by Ruth Rendell
Wexford would have liked to check with his wife every half hour, but he controlled himself and didn’t phone again until half past four. By then the heavy rain had given place to a thin relentless drizzle. The phone rang and rang, and he had almost decided she must be out when she picked up the receiver.
“I was outside. I heard it ringing but I had to get my boots off and try not to make too much mess. Rain and mud make the simplest outdoor tasks take twice as long.”
“How’s the mulberry tree?”
“The water’s reached it, Reg. It’s sort of lapping against the trunk. Well, it was bound to, the way it’s been raining. I was wondering if there was anything we could do to stop it, the water coming up, I mean, not the rain. They haven’t found a way to stop that yet. I was thinking about sandbags, only the council hasn’t any. I phoned them and this woman said they’re waiting for them to come in. Like a shop assistant, I thought.”
He laughed, though not very cheerfully. “We can’t stop the water but we can start thinking about moving our furniture upstairs.” Get Neil over to help, he nearly said, and then he remembered his son-in-law was gone out of their lives since he and Sylvia split up. Instead he told Dora he’d be home by six.
That morning he hadn’t brought the car. Lately he’d been walking a lot more. The almost endless downpours stimulated his need to walk—there was human nature for you!—because the chance to do so in comfort and in the dry came so seldom. At first light, no rain had been falling and the sky was a wet pearly blue. It was still dry at eight thirty and he’d begun to walk. Huge, heavy clouds were gathering, covering up the blue and the pale milky sun. By the time he reached the station the first drops were falling. Now he thought he would have to make it home through this wet mist that intermittently became drizzle, but when he came out of the newly installed automatic doors the rain had lifted and for the first time for a long while he felt a marked chill in the air. It smelled drier. It smelled like a change in the weather. Better not be too optimistic, he told himself.
It was dark. Already dark as midnight. From this level, on foot, he could see nothing of the floods, only that the pavements and roadways were wet and puddles lay deep in the gutters. He crossed the High Street and began the slightly uphill walk to home. The Dades he had forgotten, and he wouldn’t have recalled them even then but for passing the end of Kingston Gardens and reading the street name in the yellow light from a lamp. Lyndhurst Drive met it at its highest point, and those living there could have looked down from their windows to his roof and his garden. They were safe. Someone had told him that for the floods to reach such a height they would have had first to rise above the cupola on Kingsmarkham Town Hall.
Yes, the Dades were safe up there. And the chance of their children being drowned practically nil. Before he left, a message had come through from the Subaqua Task Force to say that no living people or bodies had been found. Wexford stared up the hill, wondering exactly where they lived. And then he stopped dead. What was the matter with him? Was he losing his grip on things? Those children might not have drowned but they were missing, weren’t they? Their parents had come home from a weekend away and found them gone. Last night. All this nonsense about floods and drowning had obscured for him the central issue. Two children, aged fifteen and thirteen, were missing.
He walked on fast, thinking fast. Of course, the chances were that they were back by now. They had been, according to Burden, in the care of an older person, and they were all three missing. That surely meant that the sitter, presumably a woman, had taken them somewhere. Probably she had told the mother on the previous Friday, or whenever it was the parents went away, that she intended to take them on some outing and the mother had forgotten. A woman who would assume that her children had drowned, just because they weren’t there and part of the town was flooded, had to be—well, to put it charitably, somewhat scatterbrained.
Dora wasn’t in the house. He found her down in the garden, directing the beam from a flashlight onto the roots of the mulberry tree. “I don’t think it’s come up any more since I spoke to you at four thirty,” she said. “Do we really have to move the furniture?”
They went indoors. “We could shift some of the stuff we value most. Books. Favorite pictures. That console table that was your mother’s. We could make a start with that and listen to the weather forecast at ten.”
He gave her a drink and poured one for himself. With the much-diluted whisky on the table beside him, he phoned Burden. The inspector said, “I was about to call you. It just struck me. The Dade kids, they must be missing.”
“I had the same thought. Still, correction: they may be missing. Who knows but that their sitter’s just brought them back from an educational trip to Leeds Castle?”
“Which started yesterday, Reg?”
“No, you’re right. Look, we have to find out. The last thing they’d do is let us know if they’ve turned up safe. We’re strictly reserved for disasters. If these children still haven’t turned up, the parents, or one of them, will have to come down to the station and fill in a missing persons form and give us a bit more information. No need for you to do it. Get Karen on to it, she hasn’t been exactly crushed with toil lately.”
“I’d like to call the Dades before I do anything,” Burden said.
“And ring me back, would you?”
He sat at the table and he and Dora had their dinner. The letter box flapped as the evening paper, the Kingsmarkham Evening Courier, arrived.
“It’s too bad,” Dora said. “It’s nearly eight o’clock, two hours late.”
“Understandable in the circumstances, don’t you think?”
“Oh, I suppose so. I shouldn’t complain. I expect the poor newsagent had to bring it himself. Surely he wouldn’t let that girl go out in this.”
“Girl?”
“It’s his daughter delivers the papers. Didn’t you know? I suppose she does look rather like a boy in those jeans and that woolly cap.”
They kept the curtains at the French windows drawn back so that they could see if the rain started again and see too the tide of flood which had crept perhaps six feet across the lawn since last night. One of the neighbors, his garden elevated a few inches above the Wexfords’, but enough, enough, had an Edwardian street lamp at the bottom of his lawn and tonight the light was on, a powerful white radiance that revealed the water lying gleaming and still. It was a shining gray color, like a sheet of slate, and the little river, somewhere down there, was lost in the broad shallow lake. It was weeks since Wexford had seen the stars and he couldn’t see them now, only the bright but hazy lamplight below and a scurrying clotted mass across the sky where the rising wind agitated the clouds. Black leafless tree branches bowed and swayed. One swept the surface of the water, sending up spray like a car driving through a puddle.
“Do you want to start moving stuff now?” Dora asked when they had finished their coffee. “Or do you want to see this?”
He shook his head, rejecting the paper which seemed to hold nothing but photographs of floods. “We’ll move the books and that cabinet. No more till we’ve seen the weather forecast.”
The phone rang as he was carrying the sixth and last cardboard box of books upstairs. Luckily, most of his books were already on the upper floor, in the little room they had once called his study and now was more like a mini-library. Dora took the call while he set the box down on the top stair.
“It’s Mike.”
Wexford took the receiver from her. “I’ve a feeling they haven’t turned up.”
“No. The Subaqua Task Force want to resume the search tomorrow. They’ve got some idea of going under the deep water in the Brede Valley. They’ve not much to do and I think they like the excitement.”
“And Mr. and Mrs. Dade?”
“I didn’t phone, Reg, I went up there,” said Burden. “They’re a funny pair. She cries.”
“She what?”
“She cries all the time. It’s weird. It’s pathological.”<
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“Is that right, doctor? And what does he do?”
“He’s just rude. Oh, and he seems to be a workaholic, never an idle moment. He said he was going back to work while I was there. The kids are definitely missing. Their dad says it’s all rubbish about them drowning. Why would they go near floodwater in the depths of winter? Who got hold of this ridiculous idea? His wife said she did and started crying. Jim Pemberton suggested maybe they went in the water to rescue someone else but in that case, who? The only other person to go missing is this Joanna Troy . . .”
“Who?”
“She’s the friend of Mrs. Dade who was spending the weekend in their house to keep an eye on the two kids. Dade’s doing the missing persons forms now.” Burden’s voice took on a hesitant tone. Perhaps he was remembering the heartfelt note in Wexford’s voice when he expressed a wish not to get involved. “As it happens, things are a bit more serious than they seemed at first. The Dades got home from Paris—they came in through Gatwick—a little while after midnight. The house was in darkness, the children’s bedroom doors were shut, and the parents just went to bed without checking. Well, I suppose they wouldn’t check. After all, Giles is fifteen and Sophie is thirteen. It wasn’t till mid-morning that Mrs. Dade found the kids weren’t there. And that means not only that they’ve been missing since Sunday midnight but possibly since Friday evening when the parents left.”
“And this Joanna Whatever?”
“Troy. Mrs. Dade’s been phoning her home number all day without getting a reply and Dade went round there this afternoon but no one was there.”
“It doesn’t seem to matter whether I sincerely hope or don’t bother,” said Wexford wearily. “But we’ll leave it all till tomorrow.”
Burden, who could be sententious, said cheerfully that tomorrow was another day.
“You’re right there, Scarlett. Tomorrow will be another day, always providing Dora and I haven’t been drowned during the night. But I dare say we’ll be able to get out of the bedroom windows.”
He had been watching for more rain as he was speaking and the first drops had splashed against the glass midway through his last sentence. He put the receiver back and opened the front door. It was milder out there than he could ever remember for the time of year. Even the wind was warm. It had brought with it the next downpour and the rain increased in intensity as he watched, straight-down rain like glass or steel rods crashing onto the stone flags and splashing into the waterlogged gullies between them. The down-flow pipe from the roof gutters began to pour out water like a tap turned full on and the drain, unable to cope with so great a volume, was soon lost under an eddying flood of its own.
Dora was watching the news. It ended as he came in, and the weather forecast began with its typical irritating preamble: a kind of improbably glamorous creature in the guise of a water sprite wearing a silver lamé designer gown, sitting on top of a fountain while a concealed fan blew her hair and draperies about. The meteorologist, an altogether more normal sort of woman, pointing with a ferrule at her map, told them of flood warnings out on four new rivers and an area of low pressure rushing across the Atlantic in pursuit of the one presently affecting the United Kingdom. By morning, she said, as if this wasn’t true already, heavy rain would be falling across southern England.
Wexford turned it off. He and Dora stood at the French windows looking at the water which now, as in the front garden, filled the paved area immediately outside. The rain made little waves on its surface where a twig bobbed about like a boat on a choppy sea. The trunk of the mulberry tree was half submerged and it was now a lilac bush which had become the criterion. The rising water lapped its roots. A few yards of dry land remained before the incoming tide would reach the wall. As he watched, the light at the end of the garden next door went out and the whole scene was plunged into darkness.
He went up the stairs to bed. The possibility of two young proficient swimmers being drowned no longer seemed to him so absurd. You didn’t need too much imagination to fancy the whole country sinking and vanishing under this vast superfluity of water. Everyone overcome by it like shipwrecked men, their raft inadequate, their strength gone, the young and the old alike, the strong and the weak.
Chapter 2
SO MUCH FOR NOT GETTING INVOLVED. He was on his way there now, heading up Kingston Gardens toward Lyndhurst Drive with Barry Vine, who was driving. Vine seemed to think drowning in the Brede Valley, particularly in the very deep water now filling Savesbury Deeps where the frogmen had begun searching again, a real possibility. The night before he had thought so himself. Now, with the sun shining on wet pavements and glittering dripping branches, he wasn’t so sure.
Three hours earlier, when he got up, the rain had apparently just stopped. It was still dark but light enough to see what had happened during the night. He didn’t look out of the window. Not then. He was afraid of what he might see, and even more afraid, when he went down to make Dora’s tea, of the water waiting for him at the foot of the stairs or lying, still and placid, across the kitchen floor. But the house was dry and when he had put the kettle on and at last made himself pull back the curtains and look out of the French windows, he saw that the silvery gray lake still stopped some ten feet from the little wall that divided lawn from paving.
Since then there had been no more rain. The weather forecast had been right as far as the coming of a further downpour but wrong in its timing. There was still the second approaching area of low pressure to look forward to. As he got out of the car at the point where Kingston Gardens met Lyndhurst Drive, a large drop of water fell onto his head, onto his bald spot, from a hollybush by the gate.
The house on the corner was called “Antrim,” a name neither pretentious nor apparently appropriate. Unlike any other in Lyndhurst Drive, where neo-Georgian sat side by side with 1930s art deco, 1960s functional, 1890s Gothic, and late-twentieth-century “Victorian,” the Dades’ house was Tudor, so well done that the undiscerning might have mistaken it for the real thing. Beams of stripped oak crisscrossed slightly darker plaster, the windows were diamond-paned, and the front door heavily studded. The knocker was the ubiquitous lion’s head, and the bell pull a twisty wrought-iron rod. Wexford pulled it.
The woman who came to the door was very obviously the anxious mother, her face tear-stained. She was thin, wispy, and breathless. Early forties, he thought. Rather pretty, her face unpainted, her hair a mass of untidy brown curls. But it was one of those faces on which years of stress and yielding to that stress show in its lines and tensions. As she led them into a living room a man came out. He was very tall, a couple of inches taller than Wexford, which would make him six feet five, his head too small for his body.
“Roger Dade,” he said brusquely and in a public school accent that sounded as if he purposely exaggerated it. “My wife.”
Wexford introduced himself and Vine. The Tudor style was sustained inside the house, where there was a great deal of carved woodwork, gargoyles on the stone fireplace (containing a modern, unlit gas fire), paisley pattern wallpaper, and lamps of wrought iron and parchment painted with indecipherable ancient glyphs. The top of the coffee table around which they sat held, under glass, a map of the world as it was known in, say, 1550, with dragons and tossing galleons. Its choppy seas reminded Wexford of his back garden. He asked the Dades to tell him about the weekend and to begin at the beginning.
The children’s mother began, making much use of her hands. “We hadn’t been away on our own, my husband and I, since our honeymoon. Can you believe that? We were desperate just to get away without the children. When I think of that now, I feel just so guilty I can’t tell you. A hundred times since then I’ve bitterly regretted even thinking like that.”
Her husband, looking as if going away with her was the last thing he had been desperate to do, sighed and cast up his eyes. “You’ve nothing to be guilty about, Katrina. Give it a rest, for God’s sake.”
At this the tears had come into her eyes and she made no e
ffort to restrain them. Like the water outside, they welled and burst their banks, trickling down her cheeks as she gulped and swallowed. As if it were a gesture which he was more than accustomed to perform, as automatic as turning off a tap or closing a door, Roger Dade pulled a handful of tissues from a box on the table and passed them to her. The box was contained in another of polished wood with brass fittings, evidently as essential a part of the furnishings as a rack for magazines or CDs might be in another household. Katrina Dade wore a blue crossover garment. A skimpy dressing gown or something a fashionable woman would wear in the daytime? To his amusement, he could see Vine doing his best to avert his eyes from the bare expanse of thigh she showed when the front of the blue thing parted.
“But what’s the use?” The tears roughened her voice and half choked it. “We can’t put the clock back, can we? What time did we leave on Friday, Roger? You know how hopeless I am about things like that.”
Roger Dade indeed looked as if, with varying degrees of impatience and exasperation, he had borne years of unpunctuality, forgetfulness, and a sublime indifference to time. “About half past two,” he said. “Our flight was four thirty from Gatwick.”
“You went by car?” Vine asked.
“Oh, yes, I drove.”
“Where were the children at this time?” Wexford had directed his eyes on to Dade and hoped he would answer, but he was to be disappointed.