Wexford 18 - Harm Done (36 page)

   She turned to the next photograph and the next. The baby was older here, maybe a year older. Impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl; the hair was short, the child’s expression a blank, and his or her clothes the uniform of the modern infant: tracksuit pants and sweatshirt. Mother and child were alone, and Sylvia looked closely at this one, laying it down with a sigh.

   Wexford came out of the house and sat down opposite her. He picked up the picture she had already looked at and watched her while she studied the remaining two. In neither of them could the child be clearly seen, for he or she had turned away from the camera. The father of this family was by far the most striking member of the group, dwarfing the woman and her sons, his grin broad compared with their tentative smiles.

   “Tell me something Dad. How did St. Agatha die?”

   “Don’t ask me. There’s a dictionary of martyrs in the living room.” He thought about it. “It’s on the third shelf from the bottom with all the other dictionaries.”

   Sylvia went indoors and came back with the Oxford Book of Martyrs. She didn’t open it but once again picked up one of the photographs.

   “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me who these people are?”

   “Is there any reason why you want me to?”

   “Only that the woman is a victim of domestic violence. Oh, you can’t see any bruises, you can’t see healed fractures, but that’s what she is and no doubt that grinning idiot is what you’d call the perpetrator.”

   Taken aback, he asked her how she could tell. He had been with Fay Devenish half a dozen times, and in her company and that of her husband together, and had seen nothing. Of course he had noted that she was a thoroughgoing old-fashioned housewife and that Stephen Devenish expected a high standard of cleanliness in his home; he had noticed they kept to themselves and had few friends, but that surely was a far cry . . .

   “How can I tell? Hard to say. I just can. You get to know when you’re always meeting women in her situation. There’s a vulnerable look, a cowed look, and something worn that comes into these women’s faces, especially when the abuse is sustained over a long period. Look at her now, Dad, in the light of what I’ve said.”

   He looked. He looked particularly at the picture in which she was alone with her little daughter, standing in the garden, smiling diffidently, a cautious, shy, self-deprecating woman who seemed here to wish to efface herself entirely it only she were allowed to. Her body language expressed a reluctance to be photographed at all and as if she were submitting only under pressure. The child had her back to the camera, her face pressed into her mother long skirt.

   “There’s no bruise you can see,” Sylvia said. “He’s careful to hit her where the bruises won’t show. If he’s careless and he happens to leave marks on her arms or her legs, she’ll cover them up with long sleeves and long skirts.”

   “I should have known,” Wexford said. “I should have seen for myself”

   “Maybe you have to be trained to recognize it. You know, Dad, I can’t only see it in her, I can see it in him. The arrogance, the grace, the charm, the smile. He’s the type. Oh, there are many types, but he’s one of them.”

   Wexford sat silent for a moment, thinking of the implications. What did this mean for Stephen Devenish? Suddenly he had become a different person, a monster, as much a criminal as the thug who punches a bystander in a pub brawl. If it was true, if Sylvia was right. He thought of how hard it would be to ask Fay Devenish and how much harder for her to answer.

   “Do you remember a couple of weeks back I asked you why a child of nearly three was apparently mute? And you gave me several possible reasons?”

   “Dad, are you saying that this child is the missing little girl Sanchia?”

   He nodded. “This is the Devenish family.”

   “Then the reason’s plain. She doesn’t speak because she’s witnessed her father beating up her mother. I’m not saying it’s direct, I mean, like, ‘My mother talks and you hit her, so I won’t run that risk, I won’t talk,’ though it’s something like that. But it’s more complex, it’s protective behaviour all right - look at the way she’s hiding herself in her mother’s skirt. How about the boys? How has it affected them?”

   “God knows, Sylvia. Now you’ve told me, I can say what in fact I did think at the time, that the older one looks as if he’s biding his time until he’s old enough to hit his father.”

   “Maybe, or maybe the father’s encouraging them to hit her too. Oh, you needn’t look like that, Dad. It happens. And don’t ask why she puts up with it, will you? Where can she go? Where can she take her children? She can’t keep herself - at least, I suppose not - so who will keep her? And she doesn’t tell people because, believe it or not, she’s ashamed. She’s ashamed. She dreads the neighbours knowing, friends knowing. She’s ashamed because real women, women who are beautiful enough and clever enough, and really good about the house, they don’t get abused. They get admired and cherished. If she were like that, if she could only come up to her husband’s standard, she wouldn’t get beaten either. “Probably no one knows about it, or maybe she’s told her parents, if she has parents, and they say she’s exaggerating, he’s a good provider, he’s faithful, she’s making a fuss about nothing. Or she tells just one girlfriend, and the friend tells her to leave him but won’t take her and her children in, so what’s the use?”

   Jane Andrews, Wexford thought. She would be that friend and confidante. But there had been a quarrel and. she had been sent away - because she knew and Devenish couldn’t bear anyone to know? Or Fay, like many a person who entrusts to another the deep and painful secrets of the heart, could no longer tolerate the company of the woman she had confided in?

   Sylvia was leafing through the Martyrs book, stopping, making a face and flinching. “God, she had a kind of double mastectomy, they cut her breasts off. I wish I hadn’t read it!”

   “It was a long time ago,” said Wexford gently, “and maybe it never happened.”

   “It was in people’s minds, though, wasn’t it? They must have done things like that or it wouldn’t - it wouldn’t be in here.”

   “Violence and cruelty are always with us, Sylvia. By telling me what you’ve just told me about the Devenishes, you may have put a stop to some of it. Think of that instead of St. Agatha.”

   After she had gone he understood that she had also shown him the way Sanchia’s abduction had been planned, the way it had happened, the despair and last-ditch remedy, the complicity of others, the final painful but necessary sacrifice. It was as if a whole panorama of revelations, causes, consequences, and seemingly endless cruelty unrolled before his eyes. He saw the paradox of the innocent victim declared guilty and the ruthless perpetrator emerging guiltless. And what on earth was he going to do about it?

A glassy lake of flowers had covered the police station forecourt since the previous week. People who had never known Ted Hennessy; even those whose only knowledge of CID work came from television serials or who hated the police, all these had brought flowers and left them lying in their slippery sheaths of cellophane under the falling rain and now the blaze of the sun. Many names on cards were those of Muriel Campden residents.

   Wexford, returning to the place from Hennessy’s funeral, wondered not for the first time at the current passion for mourning with flowers still in their wrapping. When had it begun? Probably when the custom began of placing bouquets on the site where someone had died by violence or tragic accident. Ten years ago? Not much more. It was almost always when the person who had died was some one you didn’t know or hardly knew Perhaps it was a sign of a more caring society and he was all for that, and he asked himself why no one ever thought of taking the flowers out of their wrapping and throwing away the plastic, so that all these roses and carnations might not bloom unseen.

   He had been to the funeral but played no active part. Forbidden to be a bearer by his doctor, on account of his weight and his age, he had watched Burden, with Vine, Donaldson, and Cox, carry Hennessy’s coffin on their shoulders from the grim black undertaker’s car up the aisle of St. Peter’s Church. The wreath from the Mid-Sussex Constabulary crowned it, a huge, gaudy thing of delphiniums, gazanias, and stephanotis, chosen by the assistant chief constable, while Laura Hennessy’s knot of white mock orange and her children’s pathetic twin pink roses lay at its head.

   The giving of the address had been left to Southby, who had said all the usual things about gallant officers and exceptional devotion to duty and laying down one’s life for one’s friends, than which man has no greater love. But poor Ted Hennessy hadn’t really laid down his life for anyone. He had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

   Funerals depressed Wexford, not only for the obvious reasons, but because they brought out in men and women so much hypocrisy and false piety Just looking at Southby, half-sitting half on his knees, with his hands over his eyes, mouthing prayers he hadn’t uttered since primary school, sent up Wexford’s blood pressure. The rest of them could go back to Laura’s house for sherry and Dundee cake if they liked. He wouldn’t and he was pretty sure Burden wouldn’t either.

   Pressmen and cameras were everywhere. A flash went off in his face as he came down St. Peter’s steps and for a moment the world went black. He squeezed his eyes shut and stood still in the sudden panic we all feel when threatened with blindness, real or imagined.

   Burden touched his arm. “Are you okay?”

   “I think so. Do you ever dream there’s something badly wrong with your eyes? You’re going blind or will if you don’t do something about it fast?”

   “Everyone dreams that,” Burden said surprisingly. “Everyone I’ve ever talked to at any rate.”

   “Do they? I find that curiously comforting.”

   A crowd had gathered in the High Street. As Wexford put it, God knew what they hoped to see. But perhaps it was in the same category as bringing the plastic-wrapped flowers and it made them feel they belonged, that they weren’t left out, but part of this drama, this human tragedy.

   “Any man’s death diminishes me, is that why they’re here?”

   “Bit high-flown, isn’t it?” Burden said. “They just want to see themselves on television.”

   They walked back, stared at by passers-by as if they were policemen from Mars and not the familiar faces any of them could have seen any day. Wexford was silent, thinking about Fay Devenish. He must see her but not yet. A strange reluctance to meet her again had taken bold of him and he asked himself if all abused women had this effect on others. They weren’t wanted, they must be ostracized; in becoming victims of this kind, they put them selves outside ordinary human intercourse. These passive creatures were the ultimate objects of demonization. It was a terrible attitude and he confronted it only for a few seconds before thrusting it out of his mind. He was avoiding seeing her because he had to see someone else first.

   “Come upstairs.” He and Burden picked their way through the lake of flowers. “I want to tell you a story see what you think.” Under the plastic glaze, roses and fuchsias and zinnias were dying now, petals curling up, brown at the edges, their scent undergoing strange chemical changes. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

   “I don’t see any lilies,” said prosaic Burden. “But I know what you mean.”

“An amazing number of people want to adopt children, don’t they?” Wexford said when they were in his office. “They get obsessed about it. Even normally law-abiding people, women particularly, though I hardly dare say it they forget their principles and the rules by which they’ve lived and break the law in all kinds of ways.”

   “What, you mean like going to Romania and bringing back orphan babies, forging passports and birth certificates, that kind of thing?”

   “That kind of thing. Do you remember Mrs. Louise Sharper “No. Should I?”

   “For God’s sake, Mike, it’s only a couple of days ago. Jane Andrews’s sister.”

   “Oh, her. What of it? And what about this story you’re going to tell me?”

   “Wait a little. Would you be surprised to learn that Mrs. Sharpe has a record?”

   “The life we lead,” said Burden, “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear anyone had a record. I wouldn’t be surprised to bear you had.”

   “Thanks very much. Louise Sharpe is a widow. . .”

   “Not a criminal offence unless she murdered her old man.”

   “I’ve no reason to think she did that. He had a heart attack two years ago. He was a few months under forty, but he had a heart attack and it killed him. His name was James Michael Sharpe, and he was an accountant who had gone into computers in a big way and made a fortune. She was thirty-eight when he died and pregnant. The child, a girl, had to be kept on a life-support machine and finally only lived two months. She and her husband, believing themselves infertile, had been trying to adopt a child for five years before she finally conceived. A home study was done, two babies were candidates - or whatever the term is. In both cases the mothers changed their minds at the last moment. Then Louise Sharpe became pregnant . . .”

   “How do you know all this?”

   “Thanks to our wonderful computer system, a lot of info is available on anyone with a criminal record.”

   “You haven’t said what the criminal record was for yet,” Burden grumbled.

   “I’m coming to it. Her husband died and she lost her baby, a double tragedy. I don’t know what happened next because I only got facts, not emotions. That part I have to imagine. Anyway, at some time in the following year she renewed her application to adopt, but the situation was very different now. She was three years older, she was no longer in a long-lasting and stable marriage. Her chances of being acceptable as a potential adoptive parent were practically nil.”

   The heavy throb of a diesel engine brought Wexford to the window. He looked down on the white-and-green truck owned by the local authority’s contractors and the green-and-white-uniformed men with Day-Glo armbands as they began gathering up the flowers. “Which today are,” he said, “and tomorrow are cast into the oven. Only they’re cast into that monstrous chewing machine.”