The Vault (23 page)

Once, Wexford thought, and not long ago the television would have been on. Instead the focus was on a large desktop computer where Horndon had evidently been playing a video game involving biker-like characters, bristling with weapons, blasting each other with sub-machine guns. The action had been paused at a point where a giant-breasted redhead in a kind of silver metal bikini and thigh boots filled the screen, her arms raised and her bulbous red mouth open in a scream. Horndon, a shortish man of 50 with a big belly, glanced at it as if to turn it off but evidently thought better of this course. After all, he could return to it after they had gone.

‘I think you know what we want to talk to you about, Mr Horndon,’ Lucy said.

‘That Orcadia business.’ He pronounced it more like Al-Qaeda. ‘Don’t know what I can tell you.’

‘Tell us about the day you went with Mr Clary to Orcadia Cottage. The owners, Mrs and Mrs Rokeby, were away?’

‘Don’t know if they was away. They wasn’t
there
. They was out, that’s all I know.’

Wexford said, ‘You lifted a plant pot off the manhole cover and Mr Clary suggested you went down there?’

Wexford must have touched a sensitive spot for Horndon reacted indignantly. ‘He thinks a lot of himself, does Clary. Dressed up in a nice suit, white shirt and tie and all. Of course he’d no intention of going down there. That was my
job. “Have you got a ladder or a pair of steps in your van?” says Lord Muck, all posh. Of course I had, never go out without them. “I’m just going inside the house for a few minutes,” he says and he disappears.’

‘So you went to your van and fetched the ladder?’

Horndon looked at Lucy and slowly shook his head. ‘I wasn’t taking no orders from him. It was my boss at Underland I was working for, it was him paid me my wages, not Clary. I didn’t know what might be down there, did I? Could have been full of water. I’ve come on that before. A hole where they used to keep coal but don’t no more and when you take a butcher’s it’s full of bloody water.’

Lucy, not acquainted with cockney rhyming slang, caught Wexford’s eye and he mouthed, ‘L-O-O-K, look. A butcher’s hook.’

Evidently still puzzled, she turned back to Horndon. ‘Are you saying you didn’t go into the hole, Mr Horndon?’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’ Horndon was quick to anger and he was growing angry now. ‘Clary, he said to me, “Go down in that hole
if you fancy it.”
That’s what he said,
if you fancy it
. Well, I didn’t bloody fancy it, right? I didn’t want to get my things dirty no more than Lord Muck did. All right? So I put the flowerpot thing back where it was supposed to go and I didn’t need no help from him. I sat down on the wall and when he come back I said to him I’d been down there and there was nothing to see. “Was there stairs?” he says and I says there was nothing, it was empty.’ Horndon seemed to recall at this point just what had been down there, what he might have seen. He didn’t shiver. He curled up his nose. ‘I hadn’t no call to tell the truth to him, had I? He wasn’t paying me.’

When the front door had closed on them Lucy said, ‘That “butcher’s hook” business, what does it mean?’

‘It’s old now and half-forgotten but people still say “porkies” when they mean lies. It’s Cockney rhyming slang.’

‘Reg, I really don’t follow.’

‘Pork pies for lies. You leave off the second noun, the one that rhymes and use the first one.’

‘I see,’ said Lucy. ‘It seems very complicated.’

Wexford laughed. He got out of the car at Melina Place and walked down towards Orcadia Mews. There was something he needed to ask Mildred Jones, something which by an oversight he had neglected to take her up on before. Orcadia Cottage looked much as before but with two changes. A newspaper had been thrust through its letterbox and on the doorstep was a bunch of flowers, their stems in water inside a plastic container. ‘I wonder what it bodes,’ said Wexford to himself in the words of Hortensio. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell. No one came. The newspaper must be a freeby stuck there on the off-chance, the flowers delivered to the wrong house.

‘You’re not going to arrest me, are you?’ were the first words uttered by Mildred Jones when she opened her door to him.

Wexford wanted to laugh but didn’t. ‘I no longer have the power to do that, Mrs Jones, but if I did why would I?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been so worried, telling you that stuff about what I pay my cleaner –
you
know. Every time the doorbell rings … You’re sure it’s all right.’

‘Quite sure.’

‘Come in then.’ She was more affable than she had ever been and in a cream and black dress with pearls looked prettier than he had ever seen her. ‘I’m going out to lunch but not for half an hour.’

She took him into the over-stuffed living room. ‘No, I was aghast after you had gone. I’d been so tremendously indiscreet. Talking about paying my cleaner less than the
minimum wage, talking about employing illegals. At least they hadn’t been trafficked. I might have landed myself in prison, mightn’t I?’

‘Hardly, Mrs Jones.’

‘Well, a massive fine then. Or would I have to do community service like those hoodies?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You’d like coffee, wouldn’t you? It will have to be Nescafé, the real stuff takes too long, and I have to be out of here at twenty-five past on the dot.’ She went to the door, opened it and shouted, ‘Raisa! Coffee!’

No ‘please’, Wexford noted. No polite form of request.

He decided – though it was irrelevant – that he disliked Mildred Jones quite a lot. In his previous life, his previous existence, he had seldom allowed himself likings and dislikeings. Now he could. It was an advantage.

‘Last time I talked to you,’ he said, ‘you spoke about a cleaner you had had from the Ukraine, I think it was, who had a strange name and who disappeared. What exactly did you mean by that?’

‘Well, she left and didn’t come back.’

‘What was she called?’

‘I don’t know her surname. Her Christian name, if she was a Christian, was Vladlena. I called her Vlad like Vlad the Impaler I saw in a film on TV. I can’t be doing with these fancy names. After all, what are they, these girls, the lowest of the low where they come from.’

Raisa came in with coffee on a tray. The coffee was in a willow pattern pot, the cups and saucers to match, silver spoons, lumps of brown and white sugar in a silver bowl and milk in a silver jug. Wexford wondered if the tray would have had such a civilised and elegant appearance if Mrs Jones had prepared it herself and decided that like hell it would. Raisa herself, slender, sharp-featured with long blonde hair, was the
girl Mildred Jones had been talking to on the doorstep when last he spoke to her. She smiled at him.

‘Thank you, Raisa,’ he said.

She was barely out of the door when Mildred Jones said, ‘It doesn’t do to talk to them like you knew her socially. Do it just the once and they start to take advantage.’

He wanted to say that he supposed she learnt to talk in that way to servants when she was in South Africa during apartheid. If he did that he’d never get another word out of her. ‘Vladlena, Mrs Jones.’ He was damned if he was going to refer to the girl as Vlad.

‘Yes, well it was quite weird. She was here doing the ironing one morning …’

‘Just when was this?’

‘Three years ago, maybe a bit more. Like I say, she was doing the ironing. In the kitchen she was with the radio on. They always have to have the radio on, can’t function without it. Doesn’t matter what’s on, music, talks, drama, anything, so long as they’ve got background noise. I went into the kitchen and the radio was on and the iron was on, standing in that metal rack thing at the end of the ironing board. And on the board was one of Colin’s shirts with a great iron-shaped burn in the middle of the back.’

Mrs Jones took a gulp of her coffee. ‘I must go in five minutes. Well, like I say, there was this burn and half the ironing in a pile yet to be done but no sign of her. I called out but she wasn’t in the house. Then I saw her coat was gone. It was plain to see what had happened, she had burnt Colin’s shirt and got frightened – with good cause, I may add – and just fled without saying a word to me.’

This wasn’t quite what Wexford had hoped for. It was hardly a disappearance. ‘Did you ever hear from her again?’

‘It’s funny you should say that because I did. A long time
later, months and months, I saw her go into Mr Goldberg’s house. Do you know where that is?’

Wexford remembered the reclusive man whose food was fetched in for him by the cleaner. ‘In Melina Place.’

‘Right. She was going in there as bold as brass with two shopping bags. I went up to her and said I’d seen the shirt with the burn mark and she’d have to pay for it. I wasn’t going to let her get away with it. Well, the next thing I knew was David Goldberg was on the phone to me. He never goes out, he’s not quite all there.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘But pushy like all Jews. And he can use a phone. The rudest person I’ve ever spoken to. Well, I didn’t speak to him. He spoke to
me
. How dare I accost his cleaner – accost was the word he used – who did I think I was, poking my nose in where I wasn’t wanted, interfering – I won’t say the name he called me – et cetera, et cetera. Vladlena had gone, he said, she’d left that day because she was scared the police would come and get her and put her in a camp for illegals. And that was that. I don’t know how many of these girls I’ve had since then, seven or eight at least.’

‘And now you have to go, I think you said, Mrs Jones,’ said Wexford, looking at his watch.

‘Yes, I must. Imagine, I’ve got a date with a man! Who knows what will come of it? I’m really excited.’

‘I’ll see myself out,’ said Wexford. As he left he heard her screaming to Raisa to be sure and put the burglar alarm on and lock the front door on all three locks before she left.

It was twelve noon. He needed a little more time before speaking to David Goldberg, time to think. Slowly he walked up into Alma Square, admired some Japanese maple trees, their lacy leaves scarlet, looked at a towering Magnolia grandiflora and turned back towards Orcadia Place. A car was now parked outside Orcadia Cottage and a van had drawn up
behind it. The van had a long scratch, deep, wavy and snakelike, along its nearside above the rear wheel. Wexford stood under a laburnum hung with black bean pods and watched. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to see John Scott-McGregor get out of the driver’s seat of the white van, walk round it and open the back. That was what he did, moved client’s property from one place to another. No doubt the neighbours round here all used his services. Scott-McGregor lifted a box full of books out of the van and on to a trolley and pushed it up the path. The front door was opened to him by Anne Rokeby, still in her outdoor clothes, as her husband came up the path from their car, carrying armfuls of clothes on hangers. More boxes and a large plastic bag full of something was fetched from the van and the front door closed.

The Rokebys had come home.

F
irst impressions are sometimes deceptive. Wexford admitted this cliché to himself when he had been inside the house in Melina Place for no more than five minutes. David Goldberg might be reclusive, but he was far from the zombie-like paranoid creature Wexford had set him down as when he had questioned the man before. True, the television was on and it was ten o’clock in the morning, but it was showing a DVD of
Shadowlands
, one of Wexford’s favourite films. You are always inclined to warm to someone who turns out to share your own tastes.

‘In some people’s eyes,’ said Goldberg in his harsh, gravelly voice, ‘watching TV in the daytime is the Eighth Deadly Sin.’

‘Not mine,’ said Wexford. ‘I must tell you, Mr Goldberg, that I’ve no right to question you. I’m not a policeman, not any more. And I must also tell you that if you tell
me
anything that helps in this case I shall be obliged to pass it on to Detective Superintendent Ede.’

‘OK. But I haven’t got anything to tell you.’ David Goldberg picked up the remote and pressed the key that put the DVD on ‘pause’. ‘I told you before I know nothing about that manhole case. All I know is what I read in the papers.’ He spread out his hands and shrugged. ‘I don’t have drinks and snacks and things between meals, so I hope you don’t want anything.’

‘I don’t want anything.’

The room they were in was small but very light because the rear wall was almost entirely of glass with a glass door set in it on the right-hand side. Outside was a small garden, neat as a pin, beds full of michaelmas daisies and asters surrounding a tiny lawn with a statue of a girl standing on a plinth and holding up a pitcher.

‘Yes, in case you’re going to ask, I do it myself. I may be disabled but that doesn’t stop me weeding and planting. I use my hands.’

‘It’s lovely.’

‘What do you want to ask me about?’

‘A young woman from the Ukraine called Vladlena.’

Goldberg wasn’t as surprised as Wexford expected. He nodded reflectively. ‘Yes. Vladlena. No doubt you’ve been talking to that nosy old termagant Mrs Jones. Mildred. I call her Mildreadful.’

Wexford smiled. ‘I’d better tell you that I’m not here to get Vladlena into any sort of trouble. If she’s still here. If she hasn’t gone back to wherever she came from. I have nothing to do with Immigration. I’m not even a policeman any more. Nothing you say will do her any harm.’

‘OK. Right. Vladlena – it’s a great name, isn’t it? – she came to the door one morning and when I opened it she said she’d run away from a house in Orcadia Mews because she’d burnt a shirt. So I let her in and sat her down. It’s not the sort of thing I usually do, but it wasn’t a usual situation, was it? She’d burnt a shirt and she was afraid of the police. That’s what she said. Oh, and old Mrs Mildreadful was on her trail.’

This time Wexford did laugh. ‘What did you do?’

‘Well, basically I gave her a job. My cleaner had just left. I liked the look of Vladlena. I told her I’d want her to shop for me and do a few other jobs I can’t do and she was happy
with that. She was thrilled, poor child. I told her she wouldn’t have to iron my shirts. Nothing gets ironed in this house.