Wexford 18 - Harm Done (8 page)

   “You mean this villain - what’s his name, by the way?”

   “Flay. Patrick Flay. He lives in Glebe Road.”

   “This Patrick Flay put a child of four through that fan light and instructed him how to open the door?”

   “Not quite, sir,” said Vine. “It was a girl, his own daughter, and while it was a fanlight the first time, my belief is that this second time she went in through the cat flap.”

   “The cat flap?”

   “Yes, sir. It’s a sort of trapdoor that hangs on hinges that the cat pushes open with its head and - ”

   “I know what it is.” Wexford shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger. “Before the things were invented they used to cut a hole in the door, and the story is that Isaac Newton cut a hole for his cat, and when she had kittens, he cut six more holes.”

   Vine stared at him. “He must have been bonkers.”

   “Well, no. They didn’t have Mensa in those days, but he was just as bright as Mr. Burden. He was a great physicist, he discovered gravity, among other things. But that’s the point, that very clever people can be daft in some ways. Anyway, I don’t believe it. I told you just to make it plain that I know what a cat flap is. Where’s this Flay? Downstairs?”

   “He’s called his solicitor and the guy’s on his way.”

   “I hope and trust you haven’t brought the little girl along as well?”

   Vine looked a little affronted. “I left her with her mum, sir. I’ve talked to her . . . ‘

   “In the presence of her mother, I hope?”

   “Of course. Mother claims to know nothing about it, but the child - she’s called Kaylee, K-A-Y-L-double-E - told me her dad got her to wear gloves. He said it was cold and she must keep them on, and they went out together and round the back of this house where her dad showed her the little door that belonged to ‘the pussy cat,’ I quote, and he said never to tell what she did, so she wasn’t going to tell me. But afterwards her dad gave her a Dracula.”

   “Gave her a what?’

   “It’s a kind of ice cream,” said Vine.

   They went downstairs together. On the way Wexford asked if the missing textiles had been discovered and Vine had to admit that they had not. Flay, a man of twenty-five who wore his reddish hair in dreadlocks, though he was white and that hair was sparse, sat at the table in the interview room, smoking while he awaited his solicitor. PC Martin Dempsey sat on a chair inside the door, his hack to the wall, his eyes fixed impassively on the table legs.

   Vine switched on the recorder. “Detective Chief Inspector Wexford and Detective Sergeant Vine have entered the room at four fifty-two. Present also are Police Constable Dempsey and Patrick John Flay.”

   “I’m not saying a word till my lawyer gets here,” said Flay.

   Wexford didn’t answer. He had been sitting down for no more than a minute when Lynn Fancourt brought the solicitor in. This was a young man Wexford had never seen before but whom he knew to be James Beamish of Proctor, Beamish, Green. Vine noted his arrival and began questioning Flay, whose sullen expression had changed to one of pleasurable anticipation once his solicitor was beside him. His smiles turned to laughter when Vine asked him about his daughter. “You’ve got that wrong for a start. She’s not my kid, she’s the wife’s. I’m like her step-dad. The wife had her before we like moved in together.”

   “You seem to have a good relationship with her,” said Wexford.

   “What, with Kaylee? Of course I do. I love kids.”

   “You love her so much that you teach her to go into someone else’s house and steal someone else’s property.”

   “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Flay, grinning widely. “If you believe what a four-year-old kid, practically a toddler, tells you, you’re barking. She’s got an imagination, has Kaylee. She tells stories, right? Well, some would call them lies. I mean, I wouldn’t, not me, I’m a tolerant sort of guy, but there’s some as’d give a kid a clip round the ear for telling the sort of porkies Kaylee tells.”

   “So you didn’t make her wear gloves and put her through a fanlight into the householder’s cloakroom and then through a cat flap into the householder’s basement?”

   Wexford was aware of how ridiculous it all sounded. Any outsider would almost have thought Flay’s mirth justified. He was looking at Beamish now, grinning and shaking his head.

   “You didn’t teach her how to open the window and put the property out from the inside.”

   “Zilch. Are you kidding?”

   “Kaylee wasn’t taught to enter that house and steal the property?”

   Beamish raised his eyes languidly. “My client has already told you no, Mr. Wexford.”

   Wexford was thinking how to rephrase his questions when a note was brought to him by Lynn Fancourt. He didn’t even glance at it he was so sure it was to tell him Rachel Holmes had come back, but he spoke into the recorder to announce he was leaving the room and that Lynn had taken his place. Outside, he unfolded the paper. Not a word about Rachel but a message from the assistant chief constable designate asking him to call him as a matter of urgency. Of course, it was a bit early for Rachel’s return. If she came back at the same time as Lizzie Cromwell had returned, she wouldn’t be in Stowerton before six. The moment he was back in his office he phoned Southby.

   “Orbe,” said the voice that always barked out its clipped sentences. “Henry Thomas Orbe. Mean anything to you?”

   Would he have known if he hadn’t had St. George’s letter? Wexford would never have thought he had reason to be grateful to the editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier. “Pedophile, sir,” he said promptly. “He’s been inside for nine years, coming out and home here next Friday.”

   “Right.” Southby sounded faintly disappointed. “I just thought you should know that the local rag’s going to run an in-the-public-interest story about it on Friday. I dare say it will pass off without incident.”

   So Southby too had had a letter from St. George. I wonder if that one began Dear Malcolm, thought Wexford. He started up the computer and after several false moves resulting in rather frightening admonitions on the screen, managed to access - hateful computer language but nevertheless a source of pride when you got it right - Henry Thomas Orbe.

   “Born South Woodford, London E18,” he read, “20 February 1928, the third son of George and Annie Orbe, of Churchflelds, South Woodford. Educated Buckhurst Hill County High School until age sixteen. Convicted of gross indecency 1949 and again in 1952, sent to prison on the first offence for two months and on the second for eighteen months. Convicted of gross indecency with a minor in 1958 and sent to prison for eight years.”

   Sickened by the dreary repetition almost as much as by the squalid nature of the offences, Wexford pressed the page-down key and was gratified to find that it worked. It actually did the job it claimed to do, which was far from being the case, in his opinion, with most computer moves. Up onto the screen came the last page of Orbe’s sorry catalog. Wexford drew in his breath. The man had gone to prison for manslaughter nine years before, having been sentenced originally to fifteen years for his part in the rape and death, of a twelve-year-old boy.

   Two other men had been involved, of whom one had received the same sentence as Orbe and the other eight years. There was no mention in the dossier of Orbe’s marriage or marriages and nothing about a daughter. Wexford noted that Orbe must be an old man now, more than seventy Would he still be a danger to children? You would have to know the man and know a lot more about pedophilia than Wexford did to answer that. But of one thing he was sure: something was wrong with a society that set free such a monster, even a worn-out, aged, broken monster, into a community with a bigger population of small children than anywhere else in the neighbourhood.

By nine he knew he had been wrong and the Rachel Holmes disappearance wasn’t going to follow Lizzie Cromwell’s pattern. A kind of guilt overwhelmed him, as if it were his fault she hadn’t come back. He was thankful he had said nothing of that hope and certainty of his except to Burden. What he had said to Burden would remain between them. He had tried to compensate by suggesting that the search go on after dark, but even he had to admit this was impossible, for it was a black, moonless night of heavy rain.

   Vine, whom he phoned before he went to bed, told him he had had to let Patrick Flay go. Without enough evidence to charge him Vine was obliged to release the man, still laughing, in the company of his solicitor. For a while Wexford stood at the landing window, looking out at the night. It was a habit of his, to stare out, when all was still and silent, and it amused him to see that Sylvia did it too. Maybe you could inherit a gene of meditative sky-watching. Rain fell steadily, insistently, long silver needles of it puncturing the dark. He thought then of Lear’s words when he reproaches himself for having paid too little attention to the plight of the homeless and dispossessed - poor naked wretches. . . that hide the pelting of this pitiless storm - the women who cried to Sylvia for help, such victimized children as Kaylee Flay and the missing girl. But she, probably, was dead by now, lying in a waterlogged ditch.

In Detective Sergeant Vine’s opinion people like the Flays - and he made no such reservations as Sylvia Fairfax did - shouldn’t be allowed to have children and, if by some contravention of the law they did have them, should not be allowed to bring them up. What was the care system for if not to protect children against the likes of Patrick Flay? Why was there fostering and adoption if these processes weren’t put to better use?

   He arrived at the ground-floor flat in Glebe Road, the half of a shabby, run-down house, to find both Patrick Flay and Kaylee’s mother at home, and the little girl, when he began to talk to her, firmly set on the stained and battered sofa between them, squeezed between them, with no possibility of escape. She was a child of mixed race, born of a white mother, a woman as fair, freckled, and ginger- haired as Patrick. But Kaylee had dark brown hair in tight ringlets all over her head, dark brown eyes, and a light olive skin. Under the left one of those eyes was a darker mark, a bruise that hadn’t been there before, and Vine knew, as surely as if he had seen the blow struck, that one of those two had hit her in the face. Jackie Flay, perhaps, but more probably Patrick, and Vine also knew why that blow had been inflicted.

   A choking feeling of impotence and frustration almost inhibited him from speaking, and as he afterward told Wexford, the worst part was knowing there was little he could do about it.

   “You can notify the Social Services,” said Wexford. “There’s a good case here for threatening the Flays with putting the child into care. So what happened?”

   “Kaylee told me it hadn’t happened. She’s an intelligent kid, you know. I mean, she’s really very bright. She just said none of it was true, she had made it up. In other words, just what Flay said. And he had the nerve to say to her, ‘You know what happens to you when you tell lies, don’t you, Kaylee?’ And he was grinning in that revoking way of his.”

   “And the mother?”

   “She just sat there, silly-scared, if you know what I mean, looking as if she’d say anything and do anything to stay on the right side of Flay. She probably held the kid while Flay hit her. I can just hear him saying it, ‘You say you never did it, you never went there - right? You want my fist in your face again?’”

   Wexford shook his head. “Jackie Flay may be just as much a victim. And the worst thing is that Flay’ll get the child to do it again, he’ll get her into the habit of it and soon she won’t even consider telling the truth - poor little Olivia Twist.”

   Vine, who had been frowning gloomily, brightened a little and said, “What happened to him, sir? This Oliver Twist?”

   “He got saved by an old gentleman who turned out, by an amazing coincidence, to be his own great-uncle.”

   “That won’t happen to Kaylee.”

   “Probably not, though I dare say she has no more idea who her grandfathers are than Oliver had.”

   Vine considered this, pursing his lips. “Why would a woman want to marry Flay? If they’re married. Why would any woman shack up with him? Does she want to be a victim and make her kid a victim?”

   “You’re getting into deep waters, Barry, when you start asking why anyone would marry anyone else. It’s a mystery, But I doubt if many people choose to be victims unless they’re masochists, and masochists are few. The thing is people want to be part of a couple, what they call these days ‘being in a relationship.’ And most of them would rather have a bad one than none at all. It’s nature. By the way, you didn’t really mean you hit your wife, did you?”

   “Me? Oh, right. It was just the once. She hit me and I hit her back. That’s all I mean.”

Wexford had spent the best part of the morning in Oval Road, where Rosemary Holmes, who knew Lizzie Cromwell’s story, had perhaps also believed her daughter would return on the previous evening. But Rachel hadn’t come home and Rosemary was distraught, pacing the room and at one point throwing herself into an armchair where she collapsed in a storm of tears. Wexford asked himself why on earth he had thought this disappearance would have a happy outcome just because Lizzie’s had. Thank God he hadn’t let his ridiculous hunch impede the search or prevent any serious investigation.

   The searchers had begun again soon after first light, combing the rain-drenched fields, glad of shelter inside the quiet dimness of woodlands, but while the rain remained no more than a drizzle, pressing on. Karen Malahyde and Lynn Fancourt had widened the inquiry beyond Rachel’s immediate circle of friends, had talked to people she had been at school with. They were now in Brighton with the girl’s father, Rosemary’s divorced husband, hearing how he hadn’t seen his daughter for the past seven years. Michael Devonshire, the Flagford GP, had not only taken Rosemary out to dinner but admitted frankly that he had spent most of the night with her, leaving the house in Oval Road at five the next morning.

   Rachel had now been missing for four nights and almost four days. Uneasily, Wexford set up a press conference for five that afternoon - his reluctance stemming from the certainty that Brian St. George would be there - and at that conference, as part of it, Rosemary Holmes would make her appeal for Rachel’s return. She shrank from it, at first flatly refusing. She was too little in command of herself, she told Wexford, she would make a mess of it.