Wexford 18 - Harm Done by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

houseplants grew green and lush in troughs on both windowsills in the living room, a big bowl of orange tulips was on the table, and one wall was fitted from floor to ceiling with book shelves. British country people might be class-conscious still, but a warped reasoning was behind their elitism and their sense of inferiority.
       Though he knew he was wrong to do it, Wexford couldn’t help linking the two cases in his mind, and now he had somehow convinced himself that because Lizzie had come back after three days and three nights, Rachel would come back too and after the same period of time. That would be tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday afternoon. So he was unable entirely to share Mrs. Holmes’s fear. When she said, as she now did, “I keep thinking I’ll never see her again,” he felt strangely, as if he were in possession of some superior knowledge, some secret information, that it would be cruel not to reveal to her. And yet, of course, he wasn’t, he knew nothing; he had no reason to align one girl’s disappearance with another’s. To tell her that everything would be all right, that she had no need to worry, would be the unkindest thing, for which of us can say that we guess right more often than we guess wrong?
       “Are you,” she asked him, “going to. . . well, search for her? I mean, the way you see people on television searching - in a line - with sticks? Beating the . . . well, you know, the ground?” She began to wring her hands. Wexford understood very well what she meant: that they would only do that if they had good reason to believe her daughter was dead.
       “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