Wexford 18 - Harm Done Read Online Free Page B

man, a boy. It still doesn’t tell us where.”
       “At his place, of course.”
       “Ah, but there’s the difficulty. If he’s her age, the most likely thing is that he lives with parents or one parent and maybe siblings. If he’s older, he’s likely to be married or, as they put it these clays, ‘in a relationship.’ The other people involved would know of her disappearance. Somebody would have come to us.”
       “He could have taken her to a hotel.”
       “For three days and three nights, Mike? Is he that well-off? No, the only possibility that I can see is that he lives alone in a room or flat of his own and that he took her there. He kept her indoors for the whole of the three clays and three nights, and no one in the house or block of flats saw her. I don’t like it, I don’t really believe it, but we know what Sherlock Holmes said.”
       Burden had heard it too often from Wexford’s lips to be in any doubt about it. “If all else is impossible, that which remains must be so, or something like that.” Burden went to renew their drinks. Although he wasn’t going to say so or not yet, he was sick of Lizzie Cromwell and bored with the whole thing. Wexford, in his opinion, was beginning to get obsessive again, only in the past when he had had a bee in his bonnet, it was over events rather more earth shaking than this. But if, when he returned to their table with the two halves of Adnams, he hoped that Wexford would choose a new subject of conversation, he was disappointed.
       “So when her friends left her at the bus stop, she was waiting for this guy to come along in a car, was she? Why a bus stop then? Why not somewhere warm and dry like a café?”
       “Because she had to make her friends believe she was waiting for a bus.” Burden said it repressively. He hoped he might have had the last word.
       “You’re fed up with this, aren’t you? I know you are, I can tell. I won’t bore you much longer. I think you’re right about her reason for waiting at the bus stop, but I’d like to dig a little deeper into that. Why did she want to make her friends believe she was waiting for a bus?”
       “So they wouldn’t know about the boyfriend.”
       “But why wouldn’t she want them to know? Wouldn’t she be proud of having a boyfriend? Especially one with a car and a place to take her? She could have trusted them. They’d be the last to tell her mother.”
       “Maybe he’s married.”
       “Then he wouldn’t have a place to take her,” said Wexford, and though Burden waited for the next phase of this reasoning, he said no more about it. “Hurt-Watch meeting in the morning,” he said instead. “Remember? Ten sharp. Southby will be there, in case I haven’t told you.”
       At the prospect of an encounter with the new assistant chief constable designate, Burden groaned softly. Operation Safeguard, which the program had originally been called, held little interest for him. His personal belief was that what happened in the home belonged in the home and should come as little as possible within the province of the law. But he knew where Wexford’s sympathies lay, so he held his tongue.

    Next morning, half an hour before the meeting was due to begin a woman came into the police station on her way work to say that she had seen Lizzie Cromwell at the bus stop the previous Saturday evening. It was a matter of chance that Wexford spoke to her at all. He and Barry Vine happened to be passing the desk in the foyer of the building where she was talking to the duty sergeant. Even so, Barry came out with the usual formula, that he would he would see to it, that it was hardly necessary for Wexford to. . .
       Bother my pretty little head about it, Wexford thought but he didn’t say aloud. “We’ll go up to my office.” he said.

Chapter 2

    It was Friday now and Lizzie had come home on Tuesday afternoon. Wexford imparted this information to Mrs. Pauline Ward,