‘All right, Mike, all right. I don’t want to buy one.’
‘It came in red, of course, and blue and rather a nice discreet sort of pale greenish yellow, and other colours too …’
Back to his old form, Wexford almost growled. ‘Pale yellow, I think. What does it matter? It was big enough to carry bodies in. And whoever he was, he parked it in the mews, sometimes overnight. It must have been a spectacularly recognisable car, which makes me wonder why whoever used it did use it. Why not hire a van if hiding bodies was his purpose?’
‘If it was. Let’s say it was. Using the Edsel as his means of transporting bodies must be because that’s all he could use. Was it his or had he borrowed it? So why not hire something else? Because he was poor, he couldn’t afford it. Can you think of a better reason?’
‘No, but I can easily think that a man in the mews in an Edsel around twelve years ago had nothing whatsoever to do with the bodies in the underground tomb – I call it the vault, by the way. And how about the fourth body?’
‘Ah. The young woman. Now you say she’s been there only two years.’
‘About that, they think. She was only about twenty or less. She had quite bad teeth but had no dental treatment. Now, though that’s not rare in old people it is quite rare in the young. But if you look at those photographs in the papers of crowds in Asia or even Eastern Europe you’ll see that quite a lot of even young women have discoloured teeth or prominent teeth or gaps between their teeth. I’m wondering if she could have come from one of those places and have been an asylum seeker or an illegal immigrant. But I mustn’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Whoever put her in the – er, vault, maybe your Edsel owner, must have known about the vault in advance. I’m thinking he came there with the three bodies twelve years before, and when he killed again thought of it as the ideal place to hide another body.’
‘He would have had to count on the door to the mews being unlocked.’
‘For all we know, Reg, it was always unlocked. Has anyone asked Rokeby?’
Wexford shook his head, but he didn’t really know. He thought of what a lot he didn’t really know and that finding out might be closed off from him. He couldn’t go to Rokeby and ask him. He couldn’t even phone him and ask him. He wasn’t Lord Peter Wimsey or Poirot, he wasn’t even a policeman any longer. What he could do, he thought, was find an Edsel dealer or some dealership (as Americans called it) where they had sold Edsels in the past. They must have been rare even twelve years ago. Remembering that Burden had said they dated from the Fifties, he began to lose heart. But no, this must have been a real vintage car in the Nineties, it wouldn’t have been forgotten …
Burden said as they parted, ‘It’s good to see you.’
While still in Kingsmarkham he searched the London phone books he had for car sales, but all he could find were car body repairs, car accessory manufacturers and car hire. Then he tried ‘Edsel’ but nothing was listed. Most people these days, he thought, would investigate the Internet or go online, as they called it. Dora was better at this than he was. She told him she would Google Edsel and she did so with remarkable speed. He was surprised to find so many Edsels from 1958 to 1960 for sale. There were pictures, too, and for the first time he set eyes on one of these large – and in his eyes monstrous – vehicles, red ones, green ones, as well as a photograph of a chocolate brown leather interior. They were all for sale privately or from someone who apparently specialised in Edsels and offered them at prices ranging from $2,500 to $25,000. Prices were all in dollars and since those advertised gave their owners’ locations, the cars came from Tennessee, Georgia, Indiana and Virginia.
None of this was any use to him. None of this could help him find the identity of an Edsel owner twelve years ago. But he studied the pictures, the descriptions and the prices. These cars, for all their failure to corner the market back in the late Fifties and early Sixties, seemed to be cherished by those who owned them. One advertisement said ‘one owner, never in an accident, only 70,000 miles’ and another ‘garage kept, in perfect condition’. Unfortunately for him, you could only find out more by email. No phone numbers were given and really that was as well, considering he didn’t want to pay for God knows how many calls to the United States, and he would have to pay. He was no longer in a position to claim the cost of such calls.
But these pages of advertisements had taught him something. Edsels were valued, they had vintage standing. Back in the late Nineties the Edsel he was interested in would already have been about forty years old. Through those years someone had treasured it, kept it in a garage, nursed it, replaced spare parts and accessories. It seemed unlikely in these circumstances, very nearly impossible, that it would have ended up on a dump somewhere, to be crushed into a block of metal and disposed of. If the owner was poor, as Burton had himself suggested, he might try to sell it, he might have succeeded in selling it. It could even be one of those pictured on the site – but no, they were all in Canada and the United States. So was it still in this country? Was it still around, cherished and kept in a garage by some new owner?
After a good deal of fumbling around, losing the email page and then losing the Internet altogether, he told himself to take it slowly and be patient. Eventually he succeeded in enquiring about Edsel dealerships in the United Kingdom and asking for the name of some English expert who could help him, and when that was done, in sending his first ever email. Or he thought he had until one arrived to tell him that someone called the postmaster wanted him to know that delivery had failed. How to find out what had gone wrong? He clicked on ‘sent’ and the failed one appeared. No wonder it hadn’t gone to Jonathan Green of Minneapolis, master, apparently, of fifteen Edsels. Wexford had typed [email protected]. He tried again and this time it went.
No reply to his request could be expected, he told himself. What would this American Jonathan Green know about Edsel dealerships, if any, in England? What would he know about some English person Wexford could talk to personally rather than by encounters in cyberspace?
Sunday passed as Sundays do, quietly and emptily. Though with no commitment to churchgoing, Wexford and Dora were both affected by Sunday’s apathetic yet restless dormancy. You may phone your friends on Saturday, you won’t think twice about it, but phoning them on Sunday is an intrusion. Calling on neighbours without prior notice is an affront. Maybe even the sending of emails on a Sunday was ‘not done’. When Monday is to be all rush and activity because you have a job and a responsible one, Sunday can be appreciated as a day of rest. But what if Monday is likely to be much the same as Sunday? What then?
It might have been different, he thought, if Tom Ede had phoned. But there had been no word from him and now Wexford, who had never been in such a position before, was beginning to think it would be better for all concerned if he were to give Tom a call himself at midweek, and tell him that being his adviser wasn’t going to work out and thanks, but no thanks. During the day he looked twice at his inbox but there was nothing from Jonathan Green and he wasn’t surprised. Why would the man answer when there was no sale in it for him?
Sylvia came round in the late afternoon and brought Mary with her. Both Wexford’s grandsons were still in education, the elder away at university, the younger at school. Mary told him excitedly about her new rabbit and the
