Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods

by Ruth Rendell

  Dade had groaned when he heard Wexford’s voice. ‘I suppose it’s slipped your mind that this is Saturday?’ Now he answered grudgingly, ‘Well, yes, he has. Seeing he was born in Northern Ireland, he was eligible, and when he passed the Common Entrance to get into his school - did spectacularly well, in fact - well, I applied for an Irish passport for him. It was what he wanted. God knows why. Look, you’re not saying he was planning this four years ago, are you?’

  ‘Very unlikely, Mr Dade. I expect he thought it might come in useful. I wish you’d told me about this passport before. Why didn’ you?’

  ‘Because (a) I forgot about it and (b) I didn’t suppose a son of mine could act the way he has done and do the things he’s done. You be telling me next he killed that bitch Joanna Troy.’

  Wexford didn’t answer. ‘Mr Dade, I’d like your permission to search your mother’s house. With the cooperation of the Gloucestershire police.’

  To his surprise Sophie came on an extension. He heard a soft click and then her breathing. ‘Search all you like, as far as I’m concerned,’ Dade said. ‘The place won’t be mine till we’ve got probate. You want me to ask my mother’s solicitors?’

  He had never been so willing to meet them halfway. Perhaps misery had sweetened his nature, though in Wexford’s experience it seldom did improve anyone’s.

  ‘If you’d be so kind.’

  ‘May I know what you’re searching for?’ A sarcastic edge to the question deprived it of its apparent politeness.

  ‘I will be frank with you,’ Wexford said. ‘I want to find the whereabouts of your son. And that’s as good a way as any of making a start.’

  She knows.’ He too had heard the breathing. ‘She knows where he is.’

  ‘I do not!’ Sophie shouted it at the top of her voice.

  ‘I’d fetch it out of her only I know you people would be down on me like a ton of bricks if I laid a finger on her.’

  On the way there, and accompanied by two officers of the Gloucestershire Constabulary; Wexford sat silent in the car, his thoughts turned to his last visit there. All the time he had talked to Matilda, Sophie had been in the house, concealed and laughing. Could anyone be blamed for taking it for granted no grandmother would give sanctuary to a child in opposition to that child’s parents, to her own son? That was what he had done. By now he ought to know better than to take anything for granted. Yet only a few days ago he was assuming that no social worker who spent her time witnessing domestic violence and its results would willingly continue to live with a man who beat her.

  His heavy sigh fetched a glance and bracing words from Burden. ‘Cheer up, it may not be true. We’re nearly there.’

  Already Matilda’s house had an unlived-in look and a stuffy airless atmosphere. It was very cold. Regardless of the possibility of frozen pipes and subsequent water damage, the heating had been turned off. Wexford suggested that Burden and one of the Gloucestershire officers should begin the downstairs search while he and the other officer started on the upper floor.

  The difficulty was that he had no idea what they were looking for. Perhaps he had simply supposed that this would suggest itself when they began. One thing would lead to another. He found himself rather distracted by Matilda’s photographs, which proliferated up here even more than on the ground floor. At least, he assumed they were Matilda’s, though they were unlike any of those he particularly associated with her and which her reputation rested on. These, on the staircase wall and following its angle, seemed to be views of a city with a large Gothic cathedral surmounted by twin spires, the same city pictured on the wall by the door that he had noticed last time. Between them was a print in sepia of what might have been the same city except that the cathedral had onion domes.

  He was wasting time. He went into the principal bedroom, the one that had been Matilda’s. He turned his attention first to the wardrobe and the pockets of coats and jackets, and when this yielded nothing, to the drawers of a desk and those of a tall chest. Matilda Carrish had kept no letters. What unpaid bills there had been, what bank statements, chequebooks, insurance policies and all the rest of the paraphernalia of modern paperwork, had been removed, no doubt by the firm of solicitors and executors of the will Roger Dade had spoken of. Wexford thought he had never before investigated such a barren desk. In the pigeonholes were four ballpoints and a fountain pen as well as that outdated substance, ink in a dark-blue bottle.

  Inside the two clothes cupboards and the two chests of drawers all was neat and orderly, hanging garments, folded garments, black silk socks, no frivolities in the shape of old lady’s lavender sachets or dried rose leaves. Creams and lotions in a top drawer but no make-up. Matilda Carrish had no doubt decided that at her age she must leave lipstick and eye shadow behind for ever. He never quite knew what made him open a particular jar labelled ‘moisturiser’. Perhaps it was only because it looked, from the scratched lid and partly worn-off label, as if it had been long in use. He unscrewed the top and found himself looking at a brownish, rather fibrous, powder. The smell was unmistakeable. There is no more unique and distinctive scent. Cannabis sativa.

  Well, there was bound to be some. All his find did was help confirm what the Dades had already told him. He found one thing in the bottom drawer that told him, along with the cannabis, that Matilda had been human after all: a thick pigtail of black silky hair, apparently cut off while still in its plait. ‘Whose was it? Sophie’s? Charlotte’s? But Sophie’s hair was brown and Charlotte’s fairish. Wexford decided, and this made him smile to himself, that it must have been Matilda’s own. Cut off, perhaps, sixty or seventy years ago and kept all that time. But hair never decayed, never disintegrated, lasted while teeth crumbled and nails fell to dust. . .

  He turned his attention to her books, and found him self immediately diverted by their contents. It always amazed him that an officer could conduct this kind of search and, once he or she had flipped a book open and shaken it, give it no further attention and show no curiosity as to what it was about or who had written it. But it often happened and he had often wondered at it. These books held no revealing or incriminating documents. As well as the contemporary ones he came upon Cobbett’s Rural Rides and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. There was some Thesiger, Kinglake’s Eothen and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Incongruously, a child’s book was beside it, a book with a picture of a cartoon cat on its jacket and the title in some incomprehensible language.

  He passed on to the spare bedrooms. In one the Gloucestershire officer was carefully removing small objects from a drawer, a comb, a couple of postcards, a music cassette, a tube of some cream a cosmetic company gave away as a ‘free’ gift, and laying them on top of a chest. Like those in the main bedroom, the books on the shelves here held no revealing or incriminating documents or photographs; they were travel books, mostly. He began taking them out in quest of some paper or card that might have been laid between the pages but also found himself, as he always did find himself in this situation, looking closely at them and reading extracts.

  The cameras were no doubt downstairs along with rolls of film. If she had still worked, Matilda had by this time probably acquired a digital camera as well as the trusted conventional sort - or whatever the term was. What had he expected from this chest? The kind of treasure trove he hadn’t found in the desk, presumably. But there was nothing. Underclothes, three pairs of tights, unworn and still in their transparent wrapping. The trouser-suited Matilda would have worn socks. And here they were, many pairs, nearly all of them fine black silk. Downstairs Burden had found the cameras. They had a cupboard to themselves along with tripods. But that was really all which had come to light apart from an address book in which a lot of the pages were quite blank. He looked curiously at the many phone numbers whose codes proclaimed them to be in foreign countries. Matilda had more friends abroad than here but there might be an easier way than by calling every one of those numbers. . .

  This time, tired as he w
as, he had to go to the house. A phone call wouldn’t do. Signs of the absence of women - Sophie hardly counted - were already apparent. Takeaway had been eaten by the two sole occupants and its remains, foil containers, greaseproof paper, plastic carriers, as well as a pungent spicy smell, lingered in the dusty living room. Roger Dade’s breath smelt of garlic and tikka marsala.

  Retreating a little, Wexford said to Sophie, ‘In your grandmother’s house is a children’s book in a Scandinavian language and there are some photographs, apparently taken by her, of a city that looks as if it might be somewhere in northern Europe. Can you tell me anything about that?’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Sophie said, and he believed her. ‘I’ve never seen the book and I never noticed the pictures.’

  ‘The language’, Dade said, ‘is probably Swedish. My stepfather, as I suppose I’m bound to call him, lives in Sweden. I hardly know the man. I’ve only met him once. They were married over there and my mother used to go over a couple of times a year but that all stopped when she got past seventy-five. They may have divorced for all I know.’

  Wexford tried to imagine a situation in which one didn’t know one’s mother’s husband and didn’t know whether she was divorced or not, tried and failed. But he believed Dade. It was typical. Probably it would be equally useless asking the man where in Sweden but he could lose nothing by trying.

  ‘I told you. I thought I made myself clear. I only met the man once. All I know is he’s called Philip Trent - Carrish was my mother’s maiden name - and at one time he was a university lecturer or whatever the term is.’

  ‘He wasn’t at your mother’s funeral.’

  ‘If you’re implying no one told him you’re wrong - as usual. My sister tried to phone him and then she sent an e-mail. Whether or not it got there I wouldn’t know. Probably he just couldn’t be bothered to come. Maybe he’s dead himself.’

  All he could get from Charlotte MacAllister was a messsage on her answering machine. He thought of trying to find her husband, the ‘high-ranking officer’ in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and then he decided the Internet might be easier. Some clever operator at work could find Philip Trent. He knew he was himself incapable of it. He could manage to name the universities of Sweden from an encyclopaedia and that was all. Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund. . . A young woman with a degree in computer studies, saying this was easy and implying, just, that with her talents she was capable of better things, got down to sorting out websites.

  He began to walk home. He would have his dinner, hear the latest on Sylvia’s new man - and please let it be cheerful encouraging news this time - and then come back for the search results. A fine, almost smoky, rain was falling, the kind of rain that is nearly mist, damp rather than wet, a mild hindrance to breathing. He saw Dorcas Winter, parcelled up in rainproof layers, delivering evening papers ahead, just turning out of Kingston Gardens into his own street. The large red plastic bag of papers she pushed along on what looked like a super market trolley. The rain was nearly as bad as fog, obscuring figures, turning them into ghostly shapes on a worn-out TV screen.

  Wexford was quite close to the delivery girl before he saw it wasn’t a girl at all but the newsagent himself. ‘Good evening,’ he said. At first the man failed to recognise him, then he did. ‘Oh, good evening. Not a very good one, is it?’

  ‘What’s happened to Dorcas?’

  ‘Gone to her violin lesson. I couldn’t find anyone else to do the round.’

  ‘If you’ve got a minute,’ said Wexford, ‘I’d like to ask you something. You remember the Confessional Congregation last July? You were there?’

  ‘Certainly I was there.’ It was interesting how, as soon as the subject was changed from the mundane to matters of the Good Gospel Church, from being an ordinary pleasant tradesman Kenneth ‘Hobab’ Winter became pompous and self-important. ‘I am always present at significant church functions. I am an elder, remember.’

  ‘Yes, well, can you tell me how Giles Dade went to Passingham St John that night and how he returned to Kingsmarkham?’

  ‘By what means of transport, do you mean? As a matter of fact, I can, as I was closely involved. There was no car available to take the boy. Many of our members, you must understand, came straight to the Congregation from their places of work. Mrs Zurishaddai Wilton escorted him on the train from Kingsmarkham to Passingham Park and thence by taxi to Passingham Hall. The return journey was made in my car, driven by me and accompanied by my wife and Mr and Mrs Nun Plummer.’

  ‘Was he upset? Distressed?’

  ‘Who? Giles Dade? Not at all. He was happy and relieved. “Bubbly”, I think one could say.’

  ‘Really? He had just confessed what sins he had to confess. It must have been embarrassing, not to say - well, disturbing, with the congregation all chanting.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said ‘Winter again, urbanely this time. ‘People feel cleansed and liberated. It’s a kind of God-given psychoanalysis. Giles felt free for the first time in his life as people do when they confront God after cleansing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Wexford. ‘That’s very helpful. I may as well take my paper. Save you delivering it.’

  Smiling, Winter passed over the Kingsmarkham Evening Courier with a hand in a wet woollen glove. ‘Well, goodnight, then.’ He was a normal man again.

  Wexford walked to his house, imagining the feelings of Giles Dade on that car journey. He must have made some kind of confession, perhaps of the kind of clumsy and unsatisfying sexual adventures a boy of fifteen would have had, confessed too to teenage shoplifting indulged in for bravado and the occasional pre-Matilda spliff. Then, fresh from the howling mob ‘shouting and singing’, he had to travel home sandwiched no doubt between the Plummers and facing the uncompromising backs of Mr and Mrs Winter. Yet he had been ‘bubbly’? It was a word in popular use which Wexford loathed and here it seemed singularly inapt. Perhaps the other passengers in the car had congratulated him, inducing in him a kind of mad euphoria. That was the only explanation that seemed reasonable.

  He was back in his office by eight and had been there only five minutes when the computer studies woman walked in with a couple of sheets of A4 on which he could see text in unmistakable Internet type.

  Philip Trent wasn’t dead, but very much alive and living in Uppsala. His name hadn’t been in the address book. Perhaps no one would enter a husband’s name and phone number into a personal directory, however apart or estranged they might be. She would have known it by heart.

  Chapter 25

  Ice and snow were to be expected, a kind of Ultima Thule on the northern edge of the world. He supposed he was lucky to be sent. Police officers normally looked on it as a perk to be sent abroad - only he was ungrateful enough to wish that, in March, it could have been Italy or Greece. Maybe where Burden would be going next day on his fortnight’s leave, the south of Spain.

  But it was Sweden. He had managed, at last, to speak to Philip Trent. And after one short phone conversation he knew, in Vine’s words, that he had ‘a right one here’. The old man spoke much the same kind of English as Mr Shand-Gibb, former owner of Passingham Hall, but Trent’s had a faintly alien intonation to it, not an accent - he was plainly a native English speaker - but the slight lilt that comes from habitually speaking a Scandinavian language. He admitted, without shame or apparent guilt of any kind, that Giles Dade was staying with him in his house in Fjardingen, a district of Uppsala. A quarter or ‘farthing’ in mediaeval times, he explained kindly, though he hadn’t been asked, and Wexford thought of The Lord of the Rings and hobbit country where counties were similarly named.

  ‘Oh, yes, Mr Wexford, he’s been here since early December. We spent a pleasant Christmas together. A nice boy. Pity about the fanaticism but I don’t think we shall hear much more of it.’

  Indeed? ‘He must he fetched home, Professor Trent.’

  An efficient young woman who spoke perfect English had revealed Trent’s rank to him and that be formerly held the Chair of Austro-Asia
tic Languages (whatever they might be) at the University of Uppsala and that now, although well past the retirement age of sixty-five, he retained his own office for research purposes at the university as one of its distinguished former faculty members.

  ‘I am not up to travelling, as you will appreciate. Besides, I am too busy, I have my research to do here. Investigation of Khmer, Pear and Stieng, for instance, is still in its infancy, a situation not helpful to linguisticians and brought about by the warfare which raged for such an extended period over Cambodia.’ He spoke as if the only consequence of that war was its effect on the languages spoken by the people. ‘Perhaps you could send someone?’

  ‘I thought of coming over myself,’ said Wexford tentatively.

  ‘Did you? We’re enjoying rather pleasant weather at present. Cool and fresh. I suggest you put up at the Hotel Linne. It enjoys very attractive views across the Linnaean gardens.’

  When he had rung off Wexford looked up Austro Asiatic Languages in the encyclopaedia and found there were dozens if not hundreds of them, mostly spoken in south-east Asia and eastern India. He wasn’t much wiser, though he managed to connect ‘Khmer’ with the Khmer Rouge. The section on Uppsala was more rewarding. Not only the botanist Linnaeus came from there, but also Celsius, the temperature man, Ingmar Bergman and Dag Hammarskjold, second secretary-general of the United Nations, while Strindberg had attended Trent’s university. He wondered what Trent had meant by ‘rather pleasant weather’. At least, it wouldn’t be raining. . .

  At Heathrow he went into a bookshop and searched the shelves for something to read on the flight. A guide to Sweden he already had. Besides, he wasn’t looking for a travel book but anything, fiction or non-fiction, which might spontaneously take his fancy. Much to his surprise, among the ‘classics’, he found a little slender book he had never before heard of: A Short Residence In Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft. Confessing to himself that he had never come across any work by Mary Shel1ey’s mother apart from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he bought it.