Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (29 page)

   Oddly enough, Chapman came too. A hangdog air had replaced his truculence. He trailed behind them, silent, looking as if he might start crying. Karen put the kettle on and made tea for Sylvia, herself and Wexford. Sylvia’s was very sweet and milky, the way she never took it normally but which seemed to com fort her now. Colour came back into her battered face and she began to talk. Wexford had believed she would have preferred to defer explaining until Chapman was out of the way but she seemed to take pleasure, as he confessed he would have done, in telling it all in her attacker’s presence.

   ‘He wants to marry me. Or he did. I don’t suppose he does now. He kept on and on at me and once or twice he hit me.’ She looked at her father and cast up her eyes. ‘I’m a fool, aren’t I? I of all women ought to know better. I can only say it’s different when it happens to you. You believe them when they promise not to do it again...’

   Chapman interrupted her. ‘I do promise, Sylvia. I won’t do it again. I’ll swear on the Bible, if you like. I’ll make a solemn vow that I never never will. And I still want to marry you. You know all this only came about because you wouldn’t marry me.’

   She laughed, a dry little laugh that stopped because it hurt her. ‘We had a really big row this evening. I said I wouldn’t marry him and I didn’t want him living here any more. I told him to go and he started on me. He knocked me down and punched my face. I got away from him and ran upstairs. I thought I could lock myself in my bedroom but that was a fatal mistake. It was better for him having me up there. Easier to get hold of the sticking plaster, for one thing.’ Chapman got a look of such viciousness Wexford was nearly shocked. ‘This house is so cold it’s a good thing I was wearing so many clothes - well, it is in one way. I nearly died of the heat in that cupboard but it meant I had my mobile with me, in the pocket of my cardigan.’

   Chapman hadn’t known. He shook his head, perhaps at his own lack of foresight in not searching her before making her prisoner. Sylvia said, ‘He came back later and taped up my mouth and tied up my feet and hands and put me in that cupboard, the hot cupboard. That was deliberate torture. I don’t know what he meant to do next, go out maybe in my car, or wait - till Neil brought the boys back. . . . Where are the boys?’

   As she asked that question the doorbell rang. Wexford went to answer it. Ben and Robin rushed in, making for the kitchen. Seeing their mother in that state wouldn’t be pleasant for them but they would have to know some time. He told Neil as briefly as he could what had happened.

   ‘Where is he? Let me get at him.’

   ‘No, Neil. Not you too. As it is, I shouldn’t have hit him and God knows what he’ll do about it. He’s going anyway. The best thing will be for Sylvia and the boys to come and stay with us. I’ll get Karen to drive them in Sylvia’s car.’

   ‘I’ll take them,’ Neil said.

   Sylvia had apparently told her sons she had fallen down the stairs. She had come out of the bedroom where the airing cupboard was, it was dark, she had missed her footing and crashed down the entire flight. Whether they believed that this would also account for her black eyes Wexford couldn’t tell. But they seemed satisfied with the explanation and excited, as children mostly are, at the prospect of going away for the night. Chapman, the fight knocked out of him, had gone upstairs to pack suitcases.

   ‘Why did he turn all the lights off?’ Karen asked.

   ‘I don’t know. He was always saying I was extravagant with electricity but it’s my house and I paid the bills. I don’t know what he thought would happen when Robin and Ben came back Maybe he was going to tell them I wasn’t feeling well and had gone to bed and keep me in there all night. He’s capable of it. Oh, I’m such a fool.’

   So Neil drove his family to Wexford’s house while Wexford and Karen took Chapman with them. He had brought so many cases, boxes and plastic carriers, fifing up the car boot, that Wexford was driven to wonder how many of Sylvia’s possessions the man had filched. It was worth almost anything to be rid of him. No one spoke. Donaldson at the wheel was consumed with curiosity, his ears on stalks for the hints of enlightenment that never came. He was directed to drive to a district of Stowerton he wouldn’t normally have associated with the chief inspector’s daughter or anyone belonging to her. There, in a street that ran along the back of a disused factory, he was told to drop their passenger outside a run-down block of flats with a nameplate from which several letters had fallen and never been replaced and where only one of the four globular lamps above the entrance was working. Donaldson was preparing to carry those cases and boxes up the steps to this entrance but Wexford said no, leave them on the pavement.

   Chapman got out and stood there, surrounded by his, and possibly Sylvia’s, property.

   ‘Goodnight,’ said Wexford, his head out of the window.

   The last they saw of him was a weary figure humping inelegant luggage across the pavement, along the path and up the steps. There was so much of it that he would have to make several journeys. Maybe that would be the last they saw of him and maybe not, Wexford thought, his experience of life telling him that couples when they parted seldom made a clean break of it but drifted together again and apart again, the whole sorry process punctuated with rows, reconciliations and recriminations. Not this time, please, not when it was his injured daughter.

   How about charging Chapman with causing Actual Bodily Harm, say, or even resisting arrest? He thought not. This was his daughter. Was he going to pre-empt any accusations which might come from Chapman by first telling Freeborn what he’d done? Chapman could be revenged by accusing Wexford of assault, but he was unlikely to do this when it meant admitting he’d been laid low by a man much older than himself. Wexford couldn’t honestly say he regretted what he’d done, for the blow he had struck hadn’t been for Chapman alone but for all the ghastly men who had been in and out of his daughters’ lives over the past years. The weedy bore Sylvia had been running around with between Neil and Chapman, the awful literary prizewinner and poet Sheila had gone about with, and back, back to her drama school days, the idiot called Sebastian something who had dumped his dog on them and which Wexford had had to take walkies. I won’t think about any of it now, he thought, I’ll force it out of my mind.

   He said goodnight to Karen and thanked her for her help. When she had gone he asked himself what it was, what had happened that evening, which kept teasing at the back of his mind. Something to do with that stair case it was, and the way the bedroom door opened only a couple of feet in from the top riser. Anyone coming out of that room could easily fall down the stairs, as Chapman had fallen part-way when he had overbalanced after hitting Wexford. He concentrated. He revisited the scene in his mind’s eye.

   The configuration of staircase and bedroom door was the same at Sylvia’s as at Antrim. A matter of awkward and clumsy design in both cases but safe enough if caution was used. Imagine, though, someone coming to that bedroom door . . . No, not ‘someone’; Joanna Troy. Because he was in that room doing that weary everlasting homework, the homework his father insisted on over and above the call of school duty, and Joanna came to the door and knocked, maybe to tell him it was time to put the light out and go to sleep. Possibly Roger or Katrina Dade had asked her to see the children didn’t stay up too late. Perhaps she had come before, even two or three times, and, exasperated, he had flung open the door and pushed her away.

   It was impossible. No fifteen-year-old boy would do that unless he were a criminal psychopath in the making...

There comes a time in every case if it is a complex one, when the investigating officer reaches an impasse, when there seems no way forward and no unexplored paths to go along. This is what had happened to Wexford in the Missing Dade Children affair. He had thought he had a strong lead in the matter of the Good Gospellers, but not one of the enquiries his officers had made revealed any thing suspicious beyond the fact that they knew Passingham Hall woods and Giles Dade had been one of them. Each one of the elders had been alibi by his wife and, in some cases, by his children. Joanna Troy’s past had interested him but it had mostly been concerned with things she had done and not with things done to her. Now that she was dead, probably murdered, her own offences were of little account. ‘Who cared any longer that she had been accused of stealing a schoolboy’s money? That her marriage had been a failure? Or that another boy had been attacked by her and years later died by falling over a cliff? She was dead, dumped in her car in the bottom of a waterlogged quarry. As for all the teenagers closely or remotely connected with her, Giles and Sophie, Scott and Kerry Holloway, Hobab Winter’s daughter, children would figure in her life. She was a teacher.

   The Dade children were probably dead too. Wexford knew very well how simple it may be to find a body when it has been buried in its own back garden or in next door’s, how almost insuperable when the killer has disposed of it in some distant place, perhaps hundreds of miles away, which even he has never visited before. He knew he should be looking at the case from an entirely different angle to those which he had explored already. But which angle? Where to start?

   Well, he could ask Lynn Fancourt about the Dade children’s school friends, though most had been dismissed from the case. It was Sewingbury Academy’s uniform that was brown and gold and which Dora said she had seen the Winter girl wearing when she did her father’s paper round.

   'What’s her name?’ he had asked her.

   ‘One of those strange Bible names. Dorcas.’

   ‘Dorcas?’

   ‘I said it was strange. Come to think of it, it’s not really any stranger than Deborah only one’s fashionable and the other’s not.’

   Now he said to Lynn, ‘Is she on the list?’

   She scanned it. ‘No. Was she Giles’s or Sophie’s friend?’

   ‘I don’t know. They’re the same sort of age and they go to the same school. She lives in my road and she’s the daughter of the Queen Street newsagent.’

   ‘D’you want me to go round there and ask her if she knows Giles, sir?’

   Why? What on earth was the point? He shook his head. ‘If I decide to pursue it I’ll go round there myself.’

   Another disappointment. He consoled himself with his relief that at least his garden hadn’t flooded again, while some low-lying properties in Kingsmarkham, especially those near the river banks, were once more inundated. Life at home now included Sylvia and her sons, for she was afraid to go home lest Callum Chapman come back How could she tell whether he had a key or not? She had taken his key which he had mislaid and she had found in the bedroom they had shared. He might easily have had another cut during one of their quarrelsome periods when he was pressing her ‘to make things permanent’ and she was telling him that if he went on like that he would have to leave. To her father and mother she continued endlessly to explain how it was possible she had endured him for even a day after he first struck her, she who had been the most ardent and the most vociferous campaigner against violence in the home, she who had almost daily advised women to leave abusive partners whatever promises they made or undertakings they gave.

   ‘It’s different when it’s happening to you,’ she repeatedly said. ‘It’s a real person with good qualities, it’s someone who strikes you as deeply sincere whatever else he may be.’

   ‘Strikes you is right,’ said her father, who had scant sympathy with all this now time had passed and her wounds and bruises healed. At least Chapman hadn’t attempted to have him charged with assault. ‘You could leave off the rest of that sentence. You’re a grown woman, Sylvia, you’re a mother, you were married for God knows how long. Whatever Chapman did to you you’ve only yourself to blame.’

   Dora thought him very harsh. ‘Oh, Reg.’

   ‘Oh, Reg, nothing. She’s a social worker, for God’s sake. She ought to know a lowlife when she sees one.’

   Relations between him and his elder daughter were fast returning to what they were before Sylvia left her husband and miraculously became a nicer person. And he was back in the morass of guilt he struggled to be free of by repeating to himself a kind of mantra: You must not show favouritism of one child over the other. But Chapman was gone and that was something to rejoice about.

One of the difficulties was that they still had very little idea when Joanna and the Dade children left Antrim.

   Let alone why. All of them had been there on Friday and overnight. Joanna had presumably still been there on Saturday morning and for part of the afternoon since her car was there. Giles was seen on Saturday afternoon, probably as late as half past two. On Sunday morning the car was gone. It was therefore reasonable to suppose that Giles and Joanna were alive and well by early evening on Saturday - but was it?

   To Burden, over lunch in the Moonflower, he said, ‘We know Giles went out at around half past two but we don’t know when he came back. If he came back. We know Joanna was in the house because her car was seen on the driveway by Mrs Fowler and according to her father she never walked anywhere if she could help it. But we really have no idea where Sophie was. No contact was made with her, so far as we know, after she spoke on the phone to her mother in Paris on Friday evening at about seven thirty;’

   Burden nodded abstractedly. He was ordering their meal with care. It had to be served fast, it had to be ‘healthy food’, to which he had lately become addicted, and it had to be as fat-free as possible for Wexford’s somewhat raised cholesterol. Dragon’s Eggs were still on the menu and another one, even worse, had been added: Flying Fleshpots.

   ‘It sounds awful,’ said Wexford, ‘but I’m going to try it.’

   ‘I shall ask Raffy about its fat content,’ Burden warned, though he had little faith in an honest answer. And when this enquiry was put to him, Raffy, efficient and smart as ever, replied that it was lowest in fat levels of any dish they served.

   ‘It’s got Lo-chol in it, sir, which has actually been clinically proven to lower cholesterol.’