Wexford 18 - Harm Done (20 page)

   He could tell she was relieved, she didn’t really want to know, it might be too unpleasant. But she had to ask, her husband would expect her to ask. He could almost hear her thoughts.

   “Will you let me have her address, please, Mrs. Chorley?”

“Yes, of course, I’ll be glad to.”

   He was positive it was false. Not that it didn’t look all right, just a normal Myringham address, a poor street of terraced houses between the bus station and, ironically, the police station. But it would be a place this Victoria Smith – ‘Smith’ indeed, was it likely? - would have lighted on by consulting a street plan or a driver’s road map. He thanked Mrs. Chorley, promised to let her know what came of it, and on the doorstep asked her a final question.

   “A phone? Yes, of course we have one. It’s in my bedroom. But I mostly use a mobile and have it with me when I’m out in the garden.”

   If anything more was needed to confirm Rachel’s account, this was it. The phone was in the principal bed room, and Vicky had kept that bedroom door locked. He went back to the car. Mrs. Chorley would have some thing to tell her husband when he returned home from his long commuting that evening. Was he the kind of man who would be interested and laugh and long to know the outcome? Or the other kind, one only too happy to have an excuse for admonishing and berating his wife for her carelessness?

   Rachel was sitting in the back, mouth set, brows drawn together. “Can I go back to Essex now?”

   “Sorry; Rachel,” said Karen, “we’ve got a few more questions we’d like answers to.” She was driving. “Back to the police station, sir?”

   Wexford nodded. He said nothing.

   They went back through Pomfret. After about ten minutes Rachel said, “I haven’t done anything wrong, you know. You haven’t any right to keep on at me like this.” When neither Wexford nor Karen replied, Rachel repeated what she had said, but more querulously.

   “You’ve done your best to obstruct police business,” Wexford said quietly, “and you’re lucky not to be charged with that.”

Tasneem Fowler was a woman of Pakistani parentage, born in west London, who had been married at seventeen to an Englishman and had two children before she was twenty At the group therapy sessions sometimes conduct ed by Griselda Cooper, Tasneem had told the others that for years she had endured her husband’s brutality and when he beat her, as he did most frequently on a Saturday night, she had never called the police. She was afraid that if she did so, Terry Fowler, the breadwinner, would be taken away and the family broken up. But when he broke her jaw and knocked out three of her teeth - previously he had never knocked out more than one at a time - after a weeklong stay in hospital, she had been afraid to go home and had come to The Hide.

   Things should have been better for her after that, and in many respects they were. Some satisfactory dental work had been done on her damaged mouth, she had the promise of a flat from Kingsmarkham Borough Council, and she had signed up with Myringham University as a mature student to take a BA degree. But when she came to The Hide, she had had to leave her sons behind. They were only six and four and got on well with their father, who had never raised his hand to them. Tasneem had a legal separation from her husband and awaited a divorce, but she had no chance of getting custody of Kim and Lee while she had no home.

   What she hadn’t aired at the group therapy was that every day she spoke to her friend and former next-door neighbour in Titania Road, Maria Michaels, to ask about the boys, how they were and sometimes if they had forgotten her. She phoned from the pay phone in the hall at The Hide or Maria phoned her. Tasneem was afraid to go home to see them, and their father wouldn’t allow them to come and see her.

   “I’ll go and see them if you like,” Sylvia said to her. “I’ll say I’m a social worker. Well, I am a social worker.”

   “You’re very kind.”

   “I know how I’d feel if I were separated from my boys.”

   Sylvia felt like crying but she controlled herself, and next day she went around to the Muriel Campden Estate and gained admittance to 27 Titania Road by saying she was from the council’s Family Department. Terry Fowler was a weedy little man and as fragile-looking as his wife. Sylvia, who was a big woman, tall and well-built, thought that if he tried anything with her, she’d give him as good as she got, she wouldn’t stand for it. But she knew how fallacious was this argument. Men are stronger than women, and abused women are often too demoralized even to try to fight back.

   He might be little, but he was as aggressive as a small game bird. A frustrated sergeant major, Sylvia thought, one who wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of finding himself in that position but who nourished secret dreams of power and bullying. Realized through domination of his little boys? She didn’t think so. Although he spoke curtly to her, barking out “yes” and “no” and “right,” with them he was gentle and patient. People were odd.

   Out in the hall, as she was leaving, the older boy, Kim, said, “Our mummy’s gone away and she’s never coming back.”

   A heartstrings wrencher if ever there was one, Sylvia thought as she walked back along Oberon Road. That was something she wouldn’t be telling. She had hoped to have a moment alone with those boys, to tell them their mother sent her love, but there had been no opportunity. When she got home, she phoned The Hide and spoke to Tasneem, telling her that she had been to Titania Road and that all was well, the children were happy and healthy. Tempted to tell a lie, to say they missed their mother and sent her messages, she restrained herself. It wouldn’t do.

   After Sylvia had rung off, Tasneem remained where she was, in the big hallway of The Hide, holding the receiver. She had felt a real physical pain in the area where her heart was when Sylvia had said the boys were happy. Healthy was one thing, was good, but that they were happy, which meant happy without her, was one of the greatest hurts she had ever known, worse than when Terry smashed up her face. Perhaps Sylvia had made it up, perhaps she thought hearing Kim and Lee were happy would please her. Maria Michaels never said anything like that. She only said the children were okay. Just that, just okay. But Tasneem had understood. She knew okay meant they weren’t ill or in danger and that was all she really wanted. Once more unhooking the phone from the wall, she put twenty pee in and dialed Maria’s number. Best to do it now before there was a queue for the phone as there often was in the evening.

   Maria answered. She was Tasneem’s friend and a nice woman, but she had this funny habit of calling you “my darling” almost every sentence she spoke.

   “Happy, my darling? Who told you that? . . . A social worker? You want to steer clear of the social, my darling. Need I say more?”

   “You mean they’re not happy?” Now thinking of them being miserable was just as bad.

   “Now I didn’t say that, my darling. But you know what kids are. They miss their mummy, naturally they do, so you couldn’t call them exactly over the moon. Now I’ve got some news for you. That old pedo’s come home, that Orbe. You never knew him, did you? Before he went to prison, I mean. You weren’t here then, my darling, you’re too young, but he’s come back as large as life.”

   “What’s a pedo?”

   “A ped-o-phile, one of them that messes about with children, only this one murdered them as well.”

   Tasneem began to cry. She wailed and sobbed and banged her head against the wall until Lucy Angeletti came down the stairs to see what was going on.

When she had given a precise description of Vicky and Jerry filling in all sorts of details like eye color and the clothes he and Vicky had worn, and coming as near to estimating their ages as she could, Rachel returned to her insistence that while at Sunnybank she had been made to do housework, cook, and mend clothes. “And it’s got nothing to do with The Franchise Affair,” she said sulkily. “It really happened.” She shrugged her shoulders as if exasperated by the whole exercise. “Jerry never said a word, he just sat there and stared at me. I’ll tell you something, though, something I’ve just remembered, as a matter of fact. Vicky wasn’t very well. I mean she’d something wrong with her. She coughed a lot and she got tired. It was that which made me . . .”

   “Made you what, Rachel?”

   “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

   Wexford looked hard at her, thinking that it probably meant a lot. But she had been helpful, she had told them more than anyone else had. He asked her to describe the car. Of course she didn’t know the registration number, but she was able to tell him it was “average size” and what she rather surprisingly called “middle of the market”; a white, or rather cream, car and an automatic.

   “Now I’d like to know why they let you go and how they did.”

   “They just did.” she said in her sullen mode. “I’d vacuumed the place and dusted, and I said I was going. ‘I’m going now,’ I said, and she just said I could and she’d drive me back.”

   “Just like that? They abducted you and virtually imprisoned you and drugged you, they’d forced you to work and do menial tasks, yet when you said you were going they didn’t argue, they just agreed.”

   “Not Jerry. Jerry never spoke.”

   “Right. Vicky, then. Vicky just agreed?”

   “I’ve told you.”

   “I’m wondering what else happened in that house, Rachel. Did you do any damage to something or some one? Did you do something you think might get you into trouble? Is that it?”

   “I didn’t do anything!” she shouted. “You’ve called me a criminal but it’s what was done to me you should be thinking about. What was done to me.”

   “All right, Rachel. So Vicky drove you home, did she?”

   “No, she didn’t drive me back, she just took me to the bus stop and left me there, and I waited for hours before the Kingsmarkham bus came. Can I go back to Essex now or is that too much to ask?”

   “You can go.”

   After she had gone, Wexford looked at all the collated information gathered that day. It seemed that the Devenish extended family and friends could all be cleared of suspicion. Apart from that, the most useful piece of evidence had come from the people living opposite Woodland Lodge. They were a couple called Wingrave. During the night Sanchia had been taken, Moira Wingrave had seen a car driven out of the Devenishes’ drive, at about two in the morning.

   Wexford blessed insomniacs, not those like Stephen Devenish but the ones who never took sleeping pills. Wakeful, Moira Wingrave had seen car lights through her bedroom curtains, had got up to look, not because she was suspicious but for something to do, something to look at, to distract her mind from those awful hours of sleeplessness. And of course she had looked at the clock, some thing she did at least once an hour throughout the night.

   By the time she got to the window, walking slowly and carefully so as not to wake her husband, the car had come out of the Woodland Lodge drive and its headlights blazed in her face, dazzling her, almost blinding her, so that she had been unable to tell what color it was, still less its make and registration number. She couldn’t tell who was driving it, man or woman.

   No other neighbour had seen anything. No one had heard any sounds from Woodland Lodge. And yet a small child had been carried out of that house by a stranger, awakened from sleep, lifted from her bed, taken down a ladder, put into a strange car, all without uttering a cry. Her abductor could have covered her mouth; she would have struggled and kicked. He or she could have gagged her, carried her away inside a sack. Wexford contemplated such horrors grimly. But he didn’t believe in them. “The case of the child who didn’t cry in the night,” he said.

   “I suppose she could have been drugged,” said Burden in his gloomy way. ‘We know Vicky uses drugs. Could she have been given Rohypnol?”

   “She still had to be wakened from sleep by someone she didn’t know. She still had to see a strange face looking down at her. Did this stranger clap a gag over her mouth while he injected her with something in a hypodermic? By the way, a young couple live at the Myringham address. William Street is a tarred-up former slum between the nick and the bus station. Yuppies live there in jerry-built cottages that were put up to last ten years and have lasted, more or less, for a hundred.”

   “Jerry-built,” said Burden. “How appropriate.”

   “Only unfortunately it isn’t. The occupiers have never heard of him or his mother, or whatever she is.”

   Burden, who usually left this sort of intuitive speculation to Wexford, said surprisingly, “I wonder why she picked ‘William Street. Can there be a William Street in the entire country that isn’t a squalid dump? Why choose that particular place?”

   “There’s a William Street in London, in Knightsbridge, that’s very grand, but I know what you mean. Are you saying that she had some connection with the place? Used to live there once or her parents did or someone she knew well? And that’s why she picked it?”

   “A person of limited imagination would do that. It might be worth doing a house-to-house. Pity we haven’t got a photo. Or the number of that car.”

   “If we had a photo and a car number, we’d have found her by now, Mike. But let’s do your house-to-house. Or Myringham will. They’ve only got to cross the road.” Wexford got up. “It’s late and we’ve got that Hurt-Watch meeting in the morning.”

Detective Sergeant Vine had talked to Moira Wingrave at two when she had told what she had heard the previous night. Although not an excitable man, rather a discreet man with a deadpan face, Vine must have shown her something of what he had felt at receiving from her the single piece of real evidence he had retrieved from his afternoon’s slog. For, after he had gone, from originally being angry with herself for not having seen or heard more, exasperated for failing to notice that car number, she began to feel herself an important contributor to this inquiry With luck she might even get on to television or at least into the Kingsmarkham Courier.

   That would take some manoeuvring, she thought, as she remembered the policeman telling her that everything she said was in confidence and he would be grateful if what she had told him she kept to herself. But the disappearance of the little Devenish girl would certainly be on the radio and television news, and once it was “in the public domain” - Moira liked this phrase and repeated it to herself - she would be free to talk to whom she chose and particularly tell of the significant part she had played in the investigation of a kidnapping.