Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (40 page)

   The old man who joined them within a moment or two was tall and nearly as skinny as Giles. Perhaps once, half a century ago and more, he had looked like Giles, and he still had the copious hair, now quite white. His expression was not so much irritable as preoccupied, distrait. It was apparent he looked on this development as an intrusion on a largely unvarying scholarly life.

   ‘Well, yes, good morning,’ he said in his Shand-Gibb voice. ‘Please don’t trouble yourself about this. I shall not be going to the university this morning. Don’t feel you have to, er, speed things up.’ He brought out this phrase as if uttering an outrageous piece of recent slang. Wexford understood he was dealing with a man so self-absorbed that he genuinely believed others must be exclusively concerned with anxieties about his com fort. ‘Take your time. Sit down. Oh, you are sitting down, yes.’

   He turned to Giles, addressed him in what was presumably Swedish, to which Giles responded in the same tongue. Wexford had to stop himself gaping. Trent said, when the boy had gone, ‘A very simple language to learn, Swedish. All the Scandinavian languages are. Nothing to it. Inflected, of course, but in an entirely logical way - unlike some I could name.’ Wexford was afraid he might but do so and with examples, but he continued on the subject of Swedish. ‘I picked it up myself - oh, a hundred years ago - in a month or so. Giles is taking a little longer. I thought he should occupy himself usefully while here. Naturally, I have seen to the continuance of his education - and not only in that particular respect.’

   He spoke as if Giles’s missed schooling was the only aspect of his flight likely to give anyone much concern. Wexford was for a moment struck dumb. But when Giles returned with coffee pot and cups and saucers on a tray, he addressed the boy.

   ‘Giles, I intend to return to the United Kingdom this afternoon on the two thirty p.m. flight to Heathrow and I have a ticket for you as well. I expect you to return with me.’

   He also expected resistance from one or both of them. But Giles said only, ‘Oh, I’ll come.’ He poured coffee, handed Wexford a cup and the milk jug. ‘I know I have to go back. I always knew I’d have to some time.’

   The old man was looking out of the window, not as if pretending tact or insouciance but surely because he really was thinking of something quite other, Palaungic syntax perhaps. The boy looked up, looked straight at Wexford, his face taking on that curious collapsing look, a crumbling or melting, that precedes tears. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. An effort was made, his face set and there were no tears. ‘How is my sister?’

   ‘She’s fine.’ She wasn’t but what else could he say? Certainly not at this stage that she had been abandoned by their mother. The scalding coffee alerting him and waking him in a bracing way, he turned his attention to the owner of this house. ‘May I know what possessed you, Professor Trent, when you gave shelter to Giles? What were you thinking of, a responsible man, a respected scholar of your age? Didn’t you consider your civic duty if nothing else?’

   “Possessed” me,’ said Trent, smiling. ‘I like that. I used to think, when I was young, how amazing it would be to be actually possessed. By some kind of spirit, I mean. Would it bring with it the gift of tongues, for instance? Imagine being suddenly endowed with the ability to speak Hittite?’ Giles’s shocked expression halted him. ‘Oh, come on, Giles, you’ve given up all that fundamentalist nonsense, you know you have. You’ve told me so often enough. You know very well it’s not possible to be possessed by a demon, gift of tongues or not.’

   ‘I used to think’, said Giles, ‘that Joanna was possessed by one. They said a demon was what made people behave like that.’ He didn’t specify who ‘they’ were but it was apparent he meant the Good Gospellers. ‘They said I had a demon that made me do what I did.’

   ‘You know better now, an enlightened young person like you.’

   Wexford thought it time to put a stop to this. ‘Professor Trent, you haven’t answered my questions.’

   ‘Have I not? What were they? Oh, yes, something about my civic duty not to harbour fugitive criminals. Well, I’ve never supposed I had a civic duty and Giles isn’t a criminal. You’ve just said that yourself.’ He broke into a flood of Swedish and Giles nodded. ‘I’m not particularly responsible either, I’ve never had the least interest in law or politics or, come to that, religion. I’ve always considered I had quite enough to do elucidating the knotty problems of the languages spoken by seventy million people.’

   More incomprehensible asides to Giles prompted Wexford to say testily, ‘Please don’t speak in Swedish. If you persist I must ask to talk to Giles alone. I may do that, he is over sixteen now. I take it that your late wife telephoned you and asked you to receive Giles?’

   ‘That is correct,’ said Trent slightly more affably. ‘Poor Matilda. She knew I would do anything for her except live in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’ He shuddered artificially. ‘She knew I was exactly the man to give sanctuary to someone fleeing its justice. Besides, my housekeeper had moved up to Umea and it seemed to me Giles might be an adequate substitute for a while. I am, oddly enough, quite a domesticated man, but I need some assistance. I must tell you, I’ve grown quite attached to this boy. He performed a few tasks about the house, running errands, making the beds and the coffee - now is that an example of zeugma, Giles?’

   Giles grinned. ‘No. It would be if you’d said, “making haste and the coffee”. Yours is syllepsis.’

   ‘Not quite but we won’t go into it now,’ said Trent. ‘I would have been a good deal less happy, Inspector, if Matilda had sent me a fool. The housework accomplished would hardly have been a compensation for lack of mental ability. Am I coming close to solving your problems?’

   Wexford didn’t answer. He saw that pursuing this was useless. And what did he intend to do if he got some sort of admission out of Trent? Have him extradited? The whole notion was ludicrous. Perhaps all he was after was that rather contemptible goal, revenge. Not quite abandoning the idea of it, he said, ‘You are aware, Mr Trent, that your wife is dead?’

   At that Giles turned away his face but Trent said only, ‘Oh, yes, I knew. Matilda’s daughter told me. I might have gone to the funeral - not that I approve of funerals - and even if it had meant passing the time of day with Giles’s appalling parents, but I could hardly leave Giles here alone. Apart from all that, I had just reached a crucial point in my research into the early proliferation of Pear, what I believe is called a breakthrough.’

   ‘I won’t ask you what Ms Carrish’s motive was. In asking you to receive Giles, I mean. I know what it was.’

   Giles looked at him enquiringly but he didn’t elucidate. ‘You travelled on your Irish passport,’ he said. ‘Before you left your home with Sophie you phoned Matilda, knowing she would help you, and she suggested you bring your Irish passport with you but leave the British one behind - to fool the police. Am I right?’

   Giles nodded. ‘What happened to Matilda?’

   ‘She had a stroke,’ Wexford said. ‘Sophie was with her. She’d been with her all the time. She phoned the emergency services and then, of course, she had to give herself up. There was nothing else for it.’

   ‘We should have done that in the first place, shouldn’t we? Phoned the emergency services, I mean.’ He didn’t need an answer. He knew what Wexford would say, what everyone would say. ‘I thought no one would believe me. They’d think what Matilda thought and they wouldn’t be so - so understanding.’

   ‘You can tell me about it on the flight,’ Wexford said. And now you’d better get your things together. We’ll take ourselves to the airport, have some lunch first.’

   Trent had been silent through most of this. Now he turned round and fixed his eyes, cold and blue as the Fyris, first on Wexford, then on the boy, and there they lingered. ‘If I’d known it was going to take such a short time I wouldn’t have rearranged my schedule.’ You could hear the quotation marks clanging into place on either side of the final word. ‘I suppose I can get up to the university now before any more time is wasted.’

   ‘I’ll come back,’ the boy said eagerly. ‘You know what we said. In two years’ time I’ll come back here to the university. In the silence which followed he looked at Wexford. ‘I will, won’t I?’

   ‘Let’s hope so,’ Wexford said. He turned to Trent. ‘Tell me something. The cathedral here has two Gothic spires. When it was built in the fourteenth century it must have had Gothic spires. But in the prints I saw in Ms Carrish’s house from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it’s the same cathedral but it’s got onion domes. Why?’

   Trent looked deeply bored and at the same time harassed. ‘Oh, there was an enormous fire here and the towers fell down or something like that and they put those onion things there and then at the end of the nineteenth they were out of fashion so they tore them down and put Gothic spires up again. Ridiculous.’

   ‘Could I. . .‘ Giles said to him, ‘could I have a copy of Pelle? Kind of as a souvenir?’

   ‘Oh, take it, take it,’ said Trent testily. 'And now if you’ll excuse me. . .'

   At the duty-free Wexford bought perfume for Dora, bearing in mind Burden’s pre-Christmas advice on this subject. Giles drank a can of Coke and Wexford, with out much enthusiasm, a small and very expensive bottle of sparkling water. The boy was subdued and quiet, evidently fearful of this return home and reluctant to leave the country that had received him. He still stared nostalgically out of the airport windows towards where the flat plain of Upplands lay.

   The flight was delayed but only by twenty minutes. Wexford gave Giles the window seat. As they took off the woman in the seat across the aisle crossed herself, a little shamefacedly it seemed to Wexford. The boy, who had also witnessed this, speaking for the first time since they fastened their seatbelts, said, ‘I’ve given up all that.’

   ‘All what?’ Wexford thought he knew but he needed to ask

   ‘You’d call it fundamentalism.’ Giles made a face. ‘The Good Gospel, all that. What happened cured me. I thought - I thought they were - well, what they said, good. I wanted to be good. I mean, in the widest possible sense - d’you know what I mean?’

   ‘I think so.’

   ‘You see, the way people behave - I mean people my age - makes me feel sick. My sister’s getting that way. The sex and the words they use and the way they - they sort of mock anything religious or moral or whatever. The foul stuff on TV. I mean comedy shows and that. And I thought - I thought I wanted to keep myself away from all that, keep myself clean.’

   ‘The church I went to wasn’t any good. That was St Peter’s. They didn’t seem to know what they believed or what they wanted. The Good Gospel people seemed so sure. There was just one way for them, you did all those things they said and you’d be all right. That’s what I liked. Do you see?’

   ‘Maybe. Why did you want the book?’

   ‘Pelle Svanslös? Svanslös means “the tailless one”. They children’s books about a cat and his friends, and they all live in Fjardingen, near where I was. I had to have something to remind me.’

   ‘Yes. You liked it there, didn’t you? Now why don’t you tell me what happened that weekend when Joanna came to stay? I’ve heard your sister’s version and most of it wasn’t true.’

   ‘She tells lies all the time. But it’s not her fault.’

   ‘Now I want to hear the truth, Giles.’

   The aircraft had begun its journey along the runway, proceeding slowly at first, then faster as the captain called to cabin crews to take their seats for take-off. Smoothly they soared into the air, from blue sky into blue sky for there was no cloud barrier to break through.

   ‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ the boy said. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for a long time but I’ve been - I’ve been afraid.’ His face had whitened and as he turned his head to look at Wexford his expression was desperate. ‘You have to believe me. I didn’t - kill Joanna. I didn’t do anything to her, not anything at all.’

   ‘I know that,’ Wexford said. ‘I knew that before I found out where you were.’

‘There seem to be a lot of people getting off scot-free,’ grumbled the Assistant Chief Constable.

   ‘I wouldn’t say that, sir,’ Wexford said robustly. ‘We’ve a murder charge, one for concealing a death, another for wasting police time. Even if the boy gets no more than probation and a period of community service, his conviction will be on his record for ever. I very much doubt, for instance, if the Swedish authorities will let him enter the country to attend the University of Uppsala when the time comes, which is what he wants to do.’

   ‘And you call that punishment?’

   ‘For him it will be. His sister’s punishment is to have to go on living with their father.’

   He had submitted his report to James Freeborn and explained it in detail. Now he was due to meet Burden and enlighten him. It was, of course, a wet evening in April, the fields surrounding Kingsmarkham permanently waterlogged but not under water. From where Wexford walked down the High Street towards the Olive and Dove those meadows simply looked a brilliant fresh green in the yellow clouded sunset. At the Queen Street turning he made a detour. Curiosity impelled him and, sure enough, the newsagent’s, normally open until 8 p.m., was closed ‘until further notice’. Perhaps it was a sign, perhaps this was the moment to stop taking that absurd anachronism, a provincial evening paper. Who needed it? Who wanted it? Still, if it disappeared many would lose their jobs and there were other newsagents in the neighbourhood to distribute it.

   His digression had made him a little late. Burden was already in their ‘snug’, the small room tucked away in a back region but still with access to the saloon bar, the, only corner of the drinking areas of the hotel, as Wexford sometimes said, to be free of music, fruit machines, food and children. Nor were there posters asking who wanted to be a millionaire, the local and live version of the television programmes no advertisements for tugs-of-war or clairvoyant dog contests, attractions it had long been assumed at the Rat and Carrot, and was now assumed all over the town, to be demanded indiscriminately by everyone. The snug, where Burden stood with his back to an enormous coal fire in a small grate, was a very small room with brown woodwork and brown-papered walls on which hung very dark pictures of a vaguely hunting-print kind. At least, from what you could make out in the gloom, they were of animals on foot and men on horseback chasing things through bracken, bramble and briar. If no one had smoked much in this room for several years, time was when many had. As the bar rooms of the Olive and Dove were never decorated and probably never had been since the beginning of the twentieth century, the smoke of several million cigarettes had mounted to the once cream-coloured ceiling and stained it the dark mahogany of the furniture.