Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods

by Ruth Rendell

  It was still snowing when they left, the world was glowing white in the dusk, any bodies or newly dug graves obscured. During the evening, according to the meteorologist doing the weather forecast after the ten o’clock news, 12.7 centimetres of snow fell. This was a figure understood by only that segment of the population under sixteen. Wexford looked it up and found it was five inches. He waited until Dora had gone to bed and then he wrapped up the scent he’d bought her, the silver-framed photograph of her four grandchildren, the two boys and the two girls, and the pink silk jacket Burden had promised him would fit her. Gift-wrapping wasn’t his forte and he didn’t make much of a job of it. Dora was asleep when he got upstairs. He hid the presents in the back of his wardrobe and went to bed, lying there sleepless for a while, wondering if there would be more floods when the thaw came.

  George Troy’s car yielded a harvest of information. Fingerprints were all over its interior, most of them Joanna’s. But if you had relied on prints to show you who had been driving it you would have concluded no one had, for the steering wheel, automatic shift rod and windscreen showed nothing. All had been carefully wiped. The car was untidy, books on the back seat, books and papers on the floor, chocolate papers, a half-drunk bottle of water in one of the rear door pockets, screwed-up credit card chits from petrol sales. The glove compartment held sunglasses, two ballpoint pens, a notepad, a comb and two paper-wrapped barley sugar sweets. Hairs from those back seats belonged to Joanna, the rest possibly to George Troy and his wife. A hair on the floor in the front was dark brown, a fine young hair, that could have come from the head of Sophie Dade. It had gone to the lab with hairs from her own hairbrush for comparison.

  In the boot was an overnight bag, small, dark-blue in colour, with the intials ‘JRT’ in white on one side. Inside it were a pair of clean black jeans, a clean white T-shirt, a clean white bra and pants, a pair of grey socks, a grey wool cardigan, and two used bras with two used pairs of pants and two used pairs of socks in a Marks and Spencer’s carrier bag. The sponge bag in the bottom held a toothbrush, a tin of baby powder, a sachet of shampoo and a spray bottle of very expensive perfumed cologne, Dior’s Forever and Ever. That cologne surprised Wexford. Unless the bag had contained a couture evening gown, it was the last thing he had expected to find there.

  The clothing of the body itself had puzzled him. A pair of black trainers were on the feet but only a barely knee-length pale-blue T-shirt covered it and this was of the kind made for a very large man. Nothing else, no underwear, no socks. If she had sprayed herself with Forever and Ever, no trace of its scent remained.

  Effie Troy went to the mortuary two days before Christmas and identified the body as that of her step daughter, Joanna Rachel Troy. She did it calmly, with out flinching, but when she turned away and the face was covered once more, she was very pale. Wexford accompanied her home to Forest Road and spent half an hour with the bereaved father. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to George Troy that something as seriously terrible as this, the worst thing, might have happened to his daughter. He had never contemplated it. She’d be all right, she was a sensible girl, she knew what she was doing. At first he was disbelieving, then shocked beyond words, literally beyond them for the founts and streams of speech so characteristic of him were dried up by horror. He could only stare at Wexford, his mouth open, his head shaking. His wife had tried to prepare him but he had taken her caution and her warning as referring to her being in some sort of trouble with the law or having left the country for some suspect reason. That she might be dead, and dead by violence, he had refused to con front, and the news had blasted him.

  Wexford saw him as being in the best hands and he left, telling Effie Troy of the counselling available to her and her husband, and of other sources of help, though he had little faith in this himself. Next to the Dades, up to Lyndhurst Drive, past houses with cypress trees in front gardens hung with fairy lights, Christmas trees in windows, paper chains, angels and cribs just visible in interiors. Nothing in the windows of Antrim, not a light showing on this gloomy overcast morning. He had to tell the Dades there was still nothing known of the whereabouts of their son and daughter, though the body of Joanna Troy had been found. But no news is good news and this was better than what he had had to tell Joanna’s father.

  They bombarded him with queries, Katrina pleadingly, Roger rudely. His question as to why the police had made the effort to find Joanna but not his children was one Wexford had never been asked before in comparable circumstances. He didn’t want to stress that the search at Passingham St John was continuing because it sounded as if it was bodies they searched for, as indeed it was, but he had to say it, reducing Katrina to weeping. Her departure from the room in tears was a cue he couldn’t afford to miss but he braced himself for the storm which must inevitably follow. He came out with it bluntly.

  ‘Have you ever had reason to believe Joanna Troy was in love with you?’

  ‘What’ is easy to say, Wexford thought. ‘You heard me, Mr Dade. Have you? Did you have any interest in her yourself? Were you attracted?’

  Dade began roaring like a lion, his actual words indecipherable, his articulation entirely lost. Katrina could be heard, sobbing in the kitchen.

  ‘Good morning,’ Wexford said, and added more gently, ‘I shall want to talk to you again soon.’

  On Christmas Eve more snow fell and the hunt for the children was temporarily suspended. As yet there was no sign of them, nothing of theirs that might have given a clue as to where they were.

  Late that day Wexford was told from the lab that the hair was not Sophie Dade’s but had come from the head of some unknown child. He wondered why the perpetrator had brought Joanna’s bag in the car but nothing for the children.

  Chapter 14

  It was less the enjoyment of their own festivities in peace that kept Wexford and his officers from pursuing their enquiries on Christmas Day than a sense of the wrongness of such action, the outrage of intruding even on the Troys and the Dades at that time. To him Christmas had never afforded much pleasure and he took no joy in a white one. But Dora did and the sight of their garden blanketed and gleaming seemed to inspire her in all those inescapable tasks of cooking and table setting and finding places to put things.

  ‘I hate the way it covers everything up,’ said Wexford. ‘You talk about a blanket of snow and that’s what I dislike. As if it’s all been put to bed for the - the duration.’

  ‘The duration of what? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t like hibernation, suspension, everyone having to stop doing things.’

  ‘You don’t have to stop doing things,’ said Dora. ‘You should be doing things now like opening the red wine to let it breathe and seeing we’ve got enough ice - oh, and you might check on the liqueur glasses in case any one wants apricot brandy or Cointreau after dinner.’

  The ‘anyone’ who might want liqueurs were Sylvia and Callum and Sheila and Paul. All would be accompanied by children - ‘Check the orange juice and Coke, would you, darling,’ said Dora - Sylvia’s Ben and Robin, and Sheila’s Amulet and the new one, Annoushka, Amy and Annie to most people.

  ‘Have you got a present for Chapman?’

  ‘Cal, Reg. You’ll have to get used to it. Yes, of course I have.’

  Pauline Pearson had treated as ludicrous the suggestion that she should cook the Buxtons’ Christmas dinner. ‘You won’t find a soul who’ll do that, Mrs Buxton. Not on Christmas Day. They’ll all be cooking their own, won’t they? It was different in my grandma’s time but them days are gone when they put everything on the back burner to wait on the gentry. Not that there’s any gentry left, not in our classless society, and thank God for it. You want to get that bird you’ve bought thoroughly defrosted, at least twenty-four hours, and that you haven’t got. You leave a bit of ice inside there and you’ll get salmonella or worse. A lady my auntie knew went down with that stuff women stick in their faces - what’s it called? Bot-something - from a half
-defrosted turkey.’

  It was something of a revelation to Peter that Sharonne couldn’t cook. He hadn’t left his roots as far behind as he thought and he still took it for granted that all women could cook a straightforward dinner, it was part of them, in their genes. Sharonne couldn’t. Hopelessly, she watched the frost slowly slipping off the turkey and asked Peter why they couldn’t go out to lunch.

  ‘Because every place you’d set foot in and a lot you wouldn’t have been booked up for Christmas dinner for months.’

  ‘Don’t say dinner when you mean lunch, Peter, it’s common.’

  ‘Everybody says Christmas dinner. Never mind what time of day it is, it’s dinner.’

  Peter cooked the turkey. He smothered it with butter, stuck it in the oven and left it for six hours. He could have done worse. There were tinned potatoes and frozen peas and Bisto gravy and he was rather proud of what he’d achieved. His cooking had been helped on by liberal tots of single malt and by the time the meal was ready he was unsteady on his feet and glad to sit down.

  Drink helped him forget about past police visits and, worse, possible future police visits. But along with the dry mouth, raging thirst and banging head which ensued during the evening came the suspicion that they knew he had found the car weeks before he said he had. Now he couldn’t understand his own behaviour. Why hadn’t he told the police then? Surely it wasn’t because if he had done so he would have had to cancel two local engagements that, in any case, held no particular charm for him. Surely it couldn’t have been that. No, it was Sharonne. She had stopped him.

  He looked at her through bleary eyes that intermittently afforded him double vision. She was curled up in an armchair, her shoes kicked off, her face calm, serene, unsmiling, watching a Christmas comedy show on television. The inevitable glass of sparkling water was beside her. Why had he let her stop him do what was manifestly his duty as a good citizen? The events of the first week end in December had become inexplicable. He, a sensible man who would be forty next birthday, had let his wife, twelve years his junior, a model but by no means a super-model, a woman who had never done a thing beyond walk up and down catwalks in that third-class designer Amerigo’s clothes, tell him what to do. And now God knew what would happen to him. He hadn’t liked that jibe about obstructing the police being an offence. If he appeared in court it would get into the papers.

  ‘Sharonne?’ he said.

  She didn’t turn her head. ‘What? I’m watching this.’

  ‘Is there a bed made up in one of the spare rooms?’

  ‘I suppose so. Why? Are you feeling ill?’ Now she did turn, perhaps remembering her role as his carer. ‘You’ve only yourself to blame, Peter. I’m sure I don’t know what’s the attraction of all that hard liquor. Stay where you are and I’ll get you a big glass of water and some Nurofen.’

  Why didn’t she know if a bed was made up? It was her job to know if not do it herself. He couldn’t see why she didn’t do it herself, she did nothing else. She hadn’t even supported him when he tried to explain why he’d come down here. Nobody asked her to intervene when that detective inspector was questioning him. She’d done it off her own bat, almost spitefully. There was no call for her to tell the whole truth. She could have kept quiet. As for that ridiculous Pauline, she wouldn’t have said all that about the heating if Sharonne hadn’t set her an example.

  He drank the water and swallowed the painkiller. Sharonne returned to her television programme and this time a smile disturbed her flawless features. Peter looked at her with something bordering on dislike. Then, without a word, he got up and went off to find himself a bed with blankets on it if not sheets as far from the master bedroom as possible.

  Callum Chapman played with the two boys and the two-year-old girl, thus vindicating his reputation as a man who was ‘good with children’. He was rather rough with them, though, Wexford thought, disliking the manhandling of little Amy. It mattered less with the boys who were big and could take care of themselves. But it was for Amy’s parents to intervene, not a grandfather.

  A woman living with the lover of her choice ought to be serene and revitalised but Sylvia looked unhappy. Of course they were all on edge, all trying too hard to enjoy this ‘family’ Christmas, Sheila worn out with breast feeding and rehearsing for a new play, and Paul worried about her. Dora was piqued with him because he’d for gotten her injunction about the ice and he couldn’t relax, his thoughts turning to the missing Dade children, the discovery of Joanna Troy’s body and the inexplicable behaviour of Peter Buxton.

  Whoever had driven the blue VW into the Passingham Hall woods must have known the place, at least known the woods were there and there was a way in for a vehicle. But not known it well enough to avoid driving it over the edge of the quarry? Or known it well and driven the car into the quarry on purpose? No, not driven it. Got out of it and pushed it over. With Joanna passively agreeing to sit in the driving seat? That wasn’t possible. She must have been dead or at least unconscious before the car went over. Dead most probably. And what of the children? Were they dead at the time or hidden somewhere? If he, whoever he was, had killed the children and buried them why not kill and bury Joanna too? He saw no purpose in putting her body in the car. The blue VW could just as well have been pushed over the quarry edge empty; Whoever it was must have known the Hall and its grounds were seldom visited, so was he known to Peter Buxton? The perpetrator could have been Peter Buxton. Wexford was convinced he would never have reported finding that car if Rick Mitchell hadn’t come into the wood at that moment...

  ‘Reg,’ said Dora, ‘wake up. I’ve made tea.’

  Sylvia set cup and saucer in front of him. ‘Do you want anything to eat, Dad?’

  ‘Good God, no. Not after that dinner.’

  He looked up and as she drew back her arm saw a mark like a burn, a dark-red abrasion, encircling her wrist. Later on, he was to wonder why he had f to ask her what it was.

  On Boxing Day they resumed the search. They weren’t looking for living people but for graves. Teaching him self the metric system, Wexford calculated there were now about 7.6 centimetres of snow on the ground. Whatever it was - and three inches meant much more to him and always would - it made searching pointless, confirming his opinion that snow was a nuisance, covering everything up. His thoughts returned to the day before, Callum Chapman throwing Amy up into the air and feigning not to catch her, Sheila falling asleep the moment she sat down in a chair, Dora edgy; and all the time the spectre at the feast, the one who wasn’t there and never would be again, Neil Fairfax, Sylvia’s ex-husband.

  Grandparents - who would be one? You couldn’t interfere, you couldn’t even advise. You had to shut up and smile, pretend that everything your daughters did and provided for their children was perfect parenting. Grandparents. . . Had he paid sufficient attention to the grandparents in the Dade case? To the Bruces and Matilda Carrish? It might perhaps be a good idea to call on these people in their own homes, make it all right with the Suffolk and the Gloucestershire police, and take a drive out there before the thaw. The roadways were clear and if no more snow fell...

  If they didn’t know more about their children’s children than the parents themselves, they sometimes had insights denied to the mothers and fathers. Look how he knew Amy didn’t like being thrown around by Chapman, he could tell from her stoical little face, her determination to be polite as she’d been taught, while Paul seemed to notice nothing. Sylvia was convincing herself her lover was good with children, but Wexford sometimes saw a look in Robin’s eyes expressive of contempt. He would follow through this idea of his to see the Dade grandparents in their own environment, make appointments for soon, maybe as soon as possible.

  But for now, the Dades themselves. He went alone. Theirs was the only house he was likely to enter at this time in which no decorations had been put up, yet he fancied the place would be shimmering with glitter and sylvan with green branches at a normal Christmas. Katrina opened the door to him, her face as the
woman’s in The Scream must have been just before Munch started painting it.

  ‘No, Mrs Dade, no,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m not bringing you news, bad or otherwise. I only want to have a talk now the situation has changed.’

  ‘Changed?’

  ‘In that Ms Troy’s body has been found.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes. You’d better come in.’ It was ungracious but less so than Roger Dade’s behaviour who, when he saw Wexford, cast up his eyes in silence and retreated into the living room.

  ‘I thought maybe you’d found my children,’ Katrina said miserably, tears never far away. ‘I thought maybe you’d found them dead.’

  ‘Please sit down, Mrs Dade. I must tell you both that an extensive search is being carried out in the neighbourhood of Passingham Hall but so far nothing has been found.’

  'What’s the point of searching when the place is under snow?’ said Dade.

  'Apart from it’s being a more than usually unpleasant task for the searchers, the snow isn’t deep and the thaw has begun. Now I’d like you to tell me if either Giles or Sophie had ever been to Passingham St John? Did they ever mention the place?’

  ‘Never. Why would they? We don’t know anyone there.’

  Katrina was less brusque. ‘I’d never heard of Passingham St John till we were told they’d found - Joanna. And found her car. I’ve been to Toxborough but that was years ago and the children weren’t with me.’ At the emotive word she began to cry noisily.