Wexford 18 - Harm Done (3 page)

   “So what tall stories did this limited imagination come up with?”

   “She was waiting at the bus stop and it was raining. A lady - that’s how she put it - a lady came along in a car and offered her a lift but she refused because Colin had told her never to accept lifts from strangers. The bus didn’t come and it was pouring with rain so she went into an empty house with boarded-up windows - the house with the apple tree, she calls it - and sat on the floor waiting for the rain to stop. . .”

   “I don’t believe it!”

   “I said you wouldn’t. I didn’t”

   “How did she get in?”

   “The door wasn’t locked. She pushed it open. Then when the rain had stopped and she thought she’d go back to the bus stop, she couldn’t get out because someone had come along and locked her in. She stayed in there for three nights and three days with nothing to eat, though she could get water from a tap, and she found blankets to wrap herself in and keep herself warm. Then the door was unlocked, she escaped and caught the bus home.”

No one believed Lizzie’s story but it was worth going to Myringham and taking a look.

   “No need for you to do that, sir.” Lynn meant it was beneath someone of his rank. “I can do it.”

   “It’s either that or back to the paperwork,” said Wexford.

   Vine had talked to the two friends, Hayley Lawrie and Kate Burton, and both said they had walked with Lizzie to the bus stop. They had promised not to leave her alone and they hadn’t, not really, only for five minutes, the bus was due in five minutes. Hayley said she wished now she had stayed with Lizzie till the bus came, but Kate said it didn’t matter anyway because no harm had come to Lizzie.

   The bus stop was the nearest one to the cinema where they had been, but still it was on the outskirts of Myringham, on the old Kingsmarkham Road. The first thing Wexford noticed was the derelict house. The bus stop was directly in front of it. All its windows boarded up, half the slates off its roof, its front gate hanging from a single hinge, the house stood in an overgrown patch of garden in which the one beautiful thing about the whole place was the cherry tree in rose-pink blossom. Not an apple, as Lizzie had said, but a Japanese kanzan. The front door of the house had been painted an aggressive dark green some twenty years before, and now the paint was peeling. Wexford turned the blackened brass knob and pushed it, wondering how he would feel about Lizzie if the door yielded. But it was locked.

   They went around to the back. Here the- boards were hanging off one of the windows, or someone had been at work attempting to remove them. Wexford made a quick decision. “We’ll get in that way. And afterwards we’ll have the window properly boarded up. Do the owner a service, whoever he or she may be.”

   Perhaps Lizzie had got in that way or out that way or both. The aperture was big enough for small or slight people to squeeze through, but Donaldson had to enlarge it for Wexford with the aid of tools from the car boot. Wexford stepped in over the ledge and Lynn and Donaldson followed. Inside it was cold, damp, and smelled of fungus. Floorboards had been taken up to disclose black pits, in some of which oily water lay. Most of the furniture had been taken out long ago, though a black horsehair settee remained in the room where they were and the iron basket in the fireplace was full of empty crisp packets and cigarette ends. Paper hung from the walls in long, curling swaths.

   In the only other downstairs room, apart from the kitchen, two oil paintings still hung on mildewed walls, one of a stag drinking from a pool, the other of a girl of vaguely Pre-Raphaelite appearance picking up shells on a beach. No blankets anywhere. Upstairs still remained to explore. Wexford was inspired to investigate the filthy hole of a kitchen. He tried both taps. One was dry while the other emitted a trickle of rusty water, red as blood. Lizzie hadn’t drunk from that. The back door had no key in its lock and no bolts. Wooden battens had been nailed across its architrave. Lizzie hadn’t come in through the front door either. It was bolted on the inside. The bolts were rusty and couldn’t have been drawn back without the use of tools.

   “Can we get up the stairs, Lynn?” Wexford asked. “They look as if someone’s been at them with a pickax.”

   “Just about, sir.” Lynn eyed him, not the staircase, as if she doubted his athleticism rather than the stability of treads and risers.

   An attempt had apparently been made to replace the treads or remove them or to widen the whole structure and had been abandoned, but not until the staircase was partially demolished. Wexford let Lynn go first, not so much out of politeness as from knowing that this way, if he fell over backward, he wouldn’t fall on top of a small, slim woman who probably weighed less than eight stone. He trod gingerly, holding on, perhaps unwisely, to the rickety banister and got safely to the top. His efforts were rewarded by the sight of a large gray blanket covering some sort of tank or at any rate large cuboid object. Nothing else at all was in the two small attic bedrooms.

   “I suppose she could have wrapped herself in this,” said Lynn, extending to Wexford the hand she had brought away damp from contact with the blanket. “Though it smells a bit musty.” Above them, through a hole in the stained plaster, the edge of a tile could be seen, and beyond, a segment of blue and white sky.

   “She might have drunk from a bathroom tap,” said Wexford, “if there were a bathroom.’ He shook his head. “She may have been here, but not for three days.”

   “Does it matter, sir?” Lynn asked as they made their way back down the perilous staircase. “I mean, she’s back and she’s not hurt. Is it any of our concern where she was?”

   “Maybe not. Maybe you’re right. I suppose it’s just because I’d like to know.”

   He said much the same thing to Burden next day when the inspector protested about his interest in something so trivial. They were not at the police station but in the Olive and Dove, for a beer at the end of the day’s work.

   “Only I don’t seem to have done any work,” said Wexford, “just filled in those damned forms.”

   “Perhaps we’re beating crime at last.”

   “You jest. I don’t suppose a crime was committed against Lizzie Cromwell or that she committed one, but I’d like to know. Three days she was away, Mike, three days and three nights. She wasn’t in that house - oh, we could only establish that for sure by taking her fingerprints and going over the place - but I know she wasn’t. She couldn’t have got in, or if she had, she couldn’t have got out again and restored that window to the way it was when we found it. She lied about drinking water from a tap, she lied about wrapping herself in a blanket, and she lied about being locked in and then let out. So she wasn’t there at all. I’m wondering if it would be worth putting out a call for that woman, the one who offered her a lift.”

   “That may be a lie too.”

   “True. It may be.” Wexford downed the last of his best bitter. “So where was she?” 

   “With a man. They’re always with a man, you know that. The fact that her mother says there’s no boyfriend means nothing, and saying she never had the chance to meet a boyfriend means nothing either. It doesn’t matter what a girl looks like or how simple she is - all right, don’t look like that, you know what I mean - or how shy or whatever, the instinct in young human beings to reproduce is so powerful that the most unlikely ones get together like - like magnets.”

   “I hope there’ll be no reproduction in this case, though I agree the most likely thing is that she was with a man, a boy. It still doesn’t tell us where.”

   “At his place, of course.”

   “Ah, but there’s the difficulty. If he’s her age, the most likely thing is that he lives with parents or one parent and maybe siblings. If he’s older, he’s likely to be married or, as they put it these clays, ‘in a relationship.’ The other people involved would know of her disappearance. Somebody would have come to us.”

   “He could have taken her to a hotel.”

   “For three days and three nights, Mike? Is he that well-off? No, the only possibility that I can see is that he lives alone in a room or flat of his own and that he took her there. He kept her indoors for the whole of the three clays and three nights, and no one in the house or block of flats saw her. I don’t like it, I don’t really believe it, but we know what Sherlock Holmes said.”

   Burden had heard it too often from Wexford’s lips to be in any doubt about it. “If all else is impossible, that which remains must be so, or something like that.” Burden went to renew their drinks. Although he wasn’t going to say so or not yet, he was sick of Lizzie Cromwell and bored with the whole thing. Wexford, in his opinion, was beginning to get obsessive again, only in the past when he had had a bee in his bonnet, it was over events rather more earth shaking than this. But if, when he returned to their table with the two halves of Adnams, he hoped that Wexford would choose a new subject of conversation, he was disappointed.

   “So when her friends left her at the bus stop, she was waiting for this guy to come along in a car, was she? Why a bus stop then? Why not somewhere warm and dry like a café?”

   “Because she had to make her friends believe she was waiting for a bus.” Burden said it repressively. He hoped he might have had the last word.

   “You’re fed up with this, aren’t you? I know you are, I can tell. I won’t bore you much longer. I think you’re right about her reason for waiting at the bus stop, but I’d like to dig a little deeper into that. Why did she want to make her friends believe she was waiting for a bus?”

   “So they wouldn’t know about the boyfriend.”

   “But why wouldn’t she want them to know? Wouldn’t she be proud of having a boyfriend? Especially one with a car and a place to take her? She could have trusted them. They’d be the last to tell her mother.”

   “Maybe he’s married.”

   “Then he wouldn’t have a place to take her,” said Wexford, and though Burden waited for the next phase of this reasoning, he said no more about it. “Hurt-Watch meeting in the morning,” he said instead. “Remember? Ten sharp. Southby will be there, in case I haven’t told you.”

   At the prospect of an encounter with the new assistant chief constable designate, Burden groaned softly. Operation Safeguard, which the program had originally been called, held little interest for him. His personal belief was that what happened in the home belonged in the home and should come as little as possible within the province of the law. But he knew where Wexford’s sympathies lay, so he held his tongue.

Next morning, half an hour before the meeting was due to begin a woman came into the police station on her way work to say that she had seen Lizzie Cromwell at the bus stop the previous Saturday evening. It was a matter of chance that Wexford spoke to her at all. He and Barry Vine happened to be passing the desk in the foyer of the building where she was talking to the duty sergeant. Even so, Barry came out with the usual formula, that he would he would see to it, that it was hardly necessary for Wexford to. . .

   Bother my pretty little head about it, Wexford thought but he didn’t say aloud. “We’ll go up to my office.” he said.

It was Friday now and Lizzie had come home on Tuesday afternoon. Wexford imparted this information to Mrs. Pauline Ward, surprised that she seemed not to know it already. “May I ask why you didn’t come before?” he asked her.

   “I never saw her picture till last night. It was in a paper wrapping up a crab.”

   “It was what?”

   “Look, I don’t take a paper. I mean, a daily paper. And I don’t watch television news. I watch television but not the news. It upsets me. I mean, if it’s not atrocities in Albania or kids burnt to death in a fire, it’s baby seals getting clubbed to death. So I don’t look at it anymore.”

   “The crab, please, Mrs. Ward.”

   She was in her midfifties, smartly dressed, her skirt too short and her eyelids too blue, but a handsome, well-kept woman who had arrived - and parked it on the parking place reserved for the assistant chief constable designate - in a dark blue Audi, polished to a gleam. When she smiled, as she now did, she showed a fine set of bright white teeth.

   “Oh, the crab,” she said. “Yes, I stopped off at that good fishmonger in York Street on my way home from work last evening. I had a friend coming to supper and I’d nothing for a starter, so I thought a crab would be nice and the fishmonger wrapped it up in this newspaper. The Times, I think it was. Anyway, when I unwrapped my crab, I saw her picture and I remembered seeing her on Monday night.”

   “I see. And when your friend came, did you say any thing to her about it?”

   “Him,” said Mrs. Ward. “It’s a him, my friend.” Her tone was that of a woman who would hardly bother to buy a crab for a female guest. “Well, no, I didn’t. Should I have?”

   “He might have told you Lizzie Cromwell was found. That is, unless he too shies away from the news.”

   Pauline Ward gave him a suspicious sideways look “I don’t know whether he does or not. We don’t talk about that sort of thing.” She very nearly but not quite tossed her head. “Don’t you want to know about Saturday night?”

   Wexford nodded.

   “All right, then. I work in Myringham. I’m the manager of the Crescent Minimarket on the Heaven Spent mall and we stay open till eight-thirty on Saturdays. It was twenty to nine when I left. I had to lock up and go to my car so, what with one thing and another, it was ten to when I drove past that bus stop.”

   Wexford interrupted her. “How can you be so sure of the time?”

   “I always am, to the minute. I’m a clock-watcher. Well, I suppose I’m a watch-watcher. I noted the time when I left, and I saw that digital clock on the Midland Bank just when I started driving off, and it said eight fifty-four. I thought, ‘That can’t be right, not as late as that,’ and I ‘checked it with my watch and the clock on the car - I knew they were both right to the nearest second - and they both said eight forty-nine. Well, I thought, I’ll go into the Midland and tell them - and I did, I went in on the Tuesday. And by the time I’d thought that, about the bank I mean, I was passing that bus stop and the girl was there, and I thought, ‘Poor thing, having to wait for a bus in the rain. Shall I offer her a lift.’ I thought, and then I thought, ‘No, better not,’ because you never know, do you?”