may have come to survey the place – or has he done that?’
‘We haven’t heard a word from him. No news yet from forensics on the Edsel either. We’ve still got nothing but conjecture to link the Edsel with the two men’s bodies.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘I WON’T SAY a word,’ said Dora. ‘I shall want to, but I won’t because it would upset you. Not because it would upset her.’
Wexford smiled. ‘That’s a very good reason.’
Dora was going back to Kingsmarkham by train, leaving him in London. Her intention was to be in Great Thatto in advance of Sylvia’s return from hospital, and she would have Mary with her after the little girl’s three days of blissful holiday with her cousins. ‘Phone me,’ he said.
‘Don’t I always phone you?’
He laughed. ‘Tell me what she says about that miscreant who stabbed her. She wouldn’t be daft enough to forgive him, would she?’
‘I sincerely hope not.’
He was going to have a long conversation with Martin Rokeby. It was Tom Ede’s suggestion that he should see Rokeby alone or perhaps with Anne, his wife. No policeman, only this policeman’s aide, as Wexford was beginning to call himself. They would talk. Rokeby would say things to him he might not say to Tom.
A picture of Orcadia Cottage, as it now was or as it had been when Simon Alpheton painted it thirty-six years before, Wexford retained in his head. It was therefore something of a shock to see where the Rokebys now lived. Maida Vale sounds charming and parts of it are, but not St Mary’s Grove, its tall shabby late Victorian houses almost pressing against the Westway flyover. Traffic roared across the great arch of the road behind which was Paddington Station and the new glass towers of the canal basin. A flight of steps led up to the front door under a crumbling portico and when the door came open there were more steps, about fifty of them, to the top flat. Rokeby was standing outside his front door.
A smile might have been expected, but Rokeby didn’t smile. He had been watching Wexford mount the top few stairs but now he turned his head away, gave that most unwelcoming of greetings, ‘You’d better come in.’
Though they had been there for several weeks, the Rokebys had done nothing to make the place more attractive. The rooms were large, apparently retaining their original ornamentation, elaborate and very dusty cornices, shutters at the windows which looked as if they had never been moved, even a couple of fluted columns with Corinthian capitals. A cheap-looking, much-worn carpet covered the floors, wall-to-wall, and the curtains were of thin unlined cretonne. The view from one window was largely of pretty St Mary’s, Paddington Green, but from the other all that could be seen was the Westway, dark grey concrete with its sluggishly moving load of traffic. There were no books, no plants or flowers, no cushions and scarcely any ornaments.
Anne Rokeby sat in a cane chair with a seat covered in the same cretonne. She looked worried and worn. She didn’t get up when Wexford came in. There was no reason why she should, but no reason either, as far as he could tell, for the momentary shutting of her eyes. He noticed that her hands trembled slightly.
‘I would have thought,’ said Rokeby, ‘that we’d already talked about every possible aspect of this business. What else is there to say? I looked down a hole in my backyard and found those bodies and ruined my life. That’s that, isn’t it?’
Instead of answering, Wexford said, ‘I was hoping for a list from you of the various contractors you consulted about building an underground room at Orcadia Cottage.’
Rokeby shrugged. ‘But why? They didn’t build it. They said it wasn’t feasible and then planning permission was refused. What’s to say?’
Policemen don’t answer questions. They ask them. But Wexford wasn’t a policeman any more. ‘Mr Rokeby, three of the bodies you found had been put there or had died there about twelve years ago, but the fourth had been dead only about two years. This means that the coal hole had been opened and another body put in there something over two years ago. What I’d like us to talk about is when you first moved to Orcadia Cottage and you had builders in to convert a large bedroom into two small ones, when you applied for planning permission and when those contractors came to look at the place. I’d like some dates, if possible.’
Anne Rokeby suddenly stood up. ‘I don’t see why we should tell you. You’re not a policeman, are you?’
‘I can’t suppose you have anything to hide, Mrs Rokeby.’
Her hands had again begun to shake. ‘That’s not the point, that’s not what I …’
‘Sit down, Annie,’ her husband interrupted her. ‘It’s because we’ve nothing to hide that we can’t have any objection to talking about this.’ He turned to Wexford. ‘We moved into Orcadia Cottage in the spring of twenty-o- two and we had a builder in called Pinkson. I remember that because it was such a weird name. He was a sort of jack of all trades and we found him because he’d done some work for our predecessors, the Silvermans, cut down the creeper among other things. Then in the spring of twenty-o-six I applied for planning permission to build an underground room and I consulted three or four building firms.’
‘Pinkson being one of them?’
‘No. He’d gone, moved away or gone out of business.’ Something struck Rokeby. ‘You’re not saying one of those men put a fourth body down there, one of the ones who came to talk about building below ground?’
‘I’m not saying anything, Mr Rokeby. I’m hoping you’ll say something and give me some useful information.’
‘I can’t remember the names,’ Rokeby said. ‘Well, I can remember one. They were called Subearth Structures. I thought it was a stupid name and it stuck in my mind, but as for the others …’
Anne Rokeby’s tone was cold and curiously dreary. She spoke as if she hated her husband only a little less than she hated Wexford. ‘You got the names of the others out of the Yellow Pages. I said it would be better to act on personal recommendations but you wouldn’t.’
‘Do you remember the names of the firms you took from the Yellow Pages?’
Martin Rokeby shrugged, then shook his head slowly, but his wife again jumped to her feet. Wexford was
