Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  "Come on," said Griselda, "don’t cry. Well, do cry if it makes you feel better."

  She put her arm around Sylvia, but only for a moment, because the phone was ringing again.

  A designer in textiles who lived and worked in Pomfret had had her entire stock stolen. The collection, quilted coats and waistcoats, bedcovers and throws, as well as batik wall hangings, dresses, tablecloths, and napkins, had been housed in the basement, which had been converted two years before into a workshop. The basement window was barred and the door into the area double-locked and bolted, but the window of the cloakroom, a cupboard-sized place containing lavatory and diminutive washbasin, was open. Whoever had got through that window must have been thin and lithe, and he or she had evidently removed the entire haul through the same aperture.

  "Or unbolted and unlocked that door from the inside," said Inspector Burden, "taken the stuff out, gone back, bolted and locked the door again, and escaped through that broken window."

  "I couldn’t do it," said Wexford sadly. "If it were half the size, I couldn’t." He looked critically at Burden, whose new taupe-colored suit enhanced his slimness. "And I’m bound to say you couldn’t either, Mike. Did they put a kid in there? A kind of Oliver Twist?"

  "God knows. We’ve found no prints apart from her own and the guy she lives with. She values the stuff that’s gone at fifty thousand pounds."

  "Does she now? I thought these craftspeople were supposed to be on the breadline. You know what they say, that they’d make more dosh going out cleaning than they do from their exquisite needlework, pots, batik, et cetera."

  "That’s what she values it at. It’s got nothing to do with whether she can sell it or not. By the way, before I forget, we’ve had another mum phoned up to say her daughter’s missing."

  Wexford banged the desktop with both fists. "Why didn’t you say so before?"

  Burden didn’t answer. Always particular about his appearance, he fingered his tie, also a shade of taupe but patterned discreetly in dark red and pale blue, and looked about him for a mirror. A small one had always hung on Wexford’s yellow wall between the door and the filing cabinet.

  "It’s gone," Wexford said impatiently. "I don’t like mirrors or ’looking glasses,’ as my old dad used to call them. I look in one to shave in the morning, I have to, and that’s enough for the day. I’m not a male model."

  "Evidently," said Burden, by now studying the best image of his face and neck he could get, their reflection in the glass that covered Wexford’s Chagall print. "I don’t know what’s wrong with this tie, it goes crooked whatever I do."

  "For God’s sake, take it off then. Or do as I do and have two ties to wear on alternate days, the blue one on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and the red one on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and vice versa the next week. Now perhaps you’ll tell me about this missing girl."

  Burden sat down on the other side of Wexford’s desk. "It’s almost certainly nothing, Reg. Do you know that there are more than forty thousand teenagers missing in this country? Of course you do. Anyway, this one won’t be missing, she’s not a child, she’s eighteen and she’s probably done a Lizzie Cromwell."

  "And what might that be?"

  "I mean she’s gone off with a boy or gone to visit friends, or dropped out or something."

  "What do you mean, ’dropped out’?"

  "She’s at university somewhere. She came home here for the weekend, went out on Saturday night, and hasn’t been seen since."

  "Time was," said Wexford, "when universities used to stop undergraduates leaving the place to go home or anywhere else at weekends. Pity the custom’s changed. I suppose the mother knows she hasn’t just gone back to her college—had they had a family row, for instance?"

  "She says not. And the girl hasn’t gone back. Barry’s checked with her hall of residence and her supervisor."

  "What’s she called and where’s her home?"

  "She’s called Rachel Holmes, Oval Road, Stowerton. The mother’s Mrs. Rosemary Holmes, divorced, lives alone when the girl’s not there. She’s a medical secretary in Dr. Akande’s practice."

  Turning away from his reflection, a ghostly face dimly mirrored behind Chagall’s flying lovers, Burden began to explain. Rachel had gone out at eight or thereabouts on Saturday night with the intention of meeting a group of friends in a pub. Her mother didn’t know which pub nor yet where Rachel was going afterward, but it would have been some club or a friend’s house. It was unlikely that she would be home before two or three the next morning.

  "When she was younger," Mrs. Holmes had said to Detective Sergeant Barry Vine, "I made her carry a mobile with her and she’d ring me to tell me where she was. But you can’t do that when they’re over eighteen, can you? She’s at university, after all. I don’t know what she’s doing when she’s there, do I? I don’t know what time she comes in at night when she’s there. So what’s the point of worrying if she’s late when she’s at home? I do worry, though, of course I do. I didn’t sleep a wink on Saturday night."

  "So she phoned us today, did she?" Wexford asked.

  "Phoned and came in to report a missing person."

  "Why did she wait so long?"

  "Don’t know. Vine got the impression the girl’s one of these bolshie teenagers, the kind who might give her mother a hard time if she reported her missing when she’s just off somewhere up to her own devices."

  Wexford sat silent for a moment. He was anxious not to become obsessive, not to let a single not very important case take over and dominate his mind. But he was also aware that it is hard to alter one’s nature, especially at his age. This was the way he was, and to attempt a change would be a violation of his character and not necessarily otherwise advantageous.

  "You surely aren’t thinking of going to see Mrs. Holmes?" said Burden almost derisively. "Barry’s got it in hand."

  "I’m thinking of going back to see the Crownes and Lizzie Cromwell." Wexford got up. "If they know the Holmeses or the two girls know each other, it would be very interesting indeed."

  3

  "No, we don’t know her," Debbie Crowne said, spitting out the words. "She’s not our class, is she? The likes of her wouldn’t want to know the likes of us."

  Since Rachel Holmes and her mother lived in a back-street terrace, in a poor little house rather smaller than the one he was now in, Wexford wondered at the fine distinction Mrs. Crowne made. But at the same time he knew he was being disingenuous. There was a difference. Rosemary Holmes owned her house, she had a white-collar job—if that description could be applied to a woman—and Rachel was at university. Somehow, if she had begun in the working class, Mrs. Holmes had elevated herself a grade or two, while the Crownes had remained where they started. In some ways he didn’t like these gradations, but he knew they were a fact of life, not a culture specific or, as some said, confined to this country.

  "Were she and Rachel at the same school?"

  As soon as he said it, he knew he had made things worse. Lizzie herself gave him one of her lowering looks, head drooping but nervous rabbit’s eyes peering upward. It was an expression more usually seen in children half her age.

  Her mother said, "There’s two years between them, you said. That’s like centuries when you’re her age."

  "But Lizzie does go to Kingsmarkham Comprehensive," he persisted, "where Rachel went?"

  "Along with a couple of thousand others. Anyway, she’s in the Learning Difficulties stream." Debbie Crowne eyed him with the same expression as her daughters. "That’s like the bottom of the pile."

  Nevertheless, they must have been at the same school at the same time over a period of years, perhaps as many as four. Was that the link? Was there a link? Colin Crowne came into the room before any more was said. Wexford studied him while Mrs. Crowne talked about Lizzie, repeating her fears as to what might have happened to her during her absence from home and adverting in querulous tones to the possibility of her being pregnant. She kept glancing at her husband while she t
alked.

  Most people would have called Colin Crowne handsome. He was tall and slim, dark-haired and dark-eyed with firm, clear-cut features. But the length of his hair and the beard that might have been just a weeklong failure to shave, as well as the triple earring arrangement, gave him a sinister look. His wife’s faded appearance, her pinched face and dry, shaggy hair, contrasted almost ludicrously with the impression he gave of youth and sensuality. Wexford remembered them on television when Crowne had made an eloquent appeal for Lizzie’s return, staring into the camera and enunciating his words clearly and with what seemed like real emotion, while his wife had sat by, biting her lip and only just restraining her tears. If it wasn’t true, what that caller had said, that those who appeared on television to appeal for the return of a missing child were often themselves responsible for that child’s death, there was a grain of truth in it.

  There had been cases of a parent, later found guilty of child murder, whose outpourings of grief over that child’s disappearance moved viewers to tears. And such behavior wasn’t necessarily hypocritical; these people felt genuine grief, real emotion, and sometimes bitter regret. What, after all, is likely to pain you more and stimulate more remorse than committing murder? But Lizzie wasn’t dead, Lizzie had come back. He had no reason at all to suppose Crowne responsible for her three-day absence or guilty of anything in connection with her.

  After a moment’s soul-searching, he decided to mention the derelict house in Myringham to Lizzie. Even supposing she had spoken to Lynn Fancourt in confidence, no discretion had been asked for. Besides, the truth must be that she had never been in the place. Perhaps a girl such as she couldn’t be blamed for lying, but she had lied.

  He spoke to her gently. "Lizzie, you were never in that house by the bus stop, were you? You told"—he sought for words she would understand—"the woman police officer, you told her you had been three days in that house and wrapped yourself in blankets? You told her you took water from a tap, but that wasn’t really true, was it?"

  He saw at once from their reaction, or because there was no reaction, that Colin and Debbie Crowne had been told the same story. The likelihood was that Lizzie, rather than being afraid to tell this fantasy to her mother and stepfather, had only thought it up in the moments before she’d revealed it to Lynn. Probably she had gone through the whole tale again to Debbie Crowne once he and Lynn had left.

  Now she said, with the liar’s too vehement indignation, "Yes, it was! I did go there!"

  "There was no water in the taps, Lizzie. It was very cold. There was a blanket, but it was damp."

  "I did go there!"

  Crowne said roughly, "There you are, you’ve got your answer. What more d’you want?"

  A great deal. But it would be useless, and perhaps pointless, to persist. And yet Wexford was suddenly sure that she had been in that house, not for three days and nights certainly, but she had been inside it, she knew it. She had seen that blanket and had at least attempted to get water from the taps. Had Rachel been there too?

  Burden had implied that it would be quite unnecessary for Wexford to go to Oval Road, Stowerton; that this was an altogether different missing-person case from that of Lizzie Cromwell, for Rachel was older, for the most part living away from home, and an intelligent young woman very much in charge of her own life. But since then all inquiries had had negative results. None of her relatives had heard from her, and it seemed that none of her friends was harboring her.

  A second call to the University of Essex revealed only that she had not turned up to the lecture she was due to attend at ten that morning. But a different picture was emerging. Rachel, apparently, had never intended to go straight to the pub but first to her friend’s home in Framhurst. Because the Framhurst-to-Stowerton bus route had been discontinued when work on the bypass began, Caroline Strang’s mother, who would be passing that way on her way home from work, would pick Rachel up at eight on the Kingsmarkham Road, five minutes from Oval Road, take her to Framhurst to pick up Caroline, then drive the two girls to the Rat and Carrot. Vine had talked to Mrs. Strang and been told that she had reached the pickup point some minutes after eight owing to a traffic holdup and had parked and waited.

  "They’re always late for everything, these girls. I know, I’ve got two and I thought I’d got there long before Rachel, even though I was late." She had waited for ten minutes, then driven off. "I’d have gone to her house only I don’t know where she lives. I’d got the phone number but not the address."

  Caroline Strang thought Rachel must have been confused about the arrangement and gone straight to the Rat and Carrot. Nevertheless, she had phoned Rachel’s home before she herself left but got no reply. She naturally supposed no one had answered the phone because Rachel was on her way to the pub and her mother was out.

  Vine had talked to the remaining three young people Caroline and Rachel were to meet that night. All said she hadn’t come. None had been worried. They supposed she had changed her mind. Vine concluded they were very casual indeed about such matters as forgetfulness, indecisiveness, phoning to explain, or apologizing when a better prospect for the evening turned up.

  There was a chance Rachel had gone to Kingsmarkham by bus, and Vine had talked to bus drivers. The buses on the Stowerton-Kingsmarkham-Pomfret run had no conductors, and the driver took the money and issued tickets. Vine showed Rachel’s photograph to the drivers of the 8:10 bus and the 8:32 bus. Neither remembered her, but one said he was sure he wouldn’t remember her and the other said that he had no memory for faces.

  That convinced Wexford Rachel hadn’t been on the bus, for to any man she would be unforgettable, an exceptionally good-looking girl with luxuriant dark hair, large dark eyes, and voluptuous features: full mouth, rounded chin, and high, smooth forehead. These seemed an inheritance from her handsome mother. If Rosemary Holmes was forty, she was not much more. Wexford could imagine her being flattered by people taking her and her daughter for sisters. Her own dark hair was plaited and coiled at the nape of her neck, an old-fashioned style that suited her oval face. She was slim, with long, shapely legs. Dr. Akande must keep his secretary well hidden, Wexford thought, for he would have remembered her if he had ever seen her in the medical center.

  In his own mind he had compared the Crownes’ home with this one, but theirs, though clean enough, betrayed that none of them took much interest in their surroundings, while Rosemary Holmes’s house was furnished with taste if not much expense. Well-tended houseplants grew green and lush in troughs on both windowsills in the living room, a big bowl of orange tulips was on the table, and one wall was fitted from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. British country people might be class-conscious still, but a warped reasoning was behind their elitism and their sense of inferiority.

  Though he knew he was wrong to do it, Wexford couldn’t help linking the two cases in his mind, and now he had somehow convinced himself that because Lizzie had come back after three days and three nights, Rachel would come back too and after the same period of time. That would be tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday afternoon. So he was unable entirely to share Mrs. Holmes’s fear. When she said, as she now did, "I keep thinking I’ll never see her again," he felt strangely, as if he were in possession of some superior knowledge, some secret information, that it would be cruel not to reveal to her. And yet, of course, he wasn’t, he knew nothing; he had no reason to align one girl’s disappearance with another’s. To tell her that everything would be all right, that she had no need to worry, would be the unkindest thing, for which of us can say that we guess right more often than we guess wrong?

  ’’Are you," she asked him, "going to ... well, search for her? I mean, the way you see people on television searching—in a line—with sticks? Beating the ... well, you know, the ground?" She began to wring her hands. Wexford understood very well what she meant: that they would only do that if they had good reason to believe her daughter was dead.

  "It’s early days for that, Mrs. Holmes." Karen Malahyde saved
him the trouble of answering. "Let’s wait awhile. Rachel has only been missing since Saturday evening, that’s less than forty-eight hours."

  They had already inquired about boyfriends. Vine had asked her and now Karen did so again. "You say there’s no boyfriend now, but what about in the past, when she was living here and going to school?"

  Rosemary Holmes gave two names. She had done so before, to other police officers, but if she felt impatient with these repetitions, she gave no sign of it. She was anxious to help, she would have done anything to assist in finding her daughter and done it without complaint.

  "And yourself, Mrs. Holmes?" Karen asked it delicately. "Are you perhaps in a relationship?"

  "I’ve got someone, yes. But you’re not thinking...?"

  "We’re really not thinking anything at the moment," Wexford said, reflecting that nothing could have been further from the truth. "We’re asking questions and sizing up the information we get, that’s all. It’s useful for us at this stage to have the names and addresses of all your friends and your daughters, Mrs. Holmes."

  She named a doctor with a practice in Flagford. They had been going out for about a year and sometimes they spent weekends together. Rachel, she said in a burst of frankness, didn’t like him, but she hadn’t liked any friend of her mother’s. So high is the profile of a doctor of medicine in society that Wexford immediately placed Dr. Michael Devonshire beyond suspicion, then, with quick self-admonition, put him back inside it again. A medical man was also a man, and you could never tell.

  "You went out yourself on Saturday evening, Mrs. Holmes?"

  She flushed faintly. "Well, yes. May I ask how you know that?"