Wexford 18 - Harm Done (25 page)

   She was more animated than during the whole rest of their talk. Color had come into her pale face and her eyes were so bright they seemed full of tears.

On his way home he stopped off in Ploughman’s Lane. The house Sylvia had once lived in, before she and Neil and the boys moved out into the real country, was next door but three to Woodland Lodge, if you could use such an expression about a neighbourhood in which properties were fifty yards apart. He had always liked the house, one of the smallest in this neighbourhood, its unpretentious, comfortable Arts and Crafts ashlar and gables, its simple garden with strategically placed trees. The people who had bought it had added a double garage and a glazed porch. The planning department must have allowed it, be supposed, regretting past simplicity and spaciousness. Short of cutting them down, no one could do much to spoil the beauty of the trees up here, the copper beeches at their loveliest golden red in April, the horse chestnuts in flower, the oaks just coming into amber-green leaf: That place had been called, was still called, Laburnum House. The trees after which it was named were still in bud, their yellow blossoms due to appear within days. He had never liked laburnums since Sylvia, aged three, had been rushed to hospital after eating a seed pod in her grandmother’s garden.

   The curious thought came to him that in a case like that the parents knew almost from the start their child’s fate and future. Within minutes he and Dora had been told that Sylvia’s stomach had been pumped, she was fine, she would be fine. The Devenishes knew nothing of their daughter’s whereabouts, her well-being, the state of her mind, not even if she was still alive.

   At Woodland Lodge the older boy, Edward, answered the door. He said, without waiting to be asked, “My mother’s asleep and my father’s in the garden.”

   “I’ll walk round and find your dad,” Wexford said, wondering, as he took the path that led around the back of the house, why a boy of twelve referred to his parents so formally instead of using his own gentler diminutive.

   How did people get their lawns like that? This one was like green felt, closely shaven. Stephen Devenish was standing in the middle of it, clipping the edge of the turf around a large rose bed with a pair of long-handled shears. Strange thoughts seemed to be dodging in and out of his mind today, Wexford reflected as he walked toward him, speculations and unprecedented fancies. Why on earth, for instance, did he feel that he would have much preferred to encounter Devenish when he wasn’t armed with a dangerous implement? The man was charming, gracious, courteous, patient, and civilized, wasn’t he? Not always. Not when he talked about Jane Andrews.

   And as if he read Wexford’s mind, it was to her that he immediately reverted as he laid the offensive weapon on the grass. “I’m afraid I spoke a mite roughly about Miss Andrews when I talked to you earlier.” He smiled, that ever-present smile apparent even in the worst adversity. “She meant well. No man likes to see an outsider come between him and his wife though, does he? An intervener, wouldn’t she be called?”

   “That was in divorce cases, Mr. Devenish,” said Wexford. “She was the female equivalent of a corespondent.”

   “Really?”

   “As to outsiders, as you put it, most women have women friends apart from the couples they and their husbands or partners call their friends.”

   “We don’t,” said Devenish. “We have each other. We don’t need anyone else. Come into the house.”

   Wexford followed him. They went in through the hack door into a kind of boot room and thence into a large, well-appointed, immaculate kitchen. In a dining or breakfast area, the table was laid for an evening meal for four, a white cloth instead of place mats, silver instead of bone-handled cutlery; flowers in a vase. Again Wexford thought how peculiar it was that Fay Devenish did all this on her own without help, and apparently still did it while her baby daughter was missing, while she was distraught and while her doctor had evidently sedated her and told her to rest.

   He wanted to say something like this, that frankly he was troubled, that he was like someone in a dark wood, confused and disoriented. No one could have got into this house without breaking in, but on the other hand, no one could have brought in a ladder. Most significantly, no stranger could have taken Sanchia without the child’s crying and disturbing her parents. He wanted to say it, he had begun to say it, when, unexpectedly and dreadfully, Stephen Devenish burst into tears. He flung his arms across the neatly laid table, lowered his head, and sobbed. He shook with sobs, his shoulders heaving, his hands clenched.

   Taken aback, Wexford sat opposite him patiently. There was nothing he could do, he hardly knew why he had come. Perhaps just to see this man again, this house again. He looked about him, studying his surroundings. The counters were laden with equipment of the steamer, rice-cooker, pasta-maker variety. A knife block of some dark hardwood held seven or eight horn-handled knives. The walls were hung with blue-and-white porcelain plates, Royal Copenhagen and Delft. There was a calendar of the Highlands and a cuckoo clock. Last time he was here he had heard it tell the hour, but distantly. Now, suddenly, a jaunty painted cuckoo popped out and, flapping its break, cuckooed six times.

   At the fourth cuckoo Stephen Devenish raised his face. He had been drumming on the table with his fists and had knocked over the pepper pot and the flower vase.

   One of the glasses fell over and rolled onto the floor. Wexford got up and filled another with water from the tap. He said quietly, “Here, drink this, come on,” and wondered why he couldn’t lay a hand on the man’s shoulder, why his reluctance to touch Devenish amounted to revulsion.

   “I’m a fool,” Devenish said, sitting up, taking the water. “I couldn’t help it. I keep thinking I’ll never see her again, she’s dead.” His face was dry. He had cried without shedding tears. “I’ll never see her again in this world, those are the words that go round in my head.”

   “While there’s life, there’s hope,” Wexford said in a cliché he didn’t normally use.

   “Yes, but is there life? Isn’t it much more likely there death?” Devenish drew in a long, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry I broke down like that. I love my little girl, you see. I want to see her grow up.”

   Wexford didn’t stay long after that. Incongruously, his last thought as he left that kitchen was that when Fay Devenish woke up, the first thing she would do - or would be expected to do? - was straighten, refresh, and relay that crumpled, finger-marked cloth.

So often late home that Dora no longer reproached him or even commented, Wexford nevertheless expected some kind of reproof from his elder daughter. Sylvia had called in on her mother - on her way home from work at Kingsmarkham Social Services and was sitting next to her on the sofa, the two of them drinking white wine. But instead of admonishing him she seemed anxious only to defend herself. “I’m driving, Dad, so I’m positively only having one glass.”

   He said, smiling, “You know, my dear, I can’t imagine you ever willfully breaking the law.”

   She flushed with pleasure. “Can’t you? That’s nice.”

   “If you’ve a moment, I’d like to ask you something you might call in the field of child psychology.”

   Dora sprang up. “I’ll just put your dinner in the microwave.”

   “No, don’t. I will. In a minute.” He felt a sudden distaste for the idea of expecting any such service from her. “Sit down. Stay.”

   Sylvia finished her wine and set down the glass. “I’m not a psychologist, Dad, child or otherwise, though I must say people are always taking me for one. I just did a course in it for my degree.”

   “You’ll do,” her father said. “Darwin said, I hope I can get it right, ‘Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.’ Tell me at what age you’d expect a child to start talking.”

   She shrugged. “I don’t know - eighteen months? If you mean real words and phrases. Robin was over two but Ben was talking a lot well before. I suppose it was because his brother was always talking to him.”

   “You were a very early talker, Sylvia,” Dora said. “By eighteen months you could say anything. Sheila was later.”

   “Funny how a mother remembers that. I don’t, it’s completely gone out of my head. So what would you say are the reasons behind it when a child is talking hardly at all at thirty-three months?”

   “Thirty-three months? That’s nearly three years old.” Sylvia looked dubious. “We’re discounting brain damage, I take it?”

   “Oh, I think so.”

   “He or she could be deaf. That’s a real possibility but these days I’d think that would have been checked out by thirty-three months. Or, of course, it could be some sort of emotional disturbance. Tasneem Fowler at The Hide told me her older boy stopped talking for two months after the younger one was born.”

   “But he’d been talking before?” said Wexford. “He was jealous of the newcomer and that inhibited his powers of speech?”

   “Probably. You must have some particular case in mind, Dad. What sort of home does this child of yours come from?”

   “Middle class, maybe upper middle class, plenty of money, nice home, and that’s an understatement, natural parents living together and apparently devoted, two older , brothers. I would say a much loved, much wanted child.”

   “Then I haven’t a clue,” said Sylvia.

   “I remember reading somewhere that Einstein didn’t talk till he was three,” Dora said.

   “And what on earth is that supposed to prove, Mother?”

   After Sylvia had gone he watched the nine o’clock news, then a program about a new kind of activist, the eco-warrior. A group of these people, fighting their war against genetic engineering, had uprooted a field of wheat in Shropshire and poisoned an orchard in Somerset. The wheat had been genetically altered to create a springier kind of bread and the apples were redder than normal and had no cores. He was looking at a section through a core-less apple when Dora came in and said she was taking winter clothes to the dry cleaner’s in the morning and she couldn’t find his raincoat

   “Oh, God,” he said, “I lent it to a chap called Dixon to put over his head and pretend he was a pedophile.”

   Dora gave him a strange look. “Get it back. You don’t want to lose it. It’s a Burberry”

   She switched off the television and they went to bed. He often had interesting dreams but seldom nightmares. This dream, into which he seemed to fall at once, took him and Dora years back to when they were young and their children very young. He was sitting with Dora, admiring her appearance as she brushed her long dark hair - an ordinary enough romantic cliché - when she turned around and told him quite calmly that Sheila, their baby, had disappeared, had been stolen out of her cot. She had been into the room and found the cot empty.

   His grief and terror had known no bounds. He had run through the house, calling to Sheila, begging her to come back, rushed into the street, wakened the town, the world. And then the dream shifted, as such dreams do, and he was in a television studio, being interviewed by a demonic character played by Peter Cushing. He was begging for a message to be sent to the kidnappers, offering a ransom for Sheila, and the ransom - this was the worst part, the positively most dreadful, shame-making part - was his elder daughter, Sylvia. Take her, he heard himself saying, and give me back Sheila. Then he woke up, sweating and trembling.

At midnight Lynn Fancourt, who had spent the evening at the cinema and afterward had had a drink in the Rat and Carrot with her boyfriend, got into a car that stopped for her at the north end of York Street. In fact, it had stopped for a red light. Lynn tapped on the passenger window and asked for a lift. The driver was a woman someone very young might describe as middle-aged and the passenger was a man of about thirty. They were going, the man said, to Myringham, but could drop her off in Framhurst if that was what she wanted.

   From the conversation Lynn soon knew something funny was going on, and it wasn’t the something funny she was on the lookout for. When the man suggested they stop for ten minutes in a lay-by on the old bypass, she thought it was drugs and was of two minds what to do if controlled substances made their appearance. Nick them for possession? Call the station on her mobile? But she was wrong. The car stopped and both of them got in the back with her, amorously inclined. Lynn’s discouraging tactics led the woman to say she quite understood and it would be best to go straight home where they could have their threesome in comfort.

   It occurred to Lynn then that they had taken her for a prostitute, a new phenomenon in Kingsmarkham but not unknown. She had only herself to blame for that, tapping on car windows - and at a red light, that was an irony. They were quite nice people, pleasant and gentle, and when she said she had changed her mind, they took her to Framhurst just the same and gave her their phone number in case she had second thoughts.

For more than a year now Wexford had stopped taking his local paper. The Kingsmarkham Courier had caused him more irritation with Brian St. George’s coverage of the bypass hostage-taking than he thought within the bounds of anything a man should suffer over the breakfast table. He would not go through that again, so the paper had been given up. Neither the Times nor the Independent could ever bring him so much rage, so he would stick with them.

   But since his happy relinquishment of the Courier, his newsagent had taken on a series of new paperboys, most of them inefficient. When it rained, they let the papers get wet, and if they couldn’t find the right one on top of their load, they delivered anything that came to hand: a tabloid, maybe, or the Financial Times. Any of these would have been infinitely preferable to Wexford than what he saw lying face up on his doormat. Under the masthead of an eagle with a scroll in its beak, on which the Courier name was lettered in Gothic script, the lead story leapt out at him.

   He closed his eyes, but of course he had to open them again. We always do have to. WHERE IS SANCHIA? the headline read in the largest Roman type available to the Courier’s printers, and underneath, only slightly less bold and huge, ORBE IN REFUGE WITH COPS. What the story beneath would say he guessed before he read it. The gist had come into his head the moment he saw those head lines: a baby girl had disappeared, the news had been suppressed while Orbe was spirited away, a huge cover-up was in progress. He hadn’t, though, anticipated St. George’s statement - his was the byline - that Henry Thomas Orbe was currently accommodated in a refurbished cell “with all mod cons” at Kingsmarkham Police Station.