Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (13 page)

   According to their grandmother, the Dade children were very bright indeed. ‘Mr Troy, Mrs Troy, have you ever heard of the Church of the Good Gospel? Their slogan is “God loves purity of life”.’

   Both looked blank.

   ‘Giles Dade is a member of it. Ms Troy never mentioned that to you?’

   ‘Never,’ Effie said. ‘Joanna isn’t religious herself. I don’t think she was very interested in religion.’

   ‘Lot of mumbo-jumbo,’ said her husband. ‘I feel the same.’

   ‘Finally,’ Wexford said, ‘did Joanna have crowned teeth?’

   ‘Crowned teeth?’

   ‘We have found what we believe to be a crown off one of her teeth in the Dades’ house. It looks as if it fell out and she had temporarily - and obviously not effectively - secured it with some kind of adhesive.’

   Effie knew exactly what he was talking about. ‘Oh, yes, she had two teeth that were crowned. She had them done years ago because they were discoloured. She said they aged her, which of course wasn’t true. She can’t have been more than twenty-one when they were done. The crown you’re talking about came off two or three weeks back, it actually came off while she was eating a chocolate caramel in this house. She said she’d have to go to the dentist but she hadn’t the time, she couldn’t make it that week. I was just going to the shops and she said while I was out would I get her a tube of that stuff from the pharmacy. And I did.’

Of the other parents only the mother was at home. Roger Dade was, as usual, at work. Katrina had her own mother with her, a woman very unlike her and very different from Matilda Carrish, plump and sturdy, maternal, wearing what are usually called ‘sensible’ clothes, a skirt, blouse and cardigan, and lace-up walking shoes. The house looked as if she had taken charge. It had never been dirty just rather too untidy for comfort, but Mrs Bruce had transformed it like the housewifely woman she was. All those diamond panes had been polished, ornaments washed and on a coffee table, as in the lounge of a country house hotel, magazines were stacked, their corners perfectly aligned with the angle of the table. A bowl that had looked as if it could serve no useful purpose had been filled with red and yellow chrysanthemums and a sleek black cat with a coat like satin, presumably owned by the Bruces, lay stretched out on the mantelpiece.

   The only unkempt and wretched object (animate or inanimate) in the room was Katrina who sat huddled, a blanket round her shoulders, her once pretty brown hair hanging in rats’ tails, her face gaunt. Wexford sensed there would be no more acting, no more posing, striking of attitudes, scene-setting. In the face of reality all that faded. She no longer cared how she looked or what impression she might make.

   No tea or coffee or even water had ever been offered them in that house. Doreen Bruce now offered all three. Wexford was sure that if drinks had been accepted, they would have appeared in matching china on a lace cloth. He asked the children’s grandmother when she had last seen Giles and Sophie or spoken to them on the phone.

   She looked like a woman who would have a low, comfortable sort of voice but hers was high and rather shrill. ‘I never spoke to them, dear. I’m not keen on phones, never know what to talk about. I can say what I’ve got to say or pass on a message but as to conversation, never have been able to and never shall.’

   ‘They came to stay with you in the school holidays, I believe.’

   ‘Oh, yes, dear, that’s a different thing altogether. We like having them with us, that’s quite different. They’ve always come to stay with us in the holidays, Easter as well as the summer sometimes. There’s lots to do round where we live, you see. It’s lovely country, quite isolated, plenty of things for young people.’

   Not much, as far as Wexford could see. Nothing for the kind who used Joanna’s website. Of course, he hadn’t been there but he knew that parts of the Suffolk coast, though only seventy miles from London, had a remote ness scarcely felt here. ‘What would there be to do? The seaside perhaps no more than ten miles away but no sea side resort, fields all strictly fenced in with barbed wire, fast traffic making the roads difficult to walk along. No facilities for young people, no youth club, no cinema, no shops, and probably one bus a day with luck.

   ‘Where do you think Giles and Sophie are, Mrs Bruce?’

   She glanced at her daughter. ‘Well, I don’t know, dear. They didn’t come near us. I’m sure they were happy at home, they had everything they wanted, their parents couldn’t do enough for them. They weren’t one of those - what-d’you-call-it - dysfunctional families.’

   He noticed the past tense. So, perhaps, did Katrina, for she turned to look at him and, still cowering under her blanket, shouted, ‘When are you going to find them? When? Have you looked? Has anybody been looking?’

   With perfect truth he said, ‘Mrs Dade, every police force in the United Kingdom knows they are missing. Everyone is looking for them. We have made a television appeal. The media know. We shall continue to do everything we can to find them. I assure you of that.’

   It sounded impotent to him, it sounded feeble. Two teenagers and a woman of thirty-one had vanished off the face of the earth. The muffled face emerged and tears began to wash it so that it was as wet as if put under the tap.

   Later that day he discussed it with Burden. ‘It’s almost two weeks now, Mike.’

   ‘What do you think happened to them? You must have a theory, you always do.’

   Wexford didn’t say that it was Burden’s theory of drowning, influencing Freeborn, which had delayed the investigation for eight days. ‘Joanna Troy has no criminal record. That we know for sure. But what’s the truth about that allegedly stolen note? And are there any more such incidents in her past?’

   ‘Her ex-husband’s been found. He doesn’t live in Brighton any more. He’s moved to Southampton, got himself a new girlfriend who comes from there. Anything like that he may be able to tell us.’

   ‘I feel about her that she’s a bit of mystery. She’s a young woman who’s been married but she’s apparently had no boyfriends since. She’s a teacher who loves teaching but dislikes children, yet she minds two children quite regularly while their parents go out. If she has friends apart from Katrina and up to a point the woman next door, we haven’t found any. When she’s challenged about a possible affair with Roger Dade she laughs but she doesn’t deny it. We need to know more.’

   ‘You haven’t said what your theory is.’

   ‘Mike, I suppose I think, on the slight evidence we’ve got, that Joanna has killed those children. I don’t know her motive. I don’t know where - certainly not in the Dades’ house. I don’t know how she’s disposed of the bodies or what she’s done with her car. But if all this happened on Saturday evening, she had time to dispose of them and time to leave the country before anyone knew they were missing.’

   ‘Only she didn’t leave the country. Her passport’s in her house.’

   ‘Exactly,’ said Wexford. ‘And we don’t believe in false passports, do we? Except for spies and gangsters and international crooks, especially fictional ones. Not unless the killing was carefully premeditated and I’m sure it wasn’t. Improbable as it sounds, she took those children out somewhere and killed them on an impulse because she’s a psychopath with a hatred of teenagers. And if you think that’s rubbish, can you come up with anything better?’

Toxborough lies north-east of Kingsmarkham, just over the Kentish border, but the Sussex side of the M20. Once a small town of great beauty and antiquity; its spoliation began in the 1970s with the coming of industry to its environs and its ruin was complete when an approach road was built from it to the motorway. But several villages in its vicinity, yet in remote countryside, have retained their isolation and unspoilt prettiness. One of these is Passingham St John (pronounced, for reasons unknown, ‘Passam Sinjen’) which, being no more than two miles from Passingham Park station, is a favourite with wealthier commuters. Such a one was Peter Burton who, two years before, had bought Passingham Hall as a weekend retreat.

   Originally intending to retreat there every Friday evening and return to London on Monday morning, Buxton soon found that escape to rural Kent was not so easy as it had at first appeared. For one thing the traffic on Fridays after four in the afternoon and before nine at night was appalling. Going back on Monday morning was just as bad. Moreover, most of the invitations he and his wife received to London functions it was prudent for an up-and-coming media tycoon like himself to accept were for Friday or Saturday evenings, while Sunday lunchtime parties were not unknown. Especially in the winter these invitations came thick and fast, and thus it was that the first weekend of December was the first he and his wife had been to Passingham Hall in more than a month.

   The house stood on the side of a shallow hill, so Buxton knew there was little danger of its flooding. In any case Pauline, who came in two or three times a week and kept an eye on things, had reported to Sharonne Buxton that all was well. Her husband had also worked for the Buxtons as handyman and gardener but had given up in October, offering the excuse of a bad back. Urban Buxton, originally from Greenwich, was learning how common this disability is in the countryside. Unless you are prepared to pay extravagantly for basic services, bad backs explain why it is so hard to find any one to work for you.

   He and Sharonne arrived very late on the night of Friday, 1 December, drove along the gravel drive through the eight-acre wood and up to the front door. The exterior lights were on, the heating was on and the bed linen had been changed. Pauline, at any rate, hadn’t a bad back. It was long past midnight and the Buxtons went straight to bed. The weather forecast had been good, no more rain was predicted, and Peter was awakened at eight thirty by sunshine streaming through his bedroom window. This was early by his weekend standards but mid-morning in rural Kent.

   He thought of taking Sharonne a cup of tea but decided not to wake her. Instead, he put on the Barbour jacket he had recently acquired and a pair of green wellies, requisite wear for a country landowner, and went outdoors. The sun shone brightly and it wasn’t particularly cold. Peter was intensely proud of owning his twenty acres of land but his pride he kept secret. Not even Sharonne knew of it. As far as she was concerned this garden, paddock, green slopes and wood were only what a woman like her could expect to possess. They were her due as a star of the catwalk and one of those few models to be known - and known nation- if not worldwide - by her (somewhat enhanced) given name alone. But Peter, secretly, gloried in his land. He intended adding to it and was already in negotiation with the farmer to buy an adjoining field. He dreamed of the huge garden party he planned for the following summer with a marquee on the lawn and picnic tables in the sunny flower-sprinkled clearing, the open space in the centre of the wood.

   It was towards this clearing that he was walking now, along the lane to where a track wound its way through the hornbeam plantation. In the absence of Pauline’s husband, the grass verge wasn’t as overgrown as he expected - Peter still didn’t know that grass grows hardly at all between November and March - but still he must find another gardener and woodsman, and soon. Sharonne hated untidiness, mess, neglect. She liked to make a good first impression on visitors. He turned on to the track and wondered why no birds were singing. The only sound he could hear was the buzz and rattle of a drill, which he assumed to be the farmer doing something to a fence. It was, in fact, a wood pecker whose presence would have thrilled him had he known what it was.

   The track continued up to the old quarry but a path branched off it to the left. Peter meant to take this path, for the quarry, an ancient and now overgrown chalk deposit, was of no interest to him, but at the turn-off he noticed something a more observant man would have seen as soon as he left the lane. The ruts a car’s tyres make were deeply etched into the gravelly earth of the track. They were not new, these ruts. Water still lay in the bottom of them, though it hadn’t rained for days. Peter looked back the way he had come and saw that they began at the lane. Someone had been in here since he was last at Passingham Hall. Pauline’s husband, according to Pauline, had been forbidden to drive on account of his back and she had never learned. It wasn’t them. The farmer might come into the wood but would certainly do so on foot. Some trespasser had been in here. Sharonne would be furious...

   Peter followed the rutted track up to the edge of the quarry It was plain to see that the vehicle, whatever it was, had gone over, taking part of the quarry’s grassy lip with it as well as two young trees. Down there it was full of small trees and bushes, and among them was the car, a dark-blue car which lay on its side but hadn’t fully turned over. Stouter trees had prevented its taking a somersault on to its roof. Then, in the dappled sunshine, the stillness and the silence but for the woodpecker’s drilling, he smelt the smell. It must have been there from the first but the sight before him had temporarily dulled his other senses. He had smelt something like it before, when he was very young and poor, and had a Saturday job cleaning the kitchens in a restaurant. The restaurant had been closed down by the food hygiene people but before that happened he’d one night opened up a plastic bag leaning against the wall. He had a dustpan of floor sweepings to get rid of but as soon as the bag was open a dreadful smell wafted out and in the bottom he saw decaying offal running with white maggots.

   Much the same smell was coming from the car in his quarry. He wasn’t going to look inside, he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to continue up to the clearing either. What he must do was go back to the house and call the police. If he had been carrying his mobile, as he always did when in London, he would have made that call on the spot. Dialled nine-nine-nine for want of knowing the local police number. But a country gentleman in a Barbour doesn’t carry a mobile, he hardly knows what it is. Peter walked back the way he had come, feeling a bit weak at the knees. If he had eaten breakfast before he came out he would probably have been sick.