remembered that he no longer had it, that he was no longer
‘Take the lift,’ she said, scarcely looking up. ‘Third floor, turn left and it’s the third door on the right.’
While he waited for the lift to come he was transported back in time to when, in very different surroundings, he had started his first day as Detective Constable Wexford with the Brighton Police. Years, decades, had gone by, yet he thought he felt much the same, apprehensive, excited, wondering what the coming weeks would bring.
CHAPTER THREE
‘YOU’LL HAVE READ about it or seen it on TV. God knows it’s had enough media coverage. It’s one of those cases where people start asking if they’ve found any more bodies.’
‘Except that these were all in the same place,’ said Wexford.
‘That’s true. We don’t even know if they were murdered – well, one was. Probably.’
‘Only probably?’
‘Three of them have been there so long we can’t tell how long they’ve been dead, let alone what they died of.’
Detective Superintendent Thomas Ede was sitting in his chair behind his desk in his glass-walled box of an office, the glass being the kind you can see out of but no one can see in. Laminated wood floor with a faux fur rug, the fur looking like the skin of a hybrid tiger and giraffe. Ede was a tall, thin man with a small head and tense, sharp features. He wore a dark grey suit and a white shirt, but no tie, a style of dressing Wexford thought looked fine on women, less ‘right’ on men, though it was becoming universally popular. Wexford sat opposite him in the clients’ seat, the interviewee’s place. This was something new to him, something he had to get resigned to. And he was getting there, it was all right, it was inevitable.
‘I’ve read about it,’ he said, ‘but you tell me. That way I’ll get it right.’
‘Well, as you know, this all started a month ago. We were first called at the beginning of May. The location is a street in St John’s Wood called Orcadia Place, but that detail wasn’t in the papers, was it? You’re looking as if something’s struck you.’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Wexford said. ‘Go on.’
‘The house itself is called Orcadia Cottage. It’s not a cottage as we know it but a sizeable detached house, very pretty if you like that sort of thing. Front garden’s full of flowers and trees, the back is a kind of courtyard or patio. Orcadia Place is one of those streets in St John’s Wood that are more like country lanes, hedges, big trees, cobbled roadway, that kind of thing. Orcadia Cottage belongs to a man called Martin Rokeby. He bought it about seven years ago for one and a half million. It would fetch four now – or would have before what was found in the coal hole. By the way, we call it the “patio-tomb”. Got to call it something, haven’t you?
‘The set-up is peculiar to say the least. On the face of it, the area, paved in York stone, is quite large and plain with a border round its edges. The way into the patio from the house is by a door from the kitchen and a pair of French windows. A door in the back wall opens into the mews. More or less in the middle of this patio is the manhole cover, circular, which when closed – and it always was closed – lies flush with the paving. A tub stood on it and entirely covered it up.
‘Now Rokeby had never lifted up this manhole cover. Or so he says. He had no survey done when he bought the house as he had no mortgage and distrusted surveys on old houses, reasoning that they were bound to be full of faults but never fell down. It’s a point of view. You can spend a fortune on surveys and most of the time needlessly. Anyway, Rokeby says he didn’t even know the manhole cover was there. The tub which stood on it was a half- barrel of wood bound in iron, not particularly attractive, and Mrs Rokeby said she’d like a new one. She’s the gardener. Well, the two of them were on holiday in Italy – they went on a lot of expensive holidays, Australia at the time he was planning the underground room – and in a shop in Florence she saw this, I quote, “amazingly beautiful amphora”, whatever that is, that some boat dredged up from out of the Mediterranean. I don’t know about these things. Maybe you do. Anyway, she had to have it – they’re not short of a penny or two, as you’ll have guessed – couldn’t, needless to say, take it home with them on a flight, so she asked to have it sent. Heaven knows what that cost but it doesn’t matter.’
Wexford noted that ‘heaven’ where another man would have said ‘God’. He wondered what it meant, if anything, vaguely remembering that Tom Ede, when young, had a connection with some nonconformist church or cult.
‘Much to their surprise,’ Ede went on, ‘when they emptied the soil out of the half-barrel and took the thing away, what did they find underneath but this manhole cover. Now Rokeby, quite reasonably, supposed this to be covering a drain or a fuel store that was no longer in use, and at first he intended to leave things as they were and just stick the amphora thing on the top with some lilies planted in it.’
‘Why didn’t he?’ said Wexford.
‘Curiosity, he says. The manhole cover wasn’t heavy. He lifted it off and instead of the drain or drainpipe he expected, leading away into the mews, he found himself looking down into a black hole. At the bottom was something he couldn’t properly see apart from a kind of shininess that seemed to be a sheet of plastic. That was covering a multitude of sins, but he didn’t know it then.
‘Now before he did anything more, he went into the house and fetched his wife. The two of them looked down into the darkness and at that shiny thing and what looked – he said they could just about see it – like a woman’s shoe. If the way into this hole was by the manhole, where was the way out? Was there a way out? Rokeby actually asked his wife if they had a cellar that he didn’t know was there. She told him that of course they hadn’t. There would be a door down to it in the house, there would be a staircase.
‘Well, Rokeby went indoors and fetched a torch. A big powerful halogen thing, apparently. In the circumstances it might have been better for them if it had been a feeble little job with a failing battery. He shone it down the hole and there he saw a large plastic bag full of what he called “something horrible”, as well as two skulls, the bones of a skeleton and a badly decomposed corpse. Anne Rokeby also saw it and she fainted. He took her indoors and called us after he’d been sick.’
Wexford nodded. ‘You believe neither of them knew anything about it beforehand? I mean, that the existence of the hole was a surprise to them?’
‘Well, you know, Reg, I’m inclined to believe it. But I’m open to having my mind changed.’
‘What was it? A coal hole?’
