Ruth Rendell - Harm Done: A New Inspector Wexford Mystery

The Childrens Crusade, he called it after it was all over, because children played such a big part in it. Yet it wasnt really about children at all. Not one of them was physically injured, not one of them suffered bodily pain or was even made to cry beyond the common lot of people of their age. The mental pain they endured, the emotional traumas and psychological damage - well, those were another thing. Who knows what impression certain sights leave on children? And who can tell what actions those impressions will precipitate? If any. Perhaps, as people once believed, they are character-forming. They make us strong. After all, the world is a hard place and we may as well learn it young. All childhoods are unhappy, said Freud. But then, thought Wexford, some childhoods are unhappier than others.

These children, the crusaders, were witnesses. There are many who believe children should never be permitted to be witnesses. As it is, laws are in place to protect them from exploitation by the law. But who will stop them from seeing what they witnessed in the first place? His daughter Sylvia, the social worker, said that she sometimes thought, after what she had seen, that all children should be taken from their parents at birth. On the other hand, if any busybody of a social worker tried to take her children away from her, shed fight him tooth and nail.

The children in question, in Wexfords questions and questioning, came from all over Kingsmarkham and the other small towns and villages, from an estate the news papers, in their current favourite word, called infamous, from the millionaires row they called leaf and from the middle class in between. They were given, or occasionally baptized with, the names that had become popular in the eighties and nineties: Kaylee and Scott, Gary and Lee, Sasha and Sanchia.

In one class in Kingsmarkhams St. Peters Primary School it was tactless to ask after someones father because most of the children were unsure who their father was. Raised on crisps and chips and chocolate and take-away, they were nevertheless the healthiest generation of children the country has ever known. If one of them had been smacked, he or she would have taken the perpetrator to the European Court of Human Rights. Mental torture was another story, and no one knew what that story was, though many tried to write it every day.

The eldest of the children Wexford was interested in was on the upper limits of childhood. She was sixteen, old enough to marry, though not to vote, old enough to leave school if she so chose and leave home too if she wanted to.

Her name was Lizzie Cromwell.

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead the police and her family and neighbours had already begun the search for her body. They worked on the open countryside between Kingsmarkham and Myringham, combing the hillsides and beating through the woods. It was April but cold and wet, and a sharp northeast wind was blowing. Their task was not a pleasant one; no one laughed or joked and there was little talking.

Lizzies stepfather was among the searchers, but her mother was too upset to leave the house. The evening before, the two of them had appeared on television to appeal for Lizzie to come home, for her abductor or attacker, whatever he might be, to release her. Her mother said she was only sixteen, which was already known, and that she had learning difficulties, which was not. Her stepfather was a lot younger than her mother, perhaps ten years, and looked very young. He had long hair and a beard and wore several earrings, all in the same ear. After the television appearance several people phoned Kingsmarkham Police Station and opined that Colin Crowne had murdered his stepdaughter. One said Colin had buried her on the building site down York Street, a quarter of a mile down the road from where the Crownes and Lizzie lived on the Muriel Campden Estate. Another told Detective Sergeant Vine that she had heard Colin Crowne threaten to kill Lizzie because she was as thick as two planks.

"Those folks as go on telly to talk about their missing kids, said a caller who refused to give her name, theyre always the guilty ones. Its always the dad. Ive seen it time and time again. If you dont know that, youve no business being in the police.

Chief Inspector Wexford thought she was dead. Not because of what the anonymous caller said, but because all the evidence pointed that way. Lizzie had no boyfriend, she was not at all precocious, she had a low IQ and was rather slow and timid. Three evenings before, she had gone with some friends on the bus to the cinema in Myringham, but at the end of the film the other two girls had left her to come home alone. They had asked her to come clubbing with them but Lizzie had said her mother would be worried - the friends thought Lizzie herself was worried at the idea - and they left her at the bus stop. It was just before eight-thirty and getting dark. She should have been home in Kingsmarkham by nine-fifteen, but she didnt come home at all. At midnight her mother had phoned the police.

If she had been, well, a different sort of girl, Wexford wouldnt have paid so much attention. If she had been more like her friends. He hesitated about the phrase he used even in his own mind, for he liked to keep to his personal brand of political correctness in his thoughts as well as his speech. Not to be absurd about it, not to use ridiculous expressions like intellectually challenged, but not to be insensitive either and call a girl such as Lizzie Cromwell mentally handicapped or retarded. Besides, she wasnt either of those things, she could read and write, more or less, she had a certain measure of independence and went about on her own. In daylight, at any rate. But she wasnt fit just the same to be left alone after dark on a lonely road. Come to that, what girl was?

So be thought she was dead. Murdered by someone. What he had seen of Colin Crowne he hadnt much liked, but he had no reason to suspect him of killing his step daughter. True, some years before he married Debbie Cromwell, Crowne had been convicted of assault on a man outside a pub, and be had another conviction for taking and driving away - in other words, stealing - a car. But what did all that amount to? Not much. It was more likely that someone had stopped and offered Lizzie a lift.

Would she accept a lift from a stranger? Vine had asked Debbie Crowne.

Sometimes its hard to make her like understand things, Lizzies mother had said. Shell sort of say yes and no and smile - she smiles a lot, shes a happy kid - but you dont know if its like sunk in. Do you, Col?

Ive told her never talk to strangers, said Colin Crowne. Ive told her till Im blue in the face, but what do I get? A smile and a nod and another smile, then shell just say something else, something loony, like the suns shining or whats for tea.

Not loony, Col, said the mother, obviously hurt.

You know what I mean.

So when she had been gone three nights and it was the morning of the third day, Colin Crowne and the neighbours on either side of the Crownes on the Muriel Campden Estate started searching for Lizzie. Wexford had already talked to her friends and the driver of the bus she should have been on but hadnt been on, and Inspector Burden and Sergeant Vine had talked to dozens of motorists who used that road daily around about that time. When the rain became torrential, which happened at about four in the afternoon, they called off the search for that day, but they were set to begin again at first light. Taking DC Lynn Fancourt with him, Wexford went over to Puck Road for another talk with Colin and Debbie Crowne.