Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (26 page)

   ‘The boys were going out with Neil, it being Friday, and she said that once she was alone in the house with Cal again he’d start and she didn’t like the way he bullied her.’

   'Why can’t she just leave him?’ Wexford said irritably. After all, she’s left one man, she knows how it’s done. I suppose I should say, why doesn’t she chuck him out, she’s done that too.’

   ‘I’d no idea you felt as bitter as that.’

   ‘Well, I do. About both of them, him for being a pig and a boor, and her for being such a fool. D’you think the garden’s going to flood again?’

   Calling in at Passingham Hall to check on the state of the heating - he couldn’t trust Pauline’s judgement - Buxton found the man called Colman standing on the gravel sweep at the front of the house, staring up at his bedroom window.

   ‘What the hell are you doing? Get off my property and don’t come back.’

   ‘Keep your hair on,’ said Colman, using a quaint old- fashioned expression Buxton vaguely remembered on his grandfather’s lips. ‘No need to get aerated.’ Swiftly he plucked a card from his pocket and held it out to Buxton. ‘It’s more in your interest than anyone else’s that we find those kids.’

   Buxton supposed it might be, though he didn’t say so. ‘Who are you acting for?’

   ‘Mrs Matilda Carrish. Now why don’t we go up into the wood and you show me exactly where you found that car - when was it, now?’

   ‘Just before Christmas.’ Buxton was getting nervous.

   ‘Come off it. Rumour has it you knew that vehicle was there weeks before you said a word. I wonder why you kept so mum?’

   Buxton took him up into the wood and reconstructed for him an itinerary for the car to have taken once it had left the road at the top of the lane. After a while he began to find Colman congenial company, particularly as the enquiry agent was carrying on him a hip flask of whisky which be passed several times to Buxton. By the time they parted, Colman to drive to the Cotswolds, Buxton to London, they had agreed to keep in touch.

   Sharonne was out and no note had been left for him. Buxton wondered uneasily if after that call he had made to her from Kingsmarkham Police Station she had phoned Passingham Hall and, receiving no reply, absented herself in order to punish him. It wouldn’t be untypical. The phone sat on its little table, silent and accusatory; a small white instrument whose invention and subsequent universal use had probably caused more trouble in the world than the internal combustion engine. For some reason he lifted its receiver and dialled 1471 to obtain the number of the last caller. He didn’t recognise it but he knew it belonged to none of those he and Sharonne called their friends nor to any tradesman or shop that he could recall.

   When he went to fetch himself a drink he noticed that he was holding between his fingers and turning it this way and that, the card given him by the representative of Search and Find.

At Antrim they were taking the entrance hall to pieces.

   ‘Everything will be put back exactly as it was,’ Vine said to Katrina Dade, more in hope than certainty. Katrina moaned and wrung her hands, finally retreating to the living room where she lay on a sofa with a blanket over her and her face buried in cushions.

   The carpet had come up and a couple of floorboards. A brownish patch was scraped off the skirting board and a section of flooring with a red-brown stain on it lifted away from between the bottom of the clothes cupboard and the uncarpeted floor. Vine knew what he had to do next and he didn’t fancy it, but a police man’s lot, he sometimes thought, was a series of unpleasant tasks he didn’t fancy. DC Lynn Fancourt said kindly to him, ‘I’ll ask her if you like, Sarge. I don’t mind. Really.’

   Vine sometimes thought that if he weren’t a happily married man with kids and responsibilities he wouldn’t have been averse to a runaround with Lynn. She was just his type, old-fashioned sort of figure and lovely golden- brown hair. ‘No, I’ll do it. Now. Get it over with.’

   He went into the living room and coughed. Katrina lifted a tear-blotched face from the cushions. Vine cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Dade, I’m sorry to have to ask you this. Believe me, it’s just a precaution. Don’t read anything into it. But do you happen to know which blood group your children belong to?’

   Katrina read everything into it. She set up a loud wailing. Vine looked at her in despair and called Lynn, who came in calmly, sat down beside Katrina and murmured softly to her. No brisk admonitions, no slapping of face. Katrina sobbed and gagged and stuck her fists in her eyes, laid her head on Lynn’s shoulder, but eventually gulped out that she didn’t know, she never dealt with that kind of thing.

   ‘Would your husband be able to help us?’

   ‘He’s at the office. He doesn’t care. Children are just something a man in his position thinks he ought to have. He’s never loved them.’ The emotive word set off fresh wails and floods.

   Lynn patted her shoulder, said gently, ‘But would he know about blood groups?’

   ‘I suppose so. If there’s anything to know.’

   At this moment the front door was heard to open and close, and Roger Dade came into the room. Katrina once more buried her head in the cushions. As always on the lookout for someone to blame, Dade said aggressively to Vine, ‘What have you been saying to her?’

   Lynn answered, ‘We need to know your children’s blood groups, Mr Dade.’

   ‘Why didn’t you come to me first? You know she’s a crazy hysteric. Look what you’ve done to her.’ But he lifted his wife - tenderly for him - and put his arms round her. ‘There, there, come on. You can’t go on like this.’ He looked up at Lynn. ‘Their groups are on file upstairs. If I ask you what you want them for I suppose you’ll say it’s just routine.’

   Neither officer answered. Dade sighed, disengaged himself from his wife’s grip - she had locked both hands round his neck - and went upstairs. Vine looked at Lynn and cast up his eyes. 

There was no reason to believe a triple murder hadn’t been committed in that hail. Unless the absence of much blood might be a reason. The hail would be easy to clean, Wexford thought. No carpet, no rugs, the wood apparently coated with a hard stain-repellent lacquer that would resist blood as well as any other compound. He wondered if they even had enough on the samples to make comparison with Joanna Troy’s group possible.

   One of the Dade children, Sophie, had a blood group that matched hers, 0 Positive, the commonest. Giles Dade’s group was A Positive. If the samples revealed only O Positive blood they still wouldn’t know much, merely that Sophie might have been killed along with Joanna. On the other hand she might not. But if they showed A Positive as well there was a strong possibility it was Giles’s. How about DNA comparisons They already had hair from Sophie Dade’s hairbrush. DNA would be discoverable on that if the hair had fallen out, not if it had been cut off...

   He would be seeing Jashub Wright at midday. At his home, to ask him about the ritualistic meetings at the Dancing Floor. Lynn Fancourt, back from the Dades’, went with him. This was his first visit to the semi detached bungalow, its exterior coated with that most depressing of wall covers, grey pebble-dashing. No attention had been paid to the front garden until, apparently, someone had attacked grass, nettles and incipient saplings with a scythe. Presumably on one of the rare days when it wasn’t raining. It was raining now, water staining the grey walls a deeper charcoal. Every time Wexford saw pebble-dashing he was reminded of long ago when he was seven and staying overnight for some reason with an aunt. The walls of her house had a similar surface. He had been put early to bed in a back bedroom while guests were entertained. The company sat under his window in deckchairs, his aunt and uncle, two old women - old to him then - and an old man with an entirely bald shiny head. Unbeknownst to them he watched them from his open window and, unable to resist the temptation, began picking bits of pebble-dashing off the wall and dropping them on to that bald pate; For a few moments he had the blissful satisfaction of seeing the old man brush what he thought was some insect off his head. Twice he did it, three times, and then he looked up. They all looked up. Auntie Freda came running up the stairs, grabbed her nephew and whacked him with a hairbrush, later the cause of much indignation to Wexford’s mother. These days, he thought, as Lynn rang the doorbell and they waited, she’d have had her sister-in-law up before the European Court of Human Rights.

   Thekla Wright answered the door. Wexford had never seen her before and was a little taken aback. She was blonde and very pretty but the way she was dressed - what did her clothes remind him of? It came to him when they were on the threshold of the living room. A photograph he’d once seen of the wives of a Mormon in Utah, polygamy long illegal but a blind eye turned to it. They had been dressed like Thekla Wright or she was dressed like them, her frock faded cotton print mid-calf length, her bare legs covered in fuzzy blonde hair, her feet in flat sandals of the Start-rite kind children had worn in his pebble-dashing days. Her long hair was looped up untidily with combs and grips.

   He had expected to see Jashub Wright alone but the pastor’s wife opened the door to disclose inside a gathering that made him think of a function he had never attended but only heard about, a prayer meeting. He had to stop himself staring. Probably most of the chairs the Wrights possessed were arranged in a circle and on each one, eight out of the ten, sat a man. They weren’t dressed in striped trousers and frock coats and they weren’t wearing stovepipe hats but for a moment he had the illusion they were. All were in suits with shirts and ties. All had very short hair. They rose to their feet as one when he and Lynn came in and Lynn got some very strange looks. He thought Mrs Wright had left them because her baby was crying but perhaps not, perhaps she had gone because they excluded women from their counsels. But Jashub Wright stepped forward with outstretched hand. Wexford ignored it - he was practised in this - and introduced Lynn, expecting verbal disapproval. But there was none, only a rather oppressive silence.

   Wexford sat down and Lynn did. Now all the chairs were occupied. Before he could begin one of the men spoke and he saw he had come to a conclusion too soon.

   ‘I am an elder of the United Gospel Church. My name is Hobab Winter.’ He glanced quickly at Lynn and away. In that glance a feminist would have detected fear of women. ‘It’s my duty to point out that females are not normally present at our meetings but we will make an exception in this case.’

   Wexford said nothing but Lynn spoke up, as he was sure she would. ‘Why not?’ No one answered and she repeated what she had said. ‘I’d really like to know why not.’

   It was the pastor who replied, in a genial and friendly tone, as if Lynn couldn’t fail to appreciate what he was saying. ‘We must never forget that it was a woman who brought about man’s fall.’

   Lynn was evidently too stunned for an immediate riposte and when after a few seconds she opened her mouth, Wexford whispered for no one’s ears but hers, ‘DC Fancourt, not now. Leave it.’ She said nothing but he was aware of the tremor of rage running through her. He spoke quickly. ‘May I have your names, please? So that we know what we’re doing.’

   One by one the circle uttered them, preceded by their titles, Elder, Reader, Officer, Deputy Very odd, he thought. ‘Now would someone tell me about this ceremony that takes place in the wood at Passingham Hall twice a year in January and July? Presumably this is the cleansing ritual you once mentioned to me.’

   ‘The ritual, as you call it, though we prefer another name, will not be taking place there this January Not in view of the circumstances.’

   ‘So if you don’t call it that what do you call it?’

   ‘It is our Confessional Congregation.’

   They certainly weren’t anxious to be forthcoming. Wexford looked at the circle of men. Some of them were vaguely familiar to him, he had seen them about in Kingsmarkham. Each face was calm, enclosed, mild. They were rather alike, not one could have been described as good-looking, all had roundish faces, all were clean-shaven with small eyes and small mouths, though the noses varied in shape and size and the hair colour varied where much hair could be seen. Every face was curiously unlined, though somehow he could tell the youngest was in his thirties and the oldest in his six ties. If he was still alive and if he stayed with them, would Giles Dade come to look like this one day?

   ‘What happens at the Confessional Congregation?’ he asked.

   ‘Church members attend.’ Jashub Wright was laconic. ‘New members confess their sins and are absolved. Cleansed. Purified. As I said to you once before, their bodies and spirits are cleared of toxins. Afterwards biscuits and Coke and lemonade are served. Women are involved in the catering arrangements, of course.’ Once again he smiled gently at Lynn who looked away. ‘Miss Moody is in charge of that. The people are very happy, they rejoice, they sing, they claim the new member as their own. Each new member has a mentor - one of the elders, of course - assigned to him. Or her. To prevent him sliding back into sin.’

   ‘Who did you say was in charge of the catering?’

   ‘Miss Yvonne Moody. She is one of our most deeply committed members.’

They left the room for a brief interval.

   ‘She came to us of her own accord, sir, and she did admit to knowing Giles Dade,’ Lynn said. ‘You can’t say she’s tried to deceive us.’

   ‘No, I dare say not. But it’s interesting in various ways, isn’t it? She knew Joanna Troy well, she lived next door to her, and she knew Giles through her church. Not only that. She knew about the clearing Shand-Gibb calls the Dancing Floor and therefore the existence of the quarry and the way through the wood to reach it. I revoke “I dare say not”. She did deceive us. She came to us of her own accord because she saw that as the best way to project her innocence. Let’s go back in there.’

   The circle of members was as they had left it, the faces still serene, mild, inscrutable. Wexford noticed what he hadn’t before, a faintly unpleasant smell pervading the small room. It took him a moment to realise this was the odour of eight lounge suits, worn daily but dry-cleaned seldom. He sat down again.