The Vault

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘OK. But I haven’t got anything to tell you.’ David Goldberg picked up the remote and pressed the key that put the DVD on ‘pause’. ‘I told you before I know nothing about that manhole case. All I know is what I read in the papers.’ He spread out his hands and shrugged. ‘I don’t have drinks and snacks and things between meals, so I hope you don’t want anything.’

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  The room they were in was small but very light because the rear wall was almost entirely of glass with a glass door set in it on the right-hand side. Outside was a small garden, neat as a pin, beds full of michaelmas daisies and asters surrounding a tiny lawn with a statue of a girl standing on a plinth and holding up a pitcher.

  ‘Yes, in case you’re going to ask, I do it myself. I may be disabled but that doesn’t stop me weeding and planting. I use my hands.’

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘What do you want to ask me about?’

  ‘A young woman from the Ukraine called Vladlena.’

  Goldberg wasn’t as surprised as Wexford expected. He nodded reflectively. ‘Yes. Vladlena. No doubt you’ve been talking to that nosy old termagant Mrs Jones. Mildred. I call her Mildreadful.’

  Wexford smiled. ‘I’d better tell you that I’m not here to get Vladlena into any sort of trouble. If she’s still here. If she hasn’t gone back to wherever she came from. I have nothing to do with Immigration. I’m not even a policeman any more. Nothing you say will do her any harm.’

  ‘OK. Right. Vladlena – it’s a great name, isn’t it? – she came to the door one morning and when I opened it she said she’d run away from a house in Orcadia Mews because she’d burnt a shirt. So I let her in and sat her down. It’s not the sort of thing I usually do, but it wasn’t a usual situation, was it? She’d burnt a shirt and she was afraid of the police. That’s what she said. Oh, and old Mrs Mildreadful was on her trail.’

  This time Wexford did laugh. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, basically I gave her a job. My cleaner had just left. I liked the look of Vladlena. I told her I’d want her to shop for me and do a few other jobs I can’t do and she was happy with that. She was thrilled, poor child. I told her she wouldn’t have to iron my shirts. Nothing gets ironed in this house.

  ‘I explained to her that I don’t go out. That means that anything I want from out there.’ – he waved a vague hand – ‘I’d have to ask her to do for me. I suppose I should explain to you.’ The harsh voice deepened. ‘A long time ago, twenty years ago and a bit more, I was attacked in the street. For being gay – what a word for me! Four thugs set about me. My left leg was broken in three places and my head was bashed in. That left me with epilepsy.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Wexford said.

  ‘You actually look as if you are. I live on incapacity benefit and what I earn from the odd bit of journalism. I got compensation, which enabled me to buy this house. But I don’t go out at all. Into the street, that is. Not ever. I’m scared, you see. I am simply terrified to go out. I watch DVDs, I write a column called Gaiety and I tend my garden.’

  ‘I see why you needed Vladlena.’

  ‘Yes. Well, she was great. She even cooked for me and that was a change from living on ready meals, I can tell you. I knew she hadn’t a right to be here, she hadn’t any sort of passport. I knew all that but I liked her, she suited me. I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone. Well, I never see anyone to tell. I thought, I’ll see if she’ll marry me. I’m gay, of course, if I’m anything any more. It’ll just be to get her citizenship, she won’t even have to live here if she doesn’t want to. I thought of all that and then Mildreadful accosted her in the street.’

  ‘I gather she was still harping on about the shirt.’

  ‘It was all of a year later. She told her she’d have to pay for a new shirt or the police would get her. Vladlena just ran away again. She came into the house with the shopping and said she was going away, she was going to hide. You can imagine I told her she wasn’t in any danger. It was all nonsense on old Mildreadful’s part, but she wasn’t having any. I should have told her then, I should have said I’d marry her and then she could have stayed, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure, you see. When it came to it I suppose I got cold feet. I didn’t really think she’d go. But she did. She left and I never saw her again.’

  ‘You didn’t try to find her?’

  ‘Yes, of course I did. I had her address. She had a room in the house of an old Russian woman in Kilburn. I had Vladlena’s mobile number. Everyone has mobiles these days, don’t they? Everyone but me. I haven’t got one. I phoned, but her phone was never answered. I didn’t go up there. I told you, I don’t go out. It must sound wimpish but I can’t go out, I just can’t. I’m like someone with agoraphobia only I’m not agoraphobic.’

  ‘So that was the end?’

  Goldberg sounded irritable. ‘No, it wasn’t. I asked a friend of mine to help. I do have friends, a few. Sophie, she’s called. I’ve known her since she was a child and I was young – and able-bodied.’ He made a rueful face. ‘I asked her if she’d go up there and inquire for Vladlena.’

  Wexford remembered or made a wild guess that turned out not to be wild at all. ‘Not Sophie Baird who lives in Hall Road?’

  ‘That’s the one. Do you know her?’

  ‘I don’t exactly know her, Mr Goldberg. I talked to her and her partner in connection with this case.’

  ‘Yes, the partner. The arch homophobe. We don’t exactly get on. In fact, we’ve met just the once and that was enough.’

  ‘She said nothing to me about Vladlena.’

  ‘Could you call me David, please? “Mr Goldberg” sounds like a big fat banker, very rich and living in The Bishop’s Avenue.’

  Laughing again, Wexford said he could, making a mental note to find out what and where The Bishop’s Avenue was. ‘And did Ms Baird have any luck?’

  ‘She went to the Kilburn address and saw Vladlena. But Vladlena wouldn’t talk to her. Not then. She seemed to be terrified to say anything while she was indoors. I mean inside a house. She and Sophie arranged to meet in a café in Kilburn next day, but when Sophie went there she had disappeared. Mrs Kataev said the same thing. She’d disappeared.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Let me think. Two years ago or a bit more. It was summer. I remember Vladlena had a big thick coat, very shabby, and she wore it every day through the winter and spring. She wasn’t wearing it. When she came into the house that day with the shopping after old Mrs MD had accosted her she was wearing a dress, a cotton dress. Her arms were bare.’

  Wexford thanked David Goldberg, took Mrs Kataev’s address and phone number from him and said he might want to see him again, but gave him no explanation for his questions and none was asked for. Leaving, he noticed that while Goldberg seemed happy to open the front door he stood back from it, a full yard from the daylight and the fresh air.

  John Scott-McGregor, on the other hand, marched out of his house in Hall Road, forcing Wexford to take a step backwards.

  ‘You again,’ are not pleasant words to be greeted with, but Wexford was used to worse.

  ‘I was hoping to have a word with Ms Baird.’

  ‘You hope in vain. She’s not here. She’s at work.’

  Wexford didn’t pursue it. Instead he walked back across Hamilton Terrace and Abercorn Place to the Edgware Road. There he got on the Number 16 bus for Kilburn and Brondesbury Villas where Mrs Kataev lived. The street surprised him. Kilburn High Road might be run down in some parts and blatantly gaudy in others, but Brondesbury Villas was staid and dignified. Two words seldom heard these days came to mind, ‘select’ and ‘respectable’. And Irina Kataev herself seemed both those things, a thin, upright, elderly woman who spoke precise English with a slight and attractive accent. The hallway of her house and the living room into which she took him, were hygienically clean and airy. Mrs Kataev herself wore a black dress with a red cardigan over it.

  ‘I wish I could h
elp you,’ she said. ‘I have worried about her. She gave me no notice that she would be leaving. One day she came home as usual from Mr Goldberg and went up to her room. She was in her room alone all evening. She was a quiet girl. She kept herself to herself, as I believe you say. Next day she was in her room all day. I think now that she was afraid to go out – like that poor Mr Goldberg.’

  ‘When did she go?’

  ‘I heard her on her phone many times. I listened because I was worried about her. She was only just nineteen, you know. Next day, very early in the morning – it must have been early because it was before I got up at six – she left and had with her the one suitcase she came with. She owed me some rent and she left the correct sum for me in an envelope.’

  ‘How long had she lived with you, Mrs Kataev?’

  ‘For about two years. Before that she had had a room in a flat in Kensal, very dirty and nasty, she said. She came here from the Ukraine in two thousand and six and all this you are asking about is two years ago and more.’

  ‘How did she come from the Ukraine to this country?’

  ‘Like they all do. In a minibus. She and her sister who was with her, they had to pay quite a lot of money to come. She told me there was some sea on the way, the last part – she meant the Channel – and when they were in England they were taken from the minibus and were put into a trailer. She and her sister had been told by one of the other girls that they were not to be trained as models like they expected, but to become servants to rich people. They would be paid, but for a while everything they earned would be to pay the people who had brought them here. She thought she had already paid them, so she ran away. She ran away that night, but her sister was afraid to go with her. For my part, I think they were to be something else to rich men. You understand me?’

  Wexford nodded. ‘When she ran away, where did she go?’

  ‘She had a cousin here, in London. She is married to an Englishman who found her through a – I don’t know how to say it – an agency? For dating? For looking for wives?’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Vladlena had no money. She hitch-hiked to London and she walked, she slept on the street, she begged. At last she found this woman, but she would let her stay only two nights. Her husband was not a nice man. He was old, forty years older than Vladlena’s cousin and this woman worked for him like a servant. It was not a happy situation. But the cousin helped her find a room and told her how she could be a cleaner.’

  Such stories were not uncommon. Wexford found himself wishing that David Goldberg had obeyed his instinct, taken the plunge and offered to marry Vladlena. But he hadn’t and now it was too late. Should he advise Mrs Kataev to report Vladlena as a missing person? Probably not. Vladlena herself would be too frightened of the authorities to answer such a call.

  ‘Do you know the cousin’s name and address?’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Irina Kataev. ‘Even if I did it would be no use. Vladlena wouldn’t go back there. The husband, the old man, made a – I don’t know how to say it …’

  ‘An unwelcome advance to her?’

  ‘That is it exactly. An unwelcome advance.’

  ‘Can you remember her sister’s name?’

  ‘Vladlena called her Alyona.’

  ‘Would you spell that, please?’

  ‘A-L-Y-O-N-A.’

  He walked back up the High Road, looking for a street which would cut through to West Hampstead. Someone had told him that in days gone by Irish immigrants had settled in Kilburn and in the name ‘Biddy Mulligan’s’ on a pub there was evidence of that, but now it seemed that people from the Middle East and Asia had overtaken them. Women in burkas and some in the all-obscuring niqab from which only the wearer’s eyes were visible, shopped alongside an indigenous population almost universally in anoraks, hoods and padded coats. A small establishment – that was the appropriate word for it, he thought – advertised beauty treatments and various types of massage, hair extensions, waxing and nail enhancement. Its name, Doll-up, though quite possibly referring to a woman’s preparing herself to go out on a date, had a less innocent ring to it, implying that whatever blameless activities went on at street level, the true purpose of the place was concentrated upstairs. The poster filling most of its window showed a very beautiful young woman of South-east Asian origin, wearing a white overall which left most of her long bare brown legs uncovered, administering a ‘Taiwanese’ massage to an ancient wrinkled man of about ninety. Shoppers passed it by indifferently without so much as a glance.

  Wexford thought of the story of Tithonus, the shepherd boy whom Eos, goddess of the dawn fell in love with. She asked the gods to make him immortal and her wish was granted, but she failed to ask them to give him eternal youth. Tithonus grew old while she remained ever-young, he grew bent and wrinkled, shrivelled like the man in the poster. At last Eos took pity on him and turned him into the cicada he now so closely resembled. No reinvigorating massages in those days, Wexford reflected as he turned into Iverson Road.

  At police headquarters Tom Ede suggested to him that they have lunch together. Not in the canteen, if Wexford didn’t mind, but in a small French restaurant in West End Lane. It was the first invitation as such Wexford had received from Tom and he felt gratified.

  ‘It won’t turn out to be La Punaise, will it?’ he said, but Tom had forgotten all about the disguised pin number.

  Lunch, though French, was to be abstemious. Tom didn’t drink and though he offered Wexford a glass of wine, he made it plain that to see a companion drinking alcohol while he had to abstain put him under too much of a strain. ‘I wasn’t exactly an alcoholic,’ Tom said, ‘but I was heading that way. The quack said my liver wasn’t all it ought to be so I took the plunge and gave up altogether. I had my faith, of course, and that helped. It always does.’

  Calling a doctor a quack came high on Wexford’s list of undesirable expressions, but he only smiled and said of course he wouldn’t have any wine. Tom’s faith? Like most people Wexford was made slightly embarrassed by mention of God or religion, a prejudice he struggled vainly against. Fortunately the subject was changed by his telling Tom about Mildred Jones and Vladlena and David Goldberg and Mrs Kataev. Tom nodded reflectively while pursing his lips and pushing them forward in a way which might equally mean disbelief or acceptance.

  ‘What evidence have you got that this Vlad – whatever is the girl in the patio tomb?’

  Wexford drank some water that tasted even more insipid than usual. ‘She’s the right sort of age. She worked in the area in two places. She must have known it well. It’s possible that at some point between two and three years ago she found out what was in the tomb – that is that three bodies were in there.’

  ‘So blackmail, you mean?’

  ‘I suppose I do.’ Now it was so clearly expressed Wexford found he disliked the idea. He had come – surely unwisely – to have tender feelings for Vladlena. But the poor girl – might not anyone in her unfortunate position have recourse to obtaining money by threats, if she could?

  ‘So you’re saying we should try and find her?’

  ‘I think Lucy or Miles should come along with me or I go along with them to talk to Sophie Baird. She’s the woman who tried to find her for David Goldberg.’

  Tom nodded without much enthusiasm. Suddenly Wexford thought of all the pleasant and rewarding lunches he had enjoyed with Mike Burden in the past. ‘Better be Lucy, I suppose,’ Tom said. ‘A woman to talk to a woman.’ Perhaps because they were in a French restaurant, he followed up his last statement with, ‘Cherchez la femme.’

  Sheila and her girls were with Dora when Wexford walked in. ‘Where The Bishop’s Avenue?’

  ‘It’s a street of big houses, the kind the media call “mansions”,’ said Sheila. ‘It’s Highgate and it turns out of the Hampstead Road. You’ve walked from the Spaniards Inn to Highgate, Pop. You must have passed it.’

  Amy wanted to know what a bishop was and Wexford set about explaining to her. She said she
would like to be one when she grew up, and was told that wouldn’t be possible as things were at present but that would certainly have changed by the time she was an adult.

  ‘I am going to be a banker,’ said Anoushka, which silenced everyone for a moment.

  ‘I find all this quite heartening,’ said Wexford. ‘It’s so different from what I read in the papers about girls wanting to be models and marry footballers.’

  They had been gone five minutes and Dora was talking of going to the cinema when his phone rang. It was Sophie Baird.

  ‘I was about to call you, Ms Baird,’ he said. ‘I was hoping to come along with DC Blanch and talk to you.’

  She was silent. He thought the connection had broken.

  ‘Ms Baird?’

  Her sigh preceded a breathy, ‘I’ve just split up from John. He’s gone. I didn’t think he would, I thought he’d try to throw me out, though the house is mine. But I told him and he just went. I should have done it years ago.’ She gave a sudden hysterical laugh. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m high on adrenalin. I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I hardly know you.’

  ‘It will be quite safe with me,’ said Wexford.

  ‘I know that. Somehow I know. David called me. David Goldberg.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He said he’d told you about me and Vladlena. There’s a lot he doesn’t know about what she told me. There was no point in telling him. I tried to tell John, but he just said not to get mixed up with filthy illegals. Those were his words, “filthy illegals”. I should have left him then or got him to leave me.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘I want to tell you.’

  ‘So when shall DC Blanch and I come?’

  ‘I don’t want her, whoever she is. I mean, she may be very nice, but I don’t want to tell anyone but you. I think you’ll understand. But not today, not this evening. I’ve called a locksmith to get the locks changed in case John tries to come back. He says he’ll never darken these doors again, if you’ve ever heard such crap, but he may if he changes his mind. So I’ll get the locks changed and then I’m going to cook David’s dinner and stay the night with him. He’s the only person I really want to see right now.’