The Vault by Ruth Rendell Page A

makes a big fuss. I don’t mean that Vlad, she’s gone long ago. And the one after her too. Of course I don’t keep them on when I’m away in South Africa and they don’t like that.’
    Mildred Jones stepped in fearfully over the threshold, but when she had advanced a few steps her nervousness left her and she stared at the blank wall facing them on the left-hand side of the kitchen door.
    ‘Someone’s made a wall there!’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Maybe one of Harriet’s boys. They were all builders of some sort or another.’
    The young man who might or might not have been called Keith Hill came into their minds, but it wasn’t until Mildredwas back home and the two policemen were back in the car that Tom spoke of it. He wrenched off his tie. ‘We’ve no reason to think he was a builder or a friend of Harriet Merton’s or that he built that wall, have we?’
    ‘Except that we both have a feeling that all those things are true,’ said Wexford. ‘That’s all. Assumptions.’
    For ever afterwards, for the rest of his life, Wexford would remember that it was here, on the corner, where Abbey Road comes into West End Lane, that the phone call from Dora came. ‘Assumptions’ was the last word spoken and then his phone rang. As their driver rounded the corner where Quex Road turns off to the left he heard Dora’s voice, a trembling shaken voice, and Dora’s news.
    ‘I’ll be back in five minutes – well, ten,’ he said. ‘As soon as I can. And then we’ll go home. Straightaway.’
    The driver said, ‘What is it?’
    He told her. ‘My daughter – my daughter Sylvia …’
    ‘It’ll be five minutes,’ she said. ‘Not ten. Sooner if I can make it.’

CHAPTER NINE
    T he sun was setting and all the lights were on. They sat at Sylvia’s bedside. ‘Only five minutes at the most,’ said the intensive-care sister. She came back after four minutes and shepherded them to the relatives’ room, a carpeted place with armchairs and a television set. Who, in their situation, would want to watch television? Dora, who had been dry-eyed at the bedside, now began crying quietly. When the door was shut Wexford took her in his arms and held her, not speaking.
    Sylvia’s ex-husband Neil Fairfax was sitting there, though he had not been allowed to see her. Nor had Mike Burden, who had met them at their house when they arrived and driven Wexford and Dora to the hospital. Everything goes when your child is at death’s door, Wexford thought, every other preoccupation, worry, hope, fear. She is all. You don’t even notice if the sun is shining or rain falling. Nothing else matters and, humiliatingly, you pray. You pray to a god you don’t believe in and have never believed in. It’s a mystery how you know what to do, what to say, how to frame a prayer.
    He gently released Dora, sat beside her, holding her hand. Burden said, ‘Any change?’
    Wexford shrugged. ‘Just the same. They say she’s stable.They’re worried about her blood pressure. Well, I think they are – it’s hard to know.’
    It was Burden who had told them, he who made that phone call. Sylvia had been fetching her little daughter Mary home from a pre-school for four year olds. The house, an old rectory, absurdly large for one woman, one child and two young men who were most of the time away at school or university. Sylvia had parked the car on the long winding drive, half overgrown with shrubs and trees in full leaf, had pushed open the passenger door for Mary to get out, got out herself and before she could take a step been stabbed by a man who had stepped out from the hawthorn thicket and plunged a knife into her chest. The knife had missed her heart but grazed a lung.
    While Neil was producing coffee for everyone from the machine, Burden told the story all over again. ‘Mary was a marvel,’ he said, smiling at Mary’s father as he took his coffee. ‘She got herself to Mary Beaumont’s. You know who I mean?’
    Wexford nodded. He had nodded the