by Ruth Rendell
“Kaylee told me it hadn’t happened. She’s an intelligent kid, you know. I mean, she’s really very bright. She just said none of it was true, she had made it up. In other words, just what Flay said. And he had the nerve to say to her, ‘You know what happens to you when you tell lies, don’t you, Kaylee?’ And he was grinning in that revoking way of his.”
“And the mother?”
“She just sat there, silly-scared, if you know what I mean, looking as if she’d say anything and do anything to stay on the right side of Flay. She probably held the kid while Flay hit her. I can just hear him saying it, ‘You say you never did it, you never went there - right? You want my fist in your face again?’”
Wexford shook his head. “Jackie Flay may be just as much a victim. And the worst thing is that Flay’ll get the child to do it again, he’ll get her into the habit of it and soon she won’t even consider telling the truth - poor little Olivia Twist.”
Vine, who had been frowning gloomily, brightened a little and said, “What happened to him, sir? This Oliver Twist?”
“He got saved by an old gentleman who turned out, by an amazing coincidence, to be his own great-uncle.”
“That won’t happen to Kaylee.”
“Probably not, though I dare say she has no more idea who her grandfathers are than Oliver had.”
Vine considered this, pursing his lips. “Why would a woman want to marry Flay? If they’re married. Why would any woman shack up with him? Does she want to be a victim and make her kid a victim?”
“You’re getting into deep waters, Barry, when you start asking why anyone would marry anyone else. It’s a mystery, But I doubt if many people choose to be victims unless they’re masochists, and masochists are few. The thing is people want to be part of a couple, what they call these days ‘being in a relationship.’ And most of them would rather have a bad one than none at all. It’s nature. By the way, you didn’t really mean you hit your wife, did you?”
“Me? Oh, right. It was just the once. She hit me and I hit her back. That’s all I mean.”
Wexford had spent the best part of the morning in Oval Road, where Rosemary Holmes, who knew Lizzie Cromwell’s story, had perhaps also believed her daughter would return on the previous evening. But Rachel hadn’t come home and Rosemary was distraught, pacing the room and at one point throwing herself into an armchair where she collapsed in a storm of tears. Wexford asked himself why on earth he had thought this disappearance would have a happy outcome just because Lizzie’s had. Thank God he hadn’t let his ridiculous hunch impede the search or prevent any serious investigation.
The searchers had begun again soon after first light, combing the rain-drenched fields, glad of shelter inside the quiet dimness of woodlands, but while the rain remained no more than a drizzle, pressing on. Karen Malahyde and Lynn Fancourt had widened the inquiry beyond Rachel’s immediate circle of friends, had talked to people she had been at school with. They were now in Brighton with the girl’s father, Rosemary’s divorced husband, hearing how he hadn’t seen his daughter for the past seven years. Michael Devonshire, the Flagford GP, had not only taken Rosemary out to dinner but admitted frankly that he had spent most of the night with her, leaving the house in Oval Road at five the next morning.
Rachel had now been missing for four nights and almost four days. Uneasily, Wexford set up a press conference for five that afternoon - his reluctance stemming from the certainty that Brian St. George would be there - and at that conference, as part of it, Rosemary Holmes would make her appeal for Rachel’s return. She shrank from it, at first flatly refusing. She was too little in command of herself, she told Wexford, she would make a mess of it.
“That doesn’t much matter,” he said to her gently. “I don’t want to sound cynical, but the more emotion you show and the more. . . well, frankly, upset, you appear to be, the more likely the appeal is to succeed.”
“But they don’t care, those viewers. They’re just going to gloat.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Mrs. Holmes. There are a lot of people out there who have real sympathy for you.”
And your attractions may have some effect, he thought, not saying it aloud, your pretty, youthful face and nice voice, not to mention that figure and those legs. We live in a world where good looks get you every thing, where the preservation of youth is at a premium. Those journalists would write better stories and longer ones because this woman was beautiful and had a voice like a Shakespearean actress. The photographers would take more trouble and the television cameramen be more enthusiastic.
And would all that bring Rachel back? No one could tell him.
A car was sent for Rosemary Holmes at four-thirty, Wexford saw with approval that in spite of her terrible anxiety; she had dressed herself with care for this confrontation in a black suit and pink-and-white blouse. She had made up her face for the cameras. Her hair was newly washed and her nails painted pink pearl. St George’s reporter stared as if he had never seen a presentable woman before. The cameras closed in before she had taken her seat at the table between Wexford and Burden.
“Look this way, Rosemary!”
“Just turn your head a fraction, Rosemary!”
“Thank you, that’s great. Just one more, Rosemary, and I’m done.”
Wexford clenched his teeth. Why couldn’t they call her Mrs. Holmes? Did they think that using her first name would allay her anxiety; put her at her ease, make her happier? It was such crass impertinence.
He listened while she made her appeal in that rich, modulated voice, her eyes downcast. “If you are holding my - my beloved daughter, please let her go, let her come back to me. Please have mercy on us, she’s all I’ve got and I - I’m all she’s got. Please. She’s a lovely, good, clever girl, she’s never done harm to anyone in the whole of her short life. Please send her back to me . . .”
And here Rosemary Holmes could sustain the steadiness of her voice no longer. She broke into sobs, her throat heaving, her pretty hands flying to her face, her weeping eyes. Wexford helped her to her feet and took her out. He sent for tea and left her in his office with Lynn Fancourt. Burden would conduct the rest of the press conference, they didn’t really need him, but he made his way back downstairs all the same and was just in time to hear some one, not the Courier reporter, ask in strident tones if it was true that Thomas Orbe would be coming out next day and returning to his home in Oberon Road.
“No questions will be answered not relevant to the Rachel Holmes disappearance,” Burden snapped.
The reporter took no notice. “Will he be coming out tomorrow?”
“No,” said Burden with perfect truth. Orbe’s release date was not Thursday but Friday. “That ends the conference. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.”
Wexford went back upstairs. What must it be like to be a pedophile? To want to have sex with small children? Something told him that if you could imagine it, just as if you could imagine being a sadist or a necrophile, really live it yourself in imagination, then you would under stand. ‘To understand all is to forgive all’ ought to be changed to ‘to imagine is to understand’ and leave off the forgiving bit. In the Lord’s Prayer, which he hadn’t said in church or anywhere else for forty years, there was a bit about forgiving us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.
Against us, not against other people. He couldn’t forgive those offences against others, and God, if there was a God, ought not to either. Maybe religious people would call that blasphemy.
In his office he thought about going home, putting some of these papers in his expensive hide briefcase - another gift from Sheila. Did she ever let him and Dora buy things like that? - paperwork to do at home, worse luck The phone rang but he didn’t dare think of not answering it.
A voice he didn’t recognize - they were always changing - said, “I have a Mrs. Holmes on the line for you, sir.”
And then the beautiful tones he had heard no more than half an hour ago, appealing for her daughter’s retu
rn: “Rachel’s home. She was here at home when I got back. I’m so happy, I still can’t believe it, but it’s true, she’s home.”
Chapter 5
She was twenty-four hours late but she had come back. He felt curiously gratified because he had been right, especially as she was so obviously unharmed, a beautiful girl, tall and slim, with a flawless skin and dark, shining hair. It was plain, though, that she was far from pleased to see him and Karen Malahyde. She didn’t want them there. If it had been left to her, Wexford thought, the police would never have been notified of her return.
He could almost see inside her head, imagine her thinking, “I’ll just quietly go back to Essex and then Mum can tell them after I’ve gone. It’s nothing to do with them, it’s my business.” She had greeted them by saying in a loud and surly tone that she had a bad headache.
“You should see a doctor,” Wexford said. “You must do that anyway.”
Rachel had flushed brilliantly. “I don’t need a doctor. I’ve just got a headache. No one’s done anything to me.”
What she meant was clear. But she explained, her eyes on Karen Malahyde. “It’s because I’m a woman. People just assume a woman must have been raped. Well, I haven’t been. I’d know.”
A very strange remark, Wexford thought it. How could she not know? How could anyone not know? “Have you been assaulted in any way?”
“No. Not in any way.”
He wasn’t imagining the scorn in her voice. She was one of those clever girls, brought up to have a high opinion of themselves, who when as young as this show their self-confidence in contempt for others they estimate as lower down the intelligence scale. Police officers would come into that category, he thought with concealed amusement.
“Have you been given any substances? I was thinking of a blood test.”
“I don’t know,” she said sharply. “I don’t know what I’ve been given, I can’t remember. But I’m not having any blood test. If you’ve got AIDS in mind, I’ve told you, I’ve not been raped.”
He hadn’t had it in mind. “I would like a doctor to see you.”
“I wouldn’t and I won’t.” She said savagely, “I won’t see a doctor and I won’t have a doctor see me. I hate doctors. I never go near them. If I need anything like that, I go to an alternative practitioner. Chinese medicine or an herbalist.”
“I hardly think an herbalist would be much use in the present situation,” Wexford said dryly. He thought of Rosemary Holmes’s friendship with her doctor. Was that the cause of Rachel’s dislike of orthodox medicine? Perhaps. “If you’re so set against a doctor, I can’t compel you. Now perhaps you’ll tell us where you’ve been.”
They were wonderful banisters to slide down, dark red mahogany polished over a century by a hundred hands, many of them gloved, and in the staircase’s early life, by half a dozen housemaids. The banisters flowed, an unbroken river of wood, from the top floor to the basement, unbroken but not consistent in their gradient, for while on the main areas of the flights they declined at an angle of forty-five degrees, above the bends they became briefly almost vertical and at the landings they relaxed into the horizontal. It was at the second landing that Sylvia, toiling up, stepped back to avoid contact with a protruding foot as a child of about six came flying down, hanging on with both hands and shrieking at the top of his lungs. Shrieking, Sylvia had often thought, seemed a natural concomitant of pleasure in the under-sevens. His momentum was just insufficient to carry him on across the landing horizontal to the next downward slope, and waving to Sylvia, he cried, “Give us a push, miss!”
This was the way the children at The Hide tended to address her and Lucy and Griselda, as if they were teachers at school. Deciding not to admonish him, but dreading an accident, she put out her hand and gave him a feeble shove in the middle of his back.
“Harder,” he said. “Go on.”
Sylvia pushed a very little harder; the little boy slid along the straight and tipped over onto the next slope with another shriek. Before climbing up the last flight, she watched him reach the bend and, more riskily, negotiate the vertical banister at the bend in safety. Lucy was in the helpline room and the two phones were quiet.
“I’m not on my own, am I?”
“Afraid so,” Lucy said. “Jill’s got flu and Davina’s giving up. She says she can’t afford an unpaid job, and that I understand.”
“What do I do,” Sylvia asked, “if both phones ring at the same time?”
“It seldom happens, thank God, it’s not as if we’re in the center of a big city. But if it does, you’ll just have to put one on hold. Use your own judgment which one.”
“When they get their mobiles, we’ll have a lot more, won’t we? Though I suppose that’s not something we should complain about.”
Lucy laughed. “No, we shouldn’t, but I know what you mean. I’m going to leave you to hold the fort now.”
After she had gone, Sylvia stood by the window, looking down into this garden and the next one, and those behind, all the big, shrubby, well gardens, divided from each other by walls of stone or brick, or creeper- hung fences or cypress or yew hedges. Apart from this one, all the leafy gardens were empty of people but for one mail mowing a distant lawn, the hum of the mower faintly audible as its owner took advantage of a rainless day. In The Hide’s garden two toddlers supervised by their mothers clambered up the climbing frame while bigger children occupied the swing. The banister slider came out into the garden while she watched, holding a red, white, and blue football, which he dropped onto the grass and kicked hard at the trunk of a flowering cherry, dislodging from its blossoms a cascade of petals. The pink shower he achieved evidently pleased him, for he aimed another, harder kick at the tree and, when it had the effect he wanted, gave one of his famous shrieks.
She turned back into the room. Two of its walls were papered with press cuttings of domestic-violence cases. Big black letters, big stark photographs, a haggard woman with a black eye, another with a split lip, a well-known black boxer whose smile showed his dazzling teeth, an equally famous white footballer wearing his notorious scowl. The former had put his girlfriend into a wheelchair for life, the latter had killed his wife by accident while punching her head. On the wall above the table where the phones were, hung a calendar and a large sheet of card that showed details of the four refuges in the area and what space, if any, was available in each of them. Currently there was no room at the Kingsmarkham Hide and none in Myringham, but the smaller house in Sewingbury had one room free, and the most distant of all, a onetime B & B outside Lewes, had two. Sylvia had read all the cases on the walls several times over, and now, for the intervals of quiet, she brought a book with her.
The phone’s ringing, after a quarter of an hour of silence, made her jump. She picked up the receiver. “The Hide. How can I help you?”
A woman’s voice, cultured, gentle, diffident, said, “I’m not one of those battered women, you know.”
“Right,” said Sylvia cheerfully. “Would you like to tell me what your problem is? Take your time. I’ve plenty. Everything you say will be in absolute confidence.”
She heard the rough intake of breath and its expulsion before the woman spoke again. “I would like to know if you could recommend a psychiatrist.”
Sylvia was a little taken aback. “This is The Hide helpline. Are you sure you have the right number?”
“Oh, yes. I know who you are and I’d like you to recommend a psychiatrist. My husband says he’ll stop hitting me if I put myself in the hands of a good psychiatrist.”
“There are lots of bits I can’t remember,” Rachel Holmes said. “You just have to accept that. I’ve got a sort of amnesia. It’s the shock, I expect.”
“Let’s have the bits you do remember,” said Karen Malahyde dryly. If this girl was going to be uppity, was going to try to put her down, she too could be crushing. “Begin at the beginning, will you? At eight on Saturday evening. You were to be picked up by Mrs. Strang at eight?”
“You know all that,” the girl said. “You don’t want me to repeat it, I suppose? I was early. My mother’s boyfriend was calling for her and I thought I’d get out of their way.” This last remark was accompanied by a resentful glance in her mother’s direction. “I don’t come home all that often and I’d have thought the least she could do was give up a night out with him just for once . . .”
“But, Rachel,” Rosemary protested faintly, “you were going out yourself, you’d told me you were going out.”
“Oh, what’s the use?”
Rachel seemed about to expand on her resentment, but Karen Malahyde cut in with a swift and rather curt, “Let’s get back to your movements on Saturday night, can we?”
“I left here at a few minutes to eight.” Rachel was sullen now. “I got to the bus stop opposite the Flag when it was just on eight. There’s a seat there and I sat down to wait. I’d have thought all that was pretty obvious.”
Wexford couldn’t help recalling how Mrs. Holmes had said, no more than an hour or so before, that her daughter was a “lovely, good, clever girl.” Clever she might well be. “Did you know Mrs. Strang’s car, its color and make?” he asked.
The girl gave an impatient sigh, but at last she spoke more reasonably. “I know I ought to have found that out. I ought to have found out what the woman looked like, but I didn’t and I’ve been punished for that, haven’t I?”
“You tell us,” said Wexford equably.
“I am telling you. A car came along and stopped. A woman was driving it - oh, she was about fifty, I suppose. Maybe more, I don’t know,” said Rachel with the indifference of an eighteen-year-old for the age of anyone over thirty-five. “She wound down the passenger window and I went over and said hi or something and ‘I’m Rachel,’ and she said, ‘Get in, Rachel,’ and I did. I just thought she was Mrs. Strang, I took it for granted. When I was sitting down, she said, ‘I’m Vicky,’ but I didn’t know what Mrs. Strang was called, did I?”