Wexford 18 - Harm Done (35 page)

   “My husband will be home in a minute.”

   “That’s fine. It’s best for you not to be alone too much. But it’s not a reason for your not finding a photograph for me. All we have at present is a poor, smudgy shot taken by the Courier, and we don’t even have the original.”

   “I saw that picture in the paper,” she said, as if answering him, as if explaining. “The person who took it, I didn’t even know they were taking it.”

   “Perhaps you’ll have a look now.” A conviction that Devenish’s homecoming would put an end to everything useful he could accomplish here made him urgent. “Please, Mrs. Devenish.”

   She went reluctantly. They had been in the living room and he heard her go into the study, then upstairs. Once more he asked himself why the missing little girl wouldn’t or couldn’t speak, why those boys’ eyes were so troubled, and a fresh question, also to be unanswered, was why their mother had cried when he had simply asked her elder son if he was fond of his sister. And did she now dislike Jane Andrews so much that she wept at the imputation the woman might be her friend?

   She came back and he noticed changes in her. She had powdered her face and made up her eyes and mouth, put on perfume and changed her shoes for a more elegant pair. Something had been done to make her hair look thicker, and the resulting arrangement had been sprayed with lacquer.

   “Here,” she said, “I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

   Two snapshots. He could see at a glance that they were pairs or groups of people, not a single one of the child alone, but now was no time to take a closer look.

   Fay Devenish jumped at the sound of her husband’s key in the lock.

   Wexford said quickly, “May I take these? They’ll be returned to you, of course.”

   “Yes, take them.”

   She might have been a spy passing the plans to an enemy agent, so low and urgent was her voice, more a hiss than a whisper. She stood up, running her bands down her dress as if she could smooth away weariness and pain and anxiety.

   “I was just leaving,” Wexford said as Devenish came into the room.

   The man kissed his wife. Not a casual kiss but passionate, the kind of kiss, Wexford thought, a little embarrassed, that should never be bestowed and received in the presence of others. Devenish’s lips lingered on Fay’s passive, half-open mouth, then he drew slowly away. To Wexford he extended his hand, smiling, warm, said, amazingly, that he was afraid they were giving the police a great deal of trouble. Wexford resisted saying, as he always did resist, that he was only doing his job. Walking back to his car, he asked himself if it was his imagination that Mrs. Devenish had wanted him to stay longer, would have been content for him to sit down and talk it all over once again. Yet she had dressed up for her husband’s homecoming and responded grate fully to his kiss.

   “I’ve been wondering about the older boy, Edward,” Wexford said to Burden later in the Europlate. “They don’t give much away, those children. They’re cagey and secretive, their eyes are puzzled. I have even wondered if they were abused children.”

   “The father?” said Burden.

   “One would suppose so. There’s no evidence. It may be that this whole affair of Tommy Orbe put the idea into my head, and it’s hardly an idea, it’s more a thought with out foundation.”

   “The fact is,” said Burden, “that child abuse is the fashion. You can’t open a newspaper without reading of some fresh terrible case somewhere. It’s ghastly but it’s not that common, and I can’t see Stephen Devenish in that role.”

   “I’m not so sure. He looks capable of violence and we know he has a bad temper. ‘What are you going to eat? Three kinds of herring with new potatoes - that’s Swedish - or maybe Hungarian goulash. Is Hungary in the European Union?”

   “God knows,” said Burden. “I’m reading the blackboard. Sparkling water to drink, inevitably?”

   “When we find that child, we’ll have a bottle of the Widow.”

   Wexford ordered the herring and potatoes and Burden bacalao from Portugal. “Dried salted cod with something done to it. We had it when we were in the Algarve last year.”

   “It sounds disgusting. I got some photographs from Mrs. Devenish. D’you want to see them? They’re not up to much, just out-of-focus family groups really.”

   Burden gave the pictures Wexford laid on the table cloth a fleeting glance. “Worse than useless, I’d say. I don’t know why you’re bothering with them. Either Devenish took her or one of his sons.”

   “If it was one of those boys, Sanchia is dead.”

   Burden looked at him. “You mean Devenish could have hidden her somewhere, he may even have engaged a nanny and set her and the nanny up in a rented flat somewhere, that’s a possibility. But if one of her brothers took her, he must have killed her. He’d have nowhere to hide her and no wish to hide her, as far as I can see. He’d have taken her because he was jealous of her position in the family, killed her to get her out of the way - and then what?”

   “Hidden the body.” Wexford poured mineral water for both of ‘them. “And hidden it somewhere nearby. His mother says he can drive. Perhaps he can. He may be able to drive a car in theory but I doubt very much if he could manoeuvre it out of that drive by night. They’re both b boys, either of them could have carried her, and probably she wouldn’t have cried if either had lifted her out of her cot. So if Edward did it - or come to that, if Robert did it - he killed his sister somewhere in the garden, possibly by strangling her, and back we come to your point.”

   “What then? Either is strong enough to carry a three- year-old some distance, but dig a grave and bury her? How long would it have taken? Would they even know how to set about it?”

   Their food was brought by the Europlate’s proprietor, a man who for some reason always wore a starched and spotlessly white apron, though he was not the cook. In the opinion of some of his patrons it was done to give him a French appearance. He combined in his looks supposedly typical features of many of the Union’s members, being black-haired and moustached like a Spanish bullfighter, with the regular thin-lipped profile of the Scandinavian, the olive skin of the Greek, and the high cheekbones of the Slav. Some said his name was Henri, others Henrik or Heinrich, and he was called by all these. But his English was spoken in the pure accent of the Lowland Scot, and now, as he set each plate down, he expressed the opinion that a wee bi’o’flsh would set them up for the day, as it fed the brain.

   “I can do with some of that,” Burden said when Henri had returned to the back regions. “We know it wasn’t one of the boys, though, don’t we? It has to be Devenish, or according to my as yet unfed brain, it has to be. Why he took her and where he put her we don’t know, but we can be pretty sure if he took her, she’s alive.”

   “Fathers do kill their children, you know that.”

   “Sure, and it’s a monstrous crime but it’s usually accidental, the result of violent abuse. Devenish had no reason to do it.”

   “No reason in your estimation, maybe. How about jealousy? How about seeing her as the one person with the power of coming between him and his wife? Of separating him from his wife? He looks as if he’s in love with his wife. He greets her as passionately as if they’ve known each other a year and been parted for the past six months. We know a lot about these people by now, Mike, but we know very little of their feelings. What do we ever actually know of anyone’s feelings, come to that, even when they our nearest and dearest? Devenish may have disliked and resented Sanchia. Sanchia may have been her mother’s favourite, preferred over her sons - preferred over him?”

   “I sometimes wish,” said Burden, “that we had ordinary normal people to deal with.”

   “Are there any? Do you realize, Mike, that you’ve contrived a possible scenario for Devenish? I don’t think you meant to, but you have. He’s sexually abused all his children and now turned to the little girl. This happens in her bed during the night. He doesn’t in fact take a sleeping pill, he only tells his wife he does. That night he paid his usual visit to her, accidentally killed her, carried her body downstairs, and buried her in the garden.”

   “How about the car, then?”

   “Not in the garden. No, you’re right. He took the body away somewhere and buried it.”

   Burden put down his knife and fork. He wiped his mouth on a dark blue napkin with the EU logo in its center and picked up the menu. Suddenly he said, “I don’t feel like eating anymore. I was going to have the Olde English Summer Pudding or the zabaglione, but all this talk of what Devenish may or may not have done has rather put me off. Silly, isn’t it? I’m not usually like that.”

   “I shall have a pudding,” said Wexford stoutly. “I shall have something called rød grø, which I am certain I’m not pronouncing correctly. As Henri said, I have to feed my brain.”

   “Are you going to arrest him?”

   “Henri?”

   “No, Devenish, of course.”

   “Not yet,” said Wexford. “He won’t run away, you know. He’s absolutely confident he’s safe. I’d say he always is, in everything he does. He knows best, he is right, Devenish rules okay. Doubtless it’s the secret of his success, total confidence in himself.”

   “I’d like to see what happens to this famous confidence,” said Burden viciously, “when we get him in court.”

“I’m dining with a client - remember?”

   Once upon a time, when her husband made that remark, and made it ten minutes before he was going out to his engagement, Sylvia would, in his words, have laid into him. She had been known to lean against the front door, holding it shut, while she lectured him on her rights as a woman and told him that the children were his as well as hers. But she had spent half the day at a seminar entitled “Psychological Abuse in Relationships,” and it was either this or, more likely, her experiences at The Hide that affected her, so that she asked herself if today’s lecturer would have on many occasions accused her of verbal abuse. It chastened her, she liked to think of herself as virtuous, upright, and politically correct, and she forced out pleasant words: “That’s all right. I’m on a short shift; the eight to midnight, so I’ll ask Mother to have Robin and Ben, shall I?”

   “It might be best.” He said it abstractedly, then, “Do as you like. I’d better go, I’ll be late.”

   What had she expected? That he’d go down on his knees? A good-bye kiss, even a good-bye? The front door closed after him. She phoned her mother, packed the boys’ pyjamas and clothes for the morning. It was still half- term, so her father wouldn’t have to take them to school.

   Could she keep it up, being nice to Neil, if most of the time he behaved as if she weren’t there? Would they ever have sex again? Would she ever have sex again, since she couldn’t imagine it with any other man?

   She got her sons into the car and drove to her mother’s. It was strange, but often she worked so hard she didn’t notice the weather, and at six in the evening she saw for the first time that it wasn’t raining and was going to be a fine night. The sky looked different, hazy rather than clear, and the massed clouds had split into a delicate feathering. A full moon, such as was due to rise tonight, always made working on the helpline less stressful. After a particularly disturbing encounter with a woman on the helpline, she liked to stand at that window, watch the sailing moon, and look at the gardens bathed in its pale, cold light.

   Therapy, really. Her father did it too. Perhaps she had picked it up from him. Modeling herself on the parent of the opposite sex, a bad thing, said the psychologist inside Sylvia. She could have sworn that night that the moon moved - well, it did of course, but not fast, not so that one could see it move. Counsellors sometimes suggested their clients alleviate pressure by watching the tranquil movements of goldfish swimming in circles. Well, the moon was her goldfish.

   It would be a long time before night fell. The sun came out palely just as she arrived. Her father came out to meet her and welcome the boys. She knew he was trying hard to be nicer to her, just as she was trying to be nicer to Neil, and if she felt a certain resentment that her own father had to try, she didn’t show it. She kissed him back and asked herself, but only herself what was wrong with her that comparative strangers such as those people at The Hide all liked her, while her own family. . .

   “Stay a little while?” he asked her. “We were outside in the garden. It’s almost the first chance we’ve had this year. I’ll wait till after you’ve gone, then I’ll take the boys down to the river.”

   She used to get angry because her mother did the garden as well as the housework and cooking. That kind of feminism seemed old hat now. That her mother enjoyed the things she did and was very well suited to housewifery had never seemed to enter into Sylvia’s calculations. She sat down in a cane chair, and her mother brought a tray of homemade lemonade, ice-cold with lemon slices and sugared rims to the glasses.

   “You’ve got some new photos.” Sylvia hadn’t really looked at them beyond seeing that they were photographs, but as soon as she picked them up, she did.

   “They’re your father’s, something to do with work. He emptied his pockets onto the table.” Dora laughed. “You know how he does.”

   Keys, change, a perfectly ironed white handkerchief - another cause with her in the past for pontificating against male supremacy - and, these photographs. She picked up the top one. It showed a family group: man, woman, two boys a bit older than her own children, a baby in the woman’s arms. They were standing in a garden in front of a house, and Sylvia recognized the place at once. It was Ploughman’s Lane. She had once lived just down the road, though in a rather more modest house. This one was called Woodland Lodge. In her mind’s eye she could see the nameplate by the gates at the entrance to the drive. One of the finest houses up there, this was. She had been inside once, collecting for something, and she remembered the elegant, broad staircase and the carved woodwork.

   These people weren’t there then, or if they were, she didn’t recognize them. The woman who had left her in the hall and went away to find a five-pound note had been elderly. But that had been several years ago when her own boys were very small and she was very young, and she and Neil were still getting along.