by Ruth Rendell
She shrugged. "I don’t know—eighteen months? If you mean real words and phrases. Robin was over two but Ben was talking a lot well before. I suppose it was because his brother was always talking to him."
"You were a very early talker, Sylvia," Dora said. "By eighteen months you could say anything. Sheila was later."
"Funny how a mother remembers that. I don’t, it’s completely gone out of my head. So what would you say are the reasons behind it when a child is talking hardly at all at thirty-three months?"
"Thirty-three months? That’s nearly three years old." Sylvia looked dubious. "We’re discounting brain damage, I take it?"
"Oh, I think so."
"He or she could be deaf. That’s a real possibility, but these days I’d think that would have been checked out by thirty-three months. Or, of course, it could be some sort of emotional disturbance. Tasneem Fowler at The Hide told me her older boy stopped talking for two months after the younger one was born."
"But he’d been talking before?" said Wexford. "He was jealous of the newcomer and that inhibited his powers of speech?"
"Probably. You must have some particular case in mind, Dad. What sort of a home does this child of yours come from?"
"Middle class, maybe upper middle class, plenty of money, nice home, and that’s an understatement, natural parents living together and apparently devoted, two older brothers. I would say a much loved, much wanted child."
"Then I haven’t a clue," said Sylvia.
"I remember reading somewhere that Einstein didn’t talk till he was three," Dora said.
’’And what on earth is that supposed to prove, Mother?"
After Sylvia had gone he watched the nine o’clock news, then a program about a new kind of activist, the eco-warrior. A group of these people, fighting their war against genetic engineering, had uprooted a field of wheat in Shropshire and poisoned an orchard in Somerset. The wheat had been genetically altered to create a springier kind of bread and the apples were redder than normal and had no cores. He was looking at a section through a coreless apple when Dora came in and said she was taking winter clothes to the dry cleaner’s in the morning and she couldn’t find his raincoat.
"Oh, God," he said, "I lent it to a chap called Dixon to put over his head and pretend he was a pedophile."
Dora gave him a strange look. "Get it back. You don’t want to lose it. It’s a Burberry."
She switched off the television and they went to bed. He often had interesting dreams but seldom nightmares. This dream, into which he seemed to fall at once, took him and Dora years back to when they were young and their children very young. He was sitting with Dora, admiring her appearance as she brushed her long dark hair—an ordinary enough romantic cliché—when she turned around and told him quite calmly that Sheila, their baby, had disappeared, had been stolen out of her cot. She had been into the room and found the cot empty.
His grief and terror had known no bounds. He had run through the house, calling to Sheila, begging her to come back, rushed into the street, wakened the town, the world. And then the dream shifted, as such dreams do, and he was in a television studio, being interviewed by a demonic character played by Peter Cushing. He was begging for a message to be sent to the kidnappers, offering a ransom for Sheila, and the ransom—this was the worst part, the positively most dreadful, shame-making part— was his elder daughter, Sylvia. Take her, he heard himself saying, and give me back Sheila. Then he woke up, sweating and trembling.
At midnight Lynn Fancourt, who had spent the evening at the cinema and afterward had had a drink in the Rat and Carrot with her boyfriend, got into a car that stopped for her at the north end of York Street. In fact, it had stopped for a red light. Lynn tapped on the passenger window and asked for a lift. The driver was a woman someone very young might describe as middle-aged and the passenger was a man of about thirty. They were going, the man said, to Myringham, but could drop her off in Framhurst if that was what she wanted.
From the conversation Lynn soon knew something funny was going on, and it wasn’t the something funny she was on the lookout for. When the man suggested they stop for ten minutes in a lay-by on the old bypass, she thought it was drugs and was of two minds what to do if controlled substances made their appearance. Nick them for possession? Call the station on her mobile? But she was wrong. The car stopped and both of them got in the back with her, amorously inclined. Lynn’s discouraging tactics led the woman to say she quite understood and it would be best to go straight home where they could have their threesome in comfort.
It occurred to Lynn then that they had taken her for a prostitute, a new phenomenon in Kingsmarkham but not unknown. She had only herself to blame for that, tapping on car windows—and at a red light, that was an irony. They were quite nice people, pleasant and gentle, and when she said she had changed her mind, they took her to Framhurst just the same and gave her their phone number in case she had second thoughts.
For more than a year now Wexford had stopped taking his local paper. The Kingsmarkham Courier had caused him more irritation with Brian St. George’s coverage of the bypass hostage-taking than he thought within the bounds of anything a man should suffer over the breakfast table. He would not go through that again, so the paper had been given up. Neither the Times nor the Independent could ever bring him so much rage, so he would stick with them.
But since his happy relinquishment of the Courier, his newsagent had taken on a series of new paperboys, most of them inefficient. When it rained, they let the papers get wet, and if they couldn’t find the right one on top of their load, they delivered anything that came to hand: a tabloid, maybe, or the Financial Times. Any of these would have been infinitely preferable to Wexford than what he saw lying faceup on his doormat. Under the masthead of an eagle with a scroll in its beak, on which the Courier’s name was lettered in Gothic script, the lead story leapt out at him.
He closed his eyes, but of course he had to open them again. We always do have to. WHERE Is SANCHIA? the headline read in the largest Roman type available to the Courier’s printers, and underneath, only slightly less bold and huge, ORBE IN REFUGE WITH COPS. What the story beneath would say he guessed before he read it. The gist had come into his head the moment he saw those headlines: a baby girl had disappeared, the news had been suppressed while Orbe was spirited away, a huge cover-up was in progress. He hadn’t, though, anticipated St. George’s statement—his was the byline—that Henry Thomas Orbe was currently accommodated in a refurbished cell "with all mod cons" at Kingsmarkham Police Station.
Two photographs were inserted in the text, the classic one of Orbe taken on his release from prison and featured everywhere, and a portrait of Sanchia Devenish he had never seen before. It had evidently been taken when she was about six months old, for this was a baby, her round, almost hairless head resting on a lacy pillow. A fuzzy picture, probably much enlarged. An adult’s hand could be seen in one corner—Fay Devenish’s?—and what might be the side of a pram or pushchair.
Growling to himself like a cross bear, Wexford took the paper with him into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. His instinct, like most people’s these days when astounded, delighted, shocked, or appalled, was to phone someone. But whom? Southby, of course. He had as little contact with the ACCD as he could achieve. Superintendent Rogers? The desk sergeant at the station? In the end, when he had taken up Dora’s tea, when he had observed that it was raining again but had not reverted to the subject of his missing raincoat, he fell back on the old faithful and phoned Burden.
"I’ve seen it," Burden said.
"I thought you’d given up that rag."
"I have. They delivered the wrong papers."
"You and me both. St. George must have seen Wendy Brodrick bring Orbe in. He was doubtless prowling about outside or loitering in a parked car. They were only there five minutes."
"Long enough. Where did he get that picture of Sanchia?"
"God knows. Those Devenishes hadn’t a pho
to to give us, but St. George gets one. Not that we’d have been interested in this, a child of six months looks nothing like how it will two years later. That photograph of St. George’s would no more help find Sanchia Devenish than a shot of you or me."
Burden said thoughtfully, "Maybe the Devenishes didn’t give it to him. You know how the Courier organizes all those contests, allegedly for charity—the guy with the biggest feet, some ghastly ferret competition, Miss Kingsmarkham till the feminists stopped it—well, I’ve been wondering if Sanchia was ever in a baby show, if maybe she won a baby show and they took the picture. She was a pretty baby, wasn’t she?"
These words, uncharacteristic of Burden, moved Wexford so profoundly, driving away all his anger in a moment, bringing him instead an ache of sadness at that past tense, that he was silent. The poor little girl, he thought, please God or Fates or Furies, let whoever’s got her be kind to her.
Burden said, ’’Are you still there?"
"I’m here." Wexford cleared his throat. "The Devenishes aren’t the sort of people to let their daughter compete in a baby show, are they?"
"God knows what sort of people they are. Don’t ask me, you’d better ask St. George."
"I mean to," said Wexford; then he added, with atypical relish, "I mean to think of a way of punishing him."
13
This time the trouble began in Stowerton, in Rectangle Road, not far from the homes of Trevor Ferry and Rosemary Holmes, where Joe Hebden’s brother lived with his girlfriend, two children of hers, and two children of his. David Hebden drove the van that delivered new copies of the Courier fresh off the press to every newsagent in Kingsmarkham, Stowerton, and Pomfret, and his round began at 6 a.m. Reading was not among his skills, though he was able to decipher the headlines on the sports pages. What drew his attention to the Courier this wet morning was a name, one of the few he could read, being that of his girlfriend’s younger daughter.
David Hebden was fond of little Sanchia. She was not his child but he liked her better than his own children, whom he saw as coming between him and his ex-wife. For a fearful half hour he thought something dreadful had happened to her. Why otherwise would her name be in the paper?
Asking other people to read things to him was something he avoided whenever he could, so he said nothing to any of the newsagents, simply growing more and more anxious and frustrated each time his eye lighted on that beloved name in that horrible huge print. When he got home, everyone was still asleep. He rushed upstairs to look for Sanchia, found her in bed with her mother, where she must have come after he left, and woke up the whole household with his whoops of joy.
Sanchia’s mother, Katrina, took the paper from him and read the story. After a while the other children came in and sat on the bed, seeing in this break from routine a prospect of excitement.
"The police are a disgrace," said Katrina. "This little kid’s been missing since Monday and what do they do? Not look for her, or her body more like, oh, no, they turn the police station into a hotel with all mod cons to keep that pedophile in luxury."
"What’s a pedophile, Mum?" said Georgina, aged six.
"Ask no questions and you’ll get no lies. I’m going to give Joe and Charlene a phone, Dave. Or you can, it’s your duty, they’ve a right to know."
Since the departure of Orbe from the Muriel Campden Estate, all the excitement and most of the heat had simmered down. Another event had convulsed the residents of Puck, Titania, and Oberon Roads: Colin Crowne’s assault on and destruction of Jodi the virtual baby. It had happened on the day before Lizzie Cromwell was due to return Jodi to the Social Services. After her fight with Brenda Bosworth and acknowledgment by everyone except Miroslav himself that he was the father of her child, Lizzie had seemed to lose interest in Jodi. From nursing him and feeding and changing him, putting him in his cot, lifting him up again, and constantly cuddling him, she had rapidly passed to total indifference, and Jodi, unattended for the first time in his short life, for he had been newborn when he came to her, began to cry. He cried and sobbed and wailed, and when the crying mechanism ran out, his tape rewound and he began again.
"You can’t just put him on the back burner, you know," Debbie scolded.
Colin said nothing. Nor did he make any attempt to immobilize Jodi by removing his batteries or even smothering him. At nine at night when the robot had been crying for six hours, he picked him up by the legs and smashed him against the bathroom wall. Bits of Jodi, his limbs and his mechanism and his fine handsome head, fell into the bath where Colin stamped on them.
Lizzie didn’t care, she was bored with the whole thing, but she had to explain to the social worker. Colin wasn’t there, it was his day at the Job Centre for signing on. The social worker said such a thing had never happened before and what sort of a mother would Lizzie make when she had a real baby? Of course she or her mother or her stepfather would have to pay for a replacement for Jodi, and did she realize how much a virtual baby cost?
Colin came home and said over his dead body would they make him pay for breaking a fucking stupid doll, and Debbie said she wouldn’t either, on principle. It would probably be his dead body, anyway, Colin said, he’d already started coming out in a rash all around his waist and down his bum. No one appreciated the stress he’d suffered through having that thing in the house, and God knew what it would be like with a real baby.
News of this unjust claim on the part of Kingsmarkham’s Social Services Department spread around Muriel Campden like a bushfire. Almost everyone took the Crowne-Cromwell side with the exception of the Mitchells, Monty Smith, and Maria Michaels. Monty Smith had been put on probation and required to pay an unimaginably large sum (which he had borrowed off Maria) for hitting Sergeant Fitch, and his view was that if he had been unfairly fined, why should others get off scot-free?
"How d’you make a petrol bomb?" Colin Crowne had said to Joe Hebden in the Rat and Carrot the night before.
"You what? You’re barking."
"No, I saw it on the telly. It was somewhere like Algeria or Iraq, some place like that, and this lot was throwing petrol bombs at the government. I thought to myself, ’They ought to do that to the council, make them sit up.’ "
A man neither of them had ever seen before said, "You fill up a bottle with petrol, like a milk bottle."
"We don’t get milk bottles no more," said Colin.
"Right. You don’t. Any bottle so long as it’s not plastic. Fill it up and stuff the top with a bit of rag. You put paraffin on the rag, pink or blue paraffin, don’t matter, and you light it with a match and throw it. You throw it right away, mind, no hanging about or you’ll go up in flames. But you don’t need the hassle. You want one, I can supply it. There’s a market for them things."
"It was a joke," said Joe.
The man only laughed and said he’d buy them a drink, then he’d like to show them something.
Joe’s wife, Charlene, took the call from her brother-in-law at seven-thirty next morning. That the child was still missing didn’t much concern her. She knew that, everyone on Muriel Campden knew it, if the media didn’t. But Orbe in hiding at Kingsmarkham Police Station! In luxurious accommodation! Charlene was fond of saying that the world was divided into those who don’t and those who do, and she was a doer. She got dressed, grabbed an umbrella, and went out into the triangle, knocking on every door.
There are fat men who are solid like Carl Meeks, men with big shoulders and bellies like convex drums, taut as if corseted but corseted in vain, and there are fat men whose obesity seems liquid, seems to slosh around inside a thin membrane, so that a pinprick would reduce them to a collapsed balloon. Brian St. George, editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier, was of the latter sort, and his liquidity was currently flowing over the arms of Wexford’s chair and seeping like a tide against the edge of the desk. His shirt was meant to be white but looked, as usual, as if it had been put through the wash in company with a pair of black jeans and a red T-shirt. If he had a tie with him, it must have
been in his pocket. Since becoming bald, he had grown his remaining hair long so that if you eyed him from above, as Wexford was now doing, his head looked like a big white daisy with a pinkish-yellow center.
He had come to the police station when summoned, perhaps not much fancying the chief inspector’s presence in the Courier’s offices, sat down in this chair, and suffered a grilling. St. George put up a spirited defense, half whining, half aggressive, and insisted he was obliged to "improvise" because Kingsmarkham police never told him anything.
" ’The Kingsmarkham Six,’ " said Wexford disgustedly.
"I didn’t think it up," Brian St. George said as if in mitigation. "It’s vindictive, it’s revenge. You know you don’t treat me fairly, Reg."
"Don’t call me that."
"Sorry, I’m sure. I’d been under the impression we were all old friends here. You Reg, me Brian. It’s formality gone mad the way you call me ’Mr. St. George.’ "
"Call it what you like, but we’ll keep to formality under this roof. If you believed Orbe was hidden here, what stopped you phoning your old friend and checking? No, don’t bother to answer. You’d have got a denial and a denial was the last thing you wanted. You’d have had no story."
St. George shifted his floppy bulk an inch or two. A gap opened between two of his shirt buttons to reveal a circle of hairy pink skin. Wexford tried not to look at it. The editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier took a packet of Marlboros from his pocket, looked around for an ashtray, but in spite of not seeing one, lit his cigarette.
"This is a smoke-free zone."
"It never used to be," St. George protested. "Since when?"
"Since nine this morning." Wexford looked at his watch, which showed three minutes past. "Put that fag out, come on now."
Slowly and with an expression of bitter regret, St. George stubbed out his cigarette. "The story’s in all the nationals," he pleaded. "It’s the Mail’s front-page lead."
