Vault

‘It was two years ago that she died. We can’t be certain that she was put there immediately after death but someone put her there,’ said Tom. ‘No doubt about it.’ They moved into the kitchen and sat down on stools. ‘It wasn’t Rokeby. He’d have to be a very dark horse indeed. If he put that fourth body down there the last thing he’d do is call us to tell us what he’d found in the hole.’

‘You mentioned something about DNA,’ Wexford said.

‘Right. I did. The samples that were taken showed that the older man and the young man were related. Not father and son or uncle and nephew but maybe cousins. The women had no connection with them or with each other. The – well, baffling thing is that none of them correspond to the descriptions of any persons reported missing around twelve years ago. And that in itself is very strange. Not so much in respect of the men. Men are less likely to be reported missing than women. These two may have been loners. There is no reason to suppose they lived together.

‘How did they die? We don’t know. There is nothing on the bodies to show how they died. With the women it’s a different matter. Both had severe skull fractures. According to pathology each was capable of causing death.’ Tom looked at his watch. ‘All right. I’ve an appointment to see Mrs Anthea Gardner at eleven-thirty in Bolton Mews. She’s been seen before, but not by me. She’s the one person we know of connected to Orcadia Cottage in the Mertons’ time. So if you’ll drive us to Boltons Grove, Lucy, we’ll leave now.’

‘Who’s Anthea Gardner?’ Wexford asked when they were in the car.

‘The sort of widow of Franklin Merton, who owned Orcadia Cottage from sometime in the Seventies until 1998.’

‘Ah, including the relevant period. What does “sort of” mean?’

‘He was married to her before he married someone called Harriet and who seems to have been the Harriet of the picture. For some reason he never divorced Harriet, but went back to live with Anthea from 1998 until he died last year.’

As Lucy pulled away, Wexford looked back at Orcadia Cottage. There was something serene about it, a stillness and a quiet as if nothing had ever disturbed its peacefulness. No breeze swayed the branches or ruffled the leaves. He told himself he was being fanciful in imagining that the house smiled calmly, and that if it could speak would say, ‘I have been here for two hundred years and seen many foolish human beings come and go, but I shall be here for another two hundred years when those corpses in my foundations are forgotten.’

The car turned into Grove End Road and started on its journey, through congestion and roadworks and capricious traffic lights to South Kensington.

CHAPTER FIVE

HE WOULD NEVER become accustomed to London’s Georgian houses. Not that they were truly Georgian but mid-Victorian, and not just that they were beautiful; they had a diversity about them which amazed him, a multiplicity of bow windows and columns and arches and balconies. He hadn’t seen many yet, but enough to decide they were all different, each one a surprise, ivory stucco all of them, as if carved from vanilla ice cream, their slate tops shallow, no-longer-used multiple chimneys forming crests across their roofs. It seemed to him as they passed into the Old Brompton Road that here they clustered in greater numbers than anywhere else but for Bayswater, and in the Boltons assembled in gleaming ranks, their creamy facades interrupted only by black-painted balcony rails, intricate as lacework.

Anthea Gardner lived in such a one, a small house pretty enough to hold its own with the stately palaces between which it stood. The front door was the same pearly green-grey as that on Orcadia Cottage and Wexford decided that when he next had to have his Kingsmarkham house painted he would choose that colour. Tom fished a rather shabby tie, with red and blue stripes, out of his pocket and put it on. Wexford rang the doorbell and from inside came a steady and placid barking.

‘Oh, please,’ said Tom. ‘Not a beastly dog.’

Wexford noticed that ‘beastly’ just as he had noticed the ‘heaven’ of the day before. Another man would have said ‘bloody’ or worse. It interested him and while he was speculating the door opened and there was the now silent dog with its owner, who grasped it by the collar round its chestnut-coloured neck. Not quite chestnut perhaps, but a rich near-crimson. The incongruous thought came to him that it was exactly the same shade as Harriet Oxenholme’s hair in the picture.

‘Do come in,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘This is Kildare, by the way. He’s OK, he won’t bite.’

Instead of red, her hair was grey, the elderly woman’s wiry cap, short and trim. She was thickset but not fat, dressed in a pleated skirt and blouse, her face pleasant and intelligent, the kind that has never been good-looking, but which may have been very pleasing to confront across the breakfast table each morning. The house was as beautiful inside as out, furnished with pretty antiques and small charming paintings, including a still life of fruit and Stilton. A mouse in the corner looked daringly and wistfully at the cheese.

Wexford, rather embarrassingly introduced as Tom’s adviser, remarked on it and asked if it was an Alpheton.

‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘My late partner brought it here from that house.’ There was no doubt which house she meant. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Well, he brought most of this furniture from there. Oh, and the mirror. He was very fond of that mirror.’

So that was how she got over the difficulty of referring to the man who had been her husband. Her late partner.

‘That was rather a strange business, Mrs Gardner,’ Wexford said. ‘What do you think became of your – er, partner’s wife, Mrs Harriet Merton, that is.’

Her right hand resting on the setter’s smooth crimson head, Anthea Gardner hesitated and said, ‘I never met her, you know. Franklin went off with her and we were divorced. Well, eventually we were. I made him wait five years. By that time I’d met Roger Gardner, so Franklin and I were divorced and I married Roger. I was with him till he died and then Franklin and I ran into each other by chance in St James’s Park. Then we got together again, but I never met Harriet. There was no reason why I should.’

‘Mr Merton tried to find her, I believe you told us?’

‘Well, yes and no. Frankly, he thought she’d turn up and try to find him. He went to Orcadia Cottage and found that she’d taken most of her clothes and jewellery. Some neighbour told him she’d gone off with a chap called Keith Hill.’