The Vault (11 page)

‘You want me to tell you when I saw the so-called Mr Hill and his fancy car, do you? I’ll have to think.’ She was silent for a moment. Then she said. ‘When I try to remember when something or other happened I have to try and think of the weather. I mean, if it was summer or winter and raining or whatever.’

Tom was nodding encouragingly.

‘It’s no good nodding at me like that.’ A flash of the old acerbity was showing itself. ‘That won’t help me. I’m thinking. Ah,’ she said. ‘I know now. It must have been autumn. The whole place was covered with leaves – no, it wasn’t, not
covered. That came a week or two later. The leaves from that Virginia creeper were beginning to fall. It must have been October, sometime in October. Does that help?’

‘Very much, Mrs Jones.’

‘It rained after that and made a thick wet mat of those leaves. I was glad when Clay – Mr Silverman, that is – cut it down. Ours hadn’t been planted then. Pity it ever was. That was Colin – he liked the colour.’

She waved to them as they left. Wexford imagined her going back into the house and pausing at the mirror to admire her reflection.

‘I don’t suppose Anthea Gardner will have silver streaks,’ he said.

An unobservant man, Tom looked puzzled. Wexford didn’t explain. Anthea Gardner was expecting them at midday and had coffee ready, the real thing made from beans which she had just ground herself. Tom, who had once told Wexford that he only liked the instant kind, sipped his rather gloomily. Mrs Gardner was dressed almost exactly as she had been on their previous visit, only this time instead of grey her skirt was brown and her blouse spotted instead of striped. Kildare had once more to be restrained and eventually shut in the kitchen.

‘You want to know where Franklin was in late October 1997?’

‘I know it’s difficult to remember these things from so far back, Mrs Gardner,’ Tom said. ‘Think about it. Take your time.’

‘I don’t have to think. It’s not difficult at all. He and I used to go on holiday together long before we started living together again. Harriet and he had been taking separate holidays for years. We were in San Sebastián that year. October it was, the second half of October.’

‘Why do you remember so clearly, Mrs Gardner?’

‘Oh, that’s easy. I remember because it was on that holiday, on my birthday actually, that we decided we’d live together again. Franklin would leave Harriet and come here to me.’

‘And when is your birthday?’

‘October twenty-fifth,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘St Crispin’s Day in case you’re interested.

‘Franklin went back to Orcadia Cottage,’ she went on. ‘It must have been four or five days after we got back. I told him to. I don’t think he’d have bothered if I hadn’t made him. When he came back he told me what had happened. The house was empty. He said it was very clean and tidy and Harriet wasn’t there. A woman he knew who lived in one of the cottages at the back told him that a man she called Harriet’s “young friend” had been at Orcadia Cottage with her for at least two weeks. This is the kind of thing you want?’

‘Exactly the kind of thing we want.’

‘It’s all coming back to me now,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘Franklin said he found a pile of cushions on the living-room floor with a scarlet feather boa draped across them. I mean, it was Harriet’s feather boa. He recognised it. He said the door in the wall at the back was unlocked and the key was missing. There was a manhole or drain or something in the patio, but the lid was off it …’

‘Just a minute, Mrs Gardner. You said the manhole was open?’

‘Well, I suppose so. I wasn’t there. Franklin said the lid was lying near it. The whole place was covered in those leaves which were wet and sort of sticky. He said they were very slippery. He had to walk very carefully not to fall over. Anyway, he managed to lift the cover and put it back on the manhole.’

‘Did he ever go back there?’

‘Not as far as I remember. He expected to hear from Harriet, asking for money if nothing else, but he never did.’ Anthea
Gardner was silent for a moment, looking from Ede to Wexford and then down at her own ringless hands. ‘He didn’t
care
, you see. Women had cost him enough in the past, me included. He simply hoped he’d never hear from her and that perhaps she’d found a man to support her. The feather boa he saw as a defiant gesture, sort of cocking a snook at him, if you know what I mean.’

‘Mrs Gardner, do you know if Harriet had much jewellery?’

‘She had lots, all bought for her by Franklin, but it was gone, the valuable stuff was gone, he said, when he went to the house. Most of her clothes were gone, the designer stuff, and the best of her jewellery.’

Wexford asked her if she would recognise any of the pieces if they were shown to her, but Anthea Gardner shook her head quite violently. ‘I told you, I never met the woman. I know nothing about her jewellery. I know there was a lot of it because Franklin told me he’d spent a fortune on jewellery in the first years of their marriage, but what kind it was and what it looked like I’ve no idea. And I don’t know what was the point of the feather boa.’

‘And are you saying he never heard from her again?’

‘That’s what I’m saying, yes. He never heard from her again.’

As they were driven away out of the white stucco enclaves of The Boltons, Wexford said generously, for the theory had been his alone, ‘Can we add to our scenario as a result of what we’ve heard?’

‘We’ll have to go back in time a bit. We know how Keith Hill happened to have free access to Orcadia Cottage. Franklin Merton was away on holiday in San Sebastian – where is that anyway?’

‘Spain.’

‘Oh, right. OK. Merton was away on holiday and in his absence Harriet had invited KH to stay. While he was there
and maybe she was out somewhere he discovered her pin number, presumably pinched her credit card or one of her credit cards. Suppose, for instance, he had this Francine there and Harriet came back and discovered them together? He kills Harriet …’

‘Why?’ Wexford interrupted. ‘Because his elderly girlfriend discovered him with his young girlfriend? Hardly. What could she do? Fornication’s not yet a crime in this country.’

‘All right,’ said Tom, looking rather as if he would approve if it were. ‘If you insist. He gets rid of the girl, tries to placate Harriet, but she isn’t having any of it. They fight …’

‘What? Physically?’

‘Suppose the door to the cellar was open and she fell down the stairs or he pushed her …’

Suppose, Wexford thought. It was all supposition. It might have happened quite differently. He listened to Tom’s by now elaborate theory with half an ear, while saying to himself, we have to start again, we have to start from scratch and begin from a different angle. But it’s not my case, he thought, it can never be my case. It’s Tom’s, and what I say doesn’t really count. He said it, though, just the same.

‘Hardly any attention has been paid to the second woman in the tomb.’ How useful, how tactful, the passive voice could be! This version was so much more becoming than if he had said, ‘We ought to pay attention to the second woman.’

‘Because the tomb must have been opened for her body to be put in?’

‘I see it this way. That the people who knew the hole and the cellar were there in the first place are the three whose bodies have been there twelve years. Once they were dead and in there no one knew about it with the possible – no, the probable – exception of Franklin Merton. Once Franklin Merton was dead, had died a natural death, no one knew of
it. The big plant pot placed on top of the manhole cover effectively sealed it up. If not for ever, more or less permanently. Until someone discovered it was there and saw it as a potential tomb or, rather, as an existing tomb which was like a vault. It had room for more bodies if bodies there were.’

Tom nodded. ‘All right. What next then?’

‘Back to Rokeby,’ said Wexford. ‘He must be the key to identification. It was he who proposed the construction of an underground room. And it has to be that which gave whoever it was ideas. He has yet to list the people who may have come to survey the place – or has he done that?’

‘We haven’t heard a word from him. No news yet from forensics on the Edsel either. We’ve still got nothing but conjecture to link the Edsel with the two men’s bodies.’

‘I
won’t say a word,’ said Dora. ‘I shall want to, but I won’t because it would upset you. Not because it would upset her.’

Wexford smiled. ‘That’s a very good reason.’

Dora was going back to Kingsmarkham by train, leaving him in London. Her intention was to be in Great Thatto in advance of Sylvia’s return from hospital, and she would have Mary with her after the little girl’s three days of blissful holiday with her cousins. ‘Phone me,’ he said.

‘Don’t I always phone you?’

He laughed. ‘Tell me what she says about that miscreant who stabbed her. She wouldn’t be daft enough to forgive him, would she?’

‘I sincerely hope not.’

He was going to have a long conversation with Martin Rokeby. It was Tom Ede’s suggestion that he should see Rokeby alone or perhaps with Anne, his wife. No policeman, only this policeman’s aide, as Wexford was beginning to call himself. They would talk. Rokeby would say things to him he might not say to Tom.

A picture of Orcadia Cottage, as it now was or as it had been when Simon Alpheton painted it thirty-six years before, Wexford retained in his head. It was therefore something of
a shock to see where the Rokebys now lived. Maida Vale sounds charming and parts of it are, but not St Mary’s Grove, its tall shabby late Victorian houses almost pressing against the Westway flyover. Traffic roared across the great arch of the road behind which was Paddington Station and the new glass towers of the canal basin. A flight of steps led up to the front door under a crumbling portico and when the door came open there were more steps, about fifty of them, to the top flat. Rokeby was standing outside his front door.

A smile might have been expected, but Rokeby didn’t smile. He had been watching Wexford mount the top few stairs but now he turned his head away, gave that most unwelcoming of greetings, ‘You’d better come in.’

Though they had been there for several weeks, the Rokebys had done nothing to make the place more attractive. The rooms were large, apparently retaining their original ornamentation, elaborate and very dusty cornices, shutters at the windows which looked as if they had never been moved, even a couple of fluted columns with Corinthian capitals. A cheap-looking, much-worn carpet covered the floors, wall-to-wall, and the curtains were of thin unlined cretonne. The view from one window was largely of pretty St Mary’s, Paddington Green, but from the other all that could be seen was the Westway, dark grey concrete with its sluggishly moving load of traffic. There were no books, no plants or flowers, no cushions and scarcely any ornaments.

Anne Rokeby sat in a cane chair with a seat covered in the same cretonne. She looked worried and worn. She didn’t get up when Wexford came in. There was no reason why she should, but no reason either, as far as he could tell, for the momentary shutting of her eyes. He noticed that her hands trembled slightly.

‘I would have thought,’ said Rokeby, ‘that we’d already talked
about every possible aspect of this business. What else is there to say? I looked down a hole in my backyard and found those bodies and ruined my life. That’s that, isn’t it?’

Instead of answering, Wexford said, ‘I was hoping for a list from you of the various contractors you consulted about building an underground room at Orcadia Cottage.’

Rokeby shrugged. ‘But why? They didn’t build it. They said it wasn’t feasible and then planning permission was refused. What’s to say?’

Policemen don’t answer questions. They ask them. But Wexford wasn’t a policeman any more. ‘Mr Rokeby, three of the bodies you found had been put there or had died there about twelve years ago, but the fourth had been dead only about two years. This means that the coal hole had been opened and another body put in there something over two years ago. What I’d like us to talk about is when you first moved to Orcadia Cottage and you had builders in to convert a large bedroom into two small ones, when you applied for planning permission and when those contractors came to look at the place. I’d like some dates, if possible.’

Anne Rokeby suddenly stood up. ‘I don’t see why we should tell you. You’re not a policeman, are you?’

‘I can’t suppose you have anything to hide, Mrs Rokeby.’

Her hands had again begun to shake. ‘That’s not the point, that’s not what I …’

‘Sit down, Annie,’ her husband interrupted her. ‘It’s because we’ve nothing to hide that we can’t have any objection to talking about this.’ He turned to Wexford. ‘We moved into Orcadia Cottage in the spring of twenty-o-two and we had a builder in called Pinkson. I remember that because it was such a weird name. He was a sort of jack of all trades and we found him because he’d done some work for our predecessors, the Silvermans, cut down the creeper among other
things. Then in the spring of twenty-o-six I applied for planning permission to build an underground room and I consulted three or four building firms.’

‘Pinkson being one of them?’

‘No. He’d gone, moved away or gone out of business.’ Something struck Rokeby. ‘You’re not saying one of those men put a fourth body down there, one of the ones who came to talk about building below ground?’

‘I’m not saying anything, Mr Rokeby. I’m hoping you’ll say something and give me some useful information.’

‘I can’t remember the names,’ Rokeby said. ‘Well, I can remember one. They were called Subearth Structures. I thought it was a stupid name and it stuck in my mind, but as for the others …’

Anne Rokeby’s tone was cold and curiously dreary. She spoke as if she hated her husband only a little less than she hated Wexford. ‘You got the names of the others out of the Yellow Pages. I said it would be better to act on personal recommendations but you wouldn’t.’

‘Do you remember the names of the firms you took from the Yellow Pages?’

Martin Rokeby shrugged, then shook his head slowly, but his wife again jumped to her feet. Wexford was making himself ready to restrain her if she did what she seemed about to do, fly at her husband with her hands up like a cat’s claws. ‘You want to come to the end of all this, don’t you?’ she shouted. ‘You want to solve it or whatever the term is, don’t you? I know I can’t stand much more of living in this dump. The more you tell him the sooner all this hell will be over …’