The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  “I thought of coming over myself,” Wexford said tentatively.

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

  When he had rung off, Wexford looked up Austro-Asiatic Languages in the encyclopedia and found there were dozens if not hundreds of them, mostly spoken in southeast 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, film director Ingmar Bergman, and Dag Hammarskjöld, 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 nonfiction, that 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 Shelley’s mother apart from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he bought it.

  The flight went at five. It was a mild day, very damp and misty, though no rain had fallen since the previous evening, but Wexford had rooted out his winter coat, a very old tweed affair, unworn for several years and superseded by raincoats. He laid it across his lap, settled down in his seat, and opened his book. Unfortunately, Mary Wollstonecraft had spent more time in Norway and Denmark than in Sweden and while in that country had visited no more than Gothenburg and the extreme west. Wexford’s hope that she might have given him a picture of Uppsala in the last years of the eighteenth century faded fast. It would, anyway, be very different today, as would the diet of smoked meat and salt fish denounced by the author, and the pallid, heavy appearance of the people. Certainly the poverty would be past and gone but the “degree of politeness in their address” might, he hoped, remain.

  He had decided to proceed straight to the Hotel Linné and meet Giles and Professor Trent first thing next morning. By now the Uppsala police knew all about Giles and the possibility of further spiriting him away was gone. Wexford had written “Hotel Linné, Uppsala” on a piece of paper but the taxi driver at Arlanda Airport spoke enough English to understand his directions.

  It was dark. The drive took them along a wide, straight road through what seemed to be forests of fir and birch. The houses he saw, or made out through the fairly well-lit darkness, looked modern, uniform in materials—red-painted weatherboarding, leaded roofs—if varied in design. Then the lights of the city in the distance showed him with dramatic impact a huge cathedral standing on an eminence, a black silhouette, its twin spires pointing at the jewel-blue starlit sky. In Matilda’s mezzotint it had onion domes. Only in the very old pictures were there Gothic spires. He didn’t understand, unless the images weren’t of Uppsala at all but of some other north-European city.

  A formidable castle on another hill, serene buildings he thought might be baroque, a fast-flowing black river. He got out of the taxi and the driver patiently sorted out his kronor for him. Oddly enough, he felt he could trust the man not to swindle him, something that wouldn’t be true everywhere. Outdoors only briefly, he was chilled to the bone by the bitter cold. But inside the Hotel Linné it was cheeringly warm. Everyone spoke English, everyone was polite, pleasant, efficient. He found himself in an austere room, pale, rather bare, but with everything he could possibly need. Boiling hot water gushed out of the taps. He had eaten on the plane and wasn’t hungry now. In some trepidation he followed the hotel’s telephone directions and dialed Philip Trent’s number. Instead of a flood of Swedish, Trent’s voice said, “Hello?”

  Wexford told him he had arrived, would see him in the morning at nine thirty, according to their prior arrangement. Trent, who conformed uncomfortably to clichéd images of the absent-minded professor, so much so that his manner seemed assumed, had apparently forgotten who he was. Wexford wouldn’t have been surprised to have been greeted in Wa, Tin, or Ho, some of the Austro-Asiatic languages he had discovered existed. But Trent, saying vaguely that he must “come back to earth,” agreed that nine thirty “would do.” Coffee was generally available at that time. He managed to imply that he was living in a restaurant.

  “My house is on the corner of Östraågatan and Gamla Torget. That is ‘East Street’ and ‘Old Square’ to you. More or less.” That was more or less the meaning or was the house more or less there? “It’s on the river. You can ask the hotel for a plan.”

  Philip Trent sounded profoundly uninterested in his visit. Wexford had a long hot shower and went to bed. But the street outside was noisier than he had expected. Just as the place was clean and cold, austere and not very populous, so he had anticipated utter silence. Instead, the voices of young people and their music reached him, the sound of something being kicked into the gutter, a motor bike noisily started up, and he remembered that this was a university city, Sweden’s Oxford, its oldest and one of the oldest in Europe, but nevertheless full of modern youth. He sat up in bed reading Mary Wollstonecraft on the ease of Swedish divorce and the superiority of the little towns to similar places in Wales and western France. Eventually quiet came and he slept.

  The morning was bright and cold. But where was the snow? “We haven’t had much for many years,” said a multilingual girl serving breakfast, or rather, directing guests to the buffet tables. “Like all the world, we are affected with global warming.” She added severely, looking into Wexford’s eyes, “Are you knowing Sweden has the best environmental record in the earth?”

  Humbly, he said he was glad to hear it. She returned to his table with a plan of the city she had procured for him from reception. “There. Fjärdingen. Not very large, all things are very easy for you to find.”

  It was early still. He went out into the “Farthing” and found himself in a place the like of which he had never seen before. It wasn’t that it lacked the modern appurtenances of the West. Far from it. He suddenly realized how odd it was, how refreshing in more senses than one, to see the latest models of cars, an Internet café, a CD shop, fashionably dressed women, a smart policeman directing traffic, yet at the same time smell pure crystalline air, unpolluted and clean. The sky was a pale sharp blue, scrawled over with wind-torn shreds of cloud. Some of the buildings were modern but most eighteenth-century, yellow and white and sepia, Swedish baroque. They would already have been here if Mary Wollstonecraft had passed this way. Not many cars were about, not many people. Walking toward the Linnaean gardens, he recalled that the entire population of this large country was only eight million, less than three million in Wollstonecraft’s time.

  He really only wanted to step into the gardens or look into them over the wall because the night before he had started out he had quickly read up on Linnaeus and his earth-wandering journeys to find new species. It wasn’t the best time of the year unless you were a plant enthusiast and expert, everything was still asleep, waiting for a later spring than England enjoyed. He thought of his own poor garden, swamped by unnatural rains. If it was true that this nation had the world’s best environmental record, would their thoughtful prudence save them from coming catastrophes?

  It was nine o’clock. He heard the chimes begin and, as if it were immediately above him, the deep-throated tolling of a clock striking the hour. Quickening his pace, he began to walk in the direction of that sound and, as buildings opened and parted to afford him a panorama, saw the great cathedral standing before him on an eminence. A line of prose came back to him, he had read it years ago, he couldn’t remember when or where, but it was from the writings of Hans Andersen who, visiting this city, spoke of the cathedral “lifting its s
tone arms to heaven.” It was exactly like that, he thought, as the final stroke of nine died away. The Domkyrka was crimson and gray, clerical gray, dark and austere, huge, formidable, and as unlike any cathedral he knew as could be imagined. Only its straight lines and pointed arches recalled English Gothic. It made cathedrals at home look cozy. Below and beside it hung the buildings of the university, Odins lund and high above, the vast bastion of the castle with its two cylinder towers capped in round lids of lead. He was looking at the picture Matilda Carrish had hung on her staircase, even the sky was the same, pale, ruffled, a north-edge-of-the-world backdrop, but the cathedral’s spires in her mezzotint had been onion domes . . .

  Too early yet to make his way to the man who had been her husband. He came to a modern, rather ugly street of the kind of shops he most hated in English cities, the kind of architecture everyone dislikes but which goes on being used; then, turning his back on it, to the river. Called the Fyris, it scurried along to divide the town. Ice-cold and glittering dark blue, its little waves looked as they rushed and tumbled toward the bridge and the next bridge and the next. Standing on this one, he was glad of his old tweed coat and he noticed everyone was more warmly wrapped than they would have been in Kingsmarkham. Scarves and hats and boots protected them from the knife-blade wind and the icy bite of the air. He watched his own breath make a beam of mist.

  It would be pleasant walking along this riverbank in summer, past the little shops and cafés, watching the boats. When would summer come? May or June, he supposed. On the western side he walked to the next bridge and, looking across the river, realized he had reached his destination. According to the map, that was Gamla Torget on the other side and the riverbank street that ran into it, Östraågatan. So the ocher-colored house, three floors high, its plain windows in its plain facade each with its pair of useful shutters, must be Trent’s. The shutters were open now, the panes of glass gleaming in the thin sunlight. Like them, the front door was painted white. No Swedish architect, he thought, had wasted time or money on spurious house adornment, and the result was peaceful, calming, serene, if a little stark. As the cathedral clock chimed the half hour, he crossed the bridge and rang Professor Trent’s doorbell.

  Trent himself would answer it, he had supposed, or whatever might be this cool and progressive nation’s idea of a servant, the maker of nine-thirty coffee perhaps, a young girl rather like the severe waitress at the Linné. Very unexpected was to come face to face with a boy of sixteen, dark, extremely tall, but with the almost fragile thinness of adolescence.

  “Philip said I should let you in,” Giles Dade said. “I mean he said I should and not anyone else.”

  Chapter 26

  THE WARMTH HE HAD COME to expect but not the eighteenth-century interior and early Victorian furniture, white and blue and gleaming gilt. Everything awesomely and most unacademically clean. The boy hadn’t spoken again. He was a good-looking boy with regular features, dark blue eyes, and luxuriant dark hair, which Wexford fancied had been left to grow for three months, perhaps the first time such laxness had been permitted. He showed Wexford into a living room that spanned the ground floor of the house. Almost the first things he noticed were the books in a bookcase like the one Matilda had and with more pictures of a tailless cat on their jackets. Pelle Svanslös, he read on a spine, not attempting to pronounce it. More pale delicate furniture, a ceiling-high stove in one corner encased in white and gold porcelain tiles, and a view of the river from the front windows and of a small bare garden at the back.

  The old man who joined them within a moment or two was tall and nearly as skinny as Giles. Perhaps once, half a century ago and more, he had looked like Giles, and he still had the copious hair, now quite white. His expression was not so much irritable as preoccupied, distrait. It was apparent he looked on this development as an intrusion on a largely unvarying scholarly life.

  “Well, yes, good morning,” he said in his Shand-Gibb voice. “Please don’t trouble yourself about this. I shall not be going to the university this morning. Don’t feel you have to, er, speed things up.” He brought out this phrase as if uttering an outrageous piece of recent slang. Wexford understood he was dealing with a man so self-absorbed that he genuinely believed others must be exclusively concerned with anxieties about his comfort. “Take your time. Sit down. Oh, you are sitting down, yes.”

  He turned to Giles, addressed him in what was presumably Swedish, to which Giles responded in the same tongue. Wexford had to stop himself gaping. Trent said, when the boy had gone, “A very simple language to learn, Swedish. All the Scandinavian languages are. Nothing to it. Inflected, of course, but in an entirely logical way— unlike some I could name.” Wexford was afraid he might but do so and with examples, but he continued on the subject of Swedish. “I picked it up myself—oh, a hundred years ago—in a month or so. Giles is taking a little longer. I thought he should occupy himself usefully while here. Naturally, I have seen to the continuance of his education—and not only in that particular respect.”

  He spoke as if Giles’s missed schooling was the only aspect of his flight likely to give anyone much concern. Wexford was for a moment struck dumb. But when Giles returned with coffeepot and cups and saucers on a tray, he addressed the boy.

  “Giles, I intend to return to the United Kingdom this afternoon on the two thirty P.M. flight to Heathrow and I have a ticket for you as well. I expect you to return with me.”

  He also expected resistance from one or both of them. But Giles said only, “Oh, I’ll come.” He poured coffee, handed Wexford a cup and the milk jug. “I know I have to go back. I always knew I’d have to some time.”

  The old man was looking out of the window, not as if pretending tact or insouciance but surely because he really was thinking of something quite other, Palaungic syntax perhaps. The boy looked up, looked straight at Wexford, his face taking on that curious collapsing look, a crumbling or melting, that precedes tears. “I’ll come with you,” he said. An effort was made, his face set and there were no tears. “How is my sister?”

  “She’s fine.” She wasn’t but what else could he say? Certainly not at this stage that she had been abandoned by their mother. The scalding coffee alerting him and waking him in a bracing way, he turned his attention to the owner of this house. “May I know what possessed you, Professor Trent, when you gave shelter to Giles? What were you thinking of, a responsible man, a respected scholar of your age? Didn’t you consider your civic duty if nothing else?”

  “ ‘Possessed’ me,” said Trent, smiling. “I like that. I used to think, when I was young, how amazing it would be to be actually possessed. By some kind of spirit, I mean. Would it bring with it the gift of tongues, for instance? Imagine being suddenly endowed with the ability to speak Hittite?” Giles’s shocked expression halted him. “Oh, come on, Giles, you’ve given up all that fundamentalist nonsense, you know you have. You’ve told me so often enough. You know very well it’s not possible to be possessed by a demon, gift of tongues or not.”

  “I used to think,” said Giles, “that Joanna was possessed by one. They said a demon was what made people behave like that.” He didn’t specify who “they” were but it was apparent he meant the Good Gospelers. “They said I had a demon that made me do what I did.”

  “You know better now, an enlightened young person like you.”

  Wexford thought it time to put a stop to this. “Professor Trent, you haven’t answered my questions.”

  “Have I not? What were they? Oh, yes, something about my civic duty not to harbor fugitive criminals. Well, I’ve never supposed I had a civic duty and Giles isn’t a criminal. You’ve just said that yourself.” He broke into a flood of Swedish and Giles nodded. “I’m not particularly responsible either, I’ve never had the least interest in law or politics or, come to that, religion. I’ve always considered I had quite enough to do elucidating the knotty problems of the languages spoken by seventy million people.”

  More incomprehensible asides to
Giles prompted Wexford to say testily, “Please don’t speak in Swedish. If you persist I must ask to talk to Giles alone. I may do that, he is over sixteen now. I take it that your late wife telephoned you and asked you to receive Giles?”

  “That is correct,” said Trent slightly more affably. “Poor Matilda. She knew I would do anything for her except live in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” He shuddered artificially. “She knew I was exactly the man to give sanctuary to someone fleeing its justice. Besides, my housekeeper had moved up to Umea and it seemed to me Giles might be an adequate substitute for a while. I am, oddly enough, quite a domesticated man, but I need some assistance. I must tell you, I’ve grown quite attached to this boy. He performed a few tasks about the house, running errands, making the beds and the coffee—now is that an example of zeugma, Giles?”

  Giles grinned. “No. It would be if you’d said, ‘making haste and the coffee.’Yours is syllepsis.”

  “Not quite but we won’t go into it now,” said Trent. “I would have been a good deal less happy, Inspector, if Matilda had sent me a fool. The housework accomplished would hardly have been a compensation for lack of mental ability. Am I coming close to solving your problems?”

  Wexford didn’t answer. He saw that pursuing this was useless. And what did he intend to do if he got some sort of admission out of Trent? Have him extradited? The whole notion was ludicrous. Perhaps all he was after was that rather contemptible goal, revenge. Not quite abandoning the idea of it, he said, “You are aware, Mr. Trent, that your wife is dead?”