by Ruth Rendell
‘Are you too busy to come in for a cup of tea?’
‘I’m not busy at all.’
Life would be simple if all the people involved in this case came so willingly to him. He followed Rokeby inside.
‘Anne’s out shopping. I feel I owe you an apology. I’ve been bloody these past few months and not just to the police. The thing was I felt the end of the world had come, that I owned a house I couldn’t live in, that I’d lost my children, that I was doomed for ever to be famous – well, infamous – as the man who lived in ‘that house with the bodies in the coal hole’, and everyone thinking I’d put them there.’
‘But you’re better now?’
‘It’s strange how things change. We know they do, but when we want that to happen we’re convinced that this time they won’t. Milk? Sugar?’
‘A drop of milk but no sugar, thanks.’
‘The mob are no longer hanging about outside, I’m back in my house and it feels just like it used to. My wife’s not going to leave me and my kids are coming home again. Remarkable really, isn’t it? You won’t believe this, but I’m going to have that underground room made after all and incorporate the coal hole. It’ll feel quite different when there’s a real room there. Apparently, there’s a staircase inside, and I’m going to have a door put in down at the end of the passage. Anne’s quite excited about it. I’ve applied for planning permission and I think I’ll get it.’
‘I daresay you won’t be using Subearth or Underland, though.’
‘It’s funny you should say that because I’ve got Chilvers Clary the architects making a – well, I suppose you’d call it a design. It’ll take in the whole area under the patio and the actual manhole will go. The only access will be from inside. I don’t have a problem with natural light, I can take it or leave it, but Owen Clary says he could put in a sort of shaft up to the patio with a window in the top. Sorry, I’m boring you.’
‘Not at all,’ said Wexford.
‘I’m so keen on this I get a bit carried away. Another cup?’
‘Thanks, but I must go in a minute. There’s just one thing I’d like to ask you. There are bolts on that door of yours into the mews. Have you ever bolted that door?’
‘Only when we were away on holiday.’
‘So when you were in Australia it was bolted and when you were in Florence this year it was bolted.’ Wexford looked at him and Rokeby nodded. ‘You must have gone away at other times in the past four years?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s best for me to think of it by the year. We were away twice in 2007, that was Spain and Vienna, and then in 2008 to Thailand, Vietnam and China, Spain again in 2009 and Italy that year as well.’
‘That would have been a long trip in 2008. How long were you were away on the China holiday?’
‘Well, if it’s of any interest, we were away for a few days visiting Anne’s mother in Wales at the end of May,’ said Rokeby. ‘And a few days after we got back we went off on our long trip. The door was bolted – oh, it must have been from the end of May until halfway through July. The door was bolted all that time.’
Wexford felt a tingle of excitement which was to become a surge of adrenalin when Rokeby said, ‘And as a matter of fact we left it bolted for a couple of weeks after that. We forgot about it until the window cleaner was due and he couldn’t get in. He was hammering on that door till we unbolted it.’
Wexford decided that to walk all the way home was carrying fitness to extraordinary lengths. The 13 bus would take him part of the way. He was in Pattison Road, heading for the Heath, when a young woman he recognised came out of one of the houses and unlocked a car with a DOCTOR ON CALL sticker on its windscreen.
‘Good afternoon, Dr Hill.’
She, too, had a good memory. ‘It’s Mr Wexford, isn’t it? Are you still at work on the Orcadia Cottage case?’
Wexford said cryptically, ‘Let’s say work on it is still being done.’ Oh, the uses of the passive voice! ‘You are a long way from your Hornsey practice.’
‘I’ve been visiting a private patient.’ She opened the car door. ‘I’m glad I’ve seen you. There’s something I should have told you, I don’t know why I didn’t when I looked at that jewellery that was in the – the tomb.’
‘What would that be then, Dr Hill?’
‘I said I thought all of it had belonged to the poor woman who lived there. Was she called Mrs Merton? Well, I’ve thought about it since and there was one thing – item – I don’t think could have been hers. It wasn’t her kind of thing at all. A plain silver cross on a chain. I think that must have belonged to someone else. I should have got in touch and told you.’
‘You’ve told me now,’ said Wexford, ‘and that’s what matters.’
It was a cold day with a sharp wind, heralding autumn. The leaves were still green, though tired-looking. The beginning of a shower brought rain dashing against his face as he walked from Clapham North Station along the street where Colin Jones lived.
His home was one of a long terrace. It would have been considered small in the mid-nineteenth century when it was built, a white two-floor house with a basement. Wexford wondered if he was underestimating when he calculated its value as something over a million. We expect unpleasant people to have or have had unpleasant spouses, and Wexford was anticipating someone rude and brusque. But the man who opened the door seemed affable enough.
‘Good morning. I believe you want a chat about the goings-on in Orcadia Place. Come in. Bitterly cold, isn’t it?’
He was as tall as Wexford, younger than Mildred by perhaps five or six years. He had a fine head of greying fair hair and a ruddy face with eyes of that attractive greenish-blue that is almost turquoise. This was the man whose shirt Vladlena had burned, but today he was wearing along with his black jeans a sweatshirt of such a dark brown that no burn mark would have showed. The interior of his house was as unlike his former wife’s as was possible, its decoration minimalist, the colours predominantly white, black and beige, the only ornament in this living room a large black and red jar full of dried grasses and beech leaves.
‘Can I offer you anything? I suppose it’s too early for a drink.’
‘Too early for me, thanks, Mr Jones.’
‘And I’d better not. If my wife catches me at the Scotch before midday I shall get a lecture. She worries about my health, poor love. What did you want to talk to me about?’
‘I believe you recommended a company called Subearth to Mr Rokeby when he was thinking of having an underground room built.’
‘No, it was an oufit called Underland. And he had already been on to them and made an appointment. We got chatting over the garden wall – literally over the garden wall – and when he mentioned Underland I said I’d used them and they were OK. They went bust soon after.’ Colin Jones laughed. ‘I wasn’t to know that, though. The chap who came had an architect with him, but I don’t know anything about them. Sorry I can’t be of more help. You know, I think I will have that Scotch. Just a small one.’
He left the room and Wexford could hear him talking to someone and just catch the tone of a woman’s soft voice. The glass in his hand with, as he had said, a very small quantity of neat whisky in it, Jones came back, preceded by a slender young woman with long fair hair, wearing jeans and a pale grey sweater against which hung a silver cross on a chain. She too was carrying a drink, but hers looked like water.
‘Let me get you something,’ she said to Wexford. ‘You don’t have to have the – what do they call it? – the hard stuff. Have some sparkling water like me, why not?’
Jones laughed. ‘Let me introduce my wife Vladlena.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
IT WAS ON the tip of his tongue to respond by telling her they had been searching for her high and low, but he restrained himself, and said instead, ‘How do you do, Mrs Jones?’
‘Please, call me Lena.’
It was Colin Jones who began to explain. ‘I expect you know Lena used to work for my first wife, t
hen luckily for her for a very nice guy called Goldberg. Do you know him?’
‘I’ve met him and he is very nice.’ Wexford turned to look at Vladlena. ‘And another friend of yours, Ms Sophie Baird.’
She put a glass of sparkling water with ice and a slice of lemon on the table beside him. ‘Some people have been very kind to me.’
‘But not old Mildred, eh?’ Colin Jones gave a hearty laugh and as he did Vladlena’s face lit up, so that she was suddenly beautiful. ‘The old bitch. I don’t know how I stuck her so long. Well, I was telling you. Mildred really scared Lena and she ran away yet again. She’d saved up quite a bit of her wages from David and she got herself a room in a grotty little street round the back of Lisson Grove.’
‘It was a nice little room, Colin,’ Lena protested.
‘If you say so.’ Colin Jones’s smile seemed to signify that whatever his wife said would be fine with him. ‘Anyway, Lena was walking along the Marylebone Road and I was coming from Baker Street Station. We met, we recognised each other and – well, the rest is history.’
‘He buy me a cup of coffee and we talk and …’
‘And from that moment we’ve not really been apart, have we, Lena? We got married a month later.’
Their eyes met and the naked love in each face, enraptured with the other, aroused in Wexford a sudden shaft of envy. It died as soon as it began. After all, he had known that and often knew it still. Whatever people say – however they knock it and rush to say it can’t last – there is nothing so good as being in love. Perhaps it was partly this which made him very careful what he said and asked. He would do nothing to spoil it. He was, after all, no longer a policeman. And this, which he sometimes cursed, could be an enormous advantage, for because of it he was not obliged, as he would once have been, to communicate what he knew to the UK Border Agency.
But still, the less he knew about the circumstances of these two the better. In some ways it wasn’t his business. Could they help him in finding the identity of the young woman in the vault? That was his only concern.
‘I don’t want to enquire too much into your circumstances,’ he said carefully. ‘I am no longer a policeman. I’m nothing. An ordinary pensioner, if you like.’
Colin Jones interrupted him. ‘Look, I really do need a real drink.’ He looked at Vladlena. ‘May I have a drink, darling?’
‘Of course.’ It surprised Wexford that she agreed so readily.
‘And I’m fetching one for our guest, no matter what he says.’
The moment he had gone she was writing something on a card she took from her jeans pocket. It was quickly handed to Wexford and he read it seconds before her husband came back. Meet me in Sainsbury’s 12.45.
Wexford was unused to whisky these days, but he obediently took a small swig, taken aback a little by the way it went straight to his head. He held Vladlena’s card clutched in his trouser pocket. They talked of innocuous things, the cold weather, unseasonable for early autumn, the pleasantness of being so near Clapham Common, the excellent local shopping, at mention of which Vladlena caught Wexford’s eye. And then they talked of something important, the child she expected to be born in April.
It was ten minutes to midday when he left. Walking in the Balham direction, he enquired for Sainsbury’s and was told it was no more than a hundred yards away. Why had she arranged to meet him without her husband’s knowledge? Not because she intends to deceive him in any serious way, he thought. He couldn’t be wrong about those two. Most likely she wanted not to involve Colin in any further trouble that might result from her revelations.
He went into a café and asked for a black coffee. The whisky was zinging around not at all unpleasantly in his head. That must be quietened. He tried to remember the residential requirements for naturalisation. You had to be a resident of the United Kingdom for three years, to have been present three years before your application, have not spent more than something over two hundred days out of the UK – he couldn’t recall how many more – and here came the crunch, have not been in breach of the immigration rules at any stage during the three-year period. You might say Vladlena had been in breach of those rules every day during that period. Well, that was that then. But they wouldn’t be found out through him. He wasn’t a policeman, he thought, and almost laughed out loud. Would the baby make any difference? He seemed to remember that a child’s mother’s nationality established its nationality, but perhaps not if she was married to a British citizen? Whatever happened, the marriage couldn’t be undone. He paid for his coffee, left and set off for Sainsbury’s.
It was a very large store, but he spotted her from quite a way off, drifting slowly with an empty trolley along an aisle between cereals and breads. She had on a black leather jacket and he wondered if that was the one Mildred had seen her wearing when she identified her in Oxford Street. She smiled at him and slightly raised one hand.
‘I’m deceiving my husband,’ Vladlena began, ‘but not to hurt him. It’s to save him knowing what I meant to do. I never did do it, but I meant to.’
‘I think I know what you’re talking about,’ Wexford said. ‘Sophie Baird told me.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, but I never did do it. I had gone from Mrs Kataev and I had that room I told you about. I had the money I save, but it was nearly gone and I thought I have to do what Gregory ask me.’
‘You had a phone number for him?’
‘I call him and he say to me to come to a house. He will meet me at this house. It is in West Hampstead. You understand?’
The massage parlour, Wexford thought. The place ridiculously called Elfland, up the road from Chilvers Clary. ‘The Finchley Road?’
‘Oh, no. This place was in a house near West Hampstead Station. I come in the Tube from Baker Street to West Hampstead and the house is just down the street.’ Vladlena hesitated, looked away and up at the packets of various types of muesli on a top shelf. ‘I never told my husband. I never did do it, but he must not think I even think to do it.’
‘Lena,’ he said. ‘I doubt if I shall ever see your husband again. If I do I shall tell him nothing of what you tell me.’
She smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. ‘You look at my teeth. My husband pay for dentist, he is so good to me. My sister and me, our teeth were bad and hurt a lot when we come here.’
‘Your sister’ – he had to think – ‘Alyona?’
She seemed surprised. ‘You know about her?’
‘Only what Irina Kataev told me. That the last you saw of her was in a trailer at Dover – what? Three years ago? Four?’
‘I see her again maybe two years ago. A bit more than that, in the summer.’ The smile had entirely died and her face sank into sadness. ‘I see her when I go to that house. I tell you. I stand outside for a bit because I am – scared. I am a bit scared. And I look up at the windows and I think which one is the one I must go to? And then I see her. I see Alyona.’
‘At the window of a house in West Hampstead?’
Vladlena nodded. ‘Let us move a little.’ She pushed the trolley down the aisle, turned to the left and right again along coffees, teas and sugars.
‘I am always a bit scared of people watch me.’
‘What happened when you saw your sister?’
‘First I think I must go up there and find her and then I think what this place must be. Sophie and David tell me where they would take Alyona and take me if I let them. Gregory tell me also. So I look at her and I make signs to her. Like this.’ Vladlena beckoned with her right hand, then with both hands in a gesture that seemed to indicate imploring. ‘I do this and I make with my mouth like this but make no sound.’ In dumb show she mouthed, ‘Come to me, come to me.’
Speaking aloud to Wexford, she said, ‘I do not ring the bell, I do not go in. I find a seat nearby and I sit and wait for Alyona to come. I sit for a long, long time. I wait. I look up at the window again, but she is gone. I stay down there until ten at night, until eleven, and I watch. Men come and ring the bell and
some person lets them in, so I know for sure what the place is. And then a man comes along and talks to me, asks me you know what, and I say no and another comes and then I am scared and I go back in the train to my room.’
‘Did you ever go back?’
‘Yes, I did. I look again up at the window and I wait, but I never see Alyona again. One day I ring the bell, because I think maybe she will come to the door. But it is a man come and say what do I want, and I am too afraid to say and I go away. You understand I am scared to ask for Alyona and I am scared to go to police, always scared of that.’
‘You never saw her again?’
‘No, never. I worry, I think about her all the time, but I know it is no use, I can do nothing. And one day I am walking back from Baker Street Station to Lisson Grove and I meet Colin and he is so kind to me and – well, you know what happens then.’
Wexford said, ‘Would you take me to this house? I mean where you last saw your sister.’
She began pushing her trolley in the direction of the checkouts. ‘I don’t want Colin to know. He could ask why I went there and then he would know what I meant to do.’ She was silent for a moment as she began unloading items from her trolley on to the belt. ‘Tomorrow he will be at work all day.’ She turned to look Wexford straight in the eye. ‘I love my husband,’ she said. ‘He has been like an angel to me. But if it is that we find what happen to Alyona …’
‘That’s what I hope too.’ Wexford sighed inwardly. ‘I will pick you up at nine tomorrow – is that all right?’ She nodded, but a little reluctantly. ‘Till then,’ he said and left her.
The silver cross that hung against her grey sweater … He half-wished he hadn’t noticed it. He half-wished he was less observant, had a poorer memory. But at any rate he wouldn’t have to take her to a place that would frighten her, where she might in fact refuse to go – a police station. She need not look at those demeaning garments, the stuff of pornography. Even a DNA comparison was hardly necessary, though he knew it would have to take place, for as soon as he had seen that silver cross he had known the girl in the vault was her sister Alyona.
