interview room, and he looked at the young man. He looked different, in an indefinable way. He was two years older, of course, but there was something else. Something his time behind bars had perhaps produced. The cockiness had been replaced by confidence. Drummond wasn’t afraid, wasn’t alarmed, not this time. He could handle himself now. He smiled at Judy as she spoke to him.

  “Mr. Drummond, you’re not under arrest,” said Judy briskly, after she had gone through the preliminaries with the tape, and cautioned him. No mistakes got made when Judy conducted the interview. “You are free to leave at any time, and to have free legal representation during questioning if you wish.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I would like to ask you some questions concerning a rape and
murder which took place in the Parkside area of Malworth late yesterday evening,” she said. “A motorcyclist answering your description was seen leaving the area. Can you tell us where you were between ten and eleven o’clock?”

  “I took the bike up and down the bypass for a bit,” he said. “It’s a new one. I wanted to take it out, see what it could do. Then I went up the airfield. When I left, I just carried on into Stansfield, and I was riding about here for a while until I got stopped.” He smiled. “They didn’t beat me up this time,” he said. “Do you want my clothes again?”

  He was, as ever, dressed in black, but this time his clothes were manifestly free of any incriminating stains.

  “Yes,” said Judy.

  Drummond still smiled. “Do you want me to take them off now?” he asked.

  “It’ll wait until you get home,” Lloyd said. “Thank you for being so cooperative, Mr. Drummond.”

  Drummond hadn’t taken his eyes off Judy. “Is there anything else I can do for you before I go?” he asked.

  There was something else he could do for them, thought Lloyd. He wanted a sample for DNA. He decided to go for it. “We would like a saliva sample,” he said. “Are you prepared to let us have one?”

  Drummond’s eyes left Judy, and snapped over to him. “What for?” he asked.

  “So that we may extract a DNA profile,” Lloyd said steadily.

  “You’ve already got one. It didn’t do you a lot of good, but you’ve got it anyway.”

  “No,” said Lloyd. “We’re only allowed to keep the profiles of people who have been convicted of violent offenses. And you haven’t been, Mr. Drummond. Besides—that legislation is of very recent origin. It wasn’t in place when you were convicted.”

  “And that means you didn’t keep it? I wasn’t born yesterday, Chief Inspector.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we kept it. But a comparison made with it might well be inadmissible as evidence.”

  Drummond was thrown by this frankness—so, Lloyd could feel, was Judy. It was a gamble. They might, just might find something; Drummond must be out of practice. And if they did, then there was no way they were going to compare it with the previous DNA profile, which they shouldn’t still have, because Hotshot, as Judy called him, would be on to that like a flash. But a freely given new sample … He just hoped he had judged the young man’s overweening conceit correctly, or he had handed him his defense on a plate.