The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  He and Sharonne arrived very late on the night of Friday, 1 December, drove along the gravel drive through the eight-acre wood and up to the front door. The exterior lights were on, the heating was on, and the bed linen had been changed. Pauline, at any rate, hadn’t a bad back. It was long past midnight and the Buxtons went straight to bed. The weather forecast had been good, no more rain was predicted, and Peter was awakened at eight thirty by sunshine streaming through his bedroom window. This was early by his weekend standards but mid-morning in rural Kent.

  He thought of taking Sharonne a cup of tea but decided not to wake her. Instead, he put on the Barbour jacket he had recently acquired and a pair of green wellies, requisite wear for a country landowner, and went outdoors. The sun shone brightly and it wasn’t particularly cold. Peter was intensely proud of owning his twenty acres of land but his pride he kept secret. Not even Sharonne knew of it. As far as she was concerned, this garden, paddock, green slopes, and wood were only what a woman like her could expect to possess. They were her due as a star of the catwalk and one of those few models to be known—and known nationally if not worldwide—by her (somewhat enhanced) given name alone. But Peter, secretly, gloried in his land. He intended adding to it and was already in negotiation with the farmer to buy an adjoining field. He dreamed of the huge garden party he planned for the following summer with a marquee on the lawn and picnic tables in the sunny flower-sprinkled clearing, the open space in the center of the wood.

  It was toward this clearing that he was walking now, along the lane to where a track wound its way through the hornbeam plantation. In the absence of Pauline’s husband, the grass verge wasn’t as overgrown as he expected—Peter still didn’t know that grass grows hardly at all between November and March—but still he must find another gardener and woodsman, and soon. Sharonne hated untidiness, mess, neglect. She liked to make a good first impression on visitors. He turned on to the track and wondered why no birds were singing. The only sound he could hear was the buzz and rattle of a drill, which he assumed to be the farmer doing something to a fence. It was, in fact, a woodpecker whose presence would have thrilled him had he known what it was.

  The track continued up to the old quarry, but a path branched off it to the left. Peter meant to take this path, for the quarry, an ancient and now overgrown chalk deposit, was of no interest to him, but at the turn-off he noticed something a more observant man would have seen as soon as he left the lane. The ruts a car’s tires make were deeply etched into the gravelly earth of the track. They were not new, these ruts. Water still lay in the bottom of them, though it hadn’t rained for days. Peter looked back the way he had come and saw that they began at the lane. Someone had been in here since he was last at Passingham Hall. Pauline’s husband, according to Pauline, had been forbidden to drive on account of his back and she had never learned. It wasn’t them. The farmer might come into the wood but would certainly do so on foot. Some trespasser had been in here. Sharonne would be furious . . .

  Peter followed the rutted track up to the edge of the quarry. It was plain to see that the vehicle, whatever it was, had gone over, taking part of the quarry’s grassy lip with it as well as two young trees. Down there it was full of small trees and bushes, and among them was the car, a dark blue car which lay on its side but hadn’t fully turned over. Stouter trees had prevented its taking a somersault onto its roof. Then, in the dappled sunshine, the stillness and the silence but for the woodpecker’s drilling, he smelled the smell. It must have been there from the first, but the sight before him had temporarily dulled his other senses. He had smelled something like it before, when he was very young and poor, and had a Saturday job cleaning the kitchens in a restaurant. The restaurant had been closed down by the food hygiene people, but before that happened he’d one night opened up a plastic bag leaning against the wall. He had a dustpan of floor sweepings to get rid of but as soon as the bag was open a dreadful smell wafted out and in the bottom he saw decaying offal running with white maggots.

  Much the same smell was coming from the car in his quarry. He wasn’t going to look inside, he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to continue up to the clearing either. What he must do was go back to the house and call the police. If he had been carrying his mobile, as he always did when in London, he would have made that call on the spot. Dialed nine-nine-nine for want of knowing the local police number. But a country gentleman in a Barbour doesn’t carry a mobile, he hardly knows what it is. Peter walked back the way he had come, feeling a bit weak at the knees. If he had eaten breakfast before he came out he would probably have been sick.

  Sharonne had got up and was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of instant coffee and a glass of orange juice in front of her. Though nothing could detract from the beauty of her figure and her facial structure, she was one of those women who look completely different, and hugely improved, by good dressing, makeup, and a hairdo. Now, as usual in the mornings, she was in her natural state, wrapped in his old Jaeger dressing gown, her feet in feathery mules, her face pale, greasy, and anemic-looking, and her ash-blonde hair in uneven spikes. Such a style may be fashionable but not when the spikes stand out at right angles on the sides of the head and lie flat on the crown like a wind-ravaged cornfield. Sharonne was so confident of her good looks at all times that she bothered only when an impression was called for.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “You look like you’ve seen a corpse.”

  Peter sat down at the table. “I have. Well, I think I have. I need a drink.”

  To Sharonne these last alarming words were triggers of danger, annulling the sentence which had preceded them. “No, you don’t. Not at nine in the morning, you don’t. You’d better remember what Dr. Klein said.”

  “Sharonne,” said Peter, helping himself to her orange juice as a poor substitute, “there’s a car in the quarry. I think there’s someone in it, someone dead. The smell’s ghastly, like rotten meat.”

  She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I said there’s a dead person in a car in the quarry. In our quarry. Up in the wood.”

  She stood up. She was twelve years younger but much tougher than he, he had always known it. If he was ever in danger of forgetting, she reminded him. “This car, did you look inside?”

  “I couldn’t. I thought I’d throw up. I’ve got to call the police.”

  “You didn’t look inside, you just smelled a smell. How d’you know it was a body? How d’you know it wasn’t rotten meat?”

  “God, I could do with a drink. Why would a car have meat in it? It’d have a driver in it and maybe passengers. I have to get on to the police now.”

  “Pete,” said Sharonne in a voice more suited to an animal rights or anti-capitalism activist than a model, “you can’t do that. That’s crazy. What business is it of yours? If you’d not gone up there—God knows why you did—you’d never have seen a car in there. You’re probably imagining the smell—you do imagine things.”

  “I didn’t imagine it, Sharonne. And I know whose car it is. It’s that blue VW Golf that’s missing, the one that belongs to that woman who’s kidnapped those kids. It’s been on telly, it’s been in the papers.”

  “How d’you know that? Did you go down and look? No, you didn’t. You couldn’t tell it was a Golf, it was just a blue car.”

  “I’m getting on to the police now.”

  “No, you’re not, Pete. We’re lunching with the Warrens at one and this evening we’ve got the Gilberts’ drinks party. I’m not missing out on those. You get the police here and we’ll not be able to go anywhere. We’ll be stuck here and all for something that’s not our business. If there is a body in that car, which I doubt, they’ll suspect you. They’ll think you did it. They always think the person who found the body did it. They’ll have you down here next week talking to them and then they’ll have you in court. Is that what you want, Pete?”

  “We can’t just leave it there.”

  W
hen her husband uttered those words, Sharonne knew the battle was won. “If you mean leave the car there, why not? We needn’t go near the place.” She never did, so this wouldn’t be difficult. “Come the spring there’ll be leaves on the trees and everything overgrown, and you won’t even be able to see it. I don’t see why it shouldn’t stay there for years.”

  “Suppose someone else finds it?”

  “Great. Let them. It won’t affect us then, will it?”

  Secure in her conviction that she had brought Peter round to her point of view, she went off upstairs to begin the two-hour-long process that would make her fit to attend the Warrens’ lunch party. Peter took himself into the dining room where, safe from her hectoring, he helped himself to a generous tot of Bushmills. Very soon the stench was dispelled from his nostrils. It was several hours later before the subject was again raised. They were returning from Trollfield Farm where they had lunched, and Sharonne, who never touched anything stronger than sparkling water, was driving, Peter being rather the worse for wear.

  “I’ll have to call the police tomorrow,” he said, slurring his words. “I’ll tell them I’ve only just found it.”

  “You won’t call them, Pete.”

  “It’s probably against the law to consheal—I mean conceal— a body.”

  “There’s no body. You imagined it.”

  In spite of overdoing it at lunchtime, Peter overdid it again at the Gilberts’. In normal circumstances, he more or less kept within the limits laid down by Dr. Klein because he wanted to keep his liver for a few more years, but normal circumstances didn’t include his finding abandoned cars which stank of rotting flesh. Next day he felt as if he were rotting himself and he didn’t call the police, only heaving his racked body out of bed at three in the afternoon to drive them back to London.

  “Out of sight, out of mind” is a truism of remarkable soundness. Once back in the South Kensington mews house where the only cars were his own and those on the residents’ parking in the street, and the only trees those planted in the pavement, the memory of his discovery became hazy and dreamlike. Perhaps he had imagined the smell. Perhaps it wasn’t from a decaying body, or not a human body, but a dead deer or badger lying concealed in the undergrowth. What did he know of such country matters? Sharonne was right when she said he couldn’t have said from where he stood if the car was a VW Golf or some other make of small car. He hadn’t seen its grid or read the name on its boot lid.

  He was a busy man, he always was. There was a possible takeover to avert, a new merger to accelerate. Such things become very real in a mirror-facaded tower just off Trafalgar Square while events in rural Kent take on a peculiar remoteness. But Friday always comes. Unless you die or the world ends, Friday will come.

  His way of continuing to avoid the issue would be not to go to Passingham St. John until—well, after Christmas. But something strange had happened, displacing his detachment. The blue car began to prey on his mind. He knew it was there and he knew the smell came from inside it. Sharonne was right when she said he imagined things. He was gifted, or burdened, with a powerful imagination, and now it magnified the car to twice its size, clearing away the bushes and trees which partly concealed it, while it strengthened and worsened the smell, spreading it from its source in the quarry up into the wood, along the track, and all the way up to the house. He began to fancy that next time he drove to his country home, whenever that might be, the smell would meet him as he turned into the lane. Inexorably, Friday came. He both wanted to go to Kent and he didn’t, and now he was beginning to fear that the presence of that car in the quarry would alienate him from his beautiful house and grounds, and make them repulsive to him. Suppose he never wanted to go there again?

  Sharonne had no intention of going to Passingham Hall two weekends in succession. Owning a country place was great so long as you seldom went there. It was useful for mentioning idly to people you sat next to at dining tables. She had a new dress that she meant to wear at a charity gala dinner at the Dorchester on Saturday night, and on Sunday she’d got her mother and her sister and four other people coming to lunch and caterers were booked. None of that was going to be put off so that they could go to Passingham. Peter dared not go without her. Such a thing had never happened. He must study to banish that car from his mind and restore himself to what now seemed the carefree state he was in before he went walking in the wood last Saturday morning.

  Chapter 9

  ONCE HE HAD CLEARED IT with the Hampshire police, Wexford phoned Ralph Jennings for an appointment. As soon as possible, please. He had to leave this message with an answering service. On the desk in front of him was a stack of reports and messages from other police authorities, and as he went through them he soon saw that most were negative. The same with the collated list, the huge protracted list, of sightings of the three by members of the public. To fail to follow them up would be negligent, even though he knew the idea that Joanna Troy had advertised both children for sale on the Internet and that she and Giles Dade had been married at Gretna Green was gross nonsense. Barry Vine, Karen Malahyde, Lynn Fancourt, and the rest of them would get on with the weary work.

  Several hours passed, during which he had dialed the Southampton number twice more, before Ralph Jennings called him back. The voice was cautious, almost fearful. What was it about? What could Kingsmarkham Crime Management have to do with him? He hadn’t lived in the neighborhood for six years.

  “You’ve read the newspapers, Mr. Jennings? You’ve seen television? Your former wife is missing and has been now for a fortnight.”

  “Maybe, but it’s got nothing to do with me. She’s my ex -wife.”

  He made the term sound not as if it referred to a no longer extant relationship but rather as if Joanna Troy were X-rated.

  “Nevertheless I would like to see you. There are questions it’s important I ask you. When would it be convenient for me and another officer to call on you?”

  “At my home?”

  “Where else, Mr. Jennings? I’m not asking you to come here. The interview wouldn’t take long, probably an hour at most.” The silence was long. Wexford thought they had been cut off. “Mr. Jennings, are you there?”

  In an abstracted, not to say distracted, voice, Jennings muttered, “Yes, yes ...” Then, as if making a decision that would radically change the whole course of his life, “Look, you can’t come to my home. It won’t do. It’s not on. Too much—explanation would be involved and then ... You really do need to see me?”

  “I thought I’d made that clear, sir,” Wexford said patiently.

  “We can fix something. We could, er, meet outside. In a pub—no. In a—a restaurant and have a coffee. How’s that?”

  He couldn’t exactly insist on visiting the man’s home, though his curiosity had been aroused. Probably Jennings was capable of not answering the door or being out at the crucial time or answering the door and refusing them entry. It wasn’t a situation in which he could get a warrant. “Very well,” he said, much as it went against the grain.

  Jennings named a time on the following day and the meeting place as a café. There was plenty of parking “around there,” he said, speaking now in a helpful, even cheerful, voice. And the coffee was very good, you could get ninety-nine different varieties. That was their gimmick, that was why the place was called the Ninety-Nine Café. Wexford thanked him and rang off.

  What could be the reason behind Jennings’s refusal to let them call on him? The sinister possibility was that Joanna Troy was there. Even more sinister that the bodies of Giles and Sophie Dade were concealed there. Wexford didn’t believe either was true. Jennings would have got Joanna out of the way during the interview. As for the bodies, if they were, say, buried in his garden, far from refusing the visit he would have put on a show of welcoming the police with open arms. So what was it? He intended to find out.

  When his phone rang again almost immediately he thought it was Jennings calling back with some fresh excuse or change of venue.
But it was his daughter Sylvia at The Hide, the women’s refuge where she currently worked two evenings and one morning a week.

  “You may know already, Dad, but a guy’s just been arrested outside this building for attacking his wife with a hammer. I saw it. From this window. It’s shaken me up a bit.”

  “I’m not surprised. You don’t mean she was killed, do you?”

  “Not as bad as that. He’s shorter than she is. He aimed at her head but he got her in the shoulder and the back. She fell down screaming and then—then she stopped screaming. Someone phoned for the police and they came. He was sitting beside his wife on the path by then, crying and still holding the hammer. There was blood everywhere.”

  “D’you want me to come?”

  “No, it’s all right. I think I just wanted to talk about it. Cal’s got the car today, he’s said he’ll come over and fetch me. I’ll be okay.”

  Wexford ground his teeth, but not until after she’d put down the phone. Did she mean that on the days she was at The Hide she let Chapman have her car and went to work on the bus? Perhaps only some days, but that was bad enough. Hadn’t he a car of his own? He’d done pretty well for himself, thought the father, a fine big house, the Old Rectory that Neil had refurbished, a ready-made family, the use of a car, and all because he’d made himself pleasant—or something— to a lonely woman.

  He looked out of the window. It was raining again, the fine light rain that once it had started seemed to find no reason to stop. A car came in from the High Street, windscreen wipers on to the fast speed, parked close up to the doors, and Vine and Lynn Fancourt got out of it, hustling into the station a man who had his head covered with a coat. The wielder of the hammer, that would very likely be.

  And what of Sylvia? Perhaps he and Dora should go over to what everyone had got into the habit of calling “the Old Rectory” and see how she was. He was always pleased to see his grandsons. Chapman would be there, though. Wexford was cursed with a too-volatile imagination and now the horrid thought came to him that Sylvia might have another child. Why not? It was what women wanted to do when they embarked on a new and presumably intended to be a steady— and what was the current politically correct word? Ah, yes, stable— relationship. The nauseating phrase was “I want to have his child.” No reasonable person could want to have Chapman’s child. He might be good-looking but he was stupid too and lack of brains was as likely to be inherited as beauty—perhaps more likely, but Sylvia’s father had often thought Sylvia very unreasonable.