by Ruth Rendell
“Oh, that’s easy. They lived here when they were first married. Giles was born here. Roger wasn’t in real estate then. My husband and he had been at school together, best mates and all that, and my husband put him in the way of getting a job. That’s why they came here, because of the job. He was a salesman for a computer supplier—computers were just becoming fashionable then—but apparently he wasn’t very good at it. He hasn’t inherited our mum’s brains.” Implying that she had? Perhaps. “Katrina was upset when he got the sack, and she didn’t want to leave. She loved the cottage they lived in, she wanted him to get work here. Then the pub in the village got an IRA bomb and she left fast enough after that.”
Buxton came. He looked ill. The whites of his eyes were pale yellow and his cheeks a network of broken veins. The suit he wore, a double-breasted pale gray, seemed unsuitable for the time of year, and his tie, too loosely knotted, was an inappropriate mélange of garden annuals, petunias, pansies, and nasturtiums. Such cheerful, almost holiday, clothes contrasted ludicrously with the bags under his eyes and his thinning hair. In Wexford’s pleasant office he seemed ill at ease.
“I’ve asked you to come here for two reasons, Mr. Buxton,” Wexford began. “The first involves a question you’ll find easy enough to answer. The second may be more difficult for you—I mean difficult in the sense of awkward or embarrassing. But we’ll leave that for now.” Buxton had turned his liverish eyes away and was looking at the pale chocolate-colored telephone, studying it with fascination as if it were an example of radically innovative technology. “You’ve already told us the names of various friends and acquaintances of yours who visit and know the lie of your land. Since then I’ve spoken to Mr. Shand-Gibb, and he and his housekeeper mentioned various people and groups who borrowed what he calls the Dancing Floor for functions. There was, for instance, a couple who held their wedding reception there, and his housekeeper told me of a noisy group whose shouting and singing could be heard down at the house. Does this mean anything to you?”
Buxton’s red face had gone redder. He gave the classic reply: “It might.”
“Yes, Mr. Buxton, I know it might. It might mean something to me, such as for instance, that a bunch of people out in the open on a summer night usually do make a lot of noise. Let me rephrase the question. Do you know who these people were and were they there with your permission?”
Buxton seemed to speak unwillingly as if the words were dragged out of him. “They used to use that clearing in the wood when the Shand-Gibbs owned the place. When I moved in, the man—the boss, the organizer, I don’t know—he wrote and asked if they could carry on with it. Twice a year they wanted it, July and January—must be bloody freezing in January.”
“So you agreed?”
“I couldn’t see any reason to refuse. Sharonne and me, we wouldn’t be there on a weeknight, so we weren’t bothered about noise.”
“So they’ve used it four or five times since you moved in?”
“I suppose so.”
“And since it’s now January they’re due to use it again shortly?”
“They won’t now. Not after—what was in the quarry.”
Why was the man so cautious, so evasive? Suddenly Wexford knew. “You charge a fee? They pay a rent?”
“A nominal rent,” Buxton said unhappily.
“And how much might ‘nominal’ be, Mr. Buxton?”
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
“You do,” said Wexford laconically.
Perhaps Buxton’s thoughts strayed to the charge of perverting the course of justice, for he no longer hesitated. “A hundred pounds a time.”
A nice little earner, Wexford thought. Especially if it came in twice a year and a similar sum from other organizations using the wood. A welcome addition to one’s income but not, surely, to the income of a man like Buxton. But, of course. He wasn’t declaring it, it was tax-free. And he’d insist on cash. Dropped through the letter box in an envelope, no doubt. That was the reason for the shame and the caution . . .
“Who are these people? What do they use the clearing for?”
Shifting in his seat as if his buttocks itched, Buxton said, “They’re religious. That singing is hymns. They shout out, ‘I see, I see!’ meaning they’ve seen angels or spirits or something.”
“I thought you’d never been there when all this was going on.”
“The first year they used it after we moved in I went down. I wanted to know what I was letting myself in for.”
“Who are they, Mr. Buxton?”
“They call themselves the Church of the Good Gospel.”
Of which Giles Dade was a fervent member. This meant that, having visited the wood on several occasions, he would know it and know about the quarry. And others would know about it too and know him. Know him enough to abduct him and his sister, and kill the woman who was looking after them? Perhaps. There seemed no point in inquiring about other parties who had used the place, for here was a direct lead to the missing boy, the first link between him and Passingham Hall. “The man, the boss, the organizer,” as Buxton put it, would undoubtedly be Jashub Wright, pastor of the Good Gospel Church . . .
Buxton confirmed this, astonished that Wexford could identify him. But instead of reassuring him, this evidence of the Chief Inspector’s apparent omniscience only seemed to frighten him further. He pulled a mobile out of his pocket and asked if it would be all right to phone his wife. Wexford shrugged, smiling slightly. At least the man hadn’t asked to use his phone.
Sharonne, it seemed, hadn’t been given prior notice of her husband’s visit to Kingsmarkham and interview at the police station. Wexford could gather quite a lot from Buxton’s evasive replies and although he didn’t actually say, “I’m at Passingham” —that would have been too blatant in this company—the words “Passingham Hall” were used. What would Buxton do if she called him back on the Hall phone? Perhaps say he’d had to pop over to Guildford. Buxton was getting a dressing-down. From where he sat Wexford could just hear the shrill reproving words of a scold. He couldn’t blame her. Chronic mendacity seemed to come so naturally to Buxton that he told lies when the truth would surely have been perfectly acceptable to hearer as well as speaker. For instance, why on earth tell the woman, as he now did, “I must go, darling, I’ve got a business lunch in five minutes” ? When he ceased to be besotted with the “divine Sharonne” and began on an adulterous spree he would have had plenty of practice at alibi-making.
“Then I suppose I should say I mustn’t keep you,” Wexford said smoothly. For all his lying and prevarication, Buxton hadn’t yet learned how not to blush. “Unfortunately, I haven’t done with you quite yet. I told you I had a second line of inquiry to pursue and I expect you know what that is.” A nod, an uncomfortable shrug. “When did you first see the blue VW Golf in the quarry? No, don’t tell me December the twenty-first. I know you were aware of it before that.”
“It would have been a bit before,” Buxton said, the words again wrenched out of him.
“Rather more than a bit, Mr. Buxton. The weekend of the fifteenth perhaps? The eighth? Even before that? The first?”
Of course Wexford was enjoying himself. How could it be otherwise? Normally a compassionate and considerate man, he felt no need to waste mercy on Buxton. He watched the man squirming and watched without compunction. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, as his grandmother used to say, when first we practice to deceive. The wretched Buxton said, “I didn’t come down on the fifteenth or the eighth.”
“So it was the first weekend in December?”
“It must have been.”
“Well, Mr. Buxton, you have wasted a lot of police time. You’ve wasted public money. But if you tell me no more lies and explain to me instead exactly what happened when you went up into the wood the first weekend in December, one week after Ms. Troy and Giles and Sophie Dade went missing” —he paused, looking searchingly at Buxton—“I think it’s likely the Director of Public Prosecutions will not
decide to take this any further.”
He had taken pity on him, but instead of relaxing Buxton looked as if he was going to cry.
Nothing of what Buxton told him could set a precise time on the arrival of the car in the quarry. But by Saturday, December 2, the body inside the car was decomposed enough to smell strongly. The weather was far from cold, but it was, after all, late autumn. The air was moist and mild after that rain, and decay would have happened quite quickly.
“I haven’t even got a theory,” Wexford said when he and Burden met in the Olive and Dove at the end of a long day. “Can you come up with anything?”
“We know now that Giles could have directed whoever killed Joanna to the wood and the quarry, but I don’t think he and Sophie would have acquiesced in her murder, do you? It’s more likely he told the perpetrator about Passingham Hall in all innocence. He didn’t know what the perpetrator wanted. He and Sophie didn’t even know Joanna was dead. They may have been killed before they could find out. Or they may have been taken away while Joanna was still alive. Even taken by Joanna in the car with whoever it was.”
“So where do the Good Gospelers come in?”
“They don’t. Their only function in all this is that of introducing Giles to Passingham Hall.”
“I shall still want to talk to them again. More of them. Not just the Reverend Jashub. I’d like to find out exactly what happens when they have their open-air carry-on at Passingham Hall, when they turn into Blue Domers.”
“What’s a Blue Domer?”
“Someone who doesn’t go to church but says he prefers to worship outside, under God’s ‘blue dome.’ Mike, I don’t know how, still less why, but I think Joanna Troy was killed in the hall of the Dades’ house and on that Saturday night.”
Wexford had been staring out of the window, staring at nothing, but now the void was filled with three people he knew, all crossing the bridge and hand in hand. In the glaring yellow lamplight he had recognized his former son-in-law and his two grandsons. Of course. It was Friday, the evening Neil had access to his sons and took them out. If they were crossing the bridge toward the center of town they were most likely heading for McDonald’s, the boys’ favored venue for supper.
“What are you looking at?”
“Neil and Ben and Robin. I’ve just spotted them.”
“D’you want to go outside and say hello?”
“No.” Wexford suddenly felt deeply sad. Not angry or frustrated or regretful but just sad. “Let the poor chap have some time alone with his children. You know, Mike, that’s the insoluble problem today. The media are always on about how men should learn to be good fathers, but they seldom say a word about the father who doesn’t get the chance. His wife has left him and she’s got his children, she’s always got his children. But are they therefore to stay together and be miserable together for years and years so that he can be a good father? And suppose she won’t? I don’t know the answer. Do you?”
“Marriage partners should stay together for the sake of the children,” said Burden sententiously.
“Easy to say when you’re happily married.” Neil and his children had passed on out of sight. Wexford sighed. “D’you want another?”
“Only if you will.”
“No. I’d better get home.”
Outside it was raining harder than ever. The Kingsbrook, once more in spate, tumbled and foamed along toward the dark tunnel mouth. Wexford wondered if the floods would come back and he thought with dismay of his garden. Burden gave him a lift home but refused an invitation to come in. Wexford made his way up to the front door, noticing water gushing from the outfall pipe that drained the gutters. There was nothing to be done about it. He let himself in, found Dora in the living room with her glass of wine, first of the two she would have that evening. She got up, kissed him, said, “Reg, I’ve just had a very odd phone call from Sylvia.”
“Odd in what way?”
“She sounded a bit wild. She said Cal was pressurizing her to marry him. That was her word, ‘pressurizing.’ And she’d said she’d think about it but she wasn’t ready for remarriage yet. You know the ridiculous way they talk these days. She wasn’t ready for remarriage.”
“Thank God for that, anyway.”
“The boys were going out with Neil, it being Friday, and she said that once she was alone in the house with Cal again he’d start and she didn’t like the way he bullied her.”
“Why can’t she just leave him?” Wexford said irritably. “After all, she’s left one man, she knows how it’s done. I suppose I should say, why doesn’t she chuck him out, she’s done that too.”
“I’d no idea you felt as bitter as that.”
“Well, I do. About both of them, him for being a pig and a boor, and her for being such a fool. D’you think the garden’s going to flood again?”
Calling in at Passingham Hall to check on the state of the heating— he couldn’t trust Pauline’s judgment—Buxton found the man called Colman standing on the gravel sweep at the front of the house, staring up at his bedroom window.
“What the hell are you doing? Get off my property and don’t come back.”
“Keep your hair on,” said Colman, using a quaint old-fashioned expression Buxton vaguely remembered on his grandfather’s lips. “No need to get aerated.” Swiftly he plucked a card from his pocket and held it out to Buxton. “It’s more in your interest than anyone else’s that we find those kids.”
Buxton supposed it might be, though he didn’t say so. “Who are you acting for?”
“Mrs. Matilda Carrish. Now why don’t we go up into the wood and you show me exactly where you found that car—when was it, now?”
“Just before Christmas.” Buxton was getting nervous.
“Come off it. Rumor has it you knew that vehicle was there weeks before you said a word. I wonder why you kept so stumm?”
Buxton took him up into the wood and reconstructed for him an itinerary for the car to have taken once it had left the road at the top of the lane. After a while he began to find Colman congenial company, particularly as the inquiry agent was carrying on him a hip flask of whisky which he passed several times to Buxton. By the time they parted, Colman to drive to the Cotswolds, Buxton to London, they had agreed to keep in touch.
Sharonne was out and no note had been left for him. Buxton wondered uneasily if after that call he had made to her from Kingsmarkham Police Station she had phoned Passingham Hall and, receiving no reply, absented herself in order to punish him. It wouldn’t be untypical. The phone sat on its little table, silent and accusatory, a small white instrument whose invention and subsequent universal use had probably caused more trouble in the world than the internal combustion engine. For some reason he lifted its receiver and dialed 1471 to obtain the number of the last caller. He didn’t recognize it but he knew it belonged to none of those he and Sharonne called their friends nor to any tradesman or shop that he could recall.
When he went to fetch himself a drink he noticed that he was holding between his fingers and turning it this way and that, the card given him by the representative of Search and Find.
Chapter 17
AT ANTRIM THEY WERE TAKING the entrance hall to pieces.
“Everything will be put back exactly as it was,” Vine said to Katrina Dade, more in hope than certainty. Katrina moaned and wrung her hands, finally retreating to the living room where she lay on a sofa with a blanket over her and her face buried in cushions.
A brownish patch was scraped off the wall’s skirting board, and a section of flooring with a red-brown stain on it lifted away from between the bottom of the clothes cupboard and the uncarpeted floor. Vine knew what he had to do next and he didn’t fancy it, but a policeman’s lot, he sometimes thought, was a series of unpleasant tasks he didn’t fancy. DC Lynn Fancourt said kindly to him, “I’ll ask her if you like, Sarge. I don’t mind. Really.”
Vine sometimes thought that if he weren’t a happily married man with kids and responsibilities h
e wouldn’t have been averse to a run-around with Lynn. She was just his type, old-fashioned sort of figure and lovely golden-brown hair. “No, I’ll do it. Now. Get it over with.”
He went into the living room and coughed. Katrina lifted a tearblotched face from the cushions. Vine cleared his throat. “Mrs. Dade, I’m sorry to have to ask you this. Believe me, it’s just a precaution. Don’t read anything into it. But do you happen to know which blood group your children belong to?”
Katrina read everything into it. She set up a loud wailing. Vine looked at her in despair and called Lynn, who came in calmly, sat down beside Katrina, and murmured softly to her. No brisk admonitions, no slapping of face. Katrina sobbed and gagged and stuck her fists in her eyes, laid her head on Lynn’s shoulder, but eventually gulped out that she didn’t know, she never dealt with that kind of thing.
“Would your husband be able to help us?”
“He’s at the office. He doesn’t care. Children are just something a man in his position thinks he ought to have. He’s never loved them.” The emotive word set off fresh wails and floods.
Lynn patted her shoulder, said gently, “But would he know about blood groups?”
“I suppose so. If there’s anything to know.”
At this moment the front door was heard to open and close, and Roger Dade came into the room. Katrina once more buried her head in the cushions. As always on the lookout for someone to blame, Dade said aggressively to Vine, “What have you been saying to her?”
Lynn answered, “We need to know your children’s blood groups, Mr. Dade.”
“Why didn’t you come to me first? You know she’s a crazy hysteric. Look what you’ve done to her.” But he lifted his wife—tenderly for him—and put his arms round her. “There, there, come on. You can’t go on like this.” He looked up at Lynn. “Their groups are on file upstairs. If I ask you what you want them for, I suppose you’ll say it’s just routine.”
Neither officer answered. Dade sighed, disengaged himself from his wife’s grip—she had locked both hands round his neck—and went upstairs. Vine looked at Lynn and cast up his eyes.