The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  “At school, of course. Where else? They’re quite used to letting themselves into the house. They wouldn’t have to be on their own for long. Joanna was coming over at five.”

  “Yes. Joanna. Who exactly is she?”

  “My absolutely dearest closest friend. That’s what makes all this so awful, that she’s missing too. And I don’t even know if she can swim. I’ve never had any reason to know. Perhaps she never learned. Suppose she couldn’t and she fell into the water, and Giles and Sophie plunged into the water to save her and they all . . .”

  “Don’t get in a state,” Dade said as the tears bubbled up afresh. “You’re not helping with all this blubbing.” Wexford had never actually heard the word used before, only seen it in print years before in boys’ school stories, old-fashioned even when he read them. Dade looked from one police officer to the other. “I’ll take over,” he said. “I’d better if we’re to get anywhere.”

  She shouted at him, “I want to do the talking! I can’t help crying. Isn’t it natural for a woman whose children have drowned to be crying? What do you expect?”

  “Your children haven’t drowned, Katrina. You’re being hysterical as usual. If you want to tell them what happened, just do it. Get on with it.”

  “Where was I? Oh, yes, in Paris.” Her voice had steadied a little. She pulled down the blue garment and sat up straight. “We phoned them from Paris, from the hotel. It was eight thirty. I mean, it was eight thirty French time, seven thirty for them. I just don’t understand why Europe has to be a whole hour ahead of us. Why do they have to be different?” No one supplied her with an answer. “I mean we’re all in the Common Market or the Union or whatever they call it, the name’s always changing. We’re supposed to be all the same.” She caught her husband’s eye. “Yes, all right, all right. We phoned them, like I said, and Giles answered. He said everything was fine, he and Sophie had been doing their homework. Joanna was there and they were going to have their supper and watch TV. I wasn’t worried—why should I have been?”

  This too was obviously a rhetorical question. To Wexford, although he had been in her company only half an hour, it seemed inconceivable that she would ever be free from worry. She was one of those people who manufacture anxieties if none naturally occur. Her face puckered once more and he was afraid she was going to begin crying, but she went on with her account.

  “I phoned again next day at the same sort of time, but nobody answered. I mean not a real person. The answering machine did. I thought maybe they were all watching something on television or that Giles had gone out and Joanna and Sophie weren’t expecting me to call. I hadn’t said I’d call. I left the number of the hotel—not that they didn’t have that already—and I thought they might have called me back but they never did.”

  Vine intervened. “You said you thought your son might have gone out, Mrs. Dade. Where would he go? Somewhere with his mates? Cinema? Too young for clubbing, I expect.”

  A glance passed between husband and wife. Wexford couldn’t interpret it. Katrina Dade said, as if she were skirting round the subject, avoiding a direct reply, “He wouldn’t go to the cinema or a club. He isn’t that sort of boy. Besides, my husband wouldn’t allow it. Absolutely not.”

  Dade put in swiftly, “Children have too much freedom these days. They’ve had too much for years now. I did myself and I know it had an adverse effect on me for a long time. Until I dealt with it, that is, until I disciplined myself. If Giles went out he’d have gone to church. They sometimes have a service on Saturday evening. But in fact, last weekend it was on the Sunday morning. I checked before we left.”

  Most parents in these degenerate times, thought Wexford, who was an atheist, would be gratified to know that their fifteen-year-old son had been to a church service rather than to some kind of popular entertainment. Never mind the religious aspect. No drugs in church, no AIDS, no predatory girls. But Dade was looking unhappy, his expression at best resigned.

  “What church would that be?” Wexford asked. “St. Peter’s? The Roman Catholics?”

  “They call themselves the Church of the Good Gospel,” said Dade. “They use the old hall in York Street, the one the Catholics used to have before their new church was built. God knows, I’d rather he went to the C of E but any church is better than none.” He hesitated, said almost aggressively, “Why do you want to know?”

  Vine spoke in an equable, calming tone. “It might be a good idea to find out if Giles did actually go there on Sunday, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, possibly.” Dade was a man who liked to provide ideas, not receive them from some other source. He glanced at his watch, frowning. “All this is making me late,” he said.

  “Shall we hear about the rest of the weekend?” Wexford glanced from Dade to his wife and back again.

  This time, Katrina Dade was silent, making only a petulant gesture and sniffing. Roger said, “We didn’t phone on the Sunday because we were going back in the evening.”

  “That night, rather,” said Vine. “You were very late.” He probably didn’t mean to sound severe.

  “Are you trying to insinuate something? Because if you are I’d like to know what it is. May I remind you that you’re to find my missing children, not find fault with my conduct.”

  Soothingly, Wexford said, “No one is insinuating anything, Mr. Dade. Will you go on, please?”

  Dade looked at him, curling his lip. “The flight was delayed nearly three hours. Something to do with water on the runways at Gatwick. And then they took half an hour getting the bags off. It was just after midnight when we got home.”

  “And you took it for granted everyone was in bed and asleep?”

  “Not everyone,” said Katrina. “Joanna wasn’t staying that night. She was due to go home on Sunday evening. They could be alone for a little while. Giles is nearly sixteen. We all thought—everyone thought—we’d be home by nine.”

  “But you didn’t phone home from the airport?”

  “I’d have told you if we had,” snapped Dade. “It would have been after ten thirty and I like my children to be in bed at a reasonable hour. They need their sleep if they’re to do their schoolwork.”

  “What difference would it have made if we had phoned?” This was Katrina, sniffling. “The answering machine was still on. Roger checked yesterday morning.”

  “You went straight to bed?”

  “We were exhausted. The children’s bedroom doors were shut. We didn’t look inside, if that’s what you mean. They’re not babies to be checked up on every moment. In the morning I had a lie-in. My husband went off to the office at the crack of dawn, of course. I woke up and it was gone nine. It was unbelievable, I haven’t overslept like that for years, not since I was a teenager myself, it was incredible.” Katrina’s speech quickened in pace, the words tumbling over one another. “Of course, my first thought was that the children had to go to school. I hadn’t heard them, I’d been so deeply asleep. I thought, they’ll have got up, they’ll have gone, but as soon as I got up myself I knew they hadn’t. You could tell no one had used the bathroom, their beds were made, something they never do, and it looked as if someone who knew what she was doing had made them. Joanna, obviously. There was no mess, everything was tidy—I mean, it was unknown.”

  “You must have tried to find out where they were,” Wexford said. “Phoned friends and relatives? Did you phone the school?”

  “I phoned my husband and he did, though we knew they weren’t there. And they weren’t. Of course they weren’t. Then he phoned his mother. God knows why. For some unaccountable reason that’s quite beyond me, the children seem fond of her. But he drew a complete blank. The same with the children’s friends’ parents—those we could get hold of, that is. So many mothers aren’t content to be homemakers, are they? They must have careers as well. Anyway, none of them knew a thing.”

  Vine said, “Did you try to get in touch with Ms. Troy?”

  Katrina Dade stared at him as if he’d uttered some
extreme obscenity. “Well, of course we did. Of course. That was the first thing we did. Before we even phoned the school. There was no answer—well, her answering machine was on.”

  “I was obliged to come home,” Dade said, implying it was the last place he wanted to be. “I went over to her house. No one was there. I went next door and the woman there said she hadn’t seen Joanna since Friday.”

  That meant very little. A neighbor isn’t always aware of the comings and goings of the people next door. Wexford said, “And then?”

  Katrina had assumed the vacant look and glazed eyes of a member of the local drama group playing Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene. “It was while my husband was out that I looked out of the window. I hadn’t looked out before. I saw a devastating sight. You can see all the floods from here, like a great sea, an ocean. I could hardly believe my eyes, but I had to, I had to. That was when I knew my children must be out there somewhere.”

  In the calmest, steadiest voice he could muster, Wexford said, “The frogmen have resumed their search, Mrs. Dade, but what you suggest is very unlikely. The floods are quite a distance from here and nowhere in Kingsmarkham are they more than four feet deep. The search has moved to the Brede Valley, three miles away at the nearest point. Unless Giles and Sophie are great walkers or Ms. Troy is, I find it hard to see why they should go near the Brede.”

  “None of them would walk anywhere if they could help it,” said Dade.

  Katrina looked as if he had betrayed her and she withdrew her hand. “Then where are they?” she appealed to the two policemen. “What has become of them?” Then came the question Wexford had been anticipating, the question that always came from a parent in this sort of situation, and came early, “What are you doing about it?”

  “First we’ll need some help from you, Mrs. Dade,” said Vine. “Photographs of Giles and Sophie for a start. And a description. Some background—what sort of people they are.” He glanced at Wexford.

  “A photograph of Ms. Troy as well, if possible,” the Chief Inspector said. “And we have a few more questions. How did Ms. Troy get here on Friday evening? By car?”

  “Of course.” Dade was looking at him as if he’d questioned Joanna Troy’s possession of legs or as if every normal person knew human beings were born with motor vehicles attached, as it might be hair or noses. “Naturally, she came by car. Look, is this going to go on much longer? I’m late as it is.”

  “Where is her car now? Has she a garage at home?”

  “No. She leaves it parked on a kind of drive or pad in front of the house.”

  “And was it there?”

  “No, it wasn’t.” Dade began to look a little ashamed of his recent scorn. “Would you like her address? I don’t know if we have a photograph.”

  “Of course we have a photograph.” His wife was shaking her head in apparent wonder. “Not have a photograph of my very dearest friend? Darling, how could you think that?”

  How he could Dade didn’t explain. He went into another room and came back with two photographs, which he removed from their silver frames. They were of the children, not their sitter. The girl looked like neither parent. Her features were classical, almost sharp, her nose Roman, her eyes very dark, her hair nearly black. The boy was better-looking than Roger Dade, his features more nearly corresponding to a classical ideal, but he looked as if he also might be tall.

  “Just topping six feet,” said Dade proudly as if reading Wexford’s thoughts. Katrina had fallen silent. Her husband glanced at her, went on, “You can see they’ve both got dark eyes. Giles has fairer hair. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  Some time, thought Wexford, you can explain what makes a good-looking, tall, and far from deprived fifteen-year-old join something called the Good Gospel Church. But perhaps you won’t have to, perhaps we’ll have found them before that’s necessary. “Do you know,” he said to Katrina Dade, “the names of any close relatives of Ms. Troy?”

  She was speaking dully now, though still far from naturally. “Her father. Her mother’s dead and he’s married again.” She got up, moving like a woman recovering from a long and serious illness. She opened a drawer in a desk designed to look as if made for a contemporary of Shakespeare, lifted out a thick leather-bound album, and extracted from one of its gray gilt-ornamented pages a photograph of a young woman. Still slow and somnambulant, she handed it to Wexford. “Her father lives at Twenty-eight Forest Road, if you know where that is.”

  The last street in the district to bear the postal address Kingsmarkham. It turned directly off the Pomfret Road, and the houses in it would very likely have a pleasant view of Cheriton Forest. Katrina Dade was sitting down again but on a buttoned and swagged sofa, beside her husband, who was making an exasperated face. Wexford concentrated on the picture of Joanna Troy. The first thing that struck him was her youth. He had assumed she would be the same sort of age as Katrina, but this woman looked years younger, a girl still.

  “When was this taken?”

  “Last year.”

  Well. Of course it was true that many people had friends a lot older or a lot younger than themselves. He wondered how these women had met. Joanna Troy looked confident and in control rather than handsome. Her short straight hair was fair, her eyes perhaps gray, it was hard to tell. Her skin was the fresh pink and white that used to be called a “real English complexion.” Somehow he could tell she would never be very clothes-conscious, but rather a jeans and sweater woman when she could get away with it, though the photograph showed nothing of her below the shoulders. He was asking himself if there were any more questions he need put to the Dades at this stage when a shattering scream brought him to his feet. Vine also leapt up. Katrina Dade, her head back and her neck stretched, her fists pumping the air, was shrieking and yelling at the top of her lungs.

  Dade tried to put his arms round her. She fought him off and continued to make some of the loudest screams Wexford had ever heard, as loud as children in supermarket aisles, as loud as his granddaughter Amulet at her most willful. Seldom at a loss as to what to do, he was almost flummoxed. Perhaps the woman’s face should be slapped—that used to be the sovereign remedy—but if so, if that wasn’t about as politically incorrect as could be, he wasn’t going to be the one to do it. He beckoned to Vine and they moved as far from the screaming Katrina and her ineffectual husband as they could get, standing by a pair of French windows that gave on to a terraced garden and then to the floods below.

  Katrina having subsided into sobs, Dade said, “Would you get me a glass of water, please?”

  Vine shrugged but went to fetch it. He watched Katrina choke over the water, dodged out of the way before she hurled the remaining contents in his direction. This action seemed to relieve her feelings and she laid her head back against a cushion. Wexford took advantage of the silence to tell Dade they would like to have a look at the children’s rooms.

  “I can’t leave her, can I? You’ll have to find them yourselves. Look, as soon as she shuts up I have to get off to work. All right with you, is it? I have your permission?”

  “Rude bugger, isn’t he?” Vine said when they were on the stairs.

  “He’s got a lot to put up with.” Wexford grinned. “You have to make allowances. I can’t really believe anything much has happened to these kids. Maybe I should, maybe it’s their mother’s behavior making me think none of this is quite real. I could be entirely wrong and we have to act as if I am.”

  “Isn’t it because there are three of them, sir? It’s harder to believe in three people disappearing. Unless they’re hostages, of course.” Vine was remembering that Wexford’s wife had been one of the hostages in the Kingsmarkham bypass affair. “But these three aren’t, are they?”

  “I doubt it.”

  It was probably thinking of the bypass abductions that reminded Wexford that sooner or later the media was going to have to know about this. He remembered last time with a shudder, the intrusion into his own privacy, the continued onsl
aughts of Brian St. George, editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier, the embargoes he could barely enforce. Then there had been the furor over that one-time pedophile and poor Hennessy’s death . . .

  “This is the boy’s room, sir,” Vine was saying. “Someone certainly tidied it and it wasn’t a fifteen-year-old, not even a religious maniac.”

  “I’m not sure we should brand him like that, Barry. Not at this stage. You might feel like going along to the old Catholic Church after we’ve left here and get some background on these Good Gospel people, not to mention whether the boy went to church on Sunday or not.”

  If there are any two features which distinguish a teenager’s bedroom from anyone else’s, it must be the presence of posters on the walls and a means of playing music. These days, too, a computer with Internet access and a printer, and these last Giles Dade had, though the posters and player were absent. Almost absent. Instead of a recommendation for a pop group, endangered species rescue, or soccer star, the wall facing Giles’s bed had tacked to it an unframed life-size reproduction Wexford recognized as Constable’s painting of Christ Blessing the Bread and Wine.

  Perhaps it was only because he didn’t, couldn’t, believe, but he found this distasteful. Not because of what it was, though Constable’s genius found its best expression in landscape, but where it was and who had put it there. He wondered what Dora, a churchgoer, would say. He’d ask her. Vine was looking inside a clothes cupboard at what both of them would have expected to find there: jeans, shirts, T-shirts, a pea jacket and a school blazer, dark brown, bordered in gold braid. One of the T-shirts, on a hanger and probably valued, was red and printed in black and white with a photograph of Giles Dade’s face, “Giles” lettered underneath it.

  “You see he had some elements of normal adolescence,” said Wexford.

  They must ask Dade, or if it had to be, his wife, which particular clothes were missing from the children’s wardrobes. Football boots were there, sneakers, a single pair of black leather shoes. For going to church in, no doubt.