Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods by Ruth Rendell

something like that, and broke her teeth. Then one of the crowns came off when she was eating a caramel. The dentist put it back and Joanna told me he’d said she ought to have them both replaced. He said meantime not to chew gum but she did sometimes.’
       Wexford had never heard her speak so lucidly. He wondered if it was because what they were discussing was something not so much physical and personal as pertaining to the appearance. She would probably talk as informatively on such subjects as diet and exercise, cosmetic surgery and minor ailments, subjects dear to her heart.
       ‘Wouldn’t she notice it had fallen out?’
       ‘She might not,’ Katrina said in the same earnest tone. ‘Not at once. She mightn’t until she sort of wiggled her tongue round her mouth and felt a rough bit.’
       ‘We’d like to come back this afternoon,’ Wexford said, ‘and find out more about the children, their tastes and interests and their friends, and anything more you can tell us about Ms Troy.’
       Dade said in his unpleasantly harsh and scathing voice, ‘Have you never heard that actions speak louder than words?’
       ‘We are acting, Mr Dade.’ Wexford controlled his rising anger. ‘We have all available resources working on the disappearance of your children.’ He hated the terms he was obliged to use. For him they made things worse. What did this man expect? That he and Burden would help matters by personally digging up his back garden or poking into the lakes of water with sticks? ‘You’d surely agree that the best way of discovering where Ms Troy and your children have gone is to find out what they are most likely to do and where they are most likely to go.’
       Dade gave one of his shrugs, more an indication of contempt than helplessness. ‘I shan’t be here, anyway. You’ll have to make do with her.’
       Wexford and Burden got up to go. Archbold and Lynn Fancourt had already left. He meant to say some thing to Katrina but she had so profoundly retreated into herself that it was as if a shell sat there, the outer carapace of a woman with staring but sightless eyes. Her transformation into a rational being had not lasted long.
       The inevitable house-to-house enquiries in Lyndhurst Drive elicited very little. Every householder questioned about the previous weekend spoke of the rain, the torrential, relentless rain. Water may be see-through but rain nevertheless, when descending heavily, creates a grey wall that is no longer transparent but like a thick ever-moving, constantly shifting veil. Moreover, human beings in our climate take a different attitude to weather from those who live in arid countries, being conditioned not to welcome rain but to dislike and turn away from it. That is what those neighbours of the Dades had done once the rain began on the Saturday afternoon. The more it fell, the more they retreated, dosing their curtains. It was noisy too. When at its heaviest it made a continuous low roar that masked other sounds. So the Fowlers who lived on one side of the Dades and the Holloways next door to them had heard and seen nothing. Both families heard their letter boxes open and close when their evening paper, the Evening Courier, was delivered at about six, and both assumed a copy was delivered as usual to Antrim. The neighbours on the other side of the Dades, the first house, in fact, in Kingston Drive, were away for the weekend.
       However, Rita Fowler had seen Giles leave the house on Saturday afternoon before the rain began.
       ‘I can’t remember the time. We’d had our lunch and cleared up. My husband was watching the rugby on TV. It wasn’t raining then.’
       Lynn Fancourt told her it had begun raining just before four but she knew she had seen Giles earlier than that. By four it would have started to get dark and it wasn’t dark when she saw him. Maybe half past two? Or three? Giles had been on his own. She hadn’t seen him return. She