Wexford 18 - Harm Done (6 page)

   “It’s early days for that, Mrs. Holmes.” Karen Malahyde saved him the trouble of answering. “Let’s wait awhile. Rachel has only been missing since Saturday evening, that’s less than forty-eight hours.”

   They had already inquired about boyfriends. Vine had asked her and now Karen did so again. “You say there’s no boyfriend now, but what about in the past, when she was living here and going to school?”

   Rosemary Holmes gave two names. She had done so before, to other police officers, but if she felt impatient with these repetitions, she gave no sign of it. She was anxious to help, she would have done anything to assist in finding her daughter and done it without complaint.

   “And yourself, Mrs. Holmes?” Karen asked it delicately. “Are you perhaps in a relationship?”

   “I’ve got someone, yes. But you’re not thinking . . .?”

   “We’re really not thinking anything at the moment,” Wexford said, reflecting that nothing could have been further from the truth. “We’re asking questions and sizing up the information we get, that’s all. It’s useful for us at this stage to have the names and addresses of all your friends and your daughter’s, Mrs. Holmes.”

   She named a doctor with a practice in Flagford. They had been going out for about a year and sometimes they spent weekends together. Rachel, she said in a burst of frankness, didn’t like him, but she hadn’t liked any friend of her mother’s. So high is the profile of a doctor of medicine in society that Wexford immediately placed Dr. Michael Devonshire beyond suspicion, then, with quick self-admonition, put him back inside it again. A medical man was also a man, and you could never tell.

   “You went out yourself on Saturday evening, Mrs. Holmes?”

   She flushed faintly. “Well, yes. May I ask how you know that?”

   “Caroline Strang phoned here at about twenty-five past eight. You weren’t here.”

   “Michael took me out to dinner. It’s ridiculous, I know, “but I feel guilty about being out when - when whatever was happening to Rachel was happening.”

   “Did you know about this arrangement with Mrs. Strang?”

   Rosemary Holmes said uneasily, “I knew someone was picking her up on the Kingsmarkham Road. She said. I thought it was a . . . well, one of the boys she was meeting.” Suddenly she burst out, “You can’t stop them doing things, you know. You can’t keep tabs on them all the time.” Again she dropped her guard. “I don’t suppose it’s important, I just want to say that we have our problems, Rachel and I. She’s a lovely girl, a really marvelous person and I get on with her fine, but she doesn’t exactly get on with me. I expect that’s quite usual with people her age, isn’t it?”

   “Quite usual, Mrs. Holmes,” said Karen.

   Back in the car Wexford suggested Karen speak to Michael Devonshire, perhaps catch him before his evening surgery “Though he obviously has an alibi with Rachel’s mother. Do you think it worth taking a second look at that house in Myringham?”

   “But Rachel never went near Myringham, sir.” Karen sounded surprised.

   “So far as we know.”

   “Surely it’s just coincidence that Lizzie Cromwell went missing the Saturday before last and Rachel Holmes disappeared last Saturday.”

   “But we don’t like coincidence, do we? We know that when events happen in sequence or according to a pattern, those events are most likely linked.”

   Karen looked dubious. As well she might, Wexford thought, as well she might. He must rid his mind of tying in one girl’s disappearance with the other’s. There was no point in returning to the derelict house, just as there was no real link between the girls - except for their having attended the same school. Except for their both being young and pretty and unattached and female. Except for their disappearing on successive Saturday nights. . . Stop it, he said to himself, but when he encountered Burden at the end of the day’s work, it was to the Rat and Carrot instead of the Olive and Dove that he suggested they go for their evening drink, a twice weekly event when they could make it.

   Burden gave him a sidelong look. “She never got there, you know. Rachel Holmes, I mean. Whatever happened to her happened in Stowerton. Waiting for a bus.”

   “Like Lizzie Cromwell,” said Wexford.

   “You’ve no reason to connect the two, none at all. Rachel shouldn’t have been waiting for a bus, we know that, she should have been waiting for a lift. But they’re so dozy, these young girls, they’re as forgetful as old people. Now if Lizzie Cromwell had been found dead and then Rachel Holmes had disappeared, I’d have said, now you’re talking. No, it’s just that you’ve got another one of your obsessions. I thought you’d given all that stuff up, but you haven’t, you’re as bad as ever.”

   “Can the leopard change his spots?” asked Wexford rhetorically. “Or the Ethiopian his skin?”

   “If I’d said that, you’d have called me a racist.”

The nearest bus stop to Kingsbrook Valley Drive was at the eastern end of the High Street. From there it was ten minutes’ walk to the Rat and Carrot, an ornate Victorian building on the corner of Kingsbrook Valley Drive and, Savesbury Road. The area was mainly residential, but two shops were next to the pub, one of them a small super market and the other a jeweler, and opposite it was a pharmacist. All were dosed by now and the jeweler had taken the valuable stock out of his window and pulled down a metal grille to cover it.

   It was a district of hodgepodge housing, thirties bungalows neighboring on near-mansions and seventies blocks of flats alternating with gloomy houses dating from the late nineteenth century The Rat and Carrot was the residents’ local. Not long ago the pub had been called the Duke of Albany, but that was considered by whoever rules in these matters to be outdated and meaningless to most people, so it had been given this new, and to those who rechristened it amusing, name. Unfortunately, within six months local people were dubbing it the Rotten Carrot, and this sobriquet stuck.

   It evidently put itself out to supply everything patrons could want from a pub, as well as a good many things that probably wouldn’t have occurred to them. “Good” meals were served in the restaurant as well as the bar; snacks and sandwiches were available all day long; the pub ran its own lottery and gave away scratch cards as prizes in contests to guess the number of pints consumed there each day or, how much money had been raised in the bar for charity since Christmas; and the Rats’ Hard Rock Club met every Tuesday and Thursday evening. Children were welcome in the King Rat Kids’ Room, where orange juice and Coke were on sale, or on fine days outside in the play area, furnished as it was by a large purple dinosaur, a giant Yogi Bear, two climbing frames, and a huge Looney Tunes character with a table and chairs in a cavity where its stomach should have been. As Wexford remarked, you could have been forgiven for entirely missing the point that the primary purpose of a public house was to sell alcoholic drinks to customers.

   He and Burden went in through the main entrance, under a sign informing patrons that the licensee was one Andy Honeyman, edging their way between boards advertising bumper breakfasts, line dancing, and a talent con test (Be the Next Posh Spice).

   “I wouldn’t much care to live down here,” said Burden gloomily. “Summer evenings must be a nightmare.”

   “Ah, well,” said Wexford, carrying their drinks to a table, “in the midst of life we are in karaoke. It could happen to you, you know. That pub down your road, it’s a free house. Get a change of licensee and you too could have a view of cartoon characters from your living-room windows and aspiring Spice Girls warbling away half the night.”

   Pretending not to hear, Burden surveyed the place, glass in hand. The bar was brightly decorated. Red and gold flock wallpaper shared the walls with mock linenfold paneling, there were a number of pictures of doe-eyed girls, gamboling kittens, wistful dogs, and mountainous panoramas, and all the chairs were black and gold with pale primrose upholstery. The girl who walked about wiping the already spotless tables wore skintight scarlet leggings .and earrings that hung to her collarbones.

   Apart from her and them, the only other person in the bar was a bearded man of about forty whom she addressed as Andy and who was sitting on a high stool behind the counter reading Sporting Life.

   Burden shook his head ponderously in the manner of one asking what the world was coming to. “Rachel Holmes, you can’t understand what a girl like her would be doing in a place like this.”

   “I dare say a good many men ask her that question,” said Wexford gravely.

   “You what? Oh, yes, I see. Right. But seriously, a good-looking girl from a nice background who’s got into a university - what would she find here?”

   “Her friends, presumably. Anyway, she didn’t find any thing, she didn’t come. Ah, more customers. I can’t say I’m sorry I don’t much care for being the only people in a pub, do you?”

   Two men had come in, closely followed by a man and a woman. “As a matter of fact, I prefer it,” said Burden. “I like a bit of hush.”

   Wexford grinned because that was the response he had expected. “I just thought of something. Mrs. Strang was late, she didn’t get to the pickup point - outside the Flag, was it? - until some minutes after eight, let’s say at least five past eight. Just suppose, though, that Rachel wasn’t late, that Rachel got there on the dot of eight or even a couple of minutes to. And someone else came along and offered her a lift and she took it.”

   “Why would she? She was waiting for Mrs. Strang.”

   “True. But I’ve got an idea about that . . .”

   Wexford broke off and edged his chair back to allow for the passage of a group of women who had just come into the Rat and Carrot by the swing doors. There were four of them, two young and two in early middle age, and Wexford was immediately struck by the air of wariness and timidity most of them had. But the one who led the way up to the bar, a thin and rather beautiful young woman in jeans and shabby sweater whose long black hair was tied back with a chiffon scarf; had a resolute manner as if before coming in here she had gritted her teeth and sworn to stick to her purpose. Screwed her courage to the sticking place, he thought.

   The others followed her and stood in a line along the counter. The black-haired woman cleared her throat, but this had no effect on Honeyman, who kept his eyes on his Sporting Life.

   There was a brief silence, then - and Wexford heard her draw in her breath - she said in a voice probably higher pitched than her normal tone, “We’d like a drink, please. Two glasses of white wine and two of lager and lime.”

   The licensee slammed the paper shut and looked up. “You come from that place up the road, don’t you?”

   She took a step nearer the bar. “What?”

   “That house that’s full of women who’ve walked out on their men-folk. You come from there.”

   An older woman, taking courage, said, “That’s a funny way of putting it, but what if we do?”

   “I’ll tell you what. I’m not serving you, that’s what.”

   The black-haired woman had gone very pale. Wexford thought he saw the hand that rested on the counter begin to tremble. “You can’t do that,” she said. “What reason have you got for doing that?”

   “Don’t have to have a reason. You ask anyone if I’m not within my rights to refuse to serve anyone I don’t want to serve.”

   “He is too,” Burden said softly.

   Wexford nodded. He doubted if the women would put up a fight and they didn’t. They no more but turned away and made for the door.

   The licensee called after them, “You’d best go down the High Street where they don’t know where you’re from. They’ll serve you there till they find out who you are.”

   The black-haired woman turned around and said in ringing tones, “You bastard!”

   “Charming,” said Honeyman when the door swung to behind them. “I wonder if you gentlemen heard that? Ladylike, wouldn’t you say?”

   Wexford got up, went to the counter, and having ordered two more halves of Adnams, said that he was a police officer and showed his warrant card.

   Honeyman said rather too hastily, “I was right, wasn’t I? I don’t need a reason for not serving people.”

   “You were within your rights, but you must have had a reason and I’ve been wondering what it is.”

   The licensee filled the two tankards. “It’s on the house.”

   “No it’s not, thanks all the same.” Wexford produced a flyer and put it down with precision. “We came in here to ask you about the missing girl, Rachel Holmes, but just tell me about those women first, will you?”

   “They live in a house in Kingsbrook Valley Drive, up the road here.” Honeyman’s whole manner had changed, becoming obsequious and conciliatory. Even his voice was different, the South-of-England burr replaced by a refined drawl. “They’re what they call battered women, if you know what I mean. Or they say they are. Husbands gave them a little tap when they cut up rough, if the truth were known.”

   “All right, I get the picture. But what have they done to get up your nose?”

   “Let me tell you. There was two of them in here a couple of weeks back, and some poor devil comes in and gets hold of one of them, asks her to come home, she’s left him with the kids, if you please. Well, of course, she’s not going to do as he asks, is she? Don’t suppose she ever has. So she struggles and gives him a push and he starts slapping her around, which he was driven to, and then the other one joins in, banging on his back with her fists, and then I had to intervene. Naturally, as I’m sure you’ll agree, out you go, I said, the lot of you, and don’t come back. Actually, I regret having to put him out, he seemed a decent fellow. ‘You know something? Well, of course you do. When folks got married in the old days, the woman used to have o say she’d obey him. Pity that was ever changed, if you ask me.”

   “I don’t know that I do ask you, Mr. Honeyman,” Wexford said blandly. “I’m rather inclined to think I wouldn’t want your advice on anything much.” He watched Honeyman blink his eyes and slightly recoil. “But you could take some. You’d be well advised to call us next time a decent fellow slaps a woman around on your premises. And now perhaps you’d like to tell me if to your knowledge this girl has ever been in here.”