Wexford 18 - Harm Done (26 page)

   Two photographs were inserted in the text, the classic one of Orbe taken on his release from prison and featured everywhere, and a portrait of Sanchia Devenish he had never seen before. It had evidently been taken when she was about six months old, for this was a baby, her round, almost hairless head resting on a lacy pillow. A fuzzy picture, probably much enlarged. An adult’s hand could be seen in one corner - Fay Devenish’s? - and what might be the side of a pram or pushchair.

   Growling to himself like a cross bear, Wexford took the paper with him into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. His instinct, like most people’s these days when astounded, delighted, shocked, or appalled, was to phone someone. But whom? Southby, of course. He had as little contact with the ACCD as he could achieve. Superintendent Rogers? The desk sergeant at the station? In the end, when he had taken up Dora’s tea, when he had observed that it was raining again but had not reverted to the subject of his missing raincoat, he fell back on the old faithful and phoned Burden.

   “I’ve seen it,” Burden said.

   “I thought you’d given up that rag.”

   “I have. They delivered the wrong papers.”

   “You and me both. St. George must have seen Wendy Brodrick bring Orbe in. He was doubtless prowling about outside or loitering in a parked car. They were only there five minutes.”

   “Long enough. Where did he get that picture of Sanchia?”

   “God knows. Those Devenishes hadn’t a photo to give us, but St. George gets one. Not that we’d have been interested in this, a child of six months looks nothing like how it will two years later. That photograph of St. George’s would no more help find Sanchia Devenish than a shot of you or me.”

   Burden said thoughtfully, “Maybe the Devenishes didn’t give it to him. You know how the Courier organizes all those contests, allegedly for charity - the guy with the biggest feet, some ghastly ferret competition, Miss Kingsmarkham till the feminists stopped it - well, I’ve been wondering if Sanchia was ever in a baby show, if maybe she won a baby show and they took the picture. She was a pretty baby, wasn’t she?”

   These words, uncharacteristic of Burden, moved Wexford so profoundly, driving away all his anger in a moment, bringing him instead an ache of sadness at that past tense, that he was silent. The poor little girl, he thought, please God or Fates or Furies, let whoever’s got her be kind to her.

   Burden said, “Are you still there?”

   “I’m here.” Wexford cleared his throat. “The Devenishes aren’t the sort of people to let their daughter compete in a baby show, are they?”

   “God knows what sort of people they are. Don’t ask me, you’d better ask St. George.”

   “I mean to,” said Wexford; then he added, with atypical relish, “I mean to think of a way of punishing him.”

This time the trouble began in Stowerton, in Rectangle Road, not far from the homes of Trevor Ferry and Rosemary Holmes, where Joe Hebden’s brother lived with his girlfriend, two children of hers, and two children of his. David Hebden drove the van that delivered new copies of the Courier fresh off the press to every newsagent in Kingsmarkham, Stowerton, and Pomfret, and his round began at 6 a.m. Reading was not among his skills, though he was able to decipher the headlines on the sports pages. ‘What drew his attention to the Courier this wet morning was a name, one of the few he could read, being that of his girlfriend’s younger daughter.

   David Hebden was fond of little Sanchia. She was not his child but he liked her better than his own children, whom he saw as coming between him and his ex-wife. For a fearful half hour he thought something dreadful had happened to her. Why otherwise would her name be in the paper?

   Asking other people to read things to him was some thing he avoided whenever he could, so he said nothing to any of the newsagents, simply growing more and more anxious and frustrated each time his eye lighted on that beloved name in that horrible huge print. When he got home, everyone was still asleep. He rushed upstairs to look for Sanchia, found her in bed with her mother, where she must have come after he left, and woke up the whole household with his whoops of joy.

   Sanchia’s mother, Katrina, took the paper from him and read the story. After a while the other children came in and sat on the bed, seeing in this break from routine a prospect of excitement.

   “The police are a disgrace,” said Katrina. “This little kid’s been missing since Monday and what do they do? Not look for her, or her body more like, oh, no, they turn the police station into a hotel with all mod cons to keep that pedophile in luxury.”

   “What’s a pedophile, Mum?” said Georgina, aged six.

   “Ask no questions and you’ll get no lies. I’m going to give Joe and Charlene a phone, Dave. Or you can, it’s your duty, they’ve a right to know.”

Since the departure of Orbe from the Muriel Campden Estate, all the excitement and most of the heat had simmered down. Another event had convulsed the residents of Puck, Titania, and Oberon Roads: Colin Crowne’s assault on and destruction of Jodi the virtual baby. It had happened on the day before Lizzie Cromwell was due to return Jodi to the Social Services. After her fight with Brenda Boswortb and acknowledgment by every one except Miroslav himself that he was the father of her child, Lizzie had seemed to lose interest in Jodi. From nursing him and feeding and changing him, putting him in his cot, lifting him up again, and constantly cuddling him, she had rapidly passed to total indifference, and Jodi, unattended for the first time in his short life, for he had been newborn when he came to her, began to cry. He cried and sobbed and wailed, and when the crying mechanism ran out, his tape rewound and he began again.

   “You can’t just put him on the back burner, you know,” Debbie scolded.

   Colin said nothing. Nor did he make any attempt to immobilize Jodi by removing his batteries or even smothering him. At nine at night when the robot had been crying for six hours, he picked him up by the legs and smashed him against the bathroom wall. Bits of Jodi, his limbs and his mechanism and his fine handsome head, fell into the bath where Colin stamped on them.

   Lizzie didn’t care, she was bored with the whole thing, but she had to explain to the social worker. Colin wasn’t there, it was his day at the Job Centre for signing on. The social worker said such a thing had never happened before and what sort of a mother would Lizzie make when she had a real baby? Of course she or her mother or her step father would have to pay for a replacement for Jodi, and did she realize how much a virtual baby cost?

   Colin came home and said over his dead body would they make him pay for breaking a fucking stupid doll, and Debbie said she wouldn’t either, on principle. It would probably be his dead body, anyway, Colin said, he’d already started coming out in a rash all around his waist and down his bum. No one appreciated the stress he’d suffered through having that thing in the house, and God knew what it would be like with a real baby.

   News of this unjust claim on the part of Kingsmarkham’s Social Services Department spread around Muriel Campden like a bushfire. Almost everyone took the Crowne-Cromwell side with the exception of the Mitchells, Monty Smith, and Maria Michaels. Monty Smith had been put on probation and required to pay an unimaginably large sum (which he had borrowed off Maria) for hitting Sergeant Fitch, and his view was that if he had been unfairly fined, why should others get off scot-free?

   “How d’you make a petrol bomb?” Colin Crowne had said to Joe Hebden in the Rat and Carrot the night before.

   “You what? You’re barking.”

   “No, I saw it on the telly. It was somewhere like Algeria or Iraq, some place like that, and this lot was throwing petrol bombs at the government. I thought to myself, ‘They ought to do that to the council, make them sit up.’”

   A man neither of them had ever seen before said, “You fill up a bottle with petrol, like a milk bottle.”

   “We don’t get milk bottles no more,” said Colin.

   “Right. You don’t. Any bottle so long as it’s not plastic. Fill it up and stuff the top with a bit of rag. You put paraffin on the rag, pink or blue paraffin, don’t matter, and you light it with a match and throw it. You throw it right away, mind, no hanging about or you’ll go up in flames. But you don’t need the hassle. You want one, I can supply it. There’s a market for them things.”

   “It was a joke,” said Joe.

   The man only laughed and said he’d buy them a drink, then he’d like to show them something.

   Joe’s wife, Charlene, took the call from her brother-in- law at seven-thirty next morning. That the child was still missing didn’t much concern her. She knew that, everyone on Muriel Campden knew it, if the media didn’t. But Orbe in hiding at Kingsmarkham Police Station! In luxurious accommodation! Charlene was fond of saying that the world was divided into those who don’t and those who do, and she was a doer. She got dressed, grabbed an umbrella, and. went out into the triangle, knocking on every door.

There are fat men who are solid like Carl Meeks, men with big shoulders and bellies like convex drums, taut as if corseted but corseted in vain, and there are fat men whose obesity seems liquid, seems to slosh around inside a thin membrane, so that a pinprick would reduce them to a collapsed balloon. Brian St. George, editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier, was of the latter sort, and his liquidity was currently flowing over the arms of Wexford’s chair and seeping like a tide against the edge of the desk. His shirt was meant to be white but looked, as usual, as if it had been put through the wash in company with a pair of black jeans and a red T-shirt. If he had a tie with him, it must have been in his pocket. Since becoming bald, he had grown his remaining hair long so that if you eyed him from above, as Wexford was now doing, his head looked like a big white daisy with a pinkish-yellow center.

   He had come to the police station when summoned, perhaps not much fancying the chief inspector’s presence in the Courier’s offices, sat down in this chair, and suffered a grilling. St. George put up a spirited defense, half whining, half aggressive, and insisted he was obliged to “improvise” because Kingsmarkham police never told him anything.

   “ ‘The Kingsmarkham Six,’” said Wexford disgustedly. 

   “I didn’t think it up,” Brian St. George said as if in mitigation. “It’s vindictive, it’s revenge. You know you don’t treat me fairly, Reg.”

   “Don’t call me that.”

   “Sorry, I’m sure. I’d been under the impression we were all old friends here. You Reg, me Brian. It’s formality gone mad the way you call me ‘Mr. St. George.’”

   “Call it what you like, but we’ll keep to formality under this roof. If you believed Orbe was hidden here, what stopped you phoning your old friend and checking? No, don’t bother to answer. You’d have got a denial and a denial was the last thing you wanted. You’d have had no story

   St. George shifted his floppy bulk an inch or two. A gap opened between two of his shirt buttons to reveal a circle of hairy pink skin. Wexford tried not to look at it. The editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier took a packet of Mariboros from his pocket, looked around for an ashtray, but in spite of not seeing one, lit his cigarette.

   “This is a smoke-free zone.”

   “It never used to be,” St. George protested. “Since when?”

   “Since nine this morning.” Wexford looked at his watch, which showed three minutes past. “Put that fag out, come on now.”

   Slowly and with an expression of bitter regret, St. George stubbed out his cigarette. “The story in all the nationals,” he pleaded. “It’s the Mail’s front-page lead.”

   “Only because you told them. Apparently there have been calls coming in from them all night. Everything has to be denied. Orbe is not here. Orbe was here for precisely five minutes, sitting in a car in the car park. I suppose you saw him brought in.”

   “Guilty, my lord,” said St. George, managing a boyish grin.

   “And passed on your think piece to the media but too late for them to upstage the Courier.”

   “Well, what would you have done in my place, Reg? Sorry I mean, Mr. Wexford.”

   “Behaved like a responsible citizen, but that’s an alien concept to you, I know. It’s too late now to do anything about it. We must hope there’s no harm done. Where did you get the photograph of Sanchia?”

   “I can’t reveal my sources, you know that.”

   “I’m not talking about your sources, I’m talking about a photograph you must either have got from the child’s parents or have taken yourself at some earlier time.”

   “It was when her dad got a big salary increase, a hundred - K or whatever, and we ran a ‘fat cats’ story You know, ‘Can Airline Tycoon Justify Massive Pay Rise?’”

   “What had that to do with Sanchia?”

   “Human interest, you know that. Family values. Our photographer happened to see Mrs. D. out with the baby. As a matter of fact, that’s how we knew her first name, going through the picture archives. They were calling her Sasha and Sarah and all sorts.”

   Wexford looked at him in disgust. “We shall not be offering any information to your newspaper in future on any subject whatsoever, so you will please instruct your staff that reporters who normally come in for the twice-weekly press release will no longer be welcome.”

   St. George got to his feet, his whole body on the wobble. “Now look here, you can’t do this. This is-outrageous, I’ll go to the chief constable.” Echoing Dora’s words, he said, “That’s like the Stasi, it’s like the KGB.”

   “It may be like the Taliban for all I care.”

   Any further comments he might have made were cut off by the noise of breaking glass from below. It sounded as if something had struck one of the windows on a lower floor. Wexford went to his window and looked out. He stood there quite still for a moment, then he turned around and beckoned to Brian St. George. “Come and see the result of your handiwork.”

By eight-thirty most of the population of Kingsmarkham and the villages knew that a child was missing and a notorious pedophile was under police protection. The rumour that Orbe had killed Sanchia Devenish, confessed to her murder, and been given refuge in Kingsmarkham Police Station to save him from being torn to pieces by all right-thinking local parents was started by a woman in Glebe Road. She was herself the mother of two, the elder of whom had been the victim of an indecent assault by a man from Stowerton. With her half sister Jackie Flay, Jackie’s daughter Kaylee, and half a dozen of her neighbours, she set forth on foot - it wasn’t more than a quarter of a mile - and halfway there encountered a contingent from the Stowerton end of the town. This band of pro testers all carried paper banners, rapidly improvised, bearing the legends we want Orbe and save our babies. If it had only continued to rain, as Wexford said later, the whole demonstration might have been avoided, as many of these people would have been reluctant to get wet. But the rain had stopped at a quarter to eight giving place to an angrily blue sky bright sunshine, and a strong northwest wind.