Vault

‘It’s stupid.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s everyday usage. It’s good to question, Amy, but it’s not good to be too censorious. OK, I’ll tell you what that word means later. Let’s go. I want my dinner.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IT WAS A week later. He had intended to drive back to Kingsmarkham for the weekend, but Dora phoned when he was thinking of leaving and told him she would be renting a car and bringing Sylvia with her.

‘She isn’t going to drive, is she?’

‘Of course she isn’t, Reg. I can drive, you know. Maybe you haven’t noticed or being a man have chosen not to notice, but I passed my driving test very nearly half a century ago.’

‘All right, all right.’ He started laughing, noting that this was a rare occasion of laughing for pleasure and not because something was funny. ‘I’ve missed you a lot.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Excellent. Sylvia and Mary will be staying with Sheila just in case you thought you might have to make up beds.’ Dora paused. ‘Can you make up beds, darling?’

‘I must have done long long ago in the Dark Ages but I don’t recall.’

Knowing that Dora would soon be back brought him a warm feeling of satisfaction and contentment. To walk at least part of the way to Tom’s office in Cricklewood would be pleasant on this fine July morning and good to think he would have no slow and tedious drive through the southern suburbs this afternoon. Tom was waiting for him with the latest on their investigations into the name ‘Francine’.

‘Not that there’s anything you could call a discovery. I’ve had three nerdy types getting the best they can out of the Web and you’d be surprised how many women there are in this country called Francine. You’d expect them all to be in France, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe not in these cosmopolitan days.’

‘Of course, the majority are the wrong age. That is, most aren’t between twenty-nine and thirty-four. That’s because we’re counting on the girl whose name was on the piece of paper being between seventeen and twenty- two when it was written. But that’s really only a shot in the dark.’

‘You mean that the young man would have been that sort of age himself and would therefore only know a girl of that age?’

‘I know that doesn’t have to be the case, Reg. I said it was conjecture.’

‘If you get to see any of them or speak to any of them what are you going to ask her?’

Tom hesitated. ‘Well, I’ve spoken to one so far. Just one. She lives up in Middlesborough. Her name is Francine Miller and she’s thirty, a nurse and not married. I asked her if she had ever been in a house in a street in St John’s Wood, London, twelve years ago. She knew at once what I meant. I suppose everyone in the country does. “Orcadia Cottage,” she said. “It’s about that, is it?” I didn’t dare think she was the one. Of course she’s not. She’d just read about it and seen it on TV. She wasn’t even in London twelve years ago but still at school in Berwick. One interesting thing – if it’s interesting – is that the preponderance of Francines under the age of twenty-eight is much less than over thirty. I’m not putting that very well, but you know what I mean.’

‘People stopped calling their daughters Francine,’ said Wexford. ‘The name had begun to go out of fashion. But we’re not looking for little girls anyway, are we?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Tom sounded despondent. ‘Of course I can’t be sure Francine Miller was telling the truth. On the other hand, being a realist, I’m not imagining a girl of eighteen popping down to London on a day trip from the north and putting three dead bodies into a manhole in the classy district of NW8.’

Wexford smiled. It was the first time he had heard Tom – a stolid man without a sense of humour – say anything even remotely satirical. ‘“Francine” was written on that bit of paper alongside what is presumably a pin number and “La Punaise”. Because la punaise means a pin we’ve assumed it’s a cunning way of reminding the owner of the address book what her pin number is, but to anyone else who sees it it suggests a restaurant. I suppose it isn’t or wasn’t a restaurant, was it?’

‘We’ve been there and done that,’ said Tom. ‘There isn’t a restaurant called that anywhere in London and there wasn’t in the late Nineties. Our best bet is that Francine was his girlfriend who was a student of French and he wrote down la punaise for her to translate it.’

‘And when she’d translated it the two of them plundered poor Harriet Merton’s bank account.’

‘That must have been a Eureka moment.’

‘What about the jewellery, Tom? Are we’ – Wexford quickly translated that ‘we’ to ‘you’ – ‘are you any further on that?’

‘Lucy’s shown it all to Mildred Jones and Mildred says, yes, it might be or it might not. It’s not as if she was ever likely to be able to identify it and Anthea Gardner had never seen any of it.’

Wexford asked if he might see what printouts there were on the ‘Francine’ progress and a young DC called Miles Crowhurst brought him a file bulging with information. But most of it was negative. Francine Miller might be called the star attraction. Not for the first time, Wexford was wondering if enough had been done towards searching the memories of the Mertons’ neighbours in the Orcadia Place–Melina Place-Abercorn Place–Alma Square area. But when he raised the subject Tom always said most of the people hadn’t even been living there twelve years before, and those residents who had had been questioned in the first few days after the discovery of the bodies. The three largest houses in the vicinity had been sold and divided into apartments and only four separate dwellings remained where it might be helpful to question the residents again.

‘Do it if you like,’ Tom said, and added a little awkwardly, ‘Better take a DC with you. I mean, how about Crowhurst?’

Because he had no standing of his own, Wexford thought, but without bitterness. After all, Tom might have said better go along with Crowhurst. Tom evidently had no intention of coming along himself.

‘If you’ve no objection,’ Wexford said, ‘and if Miles Crowhurst is free, I might go along there now.’ And then