got up. His car was further away than he remembered. He passed the car the punter (if that was the word) had just left parked on a double yellow line, passed the white van, pausing for a moment to take in the snake-shaped scratch on its rear nearside, and walked along the silent street. Houses were brightly lit, but most behind hedges or tall shrubs and trees. Street lamps laid a skin of yellow light on the damp stone surfaces.
He heard footsteps behind him and stepped closer to the hedge to let whoever it was pass him, a young woman sprinting along in five-inch heels. At the bottom of this gradual incline he could see his car, always a comforting sight, signifying rest, safety, a refuge, the means of getting wherever you wanted to go in privacy. How awkward it must have been when you relied on a horse, a carriage or a cart. No protection from the weather, no means of safeguarding that transport unless you had a servant to leave with the horse and that would have its own problems. He was thinking along these lines, trying to put himself in the shoes of the poor man who must have relied on what his father had called ‘Shanks’s Pony’, when he saw someone move off from where he had been standing under the overhanging branches of a tree and walk round the corner. Sheltering from the rain? It hadn’t rained for hours. Never mind. He was gone.
Wexford unlocked the car with his remote and walked round to the offside front. His hand was on the driver’s door when a powerful whiff of tobacco smoke struck him. He spun round and took the knife in his shoulder instead of his back. It felt like a blow, not a cutting sensation but a blow, as if he had been struck with a heavy implement. This is what it must have been like for Sylvia, he thought, when she was stabbed as I’ve been stabbed. For that’s what it is, the man under the tree – the one that seemed to go away – has stabbed me. He kicked out and hit softness, fatness, his legs weakened and gave way and his last thought before he lapsed into unconsciousness was, how much they must care: ten thousand pounds or this. Then it was darkness and the damp hard ground underneath him.
CHAPTER THIRTY
AN ATTEMPT HAD been made to blow him up, a woman had tried to run him over and there had been other efforts to cause him grievous bodily harm, but until now he had never been the victim of a stabbing, Britain’s murder method of choice. It might have been much worse and would have been if he hadn’t swung round in the nick of time. There is nothing vital to be damaged in one’s shoulder. Apparently, the knife was very long. If he had taken its blade in his back, between his ribs, it might have pierced a lung or his heart. And his rescue was as much due to Tom as his own nose for the smell of tobacco.
After Dora, Tom was his first visitor. He brought neither flowers nor grapes, an omission for which Wexford was thankful.
‘Tell me something. How did you get to me so fast? Ten minutes at the most from when I left that message.’
‘I was just round the corner,’ Tom said. ‘I was in church.’
Wexford recalled that frustrating drive past the shops and the garage and the little chapel. ‘The United Free Church?’
‘That’s it. I’m always there on Sunday evenings.’ Tom spoke simply and he smiled. ‘My phone pinged in the middle of a hymn and I nearly didn’t pick up the message. But it made me uneasy, I don’t know why.
‘And I fetched you out of Evensong.’
‘The better the day, the better the deed,’ said Tom.
He told Wexford that Number 8 Churchlands Road had been raided and Trevor Oswin, his wife and Damian Keyworth arrested and charged with brothel-keeping, trafficking and false imprisonment. Oswin would also be charged with the murder of Alyona Krasnikova when a case had been prepared against him.
‘I think we can make it stick. He’s scared stiff and I hope we’ll get a confession out of him.’
Sylvia came next. She kissed him, smiled ruefully at the dressing on his shoulder and said, ‘Snap!’
‘Yes. But it might have been worse – for both of us.’
‘We’re moving tomorrow. You’ll have your house back. You can go home.’
‘When they let me.’ Home is Kingsmarkham, he thought. Not the coachhouse, lovely though being there has been and will be again. One day.
‘I was very – well, ungracious, Dad. When you let us all move into your house. Ungracious and ungrateful. Thank you, though. I don’t know what we’d have done without it.’
The worst thing about being wounded at his age, he thought, maybe at any age, is that you feel so tired. He realised that most of the time he never felt tired, but he did now, overwhelmed by exhaustion. He loved seeing Dora because all he had to do when she was there was have his hand held and not talk, close his eyes and drift off to sleep, wake again and be glad she was still there. But he would talk when Burden came. He would tell him the whole thing, how he had worked it out. Then he wouldn’t be tired.
‘They want to keep you in another couple of days,’ said Dora.
‘I know. They’re afraid of infection.’
‘Mike says he’ll come tomorrow.’
It might be hurtful to show too much enthusiasm. ‘That’s nice of him,’ he said in a lacklustre tone. ‘Fine if he’s not too busy.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Why do I detect an under current of madly longing to see him?’
He laughed, but said no more. Next day, when Burden arrived, Wexford was in the bathroom and as he returned to the ward, the young nurse with whom he was a favourite whispered, ‘Your son is here.’
‘I knew I’d aged,’ he said to Burden, ‘but not that much. Or maybe it’s that you look remarkably young today.’
‘I haven’t brought you anything. Can one man give another one flowers? It seems a bit funny.’
‘I don’t want flowers or anything else for that matter. They’ll bring us tea in a minute. Do you feel up to hearing about the Vault?’
