The Vault (3 page)

Wexford noted that ‘heaven’ where another man would have said ‘God’. He wondered what it meant, if anything, vaguely remembering that Tom Ede, when young, had a connection with some nonconformist church or cult.

‘Much to their surprise,’ Ede went on, ‘when they emptied the soil out of the half-barrel and took the thing away, what did they find underneath but this manhole cover. Now Rokeby, quite reasonably, supposed this to be covering a drain or a fuel store that was no longer in use, and at first he intended to leave things as they were and just stick the amphora thing on the top with some lilies planted in it.’

‘Why didn’t he?’ said Wexford.

‘Curiosity, he says. The manhole cover wasn’t heavy. He lifted it off and instead of the drain or drainpipe he expected, leading away into the mews, he found himself looking down into a black hole. At the bottom was something he couldn’t properly see apart from a kind of shininess that seemed to be a sheet of plastic. That was covering a multitude of sins, but he didn’t know it then.

‘Now before he did anything more, he went into the house and fetched his wife. The two of them looked down into the darkness and at that shiny thing and what looked – he said they could just about see it – like a woman’s shoe. If the way into this hole was by the manhole, where was the way out? Was there a way out? Rokeby actually asked his wife if they had a cellar that he didn’t know was there. She told him that of course they hadn’t. There would be a door down to it in the house, there would be a staircase.

‘Well, Rokeby went indoors and fetched a torch. A big powerful halogen thing, apparently. In the circumstances it might have been better for them if it had been a feeble little job with a failing battery. He shone it down the hole and there he saw a large plastic bag full of what he called “something horrible”, as well as two skulls, the bones of a skeleton and a badly decomposed corpse. Anne Rokeby also saw it and she fainted. He took her indoors and called us after he’d been sick.’

Wexford nodded. ‘You believe neither of them knew anything about it beforehand? I mean, that the existence of the hole was a surprise to them?’

‘Well, you know, Reg, I’m inclined to believe it. But I’m open to having my mind changed.’

‘What was it? A coal hole?’

‘In the days when people had coal fires and coke boilers, coal was delivered by way of the mews and the sacks emptied down the hole.’

‘And the occupants of Orcadia Cottage would fetch up the coal by going down the steps to the cellar and thence to the coal hole.’

‘Ah, so you might assume,’ said Tom Ede, ‘but they couldn’t have because, though there’s a cellar that communicates with the coal hole, there’s no way into it from the house.’

‘No stairs down?’

‘Stairs down, but no door to them. I can take you up there. We can go and look.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Wexford asked.

‘Tomorrow, certainly. Two minds with but a single thought. But before we make arrangements. I went down to Orcadia Place with my sergeant that you’ll meet. By the time we got there they’d got a ladder down into the coal hole but not, of course, touched anything. I went down. I was the first. There was no smell, just a sort of stuffiness, though of course a lot of air had been getting in there by that time.

‘It was – well, a grim sight. You know the kind of things we have to see in the course of our work, but I think I can say I’ve never seen anything to come up to this. Or perhaps I should say come down to this. The thing sealed up in a big plastic bag was a man’s body badly decomposed, as was the body of the older woman. I don’t know why but I expect the forensics people do. The young man was a skeleton, the skull almost detached. The younger woman was in the best condition but decomposing. She, of course, had been there much less longer than the others. The pathologist determined that with no trouble. All the bodies were fully clothed, but with only a single clue to their identities and that not much of a one. None of them were carrying identification. The women’s clothes looked as if they had been dressed for indoors, so hadn’t had handbags with them and women don’t put stuff in pockets, do they? The young man had some coins in his jeans pocket and a piece of paper with “Francine” written on it and under that
“La Punaise”
and a four-digit number – and, wait for it, a lot of valuable jewellery. Not only in his jeans pocket but in the pockets of the jacket that was still on the body: strings of pearls, a diamond and sapphire necklace, a gold collar thing, bracelets, rings and other stuff, you name
it. The lot has been valued at worth something in the region of forty thousand pounds.

‘The bodies were photographed where they were. The pathologist came and looked at them where they were, and after all that stuff was gone through they were taken away. It was then and only then that I and DS Blanch had a good look round the coal hole and the cellar. The door from the coal hole to the cellar had been closed, but we opened it – of course we did – in case there were more bodies on the other side, but there weren’t. There was nothing, not even any coal or wood or the kind of junk people put in cellars. Nothing at all. Except, of course, the stairs. The stairs went up from the cellar floor to a blank wall.’

‘The bodies?’ Wexford asked. ‘There’s been nothing in the papers about that, there wouldn’t be. Only that they were there. DNA?’

‘I think I’ll keep that for tomorrow, Reg. I’ll come and pick you up, shall I? Bright and early – nine a.m. too early for you?’

‘Nine is fine. The address is The Coachhouse, 2 Vale of Health Lane, Hampstead.’

He felt rather diffident giving Tom Ede this classy address. Tom, he knew, lived in a flat in Finchley, and Wexford was already learning the niceties and fine shades of where in London it is de rigueur to live and where not quite so posh. He had learnt how it is quite OK to live in West Two and North-west Eight, top drawer to live in West One, North-west Three or South-west Three, less so in North Eleven or South-west Twelve. It was better to have a phone number preceded by a seven than by an eight. Much as he despised this postcode and number snobbery, he found it fascinating. Still, it was difficult when he had to give someone like Tom an address in the best part of Hampstead – not that it was his except on loan, not that he had any right to what belonged
to his daughter. When the time came he was going to have to explain to Tom how he and Dora came to be staying there. He hadn’t yet made himself say ‘living there’.

‘Open confession is good for the soul,’ said Tom, ‘and I’ll tell you frankly, I’ve asked for your help because so far we’re getting nowhere fast.’

H
ome – it was sort of half-home now – on the bus. On two buses, the second one up Haverstock Hill because he didn’t know a less complex route. He used his newly acquired Freedom Pass in its purple case. The beauties of Hampstead still drew his eyes, the church where Constable’s tomb was, Holly Mount and the Everyman Cinema, but his mind was still with Tom Ede in Orcadia Place. It must be the same, he thought. Did Tom know? Did it matter whether he knew? One of the most famous of modern paintings it must be, still unknown to many. He got off the bus and walked down into the Vale of Health.

The kitchen and living area were on the ground floor where a Victorian family’s brougham had been once housed and the horse stabled. Stairs went up to the two bedrooms and two bathrooms. It was all very light with white paint and big windows but not stark, nothing like being the shubunkin in a fish tank. He found Dora with Anoushka on her knee, reading
The Tale of Samuel Whiskers
.

‘It’s just me today, Grandad. Are you pleased?’

Wexford gave her a kiss, then kissed Dora. ‘If I say I’m pleased you’ll tell Amy and she’ll think I like you better than her.’

‘You do like me better,’ said Anoushka.

‘I like you both the same, but for different reasons. Where is she anyway?’

‘Gone to her dancing class. I hate dancing.’

‘So do I,’ said Wexford, ‘but don’t tell Amy.’ He addressed his wife. ‘All those books and papers we brought here from home’ – Kingsmarkham was still really home – ‘what happened to them?’

‘You stuffed them into that big cupboard in the spare bedroom. You said you’d tidy them up, put them in the bookcases, but they’re still waiting.’

Wexford pulled a hangdog face which made Anoushka laugh. ‘There’s something I want to look for.’

‘Can I come?’

‘Of course you can. You can help.’

This provoked sardonic laughter from Dora. Wexford and Anoushka went upstairs to the spare bedroom and Wexford opened the double doors of the cupboard. The books were stacked at the bottom, a mass of papers, which threatened to fall off but didn’t, occupied the top two shelves. Better remove the lot. He brought down two armfuls of magazines, papers, sheets of paper, forms, catalogues, and spread them about the floor.

‘What are we looking for, Grandad?’

‘A picture of a house. You know what a calendar is?’

‘A thing you hang up on the wall that’s got pictures and numbers on it.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I’ll look!’

He let her look, knowing that when a child wants to help you must patiently let her, perhaps encouraging her but never never intervening because you know you will do it faster yourself. Anoushka found two calendars but not the one he wanted. His eye caught that one, lying half under an old copy of the
New Statesman
, but nothing would have made him reach for it while she was in the room. She was bored now and after
graciously accepting his extravagant thanks, said she was going back to Grandma for more adventures of two rats and a family of kittens. Once he heard the reading start again, he picked up the calendar and leafed through it, passing the Waterhouse for January, the Laura Knight for February, the Sargent for March – and there it was for April: a reproduction of the painting whose name had alerted him when Tom Ede named a street in St John’s Wood.

It was of a man and a girl standing in front of a house, she in a dress the same red as her hair, he in a dark blue suit. The expressions on their faces were of passionate love for each other. Behind them was a living wall of green leaves and under the picture was the legend:
Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place
by Simon Alpheton, 1973. The red dress, he remembered reading somewhere, was by the great Venetian designer Mariano Fortuny, and reading somewhere else that the painting had been the Royal Academy’s Picture of the Year. Since then it had been on postcards, calendars, posters, advertisements.

It had been painted thirty-six years before. Marc Syre had been a pop star and celebrity or ‘sleb’, as they called them today, Harriet simply his girlfriend. She was very likely still alive, but Marc Syre was dead. Wexford remembered hearing or reading that he had died from taking LSD and jumping off Beachy Head. But once he had been the owner or tenant of Orcadia Cottage. Before his cellar became a charnel house, a repository of the remains of two men and two women unknown to him or not yet born.

I shall not call it a charnel house, he decided, or a patio-tomb. I shall call it ‘the vault’. He took the calendar into the kitchen where he had left his briefcase and put it inside the case so that Anoushka wouldn’t see and went into the living room, carrying the two others she had found as if they were of immense value to him.

S
o that was what he was, Detective Superintendent Ede’s expert adviser. It made him laugh every time he repeated it to himself. He laughed now as he picked up his briefcase, kissed Dora and went off outside to await the arrival of Tom’s car in the Vale of Health. Wexford knew he would be absolutely on time and he was. Tom came in an unmarked car – as an unmarked policeman, of course he did – driven by a young woman he introduced as his sergeant, DS Lucy Blanch. Lucy, as she wanted Wexford to call her, was a slim black woman with a pretty face and ebony hair. He would have liked to ask her if she plaited those corn rows herself or did a hairdresser do it, but he was always conscious of anything that might be construed as racist. Tom had been sitting next to her but when Wexford got into the back he came and sat beside him.

‘So that we can talk a bit more about the case.’

Tom didn’t comment on Sheila’s stately house or the wide garden or the little gabled coachhouse at its gates. By this time Wexford had learnt to categorise visitors as likeable or not by whether they said he’d done all right for himself, hadn’t he, that must be costing him a packet, or noticed his second home with no more envious deference than if it had been a one-bedroom flat in Tooting. It was a test that Mike Burden
had passed with honours, but then Mike had worked for him and with him since Sheila had been a young girl and knew all the circumstances.

Lucy drove along Fitzjohn’s Avenue, getting caught up in a traffic jam halfway down. Roadworks again. Wexford was daily amazed by the cones and barriers spread out everywhere while holes were dug, pipes exposed and apparently essential work carried out if London were not to break down and come to a standstill. Here temporary lights had been put up, staying red much longer than for a normal traffic-light span.

‘Before we start,’ Wexford said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ He opened his briefcase and took out the calendar.
‘Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place
. But perhaps you know about it.’

Tom Ede took it in both hands. ‘I’ve heard about this, but not seen it. The painter was Simon Alpheton, was it?’

Wexford was pleased. ‘You can see the date is 1973. Has it changed a lot?’

‘A previous owner called Clay Silverman had the Virginia creeper cut down. Who are or were Marc and Harriet?’

‘Marc was Marc Syre, a rock musician in a group called Come Hither. The woman in the red dress was his girlfriend. I think her name was Harriet Oxenholme. He died – Marc Syre. I mean, killed himself after taking LSD. I don’t know what happened to her.’

Tom was silent for a moment, considering. The temporary light turned green and Lucy moved along in the queue of cars and vans and a bus. ‘This Syre must have rented it. A John Walton owned it until 1974 when he sold it to a man called Franklin Merton, who had a survey carried out. That’s important, as you can imagine.’ Tom paused to look at a sheaf of notes he had with him. ‘Merton sold the house in 1998 to Americans called Clay and Devora Silverman. They dispensed
with a survey and relied on the surveyor’s report Merton had had done. Apparently the place was very much in demand and in 2002, as Silverman was suddenly sent back to the United States, he wanted a quick sale. The Rokebys also didn’t bother with a survey, paid cash and moved in within five weeks.’