Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘The car was found in the woods at Passingham Hall. It’s the property of a man called Peter Buxton. Do you know him?’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said Dade. ‘You heard my wife say we don’t know this Passingham place. What are you, deaf?’

  The hardest thing, Wexford sometimes thought, was to keep your cool when spoken to like this by a member of the public, especially when you were quick-tempered yourself. But it had to be. He had to remember - and remember all the time - that this man’s two children had disappeared, his only children, and were very likely dead.

  Katrina, through her tears, gave her husband the sharpest look he had ever seen from her but said, instead of something helpful, ‘Do you know when Joanna’s funeral will be?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

  ‘I’d like to go. She was my very dearest friend, poor Joanna.’

  After that, he thought another call on Peter Buxton might be helpful. He took Vine with him. This time they walked down the lane in the hope of seeing just how clear the entry to the woods was, the path the blue VW had taken, but the snow masked everything, all that could be observed in these conditions was that at the point where the path probably started and deep into the woods, the trees stood further apart, far enough apart to allow the passage of a car.

  Buxton opened the door himself Again it was too early in the morning for his wife. He looked like a sick man, destined for some coronary or arteriosclerosis crisis, his face the mottled grey and red of pink granite and as rough-surfaced. Blood-red veins made a lacework across his eyeballs. There was a faint tremor in his hands and his breath, which peppermint toothpaste hadn’t much disguised, was a mixture of stale whisky fumes and some indefinable digestive enzyme, enough to make Wexford step back He felt an unaccustomed urge to warn the man he was killing himself but of course he didn’t. Newspapers and magazines were stuffed with articles about what happened when you ate rubbish and overdid the booze. He’d had Moses and the prophets. Let him hear them.

  ‘Seems a good time to have a word, Mr Buxton,’ said Vine breezily.

  Buxton glowered. For him there had never been a worse time. He led them down passages to the kitchen, making Wexford think the drawing room, no doubt littered with yesterday’s plates and glasses, might be unfit for morning entertaining. But this can’t have been the case, for the kitchen was possibly worse, Christmas dinner cooking utensils, pots and pans and empty tins lying about. For some reason Buxton offered them a drink.

  ‘Water, orange juice, Coke or something stronger?’

  The reason was obviously so that he could have something stronger too. Wexford and Vine would have accepted tea if it had been available but it wasn’t.

  ‘Hair of the dog,’ said Buxton with a ghostly snigger, pouring Scotch. He gave the policemen fizzy water with a perceptible sneer. ‘What was the word it was a good time to have, then?’

  ‘Who knows this place apart from you and your wife?’ Wexford asked. ‘Who visits you here?’

  ‘Our friends. The people who work for us.’ Buxton uttered the first two words loftily, the second six with scarcely disguised contempt. ‘You can’t expect me to tell you the names of my friends.’

  Vine was looking incredulous. ‘Why not, sir? They’ve no reason to object if they’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘Of course they’ve done nothing wrong. Chris Warren is a County Councillor and his wife Marion, well she’s a . . .‘ Buxton seemed to have encountered some difficulty in defining exactly what Marion Warren was’. . . a very well-known lady in these parts.’

  'And where might Mr and Mrs Warren live?’ Vine wrote down the Trollfield Farm address Buxton reluctantly gave. ‘And who else, sir?’

  Their neighbours, the Gilberts, said Buxton. Perhaps he meant ‘neighbour’ in the biblical sense, thought Wexford, for there was no house within sight of Passingham Hall. ‘They live in a very lovely mansion in the heart of the village.’ Buxton sounded like a second- rate travel brochure. He didn’t know the name or number of the house, he just knew it by sight, no one could miss it. More names were dragged out of him by Vine’s persistence: village acquaintances, met on the Chardonnay party circuit, a couple of Londoners who had once been weekend guests. On the subject of those he apparently considered his social inferiors he was more expansive and, in the case of Rick Mitchell and his wife, vindictive. They were nosy, interfering people who probably snooped about all over his land in his absence. Suddenly he seemed to see that police enquiries, far from intruding on his privacy gave him opportunities he was unlikely to find elsewhere.

  ‘The same with that Pauline and her husband. She comes down here whenever she feels like it. Never mind keeping to a routine. I was here up in the wood - I don’t think these people realise I enjoy walking on my own land - when who do I come upon but Pauline’s husband strolling about with a very undesirable-looking fellow he introduces as a Mr Colman. A private detective. On my land. And that’s just one instance. For all I know the whole neighbourhood’s trespassing on my land when I’m not here.’

  ‘Where is Mr Colman now?’

  ‘How should I know? This was yesterday. Christmas Day, if you’ve ever heard of such a thing.’

  Wexford nodded. It proved only that Search and Find Limited were keen as mustard. ‘How long have you owned Passingham Hall, Mr Buxton?’

  ‘Getting on for three years. I bought it from a man called Shand-Gibb, if that interests you.’

  Buxton turned round - nervously, Wexford thought - as his wife came in. Today she was wearing a tracksuit, as white as the snow outside. Was she planning to go running, to find herself a local gym or was it just the day’s preferred costume? He said good morning to her and she asked sharply what they wanted. He didn’t think himself called upon to answer that. Buxton answered for him in a sulky voice while Sharonne pounced on the whisky replaced the cap and carried the bottle away. She acted exactly as Wexford had once seen Sylvia respond to Ben’s excessive consumption of mint humbugs from a jar and the expression on Buxton’s face was, as far as he could remember, identical to Ben’s. He looked both furious and mutinous.

  ‘Is there anyone else you can think of, Mr Buxton?’

  ‘No, there isn’t. Are they still searching those fields? And when can we go back to London?’

  ‘Yes to your first question,’ said Wexford, ‘and tomorrow morning to your second. But I’m not satisfied with your explanation about the discovery of the car, Mr Buxton, and I shall want to talk to you again.’

  He and Vine didn’t wait for protest. Outside the sun had come out and the thaw begun. Water dripped from the eaves of the house and the snow had begun to turn transparent. ‘If an English heatwave is two fine days and a thunderstorm,’ he remarked, ‘a cold snap must be twelve hours of snow and forty-eight of muddy meltdown.’

  The lane, which an hour before had been under its crisp covering, was in parts like a running stream. Halfway up they met a party of searchers who had found nothing. Wexford had an uneasy sense of frustration. Logically, the Dade children should be somewhere within a reasonable distance, they had to be there, where else would they be? He tried to imagine a scenario in which all three of them were brought here by the perpetrator - by perhaps more than one perpetrator - all killed and Joanna left in the car which was then pushed over the quarry edge. What then became of the other bodies? There was no sense in taking them away while Joanna’s body was left behind. Perhaps it wasn’t bodies he had to think of but two living people. Had there then been two cars? One to be left behind as tomb for Joanna, the other to be driven away. The children taken away - where?

  It was all too unreasonable to allow for the working out of a sequel. Who, for instance, were these two people, possibly a man and a woman, who had driven here in two cars? What was their motive? How, above all, did they know of Passingham Hall grounds and the quarry in its heart. Suddenly he found himself thinking of the open space, the clearing in the wood, and he suggested to Vine that they go up there again before leav
ing.

  This would be one of the areas from which the snow would take longest to clear, for nothing broke its smooth untouched whiteness and no foot had trodden it. From where they stood it looked like a lake of snow surrounded by a wall of leafless dark-grey trees of uniform size. There was no wind and nothing stirred their branches.

  ‘Maybe this Shand-Gibb can help us,’ said Vine.

  Chapter 15

  He had no memory for recent events. And in his case ‘recent’ meant the past two or three decades. Before that, his early and middle years, he could readily recollect. Wexford, of course, had come across this in old people before but seldom to this extent. Bernard Shand-Gibb could scarcely remember the name of his house keeper, a woman not much younger than himself, whom he addressed as ‘Polly - Pansy - Myra - Penny,’ before getting it right and coming out with ‘Betty!’ on a shout of triumph.

  It was a long time since Wexford had heard that accent. His was the speech of the old gentry, spoken by an upper class when he was a boy and liable to strike awe into those lower down the social scale, but now almost dead and gone. Actors had to learn how to do it, he had read somewhere, before playing on television in a drama of the nineteen twenties, learn to say ‘awf’ for ‘off’ and ‘crawss’ for ‘cross’. Such an accent would have prevailed, he thought, when his own grandfather was young and the local rector, riding past him and his friends, cracked his whip and called out, ‘Take your hats off to a gentleman!’

  Shand-Gibb was a gentleman but a very gentle one, puzzled by his inability to remember his last years at Passingham Hall. ‘I do wish I could recall something or someone, my dear chap,’ he said in that incomparable voice, ‘but it’s all gawne.’

  ‘Perhaps your housekeeper. . .?‘

  Mrs Shand-Gibb had been alive then and Betty had tended on them both. But she was a servant of the old school, not one to know or wish to know her employer’s business. Wexford thought that if she had to refer to him it would be as ‘the master’. She sat down in his company because Wexford had asked her to stay and asked her to sit down too, but she sat uneasily and on the edge of the chair.

  ‘Can you recollect anything?’ Shand-Gibb asked her in his mild, courteous way. He was not the sort of man to omit names or styles or titles when he addressed someone and he had made an effort to remember what she was called, had tried and failed, had struggled with it, mouthing names, but had failed.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know, sir,’ she said. ‘I could try. There was the Scouts came to camp in the springtime and in the autumn too. They was good lads, never made any trouble, never left a mess behind them.’

  ‘Did anyone else camp in the wood?’ asked Vine. ‘Friends? Relations?’

  Shand-Gibb listened courteously, occasionally nod ding or giving a puzzled smile. He was like someone who has tentatively claimed to understand a foreign language but when addressed in it by natives finds it beyond his comprehension. Betty said, ‘There was never anything like that, sir. Not to sleep, there wasn’t. The village had their summer fete there. Is that the kind of thing you mean? Regular they did that. In June it was and they put up a marquee in case of rain, sir, as it mostly did rain. They was clean too, never left a scrap of litter.’ She considered. ‘Then there was those folks that did their singing and dancing up there. On the Dancing Floor, sir.’

  A smile of nostalgia spread across Shand-Gibb’s face. A light seemed to come into his faded blue eyes, half lost as they were in a maze of wrinkles. ‘The Dancing Floor,’ he said. ‘We used to have fine hot summers then, Mr Er - I don’t believe it ever rained in June. The whole village came to dance on Midsummer’s Eve and made their own music too, none of your gramophones then.’ The tape and CD revolutions had passed him by. A long-playing record was probably the last innovation he could recall. ‘We danced on the Dancing Floor, the loveliest spot in Kent, high up but as flat as a pancake and as green as an emerald. We should go up there when the summer comes, Polly, er, Daisy, never mind. We should ask young Mitchell to wheel me up in my chair, what?’

  Betty looked at him. It was a look of infinite sweet tenderness. She spoke very softly, ‘You don’t live at the Hall any more, sir. You moved away three years since. Another gentleman and lady live there now. You remember, don’t you?’

  ‘I do for a moment,’ he said, ‘when you tell me I do,’ and he passed one shaky, veined hand across his brow as if the stroking movement might wipe away the mist that descended on his memory. ‘I take your word for it.’

  Wexford could imagine a maypole set up between the greening trees, a young girl, plump, fair, rustic, not beautiful by today’s standards, not a Sharonne Buxton, brought to be crowned Queen of the May. ‘These were people Mr Shand-Gibb gave permission to use the ground?’ he asked.

  ‘Not just anyone who asked,’ Betty said quickly. ‘If they was the sort that made a mess they never was allowed back. There was a couple wanted their wedding reception there. Mr Shand-Gibb said yes on account of him not being too well and Mrs Shand-Gibb -, she lowered her voice, though ineffectively ‘- in her last illness.’ The old man winced, tried to smile. ‘Ooh, the state they left the place in. Litter everywhere, tin cans and I don’t know what. They had the cheek to want to come back for some party or other they was giving but Mr Shand-Gibb said no, he was very sorry, but not this time, and they took it badly. It was shocking how rude they was.’

  Wexford took down these people’s names but they were the only names he was destined to get. Betty could remember other applicants for the use of the dancing floor but not what they were called. Mr Shand-Gibb knew but she hadn’t been told, it wasn’t her place to be told, she incredibly said. She only knew the name of the bridal couple because Mrs Mitchell had talked about them, the whole village had talked about them.

  ‘When you mentioned singing and dancing,’ said Vine, ‘were you referring to the people who got married?’

  ‘That was another lot,’ said Betty. ‘These folks never made no mess. After they’d gone you wouldn’t know they’d been there. Mind you, they made a lot of noise, singing you could call it but some would call it screaming and shouting. Didn’t bother Mr Shand-Gibb, he let them come back the next year.’ Her employer had fallen asleep. ‘I don’t reckon he could hear it from the house, poor old gentleman.’

  Screaming and shouting, Wexford thought, as they drove back to Passingham Hall with the Kent police DC who was accompanying them. No doubt an elderly woman of old-fashioned ideas meant no more than that the gathering danced to the kind of music habitually heard in discos or reverberating from cars with their windows open. The Mitchells at the farm might know, would almost certainly be more helpful than a servant of the old school who knew her place and an aged man with a memory irretrievably gone.

  Rick Mitchell and his wife Julie knew everything. That, at least, was the impression they liked to give.

  They knew everything and they were ‘good people’, the kind that swamp you with offers of food and drink, comfort and their time, when you come to call. That the three policeman would be calling they had been told in advance and Julie Mitchell had prepared a mid-morning spread, coffee and orange squash, scones, mince-pies and a bakewell tart. Vine and the young DC tucked in. Wexford would have liked to but dared not. Rick Mitchell moved swiftly into a lecture on Passingham St John village life from the Middle Ages to the present day. Or that was what it seemed like to Wexford who found himself powerless to cut the man short, as one is when the speaker ignores one’s interruptions and continues relentlessly on. He wondered if Mitchell had learned this technique from listening to interviews with Cabinet ministers on Radio Four.

  But at last the man paused to draw breath and Wexford put in swiftly, ‘How about this couple -, he referred to his notes ‘- a Mr and Mrs Croft who had their wedding reception in the wood? Where do they live?’

  Mitchell was looking affronted. It was easy to tell what he was thinking. You come here and eat my food, the good home-baked cakes my wife has sweated over a hot stove for
hours to make, and you can’t even have the courtesy to let me finish my sentence. . . ‘Down in the village,’ he said sulkily. ‘Cottage called something daft. What’s it called, Julie?’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it right. It used to be called Ivy Cottage but now it’s got some funny Indian name. Kerala or however you pronounce it.’

  ‘She’s Indian, the one that got married.’ Rick Mitchell seemed to forget his grievance in the pleasure of imparting information. ‘Got a funny Indian name. Narinder, if I’ve got my tongue round it right. The husband’s as English as you or me.’ He glanced uneasily at the Kent DC, an olive-skinned man with jet-black hair and dark-brown eyes. ‘They’ve got a baby now, what they call mixed-race, it must be. I reckon it takes all sorts to make a world.’

  ‘Mr Shand-Gibb’s housekeeper has told us there were some people who used the wood, apparently several years in succession, and who made a lot of screaming and shouting. Does that mean anything to you?’

  Whether it did or not Wexford was not to learn for some minutes. Both Mitchells broke into extravagant praise and regrets for the departure of the former owners of Passingham Hall. They were lovely people, of the old gentry but not a scrap of ‘side’ to them.

  ‘That was a sad day for Passingham when dear old Mr Shand-Gibb sold up,’ said Julie Mitchell in the kind of lugubrious voice television newscasters use when they segue from an England soccer victory to the death of a pop singer. ‘He was one in a million. A far cry from those new folks, those Buxtons, newvo rich yuppies they are.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ said her husband and for a moment Wexford was afraid she would. But she only shook her head more in sorrow than in anger and Mitchell went on., ‘It’s my belief he’d known that car had been there for weeks. Maybe put it there himself and what was inside it, I wouldn’t put it past him. What was he doing there mid-week in the middle of December, that’s what I’d like to know. Revisiting the scene of his crime, there is no other explanation. He knew it was there all right.’