Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (30 page)

   ‘You made that up.’

   ‘I’d never tell a lie, Mr Burden. Especially to police officers.’

   Making a face, Wexford drank some of the sparkling water Burden insisted on. ‘To return to our ongoing problem,’ he went on, ‘did Giles ever come back from wherever he went? We’ve no reason to suppose he ever came back and none really to think he didn’t. Come to that, where did he go?’

   ‘To the shops? To visit a friend?’

   ‘Those Lynn questioned say they didn’t see him the entire weekend. Scott Holloway tried to speak to him on the phone but failed. He may or may not have gone round there, he says not and it’s not much use saying I don’t believe him. And where was Sophie?’

   ‘In the house all the time with Joanna, surely?’

   ‘Maybe. But we don’t know that. All we can be sure of is that Joanna, Sophie and Giles left the house or were taken from it some time on Saturday night.’

   Burden said carefully, ‘There’s a strong possibility someone else came to the house on Saturday after the rain began. Just because no one saw him it doesn’t mean he didn’t come. It’s even possible Giles brought this per son back with him.’

   ‘Scott? If Giles had called on the Holloways and taken Scott back to his house, Mrs Holloway would know. No, if Scott went there he went alone and, I think, much later.’

   ‘So you’re saying’, said Burden, ‘this is someone we haven’t included in our enquiries.’

   ‘That’s right. Because he or she has left the country. We know, for instance, that Giles’s and Sophie’s passports are here and Joanna’s is here, but we know nothing about anyone else’s. And it’s not much use to us if we don’t know who this person is. Was Joanna killed at Antrim and killed by this person? Did it take place in the hall and was it caused by her falling or being thrown downstairs? As far as we know she never left Antrim until Saturday night and when she did leave Giles and Sophie were with her. Was this caller driving her car? It must have been someone they or one of them knew, that they invited in.’

   ‘As we know, the neighbours saw no one,’ said Burden, ‘after Mrs Fowler saw Giles leave the house. But I’m inclined to think there was a visitor to the house that night and that he came by prior arrangement. Or it could have been a chance visit.’

   Wexford’s Flying Fleshpots and Burden’s Butterflies and Flowers arrived, the former indistinguishable from lemon chicken, the latter prawns, bamboo shoots, carrots and pineapple fancifully arranged. A large bowl of prettily coloured rice accompanied these dishes. At the next table a very affectionate couple, who contrived to link his right hand and her left while manipulating chop sticks with the other, were both eating Dragon’s Eggs.

   Burden pursued his theory ‘He’d want to get her body away. We’ll say he had some sort of grudge to settle. We’ve heard about Joanna beating up Ludovic Brown while they were still at school and there may have been other instances of the same thing. She did coach children for their GCSEs. Suppose she attacked one of them and the child’s father wanted revenge.’

   ‘Then he’d have gone to her home, wouldn’t he?’ Wexford objected. ‘Not to the Dades.’

   ‘He may have enquired of the neighbours, Yvonne Moody, say, as to where Joanna was. No, he couldn’t have. She was away at her mother’s. Perhaps he followed Joanna or his child told him she might be at the Dades.’

   ‘I don’t know.’ Wexford was dubious. ‘The logistics are a bit funny. Your X finds out where Joanna is, though how is a moot point, and he goes up to Antrim on Saturday evening. He knows he’s got the right place because her car is outside. He rings the bell and some one lets him in.’

   ‘Joanna might not have done if she recognised him as antagonistic to her,’ Burden put in quickly, ‘but Giles or Sophie would have.’

   ‘Right. Presumably he makes a row. I mean, you’re not saying he sits down and has a cup of tea with them and watches telly, are you? No, he makes a row and blusters but he can’t do much in front of the kids. So he somehow gets Joanna out into the hail - this is the sticky bit, Mike - and he gets her there alone. Twirling his moustaches, our villain hisses something like, “I’m I going to get you for this, my proud beauty” and whacks her round the head. She screams, falls over and hits her head on the side of the clothes cupboard. Giles and Sophie come running out. “What have you done?” They find that Joanna is dead. The body must be removed and hidden. So X persuades the kids to go off with him in Joanna’s car? It must have been persuasion, not force. They weren’t babies, they were fifteen and thirteen. The boy will be quite strong. Remember how tall he is. They could easily have resisted. But they don’t, they agree to go. They make their beds, they put Joanna’s clothes into her case, but they don’t take a change of clothes for themselves. Why do they go? In case they might be blamed along with X? I don’t much like this part, do you?’

   ‘I don’t like it but I can’t think of anything better.’ Burden drank some water. ‘How did X get to the Dades’ house? It must have been on foot, maybe part of the way by public transport. If he or she came in their car that car would still have been there on the Monday. And they didn’t leave in it, they left in Joanna’s. Did he leave fingerprints? Maybe they were among the unidentifiable left about the house, many of them smudged by Mrs Bruce’s fanatical dusting. Then there’s the T-shirt with Sophie’s face on it. Did X tell Sophie to bring the T shirt so that he could drop it out of the window at the Kingsbrook Bridge as a red herring? That presupposes an intimate knowledge of the Dade family on his part.’

   ‘It doesn’t if he simply asked the children to bring something by which one of them could be immediately identified. But still. . . I don’t know, Mike, there are so many holes in it and so many questions left unanswered.’ Wexford looked at his watch. ‘It’s time I paid my visit to the Dades,’ he said with a sigh.

   ‘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-looking, 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.