Vault ciw-23

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I remember him,’ he began. ‘He’d pinched that car from his uncle. Not a doubt about it. Wanted to sell it to us but I could see through that. I wasn’t born yesterday.’

  ‘They were uncle and nephew? You’re sure of that?’

  ‘How can you be sure of something like that? He said he was his uncle. Why would he if he wasn’t?’

  ‘All right. What made you think he’d stolen the car?’

  ‘I knew the uncle. What was the name? Bray, I think. Or maybe Breck, something like that. His first name was Kenneth. Ken Gray. That guy loved that car, an Edsel Corsair it was. Wouldn’t even have let anyone have a lend of it or drive it round the block, let alone sell it.’

  ‘The uncle’s first name was Kenneth?’ But it couldn’t have been his uncle … ‘It wasn’t Kenneth or Keith Hill, was it?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t called Hill. He may have been Keith, not Ken. The nephew may have been called Hill, for all I know. I saw through that boy, whoever he was.’

  ‘No doubt you told the police?’

  ‘I what? You must be joking. It was a family affair, wasn’t it? The kid had nicked it while his uncle was away or whatever. Gone to Liphook, he said. On holiday, I reckon, and while the cat’s away the mice will play. That’s all it was, a try-on. I said to him, if he wants to sell his car, you get Ken or Keith to come in here and see me. Of course he never did.’

  ‘If you can’t be sure of the name,’ said Wexford, ‘have you got any idea where the young man lived or his uncle?’

  ‘Now that I can’t tell you.’ Mackenzie spoke as if he had already given Wexford valuable information. ‘I can make an intelligent guess.’ Wexford composed his face, to conceal the fact that he strongly doubted this boast. ‘I’d guess it was north London or north-west London. He didn’t seem to know his way round south of the river.’

  Using the Internet to trace a Keith or Kenneth Hill didn’t occur to Wexford. It had occurred to Tom Ede. He set their DC Garrison on to electoral registers in those areas of London and then widened his search when no one was found of suitable age.

  ‘There’s a Keith Hill who’s a well-known Labour MP,’ said Tom. He and Wexford were sitting in his office. ‘I’ve heard of him, so he must be well known. There was a footballer, but he’s dead. There’s someone who makes musical instruments. There are hundreds of Keith Hills and Kenneth Hills. It’s a common combination of names.’

  ‘Our one,’ said Wexford, ‘if he’s the one, would be missing. Not dead but missing.’

  ‘Sure, but there was no register of misspers twelve years ago. The older man and the young man, were they both called Keith Hill or, come to that, Kenneth Hill? Was one Keith and the other one Kenneth?’

  ‘I don’t know, Tom. We don’t even know if the young man who gave Mildred Jones the name Keith Hill gave it because it was his own name or because it was his uncle’s name. He may have thought it up on the spur of the moment. And although we know that the young man who gave his name as Keith Hill was driving a car which we know belonged to a man called Ken or Keith something, who now lives in Liphook or did live there, we don’t know if this was the young man who tried to sell the car to Miracle Motors. He may have bought it from that man. He may have stolen it.’

  Electoral registers are no good, Wexford thought, or they are only any good if these two men are alive and therefore not our two men. They are good only for elimination.

  If a trace of bitterness had shown itself in Walter Mackenzie’s words, it was nothing to Martin Rokeby’s. He was plainly a man who saw his whole life as ruined by one small and innocent action he had taken two months before. Or, thought Wexford, he was a consummate actor, one who knew that pretending to a ruined existence, a family break-up and financial disaster as a result of one small move, would do a great deal to free him from suspicion.

  No sooner had he sat down in Tom Ede’s state-of-the-art office, all laminate floor, tubular steel and black glass, than he began on his woes.

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this to a policeman, but you don’t know how many times I’ve wished I’d never lifted that manhole cover or put it back once I’d seen what was down there. What harm would that have done, I’d like to know? Nothing to the harm that’s been done to me. I’ve lost my home, I’m paying an exorbitant rent for a crummy flat more or less under the flyover, it’ll soon be their holidays but my children won’t come home – even supposing there was anywhere for them to come – they’re staying with friends. I ask you, could anybody have let himself in for more grief just by lifting up a manhole cover and looking inside?’

  ‘Well, Mr Rokeby,’ said Ede, ‘do you think you’d have slept comfortably in Orcadia Cottage, do you think you’d have had a moment’s peace, if you’d lifted it and just put it back? You could have kept what was underneath to yourself for years? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I didn’t and that’s all that matters now. What have you got me here for?’

  It was said with the maximum ungraciousness, but if the man was innocent Wexford could easily understand his resentment. Ede introduced Wexford as his ‘violent crimes adviser’, which Rokeby acknowledged with a minuscule nod. Tall and straight, he was a good-looking man, with regular features and greyish-blond hair, but to Wexford his thinness seemed new as if he had lost weight in those two months. The small dewlap under his chin looked as if he had once had a thicker neck. But all this meant nothing relative to the man’s innocence or guilt.

  It was virtually impossible that Rokeby could be responsible for placing the bodies of the older man and woman and the young man in the tomb, but the presence there of the young woman was a different matter altogether. Nothing would be easier than for the occupant of the house – say he had inadvertently killed this girl – to lift the manhole and cover and drop her body down to join the others. This meant that he knew the others were there, but he might easily have done so. He might have examined the contents of that underground space in exactly the way he said he wished he had done. Why then had he disclosed the contents to the police a few years later?

  Ede took his time answering Rokeby’s enquiry. ‘I’d like you to make a statement, Mr Rokeby. Nothing to be alarmed about. It won’t be about you or your family at all. I’d like you to list everyone you can remember coming to the backyard of Orcadia Cottage, that is the paved patio area, in the past, say, four years. This will be specially relevant to the people who came – surveyors, contractors, maybe people from the planning authority – who looked at the place in connection with your application to build an underground room.’

  ‘I can do that,’ Rokeby said, ‘providing you allow that I can’t remember every name.’

  ‘Just do your best.’

  Wexford caught Ede’s eye and Ede gave an infinitesimal nod. ‘Are you aware, Mr Rokeby, that there’s a staircase in the cellar part of the underground area?’

  Rokeby shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen it. I’ve been told there is.’

  ‘There is. And because these stairs mount upwards towards the ground floor, there must have been a door at the top. This door would have been at the end of the hallway, probably next to the kitchen door. It’s not there now. The doorway has been filled in, bricked up and plastered over. Do you know anything about this?’

  ‘There was no door there when I bought the place.’

  Rokeby compressed his lips and looked away, plainly indicating his intention to say no more about the staircase or the missing door. But he promised to list the people who had surveyed the place or simply looked at it four years before. There was also the building firm which had converted the largest bedroom into two smaller bedrooms eight years before.

  Once the door closed after him, Ede heaved a sigh and said, ‘Liphook is going to be a hard nut to crack.’

  ‘The Internet?’ Wexford was on shaky ground here. He never quite knew what the Internet or a search engine could or could not do.

  ‘We have the name Keith or Kenneth Hill. Whatever the nephew called himself we’re pretty s
ure the owner of the Edsel was called Ken or Kenneth, possibly Hill, possibly Gray. If this uncle character had the Edsel with him it would help. According to the young man who tried to sell the Edsel, his Uncle Ken or Kenneth went to live in Liphook twelve years ago. We don’t have the name of a street in Liphook, we don’t even have the man’s name, only probabilities. You’ve not found the car, I suppose?’

  Wexford told him. ‘The Edsel is in Balham, in a garage, being looked after by an Edsel fanatic called Mick Bestwood. It’s been so thoroughly cleaned and polished you could eat your dinner off the bonnet.’

  The laugh which greeted this was typical of Tom who (as he put it himself) always gave honour where honour was due. ‘Excellent. Well done. We’ll have Forensics go over it just the same. You know they say it’s impossible to eradicate all that sort of evidence. There’ll be something. We’ve started inquiring at service stations in Liphook, at car parks and at motor repair shops. There aren’t too many of those – Liphook’s not very big. But all that’s pointless now.’ He repeated, ‘You’ve done well, Reg.’

  ‘Still, he may be living in Liphook.’ Tom had evidently forgotten Wexford’s home was in Kingsmarkham, not many miles from Liphook. ‘It’s not much more than a big village.’

  ‘The woman who wrote Lark Rise to Candleford used to live there,’ Tom said. ‘Flora Thompson. I saw about it on television when they did the serial.’ He went off into one of his digressions, speculating as to whether Candleford was Liphook and ending with a mini-biography of the author.

  Wexford waited patiently before asking if the inquiries in Liphook had had any results.

  Tom shrugged. ‘Maybe Kenneth Hill used to live there, but if he did he didn’t make much of a mark. Lucy Blanch and DC Garrison have talked to a good many of the residents and no one remembers Hill.’

  ‘Medical centres?’ Wexford queried. ‘What we used to call doctors’ surgeries? Hotels? Pubs.’

  ‘Lucy’s tried all those and there’s nothing. The fact that he’s not there is no evidence for us, it’s another negative. I’m inclined to believe he never lived there. It looks to me as if it’s just something the young man said to your Miracle Motors people because he thought that would be an excuse for the uncle not coming in with the Edsel himself. Liphook was probably the first name that came into his head. He knew someone there or he’d seen the name written down.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right.’

  ‘Mildred Jones is home from South Africa,’ said Tom. ‘We’ll go and see her. She’s our only source for the name Keith Hill. Let’s hope she has total recall for a conversation she says she had with him twelve years ago.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SHE LIVED IN one of the garden flats in the block in Orcadia Mews. Her front door was directly opposite the door in the rear wall of the Orcadia Cottage paved yard. Three of the front doors were painted black but Mildred Jones’s was fuchsia pink. A Virginia creeper, now in new leaf, rambled over the brickwork of the flats, completely concealing some of it, and Wexford thought of the same climber which had figured in Simon Alpheton’s painting and had been cut down by Rokeby. For some reason, he wondered if the climber had any significance in this case, but he was at a loss to think what it could possibly have.

  Tom had forgotten to put his tie on or had deliberately left it off, but fished it out of his pocket and was putting it on as the front door was opened by a short but rather heavy woman in a green trouser suit. She gave Tom and his tie a glance of distaste. She was one of those people whose heads seem too big for their bodies, their features handsome enough but almost overpowering. The heavy gold jewellery she wore seemed to weigh down her neck. Her hair was grey, styled to look like as if sculpted from metal or stone, her face thickly made-up, the eyebrows shaped with excessive care.

  The room she led them into was small, stuffed with chintz-covered furniture, the French window hung with over-ornate brocade curtains, braided, pleated, fringed, its pelmet adorned at its sides with bunches of tassels. But the garden visible outside was like a rectangle cut out of a hayfield.

  ‘I told you on the phone that we spoke to him,’ Mildred Jones said. ‘He said his name was Keith Hill. I told you that too.’

  Wexford said, ‘He didn’t mention his address?’

  ‘No. Why would he? You don’t say to someone you’ve just met, “My name’s Keith Hill and I live at number something or other, do you?”’

  Neither policeman answered her. ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Young, about twenty. Very good-looking if you like the sulky type. Tall, dark. He was obviously one of Harriet’s.’

  ‘One of Harriet’s what?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Boyfriends, bits on the side. Oh, I knew all about it. She had a lot of young fellows visit her, plumbers, electricians, blokes she’d send for to do jobs for her while Franklin was out. They did the jobs all right.’

  Tom’s face set into lines of disapproval and he curled up his mouth in distaste. He reminded Wexford of a portrait he had once seen of John Knox at his most censorious. Suppressing the signs of amusement, he said, ‘You said we spoke to him, this Keith Hill. Who were “we”?’

  ‘Oh, me and my then husband. Didn’t I say?’

  Wexford hardly liked to ask if the man had died. He had no need to.

  ‘We split up a couple of years ago and got divorced.’ Mildred Jones uttered a sound halfway between a chuckle and a snort. ‘It was just after that girl Vlad burnt his shirt. Not that it was because of that or the girl. He had an eye for the girls but he never fancied those skinny blondes.’

  ‘Vlad?’

  ‘The cleaner. Her name was Vladlena, only I called her Vlad the Impaler. “Burner” would have been more like.’

  Tom was anxious to get her back to the subject.

  ‘Would you tell us everything you remember about Keith Hill? Exactly what he said when you and your ex-husband talked to him?’

  ‘Well, the first time I just said good evening or hello or something and he just said good evening. I was out for a walk with my little dog. I had a dog then but he died. The second time I was in my friend’s car and I saw him and I waved but he didn’t wave back. The next time I was coming back in the car with Colin – my ex, I mean – and this Keith Hill was in the mews but without his car that time and I thought he looked shifty – well, as if he’d been up to no good. I said, “You again” or “We meet again” or something, and he said, “Yes” or “Right”. He said his car was in for a service. Those leaves were lying all over the place and getting wet and I said to him how someone I knew had slipped on them and broken her leg. I thought I’d let him know I knew what he was up to with a woman three times his age and I asked him how Harriet was. He said she was fine and I said, tell her Mildred said hello or give her my love or something.

  ‘We went indoors after that and watched him from my front window. I don’t know what he was doing. I went out again then, carrying my rubbish bag for the council to collect in the morning. After I was back in the house again I saw him go through the door in the wall into the backyard of Harriet’s house. I said to Colin, he knew it like he lived there, like he owned the place.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Jones. That’s very helpful. Can you remember how he was dressed?’

  ‘Like they all do. The young, I mean. One of those zipper jackets, jeans of course, a black T-shirt, I think. He had that car, but he wasn’t very confident driving it. I thought he was going to scrape it against the wall out there. He was nervous and not just about the car.’

  ‘And he went through the door in the wall into the backyard of Orcadia Cottage?’

  ‘I’ve told you he did.’

  ‘Mrs Jones,’ Wexford said, ‘does the name Francine mean anything to you? And what is La Punaise?’

  He expected an answer of sorts to his first question, only perhaps to say that she had heard the name but couldn’t remember where. What he didn’t anticipate was a full and highly informative answer to his second inquiry.

&nb
sp; ‘I can tell you what La Punaise is.’ She began to laugh reminiscently. ‘Harriet told me. Well, she showed me. It was a way of remembering her pin number. Seemingly, la punaise is French for a pin. She’d got a lot of restaurants written down in her address book. Her and Franklin, they ate out all the time. So she wrote La Punaise in the book like it was a restaurant and wrote a phone number underneath, only it wasn’t a phone number, it was a London exchange followed by the four digits of her pin. Oh, she thought herself very clever, I can tell you.’

  So the boy, Keith Hill or whatever he was called, had had access to Harriet Merton’s address book and had also been clever enough to decipher her purpose in storing her pin number by this means. He had been in the house, must have had intimate knowledge of the house. Her pin number he would have wanted for illicit purposes, to say the least. Why had he written it down on that paper under the name Francine? Because Francine was French and could translate the name for him?

  ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Jones,’ he said.

  Tom asked, ‘Did you ever go into – er, Harriet’s house? Orcadia Cottage, that is?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ said Mildred Jones. ‘How d’you think I got to see her address book? She was bored stiff, nothing to do if one of her young chaps hadn’t come round. Sometimes she’d ask me in for a drink. It’d be lunchtime and I’d go, but I’m not much of a drinker especially at midday.’

  Wexford asked her, ‘What was the house like inside?’