Vault

for a service. Those leaves were lying all over the place and getting wet and I said to him how someone I knew had slipped on them and broken her leg. I thought I’d let him know I knew what he was up to with a woman three times his age and I asked him how Harriet was. He said she was fine and I said, tell her Mildred said hello or give her my love or something.

‘We went indoors after that and watched him from my front window. I don’t know what he was doing. I went out again then, carrying my rubbish bag for the council to collect in the morning. After I was back in the house again I saw him go through the door in the wall into the backyard of Harriet’s house. I said to Colin, he knew it like he lived there, like he owned the place.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Jones. That’s very helpful. Can you remember how he was dressed?’

‘Like they all do. The young, I mean. One of those zipper jackets, jeans of course, a black T-shirt, I think. He had that car, but he wasn’t very confident driving it. I thought he was going to scrape it against the wall out there. He was nervous and not just about the car.’

‘And he went through the door in the wall into the backyard of Orcadia Cottage?’

‘I’ve told you he did.’

‘Mrs Jones,’ Wexford said, ‘does the name Francine mean anything to you? And what is La Punaise?’

He expected an answer of sorts to his first question, only perhaps to say that she had heard the name but couldn’t remember where. What he didn’t anticipate was a full and highly informative answer to his second inquiry.

‘I can tell you what La Punaise is.’ She began to laugh reminiscently. ‘Harriet told me. Well, she showed me. It was a way of remembering her pin number. Seemingly, la punaise is French for a pin. She’d got a lot of restaurants written down in her address book. Her and Franklin, they ate out all the time. So she wrote La Punaise in the book like it was a restaurant and wrote a phone number underneath, only it wasn’t a phone number, it was a London exchange followed by the four digits of her pin. Oh, she thought herself very clever, I can tell you.’

So the boy, Keith Hill or whatever he was called, had had access to Harriet Merton’s address book and had also been clever enough to decipher her purpose in storing her pin number by this means. He had been in the house, must have had intimate knowledge of the house. Her pin number he would have wanted for illicit purposes, to say the least. Why had he written it down on that paper under the name Francine? Because Francine was French and could translate the name for him?

‘Thank you very much, Mrs Jones,’ he said.

Tom asked, ‘Did you ever go into – er, Harriet’s house? Orcadia Cottage, that is?’

‘Of course I did,’ said Mildred Jones. ‘How d’you think I got to see her address book? She was bored stiff, nothing to do if one of her young chaps hadn’t come round. Sometimes she’d ask me in for a drink. It’d be lunchtime and I’d go, but I’m not much of a drinker especially at midday.’

Wexford asked her, ‘What was the house like inside?’

‘You mean the furniture, pictures, that sort of thing? Oh, it was lovely. Beautiful stuff they had. Of course, it was all Franklin’s. He was a connoisseur.’

‘Mrs Jones, I’d like you to think very carefully. Imagine yourself in the hallway, looking towards the kitchen. Can you do that?’

‘OK. I’m doing it.’

‘Can you see the kitchen door?’

‘Of course I can.’

‘Now look to the left of it and tell me, is there another door there or a blank wall?’

‘What is all this?’ Mildred Jones was indignant. ‘Haven’t you been inside the place? Of course there’s a door. It leads down the stairs to the cellar where all those horrors were found. It makes me shudder to think of it.’

‘There is no door there now, Mrs Jones,’ Tom said.

She stared. ‘But I saw it. The first time I was there the door was open. Harriet had been down there to fetch something up – bottled gas or something. She had to do all that for herself. Franklin never lifted a finger. I looked down the stairs just to get a sight of the cellar, but there was nothing down there, only an empty space and a couple more of those gas bottles. You want to go down there yourselves and take a look.’

‘We’d like you to come in there with us and take a look,’ said Tom.

Mildred Jones was reluctant to accompany them. Tom explained to her that the bodies in the vault were long gone. The house itself contained nothing of Harriet’s, nothing of Franklin Merton’s. Two sets of owners had lived there since the Mertons, as she must know.

‘It’s the idea of those dead bodies lying in there, under the ground, for all those years … You’ve got to admit, it’s enough to give you the shivers.’

‘It would be a great help to us if you would come in there with us for just a few minutes.’

‘I don’t see how it could be, but OK, if it’s really a help.’

They walked out of the mews, Mildred Jones’s high-heeled green shoes having some difficulty with the cobbles, round the corner on to the smooth stone pavement. ‘I noticed you’ve got a Virginia creeper on your flat,’ Wexford said while Tom unlocked the front door of Orcadia Cottage. ‘Is it the same variety as was on this house until it was cut down?’

‘As far as I know. I don’t know anything about gardening, plants, that sort of thing.’

‘When the leaves fall it makes a lot of mess?’

‘Oh, yes, dreadful. My cleaner has to sweep it up and she makes a big fuss. I don’t mean that Vlad, she’s gone long ago. And the one after her too. Of course I don’t keep them on when I’m away in South Africa and they don’t like that.’