by Ruth Rendell
"Ms. Orbe?" said Wexford. "Ms. Suzanne Orbe?"
"That’s me. What d’you want?"
"Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden, Kingsmarkham CID. May we come in a minute?"
She stepped back and, when they were inside, slammed the door hard. "Haven’t I got enough to put up with," she asked of no one in particular, "with that scum out there?" In the living room a man sat staring at the television screen. He took no notice whatever of the newcomers; Suzanne Orbe might have come into the room alone, or as far as he was concerned, no one at all had come in.
"You expect your father to come home here on Friday— tomorrow, that is?" Wexford asked.
"I reckon. He’s nowhere else to go, the old bugger."
This remark stirred the man at the other end of the room. He took his eyes from the screen, turned his head, and stared in their direction. Suzanne Orbe made a kind of introduction: "That’s my fiancé."
Neither policeman acknowledged him. "We’re not anticipating trouble," Burden said with a confidence he didn’t feel, "but I’ll leave you this number." He wrote it down and handed it to her. ’’And if need be, you can speak to me, Inspector Burden. B-U-R-D-E-N—have you got that?"
She nodded. Loyalty to her father forgotten—or perhaps Wexford had misinterpreted her tone—she made a sound of exasperation, a "huh" noise, and cast up her eyes.
The man at the other end of the room spoke. "That’s right, girl," he said, and added in a voice so deeply vindictive and vicious that Wexford found himself flinching, "Put the likes of him in the gas chamber’d be best. Or the chair."
Outside, in the relatively wholesome air, Burden remarked that Suzanne Orbe’s "fiancé" probably had no idea capital punishment had ceased in this country over thirty years before. His whole notion of life came from television; so much transatlantic culture had he absorbed from that source that he believed death by gas chamber or electrocution were United Kingdom options.
"So long as he and she don’t give the wretched Orbe up to the mob," said Wexford.
"You’re joking, I hope," Burden said severely.
"So do I hope. There is no mob, there’s only a banner. We must look on the bright side."
Wexford looked about him. The sun had gone in but the day was still bright and the sky blue, with scurrying clouds rushing across its face. The belt-banner flapped in the breeze. In two of the gardens men who looked civilized and law-abiding mowed their lawns. "This isn’t a very pretty place," he said, "but it’s quite nice, isn’t it? It’s comfortable, rustic, the air’s pure, and if it’s not like wine, it’s like the best mineral water. There’s no vandalism or very little. If the local authority plants trees, they don’t get pulled up. Hail spoils the tulips, not human hands. A far cry from those inner-city estates one reads about, wouldn’t you say? Those places where the old go in terror of their lives or daren’t go out at all, where gangs roam the walkways and the residents deal in controlled substances."
"Sure. So what are you getting at?"
"Just that—let’s hope it stays that way. And now we’ll pay a call on the Crowne family, shall we?"
Inevitably, the banner was visible from this front room too. Lizzie Cromwell was sitting in the window, gazing at it, as if she expected it to change shape, fall off, or be joined at any moment by even more inflammatory material. Wexford, deterred neither by the smoky atmosphere nor Debbie Crowne’s grim expression and headful of heated rollers, pulled up a chair beside Lizzie and proceeded to tell her what had happened to her on Saturday two weeks before.
"After you’d waited twenty minutes for the bus you accepted a lift from a lady in a white car and she drove you to a house in the country. There was a man there. Her name was Vicky and his was Jerry. They gave you something to drink which made you sleepy and made you forget a lot of what happened to you. I’m right, aren’t I, Lizzie?"
She turned to face him. He thought how healthy she looked and blooming, her face flushed and her eyes bright and knowing. "I’m not supposed to say."
"Who told you not to say? The woman who took you away? The man, Jerry?" Lizzie didn’t get a chance to answer. Debbie Crowne interposed herself between Wexford and her daughter. There was a strong smell, suddenly, of overheated hair. He saw that she was trembling.
"What is it, Mrs. Crowne?"
"I’ll tell you what it is. She’s pregnant, that’s what it is. He’s made my daughter pregnant."
6
Wexford’s first reaction was to say, "It’s not possible to tell so soon. It’s less than a fortnight."
"Where have you been living?" Debbie Crowne asked rudely. "On the moon? I done a test, haven’t I? A home pregnancy kit’s what they call them in case you didn’t know. And I done it and she’s fallen pregnant. If I’d done it last week, it’d have shown the same. And what I’d like to know is, what are you going to do about it?"
"It would help us to do something," said Burden, "if Lizzie would tell us the truth about what happened to her."
"She’s scared, isn’t she? He raped her and now she’s scared what he might do."
At the word raped, Lizzie’s eyelids flickered. It was as if something hot or a bright light had suddenly been brought close up to her face. Her head jerked back.
"Did you sleep a lot while you were there, Lizzie?" Wexford asked. "Did they give you drinks to make you sleep?"
"I don’t know. I’m not to say. I’ll be punished if I say." Burden looked at Colin Crowne, who had just come into the room. "You won’t be punished, Lizzie. No one will punish you. If you tell us about them and about the house you went to and where it was, they will be caught and punished. I’m sure you understand that, don’t you?"
Debbie Crowne shouted suddenly, "You leave her alone! It’s not right, bullying her in her condition. She could have a miscarriage!"
Surely the best thing imaginable, Wexford thought, then castigated himself for callousness. "No one is bullying Lizzie," he began, but the rest of his sentence dwindled away as Lizzie broke in, and he forgot that he had once thought her meek and not inclined to rebellion.
"No, I won’t, I won’t have a miscarriage. I’m going to have my baby, I want my baby. Then I can go away from here and get a flat and live with my baby. I can get away from you and him and have my own place and be—be happy!" Her face crumpled and she burst into a storm of tears.
"Now see what you’ve done," said Debbie Crowne. "That’s rubbish, that is. Wants her baby! She ought to have had the morning-after pill. If she’d had the morning-after pill the day she come back ..."
"She wouldn’t be in the shit now," said Colin Crowne.
"Farrago," said Wexford next morning. "I looked it up in the dictionary. It doesn’t mean anything like tissue, it means ’mixed fodder for cattle,’ and it comes from the Latin. Interesting, don’t you think?"
Burden threw the Kingsmarkham Courier down on Wexford’s desk. "It only confirms what I said about you being a pedant. Have you seen the paper?"
With a hint of that feeling that is usually described as a sinking of the heart, Wexford said, "Why? Should I have?" He knew what he was likely to see but not how bad it would be. "Oh, God," he said, "what’s the point of doing this, I wonder. What does St. George get out of it?"
"A boost to his circulation, I suppose. God knows it needs it."
The headline was ORBE FREED, and under that, KINGSMARKHAM PEDOPHILE COMES HOME. Wexford read:
All parents with small children will live in terror from this weekend onward, knowing that Thomas Orbe, convicted pedophile and child-killer, is back in their midst. Released after serving nine years of a fifteen-year prison sentence, Orbe, seventy-one, is expected to return today to the home he left nearly a decade ago in Oberon Road on Kingsmarkham’s Muriel Campden Estate.
"He could only have spelt it out more thoroughly if he’d given the house number," Wexford said gloomily. "I wonder why he didn’t."
An elderly man by now, Orbe is nevertheless understood to have admitted he may still be a d
anger to children. His home in Oberon Road, currently occupied by his daughter, Ms. Suzanne Orbe, and her partner, Mr. Garry Wills, backs onto Kingsmarkham’s only public park with its children’s play area. Until an order is in place restraining Orbe from places frequented by children, such as York Park, this popular venue for youngsters will most likely stand empty, and that at the most favorable season of the year for outdoor play . . .
"I can’t stand his English or his reporter’s English, never mind the content," said Wexford. "That word pedophile, no one knew what it meant five years ago— well, no one but psychiatrists and Greek scholars. Now it’s on everyone’s lips. Even a moron like that Colin Crowne knows what it means."
"There’s a leading article as well," said Burden. "Would you like me to give you a synopsis? It won’t do you any good to read it yourself. Your blood pressure’s showing all over your face as it is."
Wexford sighed. "Okay. What does it say?"
"That pedophiles should be kept under restraint for the whole of their natural lives, given the option of castration, never allowed within any area where even one child may live, given more severe sentences in the first place—all that, if not necessarily in that order. Oh, and he—it’s St. George himself this time, by the way—he says the government isn’t acting fast enough and how about these steps they are supposed to be taking to monitor released pedophiles? It couldn’t be worse."
"I don’t know about that. He could have advocated compulsory castration." Wexford dropped the paper on the floor where he couldn’t see it. "I’ve been thinking about that banner thing, Mike. We don’t have any powers to make them take it down, do we?"
"I doubt it. We could if it led to trouble. Then it’d be an offense against public order. But it hasn’t led to trouble."
"Not yet. Orbe’s not home yet, but he will be today. I dreamt about the Muriel Campden Estate last night and I woke up yelling there was a bomb planted under the tower. Dora thought I’d gone mad. What are we going to do about Lizzie Cromwell?"
"It’s a job for Lynn now, don’t you reckon? Get Lynn around there and see if she can ferret out what really happened. Rachel Holmes got on fine with her, so why not Lizzie?"
"They’re a very different type of girl, Mike. But it’s a good idea. Lynn should persuade Mrs. Crowne to take Lizzie to her GP, that’s a priority. When he or she confirms it, I’ll believe she’s two weeks pregnant."
The hunt for the house with the shingles on its front and the big Christmas tree hadn’t yet begun, but Wexford, whose knowledge of the surrounding area was considerable, had given it thought. He had pictured villages in his mind’s eye, seeing their churches and clustering cottages, bigger houses, village greens with war memorials, and had been presented with several possible bungalows, but none of these stood alone in open countryside. Seeing stretches of roads and lanes, dipping valleys and swelling hills, was harder. So, on the previous evening he had driven back and forth across the area where the bypass was to have been built.
To himself he confessed that he enjoyed going there to gloat. There was a sweet, almost physical pleasure in seeing, bursting into fresh leaf, trees scheduled last year to be felled, in hearing the song of birds going to roost, and driving along the one narrow road through Framhurst Great Wood, eyeing through the long, still glades the tiny blossoms of celandine and wood anemones on the forest floor. He had even lingered on the edge of it, parking the car for a moment or two, while he reflected that here, on this very spot, he and everyone else in Kingsmarkham had expected to see by this time a huge trunk road ripping through the wasted valley. It did him good, he sometimes thought, to sit and look and rejoice, it brought him a calm satisfaction. And he felt revived and keen again when he started the car and set off for Framhurst and Savesbury and Myfleet.
All the way along the roads, some of them narrow lanes with high banks studded with primroses and cowslips, he looked for a house that would conform to Rachel Holmes’s description. But although a shingled front is a feature of many Sussex dwellings, there were few of these in the area and even fewer that were bungalows. After driving around for an hour, going as far as Myringham in one direction and Stringfield in the other, he had come across only two, and of these one was in the center of a hamlet and in any case was a house on two floors. The other, on the edge of downland, had no trees near it apart from its own Leyland cypress hedge.
That had been last evening. This morning he resolved to take Rachel reconnoitering with him and Karen Malahyde, and to go south of the town, always supposing Rachel had kept her promise and not yet returned to the University of Essex.
Sylvia had been at The Hide for no more than ten minutes when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t one of her days for being there and it wasn’t one of her times. In fact, it was the day she was owed to take off from her regular job and she had been at home, planning a morning in the garden and an afternoon at the cinema, when Lucy Angeletti had phoned and said that Jill Lewis still had flu and she had a morning meeting set up with Myringham Housing Department, and could Sylvia possibly be an angel and come in? Just for a few hours till Griselda took over at three. So of course Sylvia had said yes and had phoned her mother to ask her to pick up the boys from school, just in case she was late, and had come down here by eleven.
When she was herself a child, when she was ten, no one would have thought twice about letting her come home from school alone. No one would have considered it unsafe for her to bring her little sister home with her. But these days people were terrified of letting their kids out of their sight for five minutes. And they would be even more frightened after reading the Courier, as she had done that morning, taking it and her cup of tea back to bed with her. Presumably, there had been pedophiles when she was a child, there must have been, and just as many—human nature didn’t change—but you seldom heard about them, while today there seemed to be one behind every bush and around every corner.
She was hanging up her raincoat in the hall and no one else was about apart from two three-year-olds sitting on the stairs, so it seemed obvious that she should answer the door. But even as she put up her hand to the latch, she remembered instructions she had received during her brief training for this job. Be careful when you answer the door, look through the spyhole first, put the chain on. It could be a violent spouse or partner looking for the woman he had assaulted and who had escaped from him. So Sylvia drew back her hand, put on the chain, lifted up the little circular flap over the spyhole, and squinted through it.
An old, anxious-looking woman was what she saw. She slipped off the chain and opened the door. The woman held out a sheaf of papers fastened to a clipboard. She spoke as if she had learned her words by heart and painstakingly. "I wonder if you would care to put your name to the Kingsbrook Residents’ Association’s petition? It is a protest against the residential home where they plan to make a children’s playground."
"Do you mean The Hide?" said Sylvia.
"That is what they call it, yes. You may care to read some literature I have here first. It fully explains the situation and why the Kingsbrook Residents are so strongly opposed to it."
Sylvia had difficulty suppressing her laughter. She put one hand up to her mouth, took a deep breath, and said in a polite tone, "This is The Hide."
"This is? This house?" The woman couldn’t have sounded more aghast. She rallied, as people do, by taking refuge in unreasoning attack. This hadn’t been learned in advance. "How on earth is one supposed to know? There’s no name up, there’s no number. It ought to be against the law for a house not to have a number."
"Right. I’ll tell the police," said Sylvia, and closing the door, burst into laughter. She would tell the police, she’d tell her father if she saw him that evening. It would amuse him. She climbed the stairs. As she crossed the first landing, a black woman with two small children in tow came out of one of the bedrooms. Black people were thin on the ground in Kingsmarkham and its environs, though there were more now than a year ago, and Sylvia wondered where she
had come from and what her particular story was. She was tall and majestic, her braided hair wound and woven into a crown on top of her head. Sylvia said hello and that it was raining again and passed on to the top floor.
Lucy Angeletti was there on the phone. It didn’t sound as if she was answering a distress call. Sylvia heard Lucy say, "Yes, well, thanks. If someone will call this morning, I’ll show him or her the letter I’ve had. Good-bye."
Sylvia raised an eyebrow.
"A death threat," Lucy said. ’’Anonymous, of course. You have got my wife. If she don’t come back, I will kill you, bitch."
"Was that the police you were phoning? Are they sending someone round?"
"It won’t be your dad," said Lucy, laughing. "He’s too high-ranking. But just so that they know. I’ll leave you to it, then, shall I? We’ve got a new woman coming in any minute. She’s been at the Pomfret police house all night with a baby and a two-year-old. She’ll have our last available room, and after that I don’t know what we’ll do. And now I must get over to Myringham."
From the window, Sylvia watched the woman arrive. She came in a taxi, for the payment of which Sylvia knew the Social Services Department would have provided her with a voucher. The baby was tiny, snuggled up like a nestling bird in the harness the woman wore across her thin chest. The toddler was crying, pushing fists into his eyes. Lucy came out of the front door and down the steps and took the case the woman had brought out of the back of the cab. The driver did nothing to assist her. The voucher, Sylvia thought, probably didn’t allow for a tip. She watched the taxi reverse down the drive between the green banks of shrubs and was back to her desk when the phone started ringing.
