The Vault

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘On his own showing, Clary was in the house a long time. Long enough, I think, for “Rod” to close up the manhole, put back the tub and drive away.’

  ‘But you said he’d be shaken to the core.’

  ‘Not so shaken he couldn’t drive round the corner and sit there to recover. I suggest he lifted up the manhole cover and when he saw what he did see from the top, he didn’t fetch a ladder from his van. He saw, he understood what he saw – nothing like what it would have been had he gone down there – put the manhole cover back and dragged the tub back and drove away. God knows what Clary did next. He wasn’t, or thought he wasn’t, strong enough to lift the tub himself. Besides he was in his nice suit. “Rod” wasn’t a mate of his but just a builder who might or might not be helping with the construction of an underground room. Clary had already made up his mind to do no more until the planning permission did or did not come through. No doubt he went back to Finchley Road and forgot all about it until three years later when those bodies were discovered.’

  ‘Those bodies and a fourth one, sir – er, Reg.’

  ‘Yes, the mystery is, why did he do nothing when those bodies came to light six weeks ago?’

  *

  Wexford was due up at ‘the big house’ for dinner with Sheila and Paul and the children. He was looking forward to it. Being on his own in the evenings didn’t suit him. When he looked back over his life, he realised how seldom he had been alone at home. He had gone out, been repeatedly called out, kept out most of the night sometimes, and Dora had been on her own, but he hardly ever had. Not since he was young and single, and that was longer ago than he cared to remember. It wasn’t cooking a meal for himself that he minded because ‘cooking’ mostly meant scrambled egg on toast or sausages and chips heated up from frozen, it wasn’t lack of anything to do because reading was always there to do and always done; it was being without company, preferably Dora’s. He, who in his youth had had one girlfriend after another, later on had had to curb his roving eye, had now become entirely monogamous. That was excellent, completely satisfactory, but still he was lonely without her.

  As he dawdled about the little house, wishing for a quick passage of the hour which must elapse before the children came to fetch him – they insisted on that – he sat down by the window that looked out over the Vale of Health. It was a still quiet evening of hazy sunshine. He thought about the various men who had come to Orcadia Cottage to build (or not to build) a subterranean room. Kevin Oswin, Damian Keyworth and the Underland architect Owen Clary with his plumber who might or might not be called Rod. Oh, and there was one other that they knew almost nothing about, Oswin’s ‘bruv’, the man called Trevor. He was surely as important as Rod, yet it seemed he wasn’t a builder and as if he had just gone along for the ride.

  Although he knew how cautious he must be in constructing scenarios, Wexford nevertheless began imagining one of those men – perhaps because of their superior knowledge of underground structures – having his attention alerted by that tub which concealed a manhole cover. It was only conjecture. It was true, though, that he might have mentioned it to Oswin or Clary, but it had never registered. And, anyway, which one? Rod or Trevor? Was it possible that one of them had come back later, perhaps when it was known when Rokeby would be out or away on holiday, and looked for himself? It was not only possible, Wexford thought, it had to be. Not necessarily those two, but one of those, Damian Keyworth, Kevin Oswin, Trevor Oswin, Owen Clary or Rod, one out of five men, whatever he might now say, had come back and explored where up till then no one had looked.

  Unless, of course, it was Rokeby himself all the time. In that case, why had Rokeby called the police when he opened the manhole and found its contents? Because someone else had found them and tried to blackmail him? That would take some working out and needed time. Just now Wexford hadn’t time. He heard the front door open and the little girls’ feet on the stairs.

  ‘Grandad, Mum says you’re to come as you are.’

  This was Amy. Anoushka had already jumped into his arms.

  ‘What does it mean, Grandad, “come as you are”? How could you come as you’re not?’

  He laughed. He was enormously pleased, because he thought Amy had inherited this from him, this way of enquiring about everything, allowing no hackneyed phrase to go unquestioned.

  ‘It means to come in the clothes you’re wearing. Not to change.’

  ‘It’s stupid.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s everyday usage. It’s good to question, Amy, but it’s not good to be too censorious. OK, I’ll tell you what that word means later. Let’s go. I want my dinner.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT WAS A week later. He had intended to drive back to Kingsmarkham for the weekend, but Dora phoned when he was thinking of leaving and told him she would be renting a car and bringing Sylvia with her.

  ‘She isn’t going to drive, is she?’

  ‘Of course she isn’t, Reg. I can drive, you know. Maybe you haven’t noticed or being a man have chosen not to notice, but I passed my driving test very nearly half a century ago.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ He started laughing, noting that this was a rare occasion of laughing for pleasure and not because something was funny. ‘I’ve missed you a lot.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Excellent. Sylvia and Mary will be staying with Sheila just in case you thought you might have to make up beds.’ Dora paused. ‘Can you make up beds, darling?’

  ‘I must have done long long ago in the Dark Ages but I don’t recall.’

  Knowing that Dora would soon be back brought him a warm feeling of satisfaction and contentment. To walk at least part of the way to Tom’s office in Cricklewood would be pleasant on this fine July morning and good to think he would have no slow and tedious drive through the southern suburbs this afternoon. Tom was waiting for him with the latest on their investigations into the name ‘Francine’.

  ‘Not that there’s anything you could call a discovery. I’ve had three nerdy types getting the best they can out of the Web and you’d be surprised how many women there are in this country called Francine. You’d expect them all to be in France, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Maybe not in these cosmopolitan days.’

  ‘Of course, the majority are the wrong age. That is, most aren’t between twenty-nine and thirty-four. That’s because we’re counting on the girl whose name was on the piece of paper being between seventeen and twenty-two when it was written. But that’s really only a shot in the dark.’

  ‘You mean that the young man would have been that sort of age himself and would therefore only know a girl of that age?’

  ‘I know that doesn’t have to be the case, Reg. I said it was conjecture.’

  ‘If you get to see any of them or speak to any of them what are you going to ask her?’

  Tom hesitated. ‘Well, I’ve spoken to one so far. Just one. She lives up in Middlesborough. Her name is Francine Miller and she’s thirty, a nurse and not married. I asked her if she had ever been in a house in a street in St John’s Wood, London, twelve years ago. She knew at once what I meant. I suppose everyone in the country does. “Orcadia Cottage,” she said. “It’s about that, is it?” I didn’t dare think she was the one. Of course she’s not. She’d just read about it and seen it on TV. She wasn’t even in London twelve years ago but still at school in Berwick. One interesting thing – if it’s interesting – is that the preponderance of Francines under the age of twenty-eight is much less than over thirty. I’m not putting that very well, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘People stopped calling their daughters Francine,’ said Wexford. ‘The name had begun to go out of fashion. But we’re not looking for little girls anyway, are we?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Tom sounded despondent. ‘Of course I can’t be sure Francine Miller was telling the truth. On the other hand, being a realist, I’m not imagining a girl of eighteen popping down to London on a day trip f
rom the north and putting three dead bodies into a manhole in the classy district of NW8.’

  Wexford smiled. It was the first time he had heard Tom – a stolid man without a sense of humour – say anything even remotely satirical. ‘“Francine” was written on that bit of paper alongside what is presumably a pin number and “La Punaise”. Because la punaise means a pin we’ve assumed it’s a cunning way of reminding the owner of the address book what her pin number is, but to anyone else who sees it it suggests a restaurant. I suppose it isn’t or wasn’t a restaurant, was it?’

  ‘We’ve been there and done that,’ said Tom. ‘There isn’t a restaurant called that anywhere in London and there wasn’t in the late Nineties. Our best bet is that Francine was his girlfriend who was a student of French and he wrote down la punaise for her to translate it.’

  ‘And when she’d translated it the two of them plundered poor Harriet Merton’s bank account.’

  ‘That must have been a Eureka moment.’

  ‘What about the jewellery, Tom? Are we’ – Wexford quickly translated that ‘we’ to ‘you’ – ‘are you any further on that?’

  ‘Lucy’s shown it all to Mildred Jones and Mildred says, yes, it might be or it might not. It’s not as if she was ever likely to be able to identify it and Anthea Gardner had never seen any of it.’

  Wexford asked if he might see what printouts there were on the ‘Francine’ progress and a young DC called Miles Crowhurst brought him a file bulging with information. But most of it was negative. Francine Miller might be called the star attraction. Not for the first time, Wexford was wondering if enough had been done towards searching the memories of the Mertons’ neighbours in the Orcadia Place–Melina Place-Abercorn Place–Alma Square area. But when he raised the subject Tom always said most of the people hadn’t even been living there twelve years before, and those residents who had had been questioned in the first few days after the discovery of the bodies. The three largest houses in the vicinity had been sold and divided into apartments and only four separate dwellings remained where it might be helpful to question the residents again.

  ‘Do it if you like,’ Tom said, and added a little awkwardly, ‘Better take a DC with you. I mean, how about Crowhurst?’

  Because he had no standing of his own, Wexford thought, but without bitterness. After all, Tom might have said better go along with Crowhurst. Tom evidently had no intention of coming along himself.

  ‘If you’ve no objection,’ Wexford said, ‘and if Miles Crowhurst is free, I might go along there now.’ And then home to prepare for the coming of Sylvia and Mary …

  ‘None at all,’ said Tom, adding rather oddly, ‘Be my guest.’

  It was a while since Wexford had been near Orcadia Cottage. The roses were over but poppies and zinnias were out, together with a bed of stately dahlias, orange, pink and almost black, fuchsias bearing a thousand tiny red bell-shaped blossoms, and mauve and white Michaelmas daisies. And the sightseers seemed to have grown tired of their daily nothing-to-see vigils and gone home. Someone had hung a child’s sock on the beak of one of the stone falcons. The property of the plump child so often here in its pushchair? The day was sunny yet hazy, utterly still and with no chilly breath to spoil the mildness.

  Their project – Wexford’s and Miles Crowhurst’s – was a house-to-house inquiry of a limited kind. Only three households were to be questioned and these investigations were to be more in the nature of conversations. What did the Milsoms of Alma Square, David Goldberg of Melina Place and John Scott-McGregor and Sophie Baird of Hall Road know of Martin and Anne Rokeby? Would they even have known of their existence before those hideous discoveries were made under their patio?

  The Milsoms were a retired couple living in a house far too large for them. Peter Milsom had answered Wexford’s phone call with an immediate refusal to see them, but an intervention from his wife (a whispered, ‘It will only take a few minutes, Peter’) changed his refusal to a grudging acceptance. Any hope Wexford might have had that Bridget Milsom had some small piece of useful information to give them was quickly dashed. They knew the Rokebys, but only to ‘pass the time of day’. ‘I sometimes had a chat with Anne in the street,’ Mrs Milsom told him. She spoke as if one or both of the Rokebys was dead. She had never been inside the house. ‘I never really knew that Orcadia Cottage was there, what with the walls and the shrubs, you could barely see it from the road.’

  ‘We had an anniversary party,’ Peter Milsom said. ‘They came to that. I think that was the last time we saw them.’

  Nearest of these dwellings to Orcadia Cottage was David Goldberg’s tiny house wedged between two bigger ones in Melina Place. A middle-aged man who looked ill and walked with a limp, he lived alone and told them he hadn’t been outside the front door for eighteen years. His cleaner brought in food for him and anything else he might require. He had lived in his house for all those years but had few friends and had managed – as people in London can – to know none of his neighbours beyond ‘passing the time of day’ with them. The only people he seemed to know were John Scott-McGregor and Sophie Baird of Hall Road, by coincidence the next couple on Wexford’s list. Of what he called ‘the Orcadia Place business’ Goldberg knew from television, which he seemed to watch obsessively and which Wexford could hear now.

  Scott-McGregor had agreed on the phone to an interview but had told Crowhurst it would be useless: they knew nothing about ‘those people’. Theirs was one of the newer and smaller houses in this part of St John’s Wood, a 1950s redbrick of uninspiring design. And its occupants, Wexford thought, looked the kind of people who would never want to draw attention to themselves. They were strangely alike, both in their late thirties, of medium height, mousy-haired and with unmemorable features. Before she let them in, Sophie Baird greeted them on the doorstep with a little speech as to why, though her partner ran a removal company and she worked as a chief executive’s PA, neither of them was at work that day. Once they were in the living room, a place which for dullness matched its owners, Wexford let Crowhurst take the initiative. He began by speaking of Orcadia Cottage, but Scott-McGregor cut him short.

  ‘We know all that. You’d have to be deaf and blind not to know it.’

  ‘What we would like to talk about,’ Miles said, somewhat taken aback by this sharpness, ‘is if you have any knowledge of the house. If, for instance, you had ever been in there or in the patio at the back.’

  Sophie Baird said, ‘Inside Orcadia Cottage, you mean?’

  ‘That’s right. Inside the house or in the patio while Mr Rokeby lived there.’

  ‘I went in there to a sort of house-warming party when the Silvermans moved in,’ said Sophie Baird. ‘That would have been – well, at least ten years ago. Long before John moved in with me.’

  ‘You were friends with these people? The Silvermans, I mean?’

  ‘Not really. They were American and you know how Americans are, very friendly, speak to everyone. Devora and I, we got talking in the street, something about where was the best butchers and the next thing was they were asking me to their party. I wanted to see the inside of the house again.’

  ‘Again?’ Wexford was suddenly alerted.

  ‘Oh, yes, didn’t I say? My parents owned this house and I lived here till I was eighteen. My father had this house built.’

  ‘But Orcadia Cottage? Your parents knew the Mertons?’

  Sophie Baird looked at Wexford as if she thought he must be deaf or perhaps senile. ‘Oh, yes, didn’t I say? I’m sure I said. They were friends. My dad and Franklin were partners in a firm of accountants in the City. We were often in Orcadia Cottage. I was sure I’d said.’

  ‘No, Ms Baird, but never mind. Would you like to tell us what you remember about it?’

  ‘Well, I went there when I was a child, but mostly my dad and mum went there for dinner or drinks, that sort of thing. Only Mum got so she went off Harriet – that was Mrs Merton – and said Dad could go alone, she wasn’t going to. I suppose the last time
I went there would have been in about nineteen eighty-two or three.’

  ‘Can you remember the house?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I do remember.’ Sophie suddenly became animated. She looked quite pretty, showing white even teeth in a broad smile. ‘I remember the cellar. I’d never been in one before. I was about eight. Harriet was going down into the cellar to fetch something and I said could I come and we went down the stairs from the hall. She was never very nice to me, I don’t think she liked children, but she let me go down there with her and she showed me the coal hole. They didn’t have coal there any more …’

  ‘The stairs,’ said Wexford. ‘The stairs went down from the hall?’

  ‘That’s right. One flight went up and another went down to the cellar. Haven’t you been in there?’

  Neither Wexford nor Miles Crowhurst answered her. ‘Did you go out into the patio?’ Wexford asked and almost before the words were out Scott-McGregor interrupted, ‘What is all this in aid of?’

  ‘We won’t be long, Mr Scott-McGregor. Believe me, Ms Baird’s information may be very useful. Did you go out to the patio, Ms Baird?’

  ‘Not that time. I went another time. The first time I went there was this manhole with a cover on it. Is that the sort of thing you want to know?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Well, the second time – I was about ten – there was a pot with plants on it standing on the manhole cover so that you couldn’t see it. Did you know that Harriet was the girl in Simon Alpheton’s painting? She didn’t look much like it when I knew her.’

  ‘Ms Baird,’ said Miles Crowhurst, ‘you have been most helpful. Thank you very much.’

  Scott-McGregor turned to her. ‘Well,’ he said in a nasty tone, ‘you are a marvel. It’ll soon be ten quid to speak to you.’

  ‘It makes you wonder,’ said Miles when they were back in the car, ‘why a woman stays with a guy who talks to her like that. And she seems to have been with him quite a while.’