Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  "Noticed what?"

  "Gillian Ferry."

  "What about her?"

  "Mrs. Ferry is a teacher at the school Edward and Robert Devenish go to. She teaches English at the Francis Roscommon School in Sewingbury."

  Wexford thought about it. "So she does. Is it significant?"

  "I don’t know. But it makes, so to speak, a double connection between the Ferrys and the Devenishes. Don’t you think it’s a bit odd?"

  It was a little after ten o’clock when Sylvia put down the phone. She had been talking for twenty minutes to the woman who called but refused to give her name. Thank God no one else had phoned in the meantime. She got up, went to the window, and looked down into the gardens. The bright windows of houses in Kingsbrook Avenue punctured the darkness. Lawns looked like strips of gray velvet and cypress trees like hooded figures. Sylvia thought there was nothing like hours of solitude working on the helpline for sharpening the imagination. She would so much have liked to tell someone what the anonymous woman had said. Griselda could be told, of course, or Lucy-Sylvia wasn’t a priest and it wasn’t the confessional— but Griselda was on holiday and overworked Lucy was probably asleep.

  It was her father Sylvia really wanted to tell, but she would only do that with Griselda’s or Lucy’s permission. Standing there, looking at the backs of houses where the lights were beginning to go out, she thought about her father, and how attentively he would listen and how wisely he would respond. If she didn’t feel much better about her husband, Sylvia thought, she did about her father. Another good thing The Hide had done for her.

  Reflected in the black glass, the door behind her opened and Tracy Miller came in, wearing a pink tracksuit and with her long hair pinned to the top of her head.

  Sylvia turned around and smiled, glad of some company. Tracy often came in for half an hour on her way to bed. Her children would have her up at six in the morning. "I’ve had such a frightening phone call, Trace."

  "One of them bastards wanting to chop your tits off?"

  Sylvia laughed. She actually laughed, which only proved how hardened you could get or how the passage of time softened the worst horrors. "Not a man. A woman. I want to tell you but I can’t. You know the rules. It’s absolutely in confidence."

  "I know. It’s only on account of they know that, they trust you, that the poor cows give you a phone at all."

  "Did you call a helpline before you came here?"

  "Me? I phoned all of ten times before I screwed up my courage and made the break. By that time he’d nailed up the doors on the cupboard so I couldn’t get at my clothes and cut up my shoes. I went barefoot for a week. Well, you know what he’s like. He scared you when he got over the wall, didn’t he?"

  Sylvia nodded. "She asked my advice and I gave it. For what it’s worth. I’m not a lawyer. I just remembered something I’d read and I said to be careful. If you’ve got to lie, lie. Was that wrong, Trace?"

  "Don’t ask me, love. What do I know? You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, that’s what I say."

  The crematorium chapel was no more than five years old, its walls paneled in fine hardwoods, its windows owing a good deal to Chagall’s designs for stained glass. The curtains, of dark green linen, had been embroidered by a local craftswoman with heavenly bodies, galaxies, and long-tailed comets, and the pulpit was a cylinder of polished steel with star-shaped cutouts through which light faintly gleamed. But for all that, it was a dismal place, cold, stark, and designed to hold more mourners than were likely ever to occupy its inlaid maple pews. Often the number was limited to ten, as was the case today, when his family and a few acquaintances came to cremate Stephen Devenish.

  A representative from Seaward Air, Wexford thought the man in a raincoat very like his own lost Burberry must be. The representative sat, looking uncomfortable, with a pale gray felt hat on his lap. Devenish’s PA Wexford recognized, a smartly dressed young woman in a black suit and very high-heeled, black patent shoes, sitting two rows behind him. It was extraordinary how ostentatiously the English avoided sitting next to anyone they didn’t know. Four seats from her was Trevor Ferry.

  Anyone may go to a funeral, it isn’t obligatory to be asked. But still Wexford was surprised to see him there. Had he come to rejoice and gloat or simply quietly to celebrate? Ferry didn’t look in his direction but sat staring at the abstract up on the wall that might have represented an angel or a tree of life, it was impossible to tell.

  Fay came in with her father and mother, Jane Andrews walking behind with Edward. That was the extent of the congregation. Devenish had had no parents living, but though he had a sister, she had stayed away. There were no flowers, and if any request had been made by Fay that, instead of flowers, donations should be made to a charity, no mention was made of such a suggestion. At one point the Seaward representative got up and seemed to be about to deliver some kind of eulogy of the dead man, but Fay touched his arm, whispered something to him, and he sat down again.

  No hymns were sung. Handel’s Water Music was quietly piped, some words from the Alternative Service Book were muttered, and the coffin was slowly drawn away to disappear behind the beige velvet curtains and to send Devenish’s body to the fire. Without waiting for any valediction, any closing of the ceremony, Fay got up and walked out, the small congregation gradually following her. The officiating cleric looked embarrassed. The music stopped.

  Outside, the Seaward man got into the black Mercedes that was waiting for him and was driven away. Wexford found himself walking down the long gravel drive in the company of Trevor Ferry.

  "That was a funny old carry-on," Ferry said conversationally. "Talk about a good-riddance gathering."

  "Is that what you’d call it?" Wexford said, amused.

  "Well, wouldn’t you? I suppose you want to know what took me there."

  "If you want to tell me."

  "I don’t mind, I’m not proud. The fact is, I’m a poor man—well, you know that. I’m unemployed and likely to remain so, I’m bored. I can’t afford cinemas and I certainly can’t afford to join clubs. I’ve got square eyes—that’s what they used to call it when I was a kid — from watching TV So I like to get out sometimes to whatever I can that’s free."

  "Like funerals?"

  "Why not? You can’t get in to weddings. Not if they’re any good. Besides, believe it or not after what’s happened, I felt sorry for the poor devil. He wasn’t so bad. It’s an outing, isn’t it? Sometimes I go down to the station and watch the Intercities go through."

  Wexford said nothing. It was raining again, a drop fell on his nose, and he could see the coin-size spots on the paving.

  "Anyway, I got to talk to you. It all makes a change. For instance, another thing I do, I’ve joined the Kingsmarkham Neighbourhood Clean Streets Campaign."

  They had almost reached the car park, where Donaldson awaited Wexford. He turned back and cast a look at the sugar-loaf-shaped crematorium, with its steel doors and glass cross on the top. "The what?"

  "Haven’t you heard of it? Groups of us are organized to go to specific areas picking up litter. Oh, you don’t get paid, it’s on a voluntary basis. But you get people to talk to, I’ve met some very decent people, and they give you midmorning coffee and biscuits. Tuesdays my day. The only drawback is you have to start so damned early, before eight a.m. on the green outside the Town Hall."

  Wexford was so astonished and at the same time so aghast that anyone would be in such desperate straits of boredom and idleness as to welcome this kind of diversion that it was some moments before he realized what Ferry had said. And when he did, and Ferry was saying he must be off before it started pouring, he had to catch the bus, Wexford said nothing at all beyond good-bye.

  That evening Patrick Flay and Monty Smith were caught burgling a house in Orchard Drive. Kaylee was not with them. The neighbors recognized Flay, or they recognized the intruder they saw cutting a pane of glass out of a next-door window, as the man they had once seen in a drunken brawl outside the
York Arms public house. Whoever he might be, they were sure he had no business gaining entry to their neighbors’ home and they dialed 999.

  It was eleven forty-five. The police came quietly, entered the house by the same means as Flay and Smith had entered it, and found both men in the master bedroom, putting jewelry and ornaments into a canvas holdall. Monty Smith said he was a law-abiding man who had been led astray by Patrick Flay. Flays wife had been putting Smith up since his girlfriend turned him out. Even so, he would never have done it if he hadn’t been thrown out of his home and left destitute on the streets. Flay said nothing at all but jumped out of the window.

  The result was that he broke one of his legs and, while Smith was driven to the police station, had to be taken away in an ambulance. Next morning, at the Princess Diana Memorial Clinic where he was in traction, he told Burden that apart from the one he had given Colin Crowne, he had sold two of his petrol bombs to John Keenan and two to Peter McGregor.

  "Who’s Peter McGregor?"

  "Chap who lives with Sue Ridley, next door to the Crownes."

  Burden had no comment to make.

  "Don’t matter telling you lot now," Flay said, "seeing as I’ll be going down for Christ knows how long. I never said nothing before on account of I was scared they’d get me."

  It all sounded highly unlikely to Burden. "How about that business with Kaylee and the cat flap?"

  "Before I’m sentenced," said Flay rather grandly, "I shall be asking for a number of offenses to be taken into consideration."

  "I bet you will."

  "I can’t talk any more now, I’m in pain. My leg feels like it’s on fire. D’you know, you’ve been in here an hour and you haven’t once asked me how I’m feeling?"

  Burden met Wexford for lunch in the Europlate. Wexford said three-quarters of an hour was all the time he could spare and he hoped Henri would get a move on. The big Glaswegian appeared as if on cue to tell them that today’s specials were soufflé pomodoro secco and osso buco à Porange. Wexford said to forget it. He’d have the pike and boiled potatoes and his friend the roast lamb.

  "Good choice," said Burden, and refrained from adding that he hadn’t been consulted. "Do you know, Jenny’s sister’s got an Italian friend who’s lived in Tuscany all her life and she’d never heard of dried tomatoes till she had some in a restaurant in Soho."

  Wexford laughed. "I met Trevor Ferry at the funeral." He told Burden about their conversation. "When I got back, I phoned the Town Hall—well, not the Town Hall at all, really, these days—the building that used to be the Midland Bank, which now houses Kingsmarkham Neighbourhood Clean Streets Campaign. What do you think they told me?"

  "That Ferry turned up at the rendezvous covered in blood," said Burden sourly.

  "Not quite that. They told me that the area covered on Tuesday mornings was Winchester Drive, Harrow Avenue, Eton Gardens, and adjacent roads."

  "So? Winchester Drive’s the nearest to Ploughman’s Lane and it’s still a good half mile away."

  "Right. I asked for a lot of details about the campaign. Apparently, people may work in groups or individually— that is, one man or woman could work a street on their own. And last Tuesday very few people turned up—the usual fate of this kind of enterprise, I fear."

  Burden considered. "You’re saying Ferry could have been left on his own and while he was alone slipped away up to Woodland Lodge?"

  "At any rate I mean to find out. Here comes our delicious Euro-grub."

  A bottle of sparkling water came too. Burden poured them a glass each.

  "Karen’s gone to Brighton to have another word with Mrs. Probyn. Or another ten thousand words. Barry and Lynn are at Muriel Campden, still hoping to find some evidence for Meeks’s assertion that he went out with that dog as usual on Tuesday. Or if he didn’t, they haven’t given up hope of finding someone who saw him out without the dog around half-seven."

  Wexford tasted his pike, nodded with grudging approval. "Not bad. The thing is, Mike, Ferry lied. He lied when he said he was in bed at eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, then, caught off guard, he forgot what lie he’d told last time and told the truth."

  "You mean he was definitely out with the Clean Streets people?"

  "The organizer remembered him. So few turned up, you see, that she remembered those who did. One of the others who did, by the way, was Shirley Mitchell."

  "What, the Shirley Mitchell who lives next door but one to the Orbe house?"

  "The very same."

  "Have you talked to her?"

  "Not yet," Wexford said. "But if she tells me Ferry disappeared once they got up to Winchester Drive, I’m going to have that house of his turned upside down."

  Arriving at the police station as requested, dead on time, Shirley Mitchell told him just that. She began with a preamble on the need to be a good citizen and the importance of what she called "community values." Litter was the scourge of the age and the principal destroyer of the environment. Wexford listened patiently. Then she said most people who volunteered to take part in the campaign "fell by the wayside." Trevor Ferry was one of them. It was her belief he only took it on for the sake of getting a lift up to the top of the hill to enjoy the otherwise unattainable view across the countryside and the Kingsbrook valley.

  He was always skiving off. They didn’t necessarily work singly, the idea was to work in groups, but when she’d worked in a group with Ferry, as often as not he disappeared. It was her belief he went off for a quiet cigarette, which he couldn’t do on the job, Kingsmarkham having a ban on council workers, paid or otherwise, smoking in public places.

  "Smokers are some of the worst litter offenders," she said. "A lot of people don’t know that. They say to themselves, what’s one fag end? Well, fag ends mount up. And they’re not bio-whatsit, they’re not destroyable."

  Wexford saw he had a fanatic to deal with. "But does Mr. Ferry smoke?"

  "Don’t ask me," Shirley Mitchell said sharply. "I don’t want to know about his filthy habits. You asked me if he was there when I was there and I’m telling you he wasn’t. We got up there in the minibus, just the four of us. He got Winchester Drive, I got Harrow Avenue, and the other two got the rest of it. Well, I had my tools ready and my bag—"

  "What tools were those?"

  "We have a pole kind of thing with a spike on the end, and you can have a smaller thing like a kind of—well, not a dagger, you wouldn’t call it that, more like a metal rod kind of thing with an end that’s been sharpened. You can picture it, can’t you, sharp so that you can stab something with it and pick it up."

  Silent for a moment, Wexford thought about Devenish and his wounds. Only a knife could have made them, not a spike with a sharpened end. But it was a strange business, far stranger than he had expected. Instead of saying any more, he asked her to excuse him for a moment and went outside. There he picked up the nearest phone and got on to Barry Vine.

  "See if the council got all their tools back last Tuesday, Barry, after the morning cleanup session. And if they didn’t, what was missing?"

  Shirley Mitchell was sitting in his office, staring fixedly at an object that had once, many years previously, been used as an ashtray. When he came back and took his seat opposite her, she pushed the ashtray a little farther away from her as if it still presented a threat.

  "So at what time would you say you last saw Mr. Ferry that morning? You met at seven-thirty, probably got going in the minibus at twenty-five to eight, got to the set-down point at—what? A quarter to?"

  "Bit before a quarter to. The set-down point’s in Harrow Avenue. That’s my patch. The others just went off with their tools. Oh, and Ferry had a bag he was carrying."

  Wexford felt his muscles tense. "What sort of a bag? A briefcase?"

  "I wouldn’t call it that. He always brings that bag. Like a canvas thing with sort of leather binding-correction, more like plastic binding. Brings his fags in it, I shouldn’t wonder, and maybe a bottle. I’ve seen him drinking on the job. I’ve s
een him eating sandwiches."

  She could even make this last sound like a crime. Wexford frowned a little. "So you didn’t see him for a while after seven forty-five. When did you see him again?"

  "When I got to the end of Harrow Avenue where it joins onto Winchester Drive. I’d got to the end and I was starting down the other side. He waved to me. You want to know what time it was? All of nine, if not a bit past."

  After she had gone, Barry Vine told Wexford that one of the campaign’s short spiked tools had gone missing on the previous Tuesday morning. The loss hadn’t been noticed until after the volunteers had been dropped on the green outside the Town Hall. Wexford sat down and reread the medical report on Stephen Devenish. He had read it at least three times before. It told him once again that Devenish’s wounds had been made with a flat-bladed knife with a blade eight to ten inches long. He had taken it for granted the campaign’s tool was cylindrical, with a sharpened point like a pencil. He would have to see one.

  But first he set about applying for a warrant to search Ferry’s house.

  "He could have got there in time," Burden said. "He could have done it on foot, walked to Ploughman’s Lane, up the path to Woodland Lodge, rung the doorbell, gone in, and done the deed by eight."

  "The time’s tight, though, isn’t it?" It was Wexford’s idea but he was dubious just the same. "It must have been exactly eight when he arrived, because Edward and Robert got to Mrs. Daley’s by five past. I wouldn’t call him a very fit man and it’s uphill all the way."

  "A gentle slope," said Burden. "Even a very unfit man can walk half a mile in fifteen minutes. Once he got there, he had all the time in the world. Stephen Devenish may have been killed at any time between seven forty-five and eight-thirty. He could have stood there arguing with him for ten minutes before he did the deed."

  "Wouldn’t Devenish have thrown him out the way he did Meeks?"

  "It’s not important," Burden said airily. "Besides, the conversation might have been amicable at first. Then they quarreled. Surely the point is Ferry could easily have done it in the time. He had the means, the opportunity, and the motive."