by Ruth Rendell
‘Have you got a dinner service, sir?’ Lucy asked when they were heading for West Hampstead.
‘I don’t know. I expect we had one once. Certainly not the eighteen-piece kind.’
‘I shall never have one,’ said Lucy. ‘I shall never have anything you can’t put in a machine to wash it.’
Wexford laughed. It was Wednesday, a good day to start phoning up builders, well before they all started knocking off for the weekend. How many of those who came to size up the potentials of Orcadia Cottage, he wondered, had opened that manhole and looked inside. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people who had done that would have told Rokeby and then told the police. But one would not. One would have made use of what he had found.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SUBEARTH STRUCTURES OPERATED out of a Victorian house in the backwoods of Kilburn, round which lean-tos and sheds clustered. The house, when first built, must have been extensively encrusted with mouldings of fruit and flowers and leaves above its front door and all its windows. Most of this decoration had by now cracked or crumbled or fallen off and an attempt had been made to smarten up its appearance by painting the entire façade with a thick matt white paint. Recalling his ice-cream metaphor when he saw the houses of The Boltons, Wexford thought this place was like an ice that had half-melted.
As in all builders’ yards, piles of sand, shingle, bricks and tiles cluttered the place and a concrete mixer ground away monotonously. Lucy had already spoken on the phone to Brian George and it was he who came out of one of the sheds to meet them. Invited to come inside, she and Wexford followed him into the ice-cream house and into a kind of sitting room. Its walls were painted a bright turquoise. A cheap red hair-cord covered the floor and the chairs were upholstered in brown plastic. If this was where he brought potential clients, Wexford thought, it was a wonder any of them continued with their purpose of installing an underground room. On the turquoise wall hung framed photographs of various breeds of dog as might be in a vet’s waiting room.
‘Now I wasn’t actually working here when Mr Rokeby asked us to make a survey.’ Brian George said this as if he might have been half-working there or working perhaps, Wexford thought, only in spirit. ‘You’ll want to talk to someone who actually was working here.’ George nodded as if to confirm this careful assessment of the situation. ‘I think Kev would be your best bet, that is Kev Oswin. Kev actually went to Arcadia Cottage – funny name, that, isn’t it? Cottage, I mean. I’d call it a big house myself. But as I say, Kev went to Arcadia Cottage to size up the situation and your best bet would actually be to have a word with him. If you’ll excuse me I’ll go and root him out.’
Once he was out of the room, Wexford said to Lucy, ‘Was he like that on the phone?’
‘Exactly like that.’
She picked up a trade journal from a coffee table and Wexford retired into his thoughts. He had had a long talk on the phone with Dora the previous evening and an even longer one with Burden. Jason Wardle was still somewhere at large. Calls to all his known relatives and friends had achieved nothing. He might be abroad. He had had days in which to leave the country by air, or more probably, because simpler, by Eurostar. Sylvia’s car had not yet been found.
‘His parents seem to know no more as to his whereabouts than we do,’ Burden had said. ‘They’re rather old to be the parents of a twenty-one year old. James Wardle must be getting on for seventy. He’s been retired for years and they live in rather an isolated place on the outskirts of Stringfield. They claim not to have seen him for a month. Unless they’re very good liars, they genuinely don’t know where he’s been living in that time and they knew nothing about Sylvia. As far as they knew – this is what they say – he had a girlfriend he met at the University of Myringham that he later dropped out of. They had the girl’s name and we’ve seen her, but I’m as certain as can be in these circumstances that she hasn’t seen him for several months and has no idea where he is.’
Dora had more to say about Sylvia herself than the hunt for her assailant. ‘She seems pretty well, Reg. I’ve borrowed Mary’s car and I take her back to the hospital every day to have the wound dressed, but tomorrow will be the last time. Ben’s gone back to school for the last week till the end of term but Robin’s with her. She seems to like my being there and that’s maybe because I haven’t said a word about her having a – well, a love affair with a boy young enough to be her son. I’ve wanted to but I haven’t. I thought of you and what you’d want and I didn’t say a word.’
‘Thank you for that, darling,’ he had said and was pulled out of his reverie by Lucy saying, ‘What’s happened to him? We’ve been here ten minutes.’
‘Wait a bit longer,’ Wexford said, ‘and if he hasn’t come by a quarter past we’ll go after him.’
At fourteen minutes past Brian George came back with a very short very fat man he introduced as Kevin Oswin. Oswin was as taciturn as his employer was verbose. When Wexford asked him if he had gone to Orcadia Cottage to look over the place with a view to making an underground room, he returned a single ‘yes’.
‘And how did you set about doing that?’ Lucy asked.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Did you walk round the place, take measurements, look in the cellar?’
‘There wasn’t a cellar.’
‘The coal hole then – did you look in the coal hole?’
Oswin was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘No.’
‘Mr Oswin,’ said Wexford, ‘could you be a little more explicit?’
Oswin stared, perhaps unaware of the meaning of the word.
‘Say a bit more about it, I mean.’
‘There’s nothing to say, but if that’s what you want, OK.’ Oswin suddenly became voluble, but speaking slowly as if to people who understood English only with difficulty. ‘I said to him, Mr Rokeby, that is, that the whole front garden would have to be dug up. Right? Excavated.’ He rolled his mouth round the word. ‘All the trees have to go, the hedge, the lot, them pillars with the birds on.’ The pause was longer this time, ending in a sigh. ‘He said, what about the back, and we went out the back and I said to my bruv I said that it wasn’t on.’ So much talk appeared to have exhausted Oswin and he closed his eyes.
‘Your bruv? You had your brother with you?’
‘Yeah, my bruv Trevor.’ He added importantly. ‘Trev’s like self-employed, got a car-hire company, but he’s about here somewhere. He come with me to look at the place, but he stayed outside to have a fag. Terrible heavy smoker is Trev. I went inside with Mr Rokeby and had a look round for what that was worth.’
‘Why wasn’t it a practical proposition?’
‘It’d have meant excavating under the roadway at the back and that wouldn’t be allowed. Westminster Council wouldn’t have that. Wouldn’t be allowed. Got that? Not allowed.’
‘But you didn’t look into the coal hole?’
‘Never knew there was a bloody coal hole till I saw it on the telly. Right?’
It must have been Trevor that Wexford caught a glimpse of as they were leaving Subearth’s premises, an equally fat if slightly taller man than his brother, standing by the concrete mixer smoking a cigarette. He wore a suit and tie and appeared to be paying no more than a social visit. ‘Who do we see next?’ he asked Lucy.
‘Groundhog and Co. have gone out of business, sir. The recession’s been too much for them. Perhaps we ought to talk to the boss sometime, but don’t you think we could see those that are still operating first?’
‘All right, then.’ Wexford was looking at Lucy’s list. ‘How about K, K and L ? They’re in Hendon and that’s not far away, is it?’
Not a builders’ yard this time but a shop in one of those parades that break the monotonous rows of semi-detached houses on arterial roads. In this one was the usual sequence, newsagent, hairdresser, building society, dry cleaner, but instead of the bathroom shop, K, K and L, Below Surface Home Extensions. A rather gloomy-looking young woman in a black trouser suit showed signs
of being more helpful than Brian George and Kevin Oswin.
‘Our Mr Keyworth was down to do the survey,’ she said without looking anything up or having recourse to the desktop on the counter. ‘He was due to go over there in August twenty-o-six and he was just leaving in the taxi when Mr Rokeby phoned and said not to come because the planning people refused his application. There’d been a lot of opposition from the neighbours.’
‘And you are?’ Lucy asked.
‘I’m Ms Fortescue.’ Wexford thought her reply quaint for present day usage. Perhaps she read his mind for she added, ‘Louise Fortescue.’
‘Why a taxi? Doesn’t Mr Keyworth drive?’
‘He’d lost his licence.’ She added vindictively, ‘Driving massively over the limit.’ As if she still needed to assert Keyworth’s superior status: ‘It wasn’t a black cab. His next-door neighbour’s got a car-hire company. They only drive Mercedes.’
‘Well, Ms Fortescue, would you mind telling us how you happen to have such a precise memory of something that happened – what? Three years ago?’
‘Three years, yes. That’s easy. Me and Damian – Mr Keyworth that is – we were engaged. I remember everything about that week because we were planning our wedding. I’d even moved in with him to his new home in West Hampstead – he’d only been there a bit over a year – and the day after he was due to go to Orcadia Cottage I broke it off. The way he behaved I couldn’t do otherwise. I moved out that night. Luckily I’d kept my flat. She turned her face away. ‘It was me broke it off, but I’ve never got over it.’ Her voice broke a little. ‘I’m sorry.’
Meeting each other’s eyes as they walked to the car, Wexford and Lucy just overcame the desire to laugh. ‘I was engaged once,’ said Wexford.
‘So was I.’
‘I didn’t marry her. She married someone else and so did I.’
‘And I didn’t marry at all. Poor Miss Fortescue, she’s taken it very hard. What exactly are we looking for, sir?’
‘I wish you’d call me Reg.’
‘I’ll try,’ said Lucy, ‘but it will be difficult. What are we looking for?’
Wexford got into the passenger seat. ‘Well, someone like Ms Fortescue. Someone who knew about the set-up at Orcadia Cottage because she or he had been told about it.’
Lucy turned into the Finchley Road. ‘You mean that the theory is that one of these people who made a survey knew about the coal hole and possibly the cellar, but isn’t going to say so? They discovered it at the time and either went back when they knew no one would be at home or else told someone else about it.’
‘Something like that. We still have J. Peterson and Son to see, and Underland Constructions.’
‘They know we’re coming.’
J. Peterson had a small office over a hardware shop in North Finchley. The room was tiny, no bigger than the average suburban bathroom. It contained nothing but a desk, two chairs and the ubiquitous laptop. No pictures were on the walls, no maps, no posters, no curtain or even a blind was at the narrow sash window. The atomosphere wasn’t far off that of a prison cell.
‘We do most of our business online,’ said a harassed-looking man who gave no sign that he had expected them. ‘The client gets on to our website and books an appointment and we contract out to a building firm.’
‘You keep a record of that?’
‘The builders have an architect who would do a sort of design and if the client likes it and accepts the estimate it’ll go ahead. We’ll have a record on the computer if this client – what’s he called? Rokeby? – if he accepted the estimate.’
‘He didn’t,’ said Lucy.
‘Then I can’t help you.’ The man sounded pleased.
Underland Constructions might have answered Lucy’s call and agreed to see her and Wexford, but only one man appeared to be in charge of the big sprawling builders’ yard in Willesden. The place looked as if it were being dismantled. Two of the sheds were empty. The office with ‘Reception’ over the door had no one behind the counter.
‘We’re shutting up shop,’ the man said. ‘Been struggling for the past year but in the end it’s been too much for us. I don’t suppose I can help you. What was it you were wanting?’
Lucy told him.
‘You don’t want us. You want our architects. They did all our designs for us. Not any more, of course, but they’re still in business. Doing all right, as far as I know.’
He went into the office and came out again with a much-thumbed card. Lucy read what was on it aloud to Wexford when they were back in the car. ‘Chilvers Clary, Architects, and then there’s a string of degrees or whatever after Robyn Chilvers and Owen Clary. They have an office in the Finchley Road. Shall we go straight there?’
‘Pity it’s such a long time ago,’ Wexford said. ‘I doubt if Robyn Chilvers will have had her engagement broken on the relevant day. Still, even if they’d forgotten about it and haven’t kept records, reading all this Orcadia Cottage stuff in the papers will perhaps have jogged their memories.’
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘All the time, though, we come up against this stumbling block. In order to do a survey or make a design, whoever he is would have had to examine the coal hole, probably go down into it. And if he or she did and was honest they would have seen what was in there and gone to the police. And if they’re not honest and did see what was in there they didn’t go to the police and they’re not going to tell us now.’
Some years before Wexford had got out of a tube train at Finchley Road Station and walked up the hill towards West End Lane. Investigation of a Kingsmarkham murder with London connections had brought him there and he had thought the Finchley Road rather a pleasant place to shop and perhaps to live in. It had gone downhill very badly since then. A huge shopping mall, already dilapidated, had spoiled the western side of the street, while opposite shops and restaurants had closed, their windows boarded up. Chilvers Clary was still there and so were a massage parlour and a betting shop. The massage parlour was called Elfland and in its window were photographs of very pretty young women dressed as fairies with feathery wings and holding bows and arrows. It looked respectable and rather dull.
Those adjectives might also have been applied to Chilvers Clary, Architects. It also appeared less than promising. But for Wexford and Lucy a small breakthrough was coming. It was very small, but it let in a chink of light. Lucy said afterwards that she could have hugged Owen Clary, not a very unlikely impulse, Wexford thought, for Clary was a very handsome man, about thirty-eight with olive skin, black hair and classical features, dressed in an immaculate dark grey suit.
‘My partner is out on a job,’ he said. ‘Incidentally, Robyn is also my wife. But I don’t think she could help you, whereas I can. Well, up to a point. All this newspaper coverage has brought it back to me. I well remember going to Orcadia Cottage in summer 2005 it would have been. I went on my own the first time and the second time with the chap from Underland. Mr Rokeby let us in, but then he and his wife had to go out. I didn’t know but I guessed there was some sort of cellar under the house and it seemed to me that this would be halfway to the underground room Mr Rokeby wanted. Of course I didn’t know then that the planning authority would turn down his application.
‘The Underland chap and I shifted this great tub of plants off the manhole cover in the patio. That was the first we knew of it that there was a manhole cover. Now that was all I wanted to know, that there was a cavity underneath the patio, I wasn’t bothered about going down there or even looking down there at that juncture. In fact, to be honest with you, I was rather dressed up and I didn’t fancy going down into what I knew would be a filthy hole.
‘I asked the Underland chap if he had a pair of steps or a ladder with him in his van and he said he had. “Go down there and take a look if you fancy it,” I said to him and I went back into the house to see if there was a way down from inside into that cavity.’
‘You remember all this very clearly, Mr Clary,’ said Lucy.
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br /> ‘I’ve a good memory. Anyway, as I say, a lot came back to me when I saw the pictures of Orcadia Cottage on television. Do you want to hear the rest?’
‘If you please,’ said Wexford.
‘I thought there might be a trapdoor in the kitchen floor or in the hallway, but there wasn’t. It seemed to be quite strange that there could be a coal hole in the back for solid fuel to be shot down and no way of getting it up from the inside. I was quite a long while inside there feeling around, tapping the walls and so on, but eventually I went back outside. I thought that if we go ahead with this – I wasn’t going to take any further steps until Rokeby had got his planning permission – I’ll find out from him the answer to this riddle.
‘The Underland chap was outside, sitting on a garden seat on the patio. He’d put the tub back himself on the manhole cover. He’d gone down there, he said, he’d had a look, but there was just a big sort of coal storage space. I said to him I was doing no more until Rokeby had heard about his planning permission and he agreed with me and we left.’
Lucy said quietly, ‘How did he look, Mr Clary?’
‘What do you mean, how did he look?’
‘Was he just the same as before you went into the house?’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘Can you give us his name?’ Wexford asked.
‘I don’t think I ever knew it,’ Clary said. ‘I called him Rod.’
‘We may want to see you again,’ said Lucy and she made this routine undertaking sound rather menacing. A threat rather than a promise. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ she said to Wexford on the Finchley Road pavement.
He laughed. ‘I know what you mean, but I couldn’t say I don’t believe a word of it. I believe he went there and I believe they jointly shifted the manhole cover. And it’s not incredible that Clary didn’t want to get his nice elegant suit dirty. But that “Rod” went down that hole without finding those bodies or showing any sign that he had had sight of the most revolting and macabre sight he had ever had – that I don’t believe. That he came up again and walked out on to the patio and waited for Clary to come out, that I don’t believe either. Wouldn’t he, however tough he was, have run into the house and shouted out about what he had found? Wouldn’t he maybe have thrown up? At any rate, it would have shaken him to the core. But it didn’t, or Clary says it didn’t.’
