Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (35 page)

   At two minutes to eleven he drove on to the parking area outside Kingsmarkham Police Station. Before he had opened the driver’s door, a young policeman was saying very respectfully to him, ‘Sorry, sir, you can’t park here.’

   'Where can I park then?’ Peter asked irritably.

   ‘It’ll have to be in the street, sir. On the “pay and display”, sir, if you please, not the residents’ parking.’

   ‘I know that. I’m not a resident of this place, thank God.’

   It took him more than ten minutes to find some where to park in a side street and walk back to the police station, so that when he was shown into Wexford’s office the Chief Inspector was pointedly looking at his watch. But the interview, which he by now expected to be a gruelling interrogation, lasted no time at all. Wexford only wanted to know what he had been doing on the afternoon and evening of 25 November of the previous year. Of course he couldn’t produce an alibi, though he could have done for almost every other Saturday night of the year, Sharonne enjoying such a very social lifestyle. In fact, that was why he remembered that Saturday without reference to his diary. Simply because, almost uniquely, they had been home alone together.

   Wexford seemed not at all perturbed. He didn’t even seem interested. He thanked Buxton for coming, made a few remarks on the weather and then said he’d escort him downstairs to the front entrance himself. They took the lift and crossed the black and white checkerboard floor towards the swing doors. He vaguely thought he recognised the girl of thirteen or fourteen who was sitting on an upright chair next to an elderly woman. Her picture had been in the news lately. For being murdered? For winning something? Having not yet seen a morning paper, he couldn’t remember. She was gazing at him in a rude, brash sort of way but he soon forgot her.

   He had been so short a time in the police station that he had a good chance of getting back to Passingham by noon. It was still only twenty-five past eleven when he got back into his car. Unfortunately for him (and for the victims of the accident) a container lorry had hit a car full of holidaymakers as the driver overtook a line of vehicles this side of the Toxborough turn-off. The traffic queue extended back from the crash site for two miles by the time Buxton reached the tail end of it. Eventually, when an ambulance had taken away the injured, when the broken and twisted metal that had been a people carrier was cleared from the road and the lorry towed away, the line of cars slowly proceeded towards Toxborough and London. The time was twelve twenty and it was ten to one when Buxton reached the Hall.

   He knew Sharonne must be still there, however enraged and threatening, because he had the car and she no means of getting to Trollfield unless she’d called a taxi. If she’d done that she’d have had to explain to the driver she hadn’t got a car. That wasn’t Sharonne’s way. But she wasn’t there. He went round the house calling her name, a large whisky in his hand. Someone must have called for her, someone must have taken her to the Warrens. Well, she’d be back.

   Later, on the news, he saw that Sophie Dade had been found or come home of her own accord. It wasn’t clear which of these possibilities was the true one. So that was the girl he’d seen at the police station. There was a little whisky left in the bottle. He might as well drink it. It was wasteful leaving dregs. Reminding him self that what Sharonne had been to was a lunch party, he saw that it was after six. Soon afterwards he fell asleep and dreamed about the phone number disclosed to him when he dialled 1471. Once, just once. The chap had never phoned again. Because Sharonne had cautioned him not to? It was pitch dark and very cold when he woke up. Finding that it was four in the morning was a bit of a shock. Once again, though this time in a shaky state, he toured the house calling her name. She wasn’t there, she hadn’t come back. Maybe the phone number man, the lover, if he was a lover, had driven her back to London. After a hair of the dog and some work with an electric toothbrush to get the foul taste out of his mouth, he dialled his London number, got his own voice asking him to leave a message.

   He slept again. He phoned his London home again, eventually phoned the number that had been haunting him. An answering service responded, only repeating the number he had dialled but giving no name and asking very tersely for the caller to leave a message. The only satisfaction he got, if satisfaction it was, was from the voice being male. By the middle of the morning it was plain to him that she had left him and instead of sadness, he felt a terrible rage. He took Colman’s card out of his pocket and dialled not the main phone number but that of the man’s mobile. Colman answered smartly.

   ‘It’s Peter Buxton. I want your people to act for me.’

   ‘Sure. A pleasure. What might we be searching and finding?’

   ‘Evidence for divorce,’ said Buxton, and he explained.

   ‘You’re behind the times, Mr Buxton. Under the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1973, you can get a no-fault divorce in two years and the waiting time’s since been reduced to one year.’

   ‘I don’t want a no-fault divorce. There’s plenty of fault - on her side. And I want it fast.’

   ‘Let me just give a rundown of our charges,’ said Colman.

   Thus the Buxton marriage was the first relationship to come to grief through the case of the Missing Dade Children.

Matilda Carrish’s funeral took place in the same church and the same crematorium as Joanna Troy’s had a month or so before. There the resemblance almost ended. True, Roger Dade was at both and the same unfortunate clergyman officiated at both, intoning the same contemporary version of the funeral service to a similarly apathetic and vaguely agnostic group of mourners, but Katrina Dade was not there to see her mother-in-law laid to rest, nor were her parents. Attendance was poor. Perhaps, Wexford thought, more friends of Matilda, neighbours, fellow artists from the world in which she had moved for so long and with such distinction, might have come along if she had been buried in her local cemetery and the words of committal recited in her village church. It had obviously been Roger Dade’s decision to do otherwise.

   Dade sat in a front pew, looking sullen, beside a woman who looked not in the least like him nor like Matilda but who, Wexford nevertheless thought, must be his sister. She was a heavy woman with a full face and tightly curled hair. ‘What was her name? Charlotte something. He had once spoken to her on the phone. Would talking to her face-to-face be of any use? Then he remembered the man Matilda Carrish had married, an old man who lived abroad and was now her widower. But there was no one in the front pews it could conceivably have been. Sophie had come into the church and seated herself as far from her father as it was possible to be. She had decked herself out in deepest unrelieved black - not difficult for any teenager these days. Matilda Carrish had sent her brother away and taken the secret of his hiding place with her to the grave. But why? Why? To keep him away from this Peter? If so, what was Peter’s interest in the boy? Probably not a sexual interest at all but fear of Giles telling what he had seen at Antrim on that Saturday night. In that case, why had Matilda not sent Sophie away too? She had seen as much as he and possibly more.

   He ought to be able to reason out where she had sent Giles. Was it possible he had gone to her daughter’s house? If so, the daughter had left him behind to come here, but no doubt in the care of her husband and children. It was a place he could have gone to without a passport. As a kind of minor celebrity, Matilda most likely had friends everywhere, abroad as well as here. But he couldn’t have gone abroad because he had no passport. . . Would a friend living in, say, northern Scotland harbour a boy who was involved in a murder inquiry and whom the police wanted to question? Matilda had and birds of a feather flock together . . .

   The coffin was carried in. The sparse congregation rose as a dismal voluntary was played, and Wexford’s earlier impression was confirmed. Very few people had come. There was no choir and no one with a strong voice among the mourners. They broke into a ragged version of - what else? - ‘Abide with Me’. Just where could Giles Dade possibly be abiding at this moment?

All the members of Wexford’s team that could be spared had spent the previous day questioning George and Effie Troy and Yvonne Moody about Peter. The results weren’t helpful. Only George Troy seemed to recall Joanna mentioning a Peter but he had similar recollections of her talking about an Anthony, a Paul, a Tom and a Barry Effie interrupted to say that these weren’t boyfriends but children she had taught and this had thrown George into confusion. Yvonne Moody’s replies were useless. She was obviously predisposed to a need for Joanna to have no friends apart from herself and possibly other women. Reluctantly, she had at last admitted she had seen men - she called them boys - going to Joanna’s house for private coaching. One of them might have been a Peter.

   The coffin was removed and placed in the car that would transport it to the crematorium. Only the officiating clergyman seemed to be accompanying Matilda Cattish on her last journey Wexford watched her driven away. Dade had come down the steps from the church with Charlotte something. He gave Wexford a sullen glare, muttered to his sister. Wexford expected a putting of heads together, a whispered colloquy, before both of them ignoring him. But Dade’s sister turned in his direction, smiled and came over, hand extended.

   ‘Charlotte Macallister. How do you do?’

   ‘I was sorry to hear about your mother,’ Wexford said insincerely.

   ‘Yes. What on earth was she doing, hiding those children? I think she must have gone quite mad. Senile dementia or something.’

   She was the least likely victim of senile anything, he thought. ‘Giles is still missing, of course,’ he said. ‘But he’s alive. . .‘ A bellow from Dade momentarily took his breath away.

   ‘Sophie! Sophie!’

   The girl was running out of the churchyard, running as fist as only a thirteen-year-old can. Her father yelled because he was powerless to stop her. He clenched his fist and stamped.

   ‘Very bad for the blood pressure,’ Charlotte Macallister said calmly. ‘He won’t make old bones if he goes on like that.’

   ‘It occurred to me in there’, said Wexford, ‘that your mother might have sent Giles to you.’

   ‘It did, did it? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I’m not so much a chip off the old block as that. And if I fell in with her plots my husband wouldn’t. He’s a high-ranking officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and a pal of Sir Ronald Flanagan. Bye-bye. If you need me I’ll be staying with Roger and Katrina for a couple of days.’

Wexford and Burden lunched together, not at the Moonflower, but in the police canteen. Burden sniffed his fish and made a face.

   ‘Something wrong with it?’

   ‘No. Not really. Cod ought to smell of something, it ought to smell nice. This smells of nothing, it might be cardboard - no, polystyrene. That’s what it looks like.’

   ‘Talking of fish,’ said Wexford who was eating ravioli, ‘this whole Peter story is fishy, don’t you think? No one’s heard of him. Katrina hasn’t, Yvonne Moody hasn’t, and they were apparently her closest friends. Her father and stepfather haven’t. And I’ll tell you something else. It may be coincidence but I had another look at that cooking piece I told you about and it was written by someone with Peter for a first name.’

   Burden raised his eyebrows, nodded. ‘None of the Dade neighbours saw anyone come to the house that Saturday evening except Dorcas Winter. They didn’t even see her, only knew she’d been because the paper was there.’

   ‘Why would Sophie invent him? Besides, could she invent him? A man called Peter she might, and the name she got from a magazine, but the things he did and said? His pushing Joanna downstairs, clearing up the blood, driving the car and knowing about Passingham? Knowing how it was pronounced?’

   ‘He could be called something else,’ Burden said. ‘On the other hand, none of these people even knew of a man in Joanna’s life. Why should she conceal him from her family and friends? She wasn’t married.’

   ‘Very likely he is, though. All we know is who he’s not, and he’s not Peter Buxton. Sophie was adamant about that. In fact, when I asked her after he’d gone she was so indignant that I might even think so for a moment that she was almost in tears. I’d say she passionately didn’t want Buxton to be this Peter - and that in itself is odd.’

   ‘It’s not odd,’ Burden said slowly, pushing fishbones to the side of his plate and the khaki-coloured peas to join them. ‘It’s not odd if she invented Peter and panicked when she saw we took it seriously, when she realised that here was a real person who could be accused of a crime he didn’t commit.’

   ‘Then, if she invented Peter, who was in the house and accidentally or purposely, killed Joanna Troy?’

   ‘Someone she doesn’t want us to know about. Someone she’s protecting.’

   ‘Then we’ll have to talk to her again,’ Wexford said.

   ‘By the way, the Buxtons are splitting up. I met Colman in the High Street, taking down posters. He told me. Not very discreet of him, was it?’

There had been a funeral and, in other circumstances, he would have let a day pass, but no one except Sophie had shown much grief for Matilda Carrish. Even hers, Wexford felt, was the grief of a child whose whole future, eagerly anticipated, is before her and who knows, any way, that in the nature of things the old must die. What kind of a mother had Matilda been that Roger Dade seemed to regard her as one who caused almost less nuisance by dying than by remaining alive? Perhaps the kind he had imagined, well-intentioned, an ardent believer in free expression, but neglectful too, pursuing her own (lucrative) interests while leaving her children to pursue theirs. Or was it that Dade was simply a con genitally unpleasant man? And why, why, why had the woman taken those children in and defied the police forces of an entire country to find them?

   He notified the family that he and Burden would return in the late afternoon to speak to Sophie once more. Fortunately it was Mrs Bruce he saw. Dade’s reaction would have been less amiable. This time, surprisingly, it was her mother who chaperoned her at the interview, but she might as well have not been there, for she sat silent for almost the whole time, lying back in an armchair with her eyes closed. Also present was Karen Malahyde. ‘I need you as interpreter,’ Wexford said to her and then the girl came in. Once more she was all in black and a dancing devil with horns and trident had appeared on her forearm. It looked like a tattoo but was probably a transfer.