Wexford 18 - Harm Done (2 page)

   “Where had she been?” said Dora.

   “I don’t know. Off with some boy, I dare say. That’s usually what it is. The fact that their parents don’t know there is a boy means nothing.”

   “I suppose it was the same with us. I suppose Sylvia and Sheila had boyfriends we never knew about, as well as the ones we did. Which reminds me, Sylvia is bringing Robin and Ben to us for the night. Neil’s away somewhere and she’s got this new job.”

   “Ah, The Hide helpline. I didn’t know she had to work nights.”

   “I wish she didn’t have to. It’s far too much for her, with her day job as well. I don’t suppose The Hide pays much.”

   “If I know anything about it,” said Wexford, “The Hide pays nothing at all.”

   He was on the phone to Burden when his elder daughter arrived with his grandsons. Burden had made the call, incensed at Lizzie Cromwell’s refusal to talk.

   “You mean she won’t say where she’s been?”

   “I thought she couldn’t talk. I honestly thought she was dumb. Well, she’s not entirely normal, is she?”

   “She can talk,” said Wexford repressively. ‘I’ve heard her.”

   “Oh, so have I - now.”

   “And she’s as normal as you are or as normal as half the people in this place. It’s just that she’s not a genius.” Wexford cleared his throat. “Like you and your ilk,” he added nastily, for Burden had just gained membership of Mensa on an IQ rumored to be 152. “Why won’t she say where she’s been?”

   “I don’t know. Scared. Obstinate. Doesn’t want her mum and Earrings to know, I’d guess.”

   “Okay, we’ll have another go tomorrow.”

   Wexford’s daughter Sylvia was a social worker. She had been a mature student when she studied for her sociology degree, for she had married at eighteen. The two boys who came running out of the kitchen when their grand father put down the phone were the offspring of that marriage. Wexford said hello to them, admired a new Nintendo and a Game Boy, and asked if their mother was still in the house.

   “She’s talking to Gran,” said Ben in the tone of disgust someone might use when castigating deeply antisocial behavior.

   All parents have a favorite among their children, though they may, like Wexford, strive always to conceal that preference. He had failed to hide his bias in favor of his younger daughter and he knew it, so he kept on trying. With Sylvia he was more effusive, he never missed giving her a kiss each time they met, listened attentively when she spoke to him, and pretended not to be ruffled when she rubbed him the wrong way. For Sylvia lacked her sister’s charm and, although pleasant enough to look at, was without Sheila’s beauty. Sylvia was an opinionated, didactic, often aggressive feminist, with a talent for saying the wrong thing, a faultfinder, bad at marriage but expert at rearing children. She was also - and Wexford knew it - good as gold, with an oversize social conscience.

   He found her sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea in front of her, lecturing her mother on domestic violence. Dora had apparently asked the classic question, the one that, according to Sylvia, betrays ignorance of the whole subject: “But if their husbands beat them, why don’t they leave?”

   “That question is just so typical,” Sylvia was saying, “of the sort of woman who is completely out of touch with the world around her. Leave, you say. Where is she - we’ll say she, not they - where is she to go? She’s dependent on him, she has nothing of her own. She has children - is she to take her children? Sure, he beats her, he breaks her nose and knocks out her teeth, but afterwards, every time, he says he’s sorry he won’t do it again. She wants to keep things normal, she wants to keep the family together - Oh, hi, Dad, how are things?”

   Wexford kissed her, said things were fine and how was work on the crisis line.

   “The helpline, we call it. I was telling Mother about it. Mind you, it breaks your heart, all of it. And some of the worst is the attitude of the public. It’s extraordinary, but a lot of people still think there’s something funny about a man beating up a woman. It’s a joke, it’s a seaside-postcard kind of thing. They ought to see some of the injuries we see, some of the scars. And as for the police. . .“

   “Now, Sylvia, wait a minute.” Wexford’s resolutions flew out of the window. “We have a program here in Mid-Sussex for dealing with domestic violence, we emphatically do not treat assaults on women in the home as a routine part of married life.” His voice rose. “We’re even putting in place a scheme to encourage friends and neighbours to report evidence of domestic violence. It’s called Hurt-Watch, and if you haven’t heard about it, you should have.”

   “All right, all right. But you have to admit all that’s very new. It’s very recent.”

   “It sounds like the Stasi or the KGB to me,” said Dora. “The nanny state gone mad.”

   “Mother, suppose it is a nanny state, what’s wrong with having a nanny to look after you? I’ve often wished I could afford one. Some of these women are utterly helpless, no one cared about them until the refuges started. And if that isn’t evidence enough of the need, there aren’t refuge places enough, there aren’t half enough to meet the need. . .“

   Wexford left the room quietly and went to find his grandsons.

The boys’ school was on the outskirts of Myfleet, and next morning Wexford drove them there before going on to work. His route took him through the Brede Valley, under Savesbury Hill and along the edge of Framhurst Great Wood, and be never went that way without thankfulness that the bypass, started the previous year, had been shelved on a change of government. Newbury was completed but Salisbury would never be built, nor would Kingsmarkham (insofar as you could ever say “never” in connection with such things). It was unusual to feel glad about frugality, relieved that something couldn’t be afforded, but this was a rare instance of that happening. The yellow caddis would be saved and the map butterfly. You could even say that some kinds of wildlife benefited from the bypass plans, since the badgers retained their old setts and gained man-made new ones, while the butterfly had two nettle plantations to feed on instead of just one.

   At the point where the bypass had been due to start and where work on it had begun, earth had been shifted by diggers and excavators. No one, it appeared, had any intention of restoring the terrain to its former level, and grass and wild plants had grown over the new landscape of mounds and declivities, so that in the years to come these hills and valleys would seem a natural phenomenon. Or so Wexford said, commenting on the strange scenery;

   “And in hundreds of years, Granddad,” said Robin, “archaeologists may think those hills were the burial ground of an ancient tribe.”

   “Very likely,” said Wexford, “good point.”

   “Tumuli,” Robin said, savoring the word, “that’s what they’ll call them.”

   “Are you pleased?” Ben asked.

   "What, that they didn’t build the bypass? Yes, I am, very pleased. I didn’t like them cutting down the trees and tearing up the hedges. I didn’t like the road building.”

   “I did,” said Ben. “I liked the diggers. I’m going to drive a JCB when I’m grown up and then I’ll dig up the whole world.”

   It was the loveliest time of the year, unless early May, still a month off, might be more lush and floral, but now in April the trees were misted over with green and pale amber, and the Great Wood, which in May would be carpeted with bluebells, showed celandines and aconites, both bright gold, studding the forest floor. After he had dropped the boys at the school gate and waited a moment or two to see them shepherded into the building, he drove back, musing on children’s taste, and on the beauties of nature and when children were first affected by them. Girls sooner than boys, he thought, girls as young as seven, while boys seemed not to notice scenery - rivers and hills, woodland, the distant landscape of downs, and the high skyscape of clouds - until well into their teens. And yet all the great nature poets had been men. Of course, Sylvia might be right and there had been great women poets too, born to be unrecognized and waste their sweetness on the desert air.

   Meanwhile, he had a girl to talk to, one who might or might not care about pastoral beauty and badgers and butterflies, but who seemed amiable enough and who smiled timorously when her stepfather scolded her and when she was soaked to the skin. Not a wild teenager, not a rebel.

She was sitting on the sofa in the front room of 45 Puck Road, watching a dinosaur cartoon video, designed for children half her age, called Jurassic Larks. Or staring unseeing at it, Wexford thought. Anything rather than have to look at him and Lynn Fancourt.

   At a nod from Wexford, Lynn picked up the remote off the table. “I think we’ll have this off, Lizzie. It’s time to talk.”

   As the pink brontosaurus faded and the pterodactyl with baby ichthyosaur in its mouth vanished in a flicker, Lizzie made a deprecating sound, a kind of snort of protest. She went on staring at the blank screen.

   “You won’t get anything out of her,” Debbie Crowne said. “She’s that obstinate, you might as well talk to a brick wall.”

   “How old are you, Lizzie?” Wexford asked.

   “She’s sixteen.” Debbie didn’t give her daughter a chance to answer. “She was sixteen in January.”

   “In that case, Mrs. Crowne, perhaps it would be best for us to talk to Lizzie on her own.”

   “What, not have me here?”

   “The law requires a parent or responsible adult to be present only when a child is under sixteen.”

   Lizzie spoke, though she didn’t turn her head. “I’m not a child.”

   “If you would, please, Mrs. Crowne.”

   “Oh, all right, if you say so. But she won’t say any thing.” Debbie Crowne put her hand up to her mouth as if she had just recollected something. “If she does say something, you’ll tell me, won’t you? I mean, she could have been anywhere, with anyone. There’s no knowing, is there? I mean, she could be pregnant.”

   Lizzie made the same sound she had when her video was turned off. Saying, “It’s all very well grunting like that, but I reckon she ought to be examined,” Debbie Crowne left the room, shutting the door rather too smartly behind her. The girl didn’t move.

   “You were away from your home for three days, Lizzie,” Wexford said. “You’d never done anything like that before, had you?”

   Silence. Lizzie bent her head still farther so that her face was entirely concealed by hanging hair. It was pretty hair, red-gold, long, and wavy; The hands in her lap had bitten nails. “You didn’t go alone, did you? Did someone take you away, Lizzie?”

   When it was clear she wasn’t going to answer that either, Lynn said, “Whatever you did or wherever you went, no one is going to punish you. Are you afraid of get ting into trouble? You won’t.”

   “No one is going to harm you, Lizzie,” said Wexford. “We only want to know where you went. If you went away because you wanted to be with someone you like, you’ve a right to do that. No one can stop you doing that. But, you see, everyone was looking for you, the police and your parents and your friends were all looking for you. So now we have a right too. We’ve a right to know where you were.”

   The grunt came again, a straining sound like that made by someone in pain. “I can understand you might not want to tell me,” Wexford said. “I can go away. You could be alone with Lynn. You could talk to Lynn. Would you like that?”

   She looked up then. Her face, a rather pretty, pudgy face, freckled about the nose and forehead, was blank, her pale blue eyes vacant. She moistened her thin, pink lips. Frown lines appeared as if she was concentrating hard but as if the intellectual effort of whatever it was, was too much for her. Then she nodded. Not as people usually nod, repeating several times the up-and-down motion of the head, but just once and jerkily, almost curtly.

   “That’s good.” Wexford went out of the room into the hail, a narrow passage that contained a bicycle and a crate full of empty bottles. He tapped on a door at the end and was admitted into a kitchen-diner. Colin Crowne was nowhere to be seen. His wife was sitting in the dining area on a high stool up at a counter, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. “There’s a chance your daughter may feel more able to talk to DC Fancourt on her own.”

   “If you say so, but if she won’t talk to her own mother . . .”

   “What would your attitude be if it turns out she’s been with a boyfriend?”

   “She hasn’t,” said Debbie Crowne, stubbing out her cigarette in a saucer, “so I couldn’t have an attitude.”

   “Let me put it another way. Could she be afraid of what would happen if you found out she had been with a boyfriend?”

   “Look, she hasn’t got a boyfriend. I’d know. I know where she is every minute of the day, I have to, she’s not - well, you know what she is. She’s a bit - she’s got to be looked after.”

   “Nevertheless, she was out on her own with friends on Saturday evening, and though she went to Myringham with them, they left her to come home on her own.”

   “Well, they shouldn’t have. I’ve told them over and over not to leave Lizzie to do things on her own. I’ve told them and her.”

   “They’re sixteen, Mrs. Crowne, and they don’t always do as they’re told.”

   She shifted off the subject to one obviously nearer to her heart. “But what about like I said if she’s pregnant, she ought to have a medical, she ought to be looked at. Suppose he did something to her, we don’t know what he did.”

   “Are you suggesting she was raped?”

   “No, I’m not, of course I’m not, I’d know that all right.”

   Then if she hasn’t a boyfriend and she wasn’t raped, how could she possibly be pregnant? He didn’t say it aloud but went back to the living room, first knocking on the door. Lynn was there but the girl was gone.

   “I couldn’t exactly stop her, sir. She wanted to go upstairs to her bedroom and I couldn’t stop her.”

   “No. We’ll leave it for now.” In the car he asked Lynn what had been the result of the interview, if there had in fact been an interview. “Did she say anything?”

   “She told me a lot of lies, sir. I know they were lies. It was as if - well, she’d realized she had to say something to get us to leave her alone. Unfortunately for her, she has rather a limited imagination, but she tried.”