by Ruth Rendell
The cabdriver felt as if he were in a film. He thought of asking the reporters for a considerable sum to hold Mr. Devenish captive, then he thought of losing his job as a result, and besides, the hero—sheriff or principal witness or driver of the stagecoach—must behave heroically, keep silent, be strong, and stride boldly to the rescue. So he did his best to ignore them, marched up to the front door, and rang the bell. First Devenish put his head out of a window, then he came out. The cabdriver said soothingly, "Now you keep close to me, sir, and don’t say a word and you’ll be okay. I’m going to take your arm and get you through this bunch of paparazzi—you won’t mind that, will you?"
Devenish said he wouldn’t mind that, or rather shouted that he wouldn’t, for everything he said was drowned by the press pack’s questions, their running feet and the clicks and flashes of their cameras. The cabdriver took charge, not neglecting to get his own scowling face into the pictures as he masterfully steered Devenish to where the cab waited.
Shivering, Devenish sank into the back, said, "Thank you. Thank you very much. Frankly, I don’t know what I’d have done without you."
The pack followed but the driver managed to lose them. When they got to the police station, Devenish gave him an enormous tip. After Devenish had gone in through the damaged double doors, the driver drove twice in a circle around the forecourt to get a good look at the broken windows and blackened front of the police station. If he got the chance later in the day, he’d come back with a camera.
Stephen Devenish asked for Wexford. No, the chief inspector wasn’t expecting him but Devenish thought he’d see him and there was no way he was going out there again like a fox running into the jaws of a pack of hounds. The desk sergeant sent him up in the lift and said Wexford would come out to meet him. The first press cars arrived on the forecourt by the time he reached the second floor.
In Wexford’s room Devenish didn’t complain about media intrusion, but he shouted just the same and Wexford saw for the first time signs of that famous temper. Devenish crashed his fists on the desk. "Has that pedophile got my child?"
"Please try to keep calm, Mr. Devenish."
"Just answer me!"
"Sit down, please. That’s right. I understand your anger. I would feel the same myself in the circumstances. But, no, Orbe has not got your child."
"How can you know that? How can you possibly know?" "We kept her disappearance a secret because we feared the very thing that has happened. It’s an unfortunate coincidence that Orbe was present in the neighborhood at the time she went missing, but that’s all it is. There is no connection—I hope you understand that."
"Where is he now, then?"
"I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry. But he is not in this building, or indeed in this town." Wexford was tired of telling people that boys had been Orbe’s quarry, but he repeated to Sanchia’s father what he had said so many times before. "Thomas Orbe isn’t interested in girls. He’s a homosexual pedophile."
"How disgusting! It makes you sick to your stomach."
Too bad, Wexford thought, you can’t have it both ways. "We’re doing everything we can to find Sanchia," he said, "and I can tell you, which I hope may be a comfort to you, that she is not in the hands of any known pedophile on our lists. I’m talking nationwide. No pedophile has her. In these cases, the culprit is very often a disturbed person, usually a woman, who has recently lost her own child or who cannot herself have children. That is why I was so anxious to get from you and your wife the names of all your friends and acquaintances, on the chance that such a woman might be among them."
Wexford thought he detected a faint difference in the man’s expression, no more than a flicker, a tiny change in the iris of his eyes, a barely perceptible tightening of the mouth. Rather than pursue it, Wexford changed the subject from the possible kidnapper of Sanchia back to the situation in Woodland Lodge on the night she was taken. "It’s not quite a question, Mr. Devenish, of who might have a key or who might otherwise gain entrance to your home but rather of how anyone could do so without disturbing you or your wife or your sons and without Sanchia making a noise. Can you really tell me that any stranger could take your little girl out of her bed in the night, wake her and lift her up, and she not cry out or call to you?"
"I don’t know."
Wexford didn’t want to ask it but he had to. He had to establish once and for all just how impaired Sanchia’s intelligence and faculties were. "She can cry out, I suppose? You have said she talks very little, but she can speak?"
"Of course she can," Devenish said, quite hotly for him. "She’s not dumb. What are you saying? That she’s some sort of idiot?"
"No, Mr. Devenish, I’m not saying that. But you must admit yourself that the whole picture is a very strange one. Has any doctor or psychologist given an opinion on why Sanchia isn’t talking at the age of two and three-quarters? Has anyone offered an explanation?"
"We haven’t asked." Devenish was calm now, the color had receded from his face, and the charm was back. He spoke lightly, with his habitual half-smile. "We never thought it necessary. She’s a late developer, that’s all. Forgive me, but is this to the point? Finding out why she doesn’t speak isn’t going to find her."
"I like mysteries to be solved," Wexford said simply. "I should like to solve the mystery of these threatening letters you’ve received. Envy makes enemies and there are plenty who must envy you. For instance, when you secured your present job and later when you received a very large salary increase, there must have been people who were passed over to make way for you. Perhaps there are those who feel they have a grievance against the airline for some real or imagined shortcoming. They might transfer this grievance onto you as the airline’s representative. I’m sure you understand what I’m saying."
"Oh, yes, of course I do. But there’s nothing."
On Devenish’s transparent face, lying or truth-telling immediately showed. Now he was lying. Wexford was sure of it. And there was a stubbornness, too, revealed in those dark eyes. It wasn’t just a matter of lying but of a decision not to expand on what he had said. There was nothing, he had no enemies, and that was it. There could be no room for argument or persuasion.
"You hardly seem to realize," Devenish said, but perfectly politely, "that the people who send this sort of letter are mad. They don’t have to have a reason. They read something in the paper and that’s enough to trigger them off. They’re mad."
"I realize it, sir, I realize that this is often, though not invariably, the case. And now I’d like you to tell me something you may find similarly irrelevant but I assure you it isn’t." Wexford paused, looking steadily at the other man. "Do you have a second home?"
"What, a cottage in the country, d’you mean? We live in the country. And we don’t have a flat in London either."
’’And it would be even less necessary to ask you if an obviously devoted husband such as yourself has, or has ever had since his marriage, a relationship with another woman?"
If Devenish noticed the edge of irony to Wexford’s voice and his uncharacteristic use of the third person, he didn’t show it. "Chief Inspector, you must be joking." Devenish smiled, at the same time shaking his head as at an incredibly tall story. "You can’t be serious."
"I’m perfectly serious, sir," Wexford said in a hard voice. "I don’t find any of this amusing. A man has died a horrible death here this morning. You’ll excuse me if I concentrate on that for the time being."
The remains of Ted Hennessy lay in the mortuary. He had been thirty-four years old, for four of those years attached to the Regional Crime Squad at Myringham. Married, with two children, as the media put it. The notice of his death in a national newspaper, not the front-page story but the announcement in the Births, Marriages, and Deaths columns, said that he had been the adored husband of Laura and father of Jonathan and Kate.
Someone in that crowd had thrown the petrol bomb that killed him. He wouldn’t have been in Kingsmarkham at all in the ordinary course o
f events. He was a reinforcement for Wexford’s beleaguered team. You could say Orbe and the Devenishes were responsible for his being there, which was an irony if you like.
"I don’t see any irony," said Burden.
"No, maybe not," Wexford said. "I really meant he wasn’t here for anything real. He was here through people making a nuisance of themselves."
He didn’t explain what he meant. He had a date with Brian St. George at midday. The editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier had failed to turn up for the press conference and Wexford thought he knew why. At any rate, he guessed or hoped he knew why. St. George had "seen it all" for himself. He had had a piece of luck and seen the petrol bomb thrown.
"I’m not saying I actually saw it, Reg," St. George began. He looked nervous. "Not to say saw it. That’s not exactly what I meant."
"What did you mean, then?"
"Well, I saw it hit its target."
"By its ’target’ I suppose you mean Detective Sergeant Hennessy," Wexford said, barely suppressing rage. "For a journalist you’ve a singularly unfortunate way of expressing yourself. Is that what you’re going to write in that rag of yours?"
If it was possible to hurt St. George’s feelings, this could only be done by impugning his writing skills. He winced a little. He put his hands on his head, on the daisy-center bald spot, and looked at Wexford loweringly. "I never saw who threw it. I never meant that. If I had," St. George added recklessly, "I wouldn’t tell. I don’t want to be a marked man, not in my position I don’t, Reg."
"Don’t call me Reg."
Hennessy’s widow, Laura, when told of his death, said, "I always knew the job would kill him, but not like this, not like this."
By next morning the police station forecourt had been cleaned up, the burnt-out car—once the property of DC Archbold—removed, and the broken windows boarded up. Several arrests were made, and half a dozen people, including Brenda Bosworth, Maria Michaels, and David Hebden, appeared in court on charges of causing criminal damage. Barry Vine and Lynn Fancourt were obliged to give up the hunt for Sanchia Devenish and, with two members of the Regional Crime Squad, track down whoever among the crowd on the pavement had thrown the petrol bomb that killed Hennessy.
It was one thing for no witnesses to come forward when throwing a brick and breaking a window was in question, quite another when a man had died as a result. Not everyone was as chicken, as Wexford put it, as Brian St. George. People were anxious to talk, and volunteers with information came from all over Stowerton, Kingsmarkham, and the Muriel Campden Estate. The difficulty was that no one could be exactly sure who had the petrol bomb, still less who had thrown it. Hennessy’s killer had been in the midst of them, was one of them, had marched with them up the High Street, talked to them and chanted "Stand by Your Kids" with them, that everyone knew. It must have been so, but there they stopped and looked helplessly at Barry and Lynn. They couldn’t absolutely say it was so-and-so, they wouldn’t swear to it if it came to swearing, it was just that they thought... After all, you don’t want to say something’s absolutely certain when it could end with the person getting life imprisonment.
Andy Honeyman, landlord of the Rat and Carrot, was profuse with his information. As Barry remarked later to Michael Burden, you’d have thought he’d been there, seen it all, and taken notes and photographs. In the end it came down to a conversation he had overheard in his saloon bar. "So this guy says, ’How d’you make a petrol bomb?’ I ask you, you wouldn’t take it seriously, would you? And this other guy, he didn’t take it seriously. ’You what?’ he says, ’You’re bonkers’ or ’You’re barking’ or something. And too right, I thought, never imagining what would come of it. And then another guy comes up."
"Wait a minute," said Vine, "I can’t sort out all these guys. You don’t know their names, I suppose?"
"Of course I know their names," said Andy Honeyman. "The first guy, he was Colin whatever, Cromwell—no, Crowne. Her ex was called Cromwell, this one’s Crowne. And the other guy was Joe Hebden. Both of them come from that blot on the landscape, the Muriel Campden Estate. Well, as I say, another guy comes up—"
"What was his name?"
"Don’t ask me. I never saw him before. I don’t know who he was, but I know what he said. He told them how to make a petrol bomb—get a bottle, fill it with petrol, I leave it to your imagination. He said there was a market for the things, meaning folks would buy them, I reckon. Then he said making them was a hassle when he could supply them. There was dozens listening. I mean, there was that chap Fowler, the one with a blackie wife who’s left him and gone to that bunch of slags down the road here, The Hide they call it. I know what I’d call it."
Barry interviewed Colin Crowne and Joe Hebden and Terry Fowler. Colin said where would he get petrol, he hadn’t got a car, as if possession of a motor vehicle were the only criterion for access to a fuel pump. He didn’t remember the conversation in the Rat and Carrot, which he believed was an invention of Andy Honeyman. Anyway, he hadn’t been with the protest, he’d been in bed with shingles, from which he was still suffering as anyone could see with half an eye. Joe couldn’t remember the conversation, and Terry said he had heard the word "bomb" but he couldn’t recall any guy coming up and giving advice how to make one. But Colin’s rhetorical question gave Barry an idea, and next day he began making inquiries at every petrol station in the town and its environs.
Lynn drove home, left her car, and out on the Savesbury Road, waited, looking forlorn, until she accepted a lift from the fourth driver and first woman driver who offered. She hadn’t gray hair, or rather she had but it was dyed red, she was thin rather than thickset and certainly no more than forty-five, and she drove Lynn back into Kingsmarkham, leaving her where she asked to be let down, outside St. Peter’s. Lynn had to get a taxi home and wondered if she could get the fare off expenses.
The inquest on Ted Hennessy was opened and adjourned. Wexford and Burden came away from it together, and Wexford put on the thin plastic mac he had bought many years before for a holiday in Ireland. "I don’t seem to be able to think of anything but that poor chap," he said. "It’s what his wife said, not so much his death, though that’s bad enough, but the manner of it. To be burned to death—you can’t imagine much worse."
"We’ll get him," said Burden, looking askance at the mac. "No doubt about it. Him or her, we’ll get them."
"I’m afraid I don’t find revenge much consolation, Mike."
They walked down the High Street, where the sun shone brightly on wet pavements, on puddles, on lakes of water half across the roadway. A car, passing too fast, sent up a sheet of spray that just missed Burden’s trouser legs. The driver, for no known reason, leaned across the passenger seat at the red light and shook his fist at them.
"Let’s go in the Europlate and have a coffee," said Wexford.
The Europlate had opened six months before. Its name had nothing to do with European Monetary Union but referred solely to its menu, a suitably eclectic offering of the so-called principal dishes from the cuisine of every country in the EU. You could have Swedish meatballs, Spanish omelette, Greek salad, Irish stew, German sausage, croque monsieur, and the Roast Beef of Old England. The trouble was that everything tasted of stir-fry. The cook was reputed to be Chinese, though no one claimed to have seen him and verified this. Last time he was in there, preferring the place over the police station canteen, Wexford had asked if they did Turkish delight and got a rather surly negative response.
The place was done up in yellow and blue. Tablecloths were dark blue and every table napkin had in its center the ring of stars that is the emblem of the Union. They ordered coffee and were each offered a complimentary Danish pastry. Burden refused with an incredulous smile, but Wexford had difficulty in resisting this sugary, nut-sprinkled, apricot-jam-filled confection and eventually succumbed. "I’m going to have it," he said. "I know I shouldn’t, but I need the comfort. It’s been such a bloody week, hasn’t it? There’ll be an inquiry into what happened last Friday
morning, and the outcome will be a resigning matter for poor old Rogers."
"No one could have foreseen that petrol bomb. Who’d imagine petrol bombs in this place? It’s not Seoul, it’s not"—Burden hesitated, trying to think where else it might not be—"Jakarta."
Wexford started on his Danish pastry. It was the first of its kind he had eaten for more than a year and would probably be the last for another year. "I went to Seaward Air yesterday, as you know. The headquarters at Gatwick, not the Brighton one or the office here. I talked to Devenish’s PA and his secretary—two different women, by the way, he’s very grand—and to the present general manager. They all like him, they all say he’s a good employer, very fair, pleasant without being too matey."
"And?"
"Well, yes, there’s an ’and.’ The secretary talked about his bad temper, of which I saw some signs myself the other day. She’s seen it directed at others, though not at her. Apparently, there was an incident when he threw some chap out of his office. Fellow forced his way in, making complaints about some relative of his being badly treated by Seaward. It was two or three years ago and before her time, but she’d heard he physically threw the man out— neck and crop, as they say. The rumor was that the chap broke a rib. But it’s all very vague. She doesn’t know his name and I couldn’t find anyone there who did."
"You make him sound popular," said Burden. "You paint a very different picture from Trevor Ferry’s."
"As you said yourself, it’s understandable Ferry hasn’t got a good word for him." Wexford finished his Danish pastry and picked up in his fingers the last crumbs off his plate. He said quietly, first glancing over his shoulder, "I believe Devenish abducted his own daughter."
