by Ruth Rendell
“Mr. Dade or your daughter?”
“Katrina’s asleep, dear, and Roger’s gone to Oxford to visit his mother in hospital. She’s had a stroke. He heard this morning.”
Wexford was at a loss, but he made a decision. “There was a child with her when she was taken ill. It seems likely it’s Sophie.”
The astonished silence and then the gasp told him no one in the Dade household had been alerted.
“Will you ask Mrs. Dade to phone me when she wakes up?”
Doubts began as he put the phone down. Suppose it wasn’t Sophie? He would have told Katrina Dade her daughter was coming home when it wasn’t her daughter and he could just imagine Roger Dade’s reaction to that when he found out, the enormous fuss he would make to the Chief Constable. Wexford went down in the lift. He wanted to be there when the two women officers came back with the girl. As the crow flew, or any other bird come to that, it wasn’t all that far to Oxford, but in the current state of traffic it took a long time. And it was always worse when it was raining, which meant that these days it always was worse. Three o’clock, ten past. The swing doors opened and Burden came in, back from wherever he had been.
“D’you think it’s her?”
“Don’t know. I’ve told the mother it is. Who else would it be with Matilda Carrish at that hour of the morning?”
“She may have someone living in to look after her.”
“Sure,” Wexford said drily, forgetting that he too had doubted the girl’s identity. “Nothing more likely than that this someone is a thirteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who tells people she’s her employer’s granddaughter.”
The car came on to the forecourt, sending up a cloud of spray. Lynn was driving. He saw the girl get out, then Karen, Lynn last. It was still raining and they hurried in. He knew at once, there was no doubt. She wore the brown anorak missing from her home and shrugged herself out of it once she was inside the swing doors.
“Well, Sophie,” he said. “We’ll need to talk to you but not now. First you have to go home to your parents.”
She looked straight at him. Few people had eyes like hers, almond-shaped, slightly tilted, exceptionally large, as near dark green as human eyes ever get. She was less pretty than in her photograph but more intelligent-looking, more formidable. The camera loved her; reality did not. “I don’t want to go home,” she said.
“I’m afraid you must,” Wexford said. “You are thirteen years old and at thirteen you don’t have a choice.”
“Karen says my father is at the hospital with Matilda.”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll go, then. At least he won’t be there.”
She allowed herself to be helped back into her jacket and led back to the car by Lynn. “A bit of a little madam, sir,” said Karen.
“You could say that. Will you tell Mrs. Dade I shall want to talk to Sophie later? We’ll say six o’clock. And one of them must be with her. If Mrs. Dade isn’t up to it Mr. or Mrs. Bruce will do.”
Now he was anxious to do everything by the book. First, he phoned Antrim again and this time spoke to a hysterical incoherent Katrina, managing at last to understand that she had phoned her husband on his mobile, or rather, her mother had, and told him. Wexford decided it would nevertheless be wise for him to do the same. Not having the mobile number and scarcely trusting Katrina to give it to him, he phoned the hospital where Matilda Carrish was and eventually was able to leave a message for Dade with someone who barely spoke English.
The temptation now was to indulge in speculation. How long had she been with Mrs. Carrish? All the time or only part of it? Why had Matilda deceived them? And where, now, was Giles? Whatever he guessed would very likely be wrong. Imaginary solutions usually were. He must wait.
The rain had ceased and it had grown very cold, perhaps colder than it had been all winter. A sharp wind dried the pavements. In February it wasn’t quite dark by five forty-five but the grayish-red sun was down and dusk had begun. The sky was dark blue and jewel-bright, as yet starless. Karen drove him up to Lyndhurst Drive and, to his surprise, it was Dade who opened the door. He was considerably chastened and so forgot to be rude.
“There was no point staying up there. She’s unconscious. It’s my belief she won’t survive this.”
A lay person’s opinion is never of much value in these matters but Wexford said he was sorry to hear that and they went inside. “I can’t get a word out of my daughter,” Dade said, “but that’s par for the course. I never can.”
Wexford thought that boded better for him and Karen. They went into the living room where he had spent so much time in the past weeks. Katrina was there, looking madder than he had ever seen her. “Like one of the witches from Macbeth,” whispered Karen, who wasn’t usually given to a literary turn of phrase, and Wexford, normally only exasperated by Sophie’s mother, felt a serious concern for this woman whose hair looked as if she had been tearing it out and whose mouth hung open as if she had seen and was seeing some dreadful vision. He said nothing to her because he didn’t know what to say.
“You want someone with her when you question her, right?”
“I’m obliged to, Mr. Dade. You or” —no, obviously not—“or one of your parents-in-law.”
“She won’t talk at all if I’m there,” Dade said bitterly. He went back to the open door and called out in the sharp harsh voice all too familiar to Wexford, for it had been directed often enough at him, “Doreen! Come here, will you?”
Doreen Bruce came in and went up to her daughter, giving her her arm. “Now, dear, the best place for you is your bed. It’s all been too much.”
Once more they waited. There was no sign of Sophie. Was Doreen Bruce putting Katrina to bed? Dade sat down in an armchair, or rather, lay down, his arms spread out over its arms, his legs apart, his head thrown back in the characteristic attitude of anguish. Wexford wondered what he had expected to see in this house. Relief and joy and sweetness and light? Something like that. He could no more tell how people would react in an extreme situation than he could predict the answers to the questions he would ask Sophie. If she ever came. At that thought, her grandmother brought her into the room. She looked at her recumbent father and immediately turned away her head, twisting her neck as far around as she could, as ostentatiously as she could.
“Where shall I sit?”
That was too much for Roger Dade and he bounced upright. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he yelled at her. “You’re not at the bloody dentist’s.” He left the room and banged the door.
“You sit here, Sophie,” said Mrs. Bruce, “and I’ll sit in this chair.”
Wexford noticed that the girl had changed her clothes since she got home. Under the anorak she had been wearing a pair of trousers that were a little, but not much, too large for her and a sweater that was wrong in some indefinable way for a girl of her age. He realized now that those must have been Matilda’s clothes. She had taken nothing with her when she left except those, as people rather oddly put it, she stood up in. Now she was dressed in her own jeans and a T-shirt, unsuitable for anyone on such a cold evening, especially in a house where the central heating was inefficient. She didn’t seem affected by it. Those disconcerting eyes gazed at him.
“You will have realized, Sophie, that I want to talk to you about what happened here the weekend of twenty-sixth of November?”
“Of course I have.”
“You’re prepared for that?”
She nodded. “I’m not hiding anything. I’ll tell you all of it.” “Good. You remember that weekend?”
“Of course I do.”
“Joanna Troy came here to look after you and your brother. She came on the Friday, is that right? Would I be correct in saying she arrived at about five?” A nod. “What did you do that evening?”
“I had homework,” she said. “I went to my bedroom and did my homework. My father’s conditioned me to homework. I’m like one of that Russian guy’s dogs. Come six and I’m doing my homework
.” She sniffed. “My mother phoned from Paris. I didn’t speak to her, Giles did. He was downstairs with Joanna, watching TV, I guess. Joanna made us supper. Baked beans, it was. Baked beans and toast and bacon.” She made a face. “It was skanky.”
Karen translated. “That means ‘nasty, ’ sir.”
Sophie looked incredulous, presumably because he hadn’t understood what the whole world must understand. “The bacon was skanky, it was soft. After that we watched some shit on TV. Joanna told us to go to bed when it got to ten. I didn’t argue and Giles didn’t.”
Karen said, “Did you like Joanna, Sophie?”
As if three times her age, she said, “Is that relevant?”
“We would like to know.”
“All right. I’m not my father, you know. I mean, rude and nasty to everyone. I’m mostly quite polite. No, I didn’t much like Joanna, and Giles didn’t either. He did for a bit and then he went off her. Not that that made any difference, we still had to have her here.”
“And the next day?” Wexford asked.
“We got up. We had breakfast. It wasn’t raining then. Joanna wanted to go to the Asda—you know, out on the bypass—and we went with her. Wicked way to spend a Saturday, wasn’t it? She bought a lot of food and she bought wine, though there was plenty in the house. We all had lunch at the Three Towns Café in the High Street and she said she’d got a friend coming over for supper, that was why she’d bought the food.”
Wexford sat up straighter. “A friend? What kind of friend?”
“A man.”
She was either a very good liar or all this was true. And it meant he had been right. She continued to look at him with that steady gaze and now she took hold of a lock of her long brown hair and twisted it into a spiral in her fingers. “We went home and Giles went out. I don’t know where so don’t ask.”
“When did he come back?”
“I don’t know. I was upstairs doing more homework, the stuff my tutor gave me. When I came down Giles was there and Joanna was getting supper. Me and him, we just went cotch, he watched TV and I surfed the Net. Maybe it was six by then. Is this what you want?”
Karen nodded. “Exactly what we want. ‘Going cotch’ means relaxing, sir.”
“Considering what she’d given us, supper was going to be wicked,” said Sophie. “Three courses. Avocados and grapefruit in something she called a coulis, some dumb-ass fish—I hate fish—and some sort of fruit tart with cream.”
“Did the friend come?”
A slow nod from Sophie. “At around half-six. Peter, she called him.”
It was a common name. He must hear more before he jumped to conclusions. “At around half-six” she had said.
“And his other name?”
“No one said. It was just Peter.”
“Had the evening paper come by then?” Wexford asked. He would ask Dorcas Winter, but he wanted her version.
“I can’t remember. No, wait. I know it came. I suppose that girl brought it, the one that goes to our school. It was wet and we dried it on the radiator. God knows why, it’s always full of shit.”
Doreen Bruce flinched but didn’t interrupt.
“When we’d had the food Joanna wanted to know if Giles was going to church. ‘In this rain, ’ she said. He must have told her in the morning he’d be going. He said he wouldn’t because the service was on Sunday and that gamey Peter teased him a bit about church. Giles didn’t like it, but he gets a lot of that. You know, ‘Going to be a vicar when you grow up, are you?’—that kind of crap.”
Once more Mrs. Bruce drew in her breath. Probably Sophie had been more guarded in her speech when she stayed with her. Wexford said, “What did he look like, this Peter?”
“A dumb-ass. Ordinary. Not in very good shape. Old.”
What did that mean from someone of thirteen? “How old?” It was almost useless asking.
“I don’t know. Not as old as my father.”
He left it. She hadn’t given him much to go on but she hadn’t eliminated the suspicion she’d raised either. “Did Scott Holloway come?” he asked.
“Him? Yeah, I guess so. The bell rang but we never answered it.”
“Why not?”
“We just didn’t.”
Perhaps that was standard practice in this house. “Go on.”
“We had supper and watched Jacob’s Ladder on TV. That guy Jacob got shot in a siege. Then Joanna and Peter said they were going to bed.”
She looked at Wexford, her head on one side. What he saw in her expression, in her eyes, shocked him more than if she had screamed obscenities at him. A wealth of knowledge was there, of adult experience, of a weary worldly wisdom. He wondered if he was imagining it or if he had guessed the reason, and when he looked at Karen he saw that she was thinking the same thing. There was no need to tell Sophie to continue. She needed no encouragement.
“They’d been feeling each other up, deep kissing and all that, you know. They didn’t care about us being there. He was going to shag her, it was obvious. She didn’t say anything about us going to bed, she’d forgotten us. That was when the doorbell rang.” She looked up and at him. “I was too interested watching what they did to answer it. But when they were just kissing we did go to bed. It was about half past ten. I went to sleep. I don’t know when it happened, maybe around midnight. The noise woke me, a scream and a crash, and footsteps running down the stairs. I didn’t get up straight away. If you want to know the truth, I was scared, it was scary. I got up after a bit and went down the passage, and Giles was just standing there, outside his room. You know, it’s right at the top of the stairs. He just stood there, looking down. Peter was down there, bending over Joanna, feeling her neck and her pulse and all that. He looked up and said, ‘She’s dead.’”
There was absolute silence for a moment and then that silence was shattered by the phone ringing. It rang only twice before someone in the hall picked it up. Wexford said, “No one called the emergency services? You did that when your grandmother was taken ill but not when a woman fell downstairs. Why was that?”
“I wasn’t the only one there, was I?” She had become aggressive. “It wasn’t for me to do anything. I’m only a child, like my father’s always telling me. I haven’t got any rights.” The same thought as he had had before came into Wexford’s mind. Apparently unmoved, he shuddered inwardly. “Peter tried to lift Joanna up, but she was too heavy for him. He asked Giles to help him and they put her on the sofa. There was some blood, not much. Peter got a cloth and wiped it up and he asked me where there was a scrubbing brush. Always ask a woman, don’t they?”
She was suddenly a forty-year-old feminist and her voice had grown strident. Doreen Bruce had gone quite white, her hands trembling on the arms of the chair. Karen asked her if she was all right. She nodded, the living symbol of an aghast older generation.
“I wasn’t going to do it,” said Sophie. “It was him pushed her down the stairs.”
“You didn’t see that?”
“It was obvious. He said, was there any brandy? Giles got it for him and he drank it. Then he said he’d like another one but he’d better not, seeing as he was going to drive . . .”
The door opened and Roger Dade came in. Sophie stopped talking abruptly, fixed him with an insolent stare. He said, “That was the hospital. My mother’s dead. She died half an hour ago.”
Doreen was the first to speak. “Oh, Roger, how sad. I am sorry.”
He took absolutely no notice of her, simply repeated, “She died half an hour ago.” Then he turned with noisy violence on his daughter, shouting at her, “That’s your fault, you little bitch! She’d be alive now if you hadn’t given her all that trouble. You’ve been a liar since you were born and you made her tell lies and turn against her nearest and dearest . . .”
Wexford got up. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’ve had a shock, Mr. Dade. You’re not yourself.” He feared the man was only too much himself, but it was useless continuing now. Was the girl at risk?
He thought not. Anyway, she had her grandmother, her surviving grandmother, for what that was worth. “We’ll go now. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Dade had calmed down into a disgruntled misery and laid himself in a chair in the attitude he had adopted earlier. Wexford thanked Sophie, told her she had been very helpful. After a fashion very unusual for him, he felt he had had about as much as he could take for one day. Mrs. Bruce came up to him after the girl had gone, said apologetically, “I don’t know where they learn those words. They don’t pick them up at home.”
Wexford wasn’t so sure of that. He patted her on the arm. “They all do it. It’s a phase. Best ignore it, I think. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”
She nodded rather miserably.
Outside, the evening was colder, the sky clearer, a moon that looked as if it had been soaked in soapy water sailed above the trees. Against his face the air felt fresh and damp. He got into the car beside Karen.
“You were thinking what I was thinking, weren’t you?”
“What would that be, sir?”
“That though Dade dislikes his daughter and she hates him, there has been more between them than there should have been.”
“You mean, he’s done things he shouldn’t have.” It was a reproof but he let it pass. “Something has to account for her not wanting to go home while he’s there. It makes me want to vomit.”
“Me too,” said Wexford.
The car turned into the street where he lived and she dropped him at his gate. He hadn’t said anything about Peter. It was too soon.
Chapter 21
HE HADN’T ASKED THE GIRL where her brother was. Because he knew she wouldn’t tell him? Even supposing she knew herself. It was already clear to him that this Peter had driven them away in Joanna’s car with Joanna’s body in the boot.
“Why take the children with him?” Burden asked when they met in the morning.
“He couldn’t trust them not to tell anyone what they’d seen,” Wexford said. “But I think they went willingly. Sophie can’t wait to get away from home. Her mother’s crazy and I’ve a suspicion her father’s been abusing her.”