The Vault (18 page)

He revisited Ben’s bedroom. The body had, of course, long gone. Strange that when murder or suicide had happened in a room that room was invested with horror and fear, even if that particular killing had left no traces behind, or none that couldn’t be easily removed. A man had stood here with a rope in his hand, had climbed on to a chair and unhooked a lamp that hung on a chain from a hook in the ceiling. The only thought in his head was of ending his life and how he would do it, yet he had laid the lamp down gently, careful not to damage any part of it. He had taken off his clothes – why? – folded them and placed them on the bed. He had wished to be naked when he killed himself and that she should find him naked. Did it signify something? That she had loved his nakedness because he was young and strong? You don’t go there when it’s your daughter you’re thinking of, Wexford thought. Perhaps he was naked only to expose himself as so in her power as to be helpless and entirely vulnerable before her. For Wardle had intended Sylvia to find him, not Ben, of course he did. He would know that she would go into that room to check that all was as should be before Ben next came home.

Wexford glanced round him at all the paraphernalia in the room, the ‘stuff’ necessary to a sixteen-year-old if he is to live according to today’s teenage standards of what living meant. And he saw that computers and tennis racquets and musical instruments and trainers were only the half of it. Was his
house to be invaded by amplifying equipment for use with that enormous guitar? It was all very well in this vast rectory where you could make intolerable noise in one part of it and hear nothing two floors and six rooms away. Now he knew why Ben had slept there and he laughed to himself,
at
himself, for his past mild indignation that his younger grandson had been exiled to this distant place.

For some reason he explored the whole house, going into every room as if he expected to find more hanging bodies. As in some horror film, he thought, where every door opened on to yet another grisly death’s head. Of course there was nothing. He found the Yellow Pages Sylvia had said was in Ben’s room, but turned out to be in the spare room between Robin’s room and Mary’s and went along to Sylvia’s room where she was putting the last of her fifty-two pairs of shoes into the crate. It took a long time to carry it all downstairs and out to the car. It was a big car, but still the inside as well as the boot were filled. He thought as he squeezed in the final bag how much he disliked the idea – so much more than an idea now – of Sylvia and her three children all living in his house, living with these mountains of baggage, of which this car-full was only the start. They would spread their property over every square inch, make their horrible noise so that his kind, quiet neighbours would be forced to complain, play ball games in his garden, Ben and Mary constantly going next door to ask for their ball back. Of course the boys wouldn’t always be there, but they would be there in their intolerably long holidays. And it would go on for months, months and months if not years.

He would not say a word. Well, he would say many words to Dora and she would say the same words to him, but none to Sylvia and his grandchildren. Of course he wouldn’t. He was her father, their grandfather, their progenitor, and this
was the kind of thing you had to put up with if you were a parent. Sooner or later it or something like it came to all parents and you were lucky if it didn’t. He thought of the older brother, not the Prodigal Son who was a misbehaving spendthrift, but the older brother that his father reassured. ‘Thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine …’

‘It’s a blessing we’ve got the coachhouse,’ Dora said on the following Wednesday when they were on their way back to London.

On the Sunday Robin had come home from Cambridge in his old banger and shifted all his property and Mary’s from the Old Rectory to Wexford’s house in Kingsmarkham. Next day and the next Ben, in a friend’s car driven by a friend, had removed all his property except the bare furniture from his own room and brought it to his grandparents’. Sylvia took over Wexford and Dora’s bedroom, which she intended to share with Mary. Ben and Robin’s property occupied so much space that it overflowed on to the landing and the overspill had to be put in the garage. Sylvia had taken the news of her car without any sign of emotion. That Jason Wardle must have driven it to the Old Rectory and abandoned it there perhaps only hours before hanging himself appeared not to affect her. It was only the thought of the house which upset her.

The mantra had varied and had now become, ‘It’s so sweet of you to let us live here. We’re enormously grateful. I’m sure you really hate it. But you do realise I could never, never go back there.’

They had been in the coachhouse for just seven minutes when Sheila arrived, dying (as she said) to hear all about it. Dora told all and in the detail Sheila seemed to require. For his part Wexford said nothing. He was thinking how sad it was that Sylvia, whose lover had died by his own hand, showed no sorrow.

T
wo weeks had gone by and two days more. Wexford had been told there was ‘no rush’ for him to come back. Tom said to take his time and meanwhile here was something for him to think about: Forensics had discovered hairs in the boot of the Edsel and these afforded sufficient DNA to be compared with that taken from the older man’s remains. Not much help, Wexford thought. All such a comparison could show was that the older man had put his head inside the Edsel’s boot or that his body had been carried there. But perhaps it was a small step forward.

He walked into Tom’s office to find the detective superintendent in a state of excitement. ‘I’ve found her.’ Tom was ebullient. ‘She’s the one. She ticks all the boxes.’

If there was a cliché Wexford hated more than ‘level playing field’ or ‘kicking into the long grass’ it was the one about ticking all the boxes. But he merely looked enquiring.

‘Francine, I mean. Miles found her on the Internet, I don’t know how. I’m more or less computer illiterate, it’s a closed book to me. But he found her and she’s coming in. I’ve talked to her on the phone. She knows all about Orcadia Cottage, she’s called Francine Withers, thirty years old, had
a relationship with a man called Keith Chiltern that ended when he disappeared twelve years ago.’

Wexford nodded. ‘Where’s she coming from?’

‘High Wycombe. She manages a supermarket there. She’s been married and divorced, no children. She’s the one, Reg.’

‘Why is she coming here? I’d have expected us – you, that is – to go to her.’

‘We would have. She volunteered, said she’d like to come here.’

Wexford laughed, said there was no accounting for tastes and thus contributing a cliché of his own. As he had always feared, it was catching. Rather belatedly, Tom asked after Sylvia and Wexford kept his reply as short as he decently could. A young WPC brought in coffee. The tray had just been removed when Ms Francine Withers was announced.

The same WPC brought her in. She was of medium height, a little overweight, with blonde hair, black at the roots and a broad, handsome, over-made-up face, full mouth, straight nose and the kind of staring eyes that look as if their owner has just seen something shocking. As he must have looked, Wexford thought, when he walked into Ben’s room and saw the hanged man. She had dressed carefully, that was apparent, but not very judiciously in a too-short skirt, tight jumper and the kind of cropped jacket that shows off the flaws in an imperfect waistline. Her boots were suitable for the depths of winter rather than a late summer day.

‘Good of you to come, Ms Withers,’ Tom said.

Francine Withers held out her hand, first to Tom, then to Wexford, and said she was pleased to meet them. ‘I had to take the day off work,’ she said, ‘and I don’t get paid if I do that. But I thought it was my duty to come. You have to be a good citizen, don’t you?’

Neither Tom nor Wexford replied to this. It is the kind
of question that makes seasoned policemen distrust the speaker.

‘Now, Ms Withers,’ Tom began, ‘perhaps you’ll take us back to when you first met Mr Chiltern. That was his name, wasn’t it? Chiltern?’

‘That’s right. Keith Chiltern.’

‘You were living in High Wycombe at the time and so was he?’

‘Oh, no. I only went to High Wycombe when I got married. My husband came from King’s Langley. I used to live in London, in Battersea, and so did Keith. I was friendly with this girl and she introduced me to her brother, that was Keith, and we started going out. He was in the building trade, Keith was. It would have been 1996 we started going out.’

Wexford said, ‘Where was he living?’

‘In Clapham. I don’t remember the address, I only went there once. I had a room in Lavender Hill Road and he used to come there. I lived there till I got married in 2003. He was working on this Orcadia Cottage. It wasn’t very big but very posh. The people who owned it went away and he said we could go and stay there, they wouldn’t mind, while he did some work on the patio. There was a manhole thing in the patio and he was doing something to it. I don’t know what, I didn’t take much interest.’

‘Just a moment, Ms Withers,’ Wexford said. ‘When exactly would this have been? Nineteen ninety-six or later?’

‘I can’t remember dates like that. It was summer. I reckon it must have been ‘96. The people who owned the place were called Merton, I do know that.’

‘Tell us about the house. It was a brick house. Did it have any creeper growing over it? Roses, ivy, that sort of thing?’

She hesitated. ‘There might have been a rose, I don’t remember. I only went there a few times.’

Tom interposed. ‘But you did go inside the house? You slept in the house?’

She nodded. Wexford noticed the little beads of sweat forming on her powder-coated upper lip. ‘This manhole you spoke of – there’s been a lot about it in the papers, hasn’t there? A lot of photographs of it and of the patio?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t read papers.’

‘And you don’t watch TV or look at pictures online?’

She didn’t answer.

‘And you never went into the manhole or the cellar? There was no way in from inside the house, was there?’

‘No, there wasn’t,’ she said.

‘No staircase down to the cellar in 1996?’

She blushed darkly. ‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Tell us about Keith – er, Chiltern, wasn’t it?’

‘Keith Chiltern, yes.’ Her voice had become petulant. ‘He had a car, a big American car. The detective on the phone asked me if Keith had a big American car and I said yes, he did.’

Wexford said with apparent lack of interest, ‘What colour was the car, Ms Withers?’

‘What colour?’ She was growing indignant. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s years ago.’

‘Do the words
La Punaise
mean anything to you?’

She shook her head.

‘Now the house, Orcadia Cottage. You said it was posh. How was it posh? Very modern furnishing, abstract paintings, blinds at the windows, polished wood floors, that sort of thing?’

‘All that,’ she said. ‘Great big TV with a flat screen.’

‘So you and Keith split up. You quarrelled?’

‘I broke it off. I’d met Malcolm, that’s my ex-husband.’

‘And you never saw him again after – when?’

‘Sometime in ‘98. I don’t remember when.’

‘All right, Ms Withers,’ Tom said. ‘Would you like to write down your full address in ‘96 and ‘97, the Lavender Hill address, and Keith Chiltern’s address at the time. If you wouldn’t mind, WPC Debach will take you into another office and give you pen and paper. We won’t keep you long.’

She followed Rita Debach, casting a glance of venom over her shoulder. ‘Well, Reg,’ said Tom, ‘my goodness, I dropped a real clanger there, didn’t I? I was so sure too. It was summer, but she never noticed the creeper that covered the house. She never noticed the staircase.’

‘The house was furnished in very modern style, abstract paintings et cetera. Flat-screen TV – had they even been thought of thirteen years ago?’

‘What did she hope to get out of it, Reg? There’s no money involved, no reward for being
the
Francine.’

‘Fame, I suppose,’ Wexford said. ‘Or what passes for fame, these days. Name in the papers she never reads. Called as a witness in a trial? Face on her huge, flat-screen TV when the media get hold of her.’ He started to laugh. After a second or two Tom started to laugh too.

‘I wonder what she’s writing down?’ Tom said. ‘All pure invention? Does she think we wouldn’t check?’ He added generously, ‘I could tell you knew before I did. When did you know?’

‘When she said Keith’s name was Chiltern. She’s from High Wycombe and she said her husband came from King’s Langley. Those places are both in the Chiltern Hills and that – well, that told me.’

‘Good for you. Go to the top of the class.’ Tom picked up the phone and called WPC Debach. ‘Rita? Bring Ms Withers back in, would you?’

WPC Debach came in alone. ‘She’s gone, sir. Disappeared. She didn’t write anything on that bit of paper.’

Wexford said very seriously. ‘She’s allergic to paper, Rita.’

‘We could charge her,’ said Tom, ‘with obstructing the police, but I don’t think we ought to stick our necks out, do you?’

Wexford said, unsmiling, ‘Better to keep a low profile.’

S
he could have found all the information she had in the media, he thought as he drove over to Highgate to talk to yet another Francine, the mother of Francine Jameson. Tom had spoken to her on the phone, giving Wexford clearance as his representative. If she had refused to see him she would have been well within her rights, but she hadn’t refused, only said she couldn’t imagine what information she might have for him. And so it turned out. She was French, called Francine, had given her daughter that name because she liked it. She had never heard of Orcadia Cottage until pictures of it appeared in the media. No one had ever asked her to translate
la punaise
into English. No one she knew had ever possessed a large, pale yellow American vintage car.

An empty afternoon stretched before him. If he went home to the coachhouse he knew he would find Sheila and Dora there, discussing Sylvia and the Old Rectory business. Rehearsals for
Ghosts
were still a week away and meanwhile Sheila had nothing to do but speculate with her mother as to whether Sylvia should sell the house, conquer her fears of the house, think in any case of buying somewhere smaller and – he guessed this bit – revise her ideas on older women having affairs with men the same age as their sons. Joining in didn’t appeal to him. He drove across Highgate and parked in Shepherds Hill. Not having brought his A to Z guide with him, he had hazy ideas of the geography of this part of London. Alexandra Palace lay vaguely over there, Muswell Hill on the
other side of the woodland and Crouch End at the bottom of the street where he was parked. He would walk, taking in the wood on his way.