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.’
It was eleven before they reached the hospital. As they walked up the steps and into reception Dora said, ‘You never told me you hated showers.’
‘No point. You couldn’t change things. It’s one of my laws: half the people in the world prefer showers and the other half baths.’
Sylvia was sitting up. Or lying down, propped up on pillows. Dora looked at her almost fearfully, seeming afraid to approach her, but Wexford kissed her cheek and Sylvia put up an unsteady hand to touch his face.
‘You see, I’m alive,’ she said.
Then Dora did kiss her. Sylvia closed her eyes. Her breathing was regular, too steady for a wakeful state, and Wexford thought she had fallen asleep. She looked very young, almost as she had when she was a teenager. At the same time he noticed that there were strands of grey in the dark hair she wore long and which was now spread across the pillow. After a moment or two she opened her eyes and smiled.
‘Your lot will want to talk to me,’ she said.
‘My lot?’
‘The police.’
‘Not my lot any longer, but I expect they will.’
A nurse came over, said that was enough for now and sent them off to the relatives’ room. Robin and Ben were both there, having had their time with their mother an hour earlier. And with them was Detective Superintendent Burden.
‘I’m practically a relative,’ he said to Wexford. ‘One of the family for now.’
‘For always, Mike,’ said Dora and burst into tears.
For more than two days Wexford had thought of nothing but Sylvia. He thought of that cliché he hated, ‘putting it on the back burner’, along with ‘level playing field’ and ‘kicking whatever it was into the long grass’ – all often used by Tom Ede – but for him, now, the metaphor had been apt. He had put Orcadia Cottage on to the back burner along with the forensic aspects of the attack on Sylvia. That wasn’t allowed to continue. He had barely spoken to Burden when his phone rang, followed by the double note indicating that a message had been left. It was Tom. As soon as they left he would call Tom and explain. Meanwhile, here was Mike …
‘I’m going to talk to her myself,’ he said, ‘as soon as they’ll let me. I think she’d rather talk to me personally than to Hannah or Barry.’
‘I’m sure she would.’
Robin said, sounding years older than his age, ‘Are you going to talk to my sister?’
‘Your sister?’ Ben sounded years younger than his age. ‘She’s my sister too.’
‘Yes, right, OK. But are you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Burden said. ‘Not directly at any rate. I’d like to talk to your mother first and depending on what she says – well, it might be best if Mary’s grandmother talked to her about what happened when the attack was made on her mum.’
‘Me?’
‘I don’t think anything you might say to her would frighten her, but I’ll speak to Sylvia first.’
A nurse put her head round the door and said Sylvia was asking to see her sons again. ‘Five minutes,’ said the nurse, ‘and then you can all go home and come back later.’
As soon as he was at home Wexford called Tom Ede.
He hadn’t explained about Sylvia but now he did, keeping it short because he knew that few people care to hear much about others’ troubles. But Tom was sympathetic, asking questions, apparently delighted to hear that Wexford’s daughter was going to be all right, angry and quite aggressive about the violence that had been done to her. He said and said it devoutly, ‘Thank God.’
Wexford remembered how he had said ‘heaven’ rather than done what they called ‘taking the name of the Lord in vain’. He was almost shocked when Tom said, ‘I said a prayer for her – well, several prayers actually.’
A rather awkward ‘Thanks’ was all Wexford could respond to that.
‘I don’t suppose you want to know about the bit of progress we’ve made. You’ve got enough on your plate.’
Another cliché, but Wexford didn’t care. He felt quite affectionate towards Tom and the hackneyed phrase was endearing. ‘I’d very much like to hear,’ he said.
‘Well, we’ve identified the older woman as Harriet Merton. Her dental records showed up in California, a very prestigious and expensive dentist. Apparently, she had all those implants, crowns and bridges done there. Must have cost old Franklin a packet.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Wexford thought briefly of the red-headed girl in the red dress against the background of bright green leaves in Simon Alpheton’s painting, and then he thought of the bundle of grey bones shrunken in designer clothes, its hair dyed crimson. ‘Anything more about the two men?’
‘We’ve shown Mildred Jones the clothes the young man’s body was dressed in. She was a bit squeamish about them. She should have seen them before we had them cleaned up. The result wasn’t exactly conclusive and that’s not surprising. She just kept saying that they might have been his, but she couldn’t say for sure. A shabby black T-shirt is a shabby black T-shirt. Half the youth in London wears dark blue or black zipper jackets, and jeans are just jeans. His were the kind you’d buy off a street-market stall, brand name Zugu, of which thousands were sold twelve years ago, but to track each one down is obviously impossible. Stallholders don’t ask their customers for their names and addresses.’
‘So we’ve got a Kenneth or Keith Gray or Bray,’ said Wexford, ‘and his young cousin, but not his nephew, possibly called Keith something but possibly Keith Hill.’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘OK, if you say so. At least we know for sure that the woman was Harriet Merton. And we know that the young man we have to call Keith Hill for lack of anything else to call him, we know he had been inside the house and had access to Harriet’s address book. He wrote down her pin number, disguising it from whoever might see it by labelling it as Harriet herself had labelled it, with a name that sounds to the uninitiated like a restaurant. La Punaise.’