‘I can tell you what La Punaise is.’ She began to laugh reminiscently. ‘Harriet told me. Well, she showed me. It was a way of remembering her pin number. Seemingly, la punaise is French for a pin. She’d got a lot of restaurants written down in her address book. Her and Franklin, they ate out all the time. So she wrote La Punaise in the book like it was a restaurant and wrote a phone number underneath, only it wasn’t a phone number, it was a London exchange followed by the four digits of her pin. Oh, she thought herself very clever, I can tell you.’
So the boy, Keith Hill or whatever he was called, had had access to Harriet Merton’s address book and had also been clever enough to decipher her purpose in storing her pin number by this means. He had been in the house, must have had intimate knowledge of the house. Her pin number he would have wanted for illicit purposes, to say the least. Why had he written it down on that paper under the name Francine? Because Francine was French and could translate the name for him?
‘Thank you very much, Mrs Jones,’ he said.
Tom asked, ‘Did you ever go into – er, Harriet’s house? Orcadia Cottage, that is?’
‘Of course I did,’ said Mildred Jones. ‘How d’you think I got to see her address book? She was bored stiff, nothing to do if one of her young chaps hadn’t come round. Sometimes she’d ask me in for a drink. It’d be lunchtime and I’d go, but I’m not much of a drinker especially at midday.’
Wexford asked her, ‘What was the house like inside?’
‘You mean the furniture, pictures, that sort of thing? Oh, it was lovely. Beautiful stuff they had. Of course, it was all Franklin’s. He was a connoisseur.’
‘Mrs Jones, I’d like you to think very carefully. Imagine yourself in the hallway, looking towards the kitchen. Can you do that?’
‘OK. I’m doing it.’
‘Can you see the kitchen door?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘Now look to the left of it and tell me, is there another door there or a blank wall?’
‘What is all this?’ Mildred Jones was indignant. ‘Haven’t you been inside the place? Of course there’s a door. It leads down the stairs to the cellar where all those horrors were found. It makes me shudder to think of it.’
‘There is no door there now, Mrs Jones,’ Tom said.
She stared. ‘But I saw it. The first time I was there the door was open. Harriet had been down there to fetch something up – bottled gas or something. She had to do all that for herself. Franklin never lifted a finger. I looked down the stairs just to get a sight of the cellar, but there was nothing down there, only an empty space and a couple more of those gas bottles. You want to go down there yourselves and take a look.’
‘We’d like you to come in there with us and take a look,’ said Tom.
Mildred Jones was reluctant to accompany them. Tom explained to her that the bodies in the vault were long gone. The house itself contained nothing of Harriet’s, nothing of Franklin Merton’s. Two sets of owners had lived there since the Mertons, as she must know.
‘It’s the idea of those dead bodies lying in there, under the ground, for all those years … You’ve got to admit, it’s enough to give you the shivers.’
‘It would be a great help to us if you would come in there with us for just a few minutes.’
‘I don’t see how it could be, but OK, if it’s really a help.’
They walked out of the mews, Mildred Jones’s high-heeled green shoes having some difficulty with the cobbles, round the corner on to the smooth stone pavement. ‘I noticed you’ve got a Virginia creeper on your flat,’ Wexford said while Tom unlocked the front door of Orcadia Cottage. ‘Is it the same variety as was on this house until it was cut down?’
‘As far as I know. I don’t know anything about gardening, plants, that sort of thing.’
‘When the leaves fall it makes a lot of mess?’
‘Oh, yes, dreadful. My cleaner has to sweep it up and she makes a big fuss. I don’t mean that Vlad, she’s gone long ago. And the one after her too. Of course I don’t keep them on when I’m away in South Africa and they don’t like that.’
Mildred Jones stepped in fearfully over the threshold, but when she had advanced a few steps her nervousness left her and she stared at the blank wall facing them on the left-hand side of the kitchen door.
‘Someone’s made a wall there!’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe one of Harriet’s boys. They were all builders of some sort or another.’
The young man who might or might not have been called Keith Hill came into their minds, but it wasn’t until Mildred was back home and the two policemen were back in the car that Tom spoke of it. He wrenched off his tie. ‘We’ve no reason to think he was a builder or a friend of Harriet Merton’s or that he built that wall, have we?’
‘Except that we both have a feeling that all those things are true,’ said Wexford. ‘That’s all. Assumptions.’
For ever afterwards, for the rest of his life, Wexford would remember that it was here, on the corner, where Abbey Road comes into West End Lane, that the phone call from Dora came. ‘Assumptions’ was the last word spoken and then his phone rang. As their driver rounded the corner where Quex Road turns off to the left he heard Dora’s voice, a trembling shaken voice, and Dora’s news.
‘I’ll be back in five minutes – well, ten,’ he said. ‘As soon as I can. And then we’ll go home. Straightaway.’
The driver said, ‘What is it?’
He told her. ‘My daughter – my daughter Sylvia …’
‘It’ll be five minutes,’ she said. ‘Not ten. Sooner if I can make it.’
CHAPTER NINE
THE SUN WAS setting and all the lights were on. They sat at Sylvia’s bedside. ‘Only five minutes at the most,’ said the intensive-care sister. She came back after four minutes and shepherded them to the relatives’ room, a carpeted place with armchairs and a television set. Who, in their situation, would want to watch television? Dora, who had been dry-eyed at the bedside, now began crying quietly. When the door was shut Wexford took her in his arms and held her, not speaking.
Sylvia’s ex-husband Neil Fairfax was sitting there, though he had not been allowed to see her. Nor had Mike Burden, who had met them at their house when they arrived and driven Wexford and Dora to the hospital. Everything goes when your child is at death’s door, Wexford thought, every other preoccupation, worry, hope, fear. She is all. You don’t even notice if the sun is shining or rain falling. Nothing else matters and, humiliatingly, you pray. You pray to a god you don’t believe in and have never believed in. It’s a mystery how you know what to do, what to say, how to frame a prayer.
He gently released Dora, sat beside her, holding her hand. Burden said, ‘Any change?’
Wexford shrugged. ‘Just the same. They say she’s stable. They’re worried about her blood pressure. Well, I think they are – it’s hard to know.’
It was Burden who had told them, he who made that phone call. Sylvia had been fetching her little daughter Mary home from a pre-school for four year olds. The house, an old rectory, absurdly large for one woman, one child and two young men who were most of the time away at school or university. Sylvia had parked the car on the long winding drive, half overgrown with shrubs and trees in full leaf, had pushed open the passenger door for Mary to get out, got out herself and before she could take a step been stabbed by a man who had stepped out from the hawthorn thicket and plunged a knife into her chest. The knife had missed her heart but grazed a lung.
While Neil was producing coffee for everyone from the machine, Burden told the story all over again. ‘Mary was a marvel,’ he said, smiling at Mary’s father as he took his coffee. ‘She got herself to Mary Beaumont’s. You know who I mean?’