Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  "He never touched me. Never touched me and never said a word." Lizzie realized she had betrayed herself and put one hand over her mouth.

  Lynn said casually, "Was it a nice house?"

  Jodi replaced in his carrying cot, Lizzie turned on Lynn a resentful look. "I’m not to say, you know that. They’ll get to me and punish me. They’ll drill holes in my knees, they said, they’ll break my fingers. If they hurt me, I could lose my baby, Mum says."

  "So you’ve told your mum?"

  "No, I haven’t," Lizzie shouted. "I just said, I’d like a nice bungalow like that, modern like and out in the real country, and not joined on to next door."

  "And Jerry never spoke to you, is that right?"

  Lizzie said with bitterness, "Never spoke a word, but they never do. He never did. Just ’Leezee, Leezee.’ "

  About to ask her to explain, Lynn was interrupted by the entry of Debbie, fetched in by the sound of Lizzie’s raised voice. "What’s the matter? What have you been saying to her now?"

  "I’m just leaving, Mrs. Crowne. Lizzie has been very helpful."

  "Oh, has she? Well, wonders will never cease. To change the subject, I thought you lot might like to know that old pedo’s gone. There you are, you didn’t know, did you?" Debbie smiled complacently. "It’s funny how the police never know what the rest of the world does. He’s gone, left last night. There’s dozens of people saw him. He had a suitcase, one of them on wheels, and he was running like all the devils in hell was after him and pulling that case behind him. It’s not likely any folks here’d stop him going, is it? Good riddance to bad rubbish is what I say. It’s no good asking me," she went on, as if Lynn had asked, "where he went, because I haven’t a clue. Chucked himself under a train, hopefully, only if he’d done that, there’d be a body. What amazes me is he’s the criminal, he’s the one ought to be hung, but it’s poor John and Brenda and that Miro-what’s-he-called that’s up in court."

  When this conversation was relayed to him, Wexford said, "If they believe he’s gone, so much the better. That way we’ll have a bit of hush. Sooner or later they’re going to find out he’s still there, but unless he goes out, and I doubt if he will, there’ll be no trouble."

  "I thought you subscribed to Southby’s view," Burden said.

  "I do in a way. But I know that crowds are the same the world over, in city centers and rustic paradises alike, and all subject to mob psychology. Shall we go out and have another look for a bungalow?"

  They knew it was a bungalow now. Both girls wouldn’t be lying, not in that particular way. Lizzie had called this one "modern," which meant forgetting about the shingles. To Orbe, as Lynn said, modern might mean anything put up in his lifetime, but to Lizzie it would be no more than ten years old. And this one stood alone, without neighbors. They had asked her to come with them and try to point it out, but Lizzie refused. She felt ill, she said, and she was frightened, she might have that much dreaded miscarriage. Her mum had once "brought it on" by going for a ride in a truck on a bumpy road.

  They drove to the villages along the abandoned bypass route, as far north as Myfleet, then south to Flagford, Pickvale, and Sayle. Three bungalows were possibilities, and one of these was soon dismissed. No one, not even Lizzie Cromwell, would call a converted train carriage, even though the conversion was recent and the house stood alone at the end of a lane, "modern" or "lovely." But the bungalow on the outskirts of Pickvale was another matter. Planning restrictions forbade new building there except on a site where a previous house had been. This one probably had the vestiges of the original cottage incorporated somewhere inside it, but its outside was pristine ivory rendering, white paint and black weatherboard. No other house was in sight. Its garden was young, bleak, and laborsaving, more paving than lawn, and the trees and bushes of a kind that would never grow big.

  Burden rang the doorbell and they waited. A young woman answered it, a young man standing behind her. Somehow, as soon as he saw them, Wexford knew this wasn’t the place. They showed their warrant cards and the young couple studied them earnestly. Unless they were consummate actors, they weren’t lying when they said they knew no one called Vicky, had never heard of Jerry, and owned a black BMW, presently in their garage, but which Wexford and Burden were welcome to look at.

  On the way through Pickvale, taking the lane for Sayle, Burden said he thought the whole thing was a waste of time. No one had been harmed, both Rachel and Lizzie were home safely, and the girls themselves were obviously anxious that no further steps should be taken.

  "And that makes it all right, does it?" Wexford had been looking out of the window across the meadows to the start of the downs, but now he turned around. "The law has been broken, and broken twice, in a very serious way. Two young women have been forcibly taken from their homes and families and falsely imprisoned for three days. Two police investigations have been mounted at enormous cost to the taxpayer, and you say no harm has been done."

  Burden would have liked to tell him not to go on so and would have done but for the presence of Donaldson, the driver, whose tongue might be discreet but whose ears were not. Instead he said, "Prolonging that investigation is just costing the taxpayer more. And for what? What kind of—"

  Wexford interrupted him. "Look at that! That’s it!"

  Donaldson pulled onto the shoulder. They had stopped outside a house previously seen but dismissed because it had no shingles on its front. The bungalow, called Sunnybank, stood indeed upon a bank, planted with alpines and small junipers, which would have been sunny if the sky were not heavily overcast. In the middle of its front lawn grew, not a conifer as Rachel had said, but a deciduous tree with foliage the like of which Wexford had never seen before, pale yellow-green leaves shaped like a square joined to a triangle. Those leaves would, of course, have been only in bud when she was there. If she had been there, if this was the house.

  "We’ve seen it before," said Burden. "We didn’t give it a second glance."

  "Because the tree was wrong and there were no shingles. But we know Rachel has lied and Lizzie didn’t mention shingles or a tree. This place is just what would appeal to a girl like Lizzie."

  It was dazzling white with a pink front door, unsuitable Georgian pillared portico, and roof of jade-green pantiles. The separate garage was a little house in itself, also with pantiled roof and two small diamond-paned windows. In describing the house where she had been as two-storied, shingled, and with a gravel drive, Rachel could hardly have diverged more from the truth. Had that been her purpose? To outline its opposite?

  But again they were disappointed, though this time they went in, sat down, and talked to Mrs. Pauline Chorley for half an hour. She was in her fifties, a tall, thin woman with dyed ash-blonde hair, married to a businessman who commuted daily to London. He was there now and wouldn’t be home till seven-thirty. Mrs. Chorley was a keen gardener, gardening occupied most of her time, that and the maintenance of her home in exquisite condition. She had painted the exterior herself last year and really thought it already needed doing again. White wasn’t suitable for this country, the rain discolored it so, but she did love white, she was crazy about it, couldn’t have enough of it. And this preference showed in her furnishings of the large open-plan living-dining room, the bright white net curtains, white carpets and cushions and fluffy rugs, and in her own clothes, the frosty white lace-trimmed blouse and glossy white pumps.

  Her taste for white had its full scope in the kitchen, visible through double glass doors and as sparkling white as icebergs in an icy sea. Not in the garden, though. There she must have color. And the view from the French windows confirmed this, the blaze of pink and orange azaleas, with the strident yellow of doronicum and Crown Imperials. Mrs. Chorley supplied the names, unasked.

  "What’s that tree in the front?"

  "Liriodendron tulipifera," she said with perfect articulation.

  Wexford said he hoped he would remember but rather doubted it. Didn’t it have a common name?

  "The t
ulip-flowering lyre tree, I suppose." Mrs. Chorley said it distastefully, as if she wondered at anyone wanting to sink so low as to call vegetation by English names. She had already told them she had never heard of Vicky or Jerry and had had no visitors to the house for months. "I don’t have time to entertain. The garden and the house take all my time. Drive? A car, d’you mean? My husband does that. I never learnt."

  And yet there was something, Wexford said when they were returning to Kingsmarkham, something he had missed or should have asked.

  "That woman wouldn’t have those two girls in her house," said Burden. "Not in any circumstances, she wouldn’t. They might make the carpets dirty. I’m sorry for that poor devil, Chorley."

  "Really? I’ve always thought you a bit of a fusspot about the house yourself."

  "I’m not a crazy fanatic," said Burden huffily, "thank you very much."

  "What is it we’ve failed to ask?" Wexford speculated, but Burden couldn’t tell him.

  Three years in the police force, ambitious and hoping for promotion, Lynn Fancourt still looked much younger than her twenty-five years. Her face was round and rosy, her eyes willow-pattern china blue, and her thick brown hair, short and with a fringe, cut like an old-fashioned child’s under a pudding basin. People took her for eighteen, and a drunk she’d arrested, for an offense against public order, asked her if her parents knew where she was at that time of night. Her home—some two hundred miles away from those parents—was the top half of a house in Framhurst with a carport at the end of the garden where she kept her Ford overnight.

  Lynn usually went to work by car, but lately, ever since the return of Rachel Holmes, the Fiesta had stayed in the carport. Lynn had caught the bus halfway and walked the rest. Going home was more carefully planned. One evening she walked half a mile or so to a lonely stretch of Pomfret Road and waited at the bus stop, not exactly thumbing for a lift but looking hopeful. On another she chose Flagford Road where the traffic was light and the roadway darkened by overhanging trees.

  The driver of the van that was the only vehicle that stopped for her gave her such a lecherous look and was so repulsive that even if she had genuinely wanted a ride, she would have turned him down. Generally, she ended up catching the bus, but on the day she had visited Lizzie and seen her with Jodi the virtual baby, she accepted her first lift. It seemed entirely natural only to allow herself to get into a car driven by a woman. This one was middle-aged, gray-haired, and friendly, her car a cream-colored Honda. Not wanting to lead the woman to her own door, Lynn had said to drop her off in Savesbury.

  Her excitement mounted when the driver took the first wrong turn and seemed to be heading in the direction of the old bypass. But she had only lost her way—"I’ve no sense of direction whatsoever, my dear!"—and within ten minutes Lynn found herself set down in the middle of a Savesbury village street, waving cheerfully to the departing Honda.

  Then she had to walk the two miles home.

  Some two hours later, Wexford was thinking about going to bed. The phone rang but it was a wrong number and he was replacing the receiver when the question he had forgotten to ask Mrs. Chorley came back to him. Not so much a question, perhaps, as an omission in that house, which he had subconsciously noticed but had not commented on. There had been no telephone.

  Or he hadn’t seen one. He was trained to observe absences of things as well as their presence, and he had seen no phone. These days that was so rare as to be an eccentricity. Rachel Holmes had said that the house to which she had been taken had no phone or she had been unable to find one ...

  His own phone rang while he was standing there pondering. At this hour! And undoubtedly the wrong-number woman again.

  He picked up the receiver and heard a voice he hadn’t heard for years, the frightened child’s voice of his mature, competent, controlled daughter Sylvia: "Oh, Dad, something so horrible’s happened. I know I’m a fool but— would you come, Dad? Would you?"

  9

  He pulled on a sweater instead of his tweed jacket and got to The Hide a quarter of an hour later. There he had difficulty in getting inside, due to the woman who opened the door mistaking him for another angry husband in search of his wife. After profuse apologies and some relieved laughter, he found Sergeant Fitch and PC Dempsey arresting the man Sylvia had seen cutting the wire on top of the wall. Quincy Miller had led them on a dance from one end of the house to the other, yelling, "Tracy, where are you? I’m going to get you," kicking down two doors and punching a woman he had never seen before and could not possibly have taken for his wife. Tracy slept peacefully through it all and so did her two daughters in the beds beside her.

  Wexford found Sylvia in the help line room at the top of the house, drinking tea and recovering from her two confrontations with Miller, the first when he’d looked up and met her eyes as he crossed the garden, the second when he’d burst into this room, shook her till her teeth chattered, and bawled obscenities at her. Wexford took her in his arms and held her in a long, comforting embrace.

  After a minute or two, during which she clung to him, she said, on a sob, "Oh, Dad, and I thought I was tough. All those years with the Social Services ..."

  "No one," he said, "is that tough. Believe me."

  She thought of her resolution to "talk it through" with him and how that no longer seemed necessary. Misery and terror were succeeded by a great calm, a warmth that spread through her like drinking something hot and strong. She caught his hand and held it.

  "Show me the place," he said. "What’s that list up there? Where are all these cuttings from?" And when she had taken him on a little tour of the room, "What do you say when you answer the phone? What do you do?"

  She told him about "Anne" who had phoned some days before in great fear, the man who had apparently entered the room and how the phone had crashed down, and about the woman whose husband offered to stop hitting her if she went to a psychiatrist. Among her failures, those had been, so she told him about her successes too and her victories. When it got to midnight and Jill came to relieve her, Wexford said to leave her car and let him drive her home, he’d much rather she didn’t drive, she could get Neil to bring her next time she was on duty. So he had driven her home, all the way out into the country, ten miles from Kingsmarkham, and seen her into the house and driven home himself, getting into bed beside Dora a few minutes before two.

  Because he was weary and a bit light-headed, he had decided to walk to work in the morning. For the fresh air and the exercise, healthy options Dr. Akande was always telling him he needed. It was a beautiful day too, warm and still, the sun pleasantly hazy. He thought how pleasant it was when the litter on the pavements was fallen blossoms and green-pollen-dusted flowers instead of packaging and cigarette ends. In spite of sleeplessness—for he hadn’t slept much after getting home—it had been a most satisfactory night, rewarding him with the affection of that difficult elder daughter, whom, with luck, he might soon find he loved as much as her younger sister. At the police station he went so far as to walk upstairs, all four flights, instead of using the lift.

  A brief on his desk attracted his eye and it was the first thing he read:

  ACTION ON SEX OFFENDERS

  An enhanced system for identifying and dealing with any high-profile sex offenders released into the community was announced this week by the Home Secretary.

  A new national steering group will be established, including representatives of the Home Office, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Association of Chief Officers of Probation, and sex offender treatment specialists.

  The new group will:

  Identify high-profile, difficult-to-place sex offenders while they are still in prison and also assess the plans for their release;

  Oversee their handling after they have been released; and

  Consider any funding necessary to meet the likely additional accommodation costs. There has been obvious public concern about the way some high-profile sex offenders are released back into the communi
ty ...

  You can say that again, Wexford said to himself, also reflecting that all this would be too late for Orbe. But perhaps there had been a settling down on the Muriel Campden Estate. He was a great believer in people’s ability to accept a situation through getting used to it. If Orbe did nothing, and of course he would do nothing, if he became a high-profile offender keeping a low profile, his neighbors would do no more than ostracize him and his and hold themselves aloof.

  His reverie was interrupted by the entry into the room of Karen Malahyde. "Another girl’s gone missing, sir."

  Afterward he regretted his facetiousness. "Spirited away to a lovely bungalow with a tree in the front, I suppose?"

  Karen didn’t smile. "I don’t think so, sir. This is serious, it’s a child and she’s not quite three years old."

  Ploughman’s Lane is Kingsmarkham’s millionaires’ row Yet to the visitor it might appear not to be a street at all but rather a country road passing through woodland. And the woods of Sussex are the most beautiful in England, for the trees are taller, of more diverse kinds, their foliage more luxuriant, and among them grow the viburnum and the wayfaring tree. Loveliest of all are the beeches with their branches like feathers, like spread green wings, and their trunks the smooth silvery gray of sealskin, neatest the round-crowned hornbeam, whose natural shape looks as if the topiarist has been at work on it.

  The great hills of the South Country,

  They stand along the sea;

  And it’s there walking in the high woods

  That I could wish to be,

  And the men that were boys when I was a boy

  Walking along with me.

  That was how Wexford felt when he came up here, though there was no sea, of course, the sea was twenty miles away. And the woods were full of houses now and had been since he was a boy. More had been added, that was all. But you still failed to see most of them until you looked, until you peered through a grove or copse, supposing some dwelling must be hiding itself behind the trees because there was a gate that told you so and a letter-box and perhaps even a name such as Woodland Lodge or The Beeches. Sylvia had once lived up here, when Neil’s business was at its most prosperous, but even then her house had been among the more modest examples. The one Wexford had come to call at now was among the more grandiose, with the tallest trees in its grounds, the longest drive, and the highest degree of invisibility from the road.