‘I’d like to ask you,’ he began, ‘how important you think the name “Francine” is. I mean, do we need to try and trace every Francine in the country? The trouble with that is that so many people who were young twelve years ago have left the country, just as others have come in. If she exists – and we don’t know that she does or ever did – she may be anywhere.’
‘Perhaps we have to ask ourselves why he would write the name Francine on a piece of paper on which “La Punaise” and what is almost certainly a pin number were already written. Because this woman with a French-sounding name could translate for him what was obviously a French word? It looks like it. So she must have been someone close to him. You don’t ask a casual acquaintance or a person much older than you to translate something which obviously has a criminal connection.’
‘He might have just asked her to translate “La Punaise” and not mentioned the number.’
‘True. But wouldn’t the meaning suggest a pin number to her? At least wouldn’t she question him?’
‘I don’t know, Reg. Maybe she did question him. Can we construct some sort of scenario out of what we do know?’
‘The way I see it, the young man who called himself Keith Hill somehow got into Orcadia Cottage and perhaps even lived there with a French girl called Francine. He found the address book with the pin number and “La Punaise” made to look like a restaurant, intending to use it to rob Harriet Merton’s account.’
‘If he was living there, where were Franklin Merton and Harriet? They can’t have been there, because it must have been at this time that the pseudonymous Keith Hill removed the door to the cellar, bricked up the doorway and plastered over it. Incidentally, why would he do that?’
‘It has to be because he’d killed Harriet and maybe that cousin of his or whoever it was and was sealing them up in a tomb.’
‘But he was in there, too,’ Tom objected.
‘I know there are holes in my scenario. I think we have to see Anthea Gardner again, see if we can find out where Franklin Merton may have been at that time, whenever that time was, and maybe see Mildred Jones first to try and settle this time question. So far all we know is that it was about twelve years ago.’
Mildred Jones was in a better frame of mind than when last seen. Some women are very much affected, Wexford thought, by whether they think they are looking good or are dissatisfied with their appearance or are having, for instance, a ‘bad hair day’, while men are influenced by the state of their car – he thought of that Edsel – or a bad back or a cold coming on. Mildred Jones’s hair had evidently just been done and silver streaks put among the iron grey. The red dress she wore suited her better than the trouser suit, which dwarfed her. Wexford supposed she was aware of these things, a feeling confirmed when she glanced with satisfaction into a mirror on their way to the chintzy living room.
‘You want me to tell you when I saw the so-called Mr Hill and his fancy car, do you? I’ll have to think.’ She was silent for a moment. Then she said. ‘When I try to remember when something or other happened I have to try and think of the weather. I mean, if it was summer or winter and raining or whatever.’
Tom was nodding encouragingly.
‘It’s no good nodding at me like that.’ A flash of the old acerbity was showing itself. ‘That won’t help me. I’m thinking. Ah,’ she said. ‘I know now. It must have been autumn. The whole place was covered with leaves – no, it wasn’t, not covered. That came a week or two later. The leaves from that Virginia creeper were beginning to fall. It must have been October, sometime in October. Does that help?’
‘Very much, Mrs Jones.’
‘It rained after that and made a thick wet mat of those leaves. I was glad when Clay – Mr Silverman, that is – cut it down. Ours hadn’t been planted then. Pity it ever was. That was Colin – he liked the colour.’
She waved to them as they left. Wexford imagined her going back into the house and pausing at the mirror to admire her reflection.
‘I don’t suppose Anthea Gardner will have silver streaks,’ he said.
An unobservant man, Tom looked puzzled. Wexford didn’t explain. Anthea Gardner was expecting them at midday and had coffee ready, the real thing made from beans which she had just ground herself. Tom, who had once told Wexford that he only liked the instant kind, sipped his rather gloomily. Mrs Gardner was dressed almost exactly as she had been on their previous visit, only this time instead of grey her skirt was brown and her blouse spotted instead of striped. Kildare had once more to be restrained and eventually shut in the kitchen.
‘You want to know where Franklin was in late October 1997?’
‘I know it’s difficult to remember these things from so far back, Mrs Gardner,’ Tom said. ‘Think about it. Take your time.’
‘I don’t have to think. It’s not difficult at all. He and I used to go on holiday together long before we started living together again. Harriet and he had been taking separate holidays for years. We were in San Sebastián that year. October it was, the second half of October.’
‘Why do you remember so clearly, Mrs Gardner?’
‘Oh, that’s easy. I remember because it was on that holiday, on my birthday actually, that we decided we’d live together again. Franklin would leave Harriet and come here to me.’
‘And when is your birthday?’
‘October twenty-fifth,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘St Crispin’s Day in case you’re interested.
‘Franklin went back to Orcadia Cottage,’ she went on. ‘It must have been four or five days after we got back. I told him to. I don’t think he’d have bothered if I hadn’t made him. When he came back he told me what had happened. The house was empty. He said it was very clean and tidy and Harriet wasn’t there. A woman he knew who lived in one of the cottages at the back told him that a man she called Harriet’s “young friend” had been at Orcadia Cottage with her for at least two weeks. This is the kind of thing you want?’
‘Exactly the kind of thing we want.’
‘It’s all coming back to me now,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘Franklin said he found a pile of cushions on the living-room floor with a scarlet feather boa draped across them. I mean, it was Harriet’s feather boa. He recognised it. He said the door in the wall at the back was unlocked and the key was missing. There was a manhole or drain or something in the patio, but the lid was off it …’
‘Just a minute, Mrs Gardner. You said the manhole was open?’
‘Well, I suppose so. I wasn’t there. Franklin said the lid was lying near it. The whole place was covered in those leaves which were wet and sort of sticky. He said they were very slippery. He had to walk very carefully not to fall over. Anyway, he managed to lift the cover and put it back on the manhole.’
‘Did he ever go back there?’
‘Not as far as I remember. He expected to hear from Harriet, asking for money if nothing else, but he never did.’ Anthea Gardner was silent for a moment, looking from Ede to Wexford and then down at her own ringless hands. ‘He didn’t care, you see. Women had cost him enough in the past, me included. He simply hoped he’d never hear from her and that perhaps she’d found a man to support her. The feather boa he saw as a defiant gesture, sort of cocking a snook at him, if you know what I mean.’
‘Mrs Gardner, do you know if Harriet had much jewellery?’
‘She had lots, all bought for her by Franklin, but it was gone, the valuable stuff was gone, he said, when he went to the house. Most of her clothes were gone, the designer stuff, and the best of her jewellery.’