Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  They were saved from replying by the entry into the room of Jane Andrews, alerted no doubt by the sound of her mother’s giggle and raised voice. She was well dressed today in a short black dress and yellow jacket, the male image discarded, but she looked aghast. She turned white under the heavy makeup. Wexford had thought cosmetics would improve her looks, but now he changed his mind. Her face was a painted mask. This time she made no attempt to expel Mrs. Probyn from the room. “I was upstairs working. I didn’t hear the bell.”

  “They didn’t ring the bell, Jane. They arrived just as Louise was going and the door was open.”

  “Oh, was Louise here?” Jane Andrews looked as if she wanted to say more but bit back the words. “I didn’t hear her come,” she said instead.

  “She came to see me.” Mrs. Probyn’s unconcealed gratification made her seem senile. “Not everyone who comes to this house wants your company, you know, my dear, hard though that may be for you to grasp.”

  Jane turned toward Wexford. “What did you want to see me about?”

  Burden answered her, saying quietly, “Miss Andrews, we know your relationship with Stephen Devenish isn’t a sexual one. But there is some kind of relationship with him, isn’t there?”

  The effect on her was startling. She burst out laughing. The laughter had no amusement in it, only incredulity and wonder at the folly of human assumptions. It held relief too. “I never would have expected that. Even from the police I wouldn’t. What can I do to make it plain to you how much I loathe and despise Stephen Devenish? How can I explain to you what a bastard he is?”

  “Language, Jane,” said Mrs. Probyn.

  Wexford ignored her. “You’ve already done so, Miss Andrews. Or, rather, you’ve given a strong impression of doing so. Perhaps you’ll fill in the details.”

  She hesitated. Her own vehemence seemed to put a check on her. “He is an absolute bastard,” she said more quietly.

  “So you said. But is there a reason for your saying so? Or is it a case of Dr Fell?”

  “Of what?”

  Unexpectedly, Mrs. Probyn intervened and recited:

  I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.

  The reason why I cannot tell;

  But this alone I know full well,

  I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.

  Wexford thought it would anger her daughter. To his astonishment, it made her laugh, it made her human. “I’ve never heard that before, Mother,” she said, and to Wexford, “I certainly don’t love Stephen, I dislike him awfully, but of course I can tell you why. He’s a sexist tyrant, he makes Fay his slave, he rules that house like the despot he is and I loathe him.”

  “And perhaps you’ve said as much, Miss Andrews, which is why your friendship with his wife was broken off? Perhaps she is a loyal wife who doesn’t care for criticisms of a husband she is obviously very attached to?”

  She shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t suppose she did like it. They have no friends no either of them. Well, he may have at work, cronies, business acquaintances, if you can call those people friends.”

  “Or perhaps none of this is true. Perhaps his declared dislike of you and your unquestionable dislike of him are a blind to conceal a friendship and an alliance.” She leaned forward, tried to speak. Wexford held up his hand. “No, one moment, let me finish, please. I am not suggesting, as I’ve already said, that there is or has ever been any sexual relationship. You might be useful to him and he to you. That’s all I’m saying. And that, if we had recorded this conversation and were able to play it back, even you might say that you protested your dislike of him too violently to be credible”

  “If you’re suggesting, and I think you are,” said Jane Andrews, once more aggressive, “that I, or I and Stephen Devenish together, have abducted his daughter and are keeping her here, then you are mad.”

  “Oh, Jane,” said her mother.

  “Oh, Mother, yes. That’s what they mean.”

  “But you don’t like Mr. Devenish. That’s why we never see that nice Fay anymore, isn’t it? Because you and Mr Devenish don’t get on.”

  The wake of Ted Hennessy took place the following day. The chief constable and the assistant chief constable were there, as well as Wexford and his entire team, and the members of the Regional Crime Squad, a junior minister in the Home Office, and Hennessy’s cousin who happened to be a famous television comedian. Not on account of the minister but owing to the presence of the comedian, coverage of the whole thing was shown on the BBC’s evening news.

  As he was leaving, Mitchell came up to Wexford to say how sorry he was about Hennessy “We’re having a whip-round at Muriel Campden, collecting for the poor guy’s widow.” Mitchell gave Carl Meeks a baleful look. “Well, some of us are.”

  Returning to his car, Wexford remarked to Donaldson that it was the thought that counted, and did he know what had become of his raincoat.

  “A Mrs. Hebden came up to me in the car sir, and said you were in her house and you wanted to walk back being such a nice day for a change, and to give her your raincoat to take in to you.”

  “And you did?”

  “Yes, I did, sir. I hope I did right.”

  Wexford didn’t answer. He went upstairs where he had been due to see Lynn Fancourt five minutes before. She was waiting for him in his office, tense, her shoulders hunched, picking at her nails. Allowing none of the amusement he felt and none of the underlying approbation to show in his face, he gave her a five-minutes-long lecture on the inadvisability of showing this kind of initiative, of taking matters into her own hands and pursuing secret personal goals as if she were some kind of private eye instead of part of a team. That was not the way to look to promotion. This was amateurish, not enterprising. Lynn squirmed at “private eye” and again at “amateurish,” but she said nothing, though frequently nodding her head in an earnest fashion.

  Petrol bombs and nail bombs. Patrick Flay admitted that he had made both in his kitchen in Glebe Road. In an interview room at Kingsmarkham Police Station, when asked why by Barry Vine, he first said that it was just a matter of interest, to see if he could, but later confessed he made the bombs for sale.

  “Who were you going to sell them to?”

  “You’d be surprised” Flay was becoming increasingly confident that he had done nothing wrong, or rather, that he had committed no indictable offence. “There’s a market for weapons. It’s an industry. Don’t you watch no TV? Supplying arms is big business worldwide.”

  “That’s tanks and guns and missiles and whatever,” said DC Archbold, “not your piddling petrol in a Ribena bottle.”

  “Not so piddling,” said Flay, “when you think what it can do. It’s a funny thing, you know, how it’s getting harder all the time just to get hold of a glass bottle. All cans it is these days and plastic.”

  “You were going to tell me who you sold your petrol bombs to,” said Vine.

  “Was I? Pardon me but I don’t think you asked. As a matter of fact, I never sold none of them. I give one of them away, for a sample like, and one of my nail bombs. Then” - Flay assumed a pious, caring expression – “on account of the tragedy what happened here, I destroyed all my stock. Search the place if you want, be my guest.”

  “We will, you can be sure of that. So you didn’t make a profit on them. Who did you give the sample to?”

  “Colin Crowne,” said Flay.

  “So you’ve said before. Crowne was ill in bed with shingles.”

  “I can’t help that. I don’t know what he done with it. I give it to him in the Rotten Carrot, that’s all I know. And it’s no use asking me if I saw who threw it - if it was one of mine - because I wasn’t there. You got all this out of my Kaylee, didn’t you? Don’t trouble to deny it. You got it out of Kaylee when her mum was out of the room, you wormed it out of her, she’s only four years old and that’s illegal what you done.”

  “Mrs. Flay was present throughout the interview,” Vine said stiffly.

  “You can tell that to the judge,”
said Flay, “when I’ve writ about you to the chief constable.”

  A warrant was obtained and the house of which Jackie Flay was the tenant was searched. Nothing was found, neither petrol nor nail bombs nor stolen goods.

  Chapter 17

  Both boys resembled their father, but in different ways, each favouring a different aspect of him, so that Edward had his height, his dark, wavy hair, high forehead, straight nose, while Robert shared his eye color, sensitive., rather full mouth, his high cheekbones, and his grace of movement. Their mother seemed to have contributed nothing to their genetic makeup; not a trace of her could be seen in either young face. Did the little girl look like her? Wexford had no means of knowing. The people on the Muriel Campden Estate and in the Glebe Road area had records of their children not only filling albums but on film. The Devenishes of Ploughman’s Lane had one picture, and that taken by a newspaper when Sanchia was a baby, out in her pram.

  “We don’t take photographs of people,” Edward explained, if it was an explanation. “We take them of places.”

  Wexford was questioning each of them individually, in the presence, of course, of their mother. He asked Edward first to cast his mind back to when Sanchia disappeared, to close his eyes and attempt to re-create that night, beginning with the exact time he had gone to bed, if he had read in bed, when he had put the light out, and how soon he had fallen asleep. The boy followed this procedure, or Wexford thought he did, and said he didn’t read much and never in bed. He had been playing a computer game and left it on by mistake, so that it was still on when he woke in the night and he had to get up and turn it off.

  “What woke you?” Wexford asked him.

  The boy said he didn’t know and added, with the first sign of perception he had shown, “You don’t ever know what wakes you because by the time you’re awake, it’s stopped.” He hadn’t known what time it was either. It might have been the sound of someone coming up or going downstairs.

  “That wouldn’t wake you, Edward,” Fay Devenish said. “Dad or I often go up or downstairs after you’re in bed and you don’t wake up.”

  “Then I don’t know,” the boy said, and he gave his mother a look Wexford couldn’t interpret. It seemed resentful yet puzzled. “I said I didn’t know and I don’t.”

  “Are you fond of your sister?”

  “Of course I am. She’s my sister”

  Fay Devenish began to cry. Most boys of twelve, brought up as these had been, in this environment, would have gone up to their mother and put an arm around her shoulders, at least told her not to cry in some way comforted her. Edward sat stony-faced. He looked away. She dabbed at her eyes, seemed to be making a stoical effort at controlling herself.

  Wexford went on, “Did you ever think you would have been happier without your sister? If for instance, your sister had never been born?”

  Fay made a little murmur of protest, the sound a woman might make if she cut herself or was stung by an insect.

  “I’m sorry Mrs. Devenish, but I’d like him to answer.”

  She nodded, rather hopelessly.

  “Edward?”

  The boy, whose expression hadn’t changed, said, “I don’t know. I got used to having her around.” He hesitated. “I suppose I thought it was funny, I mean it was strange, having her when me and Robert were so old.”

  “But you never thought of harming her in any way?”

  “Chief Inspector, I’m sorry, but I can’t have this.” To his knowledge Fay had never been so assertive. Color had come into her face and her eyes were bright. “I can’t sit by and hear you ask him things like that.”

  “Very well, Mrs. Devenish. That’s all, Edward.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “You can go. Tell your brother I’ll see him next.”

  He was smaller than Edward but would probably attain his height in two years’ time. Many children, especially boys, have inquiring or mystified expressions, not surprising, Wexford thought, when you considered the state of the world they lived in. But in the eyes of these two was something more than that, something they shared but he had seen in few others, a look of bitter bewilderment. It was particularly evident when they looked at their mother.

  He asked Robert about that night, but the boy could remember even less than his brother. To the question as to whether he had been fond of Sanchia, he replied that he supposed so: “I liked her all right.”

  Wexford noticed this past tense if Fay Devenish did not. But she gasped when Robert said, “She’s dead, isn’t she? The kids at school say she’s dead.”

  “Do you know a friend of your mother’s called Jane, Robert? Miss Jane Andrews?”

  Before the boy could answer, Fay said quickly, too quickly, “She’s not a friend of mine.”

  “Robert?”

  “I think so. A long time ago. We never see her any more.”

  Wexford said he had nothing more to ask him. The child went away and his mother began crying again. “She’s not a friend of mine, she’s not. You shouldn’t have said that in front of my children.”

  “It’s understandable that you’re upset, Mrs. Devenish, but there are one or two more things I must settle while I’m here.”

  “That’s all right, but you shouldn’t have. . . Oh,.what’s the use?” She pulled tissues out of the box on a side table, dried her eyes, and blew her nose. “I won’t cry anymore. What is it you want to know?”

  “It’s not so much what I want to know as what I want to have. When I asked you for a photograph of Sanchia, you offered me only a family group. I refused it then, but I’d like it now. It’s better than nothing.”

  “My husband will be home in a minute.”

  “That’s fine. It’s best for you not to be alone too much. But it’s not a reason for your not finding a photograph for me. All we have at present is a poor, smudgy shot taken by the Courier, and we don’t even have the original.”

  “I saw that picture in the paper,” she said, as if answering him, as if explaining. “The person who took it, I didn’t even know they were taking it.”

  “Perhaps you’ll have a look now.” A conviction that Devenish’s homecoming would put an end to everything useful he could accomplish here made him urgent. “Please, Mrs. Devenish.”

  She went reluctantly. They had been in the living room and he heard her go into the study, then upstairs. Once more he asked himself why the missing little girl wouldn’t or couldn’t speak, why those boys’ eyes were so troubled, and a fresh question, also to be unanswered, was why their mother had cried when he had simply asked her elder son if he was fond of his sister. And did she now dislike Jane Andrews so much that she wept at the imputation the woman might be her friend?

  She came back and he noticed changes in her. She had powdered her face and made up her eyes and mouth, put on perfume and changed her shoes for a more elegant pair. Something had been done to make her hair look thicker, and the resulting arrangement had been sprayed with lacquer.

  “Here,” she said, “I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

  Two snapshots. He could see at a glance that they were pairs or groups of people, not a single one of the child alone, but now was no time to take a closer look.

  Fay Devenish jumped at the sound of her husband’s key in the lock.

  Wexford said quickly, “May I take these? They’ll be returned to you, of course.”

  “Yes, take them.”

  She might have been a spy passing the plans to an enemy agent, so low and urgent was her voice, more a hiss than a whisper. She stood up, running her bands down her dress as if she could smooth away weariness and pain and anxiety.

  “I was just leaving,” Wexford said as Devenish came into the room.

  The man kissed his wife. Not a casual kiss but passionate, the kind of kiss, Wexford thought, a little embarrassed, that should never be bestowed and received in the presence of others. Devenish’s lips lingered on Fay’s passive, half-open mouth, then he drew slowly away. To Wexford he extend
ed his hand, smiling, warm, said, amazingly, that he was afraid they were giving the police a great deal of trouble. Wexford resisted saying, as he always did resist, that he was only doing his job. Walking back to his car, he asked himself if it was his imagination that Mrs. Devenish had wanted him to stay longer, would have been content for him to sit down and talk it all over once again. Yet she had dressed up for her husband’s homecoming and responded grate fully to his kiss.

  “I’ve been wondering about the older boy, Edward,” Wexford said to Burden later in the Europlate. “They don’t give much away, those children. They’re cagey and secretive, their eyes are puzzled. I have even wondered if they were abused children.”

  “The father?” said Burden.

  “One would suppose so. There’s no evidence. It may be that this whole affair of Tommy Orbe put the idea into my head, and it’s hardly an idea, it’s more a thought with out foundation.”

  “The fact is,” said Burden, “that child abuse is the fashion. You can’t open a newspaper without reading of some fresh terrible case somewhere. It’s ghastly but it’s not that common, and I can’t see Stephen Devenish in that role.”

  “I’m not so sure. He looks capable of violence and we know he has a bad temper. ‘What are you going to eat? Three kinds of herring with new potatoes - that’s Swedish - or maybe Hungarian goulash. Is Hungary in the European Union?”