Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods

by Ruth Rendell

  Yes, the Dades were safe up there. And the chance of their children being drowned practically nil. Before he left, a message had come through from the Subaqua Task Force to say that no living people or bodies had been found. Wexford stared up the hill, wondering exactly where they lived. And then he stopped dead. What was the matter with him? Was he losing his grip on things? Those children might not have drowned but they were missing, weren’t they? Their parents had come home from a weekend away and found them gone. Last night. All this nonsense about floods and drowning had obscured for him the central issue. Two children, aged fifteen and thirteen, were missing.

  He walked on fast, thinking fast. Of course, the chances were that they were back by now. They had been, according to Burden, in the care of an older person, and they were all three missing. That surely meant that the sitter, presumably a woman, had taken them somewhere. Probably she had told the mother on the previous Friday or whenever it was the parents went away, that she intended to take them on some outing and the mother had forgotten. A woman who would assume that her children had drowned, just because they weren’t there and part of the town was flooded, had to be - well, to put it charitably, some what scatterbrained.

  Dora wasn’t in the house. He found her down the garden, directing the beam from a torch on to the roots of the mulberry tree. ‘I don’t think it’s come up any more since I spoke to you at four thirty,’ she said. ‘Do we really have to move the furniture?’

  They went indoors. ‘We could shift some of the stuff we value most. Books. Favourite pictures. That console table that was your mother’s. We could make a start with that and listen to the weather forecast at ten.’

  He gave her a drink and poured one for himself. With the much-diluted whisky on the table beside him, he phoned Burden. The inspector said, ‘I was about to call you. It just struck me. The Dade kids, they must be missing.’

  ‘I had the same thought. Still, correction: they may be missing. Who knows but that their sitter’s just brought them back from an educational trip to Leeds Castle?’

  ‘Which started yesterday, Reg?’

  ‘No, you’re right. Look, we have to find out. The last thing they’d do is let us know if they’ve turned up safe. We’re strictly reserved for disasters. If these children still haven’t turned up the parents, or one of them, will have to come down to the station and fill in a missing per sons form and give us a bit more information. No need for you to do it. Get Karen on to it, she hasn’t been exactly crushed with toil lately.’

  ‘I’d like to call the Dades before I do anything,’ Burden said.

  ‘And ring me back, would you?’

  He sat at the table and he and Dora had their dinner. The letter box flapped as the evening paper, the Kingsmarkham Evening Courier, arrived.

  ‘It’s too bad,’ Dora said. ‘It’s nearly eight o’clock, two hours late.’

  ‘Understandable in the circumstances, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose so. I shouldn’t complain. I expect the poor newsagent had to bring it himself. Surely he wouldn’t let that girl go out in this.’

  ‘Girl?’

  ‘It’s his daughter delivers the papers. Didn’t you know? I suppose she does look rather like a boy in those jeans and that woolly cap.’

  They kept the curtains at the french windows drawn back so that they could see if the rain started again and see too the tide of flood which had crept perhaps six feet across the lawn since last night. One of the neighbours, his garden elevated a few inches above the Wexfords’, but enough, enough, had an Edwardian street lamp at the bottom of his lawn and tonight the light was on, a powerful white radiance that revealed the water lying gleaming and still. It was a shining grey colour, like a sheet of slate and the little river, somewhere down there, was lost in the broad shallow lake. It was weeks since Wexford had seen the stars and he couldn’t see them now, only the bright but hazy lamplight below and a scurrying dotted mass across the sky where the rising wind agitated the clouds. Black leafless tree branches bowed and swayed. One swept the surface of the water, sending up spray like a car driving through a puddle.

  ‘Do you want to start moving stuff now?’ Dora asked when they had finished their coffee. ‘Or do you want to see this?’

  He shook his head, rejecting the paper which seemed to hold nothing but photographs of floods. ‘We’ll move the books and that cabinet. No more till we’ve seen the weather forecast.’

  The phone rang as he was carrying the sixth and last cardboard box of books upstairs. Luckily, most of his books were already on the upper floor, in the little room they had once called his study and now was more like a mini-library Dora took the call while he set the box down on the top stair.

  ‘It’s Mike.’

  Wexford took the receiver from her. ‘I’ve a feeling they haven’t turned up.’

  ‘No. The Subaqua Task Force want to resume the search tomorrow. They’ve got some idea of going under the deep water in the Brede Valley. They’ve not much to do and I think they like the excitement.’

  ‘And Mr and Mrs Dade?’

  ‘I didn’t phone, Reg, I went up there,’ said Burden. ‘They’re a funny pair. She cries.’

  ‘She what?’

  ‘She cries all the time. It’s weird. It’s pathological.’

  ‘Is that right, doctor? And what does he do?’

  ‘He’s just rude. Oh, and he seems to be a workaholic, never an idle moment. He said he was going back to work while I was there. The kids are definitely missing. Their dad says it’s all rubbish about them drowning. Why would they go near floodwater in the depths of winter? Who got hold of this ridiculous idea? His wife said she did and started crying. Jim Pemberton suggested maybe they went in the water to rescue someone else but in that case, who? The only other person to go missing is this Joanna Troy...’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She’s the friend of Mrs Dade who was spending the weekend in their house to keep an eye on the two kids. Dade’s doing the missing persons forms now.’ Burden’s voice took on a hesitant tone. Perhaps he was remembering the heartfelt note in Wexford’s voice when he expressed a wish not to get involved. ‘As it happens, things are a bit more serious than they seemed at first. The Dades got home from Paris - they came in through Gatwick - a little while after midnight. The house was in darkness, the children’s bedroom doors were shut, and the parents just went to bed without checking. Well, I suppose they wouldn’t check. After all, Giles is fifteen and Sophie is thirteen. It wasn’t till mid-morning that Mrs Dade found the kids weren’t there. And that means not only that they’ve been missing since Sunday midnight but possibly since Friday evening when the parents left.’

  ‘And this Joanna Whatever?’

  ‘Troy. Mrs Dade’s been phoning her home number all day without getting a reply and Dade went round there this afternoon but no one was there.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to matter whether I sincerely hope or don’t bother,’ said Wexford wearily. ‘But we’ll leave it all till tomorrow.’

  Burden, who could be sententious, said cheerfully that tomorrow was another day.

  ‘You’re right there, Scarlett. Tomorrow will be another day, always providing Dora and I haven’t been drowned during the night. But I dare say we’ll be able to get out of the bedroom windows.’

  He had been watching for more rain as he was speaking and the first drops had splashed against the glass midway through his last sentence. He put the receiver back and opened the front door. It was milder out there than he could ever remember for the time of year. Even the wind was warm. It had brought with it the next downpour and the rain increased in intensity as he watched, straight-down rain like glass or steel rods crashing on to the stone flags and splashing into the waterlogged gullies between them. The down-flow pipe from the roof gutters began to pour out water like a tap turned full on and the drain, unable to cope with so great a volume, was soon lost under an eddying flood of its own.

  Dora was watching the n
ews. It ended as he came in and the weather forecast began with its typical irritating preamble: a kind of improbably glamorous creature in the guise of a water sprite and a silver lame designer gown, sitting on top of a fountain while a concealed fan blew her hair and draperies about. The meteorologist, an altogether more normal sort of woman, pointing with a ferrule at her map, told them of flood warnings out on four new rivers and an area of low pressure rushing across the Atlantic in pursuit of the one presently affecting the United Kingdom. By morning, she said, as if this wasn’t true already, heavy rain would be falling across southern England.

  Wexford turned it off. He and Dora stood at the french windows looking at the water which now, as in the front garden, filled the paved area immediately out side. The rain made little waves on its surface where a twig bobbed about like a boat on a choppy sea. The trunk of the mulberry tree was half submerged and it was now a lilac bush which had become the criterion. The rising water lapped its roots. A few yards of dry land remained before the incoming tide would reach the wall. As he watched, the light at the end of the garden next door went out and the whole scene was plunged into darkness.

  He went up the stairs to bed. The possibility of two young proficient swimmers being drowned no longer seemed to him so absurd. You didn’t need too much imagination to fancy the whole country sinking and vanishing under this vast superfluity of water. Everyone overcome by it like shipwrecked men, their raft inadequate, their strength gone, the young and the old alike, the strong and the weak.

  Chapter 2

  So much for not getting involved. He was on his way there now, heading up Kingston Gardens towards Lyndhurst Drive, with Vine who was driving. Vine seemed to think drowning in the Brede Valley, particularly in the very deep water now filling Savesbury Deeps, where the frogmen had begun searching again, a real possibility The night before he had thought so himself. Now, with the sun shining on wet pavements and glittering dripping branches, he wasn’t so sure.

  Three hours earlier, when he got up, the rain had apparently just stopped. It was still dark but light enough to see what had happened during the night. He didn’t look out of the window. Not then. He was afraid of what he might see, and even more afraid, when he went down to make Dora’s tea, of the water waiting for him at the foot of the stairs or lying, still and placid, across the kitchen floor. But the house was dry and when he had put the kettle on and at last made himself pull back the curtains and look out of the french windows, he saw that the silvery grey lake still stopped some ten feet from the little wall that divided lawn from paving.

  Since then there had been no more rain. The weather forecast had been right as far as the coming of a further downpour but wrong in its timing. There was still the second approaching area of low pressure to look for ward to. As he got out of the car at the point where Kingston Gardens met Lyndhurst Drive, a large drop of water fell on to his head, on to his bald spot, from a hollybush by the gate.

  The house on the corner was called ‘Antrim’, a name neither pretentious nor apparently appropriate. Unlike any other in Lyndhurst Drive, where neo Georgian sat side by side with nineteen thirties art deco, nineteen sixties functional, eighteen nineties Gothic and late-twentieth-century ‘Victorian’, the Dades’ house was Tudor, so well done that the undiscerning might have mistaken it for the real thing. Beams of stripped oak criss-crossed slightly darker plaster, the windows were diamond-paned and the front door heavily studded. The knocker was the ubiquitous lion’s head and the bellpull a twisty wrought-iron rod. Wexford pulled it.

  The woman who came to the door was very obviously the anxious mother, her face tear-stained. She was thin, wispy and breathless. Early forties, he thought. Rather pretty her face unpainted, her hair a mass of untidy brown curls. But it was one of those faces on which years of stress and yielding to that stress show in its lines and tensions. As she led them into a living room a man came out. He was very tall, a couple of inches taller than Wexford, which would make him six feet five, his head too small for his body.

  ‘Roger Dade,’ he said brusquely and in a public school accent which sounded as if he purposely exaggerated it. ‘My wife.’

  Wexford introduced himself and Vine. The Tudor style was sustained inside the house where there was a great deal of carved woodwork, gargoyles on the stone fireplace (containing a modern, unlit gas fire), paisley pattern wallpaper and lamps of wrought iron and parchment painted with indecipherable ancient glyphs.

  The top of the coffee table round which they sat held, under glass, a map of the world as it was known in, say, fifteen fifty with dragons and tossing galleons. Its choppy seas reminded Wexford of his back garden. He asked the Dades to tell him about the weekend and to begin at the beginning.

  The children’s mother began, making much use of her hands. ‘We hadn’t been away on our own, my husband and I, since our honeymoon. Can you believe that? We were desperate just to get away without the children. When I think of that now, I feel just so guilty I can’t tell you. A hundred times since then I’ve bitterly regretted even thinking like that.’

  Her husband, looking as if going away with her was the last thing he had been desperate to do, sighed and cast up his eyes.’ ‘You’ve nothing to be guilty about, Katrina. Give it a rest, for God’s sake.’

  At this the tears had come into her eyes and she made no effort to restrain them. Like the water outside, they welled and burst their banks, trickling down her cheeks as she gulped and swallowed. As if it were a gesture which he was more than accustomed to perform, as automatic as turning off a tap or closing a door, Roger Dade pulled a handful of tissues from a box on the table and passed them to her. The box was contained in another of polished wood with brass fittings, evidently as essential a part of the furnishings as a magazine or CD rack might be in another household. Katrina Dade wore a blue crossover garment. A skimpy dressing gown or something a fashionable woman would wear in the daytime? To his amusement, he could see Vine doing his best to avert his eyes from the bare expanse of thigh she showed when the front of the blue thing parted.

  ‘But what’s the use?’ The tears roughened her voice and half choked it. ‘We can’t put the clock back, can we? What time did we leave on Friday, Roger? You know how hopeless I am about things like that.’

  Roger Dade indeed looked as if, with varying degrees of impatience and exasperation, he had borne years of unpunctuality; forgetfulness and a sublime indifference to time. ‘About half past two,’ he said. ‘Our flight was four thirty from Gatwick.’

  ‘You went by car?’ Vine asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, I drove.’

  ‘Where were the children at this time?’ Wexford had directed his eyes on to Dade and hoped he would answer but he was to be disappointed.

  ‘At school, of course. Where else? They’re quite used to letting themselves into the house. They wouldn’t have to be on their own for long. Joanna was coming over at five.’

  ‘Yes. Joanna. Who exactly is she?’

  ‘My absolutely dearest closest friend. That’s what makes all this so awful, that she’s missing too. And I don’t even know if she can swim. I’ve never had any reason to know. Perhaps she never learned. Suppose she couldn’t and she fell into the water, and Giles and Sophie plunged into the water to save her and they all...’

  ‘Don’t get in a state,’ said Dade as the tears bubbled up afresh. ‘You’re not, helping with all this blubbing.’ Wexford had never actually heard the word used before, only seen it in print years before in boys’ school stories, old-fashioned even when he read them. Dade looked from one police officer to the other. ‘I’ll take over,’ he said. ‘I’d better if we’re to get anywhere.’

  She shouted at him, ‘I want to do the talking! I can’t help crying. Isn’t it natural for a woman whose children have drowned to be crying? What do you expect?’

  ‘Your children haven’t drowned, Katrina. You’re being hysterical as usual. If you want to tell them what happened, just do it. Get on with it.’

 
‘Where was I? Oh, yes, in Paris.’ Her voice had steadied a little. She pulled down the blue garment and sat up straight. ‘We phoned them from Paris, from the hotel. It was eight thirty. I mean, it was eight thirty French time, seven thirty for them. I just don’t under stand why Europe has to be a whole hour ahead of us. Why do they have to be different?’ No one supplied her with an answer. ‘I mean we’re all in the Common Market or the Union or whatever they call it, the name’s always changing. We’re supposed to be all the same.’ She caught her husband’s eye. ‘Yes, all right, all right. We phoned them, like I said, and Giles answered. He said everything was fine, he and Sophie had been doing their homework. Joanna was there and they were going to have their supper and watch TV. I wasn’t worried - why should I be?’

  This too was obviously a rhetorical question. To Wexford, although he had been in her company only half an hour, it seemed inconceivable that she would ever be free from worry. She was one of those people who manufacture anxieties if none naturally occur. Her face puckered once more and he was afraid she was going to begin crying but she went on with her account.

  ‘I phoned again next day at the same sort of time but nobody answered. I mean not a real person. The answering machine did. I thought maybe they were all watching something on television or that Giles had gone out and Joanna and Sophie weren’t expecting me to call. I hadn’t said I’d call. I left the number of the hotel - not that they didn’t have that already - and I thought they might have called me back but they never did.’

  Vine intervened. ‘You said you thought your son might have gone out, Mrs Dade. Where would he go? Somewhere with his mates? Cinema? Too young for clubbing, I expect.’