Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  Through the side entrance, around to the front. Not a light on in the house, not a light anywhere. Only those who have lived in the country, better still in a house outside a village, know how dark the countryside can be at midnight. Without a torch it is virtually impossible to go for a walk. But after a while you get used to the dark as Lynn did. Absolute blackness becomes black and gray, then gray and black, then the varied shades of monochrome, like an old, dark film.

  She was walking along the lane by which they had arrived. At the crossroads she went dose up to the signpost but was still unable to read it. But she had noted where she was on the way here and she would find it again. Left here for Bredeway and the bridge over the river. Suddenly, ahead of her, on the right-hand side, she saw a light, and she made her way toward it, keeping close up against the hedge. She hadn’t got her bag with her, nor her mobile, but her warrant card she had. Carry it on you, Barry Vine had once told her. Not in your bag or your overcoat pocket but on you, in an inside pocket. So she had and it was there, against her heart, really, though that was a dramatic way of putting it.

  The light was upstairs in a thatched cottage by the bridge. It must have been generally brighter here, for she could read the name Bridge Cottage and she noted it as another pointer to where she was. She rang the door bell. No one answered. She rang again and again, banged on the door, using the knocker and her fist. She even thought of throwing stones at the window, but she might break it and she didn’t want to be responsible for causing more damage.

  No one was home. They left that light on to make people like her, or more dangerous people, think someone was there. She turned away, closed the gate behind her, and walked on over the bridge. If Vicky had heard the noise wrenching the radiator off the wall had made, would she come after her? It was likely enough. But Lynn knew she would be more than a match for Vicky on her own. A sign on the left side ahead said something, that this was the beginnings of a village, Bredeway probably. Close up, she could just read it: BREDEWAY. DRIVE CAREFULLY THROUGH OUR VILLAGE. Chance’d be a fine thing, thought Lynn. Her car was still up there on the bypass, unless someone had nicked it or driven into it.

  The village was mostly in darkness, though lights were on in two of the cottages and one biggish house was ablaze with light. That was the one, thought Lynn. She could hear the noise from the place before she was inside the gate, music, shouting, laughter, and as she entered the gar den, she could see people dancing in the brightly lit front room. Her warrant card in her hand, she rang the door bell, then knocked. They might not hear the bell.

  A girl of about eighteen opened the door. She didn’t wait for Lynn to explain. “Oh, God, I’m sorry The people next door rang and said they were phoning the police and we promised not to make so much noise, but, I don’t know how it is, you get carried away, don’t you? It’s my boyfriend’s eighteenth birthday party. I didn’t think the police would actually come. Oh, God, I feel so terrible . . .”

  “All I want,” said Lynn, “is to use your phone, if I may.”

  “Of course you may, of course. Come in. Have a drink. There’s only Football Red and Football White, we’ve drunk the champers. Look, we’ll be as quiet as mice while you’re phoning, I promise.”

  Chapter 16

  At some time during the night she had gone up into that room and retrieved her wig. A complicated structure of blue-gray puffs and whorls and curled wisps, it sat on top of a grim face, in which the crags and cracks had appeared early, if the age she had given was a true one. She looked a lot more than fifty-five. Her neck was thick but her face drawn and pinched. The ringless hands looked swollen and her ankles bulged above the tops of her lace-up shoes.

  In a gruff, mannish voice, she kept saying she hadn’t done anything wrong. She had been trying to help Jerry, that was all, caring for him as she always did. Wexford said nothing. He was waiting for James Beamish to arrive. The solicitor representing Jerry had turned up ten minutes before and was in the next interview room with his client and Burden and DC Cox. Jerry Dover, his name was, according to her. She was Victoria Cadbury and his late mother’s sister.

  Both of them had been up when the two squad cars arrived at 1:30 a.m., Jerry sitting cross-legged on the hall floor, swaying from side to side and keening softly. Vicky had been on the top floor, trying to pull a heavy metal radiator off the windowsill but lacking the strength for it. Neither of them had gone in pursuit of Lynn Fancourt. Jerry Dover looked incapable of being left on his own, though Vicky must have left him when she went for her interviews, for the night she had spent at Mrs. Chorley’s house, and later to seek her prey. Wexford had only caught a glimpse of him when he arrived at the station himself this morning, but that was enough to define Jerry as mad, or to put it more correctly, severely schizophrenic, the kind of person they used to describe as “unfit to plead.”

  The house in Upper Brede had been searched and the garden inspected. Of course there was no sign of Sanchia Devenish and no evidence that she had ever been there. It seemed that no child had lived there or been there for many years. The house belonged to a couple called Jackson. Vicky Cadbury had been house-sitting for them while they were on a Greek island. They were due home tomorrow to find their spare bedroom’s electrics dismantled and its radiator torn off the wall. Wexford had to give grudging approval to Lynn Fancourt. After all, she had caught this pair on her own initiative, but at the cost of a good deal of the taxpayers’ money - unless the house-holders’ insurance would pay up - and in some ways it served her right that her car, which she had left on the old bypass, had been vandalized during the night and its radio stolen.

  At first he had thought he would have liked to have been there and seen her snatch off Vicky’s wig, but already he was beginning to feel pity for these two. A tragic, if ludicrous, story would emerge, and coincidentally with that thought, came James Beamish, brisk and cocky as ever.

  Karen, none too pleased to have had to postpone her domestic-violence training owing to pressure here, spoke into the recording device: “Present are Victoria Mary Cadbury, Chief Inspector Wexford, and Sergeant Malahyde. Mr. James Beamish has just entered the room. The time is nine thirty-two.”

  “Ms. Cadbury,” Wexford began, “or is it Mrs.?”

  “Miss, Ms., or Vicky I don’t care, call me what you like. But not Mrs. I’ve never been married.”

  “At some time in April, did you abduct a young woman called Elizabeth Cromwell and take her to your home and keep her prisoner against her will? And did you a week later abduct Rachel Holmes and keep her a prisoner against her will?”

  Vicky shrugged her shoulders. They were heavy shoulders, such as people develop who have been on anabolic steroids. “So what? It wasn’t my home, I’ve done nothing wrong, I didn’t hurt them, I fed them, I saved them off the street. God knows what would have happened to them, out there on the street. I made them dress decently, in a skirt instead of those trousers.” She shook her head. “It’s them that’s done wrong to us. That Rachel girl stuck a penknife in Jerry. She found a knife in a drawer - you never know what’s about when it’s not your house - and went up to Jerry, who’s harmless, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and stuck it in his chest. I thought she’d got the lung, I thought he’d bleed to death. I drove her back after that, of course I did, once I’d dressed Jerry’s wound. I’d been a nurse and it’s just as well, isn’t it? Jerry might have died.”

  So that was what had made Rachel Holmes lie, Wexford thought. She was afraid of the trouble that might ensue if it was known she stabbed Jerry Dover, so she invented a house with shingled walls and a big conifer in the front garden.

  “So you did abduct these two young women?”

  “My client has just said she did, Mr. Wexford,” said Beamish.

  “Very well. For what purpose?”

  “You need not answer that,” said Beamish.

  “I want to answer it. I want you all to know I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I was doing a kindness. I did it for my nephew” Vicky looked
defiantly from Wexford to Karen and from Karen to James Beamish. She seemed not to understand that Beamish was on her side, although his function had been explained to her. “I love that boy. D’you understand that, any of you? D’you understand you can just love someone without sex and stuff being involved, and when they’re not your own kid? His mum and dad are dead. I’ve looked after him since all that started. You’ve seen him, you know what I mean.”

  Beamish, who hadn’t seen Jerry Dover, looked puzzled. No one enlightened him.

  “He’s been in and out of those places, psychiatric wards, they’re worse than the old Bedlam was, so for the past ten years he’s been with me. He lives with me. I give him his drugs and his meals, he doesn’t eat much. I’m not saying he’s not a bit destructive, he is, but he’s harmless.” Vicky said in a different, shriller tone, “I’ve got cancer.”

  No one said anything. Wexford nodded.

  “I don’t say I’ve had cancer, I say I’ve got it. Because I have, once a cancer patient, always a cancer patient. I know, like I said, I’ve been a nurse. But it’s worse than that, I’m going to die. It’s breast cancer I’ve got; you always say you’ve got the cancer where it started, but it’s my lungs now. They say they don’t know, but I know. I’ve got a year at best.”

  “What has this got to do with the abductions, Ms. Cadbury?” Karen asked.

  “You were looking for someone to look after Jerry, weren’t you?” Wexford. “A kind of wife for him, am I right? A young woman to cook and clean and mend his clothes? Someone to care for him?”

  “Not for sex,” said Vicky sharply. “Jerry doesn’t know what sex is and he doesn’t want to know. But they’d have got married, to be on the safe side.” She didn’t explain what she meant by the “safe side.” “And there was plenty in it for the lucky girl. Her and Jerry they’d come in for my house when I’m gone, nice modern house with a washer and a spin dryer, and all the linen and cutlery and whatever.”

  “Did you explain that to these young women?” Wexford asked dryly.

  “I would’ve if I’d found a suitable one. I’d have taken her to my place in Guildford and shown her what she’d be getting. I couldn’t do that with the wrong sort, or the first one to complain; you’d have found us and then there’d be no more getting Jerry a wife. Like you have now, like you’ve knocked all that on the head.”

  Her delusive state grew more and more apparent as she talked. Schizophrenia can be genetic, Wexford knew, perhaps always is. Back in the sixties and seventies those Victorian theories of inherited madness, of whole families afflicted, had been derided, Today it was seen that the nineteenth-century writers were not so far wrong.

  “But the girls didn’t suit,” he said gently. “They weren’t quite what you were looking for, and you were afraid you’d die and leave your nephew alone without anyone to care for him?”

  “Really, Mr. Wexford,” said Beamish, “I can’t have this.”

  But Vicky said, looking calmly into Wexford’s eyes, “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly right.”

  Burden came out, then Wexford. “Barking mad, that Jerry,” Burden said, casting up his eyes. “He shouldn’t be allowed out alone.”

  “He’s not.”

  “False imprisonment,” said Burden in a severe tone, “is a very serious offence.”

  “I know. I’ve been telling you that for the past three weeks. And it’s no good saying no harm was done. They’ll appear in court tomorrow and both will be remanded for psychiatric reports.” Wexford sighed. “Rachel Holmes stuck a knife in Dover’s chest.”

  “Ah, so that’s the answer. I asked him what the plaster was doing there. He didn’t answer so I asked him a second time and then the poor devil did speak. He put his hands over it and said, ‘Hurt, hurt.’ ”

  It was all pathetic, Wexford thought, a sad, ridiculous story. When Vicky Cadbury was dead, who would look after Jerry Dover? The state? More likely was his release “into the community,” only there was no community, just neighbours who would be afraid of him or regard him much as people in times past had regarded the village idiot, and he would end up, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a crazy beggar on the street.

  “There’s nothing more I can do in there,” Wexford said, “so I’m going to pay another visit to Miss Jane Andrews, and since there’s nothing more you can do in there, you may as well come with me.”

  “My daddy said I wasn’t to tell.”

  Sitting on her mother’s knee, playing with her mother’s long hair, Kaylee Flay smiled virtuously. She took hold of a lock of Jackie Flay’s hair and twisted it around and around her forefinger, while giving Vine a coy sideways glance.

  “You told Kim Fowler,” said Vine.

  “That’s different. He’s a boy, he’s not a grown-up.”

  He thought how intelligent she was, this four-year-old who had come out of the lowest stratum of society, almost the socially excluded. Somewhere he had read that, for all the claims that every child of today had an equal opportunity for education and betterment, those from her group were the least likely to avail themselves of it. It made him angry when he looked at her bright face and keen eyes and knew that she was using that intelligence, which should have been channeled into the right paths, to deceive authority. That was the real crime, to pervert a child like this one, to corrupt her into becoming a criminal’s aide and to make stealing a game, in which success was rewarded.

  Jackie Flay hadn’t said a word once she had told him she didn’t mind him questioning Kaylee. She sat there apathetically, her arms around the child’s waist, turning her head slowly around and around to make her hair more accessible to Kaylee. She seemed to enjoy this rough caressing and pulling. Vine asked her about the evening she had been in the Rat and Carrot. Had she been alone or with Patrick?

  “I don’t like you and my dad going out in the evening,” said Kaylee.

  “Now you know Auntie Josie was only next door.”

  “I don’t like Auntie Josie.”

  “Yes, you do, Kaylee. You do like Auntie Josie. You’re a naughty girl to say that.”

  “And you’re naughty to go out and leave me on my own. I could get burnt up in a fire or that pedo could come and take me.”

  “Mrs. Flay, I asked you if you and your partner were together in the Rat and Carrot that evening?”

  “What if we was? Leave off pulling, Kaylee, you’re hurting me.”

  “Did you hear someone in that bar describe how to make a petrol bomb?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Jackie.

  Kaylee got off her mother’s lap. She slid to the ground, climbed up onto another chair, and sat there with her legs dangling. “My daddy,” she said conversationally, “got two bottles and he put this stuff in them and it smelt awful, pooh, and he stuffed up the tops with socks, they was my socks what I’ve grown out of, and he took some more stuff out of the heater that’s in my bedroom and put that on the socks, and he said they was petrol bombs and they was for killing the pedo, so there!”

  Jackie Flay let out a loud scream. She made a dash for Kaylee, one arm upraised, but the child dodged her hand, and Vine, wondering what he was letting himself in for, snatched her up in his arms and held her high in the air.

  Mrs. Probyn was seeing someone out when they arrived. The woman who was leaving was so like Jane Andrews, was a more feminine version of her, that there was no doubt this was her sister. Although it was a surprise visit, Mrs. Probyn seemed delighted to see them and introduced her daughter on the doorstep. “This is my daughter, Mrs. Sharpe. These are the policemen I was telling you about, Louise, the ones that had some important business with Jane which I, of course, was not permitted to hear.”

  Mrs. Probyn smiled brightly to show the good child that this treatment was only to be expected from the troublesome child. Louise Sharpe was plumper than her sister and less stylish, only her expensive jewelry - a huge diamond in the engagement ring above her wedding band, diamond earrings, and a Cartier
watch on her left wrist - giving any indication of her affluence. Apart from these, she wore a longish floral skirt and a cotton sweat shirt bearing the logo of a well-known sportswear manufacturer. Her dark hair was untidy and in need of a good cut, and her pale face was bare of makeup but for some smudged black stuff circling her eyes.

  She gave her mother a kiss that was just a peck in the air two inches from her cheek and remarked that she must get back as she didn’t care to leave “new staff” on their own for too long in the circumstances. Saying to Wexford and Burden, in the ludicrous expression often uttered when no words have been exchanged, that it was nice to have met them, she went down the path to her car, a new red Mercedes.

  “Your daughter has a big house?” Wexford asked as Mrs. Probyn ushered them into the living room she was discouraged from occupying.

  “Louise? Oh, yes, huge house, six bedrooms, three bath rooms - well, she’s very well - off, as I believe I told you.” Mrs. Probyn laughed merrily. “Noblesse oblige, you know.” Like most people, she seemed to have only a muddled idea of what the phrase meant, Wexford thought. “I think it’s important to keep up appearances, don’t you? I will say for poor Jane, she does make the best of herself. She used to have lovely long hair, you know, but she would have it cut off. Said it was too much trouble, if you please. Louise looks a ragbag most of the time, but her carelessness in that regard doesn’t extend to her home, I’m glad to say. She has a truly beautiful home, a real abode of bliss for a child - what a pity; as I always say, she had no children of her own.”

  “She never thought of adoption?” Burden hazarded.

  “Well, yes, she did try to adopt a baby from one of those countries, Romania or Albania, one of those places in the Eastern Bloc, as the powers-that-be call it. She had all the papers, but something went wrong, don’t ask me what, and then of course poor James died, her husband that is.” Mrs. Probyn giggled and put her hand over her mouth like a schoolgirl. “But I’m not supposed to talk about it. Jane says I gossip too much and not to talk about family things. But what I say in response to that is, what else can I talk about? What else do I know? I’m not exactly out in the great world, am I? I’m not in the corridors of power or the - the Weather Centre, am I?”