Wexford 18 - Harm Done (30 page)

   “We grew apart. Friends do.”

   “How did you meet in the first place?”

   Her sudden distress was unexpected. “Why do I have to tell you all this? What’s it got to do with my little girl?”

   “When did you last see Miss Andrews, Mrs. Devenish?”

   “Years ago. Six or seven years.” Suddenly she grew voluble. “You ask how we met. We did a business studies diploma at the same time. Seventeen years ago now. The fact is that my husband dislikes her. He disapproves of her, she’s been married twice and divorced twice, you know.” She must have become aware of their puzzled looks. Was a friend’s complex marital history a reason for breaking a friendship? “I don’t think it’s possible in a marriage to keep a friend if the other one doesn’t like them,” she said, sounding confused, “not whether it’s the husband or the wife, do you?”

   “I’d like to go back to the night Sanchia disappeared, Mrs. Devenish.”

   Wexford looked at her in silence for a moment. With her old-fashioned ways and her antiquated ideas of marriage, her housewife’s uniform and her nervousness, a fear of an unspecified something that seemed to pervade her, she was a mystery; and as he had said to her husband, he liked mysteries to be solved. Fear, when it is lived with daily; abates only to a certain extent and then not for long, eats up its victim, ages her and wears her out, may drive her mad, kills her before her time. He had seen it happen before.

   “You don’t strike me,” he said, “as a person likely to be a heavy sleeper. Of course I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, but I would say you were rather tense, very often on edge, while your husband presents on the whole a picture of a calm, steady man under his own control. Yet you and he tell me that he is the one who takes sedatives at night, not you.”

   She tried a laugh. It was a pitiful, strained sound. “I may not look a sound sleeper, but I am.”

   “He was drugged and you’re a sound sleeper, so neither of you heard your little girl taken from her room and brought down the stairs, necessarily past your door. Remember that we know now there was no question of her being carried out through the window. She was brought along past your door and down the stairs.”

   “Most mothers,” put in Burden, “well, most parents, become light sleepers through being habituated to waking in the night when babies cry or children call out. It takes years to change that and maybe only changes after the children are grown up if at all.”

   “But you’re not one of those parents, though you’ve had three children?”

   “I heard nothing. I slept.”

   Leaving, Wexford turned back and said almost casually, “What age is your older son, Mrs. Devenish?”

   “He’s twelve.”

   “Ah, yes. He looks older. So many of them do these days. Long way off driving a car yet, then?”

   She hesitated. “He’s tried driving a car - well, round the front here and in the drive. That’s not illegal, is it? On private land?”

   “No, that’s not illegal, Mrs. Devenish.”

   “They all want to drive, you know, and Edward’s so big.”

   As they were leaving, she said suddenly, surprising them, “It was dreadful about that poor man, that police man, it was such an awful way to die.”

The report on the white VW Golf, Devenish’s birthday present to his wife, confirmed most of what Wexford had expected. No fingerprints were on the steering wheel, which still held shreds of the polythene wrap that had protected it when new. The prints of five people, Devenish’s, his sons’, Fay Devenish’s, and those no doubt of the man who had delivered it to the showroom, were all over the interior. There was nothing remarkable about that.

   Explicable only if Sanchia had been in the car was the presence of baby fingerprints and three fair hairs from the head of a small child. But did this mean she had been taken away in it on the night of her disappearance? Sanchia too had doubtless been among the admirers of the new car, had clambered all over the backseat while her brothers sat in the front and played with the gadgets, her mother uttered her pleasure and gratitude, and her father stood benignly by.

   “Can you think of a single reason why Devenish would abduct his own child?” Burden asked over a quick drink in the Olive and Dove. “What’s his motive? What could he possibly get out of it? I mean, if there was another woman involved and he saw himself as having a future with this other woman, I could just about imagine him putting the child into her keeping so that when he and his wife divorced and Fay got custody of the kids, he’d have Sanchia. I can just about imagine it, but even so it’s full of holes.”

   “Besides, if he did all that, what chance would he actually have of getting away with it?” said Wexford. “Precious little. If Sanchia wasn’t found beforehand, once he moved in with this woman, she would be. And there is no woman, or if there is, he and she have been to such elaborate pains to conceal her existence as is only compatible with their having been planning this abduction since the affair began.”

   Burden stared into the sparkling creamy head on his bitter like a clairvoyant looking into a crystal ball. “You know something? I don’t believe in those threatening letters. I think Devenish invented them in a clumsy effort to put us off investigating him. If he’d had them, why not keep them? Why not, at any rate, keep one? All that stuff about the letters being particularly literate, the biblical-sounding bit, that was just put in to make us think him a discerning person who’d know good prose when he saw it?”

   “You may be right. If we only knew why Sanchia was taken, we’d be a long way toward finding her. There’s no motive for taking her nor for hiding her. No reason for taking the child from her home and torturing his wife in the process. I can see how, the mechanics of it I mean, but no matter how hard I try to imagine it, I can’t come up with why.”

   “And can you come up with why some villain would want to kill Ted Hennessy? For nothing. For simply refusing to understand facts that had been explained a hundred times. Can you? I can’t.”

When her car broke down on the old bypass, Lynn had given up thinking about her entrapment of Vicky. After all, she had made several more attempts after the strange experience with the threesome couple, and all had come to nothing. Vicky, she now believed, had gone to ground, had abandoned this curious plan of hers to recruit young women to do her housework - if that had been her motive - and settled down to life with or without Jerry in her own home wherever that might be. Besides, Lynn was starting to feel guilty. She shouldn’t have embarked on this enterprise without permission.

   On her way back to Framhurst home from work she had called in on Laura Hennessy. Laura wasn’t a friend of hers and Ted hadn’t been a friend, but they had worked together and Lynn had liked him and, besides, it was such an awful tragedy and, as she put it to Laura, such a waste. Two small children were left fatherless, there was a big mortgage outstanding on the house, and if that would be covered by the compensation, it was still a worry. Lynn left the semidetached house in Orchard Road in a dismal frame of mind, thinking what a hazardous occupation hers was, what risks she and her fellows daily ran and how little thanks, or indeed respect, they got for it.

   There is no moment convenient for one’s car to break down, but some moments are less maddening than others. It shouldn’t happen on a dark, wet night when one’s boyfriend is away on business, one’s contemporary and fellow officer has been burnt to death, and there seems no one in the whole world worth talking to. A consolation was that when the engine simply died, the Fiesta wasn’t in the fast lane but far over on the left and no other traffic was on the road in either direction. It died, the car slowed down and seemed to collapse hopelessly, though of course it was all in one piece and all that had happened was that it refused to go. Lynn tried everything to make it start, but it wouldn’t. She wasn’t mechanically minded. She blessed the absence of traffic on the road - a lorry passed her and then a motorbike - because she didn’t want help from others. The only thing to do, the obvious thing, was to call the special number she had for the RAC. They would come as soon as they could and that might be very soon, in no more than ten minutes.

   The rain had stopped and a misty orange moon appeared. Afterward Lynn blessed the fact that she hadn’t dropped her mobile onto the seat before she got out of the car. It was the merest chance that she didn’t do this because she couldn’t imagine needing the phone while simply standing outside the car to breathe the fresh night air and waiting for the RAC man. Probably it reflected her police training never to be separated from her phone.

   The hazard lights on the Fiesta still worked though the motor didn’t. They flashed on and off, on and off, in the darkness. The trees, the dense woods along both sides of the dual carriageway in this section, made it dark and mysterious and, strangely on a wet road at night, beautiful. For the endless rain, the torrential or drizzling or misty or steady rain, the relentless daily rain, had fed these beeches with their feather fronds, these long-leaved chest nuts, these limes and hornbeams and oaks, so that they were greener than Lynn had ever seen them, greener and lusher and fresher and more luxuriant. It took her car breaking down to make her appreciate trees, she thought, and she moved to the woodland edge to look down the aisles between the trees where the rain dripped from glossy leaves, brilliant emerald in the pale moonlight.

   A car drawing up made her turn around. She thought it was the RAC man, but it wasn’t. A white car and a woman at the wheel, leaning across and out of the passenger window to ask her if she needed help. Lynn nearly said she had already called the RAC, thank you very much, and he would be along any minute, but then she noticed that the woman was middle-aged and thickset, with unusually luxuriant gray hair. Tension gripped her, tautening her stomach muscles, and she forgot about not doing things on her own initiative.

   “I don’t really want to wait here for them by myself though. If you would just take me to a garage. I’m a stranger round here but I’ve been told there’s an all-night one at the Myfleet exit. That would be very kind.”

   Lynn had never before heard herself sound so naive and sweetly girlish. The woman pushed open the door and she got in, praying that the RAC man wouldn’t come until they were on their way. Then, sitting next to the woman who could be Vicky, who surely was Vicky, feeling really bad about the poor RAC man on his way to going off duty, maybe, and home to his family and his dinner, and who would come and find her gone, the car abandoned, and wonder what on earth had happened to her.

   This he wouldn’t guess, though. She burbled a little more to the woman about how kind she was and how awful it would have been if she hadn’t come along because she, Lynn, was terribly nervous about being out alone on alone road in the dark one read such awful things. It was getting more likely to be Vicky by the minute, for she hadn’t even turned around to face in the direction of the Myfleet exit but was speeding up the bypass toward the Myringham turn. Lynn didn’t want to show anxiety yet, it wasn’t in keeping with her trusting and girlish pose. She had studied Vicky head, quite sure now that that thickly waved, dense coiffure was a wig, had had a good look around the car, had actually said what a lovely car it was, and now she was watching where they were going and telling Vicky the scenery was quite beautiful around here, she’d had no idea.

   Then Vicky said it, what Lynn had been waiting for: “By the way, my name’s Vicky

   “Lynn.”

   “Soon be at this garage of yours. Turn left up here.”

   Vicky turned left, squeezing the car down a lane about as wide as Lynn’s double bed. The fronds on the high bank, hart’s-tongue ferns and dog’s mercury and lords-and-ladies, brushed wetly along the side of the car. Now was the time, Lynn thought, to say this didn’t look much like the way to the garage, that would be the authentic remark to make and utter in an increasingly nervous tone, but she didn’t make it and Vicky didn’t seem to notice.

   Where were they? On the way to Myringham by a tortuous back route? Certainly they were nowhere near Sayle and the Chorley bungalow, but by now a good fifteen miles away. But Vicky made her living house-sitting for people, didn’t she? There had been other Sunnybanks since Rachel Holmes, at least one other Vicky had cared for and in which she had entertained Jerry. She was going to one of them now, Lynn thought, with that little inner gasp and catching of breath that denotes excitement. She looked at her watch. Ten to ten. God, she didn’t want to have to stay the night, but if there was no help for it . . .

   The car crawled through this narrow, wet, green tunnel of a lane, came out into a slightly wider road with a little spurt like a sigh of relief. The car turned left and Lynn saw in its headlights a signpost pointing to Myringham as five miles away and Upper Brede as three. Now was the time, she thought, to express anxiety: “This isn’t where I saw the garage.”

   “It was closed,” Vicky said. “There’s an all-night one at Upper Brede.”

   Lynn didn’t want to sound too intelligent. On the other hand, excessive stupidity might arouse suspicion. “Will they have a mechanic, do you think, or just petrol pumps?”

   “They’ve a mechanic. Don’t worry. I’ve used them many times.” She smiled as if she were looking at Lynn and not at the road ahead. “Now amuse me. Tell me about yourself After all, I’ve put myself out to give you a helping hand, haven’t I? The least you can do is talk.”

   Vicky sounded suddenly quite cross and indignant. It must be a cue, Lynn thought, for her to start being frightened. But she did as she was told, or an approximation to what she was told, and gave Vicky an account of an entirely fictitious young woman who lived with her parents in Stowerton, had been driving their car home from an evening spent with an old school friend - a girl, of course - in Kingsmarkham. She was nineteen years old and maybe Vicky would find it funny, but she hadn’t got a boyfriend. She worked as a veterinary assistant in Kingsmarkham, but that wasn’t nearly as grand as it sounded. It mostly involved clearing up messes and scrubbing floors. Lynn was proud of herself for managing to put a quite audible exclamation mark at the end of that sentence.