by Ruth Rendell
Wexford said, “Mrs. Peabody?”
She nodded. “My daughter came this morning. She came as soon as she knew about the muddle we’d got in. She’s not well, she’s just got out of the hospital, that’s why Ryan was staying with me, because she was in the hospital, but as soon as we didn’t know—I mean, as soon as we knew …”
“Why don’t you sit down, Mrs. Peabody, and tell us about it from the beginning?”
It was Audrey Barker who answered him. “Basically, my mother thought Ryan was going home yesterday and I wasn’t expecting him till today. We should have phoned and checked, but we didn’t. Ryan himself thought yesterday was the day.”
“Where do you live, Mrs. Barker?”
“In south London, Croydon. You get the train from Kingsmarkham and change at Crawley or Reigate. You don’t have to go into Victoria. Ryan had done it a good few times. He’s nearly fifteen and he’s tall for his age, taller than most grown men.” She evidently thought they were condemning her, though their faces were quite blank. “He could have walked to Kingsmarkham Station,” she said.
“It’s over three miles, Audrey. He had his bag to carry.”
Vine steered her back to the previous morning. “So Ryan was going home, Mrs. Peabody, and you thought he ought to have a taxi to the station. Is that right?”
She nodded. Slowly she clenched her fists and held them in her lap. It was a controlling gesture, a way of containing panic.
“The stopping train is the eleven-nineteen,” she said. “The bus would have got him there an hour ahead of time and the next one would have been too late. I said why not have a taxi. I’d give him the money, it would be my treat. He’d only once been in a taxi before and that was with his mum.” Her voice slipped a bit. She cleared her throat. “He didn’t know what to say so I phoned up. It was a bit before half-past ten, five-and-twenty past ten. I asked the man for a taxi for a quarter to eleven. That was to give Ryan time to buy his ticket. A nice bit of time, I don’t like rushing. Oh, I wish I’d gone with him—why didn’t I, Audrey? I was just too stingy to pay the fare back again.”
“That’s not being stingy, Mum. That’s common sense.”
“Who did you phone, Mrs. Peabody?”
She thought. One hand went up and briefly covered her mouth.
“I said to Ryan to do it. Phone up, I mean. But he wouldn’t, he said he didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t push it. I said, Find me the number in the book, the local yellow pages book, and I’ll do it. He gave me the number and I did it.”
“Wrote the number down, do you mean? Or brought you the phone book and pointed at it, or what?”
“He just said it. I put the phone on my lap and he said the number and I dialed it.”
“Can you remember it?” Wexford asked, knowing how hopeless this was, registering her bemused shake of the head. “It wasn’t double six, double six, double six, was it?”
“It was not,” she said. “I’d remember that.”
“Did you see the car? The driver?”
“Of course I did. We were waiting in the hall, Ryan and me.”
They would be, Wexford thought, they would be there on the spot waiting, these two inexperienced taxi-takers, the old woman and the boy, he could picture them. Mustn’t keep the driver waiting, have you got the money ready, Ryan, and a fifty-pee piece for his tip? Here he is now, you want to go to the station, that’s all you have to say to him, now give your nan a nice kiss …
“He came on the dot,” said Mrs. Peabody, “and Ryan picked up his bag and that bag they all wear on their shoulders, a back-something, and I said lots of love to Mum and to give me a kiss and he did. He had to bend right over to kiss me and he gave me a big hug and off he went.”
She began to cry. Her daughter put an arm tightly around her shoulders. “You’re not to blame, Mum. Nobody’s blaming you. It’s just all so mad, there’s no explanation.”
“There must be an explanation, Mrs. Barker,” said Vine. “You didn’t expect Ryan till today, you said?”
“They start back at school tomorrow. I thought he was coming the day before they started but him and my mother, they thought it was two days before. We should have phoned, I don’t know why we didn’t. I did phone when I got home from the hospital. That was Saturday and I was sure Ryan said it was Wednesday he was coming home but now I reckon what he said was, I’ll be home all day Wednesday or something like that.”
“So you weren’t worried when he didn’t turn up?” said Wexford.
“I wasn’t worried till first thing this morning. I phoned Mum to check up on his train. It was a shock, I can tell you.”
“It was a shock for both of us,” said Mrs. Peabody.
“So I got the next train down here. I don’t know why, it was just instinctive, to be here with Mum. Look, where is he? What’s happened to him? He’s not what you’d call big, but he’s very tall, he’s not stupid, he knows what he’s doing, he wouldn’t go with some man who offered him something. I mean, money, sweets, he’s fourteen for God’s sake.”
Dora’s a grown woman, Wexford thought, a middle-aged woman who knows what she’s doing, who wouldn’t go with any man who offered her anything …
“Have you got a photograph of Ryan?”
On the verges of Framhurst Great Wood men worked all day, under the supervision of a tree expert, at extracting metal spikes from the trunks of oaks, limes, and ashes at chain-saw—felling height. One of them injured his left hand so badly that he had to be taken as a matter of urgency to Stowerton Royal Infirmary where it was feared at first he would lose two fingers. The tree people in the high branches were peaceful and silent, but those in the treetop camp at Savesbury Deeps bombarded the workmen with bottles, empty soda cans, and sticks. From the top of a noble sycamore someone poured a bucket of urine onto the head of the tree expert.
Clouds had been gathering since lunchtime and the rain began at three. It descended delicately at first, pattering on a million tired summer-weary leaves, increasing in volume until it became a deluge. The Elves, as some called them, retreated into their tree houses, drew up their tarpaulins, while some of them descended into the tunnel they had dug to link Framhurst Bottom with Savesbury Dell. Lightning lit up the Elves’ nests in the high branches and a great gust of wind shook the trees so that their trunks swayed like the stems of flowers.
Over the whole panorama of woods, hills, and green valleys (as seen from the air) the wind, weighted with heavy rain, flew in great silvery gray sweeps that glittered when the lightning came. The thunder rolled, then clattered with a sound like trees falling or heavy objects flung down on top of one another from a great height.
The workmen and the tree expert went home. Down in Kingsmarkham, Wexford also went home: a brief visit to check on his forlorn hope that there might be something significant or even vital on his answering machine.
He found both his daughters there.
The three-day-old Amulet lay in Sylvia’s lap. Sheila leapt up and threw herself into his arms.
“Oh, Pop darling, we thought we ought to be here with you. We both thought that simultaneously, didn’t we, Syl? We didn’t hesitate, we didn’t think. Paul drove us down. I didn’t even bring the nurse—well, I couldn’t, could I? Where would we put her? And I don’t really know anything about babies, but Syl does, so that’s okay. And poor, poor you, out of your mind about Mother, you must be!”
He bent over the child. She was a pretty little girl with a round rose-petal face, tiny prim features, and hair as dark as Sylvia’s was and Dora’s once had been.
“Lovely blue eyes,” he said.
“They all have blue eyes at that age,” said Sylvia.
He kissed her, said, “Thank you for coming, dear,” and to Sheila, “You too, Sheila, thank you,” though he didn’t want them, they were an added complication, and his heart had sunk when he saw them, ungrateful devil that he was. Many people would give all they had for the devotion of not just one daughter but two.
“I have to go b
ack for a couple of hours,” he said. “I only came to see if there was a message.”
“There’s nothing,” said Sheila. “I checked. It was the first thing I did.”
When one has children one has no privacy. They take it for granted that what is yours is theirs, personal things and the secrets of your heart, as well as possessions. He ought to be used to it by now. But how kind they were, his daughters, how good to him.
“Surely you’re not indispensable at a time like this?”
It was a remark characteristic of his elder daughter. He ignored it, though looking at her kindly. How different they were, the two of them. Most of the time he didn’t see it, but now, inescapably, he saw her mother in Sylvia, the same features, the same almond-shaped dark eyes, hardened in Sylvia’s case just as Sylvia was taller and altogether a bigger woman. But the likeness … It made him gasp and turn his gasp to a cough. Sheila took his arm, looked into his face. “What can we do for you, darling? Have you had lunch?”
He lied, said he had. She was so absolutely the successful young actress who has just had a baby, she was it and playing it in her muslin tunic and white trousers, strings of beads, fair hair loose and flowing, soft fruit-colored makeup. Yet Sylvia in jeans and loose T-shirt, looking down with unusual tenderness at the baby on her knees, seemed more the child’s mother.
“I’ll see you both later,” Wexford said and plunged back through the torrents to his car.
They had mounted a hunt for his wife and Ryan Barker, mainly concentrated on inquiries in and around Kingsmarkham Station. Every taxi company had been investigated. The drivers had no more knowledge of Ryan than they had of Dora, and the station staff—such as they were, three ticket clerks and four platform staff—remembered nothing of either.
By five Vine and Karen Malahyde with Pemberton, Lynn Fancourt, and Archbold had come up with only one certain thing: neither Dora Wexford nor Ryan Barker had reached Kingsmarkham Station on the previous morning. Somewhere, between their points of departure and the station, they had been spirited away.
It was Burden to whom the Roxane Masood phone call was relayed at five in the afternoon.
“I want to report my daughter missing.”
Something cold touched the back of his neck and flickered down his spine. He nearly said that he supposed she’d taken a taxi to the station the morning before. But it was his caller who said that.
“Pomfret, you said? We’ll come.”
It was a cottage at the end of the short High Street where the shops came to an end, an ancient lath and plaster dwelling with eyelid gables and tiny latticed windows. Rain streamed off the eaves of the thatched roof. Pools of water lay on the path and inundated the tiny lawn. Wexford and Burden had to stand inside on the doormat and shed dripping raincoats, so heavy had the downpour been between car and front door.
She was in her early forties, thin, intense-looking, with big dark eyes and chestnut hair hanging in a shaggy mane to her shoulders. She wore a garment that in any other time in history would have been called a nightgown, white, diaphanous, floor-length, with flounces and bits of lace. The ethnic painted beads around her neck removed any such illusion.
“Mrs. Masood?”
“Come in. It’s my daughter that’s called Masood, Roxane Masood. She uses her father’s name. I’m Clare Cox.”
The interior looked as if it had been decorated and furnished in the early seventies and then frozen. Indian and African artifacts littered the place, the walls were hung with strips of Indian printed cotton and brass bells on strings, and there was a heavy odor of sandalwood. The only picture was framed in dark polished wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
It was a photograph of a young girl, the biggest photograph Wexford thought he had ever seen, and she was almost too beautiful to be real. When you looked at it you could understand those fairy tales in which the prince or the swineherd is shown the likeness of some girl unknown to him and falls instantly in love. “This portrait is of magical beauty, such as no eyes have seen before,” as Tamino sang. Her face was a perfect oval, her forehead high, her nose small and straight, her eyes huge and black with arched eyebrows, her hair a gleaming black veil, long, center-parted, water-straight and fine as silk.
Wexford reflected upon these things afterward. At the time he quickly turned away from the portrait and having ascertained that this was Roxane herself, asked Clare Cox to tell him what had happened on the previous day.
“She was going to London. She had an appointment at a model agency. She’s got a fine arts degree, but she wasn’t interested in that, she wanted to be a model, and she’d tried everything, all the agencies. Mostly, they didn’t want to know, she was too beautiful, they said, and not thin enough, but she’s extremely thin, believe me …”
“Yesterday morning, Ms. Cox,” Vine prompted her.
“Yes, yesterday morning. She was going to London to this agency and then to see her father. He’s got a business in Ealing, he’s done very well for himself, and he takes her out to some very grand places, I can tell you.” She caught Vine’s eye and collected herself. “She didn’t turn up. Anyone else would have phoned to find out why not but not him, of course not. He thought she’d changed her mind, if you please.”
“How do you know then …?”
“He did phone. An hour ago. Some pal of his thought he could get her modeling work. I hope it’s bona fide, I said, you hear such terrible things, porno rings and whatever, and I said why don’t you ask her yourself, and he said, ‘Put her on,’ and that’s when it came out. He hadn’t seen her.”
“Did you check with the modeling agency?”
She put out her hands, raised her shoulders. Her voice was a thin scream.
“I don’t even know where the bloody place is!”
“So yesterday morning,” said Wexford, “she went to Kingsmarkham Station by taxi? Which taxi?” He was sure she wouldn’t remember. “Did you hear her make the call?”
“No, but I know when it was and who it was. She always had taxis. Her father makes her an allowance and it’s liberal, I can tell you. She’d always used the same company since they started. She phoned just before eleven. She knew the girl who worked for them, answered the phone, I mean. Tanya Paine. They were at school together.”
“Roxane can’t have gone to Contemporary Cars yesterday, Ms. Cox,” said Burden. He thought of how to put it. “Their phones were down. They were out of order. She must have called another company.”
“Well, she didn’t,” said Clare Cox. “I was up in my studio, painting. That’s what I do, I’m a painter. She came in and said the cab was coming in fifteen minutes and she’d catch the eleven thirty-six. I don’t know why I said it, but I did, I said, ‘Right,’ and then I said, ‘How’s Tanya?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t talk to Tanya, it was some guy answered.’ ”
“You mean she phoned Contemporary Cars at—what?—ten-fifty? And they answered?”
“Of course they did. And the cab came for her at ten past eleven. I saw her get in it and that was the last I saw of her.
6
Wexford finally got home to his daughters and his granddaughter at ten at night. But he was glad to have been busy, up to a point to have been distracted. Sylvia’s insistence that he must be exhausted irritated him, though he gave no sign of annoyance. Her emphasis on the unfairness of it, on the way he had to do everything himself if he wanted it done, sent him to the dining room in quest of a small whisky. Upstairs Amulet was screaming the place down.
“My posterity is driving me to drink,” he said to himself.
Then he thought how wonderful it would be to have Dora here to say it to. It was years since he had actually thought, in positive words, that to see his wife would be wonderful. How quickly, he reflected, disaster or potential disaster disturbs that which we accept as normal, shifts the aspect, makes us see the truth. You could so easily understand those who said, I will never be rough with her again, never off-hand, never take her for granted, if
only …
Earlier, once they had left Clare Cox, he and Burden with Vine and Fancourt had moved in on Contemporary Cars. They had moved in, gone over the place once again, and then fetched Peter Samuel, Stanley Trotter, Leslie Cousins, and Tanya Paine down to the police station.
Burden was looking at Trotter rather in the way a Nazi-hunter might have looked at Mengele if he had found him lying low in a suburb of Asunción: with satisfaction and vengefulness and something like glee.
Who had driven Roxane Masood to the station? Who had driven Ryan Barker?
“I’ve told you enough times,” Peter Samuel said. “We never got no calls between half ten and twelve midday. We couldn’t have on account of Tanya here being out of action.”
Tanya Paine was becoming aggressive. “I didn’t make it up, you know. I didn’t tie myself up. I’m a victim and you’re treating me like a criminal.”
“I’ll need the name or at any rate the address of the fare you drove to Gatwick,” Burden said to Samuel. “I don’t understand how you all just accepted not getting any calls for an hour and a half. Didn’t it occur to you to go back and find out why not?”
“We was busy,” said Trotter. “You know where I was, going from Pomfret to the station and then to Stowerton, you know all that. It was a relief to me there weren’t no calls, I can tell you.”
“Anyway, it wasn’t all that abnormal,” Leslie Cousins said. “I can think of dozens of times when it’s been slack.”
Burden rounded on him. “I’ll have the addresses of the fares you took, please.” He said to all of them, “I want you to think. Have you any idea, even a suspicion, who it could have been that came into the place and tied Tanya up? Anyone you’ve talked to? Anyone who knew no one ever went back there before twelve noon?”
Peter Samuel asked if they minded if he smoked. He was a stout heavy man with three chins and split veins on his cheeks, probably no more than forty but looking older. He had the cigarette packet out before anyone replied.
Burden said rather unpleasantly, “Not if it helps your concentration.”