The Vault (27 page)

H
e was curious and Lucy was curious, but did their curiosity justify trying to find Vladlena? It was too late. All that was of importance to them was that she was not the girl in the vault. She had a sister somewhere in this country, a cousin somewhere in London. David Goldberg knew nothing of her whereabouts and nor did Sophie Baird. What of those others living in the immediate neighbourhood? The Milsoms?
The Rokebys themselves? Then there was Mildred Jones’s ex-husband Colin Jones. He had known Vladlena, even if she had never attracted him. Wexford thought it was possible that in the two years or so that Vladlena had worked for Mildred Jones and then for David Goldberg she had occasionally talked to the neighbours and perhaps mentioned her relatives. Put like that he could see it was a long shot. But then there was the driver, the man who suggested she sell her virginity. Who was he? Was there any point in asking those people he listed?

Sophie said Vladlena and the driver had met in a pub in Kilburn. His mind went back to Kilburn High Road and the massage parlour. Could he have told her that if she agreed to his proposition, the transaction could take place in one of the upper floors of Doll-up?

But Vladlena was alive or had been a year ago. Whatever might be the truth of all this, whatever any of these people might have to say, the young woman’s body in the tomb could not be Vladlena’s.

I
t could come to be a matter for the Vice Squad, Wexford thought, but first a preliminary reconnaissance was called for. Tom agreed to a search for Colin Jones being made online and WPC Debach was given this task. Wexford himself set off for what called itself a ‘beauty centre’. He had come prepared with a story to gain himself entry to the two upper floors if admission to them was refused, and he glanced up at the top windows before going in. All four were masked in opaque blinds.

A receptionist asked if she could help him. Wexford had already noted the array of treatments on offer, from chiropody to full-body exfoliation. One specially caught his eye and he asked if he could book a Brazilian massage. Certainly, but their masseur was fully booked until the following Monday.

‘Masseur?’

The look he got was unfriendly. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

‘I expected a masseuse.’

‘Really? I wonder if Doll-up is quite the location you are looking for?’

Location! He put his head on one side, said in a lower voice, ‘What goes on upstairs?’

‘I have no idea,’ she said stiffly. ‘The premises have nothing to do with us. They are quite separate and are, I understand, to let.’

‘Do you know who the agent is?’

‘No, I do not. If that’s all, Mr Er –? I am rather busy this morning.’

He walked down a narrow side street from which he could see the backs of a row of buildings of which Doll-up was the nearest. From here it looked even smaller than from the High Road. The building was just one room wide and if there were more than three rooms, however subdivided they might be, on the ground floor that was all there were. Back in the High Street he noticed a shabby door in the wall next to the ‘beauty centre’. There was no nameplate, no bell, no knocker, only a letter box. He flapped the lid of the box without much hope of anyone answering and no one did answer, but a window above was flung open and an elderly man put his head out.

‘Go away! How many times do I have to tell you randy bastards this is not a knocking shop?’

Wexford started laughing. How he wished he could tell this irate chap that he was a policeman. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I understand your place is to let.’

‘I’ll come down.’

He was a short spare man with a lot of hair on his face and none on his head, dressed in a black sweatshirt and jeans.
‘I’ve told them again and again what’ll happen if they give the place a bloody stupid name like that. But do they take any notice? Do they hell. That’s why I’m moving out. For ten years I lived here in peace and quiet and then they came along and buggered it up.’

‘So you wouldn’t recommend me to take it?’

‘No, I wouldn’t, but I can give you the name of the agents if you like.’

T
om was amused. ‘Well-spotted, Reg,’ he said. ‘Not your fault it was a wild goose chase. Should I send Miles along to the agents so he can give that flat the once over?’

‘If you feel it’s worth it, but I’m sure it’s perfectly innocent.’

‘Rita Debach has run Colin Jones to earth.’

She had found him in Kendal Avenue, SW12, and a phone number for him. Finding someone was easy these days, Wexford thought, even when his was a name shared by hundreds. You might know where he lived, but after that he was lost to you if he failed to come to his door or answer his phone. Messages were left for him to contact the police, but for what? What help could he be, a man who was once married to Mildred Jones, who had lived in the house where Vladlena worked and who had once recommended to Martin Rokeby a contractor he had already found? When I think of him, Wexford reflected, it’s always as the man whose shirt Vladlena burned …

Two days ahead, the weekend would not be spent in Kingsmarkham. Relations between Wexford and Dora and their elder daughter were too strained for that. Sylvia had phoned, but there had been a coolness on both sides. Her reason for calling – that she had found a house, though not
yet sold her own – led her to say that she would speed things up as much as she could because she knew ‘only too well’ that she and her children weren’t welcome in her parents’ house.

So those parents stayed in London, walked on the Heath, bought books in Hatchards and socks for Wexford in Marks & Spencer’s and on the Saturday night went to the theatre to see Sheila play Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s
Ghosts
. On the Monday morning, when he called the number of the house in Kendal Avenue, a woman answered.

She was Mrs Jones, she said. Her husband was away on business but would be back on Wednesday. She would tell him the police wanted to talk to him. Her tone was that of a woman speaking of a promise rather than a threat and she sounded quite unfazed.

The threat came from the first Mrs Jones. And if it wasn’t aimed at him, it concerned him. Tom told him as soon as he walked into the glass-walled office.

‘S
he contacted the IPCC,’ said Tom. ‘Mildred Jones, I mean.’

For a moment Wexford had to think what the initials stood for. Of course, he knew perfectly well, but for a moment the meaning had eluded him.

‘The Independent Police Complaints Commission? What on earth is that about?’

‘Well, it’s about you.’ Tom laughed to soften the blow. ‘Lucy’s in trouble for taking you along to interview her.’

‘Old Mildreadful is what Goldberg calls her.’

‘Yes, but for goodness sake, she doesn’t know
that?’

‘Of course not, Tom. What’s her specific grievance?’

‘It’s all rubbish, but she alleges you “laughed scornfully” when she “declined to provide you with refreshment”. That you asked her to answer a question in the manner you would talk to someone who was under arrest, and that Lucy allowed you to conduct the interview as if you were the police officer and she, I quote, had “just come along for the ride”.’

‘I see.’

‘The thing is that Lucy will have to be investigated and two officers appointed to do that. There’ll be no investigation of you, of course. In the eyes of the IPCC the onus will all be on Lucy and you don’t exist.’

‘Thanks very much,’ said Wexford. ‘Taking me on as your aide wasn’t such a good idea after all, was it?’ Tom made no reply. ‘I shall quietly disappear.’

‘No,
I
was wrong,’ Tom said in the quiet and just way he had and was what had made Wexford like him. ‘I shouldn’t have insisted you accompany an officer, but have left you to your own devices. I’m going to leave you to them now and ask no questions.’

‘Fair enough.’ As he said it Wexford was aware that it was an expression he hadn’t heard for years and he repeated it with emphasis. ‘Fair enough.’

H
e was left with nothing to do until Wednesday, unless he made tasks for himself. Any task connected with this case would now require careful thought. He must explain to those he interviewed that they were under no obligation to speak to him. They could show him the door and probably would. He must become a private detective without any sort of licence to practise, not even the fame which attached to a Hercule Poirot or Peter Wimsey, their names on everyone’s lips, their exploits chronicled. His role was more that of the private eye who – no longer even able to occupy himself spying on adulterers – was reduced to searching for missing persons. He wondered how on earth he was going to introduce himself to Colin Jones.

As it happened, other people intervened to help fill those two days. Perhaps it was true that he couldn’t keep away from Orcadia Place for long, though avoiding the Mews was essential. But he had paused outside Orcadia Cottage to look at its front garden and think about the builders and architects who had dismissed creating an underground room as an impossibility – Kevin Oswin and Trevor the heavy smoker, Mr
Keyworth the reluctant fiancé, Owen Clary and Rod Horndon – when Martin Rokeby came out of the house and spoke to him. Recalling their last encounter, Wexford, to say the least, was surprised.

‘Are you too busy to come in for a cup of tea?’

‘I’m not busy at all.’

Life would be simple if all the people involved in this case came so willingly to him. He followed Rokeby inside.

‘Anne’s out shopping. I feel I owe you an apology. I’ve been bloody these past few months and not just to the police. The thing was I felt the end of the world had come, that I owned a house I couldn’t live in, that I’d lost my children, that I was doomed for ever to be famous – well, infamous – as the man who lived in ‘that house with the bodies in the coal hole’, and everyone thinking I’d put them there.’

‘But you’re better now?’

‘It’s strange how things change. We know they do, but when we want that to happen we’re convinced that this time they won’t. Milk? Sugar?’

‘A drop of milk but no sugar, thanks.’

‘The mob are no longer hanging about outside, I’m back in my house and it feels just like it used to. My wife’s not going to leave me and my kids are coming home again. Remarkable really, isn’t it? You won’t believe this, but I’m going to have that underground room made after all and incorporate the coal hole. It’ll feel quite different when there’s a real room there. Apparently, there’s a staircase inside, and I’m going to have a door put in down at the end of the passage. Anne’s quite excited about it. I’ve applied for planning permission and I think I’ll get it.’

‘I daresay you won’t be using Subearth or Underland, though.’

‘It’s funny you should say that because I’ve got Chilvers
Clary the architects making a – well, I suppose you’d call it a design. It’ll take in the whole area under the patio and the actual manhole will go. The only access will be from inside. I don’t have a problem with natural light, I can take it or leave it, but Owen Clary says he could put in a sort of shaft up to the patio with a window in the top. Sorry, I’m boring you.’

‘Not at all,’ said Wexford.

‘I’m so keen on this I get a bit carried away. Another cup?’

‘Thanks, but I must go in a minute. There’s just one thing I’d like to ask you. There are bolts on that door of yours into the mews. Have you ever bolted that door?’

‘Only when we were away on holiday.’

‘So when you were in Australia it was bolted and when you were in Florence this year it was bolted.’ Wexford looked at him and Rokeby nodded. ‘You must have gone away at other times in the past four years?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s best for me to think of it by the year. We were away twice in 2007, that was Spain and Vienna, and then in 2008 to Thailand, Vietnam and China, Spain again in 2009 and Italy that year as well.’

‘That would have been a long trip in 2008. How long were you were away on the China holiday?’

‘Well, if it’s of any interest, we were away for a few days visiting Anne’s mother in Wales at the end of May,’ said Rokeby. ‘And a few days after we got back we went off on our long trip. The door was bolted – oh, it must have been from the end of May until halfway through July. The door was bolted all that time.’

Wexford felt a tingle of excitement which was to become a surge of adrenalin when Rokeby said, ‘And as a matter of fact we left it bolted for a couple of weeks after that. We forgot about it until the window cleaner was due and he couldn’t get in. He was hammering on that door till we unbolted it.’

Wexford decided that to walk all the way home was carrying fitness to extraordinary lengths. The 13 bus would take him part of the way. He was in Pattison Road, heading for the Heath, when a young woman he recognised came out of one of the houses and unlocked a car with a DOCTOR ON CALL sticker on its windscreen.

‘Good afternoon, Dr Hill.’

She, too, had a good memory. ‘It’s Mr Wexford, isn’t it? Are you still at work on the Orcadia Cottage case?’

Wexford said cryptically, ‘Let’s say work on it is still being done.’ Oh, the uses of the passive voice! ‘You are a long way from your Hornsey practice.’

‘I’ve been visiting a private patient.’ She opened the car door. ‘I’m glad I’ve seen you. There’s something I should have told you, I don’t know why I didn’t when I looked at that jewellery that was in the – the tomb.’

‘What would that be then, Dr Hill?’

‘I said I thought all of it had belonged to the poor woman who lived there. Was she called Mrs Merton? Well, I’ve thought about it since and there was one thing – item – I don’t think could have been hers. It wasn’t her kind of thing at all. A plain silver cross on a chain. I think that must have belonged to someone else. I should have got in touch and told you.’

‘You’ve told me now,’ said Wexford, ‘and that’s what matters.’

I
t was a cold day with a sharp wind, heralding autumn. The leaves were still green, though tired-looking. The beginning of a shower brought rain dashing against his face as he walked from Clapham North Station along the street where Colin Jones lived.