Free Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods by Ruth Rendell Page A

looked as if neither of them had slept much.
       ‘I suppose it’s really come home to us. It wasn’t real before, it was like a bad dream.’ Katrina added wistfully, ‘That drowning business, that was nonsense, wasn’t it? I don’t know what made me think they’d drowned.’
       ‘Quite understandable, Mrs Dade,’ said Burden, earning himself a frown from Wexford. ‘Later on, we’d like to talk to you in greater depth.’ He hoped no one noticed the unintentional pun. Wexford would have, of course. ‘First we should take a look at the room where Ms Troy spent the night or the two nights.’
       ‘She didn’t leave anything behind,’ said Katrina when they were on the stairs. ‘She must have brought a bag but if she did she took it away with her.’
       The room was under one of the steep-roofed gables of the house. Its ceiling was beamed and sharply sloping above the single bed. If you sat up unexpectedly during the night, thought Wexford, you could give your head a nasty bang. What Katrina had said appeared to be true and Joanna had indeed left nothing behind but he watched with approval as Lynn got down on her knees and scanned the floor. There was no en suite bathroom and the built-in clothes cupboard was empty. The drawers in a chest were also empty but for an ear ring in the top one on the left-hand side.
       ‘That isn’t hers,’ Katrina said in her new little girl voice. ‘Joanna never wore earrings.’ Where anyone else might have talked of ‘pierced’ ears, she said, ‘She didn’t have holes in her ears for them to go through.’ She held the single pearl in the palm of her hand, said mischievously as if she hadn’t a care in the world, ‘It must belong to my horrible old ma-in-law. She stayed here in October, the old bat. Shall I throw it away? I bet it’s valuable.’
       No one answered her. Lynn got up from the floor, plainly disappointed, and they all went down the stairs. There the old Katrina returned. She subsided on to a chair in the hail and began to cry. She sobbed that she was ashamed of herself. Why did she talk like that? Her children leaving her was a judgement on her for saying the things she did. Roger Dade came out from the living room with a handful of tissues and put a not very enthusiastic arm round her.
       ‘She’s in such a state,’ he said, ‘she doesn’t know what she saying.’
       Wexford thought the opposite, that while in vino veritas might be true, in miseria veritas, or ‘in grief truth’, certainly was. He didn’t say so. He was watching Lynn who had once more got down on hands and knees, but not in mere speculation this time - she had spotted something. She knelt up and said, like the promising young officer she was, ‘Could I have a new plastic bag, please, sir, and a pair of sterile tweezers?’
       ‘Call Archbold,’ said Wexford. ‘That’s the best way. He’ll bring what’s necessary. It’ll be more efficient than anything we can do without him.’
       ‘But what is it?’ said Dade, gaping, when they were in the living room.
       ‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’ Burden had a pretty good idea but he wasn’t going to say. Not yet. ‘Now, Mrs Dade, do you feel able to tell us something about Ms Troy? We know she’s a translator who’s been a teacher, that she’s thirty-one and been married and divorced. I believe you met her when you were a school secretary and she was teaching at Haldon Finch School?’
       ‘I only did it for a year,’ said Katrina. ‘My husband didn’t like me doing it. I got so tired.’
       ‘You were exhausted, you know you were. Other women may be able to juggle a job and the home but you’re not one of them. Regularly every Friday night you’d have a nervous collapse.’
       He said it lightly but Wexford could imagine those nervous collapses. He very nearly shuddered. ‘When was this, Mrs Dade?’
       ‘Let me think. Sophie was six when I started. It must be seven