by Ruth Rendell
The report on the white VW Golf, Devenish’s birthday present to his wife, confirmed most of what Wexford had expected. No fingerprints were on the steering wheel, which still held shreds of the polythene wrap that had protected it when new. The prints of five people, Devenish’s, his sons’, Fay Devenish’s, and those no doubt of the man who had delivered it to the showroom, were all over the interior. There was nothing remarkable about that.
Explicable only if Sanchia had been in the car was the presence of baby fingerprints and three fair hairs from the head of a small child. But did this mean she had been taken away in it on the night of her disappearance? Sanchia too had doubtless been among the admirers of the new car, had clambered all over the backseat while her brothers sat in the front and played with the gadgets, her mother uttered her pleasure and gratitude, and her father stood benignly by.
“Can you think of a single reason why Devenish would abduct his own child?” Burden asked over a quick drink in the Olive and Dove. “What’s his motive? What could he possibly get out of it? I mean, if there was another woman involved and he saw himself as having a future with this other woman, I could just about imagine him putting the child into her keeping so that when he and his wife divorced and Fay got custody of the kids, he’d have Sanchia. I can just about imagine it, but even so it’s full of holes.”
“Besides, if he did all that, what chance would he actually have of getting away with it?” said Wexford. “Precious little. If Sanchia wasn’t found beforehand, once he moved in with this woman, she would be. And there is no woman, or if there is, he and she have been to such elaborate pains to conceal her existence as is only compatible with their having been planning this abduction since the affair began.”
Burden stared into the sparkling creamy head on his bitter like a clairvoyant looking into a crystal ball. “You know something? I don’t believe in those threatening letters. I think Devenish invented them in a clumsy effort to put us off investigating him. If he’d had them, why not keep them? Why not, at any rate, keep one? All that stuff about the letters being particularly literate, the biblical-sounding bit, that was just put in to make us think him a discerning person who’d know good prose when he saw it?”
“You may be right. If we only knew why Sanchia was taken, we’d be a long way toward finding her. There’s no motive for taking her nor for hiding her. No reason for taking the child from her home and torturing his wife in the process. I can see how, the mechanics of it I mean, but no matter how hard I try to imagine it, I can’t come up with why.”
“And can you come up with why some villain would want to kill Ted Hennessy? For nothing. For simply refusing to understand facts that had been explained a hundred times. Can you? I can’t.”
Chapter 15
When her car broke down on the old bypass, Lynn had given up thinking about her entrapment of Vicky. After all, she had made several more attempts after the strange experience with the threesome couple, and all had come to nothing. Vicky, she now believed, had gone to ground, had abandoned this curious plan of hers to recruit young women to do her housework - if that had been her motive - and settled down to life with or without Jerry in her own home wherever that might be. Besides, Lynn was starting to feel guilty. She shouldn’t have embarked on this enterprise without permission.
On her way back to Framhurst home from work she had called in on Laura Hennessy. Laura wasn’t a friend of hers and Ted hadn’t been a friend, but they had worked together and Lynn had liked him and, besides, it was such an awful tragedy and, as she put it to Laura, such a waste. Two small children were left fatherless, there was a big mortgage outstanding on the house, and if that would be covered by the compensation, it was still a worry. Lynn left the semidetached house in Orchard Road in a dismal frame of mind, thinking what a hazardous occupation hers was, what risks she and her fellows daily ran and how little thanks, or indeed respect, they got for it.
There is no moment convenient for one’s car to break down, but some moments are less maddening than others. It shouldn’t happen on a dark, wet night when one’s boyfriend is away on business, one’s contemporary and fellow officer has been burnt to death, and there seems no one in the whole world worth talking to. A consolation was that when the engine simply died, the Fiesta wasn’t in the fast lane but far over on the left and no other traffic was on the road in either direction. It died, the car slowed down and seemed to collapse hopelessly, though of course it was all in one piece and all that had happened was that it refused to go. Lynn tried everything to make it start, but it wouldn’t. She wasn’t mechanically minded. She blessed the absence of traffic on the road - a lorry passed her and then a motorbike - because she didn’t want help from others. The only thing to do, the obvious thing, was to call the special number she had for the RAC. They would come as soon as they could and that might be very soon, in no more than ten minutes.
The rain had stopped and a misty orange moon appeared. Afterward Lynn blessed the fact that she hadn’t dropped her mobile onto the seat before she got out of the car. It was the merest chance that she didn’t do this because she couldn’t imagine needing the phone while simply standing outside the car to breathe the fresh night air and waiting for the RAC man. Probably it reflected her police training never to be separated from her phone.
The hazard lights on the Fiesta still worked though the motor didn’t. They flashed on and off, on and off, in the darkness. The trees, the dense woods along both sides of the dual carriageway in this section, made it dark and mysterious and, strangely on a wet road at night, beautiful. For the endless rain, the torrential or drizzling or misty or steady rain, the relentless daily rain, had fed these beeches with their feather fronds, these long-leaved chest nuts, these limes and hornbeams and oaks, so that they were greener than Lynn had ever seen them, greener and lusher and fresher and more luxuriant. It took her car breaking down to make her appreciate trees, she thought, and she moved to the woodland edge to look down the aisles between the trees where the rain dripped from glossy leaves, brilliant emerald in the pale moonlight.
A car drawing up made her turn around. She thought it was the RAC man, but it wasn’t. A white car and a woman at the wheel, leaning across and out of the passenger window to ask her if she needed help. Lynn nearly said she had already called the RAC, thank you very much, and he would be along any minute, but then she noticed that the woman was middle-aged and thickset, with unusually luxuriant gray hair. Tension gripped her, tautening her stomach muscles, and she forgot about not doing things on her own initiative.
“I don’t really want to wait here for them by myself though. If you would just take me to a garage. I’m a stranger round here but I’ve been told there’s an all-night one at the Myfleet exit. That would be very kind.”
Lynn had never before heard herself sound so naive and sweetly girlish. The woman pushed open the door and she got in, praying that the RAC man wouldn’t come until they were on their way. Then, sitting next to the woman who could be Vicky, who surely was Vicky, feeling really bad about the poor RAC man on his way to going off duty, maybe, and home to his family and his dinner, and who would come and find her gone, the car abandoned, and wonder what on earth had happened to her.
This he wouldn’t guess, though. She burbled a little more to the woman about how kind she was and how awful it would have been if she hadn’t come along because she, Lynn, was terribly nervous about being out alone on alone road in the dark one read such awful things. It was getting more likely to be Vicky by the minute, for she hadn’t even turned around to face in the direction of the Myfleet exit but was speeding up the bypass toward the Myringham turn. Lynn didn’t want to show anxiety yet, it wasn’t in keeping with her trusting and girlish pose. She had studied Vicky head, quite sure now that that thickly waved, dense coiffure was a wig, had had a good look around the car, had actually said what a lovely car it was, and now she was watching where they were going and telling Vicky the scenery was quite beautiful around here, she’d ha
d no idea.
Then Vicky said it, what Lynn had been waiting for: “By the way, my name’s Vicky
“Lynn.”
“Soon be at this garage of yours. Turn left up here.”
Vicky turned left, squeezing the car down a lane about as wide as Lynn’s double bed. The fronds on the high bank, hart’s-tongue ferns and dog’s mercury and lords-and-ladies, brushed wetly along the side of the car. Now was the time, Lynn thought, to say this didn’t look much like the way to the garage, that would be the authentic remark to make and utter in an increasingly nervous tone, but she didn’t make it and Vicky didn’t seem to notice.
Where were they? On the way to Myringham by a tortuous back route? Certainly they were nowhere near Sayle and the Chorley bungalow, but by now a good fifteen miles away. But Vicky made her living house-sitting for people, didn’t she? There had been other Sunnybanks since Rachel Holmes, at least one other Vicky had cared for and in which she had entertained Jerry. She was going to one of them now, Lynn thought, with that little inner gasp and catching of breath that denotes excitement. She looked at her watch. Ten to ten. God, she didn’t want to have to stay the night, but if there was no help for it . . .
The car crawled through this narrow, wet, green tunnel of a lane, came out into a slightly wider road with a little spurt like a sigh of relief. The car turned left and Lynn saw in its headlights a signpost pointing to Myringham as five miles away and Upper Brede as three. Now was the time, she thought, to express anxiety: “This isn’t where I saw the garage.”
“It was closed,” Vicky said. “There’s an all-night one at Upper Brede.”
Lynn didn’t want to sound too intelligent. On the other hand, excessive stupidity might arouse suspicion. “Will they have a mechanic, do you think, or just petrol pumps?”
“They’ve a mechanic. Don’t worry. I’ve used them many times.” She smiled as if she were looking at Lynn and not at the road ahead. “Now amuse me. Tell me about yourself After all, I’ve put myself out to give you a helping hand, haven’t I? The least you can do is talk.”
Vicky sounded suddenly quite cross and indignant. It must be a cue, Lynn thought, for her to start being frightened. But she did as she was told, or an approximation to what she was told, and gave Vicky an account of an entirely fictitious young woman who lived with her parents in Stowerton, had been driving their car home from an evening spent with an old school friend - a girl, of course - in Kingsmarkham. She was nineteen years old and maybe Vicky would find it funny, but she hadn’t got a boyfriend. She worked as a veterinary assistant in Kingsmarkham, but that wasn’t nearly as grand as it sounded. It mostly involved clearing up messes and scrubbing floors. Lynn was proud of herself for managing to put a quite audible exclamation mark at the end of that sentence.
“Exciting life,” said Vicky
She had changed entirely in the short space often minutes. From friendly geniality she had passed through brusqueness to barely concealed sneers. And now, as they entered another lane and turned almost at once into the front drive of a large, well-lit, newish house, she said, rather in the tone an ill-disposed prison officer might use to a recalcitrant inmate, “All right then, get out. Don’t get any silly ideas, I’m right behind you.”
Lynn wasn’t much of an actress and didn’t know how the girl she was pretending to be might react in these circumstances. So she did nothing at all but obey. Like a bemused sheep she scuttled out of the car and up to the front door, which at the moment of their arrival was opened from the inside. Vicky gave her an unexpected push and she stumbled over the doormat and nearly fell. Nearly but not quite. It was a funny thing to recall at that moment, but she remembered Wexford saying a miss was as good as a mile and adding that he was quoting the Duke of Wellington when someone took a potshot at him in Hyde Park.
She only stumbled. She looked up and found her eyes meeting a pair of stony, flat, gray eyes in a curiously blank face. At first she thought the face was lopsided, heavier about one cheek than the other, but it wasn’t, it was an illusion. The man was a little taller than she was, thin, with receding dark hair and wearing a rather shabby pin-striped suit. He looked sad and as if he never smiled, never could, didn’t know how to make the requisite muscles work. Lynn looked over her shoulder at Vicky, who was just standing there, then back at the man who must be Jerry, and said what the nice little veterinary assistant would surely have said: “What am I doing here? What is this place?”
“It’s useless asking,” said Vicky, “because I’m not saying. Why should I? You don’t have a choice. You’re here and here you stay until I decide if you’ll do.”
“Do?”
“Do for my purposes. Say hello to Jerry. Haven’t those parents of yours taught you any manners?”
Lynn said hello to Jerry who gave her a blank, silent stare in return.
Among the hardware stores that sold paraffin none opened before nine-thirty in the morning. Vine had to revise his ideas about one of the troublemakers buying his paraffin on the morning the bomb was thrown. He began to think he was on the wrong track altogether, for petrol and paraffin were such common and generally used commodities that certainly 50 percent of households would have either or both accessible. But he had spent the day calling at ironmongers and hardware shops just the same in the hope, which turned out to be vain, that an assistant might tell him of a regular customer and frequent purchaser of paraffin.
By the evening he was back in the Rat and Carrot, talking once more with Andy Honeyman. Vine found it hard to understand how someone could remember what another man said and recollect the circumstances in which he had said it without being able to describe that man. Honeyman must either be lying or totally unobservant, or forgetful to the point of amnesia, for he steadily denied any knowledge of the customer in the Rat and Carrot who had told Colin Crowne how to make a petrol bomb. Nor could he remember who else had been present, apart from Colin and Joe Hebden and Terry Fowler. Heavily pressed by Vine, he finally said that there had been a woman there he knew by sight. She lived in Glebe Road and he thought her first name was Jackie. None of this was of much help to Vine, who went back to the Muriel Campden Estate and began questioning Colin Crowne and Joe Hebden and Terry Fowler once more.
Colin had taken to his bed before the bomb throwing and the death of Ted Hennessy What with the pain from his shingles and Miroslav Zlatic’s refusal to listen to him or even give any sign that he understood when Colin asked what the Serb intended to do to provide for Lizzie’s child, the stress had been too much for him, contributing to his malaise. On the following day he had been told by Kingsmarkham Social Services that their virtual babies were valued at £1254.80 apiece, that Jodi must be replaced, and they intended to recover that sum from him by whatever means were in their power. Colin knew that meant the County Court and maybe the bailiffs in. He didn’t want to get up when Vine arrived, but Debbie said he had better, so he came down in tracksuit pants and a T-shirt.
Vine made him go through it all again, how he had only asked about making a petrol bomb out of natural curiosity He was personally too law-abiding to have any inkling of these things, but he’d seen this bit on telly, throwing bottles that blew up and set fire to cars, and naturally he’d wanted to know how it was done. Putting in a good word for his neighbour, he said that Joe Hebden was of the same way of thinking.
“But your natural curiosity didn’t take you so far as to find out the name of your instructor?”
“My what?”
“The guy who told you how to do it?”
“I never asked him, did I? He put his spoke in. I never said to him, how d’you do it. I said it to my mate. He come along and put his spoke in.”
“What did he look like?” said Vine, who had asked this question before.
Colin Crowne gave the same answer. “Just a bloke. Twenty-something, maybe a bit more, I don’t know. I wasn’t to know I’d have to remember, was I?”
One of Terry Fowler’s Sons opened the front door. The other w
as sitting with his father on a sofa, watching Crimewatch and eating taco chips. The Crowne home was far from immaculate, but this place was among the dirtiest and least cared-for Vine had ever seen. No one had cleaned it since Terry’s wife left him. Something was on the floor behind the television set that Vine, quickly looking away, hoped was dog turds but feared might be from a human source.
But Terry was able, this time, to offer a scrap of help. He knew this Jackie woman through her sister, whose son went to school with his two. The sisters lived next door to each other in Glebe Road, but more than that he couldn’t say. The little Fowler boys then began talking without a trace of diffidence or shyness about another school friend, cousin of someone or other, a boy of six who had his own computer and who had been to Florida on holiday and visited Disney World. Vine thought this a long way from the point - they seemed to be traveling through the ramifications of a whole cluster of Kingsmarkham families - and tried to get back to the subject of Jackie. Terry said that he had once seen her in the company of Charlene Hebden, but beyond that he couldn’t help.
The six-year-old Kim Fowler accompanied Vine to the door. He was what Vine’s grandmother called an old-fashioned child and he apologized for the dirty floor and the dust that covered everything. “Mum used to do it,” he said, “but she’s gone away and left us so there’s no one done it. Dad says cleaning is for ladies, not guys.”
“Well,” said Vine, “there are some guys called New Men and they do cleaning.”
“We haven’t got none of them round here.” Kim stretched upward to open the door and just made it.
“That Jackie’s got a girl called Kaylee, and do you know what her dad did? He put her through a cat flap so she could steal things. Only he didn’t go to jail because they couldn’t prove it.”