Vault

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MOBILE 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