Wexford 18 - Harm Done (17 page)

   Her taste for white had its full scope in the kitchen, visible through double glass doors and as sparkling white as icebergs in an icy sea. Not in the garden, though. There she must have color. And the view from the French windows confirmed this, the blaze of pink and orange azaleas, with the strident yellow of doronicum and Crown Imperials. Mrs. Chorley supplied the names, unasked.

   “What’s that tree in the front?”

   “Liriodendron tulipifera,” she said with perfect articulation.

   Wexford said he hoped he would remember but rather doubted it. Didn’t it have a common name?

   “The tulip-flowering lyre tree, I suppose.” Mrs. Chorley said it distastefully, as if she wondered at anyone wanting to sink so low as to call vegetation by English names. She had already told them she had never heard of Vicky or Jerry and had had no visitors to the house for months. “I don’t have time to entertain. The garden and the house take all my time. Drive? A car, d’you mean? My husband does that. I never learnt.”

   And yet there was something, Wexford said when they were returning to Kingsmarkham, something he had missed or should have asked.

   “That woman wouldn’t have those two girls in her house,” said Burden. “Not in any circumstances, she wouldn’t. They might make the carpets dirty. I’m sorry for that poor devil, Chorley.”

   “Really? I’ve always thought you a bit of a fusspot about the house yourself”

   “I’m not a crazy fanatic,” said Burden huffily, “thank you very much.”

   “What is it we’ve failed to ask?” Wexford speculated, but Burden couldn’t tell him.

Three years in the police force, ambitious and hoping for promotion, Lynn Fancourt still looked much younger than her twenty-five years. Her face was round and rosy her eyes willow-pattern china blue, and her thick brown hair, short and with a fringe, cut like an old-fashioned child’s under a pudding basin. People took her for eighteen, and a drunk she’d arrested, for an offence against public order, asked her if her parents knew where she was at that time of night. Her home - some two hundred miles away from those parents the top half of a house in Framhurst with a carport at the end of the garden where she kept her Ford overnight.

   Lynn usually went to work by car, but lately, ever since the return of Rachel Holmes, the Fiesta had stayed in the carport. Lynn had caught the bus halfway and walked the rest. Going home was more carefully planned. One evening she walked half a mile or so to a lonely stretch of Pomfret Road and waited at the bus stop, not exactly thumbing for a lift but looking hopeful. On another she chose Flagford Road where the traffic was light and the roadway darkened by overhanging trees.

   The driver of the van that was the only vehicle that stopped for her gave her such a lecherous look and was so repulsive that even if she had genuinely wanted a ride, she would have turned him down. Generally, she ended up catching the bus, but on the day she had visited Lizzie and seen her with Jodi the virtual baby, she accepted her first lift. It seemed entirely natural only to allow herself to get into a car driven by a woman. This one was middle-aged, gray-haired, and friendly, her car a cream-colored Honda. Not wanting to lead the woman to her own door, Lynn had said to drop her off in Savesbury.

   Her excitement mounted when the driver took the first wrong turn and seemed to be heading in the direction of the old bypass. But she had only lost her way - ”I’ve no sense of direction whatsoever, my dear!” - and within ten minutes Lynn found herself set down in the middle of a Savesbury village street, waving cheerfully to the departing Honda.

   Then she had to walk the two miles home.

Some two hours later, Wexford was thinking about going to bed. The phone rang but it was a wrong number and he was replacing the receiver when the question he had forgotten to ask Mrs. Chorley came back to him. Not so much a question, perhaps, as an omission in that house, which he had subconsciously noticed but had not commented on. There had been no telephone.

   Or he hadn’t seen one. He was trained to observe absences of things as well as their presence, and he had seen no phone. These days that was so rare as to be an eccentricity. Rachel Holmes had said that the house to which she had been taken had no phone or she had been unable to find one . . .

   His own phone rang while he was standing there pondering. At this hour! And undoubtedly the wrong-number woman again.

   He picked up the receiver and heard a voice he hadn’t heard for years, the frightened child’s voice of his mature, competent, controlled daughter Sylvia: “Oh, Dad, something so horrible’s happened. I know I’m a fool but - would you come, Dad? Would you?”

He pulled on a sweater instead of his tweed jacket and got to The Hide a quarter of an hour later. There he had difficulty in getting inside, due to the woman who opened the door mistaking him for another angry husband in search of his wife. After profuse apologies and some relieved laughter, he found Sergeant Fitch and PC Dempsey arresting the man Sylvia had seen cutting the wire on top of the wall. Quincy Miller had led them on a dance from one end of the house to the other, yelling, “Tracy where are you? I’m going to get you,” kicking down two doors and punching a woman he had never seen before and could not possibly have taken for his wife. Tracy slept peacefully through it all and so did her two daughters in the beds beside her.

   Wexford found Sylvia in the helpline room at the top of the house, drinking tea and recovering from her two confrontations with Miller, the first when he’d looked up and met her eyes as he crossed the garden, the second when he’d burst into this room, shook her till her teeth chattered, and bawled obscenities at her. Wexford took her in his arms and held her in a long, comforting embrace.

   After a minute or two, during which she clung to him, she said, on a sob, “Oh, Dad, and I thought I was tough. All those years with the Social Services . . .”

   “No one,” he said, “is that tough. Believe me.”

   She thought of her resolution to “talk it through” with him and how that no longer seemed necessary. Misery and terror were succeeded by a great calm, a warmth that spread through her like drinking something hot and strong. She caught his hand and held it.

   “Show me the place,” he said. “What’s that list up there? Where are all these cuttings from?” And when she had taken him on a little tour of the room, “What do you say when you answer the phone? What do you do?”

   She told him about “Anne” who had phoned some days before in great fear, the man who had apparently entered the room and how the phone had crashed down, and about the woman whose husband offered to stop hitting her if she went to a psychiatrist. Among her failures, those had been, so she told him about her successes too and her victories. When it got to midnight and Jill came to relieve her, Wexford said to leave her car and let him drive her home, he’d much rather she didn’t drive, she could get Neil to bring her next time she was on duty. So he had driven her home, all the way out into the country; ten miles from Kingsmarkham, and seen her into the house and driven home himself, getting into bed beside Dora a few minutes before two.

   Because he was weary and a bit light-headed, he had decided to walk to work in the morning. For the fresh air and the exercise, healthy options Dr. Akande was always telling him he needed. It was a beautiful day too, warm and still, the sun pleasantly hazy. He thought how pleasant it was when the litter on the pavements was fallen blossoms and green-pollen-dusted flowers instead of packaging and cigarette ends. In spite of sleeplessness - for he hadn’t slept much after getting home - it had been a most satisfactory night, rewarding him with the affection of that difficult elder daughter, whom, with luck, he might soon find he loved as much as her younger sister. At the police station he went so far as to walk upstairs, all four flights, instead of using the lift.

   A brief on his desk attracted his eye and it was the first thing he read:

   ACTION ON SEX OFFENDERS

   An enhanced system for identify and dealing with any high-profile sex offenders released into the community was announced this week by the Home Secretary.

   A new national steering group will be established, including representatives of the Home Office, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Association of Chief Officers of Probation, and sex offender treatment specialists.

   The new group will: 

   Identify high-profile, difficult-to- place sex offenders while they are still in prison and also assess the plans for their release; 

   Oversee their handling after they have been released; and 

   Consider any funding necessary to meet the likely additional accommodation costs. There has been obvious public concern about the way some high- profile sex offenders are released back into the community . . .

   You can say that again, Wexford said to himself also reflecting that all this would be too late for Orbe. But perhaps there had been a settling down on the Muriel Campden Estate. He was a great believer in people’s ability to accept a situation through getting used to it. If Orbe did nothing, and of course he would do nothing, if he became a high-profile offender keeping a low profile, his neighbours would do no more than ostracize him and his and hold themselves aloof.

   His reverie was interrupted by the entry into the room of Karen Malahyde. “Another girl’s gone missing, sir.”

   Afterward he regretted his facetiousness. “Spirited away to a lovely bungalow with a tree in the front, I suppose?”

   Karen didn’t smile. “I don’t think so, sir. This is serious, it’s a child and she’s not quite three years old.”

Ploughman’s Lane is Kingsmarkham’s millionaires’ row. Yet to the visitor it might appear not to be a street at all but rather a country road passing through woodland. And the woods of Sussex are the most beautiful in England, for the trees are taller, of more diverse kinds, their foliage more luxuriant, and among them grow the viburnum and the wayfaring tree. Loveliest of all are the beeches with their branches like feathers, like spread green wings, and their trunks the silvery gray of sealskin, neatest the round-crowned hornbeam, whose natural shape looks as if the topiarist has been at work on it.

  
The great hills of the South Country,

  
They stand along the sea,

  
And it’s there walking in the high woods

  
That I could wish to be,

  
And the men that were boys when I was a boy

  
Walking along with me.

   That was how Wexford felt when he came up here, though there was no sea, of course, the sea was twenty miles away. And the woods were full of houses now and had been since he was a boy. More had been added, that was all. But you still failed to see most of them until you looked, until you peered through a grove or copse, supposing some dwelling must be hiding itself behind the trees because there was a gate that told you so and a letter-box and perhaps even a name such as Woodland Lodge or The Beeches. Sylvia had once lived up here, when Neil’s business was at its most prosperous, but even then her house had been among the more modest examples. The one Wexford had come to call at now was among the more grandiose, with the tallest trees in its grounds, the longest drive, and the highest degree of invisibility from the road.

   No greater contrast within a mile’s radius could be found than that between this place and Glebe Road or the Muriel Campden Estate. Even those without radical leanings could hardly fail to notice it and be made, in spite of themselves, uneasy Wexford thought of that contrast each time he came up here, and as they drove along the approach to Woodland Lodge, a route to the house that was more like a country lane than a garage drive, he looked from side to side, with that same sense of the inequity of life.

   The house that they reached was almost a mansion, an Arts and Crafts house dating from the first decade of the centur red brick with solid white facings, casement windows, a studded oak front door. The big double garage was evidently a conversion from the original coachhouse. Before he got out of the car he realized that from here it was quite impossible to see any neighbouring houses or for any neighbours to overlook it. This feature of Woodland Lodge, Ploughman’s Lane, so advantageous to estate agents and desirable to house buyers, would be a hindrance to the police in their investigation.

   He had known even before he was admitted and stood in the presence of the distraught mother and father that this was a very different matter from the abductions of Lizzie Cromwell and Rachel Holmes. The Devenishes’ daughter had not been offered a lift or lured away but snatched by night from her own bed in her own bedroom in her parents’ house. But that was not to say that the Cromwell and Holmes episodes were not forerunners of or rehearsals for this one.

   Stephen Devenish had opened the door to Wexford and Karen Malahyde. He was very protective of his wife intent at first on keeping her out of the investigation.

   She could tell them nothing he said, she was far too upset, he didn’t want her troubled, made to suffer more than she need. There was nothing she could tell them that he couldn’t.

   “I’m afraid I must talk to Mrs. Devenish, sir,” Wexford said. “We shan’t upset her. I think she would want to help us.”

   Devenish had a gracious manner, not apparently aggressive or assertive, and he gave a rueful smile as he nodded acceptance of what Wexford said. He took them into a lavishly furnished drawing room, at one end of which French windows were open onto a terrace and a lawn. Beyond, the trees began, mature, even ancient trees that had been here since long before the house was built, but even they were not tall enough to hide the distant blue sweep of the downs.

   In the middle of a three-seater sofa upholstered in cream satin sat a small, thin woman with the pinched face and huge eyes of a flying fox. This marriage was an instance, Wexford could see at once, of that not uncommon phenomenon in which a tall, strikingly handsome man has married and established a successful marriage with a plain and insignificant woman. Stephen and Fay Devenish, he already knew; were both thirty-six, but while he looked in his early thirties she could have been taken for forty-five.