by Ruth Rendell
News of this unjust claim on the part of Kingsmarkham’s Social Services Department spread around Muriel Campden like a bushfire. Almost everyone took the Crowne-Cromwell side with the exception of the Mitchells, Monty Smith, and Maria Michaels. Monty Smith had been put on probation and required to pay an unimaginably large sum (which he had borrowed off Maria) for hitting Sergeant Fitch, and his view was that if he had been unfairly fined, why should others get off scot-free?
“How d’you make a petrol bomb?” Colin Crowne had said to Joe Hebden in the Rat and Carrot the night before.
“You what? You’re barking.”
“No, I saw it on the telly. It was somewhere like Algeria or Iraq, some place like that, and this lot was throwing petrol bombs at the government. I thought to myself, ‘They ought to do that to the council, make them sit up.’”
A man neither of them had ever seen before said, “You fill up a bottle with petrol, like a milk bottle.”
“We don’t get milk bottles no more,” said Colin.
“Right. You don’t. Any bottle so long as it’s not plastic. Fill it up and stuff the top with a bit of rag. You put paraffin on the rag, pink or blue paraffin, don’t matter, and you light it with a match and throw it. You throw it right away, mind, no hanging about or you’ll go up in flames. But you don’t need the hassle. You want one, I can supply it. There’s a market for them things.”
“It was a joke,” said Joe.
The man only laughed and said he’d buy them a drink, then he’d like to show them something.
Joe’s wife, Charlene, took the call from her brother-in- law at seven-thirty next morning. That the child was still missing didn’t much concern her. She knew that, everyone on Muriel Campden knew it, if the media didn’t. But Orbe in hiding at Kingsmarkham Police Station! In luxurious accommodation! Charlene was fond of saying that the world was divided into those who don’t and those who do, and she was a doer. She got dressed, grabbed an umbrella, and. went out into the triangle, knocking on every door.
There are fat men who are solid like Carl Meeks, men with big shoulders and bellies like convex drums, taut as if corseted but corseted in vain, and there are fat men whose obesity seems liquid, seems to slosh around inside a thin membrane, so that a pinprick would reduce them to a collapsed balloon. Brian St. George, editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier, was of the latter sort, and his liquidity was currently flowing over the arms of Wexford’s chair and seeping like a tide against the edge of the desk. His shirt was meant to be white but looked, as usual, as if it had been put through the wash in company with a pair of black jeans and a red T-shirt. If he had a tie with him, it must have been in his pocket. Since becoming bald, he had grown his remaining hair long so that if you eyed him from above, as Wexford was now doing, his head looked like a big white daisy with a pinkish-yellow center.
He had come to the police station when summoned, perhaps not much fancying the chief inspector’s presence in the Courier’s offices, sat down in this chair, and suffered a grilling. St. George put up a spirited defense, half whining, half aggressive, and insisted he was obliged to “improvise” because Kingsmarkham police never told him anything.
“ ‘The Kingsmarkham Six,’” said Wexford disgustedly.
“I didn’t think it up,” Brian St. George said as if in mitigation. “It’s vindictive, it’s revenge. You know you don’t treat me fairly, Reg.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry, I’m sure. I’d been under the impression we were all old friends here. You Reg, me Brian. It’s formality gone mad the way you call me ‘Mr. St. George.’”
“Call it what you like, but we’ll keep to formality under this roof. If you believed Orbe was hidden here, what stopped you phoning your old friend and checking? No, don’t bother to answer. You’d have got a denial and a denial was the last thing you wanted. You’d have had no story
St. George shifted his floppy bulk an inch or two. A gap opened between two of his shirt buttons to reveal a circle of hairy pink skin. Wexford tried not to look at it. The editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier took a packet of Mariboros from his pocket, looked around for an ashtray, but in spite of not seeing one, lit his cigarette.
“This is a smoke-free zone.”
“It never used to be,” St. George protested. “Since when?”
“Since nine this morning.” Wexford looked at his watch, which showed three minutes past. “Put that fag out, come on now.”
Slowly and with an expression of bitter regret, St. George stubbed out his cigarette. “The story in all the nationals,” he pleaded. “It’s the Mail’s front-page lead.”
“Only because you told them. Apparently there have been calls coming in from them all night. Everything has to be denied. Orbe is not here. Orbe was here for precisely five minutes, sitting in a car in the car park. I suppose you saw him brought in.”
“Guilty, my lord,” said St. George, managing a boyish grin.
“And passed on your think piece to the media but too late for them to upstage the Courier.”
“Well, what would you have done in my place, Reg? Sorry I mean, Mr. Wexford.”
“Behaved like a responsible citizen, but that’s an alien concept to you, I know. It’s too late now to do anything about it. We must hope there’s no harm done. Where did you get the photograph of Sanchia?”
“I can’t reveal my sources, you know that.”
“I’m not talking about your sources, I’m talking about a photograph you must either have got from the child’s parents or have taken yourself at some earlier time.”
“It was when her dad got a big salary increase, a hundred - K or whatever, and we ran a ‘fat cats’ story You know, ‘Can Airline Tycoon Justify Massive Pay Rise?’”
“What had that to do with Sanchia?”
“Human interest, you know that. Family values. Our photographer happened to see Mrs. D. out with the baby. As a matter of fact, that’s how we knew her first name, going through the picture archives. They were calling her Sasha and Sarah and all sorts.”
Wexford looked at him in disgust. “We shall not be offering any information to your newspaper in future on any subject whatsoever, so you will please instruct your staff that reporters who normally come in for the twice-weekly press release will no longer be welcome.”
St. George got to his feet, his whole body on the wobble. “Now look here, you can’t do this. This is-outrageous, I’ll go to the chief constable.” Echoing Dora’s words, he said, “That’s like the Stasi, it’s like the KGB.”
“It may be like the Taliban for all I care.”
Any further comments he might have made were cut off by the noise of breaking glass from below. It sounded as if something had struck one of the windows on a lower floor. Wexford went to his window and looked out. He stood there quite still for a moment, then he turned around and beckoned to Brian St. George. “Come and see the result of your handiwork.”
By eight-thirty most of the population of Kingsmarkham and the villages knew that a child was missing and a notorious pedophile was under police protection. The rumour that Orbe had killed Sanchia Devenish, confessed to her murder, and been given refuge in Kingsmarkham Police Station to save him from being torn to pieces by all right-thinking local parents was started by a woman in Glebe Road. She was herself the mother of two, the elder of whom had been the victim of an indecent assault by a man from Stowerton. With her half sister Jackie Flay, Jackie’s daughter Kaylee, and half a dozen of her neighbours, she set forth on foot - it wasn’t more than a quarter of a mile - and halfway there encountered a contingent from the Stowerton end of the town. This band of pro testers all carried paper banners, rapidly improvised, bearing the legends we want Orbe and save our babies. If it had only continued to rain, as Wexford said later, the whole demonstration might have been avoided, as many of these people would have been reluctant to get wet. But the rain had stopped at a quarter to eight giving place to an angrily blue sky bright sunshine, and a strong n
orthwest wind.
The two groups met, by chance, outside the Job Centre where they paused to muster their forces. Truants from Kingsmarkham Comprehensive, the usual dispirited teenagers, were already sitting on the wall outside. They were half-asleep on account of being got up early by their parents and sent to school. Nothing ever happened in this dump, according to them, so they were delighted to be asked to join the protest. Just as they were all on the march again turning into the High Street, the bus from Stowerton stopped outside the Olive and Dove and David Hebden got off it with Katrina, her daughters, Georgina and Sanchia, and his sons, Grant and Jason, the children having been kept from school for a more important activity.
Recognizing their purpose from the sandwich board worn by Grant (a cutout of two children holding hands with SAVE THE LITTLE CHILDREN on the front and ALL PEDOS FOR THE CHOP on the back), the Glebe Road group welcomed them with open arms, and the whole part now thirty strong, marched up the High Street past St. Peter’s Church. They were such an orderly group that WPC Lydia Wingate and PC Leslie Wilson, out on the beat, held up the traffic at the Kingsbrook bridge to let them cross the road.
Meanwhile, a bigger crowd was streaming out of the Muriel Campden into York Street. Missing for various reasons such as pregnancy, simple cautiousness, genuine illness, and fear of paying more fines or even imprisonment, were Lizzie Cromwell, Sue Ridley and Pete McGregor, and Monty Smith. But Brenda Bosworth was there with Miroslav Zlatic in the lead followed by Hebdens, Keenans, Carl and Linda Meeks, Maria Michaels and Shirley Mitchell, and Tasneem Fowler’s Terry with Kim and Lee. Many of them were carrying what looked like full shopping bags, but there was nothing particularly suspicious about this, and when Lydia Wingate saw them, she even failed to notice that they were the Muriel Campden residents she had encountered the previous weekend.
They joined up with the Stowerton and Glebe Road protest outside the Heaven Spent shopping mall. Joe and David Hebden were each overcome with emotion at the sight of his brother and fell into one another’s arms, embracing and patting backs, both having reached their mid-thirties without doing such a thing in their lives before. This show of fraternal love put heart into the fifty or so people who had assembled, and they cheered before marching on toward the police station.
But orderliness had ended with the arrival of the Muriel Campden cohort. Here was the contrast between the effete and weary old town and the vital and energetic new, and it was as if the old had received a stimulating injection that put fire into their veins, for they began to sing as they walked, their voices low at first but rising in a steady crescendo. To the tune of “Stand by Your Man” they chanted, “Stand by your kids, and tell them that you love them . . .” Who had been responsible for this inspired translation of Tammy Wynette’s song no one seemed to know, but later the consensus was that it had been Brenda Bosworth.
So they proceeded along the east end of the High Street, a troop of people all between the ages of two and forty, a company of the young, the youngest in pushchairs and the oldest with a balding head and incipient belly, all singing that perhaps best known of country songs, if an old-fashioned one to most of them. They carried their bags and their banners, and the bright sun shone on them and the wind blew the women’s hair all over the place, and just after nine o’clock they came up to the railings outside Kingsmarkham Police Station. The gates were open, the car park, which could just be glimpsed around the side, was full of cars, and there was no one about.
The protest hesitated. Carl Meeks, questioned later by the police, said that they had been taken aback to see no one. The emptiness of the place was uncanny. And even the big double doors were shut. If someone had come out, some “responsible officer,” they could have put their case to him or her. They would have told the officer, said Carl Meeks, to take Orbe elsewhere, anywhere so that he was finally removed from Kingsmarkham. As it was, no one came out. But for the cars, there might have been no one inside.
Who led them on to the outer courtyard where stood just one police car and one unmarked car? Again it was suggested it must have been Brenda Bosworth, though nobody could remember. One thing was certain. Once they began to pass through the gateway, they stopped singing and a silence fell. It seemed to Shirley Mitchell that the whole town was hushed, traffic became soundless, and even the blackbird in the maple tree on the forecourt ceased his song. In silence they walked to within a few yards of the steps and the double doors, and there they stopped to allow the woman they called their spokesperson to pass through. This was Brenda Bosworth, who had somehow uncharacteristically found herself at the back of the crowd and had to make her way to the front of it.
While she was doing so, a window in the police station opened and Sergeant Joel Fitch put his head out. What he would have said, how he would have admonished them, advised them to go home or take themselves off elsewhere, was never known, for the sight of him to Maria Michaels was like the lighting of a fuse, At once she recognized him not so much as the author of Monty Smith’s troubles as the cause of his borrowing everything she had in her Co-operative Bank account to pay his fine. She plunged her hand into the Marks & Spencer bag she was carrying, pulled out a brick, and hurled it at Sergeant Fitch.
Maria had been in her early youth the County of Sussex Women’s Putting the Shot Champion of 1984, and she could still throw farther and better than most men. Luckily for him and for her, she failed to hit Fitch, but only because he ducked. The brick went through the casement to the left of where his head had been. A short, shocked silence was succeeded by loud cheers, and the chant was taken up with renewed vigor.
“We want Orbe, we want Orbe, Orbe, Orbe!”
The tune this time was that of “Colonel Bogey” and it brought every passerby to a halt outside the gates. Perhaps this audience stimulated them, for a hail of cans and stones followed that first brick, but only one missile struck a window and broke the glass. The rest hit brickwork and fell harmlessly into the bed of overblown wallflowers at the foot of the wall. But they had the effect of bringing half a dozen police officers running out of the double doors toward the crowd. At the same time Superintendent Rogers opened the French windows in the middle of the front of the building and stepped out onto the balcony, holding a loud-hailer. He was accompanied by two other officers, one on either side of him.
“We want Orbe, we want Orbe, Orbe, Orbe!”
When the police station was designed in the early sixties, the balcony was tacked on for just this purpose: for a senior policeman to stand on and admonish, harangue, or reassure a deputation. Jokes had been made about it, references to palaces of justice in small South American states, places where revolution might be expected. It had never been used until today, and George Rogers had to seek assistance from the nearest help available, in this case DC Archbold, to get the window open. When he finally stepped out, he saw a much larger crowd than he had expected, as many as fifty people, all held back by his own officers straining against them with linked hands. No more missiles had been thrown, and at the sight of Rogers, with Fitch on one side of him and Archbold on the other, the chanting fell to a low mutter, an angry buzz like that of swarming bees.
On the floor above, at the window, Wexford stood with Brian St. George. He had opened the window, having heard what had happened below and being anxious not to be hit by flying glass. The last person he wanted with him in this situation was St. George, but he could hardly send the man out of the building into, so to speak, the jaws of the protest and certainly not leave him to roam the police station, picking up whatever he might devour.
Once, Rogers, or his equivalent, would have read the Riot Act. Instead, he said into his loud-hailer, “Those persons who have thrown missiles will be dealt with accordingly. Arrests will be made. The rest of you must go home. Orbe is not here and has never been here. No child has been killed. You have been misled by false rumours in newspapers. Orbe presents no threat whatsoever to your children. Your children are perfectly safe.”
“Where
is he, then?” called someone from the crowd.
“I’m not at liberty to tell you that,” said Rogers.
“He’s in there with you! You’re protecting him!”
“We want Orbe, we want Orbe, Orbe, Orbe!”
“How would you like it if a child murderer and rapist came and lived next door to your kids? Is that right? Is that fair?” This was Brenda Bosworth. “How would you like it if the police protected him and made the mums and dads criminals?”
Much as he disliked her, Wexford had to concede that she had a point. How would be have liked it when his daughters were small? Come to that, how would Rogers feel himself, he who had married late and had two children under ten? Rogers had handled it badly. Wexford wouldn’t have said that aloud to anyone but Burden and then in the strictest privacy; but Burden wasn’t there; for some reason he was late in this morning. Imagine the results of criticizing Rogers to St. George! Rogers should go inside now, he thought, leave it now. Make his arrests, if he could find the guilty parties. He thought what a ridiculous word missile was, that it had lost its original meaning of something sent by throwing and was now irretrievably associated with a kind of rocket, a projectile bomb, nuclear or otherwise, wielded in war situations. It was strange, he reflected afterward, that he had been thinking this at that very moment and stranger still that he and he alone witnessed what happened next.
He heard from below Rogers’s parting shot, a some what feeble, “I repeat, Orbe is not here. He is no longer living among you and he is not in this police station.”
The men on the forecourt coaxed the crowd back, easing them through the gates and out onto the pavement. The chanting had stopped, had died away to a low muttering. Rogers went inside, followed by Fitch and Archbold, and the door to the balcony closed. Wexford was about to shut the window. Instead he opened it wider and looked down.
