Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  “So they wouldn’t know about the boyfriend.”

  “But why wouldn’t she want them to know? Wouldn’t she be proud of having a boyfriend? Especially one with a car and a place to take her? She could have trusted them. They’d be the last to tell her mother.”

  “Maybe he’s married.”

  “Then he wouldn’t have a place to take her,” said Wexford, and though Burden waited for the next phase of this reasoning, he said no more about it. “Hurt-Watch meeting in the morning,” he said instead. “Remember? Ten sharp. Southby will be there, in case I haven’t told you.”

  At the prospect of an encounter with the new assistant chief constable designate, Burden groaned softly. Operation Safeguard, which the program had originally been called, held little interest for him. His personal belief was that what happened in the home belonged in the home and should come as little as possible within the province of the law. But he knew where Wexford’s sympathies lay, so he held his tongue.

  Next morning, half an hour before the meeting was due to begin a woman came into the police station on her way work to say that she had seen Lizzie Cromwell at the bus stop the previous Saturday evening. It was a matter of chance that Wexford spoke to her at all. He and Barry Vine happened to be passing the desk in the foyer of the building where she was talking to the duty sergeant. Even so, Barry came out with the usual formula, that he would he would see to it, that it was hardly necessary for Wexford to. . .

  Bother my pretty little head about it, Wexford thought but he didn’t say aloud. “We’ll go up to my office.” he said.

  Chapter 2

  It was Friday now and Lizzie had come home on Tuesday afternoon. Wexford imparted this information to Mrs. Pauline Ward, surprised that she seemed not to know it already. “May I ask why you didn’t come before?” he asked her.

  “I never saw her picture till last night. It was in a paper wrapping up a crab.”

  “It was what?”

  “Look, I don’t take a paper. I mean, a daily paper. And I don’t watch television news. I watch television but not the news. It upsets me. I mean, if it’s not atrocities in Albania or kids burnt to death in a fire, it’s baby seals getting clubbed to death. So I don’t look at it anymore.”

  “The crab, please, Mrs. Ward.”

  She was in her midfifties, smartly dressed, her skirt too short and her eyelids too blue, but a handsome, well-kept woman who had arrived - and parked it on the parking place reserved for the assistant chief constable designate - in a dark blue Audi, polished to a gleam. When she smiled, as she now did, she showed a fine set of bright white teeth.

  “Oh, the crab,” she said. “Yes, I stopped off at that good fishmonger in York Street on my way home from work last evening. I had a friend coming to supper and I’d nothing for a starter, so I thought a crab would be nice and the fishmonger wrapped it up in this newspaper. The Times, I think it was. Anyway, when I unwrapped my crab, I saw her picture and I remembered seeing her on Monday night.”

  “I see. And when your friend came, did you say any thing to her about it?”

  “Him,” said Mrs. Ward. “It’s a him, my friend.” Her tone was that of a woman who would hardly bother to buy a crab for a female guest. “Well, no, I didn’t. Should I have?”

  “He might have told you Lizzie Cromwell was found. That is, unless he too shies away from the news.”

  Pauline Ward gave him a suspicious sideways look “I don’t know whether he does or not. We don’t talk about that sort of thing.” She very nearly but not quite tossed her head. “Don’t you want to know about Saturday night?”

  Wexford nodded.

  “All right, then. I work in Myringham. I’m the manager of the Crescent Minimarket on the Heaven Spent mall and we stay open till eight-thirty on Saturdays. It was twenty to nine when I left. I had to lock up and go to my car so, what with one thing and another, it was ten to when I drove past that bus stop.”

  Wexford interrupted her. “How can you be so sure of the time?”

  “I always am, to the minute. I’m a clock-watcher. Well, I suppose I’m a watch-watcher. I noted the time when I left, and I saw that digital clock on the Midland Bank just when I started driving off, and it said eight fifty-four. I thought, ‘That can’t be right, not as late as that,’ and I ‘checked it with my watch and the clock on the car - I knew they were both right to the nearest second - and they both said eight forty-nine. Well, I thought, I’ll go into the Midland and tell them - and I did, I went in on the Tuesday. And by the time I’d thought that, about the bank I mean, I was passing that bus stop and the girl was there, and I thought, ‘Poor thing, having to wait for a bus in the rain. Shall I offer her a lift.’ I thought, and then I thought, ‘No, better not,’ because you never know, do you?”

  So this wasn’t the woman who had offered Lizzie a lift and had her offer rejected. But ten to nine. . . Had the girl really waited at the bus stop for twenty minutes?

  “Are you quite sure it was ten to nine?”

  “I’ve told you, haven’t I? I always know the time. What d’you want to know all this for, anyway, if she’s come back?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Mrs. Ward.”

  She got up. ‘Aren’t you going to thank me? I didn’t have to come in here, you know. I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t happened to buy that crab.”

  He took her downstairs and at the exit doors she looked back over her shoulder and said, “You have an attitude problem, you know. You want to get it sorted.”

  Wexford restrained his laughter until she had gone. He certainly had a problem, but it wasn’t one of attitude. Rather, he was allowing himself to be ridiculously involved in this Lizzie Cromwell business. She was back, as everyone kept telling him, she had been away with a boyfriend, but she was back and no harm was done. Had the boyfriend kept her waiting at that bus stop for twenty minutes? In the rain? Perhaps. It was possible. It struck him - and the idea was very unwelcome - that Lizzie, sweet, childishly pretty not very bright, and probably highly gullible, was the kind of person of whom the unscrupulous would take advantage.

  Did she go to a special school? And if not, why not? Even if she did, would that school be the kind of place to nurture her self-confidence and her street wisdom? He doubted it. But he resolved to turn his back on Lizzie and her problems and her family. It wasn’t a police matter. Police time and the taxpayers’ money had been wasted on it, but that happened all the time. You had to be thankful there was no crime, there was no fatality or even injury and some would say the money and time had been well spent when the outcome was such a happy one. So good bye, Lizzie Cromwell, and let’s hope you’re not pregnant.

  The Hurt-Watch meeting passed off uneventfully, even satisfactorily. For once, Wexford and Malcolm Southby were in agreement. Both wanted to prioritize (Southby’s word, Wexford wasn’t in agreement with that) domestic violence as serious crime, and both thought providing women who were its victims with mobile phones and pagers a good move. Simply knowing the police were on their side was to take a step in the right direction.

  “What about the ones who are victims but who have never called us?” Karen Malahyde asked. “There’s a lot of secrecy in this area. Many of these women will do almost anything not to admit to being victims.”

  “I hardly see what we can do about that, DS Malahyde,” said Southby, who was parsimonious with the taxpayers’ money, “short of supplying every lady in Greater Kingsmarkham with expensive electronic equipment.” Even when he approved a cause, the assistant chief constable designate could scarcely resist sarcasm. He elaborated. “Oh, excuse me, only those in a meaningful relationship, of course,” and he cackled with laughter at his own wit.

  Karen, who didn’t think it amusing, kept a straight and glowering face while deploring the sycophantic smiles of certain of her fellow officers. “That’s all very well, sir.” She didn’t quite dare say that was all very funny, and she knew the “sir” didn’t justify everything. “But don’t we have to do more to fin
d out where the victims are? I mean, the ones who’ll conceal what happens to them at any price?”

  “We have Hurt-Watch, Karen,” said Wexford, and got a look from Southby for using her Christian name. “We’re alerting everyone through advertising in the Courier and leafleting every household. A police representative - and that’ll be one of us - will go on Newsroom South-East and talk about it. I don’t see at the moment what more we can do.”

  “Okay. Thank you, sir. It’s just that the whole business is on the increase - but, thanks.”

  He had concentrated on the meeting fur the hour that it lasted, and he also had resisted smiling, without much difficulty at the ACCD’s wit. The moment it was over, the thought came winging back into his head: Talking of secrecy what was there about this boyfriend that he had to be concealed from Lizzie’s friends as well as her parents, and why wouldn’t she admit to him now?

  The Hide was probably not the dullest and least interesting looking structure in the whole of Kingsmarkham. The Muriel Campden tower was uglier and some office blocks starker, but among sizable houses standing in their own grounds The Hide had no rivals in the category of boring buildings not worth a second glance. That few people would have given it that second glance or even noticed it at all had been a factor in its purchase by Griselda Cooper and Lucy Angeletti as a center and temporary home for the victims of domestic violence.

  It was necessary for the house to be inconspicuous yet appear to have nothing to hide, dreary without being sinister, and dull with a dullness that excited no comment. Once it had been numbered 12 Kingsbrook Valley Drive, but the number plate had been removed and no name plate lettered THE HIDE had replaced it. Its telephone number was unlisted. Only its helpline number was known. Every call box in Kingsmarkham, Stowerton, Pomfret, and the villages had posted in its interior The Hide’s helpline number. But nothing on the cards said where the house was or its purpose, or who sought and found sanctuary there.

  Almost the first question Sylvia Fairfax had asked when she first went to work for the helpline was, “Why the secrecy?”

  “In nine cases out of ten,” Griselda Cooper said, “husbands or partners or boyfriends, whoever’s responsible for the abuse, come looking for them. This way it makes it harder to find them. Not impossible but harder.”

  “But they do get here?”

  “Some do. We had one got over the wall. It’s ten feet high with barbed wire on the top, but he got over. After that we changed the barbed wire for razor wire.”

  The garden was large. Trellis raised the height of the walls between The Hide and Nos. 10 and 14 Kingsbrook Valley Drive. The lawn was mown and the shrubs occ sionally pruned, but otherwise the garden was untended. There was a swing and a climbing frame for the children, and Lucy Angeletti, who was The Hide’s fund-raiser, was trying to get enough money together to create a proper play area.

  The neighbors at Nos. 10 and 14, and at Nos. 8 and 16 too, had got wind of this intention and were mounting a rival campaign to put a stop to it. The Hide and its occupants were not popular in Kingsbrook Valley Drive. People thought it constituted a danger to the peace of the area and an encouragement to crime. The house itself was a big square box without wings or gables or porch, built in 1886 by a man with a large family who wanted to save expense. Even the roof, though not entirely flat, was scarcely discernible from the street, being concealed by a bald brick wall that ran around the top of the house above the fourth-floor windows. The only decorations on the dull reddish-brown brick house were the buff stone facings around the flat sash windows. All this was half-hidden by the laurel bushes that dominated the front garden and by the two ilexes, cemetery trees whose leaves never fell but merely grew darker and dustier with time.

  Inside, it was quite different, pale colors and pretty curtains, and pictures on the walls. Well, posters rather than pictures. Lucy had had the bright idea of buying sheets of wrapping paper, the kind that has flower paintings on it or maps of the world or La Dame a la Licorne, and getting them framed. The furniture was from secondhand shops or contributed by supporters, and the floor covering came from the carpet warehouse on the Stowerton Road where all the stock was cheap because it had been dam aged by fire. There was never sufficient money. Lucy’s hair had gone gray through worrying about getting enough funds to keep The Hide going, though perhaps it would have changed color anyway as premature grayness ran in her family.

  Lack of money was the reason Sylvia and Jill Lewis and Davina Crewe got no pay for answering the phone to the women who appealed for help and sometimes for refuge. Ideally, the helpline should have operated from elsewhere. But there was no elsewhere. Griselda Cooper lived on the premises and Lucy Angeletti in a one-bedroom flat in Stowerton. The Hide had no offices apart from two poky rooms in the basement at 12 Kingsbrook Valley Drive. The two phone lines manned by Jill and Davina, sometimes by Griselda and Lucy, and now by Sylvia, were in a room on the top floor alongside Griselda’s tiny flat. Space was so precious that the other two rooms on that floor had been converted into bedsits for fugitive women, two single beds in one and three plus a cot in the other. It wasn’t ideal but it was the best they could do.

  There was no lift. Sylvia had to toil up three flights of stairs, from the ground floor where the living rooms were - the lounge and the television room and the children’s playroom and the kitchen and the laundry room - through the first and second stories, given over entirely to bedsits and bathrooms - more bathrooms were another priority when Lucy could get the funds - and up to the top where the phones were. Children were usually playing on the stairs. They weren’t supposed to, or to slide down the banisters, but when the playroom was crowded and it was raining, they hadn’t much choice.

  Sylvia worked at The Hide two evenings a week, not always the same evenings, up till midnight. Her husband was usually at home to look after the boys, and if he couldn’t be there, she knew they could go to her parents.

  She had taken on the job partly from the pressures of her social conscience and her commitment to women’s causes, and partly to get herself out of the house. When she was at home, she and Neil either sat in silence or addressed each other through the medium of their children or quarreled. Although she never talked about the state of her marriage to her mother or her father, she did to friends and she was fast making a friend of Griselda Cooper.

  Griselda shift ended when Sylvia took over, but some times she stayed on for half an hour or even longer to talk. She was a dozen years or more older than Sylvia, a single woman who had a lover who took her out and about, and away when she had a weekend off, an enviable lot. Sylvia couldn’t help being envious, though Griselda had no children and would now never have. One evening Sylvia told Griselda about her marriage, that she and Neil had married young and discovered too late they were less than well-suited.

  “Too late?” said Griselda, who had been divorced.

  “I couldn’t break up the family. If we split up, it would devastate my kids.”

  “That sounds like the sort of thing some of our callers say. He’s half killed her and he will again, and she knows he will, but she can’t break up the family.”

  The phone rang and Griselda picked up the receiver. “The Hide helpline. How can I help you?” She spoke in the calmest, warmest, and most comforting tone she could achieve, and that was very calm and warm and comforting.

  Sylvia could tell there was silence at the other end. There often was. Women lost their nerve or didn’t know what to say or, worst of all, the man of the house had come into the room where the phone was.

  Griselda waited, repeating her words, “How can I help you,” then, “We’re here to help you,” and “Won’t you tell me what your problem is? Anything you say will be in confidence.”

  After ten minutes’ perseverance she put the phone down regretfully. “I could hear her breathing,” Griselda said. “I heard her sigh. God knows, I hope she’ll call back. Maybe she will and you’ll take it.”

  “What you were saying just
now,” Sylvia said, “before the call came, about a man half killing a woman but still she won’t break up the family, Neil has never laid a finger on me. And, d’you know, working here and listening to all this, hearing from these women and what they go through, has done me good. I mean, it’s actually done my marriage good.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “The other night I went home from here and it was the middle of the night, of course, and I went home and got into bed - oh, yes, we share a bed - crazy, eh? - and I got into bed beside him - he was asleep, sleeping so peacefully, like a child, and I - I thought, you’ve always been kind to me and gentle and patient, and I’ve never appreciated that. And I - I put my arm around him and lay beside him and hugged him. That’s something I haven’t done for years. . .”

  “Come on,” said Griselda, “don’t cry. Well, do cry if it makes you feel better.”

  She put her arm around Sylvia, but only for a moment, because the phone was ringing again.

  A designer in textiles who lived and worked in Pomfret had had her entire stock stolen. The collection, quilted coats and waistcoats, bedcovers and throws, as well as batik wall hangings, dresses, tablecloths, and napkins, had been housed in the basement, which had been converted two years before into a workshop. The basement window was barred and the door into the area double-locked and bolted, but the window of the cloakroom, a cupboard-sized place containing lavatory and diminutive washbasin, was open. Whoever had got through that window must have been thin and lithe, and he or she had evidently removed the entire haul through the same aperture.

  “Or unbolted and unlocked that door from the inside,” said Inspector Burden, “taken the stuff out, gone backs bolted and locked the door again, and escaped through that broken window.”

  “I couldn’t do it,” said Wexford sadly. “If it were half the size, I couldn’t.” He looked critically at Burden, whose new taupe-colored suit enhanced his slimness. “And I’m bound to say you couldn’t either, Mike. Did they put a kid in there? A kind of Oliver Twist?”