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

hadn’t returned to the front of the house until she went to pick up the evening paper off the doormat.
       ‘Did you see a dark-blue car parked on the Dades’ driveway during the weekend?’
       She had and was proud of her memory. ‘I saw her come - she was the children’s sitter - I saw her come on the Friday evening And I can tell you that car was there when I saw Giles go out.’
       But had it still been there when she picked up the evening paper? She hadn’t noticed, it had been raining so hard. Was it still there next morning? She couldn’t answer that but she knew it hadn’t been there on Sunday afternoon.
       If someone had entered the house in order to abduct Joanna Troy and Giles and Sophie Dade, or somehow to entice them away, it began to look as if this must have happened after the rain began. Or else they had all gone for a drive on Saturday evening, a very unlikely time to go out at all. The teeming rain had kept everyone who didn’t have to leave his or her house firmly indoors. Wexford was turning all this over in his mind and noting how it made the drowning theory less and less probable when Vine came in and held out to him something soaking wet and mud-stained on a tray.
       ‘What is it?’
       ‘It’s a T-shirt, sir. A woman found it in the water in her back garden and brought it in here. It’s got a name printed on it, you see, and that’s what alerted her.’
       Wexford took the garment by the shoulders and lifted it an inch or two out of the muddy water in which it lay. The background was blue and it was smaller but otherwise it was the twin to the red one they had seen in Giles Dade’s cupboard. Only the face was a girl’s and the name on it was ‘Sophie’.

Chapter 5

    The river floods were at their widest here. The woman who had found the T-shirt said ruefully that when she and her partner had been looking for a home in the neighbourhood, they almost rejected this house because it was so far from the Kingsbrook. ‘Not far enough, evidently.’
       But a good deal further away than Wexford’s. Still, it was also lower-lying and in spite of the rain which had been falling steadily since nine, the tide had reached only about a third of the way up the garden, bringing with it a scummy detritus of plastic bottles, a carrier bag, a Coke can, broken twigs, dead leaves, used condoms, a toothbrush...
       ‘And that T-shirt.’
       ‘You found it here?’
       ‘That’s right. Among all this lot. I saw the name and it rang a bell.’
       Wexford went on home. He was meeting Burden for a ‘quick’ lunch but he wanted to see the new wall first. It wasn’t necessary to go outside. No one would go out side today if he didn’t have to. Four tiers of sandbags on each side raised the height of the walls by two feet but the swirling water hadn’t yet quite reached the bottom of the lowest tier.
       ‘It was very kind of Cal,’ Dora said.
       ‘Yes.’
       ‘He’s taking me out to lunch.’
       ‘What, just you? Where’s Sylvia?’
       ‘Gone to work. It’s her day off but she offered to do the helpline at The Hide. One of the other women is off sick’
       Wexford said no more. It struck him that a man doesn’t take his girlfriend’s mother out to a meal on her own unless he is very serious about that girlfriend, unless, in fact, he contemplates making her mother his mother-in-law or something very near it. Why did he mind so much? Callum Chapman was suitable enough. He had been married but his wife had died. There were no children. He had a reasonable job as an actuary (whatever that was), a flat of his own in Stowerton. At his last birthday he had become forty. According to Sylvia, her children liked him. Dora apparently liked him. He had been eager to do a good deed by volunteering as a sandbag shifter in the water crisis.
       ‘He’s dull,’ Wexford said to himself as he drove down the hill through the rain to meet Burden at the