‘The snug’s gone. It’s been converted into a ladies-only bar.’
Wexford stared. ‘Can they do that? Isn’t it what we now have to call gender discrimination?’
‘Probably. There’s a big fight on about it. It’s been the lead story in the Courier for the past week. Red wine?’
‘That hasn’t changed.’
Wexford and Dora had reached home in the late afternoon of the day before. As it had been last time, it was a little like returning from a fortnight’s holiday, but knowing you could go back to that holiday as soon as you liked. Dora had phoned Sylvia within an hour and was with her now in her rambling house in the countryside. It rather gratified Wexford to see that both his daughters had bigger houses than he, though of course he now had two. He had joined the ranks of the second-homers. He had become one of those who battle through the nightmare of traffic congestion to reach a country house they will find cold and comfortless. Not in the spring, though, and now with windows open a little way, the stuffiness was past and the air breathable. It was very warm and he was sitting by one of those windows, looking at the lawn – you could almost see the grass growing longer and longer – when he phoned Burden. He had small hope of the new Detective Superintendent being free on a Saturday night, but Burden had said a quick yes, he’d love to meet.
As Burden walked back to their table carrying the two glasses of wine, Wexford found himself studying him. It was as if he expected his old friend and one-time subordinate to be changed in appearance, to be taller or heavier or more dignified. Absurd, of course. Only a few months had gone by. Burden was still slender, still perfectly dressed for whatever the occasion happened to be. A Saturday evening drink in a hotel bar? Burden wore grey flannel trousers with a grey nail-head tweed jacket over an open-necked dark green shirt. His hair, once caramel-colour, was now the grey of his jacket. But that, too, was unchanged from their last meeting.
Inevitably, he asked Wexford what he had been doing. The faint note of concern in his voice was slightly irritating. Wexford told him about Tom Ede, his unorthodox appointment as Ede’s adviser and about the contents of the vault. The four bodies, one of them half-inside a plastic bag of the sort used to cover a bicycle or motorbike. The jewellery. Most of this part had been in the newspapers, had for a week back in May dominated the national dailies. For a moment Wexford had hesitated, but none of this was secret, certainly not from a detective superintendent.
‘It’s an intriguing case.’ Even in no more than four words, Burden sounded relieved. What had he expected? That Wexford would be bored with his new life, frustrated, harking back to time past? ‘I suppose there’s no possibility of this Rokeby being the perpetrator?’
‘Ede thinks not. And it’s hard to imagine a man applying to the planning authority for an underground room when this would mean excavating the very place he least wanted to be discovered. He did apply and the reason his application was rejected appears to have been the neighbours objecting. And you have to remember that it was he who removed the manhole cover. Why would he do that? And if he did, knowing what was underneath, why tell the police?’
‘Where was he twelve years ago? You did say twelve years?’
‘He and his wife and their children had a house in West Hampstead. They sold it eight years ago and it fetched one and a half million, just enough to buy Orcadia Cottage. It’s hard to see how he could possibly have put three bodies into an underground tomb in a house he very likely didn’t know existed twelve years before.’
‘So are you saying,’ said Burden, ‘that whoever did the deed would have had to be living in the house?’
‘Not quite, Mike. The manhole is in a paved area or patio with access to a mews by means of a door in the wall. Now that door can be locked and bolted too, but my guess is that it was often left unlocked and unbolted. For instance, it was unlocked when Tom Ede and his sergeant and I went to have a look at the place. It’s quite possible that someone could have brought those bodies there in a car and there has been mention from a neighbour of a man being seen in a big old American car called an Edsel at about the right time.’
Burden, who liked cars, looked close to nostalgic. He gazed dreamily into the middle distance like one seeing visions. ‘An Edsel Corsair,’ he said. ‘Well, think of that. Fords made it. Dates from the late Fifties. Lovely, but it was never popular and it didn’t sell well.’
‘How do you come to know all that?’
‘My dad was mad about cars. He told me the Edsel was promoted on E-Day, September 4th, 1957. I’ve never forgotten it.’
‘Evidently,’ said Wexford in a dry voice.
Burden took no notice. ‘I wonder if it was a two-door or a four-door hard-top? Potential buyers are very stupid about this sort of thing. They didn’t like its grid, a pursed mouth instead of a wide grin, if you can believe it. And then the onset of the recession of 1957 was one of the external forces working against …’
‘All right, Mike, all right. I don’t want to buy one.’
‘It came in red, of course, and blue and rather a nice discreet sort of pale greenish yellow, and other colours too …’
Back to his old form, Wexford almost growled. ‘Pale yellow, I think. What does it matter? It was big enough to carry bodies in. And whoever he was, he parked it in the mews, sometimes overnight. It must have been a spectacularly recognisable car, which makes me wonder why whoever used it did use it. Why not hire a van if hiding bodies was his purpose?’
‘If it was. Let’s say it was. Using the Edsel as his means of transporting bodies must be because that’s all he could use. Was it his or had he borrowed it? So why not hire something else? Because he was poor, he couldn’t afford it. Can you think of a better reason?’
‘No, but I can easily think that a man in the mews in an Edsel around twelve years ago had nothing whatsoever to do with the bodies in the underground tomb – I call it the vault, by the way. And how about the fourth body?’
‘Ah. The young woman. Now you say she’s been there only two years.’
‘About that, they think. She was only about twenty or less. She had quite bad teeth but had no dental treatment. Now, though that’s not rare in old people it is quite rare in the young. But if you look at those photographs in the papers of crowds in Asia or even Eastern Europe you’ll see that quite a lot of even young women have discoloured teeth or prominent teeth or gaps between their teeth. I’m wondering if she could have come from one of those places and have been an asylum seeker or an illegal immigrant. But I mustn’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Whoever put her in the – er, vault, maybe your Edsel owner, must have known about the vault in advance. I’m thinking he came there with the three bodies twelve years before, and when he killed again thought of it as the ideal place to hide another body.’
‘He would have had to count on the door to the mews being unlocked.’
‘For all we know, Reg, it was always unlocked. Has anyone asked Rokeby?’
Wexford shook his head, but he didn’t really know. He thought of what a lot he didn’t really know and that finding out might be closed off from him. He couldn’t go to Rokeby and ask him. He couldn’t even phone him and ask him. He wasn’t Lord Peter Wimsey or Poirot, he wasn’t even a policeman any longer. What he could do, he thought, was find an Edsel dealer or some dealership (as Americans called it) where they had sold Edsels in the past. They must have been rare even twelve years ago. Remembering that Burden had said they dated from the Fifties, he began to lose heart. But no, this must have been a real vintage car in the Nineties, it wouldn’t have been forgotten …
Burden said as they parted, ‘It’s good to see you.’