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.
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.’