Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods Read Free

helped themselves to what they fancied. One thief, arrested by Detective Sergeant Vine, protested that the iron and microwave oven he had stolen were his by right. In his view, the goods were compensation for his ground-floor flat being inundated, he was sure he would get no other. Vine suspected that a bunch of teenagers, still at school, were responsible for stealing the entire CD and cassette stock from the York Audio Centre.
       Wexford would have liked to check with his wife every half-hour but he controlled himself and didn’t phone again until half past four. By then the heavy rain had given place to a thin relentless drizzle. The phone rang and rang, and he had almost decided she must be out when she picked up the receiver.
       ‘I was outside. I heard it ringing but I had to get my boots off and try not to make too much mess. Rain and mud make the simplest outdoor tasks take twice as long.’
       ‘How’s the mulberry tree?’
       ‘The water’s reached it, Reg. It’s sort of lapping against the trunk. Well, it was bound to, the way it’s been raining. I was wondering if there was anything we could do to stop it, the water coming up, I mean, not the rain. They haven’t found a way to stop that yet. I was thinking about sandbags, only the council haven’t any, I phoned them and this woman said they’re waiting for them to come in. Like a shop assistant, I thought.’
       He laughed, though not very cheerfully. ‘We can’t stop the water but we can start thinking about moving our furniture upstairs.’ Get Neil over to help, he nearly said, and then he remembered his son-in-law was gone out of their lives since he and Sylvia split up. Instead he told Dora he’d be home by six.
       That morning he hadn’t brought the car. Lately he’d been walking a lot more. The almost endless downpours stimulated his need to walk - there was human nature for you! - because the chance to do so in comfort and in the dry came so seldom. At first light no rain had been falling and the sky was a wet pearly blue. It was still dry at eight thirty and he’d begun to walk. Huge heavy clouds were gathering, covering up the blue and the pale, milky sun. By the time he reached the station the first drops were falling. Now he thought he would have to make it home through this wet mist that intermittently became drizzle, but when he came out of the newly installed automatic doors the rain had lifted and for the first time for a long while he felt a marked chill in the air. It smelt drier. It smelt like a change in the weather. Better not be too optimistic, he told himself.
       It was dark. Already dark as midnight. From this level, on foot, he could see nothing of the floods, only that the pavements and roadways were wet and puddles lay deep in the gutters. He crossed the High Street and began the slightly uphill walk to home. The Dades he had forgotten and wouldn’t have recalled them even then but for passing the end of Kingston Gardens and reading the street name in the yellow light from a lamp. Lyndhurst Drive met it at its highest point and those living there could have looked down from their windows on to his roof and his garden. They were safe. Someone had told him that for the floods to reach such a height they would have had first to rise above the cupola on Kingsmarkham Town Hall.
       Yes, the Dades were safe up there. And the chance of their children being drowned practically nil. Before he left, a message had come through from the Subaqua Task Force to say that no living people or bodies had been found. Wexford stared up the hill, wondering exactly where they lived. And then he stopped dead. What was the matter with him? Was he losing his grip on things? Those children might not have drowned but they were missing, weren’t they? Their parents had come home from a weekend away and found them gone. Last night. All this nonsense about floods and drowning had obscured for him the central issue. Two