Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford was inclined to agree, not that he did so aloud. ‘Let’s get back to the visitors who made the music, shall we? The “screaming and shouting”. Have you any idea who they were?’

  The worst question you can ask a man like Rick Mitchell is one to which he doesn’t know the answer.

  Far less bad is one which, if he answered truthfully, might incriminate him. Plainly he had no reply to make but that didn’t stop him replying. ‘Not exactly who they were, if it’s names you’re meaning. I know what they were, a bunch of vandals, if the way they parked their cars down the Hall lane is anything to go by. Terrible ruts they made in the grass verges and that sort of rut never comes out, it’s there for good, a blot on the landscape. ..‘

  'And you could hear them shouting and yelling, Rick,’ said Julie. ‘You know you could. We were going to complain...’

  ‘Not to Mr Shand-Gibb, mind. He’d gone by then. We had serious thoughts of putting in a complaint to Buxton. Didn’t bother him, did it? He wasn’t here when they were. Oh, no, he was up in London living it up, no doubt.’

  ‘It didn’t sound English, what they were shouting,’ said Julie. ‘I C, I C, it sounded like.’

  'What, the letters I and C?’ Vine asked.

  ‘That’s what it sounded like but it’s not English, is it?’

  This emphasis on Englishness must have aroused some vestige of conscience in Mitchell, for, as they were leaving, he remarked in a kindly tone to the Kent DC, ‘You OK then, are you?’

  Wexford went back to Kingsmarkham, leaving the other two to pursue enquiries in the village. He was going to a funeral, Joanna Troy’s. She hadn’t driven the car over the edge of the quarry, she had been dead before she was put into the car. ‘Murdered?’ he had asked Tremlett on the phone.

  ‘No reason to think so, no reason at all.’

  Except that her body had been removed from wherever death took place. Pains had been taken to conceal that body. And where were the Dade children in all this?

  The parents, at any rate, were at the funeral in St Peter’s, Kingsmarkham, Roger Dade as well as his wife, and Katrina’s parents too, if he was right in thinking the elderly man was her father. Now might be his chance to carry out his resolve of talking to the grandparents. Never mind that they wouldn’t be in their own home. The Dades were feeling better, Wexford thought, they look better. They believe that because Joanna is dead and no other bodies were in the car, no other bodies have been found, Giles and Sophie are alive. Do I believe that, he asked himself. He couldn’t find the slightest reason to think so and he knew those parents were relying on instinct and intuition rather than on reason.

  It was a cold, wet day, icy inside a church the size of a cathedral. How many people know you don’t have to have a funeral? How many know it’s not necessary or prescribed by legislation to have voluntaries and glumly intoned prayers and hymns - invariably ‘Abide with Me’ or ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ - if you don’t believe and the dead person didn’t believe? None of this lot had been inside a church for years, he thought. How much better it would have been for all of them to have had Joanna Troy’s body cremated and afterwards held a quiet gathering of friends and family to remember her. At least there were only family flowers, a simple wreath of forced daffodils from Joanna’s father and stepmother.

  Ralph Jennings, the ex-husband, hadn’t come but the neighbour, Yvonne Moody, was there, the woman who had told him she suspected Joanna’s passion for Roger Dade. On her knees when everyone else was sitting or standing, weeping quietly. He noticed that Joanna’s father didn’t cry. His grief he showed otherwise, in an ageing that added a decade to his years. People hadn’t yet discarded the habit of wearing black to funerals. All these mourners were in black but only Yvonne Moody and Doreen Bruce wore hats. They filed out of the church, George Troy clinging to his wife’s arm, Katrina Dade holding her husband’s unwilling hand, and got into the cars which would take them to the crematorium miles out in the country at Myfleet Tye. Katrina’s parents weren’t going. Wexford had been surprised to see them there at all but supposed they had come simply to support their daughter. The Bruces had their own car with them. As Mrs Bruce helped her husband into it and started the engine, Wexford got into his and followed them back to Lyndhurst Drive. He was on the doorstep before they had let themselves in.

  Doreen Bruce failed to recognise him and assumed, for no reason, that he must be selling something. Even after he had explained, she wasn’t forthcoming but announced that her husband had to rest, he had a bad heart, it was essential he lie down. She hadn’t wanted him to come this morning. It wasn’t as if they’d known Joanna Troy. Eric had had a coronary in October and since then had had to take things easy Not that you’d know it the way he was always dashing about. To Wexford Eric Bruce looked far from ‘dashing’ anywhere. He was a thin little old man, pale and pinched, the last you would imagine to have a heart condition. He wasn’t to be allowed to go upstairs but was led to the sofa in the living room and covered with a blanket. The black cat, lying on the shelf above a radiator, watched the fussy movements with feline scorn and stretched out one fore leg as far as it would go as if admiring its pointed claws.

  Wexford was shown into the dining room, a not- much-used place made dark by the small diamond panes of its windows and the heavy ruby velvet curtains. Doreen Bruce sat opposite him, nervously drumming her fingers on the table. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘grand parents have a better knowledge of their grandchildren than those children’s parents have. I know Giles and Sophie enjoyed staying with you - in Suffolk, is it?’

  She probably called everyone ‘dear’. It wasn’t a sign of affection or intimacy. ‘That’s right, dear. Berningham. Where the American Air Force used to be but it’s much prettier now all those ugly buildings have gone. You hear about these teenagers wanting nothing but clubs and amusements and worse but our two weren’t like that. They, love nature and the countryside, being out in the open air. Sophie used to cry when she had to go home. Not Giles, of course, dear, a boy wouldn’t.’

  ‘What did they do all day?’

  She was puzzled. To her, obviously, the mystery was what they did at home in Kingsmarkham. ‘Went for walks, dear. We take them to the beach. Eric and I don’t think they’re old enough yet to go alone. Well, Eric does, but you know what men are, said I babied them. Mind you, he liked their company all right, always wanted to be with Giles whatever he did. Of course that was before his coronary, dear’

  ‘When did they last stay with you, Mrs Bruce?’

  ‘In August.’ She came back with her answer very promptly. ‘In their school holidays, dear. They wouldn’t have been allowed to come for a weekend in term-time. Roger keeps their noses to the grindstone, you know.’ An aggrieved note had crept into her voice. ‘Homework, homework, homework night after night. I don’t know why they don’t rebel. Most teenagers would, from what I hear. Mind you, it’s my belief they’d work hard with out his lordship cracking the whip over them. They like their school work. At any rate, Giles does. He’s a clever boy, is Giles, he’ll go far.’

  One point Doreen Bruce had made Wexford hit on. He asked curiously, ‘Did you say Sophie cried when she had to go home?’

  ‘That’s right, dear. Cried like her heart would break.’

  ‘A thirteen-year-old?’ he said. ‘Would you call her young for her age?’

  ‘Oh, no, dear. Not really. It’s not that.’ Mrs Bruce’s voice dropped and she looked cautiously in the direction of the closed door. Then she seemed to remember that her son-in-law wasn’t in the house. ‘It’s more that she doesn’t get on with her father. Giles is afraid of him but Sophie - well, she just hates being near him. Shame, isn’t it?’

  And this woman had described the Dades as ‘not one of those dysfunctional families’.

  Chapter 16

  The Bruces’ home was to remain unseen but Wexford’s reaction on contemplating Matilda Carrish’s was that theirs had to be a more congenial place for teenagers to stay in
. But perhaps Giles and Sophie seldom had stayed there. Situated in an exquisite Cotswold village of grey-gold houses and cottages, hers was of the same stone as the rest of the dwellings in Trinity Lacy but apparently built in the eighties, stark, flat-fronted and with a low-pitched slate roof. Rather forbidding at first -sight. It was possible Katrina Dade had vetoed the children’s staying with their paternal grandmother. She seemed particularly to dislike her mother-in-law. ‘What a lot of disliking went on in that family!

  ‘Were they frequent visitors?’ Burden asked when they were shown into a chilly, sparsely furnished living area.

  ‘Depends what you mean by “frequent”. They came occasionally. When I had the time. When they were allowed.’

  Discreetly, Wexford eyed the room where they were. Its redeeming feature was the number of bookshelves filled with books which lined three of the four walls. He noted the sophisticated means of playing music, the computer stand with screen, obvious Internet access, printer and other unidentifiable accessories. Every piece of furniture, apart from the white or black chairs and sofa, was of pale wood, chrome and black melamine.

  On the bookless wall strange abstracts in aluminium frames hung side by side with photographs of inner-city squalor and industrial decay, which Wexford recognised as Matilda Carrish’s own. She looked as chilly and as stark as her artwork, a long, lean woman with a flat back and etiolated legs in grey trousers and black tunic, round her neck and hanging to her waist a single strand of grey and white pebbles strung on silver.

  She must be well into her seventies, he thought, and yet the last thing you think about when you look at her is that she’s old. That in spite of the wrinkles, the white hair, the gnarled hands. ‘You last saw them in October, I believe?’

  She nodded.

  ‘When you were together,’ Burden put in, ‘were you close? They were teenagers and this is hard to imagine, but did they confide in you?’

  This time she smiled very slightly. ‘They certainly couldn’t be close to their parents, could they? My son’s a bully and his wife’s a hysteric.’ She said it quite calmly as if she were talking about acquaintances whose behaviour she had occasionally observed. ‘When she got the chance my granddaughter talked to me. Told me a little about her feelings. But it seldom happened. Her mother would have stamped on that.’

  ‘Did they get on, Giles and Sophie? Were they good friends as well as brother and sister?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. Sophie was rather under Giles’s influence. She’s inclined to do what he does. If he likes a piece of music, for instance, she’ll like it.’

  ‘What would you think of a theory that Joanna Troy was having an affair with your son? Or would have liked to have an affair with him?’

  For the first time Wexford heard her laugh. ‘One never knows with people, does one? But I wouldn’t have thought him such a good actor. Of course, I never met Miss Troy. Maybe she would have liked a relation ship with my son. There’s no accounting for tastes.’

  A chilling woman. This was her own child she was talking about. “Her feelings”, you said, Mrs Carrish. ‘What about Sophie’s feelings?’

  ‘That would be telling, wouldn’t it? But this is a serious matter, as you’ll tell me if I don’t say it first. Not to put too fine a point on it, she told me she hated her father and disliked her mother. You see, Katrina lets her do as she likes, then flies into a rage when she does it, and my son forbids every pleasure and keeps noses to the grind stone. What Sophie would really like would be to come and live with me.’

  There it was again, much the same as what Doreen Bruce had told him, only couched in different terms. ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘Mr Wexford, I will be frank with you. I don’t love my grandchildren. How could I? I only see them two or three times a year. I feel - how shall I put it? - benevolent towards them, that’s all. I wish them well. I love my son, I can help that, but I don’t much like him. He’s boorish and conventional, entirely without social graces. I don’t have many of those myself but I hope I’m more honest about things. I make no pretence at being a conformist. I do as I like. Poor Roger is unhappy because he never does anything he likes, hasn’t for years.’

  Frank, indeed, Wexford thought. When, if ever, had he heard a mother and grandmother talk like this? ‘Katrina would never even consider letting one of her children live with me,’ she said. ‘Why would she, come to that? I wouldn’t have let my children live with a grand parent. Besides, I’m selfish, I like living alone, I want to go on living alone till I die. That’s why I don’t live with my husband, though we’re on perfectly good terms.’

  He was astonished. He had supposed she was a widow, that she had been twice widowed. Other people’s mind-reading ability always amused him. It was gift he had himself. Matilda Carrish now demonstrated it. ‘No, I divorced my first husband, Roger’s father. He’s dead now. My second husband teaches at a European university. He has his job and he prefers living abroad while I prefer living here, quite a simple and amicable arrangement. We spend some time together once or twice a year - oftener, incidentally, than I see Giles and Sophie.’

  Burden had picked up on a word. ‘You mentioned children, Mrs Carrish. You have another child besides Mr Dade?’

  ‘A daughter,’ she said indifferently. ‘She’s married, she lives in Northern Ireland. County Antrim.’ Burden took this woman’s name and address. He wondered if Matilda Carrish had a similar relationship with her daughter as that with her son, a gut feeling of love but without liking or respect or, probably, much desire ever to see her.

  As they were leaving she indicated to them a colour print on the hail wall. A mezzotint, Wexford thought it would be called. It showed eighteenth-century buildings in some city that might have been anywhere in northern Europe. Matilda Carrish looked as if about to make some comment on it but she turned away, saying nothing.

  On the phone Wexford said, ‘Mr Buxton, I strongly advise you to do as I ask and come to Kingsmarkham Police Station tomorrow morning. I have already told you of the offence of obstructing the police in their enquiries. There is another, that of perverting the course of justice. You mustn’t believe this is an empty threat. I shall see you here at twelve noon tomorrow.’

  ‘I shouldn’t mind coming down,’ Buxton said in an aggrieved tone. ‘There are a few things I have to see to. Can’t you come to Passingham Hall?’

  ‘No,’ said Wexford. ‘It’s out of my way.’ He paused. ‘I shall expect you at twelve.’

  If Buxton didn’t come he would have a serious case against him. The idea of arresting the man rather appealed to him. The next phone call he made was to Charlotte MacAllister, n& Dade. Her voice was uncannily like her mother’s, crisp, cool and ironic.

  ‘I don’t know Roger’s children very well. There’s been no quarrel. I seldom go to England and they never come here. Katrina’s afraid of bombs.’ She paused to give a dry laugh. ‘I say they never come here but Giles did come three or four years back when things were quiet. He came on his own and he seemed to enjoy being with my kids.’

  Nothing there, Wexford thought. Then he remembered something. ‘Do you know why they call their house Antrim, Mrs Macallister?’

  ‘Do they? I’ve never noticed.’

  ‘I don’t think it coincidence, do you? You live in County Antrim, your brother calls his house Antrim, yet you don’t seem to be close.’

  ‘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 but 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-grey, 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-coloured 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 do.’

  ‘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?’