Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (32 page)

   Wexford noticed that the girl had changed her clothes since she got home. Under the anorak she had been wearing a pair of trousers that were a little, but not much, too large for her and a sweater that was wrong in some indefinable way for a girl of her age. He realised now that those must have been Matilda’s clothes. She had taken nothing with her when she left except those, as people rather oddly put it, she stood up in. Now she was dressed in her own jeans and a T-shirt, unsuitable for anyone on such a cold evening, especially in a house where the central heating was inefficient. She didn’t seem affected by it. Those disconcerting eyes gazed at him.

   ‘You will have realised, Sophie, that I want to talk to you about what happened here the weekend of twenty-sixth of November?’

   ‘Of course I have.’

   ‘You’re prepared for that?’

   She nodded. ‘I’m not hiding anything. I’ll tell you all of it.’

   ‘Good. You remember that weekend?’

   ‘Of course I do.’

   ‘Joanna Troy came here to look after you and your brother. She came on the Friday, is that right? Would I be correct in saying she arrived at about five?’ A nod. ‘What did you do that evening?’

   ‘I had homework,’ she said. ‘I went to my bedroom and did my homework. My father’s conditioned me to homework. I’m like one of that Russian guy’s dogs. Come six and I’m doing my homework.’ She sniffed. ‘My mother phoned from Paris. I didn’t speak to her, Giles did. He was downstairs with Joanna, watching TV I guess. Joanna made us supper. Baked beans, it was. Baked beans and toast and bacon.’ She made a face. ‘It was skanky.’

   Karen translated. ‘That means “nasty”, sir.’

   Sophie looked incredulous, presumably because he hadn’t understood what the whole world must understand. ‘The bacon was skanky, it was soft. After that we watched some shit on TV Joanna told us to go to bed when it got to ten. I didn’t argue and Giles didn’t.’

   Karen said, ‘Did you like Joanna, Sophie?’

   As if three times her age, she said, ‘Is that relevant?’

   ‘We would like to know.’

   ‘All right. I’m not my father, you know. I mean, rude and nasty to everyone. I’m mostly quite polite. No, I didn’t much like Joanna and Giles didn’t. He did for a bit and then he went off her. Not that that made any difference, we still had to have her here.’

   ‘And next day?’ Wexford asked.

   ‘We got up. We had breakfast. It wasn’t raining then. Joanna wanted to go to the Asda - you know, out on the bypass - and we went with her. Wicked way to spend a Saturday, wasn’t it? She bought a lot of food and she bought wine, though there was plenty in the house. We all had lunch at the Three Towns Cafe in the High Street and she said she’d got a friend coming over for supper, that was why she’d bought the food.’

   Wexford sat up straighter. ‘A friend? What kind of friend?’

   ‘A man.’

   She was either a very good liar or all this was true. And it meant he had been right. She continued to look at him with that steady gaze and now she took hold of a lock of her long brown hair and twisted it into a spiral in her fingers. ‘We went home and Giles went out. I don’t know where so don’t ask.’

   ‘When did he come back?’

   ‘I don’t know. I was upstairs doing more homework, the stuff my tutor set me. When I came down Giles was there and Joanna was getting supper. Me and him, we just went cotch, he watched TV and I surfed the Net. Maybe it was six by then. Is this what you want?’

   Karen nodded. ‘Exactly what we want. “Going cotch” means relaxing, sir.’

   ‘Considering what she’d given us, supper was going to be wicked,’ said Sophie. ‘Three courses. Avocados and grapefruit in something she called a coulis, some dumb-ass fish - I hate fish - and some sort of fruit tart with cream.’

   ‘Did the friend come?’

   A slow nod from Sophie. ‘At around half-six. Peter, she called him.’

   It was a common name. He must hear more before he jumped to conclusions. ‘At around half-six’ she had said.

   ‘And his other name?’

   ‘No one said. It was just Peter.’

   ‘Had the evening paper come by then?’ Wexford asked. He would ask Dorcas Winter but he wanted her version.

   ‘I can’t remember. I know it came. I suppose that girl brought it, the one that goes to our school. It was wet and we dried it on the radiator. God knows why, it’s always full of shit.’

   Doreen Bruce flinched but didn’t interrupt.

   ‘When we’d had the food Joanna wanted to know if Giles was going to church. “In this rain,” she said. He must have told her in the morning he’d be going. He said he wouldn’t because the service was on Sunday and that gamey Peter teased him a bit about church. Giles didn’t like it, but he gets a lot of that. You know, “Going to be a vicar when you grow up, are you?” - that kind of crap.’

   Once more Mrs Bruce drew in her breath. Probably Sophie had been more guarded in her speech when she stayed with her. Wexford said, ‘What did he look like, this Peter?’

   ‘A dumb-ass. Ordinary Not in very good shape. Old.’

   What did that mean from someone of thirteen? ‘How old?’ It was almost useless asking.

   ‘I don’t know. Not as old as my father.’

   He left it. She hadn’t given him much to go on but she hadn’t eliminated the suspicion she’d raised either. ‘Did Scott Holloway come?’ he asked.

   ‘Him? Yeah, I guess so. The bell rang but we never answered it.’

   ‘Why not?’

   ‘We just didn’t.’

   Perhaps that was standard practice in this house. ‘Go on.’

   ‘We had supper and watched Jacob Ladder on TV. That guy Jacob got shot in a siege. Then Joanna and Peter said they were going to bed.’

   She looked at Wexford, her head on one side. What he saw in her expression, in her eyes, shocked him more than if she had screamed obscenities at him. A wealth of knowledge was there, of adult experience, of a weary worldly wisdom. He wondered if he was imagining it or if he had guessed the reason, and when he looked at Karen he saw that she was thinking the same thing. There was no need to tell Sophie to continue. She needed no encouragement.

   ‘They’d been feeling each other up, deep kissing and all that, you know. They didn’t care about us being there. He was going to shag her, it was obvious. She didn’t say anything about us going to bed, she’d forgotten us. That was when the doorbell rang.’ She looked up and at him. ‘I was too interested watching what they did to answer it. But when they were just kissing we did go to bed. It was about half past ten. I went to sleep. I don’t know when it happened, maybe around midnight. The noise woke me, a scream and a crash, and footsteps running down the stairs. I didn’t get up straight away. If you want to know the truth, I was scared, it was scary. I got up after a bit and went down the passage, and Giles was just standing there, outside his room. You know, it’s right at the top of the stairs. He just stood there, looking down. Peter was down there, bending over Joanna, feeling her neck and her pulse and all that. He looked up and said, “She’s dead.”

   There was absolute silence for a moment and then that silence was shattered by the phone ringing. It rang only twice before someone in the hall picked it up. Wexford said, ‘No one called the emergency services? You did that when your grandmother was taken ill but not when a woman fell downstairs. Why was that?’

   ‘I wasn’t the only one there, was I?’ She had become aggressive. ‘It wasn’t for me to do anything. I’m only a child, like my father’s always telling me. I haven’t got any rights.’ The same thought as he had had before came into Wexford’s mind. Apparently unmoved, he shuddered inwardly. ‘Peter tried to lift Joanna up but she was too heavy for him. He asked Giles to help him and they put her on the sofa. There was some blood, not much. Peter got a cloth and wiped it up and he asked me where there was a scrubbing brush. Always ask a woman, don’t they?’

   She was suddenly a forty-year-old feminist and her voice had grown strident. Doreen Bruce had gone quite white, her hands trembling on the arms of the chair. Karen asked her if she was all right. She nodded, the living symbol of an aghast older generation.

   ‘I wasn’t going to do it,’ said Sophie. ‘It was him pushed her down the stairs.’

   ‘You didn’t see that?’

   ‘It was obvious. He said, was there any brandy? Giles got it for him and he drank it. Then he said he’d like another one but he’d better not, seeing as he was going to drive...’

   The door opened and Roger Dade came in. Sophie stopped talking abruptly, fixed him with an insolent stare. He said, ‘That was the hospital. My mother’s dead. She died half an hour ago.’

   Doreen was the first to speak. ‘Oh, Roger, how sad. I am sorry?’

   He took absolutely no notice of her, simply repeated, ‘She died half an hour ago.’ Then he turned with noisy violence on his daughter, shouting at her, ‘That’s your fault, you little bitch! She’d be alive now if you hadn’t given her all that trouble. You’ve been a liar since you were born and you made her tell lies and turn against her nearest and dearest . . .’

   Wexford got up. ‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a shock, Mr Dade. You’re not yourself.’ He feared the man was only too much himself, but it was useless continuing now. Was the girl at risk? He thought not. Anyway, she had her grandmother, her surviving grand mother, for what that was worth. ‘We’ll go now. We’ll see you tomorrow.’

   Dade had calmed down into a disgruntled misery and laid himself in a chair in the attitude he had adopted earlier. Wexford thanked Sophie, told her she had been very helpful. After a fashion very unusual for him, he felt he had had about as much as he could take for one day. Mrs Bruce came up to him after the girl had gone, said apologetically, ‘I don’t know where they learn those words. They don’t pick them up at home.’

   Wexford wasn’t so sure of that. He patted her on the arm. ‘They all do it. It’s a phase. Best ignore it, I think. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning?’

   She nodded rather miserably.

   Outside, the evening was colder, the sky clearer, a moon that looked as if it had been soaked in soapy water sailed above the trees. Against his face the air felt fresh and damp. He got into the car beside Karen.

   ‘You were thinking what I was thinking, weren’t you?’

   'What would that be, sir?’

   ‘That though Dade dislikes his daughter and she hates him, there has been more between them than there should have been.’

   ‘You mean, he’s done things he shouldn’t have.’ It was a reproof but he let it pass. ‘Something has to account for her not wanting to go home while he’s there. It makes me want to vomit.’

   ‘Me too,’ said Wexford.

   The car turned into the street where he lived and she dropped him at his gate. He hadn’t said anything about Peter. It was too soon.

He hadn’t asked the girl where her brother was. Because he knew she wouldn’t tell him? Even supposing she knew herself. It was already clear to him that this Peter had driven them away in Joanna’s car with Joanna’s body in the boot.

   ‘Why take the children with him?’ Burden asked when they met in the morning.

   ‘He couldn’t trust them not to tell anyone what they’d seen,’ Wexford said. ‘But I think they went willingly. Sophie can’t wait to get away from home. Her mother’s crazy and I’ve a suspicion her father’s been abusing her.’

   ‘You’re not serious.’

   ‘It’s not something I’d joke about, is it? I want a bit more to go on before I go to the Social Services. It could all be in my head.’

   ‘How much of what she says do you believe? Is she a liar?’

   Wexford thought about it. ‘I don’t know. In details perhaps, not in the essentials. For instance, the three of them didn’t have lunch at the Three Towns Cafe. The staff there know the kids and no one saw them on the Saturday. The way Sophie talked about Peter at first sounded invented but when she said he and Joanna were feeling each other up . . .’

   ‘She used those words?’

   ‘Oh, yes, and then she said he was going to “shag” her. The obnoxious Dade says she’s a liar but that’s when I knew she was telling the truth. That, too, is when I wondered if he’d been assaulting her. It’s just what abusive fathers do say, that the child is a liar. And abuse is well-known to give children a precocious - well, sophistication. They have a knowledge inappropriate for their time of life, like those two in The Turn of the Screw.’

   Burden’s initiation into literature by his wife hadn’t extended to Henry James. ‘So you’re going to see her again this morning?’

   He nodded. ‘Matilda Carrish died, you know. It’s in the paper. Along with Sophie’s reappearance, only there’s no connection so far as they know. Better that way. Sad really, isn’t it? If Sophie were dead it’d be the lead story; but she’s alive and well, so it merits a paragraph. Matilda’s obituaries will follow tomorrow, I suppose. Newspapers have them all prepared in advance of celebrities dropping off their perches. I wonder why she - well, harboured Sophie instead of doing the responsible thing.’

   ‘Maybe Sophie told her what you suspect about her dad.’

   ‘That would be quite something to hear about your own son. But I dare say she’d had enough shock-horror about ruthless Roger to take it in her stride.’

   ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ said Burden, ‘but those missing children posters are all over the place this morning. More thanever. No one’s told Search and Find Limited that Sophie’s turned up.’

   ‘They’ll know by now. Of course, there’s no one to tell them now Matilda Carrish is dead.’

   ‘Unless she’s given them some payment in advance,’ Burden said, ‘they’ll call their dogs off. They’d be daft to expect to recover what they’re owed from Roger. Some hopes.’

   When Wexford and Karen got to Antrim only Mr and Mrs Bruce and Sophie appeared to be at home. No explanation for the absence of Roger and Katrina Dade was offered and Wexford didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know. The first question he put to Sophie was unexpected. She had obviously hoped to be allowed to proceed with the departure of the three of them from the house, and for a moment she looked disconcerted.