by Ruth Rendell
“I don’t know how,” Lizzie said innocently. “He sort of touched me when he didn’t think she was looking, but she must have been looking. It must have been that. She went bonkers. Will I lose my baby?”
“I shouldn’t think so for a moment. Babies aren’t lost so easily. Is he going to leave Brenda and set up house with you when it’s born?”
Lizzie shook her head. “He can’t talk, can he? All he ever said was ‘Leezee, Leezee.’ How would I know what he’s going to do?”
Wexford reflected that Miroslav had got it made. Who knew how many other young women he had taken to the derelict house and made love to in silence? No doubt he had no intention of ever learning English. “And now we know all about you and Miroslav and your baby, perhaps you’ll tell me what really happened in the pretty white bungalow you liked so much at Sayle. Did you do those people’s housework? Sew for them and cook for them?”
She nodded, looking down again, apparently contemplating the scratches on her knees.
“Vicky and Jerry. They said to you that if you told what had happened to you, they’d seek you out and punish you. Is that right?”
Again that slow nodding. But he could tell that his guesswork and the conclusions he had drawn had deeply impressed her. How had Brenda intuited what had happened between her and Miroslav? How, equally; had he, Wexford, got it all so effortlessly right? As if he had been there, as if he, alone of all men, could speak Miroslav’s own language. The look she gave him now was wondering, even respectful. Innocent, naive, and slow, she was unlike most of her kind in that she admired, and admired reverently, intelligence in others.
“They won’t punish you, Lizzie, they can’t. I won’t let them. The best way you can help me to stop them is by telling me everything you can remember.”
She said nothing, but the admiring look didn’t change.
“There’s a little girl missing, Lizzie. You know that, that’s why you were out on the green with all the others, but perhaps you don’t know that she’s not yet three years old. Tommy Orbe hasn’t got her, that was all nonsense that someone made up. They made it up because they were afraid of him. He’s gone away now and the little girl is still missing. Do you think Vicky and Jerry have got her?”
“She couldn’t do housework,” said Lizzie.
“True. But that wasn’t all you did, was it?”
“He never did any of that to me, not like Miroslav did.”
“No, all right. I understand that. Why did they let you go?”
“I wasn’t right. I didn’t do any of it right. I can do hoovering but I can’t cook or mend things. Vicky said, ‘You’re stupid, you won’t do.’ And she brought me back in her car.”
“What did she mean, ‘won’t do’? Won’t do for what?”
“I don’t know. Nobody said.”
“Tell me what she looked like.”
He expected her to say “Just ordinary” or “Just an old woman,” the normal reaction of an unobservant person. Instead he was discovering that Lizzie was in some ways more perceptive than Rachel Holmes. “She hadn’t got any hair. She was bald. She had a wig, a big gray wig, but I saw her without it. I saw it hanging on a stand in her bedroom and I saw her head without any hair.”
“What happened at the meeting?”
“Not much,” said Burden. “When does anything ever happen when Southby’s in charge? That woman Griselda Cooper made some helpful suggestions about how to distribute the mobiles, but our ACCD wasn’t having any of it. He’s set up a committee” - Burden made a disgusted face - ”to, and I quote, consider and review the domestic-violence victim communication project. And guess what? I’m on it.”
Wexford laughed. “How about this unit they’re setting up at Myringham? Twenty officers to have special training is what I heard.”
“I’m not on that,” said Burden, “too senior, thank God, but Karen is, so we’re going to be without her for the next three months. Any more leads to Vicky and Jerry?”
“Lizzie Cromwell gave me an interesting piece of info.” Wexford described his morning briefly, then told Burden about the wig. “Rachel said Vicky seemed ill, she had a cough. Now what sort of illness results in a woman going bald?”
“Alopecia.” said Burden promptly.
“Yes, but where does the cough come in? Isn’t it much more likely she’d had chemotherapy? She’s got cancer and been treated for it with chemotherapy, which resulted, as it often does, in complete hair loss.”
“Maybe, but I don’t see how it helps. You can’t go along to Akande or the Royal Infirmary and ask them how many of their patients have had chemotherapy in the past few weeks. Or rather, you can but no one will tell you.”
“Let’s go and have lunch, Mike. It had better be the canteen for quickness. Then I want to go back to those Devenishes and maybe you’ll come with me.”
The canteen, on the top floor, had much improved in the years since Wexford had first been there. In those early days, to avoid it, he had mostly eaten out or, when particularly busy, sent out for sandwiches and later the various kinds and nationalities of take-away available. On the canteen menu today were pasta, curry; and risotto.
“You never see an old-fashioned steak-and-kidney pie these days,” said Burden wistfully. “Have you noticed?”
“Of course I’ve noticed. I’m not supposed to eat it, anyway.”
Mention of the diet he seldom followed reminded Wexford of his doctor and thus of the other GPs in the practice. Carrying his tray of tagliatelle and salad, and a small crème caramel, he went up to DS Vine, who was sharing a table with WPC Wendy Brodrick.
“May we join you?” Wexford sat down and told the sergeant his theory “I don’t think you’ll get any joy out of those GPs, Barry, but there’s just a chance when it’s a matter of a young child at risk.”
“I’ll give it a go, sir. I don’t know if you’ve seen what the lab has to say yet, but they’ve been over that ladder in the Devenishes’ garage and they’re as certain as can be no one’s shifted it, let alone climbed it.”
“How can they be?” asked Wendy Brodrick.
“It’s a brand-new metal ladder, which was bought in plastic wrapping. Devenish removed the wrapping and simply laid the ladder on the garage floor. You can see the outline of it in the dust, and there’s no doubt it’s never been moved. Devenish’s prints alone are on it and only on the top rung.”
“Exactly. That ladder wasn’t used, though another may have been.”
“What, brought there in an ordinary saloon car? Impossible, surely. We have to see what more we can get out of Moira Wingrave.” Wexford turned to Wendy Brodrick, who was eating a glutinous gray mass he supposed must be the risotto. “What did you do with Orbe?”
“I packed a case for him, sir, and made him a cup of tea, and when the coast was clear we left. Mr. Southby told me to take him to headquarters at Myringham.”
“Have they accommodation for him?”
“They’ve a room with bath. Putting him in a police cell doesn’t seem fair, does it, sir? After all, he’s paid his debt to society.”
Wexford ignored Vine’s snort and Burden’s humourless “Huh!”
“He’ll join the other one hundred and ten thousand convicted pedophiles living in this country. After all, only four percent of them are in jail. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? So most of the time we don’t. What did you do? Bring him back here and await instructions?”
“I drove round the back and he didn’t even have to get out of the car. Mr. Southby was just coming out of his meeting and he said take him to Myringham. Well, actually, sir, he said to get shot of him as fast as I could.”
Wexford nodded. That was just like Southby, an expert at passing the buck. Send the domestic-violence issue into a committee and the child-killer ten miles up the road. “Were you seen bringing him here?”
“I’m sure not. I was careful and there weren’t many people about. He was sitting in the back. Apart from that lot up at the Muriel Campd
en, there aren’t that many who would recognize him, sir.”
Telling Tracy Miller about the missing baby had seemed an innocent enough thing to do at the time. Only afterward, in the night when she couldn’t sleep, did Moira Wingrave’s guilt begin. And those pangs of conscience continued to bring her twinges throughout the morning, pinpricks made sharper by the sight of Stephen Devenish opening the gates to his driveway, so that when she saw the two policemen coming up her drive toward her front door, she was sure they knew all about it. They had come to reproach her, or worse. Yet there had been nothing on the news about it and nothing in the paper this morning . . .
She had to open the door, there was no help for it. The big policeman she recognized, the other one she had never seen before, but she supposed that he too was a detective, in spite of his elegant suit in a tiny dogtooth check and his dark green silk tie. It was all she could do to stop herself saying, “It was me, I did it, I told.”
But they seemed uninterested in that. All they wanted was for her to tell them about the car she had seen come out of the Devenishes’ drive at two in the morning, and she’d already told them everything, or she thought she had. The big one, whose suit wasn’t nearly so nice, but baggy and probably in need of cleaning and in a shade she always called “men’s suit gray,” told her to close her eyes and try to recapture in her mind that car and what it looked like, and what’ color it was and what sort of a person was driving it.
Shutting her eyes in their presence made her feel uncomfortable. Vulnerable, really. It was as if they could see so much more of her when she couldn’t see them. A bit like taking off one’s clothes. And with her eyes tight shut, Moira blushed. She couldn’t see anything but redness and little black floaters, but suddenly, though the car wouldn’t appear on the screen she was trying to create, she remembered two things.
“I thought it was going to hit the gatepost,” she said. “I nearly opened the window and shouted out to be careful. I nearly did, only my husband was asleep.”
“So you didn’t think this was a stranger, an intruder, say?” said the green-silk-tie one. “You didn’t suppose it was someone who had no right to be there?”
“Well, I didn’t know. I knew it was a strange car. I mean, I thought it was some friend visiting them. Not that they’ve got many friends.”
The big one nodded. “So what was the other thing?”
“The other thing?”
“That you remembered. You said there were two things.”
“Well, that was it. That I thought it was a friend of theirs.”
Green tie said, “Who was inside the car?”
“Only the driver. Well, I think so. I couldn’t see into the back.”
“And the driver was a man or a woman?”
Moira tried the eye-shutting method again. It felt less embarrassing this time. A picture actually appeared. She wouldn’t have believed it possible. Perhaps it was because she was relaxed. But was it a man or a woman? Just an outline, a silhouette, a faceless head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I think it was a man, but it might have been a woman.”
“Was there a ladder in the car, Mrs. Wingrave? To accommodate a ladder either the boot or one or both rear windows would have had to be open. Did you see any thing like that?”
Moira shook her head. “The baby was on the backseat, wasn’t she? There wasn’t room for a ladder.”
“You mean you saw the baby on the backseat?”
“I don’t know.” She felt rather huffy now. “You told me the baby was on the backseat, so she must have been.”
They crossed the road and walked up the drive under the overhanging tree branches. Stephen Devenish opened the door and, standing aside to let them come in, asked if there was any news of his lost child.
“We are following up a number of leads,” said Burden.
He knew how inadequate this must sound to the bereaved father, but what else could he say? It had the merit of being true. Devenish, he thought and Wexford thought, looked a lot less distraught than Rosemary Holmes had when her daughter disappeared. Even the Crownes, in his situation, had been nearer the panic edge than this calm, courteous man who took them into the study where his wife lay on the hide-covered sofa, covered by a car rug. The room was such an abode of maleness and somehow so stern that Wexford fancied a woman might feel uncomfortable in it, but Fay Devenish had apparently chosen to relax and rest here.
“Darling,” her husband said gently, “we expected to see Chief Inspector Wexford this afternoon, didn’t we?” He turned to Burden. “And you are?”
“Inspector Burden.”
“How do you do. We don’t want to pester you, but naturally we are anxious.”
The woman on the sofa looked ill. Her face was not so much white as gray, and she was shivering in spite of the blanket that covered her. She struggled to sit, while pulling the blanket up to her chin. The hands that clutched its border were the pathetic little hands of a monkey clinging to the bars of its cage.
“Don’t try to sit up, Mrs. Devenish,” Wexford said. “It’s best for you to rest. Has your GP seen you?” These days he seemed to be always recommending that people seek medical attention.
She shook her head, then nodded.
“Of course the doctor has seen you, darling,” said Devenish, and he gently prized open the thin, gray fingers, laying them on the blanket. “Try and relax, that’s better.” He stroked her cheek, smoothed the hair back. “You’ve nothing to tell the chief inspector that I can’t tell him.”
Wexford nodded. “Mr. Devenish, it is impossible that whoever took Sanchia away could have used your ladder to climb up to the window of her room. And highly improbable that he or she brought a ladder along. Our investigations have shown it to be equally improbable that entry was effected to Sanchia’s room from the outside. Whoever took her did so from the inside. Now, there were no signs of a break-in or a forced entry. Who, besides yourselves, has a key to this house?”
“No one at all,” said Devenish.
Burden, who had difficulty taking his eyes off Fay Devenish, he was so shocked by the sight of her, said, “No cleaning woman, sir, no gardener?”
“The gardener never comes into the house. My wife does the housework herself.” The surprise that showed in their faces communicated itself to him, for he said hastily, as if in defense, “She’d be the first to tell you that since she has no profession, running our home is her job. It suits her and she has never wanted help.”
Protesting too much, thought Wexford. And what, for God’s sake, was Devenish’s own profession? He was the managing director, or something like that, of an airline.
“Your sons?”
As if on cue, after the sound of a door somewhere opening and closing, the two boys came into the room. Came tentatively and stood in the doorway, as if they expected to see something inside that no one would wish to see. The younger, Robert, looked at his mother and quickly away. The elder, Edward, who was as tall as a man but with a child’s soft, vulnerable face, turned his eyes on Stephen Devenish and, curiously, unexpectedly, closed his hands into fists. As if he were going to hit him, Wexford thought. No, as if he would give it a year or two and then hit him.
But Devenish was smiling benignly at the boys. He went up to them and put an arm around each. “They don’t have a key. Big they may be, but they’re not quite old enough for a key to the door, are you, boys?”
Fay Devenish spoke for the first time. Wexford saw that she had a lisp and talked with difficulty. “One of our neighbours fetched them from school and they came in by the back door. We don’t lock the back door in the daytime.”
“But you do by night?”
“Of course. Always.” She sounded more than normally emphatic, almost as if she were afraid to open a chink of doubt.
The children had wriggled out from under their father’s arms and retreated from the room. Devenish smiled ruefully. “They grow up too soon as it is.”
“If no one has a key now,” s
aid Burden, “has anyone ever had one? Keys can be copied, you know.”
Fay Devenish turned her face into the cushion on which her head rested. Her husband drew the blanket up over her shoulders and said to the policemen, “I’d like my wife to be left to rest now. Let us talk in the living room.”
Unwell she might be, but she had maintained her high standards. The beautiful room had been dusted and the furniture polished, and fresh flowers were in the vases. The air was scented with the white and purple lilac that filled a huge Chinese urn. Her little daughter had vanished, but still she made flower arrangements and cleaned the silver ornaments and plumped up the cushions.
“Do sit down,” said Devenish. “I’d offer you tea, but as you’ve seen, my wife is hardly in any condition to make it.”
And you can Wexford didn’t say it aloud. “I had the impression, Mr. Devenish, that you brought us in here to tell us of someone who once did have a key. Am I right?”
“Yes. But I’m feeling rather. . . well, I should have told you before.”
“Are you saying that this person wasn’t on your list of relatives and friends?”
Trying to make light of it, Devenish gave a light, deprecating laugh. “I’d better come clean, hadn’t I? She’s a friend of my wife’s, this woman, and frankly, to be absolutely honest, I can’t stand her. Well, used to be her friend, only after several very unfortunate incidents - I don’t think I need say more – I . . .”
“Put your foot down, Mr. Devenish?”
“Oh, come.” For the first time Devenish showed irritation. “I was going to say I persuaded my wife that she wasn’t a very suitable person for a friend, especially round the children. We only had the boys then, but even so . . .”
“What’s her name?” Burden asked.
Having gone so far, Devenish had to tell them. “She’s a Miss Andrews, Jane Andrews. She lives in Brighton. I don’t have the address, but she’ll be in the phone book. She had the key because quite a long time ago, when Robert was only three, she came to stay here and look after the place while we went away on holiday. It was my wife’s idea, of course. We had a cat then and she took care of the cat as well. It was soon after that that my wife agreed with me the best thing to do would be to break with her. I asked for my key back and naturally she gave it to me, but that’s not to say she didn’t have another one cut, is it?”
