Read Wexford 19 - The Babes In The Woods for Free Online

affair. ‘But these three aren’t, are they?’
       ‘I doubt it.’
       It was probably mention of the bypass abductions which reminded Wexford that sooner or later the media were going to have to know about this. He remembered last time with a shudder, the intrusion into his own privacy; the continued onslaughts of Brian St George, editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier, the embargoes he could barely enforce. Then there had been the furore over that one-time paedophile and poor Hennessy’s death.
       ‘This is the boy’s room, sir,’ Vine was saying. ‘Someone certainly tidied it and it wasn’t a fifteen-year-old, not even a religious maniac.’
       ‘I’m not sure we should brand him like that, Barry; Not at this stage. You might feel like going along to the old Catholic Church after we’ve left here and get some background on these Good Gospel people, not to mention whether the boy went to church on Sunday or not.’
       If there are any two features which distinguish a teenager’s bedroom from anyone else’s, it must be the presence of posters on the walls and a means of playing music. These days, too, a computer with Internet access and a printer, and these last Giles Dade had, though the posters and player were absent. Almost absent. Instead of a recommendation for a pop group, endangered species rescue or soccer star, the wall facing Giles’s bed had tacked to it an unframed life-size reproduction Wexford recognised as Constable’s painting of Christ Blessing the Bread and Wine.
       Perhaps it was only because he didn’t, couldn’t, believe that he found this distasteful. Not because of what it was, though Constable’s genius found its best expression in landscape, but where it was and who had put it there. He wondered what Dora, a churchgoer, would say. He’d ask her. Vine was looking inside a clothes cupboard at what both of them would have expected to find there, jeans, shirts, T-shirts, a pea jacket and a school blazer, dark-brown, bordered in gold braid. One of the T-shirts on a hanger and probably valued, was red and printed in black and white with a photograph of Giles Dade’s face, ‘Giles’ lettered underneath it.
       ‘You see he had some elements of normal adolescence,’ said Wexford.
       They must ask Dade, or if it had to be, his wife, which particular clothes were missing from the children’s wardrobes. Football boots were there, trainers, a single pair of black leather shoes. For going to church in, no doubt.
       A shelf of books held a Bible, Chambers Dictionary. Orwell’s Animal Farm - a GCSE set book? - some Zola in French - surprisingly - Daudet’s Lettres de mon Moulin, Maupassant’s short stories, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and something called Purity as a Life Goal by Parker T. Ziegler. Wexford took it down and looked inside. It had been published in the United States by a company named the Creationist Foundation and sold there for the hefty sum of $35. On the shelf below, plugged in for recharging, was a mobile phone.
       Drawers below held underpants, shorts, T-shirts - or one did. In the middle drawer was a melee of papers, some of them apparently a homework essay Giles was writing, a paperback on trees and another on the early church, ballpoints, a comb, a used light bulb, shoelaces, a ball of string. The top one was much the same but out of the confusion Vine extracted the small dark-red booklet that is a British passport. It had been issued three years before to Giles Benedict Dade.
       ‘At least we know he hasn’t left the country,’ said Wexford.
       The girl’s room had far more books and posters enough. Just what you’d expect, including one of David Beckham, Posh Spice and their child, apparently off on a shopping spree. In the bookcase were the works of J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, the two Alice volumes, a lot of poetry, some of it just what you would not expect, notably the Complete Works of T. S.