Wexford 18 - Harm Done (21 page)

   On their four television sets the Wingraves had every channel it was possible to obtain. Moira managed to find a news program at three and another at three forty-five, while one of the many radio stations produced a news summary for her at five to four. The remarkable thing was that there was nothing on any of them about the child’s disappearance. This made Moira feel a mixture of excitement at being the only one to know about it - apart from the parents, of course - and indignation at the ineffectiveness of the media. When her husband came home, he’d bring the Evening Standard from London, but she’d bet anything you liked there would be nothing in it about whatever she was called, Sasha or Sandra Devenish.

   The woman who cleaned the house twice weekly came in at four. Now that her daughters were both at school, Tracy Miller did cleaning jobs all day, starting at nine in the morning, and was so much in demand that she was unable to come to Moira till mid-afternoon. This was a nuisance because Bryan Wingrave always came in at six sharp and disliked Tracy being around the place, but what could Moira do about it? She had to have a cleaner, even one who had a face like Cindy Crawford, a figure like a sixteen-year-old, and wore her long black hair in a plait down her back.

   Tracy was a bit of a mystery, anyway. She had been working here for six months now and still Moira had no idea where she lived, whether she had a husband or lived with a boyfriend or had children or what. This seemed to make her anonymous and belonging nowhere, an isolated woman who, for all Moira knew, might shut herself up in a cupboard after her day’s usefulness was over, like the vacuum cleaner she so vigorously applied. At any rate, she seemed to be a kind of recluse, friendless, discreet, and quiet. She never spoke unless she was first spoken to, and Moira wasn’t in the business of speaking to what she would have called, if she hadn’t been afraid of losing Tracy, the charwoman.

   But today she did speak to Tracy, beyond, that is, telling her there were finger marks on the mirrors and the coffee table hadn’t come up very well. The point was that she had to tell someone, and telling Tracy was really like confiding one’s secrets to a brick wall.

   She merely listened while dusting, made no response until Moira was finished, and said only, “That poor mother.”

   “Well, yes, exactly what I said to the policeman, ‘that poor mother,’ I said. But if it’s not in the public domain how can they possibly hope to catch whoever it is?”

   “Search me,” said Tracy.

   Bryan came home soon after that, bringing the evening paper with him. No missing-child story - Moira had known there wouldn’t be - and there was nothing on the BBC’s six-o’clock news either. She paid Tracy her twenty-five pounds at seven and saw her off the premises, forgetting to tell her not to say a word. But whom could she tell, anyway? No one who counted. She was a charwoman, for God’s sake.

   Quiet, secretive Tracy went home to Kingsbrook Valley Drive, an address that would very much have surprised Moira Wingrave, and to a house whose purpose she didn’t know existed. Domestic violence was what Mrs. Wingrave would have called “in the matrimonial domain” and there fore between husband and wife, a private matter to be hushed up.

   Tracy let herself in with her key and went through the house to the play area in the garden where she had the best chance of finding her children at this hour. But there she found only Tasneem Fowler, tidying up toys after the little girls’ departure. Tracy’s daughters, she told their mother, were indoors watching a video and already in their night-dresses ready for bed.

   “Thanks, you’re a star,” said Tracy, who could talk volubly to people she liked. “Hey, what d’you reckon, there’s a kid gone missing up in millionaires’ row. The old bat I work for told me. Little girl, under three, and from one of the biggest houses up there. Just goes to show money doesn’t bring happiness.”

   “Missing?” said Tasneem. “A child?”

   “Like I said, a little girl. She’s called Sandra something. I like that name, don’t you? If I ever have another one, which I’ll never have with him, so help me God, I wouldn’t mind calling her Sandra.”

   But Tasneem wasn’t listening. She gave a loud cry, halfway to a scream. “It’s that pedo! Up where my kids are. It’s that pedo’s taken her!”

The morning was beautiful, the sky blue and the sun shining through a thin veil of mist. On the Muriel Campden Estate all was still and silent but for birdsong from the park. Those few people who went to work early were just getting up. Soon after seven the milk float came around and the milkman left a bottle or two - no longer pint glass bottles but litre-sized plastic cartons - on most doorsteps. Half an hour later the sixteen-year-old Darren Meeks arrived, pushing his stolen supermarket trolley; to deliver the papers.

   Maria Michaels, who was due to leave for work at eight-thirty; picked up her copy of the Sun from the door mat and took it to the kitchen where she was breakfasting off a cup of tea and a croissant. The phone conversation she had had with Tasneem Fowler the evening before was much on her mind, though she had said nothing about it to anyone but Monty Smith, who lived with her. There had been no opportunity, anyway, as it was ten-thirty before Tasneem had got through to her, having queued up for a long time to get to The Hide pay phone.

   The missing little girl would be the Sun’s lead story; Maria was sure of that. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t just absent from the front page, she couldn’t find it anywhere. What was going on? She took a cup of tea up to Monty, who was unemployed and therefore still in bed, and asked him what he thought.

   “It’s not right,” said Monty, taking the tea and the paper from her. “They’re hushing it up, nothing on the telly and now nothing in the paper. How would you and me feel if we’d got kids?”

   “Bloody frantic, my darling. I don’t blame the paper, though, I blame the police.”

   “They’re always on the side of the criminal,” said Monty; “Pedos, rapers, robbers, manslaughterers, you name it, they can’t do no wrong.”

   “People ought to be warned. I’ll just give Rochelle a phone before I go to work, my darling. My God, look at the time, better get cracking.”

   So Maria phoned Rochelle Keenan and, because she couldn’t remember the name Tasneem had given her, told her a child called Shawna or Shana or something was missing and the police weren’t doing a thing about it. After she had rung off, Rochelle phoned Brenda Bosworth, embellishing her story to make it more accept able to that sensation-loving woman’s ears, and telling her Tommy Orbe had snatched a baby from its own bedroom and taken it away in a stolen car. Brenda wanted to know why it hadn’t been on the telly or in the Mirror, and Rochelle said the police didn’t want it to come out that they’d left Orbe at large.

   Brenda, at that moment, was the first to call herself and Miroslav, Colin Crowne, Joe Hebden, and the Keenans by a name later taken up by the newspapers. “It’s time the Kingsmarkham Six acted,” she said.

   She went round in person to tell the news to Shirley Mitchell (who had already heard it from her sister), said the Kingsmarkham Six were mustering, shook her fist at the Orbes’ house, and passed on to notify Hebdens, Meekses and Crownes. Shirley went upstairs and looked out of the back-bedroom window from where she had a good view of the Orbes’ back garden, but it looked much the same as usual, the rusty bedstead still there, though half-hidden now by the weeds, which had grown taller by a foot.

   Her husband was about to leave for work. She told him Orbe and Suzanne had stolen a baby girl called Sarah and had her in their house.

   “Orbe’s not interested in girls,” said Tony Mitchell. “It’s always been boys with him.”

   “Then he’s changed. Being in prison’s changed him.”

   “Load of rubbish,” said Tony. “You might as well say you’ve started fancying women. Don’t you get involved. You want to keep yourself to yourself. If I’ve told you that once I’ve told you five hundred times.”

   By the time he was out of sight, heading for the bus stop in York Street, a crowd was gathering in Oberon Road, with Brenda Bosworth in the vanguard. By now the sun was hot, the mist had melted away, and the silence was broken by twenty voices chanting, “We want Orbe! We want Orbe!”

Organizing the continued search for Sanchia Devenish, Wexford was too busy to attend the Hurt-Watch meeting. Burden went in his place. Wexford had been in his office since half past eight, reviewing the progress made in tracking down Victoria Smith, or rather, the progress not made. In accordance with Burden’s suggestion, Barry Vine and two officers from Myringham had carried out a house-to- house inquiry in William Street and come up with nothing. No one recognized the middle-aged woman and the young man described, no one had heard of a Vicky or a Jerry Electoral registers going back twenty years had been consulted, but the only Victoria in William Street had been checked out and found to have died two years before.

   Wexford had stopped reading and begun thinking, just sitting there with his eyes half-closed and his hands folded, reflecting on what might make someone choose a particular false address. If not because she had once lived in that street, because she had regularly walked along it on her way to work or had been to school there or had had a parent living there or a child living there, or had gone to a dentist or a doctor or a chiropodist there. Once he had found out that no doctor or dentist or chiropodist operated from William Street, and that there was no school there and never had been, he had to think again.

   Of course it was more than possible, it was even likely, that Vicky had simply picked that address out of a street plan of Myringham. It was what he would do in the unlikely event of his needing a false address. But if not by this means, how else could he find her? His train of thought was interrupted by the phone ringing. It was Sylvia. She never phoned him at work, it was almost unheard of.

   He restrained himself from asking what was wrong, was her mother all right, and simply said a cheerful, “Hello, darling.”

   “Dad, is there a child missing in Kingsmarkham, a little girl?”

   Something tightened in his chest. “Why do you ask?”

   “I’ll tell you. One of the women at The Hide heard it at the place where she works and she told me when I came on last night. Well, not when I came on actually. Not till I’d been on quite a while. I was in the helpline room and she put her head round the door on her way to bed. It was all of eleven, otherwise I’d have phoned you.”

   It went against the grain with him to admit this care fully guarded secret, even, perhaps especially, to a member of his family. He said cautiously, “A little girl is missing, yes. There are reasons for not making it public. We hope to find her and then it need never be made public.”

   “Would the reasons have something to do with Thomas Orbe?”

   “I can’t answer that, Sylvia.”

   “Only his neighbours, all that mob that went mad the other day, they know about it. One of our women told a friend of hers on the Muriel Campden and it’ll be all round the place by now.”

   “Oh, God. Thanks for telling me, Sylvia,” and Wexford added, “You may have averted a nasty situation.”

   He didn’t say what he wanted to, that she would certainly have averted it if she had called him at eleven the previous night. Their relationship had never been so good; let it stay that way. The only thing to do now was put a call through to Superintendent Rogers and suggest some of his people get over to Oberon Road immediately. The uniformed branch was responsible for crowd control, but Wexford might as well go up there himself - why not?

   Where did that woman work, the one who had found out about Sanchia Devenish and passed on her information? He should have asked Sylvia. But no doubt it was in Ploughman’s Lane or Winchester Drive, near the Devenishes’. Too late to worry about that now, he thought, as Donaldson drove him along the High Street and turned up York Street.

   He expected to hear chanting or singing or even just roaring long before the Muriel Campden Estate was reached, but there was silence, or rather, a hush, as if up here even the normal busy sounds of a country town on a weekday had been subdued. The entrance to the triangle of streets was blocked by a police car in the familiar Mid-Sussex Constabulary scarlet, blue, and canary yellow, stationary across the road and at right angles to it. The uniformed officer at the wheel Wexford didn’t recognize. He said to Donaldson, “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

   It was hot for late April, the sun blazing down by now, white on the pavements, black in the shade. He could see a crowd ahead of him, an ambulance parked halfway along Oberon Road. It pulled away and its siren sounded just as he passed the gate of No. 20. The sight of the Orbes’ house almost stopped him short. The window panes, which the council had replaced only the day before, were once more smashed, the front door was gone, and someone, somehow, had succeeded in dislodging several tiles from the roof. Outside the gate stood Sergeant Joel Fitch and in front of the gaping hole where the front door had been a WPC called, he thought, Wendy Brodrick. The crowd, huddled together, had retreated to the green to stare.

   “Who was in the ambulance?” he asked Fitch.

   “Suzanne Orbe, sir. She got hit on the head with a brick. They threw the same bricks they threw on Sunday. Someone had piled them all up again and they just used them.”

   “Everything gets recycled these days,” said Wexford.

   “It’s a blessing the little girl wasn’t in there, sir. They’d very likely have murdered her.”

   “Where’s Mr. Rogers?”

   “Inside with Orbe. He’s going to bring him out. Here’s the van now.”

   The crowd, which had been silent, began a muttering. The sound of it rose and fell, rose again, and a woman shouted out, “Nobody’s taking me away in no Black Maria!” It was Brenda Bosworth, arm in arm with Miroslav Zlatic, who was also arm in arm with Lizzie Cromwell.

   If 16 Oberon Road had had a garage drive, things would have been much easier, but the only garages on the Muriel Campden Estate were the lockup kind, a row of them at the York Street end of Titania Road. The van driver was obliged to park against the curb, and almost before he had put the handbrake on, the crowd surged up to surround it.