The Vault (8 page)

Rokeby shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen it. I’ve been told there is.’

‘There is. And because these stairs mount upwards towards the ground floor, there must have been a door at the top. This door would have been at the end of the hallway, probably next to the kitchen door. It’s not there now. The doorway has been filled in, bricked up and plastered over. Do you know anything about this?’

‘There was no door there when I bought the place.’

Rokeby compressed his lips and looked away, plainly indicating his intention to say no more about the staircase or the missing door. But he promised to list the people who had
surveyed the place or simply looked at it four years before. There was also the building firm which had converted the largest bedroom into two smaller bedrooms eight years before.

Once the door closed after him, Ede heaved a sigh and said, ‘Liphook is going to be a hard nut to crack.’

‘The Internet?’ Wexford was on shaky ground here. He never quite knew what the Internet or a search engine could or could not do.

‘We have the name Keith or Kenneth Hill. Whatever the nephew called himself we’re pretty sure the owner of the Edsel was called Ken or Kenneth, possibly Hill, possibly Gray. If this uncle character had the Edsel with him it would help. According to the young man who tried to sell the Edsel, his Uncle Ken or Kenneth went to live in Liphook twelve years ago. We don’t have the name of a street in Liphook, we don’t even have the man’s name, only probabilities. You’ve not found the car, I suppose?’

Wexford told him. ‘The Edsel is in Balham, in a garage, being looked after by an Edsel fanatic called Mick Bestwood. It’s been so thoroughly cleaned and polished you could eat your dinner off the bonnet.’

The laugh which greeted this was typical of Tom who (as he put it himself) always gave honour where honour was due. ‘Excellent. Well done. We’ll have Forensics go over it just the same. You know they say it’s impossible to eradicate all that sort of evidence. There’ll be something. We’ve started inquiring at service stations in Liphook, at car parks and at motor repair shops. There aren’t too many of those – Liphook’s not very big. But all that’s pointless now.’ He repeated, ‘You’ve done well, Reg.’

‘Still, he may be living in Liphook.’ Tom had evidently forgotten Wexford’s home was in Kingsmarkham, not many miles from Liphook. ‘It’s not much more than a big village.’

‘The woman who wrote
Lark Rise to Candleford
used to live there,’ Tom said. ‘Flora Thompson. I saw about it on television when they did the serial.’ He went off into one of his digressions, speculating as to whether Candleford was Liphook and ending with a mini-biography of the author.

Wexford waited patiently before asking if the inquiries in Liphook had had any results.

Tom shrugged. ‘Maybe Kenneth Hill used to live there, but if he did he didn’t make much of a mark. Lucy Blanch and DC Garrison have talked to a good many of the residents and no one remembers Hill.’

‘Medical centres?’ Wexford queried. ‘What we used to call doctors’ surgeries? Hotels? Pubs.’

‘Lucy’s tried all those and there’s nothing. The fact that he’s not there is no evidence for us, it’s another negative. I’m inclined to believe he never lived there. It looks to me as if it’s just something the young man said to your Miracle Motors people because he thought that would be an excuse for the uncle not coming in with the Edsel himself. Liphook was probably the first name that came into his head. He knew someone there or he’d seen the name written down.’

‘I’m afraid you’re right.’

‘Mildred Jones is home from South Africa,’ said Tom. ‘We’ll go and see her. She’s our only source for the name Keith Hill. Let’s hope she has total recall for a conversation she says she had with him twelve years ago.’

S
he lived in one of the garden flats in the block in Orcadia Mews. Her front door was directly opposite the door in the rear wall of the Orcadia Cottage paved yard. Three of the front doors were painted black but Mildred Jones’s was fuchsia pink. A Virginia creeper, now in new leaf, rambled over the brickwork of the flats, completely concealing some of it, and Wexford thought of the same climber which had figured in Simon Alpheton’s painting and had been cut down by Rokeby. For some reason, he wondered if the climber had any significance in this case, but he was at a loss to think what it could possibly have.

Tom had forgotten to put his tie on or had deliberately left it off, but fished it out of his pocket and was putting it on as the front door was opened by a short but rather heavy woman in a green trouser suit. She gave Tom and his tie a glance of distaste. She was one of those people whose heads seem too big for their bodies, their features handsome enough but almost overpowering. The heavy gold jewellery she wore seemed to weigh down her neck. Her hair was grey, styled to look like as if sculpted from metal or stone, her face thickly made-up, the eyebrows shaped with excessive care.

The room she led them into was small, stuffed with chintz-covered furniture, the French window hung with over-ornate
brocade curtains, braided, pleated, fringed, its pelmet adorned at its sides with bunches of tassels. But the garden visible outside was like a rectangle cut out of a hayfield.

‘I told you on the phone that we spoke to him,’ Mildred Jones said. ‘He said his name was Keith Hill. I told you that too.’

Wexford said, ‘He didn’t mention his address?’

‘No. Why would he? You don’t say to someone you’ve just met, “My name’s Keith Hill and I live at number something or other, do you?” ’

Neither policeman answered her. ‘What did he look like?’

‘Young, about twenty. Very good-looking if you like the sulky type. Tall, dark. He was obviously one of Harriet’s.’

‘One of Harriet’s what?’ Tom asked.

‘Boyfriends, bits on the side. Oh, I knew all about it. She had a lot of young fellows visit her, plumbers, electricians, blokes she’d send for to do jobs for her while Franklin was out. They did the jobs all right.’

Tom’s face set into lines of disapproval and he curled up his mouth in distaste. He reminded Wexford of a portrait he had once seen of John Knox at his most censorious. Suppressing the signs of amusement, he said, ‘You said
we
spoke to him, this Keith Hill. Who were “we”?’

‘Oh, me and my then husband. Didn’t I say?’

Wexford hardly liked to ask if the man had died. He had no need to.

‘We split up a couple of years ago and got divorced.’ Mildred Jones uttered a sound halfway between a chuckle and a snort. ‘It was just after that girl Vlad burnt his shirt. Not that it was because of that or the girl. He had an eye for the girls but he never fancied those skinny blondes.’

‘Vlad?’

‘The cleaner. Her name was Vladlena, only I called her Vlad the Impaler. “Burner” would have been more like.’

Tom was anxious to get her back to the subject.

‘Would you tell us everything you remember about Keith Hill? Exactly what he said when you and your ex-husband talked to him?’

‘Well, the first time I just said good evening or hello or something and he just said good evening. I was out for a walk with my little dog. I had a dog then but he died. The second time I was in my friend’s car and I saw him and I waved but he didn’t wave back. The next time I was coming back in the car with Colin – my ex, I mean – and this Keith Hill was in the mews but without his car that time and I thought he looked shifty – well, as if he’d been up to no good. I said, “You again” or “We meet again” or something, and he said, “Yes” or “Right”. He said his car was in for a service. Those leaves were lying all over the place and getting wet and I said to him how someone I knew had slipped on them and broken her leg. I thought I’d let him know I knew what he was up to with a woman three times his age and I asked him how Harriet was. He said she was fine and I said, tell her Mildred said hello or give her my love or something.

‘We went indoors after that and watched him from my front window. I don’t know what he was doing. I went out again then, carrying my rubbish bag for the council to collect in the morning. After I was back in the house again I saw him go through the door in the wall into the backyard of Harriet’s house. I said to Colin, he knew it like he lived there, like he owned the place.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Jones. That’s very helpful. Can you remember how he was dressed?’

‘Like they all do. The young, I mean. One of those zipper jackets, jeans of course, a black T-shirt, I think. He had that car, but he wasn’t very confident driving it. I thought he was
going to scrape it against the wall out there. He was nervous and not just about the car.’

‘And he went through the door in the wall into the backyard of Orcadia Cottage?’

‘I’ve told you he did.’

‘Mrs Jones,’ Wexford said, ‘does the name Francine mean anything to you? And what is La Punaise?’

He expected an answer of sorts to his first question, only perhaps to say that she had heard the name but couldn’t remember where. What he didn’t anticipate was a full and highly informative answer to his second inquiry.

‘I can tell you what La Punaise is.’ She began to laugh reminiscently. ‘Harriet told me. Well, she showed me. It was a way of remembering her pin number. Seemingly,
la punaise
is French for a pin. She’d got a lot of restaurants written down in her address book. Her and Franklin, they ate out all the time. So she wrote La Punaise in the book like it was a restaurant and wrote a phone number underneath, only it wasn’t a phone number, it was a London exchange followed by the four digits of her pin. Oh, she thought herself very clever, I can tell you.’

So the boy, Keith Hill or whatever he was called, had had access to Harriet Merton’s address book and had also been clever enough to decipher her purpose in storing her pin number by this means. He had been in the house, must have had intimate knowledge of the house. Her pin number he would have wanted for illicit purposes, to say the least. Why had he written it down on that paper under the name Francine? Because Francine was French and could translate the name for him?

‘Thank you very much, Mrs Jones,’ he said.

Tom asked, ‘Did you ever go into – er, Harriet’s house? Orcadia Cottage, that is?’

‘Of course I did,’ said Mildred Jones. ‘How d’you think I got to see her address book? She was bored stiff, nothing to do if one of her young chaps hadn’t come round. Sometimes she’d ask me in for a drink. It’d be lunchtime and I’d go, but I’m not much of a drinker especially at midday.’

Wexford asked her, ‘What was the house like inside?’

‘You mean the furniture, pictures, that sort of thing? Oh, it was lovely. Beautiful stuff they had. Of course, it was all Franklin’s. He was a connoisseur.’

‘Mrs Jones, I’d like you to think very carefully. Imagine yourself in the hallway, looking towards the kitchen. Can you do that?’

‘OK. I’m doing it.’

‘Can you see the kitchen door?’

‘Of course I can.’

‘Now look to the left of it and tell me, is there another door there or a blank wall?’

‘What is all this?’ Mildred Jones was indignant. ‘Haven’t you been inside the place? Of course there’s a door. It leads down the stairs to the cellar where all those horrors were found. It makes me shudder to think of it.’

‘There is no door there now, Mrs Jones,’ Tom said.

She stared. ‘But I saw it. The first time I was there the door was open. Harriet had been down there to fetch something up – bottled gas or something. She had to do all that for herself. Franklin never lifted a finger. I looked down the stairs just to get a sight of the cellar, but there was nothing down there, only an empty space and a couple more of those gas bottles. You want to go down there yourselves and take a look.’

‘We’d like you to come in there with us and take a look,’ said Tom.

Mildred Jones was reluctant to accompany them. Tom
explained to her that the bodies in the vault were long gone. The house itself contained nothing of Harriet’s, nothing of Franklin Merton’s. Two sets of owners had lived there since the Mertons, as she must know.

‘It’s the idea of those dead bodies lying in there, under the ground, for all those years … You’ve got to admit, it’s enough to give you the shivers.’

‘It would be a great help to us if you would come in there with us for just a few minutes.’

‘I don’t see how it could be, but OK, if it’s really a help.’

They walked out of the mews, Mildred Jones’s high-heeled green shoes having some difficulty with the cobbles, round the corner on to the smooth stone pavement. ‘I noticed you’ve got a Virginia creeper on your flat,’ Wexford said while Tom unlocked the front door of Orcadia Cottage. ‘Is it the same variety as was on this house until it was cut down?’

‘As far as I know. I don’t know anything about gardening, plants, that sort of thing.’

‘When the leaves fall it makes a lot of mess?’

‘Oh, yes, dreadful. My cleaner has to sweep it up and she makes a big fuss. I don’t mean that Vlad, she’s gone long ago. And the one after her too. Of course I don’t keep them on when I’m away in South Africa and they don’t like that.’

Mildred Jones stepped in fearfully over the threshold, but when she had advanced a few steps her nervousness left her and she stared at the blank wall facing them on the left-hand side of the kitchen door.

‘Someone’s made a wall there!’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe one of Harriet’s boys. They were all builders of some sort or another.’

The young man who might or might not have been called Keith Hill came into their minds, but it wasn’t until Mildred
was back home and the two policemen were back in the car that Tom spoke of it. He wrenched off his tie. ‘We’ve no reason to think he was a builder or a friend of Harriet Merton’s or that he built that wall, have we?’

‘Except that we both have a feeling that all those things are true,’ said Wexford. ‘That’s all. Assumptions.’

For ever afterwards, for the rest of his life, Wexford would remember that it was here, on the corner, where Abbey Road comes into West End Lane, that the phone call from Dora came. ‘Assumptions’ was the last word spoken and then his phone rang. As their driver rounded the corner where Quex Road turns off to the left he heard Dora’s voice, a trembling shaken voice, and Dora’s news.