‘I thought there might be a trapdoor in the kitchen floor or in the hallway, but there wasn’t. It seemed to be quite strange that there could be a coal hole in the back for solid fuel to be shot down and no way of getting it up from the inside. I was quite a long while inside there feeling around, tapping the walls and so on, but eventually I went back outside. I thought that if we go ahead with this – I wasn’t going to take any further steps until Rokeby had got his planning permission – I’ll find out from him the answer to this riddle.
‘The Underland chap was outside, sitting on a garden seat on the patio. He’d put the tub back himself on the manhole cover. He’d gone down there, he said, he’d had a look, but there was just a big sort of coal storage space. I said to him I was doing no more until Rokeby had heard about his planning permission and he agreed with me and we left.’
Lucy said quietly, ‘How did he look, Mr Clary?’
‘What do you mean, how did he look?’
‘Was he just the same as before you went into the house?’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘Can you give us his name?’ Wexford asked.
‘I don’t think I ever knew it,’ Clary said. ‘I called him Rod.’
‘We may want to see you again,’ said Lucy and she made this routine undertaking sound rather menacing. A threat rather than a promise. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ she said to Wexford on the Finchley Road pavement.
He laughed. ‘I know what you mean, but I couldn’t say I don’t believe a word of it. I believe he went there and I believe they jointly shifted the manhole cover. And it’s not incredible that Clary didn’t want to get his nice elegant suit dirty. But that “Rod” went down that hole without finding those bodies or showing any sign that he had had sight of the most revolting and macabre sight he had ever had – that I don’t believe. That he came up again and walked out on to the patio and waited for Clary to come out, that I don’t believe either. Wouldn’t he, however tough he was, have run into the house and shouted out about what he had found? Wouldn’t he maybe have thrown up? At any rate, it would have shaken him to the core. But it didn’t, or Clary says it didn’t.’
‘What happened then?’
‘On his own showing, Clary was in the house a long time. Long enough, I think, for “Rod” to close up the manhole, put back the tub and drive away.’
‘But you said he’d be shaken to the core.’
‘Not so shaken he couldn’t drive round the corner and sit there to recover. I suggest he lifted up the manhole cover and when he saw what he did see from the top, he didn’t fetch a ladder from his van. He saw, he understood what he saw – nothing like what it would have been had he gone down there – put the manhole cover back and dragged the tub back and drove away. God knows what Clary did next. He wasn’t, or thought he wasn’t, strong enough to lift the tub himself. Besides he was in his nice suit. “Rod” wasn’t a mate of his but just a builder who might or might not be helping with the construction of an underground room. Clary had already made up his mind to do no more until the planning permission did or did not come through. No doubt he went back to Finchley Road and forgot all about it until three years later when those bodies were discovered.’
‘Those bodies and a fourth one, sir – er, Reg.’
‘Yes, the mystery is, why did he do nothing when those bodies came to light six weeks ago?’
*
Wexford was due up at ‘the big house’ for dinner with Sheila and Paul and the children. He was looking forward to it. Being on his own in the evenings didn’t suit him. When he looked back over his life, he realised how seldom he had been alone at home. He had gone out, been repeatedly called out, kept out most of the night sometimes, and Dora had been on her own, but he hardly ever had. Not since he was young and single, and that was longer ago than he cared to remember. It wasn’t cooking a meal for himself that he minded because ‘cooking’ mostly meant scrambled egg on toast or sausages and chips heated up from frozen, it wasn’t lack of anything to do because reading was always there to do and always done; it was being without company, preferably Dora’s. He, who in his youth had had one girlfriend after another, later on had had to curb his roving eye, had now become entirely monogamous. That was excellent, completely satisfactory, but still he was lonely without her.
As he dawdled about the little house, wishing for a quick passage of the hour which must elapse before the children came to fetch him – they insisted on that – he sat down by the window that looked out over the Vale of Health. It was a still quiet evening of hazy sunshine. He thought about the various men who had come to Orcadia Cottage to build (or not to build) a subterranean room. Kevin Oswin, Damian Keyworth and the Underland architect Owen Clary with his plumber who might or might not be called Rod. Oh, and there was one other that they knew almost nothing about, Oswin’s ‘bruv’, the man called Trevor. He was surely as important as Rod, yet it seemed he wasn’t a builder and as if he had just gone along for the ride.
Although he knew how cautious he must be in constructing scenarios, Wexford nevertheless began imagining one of those men – perhaps because of their superior knowledge of underground structures – having his attention alerted by that tub which concealed a manhole cover. It was only conjecture. It was true, though, that he might have mentioned it to Oswin or Clary, but it had never registered. And, anyway, which one? Rod or Trevor? Was it possible that one of them had come back later, perhaps when it was known when Rokeby would be out or away on holiday, and looked for himself? It was not only possible, Wexford thought, it had to be. Not necessarily those two, but one of those, Damian Keyworth, Kevin Oswin, Trevor Oswin, Owen Clary or Rod, one out of five men, whatever he might now say, had come back and explored where up till then no one had looked.
Unless, of course, it was Rokeby himself all the time. In that case, why had Rokeby called the police when he opened the manhole and found its contents? Because someone else had found them and tried to blackmail him? That would take some working out and needed time. Just now Wexford hadn’t time. He heard the front door open and the little girls’ feet on the stairs.
‘Grandad, Mum says you’re to come as you are.’
This was Amy. Anoushka had already jumped into his arms.
‘What does it mean, Grandad, “come as you are”? How could you come as you’re not?’
He laughed. He was enormously pleased, because he thought Amy had inherited this from him, this way of enquiring about everything, allowing no hackneyed phrase to go unquestioned.
‘It means to come in the clothes you’re wearing. Not to change.’
