by Ruth Rendell
Had Wexford imagined that faint flash of alarm in Robert’s eyes? Edward said, “No. Nothing.”
Then Robert said, “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Then please go on, Edward.”
“Mum came back,” the boy said, more confident now, “with her hand wrapped up in a towel. It was the towel from our downstairs toilet and it was quite big, but the blood was coming through. He’d cut her. It’s no good making that face, Gran. I’m not telling lies and you know it. You don’t like hearing the truth, that’s all. D’you think we liked it?”
Edward didn’t wait for Mrs. Dodds’s reply. “She got a cloth and tied it up, then she told me and Robert it was time to go down to Mrs. Daley’s. Mrs. Daley does the school run when Mum doesn’t,” he explained for the benefit of those who might not know it. “We went out into the hall just as someone rang the doorbell. I opened the door and it was someone to see Dad, a man. I told him to go into the study and he did, and Robert and I went off to Mrs. Daley’s house.”
“Right,” said Robert.
Chapter 22
The two boys were both staring at him, then Robert looked away. If you witness your father repeatedly beat your mother, will you, in your turn, beat your wife when the time comes? They say such cruelties form a chain from generation to generation. Did Stephen Devenish’s father beat his mother? Wexford dismissed these ugly thoughts - there was no point in dwelling on them - and asked Edward if he could describe the man he had admitted to the house.
The boy frowned. He looked as if he were concentrating. “He was just a man. Not as tall as Dad. He was wearing jeans and a jacket, and a shirt. And he was wearing a tie.”
“He had a briefcase,” said Robert. “The dagger was in the briefcase.”
His brother rounded on him. “How do you know? You can’t see through leather. You don’t know what he had in the briefcase.”
“Can you make a guess at how old he was?” Wexford knew this was unlikely, almost hopeless. To a child of twelve everyone over twenty-five is old.
Edward said promptly, “About the same age as Dad.”
“I don’t suppose you saw what color his eyes were? Or his hair?”
Robert started laughing, throwing himself about in his chair and kicking his legs. “His hair was blue and his eyes were red!”
“You’re stupid,” said Edward. “No one would think you were ten.” He said to Wexford, suddenly very grown-up, “I don’t remember about his hair, and his eyes I didn’t notice. I mean, I didn’t know I was going to have to remember. He was just a man who came to see Dad.”
Apparently, it had never occurred to either Mr or Mrs. Dodds that their daughter might have been suspected of her husband’s murder, so they showed no signs of relief. Rather, they were bemused. Who would have thought the day before yesterday, they seemed to be saying to themselves, that the whole of life could be overturned like this so quickly and with no warning?
Mrs. Dodds appeared to be looking about her for some means of distraction, some way of lightening the atmosphere or removing the seriousness, and she came up with an idea commonplace enough, the universal panacea for the British, but she brought out her offer with an air of triumph. “Shall we all have a cup of tea?”
“I don’t like tea,” said Robert.
And Wexford said, “Not just now, Mrs. Dodds, if you please. It’s important I ask Edward a few more questions.” He turned to the boy. “Your mother was out in the kitchen when the man went into the study to see your father?”
“I suppose so. We left her there. She might have gone into the garden, but I don’t reckon she did. She was trying to stop her hand bleeding.”
“Where was Sanchia?”
“In the kitchen with Mum. Mum has to help her eat things or she gets them all over the floor.”
“Did this man come in a car?”
Robert starting laughing again. “He came in a high-speed train. It came up our driveway at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”
The child’s laughter was manic but without mirth or joy, or even amusement. It was the cackle of a parrot or a mynah bird. He opened his mouth, but unsmilingly, and the sound rattled out.
Wexford remembered uneasily how Jane Andrews had said all the children must be damaged by what they had witnessed and heard at home, not the little girl alone. “Edward?” he queried.
“He must have walked,” the boy said., “I didn’t see a car. Or he could have left it in the road, I didn’t see. People don’t always bring a car up our drive, they don’t know if they’ll be able to park it.”
“What did he say to you?”
The boy thought. “Something like ‘I’ve come to see Mr. Devenish’ or ‘I’ve come to see your father,’ one of those, I can’t remember.”
“And you heard nothing from the study after he had gone in there?”
“I told you. I told him to go into the study, and then we went, my brother and me. I shut the front door behind us and we went down the road to Mrs. Daley
“Daley, waley, scaley,” sang Robert, and suddenly babyish, stuck one finger in his mouth and whined, “Can we go now? I want to go and play with the aeroplanes, Granddad.”
“You can go,” said Wexford.
When he got back to the station, he found Burden waiting for him, sitting in his, Wexford’s, office at his, Wexford’s, desk, drinking tea and eating, fastidiously and with the help of a paper napkin, a chocolate éclair.
“You won’t believe this, but that villain Monty Smith says someone videoed the whole of that bomb-throwing affair on a camcorder.”
“The Mitchell woman - where does she live? Oberon Road? Next door to Orbe? Somewhere down there - she’s got a camcorder.”Wexford said.
“She hasn’t now. She says she got rid of it and I can’t prove she didn’t. Anyway, she says she was in the middle of the crowd outside here and couldn’t have filmed it and she’s right. Monty Smith says he didn’t recognize whoever was filming the whole show. It was no one he knew. Colin Crowne is sticking to his story that he put Flay’s petrol bomb in a skip outside twenty-one Oberon Road - and there was a skip there. The builders had it, the ones that left the pile of bricks about for the Kingsmarkham Six to hurl through Orbe’s windows. If what Crowne says is true, someone found it there and helped himself.”
“I doubt if Crowne would give anything away or, come to that, throw anything away if he could get money for it. Is there any more tea? No? Okay, I’ll phone down for some.” Wexford sat down. He made his phone call. “We were wrong about Fay Devenish. This is the one case where the unknown assailant really did come to the door.” He told Burden what had happened. “It’s a funny thing, when Fay told me about the man at the door, about hearing a man’s voice, I scarcely gave it credence. It was such a cliché thing to come up with. ‘No, it wasn’t, me, it was a mysterious stranger at the door.’ I knew we weren’t going to get confirmation, but we did.”
“And you separated those boys from their mother, lest she get at them and tell them to lie for her.”
Wexford grinned. He was feeling inexplicably happy. “I like your use of the subjunctive, Mike. Must be the effect of Mensa membership. Sure, that was my reason fur separating them. I’m very glad I did. Robert confirmed it too. He said the man was carrying a briefcase.”
“Containing the weapon and maybe a raincoat?”
“Presumably. So what I thought would turn out a waste of time, trying to discover who sent those threatening letters and whatever revelation Trevor Ferry has for us, is actually essential stuff. Someone had it in for Devenish, and that someone accomplished his revenge or whatever it was.”
“Let’s go and see him now. I’ll come with you.”
“I don’t suppose there’s anything in it,” Ferry said.
That phrase, or versions of it, always alerted Wexford. It invariably seemed to be used when the reverse was true and there was plenty “in it.” He was far less anxious to hear accounts that were vaunted as sensational, hair-raising, or c
alculated, in the storyteller’s estimation, to lead to immediate arrests. He said what he always said in these circumstances. “We’ll be the judges of that.”
It was three in the afternoon and they had been admitted to the house by Gillian Ferry. Burden asked her if she had got home early from work, and she said her school had broken up two days before. She was a thin, stringy woman with a prematurely lined face and silvering blonde hair, in all respects ordinary but for her large, angry green eyes. Once she had shown them into the living room, where her husband was again enjoying culinary banalities on television, she left them, shutting the door rather too sharply behind her.
The slam had made Ferry wince. He shook himself as if coming to, returning to the real world from Bolognese kitchens and Tuscan feasts. “You want to know about the guy Steve Devenish had the tussle with? I’ll tell you. It was about two years back. More than that, because I was still there and it was around the time Steve Devenish got that big raise. Mind you, I don’t reckon anyone would ever have heard of him if they hadn’t put that piece about him in the paper with all those photos.”
“The Kingsmarkham Courier, you mean?”
“The local rag, yes. They called him a fat cat and had pictures of him and his house, and they even had one of his wife and baby - that was the baby that went missing, right? Well, round about the same time as that there was this chap flying on Seaward to Amsterdam - I think it was Amsterdam - only when he got to Gatwick he was told along with a couple of others that the flight was over booked. We’d got more passengers than we had seats. It was the sixteen-ten flight, four-ten p.m. to the layman.”
“Now this doesn’t very often happen, not with Seaward, but it does sometimes, especially on the popular flights. The point about Amsterdam - Schiphol, that is - is that you can get a cheap flight from there to the U.S., I mean cheaper. Well, this chap wasn’t going to do that, he was going to Amsterdam for a dirty weekend or whatever, or he thought he was, only we were overbooked and some thing had to give, if you see what I mean.”
Ferry looked expectantly at the two policemen, apparently awaiting approval. Wexford gave it with an encouraging nod.
“So we started making offers to the passengers. You know the sort of thing: give up your seat on this flight and take the later one - say in three hours’ time - and we’ll give you a free dinner at the Holiday Inn and a complimentary bottle of wine. Now one passenger accepted so we were left with two. Of course we upped the ante, and the other guy, not this chap, he accepted. But we were in trouble because, for some reason - plain inefficiency, I’d guess - we’d issued two tickets for the seat this chap thought was his.”
“I was called in - I was the Seaward manager then, of course - and I talked to this chap, privately like, took him into a room and gave him a drink. Everyone else was on board, waiting for takeoff. I knew there’d be trouble, he didn’t want the air miles, so off my own bat I offered him a hundred and fifty quid to take the later flight. Well, the upshot was that he accepted, he said he’d take the cash and have the price of his ticket refunded, so I agreed, but he didn’t take the flight, he used the cash to hire a chauffeur-driven car to take him to Harwich and go on the ferry over to the Hook of Holland.”
“Why didn’t he drive himself?” Burden asked. It was irrelevant but he wanted to know.
“Liked the idea of the luxury. That was what he called it, ‘the luxury.’ Apparently he’d never in his life been in a car with a driver, not even a bloody minicab, or so he said. Well, he got his car and his driver, but he never got to the Hook. The car was in a pileup on the M25 near the Dartford crossing and him and the driver were both killed.”
Ferry looked at them with more animation than usual in his face, evidently proud of his dramatic tale.
Wexford said, “Where does the threat or the menace to Devenish come in?”
“I’m coming to that,” said Ferry with the storyteller’s talent for suspense. He looked much brighter, less hang-dog, and color had come into his grayish face. “This chap had a sister and she was - is, I suppose - married to a very aggressive guy. Lives round here, this guy does.”
Wexford thought he could manage to sort things out fairly satisfactorily, provided Ferry categorized his principal characters as a “chap” and a “guy.” “Go on.”
“Well, this guy knew the story; it seems the chap rang up his sister from Gatwick and told her the tale. I mean, he was full of it, over the moon, how he’d got this money out of the airline. I mean, I reckon he put it across as if he’d practiced some kind of deception.”
Ferry paused as his wife came in with three mugs of tea on a tray. The milk came in a quarter-litre carton and the sugar in a half-empty packet. There were no spoons so it was just as well none of them took sugar. Gillian Ferry left as quickly as she had come in. Handing out the mugs, her husband looked around for something to stand them on, but looked in vain, shrugged, and gave up.
“Please go on, Mr. Ferry,” said Burden.
“Right. Where was I? Oh, yes. Now you understand there’s no question it was anything to do with Seaward, what this chap decided to do with the money. He chose to spend it on a chauffeur-driven car and the car crashed and he was killed. There was no way Seaward was responsible. You might as well say the airline caused the driver’s death. But this guy, the brother-in-law, and his wife, the sister, they didn’t see it like that. For some reason they picked on Steve Devenish and put the blame on him.”
“Because Mr. Devenish was, you could say, the boss of Seaward?” Wexford asked.
“Exactly. The way this guy saw it, or the way I suppose he saw It - if you can say an animal like that sees anything - was that Steve Devenish made the company’s policy - which was only partly true - and that the company’s policy was to overbook flights and - well, ‘bribe’ was the word he used - and put temptation in the way of people like his brother-in-law by giving them large sums of money that went to their heads and they couldn’t handle it.”
“Bit over the top, wasn’t it?” Burden said.
“Out in the stratosphere,” said Ferry. “But this guy came to Seaward’s office in Kingsmarkham first of all and Steve happened to be there. He made a big scene and threatened to sue. Steve didn’t think much of it and he even tried to ignore it when the guy forced his way into his office at Gatwick. That time he said he’d call the police.”
“And did he?”
“Not so far as I know. He didn’t have to, Steve threw him out himself. He was a big chap, was Steve, as I dare say you know. Then he got a solicitor’s letter from this guy’s solicitor, whoever it was; saying this guy’s wife had a right to substantial compensation. Rubbish, of course. Seaward’s own lawyers soon put him in his place.”
Ferry took a mouthful of tea and set the mug down, making a wet ring on the coffee table. “Of course, when the death threats started coming, Steve should have got on to you, but for some reason he didn’t. D’you know what I think? I think he didn’t want any more hassle.”
“What d’you mean by hassle, Mr Ferry?”
“Well, he’d thrown the guy out of his office, hadn’t he? I mean, literally thrown him out. And when a great big bloke like Steve, in what you might call the prime of life, picks up a little guy like this guy and throws him onto his back onto a marble floor, if he doesn’t do lasting damage, he definitely causes pain. The guy said he’d broken one of his ribs. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But it was why Steve didn’t want you lot called in.”
It might be the Rachel Holmes story all over again, Wexford thought. You are attacked, physically or verbally, certainly illegally, but in repelling your assailant you injure him and, fearing repercussions, keep silent, or as silent as you can, about the original assault. There ought to be a name for it - how about the Kingsmarkham Defence? He looked up at Ferry and nodded just as Gillian Ferry came back into the room. She kicked open the door because her hands were full with books and papers - schoolchildren’s work to mark in the holidays? - but it seemed to Wexford as
if she kicked in anger.
“You mentioned death threats,” he said. “You mean letters?” The tea was thin, weak, and tepid, and he wished a potted plant were nearby in which secretly to tip it, but there wasn’t. No green leaves flourished here. “Did you see any of them?”
Ferry shook his head. “Steve told me about them. That was just before he told me Seaward were ‘letting me go.’ Nice expression that, isn’t it? It’s what they call a UFO something.”
“A euphemism,” Gillian Ferry said in a rather sharp, schoolmistressy tone. It told Wexford a lot about her relationship with her husband. She felt she had married intellectually beneath her and it rankled still. Had Ferry attracted her only because once he was well-off and successful? And, finding this not enough, had she been trying to improve him ever since? Wexford said to Ferry, “Your contention is that the brother-in-law wrote these letters?”
“Who else? Maybe it was his wife who actually wrote them. The guy could barely write, or so I’m told. Steve laughed it off. Well, whether he went on laughing it off I couldn’t say. I wasn’t there, was I? I’d been let go. The guy made phone calls too until Steve had his number changed and went ex-directory.”
It interested Wexford that of all the people he had talked to about Stephen Devenish, Trevor Ferry was the only one to call him by a diminutive of his given name.
No one else, apparently, called him Steve. Yet this man, in spite of what he professed, had particular reason for bitterness against Devenish and could never have been intimate with him Wexford found it hard to believe Ferry bore him no grudge. “You refer to him as ‘the guy’ because you can’t remember his name?”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you I remembered? His name’s Carl Meeks.”
This was no special cause for surprise, but Wexford was surprised. He remembered Meeks from the various disturbances that had taken place at Muriel Campden, an undersized but fat man with a round face and loose lips, his wife one of those grossly fat women until recently rarely seen in any British communities. Burden had interviewed them in the hunt for Hennessy’s killer and Wexford recalled murmuring to him, in a paraphrase, “It is such fools as you make the world full of ill-favoured children.” But aggressive? Violent?
