The Vault (12 page)

‘But, Annie, I don’t know …’

‘Yes, you do! You marked those firms in the Yellow Pages. I remember. You put a ring round them with a ballpoint pen.
What’s the matter with you that I can remember and you can’t?’

Very calmly, not showing any of the excitement he felt, Wexford asked if they had that particular volume of the Yellow Pages with them in the flat.

‘Of course we don’t.’ Anne Rokeby was scornful now. ‘But no one ever throws those things away, not even when you get a new one. It’ll be in the hall cupboard at the cottage unless your people have disposed of it. It’ll be there with rings round all those builders’ names, of course it will.’

I
t was a relief to be away from those bad-tempered, unhappy people. Wexford walked a little way down the road towards Paddington Green, recalling the song about Pretty Polly Perkins and her lover the milkman.

The gentleman’s family could have lived in one of the remaining Victorian houses sandwiched between the newer building on the eastern side of the green. St Mary’s Church was beautiful, the kind of place people called a ‘little gem’ and he remembered reading somewhere that in exchange for being allowed to build the Westway so close to it and across its land, the church had been given a donation sufficient to restore it to its former glory. Its clock struck noon with the kind of chimes that are usually called ‘silvery’ but sounded more golden to him, they were so rich and harmonious.

He sat down on a seat on the green and phoned Tom.

Lucy would go to Orcadia Cottage, Tom said, and meet Wexford there to explore the phone books. Was it too far to walk? All the way up the Edgware Road, turn in at Aberdeen Place, he calculated, but maybe a more interesting way would be to try the hinterland of Marylebone. Church Street with its antique shops detained him briefly, but after a minute or two of being amazed by Alfie’s windows, he walked through to Lisson Grove (where Eliza Doolittle lived, he recalled) and on up Grove End to Orcadia Place.

Two people, not police, were outside, looking at Lucy’s car. They moved away when they saw him and transferred their attention to the house itself. One of them was the fat young woman with the pushchair, though she was without it this morning and holding the hand of its usual occupant. He went up to the front door and having no key, rang the bell. Lucy answered it and he was about to step inside when, quick as a flash in spite of her size, the young woman was at his side.

‘If you’re going in, can we come?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘Sorry but no.’

Lucy said, ‘You shouldn’t even be in the garden. There’s nothing for you to see and I’d advise you to go home.’

Wexford thought the girl would retaliate – he dreaded a racist comment – but she said nothing, contenting herself with a glare at Lucy’s cornrows, and went reluctantly away, the child whose hand she was clutching, starting to grizzle. He closed the front door behind him and turned to survey the welter of phone directories lying on the hall floor. Lucy started to pick them up.

‘I’d have said that one of those Rokebys is the sort of person who never throws anything away, but they appear to have thrown away the crucial one. There are three copies of the Yellow Pages but not the marked copy. Mind you, I’ve only looked in the hall cupboard.’

‘It may be somewhere else in the house.’

They set about searching likely places and unlikely ones, a drawer at the base of a wardrobe, the drawers in a dressing table, bookshelves in case the missing directory had been placed among oversized books, the four cardboard crates packed with ornaments and crockery which the Rokebys had perhaps intended to take with them to St Mary’s Grove but in the event had left behind. On top of the fourth of these, the last one they searched, was the missing Yellow Pages. But when Wexford lifted it out he found that the pages in the first half of it had been torn out.

‘And that’s the bit with the “Builders” and “Contractors” in,’ he said.

‘It has to be the one, sir. But the pages are gone. It’s no use to us.’

‘I’m not so sure. Have a look at those crates. All the stuff that’s packed inside them is wrapped in newsprint. Not Yellow Pages, I know. But suppose they ran out of newsprint when they came to pack a fifth crate and used Yellow Pages for want of anything else.’

‘Except that they didn’t.’

‘Lucy, will you drive me back to St Mary’s Grove – do you know where that is? There’s just a chance …’

No sightseers remained outside Orcadia Cottage. It had begun to rain, a thin drizzle. ‘If it doesn’t work out the way I’m hoping,’ Wexford said when they were in the car, ‘at least we know about Subearth structure and it’s possible that may be all we need to know.’

‘What do you think we’re going to find, sir?’

Instead of replying Wexford said, ‘You’ve been to that flat the Rokebys are living in, haven’t you?’

‘Just the once, sir.’

‘Did you notice how few ornaments there were about?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Let’s hope that the ones they brought with them they never unpacked.’

This proved to be the case. The Rokebys were far from pleased to see Wexford again and positively hostile to Lucy. ‘Two of you?’ Anne Rokeby said. ‘What are you going to do? Arrest us?’

‘Did you bring a crate of china or crockery with you when you came to this flat?’

Rokeby said, ‘And if we did? Did you think it wasn’t china but another body?’

‘This isn’t a joking matter, Mr Rokeby,’ said Lucy. ‘Since you appear not to have unpacked it, we’ll see that crate, if you please.’

It was full of pieces of what might have been a dinner service and each piece was wrapped in a sheet from the Yellow Pages. Lucy began unwrapping them, doubtful until she reached the third layer from the top. The next piece she brought to light, a sauceboat, was wrapped in a page on which the name K, K and L Ltd had a ring round it in ballpoint.

‘We seem to have found what we’re looking for, Mr Rokeby,’ said Wexford. He smiled. ‘When we have unwrapped all twelve dinner plates and all twelve soup bowls we’ll leave you in peace.’ My God, he thought, I’m catching cliché-itis off Tom. I’ll be praying next …

‘Eighteen!’ said Anne Rokeby. ‘I used to wash them all with my own hands in soap made for delicate fabrics,’ and she burst into noisy tears.

F
rom the sheets of yellow paper they noted eight separate firms of contractors, including Subearth. ‘Oh, yes,
Subearth,’ said Rokeby. ‘I remember now. I mentioned them to Colin Jones and he knew all about them. Recommended them actually.’

Wexford asked the Rokebys’ permission to take the relevant pages away with them and this was grudgingly granted. Anne Rokeby had stopped crying and was muttering an explanation of her conduct, though no one had asked for it. Seeing her beautiful dinner service, which she never expected to use again, had set her off so that she lost all control. It was enough to break her heart.

‘Have you got a dinner service, sir?’ Lucy asked when they were heading for West Hampstead.

‘I don’t know. I expect we had one once. Certainly not the eighteen-piece kind.’

‘I shall never have one,’ said Lucy. ‘I shall never have anything you can’t put in a machine to wash it.’

Wexford laughed. It was Wednesday, a good day to start phoning up builders, well before they all started knocking off for the weekend. How many of those who came to size up the potentials of Orcadia Cottage, he wondered, had opened that manhole and looked inside. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people who had done that would have told Rokeby and then told the police. But one would not. One would have made use of what he had found.

S
ubearth Structures operated out of a Victorian house in the backwoods of Kilburn, round which lean-tos and sheds clustered. The house, when first built, must have been extensively encrusted with mouldings of fruit and flowers and leaves above its front door and all its windows. Most of this decoration had by now cracked or crumbled or fallen off and an attempt had been made to smarten up its appearance by painting the entire façade with a thick matt white paint. Recalling his ice-cream metaphor when he saw the houses of The Boltons, Wexford thought this place was like an ice that had half-melted.

As in all builders’ yards, piles of sand, shingle, bricks and tiles cluttered the place and a concrete mixer ground away monotonously. Lucy had already spoken on the phone to Brian George and it was he who came out of one of the sheds to meet them. Invited to come inside, she and Wexford followed him into the ice-cream house and into a kind of sitting room. Its walls were painted a bright turquoise. A cheap red hair-cord covered the floor and the chairs were upholstered in brown plastic. If this was where he brought potential clients, Wexford thought, it was a wonder any of them continued with their purpose of installing an underground room. On the turquoise wall hung framed photographs of various breeds of dog as might be in a vet’s waiting room.

‘Now I wasn’t actually working here when Mr Rokeby asked us to make a survey.’ Brian George said this as if he might have been half-working there or working perhaps, Wexford thought, only in spirit. ‘You’ll want to talk to someone who actually was working here.’ George nodded as if to confirm this careful assessment of the situation. ‘I think Kev would be your best bet, that is Kev Oswin. Kev actually went to Arcadia Cottage – funny name, that, isn’t it? Cottage, I mean. I’d call it a big house myself. But as I say, Kev went to Arcadia Cottage to size up the situation and your best bet would actually be to have a word with him. If you’ll excuse me I’ll go and root him out.’

Once he was out of the room, Wexford said to Lucy, ‘Was he like that on the phone?’

‘Exactly like that.’

She picked up a trade journal from a coffee table and Wexford retired into his thoughts. He had had a long talk on the phone with Dora the previous evening and an even longer one with Burden. Jason Wardle was still somewhere at large. Calls to all his known relatives and friends had achieved nothing. He might be abroad. He had had days in which to leave the country by air, or more probably, because simpler, by Eurostar. Sylvia’s car had not yet been found.

‘His parents seem to know no more as to his whereabouts than we do,’ Burden had said. ‘They’re rather old to be the parents of a twenty-one year old. James Wardle must be getting on for seventy. He’s been retired for years and they live in rather an isolated place on the outskirts of Stringfield. They claim not to have seen him for a month. Unless they’re very good liars, they genuinely don’t know where he’s been living in that time and they knew nothing about Sylvia. As far as they knew – this is what they say – he had a girlfriend he met at the University of Myringham that he later dropped out of. They had the girl’s name and we’ve seen her, but I’m
as certain as can be in these circumstances that she hasn’t seen him for several months and has no idea where he is.’

Dora had more to say about Sylvia herself than the hunt for her assailant. ‘She seems pretty well, Reg. I’ve borrowed Mary’s car and I take her back to the hospital every day to have the wound dressed, but tomorrow will be the last time. Ben’s gone back to school for the last week till the end of term but Robin’s with her. She seems to like my being there and that’s maybe because I haven’t said a word about her having a – well, a love affair with a boy young enough to be her son. I’ve wanted to but I haven’t. I thought of you and what you’d want and I didn’t say a word.’

‘Thank you for that, darling,’ he had said and was pulled out of his reverie by Lucy saying, ‘What’s happened to him? We’ve been here ten minutes.’

‘Wait a bit longer,’ Wexford said, ‘and if he hasn’t come by a quarter past we’ll go after him.’

At fourteen minutes past Brian George came back with a very short very fat man he introduced as Kevin Oswin. Oswin was as taciturn as his employer was verbose. When Wexford asked him if he had gone to Orcadia Cottage to look over the place with a view to making an underground room, he returned a single ‘yes’.

‘And how did you set about doing that?’ Lucy asked.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Did you walk round the place, take measurements, look in the cellar?’

‘There wasn’t a cellar.’

‘The coal hole then – did you look in the coal hole?’

Oswin was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘No.’

‘Mr Oswin,’ said Wexford, ‘could you be a little more explicit?’

Oswin stared, perhaps unaware of the meaning of the word.

‘Say a bit more about it, I mean.’

‘There’s nothing to say, but if that’s what you want, OK.’ Oswin suddenly became voluble, but speaking slowly as if to people who understood English only with difficulty. ‘I said to him, Mr Rokeby, that is, that the whole front garden would have to be dug up. Right? Excavated.’ He rolled his mouth round the word. ‘All the trees have to go, the hedge, the lot, them pillars with the birds on.’ The pause was longer this time, ending in a sigh. ‘He said, what about the back, and we went out the back and I said to my bruv I said that it wasn’t on.’ So much talk appeared to have exhausted Oswin and he closed his eyes.

‘Your bruv? You had your brother with you?’

‘Yeah, my bruv Trevor.’ He added importantly. ‘Trev’s like self-employed, got a car-hire company, but he’s about here somewhere. He come with me to look at the place, but he stayed outside to have a fag. Terrible heavy smoker is Trev. I went inside with Mr Rokeby and had a look round for what that was worth.’

‘Why wasn’t it a practical proposition?’

‘It’d have meant excavating under the roadway at the back and that wouldn’t be allowed. Westminster Council wouldn’t have that. Wouldn’t be allowed. Got that? Not allowed.’

‘But you didn’t look into the coal hole?’

‘Never knew there was a bloody coal hole till I saw it on the telly. Right?’

It must have been Trevor that Wexford caught a glimpse of as they were leaving Subearth’s premises, an equally fat if slightly taller man than his brother, standing by the concrete mixer smoking a cigarette. He wore a suit and tie and appeared to be paying no more than a social visit. ‘Who do we see next?’ he asked Lucy.