Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  A car drawing up made her turn around. She thought it was the RAC man, but it wasn’t. A white car and a woman at the wheel, leaning across and out of the passenger window to ask her if she needed help. Lynn nearly said she had already called the RAC, thank you very much, and he would be along any minute, but then she noticed that the woman was middle-aged and thickset, with unusually luxuriant gray hair. Tension gripped her, tautening her stomach muscles, and she forgot about not doing things on her own initiative.

  "I don’t really want to wait here for them by myself, though. If you would just take me to a garage. I’m a stranger round here but I’ve been told there’s an all-night one at the Myfleet exit. That would be very kind."

  Lynn had never before heard herself sound so naive and sweetly girlish. The woman pushed open the door and she got in, praying that the RAC man wouldn’t come until they were on their way. Then, sitting next to the woman who could be Vicky, who surely was Vicky, feeling really bad about the poor RAC man on his way to going off duty, maybe, and home to his family and his dinner, and who would come and find her gone, the car abandoned, and wonder what on earth had happened to her.

  This he wouldn’t guess, though. She burbled a little more to the woman about how kind she was and how awful it would have been if she hadn’t come along because she, Lynn, was terribly nervous about being out alone on a lonely road in the dark, one read such awful things. It was getting more likely to be Vicky by the minute, for she hadn’t even turned around to face in the direction of the Myfleet exit but was speeding up the bypass toward the Myringham turn. Lynn didn’t want to show anxiety yet, it wasn’t in keeping with her trusting and girlish pose. She had studied Vicky’s head, quite sure now that that thickly waved, dense coiffure was a wig, had had a good look around the car, had actually said what a lovely car it was, and now she was watching where they were going and telling Vicky the scenery was quite beautiful around here, she’d had no idea.

  Then Vicky said it, what Lynn had been waiting for: "By the way, my name’s Vicky."

  "Lynn."

  "Soon be at this garage of yours. Turn left up here."

  Vicky turned left, squeezing the car down a lane about as wide as Lynn’s double bed. The fronds on the high bank, hart’s-tongue ferns and dog’s mercury and lords-and-ladies, brushed wetly along the side of the car. Now was the time, Lynn thought, to say this didn’t look much like the way to the garage, that would be the authentic remark to make and utter in an increasingly nervous tone, but she didn’t make it and Vicky didn’t seem to notice.

  Where were they? On the way to Myringham by a tortuous back route? Certainly they were nowhere near Sayle and the Chorley bungalow, but by now a good fifteen miles away. But Vicky made her living house-sitting for people, didn’t she? There had been other Sunnybanks since Rachel Holmes, at least one other Vicky had cared for and in which she had entertained Jerry. She was going to one of them now, Lynn thought, with that little inner gasp and catching of breath that denotes excitement. She looked at her watch. Ten to ten. God, she didn’t want to have to stay the night, but if there was no help for it ...

  The car crawled through this narrow, wet, green tunnel of a lane, came out into a slightly wider road with a little spurt like a sigh of relief. The car turned left and Lynn saw in its headlights a signpost pointing to Myringham as five miles away and Upper Brede as three. Now was the time, she thought, to express anxiety: "This isn’t where I saw the garage."

  "It was closed," Vicky said. "There’s an all-night one at Upper Brede."

  Lynn didn’t want to sound too intelligent. On the other hand, excessive stupidity might arouse suspicion. "Will they have a mechanic, do you think, or just petrol pumps?"

  "They’ve a mechanic. Don’t worry. I’ve used them many times." She smiled as if she were looking at Lynn and not at the road ahead. "Now amuse me. Tell me about yourself. After all, I’ve put myself out to give you a helping hand, haven’t I? The least you can do is talk."

  Vicky sounded suddenly quite cross and indignant. It must be a cue, Lynn thought, for her to start being frightened. But she did as she was told, or an approximation to what she was told, and gave Vicky an account of an entirely fictitious young woman who lived with her parents in Stowerton, had been driving their car home from an evening spent with an old school friend—a girl, of course—in Kingsmarkham. She was nineteen years old and maybe Vicky would find it funny, but she hadn’t got a boyfriend. She worked as a veterinary assistant in Kingsmarkham, but that wasn’t nearly as grand as it sounded. It mostly involved clearing up messes and scrubbing floors! Lynn was proud of herself for managing to put a quite audible exclamation mark at the end of that sentence.

  "Exciting life," said Vicky.

  She had changed entirely in the short space of ten minutes. From friendly geniality she had passed through brusqueness to barely concealed sneers. And now, as they entered another lane and turned almost at once into the front drive of a large, well-lit, newish house, she said, rather in the tone an ill-disposed prison officer might use to a recalcitrant inmate, ’’All right then, get out. Don’t get any silly ideas, I’m right behind you."

  Lynn wasn’t much of an actress and didn’t know how the girl she was pretending to be might react in these circumstances. So she did nothing at all but obey. Like a bemused sheep she scuttled out of the car and up to the front door, which at the moment of their arrival was opened from the inside. Vicky gave her an unexpected push, and she stumbled over the doormat and nearly fell. Nearly but not quite. It was a funny thing to recall at that moment, but she remembered Wexford saying a miss was as good as a mile and adding that he was quoting the Duke of Wellington when someone took a potshot at him in Hyde Park.

  She only stumbled. She looked up and found her eyes meeting a pair of stony, flat, gray eyes in a curiously blank face. At first she thought the face was lopsided, heavier about one cheek than the other, but it wasn’t, it was an illusion. The man was a little taller than she was, thin, with receding dark hair and wearing a rather shabby pin-striped suit. He looked sad and as if he never smiled, never could, didn’t know how to make the requisite muscles work. Lynn looked over her shoulder at Vicky, who was just standing there, then back at the man who must be Jerry, and said what the nice little veterinary assistant would surely have said: "What am I doing here? What is this place?"

  "It’s useless asking," said Vicky, "because I’m not saying. Why should I? You don’t have a choice. You’re here and here you stay until I decide if you’ll do."

  "Do?"

  "Do for my purposes. Say hello to Jerry. Haven’t those parents of yours taught you any manners?"

  Lynn said hello to Jerry, who gave her a blank, silent stare in return.

  Among the hardware stores that sold paraffin none opened before nine-thirty in the morning. Vine had to revise his ideas about one of the troublemakers buying his paraffin on the morning the bomb was thrown. He began to think he was on the wrong track altogether, for petrol and paraffin were such common and generally used commodities that certainly 50 percent of households would have either or both accessible. But he had spent the day calling at ironmongers and hardware shops just the same in the hope, which turned out to be vain, that an assistant might tell him of a regular customer and frequent purchaser of paraffin.

  By the evening he was back in the Rat and Carrot, talking once more with Andy Honeyman. Vine found it hard to understand how someone could remember what another man said and recollect the circumstances in which he had said it without being able to describe that man. Honeyman must either be lying or totally unobservant, or forgetful to the point of amnesia, for he steadily denied any knowledge of the customer in the Rat and Carrot who had told Colin Crowne how to make a petrol bomb. Nor could he remember who else had been present, apart from Colin and Joe Hebden and Terry Fowler. Heavily pressed by Vine, he finally said that there had been a woman there he knew by sight. She lived in Glebe Road and he thought her first name was Jackie. None of this was of much
help to Vine, who went back to the Muriel Campden Estate and began questioning Colin Crowne and Joe Hebden and Terry Fowler once more.

  Colin had taken to his bed before the bomb throwing and the death of Ted Hennessy. What with the pain from his shingles and Miroslav Zlatic’s refusal to listen to him or even give any sign that he understood when Colin asked what the Serb intended to do to provide for Lizzie’s child, the stress had been too much for him, contributing to his malaise. On the following day he had been told by Kingsmarkham Social Services that their virtual babies were valued at £1254.80 apiece, that Jodi must be replaced, and they intended to recover that sum from him by whatever means were in their power. Colin knew that meant the County Court and maybe the bailiffs in. He didn’t want to get up when Vine arrived, but Debbie said he had better, so he came down in tracksuit pants and a T-shirt.

  Vine made him go through it all again, how he had only asked about making a petrol bomb out of natural curiosity. He was personally too law-abiding to have any inkling of these things, but he’d seen this bit on telly, throwing bottles that blew up and set fire to cars, and naturally he’d wanted to know how it was done. Putting in a good word for his neighbor, he said that Joe Hebden was of the same way of thinking.

  "But your natural curiosity didn’t take you so far as to find out the name of your instructor?"

  "My what?"

  "The guy who told you how to do it?"

  "I never asked him, did I? He put his spoke in. I never said to him, how d’you do it. I said it to my mate. He come along and put his spoke in."

  "What did he look like?" said Vine, who had asked this question before.

  Colin Crowne gave the same answer. "Just a bloke. Twenty-something, maybe a bit more, I don’t know. I wasn’t to know I’d have to remember, was I?"

  One of Terry Fowler’s sons opened the front door. The other was sitting with his father on a sofa, watching Crimewatch and eating taco chips. The Crowne home was far from immaculate, but this place was among the dirtiest and least cared-for Vine had ever seen. No one had cleaned it since Terry’s wife left him. Something was on the floor behind the television set that Vine, quickly looking away, hoped was dog turds but feared might be from a human source.

  But Terry was able, this time, to offer a scrap of help. He knew this Jackie woman through her sister, whose son went to school with his two. The sisters lived next door to each other in Glebe Road, but more than that he couldn’t say. The little Fowler boys then began talking without a trace of diffidence or shyness about another school friend, cousin of someone or other, a boy of six who had his own computer and who had been to Florida on holiday and visited Disney World. Vine thought this a long way from the point—they seemed to be traveling through the ramifications of a whole cluster of Kingsmarkham families— and tried to get back to the subject of Jackie. Terry said that he had once seen her in the company of Charlene Hebden, but beyond that he couldn’t help.

  The six-year-old Kim Fowler accompanied Vine to the door. He was what Vine’s grandmother called an old-fashioned child and he apologized for the dirty floor and the dust that covered everything. "Mum used to do it," he said, "but she’s gone away and left us so there’s no one done it. Dad says cleaning is for ladies, not guys."

  "Well," said Vine, "there are some guys called New Men and they do cleaning."

  "We haven’t got none of them round here." Kim stretched upward to open the door and just made it. "That Jackie’s got a girl called Kaylee, and do you know what her dad did? He put her through a cat flap so she could steal things. Only he didn’t go to jail because they couldn’t prove it."

  Tasneem came into the helpline room just as Sylvia was putting the phone down after her fifth call of the evening. It was half past ten, a pitch -dark night and raining hard. Sylvia hadn’t pulled down the blind and the rain hung on the window like a shifting, glittering veil of silver. By this time, and after all those disquieting or upsetting calls— one had been from a man with a fanatical manner and an Irish accent who had threatened to come and get her and do to her "what they did to the blessed martyred Saint Agatha"—she was always glad of a visitor, Tasneem or Tracy or the black woman with a name she hadn’t learned to pronounce correctly, or the newcomer, Vivienne.

  Tasneem stood at the window and gazed out through the water-drop veil at the wet, black night. Tonight, especially, there was nothing to be seen, but Tasneem often stared out there, looking, Sylvia knew, in the vague direction of York Street and the Muriel Campden Estate where Kim and Lee were.

  "You don’t happen to know anything about Saint Agatha, I suppose?" Sylvia said.

  "Moslems don’t have saints, Sylvia."

  "No, I suppose you don’t. It’s prophets you have."

  The phone rang. Sylvia said, "The Hide helpline. How may I help you?"

  "It’s my boyfriend," a voice said breathlessly, "we moved in together last week—well, I moved in with him. He’s always been so lovely, he’s a really nice guy, everyone says so, and he’s always been so gentle. Well, last night I was half an hour late home from work, the bus never came, and I didn’t phone him—are you there? Can you hear me?"

  "I’m here," Sylvia said. "I’m listening. Go on."

  "Like I said, I was half an hour late, and when I came in, he acted like I’d done something terrible, committed a crime or something, and he grabbed hold of me and said where had I been and who had I been with—it was only six-thirty in the evening, for God’s sake—and then he slapped me hard on both cheeks, wham, wham. I was so shocked, I could hardly believe what had happened except that I’ve got a really bad bruise on the left side. He said he was sorry, but then he said I ought to understand he did it because he’d been so worried."

  "Where are you now?"

  "At home, at my own place. I’d kept it on, thank God I did. He’s gone out for the evening, so I found this number on a card in a call box and came in here and phoned you. Look, I can understand he was worried about me— well, up to a point I can—but you don’t hit people because you’re worried about them, do you?"

  "Some do, as I’m afraid you now know. You said it all when you told me thank God you’d kept your own place on."

  "You mean I ought to stay here and not go back to him?"

  "You know it without my telling you."

  "If that’s what happens after I’ve lived with him for one week, what’s it going to be like after six months, is that what you mean?"

  Sylvia said that was what she meant and repeated that the caller knew the answers already, she just very naturally wanted reassurance and support. Putting down the phone, Sylvia told Tasneem what she had just heard.

  "Terry was like that, a really nice guy and gentle and all that. From a distance, that is. It’s when you get together it starts, when you’re all shut up inside alone with them. I’d like to do your job, Sylvia, it’d be doing something I really know about. Terry used to call me stupid, he said I was ignorant about everything but cooking and cleaning, but if there’s one thing I’m an expert in, it’s domestic violence."

  Sylvia took Tasneem’s hand and squeezed it. "You could train to go on the helpline, Tas, but it’s not paid and you’ve got your degree to do. Besides, once you’ve got your flat, you won’t want to come near The Hide again."

  ’’And I’ll get my boys back, won’t I?"

  "I’m sure you will," Sylvia said, though she wasn’t all that sure, but she couldn’t say any more because the phone was ringing again.

  The threatening Irishman once more. She cut him off before he had got more than three words out, but they were three offensive words and her hand on the phone was shaking. "Silly, I ought to be used to it."

  "There are some things you never get used to," said Tasneem with feeling.

  "No. I think I’ll tell my dad about this one, see if we can track him down."

  Griselda Cooper put her head around the door and said the roof was leaking in the northwest corner of the house with rain coming in through the ceiling. She’
d had to move Vivienne into Tasneem’s room, it was only temporary, and she hoped that was okay with Tasneem. Tasneem said she’d like the company, and Sylvia asked Griselda what it was they did to Saint Agatha.

  "Don’t ask me. Put her on a grill or tied her to a wheel, I expect, something disgusting, anyway. Why? Does one of our charming callers want to do it to you?"

  It was because she had made a bargain with her captor, Lynn thought, that she was spared the Rohypnol-doctored drink that had been given to Lizzie Cromwell and Rachel Holmes on their arrival. Lynn didn’t struggle or even protest much, she said her parents would be anxious and she became a little tearful, but if Vicky would promise to let her go in the morning, she would agree to spend one night there. Could she phone her parents?

  That made Vicky laugh. She didn’t even bother to answer but, looking Lynn up and down, said, "Those trousers you’re wearing won’t do. We’ll have to get you into something else tomorrow."

  But Vicky didn’t search her or even look in her bag where the mobile was. Vicky seemed to accept Lynn’s meekness and acquiescence as behavior only to be expected from an independent girl of nineteen, for Vicky, as Lynn soon saw, was an egomaniac of gigantic proportions. She didn’t observe or question or even have suspicions because she saw only herself, and saw herself as a figure of strength and power and rectitude. And, of course, she saw Jerry.