The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  “I’m innocent, he says, and he’s glad I didn’t know because it proves she never tried anything on.” Katrina achieved a convincing shudder. Then she said, “Joanna’s done this, hasn’t she? Whatever it is. Taken them where they shouldn’t go, got them into trouble. Maybe it’s her that’s drowned them, is that it?”

  Before Wexford could come up with an answer, the front door closed with a slam and Dade came striding in. “You wanted me home,” he said to his wife, “and I’ve come. For ten minutes.” He gave Wexford an exasperated glare.

  Wexford said, “I’d like a list of names of Giles’s and Sophie’s friends. I expect they’d be school friends. Their names and addresses, please.”

  Katrina got up and went to the French windows, where she stood, holding on to the curtain with one hand and looking out. With a show of impatience her husband began writing, in a large backward-sloping hand, on the sheet of paper Wexford had given him. He crossed the room to fetch a telephone directory.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Dade?”

  The ballpoint was flung down. “What can my profession possibly have to do with this inquiry? Can you tell me that?”

  “You never know. But probably nothing. Nevertheless, I would like to know.”

  The writing was resumed. “I’m a domestic property broker.”

  “Is that what I’d call an estate agent?” asked Burden.

  Dade didn’t answer. He handed Wexford the list. Katrina turned around and said thrillingly, “Look, the sun has come out!”

  It had, in a watery blaze. The Dades’ garden, trees, shrubs, the last of waterlogged autumn flowers, sparkled with a million water drops. Curving across slatey clouds and blue patches, the arc of a rainbow had one foot in the flooded Brede Valley and the other in Forby.

  “May I keep my little girl’s T-shirt?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Dade. Not at present. It will be returned to you later, of course.”

  Wexford disliked the way he had to put this, but he couldn’t think of a better phrasing. It smacked to him, inescapably, of post-mortems. Then, as he and Burden moved toward the door, she threw herself at his feet and clasped her arms round his knees. Such a thing had never happened to him before and, unusually for him, he felt deeply awkward.

  “Find my children, Mr. Wexford! You must find my darling children!”

  Afterward, as he told Dora, he didn’t know how he and Burden managed to escape. They heard the domestic property broker snarling at his wife for “making an exhibition of herself” as he strained to raise her from the carpet.

  “I’d like to go down and see how Subaqua are getting on,” Wexford said when he had recovered from his embarrassment. “Where are they now?”

  “Back at the bridge. They were going to have another look in the weir pool. It’s the deepest part. Apparently they’ve turned the weir off. Did you know they could do that?”

  “No, but seeing they can turn off Niagara Falls I’m not surprised.”

  “I supposed we’ve checked on the whereabouts of Joanna Troy’s car? Or, rather, checked it’s not parked anywhere around here?”

  “That was done yesterday. No dark blue Golf with that index number anywhere in the area. The, er, tooth’s gone off to the lab at Stowerton for something or other, I’m not sure what. Maybe only to establish that it’s what we think it is.”

  Wearing rubber boots and raincapes, they were standing on the temporary wooden bridge that had been put up during a pause in Tuesday’s downpour to carry river frontage dwellers up to the comparatively dry land of the High Street. Wednesday’s lull was still going on and, as always, everyone was hoping it was less a lull than a cessation. But the clouds were too massy and dark for that, the wind too brisk and the temperature too mild. Upstream the frogmen were in the weir pool. It was always deep water there, a favorite place for the local children to swim in until a new council member created alarm about it in a national newspaper—“there will be a fatality sooner rather than later ...” The water was deeper now and widening into an inland sea, the farthest reaches of which were creeping up Wexford’s garden. That this might be the fatality, happening in the here and now, was taking shape in everyone’s mind but his.

  A boat on this water was something he had thought he would never see. The frogman surfaced and hung on to the gunwale. Wexford didn’t know if he was the one he’d talked to on the Brede or someone different. Everything was so wet, everything dripping and spraying, that he couldn’t tell if the cold drop he felt on his cheek was renewed rain or a splash from a stone Burden had kicked into the water. But it was soon followed by another and another, a shower of splashes, and the rain began in earnest, threatening to drench them. As they waded back to the car, Wexford’s cellphone began ringing.

  “Freeborn wants to see me.” Sir James Freeborn was the Assistant Chief Constable. “He sounded thrilled to bits that we were down here ‘watching the operations, ’ as he put it. I wonder why.”

  He was soon told. Freeborn was waiting for him in Wexford’s office. This was what he always did when he came to Kingsmarkham rather than summoning the Chief Inspector to Headquarters at Myringham. There was nothing private in the office and Wexford wasn’t one of those men who keep photographs of their wife and children on their desks, yet Freeborn was always to be found seated in Wexford’s chair, looking into Wexford’s computer, and once, when the Chief Inspector returned rather sooner than expected, with his nose and a hand in one of the desk drawers. This time he wasn’t sitting down but standing at the window, contemplating in the dying light, and through the fine misty rain, the sheets of water that lay this side of Cheriton Forest.

  “Makes it look like Switzerland,” he remarked, still gazing.

  Coniferous forest and a lake . . . Well, perhaps, a little. “Does it, sir? What did you want to see me about?”

  In order to see him, Freeborn was obliged to turn around, which he did ponderously. “Sit,” he said, and took Wexford’s own seat himself. The chair on this side wasn’t quite big enough for Wexford’s bulk but he had no choice and settled himself uneasily. “Those children and that woman are somewhere under all that.” Freeborn waved impatiently at the window. “Here or in the Brede Valley. They have to be. Finding that, er, garment, clinched things, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so. That, I believe, is what Joanna Troy wants us to think.”

  “Really? You’ve evidence to show that Miss Troy is an abductor of children, have you? Possibly a child murderer?”

  “No, sir, I haven’t. But there’s absolutely no evidence of any of the three of them entering the water, still less drowning. And in any case, where’s the car?”

  “Under the water too,” said Freeborn. “I’ve been to Framhurst myself, I’ve seen how the floods have engulfed the road there. There’s a steep drop from that road into the valley—or there was. They were all out in the car, the water was rising, and she tried to drive through it. The car went over and down the incline with them all in it. Straightforward.”

  Then how did the T-shirt find its way into the water between the Kingsbrook Bridge and the weir, a distance of at least three miles? If it’s a possibility the bodies are still there, that Subaqua haven’t yet found them, they could hardly have failed to find a car. And the water didn’t begin to rise until late Saturday night, so this trip in the car, presumably to view the floods, couldn’t have taken place until Sunday morning, more probably Sunday afternoon. In that case why didn’t Giles Dade go to church as he always did? Why did his sister wear a dark, anonymous-looking jacket when she had a new yellow one she loved?

  Wexford knew it would be useless to say any of this. “I still think there’s some point in trying to trace these people, sir. I believe they all left the house on Saturday evening before the floods started.”

  “On what grounds?”

  He could imagine Freeborn’s face if he said, “Because Giles didn’t go to church.” He wasn’t going to say it but, anyway, Freeborn didn’t give hi
m a chance. “I want you to call off the search, Reg. Call off this ‘tracing, ’ as you put it. Leave it to Subaqua. They’re highly competent and they’ve reinforcements coming in from Myringham. I’m assured by their boss—incidentally, a fellow Rotarian—that they won’t rest until they’ve found them. If they’re there—and they are— they’ll find them.”

  If they’re there . . . Since they weren’t, couldn’t be, time was going by, anything could have happened. He went home, asked Dora, who had been taking and apparently excelled at a computer course, if she could get into a website on the Internet for him.

  “I should think so.”

  “It’s called www.langlearn.com. And when you’ve found it perhaps you’d give me a call so I can look at it.”

  “Darling,” she said indulgently, “I don’t have to do that. I can print it out.” She sought for language he would understand. “It will be like a book or a newspaper. You’ll see.”

  It was. “Page 1 of 2” it said at the top and, in Times New Roman type, thirty-six point: “Fantastic French with Joanna Troy.” The portrait photograph was smudgy. It might have been almost any young woman. There was a page of text, most of it incomprehensible to Wexford, not because it was in French, it wasn’t, but because of the cyber-speak which he couldn’t follow. A column down the left-hand side, extending to page 2, offered twenty or thirty options including All the Words You Want, Verbs Made Easy, Books You Need, and Instant Chat. You highlighted the one you wanted. Dora had apparently highlighted All the Words You Want for him and downloaded page 1 (of 51). It held an eye-opening vocabulary but not a word he could ever imagine using. Here the student could learn the French for pop music, both “house” and “garage,” the kind of drinks teenagers like, types of cigarette, and, he suspected, types of cannabis, the translation of “miniskirt,” “tank top,” “distressed leather,” and “kitten heels,” the when, where, and how of buying condoms, and how a French girl would ask for the morning-after pill.

  Did it tell him anything about Joanna Troy? Maybe it did. That, for instance, she had a grasp of what people of the age of her former students required from the Internet, that she was uninhibited, unshocked by drug-taking and the free availability of contraceptive measures. That she was what in his day used to be called “with it” and in his father’s “on the ball.” She might not be a fashionable dresser herself, but she knew about teenagers’ clothes. And it was hardly part of his self-imposed brief to inquire why she assumed that everyone who wanted to learn French must be under eighteen and conversant with a language far more obscure than that she was aiming to teach.

  But how very different from Katrina Dade she must be showed in all the words of this text he could understand and perhaps even more in those he couldn’t. Did it also show that, her own age more or less halfway between theirs and that of their children, she had common ground with those children? Far more in common than with Katrina, who would have defined “garage,” he was sure, as somewhere you kept a car, and “spliff” as an expostulatory noise made by a character in a comic strip.

  And why did he feel, now more than ever, that the answer to all this would lie in the reason for the friendship between Katrina Dade and Joanna Troy? Whatever that might be. Katrina’s motives were obvious enough. She was flattered by the attentions of a woman younger and cleverer than herself. Besides, she was what the psychotherapists, what Wexford’s Sylvia, would call “needy.” But what about Joanna’s purpose? Perhaps it will emerge, he thought, as he put the printout into his pocket.

  Chapter 6

  ACCORDING TO THE ENVIRONMENT AGENCY, all the ground in mid-Sussex, all the south of England, come to that, was waterlogged. Even when the rain stopped there would be nowhere for the accumulated water to go. Sheila Wexford, flying into Gatwick from the west of the United States, came to stay a night with her parents and told them the aircraft’s descent had felt like a seaplane landing, the floods spread across thousands of acres and the downs rising out of it like islands.

  The days passed, damp days, wet days, but the rain lessening, downpours giving place to showers, torrents to drizzle. The weekend was cloudy, the sky threatening, but what the Met Office had once called “precipitation,” an absurd name they had dropped recently, that had stopped. Joanna Troy and Giles and Sophie Dade had been missing for a week. On Monday a feeble watery sun came out. Instead of churning it into billows, the wind merely ruffled the gleaming gray surface of the floods. And contrary to what had been gloomily foretold, the water began to recede.

  Its level had never reached the topmost sandbags in Wexford’s garden but had lapped the walls and lain there, a menacing stagnant pool, unchanging for days. As Monday passed it started to sink and by the evening the whole of the highest sandbags were exposed. That evening Wexford brought his books downstairs and Dora’s favorite small items of furniture.

  Subaqua, whose headquarters were in Myringham, had opened a temporary office in Kingsmarkham. Since they had found nothing, its only use, as far as Wexford could tell, was as somewhere to send Roger and Katrina Dade when their demands on him became peremptory. They were quite natural, these demands. More and more he was begining to feel deep sympathy for these parents. Katrina’s tears and Dade’s brusqueness were forgotten in an overwhelming pity for a couple whose children had disappeared and who must feel total impotence in the face of an investigating officer temporarily warned off investigating. She at least probably spent long hours in the Subaqua trailer parked on the dry side of Brook Road next to the Nationwide Building Society and waited for the news that never came. Roger Dade’s snatching time off work was very likely an agony to him. Neither of them looked as if they had eaten for a week.

  George and Effie Troy, as anxious now as those other parents, called to see him and them he sent to Subaqua too. Not that he had entirely obeyed Freeborn’s injunction. Rather he had interpreted it as applying to activity on his part and that of his officers. Passivity was another matter. He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop people coming to him or even, if they phoned first, forbid them to air their fears in his presence. Of course, he could send them to Subaqua as well, but surely that was no reason not to hear them out first?

  The first of them arrived while he was reading the lab report on the little object Lynn Fancourt had found in the Dades’ hall. A tooth it was, or rather, the crown of a tooth, constructed of porcelain and gold. There was no reason to suppose violence had contributed to its separation from the root and base of the natural tooth to which it had been attached. An interesting factor, in the opinion of the forensic examiner, was that a small amount of an adhesive was found on the crown and this was of the type which Joanna Troy might have bought over the counter in a pharmacy temporarily to reattach the crown if, say, she had been unable to visit her dentist. Wexford wasn’t sure it was particularly interesting. While having no crowns on his own teeth, he felt that if he had and one came out he might, especially if pain resulted, buy and use such an adhesive. Surely anyone would as a temporary measure. Patch up your tooth and ring your dentist for an appointment.

  But now she might be in pain. Would she seek a dentist wherever she was? And should he do something about this? Alert dentists nationwide . . . Only he couldn’t because Freeborn had banned any further action. While he was thinking about this, Vine came in and said there was a Mrs. Carrish wanted to see him. Matilda Carrish.

  “She said it as if I was expected to have heard of her. Perhaps you have.”

  Wexford had. “She’s a photographer, or used to be. Famous for taking pictures of eyesores, blots on the countryside, that sort of thing.” Wexford had been going to add that Matilda Carrish had also been much praised some five years back for her exhibition of street people’s portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, but one look at Vine’s expression of apprehensive distaste stopped him. “She must be getting on a bit now. What does she want?”

  “You, sir. She’s the Dade kids’ grandmother. Roger Dade’s mum.”

  “Really?” How u
nlikely, he thought. Could she be a hoaxer? Frauds and con people turned up in hordes when they had cases like this. Yet she was called Carrish, he recalled, and it was an unusual name. If he had had to conjecture the sort of woman Dade’s mother would be, also taking into account the pearl earring and Katrina’s crushing put-down of her as an “old bat,” he would have come up with a meretricious interfering creature, never a professional woman, but someone who had too little to occupy her or allay her chronic frustration. “You’d better bring her up here,” he said, curious now to see what she was like, hoaxer or not.

  That Matilda Carrish was indeed “getting on a bit” showed in her lined face and her bright silver hair but not in her step, her carriage, and her general agility. She was very thin and springy, though without the nervous energy that showed in so many of her daughter-in-law’s movements. The hand she held out to him was dry and cool, ringless, the nails filed short. Sometimes he ignored extended hands but hers he took and was oddly surprised by the fragile bones. Remembering the photograph in Sophie Dade’s bedroom told him at once she was who she said she was.

  The black trouser suit she wore had been designed for a woman half her age, yet it was entirely suitable, it fit as if it had been made for her, as perhaps it had. Aquiline though her face was, her lips thin and her cheekbones sharp, he could see Roger Dade in her and realized that only a little padding out and smoothing, a little lifting and plumping, would make mother and son as alike as twins.

  She came straight to the point, no preamble, no excuses. “What are you doing to find my missing grandchildren?”

  This was the question Wexford dreaded. It was he who had to answer it, not Freeborn, and he was aware that by now any response he gave must sound feeble and as if the police simply weren’t bothering. But he tried. From the first Mrs. Dade had believed her children had drowned and that was now the police belief. Today or at the latest tomorrow the waters would have receded sufficiently to put the matter beyond doubt.