Harm Done

by Ruth Rendell

  "I’m not sure that would be a wise choice, sir."

  "What? No, I suppose not."

  The first few spots splashed against the windscreen, then the rain came in torrents. Donaldson put the wipers on at fast speed, but still he felt it wiser to stop until the heavy shower had passed. Someone in No. 2 Oberon Road shut an upstairs casement with a slam. Wexford rubbed at the steam on the window but could still see nothing out there, not even the graffiti on No. 16, beyond glassy streams and dazzlement.

  "This Meeks, sir," Karen said. "I suppose he’s on the benefit?"

  "He’s unemployed at any rate."

  "Living on our taxes, and from what I hear they’re both obese."

  "Being overweight has nothing to do with affluence," said Wexford. "It’s not so much a matter of you can’t be too rich or too thin as you have to be rich to be thin."

  "Cheap food makes you fat," said Donaldson sagely, "all those pies and chips." He switched on the ignition and they were off once more, the rain having subsided into a drizzle.

  Wexford put on the plastic mac. "I suppose I shall have to buy a new raincoat," he said to no one in particular, but Donaldson’s shoulders hunched a little.

  No one had blamed him for Wexford’s loss, but he sometimes felt he had been negligent. He was thinking how, if he chanced to see Charlene Hebden while he was up here, he would confront her and get the truth out of her, when he found himself outside 24 Oberon Road and Wexford was telling him to stop and let him and DS Malahyde out.

  Karen Malahyde never seemed to notice rain. Her clothes had a rainproof look to them, even skirts and blouses, and on a man her hairstyle would have been called a crew cut. She stood on the front path, surveying the house, leaving it to Wexford to find shelter under the diminutive porch and ring the bell.

  Linda Meeks was immediately recognizable, an often-seen figure in those riotous assemblies. She should have been in the hierarchy, he thought, important enough to enlarge it to the Kingsmarkham Seven, though she had never been one of the ringleaders. A large woman, soft and cushiony, she looked as if her plump, dimpled flesh, mottled pink and white, would hold the impress if a finger was dug into it. It was evident from a flicker of alarm in her pale blue eyes that she expected these two police officers to question her on the subject of DS Hennessy’s death. It wouldn’t be the first time. Just the same, she had hoped the first time would also have been the last.

  Wexford had a feeling he had set her mind at rest when he said he wanted to talk to her and her husband about her brother-in-law who had died in a car crash on his way to Harwich.

  "My brother," said Linda Meeks, "not my brother-in-law." She looked relieved, positively cheerful. "Come in. You want a cup of tea?"

  Wexford said no, thanks, and Karen said no, not now, which for both of them was a way of saying that this matter was too serious for sociable cups of tea. Both expected Meeks to be in front of the television with a can of something and a bag of crisps, which behavior, as Barry Vine, a golfer, put it, was par for the course at Muriel Campden. Instead, he was out in the garden, in a shed, doing woodwork. He appeared to be making a table, for the legs and base were finished and he was planing what appeared to be the top. When he saw them, he laid the plane down carefully on its side and came out, putting up an umbrella.

  The garden was exquisitely neat. Vegetables grew in it where others might have flowers. That is, they were not planted in rows as on an allotment, but in clusters as in an herbaceous border: lettuces making a nice contrast with beetroot, and runner beans in full scarlet bloom climbing up the fences instead of clematis.

  Meeks spotted a tiny plant that shouldn’t have been there and, in spite of the rain, pulled it out. "Never pass a weed," he said philosophically.

  He was a little man, shorter than his wife, and with his fatness, as is often the case in middle-aged male beer drinkers, concentrated on his belly. This area of his body was so large and protuberant as to make an onlooker feel uneasy. It looked as if its possessor must be uncomfortable, embarrassed by what was almost a deformity, ashamed of such grotesqueness. But if Meeks felt any of this, he gave no sign of it. He walked very upright, carrying all before him, as he led them back to the house where he dropped the weed into a waste bin.

  In the living room, the boy Scott had the television on, playing a video game in which the player won points if he could steer a surfer through a stormy sea without bumping into islands, ships, and other obstacles. His father was going to leave it—keep him quiet, it’s harmless—but Wexford asked him to switch it off and leave them. Scott Meeks, who had never been spoken to like that before, gave Wexford a glowering look, his underlip stuck out, but he did as he was told and departed, slamming the door behind him.

  "I’d like to talk to your wife as well, Mr. Meeks," Wexford said, "but not till after I’ve had a word with you. Tell me about this trouble with your brother-in-law. For a start, what was his name?"

  "Jimmy—well, James, I suppose, James Crabbe."

  If Meeks was surprised to find the police at last taking an interest in his brother-in-law’s wrongs, he gave no sign of it. Rather, he seemed pleased to have a chance of talking about what had evidently become an obsession, and before Wexford could ask him anything else, he had launched on a muddled account of the fateful happenings at Gatwick.

  "They was all dead against him from start to finish, don’t tell me they don’t make no difference between passengers and whatever, they was set against letting him on that plane from the start, and it’s my belief it was on account of he was wearing shorts, shorts and sandals, and that got up their noses, so they was set on making him a victim, it’s my belief they paid those folks to—what do they call it—overbook and then—"

  "Just a moment, Mr. Meeks," said Karen. "Would you tell us how you know all this? You weren’t there, were you?"

  "He gave us a bell, Jimmy did. Him and Linda, they was very close. I mean, they was twins. It hit her very hard, him dying like that, I can tell you. I mean, it upset me, but her, she was devastated, it knocked her for six, they thought she was going to have a mental breakdown. Well, like I was saying, he gave us a phone. He was over the moon, like out on cloud nine, bubbling over he was, how he’d got this money out of Seaward and he was going to spend it on a chauffeur-driven car to the ferry."

  "What was he going to Amsterdam for?" Wexford asked. Jimmy Crabbe wasn’t gay, he thought, or was he? He wasn’t going to buy cheese or porcelain or look at The Night Watch. "Was it just a holiday?"

  "It was his girlfriend. She’d got a job as a nanny over there. He was going to have the weekend with her while the folks she worked for was away. But he never made it. The car he hired crashed on the M25 soon after it come out of the Dartford Tunnel. Big truck jackknifed and went smack into it."

  "But surely that was no one’s fault," said Karen. "Well, maybe the truck driver’s fault or the hire-car driver’s fault but not Seaward Air. All they did was give him the money."

  Whose side are you on? Meeks may have been thinking. "They shouldn’t put temptation in a poor man’s way," he said sententiously. "Folks like Jimmy, they need looking after, they need to be protected."

  "Your brother-in-law wasn’t"—Wexford sought about for something reasonably PC and failed lamentably—"he wasn’t mentally afflicted, was he?"

  Meeks jumped up. "What are you insinuating? That Jimmy was backward, is that what you’re saying? I never said that, I never meant that. I mean he’d never been nowhere or done nothing, he said as much, he had that car because he’d never been in a chauffeur-driven car. He was thirty-six years old and he’d never even had a girlfriend before this one. Those Seaward folks put temptation in a poor man’s way when they should have been putting him on that plane and looking after him, and the air hostesses bringing him beer and a sandwich. D’you know, he’d never been on a plane before? Well, he never went on that one, did he? Thanks to them. Thanks to that bastard Stephen Devenish, he was the one made the rules, he was the one said what they a
ll had to do."

  Linda Meeks put her head around the door. "I heard you shouting, Carly. You all right?"

  "Of course I’m all right. I just got a bit aerated."

  "Leave us for a while longer, Mrs. Meeks, will you?"

  She retreated without argument, and as the door closed, Wexford changed tack completely and asked Meeks in an abrupt tone where he had been on the previous Tuesday at eight in the morning.

  Meeks looked astonished but he apparently failed to make the connection. "Out with my dog. I’m always out with my dog at eight in the morning."

  "I don’t see any dog."

  "He’s in the kitchen with Linda."

  Wexford asked if Meeks had a car and then if anyone saw him while he was out, got a "No" to the first and an "I don’t know" to the second, qualified by "I go out at half-seven and there’s not many about then. Folks round here may have seen me. I go in York Park or out in the fields and there’s no one there so early." Either he was acting or the purpose of these inquiries hit him, rather late in the day. "He’s dead, isn’t he? That Stephen Devenish? He was murdered." More light dawned, an unpleasantly searching light. "You think I done that? I murdered him?"

  "We don’t think anything, Mr. Meeks," Karen said. "We’d just like to eliminate you from our inquiries. You threatened Mr. Devenish, didn’t you? You made threatening phone calls and wrote threatening letters and went along to Seaward Air and threatened him."

  Carl Meeks was shaking his head. "I never wrote no letters." He seemed to be making up his mind to come out with a confession, he even closed his eyes briefly, screwed up his face, said in a rush, "I’m not much at writing and reading, never seemed to get the hang of it, I reckon it’s not up my street." He brightened a little. "The wife can write and read."

  "I think we’ll have Mrs. Meeks in now," said Wexford.

  "And bring Buster with you," Carl Meeks called out.

  Linda had changed out of leggings and T-shirt into an all-enveloping check dress like a tablecloth with sleeves. For their benefit? Or because she was going out? But it wasn’t her appearance that made the impact. She was pulled into the room, as a bowfront carriage might be pulled with a frisky horse in harness, by the biggest dog Wexford had ever seen. It seemed to be a Great Dane, of a slate blue color, and it slipped its lead, making straight for Carl, placing its paws on his shoulders and licking his face with a huge, slimy, dark blue tongue.

  "Down, boy, down! Get off me! That’s enough now Get down!"

  "I think I’ve seen enough," said Wexford dryly, "to know you genuinely do possess a dog. Perhaps you’d remove Buster to the kitchen, Mrs. Meeks. Thank you." He waited until she came back, panting from her exertions, and said nothing until she was sitting down, catching her breath. "You didn’t much like Stephen Devenish, did you, Mrs. Meeks?"

  "I didn’t mind him," she gasped. It took her a few moments to be able to speak. Then she said, "I didn’t know him—well, only by sight. It wasn’t just him. It was all of them Seaward people." Once started, she was voluble. "That driver was drunk, they found I don’t know how many pints of whatever in his blood, and it was those Seaward people told Jimmy to go to them, they said to him what’s ’is name was a good driver, they recommended him, and what did he know? He just did what they said and it killed him, they killed him. You said, did I like Stephen Devenish, and I say, what d’you expect when someone throws your husband down the stairs?"

  "We heard he’d thrown him out of his office," Karen said.

  "Well, you heard wrong, then. He kicked him out of the office and then he picked him up by his coat collar and dragged him to the top of the stairs and threw him down."

  "Is that how it was, Mr. Meeks?"

  Meeks nodded. He seemed less than pleased, though, that his wife had shown him in such an abject light, as a man who could be thrown hither and thither, wherever his attacker’s fancy took him. "He was a bastard," he said at last. "It’s a blessing he’s dead."

  "But you didn’t kill him?"

  That made Linda Meeks give a thin shriek. Her husband said, "Do me a favor. He was about twice as big as me."

  Compounding her offenses, Linda Meeks said, her expression quite serious, "He wouldn’t have let Carl kill him."

  "There’s a lot in that," Wexford said to Burden later. "We know that whoever stabbed Devenish was shorter than he, so there’s your question, why did he let whoever it was kill him?"

  "I suppose he was taken by surprise."

  "Well, he wouldn’t have been taken by surprise by Meeks. If Meeks was the stranger Edward Devenish saw and his mother heard, he was no stranger to Devenish. The moment he was let into that study, Devenish would have known who he was and that he meant to do him harm. Are you saying that after Devenish cut his wife’s hand he left the knife he used, the certainly bloodstained knife, lying on his desk or a table? And that when Meeks came in, he continued to leave it there for Meeks to pick up and use?

  "Because the knife must have been there, Mike. God knows where it came from, perhaps he kept a knife in a drawer. Why not? He had a whip. He maybe kept it for the express purpose of chastising his wife, used it that morning, and then what? It wasn’t in the study, he didn’t throw it out of the window—why would he?"

  Burden said thoughtfully, "He could have cut her and then handed her the knife and told her to take it away and wash it."

  "D’you know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of that directive in the Jewish law. ’Thou shalt not seethe a kid in the milk of its mother.’ It’s adding insult to injury."

  "But he was capable of it."

  "I believe he was." Wexford sat silent for a moment, reflecting with no great pleasure on human iniquity. "We’ve had the report on the knives that were in the kitchen. They’re expensive knives with horn handles. No traces of human blood on any of them. Her fingerprints on all but two, his on none."

  "Does any of them have a blade that fits those wounds?"

  "Two do. But you needn’t look like that. These blades are—well, a standard size. Thousands of knives in people’s kitchens and on sale in shops are that size and would fit those wounds. The evidence we need is Devenish’s blood on a knife, and as I say, there was no blood. Perhaps it was one of those knives, but more likely it wasn’t and the knife that was used was taken away."

  "By Carl Meeks?"

  "Maybe. I don’t know. The sequence of events is that Devenish’s killer either brought a knife with him and that knife happened to have the same size blade as one of those in the Devenishes’ knife block or that he used the knife Devenish had left lying on the desk after he cut Fay. It has to be one or the other. If it is as you say and he gave the knife to Fay to wash, could she wash it so thoroughly as to remove all trace of its previous use? But why would she want to? So the likelihood is that the killer used that knife and took it away with him."

  "Unless there were eight, not seven, knives in the knife block."

  "I don’t think there were, because what Fay says is true, and though there are eight slots in the block, if you put eight knives in, they jam up against each other. I know, I’ve tried it."

  "And Meeks?"

  "We’ve a house-to-house going on at Muriel Campden to see if any of the neighbors saw him out with his dog at eight that morning. His dog is an enormous Great Dane, a bluish-gray thing, name of Buster. It’s not the kind of animal you’d miss. Once seen, never forgotten."

  "The way things are going," said Burden, "we shall soon know that Muriel Campden lot better than our own families."

  It was a fine evening if rather muggy. The residents of Oberon, Titania, and Puck Roads, and of the tower, sat on their front doorsteps if they had them or in deck chairs on the tower green if they didn’t.

  "Like a bloody caravan camp," said Tony Mitchell, who thought it was common, the kind of thing people did who lived in tenements.

  They gossiped. They had been talking for weeks about who might or might not have thrown the petrol bomb that killed Ted Hennessy, and all of th
em had different views, depending on the side they took in personal vendettas or the degree of their paranoia. Now they had Carl Meeks to talk about, a subject made even more enthralling by the arrival on the scene of three police officers doing a house-to-house.

  Maria Michaels said she was sitting outside to save them the trouble of ringing her bell. She had just seen her old friend Tasneem Fowler go into her own house accompanied by a woman called Tracy something, and Maria had called out to them and said to come over and have a drink when they’d done their business or whatever with Terry and the kids. Maria went into the house and fetched two chairs, which she put on the bit of grass in the front garden, and she was going back for a third when she met Monty Smith coming downstairs, carrying all his belongings in two Tesco carrier bags.

  "For two pins," said Monty, "I’d smash your face in."

  "You wouldn’t do it twice, my darling. I’m not like that poor little cow Tasneem." Memories of glorious shot-putting days came back to her. "When I get going, you wouldn’t know what hit you. Don’t shut the door, I’m bringing another chair and a table out."

  Despised, rejected, and expelled, Monty Smith went off down Oberon toward the York Street bus stop. Halfway down he met Detective Constable Archbold, who asked if he could have a word. The word was to ask where Monty was at eight on that Tuesday morning and if he had seen Carl Meeks out with his dog. Monty said Archbold must be joking as he never got out of bed before ten, or that had been his habit, but God knew what the future held.

  Shirley Mitchell was on the green, picking up litter by hand and dropping the beer cans, crisp packets, cigarette ends, fish-and-chip paper, and take-away and hire-car flyers into a shopping trolley she had lined with a plastic bag. Archbold asked her about Carl Meeks, and she burst into a long diatribe about dog owners whose pets fouled the pavements. That Buster was one of the worst offenders. She had personally offered to supply Mr. and Mrs. Meeks with a dustpan, rake, and hygienic bags for the disposal of the Great Danes waste, but they had laughed in her face. No, she couldn’t say if she had seen Carl Meeks out with the dog on Tuesday morning, but she saw him every morning, or almost every morning, and it was just as well she did, for she was able to run outside and clean up the mess before her unfortunate neighbors trod in it.