Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I supposed we’ve checked on the whereabouts of Joanna Troy’s car? Or, rather, checked it’s not parked anywhere around here?’

  ‘That was done yesterday. No dark-blue Golf with that index number anywhere in the area. The, er, tooth’s gone off to the lab at Stowerton for something or other. I’m not sure what. Maybe only to establish that it’s what we think it is.’

  Wearing rubber boots and rain-capes, they were standing on the temporary wooden bridge which had been put up during a pause in Tuesday’s downpour to carry river frontage dwellers up to the comparatively dry land of the High Street. Wednesday’s lull was still going on and, as always, everyone was hoping it was less a lull than a cessation. But the clouds were too massy and dark for that, the wind too brisk and the temperature too mild. Upstream the frogmen were in the weir pool. It was always deep water there, a favourite place for the local children to swim in until a new council member created alarm about it in a national newspaper - ‘there will be a fatality sooner rather than later. . .‘ The water was deeper now and widening into an inland sea, the furthest reaches of which were creeping up Wexford’s garden. That this might be the fatality, happening in the here and now, was taking shape in everyone’s mind but his.

  A boat on this water was something he had thought he would never see. The frogman surfaced and hung on to the gunwale. Wexford didn’t know if he was the one he’d talked to on the Brede or someone different. Everything was so wet, everything dripping and spraying, that he couldn’t tell if the cold drop he felt on his cheek was renewed rain or a splash from a stone Burden had kicked into the water. But it was soon followed by another and another, a shower of splashes, and the rain began in earnest, threatening to drench them. They waded back to the car. Wexford’s cellphone was ringing.

  ‘Freeborn wants to see me.’ Sir James Freeborn was the Assistant Chief Constable. ‘He sounded thrilled to bits that we were down here “watching the operations”, as he put it. I wonder why.’

  He was soon told. Freeborn was waiting for him in Wexford’s office. This was what he always did when he came to Kingsmarkham rather than summoning the Chief Inspector to Headquarters at Myringham. There was nothing private in the office and Wexford wasn’t one of those men who keep photographs of his wife and children on his desk, yet Freeborn was always to be found seated in Wexford’s chair, looking into Wexford’s computer and once, when the Chief Inspector returned rather sooner than expected, with his nose and a hand in one of the desk drawers. This time he wasn’t sitting down but standing at the window, contemplating in the dying light and through the fine misty rain, the sheets of water that lay this side of Cheriton Forest.

  ‘Makes it look like Switzerland,’ he remarked, still gazing.

  Coniferous forest and a lake . . . Well, perhaps, a little. ‘Does it, sir? ‘What did you want to see me about?’

  In order to see him, Freeborn was obliged to turn round, which he did ponderously. ‘Sit,’ he said, and took Wexford’s own seat himself. The chair on this side wasn’t quite big enough for Wexford’s bulk but he had no choice and settled himself uneasily. ‘Those children and that woman are somewhere under all that.’ Freeborn waved impatiently at the window. ‘Here or in the Brede Valley. They have to be. Finding that, er, garment, clinched things, didn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. That, I believe, is what Joanna Troy wants us to think.’

  ‘Really? You’ve evidence to show that Miss Troy is an abductor of children, have you? Possibly a child murderer?’

  ‘No, sir, I haven’t. But there’s absolutely no evidence of any of the three of them entering the water, still less drowning. And in any case, where’s the car?’

  ‘Under the water too,’ said Freeborn. ‘I’ve been to Framhurst myself, I’ve seen how the floods have engulfed the road there. There’s a steep drop from that road into the valley - or there was. They were all out in the car, the water was rising and she tried to drive through it. The car went over and down the incline with them all in it. Straightforward.’

  Then how did the T-shirt find its way into the water between the Kingsbrook Bridge and the weir, a distance of at least three miles? If it’s a possibility the bodies are still there, that Subaqua haven’t yet found them, they could hardly have failed to find a car. And the water didn’t begin to rise until late Saturday night, so this trip in the car, presumably to view the floods, couldn’t have taken place until Sunday morning, more probably Sunday afternoon. In that case why didn’t Giles Dade go to church as he always did? Why did his sister wear a dark, anonymous-looking jacket when she had a new yellow one she loved?

  Wexford knew it would be useless to say any of this. ‘I still think there’s some point in trying to trace these people, sir. I believe they all left the house on Saturday evening before the floods started.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  He could imagine Freeborn’s face if he said, ‘Because Giles didn’t go to church.’ He wasn’t going to say it but, anyway, Freeborn didn’t give him a chance. ‘I want you to call off the search, Reg. Call off this “tracing”, as you put it. Leave it to Subaqua. They’re highly competent and they’ve reinforcements coming in from Myringham. I’m assured by their boss - incidentally, a fellow Rotarian - that they won’t rest until they’ve found them. If they’re there - and they are - they’ll find them.’

  If they’re there . . . Since they weren’t, couldn’t be, time was going by, anything could have happened. He went home, asked Dora, who had been taking and apparently excelled at a computer course, if she could get into a website on the Internet for him.

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘It’s called www.langlearn.com. And when you’ve found it perhaps you’d give me a call so I can look at it.’

  ‘Darling,’ she said indulgently, ‘I don’t have to do that. I can print it out.’ She sought for language he would understand. ‘It will be like a book or a newspaper. You’ll see.’

  It was. ‘Page 1 of 2’ it said at the top and, in Times New Roman type, thirty-six point: ‘Fantastic French with Joanna Troy.’ The portrait photograph was smudgy. It might have been almost any young woman. There was a page of text, most of it incomprehensible to Wexford, not because it was in French, it wasn’t, but because of the cyber-speak which he couldn’t follow. A column down the left-hand side, extending on to page 2, offered twenty or thirty options including All the Words You Want, Verbs Made Easy, Books You Need and Instant Chat. You highlighted the one you wanted. Dora had apparently highlighted All the Words You Want for him and downloaded page 1 (of 51). It held an eye-opening vocabulary but not a word he could ever imagine using. Here the student could learn the French for pop music, ‘house’ and ‘garage’, the kind of drinks teenagers like, types of cigarette and, he suspected, types of cannabis, the translation of ‘miniskirt’, ‘tank top’, ‘distressed leather’ and ‘kitten heels’, the when, where and how of buying condoms and how a French girl would ask for the morning-after pill.

  Did it tell him anything about Joanna Troy? Maybe it did. That, for instance, she had a grasp of what people of the age of her former students required from the Internet, that she was uninhibited, unshocked by drug-taking and the free availability of contraceptive measures. That she was what, in his day, used to be called ‘with it’ and in his father’s ‘on the ball’. She might not be a fashionable dresser herself but she knew about teenagers’ clothes. And it was hardly part of his self-imposed brief to enquire why she assumed that everyone who wanted to learn French must be under eighteen and conversant with a language far more obscure than that she was aiming to teach.

  But how very different from Katrina Dade she must be showed in all the words of this text he could under stand and perhaps even more in those he couldn’t. Did it also show that, her own age more or less halfway between theirs and that of their children, she had common ground with those children? Far more in common than with Katrina who would have defined ‘garage’, he was sure, as somewhere you kept a car and ‘s
pliff’ as an expostulatory noise made by a character in a comic strip.

  And why did he feel, now more than ever, that the answer to all this would lie in the reason for the friend ship between Katrina Dade and Joanna Troy? ‘Whatever that might be. Katrina’s motives were obvious enough. She was flattered by the attentions of a woman younger and cleverer than herself. Besides, she was what the psychotherapists, what Wexford’s Sylvia, would call ‘needy’. But what about Joanna’s purpose? Perhaps it will emerge, he thought, as he put the print out into his pocket.

  Chapter 6

  According to the Environment Agency all the ground in mid-Sussex, all the south of England, come to that, was waterlogged. Even when the rain stopped there would be nowhere for the accumulated water to go. Sheila Wexford, flying into Gatwick from the west of the United States, came to stay a night with her parents and told them the aircraft’s descent had felt like a sea plane landing, the floods spread across thousands of acres and the downs rising out of it like islands.

  The days passed, damp days, wet days, but the rain lessening, downpours giving place to showers, torrents to drizzle. The weekend was cloudy, the sky threatening, but what the Met Office had once called ‘precipitation’, an absurd name they had dropped recently, that had stopped. Joanna Troy and Giles and Sophie Dade had been missing for a week. On Monday a feeble watery sun came out. Instead of churning it into billows, the wind merely ruffled the gleaming grey surface of the floods. And contrary to what had been gloomily fore told, the water began to recede.

  Its level had never reached the topmost sandbags in Wexford’s garden but had lapped the walls and lain there, a menacing stagnant pool, unchanging for days. As Monday passed it started to sink and by the evening the whole of the highest sandbags were exposed. That evening Wexford brought his books downstairs and Dora’s favourite small items of furniture.

  Subaqua, whose headquarters were in Myringham, had opened a temporary office in Kingsmarkham. Since they had found nothing, its only use, as far as Wexford could tell, was as somewhere to send Roger and Katrina Dade when their demands on him became peremptory. They were quite natural, these demands. More and more he was begining to feel deep sympathy for these parents. Katrina’s tears and Dade’s brusqueness were forgotten in an overwhelming pity for a couple whose children had disappeared and who must feel total impotence in the face of an investigating officer temporarily warned off investigating. She at least probably spent long hours in the Subaqua trailer parked on the dry side of Brook Road next to the Nationwide Building Society and waited for the news that never came. Roger Dade’s snatching time off work was very likely an agony to him. Neither of them looked as if they had eaten for a week.

  George and Effie Troy, as anxious now as those other parents, called to see him and them he sent to Subaqua too. Not that he had entirely obeyed Freeborn’s injunction. Rather he had interpreted it as applying to activity on his part and that of his officers. Passivity was another matter. He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop people coming to him or even, if they phoned first, forbid them to air their fears in his presence. Of course, he could send them to Subaqua as well but surely that was no reason not to hear them out first?

  The first of them arrived while he was reading the lab report on the little object Lynn Fancourt had found in the Dades’ hail. A tooth it was, or rather, the crown of a tooth, constructed of porcelain and gold. There was no reason to suppose violence had contributed to its separation from the root and base of the natural tooth to which it had been attached. An interesting factor, in the opinion of the forensic examiner, was that a small amount of an adhesive was found on the crown and this was of the type which Joanna Tray might have bought over the counter in a pharmacy temporarily to reattach the crown if, say, she had been unable to visit her dentist. Wexford wasn’t sure it was particularly interesting. While having no crowns on his own teeth, he felt that if he had and one came out he might, especially if pain resulted, buy and use such an adhesive. Surely anyone would as a temporary measure. Patch up your tooth and ring your dentist for an appointment.

  But now she might be in pain. Would she seek a dentist wherever she was? And should he do something about this? Alert dentists nationwide . . . Only he couldn’t because Freeborn had banned any further action. While he was thinking about this Vine came in and said there was a Mrs Carrish wanted to see him. Matilda Carrish.

  ‘She said it as if I was expected to have heard of her Perhaps you have.’

  Wexford had. ‘She’s a photographer or used to be. Famous for taking pictures of eyesores, blots on the countryside, that sort of thing.’ Wexford had been going to add that Matilda Carrish had also been much praised some five years back for her exhibition of street people’s portraits in the National Portrait Gallery but one look at Vine’s expression of apprehensive distaste stopped him. ‘She must be getting on a bit now. What does she want?’

  ‘You, sir. She’s the Dade kids’ grandmother. Roger Dade’s mum.’

  ‘Really?’ How unlikely, he thought. Could she be a hoaxer? Frauds and con-people turned up in hordes when they had cases like this. Yet she was called Carrish, he recalled, and it was an unusual name. If he had had to conjecture the sort of woman Dade’s mother would be, also taking into account the pearl earring and Katrina’s crushing put-down of her as an ‘old bat’, he would have come up with a meretricious interfering creature, never a professional woman, but someone who had too little to occupy her or allay her chronic frustration. ‘You’d better bring her up here,’ he said, curious now to see what she was like, hoaxer or not.

  That Matilda Carrish was indeed ‘getting on a bit’ showed in her lined face and her bright silver hair but not in her step, her carriage and her general agility She was very thin and springy, though without the nervous energy that showed in so many of her daughter-in-law’s movements. The hand she held out to him was dry and cool, ringless, the nails filed short. Sometimes he ignored extended hands but hers he took and was oddly surprised by the fragile bones. Remembering the photo graph in Sophie Dade’s bedroom told him at once she was who she said she was.

  The black trouser suit she wore had been designed for a woman half her age, yet it was entirely suitable, it fitted as if it had been made for her, as perhaps it had. Aquiline though her face was, her lips thin and her cheekbones sharp, he could see Roger Dade in her and realised that only a little padding out and smoothing, a little lifting and plumping, would make mother and son as alike as twins.

  She came straight to the point, no preamble, no excuses. ‘What are you doing to find my missing grand children?’

  This was the question Wexford dreaded. It was he who had to answer it, not Freeborn, and he was aware that by now any response he gave must sound feeble and as if the police simply weren’t bothering. But he tried.

  From the first Mrs Dade had believed her children had drowned and that was now the police belief. Today or at the latest tomorrow the waters would have receded sufficiently to put the matter beyond doubt.

  ‘I understood that frogmen had been down and there had been a comprehensive search.’

  ‘That is so and -‘ he could use these words to a grand parent, not a parent ‘- no bodies have been found.’

  ‘Then - if I’m not being naïve - why haven’t you widened the search? Have ports and airports been alerted? What of other police authorities? I understand we now have a national missing persons register. Are they on that register?’

  She sounded more like an investigative journalist than a photographer. Her voice was crisp and direct, her turquoise-blue eyes piercing. When she started speaking they had fixed themselves on his face and never left it, never blinked. He wanted to tell her she wasn’t being naïve. Instead he said lamely, ‘The children’s passports are here. Ms Troy can’t, for instance, have taken them out of the country.’

  She shrugged, the way her son did. For the first time she expressed an opinion. ‘I was staying at my son’s home in October. For three nights. I found those children e
xceptionally mature for their ages. Mature and particularly intelligent. I don’t know if you’re aware that Giles took a French GCSE last spring and got an A star.’ I wonder if he managed to get the French for ‘miniskirt’ and ‘garage’ into his essay, Wexford thought. ‘Sophie will be a scientist one day,’ Matilda Carrish said. ‘It is beyond me why they had to have a sitter at all. Sophie is a responsible thirteen and her brother is nearly six teen. Let me correct that, he is sixteen. His birthday was two days ago.’

  ‘Young to be left.’

  ‘You think so? A boy or girl may marry at sixteen, Chief Inspector. If what I read in the newspapers is true, a large proportion of the female population of this country have babies at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen, and are set up in flats with their child by their local authority. No one babysits them, they are babysitters themselves.’

  ‘It was Mr and Mrs Dade’s decision,’ Wexford said, thinking that whatever had been the guiding principle behind Roger Dade’s choice of a wife, he hadn’t married his mother. ‘We have no reason –‘ he nearly said ‘as yet’ but suppressed it ‘- to associate Ms Troy with any criminal activity Whatever has happened to these three people, she may be as much an innocent victim as the children.’

  Matilda Carrish smiled. There was no humour in that smile, it was the stretching of the lips of someone who has superior knowledge and knows it, a facial expression of triumph. ‘You think so? What you don’t know, I can see, is the reason Joanna Troy gave up her teaching job at Haldon Finch. I will tell you. She was dismissed for stealing a twenty-pound note from one of her own students.’

  Wexford nodded. There was nothing else he could do. He remembered this woman’s son telling him Joanna Troy had left her job because she had been unable to put up with the behaviour of class members. ‘If we need to widen our search,’ he said, ‘you may be sure Ms Troy’s antecedents will be investigated. Now, if there is nothing else, Mrs Carrish...’