Vault

‘Don’t remember much about it,’ he said discouragingly. ‘I only went along with Kev in the Merc because I’d nothing better to do. I never went in the house. The owner – don’t recall his name – he and Kev were talking, arguing the toss; they come outside and went in again. I hung about in the lane and had a fag. Had a couple, they was so long about it.’

Wexford heard the unmistakable click of a cigarette lighter and Trevor’s indrawn breath. He coughed, said, ‘Kev never done the job. The place would have fell down if he had, he said. That was it. Then we went home.’

‘Where’s home, Mr Oswin?’

‘Never you mind. All I’ll say is, somewhere in West Hampstead. An Englishman’s home is his castle – maybe you’ve never heard that. It means that’s my business.’ Trevor was overcome by coughing and the phone went down.

Dora was taking all three children on the London Eye, a downhill walk to Finchley Road, then on the Jubilee Line to Westminster. His own walk was shorter and by the time he reached the house whose number Sophie Baird had given him, he had convinced himself she wouldn’t be in. He rang the bell and rang it again. The sound of footsteps from inside surprised him.

‘Ms Jameson,’ he said, ‘My name is Wexford, Reginald Wexford, and I’m a former detective chief inspector. I’d like to ask you some questions, but before I do have to explain to you that I have no official standing and no right to ask you anything.’

‘Do you have any identification?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’ There on the doorstep he produced his driving licence, senior railcard and, although he had forgotten it was in his pocket, his passport.

She smiled, perhaps because she had seen that the passport still described him as a police officer. ‘Come in. It’s a bit of a mess.’

Almost everyone who invited you in said that. The ones who didn’t were those who were in most need of saying it, the squalor-mongers and the compulsive rubbish hoarders. Francine Jameson’s little house was clean and as tidy as most people’s. In the living room a little boy of about two was sitting on the floor building an elaborate structure from Lego. At sight of Wexford he got up and went to his mother, clutching her round the knees. She picked him up.

‘I’m afraid William is rather shy.’

He said, ‘Hallo, William,’ in that enthusiastic tone he had long ago learnt that children love, and sat down in the chair Francine Jameson indicated. She was a rather tall, slim woman with dark hair tightly drawn back and tied in a ponytail.

‘What did you want to ask me?’

‘You will have heard about the – er, discoveries at Orcadia Cottage in St John’s Wood.’ She looked a little bewildered. ‘The place where’ – he didn’t want to say too much in front of the child – ‘there were some unpleasant discoveries made under a manhole in the patio.’

William said, ‘Patio’, and then, ‘patio, patio, catio, matio’.

‘Yes, darling, you are clever,’ said his mother and to Wexford. ‘I read about it in the paper. What has it to do with me?’

‘Have you ever been to Orcadia Cottage?’ She shook her head, mystified. ‘Do the names Franklin and Harriet Merton mean anything to you?’

‘I’ve never heard of them.’

‘La punaise?’

‘It’s French. It means a pin.’

‘Yes, but it’s quite an unusual word. Would you mind telling me how you come to know what it means?’

‘I wouldn’t mind at all.’ She laughed. ‘I teach French. That’s what I do. I teach French at Francis Holland.’

It must be a school, he thought. He got up, thanked her. ‘Do you happen to know anyone else with your first name?’

‘Francine? I don’t think so. Only my mother.’

‘And preferably your sort of age.’

‘I’ve got it because my mother’s French and it’s her name. She’s called Francine Seguin and when she and my father were divorced she reverted to her maiden name. But you don’t want to hear this. You’re looking for a young woman and my mother’s nearly seventy.’

‘Does she live in this country?’

‘In Highgate,’ said Francine Jameson, ‘but I can’t see how she’d be any help to you.’

Wexford, walking up the hill again, was inclined to agree with her. She lived in Highgate, though, where he was going. Abruptly, he turned back and struck out across the Heath past Hampstead Ponds. Not that he would look for Francine Seguin. There was no point. Unless there was in existence a society composed of women called Francine – a most unlikely contingency – and if there was Tom Ede would know about it by now. It might be that finding their Francine, the Orcadia Cottage Francine, wasn’t necessary. Better by far to get back to finding the builder who had put to use the knowledge he had picked up of the patio’s subterranean layout.

Walking, he had decided when he first took it up in a serious way, was the best occupation for thinking. Better than sitting in an armchair where your thoughts tended to send you to sleep, better than in bed at night when the post-midnight madness distorted your mindset. He assembled his thoughts as he walked briskly across the open heath, forced to the unwelcome conclusion that so far, after innumerable interviews, Internet incursions and repeated assessments of information, they had really discovered nothing about the occupants of the tomb except what had been almost obvious from the start, that the older woman in there had been Harriet Merton. From the start, too, they had known – or DNA had revealed – that there was some sort of blood relationship between the two men. Was that all?