by Ruth Rendell
‘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 …
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SO MUCH OF what occurs to us as gospel in the small hours appears absurd in the light of day. That wasn’t true here. Dr Francine Hill, Wexford thought, who is a partner in a medical practice in Crouch End or Muswell Hill. He wasn’t sure which, but he knew he could find it again.
Tom was sceptical. ‘Yes, well, how d’you know it’s not par for the course? Just another Francine. She’ll either say no she’s not, or she’ll be like the last one, wasting our time.’
‘I don’t think so. She’s not just another Francine. She’s Francine Hill.’
‘I suppose it’ll do no harm to phone her.’
‘Will you see her if I can get her to come in?’
‘Well, I will or failing me, Lucy.’
Medical practitioners may not advertise but their names may appear in phone directories. After some searching Wexford found Hill, Dr F., The Group Practice, Hornsey Lane, N8. After he had held on while Eine kleine Nachtmusik played, a receptionist said that Dr Hill took calls only from private patients on this line. She became less curt when Wexford said this was the Metropolitan Police and to ask Dr Hill to call him on this number. It was the first time he had had to say, ‘The name is Wexford’ with his Christian name, but without his rank – the rank he no longer held.
He was sitting in the small office where Tom had put the false Francine and from which she had run away when things became uncomfortable. No doubt Dr Hill had a surgery – did they still call it that? – for much of the morning. It might be lunchtime before she phoned, if she phoned. Would she think this was about some driving offence? It was unlikely she would know it concerned a boyfriend she had or might have had twelve years ago. On the landline in the office, so as not to occupy his cellphone, he called Owen Clary at Chilvers Clary.
Clary was out but the receptionist put him through to Robyn Chilvers.
She greeted him enthusiastically as if he were an old friend whose call she had been waiting for. ‘I’m so glad to hear from you. I’ve lost your number – yes, do give it to me again.’ He did so. ‘Yes, you remember that builder, plumber, whatever he is, you were asking about? Well, by an extraordinary coincidence he rang up, wanted to know if we’d any work for him. Poor chap, he sounded desperate. Of course I took his name and phone number, but I’d lost yours – how stupid can one get?’
‘Had you any work for him, Ms Chilvers?’
‘We’ve barely any for ourselves. I said I’d keep him in mind.’
Wexford wrote down the name Rodney Horndon and a mobile number. ‘Thank you very much. Ms Chilvers, I don’t suppose you know anything about your husband’s visit to Orcadia Cottage? It was in the late summer of 2006. You may not even have been married then.’
She laughed. ‘No, we weren’t. We were together, though. We were engaged, but I broke it off in the spring and we got together again in ’97. But you don’t want to know that.’
Did he? Probably not. But it reminded him of someone else: Damian Keyworth, whose engagement was also broken off at much the same time. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’
The landline receiver was scarcely in its rest when his mobile rang. As soon as he heard his caller, he thought of Cordelia – ‘her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in a woman’.
‘My name is Francine Hill. You left a message for me to call you.’
‘Yes, Dr Hill. I wanted to ask you …’
‘Oh, I know what you want. I’ve been expecting you – I mean the police. I think I ought to have got in touch with you, but I kept asking myself what, in fact, I could tell you. I kept thinking I knew nothing of any importance, but then I don’t really know what is important. Shall I come and see you?’
For a moment he was taken aback. Her willingness! Her enthusiasm! ‘Yes, please. If you would. First tell me, you are the Francine Hill who was at Orcadia Cottage, St John’s Wood, during the late summer or early autumn of 1997?’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, I was.’
‘And with Keith Hill, who drove a big yellow American car?’
> ‘That was my then boyfriend’s car. His name was Teddy Brex.’
He wasn’t going to tell Tom how utterly unlike his conception of Francine – the Francine of the credit-card swindle, of La Punaise – she had sounded. That would be enough to make him doubt and for Wexford there was no doubt. She had agreed – indeed, had offered – to come to the police headquarters in Cricklewood in her free time at four in the afternoon. She would have no more patients until six.
Wexford occupied the time by accompanying Lucy to Rokeby’s flat in Maida Vale. A thin drizzle was falling out of a leaden sky. The flyover looked leaden too, elephantine because of its weight and the heavy uprights which supported it. Someone had chained a bicycle to the railings outside the house where Rokeby’s flat was. Up against the broken steps someone else had parked a pram which looked unfit ever again to transport a baby. Once again, forewarned of their coming, Rokeby was outside his front door.
‘I can’t stop you coming,’ he said, ‘but I’ve nothing more to tell you. I can’t help that. There’s nothing more.’
‘Mr Rokeby,’ Wexford said when they were inside among the fluted columns, ‘people often say what you’ve just said, but the fact often is that they remember more events than they think they do, and those can be awakened if the right questions are asked.’ Wexford glanced around the big room, thinking to himself that no interior can be uglier than that which was designed to be grand and sumptuous but is rendered mean by cheap carpeting and chain-store chairs and tables. ‘Now the right question here my colleague Detective Sergeant Blanch would like to ask you.’
But her first question or inquiry was not that. ‘Do you think we could have a light on, Mr Rokeby? The rain is making it very dark in here.’
A central light, suspended too low down, suddenly blazed, making Wexford blink. ‘Thank you,’ Lucy said. ‘Now Mr Clary – you remember him?’
Rokeby nodded.
‘Mr Clary, the architect of Chilvers Clary, came to see you in the summer of 2006 and a while later he returned, bringing with him a plumber called Rodney Horndon? Is that right?’
