Vault

CHAPTER THREE

‘YOU’LL HAVE READ about it or seen it on TV. God knows it’s had enough media coverage. It’s one of those cases where people start asking if they’ve found any more bodies.’

‘Except that these were all in the same place,’ said Wexford.

‘That’s true. We don’t even know if they were murdered – well, one was. Probably.’

‘Only probably?’

‘Three of them have been there so long we can’t tell how long they’ve been dead, let alone what they died of.’

Detective Superintendent Thomas Ede was sitting in his chair behind his desk in his glass-walled box of an office, the glass being the kind you can see out of but no one can see in. Laminated wood floor with a faux fur rug, the fur looking like the skin of a hybrid tiger and giraffe. Ede was a tall, thin man with a small head and tense, sharp features. He wore a dark grey suit and a white shirt, but no tie, a style of dressing Wexford thought looked fine on women, less ‘right’ on men, though it was becoming universally popular. Wexford sat opposite him in the clients’ seat, the interviewee’s place. This was something new to him, something he had to get resigned to. And he was getting there, it was all right, it was inevitable.

‘I’ve read about it,’ he said, ‘but you tell me. That way I’ll get it right.’

‘Well, as you know, this all started a month ago. We were first called at the beginning of May. The location is a street in St John’s Wood called Orcadia Place, but that detail wasn’t in the papers, was it? You’re looking as if something’s struck you.’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ Wexford said. ‘Go on.’

‘The house itself is called Orcadia Cottage. It’s not a cottage as we know it but a sizeable detached house, very pretty if you like that sort of thing. Front garden’s full of flowers and trees, the back is a kind of courtyard or patio. Orcadia Place is one of those streets in St John’s Wood that are more like country lanes, hedges, big trees, cobbled roadway, that kind of thing. Orcadia Cottage belongs to a man called Martin Rokeby. He bought it about seven years ago for one and a half million. It would fetch four now – or would have before what was found in the coal hole. By the way, we call it the “patio-tomb”. Got to call it something, haven’t you?

‘The set-up is peculiar to say the least. On the face of it, the area, paved in York stone, is quite large and plain with a border round its edges. The way into the patio from the house is by a door from the kitchen and a pair of French windows. A door in the back wall opens into the mews. More or less in the middle of this patio is the manhole cover, circular, which when closed – and it always was closed – lies flush with the paving. A tub stood on it and entirely covered it up.

‘Now Rokeby had never lifted up this manhole cover. Or so he says. He had no survey done when he bought the house as he had no mortgage and distrusted surveys on old houses, reasoning that they were bound to be full of faults but never fell down. It’s a point of view. You can spend a fortune on surveys and most of the time needlessly. Anyway, Rokeby says he didn’t even know the manhole cover was there. The tub which stood on it was a half-barrel of wood bound in iron, not particularly attractive, and Mrs Rokeby said she’d like a new one. She’s the gardener. Well, the two of them were on holiday in Italy – they went on a lot of expensive holidays, Australia at the time he was planning the underground room – and in a shop in Florence she saw this, I quote, “amazingly beautiful amphora”, whatever that is, that some boat dredged up from out of the Mediterranean. I don’t know about these things. Maybe you do. Anyway, she had to have it – they’re not short of a penny or two, as you’ll have guessed – couldn’t, needless to say, take it home with them on a flight, so she asked to have it sent. Heaven knows what that cost but it doesn’t matter.’

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.’

Home – 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.