Wexford 18 - Harm Done (11 page)

   Apparently fascinated by the hailstones that stung the glass, Burden didn’t turn his head. “Does it matter? No harm’s been done. She wasn’t hurt. It probably did her good, cooking and cleaning and all that, spoilt little madam.”

   “You know better than that, Mike. I don’t have to tell you that taking someone away and detaining her against her will is a very serious offence. Not to mention drugging her. And now it’s happened to two young women. It’s false imprisonment. Of course it matters.”

   “All right. Point taken. You mean you think this Vicky woman took Lizzie away too?”

   “You remember she mentioned a woman offering her a lift, which she didn’t accept? Well, I think she did accept it and she too was taken to this house for the same purpose, whatever that was.”

   “The woman and the man were mother and son, were they?”

   “Don’t know. It’s possible.” Wexford thought of the strange relationships he came across in his work, the bizarre combinations of disparate types and the unlikely conjunctions of ages. He wasn’t going to draw any facile conclusions about this one. “What on earth are you gawping at?” he asked. “You’ve seen hailstones before, haven’t you?”

   “Come and look at this.”

   Wexford got up. Through the streaming window he could see two people sheltering from the hail in a shop doorway. Both wore sandwich boards, the woman’s cut out in the shape of a girl child, the man’s in the shape of a boy, faces and hair and clothes painted in quite realistically, one bearing the words SAVE OUR CHILDREN and the other PEDOPHILE OUT. The storm ceased as abruptly as it had started, and both of them stepped out onto the pavement and crossed the road, holding up hands to halt the traffic. Taking no notice of the honking of horns and yells of motorists, they reached the police station side and stood looking up at the windows.

   Wexford rubbed at the steam on the glass left by his breath. “The man’s Colin Crowne,” he said. “I don’t know the woman’s name, but she’s from the Muriel Campden Estate too, Oberon Road, I think.”

   “Where Orbe returns tomorrow,” said Burden in fatalistic tones. “Shall we get on over there and kill two birds with one stone?”

   “And have a word with those two first.”

   But by the time they reached the forecourt the two people and their child-shaped sandwich boards had gone.

For no apparent reason, the Muriel Campden Estate was designed so that no house faced another, but all, looking inward from the three sides of the triangle, fronted on the squat tower in its center. Around this building, from all the windows on the second floor, at bedroom-window height in the houses, a banner had been hung, bearing the same legends in red and black paint as those on the sandwich boards. It girdled the tower like a belt, running almost all the way around and announcing to anyone looking out of windows or passing by: PEDOPHILE OUT. KEEP AWAY FROM OUR CHILDREN. Of the sandwich-board bearers there was no sign.

   In the raised flower beds at the foot of the tower, hail had beaten the tulips to death. Orange-and-green-striped, feather-edged, they lay broken and crushed against the pale chalky soil. And the pink-blossoming street trees, cherries and prunus, had dropped all their petals in one mighty shedding under the hail’s onslaught. The pavements were slippery with them, bright mother-of-pearl under the blazing sun, which had suddenly come out. In the distance, beyond these charcoal-coloured houses, these anthracite walls and roofs, the green meadows shone brilliantly enough to hurt the eyes.

   Wexford rang the bell at 16 Oberon Road. Standing on the doorstep, he had only to turn his head to receive the full force of that banner, some twenty yards away. But it would be the same wherever you lived on the triangle. The protesters had seen to that. Here, though, at this point, by careful design and strategic positioning, the single word PEDOPHILE stood out most assertively.

   The woman who opened the door looked sixty but was probably forty. She appeared to have never taken the least care of herself, to have never heard that it is possible to file and clean one’s nails, keep one’s hair clean, go to a dentist, iron one’s clothes, and smell sweet. Her face was greasy and her hair, fastened back with an elastic band, was the same dull charcoal as the fabric of the house she lived in. She wore a dress that should have had a belt but was unbelted and was probably, by the shape and style of it, a hand-down from her grandmother, wrinkled brown stockings, and bedroom slippers. The smell of her, as Burden remarked later, was very like that emanating from the hamburger stall set up in Queen Street on market day. Her teeth - but Burden said he didn’t want to remember her teeth, he wanted to put them right out of his mind.

   “Ms. Orbe?” said Wexford. “Ms. Suzanne Orbe?”

   “That’s me. What d’you want?”

   “Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden, Kingsmarkham CID. May we come in a minute?”

   She stepped back and, when they were inside, slammed the door hard. “Haven’t I got enough to put up with,” she asked of no one in particular, “with that scum out there?” In the living room a man sat staring at the television screen. He took no notice whatever of the newcomers; Suzanne Orbe might have come into the room alone, or as far as he was concerned, no one at all had come in.

   “You expect your father to come home here on Friday - tomorrow, that is?” Wexford asked.

   "I reckon. He’s nowhere else to go, the old bugger.”

   This remark stirred the man at the other end of the room. He took his eyes from the screen, turned his head, and stared in their direction. Suzanne Orbe made a kind of introduction: “That’s my fiancé.”

   Neither policeman acknowledged him. “We’re not anticipating trouble,” Burden said with a confidence he didn’t feel, “but I’ll leave you this number.” He wrote it down and handed it to her. ‘And if need be, you can speak to me, Inspector Burden. B-U-R-D-E-N - have you got that?”

   She nodded. Loyalty to her father forgotten - or perhaps Wexford had misinterpreted her tone - she made a sound of exasperation, a “huh” noise, and cast up her eyes.

   The man at the other end of the room spoke. “That’s right, girl,” he said, and added in a voice so deeply vindictive and vicious that Wexford found himself flinching, “Put the likes of him in the gas chamber’d be best. Or the chair.”

   Outside, in the relatively wholesome air, Burden remarked that Suzanne Orbe’s “fiancé” probably had no idea capital punishment had ceased in this country over thirty years before. His whole notion of life came from television; so much transatlantic culture had he absorbed from that source that he believed death by gas chamber or electrocution were United Kingdom options.

   “So long as he and she don’t give the wretched Orbe up to the mob,” said Wexford.

   “You’re joking, I hope,” Burden said severely.

   “So do I hope. There is no mob, there’s only a banner. We must look on the bright side.”

   Wexford looked about him. The sun had gone in but the day was still bright and the sky blue, with scurrying clouds rushing across its face. The belt-banner flapped in the breeze. In two of the gardens men who looked civilized and law-abiding mowed their lawns. “This isn’t a very pretty place,” he said, “but it’s quite nice, isn’t it? It’s comfortable, rustic, the air’s pure, and if it’s not like wine, it’s like the best mineral water. There’s no vandalism or very little. If the local authority plants trees, they don’t get pulled up. Hail spoils the tulips, not human hands. A far cry from those inner-city estates one reads about, wouldn’t you say? Those places where the old go in terror of their lives or daren’t go out at all, where gangs roam the walk ways and the residents deal in controlled substances.”

   “Sure. So what are you getting at?”

   “Just that - let’s hope it stays that way. And now we’ll pay a call on the Crowne family, shall we?”

Inevitably, the banner was visible from this front room too. Lizzie Cromwell sitting in the window, gazing at it, as if she expected it to change shape, fall off, or be joined at any moment by even more inflammatory material. Wexford, deterred neither by the smoky atmosphere nor Debbie Crowne’s grim expression and headfull of heated rollers, pulled up a chair beside Lizzie and proceeded to tell her what had happened to her on Saturday two weeks before.

   “After you’d waited twenty minutes for the bus you accepted a lift from a lady in a white car and she drove you to a house in the country. There was a man there. Her name was Vicky and his was Jerry They gave you something to drink which made you sleepy and made you forget a lot of what happened to you. I’m right, aren’t I, Lizzie?”

   She turned to face him. He thought how healthy she looked and blooming, her face flushed and her eyes bright and knowing. “I’m not supposed to say.”

   “Who told you not to say? The woman who took you away? The man, Jerry?” Lizzie didn’t get a chance to answer. Debbie Crowne interposed herself between Wexford and her daughter. There was a strong smell, suddenly, of overheated hair. He saw that she was trembling.

   “What is it, Mrs. Crowne?”

   “I’ll tell you what it is. She’s pregnant, that’s what it is. He’s made my daughter pregnant.”

Wexford’s first reaction was to say, “It’s not possible to tell so soon. It’s less than a fortnight.”

   “Where have you been living?” Debbie Crowne asked rudely. “On the moon? I done a test, haven’t I? A home pregnancy kit’s what they call them in case you didn’t know. And I done it and she’s fallen pregnant. If I’d done it last week, it’d have shown the same. And what I’d like to know is, what are you going to do about it?”

   “It would help us to do something,” said Burden, “if Lizzie would tell us the truth about what happened to her.”

   “She’s scared, isn’t she? He raped her and now she’s scared what he might do.”

   At the word raped, Lizzie’s eyelids flickered. It was as if something hot or a bright light had suddenly been brought close up to her face. Her head jerked back.

   “Did you sleep a lot while you were there, Lizzie?” Wexford asked. “Did they give you drinks to make you sleep?”

   “I don’t know. I’m not to say. I’ll be punished if I say.”

   Burden looked at Colin Crowne, who had just come into the room. “You won’t be punished, Lizzie. No one will punish you. If you tell us about them and about the house you went to and where it was, they will be caught and punished. I’m sure you understand that, don’t you?”

   Debbie Crowne shouted suddenly, “You leave her alone! It’s not right, bullying her in her condition. She could have a miscarriage!”

   Surely the best thing imaginable, Wexford thought, then castigated himself for callousness. “No one is bullying Lizzie,” he began, but the rest of his sentence dwindled away as Lizzie broke in, and he forgot that he had once thought her meek and not inclined to rebellion.

   “No, I won’t, I won’t have a miscarriage. I’m going to have my baby, I want my baby. Then I can go away from here and get a flat and live with my baby. I can get away from you and him and have my own place and be - be happy!” Her face crumpled and she burst into a storm of tears.

   “Now see what you’ve done,” said Debbie Crowne. “That’s rubbish, that is. Wants her baby! She ought to have had the morning-after pill. If she’d had the morning-after pill the day she come back . . .”

   “She wouldn’t be in the shit now,” said Colin Crowne.

“Farrago,” said Wexford next morning. “I looked it up in the dictionary. It doesn’t mean anything like tissue, it means ‘mixed fodder for cattle,’ and it comes from the Latin. Interesting, don’t you think?”

   Burden threw the Kingsmarkham Courier down on Wexford’s desk. “It only confirms what I said about you being a pedant. Have you seen the paper?”

   With a hint of that feeling that is usually described as a sinking of the heart, Wexford said, “Why? Should I have?” He knew what he was likely to see but not how bad it would be. “Oh, God,” he said, “what’s the point of doing this, I wonder. What does St. George get out of it?”

   “A boost to his circulation, I suppose. God knows it needs it.”

   The headline was ORBE FREED, and under that, KINGSMARKHAM PEDOPHILE COMES HOME. Wexford read:

   All parents with small children will live in terror from this weekend onward, knowing that Thomas Orbe, convicted pedophile and child-killer, is back in their midst. Released after serving nine years of a fifteen-year prison sentence, Orbe, seventy-one, is expected to return today to the home he left nearly a decade ago in Oberon Road on Kingsmarkham’s Muriel Campden Estate.

   “He could only have spelt it out more thoroughly if he’d given the house number,” Wexford said gloomily “I wonder why he didn’t.”

   An elderly man by now, Orbe is nevertheless understood to have admitted he may still be a danger to children. His home in Oberon Road, currently occupied by his daughter, Ms. Suzanne Orbe, and her partner, Mr. Garry Wills, backs onto Kingsmarkham’s only public park with its children’s play area. Until an order is in place restraining Orbe from places frequented by children, such as York Park, this popular venue for youngsters will most likely stand empty, and that at the most favourable season of the year for outdoor play . . .

   “I can’t stand his English or his reporter’s English, never mind the content,” said Wexford. “That word pedophile, no one knew what it meant five years ago - well, no one but psychiatrists and Greek scholars. Now it’s on everyone’s lips. Even a moron like that Colin Crowne knows what it means.”

   “There’s a leading article as well,” said Burden. “Would you like me to give you a synopsis? It won’t do you any good to read it yourself. Your blood pressure’s showing all over your face as it is.”

   Wexford sighed. “Okay. What does it say?”

   “That pedophiles should be kept under restraint for the whole of their natural lives, given the option of castration, never allowed within any area where even one child may live, given more severe sentences in the first place - all that, if not necessarily in that order. Oh, and he - it’s St. George himself this time, by the way - he says the government isn’t acting fast enough and how about these steps they are supposed to be taking to monitor released pedophiles? It couldn’t be worse.”