Clay and Devora Silverman bought the house from Franklin Merton in 1998 and lived there until 2002, before returning to the house they had rented out in Hartford, Connecticut. The first autumn they spent at Orcadia Cottage the leaves on the Virginia creeper, which covered the entire front and much of the back of the house, turned from green to copper and copper to red and then started to fall off. Clay Silverman watched them settle on the front garden and the paving stones in the back. He was appalled by the red sticky sodden mass of leaves on which he and Devora slipped and slid and Devora sprained her ankle. Knowing nothing about natural history and still less about gardening, he was well-informed about art and was familiar with the Alpheton painting. It was one of his reasons for buying Orcadia Cottage. But he had assumed that the green leaves covering the house which formed the background to the lovers’ embrace remained green always and remained on the plant. After all of them had fallen he had the creeper cut down.
Orcadia Cottage emerged as built of bricks in a pretty pale red colour. Clay had shutters put on the windows and the front door painted a pale greenish-grey. In the paved yard at the back of the house was what he saw as an unsightly drain cover with a crumbling stone pot on top of it. He had a local nursery fill a tub with senecios, heathers and cotoneaster to replace the pot. But four years later he and Devora moved out and returned home. Clay Silverman had given £800,000 for the house and sold it for £1,500,000 to Martin and Anne Rokeby.
The Rokebys had a son and daughter; there were only two bedrooms in Orcadia Cottage but one was large enough to be divided and this was done. For the first time in nearly half a century the house was home to children. Again there was no survey on the house, for Martin and Anne paid cash and needed no mortgage. They moved into Orcadia Cottage in 2002 and had been living there for four years, their children teenagers by this time, when Martin raised the possibility with his wife of building underground. Excavations to construct an extra room or two – a wine cellar, say, or a ‘family room’, a study or all of those things – were becoming fashionable. You couldn’t build on to your historic house or add an extra storey, but the planning authority might let you build subterraneanly. A similar thing had been done in Hall Road which was near Orcadia Place and Martin had watched the builders at work with interest.
A big room under Orcadia Cottage would be just the place for their children to have a large-screen television, their computers, their ever-more sophisticated arrangements for making music, and maybe an exercise room, too, for Anne, who was something of a work-out fanatic. In the late summer of 2006 he began by consulting the builders who had divided the large bedroom but they had gone out of business. A company whose board outside the Hall Road house gave their name, phone number and an email address were next. But the men who came round to have a look said it wouldn’t be feasible. A different firm was recommended to him by a neighbour. One who came said he thought it could be done. Another said it was possible if Martin didn’t mind losing all the mature trees in the front garden. Nevertheless, he applied to the planning authority for permission to build underneath the house.
Martin and Anne and the children all went to Australia for a month. The house was too old, prospective builders said, it would be unwise to disturb the foundations. Others said it could be done, but at a cost twice that which Martin had estimated. They said all this on the phone without even looking at it. The project was put an end to when planning permission was refused, having had a string of protests from all the Rokebys’ neighbours except the one who had recommended the builder.
All this took about a year. In the autumn of 2007 the Rokebys’ son, who had been the principal family member in favour of the underground room, went off to university. Time went on and the plan was all but forgotten. The house seemed bigger now their daughter was away at boarding school. In the early spring of 2009 Martin and Anne went on holiday to Florence. There, in a shop on the Arno, Anne fell in love with a large amphora displayed in its window. Apparently dredged up from the waters of the Mediterranean, it bore a frieze round its rim of nymphs and satyrs dancing and wreathing each other with flowers.
‘I must have that,’ said Anne. ‘Imagine that replacing that hideous old pot.’
‘You have it,’ Martin said. ‘Why not? So long as you don’t try getting it on the flight.’
The shop sent it, carefully packed in a huge crate, and it finally arrived in St John’s Wood in May 2009 by some circuitous route not involving aircraft. A local nursery agreed to plant it with agapanthus and sedum spectabile, but before this was done Martin emptied the plants and soil out of the wooden tub, placed the remains of the tub into a black plastic bag and put it out into the mews for the rubbish collection.
‘I’ve often wondered what’s under that lid thing but never bothered to have a look.’
‘Now’s your chance,’ said Anne, uninterested.
‘It’s probably too heavy to lift.’
But it wasn’t too heavy. Martin lifted the manhole cover to disclose a large dark cavity. He could see nothing much beyond what appeared to be a plastic bag or sheet of plastic lying in the depths. Better get a torch, he thought, and he did, thus wrecking his life for a long time to come.
An exaggeration? Perhaps. But not much of one. By shining that torch down into the dark cavity, he gained a place for his wife and himself and his home on the front page of every daily newspaper, put an end to his and his family’s peace for months, attracting mobs of sightseers to the street and the mews, reducing the selling price of his house by about a million pounds and making Orcadia Place as notorious as Christie’s home in Notting Hill and the Wests’ in Gloucester.
CHAPTER TWO
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD, who was no longer a chief inspector or a policeman or a permanent resident of Kingsmarkham in the county of Sussex, sat in the living room of his second home in Hampstead reading the Booker Prize winner. He was no longer any of those other things, but he was still a reader. And now he had all the time in the world for books.
Of course, he had many interests besides. He loved music: Bach, Handel, lots of opera. Walking he found a bore when he always walked the same route in Kingsmarkham, but London was different; London walks were a never-ending source of interest and excitement. Galleries he visited, usually with his wife Dora. It was a mild winter and he went on the river with her, took the canal trip with her from Paddington Basin to Camden Lock and back. They went to Kew Gardens and Hampton Court. For all that, for all this richness, he missed what had been his life. He missed being a policeman.
So the chance encounter with Tom Ede as he was walking down the Finchley Road changed things. They had first met years ago when Tom had been a very young police constable and Wexford staying with his nephew Chief Superintendent Howard Fortune in Chelsea. Wexford had taken an interest in one of Howard’s cases and Tom had come to his attention as exceptionally bright and persevering. That had been more than thirty years ago, but he had recognised Tom at once. He looked older, of course, but it was the same face if overlaid with lines, the same hairline if grey now instead of brown. Must be because he hasn’t gained weight, Wexford had thought at the time, rueful about his own increased girth.
He’d looked at Tom, hesitated, then said, ‘It’s Thomas Ede, isn’t it? You won’t know me.’