The Vault

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Mrs Gardner, do you know if Harriet had much jewellery?’

  ‘She had lots, all bought for her by Franklin, but it was gone, the valuable stuff was gone, he said, when he went to the house. Most of her clothes were gone, the designer stuff, and the best of her jewellery.’

  Wexford asked her if she would recognise any of the pieces if they were shown to her, but Anthea Gardner shook her head quite violently. ‘I told you, I never met the woman. I know nothing about her jewellery. I know there was a lot of it because Franklin told me he’d spent a fortune on jewellery in the first years of their marriage, but what kind it was and what it looked like I’ve no idea. And I don’t know what was the point of the feather boa.’

  ‘And are you saying he never heard from her again?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying, yes. He never heard from her again.’

  As they were driven away out of the white stucco enclaves of The Boltons, Wexford said generously, for the theory had been his alone, ‘Can we add to our scenario as a result of what we’ve heard?’

  ‘We’ll have to go back in time a bit. We know how Keith Hill happened to have free access to Orcadia Cottage. Franklin Merton was away on holiday in San Sebastian – where is that anyway?’

  ‘Spain.’

  ‘Oh, right. OK. Merton was away on holiday and in his absence Harriet had invited KH to stay. While he was there and maybe she was out somewhere he discovered her pin number, presumably pinched her credit card or one of her credit cards. Suppose, for instance, he had this Francine there and Harriet came back and discovered them together? He kills Harriet …’

  ‘Why?’ Wexford interrupted. ‘Because his elderly girlfriend discovered him with his young girlfriend? Hardly. What could she do? Fornication’s not yet a crime in this country.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tom, looking rather as if he would approve if it were. ‘If you insist. He gets rid of the girl, tries to placate Harriet, but she isn’t having any of it. They fight …’

  ‘What? Physically?’

  ‘Suppose the door to the cellar was open and she fell down the stairs or he pushed her …’

  Suppose, Wexford thought. It was all supposition. It might have happened quite differently. He listened to Tom’s by now elaborate theory with half an ear, while saying to himself, we have to start again, we have to start from scratch and begin from a different angle. But it’s not my case, he thought, it can never be my case. It’s Tom’s, and what I say doesn’t really count. He said it, though, just the same.

  ‘Hardly any attention has been paid to the second woman in the tomb.’ How useful, how tactful, the passive voice could be! This version was so much more becoming than if he had said, ‘We ought to pay attention to the second woman.’

  ‘Because the tomb must have been opened for her body to be put in?’

  ‘I see it this way. That the people who knew the hole and the cellar were there in the first place are the three whose bodies have been there twelve years. Once they were dead and in there no one knew about it with the possible – no, the probable – exception of Franklin Merton. Once Franklin Merton was dead, had died a natural death, no one knew of it. The big plant pot placed on top of the manhole cover effectively sealed it up. If not for ever, more or less permanently. Until someone discovered it was there and saw it as a potential tomb or, rather, as an existing tomb which was like a vault. It had room for more bodies if bodies there were.’

  Tom nodded. ‘All right. What next then?’

  ‘Back to Rokeby,’ said Wexford. ‘He must be the key to identification. It was he who proposed the construction of an underground room. And it has to be that which gave whoever it was ideas. He has yet to list the people who may have come to survey the place – or has he done that?’

  ‘We haven’t heard a word from him. No news yet from forensics on the Edsel either. We’ve still got nothing but conjecture to link the Edsel with the two men’s bodies.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘I WON’T SAY a word,’ said Dora. ‘I shall want to, but I won’t because it would upset you. Not because it would upset her.’

  Wexford smiled. ‘That’s a very good reason.’

  Dora was going back to Kingsmarkham by train, leaving him in London. Her intention was to be in Great Thatto in advance of Sylvia’s return from hospital, and she would have Mary with her after the little girl’s three days of blissful holiday with her cousins. ‘Phone me,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t I always phone you?’

  He laughed. ‘Tell me what she says about that miscreant who stabbed her. She wouldn’t be daft enough to forgive him, would she?’

  ‘I sincerely hope not.’

  He was going to have a long conversation with Martin Rokeby. It was Tom Ede’s suggestion that he should see Rokeby alone or perhaps with Anne, his wife. No policeman, only this policeman’s aide, as Wexford was beginning to call himself. They would talk. Rokeby would say things to him he might not say to Tom.

  A picture of Orcadia Cottage, as it now was or as it had been when Simon Alpheton painted it thirty-six years before, Wexford retained in his head. It was therefore something of a shock to see where the Rokebys now lived. Maida Vale sounds charming and parts of it are, but not St Mary’s Grove, its tall shabby late Victorian houses almost pressing against the Westway flyover. Traffic roared across the great arch of the road behind which was Paddington Station and the new glass towers of the canal basin. A flight of steps led up to the front door under a crumbling portico and when the door came open there were more steps, about fifty of them, to the top flat. Rokeby was standing outside his front door.

  A smile might have been expected, but Rokeby didn’t smile. He had been watching Wexford mount the top few stairs but now he turned his head away, gave that most unwelcoming of greetings, ‘You’d better come in.’

  Though they had been there for several weeks, the Rokebys had done nothing to make the place more attractive. The rooms were large, apparently retaining their original ornamentation, elaborate and very dusty cornices, shutters at the windows which looked as if they had never been moved, even a couple of fluted columns with Corinthian capitals. A cheap-looking, much-worn carpet covered the floors, wall-to-wall, and the curtains were of thin unlined cretonne. The view from one window was largely of pretty St Mary’s, Paddington Green, but from the other all that could be seen was the Westway, dark grey concrete with its sluggishly moving load of traffic. There were no books, no plants or flowers, no cushions and scarcely any ornaments.

  Anne Rokeby sat in a cane chair with a seat covered in the same cretonne. She looked worried and worn. She didn’t get up when Wexford came in. There was no reason why she should, but no reason either, as far as he could tell, for the momentary shutting of her eyes. He noticed that her hands trembled slightly.

  ‘I would have thought,’ said Rokeby, ‘that we’d already talked about every possible aspect of this business. What else is there to say? I looked down a hole in my backyard and found those bodies and ruined my life. That’s that, isn’t it?’

  Instead of answering, Wexford said, ‘I was hoping for a list from you of the various contractors you consulted about building an underground room at Orcadia Cottage.’

  Rokeby shrugged. ‘But why? They didn’t build it. They said it wasn’t feasible and then planning permission was refused. What’s to say?’

  Policemen don’t answer questions. They ask them. But Wexford wasn’t a policeman any more. ‘Mr Rokeby, three of the bodies you found had been put there or had died there about twelve years ago, but the fourth had been dead only about two years. This means that the coal hole had been opened and another body put in there something over two years ago. What I’d like us to talk about is when you first moved to Orcadia Cottage and you had builders in to convert a large bedroom into two small ones, when you applied for planning permission and when those contractors came to look at the place. I’d like some dates, if possible.’

  Anne Rokeby suddenly stood up. ‘I don�
�t see why we should tell you. You’re not a policeman, are you?’

  ‘I can’t suppose you have anything to hide, Mrs Rokeby.’

  Her hands had again begun to shake. ‘That’s not the point, that’s not what I …’

  ‘Sit down, Annie,’ her husband interrupted her. ‘It’s because we’ve nothing to hide that we can’t have any objection to talking about this.’ He turned to Wexford. ‘We moved into Orcadia Cottage in the spring of twenty-o-two and we had a builder in called Pinkson. I remember that because it was such a weird name. He was a sort of jack of all trades and we found him because he’d done some work for our predecessors, the Silvermans, cut down the creeper among other things. Then in the spring of twenty-o-six I applied for planning permission to build an underground room and I consulted three or four building firms.’

  ‘Pinkson being one of them?’

  ‘No. He’d gone, moved away or gone out of business.’ Something struck Rokeby. ‘You’re not saying one of those men put a fourth body down there, one of the ones who came to talk about building below ground?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything, Mr Rokeby. I’m hoping you’ll say something and give me some useful information.’

  ‘I can’t remember the names,’ Rokeby said. ‘Well, I can remember one. They were called Subearth Structures. I thought it was a stupid name and it stuck in my mind, but as for the others …’

  Anne Rokeby’s tone was cold and curiously dreary. She spoke as if she hated her husband only a little less than she hated Wexford. ‘You got the names of the others out of the Yellow Pages. I said it would be better to act on personal recommendations but you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Do you remember the names of the firms you took from the Yellow Pages?’

  Martin Rokeby shrugged, then shook his head slowly, but his wife again jumped to her feet. Wexford was making himself ready to restrain her if she did what she seemed about to do, fly at her husband with her hands up like a cat’s claws. ‘You want to come to the end of all this, don’t you?’ she shouted. ‘You want to solve it or whatever the term is, don’t you? I know I can’t stand much more of living in this dump. The more you tell him the sooner all this hell will be over …’

  ‘But, Annie, I don’t know …’

  ‘Yes, you do! You marked those firms in the Yellow Pages. I remember. You put a ring round them with a ballpoint pen. What’s the matter with you that I can remember and you can’t?’

  Very calmly, not showing any of the excitement he felt, Wexford asked if they had that particular volume of the Yellow Pages with them in the flat.

  ‘Of course we don’t.’ Anne Rokeby was scornful now. ‘But no one ever throws those things away, not even when you get a new one. It’ll be in the hall cupboard at the cottage unless your people have disposed of it. It’ll be there with rings round all those builders’ names, of course it will.’

  It was a relief to be away from those bad-tempered, unhappy people. Wexford walked a little way down the road towards Paddington Green, recalling the song about Pretty Polly Perkins and her lover the milkman.

  I’m a broken-hearted milkman, in grief I’m arrayed

  Through keeping of the company of a young serving maid,

  Who lived on board and wages the house to keep clean

  In a gentleman’s family near Paddington Green.

  The gentleman’s family could have lived in one of the remaining Victorian houses sandwiched between the newer building on the eastern side of the green. St Mary’s Church was beautiful, the kind of place people called a ‘little gem’ and he remembered reading somewhere that in exchange for being allowed to build the Westway so close to it and across its land, the church had been given a donation sufficient to restore it to its former glory. Its clock struck noon with the kind of chimes that are usually called ‘silvery’ but sounded more golden to him, they were so rich and harmonious.

  He sat down on a seat on the green and phoned Tom.

  Lucy would go to Orcadia Cottage, Tom said, and meet Wexford there to explore the phone books. Was it too far to walk? All the way up the Edgware Road, turn in at Aberdeen Place, he calculated, but maybe a more interesting way would be to try the hinterland of Marylebone. Church Street with its antique shops detained him briefly, but after a minute or two of being amazed by Alfie’s windows, he walked through to Lisson Grove (where Eliza Doolittle lived, he recalled) and on up Grove End to Orcadia Place.

  Two people, not police, were outside, looking at Lucy’s car. They moved away when they saw him and transferred their attention to the house itself. One of them was the fat young woman with the pushchair, though she was without it this morning and holding the hand of its usual occupant. He went up to the front door and having no key, rang the bell. Lucy answered it and he was about to step inside when, quick as a flash in spite of her size, the young woman was at his side.

  ‘If you’re going in, can we come?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘Sorry but no.’

  Lucy said, ‘You shouldn’t even be in the garden. There’s nothing for you to see and I’d advise you to go home.’

  Wexford thought the girl would retaliate – he dreaded a racist comment – but she said nothing, contenting herself with a glare at Lucy’s cornrows, and went reluctantly away, the child whose hand she was clutching, starting to grizzle. He closed the front door behind him and turned to survey the welter of phone directories lying on the hall floor. Lucy started to pick them up.

  ‘I’d have said that one of those Rokebys is the sort of person who never throws anything away, but they appear to have thrown away the crucial one. There are three copies of the Yellow Pages but not the marked copy. Mind you, I’ve only looked in the hall cupboard.’

  ‘It may be somewhere else in the house.’

  They set about searching likely places and unlikely ones, a drawer at the base of a wardrobe, the drawers in a dressing table, bookshelves in case the missing directory had been placed among oversized books, the four cardboard crates packed with ornaments and crockery which the Rokebys had perhaps intended to take with them to St Mary’s Grove but in the event had left behind. On top of the fourth of these, the last one they searched, was the missing Yellow Pages. But when Wexford lifted it out he found that the pages in the first half of it had been torn out.

  ‘And that’s the bit with the “Builders” and “Contractors” in,’ he said.

  ‘It has to be the one, sir. But the pages are gone. It’s no use to us.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. Have a look at those crates. All the stuff that’s packed inside them is wrapped in newsprint. Not Yellow Pages, I know. But suppose they ran out of newsprint when they came to pack a fifth crate and used Yellow Pages for want of anything else.’

  ‘Except that they didn’t.’

  ‘Lucy, will you drive me back to St Mary’s Grove – do you know where that is? There’s just a chance …’

  No sightseers remained outside Orcadia Cottage. It had begun to rain, a thin drizzle. ‘If it doesn’t work out the way I’m hoping,’ Wexford said when they were in the car, ‘at least we know about Subearth structure and it’s possible that may be all we need to know.’

  ‘What do you think we’re going to find, sir?’

  Instead of replying Wexford said, ‘You’ve been to that flat the Rokebys are living in, haven’t you?’

  ‘Just the once, sir.’

  ‘Did you notice how few ornaments there were about?’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Let’s hope that the ones they brought with them they never unpacked.’

  This proved to be the case. The Rokebys were far from pleased to see Wexford again and positively hostile to Lucy. ‘Two of you?’ Anne Rokeby said. ‘What are you going to do? Arrest us?’

  ‘Did you bring a crate of china or crockery with you when you came to this flat?’

  Rokeby said, ‘And if we did? Did you think it wasn’t china but another body?’

  ‘This isn’
t a joking matter, Mr Rokeby,’ said Lucy. ‘Since you appear not to have unpacked it, we’ll see that crate, if you please.’

  It was full of pieces of what might have been a dinner service and each piece was wrapped in a sheet from the Yellow Pages. Lucy began unwrapping them, doubtful until she reached the third layer from the top. The next piece she brought to light, a sauceboat, was wrapped in a page on which the name K, K and L Ltd had a ring round it in ballpoint.

  ‘We seem to have found what we’re looking for, Mr Rokeby,’ said Wexford. He smiled. ‘When we have unwrapped all twelve dinner plates and all twelve soup bowls we’ll leave you in peace.’ My God, he thought, I’m catching cliché-itis off Tom. I’ll be praying next …

  ‘Eighteen!’ said Anne Rokeby. ‘I used to wash them all with my own hands in soap made for delicate fabrics,’ and she burst into noisy tears.

  From the sheets of yellow paper they noted eight separate firms of contractors, including Subearth. ‘Oh, yes, Subearth,’ said Rokeby. ‘I remember now. I mentioned them to Colin Jones and he knew all about them. Recommended them actually.’

  Wexford asked the Rokebys’ permission to take the relevant pages away with them and this was grudgingly granted. Anne Rokeby had stopped crying and was muttering an explanation of her conduct, though no one had asked for it. Seeing her beautiful dinner service, which she never expected to use again, had set her off so that she lost all control. It was enough to break her heart.

  ‘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.’