Sylvia was in the living room, lying on the sofa reading a magazine and drinking coffee. She sat up, said, ‘Dad! You might have let me know you were coming.’
He looked at the clock. He hadn’t meant to, but noticing she was still in her nightdress, a shawl round her shoulders, her long dark hair loose and in need of a wash, he looked and saw it was twenty minutes to midday.
‘There’s some coffee. Do you want some?’
‘No, thanks. I’m not staying. I’ve been to the inquest on Jason Wardle.’
‘Suicide, I suppose,’ she said.
Something inside his head snapped. But he remained cool, his voice slow and steady. ‘Sylvia, I have passed no judgement on you. I have purposely not taken a side against you. But now I have to speak out. Maybe it will make no difference. Mr and Mrs Wardle were there, Jason’s parents.’
She said nothing, cast up her eyes.
‘Don’t make that face, please. You are a fine example, aren’t you, a fine role model, for Mary?’ Sylvia drew back from him, put one hand up to press against her chest. ‘Mrs Wardle told me what she thinks of you. She holds you responsible for her son’s death. I don’t, but I will say that without your intervention in his life he’d be alive today. Damaged perhaps, mentally unstable, perhaps, but alive.’
‘What about him intervening in my life?’
Wexford said brutally, ‘Jason was twenty-one. You are a middle-aged woman with a son only two years younger. You are a social worker, quite a highly trained one, but you didn’t spot the signs of mental instability in him or if you did you didn’t care. You had what you wanted from him and then you dropped him. Mrs Wardle called you a whore – that wasn’t pleasant for a father to hear.’
Mrs Wardle had cried and now Sylvia’s defiance slid off her as the shawl slipped from her shoulders, and she too began to cry. He watched her for a moment, then he said, ‘Stop. Crying doesn’t help. Does it? It doesn’t make you feel better, whatever people say,’ and sitting down beside her he took her in his arms.
Hugging a large damp woman with greasy hair who smells of sweat is not a pleasant experience, even if she is your child. But thinking like that almost made Wexford laugh. That would never do.
‘Time you went back to work,’ he said. ‘Time you cleaned my house.’ He had noticed the dust. ‘And had Mary back with you. Your mother or I will bring her back on Monday.’
‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
‘I ought to advise you to go and see the Wardles, tell them you’re sorry, but I’m not into draconian punishments. Besides, they might kill you. Vivien Wardle looks capable of it. Now go and have a bath and get dressed.’
She looked at him with that little girl face she occasionally put on. It was no longer becoming. ‘If I do will you take me out for lunch?’
This time he did laugh. ‘Certainly not. What an idea! I’m going straight back to London.’
And there, looking in on Tom Ede before he went off for the weekend, Wexford heard that Rodney Horndon was back from his holiday in the Caribbean. They would talk to him next week. Although he had spent no more than a few hours at the inquest and after that in admonishing Sylvia, Wexford felt strangely out of touch with the events at Orcadia Cottage. He must go back there, but as he decided to go out again it began to rain, at first lightly and then in torrents, the wind getting up and blowing the rain in sheets. It was the next day, in the late afternoon, that he walked down to St John’s Wood.
It was only September but already the leaves were starting to fall from the Virginia creepers. A few had dropped on to the pavements in Orcadia Place and they lay more thickly scattered over the cobbles of the mews. Most of the houses and all the walls carried their burden of the spidery tendrils and heart-shaped leaves, now tinted to a clear red or deep blackish crimson. One fluttered down and alighted on Wexford’s shoulder as he wandered about, half-hoping for some inspiration to come to him from these walls and windows and gables and doorways which must have seen so much. As he came by her gate Mildred Jones’s front door opened and she came out of her flat on to the doorstep, preceded by a tall, thin young woman with long fair hair. They spoke, but were too far away for Wexford to hear what was said, and the girl came down the path to the gate, Mrs Jones calling after her, ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday, then. Nine a.m., remember, and don’t be late.’
Once she was out of earshot, Mildred Jones came to the gate, said to Wexford in a confidential tone, ‘Latvian. At least I know she can’t be an illegal.’
He looked inquiring. ‘My new cleaner,’ she said. ‘Comes from Riga, she says. I don’t care where she comes from so long as it’s in the EU. But they’re a bit thin on the ground. In the fourteen years I’ve been here I’ve had seven and they were from Georgia – and I don’t mean Georgia USA – and Uzbekistan and Ukraine, to name but a few.’
‘You mean they didn’t have a right to remain?’
‘That’s what I mean, yes.’ She seemed quite unaware that it was unwise to give these details to a policeman, but he was a policeman no longer and perhaps that was how she thought of him. ‘The first one was actually deported. Then there was the first Georgian. Then there was the Ukrainian with the ridiculous name, the one that disappeared, and soon after that Colin and I split up, so you can see that was a hard time for me. But I will say for these Russians – they’re all Russian to me – they’re good cleaners.’
Wexford was curious, even though all this wasn’t relevant to the Orcadia Cottage case. ‘How do you find them? I mean, if they’re working illegally in this country they can’t advertise, can they?’
‘Oh, some do. But what they mainly do is put a note through your door. Well, they just put notes through the doors in the whole street. They put their name – just their first name – and say they can do cleaning and ironing and shopping and give a mobile number. They never say how much they’re asking, because they know you’ll stick out for paying under the minimum wage.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s nearly six pounds an hour and I couldn’t afford that. That one you’ve just seen, she asked for the minimum wage – it’s amazing what they know about our laws – but I told her four pounds an hour was the most I’d pay and of course she knuckled under.’
‘Of course,’ said Wexford.
Did she notice his dry tone or was there some distaste in his expression? Whatever it was she said suddenly, ‘Oh my God, I forgot, you’re police, aren’t you?’
‘Not any more, Mrs Jones, not any more.’
She began to explain. ‘Just because I live here – I mean, in St John’s Wood – and because I go to South Africa every year, people think I’m rolling in money. Let me tell you, I got this flat under our divorce settlement and that was all I got. Colin got our place in the country and I never had a penny out of him. He sold that house and got enough from it to buy a place on Clapham Common. I have to live on my investments and you’ll know what that means in a recession. It was all I could do to afford the air fare to Cape Town and then I couldn’t go first class.’ She drew breath. ‘It’s not as though Colin’s short of a bob or two. The irons in the fire he’s got you wouldn’t believe. A share in a business in West Hampstead and a share in a betting shop.’
Soon after he left her the rain began. He noticed crossly that it hadn’t been forecast. The south-east was due to be dry all day. He had no raincoat and no umbrella and the rain came in torrents. There were no taxis, there never were when you really wanted them, but there were trees to stand under more or less all the way. His feet had got wet through his shoes by the time he reached the coachhouse and water had run down the back of his neck inside his clothes.