Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  Not believing it for a moment, Wexford said, "The temporary loss of his daughter may make a difference; it may have shocked him into changing his ways." Can the leopard change his spots? "But Mrs. Devenish," he tried again, "there is no need at all for you to put up with this treatment. What your husband does to you is just as much assault as when a man knocks down another man in a street fight."

  "I know. But he doesn’t. He says he loves me, I’m the only woman he’s ever loved. It’s his duty to ... well, chastise me. He says I need it or I’d go completely to pieces. He really believes that." Her voice, low as it normally was, rose suddenly to a shriek as her control vanished. "What will he do when he knows it was me took Sanchia? What will he do?"

  "Please try to keep calm. I do understand. I understand your predicament. I will be here, I will tell him. And the other officers will come with Sanchia and stay here." It all sounded so feeble, such a wretched compromise. He put strength and firmness into his voice. "Please remember what I’ve said. You aren’t obliged to put up with this. Next time he strikes you, get into your car and come straight to the police station. Will you do that?"

  She was crying now, shaking with sobs, as she had never cried when her child was missing. Wexford fetched her a glass of water. She sipped it, then took the glass back to the sink, rinsed it, dried it on a tea cloth, and put it away. The back door opened and the two boys came in from school. Their entry made a physical change in her. She sat up straighter, seemed to brace herself, managed a smile. But they didn’t speak to her and she didn’t speak to them. She got up and put cans of Coke from the refrigerator onto the table for them with a plate of biscuits and two packets of crisps. Would Wexford like tea? He shook his head. Both he and she jumped when the doorbell rang and she gave a little scream of fear.

  Edward said, "Come on, Mum, get yourself together."

  Robert went to the door and came back with Barry Vine, Karen Malahyde, a young child-care officer, and Sanchia. Both boys were shocked and silent. Fay Devenish said, "Sanchia," as if she were uttering an exclamation of despair. The child stared, put her fists in her eyes, turned her back on her mother, and buried her head in Karen’s skirt.

  "Someone make a cup of tea, will you?" Wexford said to the company, not daring to single out the young women.

  But the child-care officer complied.

  "Where has she been?" Edward said to his mother.

  "Don’t ask."

  "You and Dad, you’re crazy," said Robert.

  He took one of the crisp packets and walked out of the room. Barry handed round the teacups. Sanchia turned her head slowly, looked at her mother, stuck her thumb in her mouth, and squeezed her eyes tight shut. No one seemed able to think of anything to say. There was no conversation apart from Karen’s remarking that it hadn’t rained for a couple of days and the child-care officer’s saying in her bright social worker’s voice how much she liked the cuckoo clock and had it come from Switzerland. At that moment the doors opened, the cuckoo came out, flapped its beak, and said "cuckoo" five times.

  Another half hour went by and they had all had two more cups of tea before Stephen Devenish came home. Fay was the first to be aware of his car; she seemed to hear it before it could possibly be heard, as if some extra sense abuse and fear had developed in her picked up inaudible sound across long distances. She stiffened, sat rigid, then began to shiver visibly.

  "All right," Wexford said. "Stay there. Leave it to me."

  He reminded himself that the man didn’t know, no one had forewarned him. No doubt, strange as the whole concept was, monster that he was, he loved his child. Human beings were beyond belief strange creatures. Wexford didn’t wait for Devenish’s key to enter the lock but went outside onto the forecourt. Sanchia’s father was standing beside the black Jaguar he had just stepped out of, and when he was aware of Wexford, he turned and gave him his charming smile.

  "I have good news for you, Mr. Devenish," Wexford said in a low, steady voice. "Your daughter is found. Sanchia is home again with her mother."

  There was no mistaking Devenish’s joy, his unfeigned delight. He crowed with triumph, punched both fists in the air like some sportsman who has scored a goal or won a set. He took Wexford’s hand and pumped it up and down. He laughed with pleasure.

  "Where was she? What happened to her?" A less pleasant thought seemed to strike him. "Is she all right?"

  "She seems fine. Shall we go inside?"

  "But what happened to her?"

  "I’m going to tell you that. In a moment. And I am going to ask you to be very understanding and patient and tolerant, Mr. Devenish. Shall we go into your study? I want to speak to you alone. I’m sure you can postpone seeing Sanchia for ten minutes."

  Devenish listened with his back turned. He stood at the window, apparently looking out, while Wexford talked. Then, when he could stand it no longer, Wexford said, "Please sit down, Mr. Devenish."

  The man turned to him a face suffused with blood. Dark veins stood out on his forehead. He sat down on the edge of the leather sofa. "She’s not sane. She’s quite mad. I didn’t know she was mad when we got married, but I soon found out. It’s a blessing for her she’s got me or she’d just go to pieces. She’s a nymphomaniac, for one thing. Not with me, I may add, with everyone else but me. Still, what can you expect. She’s mad."

  Wexford was in a dilemma. He had no proof of Devenish’s violence, though he believed in it absolutely. But he couldn’t tell the man to leave his wife alone when Devenish would only deny he had ever assaulted her. "It’s not a matter of insanity," Wexford said at last, "but she certainly needs to see a psychiatrist..."

  "What are you going to charge her with? Kidnapping? Abduction? She ought to go to prison for life. I couldn’t bear that, I love her, she needs me."

  Instead of answering, Wexford said, ’’As much as anything, your wife is going to need your sympathy and your support, sir. Now you had better come and see her and your daughter."

  By this time Karen had told Fay Devenish that a woman officer trained about domestic violence would be visiting her and a child-care officer would be making regular calls. Fay said that after they had gone, her husband would kill her. Offered a mobile for getting rapidly in touch with the police or the Social Services, she said they already had three mobiles in the house and there was no point in having another. Sanchia crawled under the table and sat there sucking her thumb, but after about ten minutes she came out and climbed onto her mother’s lap.

  "What have I done to her?" Fay said. "Have I traumatized her?"

  "I shouldn’t think so for a moment, the child-care officer said. "She’ll be fine." But when Devenish appeared with Wexford, Sanchia started to cry. It wasn’t ordinary crying but sustained screams, pumped out hysterically. Fay sat with her head bowed, holding Sanchia around the waist but making no attempt to quiet her. Her husband walked over to Fay, stood beside her chair, laid a hand on her shoulder. Fay didn’t move. The child continued crying, sobbing now.

  "All right, darling, I know all about it," Devenish said. "It’s not so terrible. We’ve got her back and that’s all that matters."

  Fay looked at Wexford and asked if he was going to arrest her.

  "We’ll have a talk about that tomorrow," he said.

  There was nothing more to be done, but he had never before left a situation with such reluctance. He told himself not to be melodramatic; above all, not to imagine he was leaving her to her death. Devenish would be chastened, he would know he was being watched. It was absurd to feel that the moment Wexford, Vine, and the two women were out of the house, Devenish would turn upon his wife and strike her, knock her to the ground.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t over, the man would never change. Fay would again have her face punched and her eyes blackened, perhaps her bones broken, maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but next week or the week after. It would never cease until she left him or he killed her. And if she left him, he would pursue her. Wexford had never felt so powerless.


  Next day he went back as he had promised and he did see her without Devenish. The woman officer from the Regional Crime Squad had called earlier, she told him. Fortunately, her husband had left at eight-thirty for the Brighton office. DS Margaret Stamford had offered her a pager as well as a mobile, which she had refused, presented her with all sorts of options for accommodation and support if she left her husband, and told her about The Hide helpline. Nothing more had been heard from Kingsmarkham Children’s Department, and that Fay Devenish felt was a relief.

  "They won’t take Sanchia into care, will they? I don’t know why I say that, really, it might be the best thing for her if they did take her into care."

  "Mrs. Devenish," Wexford said, "you are not to be charged with any offense. Indeed, the only offense you could be charged with is wasting police time, and preparing such a case"—he smiled reassuringly—"with all the paperwork would waste more police time. I would just like to reinforce what DS Stamford said to you. We can’t prosecute your husband unless you are prepared to give evidence against him, and you’ve said you aren’t. I would urge you to think again, and if there are any more assaults, to be in touch with us as soon as possible. You can phone at any hour of the day or night. Do you understand that?"

  She nodded. "Of course," she said, "of course I will," and he knew she didn’t mean a word of it.

  So he went away and left her, but his thoughts refused to abandon her. She was with him all the rest of that day and the next, and the next. He kept thinking of ways he might act to stop it, post a man to watch the place by day and another by night, lurk outside the windows to catch Devenish when next he attacked her. It wasn’t practical, it wasn’t possible, he hadn’t the manpower. He waited for a phone call, not from her—that he was sure would never come—but from someone, even one of her sons, who had found her mutilated or dying or dead.

  It was beyond his imagination to picture what scenes ensued after he had gone and she was alone with Devenish. Or perhaps it was only that his mind flinched from it. She was so small and frail, and Devenish such a big, burly man who must be twice her weight. And the terrible thing was that Devenish had a right to be angry with his wife for what she had done, taking away his child, deceiving him, lying to him and her sons. But no one had a right to vent his anger against someone else with savage treatment and blows.

  "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 headlines. 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.

  19

  Down in Brighton, Louise Sharpe twice attempted suicide. The first time, she left her six-bedroomed, threebathroomed 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 antenatal 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 t
o 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.