Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  It was more than two months since Joanna and the children had disappeared and in that time Wexford had made a point of calling on the Dades two or three times a week. Not to enlighten them, not to bring them news, but to show them they had his support. That their children weren’t forgotten. Not that his calls were more warmly received now than at the beginning. Rather the reverse, for Katrina was more disturbed, terror-ridden and haunted than ever. Wexford thought that by the end of the first week she must have cried all the tears out of her but those weeping tanks behind her eyes still overflowed. Sometimes she was speechless, her face buried, throughout his visit, while her husband was either awesomely rude or else ignored him altogether. Strangely, though, he was out at work less often than when the children first went missing. He seemed to make a point of being at home when Wexford arrived, perhaps only to see how far he could go before the Chief Inspector rebelled and stopped coming. Wexford was determined this wouldn’t happen. Until the children were found or the case was closed he would continue to pay his visits, however these parents chose to treat him.

  The rain had stopped. It was cold and misty but already it was noticeable that the dusk came a little later and in spite of the wet, something in the air hinted at the dreadful sterility of winter left behind. The front door of Antrim was opened by Mrs Bruce. Never more than a week seemed to go by but she was back staying with her daughter, with or without her husband. The horror of his visits was lessened when she was there, simply because she behaved like a civilised human being, greeted them, offered them tea and even thanked them for coming. And she was old enough to say ‘Good afternoon’, instead of the habitual ‘Hiya’ or ‘Hi, there’, with which most householders met them.

  Unfortunately, Dade was at home. He took no notice of Wexford beyond favouring him with a hard stare before returning to his paperwork, apparently a sheaf of estate agent’s specifications. Katrina was in an armchair, sitting the way children sometimes do, her head and body facing into its back, her legs curled up under her. For a moment Wexford thought he was to be ostracised by both of them, left in silence but for Doreen Bruce’s polite chatter. Burden, who came more rarely, stood looking incredulous. But then Katrina slowly turned round, her legs still up on the chair seat, and clasped her arms round her knees. In these two months she had got even thinner, her face gaunt, her elbows sharply pointed.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve no news for you, Mrs Dade.’

  In a crazy sing-song voice she intoned, ‘If their bodies, their bodies, could be found, could be found, I’d have something, something, something, I’d have corpses to bury.'

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Dade.

  ‘I’d have a stone to write their names on, their names on, their names on. . .‘ It was reminiscent of Ophelia and her mad dirge. ‘I’d have a grave to put flowers on, flowers on...’

  Dade got up and stood over her. ‘Stop that. You’re putting it on. You’re acting. You think you’re very clever.’

  She began to sway from side to side, her eyes shut, tears trickling from between the half-closed lids. Doreen Bruce caught Wexford’s glance and cast up her eyes. Wexford thought Dade was going to hit his wife and then he knew he wasn’t, it was Sylvia’s experience gone to his head. Dade’s violence was all in his tongue. As Jennings had said Joanna Troy’s was in hers. Mrs Bruce said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  She went away to make it. Dade began to walk about the room, stopping to look out of the window, giving a meaningless shrug. Katrina folded herself up, her head down on her knees, the tears gushing now and, because of her hunched and twisted position, running down her bare legs. Wexford could think of absolutely nothing to say. It seemed to him that he had extracted from these parents every detail of their children’s lives that they were prepared to tell him. The rest he must deduce, they wouldn’t help him.

  The silence was the heaviest and the longest enduring he had known in that house. Katrina lay back with her eyes closed as if asleep, Dade had removed the cap from a ballpoint and was making notes on his property specification, Burden sat contemplating his own knees in immaculate grey broadcloth. Wexford tried to reconstruct what Roger Dade’s own childhood might have been, using hints the man had dropped as to having been too much indulged when young. No doubt Matilda Carrish had allowed him and his sister the almost total freedom that was coming into fashion for children, free expression, liberty to do anything they liked without correction. And he had hated it. Perhaps he had disliked the unpopularity which resulted from the rudeness and ill manners it encouraged. If so, he hadn’t done much to eradicate that aspect of things in his own character, only apparently determined that his own children should receive the reverse of this treatment, an old-fashioned severity and discipline. The result had been that one of them disliked him, the other feared him, which seemed to be constituent parts of the attitude he had to his own mother.

  Mrs Bruce was taking a long time. . . His thoughts wandered to Callum Chapman. The man had over balanced and fallen down the stairs. Not on account of his clumsiness or loss of control but simply due to that space at the top of the staircase being too narrow for safety That’s what happened here, he thought. Joanna fell down the stairs. Or someone pushed her. X pushed her. She would no more have died than Chapman had if she hadn’t struck her head on the side of that clothes cabinet. There was a little blood and a dislodged tooth crown...

  Katrina’s mother came back, bearing a tray with a teapot on it and a large home-made simnel cake, marzipanned and browned under a grill. It was years since he’d seen a simnel cake and it was irresistible. A look from Burden and a minuscule shake of the head he chose to ignore and allowed Mrs Bruce to lay a big slice on his plate. It was so delicious and its sweetness so comforting that Dade’s glance of disgust passed over him and left him unscathed. Mrs Bruce made conversation about the weather, the nights drawing out, her husband’s heart and the tedious journey here from Suffolk, while Burden replied to her in polite monosyllables. Wexford ate his slice of cake with huge enjoyment and saw to his surprise that Dade was doing the same thing. He thought about Joanna and the staircase. Did X push her down it or did she stumble and fall in the dark?

  Perhaps neither. Perhaps X chased her along the passage at the end of which was Sophie’s room, chased her and she fell down the stairs because she couldn’t avoid them. And when was it? On the Saturday afternoon? No, later. In the evening? It must have been dark and maybe there were no lights on upstairs. But if she had been upstairs in the late evening or night and X with her, that must mean X was a lover...

  Dade interrupted this reverie. He had finished his cake, shaken the crumbs off his lap on to the floor and turned to Wexford. ‘Time you left. You’re not doing any good here. Goodbye.’

  Both officers got up, Wexford seriously wondering, in spite of his resolve, how much more of this he could stand. ‘I will see you in a day or two, Mrs Dade,’ he said.

  It was Ken Winter’s wife who admitted him to the house. Her first name was Priscilla, as he knew from the voters’ list. Never having seen her before, he had expected an older and even dowdier version of Thekla Wright. Priscilla Winter was dowdy enough but the shabbiness of her clothes, the old slippers she wore and her rough red hands were not what was first noticeable about her. Wexford was struck, almost shocked, by her bent shoulders, the result possibly of repeatedly hunching them in a vain gesture of protecting face and chest, her withered look, the way her eyes peered fearfully at him.

  Her husband wasn’t yet home. Recognising him, she said this before he had uttered a word.

  ‘It’s your daughter I’d like to see, Mrs ‘Winter.’

  ‘My daughter?’ To be the mother of a fifteen-year old, she was very likely no more than in her late forties. Her wispy grey hair, uncut for years by the look of it, hung about her shoulders. No doubt the Good Gospellers banned hairdressers. ‘You want Dorcas?’

  The girl was good-look
ing, though there was some thing of her father in her oval face and regular features. Her darkish hair was very long, tied back with a brown ribbon, but to Wexford’s surprise, the brown and gold school uniform had been changed for the universal teenagers’ wear of jeans and sweatshirt. Dorcas looked surprised that a grown-up had been asking for her.

  ‘No paper round this evening?’ Wexford said.

  ‘I was late back from school. Dad’s got one of the boys on it or he’s doing it himself.’

  Priscilla Winter said, as if an attack had been intended on her husband, ‘It’s not a big round.’ She recited its route like a child saying its tables. ‘Chesham and this road and Caversham and Martindale and Kingston to the corner of Lyndhurst.’

  She shuffled across the floor to open a door for them. Dorcas could have done that but she left it to her mother and, pushing past her, led Wexford into a sitting room. If not the most important person in the household, she plainly ran her father a close second - even though she was a girl. That spoke of a weakness in Winter’s religious principles in the face of paternal love. There was television in this room, for the girl’s benefit, Wexford thought, but no books, no flowers, no house-plants, no cushions or ornaments. Heavy curtains of a nondescript colour shut out night and rain. The only picture was a pale landscape, innocent of trees, animals, human figures or clouds in its sky. The room reminded him of the lounge a third-rate hotel provides for its guests when they complain of nowhere to sit but their bedrooms.

  Mrs Winter said timidly, as one making a daring suggestion, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  He had wondered if tea was included among banned stimulants, but apparently not. ‘I shan’t be stopping more than a minute or two,’ he said, remembering the glories of the simnel cake, ‘but thank you.’

  ‘You will have heard about the missing young people,’ he said to Dorcas. ‘Giles and Sophie Dade. I’ve been wondering how well you knew them and what you can tell me about them. They’re fairly near neighbours.’

  ‘I don’t know them. Well, I know what they look like but not to speak to.’

  ‘You go to the same school and you and Giles are the same age.’

  ‘I know,’ the girl said. ‘But we’re in different forms at school. He’s in the A form.’

  ‘Where you should be,’ said her mother. ‘I’m sure you’re clever enough.’

  Dorcas cast her a glance of contempt. ‘I really don’t know them.’

  Wexford had to accept it. And I don’t suppose you’ve ever had private coaching from Miss Joanna Troy?’

  ‘She doesn’t need that,’ said Priscilla Winter. ‘I told you, she’s clever. The only private teaching she has is her violin lesson. That reminds me, Dorcas, have you done your practice for your lesson tomorrow night?’

  It seemed strange to him that Dorcas didn’t know the Dades but he couldn’t see why she should lie. He thanked her and said goodnight to Mrs Winter. The damp, dark night received him but he hadn’t far to go. On the way home he met no one no one passed him. He let himself into his own house, warm and well-lit and with a comforting smell of dinner in the air, and almost tripped over the evening paper which lay on the mat, damp and sodden at the edges as it always was these days.

  Chapter 20

  Sylvia remarked apropos of nothing that she thought of going home next day. Neil had promised to fetch her and the boys and take them home to the Old Rectory The light in Dora’s eyes was unmistakeable. Wexford could tell, as if he had read her mind like a book, that she was thinking there might be a reconciliation there, Sylvia and Neil reunite, remarry, live together as they once had, but this time it would be second time lucky and happiness ever after. Had she forgotten that Neil had at last found himself a new girlfriend? After Sylvia had gone to bed he said gently, ‘It won’t happen, you know, and if it did it would be a bad thing.’

  ‘Would it, Reg?’

  ‘When they got married it was sex and when that went there was nothing. It can’t be revived, it’s too late. But one day she will find someone to be happy with, you’ll see.’

  Brave words, but he was less sure himself. In the morning he said goodbye to his daughter and kissed her, and all was well again. More or less. He was sitting in his office, thinking more about her than the Dade case when the phone rang.

  ‘Hello. Wexford.’

  ‘I have Detective Superintendent Watts, of Gloucestershire Police for you, sir.’

  ‘Right. Put him on.’ Gloucestershire? No connection with the county came immediately to mind. Maybe another mistaken sighting of the Dade children. They still came in.

  A voice with a pleasant burr said, ‘Brian Watts here. I’ve got a piece of news for you. We’ve a young girl who says she’s Sophie Dade at the station here. . .‘

  ‘You have?’ A surge of excitement, then reason returned. ‘We’ve had dozens of kids saying they’re the Dades and dozens of people who’ve seen them.’

  ‘No, this one is her all right. I’m as sure as can be. She got hold of the emergency services on a nine-nine-nine call at six this morning. Asked for an ambulance for her grandma. She reckoned the old lady had had a stroke and she was right. Pretty good for a thirteen-year-old, wouldn’t you say? Anyway, she’s here.’

  'Any sign of the boy?’

  ‘You’re greedy, you are. No, it’s just the girl and she won’t say where she’s been or how long she’d been with this Mrs Carrish. She’s not said a word about her brother. Have you got someone who could come up here and fetch her home?’

  ‘Sure. Yes, thanks. Thanks a lot.’

  ‘You sound gobsmacked.’

  ‘Yes, well, I am. That’s exactly what I am. Has Roger Dade been told about his mother?’

  ‘She’s in hospital in Oxford. The hospital will have informed next of kin.’

  ‘So he’ll know a young girl was with her when she had her attack?’

  ‘Maybe. Not necessarily.’

  To say something to Roger and Katrina Dade? Better not, he thought. Not yet. The hospital wouldn’t be interested in telling him who called them beyond saying it was a young girl.

  It might not be Sophie. In spite of what his caller had said, there was more than a strong possibility it wasn’t. The difficulty was that the rules said he couldn’t question her without one of her parents or a responsible adult present. Waiting for Karen Malahyde and Lynn Fancourt to come back with the girl, he asked himself if he would recognise her. He got out her photograph and looked - really for the first time - at her face. The previous time he had seen it he had noted in passing that she was pretty and had elements of her mother in her expression, but not then having seen Matilda Carrish, hadn’t observed the resemblance. By the time she was thirty this girl would also have hawk-like features, a Roman nose, thin lips. Her eyes were curiously large, their colour dark but otherwise unidentifiable, the fierce light of intelligence gleaming in their depths.

  What was she doing in Matilda Carrish’s house? Even more to the point, how long had she been there? She must be very cool and collected for one who was after all still a child. He imagined her awakened in the night, in the deep dark of a February morning, by the sound of a crash, made by her grandmother falling to the floor. Most people of her age, surely, would have run crying to a neighbour. She had phoned the emergency services. Once she knew they were coming and her grandmother would be looked after, had she contemplated running away again but decided it would be useless, that she hadn’t a hope? Where would she go? Perhaps, too, though he hadn’t suspected it, she loved her grandmother too much to leave her.

  He ate lunch in the canteen, watched the rain falling. Karen phoned to say they were on their way back with the girl. He looked at the clock on the wall, looked at his watch, decided it would be wrong to put it off any longer and dialled the Dades’ number. Mrs Bruce answered.

  ‘Mr Dade or your daughter?’

  ‘Katrina’s asleep, dear, and Roger’s gone to Oxford to visit his mother in hospital. She’s had a stroke. He heard this morn
ing.’

  Wexford was at a loss, but he made a decision. ‘There was a child with her when she was taken ill. It seems likely it’s Sophie.’

  The astonished silence and then the gasp told him no one in the Dade household had been alerted.

  ‘Will you ask Mrs Dade to phone me when she wakes up?’

  Doubts began as he put the phone down. Suppose it wasn’t Sophie? He would have told Katrina Dade her daughter was coming home when it wasn’t her daughter and he could just imagine Roger Dade’s reaction to that when he found out, the enormous fuss he would make to the Chief Constable. Wexford went down in the lift. He wanted to be there when the two women officers came back with the girl. As the crow flew, or any other bird come to that, it wasn’t all that far to Oxford, but in the current state of traffic it took a long time. And it was always worse when it was raining, which meant that these days it always was worse. Three o’clock, ten past. The swing doors opened and Burden came in, back from wherever he had been.

  ‘D’you think it’s her?’

  ‘Don’t know. I’ve told the mother it is. Who else would it be with Matilda Carrish at that hour of the morning?’

  ‘She may have someone living in to look after her.’

  ‘Sure,’ Wexford said drily, forgetting that he too had doubted the girl’s identity. ‘Nothing more likely than that this someone is a thirteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who tells people she’s her employer’s granddaughter.’

  The car came on to the forecourt, sending up a cloud of spray. Lynn was driving. He saw the girl get out, then Karen, Lynn last. It was still raining and they hurried in. He knew at once, there was no doubt. She wore the brown anorak missing from her home and shrugged herself out of it once she was inside the swing doors.