Vault

‘And you never saw him again after – when?’

‘Sometime in ’98. I don’t remember when.’

‘All right, Ms Withers,’ Tom said. ‘Would you like to write down your full address in ’96 and ’97, the Lavender Hill address, and Keith Chiltern’s address at the time. If you wouldn’t mind, WPC Debach will take you into another office and give you pen and paper. We won’t keep you long.’

She followed Rita Debach, casting a glance of venom over her shoulder. ‘Well, Reg,’ said Tom, ‘my goodness, I dropped a real clanger there, didn’t I? I was so sure too. It was summer, but she never noticed the creeper that covered the house. She never noticed the staircase.’

‘The house was furnished in very modern style, abstract paintings et cetera. Flat-screen TV – had they even been thought of thirteen years ago?’

‘What did she hope to get out of it, Reg? There’s no money involved, no reward for being the Francine.’

‘Fame, I suppose,’ Wexford said. ‘Or what passes for fame, these days. Name in the papers she never reads. Called as a witness in a trial? Face on her huge, flat-screen TV when the media get hold of her.’ He started to laugh. After a second or two Tom started to laugh too.

‘I wonder what she’s writing down?’ Tom said. ‘All pure invention? Does she think we wouldn’t check?’ He added generously, ‘I could tell you knew before I did. When did you know?’

‘When she said Keith’s name was Chiltern. She’s from High Wycombe and she said her husband came from King’s Langley. Those places are both in the Chiltern Hills and that – well, that told me.’

‘Good for you. Go to the top of the class.’ Tom picked up the phone and called WPC Debach. ‘Rita? Bring Ms Withers back in, would you?’

WPC Debach came in alone. ‘She’s gone, sir. Disappeared. She didn’t write anything on that bit of paper.’

Wexford said very seriously. ‘She’s allergic to paper, Rita.’

‘We could charge her,’ said Tom, ‘with obstructing the police, but I don’t think we ought to stick our necks out, do you?’

Wexford said, unsmiling, ‘Better to keep a low profile.’

She could have found all the information she had in the media, he thought as he drove over to Highgate to talk to yet another Francine, the mother of Francine Jameson. Tom had spoken to her on the phone, giving Wexford clearance as his representative. If she had refused to see him she would have been well within her rights, but she hadn’t refused, only said she couldn’t imagine what information she might have for him. And so it turned out. She was French, called Francine, had given her daughter that name because she liked it. She had never heard of Orcadia Cottage until pictures of it appeared in the media. No one had ever asked her to translate la punaise into English. No one she knew had ever possessed a large, pale yellow American vintage car.

An empty afternoon stretched before him. If he went home to the coachhouse he knew he would find Sheila and Dora there, discussing Sylvia and the Old Rectory business. Rehearsals for Ghosts were still a week away and meanwhile Sheila had nothing to do but speculate with her mother as to whether Sylvia should sell the house, conquer her fears of the house, think in any case of buying somewhere smaller and – he guessed this bit – revise her ideas on older women having affairs with men the same age as their sons. Joining in didn’t appeal to him. He drove across Highgate and parked in Shepherds Hill. Not having brought his A to Z guide with him, he had hazy ideas of the geography of this part of London. Alexandra Palace lay vaguely over there, Muswell Hill on the other side of the woodland and Crouch End at the bottom of the street where he was parked. He would walk, taking in the wood on his way.

London had surprised him. He had believed himself to have a fairly good knowledge of his capital city, but in the past six months he had seen he was wrong. For instance, he hadn’t suspected there were so many rural spots like this wood. When he came to what he thought might be the end of it because he could see a street ahead of him, he found another wood on the other side of it and the street more like a country road. He turned to the right and walked along it, already beginning to wonder if he would ever find his car again.

The Orcadia Cottage case was never far from his mind, though Sylvia’s troubles had distracted him. Tom hardly seemed concerned about what to Wexford was a great mystery. He could see how the young man possibly called Keith Hill or something like it, might have killed Harriet Merton, perhaps inadvertently by pushing her down those stairs; he could see how ‘Keith Hill’ might have killed the relative he either lived with or knew well, taken Keith or Ken Gray or Greig’s car to transport his body and brought it to the vault; but how had he ended up there himself with his pockets full of valuable jewellery? Someone must have put him there before he could sell the jewellery. Francine? Some unknown killer? And why had he, who had removed a door and bricked up a doorway, not carried out the far simpler task of filling in the top of the manhole and paving over it? Because, although he meant to do it, had perhaps planned how to do it, someone had killed him before he could?

Wexford realised something else. For all their searching, they had found no one who had been related to ‘Keith Hill’ or had even known him; apart from those Miracle Motors people who had seen him once, no one who could even identify the older man by name. They had no idea where the two of them had lived or even if they had lived together, no idea of the sequence of the three earlier deaths, no hint of motive or means of murder. There were people out there, he thought, there must be, who had known one or both of the men well, yet no one had come forward when details of the bodies had appeared in newspapers and on television.

By this time Wexford had left the woods behind and come once more among houses. This must be Muswell Hill. It looked a pleasant place to live. He wandered around it, interesting himself in the different types of early twentieth-century domestic architecture, then trying to work out how he could return to his car without retracing his steps. It seemed to him that if he kept turning right he ought to find himself at the end of Shepherds Hill, but this strategy failed and he was hopelessly lost. If only he had turned right earlier, he was later to learn, and taken Cranley Gardens he would have come out into Shepherds Hill – but thank God he hadn’t.

He had noticed that his car was very near Highgate tube station, but which line it was on he had no idea. If he could find a tube station somewhere down here he could look at a map, get in a tube train and somehow – he feared it might be a circuitous route – find his way back to Highgate.

He began looking for the red, white and blue circle with a horizontal bar across it that was Transport for London’s sign, but saw none. There were buses but they all went to places he had never heard of such as Stroud Green and Manor House. Could a place be called Manor House? He asked a passer-by, an elderly woman, where the nearest tube station was and the result was to set her off on a violent denunciation of Transport for London for making this area an underground desert.