Scold's Bridle

*11*

It wasn't until late the following afternoon, a Saturday, that Sergeant Cooper felt he had enough information on Dave Hughes to make an approach viable. He was pessimistic about bringing charges of theft, but in respect of Mathilda's death there was some room for optimism. Ruth's mention of a white Ford transit had rung bells in his memory and a careful sifting of the statements taken in and around Fontwell in the days after the body was found had produced a gem. When asked if he'd seen anything unusual the previous Saturday, the landlord of the Three Pigeons, Mr. Henry Peel, had said:

I can't swear it had anything to do with Mrs. Gillespie, but there was a white Ford transit parked on my forecourt that Saturday afternoon and evening. Had a young lad in it, as far as I could judge. Stayed ten minutes the first time then drove off towards the church and picked someone up. I saw it again that evening. I pointed it out to my wife and said some wretch was using our forecourt but not using the pub. I can't give you the registration number.

Underneath in a PC's handwriting was a short note:

Mrs. Peel disagrees. She says her husband is confusing this with another occasion when white vans were there twice in one day, but her recollection is that the vans were different. Three of our regulars drive white vans, she said.

Cooper talked the problem through with his Detective Chief Inspector. "I need to question Hughes, Charlie, so do I take a team with me, or what? According to the girl, he's living in a squat, so he won't be alone, and I don't fancy trying to winkle him out from under a mob of squatters. Assuming they let me in at all. It's bloody rich, isn't it?" he grumbled. "Somebody else's property and they can take it over lock, stock and barrel. The only way the poor sod who owns it can get it back is to pay through the nose for an eviction order, by which time he finds they've turned the place into a cess-pit."

Charlie Jones's squashed face wore a permanently lugubrious expression which always reminded Cooper of a sad-eyed Pekinese. He was more of a terrier, however, who, once he got his teeth into something, rarely let go. "Can we charge him with theft on what Miss Lascelles has told you?"

"We could, but he'd be out again in a couple of hours. Bournemouth have him on file. He's been brought in three times and he's walked on each occasion. All similar offences to this one, i.e. persuading youngsters to steal for him. It's a clever scam." He sounded frustrated. "The children only prey off their families and, so far, the parents have refused to co-operate when they discover that Hughes's prosecution will involve their daughters in a prosecution, too."

"So how come he was brought in in the first place?"

"Because three indignant fathers have independently accused him of forcing their daughters to steal and demanded that charges be brought. But when the girls were questioned, they told a different story, denied the coercion and insisted that the thieving was their own idea. It's a real honey, this one. You can't do him without the daughters, and the fathers won't have the daughters done." He smiled cynically. "Too much unpleasant publicity."

"What sort of backgrounds?"

"Middle class, wealthy. The girls are all over sixteen, so no question of underage sex. Mind, I'm sure these three and Miss Lascelles are only the tip of a very large iceberg. It sounds to me as if he's got the whole thing down to a very fine art."

"Does he coerce them?"

Cooper shrugged. "All Miss Lascelles said was, he does terrible things when he's angry. He threatened to make a scene at the school if she did anything he didn't like, but when I asked her about it in the car on the way to Dr. Blakeney's, in other words after that particular threat had lost its sting because she'd already been expelled, she clammed up and burst into tears." He tugged his nose thoughtfully. "He must be using some form of coercion because she's terrified he's going to find her. I wondered if he makes videos of them but when I asked Bournemouth if they've found any equipment on him, they said no. Your guess is as good as mine, Charlie. He's got some hold on these girls, and it must be fear because they're desperate to get shot of him the minute they're found out. But precisely what's involved, I don't know."

The Inspector frowned. "Why aren't they afraid to name him?"

"Presumably because he's given them permission to shop him if they're caught. Look, he must know how easy it would be for us to track him down. If Miss Lascelles hadn't proffered the information, all I had to do was ask the headmistress for the tarmac firm and take it from there. I think his MO goes something like this: target a girl who's young enough and cosseted enough to warrant her parents' protection, win her over, then use some sort of threat to make sure she accuses herself along with him when she's caught. That way he's as sure as he can be that charges won't be brought and, if they are, he'll take her down with him. Perhaps his threat is as simple as that."

The Inspector was doubtful. "He can't make much out of it. How long before the parents notice what's going on?"

"You'd be amazed. One of the girls was borrowing her mother's credit card for months before the father queried the amount his wife was spending. It was a jointly held card, the balance was paid off automatically out of the current account, and neither of them noticed that it had increased by upwards of five hundred pounds a month. Or if they did, they assumed the other partner's expenditure was behind it. It's a different world, Charlie. Both parents working and earning a good screw, and enough money sloshing around in the coffers to obscure their daughter's thieving. Once they started looking into it, of course, they discovered she'd sold bits of silver, jewellery that her mother never wore, some valuable first editions of her father's and a five-hundred-pound camera that her father thought he'd left on a train. I'd say Hughes is doing very nicely out of it, particularly if he's running more than one of them at the same time."

"Good grief! How much has Ruth Lascelles stolen then?"

Cooper took a piece of paper from his pocket. "She made a list of what she could remember. That's it." He put it on the desk. "Same pattern as the other girl. Jewellery that her grandmother had forgotten about. Silver-backed hairbrushes from the spare room that were never used. China ornaments and bowls that were kept in cupboards because Mrs. Gillespie didn't like them, and some first editions out of the library. She said Hughes told her the sort of thing to look for. Valuable bits and pieces that wouldn't be missed."

"What about money?"

"Twenty pounds from her grandmother's handbag, fifty pounds from the bedside table and, a few weeks later, five hundred out of the old lady's account. Went to the bank as cool as cucumber with a forged cheque and a letter purporting to come from Mathilda, instructing them to hand over the loot. According to her, Mrs. Gillespie never even noticed. But she did, of course, because she mentioned the fifty-pound theft to Jack Blakeney and, when I tackled her bank this morning, they told me she had queried the five-hundred-pound withdrawal on her statement, and they advised her that Ruth had drawn it out on her instructions." He scratched his jaw. "According to them, she agreed that it was her mistake and took no further action."

"What date was that?"

Cooper consulted his notes again. "The cheque was cashed during the last week in October, Ruth's half-term in other words, and Mrs. Gillespie rang the bank as soon as she got the statement, which was the first week in November."

"Not long before she died then, and after she'd made up her mind to change the will. It's a bugger that one. I can't get the hang of it at all." He thought for a moment. "When did Ruth steal the fifty pounds?"

"At the beginning of September before she went back to school. She had some idea apparently of buying Hughes off. She said: 'I thought he'd leave me alone if I gave him some money.' "

"Dear God!" said Charlie dismally. "There's one born every minute. Did you ask her if Hughes put pressure on her to cash the five hundred at half-term?"

"I did. Her answer was: 'No, no, no. I stole it because I wanted to,' and then she turned the waterworks on again." He looked very rueful. "I've left the ball in Dr. Blakeney's court. I had a word with her on the phone this morning, gave her the gist of what Hughes has been up to and asked her to try and find out why none of the girls will turn QE against him. She may get somewhere but I'm not counting on it."

"What about the mother? Would Ruth talk to her?"

Cooper shook his head. "First, you'd have to get her to talk to Ruth. It's unnatural, if you ask me. I stopped off last night to tell her the Blakeneys had taken her daughter in and she looked at me as if I'd just climbed out of a sewer. The only thing she was interested in was whether I thought Ruth's expulsion meant she'd killed her grandmother. I said, no, that as far as I knew there were no statistics linking truancy and promiscuous sex to murder, but there were a great number linking them to poor parenting. So she told me to eff off." He chuckled happily at the memory.

Charlie Jones grunted his amusement. "I'm more interested in friend Hughes at the moment, so let's break this down into manageable proportions. Have Bournemouth tried getting the three families together so that the girls gain strength from numbers?"

"Twice. No go either time. The parents have taken legal advice and no one's talking."

Charlie pursed his lips in thought. "It's been done before, you know. George Joseph Smith did it a hundred years ago. Wrote glowing references for pretty servant girls, then found them placements in wealthy households. Within weeks of starting work they would steal valuables from their employers and take them faithfully to George to convert into ready cash. He was another one with an extraordinary pulling-power over women."

"George Smith?" said Cooper in surprise. "I thought he did away with women. Wasn't he the brides-in-the-bath murderer?"

"That's him. Started drowning wives when he discovered how easy it was to get them to make wills in his favour upon marriage. Interesting, isn't it, in view of the way Mrs. Gillespie died." He was silent for a moment. "I read a book about Smith not so long ago. The author described him as a professional and a literal lady-killer. I wonder if the same thing applies to Hughes." He rapped a tattoo on his desk-top with his knuckles. "Let's pull him in for questioning."

"How? Do I take an arrest warrant?"

Charlie reached for his phone. "No. I'll get Bournemouth to pick him up tomorrow morning and hold him on ice till you and I get there."

"Tomorrow's Sunday, Charlie."

"Then with any luck he'll have a hangover. I want to see his expression when I tell him we have reason to believe he murdered Mrs. Gillespie."

Cooper was sceptical. "Have we? The landlord's statement won't stand close scrutiny, not if his wife's claiming he was confused."

A wolfish grin spread across the Inspector's features, and the sad Pekinese became a Dobermann. "But we know he was there that afternoon because Ruth told us he was, and I'm inclined to be a little creative with the rest. He was using Mrs. Gillespie's granddaughter to extort money. He has a history of ruthless exploitation of women, and he's probably feeding a habit because his outgoings far exceed his income. If they didn't, he wouldn't have to live in squats. I'd say his psychological profile runs something like this: a dangerously unstable, psychopathic addict, whose hatred of women has undergone a dramatic change recently and taken him from their brutal manipulation to their destruction. He will be the product of a broken home and inadequate education, and boyhood fear of his father will govern most of his actions."

Cooper looked even more sceptical. "You've been reading too many books, Charlie."

Jones allowed himself a laugh. "But Hughes doesn't know that, does he? So let's try and dent his charisma a little and see if we can't stop him using other people's little girls to do his dirty work."

"I'm trying to solve a murder," said Cooper in protest. "That's what I want answers on."

"But you've still to convince me it was a murder, old son."

Ruth crept stealthily down the stairs and stood to one side of the studio doorway, watching Jack's reflection in her tiny hand mirror. Not that she could see him very well. He was sitting with his back to the window, working on a portrait but, because the easel was placed directly between him and the door, the canvas obscured all but his legs. From the bedroom window she had watched Sarah leave the house two hours ago, so she knew they were alone. Would Jack notice when she slipped past the doorway? She waited for ten minutes in panicky indecision, too afraid to take a step.

"If you want something to eat," he murmured finally into the silence, "then I suggest you try the kitchen. If you want someone to talk to, then I suggest you come in here, and if you're looking for something to steal, then I suggest you take Sarah's engagement ring which belonged to my grandmother and was valued at two thousand pounds four years ago. You'll find it in the left-hand drawer of her dressing-table." He leaned to one side so that she could see his face in her mirror. "You might as well show yourself. I'm not going to eat you." He nodded curtly as she came round the doorjamb. "Sarah gave me strict instructions to be sympathetic, patient and helpful. I'll do my best, but I warn you in advance I can't stand people who sniff into handkerchiefs and creep about on tiptoe."

Ruth's cheeks lost what little colour they had left. "Do you think it would be all right if I made myself a cup of coffee?" She looked very unattractive, damp hair clinging to her scalp, face puffy and blotched with crying. "I don't want to be a nuisance."

Jack returned to his painting so that she wouldn't see the flash of irritation in his eyes. Self-pity in others invariably brought out the worst in him. "As long as you make me one, too. Black and no sugar, please. The coffee's by the kettle, sugar's in the tin marked 'sugar,' milk's in the fridge and lunch is in the oven. It will be ready in half an hour so, unless you're starving, my advice is to skip breakfast and wait for that."

"Will Dr. Blakeney be here for lunch?"

"I doubt it, Polly Graham's gone into labour and as Sarah agreed to a home-birth, she could be there for hours."

Ruth hovered for a moment, then turned to go to the kitchen, only to change her mind again. "Has my mother phoned?" she blurted out.

"Did you expect her to?"

"I thought-" She fell silent.

"Well, try thinking about making me a cup of coffee instead. If you hadn't mentioned it, I probably wouldn't have wanted one, but as you have, I do. So get your skates on, woman. This is not a hotel and I'm not in the best of moods after being relegated to the spare room."

She fled down the corridor to the kitchen and, when she returned five minutes later with a tray and two cups, her hands were shaking so much that the cups chattered against each other like terrified teeth. Jack appeared not to notice but took the tray and placed it on a table in the window. "Sit," he instructed, pointing to a hard-backed chair and swinging his stool round to face her. "Now, is it me you're frightened of, the boyfriend, men in general, Sarah not coming home for lunch, the police, or are you worried about what's going to happen to you?"

She shrank away from him as if he'd struck her.

"Me then." He moved the stool back a yard to give her more room. "Why are you afraid of me, Ruth?"

Her hands fluttered in her lap. "I'm-you-" Her eyes widened in terror. "I'm not."

"You feel completely secure and at ease in my presence?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"You have an odd way of showing it." He reached for his coffee cup. "How old were you when your father died?"

"I was a baby."

"Since which time you've lived with your mother and your grandmother and, latterly, a bevy of women at boarding school." He took a sip of coffee. "Am I right that this Hughes character is the first boyfriend you've ever had?"

She nodded.

"So he's your only experience of men?"

She stared at her hands.

"Yes or no?" he demanded, the words whipping out impatiently.

"Yes," she whispered again.

"Then you obviously require lessons on the male of the species. There are only three things to remember. One: most men need to be told what to do by women. Even sex improves when women take the trouble to point the man in the right direction. Two: compared with women, most men are inadequate. They are less perceptive, have little or no intuition, are poorer judges of character and, therefore, more vulnerable to criticism. They find aggression immensely intimidating because they're not supposed to and, in short, are by far the more sensitive of the two sexes. Three: any man who does not conform to this pattern should be avoided. He will be a swaggering, uneducated brute whose intellect will be so small that the only way he can give himself a modicum of authority is by demeaning anyone who's foolish enough to put up with him, and, finally, he will lack the one thing that all decent men have in abundance, namely a deep and abiding admiration for women." He picked up her coffee cup and held it under her nose so that she had to take it. "Now I don't pretend to be a paragon, but I'm certainly not a brute, and between you, me and the gatepost, I am extremely fond of my irascible wife. I accept that what I did was open to interpretation, but you can take it from me that I went to Cedar House for one reason only and that was simply to paint your mother. The temptation to capture two generations of one family was irresistible." He eyed her speculatively. Almost as irresistible, he was thinking, as the temptation to capture the third generation. "And if my much-put-upon wife hadn't chosen that precise moment to expel me, well," he shrugged, "I wouldn't have had to freeze on. your mother's summer-house floor. Does all that set your mind at rest or are you going to go on quaking like a great jelly every time you see me?"

She stared at him with stricken eyes. She was beautiful after all, he thought, but it was a tragic beauty. Like her mother's. Like Mathilda's.

"I'm pregnant," she said finally, exhausted tears seeping on to her cheeks.

There was a moment of silence.

"I thought-I hoped-my mother-" She dashed at her eyes with a sodden tissue. "I don't know what-I ought to go-I shouldn't have told you."

Somewhere in the recesses of his heart, Jack blushed for himself. Was the self-pity of a child under intolerable stress so despicable that he had to savage it? He reached across and took her hand, drawing her off the chair and into his arms, holding her tight and stroking her hair as her father would have done had he lived. He let her weep for a long time before he spoke. "Your grandmother once said to me that mankind was doomed unless he learnt to communicate. She was a wise old lady. We talk a lot but we rarely communicate." He eased her off his chest and held her at arm's length so that he could look at her. "I'm glad you told me. I feel rather privileged that you felt you could. Most people would have waited until Sarah came home."

"I was going-"

He stopped her with a chuckle and released her back on to her chair. "Let me hang on to my illusions. Let me believe just once that someone thought I could be as easy to confide in as Sarah. It's not true, of course. There is no one in the world who can listen as well as my wife, or who can impart such sound advice. She'll look after you, I promise."

Ruth blew her nose. "She'll be angry with me."

"Do you think so?"

"You said she's irascible."

"She is. It's not so frightening. You just keep your head down till the saucepans stop flying."

She dabbed frantically at her eyes. "Saucepans? Does she-"

"No," he said firmly. "It was a figure of speech. Sarah's a nice person. She brings home wounded pigeons, splints their wings, and watches them die in slow and terrible agony with an expression of enormous sympathy on her face. It's one of the things they teach them at medical school."

She looked alarmed. "That's awful."

"It was a joke," he said ruefully. "Sarah is the most sensible doctor I know. She will help you reach a decision about what you want to do and then take it from there. She won't force you to have the baby, and she won't force you not to have it."

The tears welled again. "I don't want it." She clenched her hands in her lap. "Is that wrong, do you think?"

"No," he said honestly. "If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't want it either."

"But I made it. It was my fault."

"It takes two to make babies, Ruth, and I can't see your boyfriend showing much enthusiasm when it's fully-fledged and bawling its head off. It's your choice, not his. Sperm comes two-a-penny and most of it gets washed down the sink. Wombs and their foetuses come extremely expensive. Sarah's right when she says it's a life sentence."

"But isn't it alive? Won't I be murdering it?"

He was a man. How could he begin to understand the agony that women suffered because a biological accident has given them power over life and death? He could only be honest with her. "I don't know, but I'd say it's only alive at the moment because you're alive. It has no existence as an individual in its own right."

"But it could have-if I let it."

"Of course. But on that basis every egg that any woman produces and every sperm that any man produces has the potential for life, and no one accuses young men of being murderers every time they spill their seed on the ground behind the bike sheds. I think for each of us our own life has priority over the potential life that exists inside us. I don't for a moment pretend that it's an easy decision, or even a black and white one, but I do believe that you are more important at this moment than a life that can only come into being if you are prepared to pay for it, emotionally, physically, socially and financially. And you'll bear that cost alone, Ruth, because the likelihood of Hughes paying anything is virtually nil."

"He'll say it isn't his anyway."

Jack nodded. "Some men do, I'm afraid. It's so easy for them. It's not their body that's been caught."

She hid her face in her hands. "You don't understand." She wrapped her arms around her head. To protect herself? To hide herself? "It might be one of the others'. You see I had to-he made me-Oh, God-I wish-" She didn't go on, only curled herself into a tight ball and sobbed.

Jack felt completely helpless. Her anguish was so strong that it washed over him in swamping waves. He could think only in platitudes-there's nothing so bad that it might not be worse ... it's always darkest before the dawn-but what use were platitudes to a girl whose life lay in tatters before her? He put out an awkward hand and placed it on her head. It was an instinctive gesture of comfort, an echo of a priestly benediction, "tell me what happened," he said. "Perhaps it's not as bad as you think."

But it was. What she told him in tones of abject terror rocked the foundations of his own humanity. So shocked was he that he felt physically sick.

Sarah found him in the garden when she came home at three thirty after helping to deliver Polly Graham of a healthy baby daughter. He was forking industriously round some roses and scattering handfuls of fertilizer about the roots. "It's almost December," she said. "Everything's dormant. You're wasting your time."

"I know." He looked up and she thought she saw traces of tears in his eyes. "I just needed to do something active."

"Where's Ruth?"

"Asleep. She had a headache so I gave her some codeine and packed her off to bed." He brushed the hair from his forehead with the back of a muddy hand, "Have you finished for the day?"

She nodded. "What's happened?"

He leant on the fork and stared across the fields. The slowly fading light gave a misty quality to a landscape in which cows grazed and trees, shorn of their leaves, fingered the sky with dark filigree lacework. "That's the England men and women die for," he said gruffly.

She followed his gaze with a small frown creasing her forehead.

Tears glistened on his lashes. "Do you know that poem by Rupert Brooke? "The Soldier.' The one that goes:

" 'If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware...' "

He fell silent. When he spoke again, his voice shook. "It's beautiful, isn't it, Sarah? England is beautiful."

She wiped the tears from his face. "You're crying," she said, her heart aching for him. "I've never seen you cry before. What's happened, Jack?"

He didn't seem to hear her. "Rupert Brooke died in 1915. A sacrifice of war. He was only twenty-eight, younger than you and me, and he gave his life with all the other millions, whatever country they came from, for the sake of other people's children. And do you know what breaks my heart?" His dark gaze slid away from her, looking into a private hell that only he could see. "That a man who could write one of the most perfect pieces of poetry about his homeland that has ever been written should have sacrificed himself for the filth that England spawns today."

"No one's all bad, Jack, and no one's all good. We're just human. The poor kid only wanted to be loved."

He wiped a weary hand around his jaw. "I'm not talking about Ruth, Sarah. I'm talking about the men who attacked her. I'm talking about the animal who taught her obedience by shutting her in a van with a group of low-grade scum who raped her one after the other for five hours to break her spirit." He stared over the fields again. "Apparently she objected when Hughes told her to start stealing from Mathilda, said she didn't want to do it. So he locked her in the van with his mates who gave her a graphic demonstration of what was going to happen every time she refused. I've had to give my word that I'm not going to repeat this to anyone except you. She is absolutely terrified they're going to find her and do it again, and when I said we should report it to the police I thought she was going to die on me. Hughes told her that if she was ever caught, all she had to do was say the stealing was her idea. As long as she does that and doesn't mention the rape, he'll leave her alone in the future." His lips thinned. "But if she talks, he'll send his goons after her to punish her, and he doesn't care how long he has to wait to do it. Police protection won't save her, marriage won't save her. He'll wait for years if he has to, but for every year her punishment is delayed, he'll add another hour to the final ordeal. She'd have to be a quite extraordinary person to talk to the police with a threat like that hanging over her."

Sarah was too shocked to respond. "No wonder she was frightened to sleep downstairs," she said at last.

"She's hardly slept at all for weeks, as far as I can gather. The only way I could get her to take the codeine was to promise again and again that I wouldn't leave the house. She's paranoid about being caught unawares and she's paranoid about the police asking any more questions."

"But the Sergeant knows there's something," Sarah warned him. "He phoned this morning and asked me to try and find out what it was. His word for it was coercion. Hughes must be using coercion, he said, but we can't do much unless we know what sort of coercion it is. Ruth's not the only one it's happened to. They know of at least three others and they think it's only the tip of the iceberg. None of them talk."

"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.