Vault

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.’