Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  Things should have been better for her after that, and in many respects they were. Some satisfactory dental work had been done on her damaged mouth, she had the promise of a flat from Kingsmarkham Borough Council, and she had signed up with Myringham University as a mature student to take a BA degree. But when she came to The Hide, she had had to leave her sons behind. They were only six and four and got on well with their father, who had never raised his hand to them. Tasneem had a legal separation from her husband and awaited a divorce, but she had no chance of getting custody of Kim and Lee while she had no home.

  What she hadn’t aired at the group therapy was that every day she spoke to her friend and former next-door neighbour in Titania Road, Maria Michaels, to ask about the boys, how they were and sometimes if they had forgotten her. She phoned from the pay phone in the hall at The Hide or Maria phoned her. Tasneem was afraid to go home to see them, and their father wouldn’t allow them to come and see her.

  “I’ll go and see them if you like,” Sylvia said to her. “I’ll say I’m a social worker. Well, I am a social worker.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “I know how I’d feel if I were separated from my boys.”

  Sylvia felt like crying but she controlled herself, and next day she went around to the Muriel Campden Estate and gained admittance to 27 Titania Road by saying she was from the council’s Family Department. Terry Fowler was a weedy little man and as fragile-looking as his wife. Sylvia, who was a big woman, tall and well-built, thought that if he tried anything with her, she’d give him as good as she got, she wouldn’t stand for it. But she knew how fallacious was this argument. Men are stronger than women, and abused women are often too demoralized even to try to fight back.

  He might be little, but he was as aggressive as a small game bird. A frustrated sergeant major, Sylvia thought, one who wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of finding himself in that position but who nourished secret dreams of power and bullying. Realized through domination of his little boys? She didn’t think so. Although he spoke curtly to her, barking out “yes” and “no” and “right,” with them he was gentle and patient. People were odd.

  Out in the hall, as she was leaving, the older boy, Kim, said, “Our mummy’s gone away and she’s never coming back.”

  A heartstrings wrencher if ever there was one, Sylvia thought as she walked back along Oberon Road. That was something she wouldn’t be telling. She had hoped to have a moment alone with those boys, to tell them their mother sent her love, but there had been no opportunity. When she got home, she phoned The Hide and spoke to Tasneem, telling her that she had been to Titania Road and that all was well, the children were happy and healthy. Tempted to tell a lie, to say they missed their mother and sent her messages, she restrained herself. It wouldn’t do.

  After Sylvia had rung off, Tasneem remained where she was, in the big hallway of The Hide, holding the receiver. She had felt a real physical pain in the area where her heart was when Sylvia had said the boys were happy. Healthy was one thing, was good, but that they were happy, which meant happy without her, was one of the greatest hurts she had ever known, worse than when Terry smashed up her face. Perhaps Sylvia had made it up, perhaps she thought hearing Kim and Lee were happy would please her. Maria Michaels never said anything like that. She only said the children were okay. Just that, just okay. But Tasneem had understood. She knew okay meant they weren’t ill or in danger and that was all she really wanted. Once more unhooking the phone from the wall, she put twenty pee in and dialed Maria’s number. Best to do it now before there was a queue for the phone as there often was in the evening.

  Maria answered. She was Tasneem’s friend and a nice woman, but she had this funny habit of calling you “my darling” almost every sentence she spoke.

  “Happy, my darling? Who told you that? . . . A social worker? You want to steer clear of the social, my darling. Need I say more?”

  “You mean they’re not happy?” Now thinking of them being miserable was just as bad.

  “Now I didn’t say that, my darling. But you know what kids are. They miss their mummy, naturally they do, so you couldn’t call them exactly over the moon. Now I’ve got some news for you. That old pedo’s come home, that Orbe. You never knew him, did you? Before he went to prison, I mean. You weren’t here then, my darling, you’re too young, but he’s come back as large as life.”

  “What’s a pedo?”

  “A ped-o-phile, one of them that messes about with children, only this one murdered them as well.”

  Tasneem began to cry. She wailed and sobbed and banged her head against the wall until Lucy Angeletti came down the stairs to see what was going on.

  When she had given a precise description of Vicky and Jerry filling in all sorts of details like eye color and the clothes he and Vicky had worn, and coming as near to estimating their ages as she could, Rachel returned to her insistence that while at Sunnybank she had been made to do housework, cook, and mend clothes. “And it’s got nothing to do with The Franchise Affair,” she said sulkily. “It really happened.” She shrugged her shoulders as if exasperated by the whole exercise. “Jerry never said a word, he just sat there and stared at me. I’ll tell you something, though, something I’ve just remembered, as a matter of fact. Vicky wasn’t very well. I mean she’d something wrong with her. She coughed a lot and she got tired. It was that which made me . . .”

  “Made you what, Rachel?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  Wexford looked hard at her, thinking that it probably meant a lot. But she had been helpful, she had told them more than anyone else had. He asked her to describe the car. Of course she didn’t know the registration number, but she was able to tell him it was “average size” and what she rather surprisingly called “middle of the market”; a white, or rather cream, car and an automatic.

  “Now I’d like to know why they let you go and how they did.”

  “They just did.” she said in her sullen mode. “I’d vacuumed the place and dusted, and I said I was going. ‘I’m going now,’ I said, and she just said I could and she’d drive me back.”

  “Just like that? They abducted you and virtually imprisoned you and drugged you, they’d forced you to work and do menial tasks, yet when you said you were going they didn’t argue, they just agreed.”

  “Not Jerry. Jerry never spoke.”

  “Right. Vicky, then. Vicky just agreed?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “I’m wondering what else happened in that house, Rachel. Did you do any damage to something or some one? Did you do something you think might get you into trouble? Is that it?”

  “I didn’t do anything!” she shouted. “You’ve called me a criminal but it’s what was done to me you should be thinking about. What was done to me.”

  “All right, Rachel. So Vicky drove you home, did she?”

  “No, she didn’t drive me back, she just took me to the bus stop and left me there, and I waited for hours before the Kingsmarkham bus came. Can I go back to Essex now or is that too much to ask?”

  “You can go.”

  After she had gone, Wexford looked at all the collated information gathered that day. It seemed that the Devenish extended family and friends could all be cleared of suspicion. Apart from that, the most useful piece of evidence had come from the people living opposite Woodland Lodge. They were a couple called Wingrave. During the night Sanchia had been taken, Moira Wingrave had seen a car driven out of the Devenishes’ drive, at about two in the morning.

  Wexford blessed insomniacs, not those like Stephen Devenish but the ones who never took sleeping pills. Wakeful, Moira Wingrave had seen car lights through her bedroom curtains, had got up to look, not because she was suspicious but for something to do, something to look at, to distract her mind from those awful hours of sleeplessness. And of course she had looked at the clock, some thing she did at least once an hour throughout the night.

  By the time she got to the window
, walking slowly and carefully so as not to wake her husband, the car had come out of the Woodland Lodge drive and its headlights blazed in her face, dazzling her, almost blinding her, so that she had been unable to tell what color it was, still less its make and registration number. She couldn’t tell who was driving it, man or woman.

  No other neighbour had seen anything. No one had heard any sounds from Woodland Lodge. And yet a small child had been carried out of that house by a stranger, awakened from sleep, lifted from her bed, taken down a ladder, put into a strange car, all without uttering a cry. Her abductor could have covered her mouth; she would have struggled and kicked. He or she could have gagged her, carried her away inside a sack. Wexford contemplated such horrors grimly. But he didn’t believe in them. “The case of the child who didn’t cry in the night,” he said.

  “I suppose she could have been drugged,” said Burden in his gloomy way. ‘We know Vicky uses drugs. Could she have been given Rohypnol?”

  “She still had to be wakened from sleep by someone she didn’t know. She still had to see a strange face looking down at her. Did this stranger clap a gag over her mouth while he injected her with something in a hypodermic? By the way, a young couple live at the Myringham address. William Street is a tarred-up former slum between the nick and the bus station. Yuppies live there in jerry-built cottages that were put up to last ten years and have lasted, more or less, for a hundred.”

  “Jerry-built,” said Burden. “How appropriate.”

  “Only unfortunately it isn’t. The occupiers have never heard of him or his mother, or whatever she is.”

  Burden, who usually left this sort of intuitive speculation to Wexford, said surprisingly, “I wonder why she picked ‘William Street. Can there be a William Street in the entire country that isn’t a squalid dump? Why choose that particular place?”

  “There’s a William Street in London, in Knightsbridge, that’s very grand, but I know what you mean. Are you saying that she had some connection with the place? Used to live there once or her parents did or someone she knew well? And that’s why she picked it?”

  “A person of limited imagination would do that. It might be worth doing a house-to-house. Pity we haven’t got a photo. Or the number of that car.”

  “If we had a photo and a car number, we’d have found her by now, Mike. But let’s do your house-to-house. Or Myringham will. They’ve only got to cross the road.” Wexford got up. “It’s late and we’ve got that Hurt-Watch meeting in the morning.”

  Detective Sergeant Vine had talked to Moira Wingrave at two when she had told what she had heard the previous night. Although not an excitable man, rather a discreet man with a deadpan face, Vine must have shown her something of what he had felt at receiving from her the single piece of real evidence he had retrieved from his afternoon’s slog. For, after he had gone, from originally being angry with herself for not having seen or heard more, exasperated for failing to notice that car number, she began to feel herself an important contributor to this inquiry With luck she might even get on to television or at least into the Kingsmarkham Courier.

  That would take some manoeuvring, she thought, as she remembered the policeman telling her that everything she said was in confidence and he would be grateful if what she had told him she kept to herself. But the disappearance of the little Devenish girl would certainly be on the radio and television news, and once it was “in the public domain” - Moira liked this phrase and repeated it to herself - she would be free to talk to whom she chose and particularly tell of the significant part she had played in the investigation of a kidnapping.

  On their four television sets the Wingraves had every channel it was possible to obtain. Moira managed to find a news program at three and another at three forty-five, while one of the many radio stations produced a news summary for her at five to four. The remarkable thing was that there was nothing on any of them about the child’s disappearance. This made Moira feel a mixture of excitement at being the only one to know about it - apart from the parents, of course - and indignation at the ineffectiveness of the media. When her husband came home, he’d bring the Evening Standard from London, but she’d bet anything you liked there would be nothing in it about whatever she was called, Sasha or Sandra Devenish.

  The woman who cleaned the house twice weekly came in at four. Now that her daughters were both at school, Tracy Miller did cleaning jobs all day, starting at nine in the morning, and was so much in demand that she was unable to come to Moira till mid-afternoon. This was a nuisance because Bryan Wingrave always came in at six sharp and disliked Tracy being around the place, but what could Moira do about it? She had to have a cleaner, even one who had a face like Cindy Crawford, a figure like a sixteen-year-old, and wore her long black hair in a plait down her back.

  Tracy was a bit of a mystery, anyway. She had been working here for six months now and still Moira had no idea where she lived, whether she had a husband or lived with a boyfriend or had children or what. This seemed to make her anonymous and belonging nowhere, an isolated woman who, for all Moira knew, might shut herself up in a cupboard after her day’s usefulness was over, like the vacuum cleaner she so vigorously applied. At any rate, she seemed to be a kind of recluse, friendless, discreet, and quiet. She never spoke unless she was first spoken to, and Moira wasn’t in the business of speaking to what she would have called, if she hadn’t been afraid of losing Tracy, the charwoman.

  But today she did speak to Tracy, beyond, that is, telling her there were finger marks on the mirrors and the coffee table hadn’t come up very well. The point was that she had to tell someone, and telling Tracy was really like confiding one’s secrets to a brick wall.

  She merely listened while dusting, made no response until Moira was finished, and said only, “That poor mother.”

  “Well, yes, exactly what I said to the policeman, ‘that poor mother,’ I said. But if it’s not in the public domain how can they possibly hope to catch whoever it is?”

  “Search me,” said Tracy.

  Bryan came home soon after that, bringing the evening paper with him. No missing-child story - Moira had known there wouldn’t be - and there was nothing on the BBC’s six-o’clock news either. She paid Tracy her twenty-five pounds at seven and saw her off the premises, forgetting to tell her not to say a word. But whom could she tell, anyway? No one who counted. She was a charwoman, for God’s sake.

  Quiet, secretive Tracy went home to Kingsbrook Valley Drive, an address that would very much have surprised Moira Wingrave, and to a house whose purpose she didn’t know existed. Domestic violence was what Mrs. Wingrave would have called “in the matrimonial domain” and there fore between husband and wife, a private matter to be hushed up.

  Tracy let herself in with her key and went through the house to the play area in the garden where she had the best chance of finding her children at this hour. But there she found only Tasneem Fowler, tidying up toys after the little girls’ departure. Tracy’s daughters, she told their mother, were indoors watching a video and already in their night-dresses ready for bed.

  “Thanks, you’re a star,” said Tracy, who could talk volubly to people she liked. “Hey, what d’you reckon, there’s a kid gone missing up in millionaires’ row. The old bat I work for told me. Little girl, under three, and from one of the biggest houses up there. Just goes to show money doesn’t bring happiness.”

  “Missing?” said Tasneem. “A child?”

  “Like I said, a little girl. She’s called Sandra something. I like that name, don’t you? If I ever have another one, which I’ll never have with him, so help me God, I wouldn’t mind calling her Sandra.”

  But Tasneem wasn’t listening. She gave a loud cry, halfway to a scream. “It’s that pedo! Up where my kids are. It’s that pedo’s taken her!”

  Chapter 11

  The morning was beautiful, the sky blue and the sun shining through a thin veil of mist. On the Muriel Campden Estate all was still and silent but for birdsong from the par
k. Those few people who went to work early were just getting up. Soon after seven the milk float came around and the milkman left a bottle or two - no longer pint glass bottles but litre-sized plastic cartons - on most doorsteps. Half an hour later the sixteen-year-old Darren Meeks arrived, pushing his stolen supermarket trolley; to deliver the papers.

  Maria Michaels, who was due to leave for work at eight-thirty; picked up her copy of the Sun from the door mat and took it to the kitchen where she was breakfasting off a cup of tea and a croissant. The phone conversation she had had with Tasneem Fowler the evening before was much on her mind, though she had said nothing about it to anyone but Monty Smith, who lived with her. There had been no opportunity, anyway, as it was ten-thirty before Tasneem had got through to her, having queued up for a long time to get to The Hide pay phone.

  The missing little girl would be the Sun’s lead story; Maria was sure of that. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t just absent from the front page, she couldn’t find it anywhere. What was going on? She took a cup of tea up to Monty, who was unemployed and therefore still in bed, and asked him what he thought.

  “It’s not right,” said Monty, taking the tea and the paper from her. “They’re hushing it up, nothing on the telly and now nothing in the paper. How would you and me feel if we’d got kids?”

  “Bloody frantic, my darling. I don’t blame the paper, though, I blame the police.”

  “They’re always on the side of the criminal,” said Monty; “Pedos, rapers, robbers, manslaughterers, you name it, they can’t do no wrong.”

  “People ought to be warned. I’ll just give Rochelle a phone before I go to work, my darling. My God, look at the time, better get cracking.”