Wexford told him. ‘The Edsel is in Balham, in a garage, being looked after by an Edsel fanatic called Mick Bestwood. It’s been so thoroughly cleaned and polished you could eat your dinner off the bonnet.’
The laugh which greeted this was typical of Tom who (as he put it himself) always gave honour where honour was due. ‘Excellent. Well done. We’ll have Forensics go over it just the same. You know they say it’s impossible to eradicate all that sort of evidence. There’ll be something. We’ve started inquiring at service stations in Liphook, at car parks and at motor repair shops. There aren’t too many of those – Liphook’s not very big. But all that’s pointless now.’ He repeated, ‘You’ve done well, Reg.’
‘Still, he may be living in Liphook.’ Tom had evidently forgotten Wexford’s home was in Kingsmarkham, not many miles from Liphook. ‘It’s not much more than a big village.’
‘The woman who wrote Lark Rise to Candleford used to live there,’ Tom said. ‘Flora Thompson. I saw about it on television when they did the serial.’ He went off into one of his digressions, speculating as to whether Candleford was Liphook and ending with a mini-biography of the author.
Wexford waited patiently before asking if the inquiries in Liphook had had any results.
Tom shrugged. ‘Maybe Kenneth Hill used to live there, but if he did he didn’t make much of a mark. Lucy Blanch and DC Garrison have talked to a good many of the residents and no one remembers Hill.’
‘Medical centres?’ Wexford queried. ‘What we used to call doctors’ surgeries? Hotels? Pubs.’
‘Lucy’s tried all those and there’s nothing. The fact that he’s not there is no evidence for us, it’s another negative. I’m inclined to believe he never lived there. It looks to me as if it’s just something the young man said to your Miracle Motors people because he thought that would be an excuse for the uncle not coming in with the Edsel himself. Liphook was probably the first name that came into his head. He knew someone there or he’d seen the name written down.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right.’
‘Mildred Jones is home from South Africa,’ said Tom. ‘We’ll go and see her. She’s our only source for the name Keith Hill. Let’s hope she has total recall for a conversation she says she had with him twelve years ago.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE LIVED IN one of the garden flats in the block in Orcadia Mews. Her front door was directly opposite the door in the rear wall of the Orcadia Cottage paved yard. Three of the front doors were painted black but Mildred Jones’s was fuchsia pink. A Virginia creeper, now in new leaf, rambled over the brickwork of the flats, completely concealing some of it, and Wexford thought of the same climber which had figured in Simon Alpheton’s painting and had been cut down by Rokeby. For some reason, he wondered if the climber had any significance in this case, but he was at a loss to think what it could possibly have.
Tom had forgotten to put his tie on or had deliberately left it off, but fished it out of his pocket and was putting it on as the front door was opened by a short but rather heavy woman in a green trouser suit. She gave Tom and his tie a glance of distaste. She was one of those people whose heads seem too big for their bodies, their features handsome enough but almost overpowering. The heavy gold jewellery she wore seemed to weigh down her neck. Her hair was grey, styled to look like as if sculpted from metal or stone, her face thickly made-up, the eyebrows shaped with excessive care.
The room she led them into was small, stuffed with chintz-covered furniture, the French window hung with over-ornate brocade curtains, braided, pleated, fringed, its pelmet adorned at its sides with bunches of tassels. But the garden visible outside was like a rectangle cut out of a hayfield.
‘I told you on the phone that we spoke to him,’ Mildred Jones said. ‘He said his name was Keith Hill. I told you that too.’
Wexford said, ‘He didn’t mention his address?’
‘No. Why would he? You don’t say to someone you’ve just met, “My name’s Keith Hill and I live at number something or other, do you?”’
Neither policeman answered her. ‘What did he look like?’
‘Young, about twenty. Very good-looking if you like the sulky type. Tall, dark. He was obviously one of Harriet’s.’
‘One of Harriet’s what?’ Tom asked.
‘Boyfriends, bits on the side. Oh, I knew all about it. She had a lot of young fellows visit her, plumbers, electricians, blokes she’d send for to do jobs for her while Franklin was out. They did the jobs all right.’
Tom’s face set into lines of disapproval and he curled up his mouth in distaste. He reminded Wexford of a portrait he had once seen of John Knox at his most censorious. Suppressing the signs of amusement, he said, ‘You said we spoke to him, this Keith Hill. Who were “we”?’
‘Oh, me and my then husband. Didn’t I say?’
Wexford hardly liked to ask if the man had died. He had no need to.
‘We split up a couple of years ago and got divorced.’ Mildred Jones uttered a sound halfway between a chuckle and a snort. ‘It was just after that girl Vlad burnt his shirt. Not that it was because of that or the girl. He had an eye for the girls but he never fancied those skinny blondes.’
‘Vlad?’
‘The cleaner. Her name was Vladlena, only I called her Vlad the Impaler. “Burner” would have been more like.’
Tom was anxious to get her back to the subject.
‘Would you tell us everything you remember about Keith Hill? Exactly what he said when you and your ex-husband talked to him?’
‘Well, the first time I just said good evening or hello or something and he just said good evening. I was out for a walk with my little dog. I had a dog then but he died. The second time I was in my friend’s car and I saw him and I waved but he didn’t wave back. The next time I was coming back in the car with Colin – my ex, I mean – and this Keith Hill was in the mews but without his car that time and I thought he looked shifty – well, as if he’d been up to no good. I said, “You again” or “We meet again” or something, and he said, “Yes” or “Right”. He said his car was in for a service. Those leaves were lying all over the place and getting wet and I said to him how someone I knew had slipped on them and broken her leg. I thought I’d let him know I knew what he was up to with a woman three times his age and I asked him how Harriet was. He said she was fine and I said, tell her Mildred said hello or give her my love or something.
‘We went indoors after that and watched him from my front window. I don’t know what he was doing. I went out again then, carrying my rubbish bag for the council to collect in the morning. After I was back in the house again I saw him go through the door in the wall into the backyard of Harriet’s house. I said to Colin, he knew it like he lived there, like he owned the place.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Jones. That’s very helpful. Can you remember how he was dressed?’
‘Like they all do. The young, I mean. One of those zipper jackets, jeans of course, a black T-shirt, I think. He had that car, but he wasn’t very confident driving it. I thought he was going to scrape it against the wall out there. He was nervous and not just about the car.’
‘And he went through the door in the wall into the backyard of Orcadia Cottage?’
‘I’ve told you he did.’
‘Mrs Jones,’ Wexford said, ‘does the name Francine mean anything to you? And what is La Punaise?’
He expected an answer of sorts to his first question, only perhaps to say that she had heard the name but couldn’t remember where. What he didn’t anticipate was a full and highly informative answer to his second inquiry.