Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (11 page)

   That Matilda Carrish was indeed ‘getting on a bit’ showed in her lined face and her bright silver hair but not in her step, her carriage and her general agility She was very thin and springy, though without the nervous energy that showed in so many of her daughter-in-law’s movements. The hand she held out to him was dry and cool, ringless, the nails filed short. Sometimes he ignored extended hands but hers he took and was oddly surprised by the fragile bones. Remembering the photo graph in Sophie Dade’s bedroom told him at once she was who she said she was.

   The black trouser suit she wore had been designed for a woman half her age, yet it was entirely suitable, it fitted as if it had been made for her, as perhaps it had. Aquiline though her face was, her lips thin and her cheekbones sharp, he could see Roger Dade in her and realised that only a little padding out and smoothing, a little lifting and plumping, would make mother and son as alike as twins.

   She came straight to the point, no preamble, no excuses. ‘What are you doing to find my missing grand children?’

   This was the question Wexford dreaded. It was he who had to answer it, not Freeborn, and he was aware that by now any response he gave must sound feeble and as if the police simply weren’t bothering. But he tried.

   From the first Mrs Dade had believed her children had drowned and that was now the police belief. Today or at the latest tomorrow the waters would have receded sufficiently to put the matter beyond doubt.

   ‘I understood that frogmen had been down and there had been a comprehensive search.’

   ‘That is so and -‘ he could use these words to a grand parent, not a parent ‘- no bodies have been found.’

   ‘Then - if I’m not being naïve - why haven’t you widened the search? Have ports and airports been alerted? What of other police authorities? I understand we now have a national missing persons register. Are they on that register?’

   She sounded more like an investigative journalist than a photographer. Her voice was crisp and direct, her turquoise-blue eyes piercing. When she started speaking they had fixed themselves on his face and never left it, never blinked. He wanted to tell her she wasn’t being naïve. Instead he said lamely, ‘The children’s passports are here. Ms Troy can’t, for instance, have taken them out of the country.’

   She shrugged, the way her son did. For the first time she expressed an opinion. ‘I was staying at my son’s home in October. For three nights. I found those children exceptionally mature for their ages. Mature and particularly intelligent. I don’t know if you’re aware that Giles took a French GCSE last spring and got an A star.’ I wonder if he managed to get the French for ‘miniskirt’ and ‘garage’ into his essay, Wexford thought. ‘Sophie will be a scientist one day,’ Matilda Carrish said. ‘It is beyond me why they had to have a sitter at all. Sophie is a responsible thirteen and her brother is nearly six teen. Let me correct that, he is sixteen. His birthday was two days ago.’

   ‘Young to be left.’

   ‘You think so? A boy or girl may marry at sixteen, Chief Inspector. If what I read in the newspapers is true, a large proportion of the female population of this country have babies at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen, and are set up in flats with their child by their local authority. No one babysits them, they are babysitters themselves.’

   ‘It was Mr and Mrs Dade’s decision,’ Wexford said, thinking that whatever had been the guiding principle behind Roger Dade’s choice of a wife, he hadn’t married his mother. ‘We have no reason –‘ he nearly said ‘as yet’ but suppressed it ‘- to associate Ms Troy with any criminal activity Whatever has happened to these three people, she may be as much an innocent victim as the children.’

   Matilda Carrish smiled. There was no humour in that smile, it was the stretching of the lips of someone who has superior knowledge and knows it, a facial expression of triumph. ‘You think so? What you don’t know, I can see, is the reason Joanna Troy gave up her teaching job at Haldon Finch. I will tell you. She was dismissed for stealing a twenty-pound note from one of her own students.’

   Wexford nodded. There was nothing else he could do. He remembered this woman’s son telling him Joanna Troy had left her job because she had been unable to put up with the behaviour of class members. ‘If we need to widen our search,’ he said, ‘you may be sure Ms Troy’s antecedents will be investigated. Now, if there is nothing else, Mrs Carrish...’

   ‘Oh, but there is. I must tell you that first thing this morning, before I came down here - I live in Gloucestershire - I got in touch with a private investigation agency Search and Find Limited of Bedford Square. I’ll give you their telephone number.’

   ‘Bedford Square, London?’ Wexford asked.

   ‘Is there another?’

   Wexford sighed. She would make an excellent witness, he thought, as he showed her to the door and closed it behind her. A drift of her perfume had wafted past him as for a moment she stood close by him, per fume and some other scent as well. It was - it couldn’t be - cannabis? It couldn’t be. Not at her age, in her position. The cologne she used must have some pot-like ingredient in it and his sometimes too-acute sense of smell had picked it out.

   He dismissed it from his mind. He hadn’t asked her how well she got on with her grandchildren and it was too late now. It was hard to imagine small children liking her, but Sophie and Giles were of course small no longer. Yet he couldn’t picture her being drawn to teenagers, making concessions to them, entering in any way into their interests. Would she, for instance, know what hip-hop was? Or gangsta rap? Or the identity and nature of Eminem? Would the availability of the morning-after pill mean anything to her and, if it did, would she censure it out of hand? She had, he thought, spoken of teenage mothers as of some alien species permitted to exist only by the dispensation of a merciful authority

   But what of this story of hers accounting for Joanna Troy’s abandonment of her profession? If it were true, why hadn’t the Dades revealed it? Why had Roger Dade been at some pains to cover it up? Wexford couldn’t fit Matilda Carrish, into the Dade menage at all. She seemed to have nothing in common with Roger except a physical resemblance. It was possible, of course, that she was a fantasist, that she had invented her account of Joanna’s stealing from a pupil. He knew better than to believe that because a woman or man seemed straight forward, direct, was articulate, avoided circumlocution and evasiveness, they must also be truthful and beyond deceit. One had only to think of successful conmen. He went to the window and looked out across the landscape. Waterlogged or not, the solid ground could still absorb more, was absorbing more. He could see the floods receding, the water sinking into somewhere still enough of a sponge to receive it, meadows reappearing, willows rising, their trunks free and their fine trailing branches swaying once more in the wind.

   Suppose, when the Brede became a river again and not a lake, a mud-coated blue four-door saloon VW Golf was revealed lying in what had been the deepest part. And suppose three bodies had failed to come to the surface when gases inflated them because the three people had all this time been inside the car. Reason told him this was impossible, that there was no way the car could have got into the deepest part unless it had been parked on the river bank and everyone inside it unconscious for the time it took for the water to rise to its highest level. Suppose this was so and they had been overcome by carbon monoxide fumes . . . Impossible, though this must be something like what Freeborn and Burden had in mind. And if so, when had Joanna Troy parked there? On Sunday morning? In heavy rain with a flood warning out? In any case, Giles wouldn’t have gone. He had to go to church...

   All this went round and round in Wexford’s head. He put on his raincoat from force of habit rather than because he needed it and went out to get himself a sandwich for his lunch. He could have sent someone but he wanted to look at the water levels at the same time. For the first time for nearly a fortnight the pavements were dry. He walked along the High Street and noted that St Peter’s churchyard was no longer flooded. Gravestones looked like what they were, markers of burial sites. They had ceased to be rocks protruding from the sea. The parapet of the Kingsbrook Bridge was clear, its roadway awash with mud drifts. As stonework and walls, lamp standards, bollards, signposts emerged from the receding flood, everything had a sodden look, not washed dean but soiled with tidemarks, mud-stained and draped with dirty waterweed. What was it going to cost, putting all this to rights? And what of the flooded houses, some of them twice engulfed since September? Would insurance companies pay up and would their owners ever be able to sell them?

   Going back, he made a detour up York Street to buy his sandwich. Kingsmarkham’s finest were to be obtained at the Savoy Sandwich Bar where they made them for you while you waited. He chose brown bread and smoked salmon, no spread. Dr Akande had forbidden butter except in minuscule amounts, had forbidden so many kinds of substitutes that Wexford couldn’t remember which. It was easier to do without but he asked for some watercress on the salmon, not because he liked it but because Akande did. The next customer, a small man wearing a clerical collar, asked for cheese and pickle, the cheapest kind they did. It was this which made Wexford linger, his suspicion confirmed when the man behind the counter called out to someone in the kitchen, ‘The usual for Mr Wright!’

   ‘You won’t know me,’ Wexford said when the sandwiches had been packaged and handed over. ‘Two of my officers interviewed you. Chief Inspector Wexford, Kingsmarkham Crime Management.’

   Wright gave him an uncertain look. Many people did when they first met him, Wexford was used to it. They wondered what it was they had done and what he wanted them for. Wright’s wary expression gave way to a faint smile.

   ‘Giles Dade and his sister are still missing, I believe?’

   ‘Still missing.’

   They left the shop. Because Jashub Wright turned right and began walking in the direction of ‘the hut’ Wexford went that way too. The pastor of the Church of the Good Gospel talked about the floods. Everyone in Kingsmarkham and the villages talked constantly about the floods and would for weeks, months, to come. As he was speaking a pale sun, a mere pool of light, appeared among the clouds.

   ‘What sort of purity of life?’ Wexford asked when they paused in front of the church and its signboard with the sub-title.

   'All sorts really. Purity of mind and conduct. A sort of inward cleanness, if that doesn’t sound too much like the fashionable vogue for clearing the body of toxins.’ Wright laughed heartily at his joke. ‘You might say our aim is actually to clear mind, body and spirit of toxins.’

   Wexford had always had difficulty in establishing the difference between mind and spirit. Which was which and where were they? As for the soul. . . He said none of this but instead, very simply, ‘How do you do it?’

   ‘That’s a pretty big question to ask at midday out on the pavement.’ More hearty laughter.

   ‘Briefly.’

   ‘If new members want to join the congregation they must make confession before they can be accepted. We hold a cleansing for them and they undertake not to commit the sin again. We understand about temptation and if they are tempted they have only to come to us - that is, to me and the church elders - and we give them all the help we can to resist whatever it is. Now if you’ll excuse me...’

   Wexford watched him enter the church by a side door. He wondered what on earth Burden had been thinking of to describe Wright as ‘decent’. That creepy laugh had made him shiver. The cleansing sounded ominous - how could you get in and witness it? Only by applying to join, he supposed, and he wasn’t as interested as that.

‘I’ve been away,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve been away for a fortnight. When I got home yesterday someone down the street told me Joanna had disappeared.’

   This was his second uninvited guest, a short dumpy woman of forty dressed in red. She had been waiting a long time and he had to bolt his sandwich to prevent her waiting any longer. Grumblings of heartburn troubled him. ‘And you are?’

   They had told him but only her Christian name, Yvonne, had stayed with him. ‘Yvonne Moody. I live next door to Joanna. There’s something I think you ought to know. I don’t know what those Dades have told you and Joanna’s father but if they’ve said she was fond of those kids and they were fond of her, they couldn’t be more wrong.’

   ‘What do you mean, Mrs Moody?’

   ‘Miss,’ she said. ‘I’m not married I’ll tell you what I mean. First, you shouldn’t run away with the idea she and Katrina were best friends. Joanna may have been Katrina’s but Katrina wasn’t hers. Far from it. They’d nothing in common. I don’t know what brought them together in the first place, though I have my ideas. One day Joanna said she wasn’t going to have anymore to do with the family. But she did, though she’d come home and tell me that was the last time she’d babysit - well, not babysit but you know what I mean - she only did it for Katrina’s sake, she was sorry for Katrina, and the next week there she was, up there again.’

   ‘What did you mean, you have your ideas?’

   ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? She liked Roger Dade - liked him too well, I mean. The way no one should let herself think about a married man. I don’t know him, I’ve only come across the son, but whatever he’s like it was wrong what she was doing She s said to me once or twice that if Katrina went on the way she did, all those scenes and tears arid drama, she’d lose him. If that doesn’t tell you she meant she’d step into her shoes I don’t know what does. I told her she was heading for trouble besides behaving immorally. You can commit adultery in your heart just as much as in the flesh. I said that but she laughed and refused to-discuss it.’

   Wexford wasn’t surprised. He certainly wouldn’t have wanted to expose his private life to this woman Just as Burden came into the room his phone rang and he was told the Assistant Chief Constable was on the line.

   ‘You can go ahead now, Reg. Tomorrow we can be certain ‘ Freeborn sounded mildly embarrassed ‘There’s, er, nothing down there.’ Would he have preferred to - find three corpses and a waterlogged car?