by Ruth Rendell
‘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 word for it, acres and acres of hayfields, unkempt hedgerows, patches of woodland and overgrown ditches. Half-in, half-out one of these, almost covered by brambles, he found Sylvia’s car, the unwieldy four-by-four, its ignition key still inside. He’d tell her, but not yet. Tell Burden first and get someone to haul it out.
She was packing. In broad daylight, the front door open and all the windows, she seemed calm and steady enough. Every suitcase she possessed as well as two plastic sacks and a large cardboard crate were being filled. What a lot of clothes women had! The clothes they needed for utilitarian purposes he understood, but even here questions arose he couldn’t answer. One raincoat, yes, but five? Two or three ‘nice’ dresses for parties, he was used to that, but fifteen? And skirts and suits and trousers, dozens of pairs of these and sweaters and ‘tops’ beyond counting. For a while he watched it all being packed, wondering where it was going to be put in his house, and where her daughter’s clothes were going to be put and her sons’, not to mention computers and sports equipment and guitars and trainers. He supposed he should be thankful that now music could be downloaded on to iPods there would at least be no CDs.
He revisited Ben’s bedroom. The body had, of course, long gone. Strange that when murder or suicide had happened in a room that room was invested with horror and fear, even if that particular killing had left no traces behind, or none that couldn’t be easily removed. A man had stood here with a rope in his hand, had climbed on to a chair and unhooked a lamp that hung on a chain from a hook in the ceiling. The only thought in his head was of ending his life and how he would do it, yet he had laid the lamp down gently, careful not to damage any part of it. He had taken off his clothes – why? – folded them and placed them on the bed. He had wished to be naked when he killed himself and that she should find him naked. Did it signify something? That she had loved his nakedness because he was young and strong? You don’t go there when it’s your daughter you’re thinking of, Wexford thought. Perhaps he was naked only to expose himself as so in her power as to be helpless and entirely vulnerable before her. For Wardle had intended Sylvia to find him, not Ben, of course he did. He would know that she would go into that room to check that all was as should be before Ben next came home.
Wexford glanced round him at all the paraphernalia in the room, the ‘stuff’ necessary to a sixteen-year-old if he is to live according to today’s teenage standards of what living meant. And he saw that computers and tennis racquets and musical instruments and trainers were only the half of it. Was his house to be invaded by amplifying equipment for use with that e
normous guitar? It was all very well in this vast rectory where you could make intolerable noise in one part of it and hear nothing two floors and six rooms away. Now he knew why Ben had slept there and he laughed to himself, at himself, for his past mild indignation that his younger grandson had been exiled to this distant place.
For some reason he explored the whole house, going into every room as if he expected to find more hanging bodies. As in some horror film, he thought, where every door opened on to yet another grisly death’s head. Of course there was nothing. He found the Yellow Pages Sylvia had said was in Ben’s room, but turned out to be in the spare room between Robin’s room and Mary’s and went along to Sylvia’s room where she was putting the last of her fifty-two pairs of shoes into the crate. It took a long time to carry it all downstairs and out to the car. It was a big car, but still the inside as well as the boot were filled. He thought as he squeezed in the final bag how much he disliked the idea – so much more than an idea now – of Sylvia and her three children all living in his house, living with these mountains of baggage, of which this car-full was only the start. They would spread their property over every square inch, make their horrible noise so that his kind, quiet neighbours would be forced to complain, play ball games in his garden, Ben and Mary constantly going next door to ask for their ball back. Of course the boys wouldn’t always be there, but they would be there in their intolerably long holidays. And it would go on for months, months and months if not years.
He would not say a word. Well, he would say many words to Dora and she would say the same words to him, but none to Sylvia and his grandchildren. Of course he wouldn’t. He was her father, their grandfather, their progenitor, and this was the kind of thing you had to put up with if you were a parent. Sooner or later it or something like it came to all parents and you were lucky if it didn’t. He thought of the older brother, not the Prodigal Son who was a misbehaving spendthrift, but the older brother that his father reassured. ‘Thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine …’
‘It’s a blessing we’ve got the coachhouse,’ Dora said on the following Wednesday when they were on their way back to London.
On the Sunday Robin had come home from Cambridge in his old banger and shifted all his property and Mary’s from the Old Rectory to Wexford’s house in Kingsmarkham. Next day and the next Ben, in a friend’s car driven by a friend, had removed all his property except the bare furniture from his own room and brought it to his grandparents’. Sylvia took over Wexford and Dora’s bedroom, which she intended to share with Mary. Ben and Robin’s property occupied so much space that it overflowed on to the landing and the overspill had to be put in the garage. Sylvia had taken the news of her car without any sign of emotion. That Jason Wardle must have driven it to the Old Rectory and abandoned it there perhaps only hours before hanging himself appeared not to affect her. It was only the thought of the house which upset her.
The mantra had varied and had now become, ‘It’s so sweet of you to let us live here. We’re enormously grateful. I’m sure you really hate it. But you do realise I could never, never go back there.’
They had been in the coachhouse for just seven minutes when Sheila arrived, dying (as she said) to hear all about it. Dora told all and in the detail Sheila seemed to require. For his part Wexford said nothing. He was thinking how sad it was that Sylvia, whose lover had died by his own hand, showed no sorrow.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TWO WEEKS HAD gone by and two days more. Wexford had been told there was ‘no rush’ for him to come back. Tom said to take his time and meanwhile here was something for him to think about: Forensics had discovered hairs in the boot of the Edsel and these afforded sufficient DNA to be compared with that taken from the older man’s remains. Not much help, Wexford thought. All such a comparison could show was that the older man had put his head inside the Edsel’s boot or that his body had been carried there. But perhaps it was a small step forward.
He walked into Tom’s office to find the detective superintendent in a state of excitement. ‘I’ve found her.’ Tom was ebullient. ‘She’s the one. She ticks all the boxes.’
If there was a cliché Wexford hated more than ‘level playing field’ or ‘kicking into the long grass’ it was the one about ticking all the boxes. But he merely looked enquiring.
‘Francine, I mean. Miles found her on the Internet, I don’t know how. I’m more or less computer illiterate, it’s a closed book to me. But he found her and she’s coming in. I’ve talked to her on the phone. She knows all about Orcadia Cottage, she’s called Francine Withers, thirty years old, had a relationship with a man called Keith Chiltern that ended when he disappeared twelve years ago.’
Wexford nodded. ‘Where’s she coming from?’
‘High Wycombe. She manages a supermarket there. She’s been married and divorced, no children. She’s the one, Reg.’
‘Why is she coming here? I’d have expected us – you, that is – to go to her.’
‘We would have. She volunteered, said she’d like to come here.’
Wexford laughed, said there was no accounting for tastes and thus contributing a cliché of his own. As he had always feared, it was catching. Rather belatedly, Tom asked after Sylvia and Wexford kept his reply as short as he decently could. A young WPC brought in coffee. The tray had just been removed when Ms Francine Withers was announced.
The same WPC brought her in. She was of medium height, a little overweight, with blonde hair, black at the roots and a broad, handsome, over-made-up face, full mouth, straight nose and the kind of staring eyes that look as if their owner has just seen something shocking. As he must have looked, Wexford thought, when he walked into Ben’s room and saw the hanged man. She had dressed carefully, that was apparent, but not very judiciously in a too-short skirt, tight jumper and the kind of cropped jacket that shows off the flaws in an imperfect waistline. Her boots were suitable for the depths of winter rather than a late summer day.
‘Good of you to come, Ms Withers,’ Tom said.
Francine Withers held out her hand, first to Tom, then to Wexford, and said she was pleased to meet them. ‘I had to take the day off work,’ she said, ‘and I don’t get paid if I do that. But I thought it was my duty to come. You have to be a good citizen, don’t you?’
Neither Tom nor Wexford replied to this. It is the kind of question that makes seasoned policemen distrust the speaker.
‘Now, Ms Withers,’ Tom began, ‘perhaps you’ll take us back to when you first met Mr Chiltern. That was his name, wasn’t it? Chiltern?’
‘That’s right. Keith Chiltern.’
‘You were living in High Wycombe at the time and so was he?’
‘Oh, no. I only went to High Wycombe when I got married. My husband came from King’s Langley. I used to live in London, in Battersea, and so did Keith. I was friendly with this girl and she introduced me to her brother, that was Keith, and we started going out. He was in the building trade, Keith was. It would have been 1996 we started going out.’
Wexford said, ‘Where was he living?’
‘In Clapham. I don’t remember the address, I only went there once. I had a room in Lavender Hill Road and he used to come there. I lived there till I got married in 2003. He was working on this Orcadia Cottage. It wasn’t very big but very posh. The people who owned it went away and he said we could go and stay there, they wouldn’t mind, while he did some work on the patio. There was a manhole thing in the patio and he was doing something to it. I don’t know what, I didn’t take much interest.’
‘Just a moment, Ms Withers,’ Wexford said. ‘When exactly would this have been? Nineteen ninety-six or later?’
‘I can’t remember dates like that. It was summer. I reckon it must have been ’96. The people who owned the place were called Merton, I do know that.’
‘Tell us about the house. It was a brick house. Did it have any creeper growing over it? Roses, ivy, that sort of thing?’
She hesitated. ‘There might have
been a rose, I don’t remember. I only went there a few times.’
Tom interposed. ‘But you did go inside the house? You slept in the house?’
She nodded. Wexford noticed the little beads of sweat forming on her powder-coated upper lip. ‘This manhole you spoke of – there’s been a lot about it in the papers, hasn’t there? A lot of photographs of it and of the patio?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t read papers.’
‘And you don’t watch TV or look at pictures online?’
She didn’t answer.
‘And you never went into the manhole or the cellar? There was no way in from inside the house, was there?’
‘No, there wasn’t,’ she said.
‘No staircase down to the cellar in 1996?’
She blushed darkly. ‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘Tell us about Keith – er, Chiltern, wasn’t it?’
‘Keith Chiltern, yes.’ Her voice had become petulant. ‘He had a car, a big American car. The detective on the phone asked me if Keith had a big American car and I said yes, he did.’
Wexford said with apparent lack of interest, ‘What colour was the car, Ms Withers?’
‘What colour?’ She was growing indignant. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s years ago.’
‘Do the words La Punaise mean anything to you?’
She shook her head.
‘Now the house, Orcadia Cottage. You said it was posh. How was it posh? Very modern furnishing, abstract paintings, blinds at the windows, polished wood floors, that sort of thing?’
‘All that,’ she said. ‘Great big TV with a flat screen.’
‘So you and Keith split up. You quarrelled?’
‘I broke it off. I’d met Malcolm, that’s my ex-husband.’
‘And you never saw him again after – when?’
‘Sometime in ’98. I don’t remember when.’
‘All right, Ms Withers,’ Tom said. ‘Would you like to write down your full address in ’96 and ’97, the Lavender Hill address, and Keith Chiltern’s address at the time. If you wouldn’t mind, WPC Debach will take you into another office and give you pen and paper. We won’t keep you long.’
