Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (36 page)

   ‘Sophie,’ he began, ‘I’m going to be very frank with you in the hope that you’ll be frank with me. Four hours ago when I was having my lunch with Mr Burden here we discussed the man you call Peter...’

   She interrupted him. ‘He is called Peter.’

   ‘Fine. He’s called Peter,’ said Burden. ‘I expressed my doubts about Peter’s existence. None of your neighbours here had seen anyone come to this house that evening. Scott Holloway denies coming here. Only Dorcas Winter came, delivering the evening paper, and she didn’t come in. But Mr Wexford thought Peter must exist because he doubted if you could have invented him. You might have invented a man called Peter but not the things he said and did. Above all, not the way he pronounced Passingham. What do you have to say about all that?’

   Her eyelids flickered. She looked down. ‘Nothing. It’s all true.’

   ‘Describe Peter,’ Burden said.

   ‘I did. I said he was ordinary a dumb-ass.’

   ‘What did he looked like, Sophie?’

   ‘Tall. Not in good shape, quite ugly. His face was starting to go red. Dark hair but going bald.’ She screwed up her eyes, apparently in an effort to think. ‘One of his front teeth crossed a bit over the one next to it. Droopy mouth. Maybe forty-five.’

   She had described her father. But even by the wildest stretch of imagination and the wildest manipulation of alibis, Peter couldn’t be Roger Dade. At the relevant time he had been in Paris with his wife, as attested to by a hotel keeper, a travel agent, an airline and the Paris police. A psychologist would say she didn’t know many men (as against boys) and had described her father as the one she knew best and most strongly disliked and feared - in other words, a man she thought capable of violent crime.

   ‘Sophie,’ Wexford said, ‘what became of the piece of paper Peter gave you with an address on it?’

   He hadn’t asked her that before. It had seemed unimportant. He was astonished to see her flush deeply. ‘Giles threw it away,’ she said.

   He was more certain she was lying than he had been at any of her other replies. ‘Did you look at it before you decided to go to your grandmother? Was it something about that address which made you decide going to your grandmother would be better?’

   ‘Giles looked at it. I didn’t.’

   He nodded. He glanced at Katrina. She appeared to be fast asleep. ‘Giles hadn’t got his mobile with him. He made the call to your grandmother from a call box. How did he know the number?’

   ‘She was our grandmother. Of course we knew her phone number.’

   ‘I don’t think there’s any “of course” about it, Sophie. You only saw your grandmother once or twice a year. You had seldom been to her house before. No doubt you had her number in an address book at home. Your parents probably had it on a frequently used number directory in their phone at home but what you’re saying is that you knew the number by heart, you had it in your memory or Giles’s.’

   The girl shrugged. ‘Why not?’

   ‘I think you decided to make for your grandmother’s before you left this house. I think you knew where you were going from the start.’

   She made no answer.

   ‘Who spoke to her, you or Giles?’

   ‘It was me.’

   ‘All right,’ Wexford said, ‘that will do for today. I’d like to speak to Mr and Mrs Bruce, please. Where are they?’

   That awoke or at least stirred Katrina. She sat up. ‘My parents are sitting up in their room. They went up there because they’ve had a row with Roger. They’re going home tomorrow, anyway.’ Her voice rose until it became somehow frighteningly high-pitched. And I’m going with them. I’m going with them for ever.’

   Sophie said, ‘Take my father with you.’

   ‘Don’t be more stupid than you can help. I’m going with them because I’m leaving him. D’you under stand now?’

   'You’re poop.' The girl spoke roughly but she sounded afraid. ‘What about me? I can’t be left alone with him.’

   Katrina looked at her and tears of self-pity welled. ‘Why should I care about you? You didn’t care about me when you took yourself off, you and your brother, when I thought you were both lying dead somewhere. It’s time I started thinking of me.’ She addressed Wexford. ‘Having your child murdered or disappeared or thinking they have mostly leads to the mother and father splitting up. It’s quite common. Haven’t you noticed?’

   He didn’t answer this. He was thinking of Sophie, thinking fast and wondering.

   ‘We’ll be leaving in the morning. Early. If you want my parents they’re in Giles’s room. Just go up and knock on the door. I had to put that bitch Charlotte in the one they’d been using. Apparently she can only sleep in a room where the bedhead is to the north. I’ll put it all behind me tomorrow, thank God.’

   Wexford motioned to Burden to come outside into the hall with him. The house was very silent and seemed otherwise empty. Probably Roger had taken his sister out somewhere. Wexford said, ‘No time like the present. We’ll take Sophie into that other room, the dining room or whatever, and you ask her. Ask her outright. I can’t leave it another day.’

   ‘You can’t do that, Reg. She’s thirteen.’

   ‘Oh God, so I can’t. Then it’ll have to be in the mother’s presence.’

   But when they went back Katrina had fallen asleep or was giving a very good imitation of someone who had. She lay curled up like a cat, her knees under her chin, her head buried in her arms. Sophie sat staring at her fixedly like someone watching a wild animal, wondering what it would do next.

   Wexford said, ‘Why do you dislike your father so, Sophie?’

   She turned towards him, it seemed reluctantly. ‘I just do.’

   ‘Sophie, you seem very well-informed about sex. I’m going to ask you outright. Has he ever touched you or tried to touch you in a sexual way?’

   Her reaction was the last either police officer expected. She started to laugh. It wasn’t dry or cynical laughter but true merriment, peal on peal of it. ‘You’re all poop, the lot of you. That’s what Matilda thought, that’s why she let us come. Her own dad did it to her when she was a kid. So she let us come and said she’d hide us. But I put her right, though I don’t think she believed me. He’s skanky but he’s not that bad.’

   Burden glanced at Katrina. She hadn’t moved. ‘So fear of your father’s, er, attentions isn’t what makes you dislike him?’

   ‘I get pissed off at him because he’s just never never nice to me. He shouts at me and he’s skanky. And he’s always nagging me to go to my room and work. I can’t have my friends here because it’s a waste of time, he says. I’m supposed to work, work, work. I only like get books and CDs and gear as presents for working. It’s the same for Giles. Is that enough for you?’

   ‘Yes, Sophie,’ said Wexford. ‘Yes, thank you. Tell me something else, then. When did you set your grandmother straight about your relationship with your father? As soon as you got to her house? The same day, the Sunday?’

   ‘I don’t remember exactly when but it was before Giles went away. We were all three there, Matilda and Giles and me, and Matilda asked me why we’d left and I told her and she said was it really more about something my father did to me. I’d heard about that stuff, it’s always on the TV but it never happened to me and I told her so.’

   ‘In that case, if she was satisfied that your father was no more than strict and a bit bullying with you, why didn’t she then call your parents or the police to say where you were or that you were safe?’

   With a shake of her head and a brandishing of arms, Katrina woke up. Or came out of her self-induced trance. She put her feet to the ground ‘I can answer that.’ As seemed to happen almost every time she opened her mouth, the tears started. But instead of constricting her speech or causing her to gag, they simply rolled down her thin cheeks. I can tell you why she didn’t. She took my children in to get revenge on me. Because I told her when she was here in October that I wouldn’t let them see her again. Not ever. Well, when they were grown-up I couldn’t stop them but while they lived here with us I’d keep them apart if it took the last breath in my body.’

   ‘Do you mind telling us why you wouldn’t let their grandmother see them again?’

   ‘She knows.’ Katrina pointed a shaking forefinger at her daughter. ‘Ask her.’

   Wexford raised an enquiring eyebrow at Sophie. The girl said nastily, ‘You tell them if you want. I’m not going to do your dirty work for you.’

   Katrina pulled her sleeve down over her hand and used it like a handkerchief to wipe her streaming eyes. ‘She was going to stay a week. My husband -, she put extreme scorn into the word ‘- said we ought to have her for a week. I didn’t want that. She looked down on me, always did, because I’m not supposed to be clever like her. Well, the third day she was here I went up to Sophie’s room to tell her her tutor had phoned to say he couldn’t give her a lesson next day and when I opened the door she wasn’t there and she wasn’t in Giles’s room, and I found all three of them in Matilda’s room. They were all in there and Matilda was sitting on the bed smoking pot.’

   ‘Mrs Carrish was smoking cannabis?’

   ‘That’s what I said. I started screaming - well, any one would. I told Roger and he was incandescent. But I didn’t wait to see what he’d do, I told her she’d have to go, there and then. It was evening but I wasn’t going to have her in my house a minute longer...’

   ‘You’d better tell what Matilda said, not just you,’ Sophie said scornfully. ‘She said she was doing what she always did to relax. If we didn’t ever relax, she said, we’d get sick and be too ill to pass exams. It was harmless if we wanted to give it a go she said, but she wouldn’t give us any, she was sure we had plenty of chances to get it. Oh, and said my father was full of shit and he’d make us full of shit too.’

   ‘Stop using that filthy language,’ Katrina said at the top of her voice, and to Wexford in a more subdued tone, ‘I even packed her bags for her, threw all her fancy clothes, all her black designer stuff, I threw it into her cases and put them outside on the doorstep. My husband fetched her downstairs - for once he asserted himself with her. I’d never seen that before. It was nine at night. I don’t know where she stayed, some hotel, I suppose.’ Suddenly she screamed at him, ‘Don’t look at me like that! She was an old woman, I know that. But she didn’t act like one, she acted like a fiend, getting my children on to drugs. . .

   Sophie cocked a thumb at her mother. ‘What she means is she thinks Matilda hid us to get back at her and I reckon she’s right.’

   ‘It was her revenge,’ said Katrina, sobbing now. ‘It was her way of getting revenge.’

   Not for the first time, Wexford wondered what the people who talked so glibly about ‘family values’ would say to a scene such as the one he had just witnessed and the revelations he had heard. But come to that, wouldn’t he, if in Katrina’s place, have done just what Katrina had done, if more calmly? What had possessed Matilda Carrish to do something more readily associated with pushers a quarter of her age? No doubt it was because she had used cannabis herself, perhaps regularly for years, and she genuinely believed it a harmless relaxant.

   He and Burden went upstairs. Wexford thought he had known who ‘Peter’ was and, broadly speaking, what had happened that night from the point when Sophie had described her father. But he had truly seen the light when she insisted they had memorised Matilda’s phone number, when he knew the whole operation had been planned before they left Antrim.

   He knocked at the door of Giles’s bedroom and Doreen Bruce’s voice asked who it was. Wexford told her and she came to open it. Her husband was sitting in a small armchair he recognised as having been brought there from the living room, the book he had been reading lying face-downwards on the bed. Giles’s religious artefacts and posters had disappeared.

   Wexford came straight to the point. ‘Mr Bruce, can Giles drive a car?’

   Afraid of the law, as many people of her generation are, his wife immediately plunged into excuses. ‘We told him he must never try to drive before he’d got a licence and insurance and all that. We explained it was fine for him to practise on the old airfield but he couldn’t take his test till he was seventeen. And he understood, didn’t he, Eric? He knew it was all right for Eric to teach him on the old runway when he came to stay with us and he had to save driving for when he was with us, that was his treat here, something to look forward to.’

   Yes, of course, the airstrip at Berningham, once a United States base.

   ‘You took him out in your car, did you, Mr Bruce?’

   ‘It was something for him to do. And I enjoyed it. We all enjoy teaching, don’t we? Be a different matter if we had to do it for our livings, I dare say.’

   ‘We’d have taught Sophie too, dear,’ said Mrs Bruce, ‘hut she wasn’t keen to learn. I think the truth was she wasn’t keen to learn from a couple of oldies. Well, you can understand it, can’t you?’

   ‘Mind you, he was a good student,’ said Mr Bruce. ‘They are at that age. Giles can drive as well as I can - better probably.’

   ‘Talk about reversing into a marked space,’ said his wife. ‘I’ve never seen it done so well. You could drive a cab in London, I said to him, though of course he’ll do something a lot superior to that, won’t he?’ She looked up into Wexford’s face. ‘He will, won’t he, dear?’

   He understood. ‘I’m sure he will.’

   ‘We’re leaving tomorrow and - and Katrina’s coming too. I hope it’s only temporary. Frankly, I’ve never cared for Roger but still I hope it’s not a permanent break. I hope it won’t come to divorce for the children’s sake.’

   That would make the second partnership to come to grief as a result of this case, Wexford remarked as he and Burden went down the stairs. Sophie and her mother were still where he had left them. Katrina had lapsed back into sleep, the place and condition she escaped to. Sophie’s eyes were fixed inscrutably on her.

   ‘You said Matilda drove Giles to the station,’ Wexford said. ‘That would be Kingham station?’

   ‘She drove him to Oxford.’

   And was he going to Heathrow from Oxford? Was he going to catch a domestic flight?’