The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford raised an inquiring eyebrow at Sophie. The girl said nastily, “You tell them if you want. I’m not going to do your dirty work for you.”

  Katrina pulled her sleeve down over her hand and used it like a handkerchief to wipe her streaming eyes. “She was going to stay a week. My husband” —she put extreme scorn into the word—“said we ought to have her for a week. I didn’t want that. She looked down on me, always did, because I’m not supposed to be clever like her. Well, the third day she was here I went up to Sophie’s room to tell her her tutor had phoned to say he couldn’t give her a lesson next day, and when I opened the door she wasn’t there and she wasn’t in Giles’s room, and I found all three of them in Matilda’s room. They were all in there and Matilda was sitting on the bed smoking pot.”

  “Mrs. Carrish was smoking marijuana?”

  “That’s what I said. I started screaming—well, anyone would. I told Roger and he was incandescent. But I didn’t wait to see what he’d do, I told her she’d have to go, there and then. It was evening but I wasn’t going to have her in my house a minute longer . . .”

  “You’d better tell what Matilda said, not just you,” Sophie said scornfully. “She said she was doing what she always did to relax. If we didn’t ever relax, she said, we’d get sick and be too ill to pass exams. It was harmless if we wanted to give it a go, she said, but she wouldn’t give us any, she was sure we had plenty of chances to get it. Oh, and said my father was full of shit and he’d make us full of shit too.”

  “Stop using that filthy language,” Katrina said at the top of her voice, and to Wexford in a more subdued tone, “I even packed her bags for her, threw all her fancy clothes, all her black designer stuff, I threw it into her cases and put them outside on the doorstep. My husband fetched her downstairs—for once he asserted himself with her. I’d never seen that before. It was nine at night. I don’t know where she stayed, some hotel, I suppose.” Suddenly she screamed at him, “Don’t look at me like that! She was an old woman, I know that. But she didn’t act like one, she acted like a fiend, getting my children on to drugs . . .”

  Sophie cocked a thumb at her mother. “What she means is she thinks Matilda hid us to get back at her and I reckon she’s right.”

  “It was her revenge,” said Katrina, sobbing now. “It was her way of getting revenge.”

  Not for the first time, Wexford wondered what the people who talked so glibly about “family values” would say to a scene such as the one he had just witnessed and the revelations he had heard. But come to that, wouldn’t he, if in Katrina’s place, have done just what Katrina had done, if more calmly? What had possessed Matilda Carrish to do something more readily associated with pushers a quarter of her age? No doubt it was because she had used marijuana herself, perhaps regularly for years, and she genuinely believed it a harmless relaxant.

  He and Burden went upstairs. Wexford thought he had known who “Peter” was and, broadly speaking, what had happened that night from the point when Sophie had described her father. But he had truly seen the light when she insisted they had memorized Matilda’s phone number, when he knew the whole operation had been planned before they left Antrim.

  He knocked at the door of Giles’s bedroom and Doreen Bruce’s voice asked who it was. Wexford told her and she came to open it. Her husband was sitting in a small armchair he recognized as having been brought there from the living room, the book he had been reading lying face-downward on the bed. Giles’s religious artifacts and posters had disappeared.

  Wexford came straight to the point. “Mr. Bruce, can Giles drive a car?”

  Afraid of the law, as many people of her generation are, his wife immediately plunged into excuses. “We told him he must never try to drive before he’d got a license and insurance and all that. We explained it was fine for him to practice on the old airfield, but he couldn’t take his test till he was seventeen. And he understood, didn’t he, Eric? He knew it was all right for Eric to teach him on the old runway when he came to stay with us and he had to save driving for when he was with us, that was his treat here, something to look forward to.”

  Yes, of course, the airstrip at Berningham, once a United States base . . .

  “You took him out in your car, did you, Mr. Bruce?”

  “It was something for him to do. And I enjoyed it. We all enjoy teaching, don’t we? Be a different matter if we had to do it for our livings, I dare say.”

  “We’d have taught Sophie too, dear,” said Mrs. Bruce, “but she wasn’t keen to learn. I think the truth was she wasn’t keen to learn from a couple of oldies. Well, you can understand it, can’t you?”

  “Mind you, he was a good student,” said Mr. Bruce. “They are at that age. Giles can drive as well as I can—better probably.”

  “Talk about reversing into a marked space,” said his wife. “I’ve never seen it done so well. You could drive a cab in London, I said to him, though of course he’ll do something a lot superior to that, won’t he?” She looked up into Wexford’s face. “He will, won’t he, dear?”

  He understood. “I’m sure he will.”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow and—and Katrina’s coming too. I hope it’s only temporary. Frankly, I’ve never cared for Roger, but still I hope it’s not a permanent break. I hope it won’t come to divorce for the children’s sake.”

  That would make the second partnership to come to grief as a result of this case, Wexford remarked as he and Burden went down the stairs. Sophie and her mother were still where he had left them. Katrina had lapsed back into sleep, the place and condition she escaped to. Sophie’s eyes were once again fixed inscrutably on her.

  “You said Matilda drove Giles to the station,” Wexford said. “That would be Kingham station?”

  “She drove him to Oxford.”

  “And was he going to Heathrow from Oxford? Was he going to catch a domestic flight?”

  For a moment she was perfectly silent. Then she screamed at the top of her voice, waking her mother, “I don’t know!”

  It was wet and by now very dark, a starless, moonless night, though not yet six in the evening. Wexford and Burden stood under a lamppost, in its brassy yellow light.

  “Scott Holloway’s father is called Peter,” said Wexford.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t remember how. I just know.”

  “He can’t be the Peter. Sophie would have recognized him. For God’s sake, he lives practically next door.”

  “Nevertheless, let’s go and find out a bit more about those Holloways.”

  Chapter 24

  PETER HOLLOWAY NO MORE FITTED the generally accepted image of a lover than his son would in a few years’ time. He was tall enough but stout with it and moonfaced. Sitting very comfortably by a fire of real logs, a cup of some warm milky drink beside him, the newspaper on his knee, he looked as if this was his natural role and habitat. For no other occupation could he be so well adapted. Scott and his sisters were also in the room, all seated at a table playing Monopoly, and when Mrs. Holloway sat down in an armchair next to a small table on which lay pale blue knitting, Wexford felt he had strayed into a 1940s advertisement for some cozy aspect of family life.

  Burden rushed straight into the middle of things. “Did you know Joanna Troy personally, Mr. Holloway?”

  The man sat up a little, startled and defensive. “I never met her. My wife sees to that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing? The children’s education?”

  “All that sort of thing, yes.”

  Wexford had his eyes on the boy. The Monopoly game had been suspended, apparently at Scott’s wish, for one of his sisters still held the cup with the dice in it in her hand while the other’s face had taken on a look of exasperation. Now the boy turned around and looked at his father.

  Wexford said sharply, “What time did you go to the Dades’ house, Scott?”

  It was a good thing the police weren’t armed. He could cheerfully have shot Mrs. Holloway.
“He told you, he didn’t go there.” She had picked up her knitting and her fingers worked frenetically. “How many times does he have to tell you?”

  “Scott?” said Wexford.

  He had been made in his father’s image. He wasn’t quite as fat— yet. His face was as round and his eyes as small. Piggy eyes, they used to be called, Wexford remembered.

  “I know you did go there, Scott.”

  The boy got up. He stood in front of Wexford. It was possible that at that school he went to they taught children to stand when they were addressed by a teacher. “I didn’t go in.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went round there. In the evening. It was—I don’t know what time, maybe nine or a bit earlier.” He said to his mother, “You and Dad were watching TV. I went up the road to their house. There were lights on, I knew they were in. Her car was there.”

  “Whose car, Scott?” said Burden.

  “Miss Troy’s, Joanna’s.”

  “And you changed your mind about going in when you saw her car? Why was that? She’d been your teacher too, hadn’t she?”

  He gave no answer, but he blushed. The dark red spread all over his face until it was the color of raw beef. Like a child half his age, he muttered, “Because I hated her. I’m glad she’s dead,” and before the tears gathering in his eyes could fall, he rushed from the room.

  “She’s got a new one.”

  Dora’s words greeted him as he walked in the door.

  “Who’s got a new what?”

  “Sorry, that wasn’t very clear, was it? Sylvia’s got a new man. She brought him in here for a drink. They were on their way to a—well, a political meeting. There was to be a lecture. ‘The Way Forward to a New Left’ or something like that.”

  Wexford groaned. He sat down heavily in the middle of the sofa. “I suppose he’s tall and handsome and thick and deeply boring, is he? Or weedy and buck-toothed and brilliant and rude?”

  “Not any of those. He looks a bit like Neil. He’s quiet. Sizing up the situation, I imagine. Oh, and he teaches politics at the University of the South.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “John Jackson.”

  “Well, it’s different. He’s not a Marxist, is he? Not these days? Not in the twenty-first century?”

  “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”

  “I wonder what Neil will say,” said Wexford rather sadly. He hoped the man would be good company, not a bore, kind to the children. But he strove always—though not always with success—not to worry about things he couldn’t change. He believed his daughters loved him, but nothing he could say or do carried much weight with them anymore. Their contention was the usual one in any family disagreement, that a parent can’t understand, and who was to say they weren’t right?

  Dora went back to her book. He switched his thoughts back to the Dades. Their family disagreement had been far from usual. Examining it while alone, he wondered if it was the world’s first instance of a grandmother introducing her teenage grandchildren to drugs. He was prepared to give Matilda—dead Matilda—the benefit of the doubt and concede that it was probably done because she really believed marijuana would be therapeutic to these overstressed children. She had been using it for so long herself, she might even have a medical reason, arthritis for instance, and rather than harming her it had taken away pain. Now he remembered the faint scent of it, no more than a hint, a breath, he had noticed when she passed him in his office.

  In any case, those children would have been offered harder and more dangerous drugs every day at their school gates. Of course, that didn’t in any way exculpate Matilda, and it was no wonder the parents were enraged. Katrina had turned her out of the house and her own son had supported his wife. No doubt it was dark. Very probably it was raining. No taxis were ever to be found in the Lyndhurst Drive–Kingston Gardens area. She would have had to walk, carrying those cases, as far as the station taxi rank or, instead, to the nearest hotel. Most old women would have been seriously distressed, but Matilda wasn’t most old women. She would have been angry, furious, or, as Katrina might put it, incandescent. Well, she had had her revenge.

  Had Scott Holloway had his? Almost certainly not. As far as Wexford could see at present, all he had said established that Joanna and the Dade children were still in the house at nine and the only Peter in the case, apart from Buxton, had been watching television with his wife.

  Before he got the chance to talk to Burden the next day, something else happened. He had a visitor. How she ever got past the front desk he didn’t know but guessed it was because they were short-staffed. Experienced people were all away with flu, and temps were taking their place in the network that separated him from the public. She walked in and the girl who showed her up presented her as Ms. Virginia Pascall. Wexford had never heard of her. He noticed—he couldn’t help it—that she was young, still in her twenties, and quite startlingly beautiful. Apart from all that, the exquisite features, the long red-gold hair, the spectacular legs and stunning figure, he saw something else, stark madness in her blank blue stare and twisting, writhing hands.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Pascall?”

  Send for the attendants in white coats with the tranquilizing syringes? She sat down on the edge of the chair, immediately jumped up again, put her hands on his desk, leaned toward him. He could smell something on her breath, the scent of nail varnish, perhaps, or some sweet but nonalcoholic drink. Her voice was sweet, like the smell, but jerky and brittle.

  “You have to know, he wants you to know, he killed her.”

  “Who did he kill, Ms. Pascall, and who is ‘he’?”

  “Ralph. Ralph Jennings, the man I’m engaged to. The man I was engaged to.”

  “Ah.”

  “He’s had secret meetings with her. It was a conspiracy. They were plotting to kill me.” She began to shudder. “But they quarreled over how to do it and he killed her.”

  “Joanna Troy?”

  Once he’d uttered the name, Wexford wished he hadn’t. Virginia Pascall made a noise midway between an animal’s roar and a human scream, then it was all screaming. For a moment he had no idea what to do. No one came. He’d have something to say about that once he’d got rid of her. But she stopped as abruptly as she’d begun and fell into the chair. It was as if the paroxysm had released something and for a while she was at peace. She leaned across the desk and he looked into eyes which, in color only, were normal human eyes.

  “That night he killed her, I can prove he wasn’t with me. I can prove anything. He ran her down in his car, you know. Her blood was on the wheels. I wiped it off and smelled it. That’s how I know it was hers, it smelled of her, foul, stinking, disgusting.”

  You were supposed to humor people like this. Or you were once. Perhaps in these psychiatric times that was no longer true. On the other hand, it couldn’t do any harm. “Where is he now? Is he at your home?”

  “He’s gone. He’s left. He knew I’d kill him if he stayed. He ran her down outside our house. She was on her way to see me. Me!” The unsteady, sweet voice leaped an octave. “He killed her to stop her coming to me. He drove backward and forward over the body till the car was all over blood. Blood, blood, blood!” She sang it, her voice reaching scream level. “Blood, blood, blood!”

  It was at this point that Wexford pressed the alarm bell on the floor under his desk.

  “What happened then?” Burden asked over their coffee.

  “Lynn came running and a couple of uniforms I’ve never seen before. One of them was a woman. This woman didn’t fight them, though she spat at Lynn. I said to send for Crocker, but they were already on the phone to Dr. Akande.”

  “Was she always like that or has the Joanna business driven her over the top?”

  “I don’t know. The main thing is for poor old Jennings that he’s left her at last. That makes the third couple to split up through the Dade affair.”

  “I’ll be very surprised if George and Effie T
roy make a fourth or Jashub and Thekla Wright, for that matter.”

  Wexford managed a smile. “Odd, though, isn’t it? I think that’s the only wise thing I’ve ever heard Katrina Dade say, that it’s common for couples to split up when their child is missing or killed.”

  “You’d expect a loss like that to bring them closer together,” Burden said.

  “I don’t know. Would you? Isn’t it likely that they depend on the other one in ways they never have had to before? And that other, who has always seemed strong or comforting or optimistic, suddenly shows they’re none of those things. They’re just as weak and helpless as the other one and that seems to show they’ve been living for years under an illusion.”

  “Maybe, but that wasn’t what you wanted to talk about, was it?”

  “No, I want to talk about Giles. Now it’s pretty obvious Sophie invented Peter. She probably thought him up on the journey here from Gloucestershire. I’m sure Matilda was never told about him. So who did Matilda think had killed Joanna?”

  “Whoever it was drove the car. Someone drove it.”

  “Giles can drive.”

  Burden said nothing, raised his eyebrows.

  “You’re looking astonished, but you shouldn’t be. You know what kids are, you’ve got three. I guarantee even that small one of yours is talking about the day he’ll be allowed to drive a car. They’re all mad to drive pretty well from the time they can walk. Giles might be a religious fanatic, but he was no exception. His grandfather Bruce taught him on an old airfield.”

  “I should have guessed,” Burden said ruefully.

  Wexford shrugged. “There were just the two of them escaping from Antrim, Giles and Sophie. Sophie and Giles. That’s all. With a dead body in the car. Maybe in the boot. And they knew all the time they were eventually making for Trinity Lacy and Matilda. They knew she was ‘cool.’ Remember the pot-smoking.”

  Burden gave a dry laugh. “I must say that boy’s religious faith doesn’t seem to have had much effect on his moral character. As for the girl . . .”

  “You see them like that, do you? I see them as victims, truly as babes in the wood.”