Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  Barry interviewed Colin Crowne and Joe Hebden and Terry Fowler. Colin said where would he get petrol, he hadn’t got a car, as if possession of a motor vehicle were the only criterion for access to a fuel pump. He didn’t remember the conversation in the Rat and Carrot, which he believed was an invention of Andy Honeyman. Anyway, he hadn’t been with the protest, he’d been in bed with shingles, from which he was still suffering as anyone could see with half an eye. Joe couldn’t remember the conversation, and Terry said he had heard the word “bomb” but he couldn’t recall any guy coming up and giving advice how to make one. But Colin’s rhetorical question gave Barry an idea, and next day he began making inquiries at every petrol station in the town and its environs.

  Lynn drove home, left her car, and out on the Savesbury Road, waited, looking forlorn, until she accepted a lift from the fourth driver and first woman driver who offered. She hadn’t gray hair, or rather she had but it was dyed red, she was thin rather than thickset and certainly no more than forty-five, and she drove Lynn back into Kingsmarkham, leaving her where she asked to be let down, outside St. Peter’s. Lynn had to get a taxi home and wondered if she could get the fare off expenses.

  The inquest on Ted Hennessy was opened and adjourned. Wexford and Burden came away from it together, and Wexford put on the thin plastic mac he had bought many years before for a holiday in Ireland. “I don’t seem to be able to think of anything but that poor chap,” he said. “It’s what his wife said, not so much his death, though that’s bad enough, but the manner of it. To be burned to death - you can’t imagine much worse.”

  “We’ll get him,” said Burden, looking askance at the mac. “No doubt about it. Him or her, we’ll get them.”

  "I’m afraid I don’t find revenge much consolation, Mike.”

  They walked down the High Street, where the sun shone brightly on wet pavements, on puddles, on lakes of water half across the roadway. A car, passing too fast, sent up a sheet of spray that just missed Burden’s trouser legs. The driver, for no known reason, leaned across the passenger seat at the red light and shook his fist at them.

  “Let’s go in the Europlate and have a coffee,” said Wexford.

  The Europlate had opened six months before. Its name had nothing to do with European Monetary Union but referred solely to its menu, a suitably eclectic offering of the so-called principal dishes from the cuisine of every country in the EU. You could have Swedish meatballs, Spanish omelette, Greek salad, Irish stew, German sausage, croque monsieur, and the Roast Beef of Old England. The trouble was that everything tasted of stir- fry. The cook was reputed to be Chinese, though no one claimed to have seen him and verified this. Last time he was in there, preferring the place over the police station canteen, Wexford had asked if they did Turkish delight and got a rather surly negative response.

  The place was done up in yellow and blue. Tablecloths were dark blue and every table napkin had in its center the ring of stars that is the emblem of the Union. They ordered coffee and were each offered a complimentary Danish pastry. Burden refused with an incredulous smile, but Wexford had difficulty in resisting this sugary, nut-sprinkled, apricot-jam-filled confection and eventually succumbed. “I’m going to have it,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t, but I need the comfort. It’s been such a bloody week, hasn’t it? There’ll be an inquiry into what happened last Friday morning, and the outcome will be a resigning matter for poor old Rogers.”

  “No one could have foreseen that petrol bomb. Who’d imagine petrol bombs in this place? It’s not Seoul, it’s not” - Burden hesitated, trying to think where else it might not be – “Jakarta.”

  Wexford started on his Danish pastry. It was the first of its kind he had eaten for more than a year and would probably be the last for another year. “I went to Seaward Air yesterday, as you know. The headquarters at Gatwick, not the Brighton one or the office here. I talked to Devenish’s PA and his secretary - two different women, by the way, he’s very grand - and to the present general manager. They all like him, they all say he’s a good employer, very fair, pleasant without being too matey.”

  “And?”

  “Well, yes, there’s an ‘and.’ The secretary talked about his bad temper, of which I saw some signs myself the other day. She’s seen it directed at others, though not at her. Apparently, there was an incident when he threw some chap out of his office. Fellow forced his way in, making complaints about some relative of his being badly treated by Seaward. It was two or three years ago and before her time, but she’d heard he physically threw the man out - neck and crop, as they say. The rumour was that the chap broke a rib. But it’s all very vague. She doesn’t know his name and I couldn’t find anyone there who did.”

  “You make him sound popular,” said Burden. “You paint a very different picture from Trevor Ferry’s.”

  “As you said yourself, it’s understandable Ferry hasn’t got a good word for him.” Wexford finished his Danish pastry and picked up in his fingers the last crumbs off his plate. He said quietly, first glancing over his shoulder, “I believe Devenish abducted his own daughter.”

  Burden looked at him and didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know why he did or where he took her or where she is now, but I believe she’s safe and that he’s hidden her.”

  “I suppose I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Burden said.

  “He blusters too much, he cried. Maybe it was pretend crying, as the children say. I didn’t see any tears. Sometimes he seems upset about his daughter’s disappearance and at others he doesn’t seem to care.”

  Burden nodded. “Hidden her with someone? You must mean that.”

  “First of all,” Wexford said, “I considered a girlfriend. He’s good-looking, he’s young, he’s well-off. His wife looks older than her age and she looks tired. And he goes on too much about his happy marriage. The existence of a girlfriend wouldnt have surprised me.”

  “You mean he was planning to leave his wife for this girlfriend but wanted to keep the child? The child is hidden with her in some secret hideaway he can afford because he’s rich?”

  “Something like that. But there is no girlfriend, Mike. Someone among the dozens we’ve talked to would know of it if he was having an affair. I know everything there is to know about him, I even know he met his wife at a staff Christmas party when he was chief executive at Southern Cross Rail Link and she was the chairman’s PA. There’s not a breath of scandal about him. He’s never even been known to have lunch with a woman. One of the ticket-desk managers at Seaward was sure that if he spent a night a year away from his family, that was the maximum and then only because he was absolutely obliged to attend a meeting in Brussels or Frankfurt.”

  “He goes to sing eucharist at St. Peter’s on Sunday mornings, the whole family goes. He never misses parents’ evenings at the boys’ school, and he frequently takes them to sports events. He gave his wife a sapphire-and-diamond eternity ring on her thirty-fifth birthday and a car on her thirty-sixth a week or so ago. She may look old and tired - sorry to sound so callous - but he loves her.” Wexford wiped his mouth on the EU logo. “He seems to be one of those rare men who are totally monogamous, not from necessity or prudence but by inclination.”

  “I assure you I’m monogamous by inclination,” said Burden hotly.

  “You know what I mean. He wouldn’t even fancy a woman he saw in the street. In other words, he doesn’t commit adultery in his heart. He’s a devoted husband. Do you want another coffee?”

  “May as well. But this saint you’re describing kidnapped his daughter, who is incidentally also his beloved wife’s daughter?”

  “He’s not a saint. Saints aren’t arrogant and superior and insensitive to the feelings of others, and he’s all those things,” Wexford said. “The kidnapper, as you call him, was well enough known to the child for her not to cry out when she saw him. He knew exactly where she was. He had no need to break into the house because he was already in it.” Wexford signaled to the wai
tress, holding up the empty blue-and-yellow coffeepot. “He drove her away in a car Mrs. Wingrave opposite didn’t recognize and therefore assumed to be a stranger’s. She didn’t recognize it because it was the car Devenish, had given to his wife only two days before.”

  Burden looked unimpressed. “Right, and where did he take the child in his wife’s new car?”

  “Not to a relative or a friend. Not to a girlfriend. That car’s being gone over now. Peach and Cox went up there first thing and brought it back here. According to Mrs. Devenish, it hasn’t been driven since it was given to her. She hasn’t been out of the house since Sanchia disappeared. So we shall soon see.” Wexford filled their two cups with fresh coffee. He picked up a Danish pastry crumb with a nut on it off the plate and put it in his mouth. “Sanchia would have sat up in that car, she wouldn’t have been lying in a cot, she’s nearly three.”

  “In which case she should have been strapped into a child seat.”

  “I dare say he didn’t bother about that. God, how irrelevant can you get? It doesn’t matter whether she was in a child seat or not, she was there and must have left traces of herself behind - hairs, fluff from her clothes, finger prints. Now he wouldn’t dare be away from the house for long in case his wife woke up. He’s the one who takes sleeping tablets, not she, though I don’t suppose he took one that night. So I think he only drove Sanchia a short way and was met by someone else in a car, an accomplice, who took her from him and drove her to wherever she now is.”

  “Not in the river or a grave, we hope,” said Burden.

  “Who knows? He came down here in a taxi and he came in rage and despair. He put his head down on the kitchen table and wept. People weep from rage and despair and remorse though, don’t they? Not simply from grief.”

  Entering the police station, they met PC Dixon, whose golden curls had been even more rigorously trimmed since the smuggling out of Orbe. He had been much embarrassed by the taunts of Colin Crowne and Monty Smith, even more than he was by the inquiry frequently put to him as to how were things in Dock Green. He said to Wexford, who was taking off the plastic mac, “I’ve been looking for you, sir. I think you wanted to know the whereabouts of your raincoat. It never left the estate. I gave it to Jim Donaldson while he was parked in Titania Road waiting for you.”

  Just before midday Barry Vine called at the last petrol station on his list. This tiny place in the middle of the village of Bredeway was designed to blend in, insofar as this was possible, with its rural surroundings. Its two pumps were painted green, there were tubs of azaleas and pansies on its forecourt, and the building itself had a thatched roof. The proprietor, who was inside at the till, presiding over a counter filled with Snickers bars and Polo mints at one end and CDs and Disney videos at the other, asked Vine if he liked the setup and described it as environmentally friendly. Vine hadn’t much hope of the place but he said he was looking for someone who might have come in on the previous Friday, quite early in the morning, before eight at any rate, and brought a vessel to be filled with petrol, some sort of can, perhaps, or bucket.

  “You mean their car had run out of juice on the road somewhere?”

  “Maybe. That would be the reason they gave.”

  The proprietor asked a lot of questions, called to his wife, who was around the back, asked her questions, offered Vine a selection of theories, and finally said that it couldn’t have been the Bredeway Garage because they didn’t open before eight-thirty in the mornings.

  Vine went back to Kingsmarkham and picked up DC Archbold. The two of them started on the second phase of the project, calling on hardware stores that sold paraffin.

  The doors of the big double garage stood open. Both cars were gone, Devenish’s and his wife’s. The front lawn was covered in red petals, the blossoms fallen from the chest nut tree. Wexford rang the bell and, when no one came, rang it again. A casement opened upstairs and Fay Devenish put her head out.

  “May we have a word, Mrs. Devenish?”

  She didn’t want to let them in, you could tell that, but she didn’t know how to refuse. The inability of most ordinary middle-class people to say no was an enormous advantage to the police, Wexford often thought. One of the claims of psychotherapy was that it taught patients that it wasn’t necessary or desirable for their egos and their peace of mind always to accept. Saying yes was propitiatory, a weak desire to placate and ingratiate. He sometimes wondered what would be the effect on police work if a generation grew up briefed to turn down requests and invitations.

  Fay Devenish manifestly wasn’t one of them. She didn’t quite say how nice it was to see them, but she hovered on the brink. Her husband had gone in to work just for the morning. Would they care for coffee or tea? Would they mind sitting in the study because she hadn’t yet “done” the living room? She was in housewife’s garb to the extent that Wexford hadn’t seen for forty years. An old- fashioned wraparound overall covered her blouse and skirt, and her head was tied up in a turban made from a red-checked duster.

  Her face was pale and shiny, untouched by makeup. Presumably, the lipstick and powder and mascara would go on after the housework was done and her husband due home. Yes, she would dress and paint, and set her hair like a wife in a fifties magazine advertisement. (“Always be fresh and neat for him, and put on something pretty when he comes home after a hard day’s work.”) Then he reminded himself that her little child, her only daughter, her three-year-old, was missing, and it gave him a shock; all this was so inappropriate.

  They went into the study where, at his last visit, she had been lying on the leather sofa. Now she sat down on the edge of it and looked at them expectantly. She so nearly fitted the description he had ‘given of her to Burden, tired and looking older than her age, that for a moment he had asked himself what on earth a clever, handsome, wealthy, and successful man like Devenish saw in her. Her face was prematurely lined and her eyelids drooped. What would she look like at fifty?

  “Mrs. Devenish,” he began, “I believe you know we’re examining your new car, subjecting it to certain laboratory tests. You haven’t driven it yourself, but could anyone else have done so?”

  “I wouldn’t lend my car to anyone,” she said in her soft, almost childish voice.

  “Not even to your husband?”

  He thought she winced - but why would she? “My husband has his own car. He wouldn’t need to drive mine.”

  “I think you have a friend called Jane Andrews,” said Burden.

  She hesitated. “I used to have.”

  “But not any longer?” Wexford watched her face for a sign of dismay or concealment, but there was none. “What broke up the friendship? Do you mind telling us?”

  “We grew apart. Friends do.”

  “How did you meet in the first place?”

  Her sudden distress was unexpected. “Why do I have to tell you all this? What’s it got to do with my little girl?”

  “When did you last see Miss Andrews, Mrs. Devenish?”

  “Years ago. Six or seven years.” Suddenly she grew voluble. “You ask how we met. We did a business studies diploma at the same time. Seventeen years ago now. The fact is that my husband dislikes her. He disapproves of her, she’s been married twice and divorced twice, you know.” She must have become aware of their puzzled looks. Was a friend’s complex marital history a reason for breaking a friendship? “I don’t think it’s possible in a marriage to keep a friend if the other one doesn’t like them,” she said, sounding confused, “not whether it’s the husband or the wife, do you?”

  “I’d like to go back to the night Sanchia disappeared, Mrs. Devenish.”

  Wexford looked at her in silence for a moment. With her old-fashioned ways and her antiquated ideas of marriage, her housewife’s uniform and her nervousness, a fear of an unspecified something that seemed to pervade her, she was a mystery; and as he had said to her husband, he liked mysteries to be solved. Fear, when it is lived with daily; abates only to a certain extent and then not for long, eat
s up its victim, ages her and wears her out, may drive her mad, kills her before her time. He had seen it happen before.

  “You don’t strike me,” he said, “as a person likely to be a heavy sleeper. Of course I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, but I would say you were rather tense, very often on edge, while your husband presents on the whole a picture of a calm, steady man under his own control. Yet you and he tell me that he is the one who takes sedatives at night, not you.”

  She tried a laugh. It was a pitiful, strained sound. “I may not look a sound sleeper, but I am.”

  “He was drugged and you’re a sound sleeper, so neither of you heard your little girl taken from her room and brought down the stairs, necessarily past your door. Remember that we know now there was no question of her being carried out through the window. She was brought along past your door and down the stairs.”

  “Most mothers,” put in Burden, “well, most parents, become light sleepers through being habituated to waking in the night when babies cry or children call out. It takes years to change that and maybe only changes after the children are grown up if at all.”

  “But you’re not one of those parents, though you’ve had three children?”

  “I heard nothing. I slept.”

  Leaving, Wexford turned back and said almost casually, “What age is your older son, Mrs. Devenish?”

  “He’s twelve.”

  “Ah, yes. He looks older. So many of them do these days. Long way off driving a car yet, then?”

  She hesitated. “He’s tried driving a car - well, round the front here and in the drive. That’s not illegal, is it? On private land?”

  “No, that’s not illegal, Mrs. Devenish.”

  “They all want to drive, you know, and Edward’s so big.”

  As they were leaving, she said suddenly, surprising them, “It was dreadful about that poor man, that police man, it was such an awful way to die.”