Wexford 18 - Harm Done Read Online Free

imagination, but she tried.”
       “So what tall stories did this limited imagination come up with?”
       “She was waiting at the bus stop and it was raining. A lady - that’s how she put it - a lady came along in a car and offered her a lift but she refused because Colin had told her never to accept lifts from strangers. The bus didn’t come and it was pouring with rain so she went into an empty house with boarded-up windows - the house with the apple tree, she calls it - and sat on the floor waiting for the rain to stop. . .”
       “I don’t believe it!”
       “I said you wouldn’t. I didn’t”
       “How did she get in?”
       “The door wasn’t locked. She pushed it open. Then when the rain had stopped and she thought she’d go back to the bus stop, she couldn’t get out because someone had come along and locked her in. She stayed in there for three nights and three days with nothing to eat, though she could get water from a tap, and she found blankets to wrap herself in and keep herself warm. Then the door was unlocked, she escaped and caught the bus home.”

    No one believed Lizzie’s story but it was worth going to Myringham and taking a look.
       “No need for you to do that, sir.” Lynn meant it was beneath someone of his rank. “I can do it.”
       “It’s either that or back to the paperwork,” said Wexford.
       Vine had talked to the two friends, Hayley Lawrie and Kate Burton, and both said they had walked with Lizzie to the bus stop. They had promised not to leave her alone and they hadn’t, not really, only for five minutes, the bus was due in five minutes. Hayley said she wished now she had stayed with Lizzie till the bus came, but Kate said it didn’t matter anyway because no harm had come to Lizzie.
       The bus stop was the nearest one to the cinema where they had been, but still it was on the outskirts of Myringham, on the old Kingsmarkham Road. The first thing Wexford noticed was the derelict house. The bus stop was directly in front of it. All its windows boarded up, half the slates off its roof, its front gate hanging from a single hinge, the house stood in an overgrown patch of garden in which the one beautiful thing about the whole place was the cherry tree in rose-pink blossom. Not an apple, as Lizzie had said, but a Japanese kanzan. The front door of the house had been painted an aggressive dark green some twenty years before, and now the paint was peeling. Wexford turned the blackened brass knob and pushed it, wondering how he would feel about Lizzie if the door yielded. But it was locked.
       They went around to the back. Here the- boards were hanging off one of the windows, or someone had been at work attempting to remove them. Wexford made a quick decision. “We’ll get in that way. And afterwards we’ll have the window properly boarded up. Do the owner a service, whoever he or she may be.”
       Perhaps Lizzie had got in that way or out that way or both. The aperture was big enough for small or slight people to squeeze through, but Donaldson had to enlarge it for Wexford with the aid of tools from the car boot. Wexford stepped in over the ledge and Lynn and Donaldson followed. Inside it was cold, damp, and smelled of fungus. Floorboards had been taken up to disclose black pits, in some of which oily water lay. Most of the furniture had been taken out long ago, though a black horsehair settee remained in the room where they were and the iron basket in the fireplace was full of empty crisp packets and cigarette ends. Paper hung from the walls in long, curling swaths.
       In the only other downstairs room, apart from the kitchen, two oil paintings still hung on mildewed walls, one of a stag drinking from a pool, the other of a girl of vaguely Pre-Raphaelite appearance picking up shells on a beach. No blankets anywhere. Upstairs still remained to explore. Wexford was inspired to investigate the filthy hole of a kitchen. He tried both taps. One