Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods (41 page)

   Two tables and six chairs were the snug’s only furniture. On the table nearer the fire stood two tankards of beer, two packets of crisps and some cashew nuts in a dish. It was enormously, but not unpleasantly, hot. Burden, deeply tanned from his holiday, was dressed in one version of his weekend garb, a tweed suit with caramel shirt and tie that fortuitously matched the ceiling.

   ‘Raining again,’ Wexford said.

   ‘I hope you’ve got more to say than that.’

   Wexford sat down. ‘Too much, I dare say you’ll think. It’s nice here, isn’t? Quiet. Peaceful. I wonder if this will be the end of the United Gospel Church. Probably, for a while.’ He took a swig of his lager, thought of opening one of the crisp packets but changed his mind with a sigh. All the time we thought this case was about the Dade children but it wasn’t. Not really. They were just pawns. It was about the conflict between the Good Gospellers and Joanna Troy - or, rather, people like Joanna Troy in the broadest sense.’

   ‘What does that mean?’

   ‘I’ll explain. There was an aspect of the Good Gospellers we knew about but to which we neglected to give the importance it deserved: their keenness on “purity”. I should have paid more attention to it because it was one of the first things about the church’s aims that Jashub Wright mentioned to me. He talked about something he called “inner cleanliness” and all I could think of was Andrews Liver Salts, which, in case you’re too young to know, was a constipation remedy when I was a child. “Inner cleanliness” was their slogan. I sup pose that’s why I didn’t pay any attention to the fact that it was also the Good Gospellers’ slogan. Only they didn’t mean what today is called clearing the body of toxins, they meant sexual purity, chastity. Unchastity was the prime sin new converts were expected to be open about when they were brought to the Confessional Congregation.’

   ‘I don’t. imagine’, said Burden, sitting, ‘that Giles Dade had much of that to confess. He was only fifteen.’

   ‘Then there you’d be wrong. He had some revelations for that bunch of latter-day saints or however they think of themselves. But we’ll leave him for the moment and get back to the Good Gospellers themselves. Like many such fundamentalists, they weren’t much concerned with other sins, things that maybe you and I would call sins, if we were inclined that way. I mean violence, assault, bodily harm, cruelty, stealing, lying and simple unkindness, none of that bothered them. And I get the distinct impression from Giles that they would have been impatient with anyone who wasted their time confessing to hitting his wife or neglecting his children. It was sex they were concerned with, pre and extramarital sex, fornication and adultery, most of it in their view caused by women and their tempting ways, rather in the way the early fathers of the Roman Catholic Church thought about it or some modern American cults. Sex, according to Giles, must in their view be confined exclusively within marriage and not too much of it there. Ideally, it should be restricted to the procreation of children.’

   Burden nodded. ‘Sure, but where does Giles come in?’

   ‘Let’s move on to Joanna Troy now. Joanna was apparently an entirely normal young woman, clever, gifted, nice-looking, a good teacher and potentially a successful person with a full life ahead of her. But she had already done a good deal to make that full life look unlikely.’

   ‘What do you mean?’

   Wexford looked up at the window, at the rain lashing against it and the dusk deepening outside. The curtains, of figured brown velvet, looked as if they had never been drawn since someone first hung them on their mahogany pole thirty or forty years before. He got up and tugged at them, releasing clouds of tobacco-smelling dust. As they met across the window the decay of years showed in the transparent ragged areas where they were coming apart. Both of them laughed.

   ‘I only wanted to shut out the weather,’ Wexford said and, after a pause, ‘You asked me what I meant. When Joanna was a teenager she was attracted by her contemporaries, like most people of her age. At fifteen she lost her mother. What that meant to her we shall never know and I’m not a psychologist, but I’d guess she was very traumatised by that loss, especially as her sole parent then was that dreary old windbag George Troy with about as much understanding as a flea. Maybe an effect of it was to make her revert to child hood and to the companionship of children, though she was no longer a child. Maybe if she had had brothers none of this would have happened.

   ‘The first thing to happen, or the first we know about, was the incident at school with Ludovic Brown. He was younger than she, probably prepubertal, and when Joanna made advances to him he was frightened and repelled her. She did all she knew how to do then - she fought him. He wouldn’t, shall we say, love her? - so she beat him up. Revenge and anger and the misery of rejection all went into it. The consequences of that we know. His death, was an accident, quite separate from this case.

   ‘Joanna must have had other relationships with boys, some of them satisfactory, but as she grew older and the ages of the boys remained the same, that is in their early or mid-teens, her tastes began to look unnatural. But she was trapped in adolescence by the trauma of her mother’s death which happened when she was sixteen.’

   Burden interrupted him. ‘Are you saying Joanna Troy was a paedophile?’

   ‘I suppose I am. We think of paedophiles as men and their victims as either girls or boys. Older women having a taste for young boys doesn’t seem to come into the same category, largely, I think, because most men, when told about it, tend to make “Aarrgh” noises and say they should have been so lucky.’

   Burden pulled a face that had a grin in it. ‘I wasn’t going to say that but they do have a point. You know me, you think I’m a bit of a prude, but even I can’t imagine a boy of fifteen with all that testosterone slurping about inside him saying no to a good-looking woman ten or twelve years older than himself.’

   ‘You’d better imagine it, Mike, because it happened. Only say seventeen years older. But first came Joanna’s marriage. Ralph Jennings was in his early twenties when she met him but he looked years younger. Those very fair people do. Unfortunately, they also age correspondingly faster. I think Joanna believed Jennings might be her salvation. He was a passive yes-man but quite bright, a potential high earner, they had plenty in common. Perhaps if she was with him she’d stop fancying boys ten years her junior. This proclivity of hers, after all, wasn’t just a nuisance, it was as much against the law as if she’d been a middle-aged man and the boys or girls in their teens.

   ‘But, sadly for her, Jennings started to go bald. His face reddened. Domestic life ruined his boyish figure. Sex was not only no longer the fun it had been, it was becoming distasteful. The marriage broke up. But Joanna remained in Kingsmarkham and in her prestigious job teaching at Haldon Finch. Instead of controlling her impulses towards boys of fourteen or fifteen, she let rip, as people so often do when some long-term relationship comes to an end.’ Wexford paused, thinking of Sylvia, wondering how many more there would be before things worked out for her. ‘She was in exactly the right place for a female paedophile, wasn’t she?’ he went on. ‘A mixed school where she taught students of the age she most fancied. And in a much better position than her male counterparts, for young girls who may often have been raped or at least seduced are far more likely to complain than boys enjoying sex for the first time.

   ‘Damon Wimborne didn’t complain. He would happily have continued his relationship with Joanna for months if not years. You talk of testosterone but we forget the idealistic aspect, we forget how prone young boys are to worship and put the adored one on a pedestal. Damon was in love with Joanna, “whatever that may mean”, as Jennings and a more eminent person put it. But it’s a sad fact that for some people, having a sexual partner in love with them is the most off-putting thing. It put Joanna off and her feelings for Damon cooled to a point of - nothing. But in a way, she was still a teenager and always would be. Teenagers are rude to their contemporaries - and others - and they say bluntly what they think. She told him she was no longer interested in no uncertain terms, probably brutal terms. We misquote that most popular of aphorisms and say, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” But the lines are: “Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” Love can turn to hatred in men as well as women and that’s what Damon’s did. He was scorned and he needed to lash back. Physically, he was a mature man but he was only fifteen, his mind was fifteen. He said he’d seen her steal a twenty-pound note from his backpack...’

   ‘Yes. It fits.’ Burden tapped Wexford’s tankard. Another?’

   ‘In a minute. The head teacher couldn’t understand why Joanna didn’t fight it and clear her name. But Joanna dared not do that. Everything would come out if she did. She knew her career as a teacher was over, there was no help for it. Resign now and make a new career for herself, be self-employed so that within reason she could do as she liked. She owned her house without encumbrances, she had the use of her father’s car, she had her qualifications and the opportunity was there...’

   He was interrupted by the arrival of the barman. 'Another round, gentlemen? I thought I’d pop in because we’ve a coach party and we may be a bit busy over the next half-hour.’

   Wexford asked for two more halves, glancing complacently at the untouched crisps and nuts. ‘Some months before she had made the acquaintance of Katrina Dade. I can’t imagine Katrina was much company for a woman like her but she was a sycophant and people of Joanna’s sort, clever, prickly, paranoid, immature, they like sycophants, they like to be buttered up all the time, flattered, told how brilliant they are.’

   ‘This may be particularly true’, put in Burden, ‘when the flattered looks free and independent, self- supporting and successfully feminist, and the flatterer is disturbed, dependent, always seeking role models and someone to adore.’

   ‘I see evidence of that psychology course Freeborn made you take.’

   ‘Maybe, and why not?’

   The barman came back with their order and two packets of a different variety of crisps. ‘On the house, gentlemen,’ he said kindly. ‘I see you’ve drawn the curtains. Shut Out the floods, eh?’

   ‘Floods?’

   ‘The river’s rising just like it did in the winter. Those old curtains haven’t been drawn since they went up in nineteen seventy-two and it shows, doesn’t it?’

   Wexford shut his eyes. ‘I just hope my garden’s all right.’ He waited till the barman had gone back to his coach party. ‘Still, as far as I know we’ve still got the sandbags. To return to Joanna, she didn’t know of Giles’s existence at that time, just that Katrina had two children. Katrina gave up being school secretary and now neither of them was at Haldon Finch but they went on seeing each other and eventually Joanna went to Katrina’s house.’

   ‘I take it that all this time Joanna was managing to indulge her sexual tastes with young boys? These were the “men” Yvonne Moody had seen going to the house and they had ostensibly come there for private tuition?’

   ‘That’s right. Then, at Antrim, Joanna met Giles Dade. He was fourteen at the time but that wasn’t too young for her. A stumbling block was his commitment to religion, first to the Anglicans, then to the United Gospel Church. But Joanna had offered her services to the Dades as a child-sitter, the best possible way she thought she could get to know Giles. Oddly, like a lot of teachers, she wasn’t very good with children. Sophie disliked her from the first, Giles, in the grip of religious mania, simply wasn’t much interested, and Joanna did nothing to win their trust or their affection. I gather she just gazed at Giles and started touching him, his arm or his shoulder or running a finger down his back, and he didn’t understand what on earth it meant.

   ‘That was one of her problems. Another was that though the Dades occasionally went out in the evenings they never went away overnight. Joanna simply wasn’t getting anywhere and her suggestion to Roger Dade that his son might like to come to her for private tuition also failed. Dade might be a bully and a tyrant but he recognised a good brain when he came across one. In this case, two. He knew both his children were academically clever - in a way he never had been - and perhaps he was even stricter because of this, he was determined their talents wouldn’t be wasted, they must be encouraged to get on. But not with Joanna Troy. Her services simply weren’t called for. Giles had taken a French GCSE when he was only fourteen and got an A star. German wasn’t on his curriculum. What could Joanna teach him?'

   ‘French conversation. Or so she thought. She began coming round - at her own invitation - to instigate French conversation with him, to watch videos in French and encourage him to read French classics. It wasn’t a very successful move because Giles had changed courses since then and was working hard at Russian along with history and politics. French he had done with for the time being. That Giles is very quick at languages was shown, I think, by his picking up Swedish in a matter of weeks, and at that time it was Russian - a very difficult language - he was concentrating on. His spare time, such as it was, he devoted to the United Gospel Church. In a few months’ time he was due to be received into that church after he had attended the Congregation in Passingham woods and made his confession.’

   Burden said ruefully, ‘He had very little to confess then, I suppose.’

   ‘Nothing more than a bit of backsliding about going to church and possibly lack of respect to his parents, something else the Good Gospellers were very hot on. But in the spring the Dades went away for the night. It was the annual dinner and dance of Roger’s firm’s parent company and, for a change, it wasn’t held in Brighton but in London. They would have to stay overnight. I don’t know if Joanna overheard them discussing this and offered her services or if Katrina asked her. The only thing that matters is that Roger and Katrina went to this function and Joanna stayed the night with Giles and Sophie.'