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

years. Oh, my darling little Sophie! Where is she? What’s happened to her?’
       Everyone would have liked to answer that. Burden said, ‘We’re doing our best to find her and her brother, Mrs Dade. Telling us whatever you can about Ms Troy is the best way to help us find them. So you met and became friends.’ He added bluntly, ‘She was a good deal your junior.’
       Katrina Dade’s expression was one of a woman who has just been not so much insulted as deeply wounded. If he had unjustly accused her of child cruelty; selling her country’s secrets to a foreign power or breaking and entering her neighbour’s property; she couldn’t have looked more appalled. She countered it with a stammered-out, half- broken, ‘Do you think it’s fair to speak to me like that? Considering what I’m going through? Do you?’
       ‘I’d no intention of upsetting you, Mrs Dade,’ Burden said stiffly. ‘We’ll leave it.’ I know there was a good thirteen years between them, anyway, he thought. ‘Ms Troy gave up teaching some time after that - do you know when?’
       It was a reply sulkily given. ‘Three years ago.’
       ‘Why was that? Why did she give up?’
       Dade broke in. ‘I’m surprised you have to ask. Isn’t the way kids behave at these comprehensives reason enough? The noise, the foul language, the violence. The way no one can keep discipline. A teacher who dares to give a child a little tap gets up before the Human Rights Court. Isn’t that reason enough?’
       ‘I take it Giles and Sophie attend a private school?’ Wexford said.
       ‘You take it right. I believe in the best education for my children and I don’t believe in letting them take it easy. They’ll thank me one day. I’m a stickler for home work promptly done. Both of them have private tutors as well as school.’
       ‘But Ms Troy isn’t one of them?’
       ‘Absolutely not.’
       Before Dade could say any more there came a shrill ringing at the doorbell as if Archbold clutched the bell pull and hung on - as he probably had. Lynn went to let him in.
       Burden resumed, ‘Had Ms Troy come to look after your children on previous occasions?’
       ‘I told you. Roger and I had never been away together all the time we were married. Not till last weekend. If you mean for an evening sometimes while we went out - it didn’t happen often, mind - she’d done that. The last time would have been a month ago, something like that. Oh, and there was one night we went to a dinner-dance in London and she stayed then.’
       ‘I’d hoped this weekend away would be the very last time they’d need a sitter. Giles would have been - will be - sixteen very shortly.’ Roger Dade flushed deeply at what he had said, made it worse: ‘I mean - what I meant to say was...’
       ‘That you think he’s dead!’ Katrina’s tears began afresh.
       Her husband put his head in his hands, muttered from between his fingers, ‘I don’t know what I think. I can’t think straight. This is driving me mad.’ He looked up. ‘How much time am I going to have to take off work over this?’
       Wexford had almost decided he must give up for the day, try some other tack, when Archbold tapped on the door and came in. He had a small sterile pack in his hand, which he held up for Wexford’s inspection. Peering through the transparent stuff of which the envelope was made, he saw something that looked like a small fragment of whitish porcelain, backed with a strip of gold.
       ‘What is it?’
       ‘It looks to me like the crown or cap off a tooth, sir.’
       This fetched Dade out of his despair. He sat up. Katrina scrubbed at her eyes with a tissue. The sealed pack was passed to them, then to Burden and Lynn.
       ‘Did either of your children have crowns in their mouths?’ Burden asked.
       Katrina shook her head. ‘No, but Joanna did. She had two of her teeth crowned. It was years ago. She had a fall in the gym,