Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (7 page)

   Now Chapman was looking puzzled by Wexford’s anecdote. He said in his nasal Birmingham tones, ‘I don’t see the point of that. What does it mean?’

   Wexford tried to tell him. He explained how the theatre was virtually the playwright’s own, that his plays had all been performed there, he had put his heart and soul into it and now, before his eyes, it was being destroyed.

   ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

   ‘It’s an example of panache, light-hearted bravado in the face of tragedy.’

   ‘I just don’t see it.’

   Sylvia laughed again, quite unfazed. ‘Maybe by tomorrow Dad’ll be having a drink beside his own pond. Let’s go, Cal. The sitter will be fidgeting.’

   ‘Cal,’ said Wexford when they had gone. ‘Cal.’

   ‘She calls him “darling” too,’ said Dora mischievously. ‘Oh, don’t look so gloomy. I don’t suppose she’ll marry him. They’re not even living together, not really.’

   ‘What does “not really” mean?’

   She didn’t deign to answer. He knew she wouldn’t. ‘She says he’s kind. When be stays the night he makes her morning tea and gets the breakfast.’

   ‘That won’t last,’ said Wexford. ‘That New Men stuff never does. He reminds me of that Augustine Casey Sheila once brought here. The Booker shortlist bloke. Oh, I know he’s not in the least like him. I admit he’s not so obnoxious and he’s got a pretty face. But he’s not clever either or entertaining or . . .’

   ‘Or rude,’ said Dora.

   ‘No, it’s not that he’s like Casey, it’s just that I don’t understand why my daughters take up with these sorts of men. Ghastly men. Sheila’s Paul’s not ghastly, I’ll grant you that. He’s just so handsome and charming I can’t believe he won’t be off chasing some other woman. It’s not natural to look like him and be neither gay nor unfaithful to your wife or partner or whatever. I can’t help suspecting him of having a secret life.’

   ‘You’re impossible.’

   She sounded cross, not teasing or indulgent any more. He went to the window to look at the water, illuminated now by his neighbour’s lamp, and at the steadily falling insistent rain. Not long now. Another half-inch or whatever that was in millimetres and it would be at the wall. Another inch...

   ‘You said you wanted to see the news.’

   ‘I’m coming.’

   Just the bare facts coming after another rail crash, chaos on the railways, congestion on the roads, another child murdered in the north, another newborn baby left in a phone box. Just an announcement that the three were missing, then their photographs much magnified. A phone number was given for the public to call if they had information. Wexford sighed, thinking he knew well the kind of information they would have.

   ‘Tell me something. Why would a bright, good looking, middle-class teenage boy, a boy with a comfortable home who goes to a good school, why would he join a fundamentalist church? His parents don’t go there. His friends don’t.’

   ‘Perhaps it provides him with answers, Reg. Teenagers want answers. Lots of them find modern life revolts them. They think that if everything became more simple and straightforward, more fundamentalist, in fact, the world would be a better place. Maybe it would. Mostly they don’t care for ritual and facts that ought to be plain covered up in archaic words they can’t understand. He’ll grow out of it and I don’t know if that’s a shame or something to be thankful about.’

   He woke up in the night. It was just after three and rain was still falling. He went downstairs, into the dining room and over to the french windows. The lamp was out but when he turned out the light behind him and his eyes grew used to the dark he could see out well enough. The water had moved up to lap the wall.

Two men were unloading sacks of something on to the police station forecourt. For a moment Wexford couldn’t think what. Then he understood. He parked the car, went inside and asked Sergeant Camb at the desk, ‘What do we want sandbags for? There’s no possible chance of the floods reaching here.’

   No one could answer him. The driver of the truck came in with a note acknowledging receipt of the sand bags and Sergeant Peach came out from the back to sign it. ‘Though what we’re to do with them I don’t know.’ He looked at Wexford. ‘You’re not far from the river, are you, sir?’ He spoke in a wheedling tone, though half jokingly. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like a few. Take them off our hands?’

   In the same style, Wexford said, ‘I wouldn’t mind helping you out, Sergeant.’

   Ten minutes later four dozen had been loaded into a van Pemberton drove to Wexford’s home. He phoned his wife. ‘I can’t get home to put up the fortifications till this evening.’

   ‘Don’t worry darling. Cal and Sylvia are here and Cal’s going to do it.’

   Cal.. . He didn’t know what to say and came up with an ineffectual, ‘That’s good.’

   It was. Especially as it was once more pouring with rain. Wexford checked on the calls they had received as a result of the media publicity but there was nothing helpful, not even anything that seemed the suggestion of a sane person. Burden came in and told him the out come of calls on the various friends and relatives of the missing children. In the main, negative. Giles’s and Sophie’s maternal grandparents lived at Berningham on the Suffolk coast, where in the seventies and eighties had been a large United States Air Force base. They seemed to get on well with their grandchildren but they hadn’t seen either of them since September when they came to stay in Berningham for a week.

   Roger Dade’s mother, remarried since her divorce from his father, was apparently a favourite with the children. Her home was a village in the Cotswolds and she lived alone. The last time she had seen them was at their half-term in October when she had stayed for three nights with the Dades, leaving under some sort of cloud. A quarrel, Burden had gathered, though no details had been given. Katrina Dade was an only child.

   ‘How about Joanna Troy?’

   ‘No siblings,’ said Burden. ‘The present Mrs Troy has two children by a previous marriage. Joanna’s been married and divorced. The marriage lasted less than a year. We haven’t traced her ex-husband yet.’

   Wexford said thoughtfully, ‘The answer to all this is with Joanna Troy, don’t you think? I don’t see how it can be otherwise. A boy of fifteen isn’t going to be able to persuade a woman of thirty-one to take him and his sister off somewhere without telling their parents or leaving any clue to where they were going. It has to be her plan and her decision. Nor can I see how she could have taken them away without criminal intent.’

   ‘That’s a bit sweeping.’

   ‘Is it? All right, give me a scenario that covers everything and in which Joanna Troy is innocent.’

   ‘Drowning would be.’

   ‘They didn’t drown, Mike. Even if it remained a possibility, what became of her car? Or, rather, her dad’s car. Who fell in and who rescued whom? If by a huge stretch of the imagination you can get that far, isn’t it a bit odd they all drowned? Wouldn’t one have survived, especially in four feet of water?’

   ‘You can make anything sound ridiculous,’ Burden said peevishly. ‘You’re always doing it. I’m not sure it’s a virtue.’

   Wexford laughed. ‘You and Barry went to her house. ‘Where’s your report on that?’

   ‘On your desk. Under a mountain of stuff. You haven’t penetrated to it yet. I’ll tell you about it if you like.’

   It was a very small house, a living room and kitchen on the ground floor, two bedrooms and a bathroom above, part of a row of eight called Kingsbridge Mews put up by a speculative builder in the eighties.

   ‘As Dade said, the car was kept outside in the front,’ said Burden. ‘Needless to say, it’s not there now.’

   Inside the house it was cold. Joanna Troy had apparently switched off the central heating before she left on Friday. She was either naturally frugal or obliged to make economies. Vine found her passport too. It was inside a desk which held little else of interest. There were no letters, no vehicle registration document, no certificate of insurance, though these of course would have been with her father, nothing pertaining to a mort gage. Insurance policies for the house itself and for its contents were also in the drawer. A large envelope contained certificates acknowledging a degree in French from the University of Warwick, a Master’s Degree in European Literature from the University of Birmingham and a diploma Burden said was the Postgraduate Certificate in Education. Upstairs one of the bedrooms had been turned into an office with computer and printer, a photocopier, a sophisticated recording device and two large filing cabinets. The walls were lined with books, in this room mostly French and German fiction and dictionaries.

   ‘Vine says she has all those French books you found in Giles’s bedroom. Lettres de mon something and Emile Zola and whatever the other one was. Mind you, she’s got about a hundred others in French too.’

   On the desk, to the left of the PC had lain a set of page proofs of a novel in French. To the right were pages in English, fresh from Joanna Troy’s printer. She had apparently been engaged in the work of translation on the day she left for Lyndhurst Drive and her weekend with the Dade children. In the bedroom Burden had looked with interest at her clothes.

   ‘You would,’ said Wexford nastily, eyeing Burden’s slate-blue suit, lighter blue shirt and deep-purple slub silk tie. Not for a moment would anyone have taken him for a policeman.

   ‘To my mind,’ Burden said in a distant tone, ‘dressing decently is one of the markers of civilisation.’

   ‘OK, OK, depends what you mean by “decently”. You found something funny about her clothes, I can see it in your beady eye.’

   ‘Well, yes, I did. I think so. Everything in her wardrobe was casual, everything. And I mean really casual. Not a single skirt or dress, for instance. Jeans, chinos, Dockers. . .'

   ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what these things are,’ Wexford interrupted.

   ‘Then leave it to me. I have. T-shirts, shirts, sweaters, jackets, pea coats, padded coats, a fleece.

   'All right, I know you don’t know what that is either. Take it from me, it’s not something a woman would wear to a party The point is she’d nothing she could wear to a party nothing dress-up, except possibly one pair of black trousers. “What did she do if someone asked her out to dinner or a theatre?’

   ‘I’ve been to theatres, even to the National when my daughter Sheila’s been in something, and there’ve been women dressed as if about to muck out the pigpen. For all you being such a fashionista you don’t seem to realise this isn’t the nineteen thirties. But you’ll say that’s beside the point. I agree it’s odd. It just adds to what I’ve been thinking already. We need to go back to the Dades, search the place, get a team in there if necessary. Those children have been missing four days by now, Mike.’

   It was a short drive to the house called Antrim’ but Wexford asked Donaldson the driver to make a detour and take in some of the flooded areas. Heavy rain was falling, the water was still rising and of the Kingsbrook Bridge only the parapet rails still showed above the water.

   ‘It’s a good deal more than four feet deep there,’ said Burden.

   ‘It is now. Wherever they are and whatever they’ve been doing, they haven’t been hanging about waiting for the water to get deep enough to drown themselves in.’

   Burden made an inarticulate noise indicative of finding a remark in bad taste, and DC Lynn Fancourt, who was sitting in front next to Donaldson, cleared her throat. There were mysteries about the Chief Inspector she hadn’t yet solved in her two years attached to Kingsmarkham Crime Management. How was it possible, for instance, to find such irreconcilables bunched together in one man’s character? How could one man be liberal, compassionate, sensitive, well-read and at the same time ribald, derisive, sardonic and flippant about serious things? Wexford had never been nasty to her, not the way he could be to some people, but she was afraid of him just the same. In awe of him, might be a better way to put it.

   Not that she’d have admitted it to a soul. Sitting there in the front of the car, trying to see out of the passenger window down which rain was streaming, she knew it was wisest for her to keep silent unless spoken to, and no one spoke to her. Donaldson made the detour required of all vehicles when they approached the bridge, splashing up York Street and then following the one-way system.

   Wexford was a stickler for duty. And exacting obedience from his subordinates. Lynn had once been disobedient, it was during the investigation of the Devenish murder that somehow got mixed up with the paedophile demos, and Wexford had spoken to her in a way that made her shiver. It was only justice, not nastiness, she admitted that, and it had taught her something. About a police officer’s duty, for one thing, and it was because of this that she was all the more astonished when Wexford told Donaldson to drive first up the road where his own house was and drop him off for two minutes.

   Wexford let himself in with his key, called out but got no reply. He went through to the dining room. Outside the french window, in driving rain, Dora, Sylvia and Callum Chapman were raising the height of the two little walls with sandbags, evidently working as fast as they could, for the water was creeping up the walls. The sandbags had arrived just in time. Wexford tapped on the glass, then opened one of the side windows.

   ‘Thanks for what you’re doing,’ he called to Callum.

   ‘My pleasure.’

   That it could hardly be. Sylvia, who had been much nicer and easier to get on with since her divorce, held on to her boyfriend’s shoulder and, standing on one leg, took off her boot, pouring water out of it. ‘Speak for yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m hating every minute of it and so is Mother.’

   ‘It could be worse. Just think, if the ground floor floods we shall have to come and stay with you.’

   He shut the window, went back to the car. He wondered if his daughter was still doing voluntary work for that women’s refuge in addition to her job with the local authority. She must be or Dora would have told him, but he must ask. It would be a relief to know she wasn’t, that she was removed from a situation where being assaulted by other women’s rejected husbands or partners was always a risk. He got in next to Burden and within two minutes they were at ‘Antrim’.