Wexford 18 - Harm Done (39 page)

   She nodded. “Of course,” she said, “of course I will,” and he knew she didn’t mean a word of it.

   So he went away and left her, but his thoughts refused to abandon her. She was with him all the rest of that day and the next, and the next. He kept thinking of ways he might act to stop it, post a man to watch the place by day and another by night, lurk outside the windows to catch Devenish when next he attacked her. It wasn’t practical, it wasn’t possible, he hadn’t the manpower. He waited for a phone call, not from her - that he was sure would never come - but from someone, even one of her sons, who had found her mutilated or dying or dead.

   It was beyond his imagination to picture what scenes ensued after he had gone and she was alone with Devenish. Or perhaps it was only that his mind flinched from it. She was so small and frail, and Devenish such a big, burly man who must be twice her weight. And the terrible thing was that Devenish had a right to be angry with his wife for what she had done, taking away his child, deceiving him, lying to him and her sons. But no one had a right to vent his anger against someone else with savage treatment and blows.

   “When we found Sanchia,” Wexford said to Burden, “we were going to have champagne - remember? I don’t feel much like it now, do you?”

   “Not much,” said Burden.

Had he beaten her again? Wexford had no means of knowing. As time went on, he asked Margaret Stamford to call at Woodland Lodge again and she did call. This time Fay Devenish didn’t even let her get past the front door. She came out onto the step, almost closing the door behind her, and whispered that she was sorry but nothing profitable could come out of another interview. Her husband was indoors, she said, and she would have to explain who her visitor was and what she had come for. Only she wouldn’t explain, she would invent something, God knew what.

   It sounded as if Devenish’s violence toward her was continuing. And of course it was; Wexford had never really doubted that it would. Everything he might do, every action taken to support or help her, would only exacerbate his violence. Brian St. George carried a story in the Courier of the proceedings in court where Jane Andrews and Louise Sharpe appeared on a charge of wasting police time and obstructing the police in their inquiries. Wexford wondered then what would happen to Fay when Stephen Devenish read it. A much more serious charge against Victoria Cadbury, that of abduction of three women and falsely imprisoning them, made bigger head lines. Would that also incense Devenish and thus endanger his wife? Perhaps, but he heard nothing.

   He even asked Sylvia if, while operating The Hide helpline, she had ever had a call from Fay Devenish or from someone who might be Fay Devenish, but there had been nothing. If there was violence at Woodland Lodge among the high trees and in the deep peace, Fay suffered in silence.

   And then, after two months, the silence and the peace came to an end.

   Down in Brighton, Louise Sharpe twice attempted suicide. The first time, she left her six-bedroomed, three bathroomed house with its swimming pool and its staff of resident Filipino couple but no-longer-resident nanny, went down to the beach, and walked into the sea until it covered her head. She was seen by a swimmer and rescued. A month later her housekeeper found her unconscious, having swallowed a packet of sleeping pills and half a bottle of gin. The psychiatrist who saw her when she came out of hospital called her actions a cry for help, but Louise said she didn’t want help, she wanted to die.

No. 16 Oberon Road, now no longer the Orbes’ home, had been seriously damaged by the Kingsmarkham Six and their supporters, all the front windows broken, the door panels kicked in, and tiles knocked off the roof. Weeks passed before the local authority’s contractors moved in, and during those weeks the windows and front door were boarded up and the roof covered in a big sheet of blue plastic. One night, while the Muriel Campden Estate slept, a graffitist had moved in and decorated the entire facade with pictures of bleeding corpses, decapitated torsos and their separate heads, open-mawed animal faces, and such words as pedo, filth, and killer in the bright colors of spray paint - pink, yellow, emerald, Prussian blue, and scarlet.

   The Kingsmarkham Courier ran a story on the appalling situation of the homeless sleeping on the streets of Myringham while accommodation stood empty in that town and particularly in Kingsmarkham. Not to mention the shameful situation of Kingsmarkham Police Station being restored to pristine condition within three weeks while 16 Oberon Road still stood derelict. On their front page they used a photograph in full color of the graffiti.

   Speculation was rife on the Muriel Campden Estate as to whom it would be allocated when the repairs were finally carried out. Debbie Crowne hankered after it for her daughter Lizzie, and Miroslav Zlatic and their child. As to marriage, she cared little about that, whatever Lizzie might feel. Debbie just wanted, as she said to Maria Michaels, to see them in a stable relationship with family values. Unfortunately for her ambitions, Miroslav was still with Brenda in a partnership that seemed happier than formerly, and it was reported that her sons called him Dad.

   Lizzie was nearly six months pregnant and what her mother termed “as big as a house.” The social worker called occasionally, urging Lizzie to attend parenting as well as prenatal classes, but she said she was still thinking it through. It was an awkward situation, seeing that Kingsmarkham Social Services were bringing an action against Colin Crowne in the County Court for the cost of replacing Jodi the virtual baby.

   Tommy Orbe and Suzanne, his daughter, had been rehoused in a flat on the outskirts of Peterborough. The accommodation was in a bungalow block designed for pensioners and the disabled, and a long way away from any families with children. But the pensioners’ families soon discovered Orbe’s identity. They stopped bringing their children to visit their grandparents, with the result that the other occupants of the bungalow block ostracized Orbe and Suzanne and sent them obscene letters. Suzanne’s fiancé never returned, and after a time she became engaged to one of the men who came to collect the tenants’ recycling.

The police are particularly assiduous with their investigations when one of their own has been killed or injured.

   Burden and Vine, with Cox and Lynn Fancourt, had spent uncounted man- and woman-hours pursuing inquiries to find Hennessy’s killer. All they had succeeded in doing was eliminating Colin Crowne from the inquiry. Patrick Flay recalled that he had seen Miroslav Zlatic “holding a missile.” Vine found a Serbo-Croat speaker who taught Balkan studies at the University of the South to interpret for him, but Miroslav still said nothing, being apparently as disinclined to his own language as to English. And there the matter stood, though Burden and Vine pressed on, determined to find Hennessy’s killer, not to think of giving up until they had.

Frustrated by Fay Devenish’s disinclination to have her husband indicted for assault or to give evidence against him, Wexford nevertheless refused to let the Devenish affair disappear into that great recycling bin of unfinished business into which unresolved family troubles were cast and came out the other end as “in the domestic, not police, domain.” Instead, he kept an eye. DS Karen Malahyde, while undergoing a three-day-a-week training in the handling of domestic violence, had visited Fay, taking care to do so in her husband’s absence. With things back to normal, Stephen Devenish had returned to his former commitment to Seaward Air and spent between eight and ten hours a day at the Gatwick, Brighton, or Kingsmarkham offices. With the boys at their preparatory school in Sewingbury until the end of July, it was easy enough to see Fay alone.

   Karen soon became at home in Woodland Lodge and managed, while with Fay, to subdue her own feminist inclinations, her loathing of housework and contempt for those who did it. After all, as she remarked to Lynn, whether the poor woman polishes the floor right is the least of her worries. Having first arranged for a babysitter for Sanchia, Karen set up a meeting for Fay with Griselda Cooper, and the three women had lunch together at the Europlate, Fay having ascertained that it was her husband’s day at Gatwick for a trial flight to Brussels and back in one of the new Flyfast 355 Stratoslicer aircraft Seaward had bought.

   The lunch was profitable only in that it brought color into Fay’s face and a light into her eyes. She hadn’t had a meal out with friends since Stephen stopped her seeing Jane Andrews. Griselda tried to get her to wear an alarm device around her neck, but Fay said Stephen would spot it in five minutes, smash it, and probably smash her as well. One good thing had come out of all this, Karen said, and that was that at last Fay felt able to talk quite freely about what went on at home. It was no longer a dark and terrible secret, to be whispered only to one intimate friend.

   The neighbours knew. Operation Hurt-Watch’s policy was to alert residents in the vicinity as to what went on. Karen had herself told Moira Wingrave and met with a nervous not-in-my-backyard response. Moira said she couldn’t possibly think of interfering between husband and wife, especially in a select area like this one, but other dwellers in Ploughman’s Lane were more accommodating and less shocked.

   “Not that any of them will know,” Karen said to Wexford. “It’s not exactly a housing estate with paper-thin walls. He could beat her to death and they wouldn’t hear her screaming. Not through two hundred yards of dense rain forest.”

   Wexford himself, when not busy tracking down and prosecuting eco-warriors, speculated as to what currently went on at Woodland Lodge. He talked to his wife about it and to Sylvia. When he mentioned it to his younger daughter, Sheila, all she said was that if any man she’d ever been with hit her, he’d wonder what had hit him. Wexford knew it wasn’t as simple and straightforward as that. The Devenish affair was Karen’s responsibility, but he some times called on Fay himself; talking quietly to her, trying to discover what the situation now was and looking for signs of the abuse Sylvia had taught him to recognize.

   He looked for other signs too. No bruises had shown on Fay’s face since the return of Sanchia, but many an abusive man is crafty and inflicts physical damage where the results of it won’t show. That too he had learned. And he observed what Karen had not, that although it was high summer, Fay wore dresses with long skirts and long sleeves. She was only just thirty-six but she never showed off her arms or her shoulders, and all her clothes were high-necked. This might mean not only that the covered parts of her body exhibited bruises and contusions but also that Stephen Devenish demanded the excessively modest dress of a Shaker woman or an Irvingite. Wexford sometimes asked her if she was all right, and she understood perfectly what he meant, simply replying yes and he was not to worry about her.

   So he ran to earth (in more ways than one) the well-intentioned, earnest people who broke the law by uprooting fields of genetically altered oilseed rape and linseed, arrested them and had them charged with causing malicious damage, and he thought about the Devenish family. Was Stephen Devenish still receiving those threatening letters? Or had there ever been any threatening letters Wexford hadn’t much belief in the onetime existence of obscene or anonymous letters the recipient declares he has thrown away. Probably they existed only in Devenish’s paranoid imagination.

   Nor had he ever discovered exactly what had happened when Stephen and Fay were alone together after Sanchia’s return. She wouldn’t tell him and she wouldn’t tell Karen beyond saying that Stephen more often accused her of being a “mental case” than he formerly had. He had also frequently told her she was unfit to look after his children, but whether this accusation was accompanied by blows she never said.

   Sanchia had begun to talk. At the beginning of July she became three years old, and by then she was forming sentences and developing a large vocabulary. Children who are late talkers speak fluently once they begin. Knowing his reasoning was unsound, Wexford nevertheless saw her speech development as a sign that she had witnessed no further violence by her father against her mother.

   “It doesn’t work that way, Dad,” said Sylvia. “She was bound to start talking sometime. What will happen is there’ll be other traumas, she’ll be hyperactive or absolutely not, or spectacularly badly behaved or too quiet, but there’ll be something.”

   “If he’s still doing it.”

   “Dream on. He’s still doing it. Why would he stop?”

   “What amazes me,” said Dora Wexford, “is that these are middle-class people - well, upper-middle-class if you go in for all these gradations. They’re very well off, he must be earning a couple of hundred thousand a year.”

   “Three hundred and seventy-five thousand, to be precise,” said Wexford.

   “Well, there you are, then. If they got divorced, she’d still get a huge allowance. She could keep that house and he could buy himself something just as nice to live in. I don’t understand it.”

   “No, you don’t, Mother, so you might as well not air your opinions. Domestic violence occurs in all classes, it’s absolutely not just a working-class thing, which is what you’re saying. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

   “That’s me crushed,” said Dora.

   Wexford laughed. “I really ought to say, ‘don’t talk to your mother like that,’ only as someone or other said, Lord Melbourne, I think, ‘Those whose behaviour requires admonishing are seldom wise enough to profit by admonition.’”

   A view he had no reason to change when he went to Woodland Lodge to see her a week later. Unusually for her, her face was heavily made up, some kind of pancake foundation coating the fine pale skin but not entirely concealing the black bruise that covered her forehead, her left cheek, and her left temple. Her left eye was ringed in purple and the upper lid thickly swollen. Wexford found himself in the rare situation of feeling deep embarrassment. She answered the door to him, giving a little gasp when she saw who it was.

   Sanchia was with her, clinging with both hands to her skirt. Once he had observed that the sons weren’t in the least like their mother, but this little girl resembled Fay, even to the wide-eyed, fearful look. He glanced once more at Fay’s damaged face and hardly knew what to say, but he had to say something and that pertinent to what he was seeing. She walked ahead of him into the living room, her hand up to the bruises, an inadequate mask for that awful evidence.