by Ruth Rendell
“Was that the police you were phoning? Are they sending someone round?”
“It won’t be your dad,” said Lucy, laughing. “He’s too high-ranking. But just so that they know. I’ll leave you to it, then, shall I? We’ve got a new woman coming in any minute. She’s been at the Pomfret police house all night with a baby and a two-year-old. She’ll have our last avail able room, and after that I don’t know what we’ll do. And now I must get over to Myringham.”
From the window, Sylvia watched the woman arrive. She came in a taxi, for the payment of which Sylvia knew the Social Services Department would have provided her with a voucher. The baby was tiny, snuggled up like a nestling bird in the harness the woman wore across her thin chest. The toddler was crying, pushing fists into his eyes. Lucy came out of the front door and down the steps and took the case the woman had brought out of the back of the cab. The driver did nothing to assist her. The voucher, Sylvia thought, probably didn’t allow for a tip. She watched the taxi reverse down the drive between the green banks of shrubs and was back to her desk when the phone started ringing.
“The Hide. How can I help you?”
Silence. There usually was silence or else a hurried rush of speech. Most women were embarrassed about phoning. Guiltless, they were ashamed. After all, they were complaining to outsiders about the man they had chosen for their life partner. They often began with excuses for them selves or for the man who had beaten them. While the silence endured, she thought of the woman she had spoken to the other night, the one whose husband abused her because he said she was mad and would only stop when she found a cure for her madness. From her, once she had unburdened herself, they had heard no more, and Sylvia had no way of knowing if her advice to go to the police had been taken.
She said again, “This is The Hide. How may I help you?”
A voice said abruptly, “Is that the Women’s Aid Federation of England?”
“No, this is The Hide helpline. We offer you the same kind of service as the Women’s Aid Federation. Can I help you?”
“What will you - what will you do for me?”
Sylvia spoke gently. “Won’t you tell me what the problem is? Has someone hurt you? Have you been hurt?”
“It was last night. Before he left for work. He’s at work now, he’ll be back around eleven, maybe sooner. I thought he’d broken my arm, but he hasn’t. It’s not broken if I can move it, is it? I’m all over bruises and my face is a real sight.”
Sylvia looked at the clock. It was nearly ten-thirty. She didn’t ask why the woman hadn’t phoned before, why she had waited so long. She guessed what it must have cost her to have phoned at all, the sacrifice of pride and privacy, the revealing to a stranger what her marriage had come to.
“The best thing for you to do is go straight to your nearest police station. Are you in Kingsmarkham?” The woman wouldn’t want to give her address, Sylvia sensed, but she got a grudging murmur of assent. “Would you tell me your name?”
“I’d rather not.’
“That’s fine. That’s quite all right. It doesn’t matter. Go to Kingsmarkham Police Station. Do you know where it is? It’s in the High Street at the beginning of the Pomfret Road, opposite Tabard Road. I’ll phone them and alert them to expect you. Will you do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .”
“I’ll phone them as soon as I’ve said good-bye to you. I’ll tell them to expect you in half an hour.”
“Good-bye,” the voice said abruptly. “Thank you. Good-bye.”
The phone went dead and a dial tone began. Sylvia had no means of knowing if her caller would take her advice, but she phoned Kingsmarkham Police, spoke to Sergeant Camb, whom she had known since she was in her teens, and told him to expect the arrival of a woman with a badly bruised face, name unknown. The phone rang immediately when she put the receiver down. A man this time.
“Fucking bitch,” said the voice. “Frigid lesbian cow. Do you know what I’m going to do to you? I’m going to . . .”
Sylvia held the receiver at arm’s length. She noted that the hand holding it was shaking, her whole arm was trembling. Lucy had laughed when Sylvia told her the last time it had occurred and said she knew all about that shaking and trembling, it had happened to her, but it wouldn’t always. Sylvia would get used to these calls and eventually take them in her stride.
Obscenities gobbled and chattered out of the receiver. Sylvia put it down and drew a deep breath. Was it the husband of the woman who wouldn’t give her name? Had he come home while she was still talking? Sylvia desperately hoped not. That was the worst of this job. Half the time, more than hall you didn’t know what the outcome had been, you couldn’t guess the next phase in a caller’s perilous life.
No more calls came for half an hour, three-quarters of an hour. Then the phone rang. Perhaps because there had been silence for so long, the bell seemed more than usual ly loud and insistent. A shrill phone bell, a soft, cultured voice.
“My name is Anne. I don’t want to give you my surname.”
“That’s fine,” said Sylvia. “Will you tell me what your problem is?”
A hesitation, then in a slightly bewildered tone, “But surely it’s always the same problem isn’t it?”
“Basically, perhaps it is. The details vary Usually it’s a woman who’s been hurt, but not always. It may not be physical, it may be psychological abuse.”
The laugh Anne gave was unearthly, cold and echoing, the least humorous laughter Sylvia had ever heard. “Oh, there’s nothing psychological about my hurt, I can tell you.”
“I’d like to help you.” Sylvia hazarded the Christian name she didn’t entirely believe in. “I’d really like to help you, Anne. Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
“I’d have to see you, I’d have to be face-to-face with someone, it’s a long story it would take days, weeks.”
Anne stopped and a silence followed. Sylvia listened to the silence, discerning faint breathing sounds.
Then, piteously, desperately, a cry for help if Sylvia had ever heard one came on a thin, keening note out of the receiver: “What shall I do?”
“Are you in Kingsmarkham?”
“Yes”
“Is there anyone else in the house with you?”
“He’s in the garden. The baby’s with him. I can see them from the window. Oh, God, he’s coming in, I can’t talk, I shouldn’t have rung you, he’ll want to know who I was speaking to - what shall I say?”
“Phone again when you’re alone,” Sylvia said in the calmest tone she could muster. “I’ll say good-bye now.”
There was no answer. The phone went dead. Sylvia .at hunched over the desk, her head in her hands. It had shaken her, that call. So far it was the worst she had had. There was something particularly horrible in the fact that this was a middle-class woman - yes, Sylvia had to admit this - a woman perhaps gently brought up and living in this country, in this town, who could speak in the tones of a victim of imprisonment and torture. She imagined the man coming into the room, taking the phone from her, hitting her with his free hand, and she shuddered.
On this job you needed a drink, she sometimes thought, but that was impossible, she knew where that would lead, drinking at midday. She told herself there were others to think about besides “Anne” and made her self phone Kingsmarkham Police Station again, but no woman with a bruised face had come in.
“Describe the house to me again,” Wexford said. They were in Karen Malahyde’s car. Karen was driving, with Rachel Holmes in the passenger seat and Wexford in the back.
“I’ve told you.” One thing you could say for Rachel, she wasn’t scared of the police. “It stood all on its own with fields and woods around, there weren’t any other houses, it had shingle tiles all over its front - well, not all over, just over the top part, the rest was red brick - and a big tree in the front garden. I think it was a pine tree, maybe a Scotch pine.”
“You said a Christmas tree before.”
“That
’s a pine, isn’t it? I don’t know but I know what I saw. I’ve been thinking about it, shutting my eyes and trying to make a picture form, and what I see is a Christmas-tree sort of tree.”
What she meant was that the tree was coniferous, but Wexford didn’t correct her. He knew how easy it would be to put her off and drive her into a sullen silence. If only he knew equally how to put her into a cheerful and responsive mood! “Now, Rachel,” he said, “while you were being kept a prisoner, you must have known that on your release the police would be involved. Did you think of that?”
“Sometimes I thought I’d never be released.”
“All right, but you’ve made it plain you weren’t particularly frightened by your ordeal. While you were with Vicky and . . . er, Jerry, you no doubt thought that when the time came, the police would want you to recall as much as you could of your surroundings. Did you, for instance, take note of what you could see from the windows?”
Rachel sniffed. She had an unattractive habit of sniffing where others might have shrugged. “They gave me that stuff, you know they did. You said what it was. It messed up my memory Anyway, all you could see was fields. That’s all there was, just fields for miles and miles.”
They drove south from Stowerton toward Flagford. A few stretches of this road were bare of houses, but all were widely separated, each from its nearest neighbours, which might be a quarter of a mile away. And the architecture was varied, ranging from farmhouses and what had perhaps been dower houses to cottages, converted barns, modern villas, and even, on the outskirts of Flagford, a couple of blocks of flats, thinly disguised as mansions, but few bungalows. Rachel made a sullen face and Wexford guessed this was because they were passing either Dr. Devonshire’s home or the medical center where he practiced.
The village itself was not worth lingering in, for Rachel was adamant that the place to which she had been taken was surrounded by open meadows. Karen took byways and narrow lanes, through woodland and on to the downs. The great sweep of gentle hills and higher peaks was inhabited only by sheep. Not a house was in sight. Rachel, moreover, insisted that she had been nowhere near here, nowhere like this terrain at all: “I said fields, fields and woods; it wasn’t hilly.”
“You’ll be hard put,” Karen said crisply, “to find any where round here that isn’t hilly.”
She didn’t like Rachel, Wexford had noticed, and she let her dislike show. A not altogether helpful attitude in this situation. “Drive on,” he said. “Keep north of the downs.
Southwest of Pomfret they came upon a house that perfectly answered Rachel’s description, or so Wexford thought. It was what is known as a chalet bungalow, its upper floor consisting of only one room and that up in the roof, and it stood alone in an isolated place at a crossroads, though the roads in question were no more than narrow lanes. On its upper story were scallop-shaped shingles, while its lower floor was of pale reddish brick. The windows were latticed panes and its front door a lead-and-glass anachronism. In the front garden, which was otherwise lawn and gravel drive, stood a tall and beautiful tree, its shape roughly that of a Lombardy poplar, and evidently deciduous, fir it was just coming into leaf, its elegant skeleton misted over with a delicate tracery of pale bright green. Wexford thought it might be a swamp cypress, native to the bayous of Louisiana, and said so.
“I said a pine tree,” said Rachel.
“A pine or a fir. Let’s settle for a coniferous tree, shall we?”
“Then why hasn’t that one got - what d’you call it? Needles, right - why hasn’t it got needles?”
Wexford wasn’t going to get into that one. “Could this be the house?”
“No, it’s not a bit like it.”
“It answers your description,” said Karen.
“The front door’s wrong. I know I haven’t said anything about the front door, but I remember now and that one’s wrong. The tree’s wrong and the door and the tiles are the wrong color. And,” said Rachel triumphantly, “it wasn’t on a crossroads.”
They took her home. She was evidently relieved. On Sunday she would return to Colchester and the University of Essex and put her experience with Vicky and Jerry in the house with the pine tree behind her. If the house she described ever existed, as Karen said on the way back to Kingsmarkham. If there was a house. She was cleverer at invention than Lizzie Cromwell, but not much cleverer.
“Then what happened to those two girls that they so anxious to hide from us?” Wexford asked.
“Rape, apparently, in Lizzie’s case.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Karen’s look had something of disappointment in it, as if she had hitherto categorized him as a man who took rape seriously but now had cause to change her mind. “She is pregnant, sir.”
“So far as we know. And if she is, there are other ways of getting there.” Wexford looked hard at her. “Another time, Sergeant Malahyde, make your dislike of the girl a bit less obvious, will you? What you’d no doubt call emotional involvement has no place in police practice.”
No general practitioner in the area had prescribed Rohypnol to a patient in the past two years. If any had, it would have been next to impossible to get a name out of him or her. Pharmacists in Kingsmarkham, Stowerton, and Pomfret all said they had stocked it but did so no longer. None had any records of purchases, but four of them kept no records of this kind of sale.
While Rachel Holmes was being driven about the countryside, helping (or obstructing) the police in their inquiries, the GP who attended the Crowne family confirmed Lizzie’s pregnancy. That is, Debbie Crowne and her daughter said she had confirmed it. To Wexford the doctor declined to give any information about her patient.
Lizzie had had several long conversations with Lynn Fancourt, on whom she was developing a “crush.” “I’d like to be a policeman when I grow up,” she said, a statement that Lynn saw as so pathetic it nearly brought tears to that tough young woman’s eyes.
“A police officer, Lizzie,” she said gently.
“A police officer, that’s what I meant.”
“And I think you’re grown up now, aren’t you? People can’t have babies till they’re grown up.” If only that were true!
“If I get a flat to live in, Mum could come and look after my baby while I did my training to be a policeman - I mean, a police officer. I wouldn’t want him near my baby, but Mum’d be okay.”
Lynn told Wexford that Lizzie appeared to dislike Colin Crowne intensely. Lynn suspected sexual abuse.
Lizzie’s pregnancy was beginning to show, which was absurd if conception had only taken place two weeks previously. But when Lynn asked about Colin Crowne and, emboldened by the girl’s evident desire to list all Colin’s faults, all the “nasty things” he said and did, hinted that sexual relations might have taken place between her and him, Lizzie laughed so incredulously and was so obviously amazed at the idea that Lynn almost gave up. But perhaps her hints had been too oblique. She spelled things out more freely.
“I’d give him a punch he wouldn’t forget if he ever come near me,” Lizzie said, more aggressive than Lynn had ever known her.
Her renewed laughter did more to convince Lynn than her stalwart denials. She wasn’t in the least upset. On the other hand, relaying Rachel’s story to her seemed to cause distress. She didn’t want to hear. She had abandoned her tale of spending three days and nights in the derelict house, saying instead that she had never been there, that it was a “dream.”
No one had taken her to any other sort of house either, no one had taken her anywhere, she had roamed the countryside, sleeping in barns and under hedges. It had been to get away from him. It had been to get away from Colin, who said she was mental. He was always getting at her because she wasn’t brainy.
“Did you like Jerry, Lizzie?” Lynn asked.
She gave a small sigh of relief when Lizzie, distracted by her dislike of Colin, said, “Don’t know any Jerry. I liked Vicky all right.”
It was the only breakthrough, but i
t wasn’t much of one.
Chapter 7
It was dark when Thomas Orbe, always called Tommy, came home to Oberon Road. He came on foot from the station, and because those who interested themselves in his return were certain it would be by cab or in a police car or even a prison van, his arrival went unnoticed. The last train brought him to Kingsmarkham, and just after eleven-thirty he rang the bell of the house of which he was the tenant. No doubt he had possessed a key; but during the nine years he had been in prison that key had been mislaid. The house was in darkness, as if no one lived there.
His daughter Suzanne opened the door. He entered without a word and she closed the door after him.
“You’ve aged,” he said when she switched on the light.
“I suppose you think you haven’t.”
Six years had passed since she had last visited him. She didn’t like the looks she got in there. Everyone knew what he was in for and took it out on him. But why take it out on her? It wasn’t her fault. She watched him walk into the living room and look out of the window. He knew some thing was hanging out of the windows in the tower, but he hadn’t lingered to look at it by the light of the solitary streetlamp and the few lights on in the fiats. The street-lamp was still on, though it would go out in twenty minutes. He read the legend on the banner impassively. He had little feeling left and reacted to nothing, cared about nothing except staying alive, though why he desired life he couldn’t have said. A chaplain in the prison had once told him he was in danger of losing his soul and Tommy had shrugged his shoulders.
Now he said to his daughter, “What’s that thing?”
She didn’t answer. He made out the word pedophile, and if he flinched, it didn’t show He turned away from the window, said, “That chap of yours, is he still here?”
“He’s my fiancé.”
Tommy laughed. His laughter sounded as if it came from an instrument and by a mechanism long disused. It was as if he were speaking a language learned at his mother’s knee but for years superseded by a different and harsher idiom. In the quiet, dark house it echoed a little.