Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods Read Online Free

creature in the guise of a water sprite and a silver lame designer gown, sitting on top of a fountain while a concealed fan blew her hair and draperies about. The meteorologist, an altogether more normal sort of woman, pointing with a ferrule at her map, told them of flood warnings out on four new rivers and an area of low pressure rushing across the Atlantic in pursuit of the one presently affecting the United Kingdom. By morning, she said, as if this wasn’t true already, heavy rain would be falling across southern England.
       Wexford turned it off. He and Dora stood at the french windows looking at the water which now, as in the front garden, filled the paved area immediately out side. The rain made little waves on its surface where a twig bobbed about like a boat on a choppy sea. The trunk of the mulberry tree was half submerged and it was now a lilac bush which had become the criterion. The rising water lapped its roots. A few yards of dry land remained before the incoming tide would reach the wall. As he watched, the light at the end of the garden next door went out and the whole scene was plunged into darkness.
       He went up the stairs to bed. The possibility of two young proficient swimmers being drowned no longer seemed to him so absurd. You didn’t need too much imagination to fancy the whole country sinking and vanishing under this vast superfluity of water. Everyone overcome by it like shipwrecked men, their raft inadequate, their strength gone, the young and the old alike, the strong and the weak.

Chapter 2

    So much for not getting involved. He was on his way there now, heading up Kingston Gardens towards Lyndhurst Drive, with Vine who was driving. Vine seemed to think drowning in the Brede Valley, particularly in the very deep water now filling Savesbury Deeps, where the frogmen had begun searching again, a real possibility The night before he had thought so himself. Now, with the sun shining on wet pavements and glittering dripping branches, he wasn’t so sure.
       Three hours earlier, when he got up, the rain had apparently just stopped. It was still dark but light enough to see what had happened during the night. He didn’t look out of the window. Not then. He was afraid of what he might see, and even more afraid, when he went down to make Dora’s tea, of the water waiting for him at the foot of the stairs or lying, still and placid, across the kitchen floor. But the house was dry and when he had put the kettle on and at last made himself pull back the curtains and look out of the french windows, he saw that the silvery grey lake still stopped some ten feet from the little wall that divided lawn from paving.
       Since then there had been no more rain. The weather forecast had been right as far as the coming of a further downpour but wrong in its timing. There was still the second approaching area of low pressure to look for ward to. As he got out of the car at the point where Kingston Gardens met Lyndhurst Drive, a large drop of water fell on to his head, on to his bald spot, from a hollybush by the gate.
       The house on the corner was called ‘Antrim’, a name neither pretentious nor apparently appropriate. Unlike any other in Lyndhurst Drive, where neo Georgian sat side by side with nineteen thirties art deco, nineteen sixties functional, eighteen nineties Gothic and late-twentieth-century ‘Victorian’, the Dades’ house was Tudor, so well done that the undiscerning might have mistaken it for the real thing. Beams of stripped oak criss-crossed slightly darker plaster, the windows were diamond-paned and the front door heavily studded. The knocker was the ubiquitous lion’s head and the bellpull a twisty wrought-iron rod. Wexford pulled it.
       The woman who came to the door was very obviously the anxious mother, her face tear-stained. She was thin, wispy and breathless. Early forties, he thought. Rather pretty her face unpainted, her hair a mass of untidy brown curls. But it was