Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (34 page)

   ‘She didn’t say anything about it,’ Sophie said. ‘Giles told her what had happened to us and I told her. We told her in the car going back from the station. She just said she was glad we’d come to her.’

   Dade opened his eyes and looked at his daughter. It was an unpleasant look but Sophie didn’t flinch. Wexford persisted, ‘You’d done nothing wrong.’ Concealing a crime? Hiding a body? ‘I’ll correct that. You’d done nothing yourselves to Joanna. Why didn’t she phone your parents? You’d told her about Peter. Why not phone the police and tell them what you’d told her?’

   Sophie was beginning to look uncomfortable. ‘She never even thought of that, I’m sure. She just wanted to look after us and see we didn’t get into trouble.’

   He left it. ‘Your brother can’t have left the country,’ he said. ‘His passport is here. When did he leave your grandmother’s house?’

   She had already told him but again he was testing her. ‘It was early on the Sunday morning we got to Matilda’s. I slept a lot that day and so did Giles. We were tired, we’d been up all night. But in the evening Matilda said he ought to go first thing in the morning, she’d been making arrangements on the phone. He ought to go before our parents told the police we were missing. By the time I woke up it was all fixed She drove him to the station. She said it was best for me not to know where he was going and then I couldn’t tell anyone who asked.’ She looked triumphantly at him. ‘Like you,’ she said.

The sheet of water that covered most of the road reminded him of the winter floods. Not again, please. The rain had stopped but it was obviously no more than a lull. He was putting out the recycling box on to the pavement, and thus breaking one of the local authority’s rules. You weren’t supposed to put the newspapers, cans and bottles out till the following morning but the rain might be torrential in the morning . . .

   It was a funny thing, he thought, how you were always distracted from this task by reading whatever was on top of the pile. You wouldn’t normally read it when you’d sat down with the newspaper it was in, you wouldn’t dream of reading a piece about waterproof mascara or Burmese cats or the latest fifteen-year-old pop sensation, but somehow you couldn’t resist it in these particular circumstances. The article that caught his eye was on a cookery page. It happened to be lying open on the top, although the date on it was a week ago. Its illustrations in full colour, it showed a starter of avocado and grapefruit in lime coulis, a monkfish confection and a tarte tatin with cream . . .

   But wait a minute, wasn’t that the menu Sophie had described as Joanna preparing for this dinner on the fateful Saturday night three months ago? He looked at it again, standing there in the road, under the street lamp. Coincidence? He didn’t think so. More likely, it was proof of the extent to which the girl had lied. She had read that page while at her grandmother’s and remembered its details when they were needed . . .

Since he and Sharonne were detained there over Christmas, Peter Buxton had not been back to Passingham Hall. Events had given him a dislike of the place. He had even thought of selling it. But could he sell it while the discovery of a body in a car in the grounds was fresh in people’s minds? He had tentatively suggested the possibility of selling to Sharonne but she had been adamant. She had been aghast, then furious.

   ‘But we must have a country place, Pete.’

   ‘Why must we? Sell it and we could buy a bigger house up here. Think about it. We haven’t been there for two months. I don’t suppose we’ll go again before Easter, if then. The council tax still has to be paid, and Pauline. The house eats up fuel.’

   ‘What am I going to say to people? That we don’t have a country place? Oh, no. I should coco.’ Incongruously, since she so obviously wanted to hold on to Passingham Hall, she added, ‘Besides, nobody would buy it. Not since you advertised the fact there was a dead body in the grounds.’

   The Warrens had invited them to their Silver Wedding party. The anniversary itself was on Valentine’s Day but that happened to fall on a Wednesday that year so the party was fixed for Saturday the seventeenth. It was to be a big affair, half the county there. Sharonne was determined to go.

   ‘Of course we’re going, Pete. Why ever not?’

   ‘You go,’ Peter said daringly.

   ‘What, and leave you here on your own?’ As if he were a child or senile, as if he were likely to set the place on fire or invite other women in. ‘Absolutely not. God knows what you’d get up to.’

   What was that supposed to mean? What he’d get up to! Was she as pure as driven snow? That phone number was still hovering beneath the surface of his mind, he had long known it by heart. Every time he came home and found himself alone with the phone, he dialled 1471 but its records had never divulged that number again.

   He would have to go to Passingham some time. It was obvious he must either go there or sell it, and Sharonne wouldn’t let him sell it. Peter was beginning to think the unthinkable and wonder what exactly he got out of his marriage. He could see what he put into it - money, companionship, money, obedience, money, a continual yielding to pressure - but what did Sharonne put in? Herself, he supposed, herself. He felt most frightened and most like shying away from the whole subject when he began asking what that self amounted to. A caring - but deceitful? - bossy, clothes horse. . . Last week he had asked her about starting a family and she had reacted as if he had suggested she navigate the globe single-handed in an open boat or make her own clothes or something equally fantastic. They had never discussed it before. Naively, he had supposed all women wanted babies just as he had supposed they could all cook.

   Of course, they went to Passingham. As they were leaving on the Friday evening the phone started ringing. After three rings it stopped and switched over to the answering service. It never crossed Peter’s mind that this might be Kingsmarkham Police calling to fix a time to interview him. After all, he could check the message on Sunday night.

   As they turned down the lane towards the Hall she began on the body in the car.

   ‘They never would have found it if you hadn’t phoned and told them.’

   ‘Well, I did phone. It’s too late now.’

   ‘When all’s said and done, I think we’re very lucky the Warrens asked us. They must be very tolerant people to overlook a thing like that. Most people would give us the cold shoulder.’

   ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Peter in a rough tone. ‘We didn’t put that car there. We didn’t put that woman in it. It was just our luck.’

   ‘Well, I know that, but others don’t. Others would say there was no smoke without fire and we must have had something to do with it.’

   ‘You mean you would.’

   It was in a state of mutual resentment that they entered the house, Peter lugging all his wife’s three suit cases, one under his arm, two dragged behind him, a task she said was obviously his to perform. He reached for the light switch but the bulb was defunct and for a few moments they blundered about in the pitch dark. As Sharonne located the panel of switches in the drawing room but before the light came on, the phone began to ring. Peter felt for it, knocked the receiver off and was crawling about the floor feeling for it when light poured out from behind the half-open drawing room door. Kicking over the largest of Sharonne’s suitcases in his haste, he gasped out, ‘Hello?’

   ‘I seem to have phoned at a bad time,’ said a voice he recognised as belonging to Chief Inspector Wexford. ‘Kingsmarkham Crime Management.’

   ‘What do you want?’ Sharonne was standing in the doorway, watching him intently. ‘It is a bad time, very bad.’

   ‘I’m sorry about that. I’m not at liberty to be tactful about these things. You’ll be staying at Passingham for the weekend?’

   ‘Why?’

   ‘Because I’d like to talk to you tomorrow morning as a matter of urgency; Mr Buxton.’

   Peter looked at Sharonne’s stony face, thought with a disloyalty that amazed him, how anger reduced her to ugliness, and wondered how he could keep from her whatever it was this policeman wanted. He said a cautious, All right.’

   ‘You have a car with you? I’d like you to come here. In the morning.’

   The Warrens’ lunch party. . . ‘What time in the morning? Early preferably.’

   ‘I was thinking of eleven.’

   ‘Could you make it ten?’ Sharonne was listening intently. ‘Ten would suit me better.’

   ‘It wouldn’t suit me,’ said Wexford. ‘I’ll see you at eleven.

   What could he say? In Sharonne’s presence, he dared not ask what the police wanted this time. He thought only of the blamelessness of his life these past six weeks. Surely they hadn’t found anything else on his land . . .? He dared not ask. Wexford said he would see him at eleven in the morning and rang off. Peter carried the suitcases upstairs and dumped them on the bedroom floor. The house felt damp and chill as the central heating began to cool. He went downstairs and after a good deal of grubbing about in the kitchen, dislodging stacks of heterogeneous rubbish, receipted bills, empty cardboard boxes, plastic bags, out-of-focus photographs, used matchbooks, triple A batteries, keys that locked no known doors, at last found a 100 watt light bulb in the back of a cupboard. Once he had managed with some difficulty to slot it into the socket, he went into the by now cold drawing room and poured him self a large Scotch.

   ‘Did you take my cases upstairs?’ said Sharonne. Getting a surly nod in response, she remarked that she was disappointed to see him lapsing back into his old drinking habits. ‘You’ve been so good about it lately.’

   Not all worms turn but some do. ‘I haven’t been good. I haven’t cut down on my drinking, I’ve just done it when you weren’t there. I’m a grown man, Mummy, I’m not a child. No one tells me what to do.’ He picked up his whisky. ‘I’m going to bed now. Goodnight.’

They had shared their bed but distantly, each one lying on an extreme edge. Peter woke up very early and got up. He couldn’t lie there wondering if something else had turned up on his land, those children’s bodies, for instance, or clothing or some weapon. He should have asked. But he couldn’t, not with Sharonne looking at him so accusingly. So far she hadn’t said a word about that telephone conversation.

   It was still dark but dawn was coming. A fine precipitation, halfway between drizzle and mist, hung in the greyish air. In Barbour, rubber boots, country gentleman’s tweed cap and gauntlets, he explored the wood, expecting at any moment to see blue and white crime tape showing brightly among the tree trunks. But there was nothing. The Dancing Floor lay passive within its encircling trees, a brighter green than he had ever seen it, quagmire green, bog green, in the increasing light waterdrops glittering on every blade of grass. No one could walk on it at present, still less dance. His search yielding nothing that might be construed as incriminating, he felt a little better and he returned to the house with a renewed appetite for breakfast.

   He was making toast and, in some trepidation, boiling an egg, when Sharonne appeared unprecedentedly early. She had cleaned up her face before going to bed but not removed her eye make-up so that this morning she looked as if she had received a double whammy during the night. In her not very clean white dressing gown and with her hair sticking up in tufts, but not in a fashionable way, she was an unappetising sight.

   ‘You never told me’, she said, ‘who that was on the phone last night.’

   ‘The office,’ he lied.

   ‘You’re never going into the office at eleven this morning?’

   ‘Why not?’

   ‘Well, for a start, what for? You never work on Saturdays. You once said it was a rule, no one in your firm worked on Saturdays or Sundays. Not ever.’

   Peter didn’t answer. He took the pan off the ring and rather clumsily cut the top off his egg. It had boiled hard, the way he disliked it. Sharonne sat down at the table and poured herself some coffee.

   ‘You’re not going to the office, are you? I can read you like a book, Pete. That wasn’t the office on the phone, it was someone else.’

   ‘If you say so.’ He might say much the same to her concerning phone calls, but he didn’t. He was afraid.

   ‘Well, we’re due at the Warrens by twelve thirty at the latest and I hope I don’t need to remind you Trollfield Farm is fifteen miles away. So you’d better not be wherever you’re going for more than half an hour.’ She studied his face, reading him like a book ‘I know who it was,’ she said. ‘It was the police.’

   He shrugged.

   ‘You’re going to Toxborough police station. Well, Trollfield Farm is between here and Toxborough, so that’s all right. What do they want? I thought all that business was over. What have you been doing, Pete?’

   ‘Me? I haven’t done a thing. I never have done. All I did was find a car with a body in it.’

   She stood up, hands on hips. ‘No, that wasn’t all you did. All you did was go and look at it, mess about with something that was no business of yours. All you did was go and tell the police and bring them here so that this place has got a bad name and we’ll never be able to sell it.’

   ‘But you don’t want to sell it!’

   ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. It’d be all the same if I did, you never take any notice of what I want. And now they suspect you of something else. Putting that car there, I expect, and maybe you did. - how would I know? I’d be the last to know.’

   Peter picked a piece of toast out of the toaster and hurled it across the room. He tipped the remains of his egg into the sink. ‘It’s not Toxborough, it’s Kingsmarkham. And there’s no way I can get back here before half past one.’ Like a child, he added, ‘So there!’

   She stared at him, gathering her rage for an outburst.

   ‘And you can’t have the car,’ he said. ‘I want it.’

   ‘If you go to Kingsmarkham,’ she shouted, ‘and I can’t go to the Warrens, I’ll never speak to you again.’

   He found the nerve that had been in abeyance for three years. ‘Good,’ he said.

The single sentence of that altercation that stayed in his mind was the one she had uttered about the police suspecting him of putting the car in the quarry. Maybe they did, he thought as he began the drive to Kingsmarkham, maybe that was what it was all about. But they couldn’t. On what grounds? He didn’t know the dead woman, he didn’t know those missing kids. He should have asked that policeman. But Wexford’s tone had been so cold and repressive that he had sensed he’d get no more out of him on the phone.