The Babes in the Wood

by Ruth Rendell

  At that Giles turned away his face, but Trent said only, “Oh, yes, I knew. Matilda’s daughter told me. I might have gone to the funeral— not that I approve of funerals—and even if it had meant passing the time of day with Giles’s appalling parents, but I could hardly leave Giles here alone. Apart from all that, I had just reached a crucial point in my research into the early proliferation of Pear, what I believe is called a breakthrough.”

  “I won’t ask you what Ms. Carrish’s motive was. In asking you to receive Giles, I mean. I know what it was.”

  Giles looked at him inquiringly but he didn’t elucidate. “You traveled on your Irish passport,” he said. “Before you left your home with Sophie you phoned Matilda, knowing she would help you, and she suggested you bring your Irish passport with you but leave the British one behind—to fool the police. Am I right?”

  Giles nodded. “What happened to Matilda?”

  “She had a stroke,” Wexford said. “Sophie was with her. She’d been with her all the time. She phoned the emergency services and then, of course, she had to give herself up. There was nothing else for it.”

  “We should have done that in the first place, shouldn’t we? Phoned the emergency services, I mean.” He didn’t need an answer. He knew what Wexford would say, what everyone would say. “I thought no one would believe me. They’d think what Matilda thought and they wouldn’t be so—so understanding.”

  “You can tell me about it on the flight,” Wexford said. “And now you’d better get your things together. We’ll take ourselves to the airport, have some lunch first.”

  Trent had been silent through most of this. Now he turned around and fixed his eyes, cold and blue as the Fyris, first on Wexford, then on the boy, and there they lingered. “If I’d known it was going to take such a short time I wouldn’t have rearranged my schedule.” You could hear the quotation marks clanging into place on either side of the final word. “I suppose I can get up to the university now before any more time is wasted.”

  “I’ll come back,” the boy said eagerly. “You know what we said. In two years’ time I’ll come back here to the university.” In the silence which followed he looked at Wexford. “I will, won’t I?”

  “Let’s hope so,” Wexford said. He turned to Trent. “Tell me something. The cathedral here has two Gothic spires. When it was built in the fourteenth century it must have had Gothic spires. But in the prints I saw in Ms. Carrish’s house from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it’s the same cathedral but it’s got onion domes. Why?”

  Trent looked deeply bored and at the same time harassed. “Oh, there was an enormous fire here and the towers fell down or something like that and they put those onion things there and then at the end of the nineteenth they were out of fashion so they tore them down and put Gothic spires up again. Ridiculous.”

  “Could I . . .” Giles said to him, “could I have a copy of Pelle? Kind of as a souvenir?”

  “Oh, take it, take it,” said Trent testily. “And now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  At the duty-free Wexford bought perfume for Dora, bearing in mind Burden’s pre-Christmas advice on this subject. Giles drank a can of Coke, and Wexford, without much enthusiasm, a small and very expensive bottle of sparkling water. The boy was subdued and quiet, evidently fearful of this return home and reluctant to leave the country that had received him. He still stared nostalgically out of the airport windows toward where the flat plain of Upplands lay.

  The flight was delayed but only by twenty minutes. Wexford gave Giles the window seat. As they took off, the woman in the seat across the aisle crossed herself, a little shamefacedly it seemed to Wexford. The boy, who had also witnessed this, speaking for the first time since they fastened their seatbelts, said, “I’ve given up all that.”

  “All what?” Wexford thought he knew but he needed to ask.

  “You’d call it fundamentalism.” Giles made a face. “The Good Gospel, all that. What happened cured me. I thought—I thought they were—well, what they said, good. I wanted to be good. I mean, in the widest possible sense—d’you know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “You see, the way people behave—I mean people my age—makes me feel sick. My sister’s getting that way. The sex and the words they use and the way they—they sort of mock anything religious or moral or whatever. The foul stuff on TV, I mean comedy shows and that. And I thought—I thought I wanted to keep myself away from all that, keep myself clean.

  “The church I went to wasn’t any good. That was St. Peter’s. They didn’t seem to know what they believed or what they wanted. The Good Gospel people seemed so sure. There was just one way for them, you did all those things they said and you’d be all right. That’s what I liked. Do you see?”

  “Maybe. Why did you want the book?”

  “Pelle Svanslös? Svanslös means ‘the tailless one.’ They’re children’s books about a cat and his friends, and they all live in Fjärdingen, near where I was. I had to have something to remind me.”

  “Yes. You liked it there, didn’t you? Now why don’t you tell me what happened that weekend when Joanna came to stay? I’ve heard your sister’s version and most of it wasn’t true.”

  “She tells lies all the time. But it’s not her fault.”

  “Now I want to hear the truth, Giles.”

  The aircraft had begun its journey along the runway, proceeding slowly at first, then faster as the captain called to cabin crews to take their seats for takeoff. Smoothly they soared into the air, from blue sky into blue sky for there was no cloud barrier to break through.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” the boy said. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time, but I’ve been—I’ve been afraid.” His face had whitened and as he turned his head to look at Wexford his expression was desperate. “You have to believe me. I didn’t—kill Joanna. I didn’t do anything to her, not anything at all.”

  “I know that,” Wexford said. “I knew that before I found out where you were.”

  Chapter 27

  “THERE SEEM TO BE A LOT of people getting off scot-free,” grumbled the Assistant Chief Constable.

  “I wouldn’t say that, sir,” Wexford said robustly. “We’ve a murder charge, one for concealing a death, another for wasting police time. Even if the boy gets no more than probation and a period of community service, his conviction will be on his record forever. I very much doubt, for instance, if the Swedish authorities will let him enter the country to attend the University of Uppsala when the time comes, which is what he wants to do.”

  “And you call that punishment?”

  “For him it will be. His sister’s punishment is to have to go on living with their father.”

  He had submitted his report to James Freeborn and explained it in detail. Now he was due to meet Burden and enlighten him. It was, of course, a wet evening in April, the fields surrounding Kingsmarkham permanently waterlogged but not under water. From where Wexford walked down the High Street toward the Olive and Dove those meadows simply looked a brilliant fresh green in the yellow clouded sunset. At the Queen Street turning he made a detour. Curiosity impelled him and, sure enough, the newsagent’s, normally open until 8 P.M., was closed “until further notice.” Perhaps it was a sign, perhaps this was the moment to stop taking that absurd anachronism, a provincial evening paper. Who needed it? Who wanted it? Still, if it disappeared, many would lose their jobs and there were other newsagents in the neighborhood to distribute it . . .

  His digression had made him a little late. Burden was already in their “snug,” the small room tucked away in a back region but still with access to the saloon bar, the only corner of the drinking areas of the hotel, as Wexford sometimes said, to be free of music, fruit machines, food, and children. Nor were there posters asking who wanted to be a millionaire, the local and live version of the television program, no advertisements for tugs-of-war or clairvoyant dog contests, attractions it had long been assumed at the Rat and Carrot, and was
now assumed all over the town, to be demanded indiscriminately by everyone. The snug, where Burden stood with his back to an enormous coal fire in a small grate, was a very small room with brown woodwork and brown-papered walls on which hung very dark pictures of a vaguely hunting-print kind. At least, from what you could make out in the gloom, they were of animals on foot and men on horseback chasing things through bracken, bramble, and briar. If no one had smoked much in this room for several years, time was when many had. As the bar rooms of the Olive and Dove were never decorated and probably never had been since the beginning of the twentieth century, the smoke of several million cigarettes had mounted to the once cream-colored ceiling and stained it the dark mahogany of the furniture.

  Two tables and six chairs were the snug’s only furniture. On the table nearer the fire stood two tankards of beer, two packets of crisps, and some cashew nuts in a dish. It was enormously, but not unpleasantly, hot. Burden, deeply tanned from his holiday, was dressed in one version of his weekend garb, a tweed suit with caramel shirt and tie that fortuitously matched the ceiling.

  “Raining again,” Wexford said.

  “I hope you’ve got more to say than that.”

  Wexford sat down. “Too much, I dare say you’ll think. It’s nice here, isn’t it? Quiet. Peaceful. I wonder if this will be the end of the Church of the Good Gospel. Probably, for a while.” He took a swig of his lager, thought of opening one of the crisp packets but changed his mind with a sigh. “All the time we thought this case was about the Dade children, but it wasn’t. Not really. They were just pawns. It was about the conflict between the Good Gospelers and Joanna Troy—or, rather, people like Joanna Troy in the broadest sense.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll explain. There was an aspect of the Good Gospelers we knew about but to which we neglected to give the importance it deserved: their keenness on ‘purity.’ I should have paid more attention to it because it was one of the first things about the church’s aims that Jashub Wright mentioned to me. He talked about something he called ‘inner cleanliness’ and all I could think of was Andrews Liver Salts, which, in case you’re too young to know, was a constipation remedy when I was a child. ‘Inner cleanliness’ was their slogan. I suppose that’s why I didn’t pay any attention to the fact that it was also the Good Gospelers’ slogan. Only they didn’t mean what today is called clearing the body of toxins, they meant sexual purity, chastity. Unchastity was the prime sin new converts were expected to be open about when they were brought to the Confessional Congregation.”

  “I don’t imagine,” said Burden, sitting, “that Giles Dade had much of that to confess. He was only fifteen.”

  “Then there you’d be wrong. He had some revelations for that bunch of latter-day saints or however they think of themselves. But we’ll leave him for the moment and get back to the Good Gospelers themselves. Like many such fundamentalists, they weren’t much concerned with other sins, things that maybe you and I would call sins, if we were inclined that way. I mean violence, assault, bodily harm, cruelty, stealing, lying, and simple unkindness, none of that bothered them. And I get the distinct impression from Giles that they would have been impatient with anyone who wasted their time confessing to hitting his wife or neglecting his children. It was sex they were concerned with, pre- and extramarital sex, fornication and adultery, most of it in their view caused by women and their tempting ways, rather in the way the early fathers of the Roman Catholic Church thought about it or some modern American cults. Sex, according to Giles, must in their view be confined exclusively within marriage and not too much of it there. Ideally, it should be restricted to the procreation of children.”

  Burden nodded. “Sure, but where does Giles come in?”

  “Let’s move on to Joanna Troy now. Joanna was apparently an entirely normal young woman, clever, gifted, nice-looking, a good teacher, and potentially a successful person with a full life ahead of her. But she had already done a good deal to make that full life look unlikely.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Wexford looked up at the window, at the rain lashing against it and the dusk deepening outside. The curtains, of figured brown velvet, looked as if they had never been drawn since someone first hung them on their mahogany pole thirty or forty years before. He got up and tugged at them, releasing clouds of tobacco-smelling dust. As they met across the window the decay of years showed in the transparent ragged areas where they were coming apart. Both of them laughed.

  “I only wanted to shut out the weather,” Wexford said and, after a pause, “You asked me what I meant. When Joanna was a teenager she was attracted by her contemporaries, like most people of her age. At sixteen she lost her mother. What that meant to her we shall never know and I’m not a psychologist, but I’d guess she was very traumatized by that loss, especially as her sole parent then was that dreary old windbag George Troy with about as much understanding as a flea. Maybe an effect of it was to make her revert to childhood and to the companionship of children, though she was no longer a child. Maybe if she had had brothers none of this would have happened.

  “The first thing to happen, or the first we know about, was the incident at school with Ludovic Brown. He was younger than she, probably pre-pubertal, and when Joanna made advances to him he was frightened and repelled her. She did all she knew how to do then— she fought him. He wouldn’t, shall we say, love her?—so she beat him up. Revenge and anger and the misery of rejection all went into it. The consequences of that we know. His death was an accident, quite separate from this case.

  “Joanna must have had other relationships with boys, some of them satisfactory, but as she grew older and the ages of the boys remained the same, that is in their early or mid-teens, her tastes began to look unnatural. But she was trapped in adolescence by the trauma of her mother’s death.”

  Burden interrupted him. “Are you saying that Joanna Troy was a pedophile?”

  “I suppose I am. We think of pedophiles as men and their victims as either girls or boys. Older women having a taste for young boys doesn’t seem to come into the same category, largely, I think, because most men, when told about it, tend to make ‘Aarrgh’ noises and say they should have been so lucky.”

  Burden pulled a face that had a grin in it. “I wasn’t going to say that, but they do have a point. You know me, you think I’m a bit of a prude, but even I can’t imagine a boy of fifteen with all that testosterone slurping about inside him saying no to a good-looking woman ten or twelve years older than himself.”

  “You’d better imagine it, Mike, because it happened. Only say seventeen years older. But first came Joanna’s marriage. Ralph Jennings was in his early twenties when she met him, but he looked years younger. Those very fair people do. Unfortunately, they also age correspondingly faster. I think Joanna believed Jennings might be her salvation. He was a passive yes-man but quite bright, a potential high earner, they had plenty in common. Perhaps if she was with him she’d stop fancying boys ten years her junior. This proclivity of hers, after all, wasn’t just a nuisance, it was as much against the law as if she’d been a middle-aged man and the boys girls in their teens.

  “But, sadly for her, Jennings started to go bald. His face reddened. Domestic life ruined his boyish figure. Sex was not only no longer the fun it had been, it was becoming distasteful. The marriage broke up. But Joanna remained in Kingsmarkham and in her prestigious job teaching at Haldon Finch. Instead of controlling her impulses toward boys of fourteen or fifteen, she let rip, as people so often do when some long-term relationship comes to an end.” Wexford paused, thinking of Sylvia, wondering how many more there would be before things worked out for her. “She was in exactly the right place for a female pedophile, wasn’t she?” he went on. “A mixed school where she taught students of the age she most fancied. And in a much better position than her male counterparts, for young girls who may often have been raped or at least seduced are far more likely to complain than boys enjoying sex for the fir
st time.

  “Damon Wimborne didn’t complain. He would happily have continued his relationship with Joanna for months if not years. You talk of testosterone but we forget the idealistic aspect, we forget how prone young boys are to worship and put the adored one on a pedestal. Damon was in love with Joanna, ‘whatever that may mean, ’ as Jennings and a more eminent person put it. But it’s a sad fact that for some people, having a sexual partner in love with them is the most off-putting thing. It put Joanna off and her feelings for Damon cooled to a point of—nothing. But in a way, she was still a teenager and always would be. Teenagers are rude to their contemporaries—and others—and they say bluntly what they think. She told him she was no longer interested in no uncertain terms, probably brutal terms. We misquote that most popular of aphorisms and say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ But the lines are: ‘Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’ Love can turn to hatred in men as well as women and that’s what Damon’s did. He was scorned and he needed to lash back. Physically, he was a mature man but he was only fifteen, his mind was fifteen. He said he’d seen her steal a twenty-pound note from his backpack . . .”

  “Yes. It fits.” Burden tapped Wexford’s tankard. “Another?”

  “In a minute. The head teacher couldn’t understand why Joanna didn’t fight it and clear her name. But Joanna dared not do that. Everything would come out if she did. She knew her career as a teacher was over, there was no help for it. Resign now and make a new career for herself, be self-employed so that within reason she could do as she liked. She owned her house without encumbrances, she had the use of her father’s car, she had her qualifications and the opportunity was there . . .”

  He was interrupted by the arrival of the barman. “Another round, gentlemen? I thought I’d pop in because we’ve a coach party and we may be a bit busy over the next half hour.”

  Wexford asked for two more halves, glancing complacently at the untouched crisps and nuts. “Some months before she had made the acquaintance of Katrina Dade. I can’t imagine Katrina was much company for a woman like her but she was a sycophant and people of Joanna’s sort, clever, prickly, paranoid, immature, they like sycophants, they like to be buttered up all the time, flattered, told how brilliant they are.”