Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  Louise Sharpe had remarried. Her husband was the man wlio had rescued her when she attempted suicide by walk ing into the sea. Six months pregnant, she expected the birth of her baby at the end of July.

  Revengeful as ever, Rochelle Keenan went to the police with the film she had made of the Kingsmarkham riot, claiming that it showed beyond a doubt that it was her husband, John, who had thrown the petrol bomb that killed Detective Sergeant Hennessy. Burden, who confronted her, was a little taken aback He thought he had seen everything, become hardened to everything, and that nothing remained to astonish him. But a wife endeavouring to secure for her husband life imprisonment merely because he resented a cuckoo in his nest, that shook him. He put the film on his video transmitter - what else could he do? He was almost glad when the picture that appeared wasn’t much of an improvement on a store’s closed-circuit television, grainy, gray images of barely recognizable people. He certainly saw someone throw a bottle with a rag stuffed into its neck - he saw three men throwing bottles and a woman throwing a brick - but whose hands these missiles came from he had no idea at all.

  Still, he would keep trying to find Hennessy’s killer. He would never give up, he said.

  “When you’re dead,” said Wexford, “and they open you up, they’ll find Get Hennessy’s Killer written on your heart.”

  “I hope they’ll find He Did written underneath.”

  “We all hope that, Mike.”

  These days Wexford often found himself in sombre mood. Sylvia and Neil had at last decided to divorce. Strangely, they got on better since they had come to this decision than they had for years, and sometimes Wexford hoped that this new accord might lead to reunion. They were still living in the same house, if on different floors of it, the old rectory being quite large enough to accommodate this arrangement. The children knew but showed no signs of minding while both parents were under the same roof. It would be a different story, Wexford thought, when Neil moved out.

  Or when there was someone else for Neil or for Sylvia? “An intervener,” as Stephen Devenish had called it, in another context. Dora took the attitude that while they were still together, nothing was decided, nothing was definite. But he, when he considered it quietly to himself, asked how he would feel about this pair if they were not his own daughter and son-in-law, the parents of his grandsons. If they were strangers, wouldn’t he perhaps think the best course for everyone’s ultimate happiness was an absolute separation?

  Sylvia was in the house when he got home that evening. He never mentioned the imminent divorce unless she did. She usually did, particularly when she could take advantage of the children’s being out with their father to list Neil’s manifold faults and sometimes, to do her justice, her own. But this evening she gave him an especially loving kiss when he came in and said she had something to tell him, she had a confession to make.

  Wexford’s heart sank a little. If her mother had been in the room, this couldn’t have happened. Neither daughter cared to shock their mother, knowing her tongue could be rough and her opinions strong. But they told their father anything. He was unshockable, or so they believed, and now he was afraid she was going to tell him she had a lover. Or had met someone who would soon be her lover. Or Neil had a girlfriend. Things of that sort - what else could a confession be?

  Something quite different.

  “Dad,” she said, “do you remember once saying to me that you couldn’t imagine me breaking the law?”

  “I think so,” he said guardedly.

  “Well, I don’t know if I have broken the law, but I may have covered up a crime.” She looked at him warily. “I can’t remember if I ever told you how, when I was first working for The Hide helpline, a woman calling herself Anne phoned. Her husband was out in the garden with the baby, she said, and then she saw him coming in and she was afraid of being found talking to me.”

  “Maybe you did. Very discreetly, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, well, that must have been last April. She was terrified of her husband, but like so many of them she wouldn’t leave. Her name wasn’t Anne at all, of course it wasn’t, they do give false names. Well, she phoned again but what she had to say was quite different. He wasn’t abusing her anymore, all that had stopped, she didn’t say why. She said she wanted to ask me about the law relating to - well, to abused women who kill their husbands.”

  “Go on.”

  “First of all I said I wasn’t a lawyer, I couldn’t help her. I said The Hide had the services of a solicitor - we have, she does it for free - who would advise her if she’d like to ring this number. And I was going to give her the number when she said she wouldn’t do that, she didn’t want that, all she wanted was to know what was the best excuse a woman could use if she killed her husband. Could she plead self-defence?”

  A gentle chill, not unpleasurable, ran through Wexford’s body. “So what’s this confession?”

  Sylvia looked at him speculatively. “I told her - what I knew What I’d learnt, that is, when I had my couple of days’ training for working there. I said that if a woman used a knife or a gun to kill an unarmed man or a sleeping man, she couldn’t use self-defence. And that was because no matter what he’d threatened to do to her in the future or what had happened in the past, the ‘criterion of immediacy’ for manslaughter - I remembered that phrase - wouldn’t be there. A jury might be understanding, but they couldn’t acquit her and she’d get life imprisonment because that’s the sentence that’s mandatory for murder.”

  “And?”

  “She said, but what about being provoked to it beyond bearing. I said to forget all that. The only thing was to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. In other words, a woman goes mad, picks up the gun or whatever, and loses control. You’ll always be stamped a criminal, I said, but you probably won’t go to prison.”

  “And then, a few months later, that woman I recognized as abused in the photo came up in court and pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and it all came back to me what I’d said. I knew then, I just knew Fay Devenish was Anne and I’d told her how to avoid a life sentence for murder. And my own father was the investigating officer in the case.”

  “I’ve wanted to tell you for ages, but I’ve only just plucked up the courage.”

  Wexford drew a deep breath. So much depended on when this phone call had been made. Stephen Devenish had died on the morning of July 29. “When was this, Sylvia?”

  “When was it? Let’s see. It was ten at night, I do remember that. The end of July, I think. The children’s school had broken up.”

  “When did they break up?”

  “I don’t remember. ‘Anne’ probably phoned on a Wednesday or a Friday, because those are the nights I usually work. I mean, there are exceptions, but there weren’t that week. I’ve checked. Dad, tell me, have I done some thing dreadful?”

  Seriously perturbed now, Wexford went to find last year’s calendar. He always kept calendars for a year or two. If “Anne” had made that phone call before July 29, it meant Fay Devenish’s attack on her husband had not been a reaction to his cutting her - perhaps he hadn’t cut her, perhaps she had cut herself - but premeditated murder, planned possibly for a long time. Wexford dosed his eyes, opened them, found the calendar in his desk pigeonhole, and took it with him, reading it on the way, nearly falling down the bottom four stairs.

  “Tell me, Dad,” Sylvia said. “Don’t keep me in suspense."

  “The twenty-ninth, when Stephen Devenish died, was a Tuesday. That was the day school broke up. Your punctilious mother has written it on the calendar. It must have been a Wednesday or a Friday when Fay Devenish phoned you, so it was either Wednesday the thirtieth or Friday, August the first.” He gave her a half smile. “You’re off the hook.”

  “Thank God,” she said, “but I did tell her how to get herself off the hook.”

  “I know. But by then he was already dead. Sylvia . . .”

  He went over
to her and took her hand. “There’s no harm done.”