Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  DS Ted Hennessy had come out of the double doors and was crossing the forecourt toward the gates. To make the threatened arrests? Or simply because at that moment, previously out of sight and earshot in the back of the building, he had come out in all innocence for some quite other purpose? Afterward Wexford bitterly regretted having taken his eyes from the protesters to look at Hennessy and thus having missed seeing what he was later told had happened. He saw the thing loop out of the crowd, though, saw it leave an unidentifiable hand, and he cried out, too late, “Watch out! Get down on the ground!”

  The bottle was alight, he saw the thin sheet of flame as it flew and, although it was well below him, ducked, dragging St. George with him to the floor. If he hadn’t, the explosion would have knocked him off his feet. It was thunderous, deafening, a roar rather than a crash, a great hissing sound like a tornado sucking up air. But not loud enough to drown the scream from the forecourt. A horrible cry it was, scarcely human, the noise you imagined an animal dying by violence might make. Wexford rolled over onto his back. He reached for St. George but the man was up, craning out of the window, crying at the top of his voice, “I saw it! I saw it all!”

  Wexford got to his feet. Broken glass was everywhere, crunching under his shoes. The window was gone. Below him a car on the forecourt was burning, a column of flame hissing up into the blue air. The crowd had shrunk, people squatting or even lying on the pavement. Wexford saw Burden come in from the street, come in on his way to work and, his hands up to his face, walk slowly across the now empty forecourt. Behind him, their presence perhaps unknown to him streamed the press pack with their cameras and their microphones.

  It was too late to do anything for the man who had been close to that car. He had disappeared. He was in that inferno, burning along with the metal and the chrome and the leather, somewhere inside that hissing blaze, that eddying spiral of white smoke and black smoke, and the breath-snatching stench of burning petrol.

  A groan rose from the crowd. The chain of officers continued to hold them back. Wexford found himself speechless, incapable even of making the mourning, regretful moan that came from the people on the pavement. He watched the press approach, cameras flashing, heard in the distance the sound of the fire engines’ sirens, and then, turning to St. George, did something he had never done to a man before - grabbed him by the collar of his jacket as one might take a disobedient dog by the scruff of its neck and propelled him toward the door.

  “I saw it all!” gasped St. George, half-strangled. “What a piece of luck!”

  Chapter 14

  The death of Ted Hennessy had done nothing to inhibit the media. Their cars filled Ploughman’s Lane and Savesbury Road and Winchester Drive, and they set up camp in the front garden of Woodland Lodge. Wexford held an impromptu press conference and did his best to answer questions on the lines of “Why have you been keeping this disappearance dark?” and “Can you be certain Thomas Orbe has nothing to do with the missing child?”

  In vain he repeated the simple truth: that Orbe had never, in the course of his miserable career, been known to show interest in girls. He had convictions for abusing boys and had been imprisoned for the manslaughter of a boy. In the original meaning of the word he was truly a pedophile.

  “He got married, didn’t he?” one young woman from a national tabloid asked. “He’s got a daughter.”

  “His victims have always been male,” said Barry Vine, who was on the platform with Wexford. “Orbe has nothing to do with the disappearance of Sanchia Devenish.”

  Those of them who weren’t laying siege to the Devenishes or on Hennessy’s widow’s doorstep, directed their onslaught to Suzanne Orbe, convalescent at 16 Oberon Road. An unfounded rumour had got about that Suzanne was one of her father’s early victims, Suzanne must have been an abused child, wretched copartner in incest. Her head still swathed in bandages, she came out from the boarded-up house through the makeshift door and screamed at them. “He never laid a finger on me, you filthy buggers! Poor old sod’d have never touched those dirty kids if my mum hadn’t gone off and left him. That was what done it, that was what turned him bonkers for dirty kids. You fuck off the lot of you and leave us alone!”

  Up in Ploughman’s Lane, Fay Devenish had picked up the local paper off the doormat at seven-thirty. Even before Stephen Devenish had seen it, reporters were ringing his doorbell, pounding on his door, and his phone had started ringing and went on ringing nonstop. He knew better than to answer the door. One of the media people climbed up onto the garage roof and tried to get in through a fanlight. He should have had Kaylee Flay with him, as Wexford remarked when told about it.

  Devenish called a taxi to take him to the police station. If he got his own car out, the pack would descend on him and maybe gain entrance to the house. The cab company was called All the Sixes and its vehicles regularly plied between Kingsmarkham town, Kingsmarkham Station, and the villages. The driver couldn’t get through the media people and the parked cars. He left his cab and went on foot. Reporters surrounded him and some clung to him, begging to know who his fare was to be, where was he taking him, and to give them a moment to talk to Sanchia’s father.

  The cabdriver felt as if he were in a film. He thought of asking the reporters for a considerable sum to hold Mr. Devenish captive, then he thought of losing his job as a result, and besides, the hero - sheriff or principal witness or driver of the stagecoach - must behave heroically, keep silent, be strong, and stride boldly to the rescue. So be did his best to ignore them, marched up to the front door, and rang the bell. First Devenish put his head out of a window, then he came out. The cabdriver said soothingly, “Now you keep close to me, sir, and don’t say a word and you’ll be okay. I’m going to take your arm and get you through this bunch of paparazzi - you won’t mind that, will you?”

  Devenish said he wouldn’t mind that, or rather shouted that he wouldn’t, for everything he said was drowned by the press pack’s questions, their running feet and the clicks and flashes of their cameras. The cabdriver took charge, not neglecting to get his own scowling face into the pictures as he masterfully steered Devenish to where the cab waited.

  Shivering, Devenish sank into the back, said, “Thank you. Thank you very much. Frankly, I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

  The pack followed but the driver managed to lose them. When they got to the police station, Devenish gave him an enormous tip. After Devenish had gone in through the damaged double doors, the driver drove twice in a circle around the forecourt to get a good look at the broken windows and blackened front of the police station. If he got the chance later in the day, he’d come back with a camera.

  Stephen Devenish asked for Wexford. No, the chief inspector wasn’t expecting him but Devenish thought he’d see him and there was no way he was going out there again like a fox running into the jaws of a pack of hounds. The desk sergeant sent him up in the lift and said Wexford would come out to meet him. The first press cars arrived on the forecourt by the time he reached the second floor.

  In Wexford’s room Devenish didn’t complain about media intrusion, but he shouted just the same and Wexford saw for the first time signs of that famous temper. Devenish crashed his fists on the desk “Has that pedophile got my child?”

  “Please try to keep calm, Mr. Devenish.”

  “Just answer me!”

  “Sit down, please. That’s right. I understand your anger. I would feel the same myself in the circumstances. But, no, Orbe has not got your child.”

  “How can you know that? How can you possibly know?”

  “We kept her disappearance a secret because we feared the very thing that has happened. It’s an unfortunate coincidence that Orbe was present in the neighbourhood at the time she went missing, but that’s all it is. There is no connection - I hope you understand that.”

  “Where is he now, then?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry. But he is not in this building, or indeed in this town.” Wexford w
as tired of telling people that boys had been Orbe’s quarry; but he repeated to Sanchia’s father what he had said so many times before. “Thomas Orbe isn’t interested in girls. He’s a homosexual pedophile.”

  “How disgusting! It makes you sick to your stomach.”

  Too bad, Wexford thought, you can’t have it both ways. “We’re doing everything we can to find Sanchia,” he said, “and I can tell you, which I hope may be a comfort to you, that she is not in the hands of any known pedophile on our lists. I’m talking nationwide. No pedophile has her. In these cases, the culprit is very often a disturbed person, usually a woman, who has recently lost her own child or who cannot herself have children. That is why I was so anxious to get from you and your wife the names of all your friends and acquaintances, on the chance that such a woman might be among them.”

  Wexford thought he detected a faint difference in the man’s expression, no more than a flicker, a tiny change in the iris of his eyes, a barely perceptible tightening of the mouth. Rather than pursue it, Wexford changed the subject from the possible kidnapper of Sanchia back to the situation in Woodland Lodge on the night she was taken. “It’s not quite a question, Mr. Devenish, of who might have a key or who might otherwise gain entrance to your home but rather of how anyone could do so without disturbing you or your wife or your sons and without Sanchia making a noise. Can you really tell me that any stranger could take your little girl out of her bed in the night, wake her and lift her up, and she not cry out or call to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Wexford didn’t want to ask it but he had to. He had to establish once and for all just how impaired Sanchia’s intelligence and faculties were. “She can cry out, I suppose? You have said she talks very little, but she can speak?”

  “Of course she can,” Devenish said, quite hotly for him. “She’s not dumb. What are you saying? That she’s some sort of idiot?”

  “No, Mr. Devenish, I’m not saying that. But you must admit yourself that the whole picture is a very strange one. Has any doctor or psychologist given an opinion on why Sanchia isn’t talking at the age of two and three-quarters? Has anyone offered an explanation?”

  “We haven’t asked.” Devenish was calm now, the color had receded from his face, and the charm was back. He spoke lightly, with his habitual half-smile. “We never thought it necessary. She’s a late developer, that’s all. Forgive me, but is this to the point? Finding out why she doesn’t speak isn’t going to find her.”

  “I like mysteries to be solved,” Wexford said simply. “I should like to solve the mystery of these threatening letters you’ve received. Envy makes enemies and there are plenty who must envy you. For instance, when you secured your present job and later when you received a very large salary increase, there must have been people who were passed over to make way for you. Perhaps there are those who feel they have a grievance against the airline for some real or imagined shortcoming. They might transfer this grievance onto you as the airline’s representative. I’m sure you understand what I’m saying.”

  “Oh, yes, of course I do. But there’s nothing.”

  On Devenish’s transparent face, lying or truth-telling immediately showed. Now he was lying. Wexford was sure of it. And there was a stubbornness, too, revealed in those dark eyes. It wasn’t just a matter of lying but of a decision not to expand on what he had said. There was nothing, he had no enemies, and that was it. There could be no room for argument or persuasion.

  “You hardly seem to realize,” Devenish said, but perfectly politely, “that the people who send this sort of letter are mad. They don’t have to have a reason. They read something in the paper and that’s enough to trigger them off. The mad.”

  “I realize it, sir, I realize that this is often, though not invariably, the case. And now I’d like you to tell me some thing you may find similarly irrelevant but I assure you it isn’t.” Wexford paused, looking steadily at the other man. “Do you have a second home?”

  “What, a cottage in the country d’you mean? We live in the country. And we don’t have a flat in London either.”

  “And it would be even less necessary to ask you if an obviously devoted husband such as yourself has, or has ever had since his marriage, a relationship with another woman?”

  If Devenish noticed the edge of irony to Wexford’s voice and his uncharacteristic use of the third person, he didn’t show it. “Chief Inspector, you must be joking.” Devenish smiled, at the same time shaking his head as at an incredibly tall story “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m perfectly serious, six Wexford said in a hard voice. “I don’t find any of this amusing. A man has died a horrible death here this morning. You’ll excuse me if I concentrate on that for the time being.”

  The remains of Ted Hennessy lay in the mortuary He had been thirty-four years old, for four of those years attached to the Regional Crime Squad at Myringham. Married, with two children, as the media put it. The notice of his death in a national newspaper, not the front-page story but the announcement in the Births, Marriages, and Deaths columns, said that he had been the adored husband of Laura and father of Jonathan and Kate.

  Someone in that crowd had thrown the petrol bomb that killed him. He wouldn’t have been in Kingsmarkham at all in the ordinary course of events. He was a reinforcement for Wexford’s beleaguered team. You could say Orbe and the Devenishes were responsible for his being there, which was an irony if you like.

  “I don’t see any irony,” said Burden.

  “No, maybe not,” Wexford said. “I really meant he wasn’t here for anything real. He was here through people making a nuisance of themselves.”

  He didn’t explain what he meant. He had a date with Brian St. George at midday. The editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier had failed to turn up for the press conference and Wexford thought he knew why. At any rate, he guessed or hoped he knew why. St. George had “seen it all” for himself. He had had a piece of luck and seen the petrol bomb thrown.

  “I’m not saying I actually saw it, Reg,” St. George began. He looked nervous. “Not to say saw it. That’s not exactly what I meant.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  “Well, I saw it hit its target.”

  “By its ‘target’ I suppose you mean Detective Sergeant Hennessy,” Wexford said, barely suppressing rage. “For a journalist you’ve a singularly unfortunate way of expressing yourself. Is that what you’re going to write in that rag of yours?”

  If it was possible to hurt St. George’s feelings, this could only be done by impugning his writing skills. He winced a little. He put his hands on his head, on the daisy-center bald spot, and looked at Wexford loweringly. “I never saw who threw it. I never meant that. If I had,” St. George added recklessly, “I wouldn’t tell. I don’t want to be a marked man, not in my position I don’t, Reg.”

  “Don’t call me Reg.”

  Hennessy’s widow, Laura, when told of his death, said, “I always knew the job would kill him, but not like this, not like this.”

  By next morning the police station forecourt had been cleaned up, the burnt-out car - once the property of DC Archbold - removed, and the broken windows boarded up. Several arrests were made, and half a dozen people, including Brenda Bosworth, Maria Michaels, and David Hebden, appeared in court on charges of causing criminal damage. Barry Vine and Lynn Fancourt were obliged to give up the hunt for Sanchia Devenish and, with two members of the Regional Crime Squad, track down who ever among the crowd on the pavement had thrown the petrol bomb that killed Hennessy.

  It was one thing for no witnesses to come forward when throwing a brick and breaking a window was in question, quite another when a man had died as a result. Not everyone was as chicken, as Wexford put it, as Brian St. George. People were anxious to talk, and volunteers with information came from all over Stowerton, Kingsmarkham, and the Muriel Campden Estate. The difficulty was that no one could be exactly sure who had the petrol bomb, still less who had thrown it. Hennessy’s
killer had been in the midst of them, was one of them, had marched with them up the High Street, talked to them and chanted “Stand by Your Kids” with them, that everyone knew. It must have been so, but there they stopped and looked helplessly at Barry and Lynn. They couldn’t absolutely say it was so-and-so, they wouldn’t swear to it if it came to swearing, it was just that they thought. . . After all, you don’t want to say something’s absolutely certain when it could end with the person getting life imprisonment.

  Andy Honeyman, landlord of the Rat and Carrot, was profuse with his information. As Barry remarked later to Michael Burden, you’d have thought he’d been there, seen it all, and taken notes and photographs. In the end it came down to a conversation he had overheard in his saloon bar. “So this guy says, ‘How d’you make a petrol bomb?’ I ask you, you wouldn’t take it seriously, would you? And this other guy, he didn’t take it seriously. ‘You what?’ he says, ‘You’re bonkers’ or ‘You’re barking’ or something. And too right, I thought, never imagining what would come of it. And then another guy comes up.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Vine, “I can’t sort out all these guys. You don’t know their names, I suppose?”

  “Of course I know their names,” said Andy Honeyman. “The first guy, he was Colin whatever, Cromwell - no, Crowne. Her ex was called Cromwell, this one’s Crowne. And the other guy was Joe Hebden. Both of them come from that blot on the landscape, the Muriel Campden Estate. Well, as I say, another guy comes up - ”

  ‘What was his name?”

  “Don’t ask me. I never saw him before. I don’t know who he was, but I know what he said. He told them how to make a petrol bomb - get a bottle, fill it with petrol, I leave it to your imagination. He said there was a market for the things, meaning folks would buy them, I reckon. Then he said making them was a hassle when he could supply them. There was dozens listening. I mean, there was that chap Fowler, the one with a blackie wife who’s left him and gone to that bunch of slags down the road here, The Hide they call it. I know what I’d call it.”