The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  A shelf of books held a Bible, Chambers Dictionary, Orwell’s Animal Farm—a GCSE set book?—some Zola in French, surprisingly, Daudet’s Lettres de mon Moulin, Maupassant’s short stories, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and something called Purity as a Life Goal by Parker T. Ziegler. Wexford took it down and looked inside. It had been published in the United States by a company named the Creationist Foundation and sold there for the hefty sum of thirty-five dollars. On the shelf below, plugged in for recharging, was a mobile phone.

  Drawers below held underpants, shorts, white T-shirts—or one did. In the middle drawer was a mêlée of papers, some of them apparently a homework essay Giles was writing, a paperback on trees and another on the early Church, ballpoints, a comb, a used lightbulb, shoelaces, a ball of string. The top one was much the same but out of the confusion Vine extracted the small dark-red booklet that is a British passport. It had been issued three years before to Giles Benedict Dade.

  “At least we know he hasn’t left the country,” said Wexford.

  The girl’s room had far more books and posters enough. Just what you’d expect, including one of David Beckham, Posh Spice, and their child, apparently off on a shopping spree. In the bookcase were the works of J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the two Alice volumes, a lot of poetry, some of it just what you would not expect, notably the Complete Works of T. S. Eliot and a selection from Gerard Manley Hop-kins. The girl, after all, was only thirteen. A photograph of a handsome but very old woman and one she resembled stood on top of the bookcase, but the one of her brother, identical to that which they had been given, was on the bedside cabinet. A rack of CDs held hip-hop and Britney Spears, showing Sophie to be more of a typical teenager than her brother. Her clothes contributed nothing in the way of enlightenment except that things to wear didn’t much interest her. From the brown-and-gold blazer and brown pleated skirt, they saw that she went to the same school as her brother. There was a hockey stick and a tennis racquet in the wardrobe as well. Sophie’s computer was a humbler version of Giles’s with Internet access but no printer. No doubt, she shared his. She also had a combined radio and cassette player, and a CD Walkman.

  Wexford and Vine went downstairs and put a few more questions to the parents. Katrina Dade was lying down. Her husband was on his knees picking up broken glass, having made her a cup of coffee. None was offered to the two police officers. Wexford asked about clothes and Dade said they had looked, this had seemed important to his wife, but they had been unable to say what had gone. So many of the clothes their children wore looked just the same, blue jeans and black jeans, plain T-shirts and T-shirts with logos, black, gray, and white sneakers.

  “How about coats?” Vine asked. “Where do you keep coats? When they went out they must have worn something more than a sweater at this time of the year.”

  Wexford wasn’t so sure. It had become a sign of a kind of macho strength and youthful stamina not to wear a coat outdoors, not even in snow, not even when the temperature fell below freezing. And it hadn’t been cold for the time of year. But was Giles Dade that sort of boy? The boastful swaggering sort who would strut about in a sleeveless vest while others wore padded jackets? He followed Vine and Giles’s father out into the hall, and the inside of a large and rather ornate clothes cupboard was examined.

  A fur coat hung there, mink probably, very likely Roger Dade’s gift to his wife in happier days before disillusionment set in, but very politically incorrect just the same. Wexford wondered when and where she dared wear it. In Italy, on a winter holiday? There were two other winter coats, both belonging to the parents, a man’s raincoat, a padded jacket, a fleece, a reinforced red garment that looked as if designed for skiing in and a striped cagoule with hood.

  “Giles has got an army surplus greatcoat,” said Dade. “It’s hideous but he likes it. It should be here but it’s not. And Sophie has a brown padded jacket like that one but that’s not hers. That’s Giles’s.”

  Then it looks likely they at least went of their own volition, Wexford thought. Roger Dade took his own raincoat out of the cupboard, hung it over his arm, said, “I’m going. I just hope this will all have blown over before I get back tonight.”

  Wexford didn’t answer. “You say you phoned parents of the children’s friends. We’d like names and addresses, please. As soon as possible. Have you cleared the messages from your answering machine?”

  “We’ve listened to them, not cleared them.”

  “Good. We’ll take the tape.”

  He walked back into the living room to say good-bye to Katrina. They would keep in touch. They would want to see her and her husband very soon. Lying on her back, she kept her eyes closed and her breathing steady. He knew she was awake.

  “Mrs. Dade?” Vine said. She didn’t stir. “We’re leaving.”

  “I suppose it’s understandable,” said Wexford in the car. “All the many times I’ve talked to parents whose children are missing I’ve never been able to understand why they don’t scream the place down with rage and fear. And when I come across one who does I pass judgment on her.”

  “It’s because we don’t believe anything serious has happened to them, sir.”

  “Don’t we? It’s far too soon to make up our minds.”

  Chapter 3

  KINGSMARKHAM’S NEW ROMAN CATHOLIC church of Christ the King was a handsome modern building designed by Alexander Dix and built with donations from the town’s growing Catholic population, including Dix himself. Foreign tourists might not immediately have recognized it as a sacred building, it looked more like a villa on some Mediterranean promontory, but there was nothing secular about its interior, white and gold and precious hardwoods, a stained-glass window depicting a contemporary version of the Stations of the Cross and, above the black marble altar, a huge crucifix in ivory and gold. A far cry, as members of the congregation often remarked, from “the hut” where they had heard mass from 1911 till two years ago.

  It was this humble building that Barry Vine was approaching now. Its appearance aroused no curiosity in him and not much interest. He had seen several like it in every country town he had ever visited in the United Kingdom, was so accustomed to these single-story century-old (or more) brick edifices with double wooden doors and windows high up in the walls that he had scarcely noticed this one before. Nevertheless, it was instantly recognizable. What else could it be but a church hall or a church itself, most likely in use by an obscure sect?

  No fence or gate protected it. The small area of broken paving that separated it from the York Street pavement held pools of water that seemed to have no means of escape. Someone signing himself Fang had decorated the brickwork on either side of the doors with incomprehensible graffiti, black and red. For some reason, perhaps a taboo born of superstition, he hadn’t touched the oblong plaque attached to the left side on which was printed in large letters: CHURCH OF THE GOOD GOSPEL, and in small ones, THE LORD LOVES PURITY OF LIFE. There followed a list of the times of services and various weekly meetings. Underneath this: Pastor, the Rev. Jashub Wright, 42 CarlyleVillas, Forest Road, Kingsmarkham.

  Jashub, thought Vine, just where do you get a name like that? I bet he was christened John. Then he noticed the coincidence, if coincidence it was, that this pastor lived on the same street as Joanna Troy’s father. He tried the church door and found to his surprise that it was unlocked. This, he saw as soon as he was inside, was plainly because there was nothing inside worth stealing. It was almost empty, rather dark and very cold. Decades must have passed since the walls had been painted. The congregation was expected to sit on wooden benches without backs, and these were bolted to the wooden floor. On a dais at the far end stood a desk, such a desk as Vine hadn’t seen since he left his primary school thirty years before. Even then parents had pronounced the school furniture a disgrace. This one, he saw as he bent over it, had been operated on with penknives by several generations of children, and when cutting and carving palled, scribbled over, initialed, and
generally decorated with ink, crayon, and paint. There was a cavity for an inkwell but the inkwell was missing and someone had cut a hole of corresponding size in the middle of the lid. A stool, presumably for the officiating priest to sit on, looked so uncomfortable that Vine supposed Mr. Wright preferred to stand.

  Jashub . . . “Where do you reckon it comes from, sir?” Vine said to Wexford when he got back.

  “God knows. You could try the Book of Numbers.‘Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel after their families, by the house of their fathers . . .’You know the sort of thing.”

  Vine didn’t look as though he knew.

  “Or you could ask the man himself. Mike Burden wants to see this Troy chap and since they live practically next door to each other, you might as well go together.”

  Wexford himself was off to Savesbury Deeps, or as near as he could get, to see how the Subaqua frogmen were getting on. But as soon as Pemberton had driven half a mile out of Myfleet it was clear that the only way to get an overview was to take a circular route round what had become a lake. Lakes, of course, usually have a road encircling them and this had nothing but soggy meadows and a few houses whose owners, like himself, watched the lapping waters with apprehension.

  “Go back the way we’ve come,” he said, “and try approaching it from Framhurst.” He noticed for the first time that the windscreen wipers weren’t on.

  Once they were returning, splashing through a ford where no ford had been before, he dialed his own number on the car phone. Dora answered after the second ring.

  “It’s just the same as it was when you left. It may even have gone down a bit. I thought I might bring some of those books down.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said, remembering how he’d humped the boxes up those stairs.

  Framhurst looked as on a summer’s day, apart from the puddles. The clouds had gone while Wexford was on the phone, the sky was blue and everything glittered in the sun. Pemberton took the Kingsmarkham road until he could see ahead of him something very like the seashore with the tide coming in. Reversing for a dozen yards, he took a right-hand turn along what was usually a country lane but which now skirted the lake. The sun on the water was so bright, turning the surface to blazing silver, that at first they could see nothing. The River Brede had disappeared under the waters. A little way ahead on the road, Wexford spotted a van, a fire engine, and a private car parked as near to the water’s edge as was safe. A motor boat could be seen slowly circling. They drove up and parked. As Wexford got out he saw a black gleaming amphibian break the surface, rise a little into the brightness, and then begin the swim to shore. He waded the last part.

  “Ah, the Loch Brede Monster,” he said.

  The frogman peeled himself out of some of his gear. “There’s nothing down there. You can be positive about that. My mate’s yet to come up, but he’ll tell you the same.”

  “Anyway, thanks for your help.”

  “My pleasure. We do enjoy it, you know. Though, if I may say so, it was a pretty crazy idea in the first place, thinking anyone might be down there. I mean, why would they go in?”

  “You may say so. I feel the same,” said Wexford. “The mother got it into her head they’d been drowned.”

  “It’s not as if there’d been ice on it and they’d been skating, is it?” the frogman persisted, creating unlikely options. “It’s not as if it’s hot and they’d felt like swimming. Or that anyone could fall in and need rescuing, it’s as shallow as a kids’ paddling pool around the edges. Ah, here’s my mate, getting in the boat. He’ll tell you the same.”

  He did. Wexford wondered whether to return to Lyndhurst Drive and “Antrim” but, recalling details of Katrina Dade’s hysteria, decided to phone instead.

  George Troy lived in the only house of any architectural interest on Forest Road. It had once been the lodge of a mansion, demolished at the start of the previous century, whose parkland filled the area bounded by Kingsmarkham, Pomfret, Cheriton Forest, and the Pomfret Road. All this was since changed out of recognition, but the lodge still stood, an awkwardly shaped small Gothic house with a pinnacle and two castellated turrets, separated from the road by an incongruously suburban garden of lawn and flowerbeds bounded by a white wooden fence and gate.

  A lot of explaining and production of warrant cards was needed before the woman who came to the door would let them in. The second Mrs. Troy seemed unwilling to understand that two police officers could actually come to her house, wish to enter it, and talk to her husband about the whereabouts of his daughter. She said, “She’s at home. In her own home. She doesn’t live here.”

  Burden repeated that at home Joanna Troy was not, that he and Vine had checked and checked thoroughly before arriving here. “May we come in, Mrs. Troy?”

  She remained suspicious. “I must ask my husband. Please wait there . . .”

  A voice from the staircase cut her short. “Who is it, Effie?”

  Burden answered for her. “Detective Inspector Burden and Detective Sergeant Vine, Kingsmarkham Crime Management, sir.”

  “Crime management?” The voice had become incredulous and Burden thought, not for the first time, what an unfortunate effect this new title had on the law-abiding. “Crime? I don’t believe it. What’s this about?”

  “If we could come in, sir . . .”

  The owner of the voice appeared, and Effie Troy whispered to him then stepped aside. He was a stout, upright man who had had the good fortune to keep his hair and its fair sandy color into, Burden guessed, his sixties. Vine, who had seen Joanna Troy’s photograph, thought how very like her father she must be. Here were the same high forehead, longish nose, blue eyes, and fresh-colored skin, in George Troy’s case rather reddened, especially about the high cheekbones.

  Burden had to repeat his request and now Troy nodded and exclaimed, “Of course, of course, I can’t think what we were doing, keeping you out there. On the doorstep in the wet. Come in, come in. Welcome to our humble abode. What was it you wanted Joanna for?”

  Before answering that, they waited until they were in a small, rather dark sitting room. At the best of times, not much light would have penetrated the two narrow arched windows, and this was far from the best of times, the sun fast disappearing and rainclouds gathering once more. Effie Troy switched on a table lamp and sat down, looking inscrutable. “When did you last speak to your daughter, Mr. Troy?”

  “Well, I ...” Anxiety was beginning to show in the drawing together of George Troy’s eyebrows. “She’s all right, isn’t she? I mean, she’s all right?”

  “As far as we know, sir. Would you mind telling me when you last spoke to her?”

  “It would have been—let me see—last Friday afternoon. Or was it Thursday? No, Friday, I’m almost positive. In the afternoon. About four. Or maybe four thirty, was it, Effie?”

  “About that,” said his wife in a guarded tone.

  “You phoned her?”

  “She phoned me. Yes, Joanna made the call. She phoned me—us—” here a reassuring smile at his wife “—somewhere between four and four thirty.” This was going to be slow work, Burden thought, largely due to George Troy’s habit of saying everything two or three times over. “I’m retired, you see,” he went on. “Yes, I’ve given up gainful employment, a bit of an old has-been, that’s me. No longer the bread-winner. I’m always at home. She could be sure of getting me any old time. She is all right?”

  “As far as we know. What did she say, Mr. Troy?”

  “Now let me see. I wonder what she actually did say. Nothing much, I’m sure it didn’t amount to much. Not that I’m saying she wasn’t a well-informed, highly educated young woman with plenty to say for herself, oh, yes, but on that particular occasion . . .”

  To general surprise except perhaps on her husband’s part, Effie Troy suddenly butted in, a cool and crisp contrast to him, “She said she was going to her friend Katrina Dade’s house for the weekend. She was going to keep the children company while
their parents were away. Paris, I think. She’d be back home on Sunday night. Another thing was that she’d come around on Wednesday, that’s tomorrow, and drive George and me over to Tonbridge to see my sister, who’s not been well. The car’s George’s but he lets her use it because he’s given up driving.”

  Troy smiled, proud of his wife. Burden spoke to her. “What kind of car, Mrs. Troy? Would you know the index number?”

  “I would,” she said. “But first I’d like you to tell Joanna’s father what’s brought all this on.”

  Vine glanced from one to the other, the man who looked young for his age and acted old, and the woman whose initial suspiciousness had changed to a thoughtful alertness. She was good-looking in a strange way, perhaps ten years her husband’s junior, as thin as he was fat and as dark as he was fair, with a mass of black hair, gray-threaded, and thick black eyebrows, the swarthy effect heightened by the glasses she wore in heavy black frames.

  His eyes on Troy, he said, “Ms. Troy appears to be missing, sir. She and the Dade children were not in the house when Mr. and Mrs. Dade returned and their present whereabouts aren’t known. The car—your car—also appears to be gone.”

  Troy sat, shaking his head. But he was plainly an optimist, one to take as cheerful a view as possible. “Surely she’s only taken them on some trip, hasn’t she? Some outing somewhere? She’s done that before. That’s all it is, isn’t it?”

  “Hardly, Mr. Troy. The children should have gone to school yesterday morning. And wouldn’t your daughter have to go to work? What does she do for a living?”

  Possibly fearing a ten-minute-long disquisition from her husband on work, jobs, retirement, and employment in general, Effie Troy said in her practiced way, “Joanna used to be a teacher. She trained as a teacher and taught at Haldon Finch School. But now she’s self-employed and works as a translator and editor. She has a degree in modern languages and a master’s degree, and she teaches a French course on the Internet.” She glanced at Burden. “I don’t know if it’s relevant—” irrelevance was something she must know plenty about, he thought “—but that’s how she and Katrina met. She taught at the school and Katrina was the head teacher’s secretary. I’ll find the car number for you.”