Wexford 18 - Harm Done (7 page)

   A deep red flush had suffused Honeyman’s face. It was probably a relief to him to have something to look at and be distracted by. He stared at the photograph Wexford showed him, then muttered, “I don’t know, I don’t recall.”

   Burden, who had come up to the counter, said, “Does that mean you never saw her meet her friends in here on a Saturday night? She’s very good-looking, isn’t she? Not the sort of face you’d forget.”

   “I may have seen her.” The burr was back and the sulkiness. “I reckon I did, maybe two or three months back. She was in here with some other kids - well, I don’t mean kids,” he said quickly, remembering what the law said about selling alcohol to those underage, “they was all over eighteen - and they had a bar meal.”

   “But you didn’t see her on Saturday night?”

   “Absolutely not,” said Honeyman, shaking his head to give a kind of earnest vehemence to his denial.

   “Sylvia’s working there,” Wexford said when he and Burden were outside and approaching The Hide. “I can’t remember if I told you. Answering calls on the helpline among other things. Have you ever hit a woman?”

   “Of course I haven’t,” Burden said, shocked. “What a question.”

   “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t either. D’you know what Barry said to me the other day? ‘All men hit their wives sometime or other,’ that’s what he said. I was a bit taken aback.”

   “My God.” Burden sounded horrified. “I hope and trust we haven’t got a wife-beater on the team. That would be a fine thing, just when Hurt-Watch has got going. And by the way, just how are we to go about distributing those pagers and mobiles? We may know that domestic violence is very prevalent in all societies, but how many prosecutions for assaults on wives and girlfriends have there been in our area? Precious few. Presumably that doesn’t mean male-female relationships are more idyllic here or men more easygoing. It’s just because in the past women haven’t called us and haven’t wanted our intervention.”

   “So how are we going to find the ones that are in danger? Is that what you mean? Maybe by consulting the people who run this place.”

   Wexford stopped outside The Hide and looked up at the windows. Those on the ground floor were almost entirely hidden by the tall evergreens that filled the front garden. From a top-floor window a white face framed in black hair looked back at him and he recognized its owner as the woman who had shouted at Andy Honeyman.

   “There’ll have to be some such method. We can’t very well put an ad in the Courier offering free communication systems to anyone who applies. As Southby says the entire female population would want one.”

   Burden obviously wasn’t much interested. “Talking of the female population, what was this idea of yours?”

   “Idea?”

   “You said you’d an idea about Rachel waiting for Mrs. Strang. Presumably you meant you’d found some sort of answer.”

   “Oh, right. Yes. But I wouldn’t go as far as that. I only wondered if Rachel and Mrs. Strang had ever met. I mean, would they recognize each other?”

   Burden seemed mystified. He gave Wexford a dark look and said he had better be getting home, his mother and father-in-law were visiting and he was inexcusably late already. And Wexford went home too, with Burden’s remarks to nag at him while he ate his dinner and afterward, when a television documentary on a European single currency failed to hold his attention. Operation Safeguard, and its subsidiary scheme Hurt-Watch, would only work if he and his team probed the whole domestic-violence situation.

   A ludicrous picture presented itself to him of five hundred mobile phones and pagers landing in his office, perhaps even on his desk, and he without a clue as to which women were eligible to receive them and which would be affronted to be offered what amounted to a defense against the men who shared their lives. Once that hurdle had been got ever, how were they to react when a call on one of these mobiles was received? Go to the caller’s home and arrest the perpetrator. Simple. Only most of the time it wouldn’t be as clear-cut as that. She’d say she didn’t want him charged, she didn’t want him taken from the house, he was the breadwinner, he’d promised not to do it again, he was sorry, he was ashamed, she shouldn’t have called the police, only she was frightened and hurt and at her wits’ end, but she didn’t want the family broken up. . . He must talk to Sylvia. Meanwhile, there was this missing girl, Rachel Holmes.

   Dora seemed quite keen on the boring television program, which meant he couldn’t turn it off. The evening would stay light till past eight, so he went out into the garden and walked about, finally sitting down in the little paved area, which was the centerpiece of Dora’s rose garden. His seat was one of a pair of French café chairs that Sheila had given them for Christmas, an elegant affair of pale gray metal scrolls and twists and curlicues, but not the most comfortable to sit on. Above him the sky was a deepening blue, and heading this way, probably by now passing over Pomfret, was a red and yellow balloon whose passengers he could see waving to him. Or waving to someone. Wexford waved back and in doing so nearly fell off his delicate and perilous seat.

   Tomorrow would be Tuesday and in the afternoon Rachel Holmes would come back. Both girls had been to the same school, both were still in their teens, both were attractive, if in very different ways, each was the child of a divorced mother, both had been waiting for a lift, one returning from an evening out with friends, the other anticipating such an evening. Both had gone missing on a Saturday, and on successive Saturdays. In spite of all that, Burden would say it was a ridiculous assumption to make. Wexford was making it every time the girl entered his thoughts. It kept him from worrying about Rachel as he should have been worrying. Did it also prevent him from taking all possible steps and measures to find her?

   Should he, for instance, have put Rosemary Holmes on television? Should he have instituted a search of the countryside between Stowerton and Kingsmarkham? Perhaps the question he should have been asking himself was, would he have done so if Lizzie Cromwell hadn’t gone missing exactly a week before and come home three nights and three days later?

   The balloon sailed overhead and a little breeze sprang up to ruffle the new leaves and send a shower of petals scattering off the pear tree. The pretty chair was so uncomfortable it might have been designed as an instrument of torture. Sit on it for twelve hours under bright lights and answer the interrogator’s questions . . . My God, he thought. He got up and went into the house, resolving to talk to Caroline Strang’s mother first thing in the morning.

The search began at two on Tuesday afternoon. There were ten uniformed officers, some of them reinforcements from the Regional Crime Squad, and sixteen members of the public, all volunteers from among neighbours and friends of the Holmeses’. Rosemary Holmes wanted to join them but Wexford advised against it. He still believed, against the odds, that Rachel would turn up later in the afternoon, and what he had discovered in Framhurst that morning only reinforced his belief. Olga Strang had never met Rachel, had never even seen a photograph of her. The two girls had met at university, not through living only five miles apart or having been to the same school. Rachel was a stranger to Olga and she to Rachel.

   “How were you to know her?” Wexford had asked. “You were to give her a lift, but how were you to recognize her?”

   “You mean, she wore a yellow ribbon and I wore a big red rose? There was nothing like that. I never, thought about it, I was just there and she was supposed to be there but she wasn’t.”

   A scatty woman who seemed unable to collect her thoughts for two minutes at a time, Mrs. Strang gave the impression of being harassed by everything in her surroundings and perhaps by life itself. The cottage she lived in with her husband and three children was frighteningly disordered, with papers mixed with clothes, chairs laden with newspapers and magazines, used cups and glasses set or left beside vases of dead flowers, an iron switched on, its red light glistening, standing upended between a naked loaf of bread and an open packet of kettle descaler.

   She herself, perhaps about to use the iron, wore a diaphanous dressing gown over blouse and slip and clutched in her left hand something made of crumpled red material that might have been a skirt or a pair of trousers. Without relinquishing her hold on it, she sat on the edge of the table, crumpling the red stuff to a worse state of creasedness while running her right hand through her wispy, reddish gold hair.

   “I won’t keep you long,” Wexford said. “I can see you’re getting ready to go to work.” He couldn’t keep his eyes off that iron, which seemed to come closer and closer to her muslin frills as she swayed nervously back and forth. “But did Rachel know the make of your car? Its color?”

   “Oh, I don’t know, I can’t answer.”

   “Had Caroline described you to her?”

   “You’ll have to ask her. I can’t remember.” She brightened and suddenly smiled. “I knew she had dark hair. I was looking for a dark-haired girl. And Caroline said she was very good-looking.”

   “Mrs. Strang, you’re about to singe your, er, dressing gown.”

   “Am I? Oh, God. Thank you. Caroline’s not here, she’s back at college, you could phone her and ask her. Or I could. I must get this skirt ironed, you must excuse me, I’m late . . .”

   He knew enough. Rachel had no more idea as to the woman due to give her a lift than that she was middle-aged and driving a car. Someone else had come along at eight and picked her up, and when Rachel said, “Mrs. Strang?” or some such thing, this woman had agreed, had fallen in with the misapprehension, and used it to her advantage.

   Was she the same woman who had offered a lift to Lizzie Cromwell? And had Lizzie, in spite of what she’d said, accepted it? To risk acting on this wild intuition would be criminal. There must be a search, and next day, if she hadn’t come home, he would have Rosemary Holmes up before the television cameras, But she’d come home. She’d walk into the house on Oval Road. She wouldn’t be distraught or soaked to the skin, she would simply stroll in and, after her mother had had hysterics, ask what all the fuss was about. Or else, instead, she’d turn up at her university with a considerable amount of explaining to do. He turned his attention to his post, first to the document that lay uppermost on his desk.

   If someone addresses you, in a letter, by your given name and signs himself “yours always,” you may confidently expect your correspondent to be a close friend. This printout of an E-mail began “Dear Reg” and ended “Yours always, Brian,” but Wexford would not have placed Brian St. George, editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier, in that intimate category. The very sight of it filled him with apprehension. No communication he had ever received from St. George had been supportive or even cooperative with police strategy He had looked at this one without putting on his reading glasses, and he stared at a glazed muzziness of dancing print for a moment. But he knew that was no good, and after only a brief hesitation, he put on his glasses and read St. George’s letter.

   Dear Reg,

   It has come to my attention that the infamous pedophile, Henry Thomas Orbe, is due to be released from detention at the end of this week. His home was and still is on the Muriel Campden Estate in Kingsmarkham and I have been reliably informed that he intends to return to the house, currently occupied by his daughter and her partner, when he leaves prison, where he has been for the past nine years, on 17 April. Now, a large number of parents with young children, to whom Orbe must pose a threat, live on the Muriel Campden Estate and my intention is to run a lead story in this week’s edition of the Courier, informing interested parties of Orbe’s return. I am sure you will agree that Orbe is a dangerous man and that no child can be safe while he remains at large.

   I will be interested to receive your comments. If the Mid-Sussex Constabulary would care to supply me with a statement of Orbe’s current situation and perhaps their general opinion on the arrangements made for released pedophiles, I will be delighted to print it.

   With my very good wishes,

   Yours always, Brian

   Wexford sighed. It wasn’t only a wonder what induced St. George to call him by his first name and end in that affectionate way, but a mystery why the man should want to. At their last meeting, which had been in connection with the hostage-taking over the proposed bypass, he, Wexford, had been atrociously (but justifiably) rude to the editor and had received a good deal of abuse in return. The answer, no doubt, was that St. George wanted some thing. Wexford’s approval?

   He decided - quite quickly - not to reply. After all, much as he would have liked to, he couldn’t stop St. George and the Courier in their mission. Barring an injunction to restrain them, they would go ahead whatever happened. Wexford tried to remember Orbe but could recall only a newspaper photograph from long ago of a fat-faced man with bleated chin and forehead. That didn’t mean much.

   Anyone would look dreadful in one of those blown-up snaps. Orbe, the man, had entirely faded from his memory. Of course the crime, whatever it was, hadn’t happened in the Kingsmarkham area and he hadn’t arrested him.

   He was wondering whether he was capable of summoning up Orbe’s CV or dossier on his computer, of filling with information the pretty blue screen over which clouds swam and birds flew, when Barry Vine came in. “How’s the Rachel Holmes search going?” Wexford asked.

   “Nothing new, sir. But I came to tell you something else. You know we had a second clothes robbery?”

   “Oh, yes. The First Gear boutique.”

   “Well we’ve got someone for both, the First Gear and the craftswoman, the designer. You were right when you said they used a child to get in. ‘A sort of Oliver Twist’ were your words if I remember rightly. I don’t know how old Oliver Twist was - I can’t say I’ve ever read the book or seen the film - but this kid’s four.”

   For a moment Wexford said nothing. Orbe’s face, die remembered face, reappeared in some picture frame of his mind, and he asked himself which was worse, to use a small child sexually or to teach that child to break and enter and steal. The former, no question about it, but still . . .