The Vault by Ruth Rendell Page B

first time. He knew this was just Burden’s well-meant effort at distraction. ‘Sylvia’s friend. Mary’s named after her.’
    ‘Mary Beaumont says she doesn’t really know what had happened – Mary couldn’t tell her, just said there’d been a man and a lot of shouting. Mary ran back with little Mary and there was Sylvia – well, you can imagine the rest. The car was gone, but he didn’t take her handbag or apparently any money or credit cards. Thank God, whoever he was, he didn’t touch the child.’
    For a car, for nothing but a car. If he’d come to me, Wexford thought irrationally, I’d have given him a car and anything else he wanted not to touch my daughter. Only life isn’t like that and people don’t behave like that.
    Dora asked, ‘Where is Mary now?’
    ‘With Mary Beaumont,’ Neil said. ‘She knows her, she lovesher and Mary was happy to have her.’ Neil was the little girl’s father, though she had been born long after her parents’ divorce. ‘I shall take the day off work tomorrow so that she can be with me, but after that – well, I don’t know. We’ll arrange something.’
    Suddenly Dora looked better, more hopeful, less distraught than she had since the news came. ‘Let us take her, Neil. She can stay here with us or we can take her back to London to Sheila.’ Her lip trembled. ‘I would love to do that,’ she said shakily. ‘Mary is happiest of all when she can be with Amy and Anny. Do let us.’
    ‘Not yet,’ said Wexford, more gruffly than he intended. ‘I’m staying here, in this hospital until we know.’
    B ut the Princess Diana Memorial Hospital refused to let them stay. If there was a change they would be phoned, but they couldn’t be allowed to remain overnight in the relatives’ room or elsewhere.
    ‘You let mothers stay with their sick children,’ said Dora, ‘and I’m a mother and Sylvia is my child.’
    ‘Yes but she’s grown-up,’ said the intensive care sister. ‘I’m sorry but we have to stick to our policy.’
    They went home and sat up, drinking whisky. Even Dora had a small glass and made a face at the taste. They tried putting on
News at Ten
but for all that sunk in they might as well have done without it. Wexford was thinking about what he had been told, that the knife had been thrust into Sylvia’s chest millimetres from her aorta. A second blow had grazed a lung, and surgery – carried out within an hour of her entering the hospital – had saved it.
    ‘Mr Messaoud is one of the finest surgeons in the country, the top man,’ said one of the intensive-care nurses.
    Everyone you ever heard of who had an operation, Wexford thought, always described their surgeon like that, as being Britain’s finest, the top man. It made you wonder what the second-class surgeons did, whom they operated on. Maybe they stood about and watched. He put the whisky bottle back in the cupboard. It was no good swigging scotch, it dulled but it didn’t help, it never did. Dora had fallen asleep, stretched out on the sofa. She woke up when the phone rang, sat up, made a little inarticulate cry. But it was only Robin, their elder grandson, at home in his mother’s house, waiting for his brother to arrive from school. Robin’s university was up for the long vacation but Ben, whose school term continued for another three weeks, would come home for a few days.
    ‘I’ve not seen Mum yet. I thought I’d wait for Ben. We’ll go together in the morning.’
    ‘She’s just the same, Rob,’ Wexford said. ‘There’s no change.’
    Robin asked no questions. If Wexford had been asked how his grandson sounded he would have said ‘sick at heart’. When the receiver had been put down he started thinking about the man who had attacked Sylvia. For him to have been waiting there, hiding in the bushes, he must have known Sylvia’s movements, perhaps that she lived alone with a child, that she worked only in the mornings and returned home, bringing Mary from pre-school, at