Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (4 page)

   ‘You must have tried to find out where they were,’ Wexford said. ‘Phoned round friends and relatives? Did you phone the school?’

   ‘I phoned my husband and he did, though we knew they weren’t there. And they weren’t. Of course they weren’t. Then he phoned his mother. God knows why. For some unaccountable reason that’s quite beyond me the children seem fond of her. But he drew a complete blank. The same with the children’s friends’ parents - those we could get hold of, that is. So many mothers aren’t content to be homemakers, are they? They must have careers as well. Anyway, none of them knew a thing.’

   Vine said, ‘Did you try to get in touch with Ms Troy?’

   Katrina Dade stared at him as if he’d uttered some extreme obscenity ‘Well, of course we did. Of course. That was the first thing we did. Before we even phoned the school. There was no answer - well, her answer-phone was on.’

   ‘I was obliged to come home,’ Dade said, implying it was the last place he wanted to be. ‘I went over to her house. No one was there. I went next door and the woman there said she hadn’t seen Joanna since Friday.’

   That meant very little. A neighbour isn’t always aware of the comings and goings of the people next door. Wexford said, 'and then?’

   Katrina had assumed the vacant look and glazed eyes of a member of the local drama group playing Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene. ‘It was while my husband was out that I looked out of the window. I hadn’t looked out before. I saw a devastating sight. You can see all the floods from here, like a great sea, an ocean. I could hardly believe my eyes but I had to, I had to. That was when I knew my children must be out there somewhere.’

   In the calmest, steadiest voice he could muster, Wexford said, ‘The frogmen have resumed their search, Mrs Dade, but what you suggest is very unlikely. The floods are quite a distance from here and nowhere in Kingsmarkham are they more than four feet deep. The search has moved to the Brede Valley, three miles away at the nearest point. Unless Giles and Sophie are great walkers or Ms Troy is, I find it hard to see why they should go near the Brede.’

   ‘None of them would walk anywhere if they could help it,’ said Dade.

   Katrina looked as if he had betrayed her and she withdrew her hand. ‘Then where are they?’ she appealed to the two policemen. ‘What has become of them?’ Then came the question Wexford had been anticipating, the question that always came from a parent in this sort of situation, and came early, ‘What are you doing about it?’

   ‘First we’ll need some help from you, Mrs Dade,’ said Vine. ‘Photographs of Giles and Sophie for a start. And a description. Some background - what sort of people they are.’ He glanced at Wexford.

   ‘A photograph of Ms Troy as well, if possible,’ the Chief Inspector said. And we have a few more questions. How did Ms Troy get here on Friday evening? By car?’

   ‘Of course.’ Dade was looking at him as if he’d questioned Joanna Troy’s possession of legs or as if every nor mal person knew human beings were born with motor vehicles attached, as it might be hair or noses. ‘Naturally, she came by car. Look, is this going to go on much longer? I’m late as it is.’

   ‘Where is her car now? Has she a garage at home?’

   ‘No. She leaves it parked on a kind of drive or pad in front of the house.’

   ‘And was it there?’

   ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Dade began to look a little ashamed of his recent scorn. ‘Would you like her address? I don’t know if we have a photograph?’

   ‘Of course we have a photograph.’ His wife was shaking her head in apparent wonder. ‘Not have a photograph of my very dearest friend? Darling, how could you think that?’

   How he could Dade didn’t explain. He went into another room and came back with two photographs which he removed from their silver frames. They were of the children, not their sitter. The girl looked like neither parent. Her features were classical, almost sharp, her nose Roman, her eyes very dark, her hair nearly black. The boy was better looking than Roger Dade, his features more nearly corresponding to a classical ideal, but he looked as if he also might be tall.

   ‘Just topping six feet,’ said Dade proudly as if reading Wexford’s thoughts. Katrina had fallen silent. Her husband glanced at her, went on, ‘You can see they’re both got dark eyes. Giles has fairer hair. I don’t know what else I can tell you.’

   Some time, thought Wexford, you can explain what makes a good-looking, tall and far from deprived fifteen-year-old join something called the Good Gospel Church. But perhaps you won’t have to, perhaps we’ll have found them before that’s necessary. ‘Do you know’, he said to Katrina Dade, ‘the names of any close relatives of Ms Troy?’

   She was speaking dully now, though still far from naturally. ‘Her father. Her mother’s dead and he’s married again. She got up, moving like a woman recovering from a long and serious illness. She opened a drawer in a desk designed to look as if made for a contemporary of Shakespeare, lifted out a thick leather-bound album and extracted from one of its grey, gilt-ornamented pages a photograph of a young woman. Still slow and somnambulant, she handed it to Wexford. ‘Her father lives at 28 Forest Road, if you know where that is.’

   The last street in the district to bear the postal address Kingsmarkham. It turned directly off the Pomfret road and the houses in it would very likely have a pleasant view of Cheriton Forest. Katrina Dade was sitting down again but on a buttoned and swagged sofa, beside her husband, who was making an exasperated face. Wexford concentrated on the picture of Joanna Troy. The first thing that struck him was her youth. He had assumed she would be the same sort of age as Katrina but this woman looked years younger, a girl still.

   ‘When was this taken?’

   ‘Last year.’

   Well. Of course it was true that many people had friends a lot older or a lot younger than themselves. He wondered how these women had met. Joanna Troy looked confident and in control rather than handsome. Her short straight hair was fair, her eyes perhaps grey, it was hard to tell. Her skin was the fresh pink and white that used to be called a ‘real English complexion’. Somehow he could tell she would never be very clothes-conscious, but rather a jeans and sweater woman when she could get away with it, though the photograph showed nothing of her below the shoulders. He was asking himself if there were any more questions he need put to the Dades at this stage when a shattering scream brought him to his feet. Vine also leapt up. Katrina Dade, her head back and her neck stretched, her fists pumping the air, was shrieking and yelling at the top of her lungs.

   Dade tried to put his arms round her. She fought him off and continued to make some of the loudest screams Wexford had ever heard, as loud as children in supermarket aisles, as loud as his granddaughter Amulet at her most wilful. Seldom at a loss as to what to do, he was almost flummoxed. Perhaps the woman’s face should be slapped - that used to be the sovereign remedy - but if so, if that wasn’t about as politically incorrect as could be, he wasn’t going to be the one to do it. He beckoned to Vine and they moved as far from the screaming Katrina and her ineffectual husband as they could get, standing by a pair of french windows that gave on to a terraced garden and then to the floods below.

   Katrina having subsided into sobs, Dade said, ‘Would you get me a glass of water, please?’

   Vine shrugged but went to fetch it. He watched Katrina choke over the water, dodged out of the way before she hurled the remaining contents in his direction. This action seemed to relieve her feelings and she laid her head back against a cushion. Wexford took advantage of the silence to tell Dade they would like to have a look at the children’s rooms.

   ‘I can’t leave her, can I? You’ll have to find them your selves. Look, as soon as she shuts up I have to get off to work. All right with you, is it? I have your permission?’

   ‘Rude bugger, isn’t he?’ Vine said when they were on the stairs.

   ‘He’s got a lot to put up with.’ Wexford grinned. ‘You have to make allowances. I can’t really believe any thing much has happened to these kids. Maybe I should, maybe it’s their mother’s behaviour making me think none of this is quite real. I could be entirely wrong and we have to act as if I am.’

   ‘Isn’t it because there are three of them, sir? It’s harder to believe in three people disappearing. Unless they’re hostages, of course.’ Vine was remembering that Wexford’s wife had been one of the hostages in the Kingsmarkham bypass affair. ‘But these three aren’t, are they?’

   ‘I doubt it.’

   It was probably mention of the bypass abductions which reminded Wexford that sooner or later the media were going to have to know about this. He remembered last time with a shudder, the intrusion into his own privacy; the continued onslaughts of Brian St George, editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier, the embargoes he could barely enforce. Then there had been the furore over that one-time paedophile and poor Hennessy’s death.

   ‘This is the boy’s room, sir,’ Vine was saying. ‘Someone certainly tidied it and it wasn’t a fifteen-year-old, not even a religious maniac.’

   ‘I’m not sure we should brand him like that, Barry; Not at this stage. You might feel like going along to the old Catholic Church after we’ve left here and get some background on these Good Gospel people, not to mention whether the boy went to church on Sunday or not.’

   If there are any two features which distinguish a teenager’s bedroom from anyone else’s, it must be the presence of posters on the walls and a means of playing music. These days, too, a computer with Internet access and a printer, and these last Giles Dade had, though the posters and player were absent. Almost absent. Instead of a recommendation for a pop group, endangered species rescue or soccer star, the wall facing Giles’s bed had tacked to it an unframed life-size reproduction Wexford recognised as Constable’s painting of Christ Blessing the Bread and Wine.

   Perhaps it was only because he didn’t, couldn’t, believe that he found this distasteful. Not because of what it was, though Constable’s genius found its best expression in landscape, but where it was and who had put it there. He wondered what Dora, a churchgoer, would say. He’d ask her. Vine was looking inside a clothes cupboard at what both of them would have expected to find there, jeans, shirts, T-shirts, a pea jacket and a school blazer, dark-brown, bordered in gold braid. One of the T-shirts on a hanger and probably valued, was red and printed in black and white with a photograph of Giles Dade’s face, ‘Giles’ lettered underneath it.

   ‘You see he had some elements of normal adolescence,’ said Wexford.

   They must ask Dade, or if it had to be, his wife, which particular clothes were missing from the children’s wardrobes. Football boots were there, trainers, a single pair of black leather shoes. For going to church in, no doubt.

   A shelf of books held a Bible, Chambers Dictionary. Orwell’s Animal Farm - a GCSE set book? - some Zola in French - surprisingly - Daudet’s Lettres de mon Moulin, Maupassant’s short stories, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and something called Purity as a Life Goal by Parker T. Ziegler. Wexford took it down and looked inside. It had been published in the United States by a company named the Creationist Foundation and sold there for the hefty sum of $35. On the shelf below, plugged in for recharging, was a mobile phone.

   Drawers below held underpants, shorts, T-shirts - or one did. In the middle drawer was a melee of papers, some of them apparently a homework essay Giles was writing, a paperback on trees and another on the early church, ballpoints, a comb, a used light bulb, shoelaces, a ball of string. The top one was much the same but out of the confusion Vine extracted the small dark-red booklet that is a British passport. It had been issued three years before to Giles Benedict Dade.

   ‘At least we know he hasn’t left the country,’ said Wexford.

   The girl’s room had far more books and posters enough. Just what you’d expect, including one of David Beckham, Posh Spice and their child, apparently off on a shopping spree. In the bookcase were the works of J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the two Alice volumes, a lot of poetry, some of it just what you would not expect, notably the Complete Works of T. S. Eliot and a selection from Gerard Manley Hopkins. The girl, after all, was only thirteen. A photograph of a handsome but very old woman and one she resembled stood on top of the bookcase but the one of her brother, identical to that which they had been given, was on the bedside cabinet. A rack of CDs held hip-hop and Britney Spears, showing Sophie to be more normal than her brother. Her clothes contributed nothing in the way of enlightenment except that things to wear didn’t much interest her. From the brown-and-gold blazer and brown pleated skirt, they saw that she went to the same school as her brother. There was a hockey stick and a tennis racquet in the wardrobe as well. Sophie’s computer was a humbler version of Giles’s with Internet access but no printer. No doubt, she shared his. She also had a combined radio and cassette player, and a CD Walkman.

   Wexford and Vine went downstairs and put a few more questions to the parents. Katrina Dade was lying down. Her husband was on his knees picking up broken glass, having made her a cup of coffee. None was offered to the two police officers. Wexford asked about clothes and Dade said they had looked, this had seemed important to his wife, but they had been unable to say what had gone. So many of the clothes their children wore looked just the same, blue jeans and black jeans, plain T-shirts and T-shirts with logos, black, grey and white trainers.

   ‘How about coats?’ Vine asked. ‘Where do you keep coats? When they went out they must have worn some thing more than a sweater at this time of the year.’

   Wexford wasn’t so sure. It had become a sign of a kind of macho strength and youthful stamina not to wear a coat outdoors, not even in snow, not even when the temperature fell below freezing. And it hadn’t been cold for the time of year. But was Giles Dade that sort of boy? The boastful swaggering sort who would strut about in a sleeveless vest while others wore padded jackets? He followed Vine and Giles’s father out into the hall, and the inside of a large and rather ornate clothes cupboard was examined.