Wexford 18 - Harm Done Read Online Free Page A

was dry while the other emitted a trickle of rusty water, red as blood. Lizzie hadn’t drunk from that. The back door had no key in its lock and no bolts. Wooden battens had been nailed across its architrave. Lizzie hadn’t come in through the front door either. It was bolted on the inside. The bolts were rusty and couldn’t have been drawn back without the use of tools.
       “Can we get up the stairs, Lynn?” Wexford asked. “They look as if someone’s been at them with a pickax.”
       “Just about, sir.” Lynn eyed him, not the staircase, as if she doubted his athleticism rather than the stability of treads and risers.
       An attempt had apparently been made to replace the treads or remove them or to widen the whole structure and had been abandoned, but not until the staircase was partially demolished. Wexford let Lynn go first, not so much out of politeness as from knowing that this way, if he fell over backward, he wouldn’t fall on top of a small, slim woman who probably weighed less than eight stone. He trod gingerly, holding on, perhaps unwisely, to the rickety banister and got safely to the top. His efforts were rewarded by the sight of a large gray blanket covering some sort of tank or at any rate large cuboid object. Nothing else at all was in the two small attic bedrooms.
       “I suppose she could have wrapped herself in this,” said Lynn, extending to Wexford the hand she had brought away damp from contact with the blanket. “Though it smells a bit musty.” Above them, through a hole in the stained plaster, the edge of a tile could be seen, and beyond, a segment of blue and white sky.
       “She might have drunk from a bathroom tap,” said Wexford, “if there were a bathroom.’ He shook his head. “She may have been here, but not for three days.”
       “Does it matter, sir?” Lynn asked as they made their way back down the perilous staircase. “I mean, she’s back and she’s not hurt. Is it any of our concern where she was?”
       “Maybe not. Maybe you’re right. I suppose it’s just because I’d like to know.”
       He said much the same thing to Burden next day when the inspector protested about his interest in something so trivial. They were not at the police station but in the Olive and Dove, for a beer at the end of the day’s work.
       “Only I don’t seem to have done any work,” said Wexford, “just filled in those damned forms.”
       “Perhaps we’re beating crime at last.”
       “You jest. I don’t suppose a crime was committed against Lizzie Cromwell or that she committed one, but I’d like to know. Three days she was away, Mike, three days and three nights. She wasn’t in that house - oh, we could only establish that for sure by taking her fingerprints and going over the place - but I know she wasn’t. She couldn’t have got in, or if she had, she couldn’t have got out again and restored that window to the way it was when we found it. She lied about drinking water from a tap, she lied about wrapping herself in a blanket, and she lied about being locked in and then let out. So she wasn’t there at all. I’m wondering if it would be worth putting out a call for that woman, the one who offered her a lift.”
       “That may be a lie too.”
       “True. It may be.” Wexford downed the last of his best bitter. “So where was she?” 
       “With a man. They’re always with a man, you know that. The fact that her mother says there’s no boyfriend means nothing, and saying she never had the chance to meet a boyfriend means nothing either. It doesn’t matter what a girl looks like or how simple she is - all right, don’t look like that, you know what I mean - or how shy or whatever, the instinct in young human beings to reproduce is so powerful that the most unlikely ones get together like - like magnets.”
       “I hope there’ll be no reproduction in this case, though I agree the most likely thing is that she was with a