Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (17 page)

   Jacqueline achieved a tiny smile, shaking her head. ‘Poor Ludo. But it may have been all for the best. He wouldn’t have lasted long anyway, never have made old bones.’

   ‘People don’t cease to amaze me,’ said Wexford as they went down the steep dark staircase.

   ‘Me too. I mean, me neither. There’s another set of parents to see and maybe the boy too. The one she may or may not have stolen the twenty-pound note from.’

   ‘Not today. He’ll keep. I have to pay my usual visit to the Dades. You can come if you want. And while I’m there I want to look in on those Holloways. There’s been something niggling at the back of my mind for days, something the boy’s mother said and he denied.’

   Roger Dade was at home. He answered the door, saying nothing but looking at them the way one might look at a couple of teenagers come to ask for their ball back for the fifth time. Katrina was lying down, her face buried in cushions.

   ‘How are you?’

   ‘How d’you expect?’ said Dade. ‘Bloody miserable and out of our minds with worry.’

   ‘I’m not worried,’ came the muffled voice of Katrina. ‘I’m past that. I’m mourning.’

   ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Dade.

   ‘Mr Dade,’ said Wexford. ‘We have been trying to construct the events of that Saturday. Your son appears to have gone out in the afternoon on his own. Do you know where he might have gone?’

   ‘How should I know? Shopping, probably. Taking advantage of my absence. These kids are always shopping when they get the chance. They don’t get much chance when I’m home, I can tell you. I can hardly think of a more time-wasting empty occupation.’

   Wexford nodded. He fancied Burden looked a little awkward, shopping being a pastime he rather enjoyed. If Giles Dade had been to the shops, what had he bought? This was almost impossible to say. One didn’t know which of the objects in his room were old, newish or brand-new and he was sure Dade wouldn’t.

   ‘One of his friends, Scott Holloway, your neighbours’ son, left a message on your phone and phoned several times after that without getting a reply. He intended to come round and take Giles back to hear some new CDs. Was he a frequent visitor?’

   Dade looked exasperated. ‘I thought I’d made it clear my children don’t have frequent visitors or go to other people’s houses. They don’t have time.’

   Suddenly Katrina sat up. She seemed to have forgotten that she had recently called her ‘best and dearest friend’ a murderer. ‘I was able to do Joanna a good turn there. I recommended her when Peter wanted someone to tutor Scott in French.’

   ‘Peter?’ said Burden.

   ‘Holloway,’ said Dade. ‘Giles, needless to say, need help with his French.’

   ‘And she did tutor him?’

   ‘For a while.’ Katrina put on a schadenfreude face. I felt so sorry for those poor Holloways. Joanna said Scott was hopeless.’

   Dade’s insults, on the lines of how ineffectual and unprofessional they were, accompanied them to the door.

   ‘Funny, really,’ said Wexford as they walked the fifty yards to the Holloways, ‘I don’t mind what he says nearly as much as a milder jibe from Callum Chapman. It seems an inseparable part of his character, I suppose, the way’, he added mischievously, ‘shopping and natty dressing is of yours.’

   ‘Thanks very much.’

   The Holloways’ doorbell was virtually unreachable owing to the garland of red poinsettias, green leaves and gold ribbon hanging in front of it. They were well in advance of others in the street with their Christmas decorations. A wreath of holly hung over the cast-iron door knocker but Burden managed to insert his fingers under it and give it a double bang.

   ‘Goodness,’ Mrs Holloway looked severe. ‘What a noise that makes!’ As if they were responsible for the poinsettias. ‘Did you want Scott again?’

   The boy was coming down the stairs, ducking his head under a bunch of mistletoe, hung there no doubt to catch kissable callers. They all went into a living room as glittery and bauble-hung as the Christmas section of a department store.

   ‘Doesn’t it look lovely?’ said Mrs Holloway. ‘Scott and his sisters did it all themselves.’

   ‘Very nice,’ said Wexford. It surely wasn’t his imagination that the boy appeared terrified. His hands were actually shaking and, to control them, he pressed the palms into his knees. ‘Now, Scott, there’s no need to be nervous. You only have to tell us the simple truth.’

   Scott’s mother interrupted. ‘What on earth do you mean? Of course he’ll tell the truth. He always does. All my children are truthful.’

   What a paragon he must be, thought Wexford, more than that, a superhuman being. Did anyone always tell the truth? ‘Did you call at Giles’s house that Saturday afternoon, Scott?’ Scott shook his head and Mrs Holloway fired up. ‘If he said he didn’t go he didn’t and that’s all there is to it.’

   ‘I didn’t,’ whispered Scott and, rather more loudly, ‘I didn’t.’

   Burden nodded. He said in a gentle tone, ‘It is only that we are trying to reconstruct what happened that day at the Dades’ house, who called, who came and went and so on. If you had been there you might have been able to help us but since you say you didn’t...’

   ‘I didn’t.’

   ‘I expect you know that Miss Troy, Joanna Troy, is also missing. She gave you private coaching -, did they use that term any more? ‘- in French?’

   ‘Scott and my daughter Kerry.’ Mrs Holloway had evidently decided, with some justification, that Scott was unfit to answer any more questions. ‘Scott only had three sessions with her, he couldn’t get on with her. Kerry didn’t like her - no one seemed to like her - but she got something from what she was taught. At any rate, she passed her exam.’

   There was no more to be done. ‘I know the boy is lying,’ Wexford said as they got back into the car. ‘I just wonder why. And what’s he so afraid of? We’ll go home now. What I want to do tonight is think about it all and see if I can come up with some reasonable idea of where that car can be. It’s been our stumbling block all the way. And yet, apart from every force in the country looking for it, we haven’t done much to construct a workable theory for its whereabouts.’

   ‘We’ve heard about a boy falling off a cliff into the sea. Maybe she pushed him and later on maybe she pushed her car over.’

   ‘Not on the south coast she didn’t said Wexford. ‘It’s not like the west coast of Scotland where you might drive a car right up to the edge. Can you imagine doing that somewhere around Eastbourne? I’ll think about it. I’m going to go home and think about it. Drop me off, will you, Jim?’

   It is, in fact, very difficult to sit down in a chair, even if it’s quiet and you’re alone, and concentrate on one particular subject. As men and women trying to pray or meditate have found, there is much to distract your thoughts, a human voice from outside the room or in the street, traffic noise, ‘the buzzing of a fly’, as John Donne said. Wexford wasn’t trying to pray, only to find the solution to a problem, but after he had sat for half an hour, had once dozed off, once forced himself to stay awake, and twice felt his thoughts drift off towards Sylvia and the possibility of more flooding, he acknowledged his failure. Concentration is more easily achieved while going for a long walk. But it was raining, some times only lightly and sometimes lashing down, and the vagaries of the rain had been another factor in disrupting his train of thought. He had no more idea of what had happened to George Trots dark-blue VW Golf four-door saloon, index number LCO2 YMY, than when he first sat down.

   In the night he dreamed of it, one of those mad chaotic dreams in which bizarre metamorphosis is the rule. The car, driven by a vaguely male driver, was ahead of him on some arterial road but when it moved into a lay-by and parked it changed into an elephant which stood placidly chomping the leaves of an apple tree. The driver had disappeared. He had some idea of climbing on to the elephant’s back but again it had changed, wriggling its outlines into a Trojan Horse of dark-blue shiny coachwork, and as he stared, one of the four doors in its side opened and a woman and two children climbed out. Before he could see their faces he woke up.

   It wasn’t the kind of wakefulness you know will soon give place to sleep once more. He would lie there sleepless for at least an hour. So he got up, found the Complete Plays of George Bernard Shaw and turned to Androcles and the Lion. More whimsical than he remembered - it was thirty-five years since he had read it - deeply dated and the sentiments, which may have seemed new when it was written, now stale. There were only two women’s parts, Megaera, Androcles’s wife, and Lavinia, the beautiful Christian. This latter must have been played by Joanna Troy. What then of Ludovic Brown? The only young boy’s part was that of the Call Boy who had six or seven lines to speak. That surely would have been Ludovic’s.

   At some point, perhaps when Lavinia was flirting with the Captain, a scene likely to make fourteen-year-old boys snigger, he had made a face and stuck out his tongue. Or he had done so on one of the occasions when he had to come on to call a gladiator or lion’s victim into the arena. And for this Joanna had beaten him mercilessly? Where did the story of insulting Joanna’s mother come from? It was pretty obvious this was just the version Joanna had given her husband. It made the attack on Ludovic more justifiable. All he had really done was stick out his tongue at her.

   Wexford went back to bed, slept, woke at seven. The first words that came into his mind were: the car is somewhere on private land. It is on an estate, the park-land of a great house, the wild untended grounds of some neglected demesne. Somewhere no one goes for long months in the winter. She drove it there and abandoned it. Because there were ineradicable things inside, stains, damage, incriminating evidence - or the children’s bodies.

George Troy tried to supply an answer and failed, diverting from the central enquiry into all kinds of irrelevant by-paths. These threaded their way through properties he had visited owned by the National Trust, great houses such as Chatsworth and Blenheim he had always wanted to see but never had the time for and a stretch of Scottish moorland where a distant cousin, long-dead, had been shot in the leg while injudiciously walking there during a shoot. His wife, not Vine, finally cut him short with a, ‘That’s very interesting, darling, but not quite what the sergeant wants just at present.’

   ‘This moorland,’ said Vine, ‘where your cousin was, was it family-owned? I mean, did someone he knew or was related to own it?’

   ‘Good heavens, no,’ said Effie Troy, who had evidently heard the story before, perhaps many times before. ‘The Troys aren’t in that sort of league. This cousin came from Morecambe and, anyway, it was in nineteen twenty-six.’

   Vine wasn’t surprised. ‘So Joanna -, he had graduated to calling her Joanna since no one seemed to object ‘- didn’t know anyone who owned a large country property?’

   ‘Not to say “know”. The nearest she ever came to anyone like that was when she was giving GCSE candidates extra coaching for their exams. There was a girl, I can’t remember what she was called -, Mrs Troy looked as if she would like to have asked her husband for help but knew what the result would be ‘- Julia something, Judith something. Joanna didn’t care for her, said she was rude. Her parents owned Saltram House, probably still do. You know that big house that was completely refurbished ten or fifteen years back in about twenty acres? It’s on the Forby road. What was their name?’

   ‘Greenwell,’ said Vine. As part of a general search of estates in the neighbourhood, Saltram House and grounds had already been visited and the Greenwells interviewed. ‘There’s nowhere Joanna herself liked to go to? She wouldn’t necessarily have to know the owners and it wouldn’t have to be around here. A place where she went walking where there were public footpaths?’

   ‘She isn’t much for walking,’ said George Troy, no longer suppressible. ‘She’d go running, or jogging as they call it nowadays, or race-walking I think some would say. Not that she or anyone else would go a distance to a footpath on private land to do that. No, you can’t imagine anyone doing that, not if they had ample jogging or running space at home. When she wanted exercise she’d go to the gym, as they call it, short for “gymnasium” of course. She told me it comes from a Greek word meaning “to strip naked”. Not that she did strip naked, of course not. Joanna is always decently dressed, isn’t she, Effie? We’ve seen her in shorts, in hot weather that is, and possibly she wears shorts for this gym. Whatever she does wear, there’s no doubt that’s where she gets her exercise, at the gym.’

   He paused to draw breath and Effie cut in swiftly, ‘We really can’t help you, I’m afraid. Joanna was born in the country and most of her life she’d lived in it but I wouldn’t call her a country person, not really. The environment, farming, wildlife, that sort of thing didn’t much interest her.’

   ‘You’ll let us know when you find her, won’t you?’ George Troy, who seemed to have abandoned worrying about his daughter, spoke as if Kingsmarkham Police and forces all over the country were looking for an umbrella he had mislaid on a bus. ‘When she turns up, wherever she is? We’d like to know.’

   ‘You may be sure of that, sir,’ said Vine, trying to keep the grimness out of his voice.

   ‘That’s good to know, isn’t it, Effie? It’s good to know they’ll keep us informed. I was worried at first, we were both worried. My wife was as worried as I was. She’s not your typical stepmother, you know, no, not at all. She was a family friend while my poor dear first wife was alive, she was in fact Joanna’s godmother. Godmother and stepmother, that can’t be a very usual combination, what do you think? Effie’s both, you see, godmother and stepmother. Poor Joanna was only sixteen when her mother died, terrible thing for a young girl, she was disturbed by it, very badly disturbed, and there was nothing I could do. Effie did everything. Along came Effie like an angel, completely saved Joanna, she was mother as well as godmother and stepmother, all three she was, and I’m not exaggerating when I say she saved Joanna’s sanity...’

   But at this point Barry Vine, feeling as if he had been hit over the head with something large and heavy shut off his hearing. He sat, as Wexford might have paraphrased it, like patience on a monument smiling at these streams of pointless drivel, until Effie released him by springing to her feet and repeating her last words, ‘We really can’t help you, I’m afraid.’