nowhere for the accumulated water to go. Sheila Wexford, flying into Gatwick from the west of the United States, came to stay a night with her parents and told them the aircraft’s descent had felt like a sea plane landing, the floods spread across thousands of acres and the downs rising out of it like islands.
The days passed, damp days, wet days, but the rain lessening, downpours giving place to showers, torrents to drizzle. The weekend was cloudy, the sky threatening, but what the Met Office had once called ‘precipitation’, an absurd name they had dropped recently, that had stopped. Joanna Troy and Giles and Sophie Dade had been missing for a week. On Monday a feeble watery sun came out. Instead of churning it into billows, the wind merely ruffled the gleaming grey surface of the floods. And contrary to what had been gloomily fore told, the water began to recede.
Its level had never reached the topmost sandbags in Wexford’s garden but had lapped the walls and lain there, a menacing stagnant pool, unchanging for days. As Monday passed it started to sink and by the evening the whole of the highest sandbags were exposed. That evening Wexford brought his books downstairs and Dora’s favourite small items of furniture.
Subaqua, whose headquarters were in Myringham, had opened a temporary office in Kingsmarkham. Since they had found nothing, its only use, as far as Wexford could tell, was as somewhere to send Roger and Katrina Dade when their demands on him became peremptory. They were quite natural, these demands. More and more he was begining to feel deep sympathy for these parents. Katrina’s tears and Dade’s brusqueness were forgotten in an overwhelming pity for a couple whose children had disappeared and who must feel total impotence in the face of an investigating officer temporarily warned off investigating. She at least probably spent long hours in the Subaqua trailer parked on the dry side of Brook Road next to the Nationwide Building Society and waited for the news that never came. Roger Dade’s snatching time off work was very likely an agony to him. Neither of them looked as if they had eaten for a week.
George and Effie Troy, as anxious now as those other parents, called to see him and them he sent to Subaqua too. Not that he had entirely obeyed Freeborn’s injunction. Rather he had interpreted it as applying to activity on his part and that of his officers. Passivity was another matter. He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop people coming to him or even, if they phoned first, forbid them to air their fears in his presence. Of course, he could send them to Subaqua as well but surely that was no reason not to hear them out first?
The first of them arrived while he was reading the lab report on the little object Lynn Fancourt had found in the Dades’ hail. A tooth it was, or rather, the crown of a tooth, constructed of porcelain and gold. There was no reason to suppose violence had contributed to its separation from the root and base of the natural tooth to which it had been attached. An interesting factor, in the opinion of the forensic examiner, was that a small amount of an adhesive was found on the crown and this was of the type which Joanna Tray might have bought over the counter in a pharmacy temporarily to reattach the crown if, say, she had been unable to visit her dentist. Wexford wasn’t sure it was particularly interesting. While having no crowns on his own teeth, he felt that if he had and one came out he might, especially if pain resulted, buy and use such an adhesive. Surely anyone would as a temporary measure. Patch up your tooth and ring your dentist for an appointment.
But now she might be in pain. Would she seek a dentist wherever she was? And should he do something about this? Alert dentists nationwide . . . Only he couldn’t because Freeborn had banned any further action. While he was thinking about this Vine came in and said there was a Mrs Carrish
The days passed, damp days, wet days, but the rain lessening, downpours giving place to showers, torrents to drizzle. The weekend was cloudy, the sky threatening, but what the Met Office had once called ‘precipitation’, an absurd name they had dropped recently, that had stopped. Joanna Troy and Giles and Sophie Dade had been missing for a week. On Monday a feeble watery sun came out. Instead of churning it into billows, the wind merely ruffled the gleaming grey surface of the floods. And contrary to what had been gloomily fore told, the water began to recede.
Its level had never reached the topmost sandbags in Wexford’s garden but had lapped the walls and lain there, a menacing stagnant pool, unchanging for days. As Monday passed it started to sink and by the evening the whole of the highest sandbags were exposed. That evening Wexford brought his books downstairs and Dora’s favourite small items of furniture.
Subaqua, whose headquarters were in Myringham, had opened a temporary office in Kingsmarkham. Since they had found nothing, its only use, as far as Wexford could tell, was as somewhere to send Roger and Katrina Dade when their demands on him became peremptory. They were quite natural, these demands. More and more he was begining to feel deep sympathy for these parents. Katrina’s tears and Dade’s brusqueness were forgotten in an overwhelming pity for a couple whose children had disappeared and who must feel total impotence in the face of an investigating officer temporarily warned off investigating. She at least probably spent long hours in the Subaqua trailer parked on the dry side of Brook Road next to the Nationwide Building Society and waited for the news that never came. Roger Dade’s snatching time off work was very likely an agony to him. Neither of them looked as if they had eaten for a week.
George and Effie Troy, as anxious now as those other parents, called to see him and them he sent to Subaqua too. Not that he had entirely obeyed Freeborn’s injunction. Rather he had interpreted it as applying to activity on his part and that of his officers. Passivity was another matter. He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop people coming to him or even, if they phoned first, forbid them to air their fears in his presence. Of course, he could send them to Subaqua as well but surely that was no reason not to hear them out first?
The first of them arrived while he was reading the lab report on the little object Lynn Fancourt had found in the Dades’ hail. A tooth it was, or rather, the crown of a tooth, constructed of porcelain and gold. There was no reason to suppose violence had contributed to its separation from the root and base of the natural tooth to which it had been attached. An interesting factor, in the opinion of the forensic examiner, was that a small amount of an adhesive was found on the crown and this was of the type which Joanna Tray might have bought over the counter in a pharmacy temporarily to reattach the crown if, say, she had been unable to visit her dentist. Wexford wasn’t sure it was particularly interesting. While having no crowns on his own teeth, he felt that if he had and one came out he might, especially if pain resulted, buy and use such an adhesive. Surely anyone would as a temporary measure. Patch up your tooth and ring your dentist for an appointment.
But now she might be in pain. Would she seek a dentist wherever she was? And should he do something about this? Alert dentists nationwide . . . Only he couldn’t because Freeborn had banned any further action. While he was thinking about this Vine came in and said there was a Mrs Carrish
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