‘It’s old now and half-forgotten but people still say “porkies” when they mean lies. It’s Cockney rhyming slang.’
‘Reg, I really don’t follow.’
‘Pork pies for lies. You leave off the second noun, the one that rhymes and use the first one.’
‘I see,’ said Lucy. ‘It seems very complicated.’
Wexford laughed. He got out of the car at Melina Place and walked down towards Orcadia Mews. There was something he needed to ask Mildred Jones, something which by an oversight he had neglected to take her up on before. Orcadia Cottage looked much as before but with two changes. A newspaper had been thrust through its letterbox and on the doorstep was a bunch of flowers, their stems in water inside a plastic container. ‘I wonder what it bodes,’ said Wexford to himself in the words of Hortensio. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell. No one came. The newspaper must be a freeby stuck there on the off-chance, the flowers delivered to the wrong house.
‘You’re not going to arrest me, are you?’ were the first words uttered by Mildred Jones when she opened her door to him.
Wexford wanted to laugh but didn’t. ‘I no longer have the power to do that, Mrs Jones, but if I did why would I?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been so worried, telling you that stuff about what I pay my cleaner –
‘Quite sure.’
‘Come in then.’ She was more affable than she had ever been and in a cream and black dress with pearls looked prettier than he had ever seen her. ‘I’m going out to lunch but not for half an hour.’
She took him into the over-stuffed living room. ‘No, I was aghast after you had gone. I’d been so tremendously indiscreet. Talking about paying my cleaner less than the minimum wage, talking about employing illegals. At least they hadn’t been trafficked. I might have landed myself in prison, mightn’t I?’
‘Hardly, Mrs Jones.’
‘Well, a massive fine then. Or would I have to do community service like those hoodies?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You’d like coffee, wouldn’t you? It will have to be Nescafe, the real stuff takes too long, and I have to be out of here at twenty-five past on the dot.’ She went to the door, opened it and shouted, ‘Raisa! Coffee!’
No ‘please’, Wexford noted. No polite form of request.
He decided – though it was irrelevant – that he disliked Mildred Jones quite a lot. In his previous life, his previous existence, he had seldom allowed himself likings and dislikings. Now he could. It was an advantage.
‘Last time I talked to you,’ he said, ‘you spoke about a cleaner you had had from the Ukraine, I think it was, who had a strange name and who disappeared. What exactly did you mean by that?’
‘Well, she left and didn’t come back.’
‘What was she called?’
‘I don’t know her surname. Her Christian name, if she was a Christian, was Vladlena. I called her Vlad like Vlad the Impaler I saw in a film on TV. I can’t be doing with these fancy names. After all, what are they, these girls, the lowest of the low where they come from.’
Raisa came in with coffee on a tray. The coffee was in a willow pattern pot, the cups and saucers to match, silver spoons, lumps of brown and white sugar in a silver bowl and milk in a silver jug. Wexford wondered if the tray would have had such a civilised and elegant appearance if Mrs Jones had prepared it herself and decided that like hell it would. Raisa herself, slender, sharp-featured with long blonde hair, was the girl Mildred Jones had been talking to on the doorstep when last he spoke to her. She smiled at him.
‘Thank you, Raisa,’ he said.
She was barely out of the door when Mildred Jones said, ‘It doesn’t do to talk to them like you knew her socially. Do it just the once and they start to take advantage.’
He wanted to say that he supposed she learnt to talk in that way to servants when she was in South Africa during apartheid. If he did that he’d never get another word out of her. ‘Vladlena, Mrs Jones.’ He was damned if he was going to refer to the girl as Vlad.
‘Yes, well it was quite weird. She was here doing the ironing one morning …’
‘Just when was this?’
‘Three years ago, maybe a bit more. Like I say, she was doing the ironing. In the kitchen she was with the radio on. They always have to have the radio on, can’t function without it. Doesn’t matter what’s on, music, talks, drama, anything, so long as they’ve got background noise. I went into the kitchen and the radio was on and the iron was on, standing in that metal rack thing at the end of the ironing board. And on the board was one of Colin’s shirts with a great iron-shaped burn in the middle of the back.’
Mrs Jones took a gulp of her coffee. ‘I must go in five minutes. Well, like I say, there was this burn and half the ironing in a pile yet to be done but no sign of her. I called out but she wasn’t in the house. Then I saw her coat was gone. It was plain to see what had happened, she had burnt Colin’s shirt and got frightened – with good cause, I may add – and just fled without saying a word to me.’
This wasn’t quite what Wexford had hoped for. It was hardly a disappearance. ‘Did you ever hear from her again?’
‘It’s funny you should say that because I did. A long time later, months and months, I saw her go into Mr Goldberg’s house. Do you know where that is?’
Wexford remembered the reclusive man whose food was fetched in for him by the cleaner. ‘In Melina Place.’
‘Right. She was going in there as bold as brass with two shopping bags. I went up to her and said I’d seen the shirt with the burn mark and she’d have to pay for it. I wasn’t going to let her get away with it. Well, the next thing
