The Vault (17 page)

‘Walking has its pitfalls,’ Wexford said, ‘when you don’t come to it till late in life. Have you spoken to Sylvia while I was out?’

‘She phoned. She said she’d go to bed early and watch television and that was what she was doing. It was a relief to hear from her.’

He took hold of her hand. ‘What have you been imagining now?’

She sighed a little. ‘Darling, you remember a few years back Sylvia had that – friend. I don’t want to say boyfriend and I just
can’t
say partner. And he was violent to her and sort of imprisoned her and you and I went over and you knocked him down and got rid of him.’

‘Of course I remember him.’

‘Well, I’ve been wondering if she sort of attracts men like that, even if she wants men like that and if this Jason might come to her again, might even be with her now. So her phoning was an enormous relief.’

‘If he came,’ Wexford said, ‘because she’s come back and he knows it, she won’t let him in.’

‘Yes, but there’s something I have to tell you. It’s what she told me on the phone just now.’ Dora freed her hand
from his and closed it over the other one. ‘He’s got a key.’

Wexford said nothing. He sat very still.

‘It’s a front-door key. I asked her if the police know and she said, “What would be the point of telling them?” Having a key doesn’t mean he can get in if she keeps her front door locked and bolted, and apparently she does.’

Wexford picked up the phone and called Sylvia’s mobile number. The message answered him. He called it again and this time she answered.

‘Is your front door bolted on the inside, Sylvia?’

‘I think so. I’m in bed.’

‘Go down and check. Take your phone with you.’

She made exasperated noises, sighs and the kind of sound that accompanies the rolling of eyes. He heard her feet on the stairs. Her voice came after a brief silence. ‘All right, Dad. I’m going to bolt the door now.’

‘Let me hear it,’ he said.

First one bolt, then the other, ground across, the upper one with a squeak, the lower with a kind of growl.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow you will have the lock changed. You won’t do it unless I make you, so I shall come over first thing in the morning and call a locksmith myself. See you at eight. Good night.’

‘Good night, Dad.’ She sounded very subdued.

‘D
’you want to come?’ he said to Dora at seven.

‘I don’t think so, darling.’ She was still half-asleep. ‘Sylvia won’t want an invasion.’

Fog had been forecast and, looking out of the window, he thought at first it would be unwise to drive. It was possible to see to the other side of the road, but no further. Still, when he had made himself tea, taken a cup upstairs to Dora and
eaten a slice of toast and Marmite, the mist had begun to clear and a weak sun appeared.

The road to Great Thatto passed through some of the prettiest countryside in this part of Sussex, a place of high hills and deep valleys, thickly wooded but dotted here and there with thatched cottages and newer houses. The older dwellings had that self-conscious look of cottages which have been half-timbered, exquisitely thatched with enduring reed and painted in the correct local colours of homes owned by middle-class householders with pretensions. There was little traffic, due perhaps to the fog which came and went, settling in pockets where least expected and suddenly disappearing altogether on the outskirts of Great Thatto. Mary Beaumont was in her front garden, picking asters and gypsophila. She recognised the car and waved to him.

The Old Rectory had been Sylvia’s home for years now, since her sons were little, and long before she and her husband separated and Neil left the house for her and their children. Wexford had been there innumerable times. Yet now, as he drove through the open gates and up the drive, as the untended trees and bushes gave place to a wide space, he seemed to see the house with new eyes. It was a very big house. Had he ever realised before quite how big it was? Built in the middle of the nineteenth century for the rector of a parish, it had needed to be large enough to accommodate the incumbent and his wife, five or six children and all the panoply of servants a Victorian household apparently required. Now it was home to one woman and a little girl. Occasionally, in holidays, when they weren’t off somewhere with friends or exploring foreign parts, to that little girl’s brothers.

She should sell it and move, he thought. Here, in beautiful countryside, a house of this size would fetch a fortune. But it wasn’t for him to tell her what she must know already.
Children of any age never take advice from their parents. It was a rule of life and perhaps might stand as Wexford’s fifteenth law or something like that. He rang the doorbell and had the satisfaction of hearing her draw back the bolts.

‘Oh, Dad, you’re very punctual.’ She kissed him, something which was by no means inevitable with her. ‘I’d have got the locksmith myself, you know, if you’d told me to.’

‘Oh, really? You amaze me.’

She laughed. ‘Have you had breakfast?’

‘A bit of toast.’

‘Let me cook you breakfast. You’ve got so thin you can eat bacon and eggs sometimes, can’t you?’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘That will be nice. I don’t suppose I can phone a locksmith before nine, but I can go and look some of them up in the Yellow Pages. Where are your phone books?’

It was rather an untidy house. Children, especially teenagers are seldom neat and orderly and Robin and Ben tended to leave their property all over the house. Where they had used an item, rather than where it was kept, was inevitably where it remained. But that, Wexford thought, would hardly apply to a phone directory, the last thing needed by people in their late teens who conducted all their business on cellphones, BlackBerries or iPhones. He went back to the kitchen where Sylvia was breaking eggs into a pan on the Aga.

‘No, sorry, Dad. It was before Jason – well, you know what. There was a leaking pipe in Ben’s room and I took the Yellow Pages up there to phone a plumber and sort of describe what was happening. It’ll be up there still, I expect. I’ll get it when I’ve done your breakfast.’

Plumbers, thought Wexford, they got everywhere. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said, destined to be enormously glad that he had insisted.

All the bedrooms in use but Ben’s were on the first floor, Sylvia’s very large and facing the front, Robin’s and Mary’s at
the back and separated by a spare room, but Ben’s was on the top, on the second floor and at the end of the passage. The last time Wexford had been in Ben’s room was all of twelve years ago, maybe fourteen, when he had gone in to read the little boy a bedtime story. He opened the door.

He drew in his breath, but made no other sound. From a hook in the ceiling a man’s body was hanging, its feet about a yard from the floor. It was naked. Jason Wardle, Wexford thought. It had to be Jason Wardle. He had stood on a chair, adjusted the rope round his neck and kicked the chair away. It lay on its side beside the pendent central lamp, which he must have taken down in order to do the deed. Discarded clothes lay on Ben’s bed.

Sylvia’s voice called out, ‘Dad, what are you doing?’ and he heard her feet on the stairs.

Outside the room in a second, he slammed the door behind him and ran down to seize her in his arms. ‘Don’t go up there, don’t,’ was all he said.

M
obile phones make life a lot easier. This was Burden’s opinion, offered after they had managed to redirect the homecoming Ben to his grandparents’ house. ‘Yes and no,’ said Wexford, who privately believed that it was all right when the police had them but a restriction of freedom to other people.

‘I shall never be able to live in that house again,’ Sylvia had said when told what her father had found. ‘I’d rather sleep in the street. When I think how I slept there last night and he –
that
– was – well, just above my head …’

‘I shall take you home to your mother,’ Wexford said, ‘and Ben will come to you there.’

‘I shall never come back here.’

‘You should wait a while before making decisions like that,’ Wexford said as they left Great Thatto behind and entered the road that passed through Thatto Wood. He was driving quite slowly because they had both had a shock and he braked hard when a deer ran across in front of them. ‘It may be enough for you never to use that room again. Empty it of furniture and lock the door.’

Even as he spoke he thought of what that would mean, your
home
in which one room was forbidden, in a way haunted, because someone had hanged himself inside it. We don’t use
that room, it’s been shut up for years. Something terrible happened inside there … ‘No, I expect you’re right,’ he said, and he felt her shivering beside him. Of course she was in shock, severe shock, and that perhaps accounted for her showing no grief.

It was he who told his grandson Ben. He had allowed for the macabre imagination of the teenager and he wasn’t surprised when the boy’s eyes expanded in a not altogether horrified way. ‘In my bedroom? Wow, but that’s gross. Is he still there?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

If Jason Wardle had killed himself in Ben’s bedroom to cause Sylvia distress through distressing her son, he had a poor idea of the psyche of his near contemporaries. Of course it would have been a different matter if Ben had actually seen the hanging body – or would it? Wexford wondered uncomfortably how inured these children were – he naturally thought of them as children – by what they saw on television and to a far greater extent on the Internet. Still, none knew better than he the difference between a dead body and the representation of one. Lady Macbeth couldn’t have been more wrong when she said that the sleeping and the dead were but as pictures. The sleeping might be, but the dead were lost and gone, as if they had never been alive.

When Burden arrived Sylvia was with her mother in the kitchen, repeating what had become almost a mantra. ‘I can never go back to that house, I never can. I can never go back there.’

After Burden had spoken to her Wexford took him into the living room. ‘If she means it, that house won’t be easy to sell. A suicide doesn’t damage a house as much as murder, but it doesn’t improve its saleability.’

‘It’s not in the same league as your Orcadia Cottage,’ Burden said.

‘No. I suppose Rokeby knows that. He’ll be lucky if he ever sells that place. But back to Sylvia. I think she should stay here, don’t you? It’s big enough for all of them, but it’s seldom they’re all at home at once.’

‘You never did like the Old Rectory.’

‘No, I never did. Sylvia won’t have to attend the inquest, will she?’

‘I don’t see why she should,’ said Burden. ‘You will. You found the body.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. Or the hundredth, come to that. What I should like would be for none of that stuff about her affair with a boy of twenty-one coming out. So far all the papers have got is that Sylvia was stabbed and a young man the police wanted to question was missing.’

‘It will come out, Reg. It’s inevitable. You must grin and bear it.’

‘I’ll bear it, but I won’t grin,’ said Wexford. ‘Anyway, it’s Sylvia who’ll have to bear it, poor girl. But, Mike, how long had he been in the house before he killed himself? I haven’t mentioned this to anyone else. Had he come in before Sylvia returned, maybe days or even a week before? Thank God she hasn’t thought of that.’

‘That too will come out at the inquest. If it’s known. If there’s any way of knowing it.’

Wexford sighed. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen and I’ll make you a cup of delicious instant coffee. Why does it taste like quite a different drink from the real stuff?’

‘I shall just go back to pack up my clothes,’ Sylvia was saying. ‘Just for that. I shan’t stay a minute longer than I have to.’

Dora laid her hand over her daughter’s. ‘I’ve told her she must live here as long as she likes, Reg.’

‘I’ve come to tell her the same thing,’ said Wexford. ‘We
can be in London for as long as it takes to sell the Old Rectory and buy somewhere else.’

Dora had made coffee and not the instant kind. They sat round the table and Burden explained to Sylvia what the inquest would involve, but that she wouldn’t be required to be there. Then he told her that the media would want details from Kingsmarkham Police and that would mean from him.

‘I will do what I can, Sylvia,’ he said, ‘but there’s a limit to what I can do and then they’ll come to you.’

‘I know. I can stand it so long as I don’t have to go back to
that house.’

But she went back with her father in the late afternoon to fetch her clothes and Mary’s. ‘And Ben’s and Robin’s, Dad.’

‘They can fetch their own when they like.’

‘Oh, but I can’t expose them to the horror of going there.’

‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘they won’t mind. They aren’t going to feel it like you do.’

He saw her into the house, but before going in himself he walked round the garden. Wilderness was more the word for it, acres and acres of hayfields, unkempt hedgerows, patches of woodland and overgrown ditches. Half-in, half-out one of these, almost covered by brambles, he found Sylvia’s car, the unwieldy four-by-four, its ignition key still inside. He’d tell her, but not yet. Tell Burden first and get someone to haul it out.

She was packing. In broad daylight, the front door open and all the windows, she seemed calm and steady enough. Every suitcase she possessed as well as two plastic sacks and a large cardboard crate were being filled. What a lot of clothes women had! The clothes they needed for utilitarian purposes he understood, but even here questions arose he couldn’t answer. One raincoat, yes, but five? Two or three ‘nice’ dresses for parties, he was used to that, but fifteen? And skirts and
suits and trousers, dozens of pairs of these and sweaters and ‘tops’ beyond counting. For a while he watched it all being packed, wondering where it was going to be put in his house, and where her daughter’s clothes were going to be put and her sons’, not to mention computers and sports equipment and guitars and trainers. He supposed he should be thankful that now music could be downloaded on to iPods there would at least be no CDs.