Wexford 18 - Harm Done by Ruth Rendell

children than anywhere else in the neighbourhood.

    By nine he knew he had been wrong and the Rachel Holmes disappearance wasn’t going to follow Lizzie Cromwell’s pattern. A kind of guilt overwhelmed him, as if it were his fault she hadn’t come back. He was thankful he had said nothing of that hope and certainty of his except to Burden. What he had said to Burden would remain between them. He had tried to compensate by suggesting that the search go on after dark, but even he had to admit this was impossible, for it was a black, moonless night of heavy rain.
       Vine, whom he phoned before he went to bed, told him he had had to let Patrick Flay go. Without enough evidence to charge him Vine was obliged to release the man, still laughing, in the company of his solicitor. For a while Wexford stood at the landing window, looking out at the night. It was a habit of his, to stare out, when all was still and silent, and it amused him to see that Sylvia did it too. Maybe you could inherit a gene of meditative sky-watching. Rain fell steadily, insistently, long silver needles of it puncturing the dark. He thought then of Lear’s words when he reproaches himself for having paid too little attention to the plight of the homeless and dispossessed - poor naked wretches. . . that hide the pelting of this pitiless storm - the women who cried to Sylvia for help, such victimized children as Kaylee Flay and the missing girl. But she, probably, was dead by now, lying in a waterlogged ditch.

    In Detective Sergeant Vine’s opinion people like the Flays - and he made no such reservations as Sylvia Fairfax did - shouldn’t be allowed to have children and, if by some contravention of the law they did have them, should not be allowed to bring them up. What was the care system for if not to protect children against the likes of Patrick Flay? Why was there fostering and adoption if these processes weren’t put to better use?
       He arrived at the ground-floor flat in Glebe Road, the half of a shabby, run-down house, to find both Patrick Flay and Kaylee’s mother at home, and the little girl, when he began to talk to her, firmly set on the stained and battered sofa between them, squeezed between them, with no possibility of escape. She was a child of mixed race, born of a white mother, a woman as fair, freckled, and ginger- haired as Patrick. But Kaylee had dark brown hair in tight ringlets all over her head, dark brown eyes, and a light olive skin. Under the left one of those eyes was a darker mark, a bruise that hadn’t been there before, and Vine knew, as surely as if he had seen the blow struck, that one of those two had hit her in the face. Jackie Flay, perhaps, but more probably Patrick, and Vine also knew why that blow had been inflicted.
       A choking feeling of impotence and frustration almost inhibited him from speaking, and as he afterward told Wexford, the worst part was knowing there was little he could do about it.
       “You can notify the Social Services,” said Wexford. “There’s a good case here for threatening the Flays with putting the child into care. So what happened?”
       “Kaylee told me it hadn’t happened. She’s an intelligent kid, you know. I mean, she’s really very bright. She just said none of it was true, she had made it up. In other words, just what Flay said. And he had the nerve to say to her, ‘You know what happens to you when you tell lies, don’t you, Kaylee?’ And he was grinning in that revoking way of his.”
       “And the mother?”
       “She just sat there, silly-scared, if you know what I mean, looking as if she’d say anything and do anything to stay on the right side of Flay. She probably held the kid while Flay hit her. I can just hear him saying it, ‘You say you never did it, you never went there - right? You want my fist in your face again?’”
       Wexford shook his head. “Jackie Flay may be just as much a victim. And the worst thing is that Flay’ll