Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford was so astonished and at the same time so aghast that anyone would be in such desperate straits of boredom and idleness as to welcome this kind of diversion that it was some moments before he realized what Ferry had said. And when he did, and Ferry was saying he must be off before it started pouring, he had to catch the bus, Wexford said nothing at all beyond good-bye.

  That evening Patrick Flay and Monty Smith were caught burgling a house in Orchard Drive. Kaylee was not with them. The neighbours recognized Flay, or they recognized the intruder they saw cutting a pane of glass out of a next-door window, as the man they had once seen in a drunken brawl outside the York Arms public house. Whoever he might be, they were sure he had no business gaining entry to their neighbours’ home and they dialed 999.

  It was eleven forty-five. The police came quietly, entered the house by the same means as Flay and Smith had entered it, and found both men in the master bedroom, putting jewelry and ornaments into a canvas holdall. Monty Smith said he was a law-abiding man who had been led astray by Patrick Flay. Flay wife had been putting Smith up since his girlfriend turned him out. Even so, he would never have done it if he hadn’t been thrown out of his home and left destitute on the streets. Flay said nothing at all but jumped out of the window.

  The result was that he broke one of his legs and, while Smith was driven to the police station, had to be taken away in an ambulance. Next morning, at the Princess Diana Memorial Clinic where he was in traction, he told Burden that apart from the one he had given Colin Crowne, he had sold two of his petrol bombs to John Keenan and two to Peter McGregor.

  “Who’s Peter McGregor?”

  “Chap who lives with Sue Ridley, next door to the Crownes.”

  Burden had no comment to make.

  “Don’t matter telling you lot now,” Flay said, “seeing as I’ll be going down for Christ knows how long. I never said nothing before on account of I was scared they’d get me.”

  It all sounded highly unlikely to Burden. “How about that business with Kaylee and the cat flap?”

  “Before I’m sentenced,” said Flay rather grandly, “I shall be asking for a number of offences to be taken into consideration.”

  “I bet you will.”

  “I can’t talk any more now, I’m in pain. My leg feels like it’s on fire. D’you know, you’ve been in here an hour and you haven’t once asked me how I’m feeling?”

  Burden met Wexford for lunch in the Europlate. Wexford said three-quarters of an hour was all the time he could spare and he hoped Henri would get a move on. The big Glaswegian appeared as if on cue to tell them that today’s specials were soufflé pomodoro secco and osso buco a Porange. Wexford said to forget it. He’d have the pike and boiled potatoes and his friend the roast lamb.

  “Good choice,” said Burden, and refrained from adding that he hadn’t been consulted. “Do you know, Jenny’s sister’s got an Italian friend who’s lived in Tuscany all her life and she’d never heard of dried tomatoes till she had some in a restaurant in Soho.”

  Wexford laughed. “I met Trevor Ferry at the funeral.” He told Burden about their conversation. “When I got back, I phoned the Town Hall - well, not the Town Hall at all, really, these days - the building that used to be the Midland Bank, which now houses Kingsmarkham Neighbourhood Clean Streets Campaign. What do you think they told me?”

  “That Ferry turned up at the rendezvous covered in blood,” said Burden sourly.

  “Not quite that. They told me that the area covered on Tuesday mornings was Winchester Drive, Harrow Avenue, Eton Gardens, and adjacent roads.”

  “So? Winchester Drive’s the nearest to Ploughman’s Lane and it’s still a good half mile away.”

  “Right. I asked for a lot of details about the campaign. Apparently, people may work in groups or individually - that is, one man or woman could work a street on their own. And last Tuesday very few people turned up - the usual fate of this kind of enterprise, I fear.”

  Burden considered. “You’re saying Ferry could have been left on his own and while he was alone slipped away up to Woodland Lodge?”

  “At any rate I mean to find out. Here comes our delicious Euro-grub.”

  A bottle of sparkling water came too. Burden poured them a glass each.

  “Karen’s gone to Brighton to have another word with Mrs. Probyn. Or another ten thousand words. Barry and Lynn are at Muriel Campden, still hoping to find some evidence for Meeks’s assertion that he went out with that dog as usual on Tuesday. Or if he didn’t, they haven’t given up hope of finding someone who saw him out without the dog around half-seven.”

  Wexford tasted his pike, nodded with grudging approval. “Not bad. The thing is, Mike, Ferry lied. He lied when be said he was in bed at eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, then, caught off guard, he forgot what lie he’d told last time and told the truth.”

  “You mean he was definitely out with the Clean Streets people?”

  “The organizer remembered him. So few turned up, you see, that she remembered those who did. One of the others who did, by the way, was Shirley Mitchell.”

  “What, the Shirley Mitchell who lives next door but one to the Orbe house?”

  “The very same.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “Not yet,” Wexford said. “But if she tells me Ferry disappeared once they got up to Winchester Drive, I’m going to have that house of his turned upside down.”

  Arriving at the police station as requested, dead on time, Shirley Mitchell told him just that. She began with a preamble on the need to be a good citizen and the importance of what she called “community values.” Litter was the scourge of the age and the principal destroyer of the environment. Wexford listened patiently. Then she said most people who volunteered to take part in the campaign “fell by the wayside.” Treyor Ferry was one of them. It was her belief he only took it on for the sake of getting a lift up to the top of the hill to enjoy the otherwise unattainable view across the countryside and the Kingsbrook valley.

  He was always skiving off. They didn’t necessarily work singly, the idea was to work in groups, but when she’d worked in a group with Ferry, as often as not he disappeared. It was her belief he went off for a quiet cigarette, which he couldn’t do on the job, Kingsmarkham having a ban on council workers, paid or otherwise, smoking in public places.

  “Smokers are some of the worst litter offenders,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know that. They say to themselves, what’s one fag end? Well, fag ends mount up. And they’re not bio-whatsit, they’re not destroyable.”

  Wexford saw he had a fanatic to deal with. “But does Mr. Ferry smoke?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Shirley Mitchell said sharply. “I don’t want to know about his filthy habits. You asked me if he was there when I was there and I’m telling you he wasn’t. We got up there in the minibus, just the four of us. He got Winchester Drive, I got Harrow Avenue, and the other two got the rest of it. Well, I had my tools ready and my bag.”

  “What tools were those?”

  “We have a pole kind of thing with a spike on the end, and you can have a smaller thing like a kind of - well, not a dagger, you wouldn’t call it that, more like a metal rod kind of thing with an end that’s been sharpened. You can picture it, can’t you, sharp so that you can stab something with it and pick it up.”

  Silent for a moment, Wexford thought about Devenish and his wounds. Only a knife could have made them, not a spike with a sharpened end. But it was a strange business, far stranger than he had expected. Instead of saying any more, he asked her to excuse him for a moment and went outside. There he picked up the nearest phone and got on to Barry Vine.

  “See if the council got all their tools back last Tuesday, Barry, after the morning cleanup session. And if they didn’t, what was missing?”

  Shirley Mitchell was sitting in his office, staring fixedly at an object that had once, many years previously, been used as an ashtray. When he came back and took his seat opposite
her, she pushed the ashtray a little farther away from her as if it still presented a threat.

  “So at what time would you say you last saw Mr. Ferry that morning? You met at seven-thirty, probably got going in the minibus at twenty-five to eight, got to the set-down point at - what? A quarter to?”

  “Bit before a quarter to. The set-down point’s in Harrow Avenue. That’s my patch. The others just went off with their tools. Oh, and Ferry had a bag he was carrying.”

  Wexford felt his muscles tense. “What sort of a bag? A briefcase?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that. He always brings that bag. Like a canvas thing with sort of leather binding-correction, more like plastic binding. Brings his fags in it, I shouldn’t wonder, and maybe a bottle. I’ve seen him drinking on the job. I’ve seen him eating sandwiches.”

  She could even make this last sound like a crime. Wexford frowned a little. “So you didn’t see him for a while after seven forty-five. When did you see him again?”

  “When I got to the end of Harrow Avenue where it joins onto Winchester Drive. I’d got to the end and I was starting down the other side. He waved to me. You want to know what time it was? All of nine, if not a bit past.”

  After she had gone, Barry Vine told Wexford that one of the campaign’s short spiked. tools had gone missing on the previous Tuesday morning. The loss hadn’t been noticed until after the volunteers had been dropped on the green outside the Town Hall. Wexford sat down and reread the medical report on Stephen Devenish. He had read it at least three times before. It told him once again that Devenish’s wounds had been made with a flat bladed knife with a blade eight to ten inches long. He had taken it for granted the campaign’s tool was cylindrical, with a sharpened point like a pencil. He would have to see one.

  But first he set about applying for a warrant to search Ferry house.

  “He could have got there in time,” Burden said. “He could have done it on foot, walked to Ploughman’s Lane, up the path to Woodland Lodge, rung the doorbell, gone in, and done the deed by eight.”

  “The time’s tight, though, isn’t it?” It was Wexford’s idea but he was dubious just the same. “It must have been exactly eight when he arrived, because Edward and Robert got to Mrs. Daley’s by five past. I wouldn’t call him a very fit man and it’s uphill all the way.”

  “A gentle slope,” said Burden. “Even a very unfit man can walk half a mile in fifteen minutes. Once he got there, he had all the time in the world. Stephen Devemsh may have been killed at any time between seven forty-five and eight-thirty. He could have stood there arguing with him for ten minutes before he did the deed.”

  “Wouldn’t Devenish have thrown him out the way he did Meeks?”

  “It not important,” Burden said airily. “Besides, the conversation might have been amicable at first. Then they quarrelled. Surely the point is Ferry could easily have done it in the time. He had the means, the opportunity; and the motive.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Look, Reg, we’ve known all along that whoever did this did it for revenge. That’s the only possible motive.”

  “I’m off to look at spikes,” said Wexford.

  The old Midland Bank building in Brook Road was opposite the Job Centre and the Nationwide Building Society Brutal refurbishment had removed the pillared portico and the Parthenon frieze and replaced the front entrance with swing doors in a white metal-mesh arrangement rather like a freezer basket. This was the headquarters of Kingsmarkham Domestic Environment and Landscape Department, and the man-with-flowers, woman-with-spade logo was over the door.

  Entering the foyer, Wexford encountered Rochelle Keenan coming out of the lift. This made little impact on him beyond reminding him that she was some relation to his informant of the morning, Shirley Mitchell, sister or sister-in-law or something. He went upstairs to the room that housed the Clean Streets Campaign and was shown the tools supplied to the volunteers. Shirley Mitchell had described them accurately, and nothing he saw much surprised him.

  Undoubtedly either of these spiked implements could have been used to kill a man. The smaller one reminded Wexford of something he had never actually seen but had often read and heard about: the ice pick, once beloved of the writers of American murder mysteries. But perhaps it didn’t in fact look much like this at all.

  “The missing one hasn’t been returned to you?”

  It had not. The woman who had shown him the tools took a philosophical view. So much went missing from the council’s property, issued for various reasons to the public - went missing or was destroyed - that really she was surprised more of these hadn’t disappeared. Had he heard, for instance, of the fatal damage to Jodi the virtual baby?

  “Fatal?” ‘Wexford said. “It wasn’t real.”

  “Maybe not.” She sounded huffy. “But it was very valuable.”

  By this time the search of Ferry’s house in Oval Road would have begun. Wexford said to Burden, “There is no way the wounds in Stephen Devenish’s chest are going to match up with one of those spikes. They are very precisely described in the medical report. It was a knife, not a spike.”

  "What if you find the thing inadequately washed and wrapped up in a towel in Ferry’s bedroom?”

  “I doubt very much that we will. Even if we do, the fact remains that a knife of precise measurements was used and not a spike of any kind.”

  “With Devenish cremated . . .”

  “‘Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass,’ only she won’t have wasted a good brass urn on him. Makes no difference, anyway. The medical report is a marvel of precision.”

  Burden looked dubiously at him. “Then what are you going to find?”

  “Possibly nothing. Possibly something unconnected with Devenish’s death. You remember what you pointed out to me and I’d missed? About Gillian Ferry being a teacher at the school the Devenish boys go to?”

  “Sure I do. She teaches English at the Francis Roscommon.”

  “Sit down a minute, Mike.” Wexford took his seat on one side of the desk, motioned Burden to the other. Wexford pushed away the ashtray Shirley Mitchell had moved toward his side. “Gillian Ferry is also Robert Devenish’s - well, we used to call them form mistresses, I expect there’s another term now. I’m no expert in these things but I think Robert is a badly disturbed child, a child who was perhaps more affected by his father’s treatment of his mother than either his brother or his sister was. Did he have anyone to confide in? Anyone to tell about the horrors that went on at home?”

  “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

  “Yes, he had his teacher, his class teacher. Suppose he confided in her? She already had cause to hate Devenish, he was responsible for her husband losing his job and, incidentally, for forcing her back to work. Almost any woman - any man, come to that - would be moved by a child telling them his father constantly assaulted his mother. Many would be outraged and angry . . .“

  “Are you saying Gillian Ferry killed Devenish?”

  “No, Mike. I’m saying she wrote the letters.”

  Chapter 25

  It was too small a house and too sparsely furnished to give the searchers much difficulty Less than half an hour after they began, they found the spiked tool that was the property of the local authority. Trevor Ferry had made no attempt to hide it but put it into a kitchen drawer along with a hammer and a couple of screwdrivers. Technically, he had stolen it, but more realistically, he had simply taken it home by mistake. In any case, even a cursory examination of the tool made it clear that though it was capable of being used as a lethal weapon, it hadn’t been so used.

  The bag Ferry had carried with him the Tuesday before and yesterday could never have been described as a brief case, even by a twelve-year-old. It was a soft, unstructured holdall, shabby and almost dilapidated, made of dark green canvas with tan-coloured plastic binding. Wexford wasn’t going to waste time showing it to Edward Devenish. Would he ever have mentioned a briefcase if his younger brother hadn’t?<
br />
  Ferry’s indignation at the searching of his house was extreme, and he accused Wexford of “disloyalty” and even of “betrayal” solely, it seemed, on the grounds that they had left a crematorium together and carried on a reasonably amicable conversation. “I call it dirty and underhand. Worming details out of me under the guise of friendship.”

  Wexford ignored the last bit. It was too ridiculous to be taken seriously and reminded him of Brian St. George. “You volunteered the information, Mr. Ferry,” Wexford said mildly. “I didn’t ask you.”

  “I should have known better than to open my mouth to you people.”

  “Why did you tell me you were still in bed at eight in the morning when in fact you were out with the cleanup campaign?”

  “Because that time I had the sense not to open my mouth. I knew what you’d think if I said I’d been in Winchester Drive at a quarter to eight. You already knew there was no love lost between me and Steve Devenish. I may as well say it now.”

  “You told me, I quote, ‘He wasn’t so bad.’”

  The blood came into Ferry’s face and swelled the tissues. It even seemed to get into his eyes. “I hated him.”

  “Did your wife also hate him, Mr. Ferry?”

  Many men would have seen the question as a hint that there might have been sexual relations or a desire for sexual relations between Devenish and Gillian Ferry. In that Ferry did not, in that he hesitated and slightly narrowed his eyes, Wexford understood her husband had half guessed she had written the threatening letters.

  She had been out while the search was done and knew nothing about it. The anger she had suppressed burst out when she saw police in her home, and she turned on Ferry calling him a fool, a spiritless fool with no gumption. “You’re as weak as a baby! You are a baby, you’ve never begun to grow up.”

  Wexford had found no evidence of the letters but he hadn’t expected to do so. She would hardly have made copies and kept them in a reference file. A Word for Windows program had been used to produce them, but the searchers hadn’t found a computer. He would have been surprised if they had in this household where money was tight. She would have used one of the computers at the Francis Roscommon School. He showed her the letter, the last line of which threatened to make Devenish’s wife a widow and his children orphans, and asked if she was its author.