‘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.
