Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (8 page)

   A creature of moods, Katrina Dade seemed quite different today, girlish but quiet, withdrawn, her eyes wide and staring. She was sensibly dressed too, wearing trousers and a jumper. Her husband, by contrast, was more expansive and more polite. What was he doing home from work at this hour? They looked as if neither of them had slept much.

   ‘I suppose it’s really come home to us. It wasn’t real before, it was like a bad dream.’ Katrina added wistfully, ‘That drowning business, that was nonsense, wasn’t it? I don’t know what made me think they’d drowned.’

   ‘Quite understandable, Mrs Dade,’ said Burden, earning himself a frown from Wexford. ‘Later on, we’d like to talk to you in greater depth.’ He hoped no one noticed the unintentional pun. Wexford would have, of course. ‘First we should take a look at the room where Ms Troy spent the night or the two nights.’

   ‘She didn’t leave anything behind,’ said Katrina when they were on the stairs. ‘She must have brought a bag but if she did she took it away with her.’

   The room was under one of the steep-roofed gables of the house. Its ceiling was beamed and sharply sloping above the single bed. If you sat up unexpectedly during the night, thought Wexford, you could give your head a nasty bang. What Katrina had said appeared to be true and Joanna had indeed left nothing behind but he watched with approval as Lynn got down on her knees and scanned the floor. There was no en suite bathroom and the built-in clothes cupboard was empty. The drawers in a chest were also empty but for an ear ring in the top one on the left-hand side.

   ‘That isn’t hers,’ Katrina said in her new little girl voice. ‘Joanna never wore earrings.’ Where anyone else might have talked of ‘pierced’ ears, she said, ‘She didn’t have holes in her ears for them to go through.’ She held the single pearl in the palm of her hand, said mischievously as if she hadn’t a care in the world, ‘It must belong to my horrible old ma-in-law. She stayed here in October, the old bat. Shall I throw it away? I bet it’s valuable.’

   No one answered her. Lynn got up from the floor, plainly disappointed, and they all went down the stairs. There the old Katrina returned. She subsided on to a chair in the hail and began to cry. She sobbed that she was ashamed of herself. Why did she talk like that? Her children leaving her was a judgement on her for saying the things she did. Roger Dade came out from the living room with a handful of tissues and put a not very enthusiastic arm round her.

   ‘She’s in such a state,’ he said, ‘she doesn’t know what she saying.’

   Wexford thought the opposite, that while in vino veritas might be true, in miseria veritas, or ‘in grief truth’, certainly was. He didn’t say so. He was watching Lynn who had once more got down on hands and knees, but not in mere speculation this time - she had spotted something. She knelt up and said, like the promising young officer she was, ‘Could I have a new plastic bag, please, sir, and a pair of sterile tweezers?’

   ‘Call Archbold,’ said Wexford. ‘That’s the best way. He’ll bring what’s necessary. It’ll be more efficient than anything we can do without him.’

   ‘But what is it?’ said Dade, gaping, when they were in the living room.

   ‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’ Burden had a pretty good idea but he wasn’t going to say. Not yet. ‘Now, Mrs Dade, do you feel able to tell us something about Ms Troy? We know she’s a translator who’s been a teacher, that she’s thirty-one and been married and divorced. I believe you met her when you were a school secretary and she was teaching at Haldon Finch School?’

   ‘I only did it for a year,’ said Katrina. ‘My husband didn’t like me doing it. I got so tired.’

   ‘You were exhausted, you know you were. Other women may be able to juggle a job and the home but you’re not one of them. Regularly every Friday night you’d have a nervous collapse.’

   He said it lightly but Wexford could imagine those nervous collapses. He very nearly shuddered. ‘When was this, Mrs Dade?’

   ‘Let me think. Sophie was six when I started. It must be seven years. Oh, my darling little Sophie! Where is she? What’s happened to her?’

   Everyone would have liked to answer that. Burden said, ‘We’re doing our best to find her and her brother, Mrs Dade. Telling us whatever you can about Ms Troy is the best way to help us find them. So you met and became friends.’ He added bluntly, ‘She was a good deal your junior.’

   Katrina Dade’s expression was one of a woman who has just been not so much insulted as deeply wounded. If he had unjustly accused her of child cruelty; selling her country’s secrets to a foreign power or breaking and entering her neighbour’s property; she couldn’t have looked more appalled. She countered it with a stammered-out, half- broken, ‘Do you think it’s fair to speak to me like that? Considering what I’m going through? Do you?’

   ‘I’d no intention of upsetting you, Mrs Dade,’ Burden said stiffly. ‘We’ll leave it.’ I know there was a good thirteen years between them, anyway, he thought. ‘Ms Troy gave up teaching some time after that - do you know when?’

   It was a reply sulkily given. ‘Three years ago.’

   ‘Why was that? Why did she give up?’

   Dade broke in. ‘I’m surprised you have to ask. Isn’t the way kids behave at these comprehensives reason enough? The noise, the foul language, the violence. The way no one can keep discipline. A teacher who dares to give a child a little tap gets up before the Human Rights Court. Isn’t that reason enough?’

   ‘I take it Giles and Sophie attend a private school?’ Wexford said.

   ‘You take it right. I believe in the best education for my children and I don’t believe in letting them take it easy. They’ll thank me one day. I’m a stickler for home work promptly done. Both of them have private tutors as well as school.’

   ‘But Ms Troy isn’t one of them?’

   ‘Absolutely not.’

   Before Dade could say any more there came a shrill ringing at the doorbell as if Archbold clutched the bell pull and hung on - as he probably had. Lynn went to let him in.

   Burden resumed, ‘Had Ms Troy come to look after your children on previous occasions?’

   ‘I told you. Roger and I had never been away together all the time we were married. Not till last weekend. If you mean for an evening sometimes while we went out - it didn’t happen often, mind - she’d done that. The last time would have been a month ago, something like that. Oh, and there was one night we went to a dinner-dance in London and she stayed then.’

   ‘I’d hoped this weekend away would be the very last time they’d need a sitter. Giles would have been - will be - sixteen very shortly.’ Roger Dade flushed deeply at what he had said, made it worse: ‘I mean - what I meant to say was...’

   ‘That you think he’s dead!’ Katrina’s tears began afresh.

   Her husband put his head in his hands, muttered from between his fingers, ‘I don’t know what I think. I can’t think straight. This is driving me mad.’ He looked up. ‘How much time am I going to have to take off work over this?’

   Wexford had almost decided he must give up for the day, try some other tack, when Archbold tapped on the door and came in. He had a small sterile pack in his hand, which he held up for Wexford’s inspection. Peering through the transparent stuff of which the envelope was made, he saw something that looked like a small fragment of whitish porcelain, backed with a strip of gold.

   ‘What is it?’

   ‘It looks to me like the crown or cap off a tooth, sir.’

   This fetched Dade out of his despair. He sat up. Katrina scrubbed at her eyes with a tissue. The sealed pack was passed to them, then to Burden and Lynn.

   ‘Did either of your children have crowns in their mouths?’ Burden asked.

   Katrina shook her head. ‘No, but Joanna did. She had two of her teeth crowned. It was years ago. She had a fall in the gym, something like that, and broke her teeth. Then one of the crowns came off when she was eating a caramel. The dentist put it back and Joanna told me he’d said she ought to have them both replaced. He said meantime not to chew gum but she did sometimes.’

   Wexford had never heard her speak so lucidly. He wondered if it was because what they were discussing was something not so much physical and personal as pertaining to the appearance. She would probably talk as informatively on such subjects as diet and exercise, cosmetic surgery and minor ailments, subjects dear to her heart.

   ‘Wouldn’t she notice it had fallen out?’

   ‘She might not,’ Katrina said in the same earnest tone. ‘Not at once. She mightn’t until she sort of wiggled her tongue round her mouth and felt a rough bit.’

   ‘We’d like to come back this afternoon,’ Wexford said, ‘and find out more about the children, their tastes and interests and their friends, and anything more you can tell us about Ms Troy.’

   Dade said in his unpleasantly harsh and scathing voice, ‘Have you never heard that actions speak louder than words?’

   ‘We are acting, Mr Dade.’ Wexford controlled his rising anger. ‘We have all available resources working on the disappearance of your children.’ He hated the terms he was obliged to use. For him they made things worse. What did this man expect? That he and Burden would help matters by personally digging up his back garden or poking into the lakes of water with sticks? ‘You’d surely agree that the best way of discovering where Ms Troy and your children have gone is to find out what they are most likely to do and where they are most likely to go.’

   Dade gave one of his shrugs, more an indication of contempt than helplessness. ‘I shan’t be here, anyway. You’ll have to make do with her.’

   Wexford and Burden got up to go. Archbold and Lynn Fancourt had already left. He meant to say some thing to Katrina but she had so profoundly retreated into herself that it was as if a shell sat there, the outer carapace of a woman with staring but sightless eyes. Her transformation into a rational being had not lasted long.

   The inevitable house-to-house enquiries in Lyndhurst Drive elicited very little. Every householder questioned about the previous weekend spoke of the rain, the torrential, relentless rain. Water may be see-through but rain nevertheless, when descending heavily, creates a grey wall that is no longer transparent but like a thick ever-moving, constantly shifting veil. Moreover, human beings in our climate take a different attitude to weather from those who live in arid countries, being conditioned not to welcome rain but to dislike and turn away from it. That is what those neighbours of the Dades had done once the rain began on the Saturday afternoon. The more it fell, the more they retreated, dosing their curtains. It was noisy too. When at its heaviest it made a continuous low roar that masked other sounds. So the Fowlers who lived on one side of the Dades and the Holloways next door to them had heard and seen nothing. Both families heard their letter boxes open and close when their evening paper, the Evening Courier, was delivered at about six, and both assumed a copy was delivered as usual to Antrim. The neighbours on the other side of the Dades, the first house, in fact, in Kingston Drive, were away for the weekend.

   However, Rita Fowler had seen Giles leave the house on Saturday afternoon before the rain began.

   ‘I can’t remember the time. We’d had our lunch and cleared up. My husband was watching the rugby on TV. It wasn’t raining then.’

   Lynn Fancourt told her it had begun raining just before four but she knew she had seen Giles earlier than that. By four it would have started to get dark and it wasn’t dark when she saw him. Maybe half past two? Or three? Giles had been on his own. She hadn’t seen him return. She hadn’t returned to the front of the house until she went to pick up the evening paper off the doormat.

   ‘Did you see a dark-blue car parked on the Dades’ driveway during the weekend?’

   She had and was proud of her memory. ‘I saw her come - she was the children’s sitter - I saw her come on the Friday evening And I can tell you that car was there when I saw Giles go out.’

   But had it still been there when she picked up the evening paper? She hadn’t noticed, it had been raining so hard. Was it still there next morning? She couldn’t answer that but she knew it hadn’t been there on Sunday afternoon.

   If someone had entered the house in order to abduct Joanna Troy and Giles and Sophie Dade, or somehow to entice them away, it began to look as if this must have happened after the rain began. Or else they had all gone for a drive on Saturday evening, a very unlikely time to go out at all. The teeming rain had kept everyone who didn’t have to leave his or her house firmly indoors. Wexford was turning all this over in his mind and noting how it made the drowning theory less and less probable when Vine came in and held out to him something soaking wet and mud-stained on a tray.

   ‘What is it?’

   ‘It’s a T-shirt, sir. A woman found it in the water in her back garden and brought it in here. It’s got a name printed on it, you see, and that’s what alerted her.’

   Wexford took the garment by the shoulders and lifted it an inch or two out of the muddy water in which it lay. The background was blue and it was smaller but otherwise it was the twin to the red one they had seen in Giles Dade’s cupboard. Only the face was a girl’s and the name on it was ‘Sophie’.

The river floods were at their widest here. The woman who had found the T-shirt said ruefully that when she and her partner had been looking for a home in the neighbourhood, they almost rejected this house because it was so far from the Kingsbrook. ‘Not far enough, evidently.’

   But a good deal further away than Wexford’s. Still, it was also lower-lying and in spite of the rain which had been falling steadily since nine, the tide had reached only about a third of the way up the garden, bringing with it a scummy detritus of plastic bottles, a carrier bag, a Coke can, broken twigs, dead leaves, used condoms, a toothbrush...

   ‘And that T-shirt.’

   ‘You found it here?’

   ‘That’s right. Among all this lot. I saw the name and it rang a bell.’

   Wexford went on home. He was meeting Burden for a ‘quick’ lunch but he wanted to see the new wall first. It wasn’t necessary to go outside. No one would go out side today if he didn’t have to. Four tiers of sandbags on each side raised the height of the walls by two feet but the swirling water hadn’t yet quite reached the bottom of the lowest tier.