Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (21 page)

   ‘She’s already said she made a mistake about that.’

   ‘Did Mr Bellini make a mistake too? When Inspector Burden spoke to him on his home phone at nine last evening, he seemed very sure of what you’d told him.’

   Peter Buxton affected to sigh impatiently. ‘What does all this matter? I came down here. To my own house. Is there something unusual in that? I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t breaking and entering. This is my house. I’ve a perfect right to be here. I found a car in the woods and told the police. What’s wrong with that?’

   ‘On the face of it, nothing. It sounds very public-spirited. But when did you first see the car in the quarry? Was it the last time you came here? Was it the weekend of Saturday, December the second, just under three weeks ago?’

   ‘I don’t know what you’re insinuating.’ Buxton jumped to his feet and pointed out of the window. ‘What are all those people doing on my land? Who are they? What are they looking for?’

   ‘First of all, they are not on your land. They are on Mr Mitchell’s land. They are police officers and conscientious members of the public helping them in the search for two missing children. We should like to search your land also. I’ve no doubt there’ll be no objection on your part.’

   ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Buxton. ‘I don’t know at all. Here’s my wife. We’re of one mind on this. We resent being kept here, we want to go home.’

   Sharonne Buxton was of a type Wexford had never found attractive, belonging as he did to the class of men who admire sweeter-faced, darker, livelier women with hour-glass figures, but he acknowledged her beauty A less sullen and contemptuous expression would have improved her. Instead of a ‘Good morning’, ‘hello’ or even ‘hi’, she said in a voice and with an accent that required but hadn’t received the same honing and polishing as her face and body, ‘You don’t need us here. We’ve engagements in London. It’s Christmas or hadn’t you noticed?’

   Wexford ignored her. He said to her husband, ‘Thank you for your permission. The search is very important and the searchers will be as careful of your property as possible’

   ‘I didn’t give permission. And I shan’t. Not unless you let us go. That’s a fair exchange, isn’t it? Let us return to London and you can search the place until the New Year for all I care.’

   Wexford, who had been looking at his notes, snapped the book shut. He felt like paraphrasing Through the Looking Glass with a, ‘Police officers don’t make bargains.’ Instead he said, ‘In that case I shall apply for a warrant. I have no powers to force you to stay here but I think I should remind you that obstructing the police in the course of their enquiries is an offence.’

   ‘We’ll stay,’ said Sharonne Buxton, ‘But we’d like it to go on record that we didn’t want the place searched or any of you here.’

It was Burden who attended the post-mortem. For a man of such fastidious tastes and sleek appearance, he was surprisingly unmoved by the sight of an autopsy. He watched it impassively with much the same attitude as anyone else viewing a hospital sitcom on television.

   Wexford, who felt differently, but was accustomed by now to hiding those feelings, arrived when it was nearly over. Hilary, Lord Tremlett, whose macabre sense of humour had increased with his elevation to the peerage, was at the stage of talking about bagging up the dead mutton and doing a ‘quickie facelift’ for the ‘benefit of the relatives. He seemed to find it hugely amusing that the dentist who had looked in to check the dentition against his chart and to match the crown, unused to such sights, had retched and required a glass of water before he could look inside the cadaver’s mouth.

   ‘It’s her, though,’ said Burden, as callous as Tremlett in his attitude to the poor dentist. ‘It’s Joanna Troy.’

   ‘I shall get Effie Troy to look just the same,’ Wexford said, remembering certain misidentifications in the past. ‘She’s a sensible woman and Lord Tremlett’s tidied up the face. So what did she die of?’

   Tremlett began stripping off his gloves. ‘A blow to the head. Death would have been instantaneous. Could have been inflicted with that dear old standby, the blunt instrument, but I think not. I favour a fall and a striking of her head against something hard, possibly the ground, but not soft ground. Not that famous wood of yours, that wouldn’t have killed her, more likely sucked her in, like the quagmire in The Hound of the Baskerviles.’

   ‘Could it have been the car itself?’ Wexford asked. ‘I  mean, when the car went over the quarry could she have struck her head on the windscreen with sufficient force to kill her?’

   ‘Your people can tell you more about that. Marks on the screen and whatever. But I doubt it. I doubt if she was driving the car. I doubt it very much. It’s a crying shame I didn’t get to see her sooner, she’s been dead a month.’

   ‘You would have done if I’d had a say in it,’ said Wexford. But thanks to that clown. . . ‘Did the fall or the blow knock the crown off her tooth?’

   ‘How do I know? I’m not an orthodontist. A common butcher, that’s me. It might have. I can’t say. There was nothing else wrong with her and she wasn’t pregnant. You’ll get it all in appropriate language you won’t understand a word of when I’ve done my report.’

   ‘I can’t stand that man,’ said Burden when they were back in Wexford’s office. ‘Give me the other one - what’s he called? Mavrikiev - any time.’

   ‘You’re not alone in that. What was she doing in Passingham Hall woods, Mike, why was she there? I had a look around after that fool Buxton had tried to make a bargain with me. I went up to the quarry and walked about in the wood. There’s a great rather beautiful - well, it’d be beautiful in the spring - kind of open space in the middle, all ringed by trees, but there’s nothing else except the quarry and more trees. If she wasn’t driving, who was? And where are Giles and Sophie Dade?’

   ‘The search is well under way. And we’ll have that warrant by this afternoon to search Buxton’s grounds.’

   ‘By which time it’ll be getting dark. I’m glad I kept Buxton there, I’ll keep him over Christmas, I’ll keep him till the New Year if I can. I’m not usually vindictive but I’d like to lock him up.’

   ‘The divine Sharonne will have to drive to the nearest supermarket and buy herself a frozen turkey,’ said Burden, ‘and a Christmas pud in a packet and cook it all herself.’

   ‘If I were a religious man I’d say God is not mocked.’

   That afternoon it began to snow. This was the first snow to fall on Kingsmarkham and points eastward for seven years. The search of Rick Mitchell’s land was called off at three thirty and the searchers, Kent police, mid-Sussex police and Passingham St John villagers, all adjourned to the Mitchells’ large farmhouse kitchen. There Rick regaled them with mugs of tea (whisky laced), newly baked scones and Dundee cake, and a spiteful account of his treatment at the hands of Peter Buxton the previous morning. It was a tale of ingratitude, snobbery and the contempt of the town dweller for honest country yeomen. If Buxton thought he, Rick, was going to sell him even half an acre of his land he had another think coming. As for Sharonne, according to Mrs Mitchell, a large woman in leggings and shocking-pink sweatshirt, she was ‘common as dirt’ and only in it for the money. She’d give that marriage another year at most.

   It was still snowing when they left, the world was glowing white in the dusk, any bodies or newly dug graves obscured. During the evening, according to the meteorologist doing the weather forecast after the ten o’clock news, 12.7 centimetres of snow fell. This was a figure understood by only that segment of the population under sixteen. Wexford looked it up and found it was five inches. He waited until Dora had gone to bed and then he wrapped up the scent he’d bought her, the silver-framed photograph of her four grandchildren, the two boys and the two girls, and the pink silk jacket Burden had promised him would fit her. Gift-wrapping wasn’t his forte and he didn’t make much of a job of it. Dora was asleep when he got upstairs. He hid the presents in the back of his wardrobe and went to bed, lying there sleepless for a while, wondering if there would be more floods when the thaw came.

George Troy’s car yielded a harvest of information. Fingerprints were all over its interior, most of them Joanna’s. But if you had relied on prints to show you who had been driving it you would have concluded no one had, for the steering wheel, automatic shift rod and windscreen showed nothing. All had been carefully wiped. The car was untidy, books on the back seat, books and papers on the floor, chocolate papers, a half-drunk bottle of water in one of the rear door pockets, screwed-up credit card chits from petrol sales. The glove compartment held sunglasses, two ballpoint pens, a notepad, a comb and two paper-wrapped barley sugar sweets. Hairs from those back seats belonged to Joanna, the rest possibly to George Troy and his wife. A hair on the floor in the front was dark brown, a fine young hair, that could have come from the head of Sophie Dade. It had gone to the lab with hairs from her own hairbrush for comparison.

   In the boot was an overnight bag, small, dark-blue in colour, with the intials ‘JRT’ in white on one side. Inside it were a pair of clean black jeans, a clean white T-shirt, a clean white bra and pants, a pair of grey socks, a grey wool cardigan, and two used bras with two used pairs of pants and two used pairs of socks in a Marks and Spencer’s carrier bag. The sponge bag in the bottom held a toothbrush, a tin of baby powder, a sachet of shampoo and a spray bottle of very expensive perfumed cologne, Dior’s Forever and Ever. That cologne surprised Wexford. Unless the bag had contained a couture evening gown, it was the last thing he had expected to find there.

   The clothing of the body itself had puzzled him. A pair of black trainers were on the feet but only a barely knee-length pale-blue T-shirt covered it and this was of the kind made for a very large man. Nothing else, no underwear, no socks. If she had sprayed herself with Forever and Ever, no trace of its scent remained.

Effie Troy went to the mortuary two days before Christmas and identified the body as that of her step daughter, Joanna Rachel Troy. She did it calmly, with out flinching, but when she turned away and the face was covered once more, she was very pale. Wexford accompanied her home to Forest Road and spent half an hour with the bereaved father. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to George Troy that something as seriously terrible as this, the worst thing, might have happened to his daughter. He had never contemplated it. She’d be all right, she was a sensible girl, she knew what she was doing. At first he was disbelieving, then shocked beyond words, literally beyond them for the founts and streams of speech so characteristic of him were dried up by horror. He could only stare at Wexford, his mouth open, his head shaking. His wife had tried to prepare him but he had taken her caution and her warning as referring to her being in some sort of trouble with the law or having left the country for some suspect reason. That she might be dead, and dead by violence, he had refused to con front, and the news had blasted him.

   Wexford saw him as being in the best hands and he left, telling Effie Troy of the counselling available to her and her husband, and of other sources of help, though he had little faith in this himself. Next to the Dades, up to Lyndhurst Drive, past houses with cypress trees in front gardens hung with fairy lights, Christmas trees in windows, paper chains, angels and cribs just visible in interiors. Nothing in the windows of Antrim, not a light showing on this gloomy overcast morning. He had to tell the Dades there was still nothing known of the whereabouts of their son and daughter, though the body of Joanna Troy had been found. But no news is good news and this was better than what he had had to tell Joanna’s father.

   They bombarded him with queries, Katrina pleadingly, Roger rudely. His question as to why the police had made the effort to find Joanna but not his children was one Wexford had never been asked before in comparable circumstances. He didn’t want to stress that the search at Passingham St John was continuing because it sounded as if it was bodies they searched for, as indeed it was, but he had to say it, reducing Katrina to weeping. Her departure from the room in tears was a cue he couldn’t afford to miss but he braced himself for the storm which must inevitably follow. He came out with it bluntly.

   ‘Have you ever had reason to believe Joanna Troy was in love with you?’

   ‘What’ is easy to say, Wexford thought. ‘You heard me, Mr Dade. Have you? Did you have any interest in her yourself? Were you attracted?’

   Dade began roaring like a lion, his actual words indecipherable, his articulation entirely lost. Katrina could be heard, sobbing in the kitchen.

   ‘Good morning,’ Wexford said, and added more gently, ‘I shall want to talk to you again soon.’

On Christmas Eve more snow fell and the hunt for the children was temporarily suspended. As yet there was no sign of them, nothing of theirs that might have given a clue as to where they were.

   Late that day Wexford was told from the lab that the hair was not Sophie Dade’s but had come from the head of some unknown child. He wondered why the perpetrator had brought Joanna’s bag in the car but nothing for the children.

It was less the enjoyment of their own festivities in peace that kept Wexford and his officers from pursuing their enquiries on Christmas Day than a sense of the wrongness of such action, the outrage of intruding even on the Troys and the Dades at that time. To him Christmas had never afforded much pleasure and he took no joy in a white one. But Dora did and the sight of their garden blanketed and gleaming seemed to inspire her in all those inescapable tasks of cooking and table setting and finding places to put things.

   ‘I hate the way it covers everything up,’ said Wexford. ‘You talk about a blanket of snow and that’s what I dislike. As if it’s all been put to bed for the - the duration.’

   ‘The duration of what? What are you talking about?’

   ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t like hibernation, suspension, everyone having to stop doing things.’

   ‘You don’t have to stop doing things,’ said Dora. ‘You should be doing things now like opening the red wine to let it breathe and seeing we’ve got enough ice - oh, and you might check on the liqueur glasses in case any one wants apricot brandy or Cointreau after dinner.’