by Ruth Rendell
Wexford followed him. They went in through the hack door into a kind of boot room and thence into a large, well-appointed, immaculate kitchen. In a dining or breakfast area, the table was laid for an evening meal for four, a white cloth instead of place mats, silver instead of bone-handled cutlery; flowers in a vase. Again Wexford thought how peculiar it was that Fay Devenish did all this on her own without help, and apparently still did it while her baby daughter was missing, while she was distraught and while her doctor had evidently sedated her and told her to rest.
He wanted to say something like this, that frankly he was troubled, that he was like someone in a dark wood, confused and disoriented. No one could have got into this house without breaking in, but on the other hand, no one could have brought in a ladder. Most significantly, no stranger could have taken Sanchia without the child’s crying and disturbing her parents. He wanted to say it, he had begun to say it, when, unexpectedly and dreadfully, Stephen Devenish burst into tears. He flung his arms across the neatly laid table, lowered his head, and sobbed. He shook with sobs, his shoulders heaving, his hands clenched.
Taken aback, Wexford sat opposite him patiently. There was nothing he could do, he hardly knew why he had come. Perhaps just to see this man again, this house again. He looked about him, studying his surroundings. The counters were laden with equipment of the steamer, rice-cooker, pasta-maker variety. A knife block of some dark hardwood held seven or eight horn-handled knives. The walls were hung with blue-and-white porcelain plates, Royal Copenhagen and Delft. There was a calendar of the Highlands and a cuckoo clock. Last time he was here he had heard it tell the hour, but distantly. Now, suddenly, a jaunty painted cuckoo popped out and, flapping its break, cuckooed six times.
At the fourth cuckoo Stephen Devenish raised his face. He had been drumming on the table with his fists and had knocked over the pepper pot and the flower vase.
One of the glasses fell over and rolled onto the floor. Wexford got up and filled another with water from the tap. He said quietly, “Here, drink this, come on,” and wondered why he couldn’t lay a hand on the man’s shoulder, why his reluctance to touch Devenish amounted to revulsion.
“I’m a fool,” Devenish said, sitting up, taking the water. “I couldn’t help it. I keep thinking I’ll never see her again, she’s dead.” His face was dry. He had cried without shedding tears. “I’ll never see her again in this world, those are the words that go round in my head.”
“While there’s life, there’s hope,” Wexford said in a cliché he didn’t normally use.
“Yes, but is there life? Isn’t it much more likely there death?” Devenish drew in a long, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry I broke down like that. I love my little girl, you see. I want to see her grow up.”
Wexford didn’t stay long after that. Incongruously, his last thought as he left that kitchen was that when Fay Devenish woke up, the first thing she would do - or would be expected to do? - was straighten, refresh, and relay that crumpled, finger-marked cloth.
So often late home that Dora no longer reproached him or even commented, Wexford nevertheless expected some kind of reproof from his elder daughter. Sylvia had called in on her mother - on her way home from work at Kingsmarkham Social Services and was sitting next to her on the sofa, the two of them drinking white wine. But instead of admonishing him she seemed anxious only to defend herself. “I’m driving, Dad, so I’m positively only having one glass.”
He said, smiling, “You know, my dear, I can’t imagine you ever willfully breaking the law.”
She flushed with pleasure. “Can’t you? That’s nice.”
“If you’ve a moment, I’d like to ask you something you might call in the field of child psychology.”
Dora sprang up. “I’ll just put your dinner in the microwave.”
“No, don’t. I will. In a minute.” He felt a sudden distaste for the idea of expecting any such service from her. “Sit down. Stay.”
Sylvia finished her wine and set down the glass. “I’m not a psychologist, Dad, child or otherwise, though I must say people are always taking me for one. I just did a course in it for my degree.”
“You’ll do,” her father said. “Darwin said, I hope I can get it right, ‘Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.’ Tell me at what age you’d expect a child to start talking.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know - eighteen months? If you mean real words and phrases. Robin was over two but Ben was talking a lot well before. I suppose it was because his brother was always talking to him.”
“You were a very early talker, Sylvia,” Dora said. “By eighteen months you could say anything. Sheila was later.”
“Funny how a mother remembers that. I don’t, it’s completely gone out of my head. So what would you say are the reasons behind it when a child is talking hardly at all at thirty-three months?”
“Thirty-three months? That’s nearly three years old.” Sylvia looked dubious. “We’re discounting brain damage, I take it?”
“Oh, I think so.”
“He or she could be deaf. That’s a real possibility but these days I’d think that would have been checked out by thirty-three months. Or, of course, it could be some sort of emotional disturbance. Tasneem Fowler at The Hide told me her older boy stopped talking for two months after the younger one was born.”
“But he’d been talking before?” said Wexford. “He was jealous of the newcomer and that inhibited his powers of speech?”
“Probably. You must have some particular case in mind, Dad. What sort of home does this child of yours come from?”
“Middle class, maybe upper middle class, plenty of money, nice home, and that’s an understatement, natural parents living together and apparently devoted, two older , brothers. I would say a much loved, much wanted child.”
“Then I haven’t a clue,” said Sylvia.
“I remember reading somewhere that Einstein didn’t talk till he was three,” Dora said.
“And what on earth is that supposed to prove, Mother?”
After Sylvia had gone he watched the nine o’clock news, then a program about a new kind of activist, the eco-warrior. A group of these people, fighting their war against genetic engineering, had uprooted a field of wheat in Shropshire and poisoned an orchard in Somerset. The wheat had been genetically altered to create a springier kind of bread and the apples were redder than normal and had no cores. He was looking at a section through a core-less apple when Dora came in and said she was taking winter clothes to the dry cleaner’s in the morning and she couldn’t find his raincoat
“Oh, God,” he said, “I lent it to a chap called Dixon to put over his head and pretend he was a pedophile.”
Dora gave him a strange look. “Get it back. You don’t want to lose it. It’s a Burberry”
She switched off the television and they went to bed. He often had interesting dreams but seldom nightmares. This dream, into which he seemed to fall at once, took him and Dora years back to when they were young and their children very young. He was sitting with Dora, admiring her appearance as she brushed her long dark hair - an ordinary enough romantic cliché - when she turned around and told him quite calmly that Sheila, their baby, had disappeared, had been stolen out of her cot. She had been into the room and found the cot empty.
His grief and terror had known no bounds. He had run through the house, calling to Sheila, begging her to come back, rushed into the street, wakened the town, the world. And then the dream shifted, as such dreams do, and he was in a television studio, being interviewed by a demonic character played by Peter Cushing. He was begging for a message to be sent to the kidnappers, offering a ransom for Sheila, and the ransom - this was the worst part, the positively most dreadful, shame-making part - was his elder daughter, Sylvia. Take her, he heard himself saying, and give me back Sheila. Then he woke up, sweating and trembling.
At midnight Lynn Fancourt,
who had spent the evening at the cinema and afterward had had a drink in the Rat and Carrot with her boyfriend, got into a car that stopped for her at the north end of York Street. In fact, it had stopped for a red light. Lynn tapped on the passenger window and asked for a lift. The driver was a woman someone very young might describe as middle-aged and the passenger was a man of about thirty. They were going, the man said, to Myringham, but could drop her off in Framhurst if that was what she wanted.
From the conversation Lynn soon knew something funny was going on, and it wasn’t the something funny she was on the lookout for. When the man suggested they stop for ten minutes in a lay-by on the old bypass, she thought it was drugs and was of two minds what to do if controlled substances made their appearance. Nick them for possession? Call the station on her mobile? But she was wrong. The car stopped and both of them got in the back with her, amorously inclined. Lynn’s discouraging tactics led the woman to say she quite understood and it would be best to go straight home where they could have their threesome in comfort.
It occurred to Lynn then that they had taken her for a prostitute, a new phenomenon in Kingsmarkham but not unknown. She had only herself to blame for that, tapping on car windows - and at a red light, that was an irony. They were quite nice people, pleasant and gentle, and when she said she had changed her mind, they took her to Framhurst just the same and gave her their phone number in case she had second thoughts.
For more than a year now Wexford had stopped taking his local paper. The Kingsmarkham Courier had caused him more irritation with Brian St. George’s coverage of the bypass hostage-taking than he thought within the bounds of anything a man should suffer over the breakfast table. He would not go through that again, so the paper had been given up. Neither the Times nor the Independent could ever bring him so much rage, so he would stick with them.
But since his happy relinquishment of the Courier, his newsagent had taken on a series of new paperboys, most of them inefficient. When it rained, they let the papers get wet, and if they couldn’t find the right one on top of their load, they delivered anything that came to hand: a tabloid, maybe, or the Financial Times. Any of these would have been infinitely preferable to Wexford than what he saw lying face up on his doormat. Under the masthead of an eagle with a scroll in its beak, on which the Courier name was lettered in Gothic script, the lead story leapt out at him.
He closed his eyes, but of course he had to open them again. We always do have to. WHERE IS SANCHIA? the headline read in the largest Roman type available to the Courier’s printers, and underneath, only slightly less bold and huge, ORBE IN REFUGE WITH COPS. What the story beneath would say he guessed before he read it. The gist had come into his head the moment he saw those head lines: a baby girl had disappeared, the news had been suppressed while Orbe was spirited away, a huge cover-up was in progress. He hadn’t, though, anticipated St. George’s statement - his was the byline - that Henry Thomas Orbe was currently accommodated in a refurbished cell “with all mod cons” at Kingsmarkham Police Station.
Two photographs were inserted in the text, the classic one of Orbe taken on his release from prison and featured everywhere, and a portrait of Sanchia Devenish he had never seen before. It had evidently been taken when she was about six months old, for this was a baby, her round, almost hairless head resting on a lacy pillow. A fuzzy picture, probably much enlarged. An adult’s hand could be seen in one corner - Fay Devenish’s? - and what might be the side of a pram or pushchair.
Growling to himself like a cross bear, Wexford took the paper with him into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. His instinct, like most people’s these days when astounded, delighted, shocked, or appalled, was to phone someone. But whom? Southby, of course. He had as little contact with the ACCD as he could achieve. Superintendent Rogers? The desk sergeant at the station? In the end, when he had taken up Dora’s tea, when he had observed that it was raining again but had not reverted to the subject of his missing raincoat, he fell back on the old faithful and phoned Burden.
“I’ve seen it,” Burden said.
“I thought you’d given up that rag.”
“I have. They delivered the wrong papers.”
“You and me both. St. George must have seen Wendy Brodrick bring Orbe in. He was doubtless prowling about outside or loitering in a parked car. They were only there five minutes.”
“Long enough. Where did he get that picture of Sanchia?”
“God knows. Those Devenishes hadn’t a photo to give us, but St. George gets one. Not that we’d have been interested in this, a child of six months looks nothing like how it will two years later. That photograph of St. George’s would no more help find Sanchia Devenish than a shot of you or me.”
Burden said thoughtfully, “Maybe the Devenishes didn’t give it to him. You know how the Courier organizes all those contests, allegedly for charity - the guy with the biggest feet, some ghastly ferret competition, Miss Kingsmarkham till the feminists stopped it - well, I’ve been wondering if Sanchia was ever in a baby show, if maybe she won a baby show and they took the picture. She was a pretty baby, wasn’t she?”
These words, uncharacteristic of Burden, moved Wexford so profoundly, driving away all his anger in a moment, bringing him instead an ache of sadness at that past tense, that he was silent. The poor little girl, he thought, please God or Fates or Furies, let whoever’s got her be kind to her.
Burden said, “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.” Wexford cleared his throat. “The Devenishes aren’t the sort of people to let their daughter compete in a baby show, are they?”
“God knows what sort of people they are. Don’t ask me, you’d better ask St. George.”
“I mean to,” said Wexford; then he added, with atypical relish, “I mean to think of a way of punishing him.”
Chapter 13
This time the trouble began in Stowerton, in Rectangle Road, not far from the homes of Trevor Ferry and Rosemary Holmes, where Joe Hebden’s brother lived with his girlfriend, two children of hers, and two children of his. David Hebden drove the van that delivered new copies of the Courier fresh off the press to every newsagent in Kingsmarkham, Stowerton, and Pomfret, and his round began at 6 a.m. Reading was not among his skills, though he was able to decipher the headlines on the sports pages. ‘What drew his attention to the Courier this wet morning was a name, one of the few he could read, being that of his girlfriend’s younger daughter.
David Hebden was fond of little Sanchia. She was not his child but he liked her better than his own children, whom he saw as coming between him and his ex-wife. For a fearful half hour he thought something dreadful had happened to her. Why otherwise would her name be in the paper?
Asking other people to read things to him was some thing he avoided whenever he could, so he said nothing to any of the newsagents, simply growing more and more anxious and frustrated each time his eye lighted on that beloved name in that horrible huge print. When he got home, everyone was still asleep. He rushed upstairs to look for Sanchia, found her in bed with her mother, where she must have come after he left, and woke up the whole household with his whoops of joy.
Sanchia’s mother, Katrina, took the paper from him and read the story. After a while the other children came in and sat on the bed, seeing in this break from routine a prospect of excitement.
“The police are a disgrace,” said Katrina. “This little kid’s been missing since Monday and what do they do? Not look for her, or her body more like, oh, no, they turn the police station into a hotel with all mod cons to keep that pedophile in luxury.”
“What’s a pedophile, Mum?” said Georgina, aged six.
“Ask no questions and you’ll get no lies. I’m going to give Joe and Charlene a phone, Dave. Or you can, it’s your duty, they’ve a right to know.”
Since the departure of Orbe from the Muriel Campden Estate, all the excitement and most of the heat had simmered down. Another event had convulsed the residents of Puck, Titania,
and Oberon Roads: Colin Crowne’s assault on and destruction of Jodi the virtual baby. It had happened on the day before Lizzie Cromwell was due to return Jodi to the Social Services. After her fight with Brenda Boswortb and acknowledgment by every one except Miroslav himself that he was the father of her child, Lizzie had seemed to lose interest in Jodi. From nursing him and feeding and changing him, putting him in his cot, lifting him up again, and constantly cuddling him, she had rapidly passed to total indifference, and Jodi, unattended for the first time in his short life, for he had been newborn when he came to her, began to cry. He cried and sobbed and wailed, and when the crying mechanism ran out, his tape rewound and he began again.
“You can’t just put him on the back burner, you know,” Debbie scolded.
Colin said nothing. Nor did he make any attempt to immobilize Jodi by removing his batteries or even smothering him. At nine at night when the robot had been crying for six hours, he picked him up by the legs and smashed him against the bathroom wall. Bits of Jodi, his limbs and his mechanism and his fine handsome head, fell into the bath where Colin stamped on them.
Lizzie didn’t care, she was bored with the whole thing, but she had to explain to the social worker. Colin wasn’t there, it was his day at the Job Centre for signing on. The social worker said such a thing had never happened before and what sort of a mother would Lizzie make when she had a real baby? Of course she or her mother or her step father would have to pay for a replacement for Jodi, and did she realize how much a virtual baby cost?
Colin came home and said over his dead body would they make him pay for breaking a fucking stupid doll, and Debbie said she wouldn’t either, on principle. It would probably be his dead body, anyway, Colin said, he’d already started coming out in a rash all around his waist and down his bum. No one appreciated the stress he’d suffered through having that thing in the house, and God knew what it would be like with a real baby.
