‘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 enormous 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.’