Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  “When we found Sanchia,” Wexford said to Burden, “we were going to have champagne - remember? I don’t feel much like it now, do you?”

  “Not much,” said Burden.

  Had he beaten her again? Wexford had no means of knowing. As time went on, he asked Margaret Stamford to call at Woodland Lodge again and she did call. This time Fay Devenish didn’t even let her get past the front door. She came out onto the step, almost closing the door behind her, and whispered that she was sorry but nothing profitable could come out of another interview. Her husband was indoors, she said, and she would have to explain who her visitor was and what she had come for. Only she wouldn’t explain, she would invent something, God knew what.

  It sounded as if Devenish’s violence toward her was continuing. And of course it was; Wexford had never really doubted that it would. Everything he might do, every action taken to support or help her, would only exacerbate his violence. Brian St. George carried a story in the Courier of the proceedings in court where Jane Andrews and Louise Sharpe appeared on a charge of wasting police time and obstructing the police in their inquiries. Wexford wondered then what would happen to Fay when Stephen Devenish read it. A much more serious charge against Victoria Cadbury, that of abduction of three women and falsely imprisoning them, made bigger head lines. Would that also incense Devenish and thus endanger his wife? Perhaps, but he heard nothing.

  He even asked Sylvia if, while operating The Hide helpline, she had ever had a call from Fay Devenish or from someone who might be Fay Devenish, but there had been nothing. If there was violence at Woodland Lodge among the high trees and in the deep peace, Fay suffered in silence.

  And then, after two months, the silence and the peace came to an end.

  Chapter 19

  Down in Brighton, Louise Sharpe twice attempted suicide. The first time, she left her six-bedroomed, three bathroomed house with its swimming pool and its staff of resident Filipino couple but no-longer-resident nanny, went down to the beach, and walked into the sea until it covered her head. She was seen by a swimmer and rescued. A month later her housekeeper found her unconscious, having swallowed a packet of sleeping pills and half a bottle of gin. The psychiatrist who saw her when she came out of hospital called her actions a cry for help, but Louise said she didn’t want help, she wanted to die.

  No. 16 Oberon Road, now no longer the Orbes’ home, had been seriously damaged by the Kingsmarkham Six and their supporters, all the front windows broken, the door panels kicked in, and tiles knocked off the roof. Weeks passed before the local authority’s contractors moved in, and during those weeks the windows and front door were boarded up and the roof covered in a big sheet of blue plastic. One night, while the Muriel Campden Estate slept, a graffitist had moved in and decorated the entire facade with pictures of bleeding corpses, decapitated torsos and their separate heads, open-mawed animal faces, and such words as pedo, filth, and killer in the bright colors of spray paint - pink, yellow, emerald, Prussian blue, and scarlet.

  The Kingsmarkham Courier ran a story on the appalling situation of the homeless sleeping on the streets of Myringham while accommodation stood empty in that town and particularly in Kingsmarkham. Not to mention the shameful situation of Kingsmarkham Police Station being restored to pristine condition within three weeks while 16 Oberon Road still stood derelict. On their front page they used a photograph in full color of the graffiti.

  Speculation was rife on the Muriel Campden Estate as to whom it would be allocated when the repairs were finally carried out. Debbie Crowne hankered after it for her daughter Lizzie, and Miroslav Zlatic and their child. As to marriage, she cared little about that, whatever Lizzie might feel. Debbie just wanted, as she said to Maria Michaels, to see them in a stable relationship with family values. Unfortunately for her ambitions, Miroslav was still with Brenda in a partnership that seemed happier than formerly, and it was reported that her sons called him Dad.

  Lizzie was nearly six months pregnant and what her mother termed “as big as a house.” The social worker called occasionally, urging Lizzie to attend parenting as well as prenatal classes, but she said she was still thinking it through. It was an awkward situation, seeing that Kingsmarkham Social Services were bringing an action against Colin Crowne in the County Court for the cost of replacing Jodi the virtual baby.

  Tommy Orbe and Suzanne, his daughter, had been rehoused in a flat on the outskirts of Peterborough. The accommodation was in a bungalow block designed for pensioners and the disabled, and a long way away from any families with children. But the pensioners’ families soon discovered Orbe’s identity. They stopped bringing their children to visit their grandparents, with the result that the other occupants of the bungalow block ostracized Orbe and Suzanne and sent them obscene letters. Suzanne’s fiancé never returned, and after a time she became engaged to one of the men who came to collect the tenants’ recycling.

  The police are particularly assiduous with their investigations when one of their own has been killed or injured.

  Burden and Vine, with Cox and Lynn Fancourt, had spent uncounted man- and woman-hours pursuing inquiries to find Hennessy’s killer. All they had succeeded in doing was eliminating Colin Crowne from the inquiry. Patrick Flay recalled that he had seen Miroslav Zlatic “holding a missile.” Vine found a Serbo-Croat speaker who taught Balkan studies at the University of the South to interpret for him, but Miroslav still said nothing, being apparently as disinclined to his own language as to English. And there the matter stood, though Burden and Vine pressed on, determined to find Hennessy’s killer, not to think of giving up until they had.

  Frustrated by Fay Devenish’s disinclination to have her husband indicted for assault or to give evidence against him, Wexford nevertheless refused to let the Devenish affair disappear into that great recycling bin of unfinished business into which unresolved family troubles were cast and came out the other end as “in the domestic, not police, domain.” Instead, he kept an eye. DS Karen Malahyde, while undergoing a three-day-a-week training in the handling of domestic violence, had visited Fay, taking care to do so in her husband’s absence. With things back to normal, Stephen Devenish had returned to his former commitment to Seaward Air and spent between eight and ten hours a day at the Gatwick, Brighton, or Kingsmarkham offices. With the boys at their preparatory school in Sewingbury until the end of July, it was easy enough to see Fay alone.

  Karen soon became at home in Woodland Lodge and managed, while with Fay, to subdue her own feminist inclinations, her loathing of housework and contempt for those who did it. After all, as she remarked to Lynn, whether the poor woman polishes the floor right is the least of her worries. Having first arranged for a babysitter for Sanchia, Karen set up a meeting for Fay with Griselda Cooper, and the three women had lunch together at the Europlate, Fay having ascertained that it was her husband’s day at Gatwick for a trial flight to Brussels and back in one of the new Flyfast 355 Stratoslicer aircraft Seaward had bought.

  The lunch was profitable only in that it brought color into Fay’s face and a light into her eyes. She hadn’t had a meal out with friends since Stephen stopped her seeing Jane Andrews. Griselda tried to get her to wear an alarm device around her neck, but Fay said Stephen would spot it in five minutes, smash it, and probably smash her as well. One good thing had come out of all this, Karen said, and that was that at last Fay felt able to talk quite freely about what went on at home. It was no longer a dark and terrible secret, to be whispered only to one intimate friend.

  The neighbours knew. Operation Hurt-Watch’s policy was to alert residents in the vicinity as to what went on. Karen had herself told Moira Wingrave and met with a nervous not-in-my-backyard response. Moira said she couldn’t possibly think of interfering between husband and wife, especially in a select area like this one, but other dwellers in Ploughman’s Lane were more accommodating and less shocked.

  “Not that any of them will know,” Karen said to Wexford. “It’s not exactly a housing estate with paper-th
in walls. He could beat her to death and they wouldn’t hear her screaming. Not through two hundred yards of dense rain forest.”

  Wexford himself, when not busy tracking down and prosecuting eco-warriors, speculated as to what currently went on at Woodland Lodge. He talked to his wife about it and to Sylvia. When he mentioned it to his younger daughter, Sheila, all she said was that if any man she’d ever been with hit her, he’d wonder what had hit him. Wexford knew it wasn’t as simple and straightforward as that. The Devenish affair was Karen’s responsibility, but he some times called on Fay himself; talking quietly to her, trying to discover what the situation now was and looking for signs of the abuse Sylvia had taught him to recognize.

  He looked for other signs too. No bruises had shown on Fay’s face since the return of Sanchia, but many an abusive man is crafty and inflicts physical damage where the results of it won’t show. That too he had learned. And he observed what Karen had not, that although it was high summer, Fay wore dresses with long skirts and long sleeves. She was only just thirty-six but she never showed off her arms or her shoulders, and all her clothes were high-necked. This might mean not only that the covered parts of her body exhibited bruises and contusions but also that Stephen Devenish demanded the excessively modest dress of a Shaker woman or an Irvingite. Wexford sometimes asked her if she was all right, and she understood perfectly what he meant, simply replying yes and he was not to worry about her.

  So he ran to earth (in more ways than one) the well-intentioned, earnest people who broke the law by uprooting fields of genetically altered oilseed rape and linseed, arrested them and had them charged with causing malicious damage, and he thought about the Devenish family. Was Stephen Devenish still receiving those threatening letters? Or had there ever been any threatening letters Wexford hadn’t much belief in the onetime existence of obscene or anonymous letters the recipient declares he has thrown away. Probably they existed only in Devenish’s paranoid imagination.

  Nor had he ever discovered exactly what had happened when Stephen and Fay were alone together after Sanchia’s return. She wouldn’t tell him and she wouldn’t tell Karen beyond saying that Stephen more often accused her of being a “mental case” than he formerly had. He had also frequently told her she was unfit to look after his children, but whether this accusation was accompanied by blows she never said.

  Sanchia had begun to talk. At the beginning of July she became three years old, and by then she was forming sentences and developing a large vocabulary. Children who are late talkers speak fluently once they begin. Knowing his reasoning was unsound, Wexford nevertheless saw her speech development as a sign that she had witnessed no further violence by her father against her mother.

  “It doesn’t work that way, Dad,” said Sylvia. “She was bound to start talking sometime. What will happen is there’ll be other traumas, she’ll be hyperactive or absolutely not, or spectacularly badly behaved or too quiet, but there’ll be something.”

  “If he’s still doing it.”

  “Dream on. He’s still doing it. Why would he stop?”

  “What amazes me,” said Dora Wexford, “is that these are middle-class people - well, upper-middle-class if you go in for all these gradations. They’re very well off, he must be earning a couple of hundred thousand a year.”

  “Three hundred and seventy-five thousand, to be precise,” said Wexford.

  “Well, there you are, then. If they got divorced, she’d still get a huge allowance. She could keep that house and he could buy himself something just as nice to live in. I don’t understand it.”

  “No, you don’t, Mother, so you might as well not air your opinions. Domestic violence occurs in all classes, it’s absolutely not just a working-class thing, which is what you’re saying. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s me crushed,” said Dora.

  Wexford laughed. “I really ought to say, ‘don’t talk to your mother like that,’ only as someone or other said, Lord Melbourne, I think, ‘Those whose behaviour requires admonishing are seldom wise enough to profit by admonition.’”

  A view he had no reason to change when he went to Woodland Lodge to see her a week later. Unusually for her, her face was heavily made up, some kind of pancake foundation coating the fine pale skin but not entirely concealing the black bruise that covered her forehead, her left cheek, and her left temple. Her left eye was ringed in purple and the upper lid thickly swollen. Wexford found himself in the rare situation of feeling deep embarrassment. She answered the door to him, giving a little gasp when she saw who it was.

  Sanchia was with her, clinging with both hands to her skirt. Once he had observed that the sons weren’t in the least like their mother, but this little girl resembled Fay, even to the wide-eyed, fearful look. He glanced once more at Fay’s damaged face and hardly knew what to say, but he had to say something and that pertinent to what he was seeing. She walked ahead of him into the living room, her hand up to the bruises, an inadequate mask for that awful evidence.

  “I know you haven’t walked into a door or fallen against the mantelpiece,” he said. She shook her head. It might have meant a denial or simply a dismissing of the subject. The little girl was holding a long strip of cloth, a piece of cotton material, one end of which she stuffed into her mouth, while staring at him with her mother’s flying-fox eyes.

  “I can’t talk about it in front of her,” Fay Devenish said. “And she’s here with us and I can’t send her away.”

  “You can at least tell me if she witnessed it.”

  Another nod. All the time that hand remained pressed against the damaged flesh, the half-closed eye.

  “Mrs. Devenish, I’ve said it before, DS Malahyde has said it, everyone would say it, you must no longer tolerate this treatment. You surely have tolerated it once too often. Next time you must come to us. You must.”

  Her heavy sigh seemed to raise and sink her whole body in a wave of suffering. “I wish I spoke another language so that we could talk in that. I wish I spoke French - well, proper French. Do you speak French?”

  He nodded his head.

  She made an effort, an effort that was both ridiculous and moving. “Il me cherchera et eligne tuera.”

  He understood that. Or he understood enough. Her husband would hunt for her and, when he had found her, kill her.

  Never had he felt so impotent and helpless. He imagined arresting Devenish, talking to him with his solicitor present and the man denying everything, Fay refusing to give evidence, coming up instead with one of her ready stories, the walking-into-a-wall one, the accident-prone one. At the same time he wished he understood the man’s raison d’etre, that he could begin to understand a philosophy of life that decreed a large, heavy man beat with his fists and his feet a small, vulnerable woman, for an unreal and manufactured cause. Because she couldn’t always maintain the standard of perfection he desired in her household, because she lost control over the behaviour of her children. It made no sense. It denied all human decency, kindness, and civilization. Of course Devenish was a sadist, and not one content with a masochist partner or one who merely pretended pain.

  But how would he, Wexford, feel if the man killed her? Wouldn’t he then look back with bitter regret that he had failed to do more?

  But do what?

  Make sure Karen kept up her visits to Woodland Lodge. Alert Hurt-Watch and its newly trained operatives to this classic situation in their midst. Make certain the Social Services were aware and attentive. Visit there himself whenever possible and whenever safe. Never forget her.

  Never let her disappear from his thoughts.

  He and Dora went away on a fortnight’s holiday to Portugal in July. When he found that the travel agent Dora used had booked them on a Seaward Air flight to Lisbon, he felt a momentary dismay. But why on earth shouldn’t they fly with Seaward Air? Even if it meant putting money in Devenish’s pocket - which it did not - Fay and her children would benefit as much as the chief executive of the airl
ine himself. Burden often said he allowed himself to become obsessive. Now he was over-emotional as well.

  At Gatwick, waiting for their flight to be called, he was nervous of seeing Devenish. It was unlikely, he knew. A man in Devenish’s position was hardly to be found wandering among the economy-class passengers or chatting to them about how they liked the service. The trouble was that if Devenish did appear and did see them, he would almost certainly invite them into some private room or sanctum of his own and produce drinks. He might even offer to upgrade their seats. Wexford would of course refuse, but the refusing would in itself be unpleasant. However, there was no sign of Devenish and they boarded the plane uneventfully.

  Estoril and Sintra were enjoyable, the sun shone but not too blisteringly, the food was good, the hotel comfortable, and they returned in the last weekend of July, rejuvenated and tanned. Wexford immediately phoned Burden to find out what had happened, what new developments had there been, and how, in general, were things.

  “We’ve got no one for Hennessy’s murder, if that’s what you mean,” said Burden.

  “That’s only partly what I mean. Anyway, if you had, it’d have been in the English papers, which I read every day like a good citizen.”

  “Vicky Cadbury will never come to trial. She’s dying. They say any more treatment would be useless and now it’s only a matter of administering morphine to kill the pain. Jerry Dover’s gone barking mad and been sectioned.”