The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  “My wife is a marvel,” said Troy while she was away. “I’m a bit of a dreamer myself, a bit vague they tell me, find it hard to stick to the point. But she—well, she has such grasp, she has such ability to managethings, organize, you know, get everything straight—well, ship-shape and Bristol fashion. She’ll find that number,” he said, as if his wife would be obliged to use differential calculus to do so, “nothing’s beyond her. Don’t know why she married me, never have understood, thank God every day of my life, of course, but the ‘why’ of it’s a mystery. She says I’m a nice man, how about that? She says I’m kind. Funny old reason for marrying someone, eh? Funny old thing to—”

  “The number’s LC02 YMY,” said Effie Troy as she came back into the room. “The car is a VW Golf, dark blue with four doors.”

  Only a couple of years old then, Burden thought, with an L registration. What had happened to George Troy just after buying a new car to make him decide to give up driving? At the moment it wasn’t important. “I would like to enter your daughter’s house, Mr. Troy. Do you by any chance have a key?”

  He addressed the father but hoped the reply would come from the stepmother. It did but only after Troy had bumbled on for a couple of minutes about types of keys, Yale and Banham locks, the danger of losing keys, and the paramount need to lock all one’s doors at night.

  “We have a key,” said Effie Troy. Suspicion returned. “I’m not at all sure she’d like the idea of your having it.”

  “That’s all right, my darling. That’s quite okay. They’re police officers, they’re okay. They won’t do anything they shouldn’t. Let them have it, it’ll be all right.”

  “Very well.” The wife had evidently decided long ago that, notwithstanding her superior intellect and grasp, her husband must make the decisions. She fetched the key but not before Troy had told them what a marvel she was and how there was no doubt she would run that key to earth.

  “In Ms. Troy’s absence you personally would have no objection to our taking a look inside the house?”

  The fact that his daughter had disappeared and had been gone for two days, and possibly more, at last seemed to penetrate the father’s cheerful bonhomie. Repetition, apparently for the sake of it, was abruptly forgotten. He said with slow deliberation, “Joanna is actually missing, then? No one knows where she is?”

  “We’ve only just begun our inquiries, sir. We’ve no reason to think any harm has come to her.”

  Hadn’t they? The very fact that she had vanished without leaving a note or a message for the Dades was close to a reason. But his reply seemed to have gone some way to allaying Troy’s fears.

  “One more question, Mrs. Troy. Did your stepdaughter have a good relationship with Giles and Sophie Dade? Did they get on?” God, he was doing it himself now . . .

  “Oh, yes. She was a great favorite with both of them. She’d known them since they were nine and seven. That was when Katrina started working at the school.”

  “Anything you want to ask, Barry?” he said to Vine.

  “Just one thing. Can she swim?”

  “Joanna?” For the first time Effie Troy smiled. The smile transformed her almost into a beauty. “She’s a top-class swimmer. When the woman who taught PE was off sick for a whole term Joanna took the students to swimming and gave lessons to the first and second years. That was a year before she gave up.” She hesitated, then said, “If you’re thinking of the floods—that is, that there could have been an accident, don’t. Joanna was always saying how terrible the last lot we had were, the damage they’d do, she wished she could hibernate till all this was over. She had quite a thing about it. And the upshot was that in October she never went out except in the car. When she talked to us on Friday she said to me that once she got to the Dades’ she wasn’t going to set foot outside till she drove home on Sunday evening.”

  No outings then, no trips. And the rain had come down more heavily on Friday night and most of Saturday than it had on any single two days in the October floods. Joanna Troy wouldn’t have gone near Savesbury Deeps. She wouldn’t have taken Giles and Sophie for a nice Sunday afternoon walk in macs and wellies to see the water rising over the top of the Kingsbrook Bridge. When she went out, as she must have done, she went by car and the children with her. Because, Burden thought suddenly, she had to. Something happened to make it paramount for them all to leave the house at some time during the weekend . . .

  “You mentioned a course she teaches on the Internet. Would you happen to know . . . ?” He was certain she wouldn’t. Neither of them would.

  George Troy didn’t but that didn’t stop him beginning a lecture on the intricacies and obscurity of cyberspace, his own total inability to understand any of it, and his position as an “absolute fool when it comes to things like that.” Effie waited for him to finish his sentence before saying quietly, “www.langlearn.com.”

  “By the way, the media has been told,” Wexford said. At the look on Burden’s face he added, “Yes, I know. But it was a directive from Freeborn.” Mention of the Assistant Chief Constable’s name evoked a groan. “He says it’s the best way to find them and maybe he’s right.”

  “The best way to get calls and no doubt e-mails from all the nuts.”

  “I quite agree. We know in advance they’ll have been seen in Rio and Jakarta, and going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. But they may be in a hotel somewhere. She may be renting a flat for the three of them.”

  “Why would she?”

  “I’m not saying she is, Mike. It’s a possibility. We know so little about her. For instance, you say she has a good relationship with the Dade kids. Suppose it’s more than that, suppose she’s so fond of them she wants them for herself.”

  “Adopt them, you mean? They’re not exactly the babes in the wood. The boy’s fifteen. She’d have to be mad.”

  “So? The very fact that she’s disappeared and with two children makes her a bit out of the ordinary, doesn’t it? Did you get to see the shepherd of the gospel flock?”

  Burden had. He and Barry Vine had walked up the road a hundred yards or so to a house very different from the Troys’, a semidetached bungalow, plain and unprepossessing. The Rev. Mr. Wright had been a surprise. Burden had a preconceived idea of what he would be like, an image which derived from television dramas and newspaper stories of American fundamentalists. He would be a fanatic with burning eyes, a fixed stare, and an orator’s voice, a tall, thin ascetic in a shabby suit and constricting collar. The reality was different. Jashub Wright was thin certainly but rather small, no more than thirty, quiet-voiced and with a pleasant manner. He invited the two officers in without hesitation and introduced them to a fair-haired young girl with a baby in her arms. “My wife, Thekla.”

  Seated in an armchair and given a cup of strong hot tea, Burden had asked the most important question. “Did Giles Dade attend church last Sunday morning?”

  “No, he didn’t,” the pastor answered promptly. No beating about the bush, no wanting to know why Burden wanted to know. “Nor the service in the afternoon. We have a young people’s service on a Sunday afternoon once a month. I remarked to my wife that his not coming was odd and I hoped he wasn’t unwell.”

  “That’s right.” Thekla Wright was now holding the baby in the crook of her left arm while passing the sugar basin to Vine with her right hand. Vine helped himself freely. “It was so unusual that I rang up to ask if he was all right,” she said. “We were both anxious.”

  Burden leaned forward in his chair. “Would you tell me what time you phoned, Mrs. Wright?”

  She sat down, placing the baby, now fast asleep, on her lap. “It was after afternoon service. I didn’t go in the morning, I can’t go to every service because of the baby, but I did go in the afternoon and when I got home—it was about five—I phoned the Dades’ house.”

  “Did you get a reply?”

  “Only the answering machine. It just said no one was available, the usual thing.” Thekla Wright said very politely, “Wou
ld you mind telling us why you want to know all this?”

  Vine explained. Both Wrights looked deeply concerned. “I am sorry,” Jashub Wright said. “That must be deeply distressing for Mr. and Mrs. Dade. Is there anything we can do?”

  “I doubt if there’s anything you could do for them personally, sir, but it would help if you’d answer one more question.”

  “Of course.”

  Burden had found himself in a fix. These people were so nice, so helpful, so unlike what he had expected. And now he had to ask a question that, unless he phrased it with the greatest care, must sound insulting. He made the attempt. “I’ve been wondering, Mr. Wright, what attracts a teenager to your church. Forgive me if that sounds rude, I don’t mean it to. But your, er, slogan, ‘The Lord loves purity of life’ sounds—again, forgive me—sounds something more likely to arouse—well, derision in a boy of fifteen than a desire to belong to it.”

  In spite of his apologies, Wright looked rather offended. His voice had stiffened. “We practice a simple faith, Inspector. Love your neighbor, be kind, tell the truth, and keep your sexual activities for within marriage. I won’t go into our ritual and liturgy, you don’t want that and anyway it too is simple. Giles was a confirmed member of the Church of England, he’d sung in the choir at St. Peter’s. Apparently, he decided one day that it was all too complicated and confused for him. All these different prayer books in use, all these Bibles. You couldn’t be sure if you were getting the RC mass or matins of 1928 or happyclappy or the Alternative Service Book. It might be smells and bells or it might be tambourines and soul. So he came over to us.”

  “His parents aren’t members of your church? Are any of his friends or relatives?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  Thekla Wright cut in, “We’re simple, you see. That’s what people like. We’re direct and we don’t compromise. That’s the—well, the essence of us. The rules don’t change and the principles don’t, they haven’t changed much in a hundred and forty years.”

  This intervention provoked a glance from her husband. Burden couldn’t interpret it until she said, rather humbly, “I’m sorry, dear. I know it’s not for me to talk about matters of doctrine.”

  A smile from Wright brought a little flush to her pretty face. What did it mean? That she mustn’t intervene because she was a woman? “We welcome new people, Inspector, though we don’t make a song and dance about it. Youngsters, as I’m sure you know, often have much more enthusiasm than older people. They put their hearts and souls into worship.”

  To this neither Burden nor Vine had any response to make.

  Thekla Wright nodded. “Would you like another cup of tea?”

  The experience he had related to Wexford. “He wasn’t particularly fanatical. Seems quite a decent chap and his church is simple and straightforward, nothing suspicious about it.”

  “Sounds as if you’ll be their next convert,” said the Chief Inspector. “You’ll be popping along there next Sunday morning.”

  “Of course I won’t. For one thing, I don’t like their attitude to women. They’re as bad as the Taliban.”

  “Anyway, the main thing is that Giles Dade didn’t go to church on Sunday morning and it seems that if he was at home he would have gone, come what might. Nor did he go in the afternoon. On Friday evening when Mrs. Dade phoned from Paris the answering machine was not on, but it was on Saturday evening and again on Sunday evening. All this makes it look as if the three of them left the house some time on Saturday. On the other hand, the answering machine may have been on on Saturday evening for no better reason than that they all wanted to watch something on television without being disturbed.

  “Now on Saturday evening, as the whole country knows, the last ever episode of Jacob’s Ladder, in which Inspector Martin Jacob dies, was shown on ITV. It’s said to have had twelve million viewers and it may well be that Giles and Sophie Dade and Joanna Troy were among them. To put the answering machine on would be the obvious way of assuring peace and quiet. Giles’s failure to go to church next day is much more indicative of when they left the house.”

  “Early on Sunday morning,” said Burden, “or possibly around lunchtime. But why did they leave? What for?”

  Chapter 4

  THE WATER HAD ADVANCED DURING the morning and was now within inches of the wall. Dora had been taking photographs of it, first when it was approaching but not touching the mulberry tree, later of the point it had reached by four o’clock. Dusk had come and now darkness, a merciful veiling of that sight. The camera had been put away until the morning.

  “I couldn’t do it,” said Wexford, half horrified, half admiring.

  “No, Reg, but you’ve never been much of a photographer, have you?”

  “You know I don’t mean that. We’re about to be engulfed and you’re taking pictures.”

  “Like Nero fiddling while Rome burned?”

  “More like Sheridan sitting in a coffeehouse opposite the burning Drury Lane Theatre and saying that surely a man could have a drink by his own fireside.”

  That made Sylvia laugh. Not so her new man whom she had brought around for a drink. It wasn’t the first time Wexford had met him and he was no more impressed than on the last occasion. Callum Chapman was good-looking but neither clever nor a conversationalist. Did good looks in a man really mean so much to a woman? He had always supposed not, but unless his daughter was the exception he must be wrong. Charm too was lacking. The man seldom smiled. Wexford had never heard him laugh. Perhaps he was like Diane de Poitiers, whose good looks meant so much to her that she never smiled lest the movement wrinkle her face.

  Now Chapman was looking puzzled by Wexford’s anecdote. He said in his nasal Birmingham tones, “I don’t see the point of that. What does it mean?”

  Wexford tried to tell him. He explained how the theater was virtually the playwright’s own, that his plays had all been performed there, he had put his heart and soul into it and now, before his eyes, it was being destroyed.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “It’s an example of panache, light-hearted bravado in the face of tragedy.”

  “I just don’t see it.”

  Sylvia laughed again, quite unfazed. “Maybe by tomorrow Dad’ll be having a drink beside his own pond. Let’s go, Cal. The sitter will be fidgeting.”

  “Cal,” said Wexford when they had gone. “Cal.”

  “She calls him ‘darling’ too,” said Dora mischievously. “Oh, don’t look so gloomy. I don’t suppose she’ll marry him. They’re not even living together, not really.”

  “What does ‘not really’ mean?”

  She didn’t deign to answer. He knew she wouldn’t. “She says he’s kind. When he stays the night he makes her morning tea and gets the breakfast.”

  “That won’t last,” said Wexford. “That New Men stuff never does. He reminds me of that Augustine Casey who Sheila once brought here. The Booker shortlist bloke. Oh, I know he’s not in the least like him. I admit he’s not so obnoxious and he’s got a pretty face. But he’s not clever either or entertaining or . . .”

  “Or rude,” said Dora.

  “No, it’s not that he’s like Casey, it’s just that I don’t understand why my daughters take up with these sorts of men. Ghastly men. Sheila’s Paul’s not ghastly, I’ll grant you that. He’s just so handsome and charming I can’t believe he won’t be off chasing some other woman. It’s not natural to look like him and be neither gay nor unfaithful to your wife or partner or whatever. I can’t help suspecting him of having a secret life.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  She sounded cross, not teasing or indulgent anymore. He went to the window to look at the water, illuminated now by his neighbor’s lamp, and at the steadily falling insistent rain. Not long now. Another half-inch or whatever that was in millimeters and it would be at the wall. Another inch . . .

  “You said you wanted to see the news.”

  “I’m coming.”

 
Just the bare facts coming after another rail crash, chaos on the railways, congestion on the roads, another child murdered in the north, another newborn baby left in a phone box. Just an announcement that the three were missing, then their photographs much magnified. A phone number was given for the public to call if they had information. Wexford sighed, thinking he knew well the kind of information they would have.

  “Tell me something. Why would a bright, good-looking, middle-class teenage boy, a boy with a comfortable home who goes to a good school, why would he join a fundamentalist church? His parents don’t go there. His friends don’t.”

  “Perhaps it provides him with answers, Reg. Teenagers want answers. Lots of them find modern life revolts them. They think that if everything became more simple and straightforward, more fundamentalist, in fact, the world would be a better place. Maybe it would. Mostly they don’t care for ritual and facts that ought to be plain covered up in archaic words they can’t understand. He’ll grow out of it and I don’t know if that’s a shame or something to be thankful about.”

  Wexford woke up in the night. It was just after three and rain was still falling. He went downstairs, into the dining room and over to the French windows. The lamp was out but when he turned out the light behind him and his eyes grew used to the dark he could see out well enough. The water had moved up to lap the wall.

  Two men were unloading sacks of something onto the police station forecourt. For a moment Wexford couldn’t think what. Then he understood. He parked the car, went inside, and asked Sergeant Camb at the desk, “What do we want sandbags for? There’s no possible chance of the floods reaching here.”

  No one could answer him. The driver of the truck came in with a note acknowledging receipt of the sandbags and Sergeant Peach came out from the back to sign it. “Though what we’re to do with them I don’t know.” He looked at Wexford. “You’re not far from the river, are you, sir?” He spoke in a wheedling tone, though half jokingly. “I don’t suppose you’d like a few. Take them off our hands?”