Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  "Now this doesn’t very often happen, not with Seaward, but it does sometimes, especially on the popular flights. The point about Amsterdam—Schiphol, that is— is that you can get a cheap flight from there to the U.S., I mean cheaper. Well, this chap wasn’t going to do that, he was going to Amsterdam for a dirty weekend or whatever, or he thought he was, only we were overbooked and something had to give, if you see what I mean."

  Ferry looked expectantly at the two policemen, apparently awaiting approval. Wexford gave it with an encouraging nod.

  "So we started making offers to the passengers. You know the sort of thing: give up your seat on this flight and take the later one—say in three hours’ time—and we’ll give you a free dinner at the Holiday Inn and a complimentary bottle of wine. Now one passenger accepted so we were left with two. Of course we upped the ante, and the other guy, not this chap, he accepted. But we were in trouble because, for some reason—plain inefficiency, I’d guess—we’d issued two tickets for the seat this chap thought was his.

  "I was called in—I was the Seaward manager then, of course—and I talked to this chap, privately like, took him into a room and gave him a drink. Everyone else was on board, waiting for takeoff. I knew there’d be trouble, he didn’t want the air miles, so off my own bat I offered him a hundred and fifty quid to take the later flight. Well, the upshot was that he accepted, he said he’d take the cash and have the price of his ticket refunded, so I agreed, but he didn’t take the flight, he used the cash to hire a chauffeur-driven car to take him to Harwich and go on the ferry over to the Hook of Holland."

  "Why didn’t he drive himself?" Burden asked. It was irrelevant but he wanted to know.

  "Liked the idea of the luxury. That was what he called it, ’the luxury.’ Apparently he’d never in his life been in a car with a driver, not even a bloody minicab, or so he said. Well, he got his car and his driver, but he never got to the Hook. The car was in a pileup on the M25 near the Dartford crossing, and him and the driver were both killed."

  Ferry looked at them with more animation than usual in his face, evidently proud of his dramatic tale.

  Wexford said, "Where does the threat or the menace to Devenish come in?"

  "I’m coming to that," said Ferry with the storyteller’s talent for suspense. He looked much brighter, less hang-dog, and color had come into his grayish face. "This chap had a sister and she was—is, I suppose—married to a very aggressive guy. Lives round here, this guy does."

  Wexford thought he could manage to sort things out fairly satisfactorily, provided Ferry categorized his principal characters as a "chap" and a "guy." "Go on."

  "Well, this guy knew the story; it seems the chap rang up his sister from Gatwick and told her the tale. I mean, he was full of it, over the moon, how he’d got this money out of the airline. I mean, I reckon he put it across as if he’d practiced some kind of deception."

  Ferry paused as his wife came in with three mugs of tea on a tray. The milk came in a quarter-liter carton and the sugar in a half-empty packet. There were no spoons so it was just as well none of them took sugar. Gillian Ferry left as quickly as she had come in. Handing out the mugs, her husband looked around for something to stand them on, but looked in vain, shrugged, and gave up.

  "Please go on, Mr. Ferry," said Burden.

  "Right. Where was I? Oh, yes. Now you understand there’s no question it was anything to do with Seaward, what this chap decided to do with the money. He chose to spend it on a chauffeur-driven car and the car crashed and he was killed. There was no way Seaward was responsible. You might as well say the airline caused the driver’s death. But this guy, the brother-in-law, and his wife, the sister, they didn’t see it like that. For some reason they picked on Steve Devenish and put the blame on him."

  "Because Mr. Devenish was, you could say, the boss of Seaward?" Wexford asked.

  "Exactly. The way this guy saw it, or the way I suppose he saw it—if you can say an animal like that sees anything—was that Steve Devenish made the company’s policy—which was only partly true—and that the company’s policy was to overbook flights and—well, ’bribe’ was the word he used—and put temptation in the way of people like his brother-in-law by giving them large sums of money that went to their heads and they couldn’t handle it."

  "Bit over the top, wasn’t it?" Burden said.

  "Out in the stratosphere," said Ferry. "But this guy came to Seaward office in Kingsmarkham first of all and Steve happened to be there. He made a big scene and threatened to sue. Steve didn’t think much of it and he even tried to ignore it when the guy forced his way into his office at Gatwick. That time he said he’d call the police."

  ’’And did he?"

  "Not so far as I know. He didn’t have to, Steve threw him out himself. He was a big chap, was Steve, as I dare say you know. Then he got a solicitor’s letter from this guy’s solicitor, whoever it was, saying this guy’s wife had a right to substantial compensation. Rubbish, of course. Seaward’s own lawyers soon put him in his place."

  Ferry took a mouthful of tea and set the mug down, making a wet ring on the coffee table. "Of course, when the death threats started coming, Steve should have got on to you, but for some reason he didn’t. D’you know what I think? I think he didn’t want any more hassle."

  "What d’you mean by hassle, Mr. Ferry?"

  "Well, he’d thrown the guy out of his office, hadn’t he? I mean, literally thrown him out. And when a great big bloke like Steve, in what you might call the prime of life, picks up a little guy like this guy and throws him onto his back onto a marble floor, if he doesn’t do lasting damage, he definitely causes pain. The guy said he’d broken one of his ribs. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But it was why Steve didn’t want you lot called in."

  It might be the Rachel Holmes story all over again, Wexford thought. You are attacked, physically or verbally, certainly illegally, but in repelling your assailant you injure him and, fearing repercussions, keep silent, or as silent as you can, about the original assault. There ought to be a name for it—how about the Kingsmarkham Defense? He looked up at Ferry and nodded just as Gillian Ferry came back into the room. She kicked open the door because her hands were full with books and papers—schoolchildren’s work to mark in the holidays?—but it seemed to Wexford as if she kicked in anger.

  "You mentioned death threats," he said. "You mean letters?" The tea was thin, weak, and tepid, and he wished a potted plant were nearby in which secretly to tip it, but there wasn’t. No green leaves flourished here. "Did you see any of them?"

  Ferry shook his head. "Steve told me about them. That was just before he told me Seaward were ’letting me go.’ Nice expression that, isn’t it? It’s what they call a UFOSOMETHING."

  "A euphemism," Gillian Ferry said in a rather sharp, schoolmistressy tone. It told Wexford a lot about her relationship with her husband. She felt she had married intellectually beneath her and it rankled still. Had Ferry attracted her only because once he was well-off and successful? And, finding this not enough, had she been trying to improve him ever since? Wexford said to Ferry, "Your contention is that the brother-in-law wrote these letters?"

  "Who else? Maybe it was his wife who actually wrote them. The guy could barely write, or so I’m told. Steve laughed it off. Well, whether he went on laughing it off I couldn’t say. I wasn’t there, was I? I’d been let go. The guy made phone calls too until Steve had his number changed and went ex-directory."

  It interested Wexford that of all the people he had talked to about Stephen Devenish, Trevor Ferry was the only one to call him by a diminutive of his given name. No one else, apparently, called him Steve. Yet this man, in spite of what he professed, had particular reason for bitterness against Devenish and could never have been intimate with him. Wexford found it hard to believe Ferry bore him no grudge. "You refer to him as ’the guy’ because you can’t remember his name?"

  "Oh, didn’t I tell you I remembered? His name’s Carl Meeks."

  This
was no special cause for surprise, but Wexford was surprised. He remembered Meeks from the various disturbances that had taken place at Muriel Campden, an undersized but fat man with a round face and loose lips, his wife one of those grossly fat women until recently rarely seen in any British communities. Burden had interviewed them in the hunt for Hennessy’s killer and Wexford recalled murmuring to him, in a paraphrase, "It is such fools as you make the world full of ill-favored children." But aggressive? Violent?

  That this man and this woman might be capable of the literate letter he had found in Stephen Devenish’s desk seemed questionable. The language used would scarcely have been available to them.

  "When exactly did you leave Seaward, Mr. Ferry?"

  "I like ’leave,’ " said Ferry with an unamused laugh. "It’s almost as good as ’letting go.’ I left in July, exactly two years ago, struggled to keep up the payments on my house, which, incidentally, was in Kingsbrook Valley Drive, Kingsmarkham—a nice part if you know it—failed, sold it for a lot less than I gave for it, and bought this dump."

  "So you don’t know if the threats went on coming after July two years ago?"

  "No, and he can’t tell you, can he? Maybe his widow can."

  At least we know he had a letter very recently, Wexford thought. He was rather surprised to hear Burden ask the name of the private preparatory school where Gillian Ferry taught.

  "The Francis Roscommon in Sewingbury."

  "Quite a distance," Burden said. He was remembering the plastic-hooded bicycles in the passage outside. "You no longer run a car?"

  "She gets the bus," Ferry said shortly.

  Fay took him out into the garden. It was one of the rare mornings of that cool, wet summer when sitting outdoors was just possible. When the sun was out, it was almost too hot, and when the clouds surged up once more and covered it, too cold. Three wicker chairs were arranged around a wicker table on the broadest area of lawn, under a mulberry tree, so that it looked as if they were expected. But Fay said the neighbors kept coming in. She made them tea and they gave her their condolences, though what sympathy they felt was due to her she couldn’t imagine, as most of them had been alerted by the police and the Social Services under Operation Hurt-Watch of her situation with her husband.

  The little girl, Sanchia, had a blanket on the grass, on which stood a glass of orange-colored liquid (or so it appeared from its dregs) that she had managed to knock over, an opened can of Coke, a packet of custard-cream biscuits and another of chocolate-chip cookies, and a welter of toys. It was a happy, comfortable mess and one that, Wexford was sure, Devenish would never have tolerated. Passing through the house with Fay, he had noticed that on only the third day after the man’s death it was already less immaculate, less tidy. At ten-thirty in the morning two wineglasses with wine dregs in them stood on a table in the living room, had certainly been drunk from the evening before and left there.

  "Jane’s gone back to Brighton just for the day," Fay said to him. "She was here last night and we drank—oh, nearly a bottle of wine between us. I’m getting sloppy, I haven’t cleared up." It was still necessary for her to make excuses for untidiness. "I don’t know what I’d do without Jane. I had to do without her for so long."

  She looked a lot better. It was strange; to anyone who hadn’t known what went on in that house it would have been monstrous. Her eyes were brighter, her color better, she even looked younger. Somehow he guessed that the clothes she wore, a short denim skirt, a top that was rather low-cut, had long been banned but never disposed of, had thankfully been put on now the censor and brutal judge was gone.

  "My boys are coming home today. I’ve missed them. It’ll be good to have them back."

  "They both go to the same school, I think you said?"

  "That’s right. In Sewingbury. Edward will be leaving next year to go to Oundle."

  "Don’t let them tire you out."

  "I don’t think I shall get tired the way I used to. The only thing is, I cry all the time. I just start to cry for no reason."

  "I think you’ve plenty of reason," he said, then, "Mrs. Devenish, do you remember the threats made against your husband by a man called Carl Meeks? Do you remember how he came to the Kingsmarkham office of Seaward Air, then to Gatwick? And your husband threw him out, allegedly injuring him?"

  She said, but without bitterness, "He was great at injuring people."

  "But you remember these incidents?"

  "He never said much to me about them. He didn’t talk about his work, but he did tell me about this man Meeks. He was proud of hurting him."

  "Do you think Carl Meeks could have sent these threatening letters? They threatened your husband’s life, didn’t they?"

  "He said he’d kill him, yes." She spoke dreamily, almost as if with a longing for some wished-for event. Then she said, in quite a different tone, "I loved him so much once. When we were engaged, he was so gentle and thoughtful. He hit me while we were on our honeymoon, but that was because he was jealous of me talking to a man in the hotel, and he was so sorry afterwards. Only even then, you know, he said I’d made him do it, it was my fault for being—for being flirtatious."

  Her eyes filled with tears. She made a little sound that was between a gulp and a sob, and Sanchia came over to her with the biscuit packet, an offering of comfort. "Mummy not cry."

  "Mummy won’t cry, darling," Fay said, and it was true, she had stopped crying. She put her arms around the little girl and kissed the top of her head. "I’m so lucky. Look what I’ve got, all my lovely children, and my health and I’m free, but somehow I keep crying. You see, I always loved Stephen, somewhere the love I had for him was still there. He tried to beat and kick and knock it out of me, and in the end he nearly did, but when I think of the love I once had, I cry. And it was true I was the only woman for him, the only one he ever loved, it was true. It was just that he had ... well, a funny way of showing it ..."

  23

  The builders working on the restoration of 16 Oberon Road were sitting on the front step, having their midmorning coffee break. So far, all they had done was put back the tiles that had come off the roof during the fracas led by the Kingsmarkham Six. The graffiti still remained, filth, pedo, and killer, among the decapitated bodies and the snarling animal faces, all done in red and pink and blue and yellow. The builders would leave repainting till last. Later in the day, unless it rained, which it looked likely to do, they would set about replacing the glass in the upstairs windows.

  They finished their coffee and were just having their second smoke when a van drew up outside from Kingsmarkham Borough Council’s Domestic Environment and Landscape Department. The logo on its side was of a female doll holding a spade and a male doll with a bunch of flowers. This reversal of what some would call the accepted order of things had taken place in response to the demands of the militant feminist element on the council. The driver of the van, who had long red hair like a teenage girl, and his mate, with an open mouth and protruding tongue in much the same sort of red tattooed on one wrist, got down from the cab and went around the back to size up the situation.

  Daunted by the now waist-high grass, the giant hog-weed, and man-height thistles, not to mention the iron bedstead, they came back to have a cigarette with the builders. The driver said it was a job for a JCB. All the department’s mechanical diggers were in use, so it would be at least three months before one could be spared to start on this garden, and in his opinion they would be lucky if they got it done by Christmas. There was the added problem of getting a JCB around the back of No. 16.

  From her second-floor window in the Muriel Campden tower, Rochelle Keenan was filming the four men on her camcorder. Kingsmarkham Council had just banned all its employees from smoking in public places, and Rochelle intended to produce her film as part of her revenge campaign against the driver of the van. She had had a brief affair with him a couple of years back while her husband was in Stowerton Royal Infirmary (about to be renamed the Princess Diana Memorial Clinic) h
aving a hernia operation. He had been the one to end it, and now when she saw him, he pretended not to know her. She watched him light another cigarette before sitting down on a camp stool one of the builders had produced from inside the house.

  John Keenan didn’t know about the affair, but he suspected something, largely owing, Rochelle believed, to the youngest Keenan child, Winona, having red hair. He said that as soon as he could raise the £300 it cost, he was going to get one of those home DNA-testing kits and find out for sure. To make certain of getting it right he had already tried taking a swab from the inside of Winona’s mouth, only the enterprise had come to nothing because the little girl had swallowed it. Rochelle didn’t know which of them was Winona’s dad and she didn’t much care. She was far more interested in her video and in getting the redheaded driver the sack or at least a severe reprimand.

  A stone’s throw away in Titania Road—"a stone’s throw" at Muriel Campden being more a fact of life than a figure of speech—Maria Michaels had a date with Miroslav Zlatic. He admired powerful women and had somehow managed to make her understand with signs but without words that he had fallen in love with her when he saw her put the shot that broke the police station window Their meeting planned for this morning was to be in the derelict house on the outskirts of Myringham, where Miroslav had taken Lizzie Cromwell and perhaps other young women as well. Leaving the despised Monty Smith in bed, Maria was off to catch the Myringham bus at the York Street stop.

  Wexford saw her as his car entered the approach road but he ignored her cheerful wave. Although not one of the Kingsmarkham Six, she was almost certainly responsible for a great deal of the criminal damage caused on the day of Hennessy’s death. The difficulty was that, along with other people’s involvement, he couldn’t prove it. Donaldson drove him the long way around, up Titania and along Puck, for the purpose of assessing what was going on, if anything. On the street sign the name of this latter road had once more been defaced. "I don’t know why they don’t rechristen it another name from A Midsummer Night’s Dream," he said to Karen Malahyde. "Call it Bottom or something."