by Ruth Rendell
“God knows,” said Burden. “I’m reading the blackboard. Sparkling water to drink, inevitably?”
“When we find that child, we’ll have a bottle of the Widow.”
Wexford ordered the herring and potatoes and Burden bacalao from Portugal. “Dried salted cod with something done to it. We had it when we were in the Algarve last year.”
“It sounds disgusting. I got some photographs from Mrs. Devenish. D’you want to see them? They’re not up to much, just out-of-focus family groups really.”
Burden gave the pictures Wexford laid on the table cloth a fleeting glance. “Worse than useless, I’d say. I don’t know why you’re bothering with them. Either Devenish took her or one of his sons.”
“If it was one of those boys, Sanchia is dead.”
Burden looked at him. “You mean Devenish could have hidden her somewhere, he may even have engaged a nanny and set her and the nanny up in a rented flat somewhere, that’s a possibility. But if one of her brothers took her, he must have killed her. He’d have nowhere to hide her and no wish to hide her, as far as I can see. He’d have taken her because he was jealous of her position in the family, killed her to get her out of the way - and then what?”
“Hidden the body.” Wexford poured mineral water for both of ‘them. “And hidden it somewhere nearby. His mother says he can drive. Perhaps he can. He may be able to drive a car in theory but I doubt very much if he could manoeuvre it out of that drive by night. They’re both b boys, either of them could have carried her, and probably she wouldn’t have cried if either had lifted her out of her cot. So if Edward did it - or come to that, if Robert did it - he killed his sister somewhere in the garden, possibly by strangling her, and back we come to your point.”
“What then? Either is strong enough to carry a three- year-old some distance, but dig a grave and bury her? How long would it have taken? Would they even know how to set about it?”
Their food was brought by the Europlate’s proprietor, a man who for some reason always wore a starched and spotlessly white apron, though he was not the cook. In the opinion of some of his patrons it was done to give him a French appearance. He combined in his looks supposedly typical features of many of the Union’s members, being black-haired and moustached like a Spanish bullfighter, with the regular thin-lipped profile of the Scandinavian, the olive skin of the Greek, and the high cheekbones of the Slav. Some said his name was Henri, others Henrik or Heinrich, and he was called by all these. But his English was spoken in the pure accent of the Lowland Scot, and now, as he set each plate down, he expressed the opinion that a wee bi’o’flsh would set them up for the day, as it fed the brain.
“I can do with some of that,” Burden said when Henri had returned to the back regions. “We know it wasn’t one of the boys, though, don’t we? It has to be Devenish, or according to my as yet unfed brain, it has to be. Why he took her and where he put her we don’t know, but we can be pretty sure if he took her, she’s alive.”
“Fathers do kill their children, you know that.”
“Sure, and it’s a monstrous crime but it’s usually accidental, the result of violent abuse. Devenish had no reason to do it.”
“No reason in your estimation, maybe. How about jealousy? How about seeing her as the one person with the power of coming between him and his wife? Of separating him from his wife? He looks as if he’s in love with his wife. He greets her as passionately as if they’ve known each other a year and been parted for the past six months. We know a lot about these people by now, Mike, but we know very little of their feelings. What do we ever actually know of anyone’s feelings, come to that, even when they our nearest and dearest? Devenish may have disliked and resented Sanchia. Sanchia may have been her mother’s favourite, preferred over her sons - preferred over him?”
“I sometimes wish,” said Burden, “that we had ordinary normal people to deal with.”
“Are there any? Do you realize, Mike, that you’ve contrived a possible scenario for Devenish? I don’t think you meant to, but you have. He’s sexually abused all his children and now turned to the little girl. This happens in her bed during the night. He doesn’t in fact take a sleeping pill, he only tells his wife he does. That night he paid his usual visit to her, accidentally killed her, carried her body downstairs, and buried her in the garden.”
“How about the car, then?”
“Not in the garden. No, you’re right. He took the body away somewhere and buried it.”
Burden put down his knife and fork. He wiped his mouth on a dark blue napkin with the EU logo in its center and picked up the menu. Suddenly he said, “I don’t feel like eating anymore. I was going to have the Olde English Summer Pudding or the zabaglione, but all this talk of what Devenish may or may not have done has rather put me off. Silly, isn’t it? I’m not usually like that.”
“I shall have a pudding,” said Wexford stoutly. “I shall have something called rød grø, which I am certain I’m not pronouncing correctly. As Henri said, I have to feed my brain.”
“Are you going to arrest him?”
“Henri?”
“No, Devenish, of course.”
“Not yet,” said Wexford. “He won’t run away, you know. He’s absolutely confident he’s safe. I’d say he always is, in everything he does. He knows best, he is right, Devenish rules okay. Doubtless it’s the secret of his success, total confidence in himself.”
“I’d like to see what happens to this famous confidence,” said Burden viciously, “when we get him in court.”
“I’m dining with a client - remember?”
Once upon a time, when her husband made that remark, and made it ten minutes before he was going out to his engagement, Sylvia would, in his words, have laid into him. She had been known to lean against the front door, holding it shut, while she lectured him on her rights as a woman and told him that the children were his as well as hers. But she had spent half the day at a seminar entitled “Psychological Abuse in Relationships,” and it was either this or, more likely, her experiences at The Hide that affected her, so that she asked herself if today’s lecturer would have on many occasions accused her of verbal abuse. It chastened her, she liked to think of herself as virtuous, upright, and politically correct, and she forced out pleasant words: “That’s all right. I’m on a short shift; the eight to midnight, so I’ll ask Mother to have Robin and Ben, shall I?”
“It might be best.” He said it abstractedly, then, “Do as you like. I’d better go, I’ll be late.”
What had she expected? That he’d go down on his knees? A good-bye kiss, even a good-bye? The front door closed after him. She phoned her mother, packed the boys’ pyjamas and clothes for the morning. It was still half- term, so her father wouldn’t have to take them to school.
Could she keep it up, being nice to Neil, if most of the time he behaved as if she weren’t there? Would they ever have sex again? Would she ever have sex again, since she couldn’t imagine it with any other man?
She got her sons into the car and drove to her mother’s. It was strange, but often she worked so hard she didn’t notice the weather, and at six in the evening she saw for the first time that it wasn’t raining and was going to be a fine night. The sky looked different, hazy rather than clear, and the massed clouds had split into a delicate feathering. A full moon, such as was due to rise tonight, always made working on the helpline less stressful. After a particularly disturbing encounter with a woman on the helpline, she liked to stand at that window, watch the sailing moon, and look at the gardens bathed in its pale, cold light.
Therapy, really. Her father did it too. Perhaps she had picked it up from him. Modeling herself on the parent of the opposite sex, a bad thing, said the psychologist inside Sylvia. She could have sworn that night that the moon moved - well, it did of course, but not fast, not so that one could see it move. Counsellors sometimes suggested their clients alleviate pressure by watching the tranquil movements of goldfish swimming in circles. Well, the moon
was her goldfish.
It would be a long time before night fell. The sun came out palely just as she arrived. Her father came out to meet her and welcome the boys. She knew he was trying hard to be nicer to her, just as she was trying to be nicer to Neil, and if she felt a certain resentment that her own father had to try, she didn’t show it. She kissed him back and asked herself, but only herself what was wrong with her that comparative strangers such as those people at The Hide all liked her, while her own family. . .
“Stay a little while?” he asked her. “We were outside in the garden. It’s almost the first chance we’ve had this year. I’ll wait till after you’ve gone, then I’ll take the boys down to the river.”
She used to get angry because her mother did the garden as well as the housework and cooking. That kind of feminism seemed old hat now. That her mother enjoyed the things she did and was very well suited to housewifery had never seemed to enter into Sylvia’s calculations. She sat down in a cane chair, and her mother brought a tray of homemade lemonade, ice-cold with lemon slices and sugared rims to the glasses.
“You’ve got some new photos.” Sylvia hadn’t really looked at them beyond seeing that they were photographs, but as soon as she picked them up, she did.
“They’re your father’s, something to do with work. He emptied his pockets onto the table.” Dora laughed. “You know how he does.”
Keys, change, a perfectly ironed white handkerchief - another cause with her in the past for pontificating against male supremacy - and, these photographs. She picked up the top one. It showed a family group: man, woman, two boys a bit older than her own children, a baby in the woman’s arms. They were standing in a garden in front of a house, and Sylvia recognized the place at once. It was Ploughman’s Lane. She had once lived just down the road, though in a rather more modest house. This one was called Woodland Lodge. In her mind’s eye she could see the nameplate by the gates at the entrance to the drive. One of the finest houses up there, this was. She had been inside once, collecting for something, and she remembered the elegant, broad staircase and the carved woodwork.
These people weren’t there then, or if they were, she didn’t recognize them. The woman who had left her in the hall and went away to find a five-pound note had been elderly. But that had been several years ago when her own boys were very small and she was very young, and she and Neil were still getting along.
She turned to the next photograph and the next. The baby was older here, maybe a year older. Impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl; the hair was short, the child’s expression a blank, and his or her clothes the uniform of the modern infant: tracksuit pants and sweatshirt. Mother and child were alone, and Sylvia looked closely at this one, laying it down with a sigh.
Wexford came out of the house and sat down opposite her. He picked up the picture she had already looked at and watched her while she studied the remaining two. In neither of them could the child be clearly seen, for he or she had turned away from the camera. The father of this family was by far the most striking member of the group, dwarfing the woman and her sons, his grin broad compared with their tentative smiles.
“Tell me something Dad. How did St. Agatha die?”
“Don’t ask me. There’s a dictionary of martyrs in the living room.” He thought about it. “It’s on the third shelf from the bottom with all the other dictionaries.”
Sylvia went indoors and came back with the Oxford Book of Martyrs. She didn’t open it but once again picked up one of the photographs.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me who these people are?”
“Is there any reason why you want me to?”
“Only that the woman is a victim of domestic violence. Oh, you can’t see any bruises, you can’t see healed fractures, but that’s what she is and no doubt that grinning idiot is what you’d call the perpetrator.”
Taken aback, he asked her how she could tell. He had been with Fay Devenish half a dozen times, and in her company and that of her husband together, and had seen nothing. Of course he had noted that she was a thoroughgoing old-fashioned housewife and that Stephen Devenish expected a high standard of cleanliness in his home; he had noticed they kept to themselves and had few friends, but that surely was a far cry . . .
“How can I tell? Hard to say. I just can. You get to know when you’re always meeting women in her situation. There’s a vulnerable look, a cowed look, and something worn that comes into these women’s faces, especially when the abuse is sustained over a long period. Look at her now, Dad, in the light of what I’ve said.”
He looked. He looked particularly at the picture in which she was alone with her little daughter, standing in the garden, smiling diffidently, a cautious, shy, self-deprecating woman who seemed here to wish to efface herself entirely it only she were allowed to. Her body language expressed a reluctance to be photographed at all and as if she were submitting only under pressure. The child had her back to the camera, her face pressed into her mother long skirt.
“There’s no bruise you can see,” Sylvia said. “He’s careful to hit her where the bruises won’t show. If he’s careless and he happens to leave marks on her arms or her legs, she’ll cover them up with long sleeves and long skirts.”
“I should have known,” Wexford said. “I should have seen for myself”
“Maybe you have to be trained to recognize it. You know, Dad, I can’t only see it in her, I can see it in him. The arrogance, the grace, the charm, the smile. He’s the type. Oh, there are many types, but he’s one of them.”
Wexford sat silent for a moment, thinking of the implications. What did this mean for Stephen Devenish? Suddenly he had become a different person, a monster, as much a criminal as the thug who punches a bystander in a pub brawl. If it was true, if Sylvia was right. He thought of how hard it would be to ask Fay Devenish and how much harder for her to answer.
“Do you remember a couple of weeks back I asked you why a child of nearly three was apparently mute? And you gave me several possible reasons?”
“Dad, are you saying that this child is the missing little girl Sanchia?”
He nodded. “This is the Devenish family.”
“Then the reason’s plain. She doesn’t speak because she’s witnessed her father beating up her mother. I’m not saying it’s direct, I mean, like, ‘My mother talks and you hit her, so I won’t run that risk, I won’t talk,’ though it’s something like that. But it’s more complex, it’s protective behaviour all right - look at the way she’s hiding herself in her mother’s skirt. How about the boys? How has it affected them?”
“God knows, Sylvia. Now you’ve told me, I can say what in fact I did think at the time, that the older one looks as if he’s biding his time until he’s old enough to hit his father.”
“Maybe, or maybe the father’s encouraging them to hit her too. Oh, you needn’t look like that, Dad. It happens. And don’t ask why she puts up with it, will you? Where can she go? Where can she take her children? She can’t keep herself - at least, I suppose not - so who will keep her? And she doesn’t tell people because, believe it or not, she’s ashamed. She’s ashamed. She dreads the neighbours knowing, friends knowing. She’s ashamed because real women, women who are beautiful enough and clever enough, and really good about the house, they don’t get abused. They get admired and cherished. If she were like that, if she could only come up to her husband’s standard, she wouldn’t get beaten either. “Probably no one knows about it, or maybe she’s told her parents, if she has parents, and they say she’s exaggerating, he’s a good provider, he’s faithful, she’s making a fuss about nothing. Or she tells just one girlfriend, and the friend tells her to leave him but won’t take her and her children in, so what’s the use?”
Jane Andrews, Wexford thought. She would be that friend and confidante. But there had been a quarrel and. she had been sent away - because she knew and Devenish couldn’t bear anyone to know? Or Fay, like many a person who entrusts to another the deep and p
ainful secrets of the heart, could no longer tolerate the company of the woman she had confided in?
Sylvia was leafing through the Martyrs book, stopping, making a face and flinching. “God, she had a kind of double mastectomy, they cut her breasts off. I wish I hadn’t read it!”
“It was a long time ago,” said Wexford gently, “and maybe it never happened.”
“It was in people’s minds, though, wasn’t it? They must have done things like that or it wouldn’t - it wouldn’t be in here.”
“Violence and cruelty are always with us, Sylvia. By telling me what you’ve just told me about the Devenishes, you may have put a stop to some of it. Think of that instead of St. Agatha.”
After she had gone he understood that she had also shown him the way Sanchia’s abduction had been planned, the way it had happened, the despair and last-ditch remedy, the complicity of others, the final painful but necessary sacrifice. It was as if a whole panorama of revelations, causes, consequences, and seemingly endless cruelty unrolled before his eyes. He saw the paradox of the innocent victim declared guilty and the ruthless perpetrator emerging guiltless. And what on earth was he going to do about it?
Chapter 18
A glassy lake of flowers had covered the police station forecourt since the previous week. People who had never known Ted Hennessy; even those whose only knowledge of CID work came from television serials or who hated the police, all these had brought flowers and left them lying in their slippery sheaths of cellophane under the falling rain and now the blaze of the sun. Many names on cards were those of Muriel Campden residents.
Wexford, returning to the place from Hennessy’s funeral, wondered not for the first time at the current passion for mourning with flowers still in their wrapping. When had it begun? Probably when the custom began of placing bouquets on the site where someone had died by violence or tragic accident. Ten years ago? Not much more. It was almost always when the person who had died was some one you didn’t know or hardly knew Perhaps it was a sign of a more caring society and he was all for that, and he asked himself why no one ever thought of taking the flowers out of their wrapping and throwing away the plastic, so that all these roses and carnations might not bloom unseen.