Vault

CHAPTER FIVE

HE WOULD NEVER become accustomed to London’s Georgian houses. Not that they were truly Georgian but mid-Victorian, and not just that they were beautiful; they had a diversity about them which amazed him, a multiplicity of bow windows and columns and arches and balconies. He hadn’t seen many yet, but enough to decide they were all different, each one a surprise, ivory stucco all of them, as if carved from vanilla ice cream, their slate tops shallow, no-longer-used multiple chimneys forming crests across their roofs. It seemed to him as they passed into the Old Brompton Road that here they clustered in greater numbers than anywhere else but for Bayswater, and in the Boltons assembled in gleaming ranks, their creamy facades interrupted only by black-painted balcony rails, intricate as lacework.

Anthea Gardner lived in such a one, a small house pretty enough to hold its own with the stately palaces between which it stood. The front door was the same pearly green-grey as that on Orcadia Cottage and Wexford decided that when he next had to have his Kingsmarkham house painted he would choose that colour. Tom fished a rather shabby tie, with red and blue stripes, out of his pocket and put it on. Wexford rang the doorbell and from inside came a steady and placid barking.

‘Oh, please,’ said Tom. ‘Not a beastly dog.’

Wexford noticed that ‘beastly’ just as he had noticed the ‘heaven’ of the day before. Another man would have said ‘bloody’ or worse. It interested him and while he was speculating the door opened and there was the now silent dog with its owner, who grasped it by the collar round its chestnut-coloured neck. Not quite chestnut perhaps, but a rich near-crimson. The incongruous thought came to him that it was exactly the same shade as Harriet Oxenholme’s hair in the picture.

‘Do come in,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘This is Kildare, by the way. He’s OK, he won’t bite.’

Instead of red, her hair was grey, the elderly woman’s wiry cap, short and trim. She was thickset but not fat, dressed in a pleated skirt and blouse, her face pleasant and intelligent, the kind that has never been good-looking, but which may have been very pleasing to confront across the breakfast table each morning. The house was as beautiful inside as out, furnished with pretty antiques and small charming paintings, including a still life of fruit and Stilton. A mouse in the corner looked daringly and wistfully at the cheese.

Wexford, rather embarrassingly introduced as Tom’s adviser, remarked on it and asked if it was an Alpheton.

‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘My late partner brought it here from that house.’ There was no doubt which house she meant. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Well, he brought most of this furniture from there. Oh, and the mirror. He was very fond of that mirror.’

So that was how she got over the difficulty of referring to the man who had been her husband. Her late partner.

‘That was rather a strange business, Mrs Gardner,’ Wexford said. ‘What do you think became of your – er, partner’s wife, Mrs Harriet Merton, that is.’

Her right hand resting on the setter’s smooth crimson head, Anthea Gardner hesitated and said, ‘I never met her, you know. Franklin went off with her and we were divorced. Well, eventually we were. I made him wait five years. By that time I’d met Roger Gardner, so Franklin and I were divorced and I married Roger. I was with him till he died and then Franklin and I ran into each other by chance in St James’s Park. Then we got together again, but I never met Harriet. There was no reason why I should.’

‘Mr Merton tried to find her, I believe you told us?’

‘Well, yes and no. Frankly, he thought she’d turn up and try to find him. He went to Orcadia Cottage and found that she’d taken most of her clothes and jewellery. Some neighbour told him she’d gone off with a chap called Keith Hill.’

‘But you didn’t go to Orcadia Cottage with him?’ Wexford asked at a nod from Tom.

‘No, I never did. I’ve never been near the place. All I know about it is what I’ve seen on the TV and in the newspapers. There’s one funny thing, though, you may be interested in. Franklin came back from there and said to me he could have sworn there was a staircase going down from behind a doorway in the hall into the cellar, only there wasn’t. I said to him, “What do you mean by ‘could have sworn’, would you take your oath on it in court?” and he had to say he wouldn’t.’

‘Surely he must have known whether there was a staircase or not. He lived in the house for thirty years.’

‘I’m only telling you what he said,’ said Anthea Gardner.

Wexford’s thoughts went back to the DNA tests. ‘Did you ever hear of any relatives of Harriet’s? Brothers, sisters, even cousins?’

‘Her parents are both dead,’ said Tom. ‘Well, that’s not unlikely. Harriet would be sixty or more if she were alive.’

‘I don’t think so. I mean, I never heard of anyone. I don’t think she had any family, but they wouldn’t come near me if she had, would they?’

Wexford took a last look at the mirror Franklin Merton had been so fond of. Its frame was a delicate medley of inlaid woods, grey, gold, blond, a pale greenish blue. Its glass reflected his admiring gaze. Anthea Gardner shut the dog in the living room and came to let them out. Outside, Lucy was waiting for them in the car. When he was sitting in the back Wexford said, ‘The skeleton – I suppose – of the older woman, was there any hair on it or near it?’ A bracelet of bright hair about the bone …

There was, but bright it hadn’t been. Tom said, ‘There was some hair, red hair but originally grey and dyed that colour. Which doesn’t tell us much.’

Women who have had red hair dye it red when it goes grey, Wexford thought. Come to that, grey-haired women dye their head red even if it was once blonde or dark. ‘How about the neighbours in Orcadia Place? Some of them must have known her.’

‘This is London,’ Tom said. ‘People don’t know their neighbours. You can live next door to someone for years in London and not know their name. Besides, we have to go back twelve years. Among the neighbours, there aren’t many who were there then, and those who were say they knew Harriet by sight only. There’s one woman in a flat in the mews who seems to have known her. She’s divorced now and she’s in South Africa. I don’t mean she lives there, but she goes there on extended visits. I’ve talked to her on the phone and she’s given me more information about Harriet than anyone else, but that isn’t much. She’s coming home in about a week and I hope to talk to her more – well, in depth.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Mildred Jones. You noticed Anthea Gardner mentioned Keith Hill as the man Harriet may have gone off with? Well, Mildred Jones told me she’d met this Keith Hill and it was her told Franklin Merton. A young chap, she said, who drove some sort of vintage car, a big American thing called an Edsel. She saw him park it in the mews once or twice. Twelve or thirteen years ago, she thinks it was.’

‘You said “a young chap”. How old would that be?’

Mildred Jones said ‘about twenty’. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, that on the whole men of twenty don’t elope with women of fifty. I really need to talk to Mildred face to face.’

Tom wrenched off his tie and sent for coffee. They sat in his glass office. A few men and women in uniform or plain-clothes passed by. There was something uncanny about seeing them, yet knowing they couldn’t see in.

Tom said suddenly, ‘Are you anywhere near West Hampstead Cemetery?’ Wexford said he didn’t think so. ‘There’s a tomb in there to the Grand Duke Michael of Russia. He was some relation of the last Tsar, but he was exiled after he married a commoner. She was a countess but that wasn’t good enough for the Imperial family, so he had to leave Russia. A piece of luck or good judgement or you could say that God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Michael would have met the same fate as the rest of them when the Revolution came. Instead he lived a peaceful life in Hampstead with the wife he was wise enough to marry and died of natural causes.’

‘I’ll go and have a look at his grave,’ said Wexford. He was to learn that Tom sometimes digressed in this way. Quite abruptly Wexford said, ‘Teeth!’

‘Yes, well, of course. Teeth were almost the first means of identification we thought of. But you know something? Teeth – or I suppose I should say dentition – aren’t the infallible clue to who someone is they used to be. We’ve such a large immigrant community. We have asylum seekers. Trafficked women, too, I’m sorry to say. A lot of these people who come here from Asia or even Eastern Europe have never been to a dentist. Or if they have the dentist may never be found. And with NHS dentists difficult to find, thousands of people who haven’t money to spare economise by not looking after their teeth.’

‘And this applies to the four in the coal hole?’

‘The patio-tomb is what I call it,’ said Tom.

The vault, Wexford thought to himself. He repeated his question.

‘It would seem to apply to three of them. The older man’s teeth were what you might call in ruins. He’d lost a few and the remaining ones must have given him a lot of pain, but it appears he’d never been to a dentist. He’d had no treatment at all. Ever. The younger man also had had no attention to his teeth, but he was young and apart from one molar which needed a filling, his were all right. The younger woman had fairly bad teeth which must have pained her, but she’d had no dental treatment, while the reverse is true of the older woman. She had had a number of implants, crowns and bridges – very expensive dental work, but so far we’ve been unable to trace where this was done. It may even have been in America and we’ll find out, but it takes time.’

‘This again points to her being Harriet Merton.’

Tom nodded abstractedly. He looked at his watch, said, ‘Well, I’m needed at this conference in half an hour’s time, but we’ll be in touch. I’ll ring you. Meanwhile, Lucy will drive you home.’

Wexford told himself not to feel he had been peremptorily dismissed. If Tom had a conference to go to – and Wexford knew only too well how many conferences, seminars, symposia, launches, lectures, meetings and exchange-of-views groups now filled policemen’s lives – so well and good. He couldn’t complain. They had discussed everything that needed to be discussed. Tom would call him. But he refused the offer of a lift home. He would take a bus and walk the nicest part.

Up Pattison Road to the West Heath in the sunshine. Someone had told him that the ex-King of Greece lived up here and he looked with a sightseer’s interest at the house he thought must be the one. But there was no sign of royalty and Wexford felt a certain disappointment as he had never seen a king. He paused to sniff at a branch of white blossom, but was disappointed. Still, the tree on which it grew was so elegant that for it to have a scent as well was evidently too much to expect.

In the early evening, the sun still high in the sky and dusk a long way off, he went back to Orcadia Place, this time with Dora. She refused to walk, telling him that he was getting ‘one of your obsessions’ about going everywhere on foot. She had spent an hour and a half in the gym she had joined and that was enough exercise for one day. Wexford looked at his new figure in the mirror and realised that he was acquiring something worse than a straightforward exercise obsession: he was worrying that he would immediately put on pounds if he took a bus or a taxi. They took a taxi.

A small crowd remained outside the gate. It wasn’t quite the same crowd. The young woman with the child had gone, but the man in the big sunglasses was still there or, more likely, had come back. His companion, also wearing sunglasses, was probably his wife. The gum-chewing boy in a hood was also a newcomer. Perhaps the sunglasses man kept an eye on the house each time he passed it on his way to work and his way back. Wexford and Dora walked round the corner into the mews. There, no one was about.

‘I find it hard to believe,’ Wexford said, glancing at the block of flats called Orcadia Court, ‘that no one in those flats or the houses in the streets round here has any information to give us – I mean, give the Met – about Harriet Merton.’ When he had been a policeman he had been careful to keep his work apart from his family, but it was different now. He had described the events of the morning to Dora. ‘Tom says neighbours in London don’t know each other. That may be true up to a point, but they’re people like people anywhere else. They must be gregarious, they must enjoy gossip.’

She nodded. ‘They may do, but all this is supposed to have happened twelve years ago and I expect you’ll find that those flats have changed hands a few times.’

‘I wish I could go in and talk to them. Like one of those amateur detectives in fiction.’

She said nothing, but she lightly squeezed the hand she was holding.

‘You don’t have so many of them nowadays,’ said Wexford, suddenly aware that ‘nowadays’ was an obsolete word. ‘These days, I mean. Every detective story writer had an amateur detective who was cleverer than the police. Sherlock Holmes, of course. Poirot. Lord Peter Wimsey …’

‘Albert Campion.’

‘Roderick Alleyn.’

‘Alan Grant.’

‘Who on earth was he?’

‘Josephine Tey’s detective. But no, Reg, I forgot. He was a bona fide policeman.’

‘The point I’m making is that all these people were enormously respected by the police. They went everywhere with police officers, questioned suspects, were privy to secrets, read forensic reports and ultimately were the first to come up with answers. And they were celebrities. Everyone had not only heard of them but they were famous.’

‘I don’t suppose it was really like that.’

‘Probably not. The thing is I’m an amateur detective now, but I haven’t got Lord Peter’s right of entry into a suspect’s home or a right to question him or her.’

She looked at him, but he was smiling and sounded cheerful. He went up to a door in the high brick wall and turned the handle. To his surprise the door opened. ‘We were here this morning,’ he said, ‘and when we went someone left the door unlocked. Not my responsibility, though, and that’s rather a good feeling.’

There was nothing to see. The cover was back on the manhole. Paulson and Grieve, Ironsmiths of Stoke. The fronds of the lavender swayed a little in the evening breeze. A blackbird was singing its going-to-roost song in one of the gardens. Wexford thought of Auden’s poem, the one called ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, about life going quietly on regardless of terrible happenings. ‘The torturer’s horse,’ he remembered, ‘scratches its innocent behind on a tree.’

‘The bodies were in there?’ Dora pointed to Paulson and Grieve’s iron lid. ‘In a hole under that?’

‘In a hole under that,’ Wexford echoed. ‘And an ill-assorted bunch they were. Two men, two women. Two young, two older. Let’s go. There’s nothing to see.’

They walked up to West Hampstead. It was Wednesday and Tom would call him tomorrow. He had the coachhouse landline number and Wexford’s mobile number. Tom had asked him to be his adviser and he would call him tomorrow. A taxi came and they got into it. He was constantly surprised by the amount taxis cost and had learnt that they were more expensive after eight in the evening. Ten pounds to go from one side of Hampstead to the other even before eight …

It was starting to get dark. Sheila’s cat, a British Blue called Bettina, was sitting on their doorstep when they got back. ‘Back’ not ‘home’. He hadn’t reached that stage yet and perhaps he never would. The cat let out a loud piercing mew and ran inside when Dora unlocked the front door.

‘Shall I give her a saucer of milk?’

Dora looked shocked. ‘Oh, no, you mustn’t. Milk’s very bad for cats, apparently. They can’t digest it.’

Wexford did some digesting himself, then said, ‘Are you telling me that for centuries man has been giving cats milk in life and in literature? Every book or story with a cat in it has it drinking milk. Milk is what cats drink, live on, like, enjoy. If you were doing one of those tests where you’re given a word and have to say the first other word that comes into your head, if you were given “cat” you’d probably say “milk”. And now you tell me milk is bad for cats.’

‘I can’t help all that, Reg. That’s what Sheila said. Her vet told her.’

‘The next thing will be bones are bad for dogs.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, a lot of people say they are. Bones can splinter, you see.’

The cat appeared contented with nothing but their company. She sat with them until Wexford switched on the News at Ten and then, apparently having an aversion to television, took her departure, a slender slinky shape under her thick blue coat, streaking up through the dusk to the big house.

He wasn’t going to stay in on Thursday and wait for Tom’s call, but he took his mobile out with him. He walked by way of the Heath to Kenwood, intending to make it to Highgate, but that would have meant finding some sort of transport to bring him back. It was too far to walk both ways. Highgate could be saved for another day. St Michael’s Church where Coleridge had a memorial tablet could wait till next week and so could Highgate Hill where Dick Whittington and his cat turned to look down on London and its gold-paved streets. ‘I would bet you anything you like,’ Wexford said to no one in particular, ‘that he gave milk to his cat.’

Tom didn’t call. Nor was there a message from him on the landline when he got back. Never mind. He and Dora went to the cinema to see Slumdog Millionaire and next morning, in the absence of any phone call or message, he said to Dora, ‘Let’s go home for the weekend.’

‘We are at home.’

‘No we’re not. Not really. If we go before three we’ll avoid the get-away-from-London rush.’