Vault

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MARY, AS DORA put it, seemed untouched by her ordeal. ‘What ordeal?’ Wexford said, his picture of the terrified child negated by the facts. ‘She wasn’t there when Sylvia was stabbed. She was having a happy time with her godmother. You’re imagining things.’

They had been back in London for twenty-four hours. Mary had chattered all the way and was now in Sheila’s nursery – Wexford remarked to Dora that he couldn’t remember ever previously having encountered the possessor of a nursery – with Sheila’s nanny, Amy, Anoushka and Bettina the cat. He had chickened out of Dora’s plans to take all the children to a matinee of The Lion King and was waiting to be picked up and driven to police headquarters in Cricklewood.

True to her undertaking, Dora had asked Sylvia’s permission to take Mary with them to London, and had asked it in her habitual kind and loving tone. It was only Wexford who could hear the underlying note which said, ‘Oh, Sylvia, how could you? Are you lost to all morality and decency?’ But it was only thought, not said. Would it ever be said?

Naturally, the first remark Tom Ede made to him was to ask about Sylvia, and he seemed delighted when Wexford said she was recovering and would be out of hospital in two days’ time. Nothing was said about prayers and Tom quickly reverted to the Orcadia Cottage case.

‘I’d like to ask you,’ he began, ‘how important you think the name “Francine” is. I mean, do we need to try and trace every Francine in the country? The trouble with that is that so many people who were young twelve years ago have left the country, just as others have come in. If she exists – and we don’t know that she does or ever did – she may be anywhere.’

‘Perhaps we have to ask ourselves why he would write the name Francine on a piece of paper on which “La Punaise” and what is almost certainly a pin number were already written. Because this woman with a French-sounding name could translate for him what was obviously a French word? It looks like it. So she must have been someone close to him. You don’t ask a casual acquaintance or a person much older than you to translate something which obviously has a criminal connection.’

‘He might have just asked her to translate “La Punaise” and not mentioned the number.’

‘True. But wouldn’t the meaning suggest a pin number to her? At least wouldn’t she question him?’

‘I don’t know, Reg. Maybe she did question him. Can we construct some sort of scenario out of what we do know?’

‘The way I see it, the young man who called himself Keith Hill somehow got into Orcadia Cottage and perhaps even lived there with a French girl called Francine. He found the address book with the pin number and “La Punaise” made to look like a restaurant, intending to use it to rob Harriet Merton’s account.’

‘If he was living there, where were Franklin Merton and Harriet? They can’t have been there, because it must have been at this time that the pseudonymous Keith Hill removed the door to the cellar, bricked up the doorway and plastered over it. Incidentally, why would he do that?’

‘It has to be because he’d killed Harriet and maybe that cousin of his or whoever it was and was sealing them up in a tomb.’

‘But he was in there, too,’ Tom objected.

‘I know there are holes in my scenario. I think we have to see Anthea Gardner again, see if we can find out where Franklin Merton may have been at that time, whenever that time was, and maybe see Mildred Jones first to try and settle this time question. So far all we know is that it was about twelve years ago.’

Mildred Jones was in a better frame of mind than when last seen. Some women are very much affected, Wexford thought, by whether they think they are looking good or are dissatisfied with their appearance or are having, for instance, a ‘bad hair day’, while men are influenced by the state of their car – he thought of that Edsel – or a bad back or a cold coming on. Mildred Jones’s hair had evidently just been done and silver streaks put among the iron grey. The red dress she wore suited her better than the trouser suit, which dwarfed her. Wexford supposed she was aware of these things, a feeling confirmed when she glanced with satisfaction into a mirror on their way to the chintzy living room.

‘You want me to tell you when I saw the so-called Mr Hill and his fancy car, do you? I’ll have to think.’ She was silent for a moment. Then she said. ‘When I try to remember when something or other happened I have to try and think of the weather. I mean, if it was summer or winter and raining or whatever.’

Tom was nodding encouragingly.

‘It’s no good nodding at me like that.’ A flash of the old acerbity was showing itself. ‘That won’t help me. I’m thinking. Ah,’ she said. ‘I know now. It must have been autumn. The whole place was covered with leaves – no, it wasn’t, not covered. That came a week or two later. The leaves from that Virginia creeper were beginning to fall. It must have been October, sometime in October. Does that help?’

‘Very much, Mrs Jones.’

‘It rained after that and made a thick wet mat of those leaves. I was glad when Clay – Mr Silverman, that is – cut it down. Ours hadn’t been planted then. Pity it ever was. That was Colin – he liked the colour.’

She waved to them as they left. Wexford imagined her going back into the house and pausing at the mirror to admire her reflection.

‘I don’t suppose Anthea Gardner will have silver streaks,’ he said.

An unobservant man, Tom looked puzzled. Wexford didn’t explain. Anthea Gardner was expecting them at midday and had coffee ready, the real thing made from beans which she had just ground herself. Tom, who had once told Wexford that he only liked the instant kind, sipped his rather gloomily. Mrs Gardner was dressed almost exactly as she had been on their previous visit, only this time instead of grey her skirt was brown and her blouse spotted instead of striped. Kildare had once more to be restrained and eventually shut in the kitchen.

‘You want to know where Franklin was in late October 1997?’

‘I know it’s difficult to remember these things from so far back, Mrs Gardner,’ Tom said. ‘Think about it. Take your time.’

‘I don’t have to think. It’s not difficult at all. He and I used to go on holiday together long before we started living together again. Harriet and he had been taking separate holidays for years. We were in San Sebastián that year. October it was, the second half of October.’

‘Why do you remember so clearly, Mrs Gardner?’

‘Oh, that’s easy. I remember because it was on that holiday, on my birthday actually, that we decided we’d live together again. Franklin would leave Harriet and come here to me.’

‘And when is your birthday?’

‘October twenty-fifth,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘St Crispin’s Day in case you’re interested.

‘Franklin went back to Orcadia Cottage,’ she went on. ‘It must have been four or five days after we got back. I told him to. I don’t think he’d have bothered if I hadn’t made him. When he came back he told me what had happened. The house was empty. He said it was very clean and tidy and Harriet wasn’t there. A woman he knew who lived in one of the cottages at the back told him that a man she called Harriet’s “young friend” had been at Orcadia Cottage with her for at least two weeks. This is the kind of thing you want?’

‘Exactly the kind of thing we want.’

‘It’s all coming back to me now,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘Franklin said he found a pile of cushions on the living-room floor with a scarlet feather boa draped across them. I mean, it was Harriet’s feather boa. He recognised it. He said the door in the wall at the back was unlocked and the key was missing. There was a manhole or drain or something in the patio, but the lid was off it …’

‘Just a minute, Mrs Gardner. You said the manhole was open?’

‘Well, I suppose so. I wasn’t there. Franklin said the lid was lying near it. The whole place was covered in those leaves which were wet and sort of sticky. He said they were very slippery. He had to walk very carefully not to fall over. Anyway, he managed to lift the cover and put it back on the manhole.’

‘Did he ever go back there?’

‘Not as far as I remember. He expected to hear from Harriet, asking for money if nothing else, but he never did.’ Anthea Gardner was silent for a moment, looking from Ede to Wexford and then down at her own ringless hands. ‘He didn’t care, you see. Women had cost him enough in the past, me included. He simply hoped he’d never hear from her and that perhaps she’d found a man to support her. The feather boa he saw as a defiant gesture, sort of cocking a snook at him, if you know what I mean.’

‘Mrs Gardner, do you know if Harriet had much jewellery?’

‘She had lots, all bought for her by Franklin, but it was gone, the valuable stuff was gone, he said, when he went to the house. Most of her clothes were gone, the designer stuff, and the best of her jewellery.’

Wexford asked her if she would recognise any of the pieces if they were shown to her, but Anthea Gardner shook her head quite violently. ‘I told you, I never met the woman. I know nothing about her jewellery. I know there was a lot of it because Franklin told me he’d spent a fortune on jewellery in the first years of their marriage, but what kind it was and what it looked like I’ve no idea. And I don’t know what was the point of the feather boa.’

‘And are you saying he never heard from her again?’

‘That’s what I’m saying, yes. He never heard from her again.’

As they were driven away out of the white stucco enclaves of The Boltons, Wexford said generously, for the theory had been his alone, ‘Can we add to our scenario as a result of what we’ve heard?’

‘We’ll have to go back in time a bit. We know how Keith Hill happened to have free access to Orcadia Cottage. Franklin Merton was away on holiday in San Sebastian – where is that anyway?’

‘Spain.’

‘Oh, right. OK. Merton was away on holiday and in his absence Harriet had invited KH to stay. While he was there and maybe she was out somewhere he discovered her pin number, presumably pinched her credit card or one of her credit cards. Suppose, for instance, he had this Francine there and Harriet came back and discovered them together? He kills Harriet …’

‘Why?’ Wexford interrupted. ‘Because his elderly girlfriend discovered him with his young girlfriend? Hardly. What could she do? Fornication’s not yet a crime in this country.’

‘All right,’ said Tom, looking rather as if he would approve if it were. ‘If you insist. He gets rid of the girl, tries to placate Harriet, but she isn’t having any of it. They fight …’

‘What? Physically?’

‘Suppose the door to the cellar was open and she fell down the stairs or he pushed her …’

Suppose, Wexford thought. It was all supposition. It might have happened quite differently. He listened to Tom’s by now elaborate theory with half an ear, while saying to himself, we have to start again, we have to start from scratch and begin from a different angle. But it’s not my case, he thought, it can never be my case. It’s Tom’s, and what I say doesn’t really count. He said it, though, just the same.

‘Hardly any attention has been paid to the second woman in the tomb.’ How useful, how tactful, the passive voice could be! This version was so much more becoming than if he had said, ‘We ought to pay attention to the second woman.’

‘Because the tomb must have been opened for her body to be put in?’

‘I see it this way. That the people who knew the hole and the cellar were there in the first place are the three whose bodies have been there twelve years. Once they were dead and in there no one knew about it with the possible – no, the probable – exception of Franklin Merton. Once Franklin Merton was dead, had died a natural death, no one knew of it. The big plant pot placed on top of the manhole cover effectively sealed it up. If not for ever, more or less permanently. Until someone discovered it was there and saw it as a potential tomb or, rather, as an existing tomb which was like a vault. It had room for more bodies if bodies there were.’

Tom nodded. ‘All right. What next then?’

‘Back to Rokeby,’ said Wexford. ‘He must be the key to identification. It was he who proposed the construction of an underground room. And it has to be that which gave whoever it was ideas. He has yet to list the people who may have come to survey the place – or has he done that?’

‘We haven’t heard a word from him. No news yet from forensics on the Edsel either. We’ve still got nothing but conjecture to link the Edsel with the two men’s bodies.’