Wexford 18 - Harm Done (12 page)

   “I don’t know about that. He could have advocated compulsory castration.” Wexford dropped the paper on the floor where he couldn’t see it. “I’ve been thinking about that banner thing, Mike. We don’t have any powers to make them take it down, do we?”

   “I doubt it. We could if it led to trouble. Then it’d be an offence against public order. But it hasn’t led to trouble.”

   “Not yet. Orbe’s not home yet, but he will be today. I dreamt about the Muriel Campden Estate last night and I woke up yelling there was a bomb planted under the tower. Dora thought I’d gone mad. What are we going to do about Lizzie Cromwell?”

   “It’s a job for Lynn now, don’t you reckon? Get Lynn around there and see if she can ferret out what really happened. Rachel Holmes got on fine with her, so why not Lizzie?”

   “They’re a very different type of girl, Mike. But it’s a good idea. Lynn should persuade Mrs. Crowne to take Lizzie to her GE that’s a priority: When he or she confirms it, I’ll believe she’s two weeks pregnant.”

   The hunt for the house with the shingles on its front and the big Christmas tree hadn’t yet begun, but Wexford, whose knowledge of the surrounding area was considerable, had given it thought. He had pictured villages in his mind’s eye, seeing their churches and clustering cottages, bigger houses, village greens with war memorials, and hid been presented with several possible bungalows, but none of these stood alone in open countryside. Seeing stretches of roads and lanes, dipping valleys and swelling hills, was harder. So, on the previous evening he had driven back and forth across the area where the bypass was to have been built.

   To himself he confessed that he enjoyed going there to gloat. There was a sweet, almost physical pleasure in seeing, bursting into fresh leaf; trees scheduled last year to be felled, in hearing the song of birds going to roost, and driving along the one narrow road through Framhurst Great Wood, eyeing through the long, still glades the tiny blossoms of celandine and wood anemones on the forest floor. He had even lingered on the edge of it, parking the car for a moment or two, while he reflected that here, on this very spot, he and everyone else in Kingsmarkham had expected to see by this time a huge trunk road ripping through the wasted valley. It did him good, he sometimes thought, to sit and look and rejoice, it brought him a calm satisfaction. And he felt revived and keen again when he started the car and set off for Framhurst and Savesbury and Myfleet.

   All the way along the roads, some of them narrow lanes with high banks studded with primroses and cowslips, he looked for a house that would conform to Rachel Holmes’s description. But although a shingled front is a feature of many Sussex dwellings, there were few of these in the area and even fewer that were bungalows. After driving around for an hour, going as far as Myringham in one direction and Stringfield in the other, he had come across only two, and of these one was in the center of a hamlet and in any case was a house on two floors. The other, on the edge of downland, had no trees near it apart from its own Leyland cypress hedge.

   That had been last evening. This morning he resolved to take Rachel reconnoitering with him and Karen Malahyde, and to go south of the town, always supposing Rachel had kept her promise and not yet returned to the University of Essex.

Sylvia had been at The Hide for no more than ten minutes when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t one of her days for being there and it wasn’t one of her times. In fact, it was the day she was owed to take off from her regular job and she had been at home, planning a morning in the garden and an afternoon at the cinema, when Lucy Angeletti had phoned and said that Jill Lewis still had flu and she had a morning meeting set up with Myringham Housing Department, and could Sylvia possibly be an angel and come in? Just for a few hours till Griselda took over at three. So of course Sylvia had said yes and had phoned her mother to ask her to pick up the boys from school, just in case she was late, and had come down here by eleven.

   When she was herself a child, when she was ten, no one would have thought twice about letting her come home from school alone. No one would have considered it unsafe for her to bring her little sister home with her. But these days people were terrified of letting their kids out of their sight for five minutes. And they would be even more frightened after reading the Courier, as she had done that morning, taking it and her cup of tea back to bed with her. Presumably, there had been pedophiles when she was a child, there must have been, and just as many - human nature didn’t change - but you seldom heard about them, while today there seemed to be one behind every bush and around every corner.

   She was hanging up her raincoat in the hall and no one else was about apart from two three-year sitting on the stairs, so it seemed obvious that she should answer the door. But even as she put up her hand to the latch, she remembered instructions she had received during her brief training for this job. Be careful when you answer the door, look through the spyhole first, put the chain on. It could be a violent spouse or partner looking for the woman he had assaulted and who had escaped from him. So Sylvia drew back her hand, put on the chain, lifted up the little circular flap over the spyhole, and squinted through it.

   An old, anxious-looking woman was what she saw. She slipped off the chain and opened the door. The woman held out a sheaf of papers fastened to a clipboard. She spoke as if she had learned her words by heart and painstakingly. “I wonder if you would care to put your name to the Kingsbrook Residents’ Association’s petition? It is a protest against the residential home where they plan to make a children’s playground.”

   “Do you mean The Hide?” said Sylvia.

   “That is what they call it, yes. You may care to read some literature I have here first. It fully explains the situation and why the Kingsbrook Residents are so strongly opposed to it.”

   Sylvia had difficulty suppressing her laughter. She put one hand up to her mouth, took a deep breath, and said in a polite tone, “This is The Hide.”

   “This is? This house?” The woman couldn’t have sounded more aghast. She rallied, as people do, by taking refuge in unreasoning attack. This hadn’t been learned in advance. “How on earth is one supposed to know? There’s no name up, there’s no number. It ought to be against the law for a house not to have a number.”

   “Right. I’ll tell the police,” said Sylvia, and closing the door, burst into laughter. She would tell the police, she’d tell her father if she saw him that evening. It would amuse him. She climbed the stairs. As she crossed the first landing, a black woman with two small children in tow came out of one of the bedrooms. Black people were thin on the ground in Kingsmarkham and its environs, though there were more now than a year ago, and Sylvia wondered where she had come from and what her particular story was. She was tall and majestic, her braided hair wound and woven into a crown on top of her head. Sylvia said hello and that it was raining again and passed on to the top floor.

   Lucy Angeletti was there on the phone. It didn’t sound as if she was answering a distress call. Sylvia heard Lucy say, “Yes, well, thanks. If someone will call this morning, I’ll show him or her the letter I’ve had. Good-bye.”

   Sylvia raised an eyebrow.

   “A death threat,” Lucy said. “Anonymous, of course. You have got my wife. If she don’t come back, I will kill you, bitch.”

   “Was that the police you were phoning? Are they sending someone round?”

   “It won’t be your dad,” said Lucy, laughing. “He’s too high-ranking. But just so that they know. I’ll leave you to it, then, shall I? We’ve got a new woman coming in any minute. She’s been at the Pomfret police house all night with a baby and a two-year-old. She’ll have our last avail able room, and after that I don’t know what we’ll do. And now I must get over to Myringham.”

   From the window, Sylvia watched the woman arrive. She came in a taxi, for the payment of which Sylvia knew the Social Services Department would have provided her with a voucher. The baby was tiny, snuggled up like a nestling bird in the harness the woman wore across her thin chest. The toddler was crying, pushing fists into his eyes. Lucy came out of the front door and down the steps and took the case the woman had brought out of the back of the cab. The driver did nothing to assist her. The voucher, Sylvia thought, probably didn’t allow for a tip. She watched the taxi reverse down the drive between the green banks of shrubs and was back to her desk when the phone started ringing.

   “The Hide. How can I help you?”

   Silence. There usually was silence or else a hurried rush of speech. Most women were embarrassed about phoning. Guiltless, they were ashamed. After all, they were complaining to outsiders about the man they had chosen for their life partner. They often began with excuses for them selves or for the man who had beaten them. While the silence endured, she thought of the woman she had spoken to the other night, the one whose husband abused her because he said she was mad and would only stop when she found a cure for her madness. From her, once she had unburdened herself, they had heard no more, and Sylvia had no way of knowing if her advice to go to the police had been taken.

   She said again, “This is The Hide. How may I help you?”

   A voice said abruptly, “Is that the Women’s Aid Federation of England?”

   “No, this is The Hide helpline. We offer you the same kind of service as the Women’s Aid Federation. Can I help you?”

   “What will you - what will you do for me?”

   Sylvia spoke gently. “Won’t you tell me what the problem is? Has someone hurt you? Have you been hurt?”

   “It was last night. Before he left for work. He’s at work now, he’ll be back around eleven, maybe sooner. I thought he’d broken my arm, but he hasn’t. It’s not broken if I can move it, is it? I’m all over bruises and my face is a real sight.”

   Sylvia looked at the clock. It was nearly ten-thirty. She didn’t ask why the woman hadn’t phoned before, why she had waited so long. She guessed what it must have cost her to have phoned at all, the sacrifice of pride and privacy, the revealing to a stranger what her marriage had come to.

   “The best thing for you to do is go straight to your nearest police station. Are you in Kingsmarkham?” The woman wouldn’t want to give her address, Sylvia sensed, but she got a grudging murmur of assent. “Would you tell me your name?”

   “I’d rather not.’

   “That’s fine. That’s quite all right. It doesn’t matter. Go to Kingsmarkham Police Station. Do you know where it is? It’s in the High Street at the beginning of the Pomfret Road, opposite Tabard Road. I’ll phone them and alert them to expect you. Will you do that?”

   “Oh, I don’t know . . .”

   “I’ll phone them as soon as I’ve said good-bye to you. I’ll tell them to expect you in half an hour.”

   “Good-bye,” the voice said abruptly. “Thank you. Good-bye.”

   The phone went dead and a dial tone began. Sylvia had no means of knowing if her caller would take her advice, but she phoned Kingsmarkham Police, spoke to Sergeant Camb, whom she had known since she was in her teens, and told him to expect the arrival of a woman with a badly bruised face, name unknown. The phone rang immediately when she put the receiver down. A man this time.

   “Fucking bitch,” said the voice. “Frigid lesbian cow. Do you know what I’m going to do to you? I’m going to . . .”

   Sylvia held the receiver at arm’s length. She noted that the hand holding it was shaking, her whole arm was trembling. Lucy had laughed when Sylvia told her the last time it had occurred and said she knew all about that shaking and trembling, it had happened to her, but it wouldn’t always. Sylvia would get used to these calls and eventually take them in her stride.

   Obscenities gobbled and chattered out of the receiver. Sylvia put it down and drew a deep breath. Was it the husband of the woman who wouldn’t give her name? Had he come home while she was still talking? Sylvia desperately hoped not. That was the worst of this job. Half the time, more than hall you didn’t know what the outcome had been, you couldn’t guess the next phase in a caller’s perilous life.

   No more calls came for half an hour, three-quarters of an hour. Then the phone rang. Perhaps because there had been silence for so long, the bell seemed more than usual ly loud and insistent. A shrill phone bell, a soft, cultured voice.

   “My name is Anne. I don’t want to give you my surname.”

   “That’s fine,” said Sylvia. “Will you tell me what your problem is?”

   A hesitation, then in a slightly bewildered tone, “But surely it’s always the same problem isn’t it?”

   “Basically, perhaps it is. The details vary Usually it’s a woman who’s been hurt, but not always. It may not be physical, it may be psychological abuse.”

   The laugh Anne gave was unearthly, cold and echoing, the least humorous laughter Sylvia had ever heard. “Oh, there’s nothing psychological about my hurt, I can tell you.”

   “I’d like to help you.” Sylvia hazarded the Christian name she didn’t entirely believe in. “I’d really like to help you, Anne. Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

   “I’d have to see you, I’d have to be face-to-face with someone, it’s a long story it would take days, weeks.”

   Anne stopped and a silence followed. Sylvia listened to the silence, discerning faint breathing sounds.

   Then, piteously, desperately, a cry for help if Sylvia had ever heard one came on a thin, keening note out of the receiver: “What shall I do?”

   “Are you in Kingsmarkham?”

   “Yes”

   “Is there anyone else in the house with you?”

   “He’s in the garden. The baby’s with him. I can see them from the window. Oh, God, he’s coming in, I can’t talk, I shouldn’t have rung you, he’ll want to know who I was speaking to - what shall I say?”

   “Phone again when you’re alone,” Sylvia said in the calmest tone she could muster. “I’ll say good-bye now.”

   There was no answer. The phone went dead. Sylvia .at hunched over the desk, her head in her hands. It had shaken her, that call. So far it was the worst she had had. There was something particularly horrible in the fact that this was a middle-class woman - yes, Sylvia had to admit this - a woman perhaps gently brought up and living in this country, in this town, who could speak in the tones of a victim of imprisonment and torture. She imagined the man coming into the room, taking the phone from her, hitting her with his free hand, and she shuddered.