by Ruth Rendell
No greater contrast within a mile’s radius could be found than that between this place and Glebe Road or the Muriel Campden Estate. Even those without radical leanings could hardly fail to notice it and be made, in spite of themselves, uneasy. Wexford thought of that contrast each time he came up here, and as they drove along the approach to Woodland Lodge, a route to the house that was more like a country lane than a garage drive, he looked from side to side, with that same sense of the inequity of life.
The house that they reached was almost a mansion, an Arts and Crafts house dating from the first decade of the century, red brick with solid white facings, casement windows, a studded oak front door. The big double garage was evidently a conversion from the original coachhouse. Before he got out of the car he realized that from here it was quite impossible to see any neighboring houses or for any neighbors to overlook it. This feature of Woodland Lodge, Ploughman’s Lane, so advantageous to estate agents and desirable to house buyers, would be a hindrance to the police in their investigation.
He had known even before he was admitted and stood in the presence of the distraught mother and father that this was a very different matter from the abductions of Lizzie Cromwell and Rachel Holmes. The Devenishes’ daughter had not been offered a lift or lured away but snatched by night from her own bed in her own bedroom in her parents’ house. But that was not to say that the Cromwell and Holmes episodes were not forerunners of or rehearsals for this one.
Stephen Devenish had opened the door to Wexford and Karen Malahyde. He was very protective of his wife, intent at first on keeping her out of the investigation. She could tell them nothing he said, she was far too upset, he didn’t want her troubled, made to suffer more than she need. There was nothing she could tell them that he couldn’t.
"I’m afraid I must talk to Mrs. Devenish, sir," Wexford said. "We shan’t upset her. I think she would want to help us."
Devenish had a gracious manner, not apparently aggressive or assertive, and he gave a rueful smile as he nodded acceptance of what Wexford said. He took them into a lavishly furnished drawing room, at one end of which French windows were open onto a terrace and a lawn. Beyond, the trees began, mature, even ancient trees that had been here since long before the house was built, but even they were not tall enough to hide the distant blue sweep of the downs.
In the middle of a three-seater sofa upholstered in cream satin sat a small, thin woman with the pinched face and huge eyes of a flying fox. This marriage was an instance, Wexford could see at once, of that not uncommon phenomenon in which a tall, strikingly handsome man has married and established a successful marriage with a plain and insignificant woman. Stephen and Fay Devenish, he already knew, were both thirty-six, but while he looked in his early thirties she could have been taken for forty-five.
She got up when they entered the room and held out her hand, gestures of a well-brought-up woman who needs more than the horror of that morning’s discovery to make her forget her manners. She said in a low, sweet voice, "Thank you for coming, it’s good of you to come."
"Sit down, darling," Devenish said. "You must take it easy, you have to conserve your strength."
For what? Wexford wondered, but aloud he said, "Your daughter, she’s three years old, I believe?"
"Thirty-three months, to be precise, said Devenish.
"And her name is—let me see—Sanchia?"
"That’s right."
"Have you any other children, Mr. Devenish?"
"We have two sons. They’re at school. I sent them off to school this morning, I thought it the best thing. They’re called Edward and Robert, and they’re twelve and ten."
Karen said, "Would you like to tell us what happened here last evening and this morning, Mrs. Devenish?"
Although it was his wife who had been asked, Devenish said quickly, "Last evening was just normal, an absolutely normal weekday evening. It was what happened in the night that was so—so horrendous, so terrible." He sat down beside his wife and took her hand, drawing it onto his own knees. Next to her, he looked twice her size, a burly, though not fat, man, dark almost to swarthiness, with a Byronic head and the poet’s striking features. "Sanchia went to bed at seven as she always does and my wife read her a story, as she always does, everything was entirely normal."
"I left the bedroom window open," Fay Devenish said in a despairing voice, as one confessing to a dreadful solecism. "It was a beautiful night and I left the window open. It didn’t seem a dangerous thing to do, not in this place, not in England, in the spring."
"Well, darling," Devenish said, "you know you do silly things sometimes."
He spoke in a loving, almost bantering tone, but Wexford was surprised. Not "we all do silly things sometimes" but "you do silly things," you’re the fool and to blame. "We’ll go up and see Sanchia’s room in a minute," he said. "Did you hear anything untoward during the night?"
"I never do hear a thing, I take a sleeping pill before I go to bed." It was a surprising admission from such a strong, healthy-looking man. "It makes me sleep like a log. I need my rest, I’ve a demanding job."
"Doing what, Mr. Devenish?"
"I’m the chief executive of Seaward Air," said Devenish, naming one of the principal trans-European airlines using Gatwick Airport. "I should be there now, but obviously..." He lifted up his hands in a gesture of inevitability.
"And you heard nothing in the night, Mrs. Devenish? Do you also take sleeping pills?"
She shook her head, then looked at Wexford with such naked pleading that he had to turn away his eyes. But he had to go on asking. "What time would you expect Sanchia to wake up in the morning?"
Again it was Sanchia’s father who spoke. "Six. Very occasionally six-thirty." He smiled, as one paterfamilias to another. "They all wake early at that age."
"So you thought she was sleeping late, as she had done before?" Karen said. "What time did you go into her room?" Devenish was evidently about to supply the answer to that, but Karen said firmly, "Mrs. Devenish?"
"I—we—we overslept a bit." She looked at her husband as if seeking permission to continue. He nodded reassuringly. "It was seven when I woke up. I got up and rushed in to Sanchia. I thought she must have been awake for an hour and I hadn’t heard her. Of course, if she’d been there, she’d have got up and come in to us, she could have done that, but I didn’t think of it, not then. I rushed into her room and the bed was empty and—oh, God—I thought—I thought ..."
"Don’t upset yourself, darling," said Devenish. "Try to keep calm. You know it’s not wise for you to get excited. I’ll tell the rest." Once more he took his wife’s hand and pulled it close against his own body. "We thought Sanchia must have got up and gone downstairs. She’d never done that but they change so much at that age, there’s always something new.... Anyway, she hadn’t. We searched for her, we even searched the garden, though all the doors had been locked and still were locked. That door"—he pointed to the French windows—"that was locked and the key was taken out as it always is." He nodded. "By me," he said as if no one else in the household would be capable of taking a key out of a lock.
Wexford got up. "We’ll see Sanchia’s room now, if you please."
The house was beautiful, immaculately kept, its woodwork typical of its period, dark, carved, and highly polished, the spacious hallway and wide staircase carpeted in an ivory close-pile. Strange choice, Wexford thought. It was one thing for the childless, middle-aged Mrs. Chorley to enjoy and maintain pristine whiteness everywhere, but for a couple with three children, the eldest of whom was not yet in his teens? Yet it was spotless. Presumably Mrs. Devenish had daily help or even a live-in maid. As they climbed the stairs, he asked.
"My wife sees to all that," said Devenish with pride. "She’s a splendid housewife. Not that I would stand for anything else," and he smiled to show he was joking.
Upstairs was all ivory too, and standing about on the landing were those articles of furniture that only the wealthy have: a couple of small wh
ite-and-gilt chairs, a jardiniere with a huge flower arrangement, a pink chaise longue. A door on the right had an enameled medallion inset and on it the words SANCHIA’S ROOM: Devenish opened the door and they went inside, the missing child’s mother covering her face with her hands. She gave a low sob.
"Now sit down, darling," said Devenish. "It would have been better if you hadn’t come up. All this is too much for you." He lifted his eyes to give Wexford a significant look, though significant of what it was impossible to say. "My wife isn’t very strong."
By this, Devenish seemed to mean much more than the common, though old-fashioned, usage implied. Was she recovering from some illness? Had she heart disease? Wexford couldn’t guess. He surveyed the room. It was at the back of the house and its windows overlooked the garden. The carpet here was pink, the bed canopied with pink curtains. It was evidently as it had been when the child left it, was taken from it, its pink-and-white floral duvet folded back and the menagerie of furry animals— several bears, a dog, two cats, and giraffe—piled at the foot. One of the windows was still open, wide enough for an adult to pass through. The other was more in the nature of a glass door, and when Wexford unlocked and opened it, he found that it gave onto a balcony with a wrought-iron railing. He went outside. The drop to the ground was only about fifteen feet, still too high for anyone to jump with a child in his arms.
"The bed would normally be made by this time, of course," Devenish said, apparently apologizing. "But, in the circumstances, I thought ..."
Wexford made no answer to that, if answer was required. "Have you a ladder on the premises?" he asked Devenish, who had come out onto the balcony with him.
"I’m afraid we have. An extending one. It’s in the garage and—again, I’m afraid, I blame myself—the garage wasn’t locked. In a place like this, I mean, a country town, a very select neighborhood, you don’t expect to have to lock up the garage every night."
’’And I’m afraid the select neighborhood is the reason you may have to," said Wexford dryly.
Devenish shrugged. "May we shut the window now? Your people have been over everything, fingerprinting and whatever, and I showed an officer the garage and the ladder."
Wexford sat down next to Fay Devenish. Her head was still in her hands, but now she took them away and looked at him, presenting a ravaged face, marked with tears. "Mrs. Devenish," he said, "what kind of a child is Sanchia? She’s thirty-three months old, so presumably she is talking quite well and has a strong, clear voice?" He was thinking of children accompanying their mothers to supermarkets. The voice of the three-year-old is the most earsplitting of all. ’’And she has been walking for a year and a half?"
Fay Devenish hesitated, then said, "She was a late walker, she was eighteen months before she walked." Her voice was monotonous, all on one level, as if she had been drugged. "And she doesn’t talk much, not as much as she should."
"Darling, please don’t make my child out to be retarded." Devenish’s genial and indulgent manner softened the harshness of the reproof. "Chief Inspector, Sanchia is simply one of those children who come rather late to talking. My sons both walked at a year and were fluent by two. Sanchia’s a girl and maybe it’s that which makes the difference."
Karen’s intake of breath was only what Wexford would have expected from her, but he gave her a quelling look just the same. "Would she let a stranger lift her from her bed and take her out of her bedroom down a ladder? Would she protest? Surely she’d cry out?"
The father said he didn’t know, he couldn’t answer that, and Wexford wondered how much time Devenish had actually spent with his children. Had Seaward Air kept him so busy that, though he might have seen them briefly in the mornings, he usually failed to get home until after they had all gone to bed?
On a choking sob Fay Devenish said, "She’s a nice little girl, a friendly little girl, she might—she might go with someone who was—who was nice to her." And with that she broke into a storm of tears, sobbing and swaying from side to side. Her husband took Wexford’s place and put his arms around her.
It wasn’t necessary to spell it out. Montague Ryder, the chief constable, hadn’t been explicit on the phone, but he had said all that needed to be said, and Wexford hadn’t named names or given details to Karen and Burden and Vine, but they understood what Wexford meant just as he had understood Ryder. It would be wiser at this stage to keep the snatching of Sanchia Devenish out of the press, off the media, to keep it for the time being a secret.
This meant no television appearance for Stephen and Fay Devenish to appeal for the return of their child, something of a relief to Wexford, who was beginning to feel that after the Crowds’ appeal and Rosemary Holmes’s, another would be an embarrassment. Besides, he pinned his faith on Vicky and Jerry. Whatever lies Lizzie and Rachel had told, Vicky and Jerry came into both accounts; they existed.
"Someone’ll have to go to the University of Essex, I suppose," said Burden, "see Rachel and get the truth out of her. I imagine she may stop lying when she’s told it’s a three-year-old that’s been taken."
Wexford shook his head. "No, Mike, that won’t do. I want her back here. Karen is going to Colchester to bring her back here. She can get permission from her tutor or supervisor or director of studies, whatever he or she is called. One day here will be enough. I’ll drive her round myself till she finds that house and identifies these people."
"She may refuse to come."
"In that case," said Wexford, "I’ll have her charged with perverting the course of justice. She’s over eighteen, she’s a grown woman."
Vicky was evidently very persuasive, a woman of charm perhaps. If she hadn’t been, would she have been able to entice Lizzie into her car and convince the far more intelligent Rachel that she was a friend’s mother? Was she also what is called "good" with children? Was she the kind of woman a little child will immediately take to, go with, feel at ease with? Such say, "Suffer the little children to come unto me," and they come willingly, happily, with trust. Because if it wasn’t such a Pied Piper, Wexford decided, it must be someone Sanchia knew, a relative or family friend, a frequent visitor to the house in Ploughman’s Lane. How unlikely that seemed, how difficult to imagine such a person taking a ladder out of a garage at dead of night, climbing it, getting in through the window, and waking that sleeping infant, taking that infant away without her uttering a single cry.
Later that day he went back to Woodland Lodge and extracted from Stephen Devenish a list—a very short list—of relatives and friends Sanchia knew and saw often. Extracted was the word, for Devenish was most unwilling to give it. None of these people was remotely capable, he insisted, of kidnapping a child, let alone his child. He gave a strange impression, as of one of whom his few friends were in awe, or deeply respected or even feared. But then he smiled and it struck Wexford, not for the first time, that Devenish didn’t seem as upset as he should be. Wexford imagined how it would have been for him if Sylvia or Sheila had been taken from their beds when they were less than three years old. Rage and incredulity would have beset him, and panic and grief. But this man smiled, albeit ruefully. Well, people were different, you had to face it. And some were good at concealing their feelings.
Devenish gave him a list and Fay Devenish another. The husband looked at what the wife had offered and shook his head. "Look here, darling, you’ve put down Gerard Morgan and Sarah Pilgrim and—let’s see— Carmel Finn, whoever she may be. None of these people has been in this house for years—well, certainly not since Sanchia was born." He smiled to soften his words as he had in a similar situation that morning. "I wouldn’t have allowed it." His wife’s hand received a comforting squeeze. "Sanchia didn’t know any of them, she certainly wouldn’t have gone with them. Their ugly faces would have frightened her to death."
At that final word Fay Devenish burst once more into tears.
Wexford took the lists, doubting whether they would help him much. "I expect you have a recent photograph of Sanchia," he said.
They hadn’t. Perhaps in a family group, Devenish said doubtfully, a snapshot that would be not anything like a portrait. Wexford looked from one to the other of them, recalling his own young parenthood when photography was not the almost weekly routine it was today, but still he and Dora had pictures faithfully and regularly taken of their daughters. And they had scarcely been well-off ...
Alone with Devenish, who took him into a room he called the study, Wexford asked if the man had any enemies.
"Enemies?" Stephen Devenish made it sound a ludicrous suggestion.
"Have you ever received any threats?"
"Yes, of course. Any man in my position receives threats."
Wexford found this an astonishing response. "Really?"
"I mean, threatening letters, I’ve had a few of those, the kind that are full of obscenities and the writer says he wants to kill me."
"You take it very casually, Mr. Devenish. Did you inform us? Have you kept these letters?"
"No to both. Look, I know there are people at work with me, subordinates, you know, or people who have been at work, who don’t like me, but that’s a far cry from stealing my child, isn’t it?"
Wexford didn’t answer. When it came to people’s behavior, he knew, nothing was a far cry. He looked around the room. It was an abode of maleness but almost a parody of a study, an office where men’s things were done, men’s work and men’s business, but where a man could luxuriate too among things alien to women. A stage designer might create something like it as set for a play about a tycoon or a politician. The furniture was all big and heavy, the woodwork mahogany with brass fittings, and the upholstery tan-colored hide. No photographs, no flowers, no calendar. Crossed swords in leather scabbards hung on one wall with an unsheathed dagger beneath them. An ancient flintlock gun reposed in a glass case and next to it, in another, a large, dead, possibly stuffed fish. The window had a blind, not curtains, and on the hearth of the black marble fireplace stood an array of polished brass fire-irons.
