Vault ciw-23

by Ruth Rendell

  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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SO THAT WAS what he was, Detective Superintendent Ede’s expert adviser. It made him laugh every time he repeated it to himself. He laughed now as he picked up his briefcase, kissed Dora and went off outside to await the arrival of Tom’s car in the Vale of Health. Wexford knew he would be absolutely on time and he was. Tom came in an unmarked car – as an unmarked policeman, of course he did – driven by a young woman he introduced as his sergeant, DS Lucy Blanch. Lucy, as she wanted Wexford to call her, was a slim black woman with a pretty face and ebony hair. He would have liked to ask her if she plaited those corn rows herself or did a hairdresser do it, but he was always conscious of anything that might be construed as racist. Tom had been sitting next to her but when Wexford got into the back he came and sat beside him.

  ‘So that we can talk a bit more about the case.’

  Tom didn’t comment on Sheila’s stately house or the wide garden or the little gabled coachhouse at its gates. By this time Wexford had learnt to categorise visitors as likeable or not by whether they said he’d done all right for himself, hadn’t he, that must be costing him a packet, or noticed his second home with no more envious deference than if it had been a one-bedroom flat in Tooting. It was a test that Mike Burden had passed with honours, but then Mike had worked for him and with him since Sheila had been a young girl and knew all the circumstances.

  Lucy drove along Fitzjohn’s Avenue, getting caught up in a traffic jam halfway down. Roadworks again. Wexford was daily amazed by the cones and barriers spread out everywhere while holes were dug, pipes exposed and apparently essential work carried out if London were not to break down and come to a standstill. Here temporary lights had been put up, staying red much longer than for a normal traffic-light span.

  ‘Before we start,’ Wexford said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ He opened his briefcase and took out the calendar. ‘Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place. But perhaps you know about it.’

  Tom Ede took it in both hands. ‘I’ve heard about this, but not seen it. The painter was Simon Alpheton, was it?’

  Wexford was pleased. ‘You can see the date is 1973. Has it changed a lot?’

  ‘A previous owner called Clay Silverman had the Virginia creeper cut down. Who are or were Marc and Harriet?’

  ‘Marc was Marc Syre, a rock musician in a group called Come Hither. The woman in the red dress was his girlfriend. I think her name was Harriet Oxenholme. He died – Marc Syre. I mean, killed himself after taking LSD. I don’t know what happened to her.’

  Tom was silent for a moment, considering. The temporary light turned green and Lucy moved along in the queue of cars and vans and a bus. ‘This Syre must have rented it. A John Walton owned it until 1974 when he sold it to a man called Franklin Merton, who had a survey carried out. That’s important, as you can imagine.’ Tom paused to look at a sheaf of notes he had with him. ‘Merton sold the house in 1998 to Americans called Clay and Devora Silverman. They dispensed with a survey and relied on the surveyor’s report Merton had had done. Apparently the place was very much in demand and in 2002, as Silverman was suddenly sent back to the United States, he wanted a quick sale. The Rokebys also didn’t bother with a survey, paid cash and moved in within five weeks.’

  Wexford thought about it. ‘This means that three of the bodies, the two men and the older woman were probably put in the vault’ – his first use of the word – ‘during Merton’s occupancy. Is it known how long they’ve been there?’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Tom, ‘that however long ago it is, it’s a long time. Between ten and fifteen years is the estimate, later narrowed down to between eleven and thirteen – we’ll say twelve years. That would very likely be at the end of Merton’s occupancy, as you say. But Merton is dead. He was in his seventies when he sold the house and he died last year.’

  ‘And the younger woman?’

  ‘That’s difficult. She’s been dead between two and two-and-a-half years. Say two to three. We assume she’s been in the tomb that same length of time but it may have been only two years.’

  ‘I suppose it depends,’ said Wexford, ‘on whether her killer had the vault in mind before he killed her or only thought of it as a possible burial place later on.’

  They were nearly there. Lucy was a good driver, precise and dashing, squeezing through spaces between a bus and a lorry with a skill Wexford was sure he couldn’t have mustered. She directed his attention to the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios as she pulled up to allow three teenagers to stand in the middle of the pedestrian crossing and have their photographs taken.

  ‘It’s a funny thing, sir,’ she said, ‘that none of the drivers who have to stop for this sort of thing ever sound their horns or shout or anything even if whole droves of kids cross and do that. It’s a tribute to the Beatles, don’t you think?’

  Wexford laughed. ‘I expect you’re right.’

  She drove on down Grove End Road, turned right into Melina Place and then into Orcadia Place. A country lane it might have been, but one where all the trees had had the attention of a tree surgeon, every weed had been removed and each wild flower had been replaced by a pansy or a tuft of primulas. A high wall concealed all but the upper floor and almost flat roof of Orcadia Cottage, but there was a wrought iron gate in this wall, set between pillars on which stood two falcons in terra cotta. As he got out of the car Wexford could see through the bars and curlicues roses of many shapes and colours, but no scent as far as he could tell. Tom paused to put on a red and blue striped tie, somewhat the worse for rough handling.

  A small crowd of perhaps six people had gathered by the gate, in hopes perhaps of some such event as their arrival. The very large young woman with a plump child strapped into a buggy stepped back reluctantly for Lucy to open the gate and let Tom and Wexford through. The man in sunglasses and a lounge suit looked as if he were going to come up to them and ask for an autograph, but he quickly put his notebook away as if he feared he might be doing something illegal.

  Shallow steps mounted to the pale grey front door and on these steps stood stone pots of bay trees and others planted with purple pansies and pink petunias. A trailing plant with dappled leaves, green and white, dripped from the rims of urns and vases. But the Virginia creeper of the picture had gone, as Tom had said, and in its absence all the pale brickwork was revealed with the medallion that was a copy of one by Della Robbia. Under the eaves a frieze of green and blue tiles ran round the house. A cottage it might be called, but in Wexford’s eyes it seemed a sizeable house and one which, from its garden, no other house could be seen. All was screened by shrubs and conifers and hedgerows and roses of many colours. And the place was very quiet. Only if you strained your ears to listen could you hear a distant hum from St John’s Wood Road and Hamilton Terrace.

  Lucy took a key from her jacket pocket and opened the front door. The interior was a disappointment, department-store furnishings and window drapings in conventional creams and browns. No books. A picture, framed in heavily ornate gilt occupied the centre of each wall. The whole place looked lifeless and smelt stuffy.

  ‘The Rokebys no longer live here then?’

  ‘Anne Rokeby couldn’t stand it. They’re renting
a flat in Maida Vale. No doubt they’ll come back when the investigation’s done with. When we’ve found the answer, whenever that will be.’

  Tom led the way down a passage which led to the kitchen. The door was closed. Alongside it, to the left, was an area of wall on which a picture hung, a reproduction of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

  ‘The cellar and the stairs to it are just under here,’ Tom said. ‘The flight of stairs – there are twelve of them – come up here and reach to just where our feet are. There ought to be a door but there isn’t. That wall is where there once was a door, it has to be. Let’s go outside.’

  They went by way of the backdoor which opened from the kitchen. Outside was a kind of backyard, too large to be called a patio, paved in York stone, with narrow borders on three sides, planted with lavender and heathers, not yet in bloom. In the high rear wall was a solid wooden door, painted black, which Lucy told Wexford led out into the mews. Tom opened the gate and Wexford saw garages with flats over them and a block of flats. Lucy told him they were flats, though they looked like a terrace of houses, two storeys high with balconies on top and bay windows on the ground floor.

  In the middle of the paved courtyard, slightly to the left, was a gaping hole, rectangular and uncovered. Incised on its metal cover which lay on the stones beside it were the words: Paulson and Grieve, Ironsmiths of Stoke. The sun was shining and when Wexford knelt down to look into the hole, the flat, slightly irregular paving felt warm to his touch. There was nothing to be seen down there and nothing, any longer, to be smelt. He could just make out the brickwork of the walls and the shape of the door into the cellar.

  ‘That is where they all were,’ Lucy said. ‘Sort of piled on top of each other.’

  They returned to the house, standing in the hallway outside the kitchen door. Wexford looked once more at the blank wall and put out one hand to touch it, as if it might give way and fold inwards to reveal the staircase.

  Tom said, ‘You can understand someone removing a door and bricking up the doorway if it serves no useful purpose, but this door – and there must have been a door – did serve a purpose. It was there solely to lead to the steps down into the cellar.’

  ‘This is conjecture,’ Wexford put in, ‘but it looks to me as if whoever put the bodies of the two men and the older woman into the hole also bricked up the doorway. This would leave only one means of access into the hole, that is by the opening in the patio.’

  ‘Does that mean he was a builder? A skilled handyman? I couldn’t do it. Could you?’

  ‘No, Tom. I couldn’t. The idea of me doing it is a joke. But that leads me back to the opening in the patio. If he’s skilled enough to remove a door and brick up and plaster over a doorway, why didn’t he brick up or pave over the manhole opening?’

  ‘Maybe he meant to,’ said Lucy, ‘but he was interrupted or even couldn’t get hold of the materials.’

  ‘If he could get hold of bricks and plaster, he could get paving stones. If it was an interruption it must have been a very significant one, because once he had sealed up that opening he would have been safe, not for just eleven or twelve years, but for ever. Those bodies would have been enclosed in an impregnable tomb.’

  ‘And no one could have gone there two years ago and added a fourth body. It was two years ago, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was two years ago that she died. We can’t be certain that she was put there immediately after death but someone put her there,’ said Tom. ‘No doubt about it.’ They moved into the kitchen and sat down on stools. ‘It wasn’t Rokeby. He’d have to be a very dark horse indeed. If he put that fourth body down there the last thing he’d do is call us to tell us what he’d found in the hole.’

  ‘You mentioned something about DNA,’ Wexford said.

  ‘Right. I did. The samples that were taken showed that the older man and the young man were related. Not father and son or uncle and nephew but maybe cousins. The women had no connection with them or with each other. The – well, baffling thing is that none of them correspond to the descriptions of any persons reported missing around twelve years ago. And that in itself is very strange. Not so much in respect of the men. Men are less likely to be reported missing than women. These two may have been loners. There is no reason to suppose they lived together.

  ‘How did they die? We don’t know. There is nothing on the bodies to show how they died. With the women it’s a different matter. Both had severe skull fractures. According to pathology each was capable of causing death.’ Tom looked at his watch. ‘All right. I’ve an appointment to see Mrs Anthea Gardner at eleven-thirty in Bolton Mews. She’s been seen before, but not by me. She’s the one person we know of connected to Orcadia Cottage in the Mertons’ time. So if you’ll drive us to Boltons Grove, Lucy, we’ll leave now.’

  ‘Who’s Anthea Gardner?’ Wexford asked when they were in the car.

  ‘The sort of widow of Franklin Merton, who owned Orcadia Cottage from sometime in the Seventies until 1998.’

  ‘Ah, including the relevant period. What does “sort of” mean?’

  ‘He was married to her before he married someone called Harriet and who seems to have been the Harriet of the picture. For some reason he never divorced Harriet, but went back to live with Anthea from 1998 until he died last year.’

  As Lucy pulled away, Wexford looked back at Orcadia Cottage. There was something serene about it, a stillness and a quiet as if nothing had ever disturbed its peacefulness. No breeze swayed the branches or ruffled the leaves. He told himself he was being fanciful in imagining that the house smiled calmly, and that if it could speak would say, ‘I have been here for two hundred years and seen many foolish human beings come and go, but I shall be here for another two hundred years when those corpses in my foundations are forgotten.’

  The car turned into Grove End Road and started on its journey, through congestion and roadworks and capricious traffic lights to South Kensington.

  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.’