Vault

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 looked 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?’

‘Your sister?’ Ben sounded years younger than his age. ‘She’s my sister too.’

‘Yes, right, OK. But are you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Burden said. ‘Not directly at any rate. I’d like to talk to your mother first and depending on what she says – well, it might be best if Mary’s grandmother talked to her about what happened when the attack was made on her mum.’

‘Me?’

‘I don’t think anything you might say to her would frighten her, but I’ll speak to Sylvia first.’

A nurse put her head round the door and said Sylvia was asking to see her sons again. ‘Five minutes,’ said the nurse, ‘and then you can all go home and come back later.’

As soon as he was at home Wexford called Tom Ede.

He hadn’t explained about Sylvia but now he did, keeping it short because he knew that few people care to hear much about others’ troubles. But Tom was sympathetic, asking questions, apparently delighted to hear that Wexford’s daughter was going to be all right, angry and quite aggressive about the violence that had been done to her. He said and said it devoutly, ‘Thank God.’

Wexford remembered how he had said ‘heaven’ rather than done what they called ‘taking the name of the Lord in vain’. He was almost shocked when Tom said, ‘I said a prayer for her – well, several prayers actually.’

A rather awkward ‘Thanks’ was all Wexford could respond to that.

‘I don’t suppose you want to know about the bit of progress we’ve made. You’ve got enough on your plate.’

Another cliché, but Wexford didn’t care. He felt quite affectionate towards Tom and the hackneyed phrase was endearing. ‘I’d very much like to hear,’ he said.

‘Well, we’ve identified the older woman as Harriet Merton. Her dental records showed up in California, a very prestigious and expensive dentist. Apparently, she had all those implants, crowns and bridges done there. Must have cost old Franklin a packet.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Wexford thought briefly of the red-headed girl in the red dress against the background of bright green leaves in Simon Alpheton’s painting, and then he thought of the bundle of grey bones shrunken in designer clothes, its hair dyed crimson. ‘Anything more about the two men?’

‘We’ve shown Mildred Jones the clothes the young man’s body was dressed in. She was a bit squeamish about them. She should have seen them before we had them cleaned up. The result wasn’t exactly conclusive and that’s not surprising. She just kept saying that they might have been his, but she couldn’t say for sure. A shabby black T-shirt is a shabby black T-shirt. Half the youth in London wears dark blue or black zipper jackets, and jeans are just jeans. His were the kind you’d buy off a street-market stall, brand name Zugu, of which thousands were sold twelve years ago, but to track each one down is obviously impossible. Stallholders don’t ask their customers for their names and addresses.’

‘So we’ve got a Kenneth or Keith Gray or Bray,’ said Wexford, ‘and his young cousin, but not his nephew, possibly called Keith something but possibly Keith Hill.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘OK, if you say so. At least we know for sure that the woman was Harriet Merton. And we know that the young man we have to call Keith Hill for lack of anything else to call him, we know he had been inside the house and had access to Harriet’s address book. He wrote down her pin number, disguising it from whoever might see it by labelling it as Harriet herself had labelled it, with a name that sounds to the uninitiated like a restaurant. La Punaise.’

‘But why would he do that, Tom? That piece of paper was surely for himself, simply to remind him of the number. He must have had her credit card and have used it or planned to use it to milk her account or even empty it. But why write La Punaise? The only reason I can think of was because he didn’t know what it meant and intended to ask for a translation from someone who would know. Francine, whoever she is or was?’

Tom said he would get his team searching online electoral registers for someone with the first name Francine. He sounded far from hopeful. There might be thousands. But he’d leave no stone unturned. ‘How old do you reckon she was?’

‘If she was his girlfriend, late teens or early twenties. But she might be his French teacher or his French-speaking aunt or the lady next door …’

Tom groaned. ‘Forensics have been looking over the Edsel, but we’ve got no answers yet. Let me know when you’re coming back to London,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to chase you up. Hope your daughter gets better soon.’

Wexford thought Tom might say he would carry on praying for Sylvia, but he didn’t.

There was an uneasiness in Burden’s manner that Wexford spotted at once. Never effusive, seldom demonstrative, Burden surprised his friend by shaking his hand, something which hadn’t happened for more years than he cared to remember. And he kissed Dora, a further departure from the norm.

Another day had gone by, and then another, and the detective superintendent had twice talked to Sylvia, allowed by the ward sister to remain with her only for half an hour at a time. Sylvia was now out of intensive care and her parents had sat with her for most of the afternoon, leaving for home just before Burden arrived at Sylvia’s bedside. Now he sat in their living room, nursing with fidgeting hands a small orange juice, having refused all alcohol offers.

Wexford, drinking red wine, said, ‘There’s something wrong, Mike, what is it? The hospital haven’t told you something they’re keeping from us?’

‘No, no, nothing like that.’

‘But you’ve talked to Sylvia about what happened?’ This was Dora, braver than Wexford. ‘Are you able to tell us what she told you? If it wouldn’t be right …’

‘No, of course it’s right.’ Burden set down his glass, picked it up again, apologised for the wet ring it made on the table surface. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll get a cloth …’

‘Mike,’ said Wexford, ‘what is it?’

‘All right. It’s just that you’re her parents and I just think it would be better if you didn’t know, yet I know you have to know.’ Burden rubbed at the wet ring with his finger, avoided the parents’ eyes. ‘But I’m making it worse. I’ll tell you straight. It’s better that way. The man who stabbed her was known to her. More than that, he’d been – well, her lover. He wasn’t hiding in the bushes, he was in the car with her and Mary and they had a row and …’

‘Mike, begin at the beginning, will you?’ Wexford made a dismissive gesture with his hands, the kind of movement that means, it doesn’t matter, just tell us. So long as she’s all right, nothing like that matters. ‘Just tell us. We can take anything now we know she’ll be all right.’

‘Well, OK,’ Burden’s tense shoulders relaxed and he very nearly smiled. ‘The story I told you at first I got from Mary Beaumont and she was very discreet but she probably knew little of the true facts. I sat by Sylvia’s bed and asked her to tell me exactly what happened when she got home to Great Thatto. She said, “I’d better start before that, Mike. The guy who stabbed me is called Jason Wardle. He’s twenty-one and I’ve been having a relationship with him.” Then she corrected herself. “I think a ‘fling’ might be a better word.”’ Burden paused briefly because Dora had made a sound, a wordless whimper of distress. ‘I’ll go on. She told me he lived in Stringfield. They’d met and had coffee in Kingsmarkham, the purpose of the meeting was to break things off and when she’d done that she was going to pick Mary up from her nursery school. But Wardle wasn’t having any. He said he’d kill her first, but of course she didn’t believe him. They never do. Oh, God, I’m sorry, Dora. I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘That’s all right, Mike. That’s nothing to what you’re telling us.’

‘Twenty-one, you said?’ Wexford found it hard to bring the words out, but he had to know. Young enough to be Sylvia’s son. Just.

‘So she said. He got into her car and they set off. Mary had apparently met him before and wasn’t fazed by his being with them, but Sylvia was anxious that the row shouldn’t continue in her presence and refused to answer his accusations but tried to talk only to Mary. He constantly interrupted them and began shouting and when Sylvia was passing Mary Beaumont’s house she stopped the car and told Mary to go in there and she would come for her very soon. She watched Mary being let in by Mary and then …’

‘So all that about Mary running away when her mother was hurt, that wasn’t true?’

‘Apparently not, Dora. That was the discreet version Mary Beaumont gave me – maybe she believed it herself. Sylvia said to Wardle that she would drive him to Stringfield – where he lives with his parents – but Wardle wasn’t having any. She drove up into the Old Rectory drive and stopped the car and they started to argue. Well, Wardle said he loved her and wanted to marry her. Apparently, he said he knew what all this was about. It was because Sylvia wanted him to marry her and she was breaking it off because he hadn’t proposed. He was proposing to her now. She started laughing. She said she didn’t want to be married and if she did he’d be the last man on earth. She got out of the car and stood there, laughing. He screamed at her and pulled the knife – ironically, it was one of her own kitchen knives.’

‘So he had been planning it?’ Wexford shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose he carries a carving knife about with him on the chance he may need to use it?’

‘I think they had had a row the evening before and he took the knife then. Sylvia had the day all this happened off work and he spent the morning with her.’ Burden paused, shaking his head. ‘There’s a lot to come out yet, Reg. A lot we don’t know and will have to know. Where is he, for instance? He’s not with his parents. They haven’t seen him for days. Incidentally, they knew nothing about his relationship with Sylvia.’

‘Come to that,’ said Wexford, ‘nor did we.’

‘We’ve put out a nationwide call for him. And, of course, for Sylvia’s car. We’ve checked on various friends and relatives, but so far there’s been nothing. We’ll find him, of course, but it’ll take time.’