Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  “I got your bed ready,” she said, “in the back.”

  “Taken my room, have you? You and your fiancé?” Into that last word he put infinite scorn. “I don’t want anything to eat or drink,” he said, as if she had asked.

  He picked up the suitcase he had left in the hail and went upstairs without turning on more lights to guide him. His daughter waited at the foot until he had disappeared. She opened the front door and looked out into the silent, empty street, the rows of houses, the tower and the banner, which swayed a little in the wind. When, on the stroke of midnight, the streetlamps went out, she closed the front door, bolted it, and put on the chain. Then she too went to bed.

  In the large, inconvenient, rather beautiful, and incompletely modernized former rectory where she lived with her husband and sons, Sylvia lay awake, worrying about The Hide. The woman who had come in that morning (yesterday morning by now) had taken the last room for herself and her children. What would they do when the next caller appealed for sanctuary? Only a couple of hours after that woman’s arrival another had rung and asked, with such hope and innocence, “Can I come and stay with you? Can I bring my baby?” And then, when Sylvia had asked for details of her problem, “Would I get a flat for myself and my baby?”

  Some had such optimistic expectations, others almost none. Some wanted no more than a listening ear, another human being to confide in, while there was always one who thought that once she had taken that initial small step - that vast, enormous, almost impossible step - all else would follow: substantial accommodation found for her, the law invoked on her behalf, the man who was the author of her troubles chastised, warned, and brought to behave as she had believed he would when first she threw in her lot with his.

  What became of the ones who phoned in but never went to the police or the Social Services? The one with the battered face, for instance? And what about the woman called Anne who had laughed that dreadful bitter laugh when Sylvia mentioned psychological abuse and who had sounded so terrified when she saw her husband coming in from the garden?

  What had been her fate when he confronted her and perhaps understood whom she had been phoning? Had he hit her again? Injured her again? And what of the baby she had mentioned? Where did that baby come into all this? It worried Sylvia, it kept her awake at night, lying beside the nice, kind, dull man she had ceased to love long ago. He was as likely to raise his hand to her, she thought, as he was to change into the interesting, exciting, and charming lover she had expected him to be when she married him. A lot of those abusive spouses and partners, “fiancés” and boyfriends, were charming men - considerate, and altogether delightful to all but the woman they lived with. Sylvia wondered why this was. She had asked her father what he thought when she called round last evening to collect Robin and Ben.

  “To throw a blanket of deceit over their true activities maybe,” he had replied. “Only you’ll think that so psychologically unsound I hesitate to say it.”

  “Yes, it can’t be that,” she had said in her dismissive way, “that’s ridiculous,” then wished she’d been nicer to him as she often did wish.

  He made considerable efforts to behave as if he loved her as much as he loved her sister. She noticed the efforts, but her awareness didn’t make her feel tenderly toward him. She thought he ought not to prefer Sheila. Why did he? She loved her two sons equally, she made no difference between them, for she genuinely had no favourite.

  He’d gone on talking to her as if she hadn’t snapped at him. “We’ve got a meeting set up for next Thursday. The ACCD and I, and a couple of people from the Regional Crime Squad and a woman called Griselda Cooper from The Hide. It’s to discuss methods of supplying those mobiles to women in need.”

  Confiding in her, she thought, making a conscious effort to talk about things he calculated she’d be interested in.

  “Do you know Ms. Cooper?”

  She observed the Ms., uncharacteristically used. A placating tactic, no doubt. “Well, of course I do,” she said sharply. “We haven’t got a staff of hundreds, more’s the pity."

  Now, lying wakeful beside Neil, she remembered her sharpness. She was too old for this behavior. What was wrong with her, anyway, that she couldn’t get on with her own husband and her own father? Her own mother, come to that. She was great with children. She was marvelous with the disadvantaged, the poor, the socially excluded. Everyone said so. Why not with her kind, forbearing father? And then a thought so daring and bold came to her that she sat bolt upright in bed. Hadn’t she always maintained, hadn’t she been taught this in therapy, that the proper thing to do in such circumstances was to “talk it through”? Why, then, not talk it through with her father?

  She said it aloud, half waking Neil, so that he muttered at her, “‘What’s the matter? ‘What’s wrong?”

  Talking to Neil of their differences had only ever resulted in his retorting that there was nothing to talk about, they were incompatible, that was all, but must remain together for their sons’ sake. She looked at him in the half-light of dawn, at his closed eyes, the frown lines on his forehead that never relaxed, then she bent over and gently kissed his cheek. He smiled in his sleep. That smile brought tears to her eyes and she thought, when he’s asleep, I still love him. She lay down again, close up beside him.

  A beautiful day, the first really fine day for a month. The sky was blue, the sun shining, and every blade of grass, every new leaf, every spring flower, bright and fresh, fed by weeks of rain. Wexford and Dora were going to London by train to shop, to visit the Bonnard exhibition at the Tate and in the evening see Sheila in the revival of Somerset Maugham’s Home and Beauty at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Because it was such nice weather, they walked to the station, discussing on the way whether they would have to leave immediately after the curtain fell in order to catch the last train or if the play would end early enough for them to have a glass of champagne with Sheila in her dressing room.

  Burden was in his garden. His wife had planted box wood all around a formal flower bed and now he had to decide how to trim it. To cut it square or up to a point? To turn each small bush into a ball? He doubted if he was capable of this last. Wasn’t it, anyway, too early in the year to cut it at all? Perhaps he should just trim off the bits that stuck out. He decided to leave it for now and mow the lawn instead.

  On the Muriel Campden Estate the street sign had been repainted and the loop in the P of Puck restored entire. It wouldn’t last, as Hayley Lawrie remarked to Kate Burton on their way to the Crownes’ house to ask Lizzie Cromwell to accompany them to the new shopping arcade in Myringham. Kate had just had her sixteenth birthday and wanted to spend the fifty pounds her father and stepmother and two half brothers had sent her for a birthday present.

  Lizzie, who hadn’t been to school since, her abduction and didn’t intend to go back, said she couldn’t come out because she was pregnant and had to rest. The two girls were astounded at her news, astounded, delighted, and somewhat overawed. Details were demanded. Who, why, and when? Lizzie had scarcely begun to answer when Colin Crowne came in, lighting a cigarette from the stub of the last one. He had overheard Lizzie say she couldn’t come out and, anxious to get rid of her, said what was she, simple or something? Of course she must go, it would do her good, they weren’t living in “olden times.” Kate, who fancied Colin, cast him languishing looks, of which he took no notice, having other fish to fry.

  When the girls had gone, he and his wife went down the road to call on Brenda Bosworth, the mother of three small children. The young Bosworths were out playing, unsupervised, in York Park with a number of other children from the estate. Colin and Debbie and Brenda Bosworth walked to the end of Puck Road and into Oberon Road where they rang the doorbell of Tommy Orbe’s house. Suzanne withdrew the bolts and opened the door but kept the chain on. This allowed it to stand about six inches ajar.

  “Where is he?” asked Colin Crowne.

  “What’s that to you?” said Suzanne.

  “Is he
inside?”

  “Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.”

  “We want a straight answer to a straight question.” Brenda Bosworth elbowed Colin aside and tried to get sight of the hallway behind Suzanne. “And that question is,” she cried theatrically, “where is the infamous pedophile, Thomas Orbe?”

  “Fuck off, the lot of you,” said Suzanne, and slammed the door in Brenda’s face.

  Undaunted, they went around the back, Colin first, with the two women following. The house was semi-detached, with a gate of wire netting on a wooden frame between the side wall and the fence dividing this garden from next door’s. Colin kicked the gate open and they walked through into the back garden. It presented a startling contrast to those on either side of it, both of which were trim, with neat lawns and flower beds. The Orbes grew nettles, thistles, and docks as luxuriantly as the next-door gardens grew tulips and wallflowers. In among the weeds, where the neighbours on one side had a birdbath, lay a rusty iron bedstead.

  Colin, Debbie, and Brenda took no notice of any of this. Having peered at the front window as they passed and seen that the curtains were drawn, they now made for the French windows. Through these they saw Garry Wills, the man they knew as Suzanne’s fiancé, watching television, and a yard from him, in an armchair, a much man who was doing nothing at all, just staring at the opposite wall. He was short and stocky, with a bloated, puffy face and iron gray hair, surprisingly long and luxuriant. The hands that lay slack in his lap were large and thickly veined, his nails as thick and yellow as hooves. He was dressed in gray flannel trousers far too big for him and a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt far too young for him.

  Debbie Crowne banged on the window. Garry Wills turned his head and scowled at her. The other man moved not at all but continued to stare straight ahead of him, even his hands remaining perfectly still on his bony knees. “We’ve seen you, Tommy Orbe,” Debbie shrieked. “We know it’s you.”

  “We know you’re in there,” said Colin, as if Orbe were hiding in a cupboard. “Don’t think you can get away with this.”

  Suzanne Orbe’s fiancé turned his eyes back to the screen. Orbe stayed immobile. He might have been a wax work of himself. At a loss how to act, Colin and Debbie Crowne and Brenda Bosworth walked away back to the front of the house where, in the street, they encountered two women carrying sheets of cardboard mounted on broom handles. One said PEDOPHILE GO AWAY and the other PROTECT OUR CHILDREN. The banner still rested, like a belt, around the waist of the tower. Colin persuaded the women to join forces with him, Debbie, and Brenda, whereupon the lot of them made their way into York Park where they collected all the children playing on the swings, seesaws, and climbing frames and brought them back, protesting, to Oberon Road.

  With the exception of Brenda Bosworth they assembled outside the Orbe house, chanting “Ban the pedo” and “Save our children,” to the tune of “Men of Harlech.” Soon heads appeared out of the windows of the tower and the neighbours came out of their houses to swell their numbers. Brenda Bosworth went back to her own house where she phoned the Kingsmarkham Courier. No one was in the offices except the woman who took the small ads, but she gave Brenda Brian St. George’s home number. Brenda phoned him and, showing some contempt for a newspaper that appeared only once a week, asked how she could get hold of Independent Television News. He would do that, St. George said, gladly abandoning his earlier plans to spend the day at a point-to-point.

  A train crash, owing to a signal failure on the line between Bath and Bristol, occupied the media that Saturday to the exclusion of almost all other news. Almost all, because at approximately the same time as the engine of the local train plowed into the last carriage of the Paddington-to Bristol Intercity a bomb exploded in a Belfast pub, killing no one but injuring four people. Therefore television and radio showed little interest in the Kingsmarkham fracas, and although both the Sunday Mirror and the Mail on Sunday responded favourably to Brian St. George’s frenzied efforts to get his story recognized as major, nothing of what he had written appeared in their pages on the following day.

  There having been a soccer match of international significance on the Saturday afternoon, occupying a television channel from three till five, most of the residents of Puck, Titania, and Oberon Roads, occupied in watching it, had no inclination to follow Colin and Debbie Crowne and Brenda Bosworth into battle.

  “A bit of a damp squib” was the comment of a peace-loving neighbour of the Orbes’, who had watched the Crowne-Bosworth activities and listened to the chanting for as long as he could bear it. But at five to three, just before the soccer was due to start, he walked around to York Street where he encountered two police officers on the beat, PC Martin Dempsey and WPC Lydia Wingate.

  They went back with him to Oberon Road and advised the chanters and banner carriers to go home. Colin Crowne argued with them, but not for long. The children who had been removed from York Park were whining about missing their lunch and noisily demanding food, so by three-fifteen everyone had departed or “dispersed to their homes,” as PC Dempsey put it.

  He and Lydia Wingate went into the tower and up in the lift to the second floor where they banged on the door of a flat tenanted by John and Rochelle Keenan. Martin Dempsey asked them to take the banner down. Expecting a refusal, he got meek acquiescence - John Keenan would have agreed to anything so long as he could watch the soccer - and by the time Dempsey and Wingate were on their way back to York Street, Keenan had sent Rochelle around to the neighbours and together they had removed the strip of cloth with its inflammatory lettering. On the corner, Dempsey looked back and saw to his surprise and gratification that it had gone.

  Not in all this time had Tommy Orbe shown his face at any window or door of 16 Oberon Road. Suzanne Orbe ventured out at four and came back three-quarters of an hour later with two carrier bags of shopping. The place was dead, not a soul about, for everyone was watching the match, including her father and her fiancé. Garry Wills left the house alone at seven to go to the pub, as was his habit, but instead of the Crown and Anchor in York Street, his usual venue, he thought it wiser to go farther afield to the Rat and Carrot, where no one knew him.

  The Sunday papers were full of the bomb and the rail crash. With her morning tea Wexford took them upstairs to his wife, who was having a lie-in after her late night, but first he checked that there was nothing in them about Orbe. A mile away, in the triangle of streets with the central tower, all was as yet calm. The banner had disappeared. The curtains in the front window of 16 Oberon Road remained drawn. At ten Colin Crowne was still in bed, sleeping off a hangover, the result of drinking round at Brenda Bosworth’s until the small hours with Brenda and her live-in lover, Miroslav Zlatic. Brenda and Miroslav were also still asleep, so the two small boys and the small girl had got up on their own, got their breakfast unaided, and taken themselves off to York Park with two little Keenans and three children called Hebden from Titania Road.

  Saturday had been one of the most enjoyable days of Lizzie Cromwell’s life. For once she had been feted and admired. Hayley had bought her ice cream, and Kate, having treated them all to lunch out of her birthday money, persuaded Lizzie to have a vodka and black currant to “build her up.” She had to look after herself now she was pregnant, they said. After several illegal drinks in a pub that boasted it never closed, they went back to Kate’s mother’s flat on the Stowerton Road, had fish and chips and mushy peas fetched in by Kate’s brother Darryl, and watched a video of L.A. Confidential.

  Lizzie hadn’t got home till nearly midnight. She expected trouble but none came, for, as Debbie said, “It’s too late for that, isn’t it?”

  And Colin said, “No point in shutting the stable door after the bloody horse has bolted.”

  Next day looked like being nearly as good, for soon after ten Kate and Hayley called for her with another girl whose name was Charlotte. This Charlotte, as well as being over six feet tall and stunningly beautiful, with red hair that reached to her waist, knew hundreds of boys,
including four who all had motorbikes and were coming over from Pomfret to meet up by the bandstand at eleven. The four girls all went down to the High Street and bought Twix bars and crisps from the only shop in the town center open on a Sunday, then they made their way into the park.

  The day’s promise was destined not to be fulfilled, for the boys failed to turn up. Lizzie and Kate and Hayley and Charlotte hung about the bandstand for a long time, eating their crisps and chocolate, and eventually lying down on the grass to listen to Lizzie’s account of the origin of her pregnancy. Each time she told this story she gave a different account of events, and by this time she had invented three possible fathers for the child. Hayley noticed this and pointed it out, but Lizzie said not to argue with her, she mustn’t be upset in her condition.

  When it was obvious the boys weren’t coming, they all got up and trailed back. Not the way they had come, for that would have brought them out into the High Street, but via the children’s playground, which was in that part of the park closest to the Muriel Campden Estate. A young Keenan and a young Bosworth were on the swings, another Bosworth and two Hebdens were on the climbing frame, and the rest of them were kicking a ball about. The four girls lingered and Hayley said she was going down the slide, she’d never dared to when she was little.

  Most of the houses in Oberon Road backed onto the park, but only those numbered between 14 and 19 actually overlooked the playground. Hayley, descending the slide for the second time, looked up and saw a man standing at an upstairs window, apparently staring at the children in the playground. It wasn’t No. 16 and it wasn’t Tommy Orbe, but the man next door but one at No. 18, the one who had fetched the police on the previous after noon. Tony Mitchell was six inches taller than Orbe and twenty years younger, but Hayley didn’t let these minor matters bother her. Descending with a whoosh, arms and legs in the air, she screamed out, “The pedo! The pedo’s up there, watching us!” The other girls took up the cry and so did the children, bored by now with what the playground had on offer. With Hayley in the lead, they started back for the Muriel Campden Estate, running now, and all yelling, “The pedo, the pedo!”