Wexford 18 - Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  “But only one knife, not two?”

  “Edward spoke of just one. But there were two. So when was the second knife put through the hot wash? Not, surely, before Devenish’s death. Fay was often enough punished for nothing, she wasn’t going to stick her neck out committing an offence for which she was deliberately cut across the hand the first time.”

  “Right. And why was it put through the dishwasher?” Burden answered his own question: “Presumably, because such a wash, extending over - what? Forty minutes? - would effectively have removed any blood and any prints that might be on it.”

  “Certainly its blade matches Stephen Devenish’s wounds.” Wexford said. “Don’t you want to know who the man at the door was?”

  “I know you well enough to be quite aware that you’ll only tell me when you’re ready.”

  Wexford grinned. He drank from the new Adnams, nodded. “Remember, according to Edward, it was a man of about thirty-six or seven, tall but not so tall as his father, wearing jeans and a jacket, and carrying a briefcase. Now there is a woman involved in all this whom, when I first saw her, because of her hair and her lack of makeup and her height, and her thinness and her clothes, I took for a man. Very briefly, a matter of seconds rather than minutes, but I took her for a man.”

  “Jane Andrews,” said Burden.

  “Without being in the least unattractive or what used to be called ‘mannish,’ she can make herself look like a man. She’s flat-chested, she’s tall, she has the right haircut. These days women’s jackets and men’s are scarcely different from one another. Jeans are the same for men and women. Let us suppose that Jane Andrews dressed herself in her jeans and jacket, and perhaps added some other masculine touches, men’s shoes in a size seven - her size, anyway, I’d guess - a white shirt? A tie? Edward says the man wore a tie. And the briefcase. Most people still associate briefcases with men, though the concept is slowly changing. That would be enough.”

  “She leaves the house in Brighton at seven or seven- fifteen. Her mother is still in bed asleep and likely to remain so for a couple of hours. There is no one else to see her go or care whether she goes or not. She arrives in Ploughman’s Lane, a place she knows very well, though she hasn’t been there for years.”

  “She parks somewhere. Maybe in Ploughman’s Close or even down the hill to where it meets Winchester Drive. She walks to Woodland Lodge, carrying her briefcase, in which she has a thin, lightweight raincoat and a weapon, for she intends to kill Stephen Devenish. That is the purpose of her visit.”

  “Then what happened . . .?”

  “To the other knife? The one used to cut Fay and which she afterwards put through the hot wash? Wait. Presumably Jane brought a knife with her or even a gun. Why she chose that time of day I don’t know. Perhaps she had already tried to set up a meeting alone with him out side the house but he had refused even to speak to her.”

  “Her motive, of course, is her affection and sympathy with Fay Devenish?”

  “That and the rage she felt, and has felt for years, against Devenish. Perhaps too, her empathy with her sister, Louise Sharpe . . .”

  “It would be a very illogical empathy,” Burden said hotly. “Devenish may have been a villain and a miscreant, but no one could say he was to blame for Louise Sharpe’s problems.”

  Wexford sighed. “We’re talking about emotion, Mike, not logic.” He paused, looked down at the table, then said, “Jane Andrews rang the doorbell and the door was opened almost immediately by Edward. She recognized him, of course, but he didn’t recognize her. Why would he? He hadn’t seen her for years, and when he last saw her, she had long hair. Mrs. Probyn told us that her daughter used to have ‘lovely long hair.’ No doubt Jane deepened her voice for the few words she had to speak to Edward, not a very difficult undertaking. She already has a deep voice for a woman.”

  “She goes into the study and for a moment he doesn’t know who this stranger is. He says hello or something and what can he do for her - well, him, as he thinks. She speaks in her normal voice and then he does recognize her . . .”

  “Why doesn’t he throw her out?”

  “I don’t know, Mike. There are a few loose ends to tie up. The point is that he doesn’t. Maybe he welcomes a confrontation. He may suspect she and Fay were still in touch, he may know that they were and he wants to tell her what he’ll do if she doesn’t stop communicating with his wife. And we know what that might be, don’t we? More and severer punishment for Fay. Or he may prefer to deny what Jane says or tell her she’s mad, a favourite retort with him. One thing you can be sure of, he doesn’t think she’s come to kill him.”

  “What he says drives her over the edge. A knife is lying on the desk. She has a weapon with her, but why use that when one is here to hand? She picks it up, catches Devenish unawares, and stabs him.”

  “She wipes the knife - on what? Her own clothes perhaps, which in any case will already be splashed with blood - puts it back on the table, having guessed why it was there and what it was used for and knowing that in due course Fay will take it away and wash it. She knows her Fay.”

  “She puts on the raincoat she has brought with her and leaves the house, picks up the car, drives home, where her mother is still in bed. How’s that? It covers everything, I think”

  “Yes, it does. It’s the only solution that does.” Burden lifted his glass. “Well, congratulations, if that’s appropriate.”

  Wexford nodded. He didn’t drink. “The only drawback is that it isn’t true.”

  Chapter 26

  The new raincoat looked uncomfortably new. Yet it wasn’t uncomfortable but an excellent fit, the right breadth on the shoulders, the right length. Burden would have enjoyed, wearing it. Mystifyingly, Burden loved new clothes, the pleasure of putting them on for the first time, of seeing himself look elegant. Wexford could never understand it. Part of the trouble for him was the newness, the looking new. He wasn’t a self-conscious man, nor shy, nor desirous of making an impression, but in new clothes he felt everyone was looking at him. With a kind of nostalgia, he thought of his old raincoat, so comfortable, so pleasantly worn, so mildly battered. He even loved the ineradicable small stain, the heart-shaped blotch of something unanalyzable that defied the efforts of dry cleaners.

  But once again it was raining. The warm, dryish weather had lasted no more than a day He would have to wear it, make a start, break it in. The faint sheen on its fabric, the stiffness of its lapels, discomfited him.

  On the phone to Burden he said, “If we have even a week’s dry spell after all this rain, the water moguls will say we’re in drought and put on a hose-pipe ban. You see if I’m not right.”

  “What are you really ringing me about, Reg?”

  “How well you know me.”

  “Perhaps. So what’s new?”

  Wexford told him, in a sombre voice and with a heavy heart. But Burden knew already. He’d see him later, and never mind, what must be, must be. Justice must be done.

  The rain was so heavy that Donaldson had to stop the car in Winchester Drive, pull under the trees, and wait for it to abate a little. Wexford, in the back, not even bothering to clear a space with his hand in the steamy window, sat thinking whether there was anything he could say, any hint he could give, any adumbration of the terrible risks involved, without jeopardizing his career and his very job. Through his head ran such phrases as “mandatory life sentence” and “provocation beyond bearing.” The rain crashed on the car roof. Condensation trickled down the glass. “Give it another go, will you?” he said with unaccustomed roughness. “We can’t sit here all day.”

  As he spoke, the rain diminished a little. The roar lessened. The wipers could just cope with the flow down the windscreen. Donaldson started the car and drove slowly up the hill, sending fountains of water onto the pavements as the wheels rolled through puddles. In the driveway, an overhanging branch brushed against the car and sent down a cascade of water.

  The rendering on the walls of Woodland Lodge was
stained dark gray with water. A puddle lay at the foot of the front doorstep, and Wexford was faced either with an undignified jump or the prospect of inundated shoes. He jumped. Lynn Fancourt’s small leap was more elegant. The bell rang hollowly through the house. He must have rung this bell a dozen times, but he had never noted its loudness before, nor the echo that seemed to follow it. At any rate, he reflected while he waited, that cuckoo was gone.

  Jane Andrews came to the door with Sanchia close behind her. In a long skirt and silk jumper, she looked very unlike a man today. Her hair seemed longer, and a hairdresser had put blonde highlights in it. “She’s expecting you,” she said, then, “She knows why you’ve come.”

  “Thanks,” he said because he didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’m going to take the children out. In the car somewhere. I’ll think of somewhere we can go in the rain.”

  The house looked like a place people lived in, women and children lived in, no longer like a country-house interiors museum. Someone’s cardigan hung over the banisters. The flowers in the big Chinese vase were dying. In the big living room where Fay Devenish sat alone, books were scattered on the coffee table among two or three days’ newspapers. She jumped up when he and Lynn came in.

  “Please sit down, Mrs. Devenish.”

  In a slow, sad voice, not at all hysterical, she said calmly, “You know, don’t you? I knew you would. I just want you to know I wouldn’t have let anyone else take the blame for this. I mean, if you’d arrested someone else, I’d have stopped it.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  “I killed Stephen, of course I did. Didn’t you always know?”

  He wouldn’t admit to her that in his heart he had indeed always known. At any rate, had always feared. It was really that he hadn’t wanted to face up to it. Had he, of all people, been wasting police time these past few days?

  He said quietly, “There was no man, no stranger who came to the door. It was just the story that any frightened person would invent, it’s the first thing that comes into one’s head. It came into your head and into your son Edward’s - perhaps because you’re mother and son - only he went further than you did. He gave the mystery man an appearance: height and clothes and an age. You only gave him a voice.” He cleared his throat. “Edward loves you, you see. He didn’t think twice about lying for you. That morning, when he was at school and the head teacher came and told him, I think he knew then that you’d killed his father. It was so obvious to him. He’d have done it himself - one day.”

  Lynn made a small sound behind him, a little in drawing of the breath. Fay had been looking at him impassively, but when he spoke of her son, her lip trembled. He knew he was talking to postpone the incriminating confession she would soon make.

  “No one came to the door,” he said. “Edward invented that, not knowing that you’d also invented it. He and Robert left for school, but by then, for ten minutes before that, your husband was dead. Your husband took the knife from the knife block after breakfast and took it into the study. That’s how you knew what he would do when he called you in. You killed him after he cut you with the knife.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he cry out? Scream?” She wasn’t going to answer him. “It would have made no difference if he had. If Edward and Robert and Sanchia had all heard him. It would simply have been a change to hear a cry from him instead of from you.”

  He saw her wince. A conviction for murder, he thought, carries a mandatory life sentence. Self defence doesn’t always work, often doesn’t work. If a woman gives evidence of repeated abuse and it is known that on the final occasion she reacted by killing, a jury is going to want to know what was so special about the last time. Why kill then when in the past she had borne the abuse passively? Pickup a knife and kill an unarmed man? That’s murder. It’s just as much murder as if a stranger came up to him in the street and stabbed him. And murder carries a mandatory life sentence, there’s no choice about it, no second- and third-degree murder such as they have in the United States. Here murder is murder and the punishment is life.

  “I am going to take you back with me now, Mrs. Devenish, and you will of course want a solicitor to be present.”

  “Are you arresting me?”

  “Of course.”

  “This is what I’m going to say. Stephen always said I was - was mentally unstable and he was right. That morning he cut me and I went mad, I lost control, I don’t know what I did or why I did it. I must have just grabbed the knife and stabbed him in a frenzy I don’t remember it, it’s all a blur, it was then. They say you see red. I did, I just saw red in front of my eyes. I lost my mind. I didn’t even see him when I struck out.” She stared at Wexford as if she saw red now and her whole body shook. “I went mad.”

  He felt an inward sigh relax him. She might be lying, but he didn’t care. If she stuck to that story - and her solicitor, her counsel, would love it - she would be saved.

  “Jane will look after my children,” she said in the most tranquil tone he had ever heard her use. “I know I may not see them for a long time. They will be fine with Jane.”

  Chapter 27

  In the months that followed, the hunt went on for Ted Hennessy’s killer, but inquiries had reached a stalemate. It was thought that the petrol bomb had been thrown by John Keenan or Joe Hebden, but neither of them would give evidence against the other - and no one admitted possessing or handling any bombs.

  In the middle of October, Brenda Bosworth took her three children out of school for a week and up to Clacton for a holiday in her mother’s caravan. As soon as she was out of the way, Miroslav Zlatic and Maria Michaels were married in the new Bridal Bower at the Cheriton Forest Hotel with the maximum of celebration and the minimum of secrecy Heavily pregnant Lizzie Cromwell, along with her mother, attended the wedding and the buffet lunch afterward, not at all upset. For, as Lizzie told every one over the Spanish champagne, Miroslav had only got married for the sake of British citizenship and Maria was years and years older than him.

  Two weeks later Lizzie gave birth to a daughter in the maternity wing of the Princess Diana Memorial Clinic and named her Millennia. During the single day and night Lizzie was in there, Colin Crowne, who had been consoling Brenda for Miroslav’s defection, moved in with her. Debbie said there was no way she was going to live three doors away from ‘that pair, but instead of 16 Oberon Road (now tenanted by cousins of the Meekses) Kingsmarkham Housing Department, delighted to repossess 45 Puck Road, allotted Debbie and Lizzie and Millennia a two-bedroom flat in Glebe Close.

  Further reshuffling took place in the tower when John Keenan finally accumulated enough money to buy DNA-testing equipment, used it, and proved he was not the biological father of the redheaded Winona. He rented a room in the Mitchells’ house - which was strictly against Kingsmarkham housing rules - while determining his future. Shirley Mitchell, though his wife’s sister, was entirely on his side. Shirley’s husband was seriously worried about her since she had taken to grabbing and shaking any child she came upon dropping a chocolate bar wrapper or crisp packet in the street. Sooner or later she would hit one of them and get taken to the European Court of Human Rights.

  Doing well at the University of Myringham and showing a particular aptitude for social sciences, Tasneem Fowler had also been rehoused. Kingsmarkham Housing eventually gave her a “studio” flat quite near where Debbie and Lizzie Cromwell lived. At their divorce hearing she and Terry were awarded joint custody of Kim and Lee, but Terry got care. The two boys, asked with whom they would prefer to live, opted for their father.

  Tracy Miller made so much money working from morning till night that she set up her own house-cleaning business with ten employees, called it Tracy’s Treasures, and put down a deposit on a house for herself and her daughters in Eton Road.

  One morning, leaving a house in Titania Road that the occupants had been using as the headquarters of a cocaine-dealing syndicate, Wexford saw a man come out of the tower wearing a Burberry.
It was a fawn-coloured raincoat with a heart-shaped stain at the hem on the left- hand side. It took him a few seconds to identify the man as Peter McGregor, partner of Sue Ridley, once the Crownes’ neighbour in Puck Road. What he had been doing in the tower Wexford didn’t know, and seeing the general goings-on, perhaps it was just as well he didn’t.

  McGregor gave him a calm, innocent stare before looking away. Wexford knew he couldn’t prove anything. Besides, he had the new one now, no longer new, really, but becoming comfortably battered and even slightly stained.

  He had another call to make, this time in Harrow Avenue. Donaldson drove him there but Wexford was early, so he walked up the hill and saw, with some undefined satisfaction, that the estate agent had put a sold sign up at the gate of Woodland Lodge. Good. It was hers, in her name. If it had been in Stephen Devenish’s, God knew if she would ever have got the money, seeing that no one may benefit from his or her crime.

  Now, nine months after Stephen Devenish’s death, she was living in Brighton, she and her children, in a house she had bought next door but one to Jane Andrews. She would still live with and carry through her life the stigma of a conviction for manslaughter. Her plea of diminished responsibility that she had gone mad and scarcely knew what she was doing, had saved her, and she had received no more than probation.

  Sentencing her, the judge said, “We are taught that we should not speak ill of the dead. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. ‘Of the dead nothing but good.’ There must be exceptions to that axiom. Stephen Devenish was a hard worker, a good provider, and, I believe, an honest man. He was also, in other respects, a monster. This woman lived a life of unimaginable suffering, abuse, and torture at the hands of a miscreant who used her as a punching bag for his sadistic impulses.”