The Babes in the Wood by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Suspense, Thriller
ISBN: 9781400049301
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2001-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

He had no memory for recent events. And in his case ‘recent’ meant the past two or three decades. Before that, his early and middle years, he could readily recollect. Wexford, of course, had come across this in old people before but seldom to this extent. Bernard Shand-Gibb could scarcely remember the name of his housekeeper, a woman not much younger than himself, whom he addressed as ‘Polly – Pansy – Myra – Penny,’ before getting it right and coming out with ‘Betty!’ on a shout of triumph.

It was a long time since Wexford had heard that accent. His was the speech of the old gentry, spoken by an upper class when he was a boy and liable to strike awe into those lower down the social scale, but now almost dead and gone. Actors had to learn how to do it, he had read somewhere, before playing on television in a drama of the nineteen twenties, learn to say ‘awf’ for ‘off’ and ‘crawss’ for ‘cross’. Such an accent would have prevailed, he thought, when his own grandfather was young and the local rector, riding past him and his friends, cracked his whip and called out, ‘Take your hats off to a gentleman!’

Shand-Gibb was a gentleman but a very gentle one, puzzled by his inability to remember his last years at Passingham Hall. ‘I do wish I could recall something or someone, my dear chap,’ he said in that incomparable voice, ‘but it’s all gawne.’

‘Perhaps your housekeeper …?’

Mrs Shand-Gibb had been alive then and Betty had tended on them both. But she was a servant of the old school, not one to know or wish to know her employer’s business. Wexford thought that if she had to refer to him it would be as ‘the master’. She sat down in his company because Wexford had asked her to stay and asked her to sit down too, but she sat uneasily and on the edge of the chair.

‘Can you recollect anything?’ Shand-Gibb asked her in his mild, courteous way. He was not the sort of man to omit names or styles or titles when he addressed someone and he had made an effort to remember what she was called, had tried and failed, had struggled with it, mouthing names, but had failed.

‘I’m sure I don’t know, sir,’ she said. ‘I could try. There was the Scouts came to camp in the springtime and in the autumn too. They was good lads, never made any trouble, never left a mess behind them.’

‘Did anyone else camp in the wood?’ asked Vine. ‘Friends? Relations?’

Shand-Gibb listened courteously, occasionally nodding or giving a puzzled smile. He was like someone who has tentatively claimed to understand a foreign language but when addressed in it by natives finds it beyond his comprehension. Betty said, ‘There was never anything like that, sir. Not to sleep, there wasn’t. The village had their summer fête there. Is that the kind of thing you mean? Regular they did that. In June it was and they put up a marquee in case of rain, sir, as it mostly did rain.

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