The Vault (26 page)

‘Well – I don’t understand. What do you mean, worn underwear? Of course she would. Everyone does.’

‘So you believe she would have?’

‘I assume she would. I don’t know, though. I really don’t know.’

Tom Ede asked her if Vladlena had any jewellery. Sophie Baird said she couldn’t remember; perhaps a ring. The necklaces and rings and bracelets they had concluded had all belonged to Harriet Merton, were shown to her but she had scarcely glanced at them when she shook her head impatiently.

‘You don’t understand. She was
poor
. She was much poorer than the poor in this country are. She had nothing. She earned enough to pay her rent to Mrs Kataev and buy food and that was all.’

‘You mentioned the possibility of a ring,’ Tom said.

‘Yes, but I’m not sure I’m not imagining it. I seem to remember something silver she wore, a ring, a pendant. I
seem
to, but that’s all I can say.’

Getting ready to drive himself and Dora back to Kingsmarkham for the weekend, Wexford asked himself what steps Vladlena would have taken to carry out her plan. The driver called Grigor or Gregory seemed the most likely for her to have contacted. But where was he to be found? If the transaction had reached a stage of Vladlena prostituting herself, where would she have done it? Not in a room at Irina Kataev’s. In a hotel room booked for her? He didn’t think so. More likely in a brothel disguised
as something else. He had little experience of such places. So far as he knew there had never been in Kingsmarkham what used to be called a disorderly house.

B
ut there he was wrong, as Mike Burden told him on the Saturday evening. The drinks they enjoyed together after work in the old days had come to an end when Wexford retired and Burden was promoted but had been replaced by meeting – often in a new and previously unvisited pub – every weekend Wexford returned home. It was becoming a tradition with a ritualistic quality to it. Many pubs had closed in the surrounding villages, largely due to would-be visitors intimidated by the drink-driving laws, but in Kingsmarkham itself the Olive and Dove still ruled supreme and the Dragon did a brisk trade. This evening they were to meet in the Mermaid, a small snug pub in a narrow lane off York Street.

But before that Wexford and Dora had spent half a day, a night and more than half the next day in their own house. Both their grandsons were at home and Robin had brought a fellow-student home with him. When he was young, though he had not attended one himself, Wexford said universities used to discourage if not expressly forbid undergraduates to go home for the weekend. All that had changed. Ben was there, too, his school having closed for half-term. With a fairly good grace, Sylvia gave up the bedroom she shared with her daughter to her parents, but made them feel guilty by whining miserably about her and Mary having to share a single bed put up in the dining room.

‘How to make one feel one should have booked a room in a hotel,’ said Dora.

‘Why did we come, anyway?’

‘We’d forgotten – if we ever knew – how many people there would be here.’

Matters weren’t helped by an encounter Wexford had on his way to the Mermaid. He was halfway down York Street when a man and a woman came out of one of the houses and the man unlocked a car parked at the kerb with a remote. Wexford recognised them at once as the Wardles, parents of the dead Jason. And they knew him. They looked, stared and ostentatiously turned their heads away.

‘I wonder,’ he said when he saw Burden, ‘what third thing is going to happen to make me feel guilty.’

‘You don’t believe in that stuff about things coming in threes, do you?’

‘I didn’t last week, but all this makes me nervous.’

Burden fetched Wexford a glass of claret and himself a Chardonnay. Nuts, once an enemy yet desired, had become no more or less than a pleasant adjunct to their drinks.

‘You’ve lost a lot of weight. You look quite different.’

‘That may be no bad thing. What were you going to tell me about brothels?’

‘We had one here,’ said Burden. ‘A couple of months ago.’

‘What, you mean a massage place or beauty and tanning and waxing, do you?’

‘This was in a flat over a shop in the High Street. It was a clothes shop, highly respectable and selling dresses and suits for sizes 16 to 28.’

‘If I’d been a transvestite they’d just about have suited me in days gone by.’

Burden laughed. ‘A lot of men had been seen coming to the door at the right side of the shops in the evenings. I sent DC Thompson in there, posing as a punter. The girls he had to choose from were presented to him, but he obeyed my prudish instructions, said no thanks politely and walked out. We raided the place on the following evening.’ He took a swig of his Chardonnay. ‘It was quite exciting.’

‘I can’t remember the rule. It has to be more than one girl to constitute a brothel, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s right. I wasn’t there but Thompson told me one of the men fell on his knees and swore on his mother’s head that if it didn’t come out that he was there he would never do it again.’

‘When I was a young DC in Brighton about a hundred years ago we used to come across them. Brothels, I mean. I suppose if I got someone to find “brothels” on the Internet I’d just get quantities of porn.’

‘That’s an understatement,’ said Burden. ‘Come to me instead. What is it you want to know?’

Wexford told him about Vladlena and the sale she had proposed to make. ‘Where would she go? Who would she have asked? There’s a perfectly respectable-looking massage parlour in Kilburn High Road near the Tricycle Theatre – sorry, you don’t know where that is – but it did occur to me she might have tried there. I shall have to find how long it’s been there, and you know how these outfits come and go. The girl in the vault has been dead at least two years.’

‘You know, Reg,’ Burden said, passing the nuts it was no longer necessary to avoid, ‘as you’ve rightly just pointed out to me, I don’t know London well, but I’ve enough knowledge of the way these things work to say that this girl is most likely to have tried Soho. If those places don’t outright advertise prostitutes everyone knows prostitution is what they offer.’

‘You mean she’d just call at some lap-dancing club or place where there are strippers.’

‘She might if she was desperate enough to get what was to her a large sum of money,’ said Burden.

But it was more than two years ago, Wexford reminded himself. Had she complied and been killed because of what she had done and what she might tell? It seemed a possibility.

I
t was Monday morning and Wexford and Lucy Blanch were on their way to see Mildred Jones. Neither of them looked forward to the visit. The day began badly with Martin Rokeby emerging from his front door and shouting at Lucy not to park the car in front of his house. She moved it a few feet, explaining that they had calls to make in the neighbourhood and there was nowhere else to put it. Rokeby began on a long peevish complaint, the gist of which was that the police had been investigating this case for months and still had got nowhere.

They walked round the corner and into Orcadia Mews. Wexford was glad to be back in London for no better reason than that his stay in Kingsmarkham had been horrible. Returning from his evening out with Burden, he was told by Dora, whispering, that another child had joined the household, a schoolfellow of Mary’s. The previous week Sylvia had promised this little boy’s mother to have her son for the night while the parents celebrated a wedding anniversary. Ben would have to share his room with this child, had at first refused outright, then agreed with an ill grace and after putting up a lot of conditions.

‘You and Dad might have given me a little more notice you were coming,’ Sylvia had said, causing Dora to explode.

‘This is
our house
, Sylvia! How dare you tell me we should have given you notice to come to our own house!’

‘I wish we didn’t have to be here,’ said Sylvia. ‘I’m not getting any pleasure out of it. Thank God I’m back at work.’

Wexford had not even attempted to bring about a truce but had gone straight to bed. Guilty now because he and Dora were occupying the largest of the four bedrooms, he lay awake for a long time, to be awakened almost at once by shouts and running feet in the passage outside. The little boy guest had been sick. He needed comforting and cleaning up and his bed sheets changed. In the morning Sylvia refused her father’s offer to take all of them out for lunch, so he and Dora were on their way back to London by eleven.

Mildred Jones had had her once-pink front door repainted. Now it was lime green. Although Lucy had phoned her to arrange their visit, Mrs Jones behaved as if their appearance on her doorstep was the first she had heard of it. ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ were her opening words, without even the preamble of a ‘Good morning’ in reply to Lucy’s polite greeting.

Assessing this woman’s character, Wexford had noted how dramatically she was changed by her view of the day ahead of her. When about to lunch with a man, she was ebullient, confident and assertive, but with a blank or tedious day in prospect she became petulant and sullen. Today was evidently going to be blank or tedious. Her mood seemed also to affect the way she dressed, to the extent that she wore unflattering clothes on bad days and attractive ones when things looked to be going well.

‘I can’t offer you anything to drink,’ she said as she led them into the living room. ‘Raisa’s too busy.’

This attitude, that any domestic task must be performed by the cleaner and never by the employer, brought a humourless smile to Wexford’s lips, a reaction he was later to regret.

‘Something amuses you?’

He took it to be a rhetorical question and said nothing. Lucy said they would like to talk about Vladlena. Was she aware that Vladlena had a sister who had come to this country with her in a minibus driven across Europe?

‘She’d be another illegal immigrant? Because if so, I don’t want to talk about her or any of them. I told you before’ – she glowered at Wexford – ‘I’ve been frightened out of my wits I’d be in trouble with the immigration.’

‘We’re not concerned with immigration, Mrs Jones …’ Wexford began and Lucy added what he hadn’t felt it was incumbent on him to say, ‘We’re concerned with the identity of the young woman whose body was with the others underneath Orcadia Cottage.’

Without exciting plans for her day, Mildred Jones was wearing no make-up to cover her sudden pallor. Her face turned a yellowish white. ‘You mean you think that girl in the hole, the cellar, was Vladlena?’

‘We only want to eliminate her from our enquiries,’ Wexford said.

‘That’s what you all say. I’d like a pound for the number of times I’ve heard that on TV. What a ghastly idea.’

How much he would have liked to say that – considering her attitude towards her former cleaner – he would have expected her to be pleased at the prospect. But he had wanted to say that sort of thing when he was a young policeman decades ago. Now he was old there was all the more reason to restrain himself. Instead, politely, he asked Mrs Jones how Vladlena had usually been dressed.

Dress was a subject, he could tell, which greatly interested her. ‘She wasn’t what you’d call elegant.’ She laughed, and paused to let her wit be appreciated. ‘She wore this one cotton frock day in and day out. I asked her about it and she said
it was all she had, so I took pity on her and gave her a couple of cast-offs of my own. She was practically anorexic, so of course she had to take them in a bit before she could wear them.’

‘Did you ever see her in a miniskirt and wearing a leather jacket?’

She looked at Wexford as if he had asked something obscene. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Just answer the question, please, Mrs Jones.’

‘A leather jacket, yes. A miniskirt, no.’

As she spoke, a diffident Raisa put her head round the door. ‘You like coffee, madam?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. When I want you I’ll call you.’ Mildred Jones turned back to Lucy. ‘I saw her wearing a black leather jacket and a long floral skirt, not a very attractive combination in my opinion.’

‘Where was that?’ Wexford asked. ‘When she was shopping for Mr Goldberg?’

‘Of course not. Whatever put that idea into your head? It wasn’t round here at all. It was in Oxford Street. I’d been in Selfridges and when I came out I found the police had closed the street to traffic. Some silly woman had run across in front of a bus and got knocked down. So, of course, everyone had to suffer and while I was walking all the way to Marble Arch to get a taxi – carrying heavy bags I may add – I saw her coming out of that cheap store, Primark. She was doing all right, carrying bags of stuff she’d bought.’

This meant little to Wexford, but he could see that Lucy’s reaction was very different. ‘Are you sure, Mrs Jones? The closing of Oxford Street for a street accident was only about a year ago.’

‘I know
that.’
Mildred Jones eyed Lucy indignantly. ‘I hope you’re not calling me a liar.’

‘You’re telling us you saw Vladlena a year ago?’ said Wexford.

‘For God’s sake. How many times do I have to tell you?’

‘Once more, please, to be sure.’

‘I saw her a year ago.’

He and Lucy were silent until they had rounded the corner into Orcadia Place. They looked at each other and laughed and Wexford said, ‘Maybe we should be thankful for small mercies. I’m glad to know she’s alive and apparently quite prosperous, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, of course I am. I’m glad she’s not the girl in the patio-tomb, but someone was and it did look as if it was her.’

‘I’d like to think she was out of it, clear of it. But I don’t think she can be. She may know all sorts of things we don’t dream of. She can’t be the girl in the vault, but she may know who the girl in the vault was. Besides, I confess I’m curious.’

‘So am I,’ said Lucy. ‘I’d like to know what happened to her, how she got from being a homeless, poverty-stricken sort of – well, waif – to owning a leather jacket and shopping in Primark. Shopping at all, come to that.’

Wexford said nothing. He thought of what Vladlena had told Sophie Baird she would do to get money. He must really be getting old. He was certainly getting soft if the means she had spoken off could revolt him so deeply – yes, even shock him. He who had believed nothing could shock him any more.