The Vault

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I don’t think anything you might say to her would frighten her, but I’ll speak to Sylvia first.’

  A nurse put her head round the door and said Sylvia was asking to see her sons again. ‘Five minutes,’ said the nurse, ‘and then you can all go home and come back later.’

  As soon as he was at home Wexford called Tom Ede.

  He hadn’t explained about Sylvia but now he did, keeping it short because he knew that few people care to hear much about others’ troubles. But Tom was sympathetic, asking questions, apparently delighted to hear that Wexford’s daughter was going to be all right, angry and quite aggressive about the violence that had been done to her. He said and said it devoutly, ‘Thank God.’

  Wexford remembered how he had said ‘heaven’ rather than done what they called ‘taking the name of the Lord in vain’. He was almost shocked when Tom said, ‘I said a prayer for her – well, several prayers actually.’

  A rather awkward ‘Thanks’ was all Wexford could respond to that.

  ‘I don’t suppose you want to know about the bit of progress we’ve made. You’ve got enough on your plate.’

  Another cliché, but Wexford didn’t care. He felt quite affectionate towards Tom and the hackneyed phrase was endearing. ‘I’d very much like to hear,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we’ve identified the older woman as Harriet Merton. Her dental records showed up in California, a very prestigious and expensive dentist. Apparently, she had all those implants, crowns and bridges done there. Must have cost old Franklin a packet.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Wexford thought briefly of the red-headed girl in the red dress against the background of bright green leaves in Simon Alpheton’s painting, and then he thought of the bundle of grey bones shrunken in designer clothes, its hair dyed crimson. ‘Anything more about the two men?’

  ‘We’ve shown Mildred Jones the clothes the young man’s body was dressed in. She was a bit squeamish about them. She should have seen them before we had them cleaned up. The result wasn’t exactly conclusive and that’s not surprising. She just kept saying that they might have been his, but she couldn’t say for sure. A shabby black T-shirt is a shabby black T-shirt. Half the youth in London wears dark blue or black zipper jackets, and jeans are just jeans. His were the kind you’d buy off a street-market stall, brand name Zugu, of which thousands were sold twelve years ago, but to track each one down is obviously impossible. Stallholders don’t ask their customers for their names and addresses.’

  ‘So we’ve got a Kenneth or Keith Gray or Bray,’ said Wexford, ‘and his young cousin, but not his nephew, possibly called Keith something but possibly Keith Hill.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘OK, if you say so. At least we know for sure that the woman was Harriet Merton. And we know that the young man we have to call Keith Hill for lack of anything else to call him, we know he had been inside the house and had access to Harriet’s address book. He wrote down her pin number, disguising it from whoever might see it by labelling it as Harriet herself had labelled it, with a name that sounds to the uninitiated like a restaurant. La Punaise.’

  ‘But why would he do that, Tom? That piece of paper was surely for himself, simply to remind him of the number. He must have had her credit card and have used it or planned to use it to milk her account or even empty it. But why write La Punaise? The only reason I can think of was because he didn’t know what it meant and intended to ask for a translation from someone who would know. Francine, whoever she is or was?’

  Tom said he would get his team searching online electoral registers for someone with the first name Francine. He sounded far from hopeful. There might be thousands. But he’d leave no stone unturned. ‘How old do you reckon she was?’

  ‘If she was his girlfriend, late teens or early twenties. But she might be his French teacher or his French-speaking aunt or the lady next door …’

  Tom groaned. ‘Forensics have been looking over the Edsel, but we’ve got no answers yet. Let me know when you’re coming back to London,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to chase you up. Hope your daughter gets better soon.’

  Wexford thought Tom might say he would carry on praying for Sylvia, but he didn’t.

  There was an uneasiness in Burden’s manner that Wexford spotted at once. Never effusive, seldom demonstrative, Burden surprised his friend by shaking his hand, something which hadn’t happened for more years than he cared to remember. And he kissed Dora, a further departure from the norm.

  Another day had gone by, and then another, and the detective superintendent had twice talked to Sylvia, allowed by the ward sister to remain with her only for half an hour at a time. Sylvia was now out of intensive care and her parents had sat with her for most of the afternoon, leaving for home just before Burden arrived at Sylvia’s bedside. Now he sat in their living room, nursing with fidgeting hands a small orange juice, having refused all alcohol offers.

  Wexford, drinking red wine, said, ‘There’s something wrong, Mike, what is it? The hospital haven’t told you something they’re keeping from us?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that.’

  ‘But you’ve talked to Sylvia about what happened?’ This was Dora, braver than Wexford. ‘Are you able to tell us what she told you? If it wouldn’t be right …’

  ‘No, of course it’s right.’ Burden set down his glass, picked it up again, apologised for the wet ring it made on the table surface. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll get a cloth …’

  ‘Mike,’ said Wexford, ‘what is it?’

  ‘All right. It’s just that you’re her parents and I just think it would be better if you didn’t know, yet I know you have to know.’ Burden rubbed at the wet ring with his finger, avoided the parents’ eyes. ‘But I’m making it worse. I’ll tell you straight. It’s better that way. The man who stabbed her was known to her. More than that, he’d been – well, her lover. He wasn’t hiding in the bushes, he was in the car with her and Mary and they had a row and …’

  ‘Mike, begin at the beginning, will you?’ Wexford made a dismissive gesture with his hands, the kind of movement that means, it doesn’t matter, just tell us. So long as she’s all right, nothing like that matters. ‘Just tell us. We can take anything now we know she’ll be all right.’

  ‘Well, OK,’ Burden’s tense shoulders relaxed and he very nearly smiled. ‘The story I told you at first I got from Mary Beaumont and she was very discreet but she probably knew little of the true facts. I sat by Sylvia’s bed and asked her to tell me exactly what happened when she got home to Great Thatto. She said, “I’d better start before that, Mike. The guy who stabbed me is called Jason Wardle. He’s twenty-one and I’ve been having a relationship with him.” Then she corrected herself. “I think a ‘fling’ might be a better word.”’ Burden paused briefly because Dora had made a sound, a wordless whimper of distress. ‘I’ll go on. She told me he lived in Stringfield. They’d met and had coffee in Kingsmarkham, the purpose of the meeting was to break things off and when she’d done that she was going to pick Mary up from her nursery school. But Wardle wasn’t having any. He said he’d kill her first, but of course she didn’t believe him. They never do. Oh, God, I’m sorry, Dora. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mike. That’s nothing to what you’re telling us.’

  ‘Twenty-one, you said?’ Wexford found it hard to bring the words out, but he had to know. Young enough to be Sylvia’s son. Just.

  ‘So she said. He got into her car and they set off. Mary had apparently met him before and wasn’t fazed by his being with them, but Sylvia was anxious that the row shouldn’t continue in her presence and refused to answer his accusations but tried to talk only to Mary. He constantly interrupted them and began shouting and when Sylvia was passing Mary Beaumont’s house she stopped the car and told Mary to go in there and she would come for her very soon. She watched Mary being let in by Mary and then …’

  ‘So all that about Mary running
away when her mother was hurt, that wasn’t true?’

  ‘Apparently not, Dora. That was the discreet version Mary Beaumont gave me – maybe she believed it herself. Sylvia said to Wardle that she would drive him to Stringfield – where he lives with his parents – but Wardle wasn’t having any. She drove up into the Old Rectory drive and stopped the car and they started to argue. Well, Wardle said he loved her and wanted to marry her. Apparently, he said he knew what all this was about. It was because Sylvia wanted him to marry her and she was breaking it off because he hadn’t proposed. He was proposing to her now. She started laughing. She said she didn’t want to be married and if she did he’d be the last man on earth. She got out of the car and stood there, laughing. He screamed at her and pulled the knife – ironically, it was one of her own kitchen knives.’

  ‘So he had been planning it?’ Wexford shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose he carries a carving knife about with him on the chance he may need to use it?’

  ‘I think they had had a row the evening before and he took the knife then. Sylvia had the day all this happened off work and he spent the morning with her.’ Burden paused, shaking his head. ‘There’s a lot to come out yet, Reg. A lot we don’t know and will have to know. Where is he, for instance? He’s not with his parents. They haven’t seen him for days. Incidentally, they knew nothing about his relationship with Sylvia.’

  ‘Come to that,’ said Wexford, ‘nor did we.’

  ‘We’ve put out a nationwide call for him. And, of course, for Sylvia’s car. We’ve checked on various friends and relatives, but so far there’s been nothing. We’ll find him, of course, but it’ll take time.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MARY, AS DORA put it, seemed untouched by her ordeal. ‘What ordeal?’ Wexford said, his picture of the terrified child negated by the facts. ‘She wasn’t there when Sylvia was stabbed. She was having a happy time with her godmother. You’re imagining things.’

  They had been back in London for twenty-four hours. Mary had chattered all the way and was now in Sheila’s nursery – Wexford remarked to Dora that he couldn’t remember ever previously having encountered the possessor of a nursery – with Sheila’s nanny, Amy, Anoushka and Bettina the cat. He had chickened out of Dora’s plans to take all the children to a matinee of The Lion King and was waiting to be picked up and driven to police headquarters in Cricklewood.

  True to her undertaking, Dora had asked Sylvia’s permission to take Mary with them to London, and had asked it in her habitual kind and loving tone. It was only Wexford who could hear the underlying note which said, ‘Oh, Sylvia, how could you? Are you lost to all morality and decency?’ But it was only thought, not said. Would it ever be said?

  Naturally, the first remark Tom Ede made to him was to ask about Sylvia, and he seemed delighted when Wexford said she was recovering and would be out of hospital in two days’ time. Nothing was said about prayers and Tom quickly reverted to the Orcadia Cottage case.

  ‘I’d like to ask you,’ he began, ‘how important you think the name “Francine” is. I mean, do we need to try and trace every Francine in the country? The trouble with that is that so many people who were young twelve years ago have left the country, just as others have come in. If she exists – and we don’t know that she does or ever did – she may be anywhere.’

  ‘Perhaps we have to ask ourselves why he would write the name Francine on a piece of paper on which “La Punaise” and what is almost certainly a pin number were already written. Because this woman with a French-sounding name could translate for him what was obviously a French word? It looks like it. So she must have been someone close to him. You don’t ask a casual acquaintance or a person much older than you to translate something which obviously has a criminal connection.’

  ‘He might have just asked her to translate “La Punaise” and not mentioned the number.’

  ‘True. But wouldn’t the meaning suggest a pin number to her? At least wouldn’t she question him?’

  ‘I don’t know, Reg. Maybe she did question him. Can we construct some sort of scenario out of what we do know?’

  ‘The way I see it, the young man who called himself Keith Hill somehow got into Orcadia Cottage and perhaps even lived there with a French girl called Francine. He found the address book with the pin number and “La Punaise” made to look like a restaurant, intending to use it to rob Harriet Merton’s account.’

  ‘If he was living there, where were Franklin Merton and Harriet? They can’t have been there, because it must have been at this time that the pseudonymous Keith Hill removed the door to the cellar, bricked up the doorway and plastered over it. Incidentally, why would he do that?’

  ‘It has to be because he’d killed Harriet and maybe that cousin of his or whoever it was and was sealing them up in a tomb.’

  ‘But he was in there, too,’ Tom objected.

  ‘I know there are holes in my scenario. I think we have to see Anthea Gardner again, see if we can find out where Franklin Merton may have been at that time, whenever that time was, and maybe see Mildred Jones first to try and settle this time question. So far all we know is that it was about twelve years ago.’

  Mildred Jones was in a better frame of mind than when last seen. Some women are very much affected, Wexford thought, by whether they think they are looking good or are dissatisfied with their appearance or are having, for instance, a ‘bad hair day’, while men are influenced by the state of their car – he thought of that Edsel – or a bad back or a cold coming on. Mildred Jones’s hair had evidently just been done and silver streaks put among the iron grey. The red dress she wore suited her better than the trouser suit, which dwarfed her. Wexford supposed she was aware of these things, a feeling confirmed when she glanced with satisfaction into a mirror on their way to the chintzy living room.

  ‘You want me to tell you when I saw the so-called Mr Hill and his fancy car, do you? I’ll have to think.’ She was silent for a moment. Then she said. ‘When I try to remember when something or other happened I have to try and think of the weather. I mean, if it was summer or winter and raining or whatever.’

  Tom was nodding encouragingly.

  ‘It’s no good nodding at me like that.’ A flash of the old acerbity was showing itself. ‘That won’t help me. I’m thinking. Ah,’ she said. ‘I know now. It must have been autumn. The whole place was covered with leaves – no, it wasn’t, not covered. That came a week or two later. The leaves from that Virginia creeper were beginning to fall. It must have been October, sometime in October. Does that help?’

  ‘Very much, Mrs Jones.’

  ‘It rained after that and made a thick wet mat of those leaves. I was glad when Clay – Mr Silverman, that is – cut it down. Ours hadn’t been planted then. Pity it ever was. That was Colin – he liked the colour.’

  She waved to them as they left. Wexford imagined her going back into the house and pausing at the mirror to admire her reflection.

  ‘I don’t suppose Anthea Gardner will have silver streaks,’ he said.

  An unobservant man, Tom looked puzzled. Wexford didn’t explain. Anthea Gardner was expecting them at midday and had coffee ready, the real thing made from beans which she had just ground herself. Tom, who had once told Wexford that he only liked the instant kind, sipped his rather gloomily. Mrs Gardner was dressed almost exactly as she had been on their previous visit, only this time instead of grey her skirt was brown and her blouse spotted instead of striped. Kildare had once more to be restrained and eventually shut in the kitchen.

  ‘You want to know where Franklin was in late October 1997?’

  ‘I know it’s difficult to remember these things from so far back, Mrs Gardner,’ Tom said. ‘Think about it. Take your time.’

  ‘I don’t have to think. It’s not difficult at all. He and I used to go on holiday together long before we started living together again. Harriet and he had been taking separate holidays for years. We were in San Sebastián that year. October it was, the second half of October
.’

  ‘Why do you remember so clearly, Mrs Gardner?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy. I remember because it was on that holiday, on my birthday actually, that we decided we’d live together again. Franklin would leave Harriet and come here to me.’

  ‘And when is your birthday?’

  ‘October twenty-fifth,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘St Crispin’s Day in case you’re interested.

  ‘Franklin went back to Orcadia Cottage,’ she went on. ‘It must have been four or five days after we got back. I told him to. I don’t think he’d have bothered if I hadn’t made him. When he came back he told me what had happened. The house was empty. He said it was very clean and tidy and Harriet wasn’t there. A woman he knew who lived in one of the cottages at the back told him that a man she called Harriet’s “young friend” had been at Orcadia Cottage with her for at least two weeks. This is the kind of thing you want?’

  ‘Exactly the kind of thing we want.’

  ‘It’s all coming back to me now,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘Franklin said he found a pile of cushions on the living-room floor with a scarlet feather boa draped across them. I mean, it was Harriet’s feather boa. He recognised it. He said the door in the wall at the back was unlocked and the key was missing. There was a manhole or drain or something in the patio, but the lid was off it …’

  ‘Just a minute, Mrs Gardner. You said the manhole was open?’

  ‘Well, I suppose so. I wasn’t there. Franklin said the lid was lying near it. The whole place was covered in those leaves which were wet and sort of sticky. He said they were very slippery. He had to walk very carefully not to fall over. Anyway, he managed to lift the cover and put it back on the manhole.’

  ‘Did he ever go back there?’

  ‘Not as far as I remember. He expected to hear from Harriet, asking for money if nothing else, but he never did.’ Anthea Gardner was silent for a moment, looking from Ede to Wexford and then down at her own ringless hands. ‘He didn’t care, you see. Women had cost him enough in the past, me included. He simply hoped he’d never hear from her and that perhaps she’d found a man to support her. The feather boa he saw as a defiant gesture, sort of cocking a snook at him, if you know what I mean.’