by Ruth Rendell
‘You mean the furniture, pictures, that sort of thing? Oh, it was lovely. Beautiful stuff they had. Of course, it was all Franklin’s. He was a connoisseur.’
‘Mrs Jones, I’d like you to think very carefully. Imagine yourself in the hallway, looking towards the kitchen. Can you do that?’
‘OK. I’m doing it.’
‘Can you see the kitchen door?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘Now look to the left of it and tell me, is there another door there or a blank wall?’
‘What is all this?’ Mildred Jones was indignant. ‘Haven’t you been inside the place? Of course there’s a door. It leads down the stairs to the cellar where all those horrors were found. It makes me shudder to think of it.’
‘There is no door there now, Mrs Jones,’ Tom said.
She stared. ‘But I saw it. The first time I was there the door was open. Harriet had been down there to fetch something up – bottled gas or something. She had to do all that for herself. Franklin never lifted a finger. I looked down the stairs just to get a sight of the cellar, but there was nothing down there, only an empty space and a couple more of those gas bottles. You want to go down there yourselves and take a look.’
‘We’d like you to come in there with us and take a look,’ said Tom.
Mildred Jones was reluctant to accompany them. Tom explained to her that the bodies in the vault were long gone. The house itself contained nothing of Harriet’s, nothing of Franklin Merton’s. Two sets of owners had lived there since the Mertons, as she must know.
‘It’s the idea of those dead bodies lying in there, under the ground, for all those years … You’ve got to admit, it’s enough to give you the shivers.’
‘It would be a great help to us if you would come in there with us for just a few minutes.’
‘I don’t see how it could be, but OK, if it’s really a help.’
They walked out of the mews, Mildred Jones’s high-heeled green shoes having some difficulty with the cobbles, round the corner on to the smooth stone pavement. ‘I noticed you’ve got a Virginia creeper on your flat,’ Wexford said while Tom unlocked the front door of Orcadia Cottage. ‘Is it the same variety as was on this house until it was cut down?’
‘As far as I know. I don’t know anything about gardening, plants, that sort of thing.’
‘When the leaves fall it makes a lot of mess?’
‘Oh, yes, dreadful. My cleaner has to sweep it up and she makes a big fuss. I don’t mean that Vlad, she’s gone long ago. And the one after her too. Of course I don’t keep them on when I’m away in South Africa and they don’t like that.’
Mildred Jones stepped in fearfully over the threshold, but when she had advanced a few steps her nervousness left her and she stared at the blank wall facing them on the left-hand side of the kitchen door.
‘Someone’s made a wall there!’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe one of Harriet’s boys. They were all builders of some sort or another.’
The young man who might or might not have been called Keith Hill came into their minds, but it wasn’t until Mildred was back home and the two policemen were back in the car that Tom spoke of it. He wrenched off his tie. ‘We’ve no reason to think he was a builder or a friend of Harriet Merton’s or that he built that wall, have we?’
‘Except that we both have a feeling that all those things are true,’ said Wexford. ‘That’s all. Assumptions.’
For ever afterwards, for the rest of his life, Wexford would remember that it was here, on the corner, where Abbey Road comes into West End Lane, that the phone call from Dora came. ‘Assumptions’ was the last word spoken and then his phone rang. As their driver rounded the corner where Quex Road turns off to the left he heard Dora’s voice, a trembling shaken voice, and Dora’s news.
‘I’ll be back in five minutes – well, ten,’ he said. ‘As soon as I can. And then we’ll go home. Straightaway.’
The driver said, ‘What is it?’
He told her. ‘My daughter – my daughter Sylvia …’
‘It’ll be five minutes,’ she said. ‘Not ten. Sooner if I can make it.’
CHAPTER NINE
THE SUN WAS setting and all the lights were on. They sat at Sylvia’s bedside. ‘Only five minutes at the most,’ said the intensive-care sister. She came back after four minutes and shepherded them to the relatives’ room, a carpeted place with armchairs and a television set. Who, in their situation, would want to watch television? Dora, who had been dry-eyed at the bedside, now began crying quietly. When the door was shut Wexford took her in his arms and held her, not speaking.
Sylvia’s ex-husband Neil Fairfax was sitting there, though he had not been allowed to see her. Nor had Mike Burden, who had met them at their house when they arrived and driven Wexford and Dora to the hospital. Everything goes when your child is at death’s door, Wexford thought, every other preoccupation, worry, hope, fear. She is all. You don’t even notice if the sun is shining or rain falling. Nothing else matters and, humiliatingly, you pray. You pray to a god you don’t believe in and have never believed in. It’s a mystery how you know what to do, what to say, how to frame a prayer.
He gently released Dora, sat beside her, holding her hand. Burden said, ‘Any change?’
Wexford shrugged. ‘Just the same. They say she’s stable. They’re worried about her blood pressure. Well, I think they are – it’s hard to know.’
It was Burden who had told them, he who made that phone call. Sylvia had been fetching her little daughter Mary home from a pre-school for four year olds. The house, an old rectory, absurdly large for one woman, one child and two young men who were most of the time away at school or university. Sylvia had parked the car on the long winding drive, half overgrown with shrubs and trees in full leaf, had pushed open the passenger door for Mary to get out, got out herself and before she could take a step been stabbed by a man who had stepped out from the hawthorn thicket and plunged a knife into her chest. The knife had missed her heart but grazed a lung.
While Neil was producing coffee for everyone from the machine, Burden told the story all over again. ‘Mary was a marvel,’ he said, smiling at Mary’s father as he took his coffee. ‘She got herself to Mary Beaumont’s. You know who I mean?’
Wexford nodded. He had nodded the first time. He knew this was just Burden’s well-meant effort at distraction. ‘Sylvia’s friend. Mary’s named after her.’
‘Mary Beaumont says she doesn’t really know what had happened – Mary couldn’t tell her, just said there’d been a man and a lot of shouting. Mary ran back with little Mary and there was Sylvia – well, you can imagine the rest. The car was gone, but he didn’t take her handbag or apparently any money or credit cards. Thank God, whoever he was, he didn’t touch the child.’
For a car, for nothing but a car. If he’d come to me, Wexford thought irrationally, I’d have given him a car and anything else he wanted not to touch my daughter. Only life isn’t like that and people don’t behave like that.
Dora asked, ‘Where is Mary now?’
‘With Mary Beaumont,’ Neil said. ‘She knows her, she loves her and Mary was happy to have her.’ Neil was the little girl’s father, though she had been born long after her parents’ divorce. ‘I shall take the day off work tomorrow so that she can be with me, but after that – well, I don’t know. We’ll arrange something.’
Suddenly Dora looked better, more hopeful, less distraught than she had since the news came. ‘Let us take her, Neil. She can stay here with us or we can take her back to London to Sheila.’ Her lip trembled. ‘I would love to do that,’ she said shakily. ‘Mary is happiest of all when she can be with Amy and Anny. Do let us.’
‘Not yet,’ said Wexford, more gruffly than he intended. ‘I’m staying here, in this hospital until we know.’
But the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital refused to let them stay. If there was a change they would be phoned, but they couldn’t be allowed to remain overnight in the relatives’ r
oom or elsewhere.
‘You let mothers stay with their sick children,’ said Dora, ‘and I’m a mother and Sylvia is my child.’
‘Yes but she’s grown-up,’ said the intensive care sister. ‘I’m sorry but we have to stick to our policy.’
They went home and sat up, drinking whisky. Even Dora had a small glass and made a face at the taste. They tried putting on News at Ten but for all that sunk in they might as well have done without it. Wexford was thinking about what he had been told, that the knife had been thrust into Sylvia’s chest millimetres from her aorta. A second blow had grazed a lung, and surgery – carried out within an hour of her entering the hospital – had saved it.
‘Mr Messaoud is one of the finest surgeons in the country, the top man,’ said one of the intensive-care nurses.
Everyone you ever heard of who had an operation, Wexford thought, always described their surgeon like that, as being Britain’s finest, the top man. It made you wonder what the second-class surgeons did, whom they operated on. Maybe they stood about and watched. He put the whisky bottle back in the cupboard. It was no good swigging scotch, it dulled but it didn’t help, it never did. Dora had fallen asleep, stretched out on the sofa. She woke up when the phone rang, sat up, made a little inarticulate cry. But it was only Robin, their elder grandson, at home in his mother’s house, waiting for his brother to arrive from school. Robin’s university was up for the long vacation but Ben, whose school term continued for another three weeks, would come home for a few days.
‘I’ve not seen Mum yet. I thought I’d wait for Ben. We’ll go together in the morning.’
‘She’s just the same, Rob,’ Wexford said. ‘There’s no change.’
Robin asked no questions. If Wexford had been asked how his grandson sounded he would have said ‘sick at heart’. When the receiver had been put down he started thinking about the man who had attacked Sylvia. For him to have been waiting there, hiding in the bushes, he must have known Sylvia’s movements, perhaps that she lived alone with a child, that she worked only in the mornings and returned home, bringing Mary from pre-school, at 12.45 p.m. Great Thatto Old Rectory was in a remote place, deep countryside. The nearest village, Myland, was small enough, but Great Thatto had only sixty-five inhabitants and Wexford had often wondered how tiny a Little Thatto would be if this one was great. How had Sylvia’s assailant got there? By car surely. That was impossible. He couldn’t have driven both his car and Sylvia’s four-by-four at once, and no car had been found in the wilderness grounds.
A bus from Stowerton stopped in Myland. Walking two or three miles hardly fitted the image of a thug who would attack a woman with a child. He wondered about his granddaughter Mary. Had this man tried to stop her as she ran away? If so, why hadn’t he succeeded? Wexford would have liked to know if she screamed all the way to Mary Beaumont’s, but nobody could know that except Mary herself. The picture he had of the terrified little girl running and screaming down the road to the one person who could give her sanctuary, sickened him and made him grow cold.
He tried to think of something else. Orcadia Cottage. Mildred Jones. The bodies in the vault … The young man might be Keith Hill; the older man might be related to him; the older woman was very likely Harriet Merton, but all that was still mainly conjecture. He had been wondering if the woman with the exotic name who had worked for Mildred Jones and had burned a shirt might be the fourth body, the one that had been in there for only two or three years. But why had he even considered that? He had no grounds for supposing it.
His thoughts drifted away at this point, flowed back to Sylvia. It was no good. Whatever else he succeeded in thinking of, it would last for no more than a very few minutes. He could see her lying there with all those tubes – lines, they called them – attached to her, her dark hair spread across the pillow, her face and neck still and pale as a marble bust. She may die, a voice inside his head said to him. She is at death’s door, that door still closed but trembling a little as a hand tried to open it from the inside. Don’t think like that. But how else could he think? She might be dead already and no one phoning them until the morning. It was ten minutes to one.
Our children should not die before us. If they do, if one of them does, that must be life’s greatest tragedy. He asked himself what he would do if Sylvia died. How could he handle it? How would he live? How would Dora live? When you first met them and started talking, people asked you if you had children and you would no longer be able to say you had two. You had just the one. Perhaps you would also have to say that you had two but one died … There was a line in King John, a woman mourning her small dead son. ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me …’ That was how it would be. He would never see her again. Never. He got up, telling himself to shut up, to stop it.
Perhaps Dora had been asleep or just pretending to be. She sat up. He sat beside her on the bed and held her. She rested her face on his shoulder and they clung to each other. After a minute or two she said, ‘What shall we do?’
‘God knows. Wait.’
‘How early can we phone the hospital?’
‘Probably any time we like. She’s in intensive care. She won’t be left alone, so they’ll know if there’s any change.’
‘It gets light very early now.’
‘We’ll wait till it gets light, Dora.’
She asked him if it would be better to go downstairs, but he said no, let’s stay where we are. Well, he’d go down and make them both a cup of tea. But he’d bring it back up here and wait for the dawn, for sunrise. Waiting for the kettle to boil, he thought how he had been in this kitchen with Sylvia a couple of weeks ago. Was that the last time he would ever see her? Her white face on the pillow in intensive care didn’t count. He remembered her as a child, as a teenager, her marriage when she was only eighteen, then divorce and Dora’s distress. Dora’s horror when she said she was going to be a surrogate mother, to have a child for her ex-husband and his girlfriend. That was Mary, who in the event had never been given up to them …
He made the tea, waited for it to ‘draw’ as they used to say in the days before teabags. Not at the time but later, he had speculated that Sylvia’s willingness to have a child for those two people had been less altruism than pride that she could bear children with ease, while poor Naomi was, in her own harsh, out-dated term, ‘barren’. Sylvia – a mix of the wildly generous and the relentless. Like her mother, perhaps. He poured two cups of tea, carried them upstairs. Dora was lying flat on her back with her eyes shut. He opened the curtains to let in the dawn, a pale grey glow behind the roofs and treetops.
They drank the tea, but they didn’t speak. There was nothing left to say. The strange thing was that they both slept a little – so much for the effects of caffeine. The bedside phone woke them, its blast amplified to screams. Wexford surfaced, reached out and picked up the receiver.
CHAPTER TEN
SHE WAS AWAKE, she had spoken, she was breathing without assistance. Wexford said a quiet thank you to Robin, who had phoned. He looked at the clock and saw it was ten past nine.
‘Oh, my God, and I was asleep!’ Dora sat up, struggled to get up. ‘My daughter might have been dying and I slept. What kind of a mother does that make me?’
Wexford said irritably, ‘Don’t be so daft. I’m the emotional one, you’re the calm one – remember? Come here.’ He hugged her, said, ‘We’ll get up, have showers, eat an enormous breakfast and then we’ll go and see her. Let her be with her kids first. On second thoughts, I shall have a bath. I hate showers, always have. Showers are for speed, baths are for celebration.’
It was eleven before they reached the hospital. As they walked up the steps and into reception Dora said, ‘You never told me you hated showers.’
‘No point. You couldn’t change things. It’s one of my laws: half the people in the world prefer showers and the other half baths.’
Sylvia was sitting up. Or lying down, propped up on pillows. Dora l
ooked at her almost fearfully, seeming afraid to approach her, but Wexford kissed her cheek and Sylvia put up an unsteady hand to touch his face.
‘You see, I’m alive,’ she said.
Then Dora did kiss her. Sylvia closed her eyes. Her breathing was regular, too steady for a wakeful state, and Wexford thought she had fallen asleep. She looked very young, almost as she had when she was a teenager. At the same time he noticed that there were strands of grey in the dark hair she wore long and which was now spread across the pillow. After a moment or two she opened her eyes and smiled.
‘Your lot will want to talk to me,’ she said.
‘My lot?’
‘The police.’
‘Not my lot any longer, but I expect they will.’
A nurse came over, said that was enough for now and sent them off to the relatives’ room. Robin and Ben were both there, having had their time with their mother an hour earlier. And with them was Detective Superintendent Burden.
‘I’m practically a relative,’ he said to Wexford. ‘One of the family for now.’
‘For always, Mike,’ said Dora and burst into tears.
For more than two days Wexford had thought of nothing but Sylvia. He thought of that cliché he hated, ‘putting it on the back burner’, along with ‘level playing field’ and ‘kicking whatever it was into the long grass’ – all often used by Tom Ede – but for him, now, the metaphor had been apt. He had put Orcadia Cottage on to the back burner along with the forensic aspects of the attack on Sylvia. That wasn’t allowed to continue. He had barely spoken to Burden when his phone rang, followed by the double note indicating that a message had been left. It was Tom. As soon as they left he would call Tom and explain. Meanwhile, here was Mike …
‘I’m going to talk to her myself,’ he said, ‘as soon as they’ll let me. I think she’d rather talk to me personally than to Hannah or Barry.’
‘I’m sure she would.’
Robin said, sounding years older than his age, ‘Are you going to talk to my sister?’