The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  In the same style, Wexford said, “I wouldn’t mind helping you out, Sergeant.”

  Ten minutes later four dozen had been loaded into a van Pemberton drove to Wexford’s home. He phoned his wife. “I can’t get home to put up the fortifications till this evening.”

  “Don’t worry, darling. Cal and Sylvia are here and Cal’s going to do it.”

  Cal . . . He didn’t know what to say and came up with an ineffectual, “That’s good.”

  It was. Especially as it was once more pouring with rain. Wexford checked on the calls they had received as a result of the media publicity, but there was nothing helpful, not even anything that seemed the suggestion of a sane person. Burden came in and told him the outcome of calls on the various relatives of the missing children. In the main, negative. Giles and Sophie’s maternal grandparents lived at Berningham on the Suffolk coast, where in the seventies and eighties had been a large United States Air Force base. They seemed to get on well with their grandchildren but hadn’t seen either of them since summer, when the children had come to stay in Berningham for a week.

  Roger Dade’s mother, remarried since her divorce from his father, was apparently a favorite with the children. Her home was a village in the Cotswolds and she lived alone. The last time she had seen them was at their half-term in October when she had stayed for three nights with the Dades, leaving under some sort of cloud. A quarrel, Burden had gathered, though no details had been given. Katrina Dade was an only child.

  “How about Joanna Troy?”

  “No siblings,” said Burden. “The present Mrs. Troy has two children by a previous marriage. Joanna’s been married and divorced. The marriage lasted less than a year. We haven’t traced her ex-husband yet.”

  Wexford said thoughtfully, “The answer to all this is with Joanna Troy, don’t you think? I don’t see how it can be otherwise. A boy of fifteen isn’t going to be able to persuade a woman of thirty-one to take him and his sister off somewhere without telling their parents or leaving any clue to where they were going. It has to be her plan and her decision. Nor can I see how she could have taken them away without criminal intent.”

  “That’s a bit sweeping.”

  “Is it? All right, give me a scenario that covers everything and in which Joanna Troy is innocent.”

  “Drowning would be.”

  “They didn’t drown, Mike. Even if it remained a possibility, what became of her car? Or, rather, her dad’s car. Who fell in and who rescued whom? If by a huge stretch of the imagination you can get that far, isn’t it a bit odd they all drowned? Wouldn’t one have survived, especially in four feet of water?”

  “You can make anything sound ridiculous,” Burden said peevishly. “You’re always doing it. I’m not sure it’s a virtue.”

  Wexford laughed. “You and Barry went to her house. Where’s your report on that?”

  “On your desk. Under a mountain of stuff. You haven’t penetrated to it yet. I’ll tell you about it if you like.”

  It was a very small house, a living room and kitchen on the ground floor, two bedrooms and a bathroom above, part of a row of eight called Kingsbridge Mews put up by a speculative builder in the eighties.

  “As Dade said, the car was kept outside in the front,” said Burden. “Needless to say, it’s not there now.”

  Inside the house it was cold. Joanna Troy had apparently switched off the central heating before she left on Friday. She was either naturally frugal or obliged to make economies. Vine found her passport too. It was inside a desk which held little else of interest. There were no letters, no vehicle registration document, no certificate of insurance, though these of course would have been with her father, nothing pertaining to a mortgage. Insurance policies for the house itself and for its contents were also in the drawer. A large envelope contained certificates acknowledging a degree in French from the University of Warwick, a master’s degree in European literature from the University of Birmingham, and a diploma Burden said was the Postgraduate Certificate in Education. Upstairs one of the bedrooms had been turned into an office with computer and printer, a photocopier, a sophisticated recording device, and two large filing cabinets. The walls were lined with books, in this room mostly French and German fiction and dictionaries.

  “Vine says she has all those French books you found in Giles’s bedroom. Lettres de mon something and Emile Zola and whatever the other one was. Mind you, she’s got about a hundred others in French too.”

  On the desk, to the left of the PC had lain a set of page proofs of a novel in French. To the right were pages in English, fresh from Joanna Troy’s printer. She had apparently been engaged in the work of translation on the day she left for Lyndhurst Drive and her weekend with the Dade children. In the bedroom Burden had looked with interest at her clothes.

  “You would,” said Wexford nastily, eyeing Burden’s slate-blue suit, lighter blue shirt, and deep-purple slub silk tie. Not for a moment would anyone have taken him for a policeman.

  “To my mind,” Burden said in a distant tone, “dressing decently is one of the markers of civilization.”

  “Okay, okay, depends what you mean by ‘decently.’ You found something funny about her clothes, I can see it in your beady eye.”

  “Well, yes, I did. I think so. Everything in her wardrobe was casual, everything. And I mean really casual. Not a single skirt or dress, for instance. Jeans, chinos, Dockers—”

  “Dockers? I haven’t the faintest idea what those are,” Wexford interrupted.

  “Then leave it to me. I have. T-shirts, shirts, sweaters, jackets, pea coats, padded coats, a fleece . . . All right, I know you don’t know what that is either. Take it from me, it’s not something a woman would wear to a party. The point is she’d nothing she could wear to a party, nothing dress-up, except possibly one pair of black trousers. What did she do if someone asked her out to dinner or the theater?”

  “I’ve been to theaters, even to the National when my daughter Sheila’s been in something, and there’ve been women dressed as if about to muck out the pigpen. For all your being such a fashionista you don’t seem to realize this isn’t the 1930s. But you’ll say that’s beside the point. I agree it’s odd. It just adds to what I’ve been thinking already. We need to go back to the Dades’, search the place, get a team in there if necessary. Those children have been missing four days by now, Mike.”

  It was a short drive to the house called “Antrim,” but Wexford asked Donaldson the driver to make a detour and take in some of the flooded areas. Heavy rain was falling, the water was still rising, and of the Kingsbrook Bridge only the parapet rails still showed above the water.

  “It’s a good deal more than four feet deep there,” said Burden.

  “It is now. Wherever they are and whatever they’ve been doing, they haven’t been hanging about waiting for the water to get deep enough to drown themselves in.”

  Burden made an inarticulate noise indicative of finding a remark in bad taste, and DC Lynn Fancourt, who was sitting in front next to Donaldson, cleared her throat. There were mysteries about the Chief Inspector she hadn’t yet solved in her two years attached to Kingsmarkham Crime Management. How was it possible, for instance, to find such irreconcilables bunched together in one man’s character? How could one man be liberal, compassionate, sensitive, well-read and at the same time ribald, derisive, sardonic, and flippant about serious things? Wexford had never been nasty to her, not the way he could be to some people, but she was afraid of him just the same. In awe of him, might be a better way to put it. Not that she’d have admitted it to a soul. Sitting there in the front of the car, trying to see out of the passenger window down which rain was streaming, she knew it was wisest for her to keep silent unless spoken to, and no one spoke to her. Donaldson made the detour required of all vehicles when they approached the bridge, splashing up York Street and then following the one-way system.

  Wexford was a stickler for duty. And exacting obedience from his subordinates. Lynn had onc
e been disobedient, it was during the investigation of the Devenish murder that somehow got mixed up with the pedophile demos, and Wexford had spoken to her in a way that made her shiver. It was only justice, not nastiness, she admitted that, and it had taught her something. About a police officer’s duty, for one thing, and it was because of this that she was all the more astonished when Wexford told Donaldson to drive first up the road where his own house was and drop him off for two minutes.

  Wexford let himself in with his key, called out but got no reply. He went through to the dining room. Outside the French windows, in driving rain, Dora, Sylvia, and Callum Chapman were raising the height of the two little walls with sandbags, evidently working as fast as they could, for the water was creeping up the walls. The sandbags had arrived just in time. Wexford tapped on the glass, then opened one of the side windows.

  “Thanks for what you’re doing,” he called to Callum.

  “My pleasure.”

  That it could hardly be. Sylvia, who had been much nicer and easier to get on with since her divorce, held on to her boyfriend’s shoulder and, standing on one leg, took off her boot, pouring water out of it. “Speak for yourself,” she said. “I’m hating every minute of it and so is Mother.”

  “It could be worse. Just think, if the ground floor floods we shall have to come and stay with you.”

  He shut the window, went back to the car. He wondered if his daughter was still doing voluntary work for that women’s refuge in addition to her job with the local authority. She must be or Dora would have told him, but he must ask. It would be a relief to know she wasn’t, that she was removed from a situation where being assaulted by other women’s rejected husbands or partners was always a risk. He got in next to Burden and within two minutes they were at Antrim.

  A creature of moods, Katrina Dade seemed quite different today, girlish but quiet, withdrawn, her eyes wide and staring. She was sensibly dressed too, wearing trousers and a sweater. Her husband, by contrast, was more expansive and more polite. What was he doing home from work at this hour? They looked as if neither of them had slept much.

  “I suppose it’s really come home to us. It wasn’t real before, it was like a bad dream.” Katrina added wistfully, “That drowning business, that was nonsense, wasn’t it? I don’t know what made me think they’d drowned.”

  “Quite understandable, Mrs. Dade,” said Burden, earning himself a frown from Wexford. “Later on, we’d like to talk to you in greater depth.” He hoped no one noticed the unintentional pun. Wexford would have, of course. “First we should take a look at the room where Ms. Troy spent the night or the two nights.”

  “She didn’t leave anything behind,” said Katrina when they were on the stairs. “She must have brought a bag, but if she did she took it away with her.”

  The room was under one of the steep-roofed gables of the house. Its ceiling was beamed and sharply sloping above the single bed. If you sat up unexpectedly during the night, thought Wexford, you could give your head a nasty bang. What Katrina had said appeared to be true and Joanna had indeed left nothing behind, but he watched with approval as Lynn got down on her knees and scanned the floor. There was no en suite bathroom and the built-in clothes cupboard was empty. The drawers in a chest were also empty but for an earring in the top one on the left-hand side.

  “That isn’t hers,” Katrina said in her new little-girl voice. “Joanna never wore earrings.” Where anyone else might have talked of “pierced” ears, she said, “She didn’t have holes in her ears for them to go through.” She held the single pearl in the palm of her hand, said mischievously as if she hadn’t a care in the world, “It must belong to my horrible old ma-in-law. She stayed here in October, the old bat. Shall I throw it away? I bet it’s valuable.”

  No one answered her. Lynn got up from the floor, plainly disappointed, and they all went down the stairs. There the old Katrina returned. She subsided onto a chair in the hall and began to cry. She sobbed that she was ashamed of herself. Why did she talk like that? Her children leaving her was a judgment on her for saying the things she did. Roger Dade came out from the living room with a handful of tissues and put a not very enthusiastic arm round her.

  “She’s in such a state,” he said, “she doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  Wexford thought the opposite, that while in vino veritas might be true, in miseria veritas, or “in grief truth,” certainly was. He didn’t say so. He was watching Lynn, who had once more got down on hands and knees, but not in mere speculation this time—she had spotted something. She knelt up and said, like the promising young officer she was, “Could I have a new plastic bag, please, sir, and a pair of sterile tweezers?”

  “Call Archbold,” said Wexford. “That’s the best way. He’ll bring what’s necessary. It’ll be more efficient than anything we can do without him.”

  “But what is it?” said Dade, gaping, when they were in the living room.

  “Let’s wait and see, shall we?” Burden had a pretty good idea but he wasn’t going to say. Not yet. “Now, Mrs. Dade, do you feel able to tell us something about Ms. Troy? We know she’s a translator who’s been a teacher, that she’s thirty-one and been married and divorced. I believe you met her when you were a school secretary and she was teaching at Haldon Finch School?”

  “I only did it for a year,” said Katrina. “My husband didn’t like me doing it. I got so tired.”

  “You were exhausted, you know you were. Some women may be able to juggle a job and the home but you’re not one of them. Regularly every Friday night you’d have a nervous collapse.”

  He said it lightly but Wexford could imagine those nervous collapses. He very nearly shuddered. “When was this, Mrs. Dade?”

  “Let me think. Sophie was six when I started. It must be seven years. Oh, my darling little Sophie! Where is she? What’s happened to her?”

  Everyone would have liked to answer that. Burden said, “We’re doing our best to find her and her brother, Mrs. Dade. Telling us whatever you can about Ms. Troy is the best way to help us find them. So you met and became friends.” He added bluntly, “She was a good deal your junior.”

  Katrina Dade’s expression was one of a woman who has just been not so much insulted as deeply wounded. If he had unjustly accused her of child cruelty, selling her country’s secrets to a foreign power, or breaking and entering her neighbor’s property, she couldn’t have looked more appalled. She countered it with a stammered-out, half-broken, “Do you think it’s fair to speak to me like that? Considering what I’m going through? Do you?”

  “I’d no intention of upsetting you, Mrs. Dade,” Burden said stiffly. “We’ll leave it.” I know there was a good thirteen years between them, anyway, he thought. “Ms. Troy gave up teaching some time after that— do you know when?”

  It was a reply sulkily given. “Three years ago.”

  “Why was that? Why did she give up?”

  Dade broke in. “I’m surprised you have to ask. Isn’t the way kids behave at these comprehensives reason enough? The noise, the foul language, the violence. The way no one can keep discipline. A teacher who dares to give a child a little tap gets up before the Human Rights Court. Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “I take it Giles and Sophie attend a private school?” Wexford said.

  “You take it right. I believe in the best education for my children and I don’t believe in letting them take it easy. They’ll thank me one day. I’m a stickler for homework promptly done. Both of them have private tutors as well as school.”

  “But Ms. Troy isn’t one of them?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Before Dade could say any more there came a shrill ringing at the doorbell as if Archbold clutched the bell pull and hung on—as he probably had. Lynn went to let him in.

  Burden resumed, “Had Ms. Troy come to look after your children on previous occasions?”

  “I told you. Roger and I had never been away together all the time we were married. Not till las
t weekend. If you mean for an evening sometimes while we went out—it didn’t happen often, mind—she’d done that. The last time would have been a month ago, something like that. Oh, and there was one night we went to a dinner-dance in London and she stayed then.”

  “I’d hoped this weekend away would be the very last time they’d need a sitter. Giles would have been—will be—sixteen very shortly.” Roger Dade flushed deeply at what he had said, made it worse: “I mean—what I meant to say was . . .”

  “That you think he’s dead!” Katrina’s tears began afresh.

  Her husband put his head in his hands, muttered from between his fingers, “I don’t know what I think. I can’t think straight. This is driving me mad.” He looked up. “How much time am I going to have to take off work over this?”

  Wexford had almost decided he must give up for the day, try some other tack, when Archbold tapped on the door and came in. He had a small sterile pack in his hand, which he held up for Wexford’s inspection. Peering through the transparent stuff of which the envelope was made, he saw something that looked like a small fragment of whitish porcelain, backed with a strip of gold.

  “What is it?”

  “It looks to me like the crown or cap off a tooth, sir.”

  This fetched Dade out of his despair. He sat up. Katrina scrubbed at her eyes with a tissue. The sealed pack was passed to them, then to Burden and Lynn.

  “Did either of your children have crowns in their mouths?” Burden asked.

  Katrina shook her head. “No, but Joanna did. She had two of her teeth crowned. It was years ago. She had a fall in the gym, something like that, and broke her teeth. Then one of the crowns came off when she was eating a caramel. The dentist put it back and Joanna told me he’d said she ought to have them both replaced. He said meantime not to chew gum, but she did sometimes.”