Vault

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TWO WEEKS HAD gone by and two days more. Wexford had been told there was ‘no rush’ for him to come back. Tom said to take his time and meanwhile here was something for him to think about: Forensics had discovered hairs in the boot of the Edsel and these afforded sufficient DNA to be compared with that taken from the older man’s remains. Not much help, Wexford thought. All such a comparison could show was that the older man had put his head inside the Edsel’s boot or that his body had been carried there. But perhaps it was a small step forward.

He walked into Tom’s office to find the detective superintendent in a state of excitement. ‘I’ve found her.’ Tom was ebullient. ‘She’s the one. She ticks all the boxes.’

If there was a cliché Wexford hated more than ‘level playing field’ or ‘kicking into the long grass’ it was the one about ticking all the boxes. But he merely looked enquiring.

‘Francine, I mean. Miles found her on the Internet, I don’t know how. I’m more or less computer illiterate, it’s a closed book to me. But he found her and she’s coming in. I’ve talked to her on the phone. She knows all about Orcadia Cottage, she’s called Francine Withers, thirty years old, had a relationship with a man called Keith Chiltern that ended when he disappeared twelve years ago.’

Wexford nodded. ‘Where’s she coming from?’

‘High Wycombe. She manages a supermarket there. She’s been married and divorced, no children. She’s the one, Reg.’

‘Why is she coming here? I’d have expected us – you, that is – to go to her.’

‘We would have. She volunteered, said she’d like to come here.’

Wexford laughed, said there was no accounting for tastes and thus contributing a cliché of his own. As he had always feared, it was catching. Rather belatedly, Tom asked after Sylvia and Wexford kept his reply as short as he decently could. A young WPC brought in coffee. The tray had just been removed when Ms Francine Withers was announced.

The same WPC brought her in. She was of medium height, a little overweight, with blonde hair, black at the roots and a broad, handsome, over-made-up face, full mouth, straight nose and the kind of staring eyes that look as if their owner has just seen something shocking. As he must have looked, Wexford thought, when he walked into Ben’s room and saw the hanged man. She had dressed carefully, that was apparent, but not very judiciously in a too-short skirt, tight jumper and the kind of cropped jacket that shows off the flaws in an imperfect waistline. Her boots were suitable for the depths of winter rather than a late summer day.

‘Good of you to come, Ms Withers,’ Tom said.

Francine Withers held out her hand, first to Tom, then to Wexford, and said she was pleased to meet them. ‘I had to take the day off work,’ she said, ‘and I don’t get paid if I do that. But I thought it was my duty to come. You have to be a good citizen, don’t you?’

Neither Tom nor Wexford replied to this. It is the kind of question that makes seasoned policemen distrust the speaker.

‘Now, Ms Withers,’ Tom began, ‘perhaps you’ll take us back to when you first met Mr Chiltern. That was his name, wasn’t it? Chiltern?’

‘That’s right. Keith Chiltern.’

‘You were living in High Wycombe at the time and so was he?’

‘Oh, no. I only went to High Wycombe when I got married. My husband came from King’s Langley. I used to live in London, in Battersea, and so did Keith. I was friendly with this girl and she introduced me to her brother, that was Keith, and we started going out. He was in the building trade, Keith was. It would have been 1996 we started going out.’

Wexford said, ‘Where was he living?’

‘In Clapham. I don’t remember the address, I only went there once. I had a room in Lavender Hill Road and he used to come there. I lived there till I got married in 2003. He was working on this Orcadia Cottage. It wasn’t very big but very posh. The people who owned it went away and he said we could go and stay there, they wouldn’t mind, while he did some work on the patio. There was a manhole thing in the patio and he was doing something to it. I don’t know what, I didn’t take much interest.’

‘Just a moment, Ms Withers,’ Wexford said. ‘When exactly would this have been? Nineteen ninety-six or later?’

‘I can’t remember dates like that. It was summer. I reckon it must have been ’96. The people who owned the place were called Merton, I do know that.’

‘Tell us about the house. It was a brick house. Did it have any creeper growing over it? Roses, ivy, that sort of thing?’

She hesitated. ‘There might have been a rose, I don’t remember. I only went there a few times.’

Tom interposed. ‘But you did go inside the house? You slept in the house?’

She nodded. Wexford noticed the little beads of sweat forming on her powder-coated upper lip. ‘This manhole you spoke of – there’s been a lot about it in the papers, hasn’t there? A lot of photographs of it and of the patio?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t read papers.’

‘And you don’t watch TV or look at pictures online?’

She didn’t answer.

‘And you never went into the manhole or the cellar? There was no way in from inside the house, was there?’

‘No, there wasn’t,’ she said.

‘No staircase down to the cellar in 1996?’

She blushed darkly. ‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Tell us about Keith – er, Chiltern, wasn’t it?’

‘Keith Chiltern, yes.’ Her voice had become petulant. ‘He had a car, a big American car. The detective on the phone asked me if Keith had a big American car and I said yes, he did.’

Wexford said with apparent lack of interest, ‘What colour was the car, Ms Withers?’

‘What colour?’ She was growing indignant. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s years ago.’

‘Do the words La Punaise mean anything to you?’

She shook her head.

‘Now the house, Orcadia Cottage. You said it was posh. How was it posh? Very modern furnishing, abstract paintings, blinds at the windows, polished wood floors, that sort of thing?’

‘All that,’ she said. ‘Great big TV with a flat screen.’

‘So you and Keith split up. You quarrelled?’

‘I broke it off. I’d met Malcolm, that’s my ex-husband.’

‘And you never saw him again after – when?’

‘Sometime in ’98. I don’t remember when.’

‘All right, Ms Withers,’ Tom said. ‘Would you like to write down your full address in ’96 and ’97, the Lavender Hill address, and Keith Chiltern’s address at the time. If you wouldn’t mind, WPC Debach will take you into another office and give you pen and paper. We won’t keep you long.’

She followed Rita Debach, casting a glance of venom over her shoulder. ‘Well, Reg,’ said Tom, ‘my goodness, I dropped a real clanger there, didn’t I? I was so sure too. It was summer, but she never noticed the creeper that covered the house. She never noticed the staircase.’

‘The house was furnished in very modern style, abstract paintings et cetera. Flat-screen TV – had they even been thought of thirteen years ago?’

‘What did she hope to get out of it, Reg? There’s no money involved, no reward for being the Francine.’

‘Fame, I suppose,’ Wexford said. ‘Or what passes for fame, these days. Name in the papers she never reads. Called as a witness in a trial? Face on her huge, flat-screen TV when the media get hold of her.’ He started to laugh. After a second or two Tom started to laugh too.

‘I wonder what she’s writing down?’ Tom said. ‘All pure invention? Does she think we wouldn’t check?’ He added generously, ‘I could tell you knew before I did. When did you know?’

‘When she said Keith’s name was Chiltern. She’s from High Wycombe and she said her husband came from King’s Langley. Those places are both in the Chiltern Hills and that – well, that told me.’

‘Good for you. Go to the top of the class.’ Tom picked up the phone and called WPC Debach. ‘Rita? Bring Ms Withers back in, would you?’

WPC Debach came in alone. ‘She’s gone, sir. Disappeared. She didn’t write anything on that bit of paper.’

Wexford said very seriously. ‘She’s allergic to paper, Rita.’

‘We could charge her,’ said Tom, ‘with obstructing the police, but I don’t think we ought to stick our necks out, do you?’

Wexford said, unsmiling, ‘Better to keep a low profile.’

She could have found all the information she had in the media, he thought as he drove over to Highgate to talk to yet another Francine, the mother of Francine Jameson. Tom had spoken to her on the phone, giving Wexford clearance as his representative. If she had refused to see him she would have been well within her rights, but she hadn’t refused, only said she couldn’t imagine what information she might have for him. And so it turned out. She was French, called Francine, had given her daughter that name because she liked it. She had never heard of Orcadia Cottage until pictures of it appeared in the media. No one had ever asked her to translate la punaise into English. No one she knew had ever possessed a large, pale yellow American vintage car.

An empty afternoon stretched before him. If he went home to the coachhouse he knew he would find Sheila and Dora there, discussing Sylvia and the Old Rectory business. Rehearsals for Ghosts were still a week away and meanwhile Sheila had nothing to do but speculate with her mother as to whether Sylvia should sell the house, conquer her fears of the house, think in any case of buying somewhere smaller and – he guessed this bit – revise her ideas on older women having affairs with men the same age as their sons. Joining in didn’t appeal to him. He drove across Highgate and parked in Shepherds Hill. Not having brought his A to Z guide with him, he had hazy ideas of the geography of this part of London. Alexandra Palace lay vaguely over there, Muswell Hill on the other side of the woodland and Crouch End at the bottom of the street where he was parked. He would walk, taking in the wood on his way.

London had surprised him. He had believed himself to have a fairly good knowledge of his capital city, but in the past six months he had seen he was wrong. For instance, he hadn’t suspected there were so many rural spots like this wood. When he came to what he thought might be the end of it because he could see a street ahead of him, he found another wood on the other side of it and the street more like a country road. He turned to the right and walked along it, already beginning to wonder if he would ever find his car again.

The Orcadia Cottage case was never far from his mind, though Sylvia’s troubles had distracted him. Tom hardly seemed concerned about what to Wexford was a great mystery. He could see how the young man possibly called Keith Hill or something like it, might have killed Harriet Merton, perhaps inadvertently by pushing her down those stairs; he could see how ‘Keith Hill’ might have killed the relative he either lived with or knew well, taken Keith or Ken Gray or Greig’s car to transport his body and brought it to the vault; but how had he ended up there himself with his pockets full of valuable jewellery? Someone must have put him there before he could sell the jewellery. Francine? Some unknown killer? And why had he, who had removed a door and bricked up a doorway, not carried out the far simpler task of filling in the top of the manhole and paving over it? Because, although he meant to do it, had perhaps planned how to do it, someone had killed him before he could?

Wexford realised something else. For all their searching, they had found no one who had been related to ‘Keith Hill’ or had even known him; apart from those Miracle Motors people who had seen him once, no one who could even identify the older man by name. They had no idea where the two of them had lived or even if they had lived together, no idea of the sequence of the three earlier deaths, no hint of motive or means of murder. There were people out there, he thought, there must be, who had known one or both of the men well, yet no one had come forward when details of the bodies had appeared in newspapers and on television.

By this time Wexford had left the woods behind and come once more among houses. This must be Muswell Hill. It looked a pleasant place to live. He wandered around it, interesting himself in the different types of early twentieth-century domestic architecture, then trying to work out how he could return to his car without retracing his steps. It seemed to him that if he kept turning right he ought to find himself at the end of Shepherds Hill, but this strategy failed and he was hopelessly lost. If only he had turned right earlier, he was later to learn, and taken Cranley Gardens he would have come out into Shepherds Hill – but thank God he hadn’t.

He had noticed that his car was very near Highgate tube station, but which line it was on he had no idea. If he could find a tube station somewhere down here he could look at a map, get in a tube train and somehow – he feared it might be a circuitous route – find his way back to Highgate.

He began looking for the red, white and blue circle with a horizontal bar across it that was Transport for London’s sign, but saw none. There were buses but they all went to places he had never heard of such as Stroud Green and Manor House. Could a place be called Manor House? He asked a passer-by, an elderly woman, where the nearest tube station was and the result was to set her off on a violent denunciation of Transport for London for making this area an underground desert.

‘That’s what I call it,’ she said. ‘An underground desert. The nearest tube is Finsbury Park, if you can believe it.’

Wexford could easily believe it, as she seemed knowledgeable and he hadn’t the faintest idea where Finsbury Park might be. He asked her how he could find Shepherds Hill and she gave him complicated directions through Crouch End. He set off to walk, looking for street names he thought he might have a chance of recognising. One of these, a street called Hornsey Lane, had its nameplate on the brick wall of a medical centre. The doctors practising there were listed on a sheet of whiteboard instead of the old-time brass plate and one of them caught his eye as this particular name always attracted his attention: Dr James Azziz FRCP, Dr Francine Hill PhD, FRCS, Dr William V. Johns FRCP.

Ah, well, another Francine. He had once thought it an uncommon name but they were everywhere. The chances against her being the one they were looking for were huge. It was a tack they had better give up on but concentrate instead on the architect, the plumber and the builder’s labourer. He walked along Hornsey Lane, getting more lost than ever, turned to the left and left again and found himself, maddeningly, back at the medical centre. Again he looked at the whiteboard, he looked at the plate-glass window, through which he could see patients sitting in a waiting room with the usual warning posters plastered all over the walls. What is chlamydia? Has your child had the triple vaccine? Are you drinking more than two units of alcohol per day? Stroke disables and kills! He turned away, took a side street and then a broad avenue he hoped might be Shepherds Hill.

Why couldn’t he forget this new Francine? Something about her name stuck in his memory and wouldn’t go away, though he had no idea what it was. One thing was sure, this wasn’t Shepherds Hill. Suddenly, out of another side street, a taxi with its orange light on, appeared to save him. Francine, he thought, settling into his seat and dutifully putting on his seat belt, Francine Hill. What’s different about that? It’s just another woman with that Christian name. They are legion.

Rokeby must be seen again, however distasteful the man found it. Trevor Oswin – why was his home address treated as a secret? Why did the woman who was probably his wife give him Trevor’s mobile number rather than tell him to call again when her husband was in? Perhaps it meant nothing. Would Rokeby remember him? Francine, he thought, Francine Hill … The taxi drew up behind his parked car.

It was only at three two mornings later that he thanked God he had taken the wrong turnings and thus – twice – passed that medical centre. Before that he had Dora to reassure, Dora who had now begun to see the disadvantages of handing over one’s principal residence to one’s daughter’s family and being obliged to live in one’s second home. He reminded her how hard it was to predict the future, how the best laid plans (but this one was too much like one of Tom’s maxims) could go wrong, how people changed their minds in the course of time. She could bring some of her favourite things here, that would be easy, favourite books, ornaments, photographs.

‘Yes, Reg, I know, but you feel the same as I do, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘If before they got married people had to go to classes where they learned about what children are like, how they go on being your responsibility until they’ve got grown-up children themselves and beyond, the world population would go down fast.’

‘They wouldn’t listen,’ said Wexford, ‘and anyway half the population doesn’t get married any more.’

For the first time ever that evening he phoned an Indian takeaway which sent the order round on a bicycle. The phone number was on one of the gaudy flyovers that came through the coachhouse letter box every day. ‘Now that’s something you couldn’t do in Kingsmarkham.’

‘If it doesn’t taste nice I wouldn’t want to do it.’

But it tasted very nice and they accompanied it with a bottle of Merlot. ‘Incorrect, I’m sure,’ said Wexford and he felt a real nostalgia for all those oriental restaurants he and Burden used to visit in what he thought of as ‘the old days’. But he said none of that aloud. He had to make London more attractive to Dora, more acceptable as perhaps a whole year’s domicile.

A sound sleeper, she went to bed early. She never minded light in their bedroom and slept through the bedlamp being switched on and off. He sat up for a while, reading Kinglake’s Eothen, a favourite book about the Middle East one hundred and fifty years ago, a different world, just as violent but more romantic. Dreaming about the awe-inspiring Hodja who preached in the Great Mosque with a sword in his hand, he awoke at three with the name Francine Hill on his lips.

Of course … That was why he had known she wasn’t just another woman with that Christian name. Hill was what mattered, Hill. The young man who parked his big American car in Orcadia Mews had given his name to Mildred Jones as Keith Hill. Francine was his wife or his sister, she had to be …