Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  At the point where the bypass had been due to start and where work on it had begun, earth had been shifted by diggers and excavators. No one, it appeared, had any intention of restoring the terrain to its former level, and grass and wild plants had grown over the new landscape of mounds and declivities, so that in the years to come these hills and valleys would seem a natural phenomenon. Or so Wexford said, commenting on the strange scenery;

  “And in hundreds of years, Granddad,” said Robin, “archaeologists may think those hills were the burial ground of an ancient tribe.”

  “Very likely,” said Wexford, “good point.”

  “Tumuli,” Robin said, savoring the word, “that’s what they’ll call them.”

  “Are you pleased?” Ben asked.

  "What, that they didn’t build the bypass? Yes, I am, very pleased. I didn’t like them cutting down the trees and tearing up the hedges. I didn’t like the road building.”

  “I did,” said Ben. “I liked the diggers. I’m going to drive a JCB when I’m grown up and then I’ll dig up the whole world.”

  It was the loveliest time of the year, unless early May, still a month off, might be more lush and floral, but now in April the trees were misted over with green and pale amber, and the Great Wood, which in May would be carpeted with bluebells, showed celandines and aconites, both bright gold, studding the forest floor. After he had dropped the boys at the school gate and waited a moment or two to see them shepherded into the building, he drove back, musing on children’s taste, and on the beauties of nature and when children were first affected by them. Girls sooner than boys, he thought, girls as young as seven, while boys seemed not to notice scenery - rivers and hills, woodland, the distant landscape of downs, and the high skyscape of clouds - until well into their teens. And yet all the great nature poets had been men. Of course, Sylvia might be right and there had been great women poets too, born to be unrecognized and waste their sweetness on the desert air.

  Meanwhile, he had a girl to talk to, one who might or might not care about pastoral beauty and badgers and butterflies, but who seemed amiable enough and who smiled timorously when her stepfather scolded her and when she was soaked to the skin. Not a wild teenager, not a rebel.

  She was sitting on the sofa in the front room of 45 Puck Road, watching a dinosaur cartoon video, designed for children half her age, called Jurassic Larks. Or staring unseeing at it, Wexford thought. Anything rather than have to look at him and Lynn Fancourt.

  At a nod from Wexford, Lynn picked up the remote off the table. “I think we’ll have this off, Lizzie. It’s time to talk.”

  As the pink brontosaurus faded and the pterodactyl with baby ichthyosaur in its mouth vanished in a flicker, Lizzie made a deprecating sound, a kind of snort of protest. She went on staring at the blank screen.

  “You won’t get anything out of her,” Debbie Crowne said. “She’s that obstinate, you might as well talk to a brick wall.”

  “How old are you, Lizzie?” Wexford asked.

  “She’s sixteen.” Debbie didn’t give her daughter a chance to answer. “She was sixteen in January.”

  “In that case, Mrs. Crowne, perhaps it would be best for us to talk to Lizzie on her own.”

  “What, not have me here?”

  “The law requires a parent or responsible adult to be present only when a child is under sixteen.”

  Lizzie spoke, though she didn’t turn her head. “I’m not a child.”

  “If you would, please, Mrs. Crowne.”

  “Oh, all right, if you say so. But she won’t say any thing.” Debbie Crowne put her hand up to her mouth as if she had just recollected something. “If she does say something, you’ll tell me, won’t you? I mean, she could have been anywhere, with anyone. There’s no knowing, is there? I mean, she could be pregnant.”

  Lizzie made the same sound she had when her video was turned off. Saying, “It’s all very well grunting like that, but I reckon she ought to be examined,” Debbie Crowne left the room, shutting the door rather too smartly behind her. The girl didn’t move.

  “You were away from your home for three days, Lizzie,” Wexford said. “You’d never done anything like that before, had you?”

  Silence. Lizzie bent her head still farther so that her face was entirely concealed by hanging hair. It was pretty hair, red-gold, long, and wavy; The hands in her lap had bitten nails. “You didn’t go alone, did you? Did someone take you away, Lizzie?”

  When it was clear she wasn’t going to answer that either, Lynn said, “Whatever you did or wherever you went, no one is going to punish you. Are you afraid of get ting into trouble? You won’t.”

  “No one is going to harm you, Lizzie,” said Wexford. “We only want to know where you went. If you went away because you wanted to be with someone you like, you’ve a right to do that. No one can stop you doing that. But, you see, everyone was looking for you, the police and your parents and your friends were all looking for you. So now we have a right too. We’ve a right to know where you were.”

  The grunt came again, a straining sound like that made by someone in pain. “I can understand you might not want to tell me,” Wexford said. “I can go away. You could be alone with Lynn. You could talk to Lynn. Would you like that?”

  She looked up then. Her face, a rather pretty, pudgy face, freckled about the nose and forehead, was blank, her pale blue eyes vacant. She moistened her thin, pink lips. Frown lines appeared as if she was concentrating hard but as if the intellectual effort of whatever it was, was too much for her. Then she nodded. Not as people usually nod, repeating several times the up-and-down motion of the head, but just once and jerkily, almost curtly.

  “That’s good.” Wexford went out of the room into the hail, a narrow passage that contained a bicycle and a crate full of empty bottles. He tapped on a door at the end and was admitted into a kitchen-diner. Colin Crowne was nowhere to be seen. His wife was sitting in the dining area on a high stool up at a counter, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. “There’s a chance your daughter may feel more able to talk to DC Fancourt on her own.”

  “If you say so, but if she won’t talk to her own mother . . .”

  “What would your attitude be if it turns out she’s been with a boyfriend?”

  “She hasn’t,” said Debbie Crowne, stubbing out her cigarette in a saucer, “so I couldn’t have an attitude.”

  “Let me put it another way. Could she be afraid of what would happen if you found out she had been with a boyfriend?”

  “Look, she hasn’t got a boyfriend. I’d know. I know where she is every minute of the day, I have to, she’s not - well, you know what she is. She’s a bit - she’s got to be looked after.”

  “Nevertheless, she was out on her own with friends on Saturday evening, and though she went to Myringham with them, they left her to come home on her own.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t have. I’ve told them over and over not to leave Lizzie to do things on her own. I’ve told them and her.”

  “They’re sixteen, Mrs. Crowne, and they don’t always do as they’re told.”

  She shifted off the subject to one obviously nearer to her heart. “But what about like I said if she’s pregnant, she ought to have a medical, she ought to be looked at. Suppose he did something to her, we don’t know what he did.”

  “Are you suggesting she was raped?”

  “No, I’m not, of course I’m not, I’d know that all right.”

  Then if she hasn’t a boyfriend and she wasn’t raped, how could she possibly be pregnant? He didn’t say it aloud but went back to the living room, first knocking on the door. Lynn was there but the girl was gone.

  “I couldn’t exactly stop her, sir. She wanted to go upstairs to her bedroom and I couldn’t stop her.”

  “No. We’ll leave it for now.” In the car he asked Lynn what had been the result of the interview, if there had in fact been an interview. “Did she say anything?”

  “She told me a lot of lies, sir. I kn
ow they were lies. It was as if - well, she’d realized she had to say something to get us to leave her alone. Unfortunately for her, she has rather a limited imagination, but she tried.”

  “So what tall stories did this limited imagination come up with?”

  “She was waiting at the bus stop and it was raining. A lady - that’s how she put it - a lady came along in a car and offered her a lift but she refused because Colin had told her never to accept lifts from strangers. The bus didn’t come and it was pouring with rain so she went into an empty house with boarded-up windows - the house with the apple tree, she calls it - and sat on the floor waiting for the rain to stop. . .”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “I said you wouldn’t. I didn’t”

  “How did she get in?”

  “The door wasn’t locked. She pushed it open. Then when the rain had stopped and she thought she’d go back to the bus stop, she couldn’t get out because someone had come along and locked her in. She stayed in there for three nights and three days with nothing to eat, though she could get water from a tap, and she found blankets to wrap herself in and keep herself warm. Then the door was unlocked, she escaped and caught the bus home.”

  No one believed Lizzie’s story but it was worth going to Myringham and taking a look.

  “No need for you to do that, sir.” Lynn meant it was beneath someone of his rank. “I can do it.”

  “It’s either that or back to the paperwork,” said Wexford.

  Vine had talked to the two friends, Hayley Lawrie and Kate Burton, and both said they had walked with Lizzie to the bus stop. They had promised not to leave her alone and they hadn’t, not really, only for five minutes, the bus was due in five minutes. Hayley said she wished now she had stayed with Lizzie till the bus came, but Kate said it didn’t matter anyway because no harm had come to Lizzie.

  The bus stop was the nearest one to the cinema where they had been, but still it was on the outskirts of Myringham, on the old Kingsmarkham Road. The first thing Wexford noticed was the derelict house. The bus stop was directly in front of it. All its windows boarded up, half the slates off its roof, its front gate hanging from a single hinge, the house stood in an overgrown patch of garden in which the one beautiful thing about the whole place was the cherry tree in rose-pink blossom. Not an apple, as Lizzie had said, but a Japanese kanzan. The front door of the house had been painted an aggressive dark green some twenty years before, and now the paint was peeling. Wexford turned the blackened brass knob and pushed it, wondering how he would feel about Lizzie if the door yielded. But it was locked.

  They went around to the back. Here the- boards were hanging off one of the windows, or someone had been at work attempting to remove them. Wexford made a quick decision. “We’ll get in that way. And afterwards we’ll have the window properly boarded up. Do the owner a service, whoever he or she may be.”

  Perhaps Lizzie had got in that way or out that way or both. The aperture was big enough for small or slight people to squeeze through, but Donaldson had to enlarge it for Wexford with the aid of tools from the car boot. Wexford stepped in over the ledge and Lynn and Donaldson followed. Inside it was cold, damp, and smelled of fungus. Floorboards had been taken up to disclose black pits, in some of which oily water lay. Most of the furniture had been taken out long ago, though a black horsehair settee remained in the room where they were and the iron basket in the fireplace was full of empty crisp packets and cigarette ends. Paper hung from the walls in long, curling swaths.

  In the only other downstairs room, apart from the kitchen, two oil paintings still hung on mildewed walls, one of a stag drinking from a pool, the other of a girl of vaguely Pre-Raphaelite appearance picking up shells on a beach. No blankets anywhere. Upstairs still remained to explore. Wexford was inspired to investigate the filthy hole of a kitchen. He tried both taps. One was dry while the other emitted a trickle of rusty water, red as blood. Lizzie hadn’t drunk from that. The back door had no key in its lock and no bolts. Wooden battens had been nailed across its architrave. Lizzie hadn’t come in through the front door either. It was bolted on the inside. The bolts were rusty and couldn’t have been drawn back without the use of tools.

  “Can we get up the stairs, Lynn?” Wexford asked. “They look as if someone’s been at them with a pickax.”

  “Just about, sir.” Lynn eyed him, not the staircase, as if she doubted his athleticism rather than the stability of treads and risers.

  An attempt had apparently been made to replace the treads or remove them or to widen the whole structure and had been abandoned, but not until the staircase was partially demolished. Wexford let Lynn go first, not so much out of politeness as from knowing that this way, if he fell over backward, he wouldn’t fall on top of a small, slim woman who probably weighed less than eight stone. He trod gingerly, holding on, perhaps unwisely, to the rickety banister and got safely to the top. His efforts were rewarded by the sight of a large gray blanket covering some sort of tank or at any rate large cuboid object. Nothing else at all was in the two small attic bedrooms.

  “I suppose she could have wrapped herself in this,” said Lynn, extending to Wexford the hand she had brought away damp from contact with the blanket. “Though it smells a bit musty.” Above them, through a hole in the stained plaster, the edge of a tile could be seen, and beyond, a segment of blue and white sky.

  “She might have drunk from a bathroom tap,” said Wexford, “if there were a bathroom.’ He shook his head. “She may have been here, but not for three days.”

  “Does it matter, sir?” Lynn asked as they made their way back down the perilous staircase. “I mean, she’s back and she’s not hurt. Is it any of our concern where she was?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe you’re right. I suppose it’s just because I’d like to know.”

  He said much the same thing to Burden next day when the inspector protested about his interest in something so trivial. They were not at the police station but in the Olive and Dove, for a beer at the end of the day’s work.

  “Only I don’t seem to have done any work,” said Wexford, “just filled in those damned forms.”

  “Perhaps we’re beating crime at last.”

  “You jest. I don’t suppose a crime was committed against Lizzie Cromwell or that she committed one, but I’d like to know. Three days she was away, Mike, three days and three nights. She wasn’t in that house - oh, we could only establish that for sure by taking her fingerprints and going over the place - but I know she wasn’t. She couldn’t have got in, or if she had, she couldn’t have got out again and restored that window to the way it was when we found it. She lied about drinking water from a tap, she lied about wrapping herself in a blanket, and she lied about being locked in and then let out. So she wasn’t there at all. I’m wondering if it would be worth putting out a call for that woman, the one who offered her a lift.”

  “That may be a lie too.”

  “True. It may be.” Wexford downed the last of his best bitter. “So where was she?”

  “With a man. They’re always with a man, you know that. The fact that her mother says there’s no boyfriend means nothing, and saying she never had the chance to meet a boyfriend means nothing either. It doesn’t matter what a girl looks like or how simple she is - all right, don’t look like that, you know what I mean - or how shy or whatever, the instinct in young human beings to reproduce is so powerful that the most unlikely ones get together like - like magnets.”

  “I hope there’ll be no reproduction in this case, though I agree the most likely thing is that she was with a man, a boy. It still doesn’t tell us where.”

  “At his place, of course.”

  “Ah, but there’s the difficulty. If he’s her age, the most likely thing is that he lives with parents or one parent and maybe siblings. If he’s older, he’s likely to be married or, as they put it these clays, ‘in a relationship.’ The other people involved would know of her disappearance. Somebody would have come to us.”
<
br />   “He could have taken her to a hotel.”

  “For three days and three nights, Mike? Is he that well-off? No, the only possibility that I can see is that he lives alone in a room or flat of his own and that he took her there. He kept her indoors for the whole of the three clays and three nights, and no one in the house or block of flats saw her. I don’t like it, I don’t really believe it, but we know what Sherlock Holmes said.”

  Burden had heard it too often from Wexford’s lips to be in any doubt about it. “If all else is impossible, that which remains must be so, or something like that.” Burden went to renew their drinks. Although he wasn’t going to say so or not yet, he was sick of Lizzie Cromwell and bored with the whole thing. Wexford, in his opinion, was beginning to get obsessive again, only in the past when he had had a bee in his bonnet, it was over events rather more earth shaking than this. But if, when he returned to their table with the two halves of Adnams, he hoped that Wexford would choose a new subject of conversation, he was disappointed.

  “So when her friends left her at the bus stop, she was waiting for this guy to come along in a car, was she? Why a bus stop then? Why not somewhere warm and dry like a café?”

  “Because she had to make her friends believe she was waiting for a bus.” Burden said it repressively. He hoped he might have had the last word.

  “You’re fed up with this, aren’t you? I know you are, I can tell. I won’t bore you much longer. I think you’re right about her reason for waiting at the bus stop, but I’d like to dig a little deeper into that. Why did she want to make her friends believe she was waiting for a bus?”