The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford had never heard her speak so lucidly. He wondered if it was because what they were discussing was something not so much physical and personal as pertaining to the appearance. She would probably talk as informatively on such subjects as diet and exercise, cosmetic surgery and minor ailments, subjects dear to her heart.

  “Wouldn’t she notice it had fallen out?”

  “She might not,” Katrina said in the same earnest tone. “Not at once. She mightn’t until she sort of wiggled her tongue round her mouth and felt a rough bit.”

  “We’d like to come back this afternoon,” Wexford said, “and find out more about the children, their tastes and interests and their friends, and anything more you can tell us about Ms. Troy.”

  Dade said in his unpleasantly harsh and scathing voice, “Have you never heard that actions speak louder than words?”

  “We are acting, Mr. Dade.” Wexford controlled his rising anger. “We have all available resources working on the disappearance of your children.” He hated the terms he was obliged to use. For him they made things worse. What did this man expect? That he and Burden would help matters by personally digging up his back garden or poking into the lakes of water with sticks? “You’d surely agree that the best way of discovering where Ms. Troy and your children have gone is to find out what they are most likely to do and where they are most likely to go.”

  Dade gave one of his shrugs, more an indication of contempt than helplessness. “I shan’t be here, anyway. You’ll have to make do with her.”

  Wexford and Burden got up to go. Archbold and Lynn Fancourt had already left. He meant to say something to Katrina but she had so profoundly retreated into herself that it was as if a shell sat there, the outer carapace of a woman with staring but sightless eyes. Her transformation into a rational being had not lasted long.

  The inevitable house-to-house inquiries in Lyndhurst Drive elicited very little. Every householder questioned about the previous weekend spoke of the rain, the torrential, relentless rain. Water may be see-through, but rain nevertheless, when descending heavily, creates a gray wall that is no longer transparent but like a thick ever-moving, constantly shifting veil. Moreover, human beings in our climate take a different attitude to weather from those who live in arid countries, being conditioned not to welcome rain but to dislike and turn away from it. That is what those neighbors of the Dades had done once the rain began on the Saturday afternoon. The more it fell, the more they retreated, closing their curtains. It was noisy too. When at its heaviest it made a continuous low roar that masked other sounds. So the Fowlers who lived on one side of the Dades and the Holloways next door to them had heard and seen nothing. Both families heard their letter boxes open and close when their evening paper, the Evening Courier, was delivered at about six, and both assumed a copy was delivered as usual to Antrim. The neighbors on the other side of the Dades, the first house, in fact, in Kingston Drive, were away for the weekend.

  However, Rita Fowler had seen Giles leave the house on Saturday afternoon before the rain began.

  “I can’t remember the time. We’d had our lunch and cleared up. My husband was watching the rugby on TV. It wasn’t raining then.”

  Lynn Fancourt told her it had begun raining just before four but she knew she had seen Giles earlier than that. By four it would have started to get dark and it wasn’t dark when she saw him. Maybe half past two? Or three? Giles had been on his own. She hadn’t seen him return. She hadn’t returned to the front of the house until she went to pick up the evening paper off the doormat.

  “Did you see a dark blue car parked on the Dades’ driveway during the weekend?”

  She had and was proud of her memory. “I saw her come—she was the children’s sitter—I saw her come on the Friday evening. And I can tell you that car was there when I saw Giles go out.”

  But had it still been there when she picked up the evening paper? She hadn’t noticed, it had been raining so hard. Was it still there next morning? She couldn’t answer that, but she knew it hadn’t been there on Sunday afternoon.

  If someone had entered the house in order to abduct Joanna Troy and Giles and Sophie Dade, or somehow to entice them away, it began to look as if this must have happened after the rain began. Or else they had all gone for a drive on Saturday evening, a very unlikely time to go out at all. The teeming rain had kept everyone who didn’t have to leave his or her house firmly indoors. Wexford was turning all this over in his mind and noting how it made the drowning theory less and less probable when Vine came in and held out to him something soaking wet and mud-stained on a tray.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a T-shirt, sir. A woman found it in the water in her back garden and brought it in here. It’s got a name printed on it, you see, and that’s what alerted her.”

  Wexford took the garment by the shoulders and lifted it an inch or two out of the muddy water in which it lay. The background was blue and it was smaller but otherwise it was the twin to the red one they had seen in Giles Dade’s cupboard. Only the face was a girl’s and the name on it was “Sophie.”

  Chapter 5

  THE RIVER FLOODS WERE AT their widest here. The woman who had found the T-shirt said ruefully that when she and her partner had been looking for a home in the neighborhood, they almost rejected this house because it was so far from the Kingsbrook. “Not far enough, evidently.”

  But a good deal farther away than Wexford’s. Still, it was also lower-lying and in spite of the rain which had been falling steadily since nine, the tide had reached only about a third of the way up the garden, bringing with it a scummy detritus of plastic bottles, a carrier bag, a Coke can, broken twigs, dead leaves, used condoms, a toothbrush . . .

  “And that T-shirt.”

  “You found it here?”

  “That’s right. Among all this lot. I saw the name and it rang a bell.”

  Wexford went on home. He was meeting Burden for a “quick” lunch, but he wanted to see the new wall first. It wasn’t necessary to go outside. No one would go outside today if he didn’t have to. Four tiers of sandbags on each side raised the height of the walls by two feet but the swirling water hadn’t yet quite reached the bottom of the lowest tier.

  “It was very kind of Cal,” Dora said.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s taking me out to lunch.”

  “What, just you? Where’s Sylvia?”

  “Gone to work. It’s her day off but she offered to do the helpline at The Hide. One of the other women is off sick.”

  Wexford said no more. It struck him that a man doesn’t take his girlfriend’s mother out to a meal on her own unless he is very serious about that girlfriend, unless, in fact, he contemplates making her mother his mother-in-law or something very near it. Why did he mind so much? Callum Chapman was suitable enough. He had been married but his wife had died. There were no children. He had a reasonable job as an actuary (whatever that was), a flat of his own in Stowerton. At his last birthday he had become forty. According to Sylvia, her children liked him. Dora apparently liked him. He had been eager to do a good deed by volunteering as a sandbag shifter in the water crisis.

  “He’s dull,” Wexford said to himself as he drove down the hill through the rain to meet Burden at the Moonflower Takeaway’s new restaurant. “Abysmally dull and dreary.” But was that important? Wexford wasn’t going to have to live with him, see his handsome face on the pillow beside him—he grinned at the thought of that—watch his deadpan look when anything amusing was said. But, wait a minute, maybe this last was more than a possibility if Sylvia got into some permanent arrangement with him . . . How much of a New Man was he? These days, he thought, women seemed to like best a man who’d do the housework and mind the kids and iron his own shirts, and never mind if he was boring as hell. In much the same way, men had once preferred and many still did, housewifely women with empty heads and pretty faces. It didn’t say much for human discernment.

  Burden was already seated at one of
the Moonflower’s twelve tables. Famous in the district for their Chinese takeaway, this restaurant had been opened a year before by Mark Ling and his brother Pete. It was already popular and with visitors not only local but from farther afield, not least because of its (self-styled) head waiter, Raffy Johnson, the Lings’ nephew. Raffy was young, black, handsome, and in Wexford’s opinion the most courteous server of food in mid-Sussex. No one could spread a napkin over a customer’s lap with a more graceful flourish than Raffy, no one be more prompt with the menu or more assiduous to check that the single red or purple anemone in its cut-glass vase was placed on the table where it neither blocked diners’ sight of each other nor got in the way of the dishes of lemon chicken and black bean squid. He was engaged now in pouring for Burden a glass of sparkling water. He set the bottle down, smiled, and drew back Wexford’s chair.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wexford. How are you? Not liking all this rain, I dare say.”

  If ever there was a success story . . . Wexford remembered Raffy a few years back when he had been a hopeless seventeen-year-old layabout, a feckless boy whose only virtue seemed to be his love for his mother, and whom his aunt Mhonum Ling had called a hopeless case, one who would never find work his life long. But his mother Oni had had a win on the Lottery and much of the money had gone on Raffy’s training. There had been hotel work in London, in Switzerland and Jordan, and now he was a partner with his uncles and aunt in this prosperous business.

  “I comfort myself with thoughts of Raffy when I’m feeling low,” said Wexford.

  “Good. I must try it. I reckon we’re all feeling low at the moment. I’m going to have the dragon’s eggs and cherry blossom noodles.”

  “You’re joking. You made that up.”

  “I did not. It’s on page four. Raffy recommended it. It’s not real dragon’s eggs.”

  Wexford looked up from the menu. “I don’t suppose it is since there aren’t any real dragons. I may as well have the same. We have the unenviable task of showing that T-shirt to the Dades this afternoon and the sooner we get it over with the better.”

  Their order was taken and Raffy, agreeing that perhaps “dragon’s eggs” was an unfortunate name, assured them it was a delicious seafood concoction. He’d tell his uncle and they’d find something that sounded more suitable. Could Mr. Wexford suggest something? Wexford said he’d think about it.

  “What I’m thinking at the moment,” he said to Burden, “is that we ought to be sure just when these floods began. I mean, when the Kingsbrook first burst its banks, that sort of thing. When I got home last Friday it was raining, but not heavily and there weren’t any floods. I didn’t go out at all on Saturday and I didn’t know about the flood warning till I saw the television news at five fifteen.”

  “Yes, well, I heard the flood warning on Radio Four on Saturday morning early, but I guessed we’d be okay, we’re too high up and too far from the Brede or the Kingsbrook. But on Saturday afternoon— well, early evening—Jenny and I and Mark went round to her parents to see how it was affecting them. As you know they’ve got a river frontage, their house backs on to the Kingsbrook, and as it happens, they moved out and went to Jenny’s sister Candy on Sunday afternoon. But to get to their place we crossed the Kingsbrook Bridge and you could do it at six with ease. The height of the river wasn’t anywhere near the bridge and it wasn’t at seven thirty when we came back.

  “But it wasn’t raining very heavily then. The really heavy rain didn’t start until about ten or later, nearer eleven. You know I’ve got that skylight in my house? Well, I heard it starting to crash on there as I was going to bed. I thought for a bit the water would come in and Jenny found an old enamel bath to put underneath it in case. Skylights are a menace. Anyway, the water didn’t come in but we both lay awake a long time listening to the rain. I don’t know when I’ve heard it heavier. It woke Mark and we had to take him in with us. I did go to sleep at last, but I woke up at five and the crashing was still going on. I can tell you, I was scared to look out of the window.”

  The dragon’s eggs came. It was a prettily colored dish, mostly butterfly prawns and shrimps and lobster claws with bean sprouts and shredded carrot in a primrose-colored sauce. Wexford, who had forgotten to take the linen napkin printed with anemones and birds of paradise out of its silver clip, had it graciously spread across his knees by Raffy.

  “And the water went on rising all day,” he said.

  “Absolutely. The Dade kids and Joanna Troy could have gone out at any time on the Sunday to take a look and that’s when they possibly all went in.”

  “Impossible,” said Wexford.

  As he spoke, the street door opened and Dora entered with Callum Chapman. At first they didn’t see him and Burden. Raffy was showing them to a table when Dora looked around and spotted him. Both came over and Wexford was starting to thank Chapman for his morning’s work when, glancing from one to the other of them, he smiled— at last he smiled—and interrupted in his slow monotone, “Skiving off, eh? So this is how you fritter away our taxes.”

  Wexford was suddenly so angry he couldn’t speak. He turned his back while Dora attempted to laugh it off. There was no introducing Burden now and Sylvia’s mother and Sylvia’s lover went back to their table. Whether his wife had much appetite for her lunch Wexford couldn’t tell, but his had gone. Burden glanced over his shoulder.

  “Who was that?”

  “Obviously my daughters don’t get their taste in men from their mother.” Wexford had tried a joke, but it failed miserably. “Sylvia’s new bloke.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “If only I were.”

  “It takes all sorts, I suppose.”

  “Yes, but I wish it didn’t, don’t you? I wish it took two or three sorts. Funny people, kind and thoughtful, sensitive people with imagination, tolerant and forbearing with good conversation, those sorts. No room for pompous, mean-spirited bastards like him.”

  They ate as much as they were going to and Burden paid the bill. “What he said, it wasn’t that bad, you know,” he said as they were leaving. “Haven’t you got it a bit out of proportion? People are always saying that sort of thing to us.”

  “They aren’t all sleeping with my daughter.”

  Burden shrugged. “You were going to tell me why you didn’t think finding the T-shirt was evidence of those three being in the water.”

  Wexford got into the car.

  “I don’t know about not being in the water. I mean not being drowned. If she’d been wearing the T-shirt, why would it come off? I looked at it quite carefully. It’s got a fairly tight round neck—do they call that a crew neck?” Burden nodded. “It might be dragged off if she’d gone over Niagara but not in the flooded Kingsbrook. Another thing is, wouldn’t she have had a coat over it? At least something rainproof. And if so, where’s that? You’ll say it’s still to come to light. Maybe. This afternoon we have to find out positively what topcoats are missing.”

  “If it didn’t come off Sophie Dade, what was it doing there?”

  “It was put there to make us think she drowned. A red herring. It was to distract us, at least for a while, from looking further.”

  Katrina Dade identified the T-shirt, though there had never been any doubt about its ownership. Once again she became rational and calm when anything connected with outward appearance was involved. “Sophie and Giles both had these done. It was when we were all on holiday in Florida last April. You can have a look at his, it’s in his room.”

  “We’ve seen it, thank you, Mrs. Dade.”

  “Now maybe you’ll accept that they’ve drowned.” Once more she had changed her tack. They had drowned. From reproaching herself for even considering the possibility, she had returned to believing it. “Oh, I wish my husband was here. I want him. Why is he always working when I need him?” No one could answer that. “I want my children’s bodies. I want to give them a dignified burial.”

  “It hasn’t come to that, Mrs. Dade,” said Burden. He assured
her truthfully that the frogmen had begun searching again as soon as the T-shirt had been found. “But it’s a precaution,” he said, denying his own private belief. “We don’t accept the drowning theory, we still don’t. While we’re here we want to establish positively what topcoats or jackets Giles and Sophie were wearing when they left this house. They must have been wearing coats.”

  “I was quite surprised Sophie was wearing that brown anorak,” she said. “I can’t think why. Not when she had a brand-new jacket in canary yellow with a plaid lining. She chose it herself. She loved that jacket.”

  I can think why, Wexford said to himself. So that she wouldn’t be easily identified, so that she wouldn’t stand out a mile. That, too, may be a better reason for getting rid of the T-shirt. Or someone else getting rid of it and someone else persuading her not to wear the bright yellow jacket . . .

  “Did Ms. Troy see much of her former husband, Mrs. Dade?”

  “She never saw him.”

  “His name is Ralph Jennings, I believe, and he lives in Reading.”

  “I don’t know where he lives.” Katrina, for whom acting naturally was impossible, whose posturing was almost pathological, seemed uncertain how to proceed with regard to Joanna Troy. Was her former friend still her friend or had she become an enemy? “I said to her once that she wouldn’t know about something, I don’t remember what it was, because she’d never been married, I said, and she said, oh, yes, she had.‘Believe it or not, ’ she said, ‘but I was once a Mrs. Ralph Jennings, ’ and she laughed. The name just stuck in my mind. She isn’t suited to marriage, you can tell that.”

  “Why would that be?” Burden asked.

  “My husband says it’s because she’s a lesbian. He says you can see that with half an eye.” Her sudden coyness and eyelid-batting was an embarrassment. “He knows a dyke when he sees one, he says.”

  Wexford thought he had seldom come across a more unpleasant man. Chapman was a pussycat beside him.