by Ruth Rendell
Burden looked at him and didn’t say anything.
"I don’t know why he did or where he took her or where she is now, but I believe she’s safe and that he’s hidden her."
"I suppose I’ve been thinking the same thing," Burden said.
"He blusters too much, he cried. Maybe it was pretend crying, as the children say. I didn’t see any tears. Sometimes he seems upset about his daughter’s disappearance and at others he doesn’t seem to care."
Burden nodded. "Hidden her with someone? You must mean that."
"First of all," Wexford said, "I considered a girlfriend. He’s good-looking, he’s young, he’s well-off. His wife looks older than her age and she looks tired. And he goes on too much about his happy marriage. The existence of a girlfriend wouldn’t have surprised me."
"You mean he was planning to leave his wife for this girlfriend but wanted to keep the child? The child is hidden with her in some secret hideaway he can afford because he’s rich?"
"Something like that. But there is no girlfriend, Mike. Someone among the dozens we’ve talked to would know of it if he was having an affair. I know everything there is to know about him, I even know he met his wife at a staff Christmas party when he was chief executive at Southern Cross Rail Link and she was the chairman’s PA. There’s not a breath of scandal about him. He’s never even been known to have lunch with a woman. One of the ticket-desk managers at Seaward was sure that if he spent a night a year away from his family, that was the maximum and then only because he was absolutely obliged to attend a meeting in Brussels or Frankfurt.
"He goes to sung eucharist at St. Peter’s on Sunday mornings, the whole family goes. He never misses parents’ evenings at the boys’ school, and he frequently takes them to sports events. He gave his wife a sapphire-and-diamond eternity ring on her thirty-fifth birthday and a car on her thirty-sixth a week or so ago. She may look old and tired—sorry to sound so callous—but he loves her." Wexford wiped his mouth on the EU logo. "He seems to be one of those rare men who are totally monogamous, not from necessity or prudence but by inclination."
"I assure you I’m monogamous by inclination," said Burden hotly.
"You know what I mean. He wouldn’t even fancy a woman he saw in the street. In other words, he doesn’t commit adultery in his heart. He’s a devoted husband. Do you want another coffee?"
"May as well. But this saint you’re describing kidnapped his daughter, who is incidentally also his beloved wife’s daughter?"
"He’s not a saint. Saints aren’t arrogant and superior and insensitive to the feelings of others, and he’s all those things," Wexford said. "The kidnapper, as you call him, was well enough known to the child for her not to cry out when she saw him. He knew exactly where she was. He had no need to break into the house because he was already in it." Wexford signaled to the waitress, holding up the empty blue-and-yellow coffeepot. "He drove her away in a car Mrs. Wingrave opposite didn’t recognize and therefore assumed to be a stranger’s. She didn’t recognize it because it was the car Devenish had given to his wife only two days before."
Burden looked unimpressed. "Right, and where did he take the child in his wife’s new car?"
"Not to a relative or a friend. Not to a girlfriend. That car’s being gone over now. Peach and Cox went up there first thing and brought it back here. According to Mrs. Devenish, it hasn’t been driven since it was given to her. She hasn’t been out of the house since Sanchia disappeared. So we shall soon see." Wexford filled their two cups with fresh coffee. He picked up a Danish pastry crumb with a nut on it off the plate and put it in his mouth. "Sanchia would have sat up in that car, she wouldn’t have been lying in a cot, she’s nearly three."
"In which case she should have been strapped into a child seat."
"I dare say he didn’t bother about that. God, how irrelevant can you get? It doesn’t matter whether she was in a child seat or not, she was there and must have left traces of herself behind—hairs, fluff from her clothes, fingerprints. Now, he wouldn’t dare be away from the house for long in case his wife woke up. He’s the one who takes sleeping tablets, not she, though I don’t suppose he took one that night. So I think he only drove Sanchia a short way and was met by someone else in a car, an accomplice, who took her from him and drove her to wherever she now is. "
"Not in the river or a grave, we hope," said Burden.
"Who knows? He came down here in a taxi and he came in rage and despair. He put his head down on the kitchen table and wept. People weep from rage and despair and remorse though, don’t they? Not simply from grief. "
Entering the police station, they met PC Dixon, whose golden curls had been even more rigorously trimmed since the smuggling out of Orbe. He had been much embarrassed by the taunts of Colin Crowne and Monty Smith, even more than he was by the inquiry frequently put to him as to how were things in Dock Green. He said to Wexford, who was taking off the plastic mac, "I’ve been looking for you, sir. I think you wanted to know the whereabouts of your raincoat. It never left the estate. I gave it to Jim Donaldson while he was parked in Titania Road waiting for you."
Just before midday Barry Vine called at the last petrol station on his list. This tiny place in the middle of the village of Bredeway was designed to blend in, insofar as this was possible, with its rural surroundings. Its two pumps were painted green, there were tubs of azaleas and pansies on its forecourt, and the building itself had a thatched roof. The proprietor, who was inside at the till, presiding over a counter filled with Snickers bars and Polo mints at one end and CDs and Disney videos at the other, asked Vine if he liked the setup and described it as environmentally friendly. Vine hadn’t much hope of the place but he said he was looking for someone who might have come in on the previous Friday, quite early in the morning, before eight at any rate, and brought a vessel to be filled with petrol, some sort of can, perhaps, or bucket.
"You mean their car had run out of juice on the road somewhere?"
"Maybe. That would be the reason they gave."
The proprietor asked a lot of questions, called to his wife, who was around the back, asked her questions, offered Vine a selection of theories, and finally said that it couldn’t have been the Bredeway Garage because they didn’t open before eight-thirty in the mornings.
Vine went back to Kingsmarkham and picked up DC Archbold. The two of them started on the second phase of the project, calling on hardware stores that sold paraffin.
The doors of the big double garage stood open. Both cars were gone, Devenish’s and his wife’s. The front lawn was covered in red petals, the blossoms fallen from the chestnut tree. Wexford rang the bell and, when no one came, rang it again. A casement opened upstairs and Fay Devenish put her head out.
"May we have a word, Mrs. Devenish?"
She didn’t want to let them in, you could tell that, but she didn’t know how to refuse. The inability of most ordinary middle-class people to say no was an enormous advantage to the police, Wexford often thought. One of the claims of psychotherapy was that it taught patients that it wasn’t necessary or desirable for their egos and their peace of mind always to accept. Saying yes was propitiatory, a weak desire to placate and ingratiate. He sometimes wondered what would be the effect on police work if a generation grew up briefed to turn down requests and invitations.
Fay Devenish manifestly wasn’t one of them. She didn’t quite say how nice it was to see them, but she hovered on the brink. Her husband had gone in to work just for the morning. Would they care for coffee or tea? Would they mind sitting in the study because she hadn’t yet "done" the living room? She was in housewife’s garb to the extent that Wexford hadn’t seen for forty years. An old-fashioned wraparound overall covered her blouse and skirt, and her head was tied up in a turban made from a red-checked duster.
Her face was pale and shiny, untouched by makeup. Presumably, the lipstick and powder and mascara would go on after the housework was done and her husband due home. Yes, she would dress and paint, and
set her hair like a wife in a fifties magazine advertisement. ("Always be fresh and neat for him, and put on something pretty when he comes home after a hard day’s work.") Then he reminded himself that her little child, her only daughter, her three-year-old, was missing, and it gave him a shock; all this was so inappropriate.
They went into the study where, at his last visit, she had been lying on the leather sofa. Now she sat down on the edge of it and looked at them expectantly. She so nearly fitted the description he had given of her to Burden, tired and looking older than her age, that for a moment he had asked himself what on earth a clever, handsome, wealthy, and successful man like Devenish saw in her. Her face was prematurely lined and her eyelids drooped. What would she look like at fifty?
"Mrs. Devenish," he began, "I believe you know we’re examining your new car, subjecting it to certain laboratory tests. You haven’t driven it yourself, but could anyone else have done so?"
"I wouldn’t lend my car to anyone," she said in her soft, almost childish voice.
"Not even to your husband?"
He thought she winced—but why would she? "My husband has his own car. He wouldn’t need to drive mine."
"I think you have a friend called Jane Andrews," said Burden.
She hesitated. "I used to have."
"But not any longer?" Wexford watched her face for a sign of dismay or concealment, but there was none. "What broke up the friendship? Do you mind telling us?"
"We grew apart. Friends do."
"How did you meet in the first place?"
Her sudden distress was unexpected. "Why do I have to tell you all this? What’s it got to do with my little girl?"
"When did you last see Miss Andrews, Mrs. Devenish?"
"Years ago. Six or seven years." Suddenly she grew voluble. "You ask how we met. We did a business studies diploma at the same time. Seventeen years ago now. The fact is that my husband dislikes her. He disapproves of her; she’s been married twice and divorced twice, you know." She must have become aware of their puzzled looks. Was a friend’s complex marital history a reason for breaking a friendship? "I don’t think it’s possible in a marriage to keep a friend if the other one doesn’t like them," she said, sounding confused, "not whether it’s the husband or the wife, do you?"
"I’d like to go back to the night Sanchia disappeared, Mrs. Devenish."
Wexford looked at her in silence for a moment. With her old-fashioned ways and her antiquated ideas of marriage, her housewife’s uniform and her nervousness, a fear of an unspecified something that seemed to pervade her, she was a mystery, and as he had said to her husband, he liked mysteries to be solved. Fear, when it is lived with daily, abates only to a certain extent and then not for long, eats up its victim, ages her and wears her out, may drive her mad, kills her before her time. He had seen it happen before.
"You don’t strike me," he said, "as a person likely to be a heavy sleeper. Of course I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, but I would say you were rather tense, very often on edge, while your husband presents on the whole a picture of a calm, steady man under his own control. Yet you and he tell me that he is the one who takes sedatives at night, not you."
She tried a laugh. It was a pitiful, strained sound. "I may not look a sound sleeper, but I am."
"He was drugged and you’re a sound sleeper, so neither of you heard your little girl taken from her room and brought down the stairs, necessarily past your door. Remember that we know now there was no question of her being carried out through the window. She was brought along past your door and down the stairs."
"Most mothers," put in Burden, "well, most parents, become light sleepers through being habituated to waking in the night when babies cry or children call out. It takes years to change that and maybe only changes after the children are grown up if at all."
"But you’re not one of those parents, though you’ve had three children?"
"I heard nothing. I slept."
Leaving, Wexford turned back and said almost casually, "What age is your older son, Mrs. Devenish?"
"He’s twelve."
"Ah, yes. He looks older. So many of them do these days. Long way off driving a car yet, then?"
She hesitated. "He’s tried driving a car—well, round the front here and in the drive. That’s not illegal, is it? On private land?"
"No, that’s not illegal, Mrs. Devenish."
"They all want to drive, you know, and Edward’s so big."
As they were leaving, she said suddenly, surprising them, "It was dreadful about that poor man, that policeman, it was such an awful way to die."
The report on the white VW Golf, Devenish’s birthday present to his wife, confirmed most of what Wexford had expected. No fingerprints were on the steering wheel, which still held shreds of the polythene wrap that had protected it when new. The prints of five people, Devenish’s, his sons’, Fay Devenish’s, and those no doubt of the man who had delivered it to the showroom, were all over the interior. There was nothing remarkable about that.
Explicable only if Sanchia had been in the car was the presence of baby fingerprints and three fair hairs from the head of a small child. But did this mean she had been taken away in it on the night of her disappearance? Sanchia too had doubtless been among the admirers of the new car, had clambered all over the backseat while her brothers sat in the front and played with the gadgets, her mother uttered her pleasure and gratitude, and her father stood benignly by.
"Can you think of a single reason why Devenish would abduct his own child?" Burden asked over a quick drink in the Olive and Dove. "What’s his motive? What could he possibly get out of it? I mean, if there was another woman involved and he saw himself as having a future with this other woman, I could just about imagine him putting the child into her keeping so that when he and and his wife divorced and Fay got custody of the kids, he’d have Sanchia. I can just about imagine it, but even so it’s full of holes."
"Besides, if he did all that, what chance would he actually have of getting away with it?" said Wexford. "Precious little. If Sanchia wasn’t found beforehand, once he moved in with this woman, she would be. And there is no woman, or if there is, he and she have been to such elaborate pains to conceal her existence as is only compatible with their having been planning this abduction since the affair began."
Burden stared into the sparkling creamy head on his bitter like a clairvoyant looking into a crystal ball. "You know something? I don’t believe in those threatening letters. I think Devenish invented them in a clumsy effort to put us off investigating him. If he’d had them, why not keep them? Why not, at any rate, keep one? All that stuff about the letters being particularly literate, the biblical-sounding bit, that was just put in to make us think him a discerning person who’d know good prose when he saw it."
"You may be right. If we only knew why Sanchia was taken, we’d be a long way toward finding her. There’s no motive for taking her nor for hiding her. No reason for taking the child from her home and torturing his wife in the process. I can see how, the mechanics of it I mean, but no matter how hard I try to imagine it, I can’t come up with why."
"And can you come up with why some villain would want to kill Ted Hennessy? For nothing. For simply refusing to understand facts that had been explained a hundred times. Can you? I can’t."
15
When her car broke down on the old bypass, Lynn had given up thinking about her entrapment of Vicky. After all, she had made several more attempts after the strange experience with the threesome couple, and all had come to nothing. Vicky, she now believed, had gone to ground, had abandoned this curious plan of hers to recruit young women to do her housework—if that had been her motive—and settled down to life with or without Jerry in her own home wherever that might be. Besides, Lynn was starting to feel guilty. She shouldn’t have embarked on this enterprise without permission.
On her way back to Framhurst home from work she had called in on Laura Hennessy. Laura wasn’t a friend of hers and Ted
hadn’t been a friend, but they had worked together and Lynn had liked him and, besides, it was such an awful tragedy and, as she put it to Laura, such a waste. Two small children were left fatherless, there was a big mortgage outstanding on the house, and if that would be covered by the compensation, it was still a worry. Lynn left the semidetached house in Orchard Road in a dismal frame of mind, thinking what a hazardous occupation hers was, what risks she and her fellows daily ran and how little thanks, or indeed respect, they got for it.
There is no moment convenient for one’s car to break down, but some moments are less maddening than others. It shouldn’t happen on a dark, wet night when one’s boyfriend is away on business, one’s contemporary and fellow officer has been burnt to death, and there seems no one in the whole world worth talking to. A consolation was that when the engine simply died, the Fiesta wasn’t in the fast lane but far over on the left and no other traffic was on the road in either direction. It died, the car slowed down and seemed to collapse hopelessly, though of course it was all in one piece and all that had happened was that it refused to go. Lynn tried everything to make it start, but it wouldn’t. She wasn’t mechanically minded. She blessed the absence of traffic on the road—a lorry passed her and then a motorbike—because she didn’t want help from others. The only thing to do, the obvious thing, was to call the special number she had for the RAC. They would come as soon as they could and that might be very soon, in no more than ten minutes.
The rain had stopped and a misty orange moon appeared. Afterward Lynn blessed the fact that she hadn’t dropped her mobile onto the seat before she got out of the car. It was the merest chance that she didn’t do this because she couldn’t imagine needing the phone while simply standing outside the car to breathe the fresh night air and waiting for the RAC man. Probably it reflected her police training never to be separated from her phone.
The hazard lights on the Fiesta still worked though the motor didn’t. They flashed on and off, on and off, in the darkness. The trees, the dense woods along both sides of the dual carriageway in this section, made it dark and mysterious and, strangely on a wet road at night, beautiful. For the endless rain, the torrential or drizzling or misty or steady rain, the relentless daily rain, had fed these beeches with their feather fronds, these long-leaved chestnuts, these limes and hornbeams and oaks, so that they were greener than Lynn had ever seen them, greener and lusher and fresher and more luxuriant. It took her car breaking down to make her appreciate trees, she thought, and she moved to the woodland edge to look down the aisles between the trees where the rain dripped from glossy leaves, brilliant emerald in the pale moonlight.