Wexford 18 - Harm Done

The Children’s Crusade, he called it after it was all over, because children played such a big part in it. Yet it wasn’t really about children at all. Not one of them was physically injured, not one of them suffered bodily pain or was even made to cry beyond the common lot of people of their age. The mental pain they endured, the emotional traumas and psychological damage - well, those were another thing. Who knows what impression certain sights leave on children? And who can tell what actions those impressions will precipitate? If any. Perhaps, as people once believed, they are character-forming. They make us strong. After all, the world is a hard place and we may as well learn it young. All childhoods are unhappy, said Freud. But then, thought Wexford, some childhoods are unhappier than others.

   These children, the crusaders, were witnesses. There are many who believe children should never be permitted to be witnesses. As it is, laws are in place to protect them from exploitation by the law. But who will stop them from seeing what they witnessed in the first place? His daughter Sylvia, the social worker, said that she sometimes thought, after what she had seen, that all children should be taken from their parents at birth. On the other hand, if any busybody of a social worker tried to take her children away from her, she’d fight him tooth and nail.

   The children in question, in Wexford’s questions and questioning, came from all over Kingsmarkham and the other small towns and villages, from an estate the news papers, in their current favourite word, called “infamous,” from the millionaires’ row they called “leaf and from the middle class in between. They were given, or occasionally baptized with, the names that had become popular in the eighties and nineties: Kaylee and Scott, Gary and Lee, Sasha and Sanchia.

   In one class in Kingsmarkham’s St. Peter’s Primary School it was tactless to ask after someone’s father because most of the children were unsure who their father was. Raised on crisps and chips and chocolate and take-away, they were nevertheless the healthiest generation of children the country has ever known. If one of them had been smacked, he or she would have taken the perpetrator to the European Court of Human Rights. Mental torture was another story, and no one knew what that story was, though many tried to write it every day.

   The eldest of the children Wexford was interested in was on the upper limits of childhood. She was sixteen, old enough to marry, though not to vote, old enough to leave school if she so chose and leave home too if she wanted to.

   Her name was Lizzie Cromwell.

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead the police and her family and neighbours had already begun the search for her body. They worked on the open countryside between Kingsmarkham and Myringham, combing the hillsides and beating through the woods. It was April but cold and wet, and a sharp northeast wind was blowing. Their task was not a pleasant one; no one laughed or joked and there was little talking.

   Lizzie’s stepfather was among the searchers, but her mother was too upset to leave the house. The evening before, the two of them had appeared on television to appeal for Lizzie to come home, for her abductor or attacker, whatever he might be, to release her. Her mother said she was only sixteen, which was already known, and that she had learning difficulties, which was not. Her stepfather was a lot younger than her mother, perhaps ten years, and looked very young. He had long hair and a beard and wore several earrings, all in the same ear. After the television appearance several people phoned Kingsmarkham Police Station and opined that Colin Crowne had murdered his stepdaughter. One said Colin had buried her on the building site down York Street, a quarter of a mile down the road from where the Crownes and Lizzie lived on the Muriel Campden Estate. Another told Detective Sergeant Vine that she had heard Colin Crowne threaten to kill Lizzie “because she was as thick as two planks.”

   "Those folks as go on telly to talk about their missing kids,” said a caller who refused to give her name, “they’re always the guilty ones. It’s always the dad. I’ve seen it time and time again. If you don’t know that, you’ve no business being in the police.”

   Chief Inspector Wexford thought she was dead. Not because of what the anonymous caller said, but because all the evidence pointed that way. Lizzie had no boyfriend, she was not at all precocious, she had a low IQ and was rather slow and timid. Three evenings before, she had gone with some friends on the bus to the cinema in Myringham, but at the end of the film the other two girls had left her to come home alone. They had asked her to come clubbing with them but Lizzie had said her mother would be worried - the friends thought Lizzie herself was worried at the idea - and they left her at the bus stop. It was just before eight-thirty and getting dark. She should have been home in Kingsmarkham by nine-fifteen, but she didn’t come home at all. At midnight her mother had phoned the police.

   If she had been, well, a different sort of girl, Wexford wouldn’t have paid so much attention. If she had been more like her friends. He hesitated about the phrase he used even in his own mind, for he liked to keep to his personal brand of political correctness in his thoughts as well as his speech. Not to be absurd about it, not to use ridiculous expressions like intellectually challenged, but not to be insensitive either and call a girl such as Lizzie Cromwell mentally handicapped or retarded. Besides, she wasn’t either of those things, she could read and write, more or less, she had a certain measure of independence and went about on her own. In daylight, at any rate. But she wasn’t fit just the same to be left alone after dark on a lonely road. Come to that, what girl was?

   So be thought she was dead. Murdered by someone. What he had seen of Colin Crowne he hadn’t much liked, but he had no reason to suspect him of killing his step daughter. True, some years before he married Debbie Cromwell, Crowne had been convicted of assault on a man outside a pub, and be had another conviction for taking and driving away - in other words, stealing - a car. But what did all that amount to? Not much. It was more likely that someone had stopped and offered Lizzie a lift.

   “Would she accept a lift from a stranger?” Vine had asked Debbie Crowne.

   “Sometimes it’s hard to make her like understand things,” Lizzie’s mother had said. “She’ll sort of say yes and no and smile - she smiles a lot, she’s a happy kid - but you don’t know if it’s like sunk in. Do you, Col?”

   “I’ve told her never talk to strangers,” said Colin Crowne. “I’ve told her till I’m blue in the face, but what do I get? A smile and a nod and another smile, then she’ll just say something else, something loony, like the sun’s shining or what’s for tea.”

   “Not loony, Col,” said the mother, obviously hurt.

   “You know what I mean.”

   So when she had been gone three nights and it was the morning of the third day, Colin Crowne and the neighbours on either side of the Crownes on the Muriel Campden Estate started searching for Lizzie. Wexford had already talked to her friends and the driver of the bus she should have been on but hadn’t been on, and Inspector Burden and Sergeant Vine had talked to dozens of motorists who used that road daily around about that time. When the rain became torrential, which happened at about four in the afternoon, they called off the search for that day, but they were set to begin again at first light. Taking DC Lynn Fancourt with him, Wexford went over to Puck Road for another talk with Colin and Debbie Crowne.

When it was built in the sixties, on an open space that would now be called a “green field area,” between the top of York Street and the western side of Glebe Road, the three streets and block of flats on a green in the midst of them, it had been called the York Estate. The then chairman of the housing committee, who had done 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' for his school certificate and was proud of the knowledge thus gained, named the streets after characters in that comedy, Oberon, Titania, and Puck. This last had always been a problem to tenants, the police, and the local authority because of the opportunity it gave the local youth of transforming, with a can of spray paint and the minimum effort, an innocent name into an obscenity

   Muriel Campden had been the chair (as she must now be designated) of Kingsmarkham Borough Council longer than anyone else, and when she died, the York Estate was renamed after her. A move was afoot to erect a statue of her on the green opposite the council offices, a building newly named the Municipal Centre. Half the population was in favor and half was vehemently opposed.

   “I’d have thought this place was memorial enough,” said Wexford, eyeing the triangle of squat sixties houses in the midst of which reared up a truncated tower, six stories high. Titania, Oberon, and Puck Roads looked as if built out of absorbent breeze blocks that had soaked up the rain of two dozen wet winters and had rendered them the darkest shade of charcoal. “Very appropriate for Muriel Campden. She was a dark, gray, gloomy sort of woman.” He pointed to the street sign at the beginning of Puck Road, once more defaced. “Look at that. You’d think they’d get bored with doing it.”

   “Little things please little minds, sir,” said Lynn just as the door was opened and they were admitted to No. 45 by the occupier of No. 47. This was a neighbour called Sue Ridley, who conducted them into the presence of Debbie and Colin Crowne, sitting side by side on a sofa. They were both smoking cigarettes and both watching, or at any rate looking at, a television quiz show.

   Debbie jumped up and screamed when they came in, “They’ve found her! She’s dead!”

   “No, no, Mrs. Crowne, we’ve no news for you. Nothing has happened. May I sit down?”

   “Do what you want,” said Colin Crowne in customary surly tones.

   He lit a cigarette and gave his wife one without asking her. The atmosphere in the small room was already thick with smoke. Rain beat relentlessly on the windows. On the screen a quiz contender, asked if Oasis was a town in Saudi, a pop group, or a West End cinema, was unable to answer. Debbie Crowne called fretfully to her neighbour to make another cup of tea, “Would you Sue, love?”

   Wexford and his team had already asked all the relevant questions, and he was there more to convince Mrs. Crowne that everything was being done that could be done than to elicit more information. But he did press once more for the names of any relatives or even friends living in distant parts of the country to whom Lizzie might conceivably have gone. Such a man or woman would have to have been marooned on a newspaper-less, radio-less and TV-less island in perhaps the Outer Hebrides not to have known that Lizzie Cromwell had vanished and that the police were hunting for her, but he still asked. For some thing to say, for the sake of something to distract Debbie Crowne’s mind from the horror of her fears.

   The doorbell rang at the very moment Sue Ridley brought in their tea, four mugs of it with the teabags still in as well as the milk and no spoons. She deposited the mugs in a bunch on the table and went to answer the door, saying it would be her partner, come back from going out with the search party.

   Her loud shout made Wexford jump. “You naughty girl, wherever have you been!”

   Everybody stood up, the door opened, and a girl came in, water running from her hair and clothes as if she had just stepped out of a bathful of it. Debbie Crowne screamed and, screaming, threw her arms around her daughter, oblivious of her soaking clothes.

   “I’m cold, Mum,” said Lizzie, smiling waterily through chattering teeth. “I’m ever so cold.”

She was back and safe, and apparently unharmed, and that, at first, was all that mattered. Wexford left, deputing Mike Burden and Lynn Fancourt to talk to Lizzie after she had had a hot bath. He was to question her himself on the following day and several times on subsequent days because her response was far from satisfactory In other words, she refused - or was unable - to say where she had been.

   He said nothing, be knew nothing, of this when he walked into his own house at six, early for him, but he did tell his wife Lizzie Cromwell was found. “Rather, she seems to have come back of her own accord. It’ll be on the news at nine.”