‘Your bruv? You had your brother with you?’
‘Yeah, my bruv Trevor.’ He added importantly. ‘Trev’s like self-employed, got a car-hire company, but he’s about here somewhere. He come with me to look at the place, but he stayed outside to have a fag. Terrible heavy smoker is Trev. I went inside with Mr Rokeby and had a look round for what that was worth.’
‘Why wasn’t it a practical proposition?’
‘It’d have meant excavating under the roadway at the back and that wouldn’t be allowed. Westminster Council wouldn’t have that. Wouldn’t be allowed. Got that? Not allowed.’
‘But you didn’t look into the coal hole?’
‘Never knew there was a bloody coal hole till I saw it on the telly. Right?’
It must have been Trevor that Wexford caught a glimpse of as they were leaving Subearth’s premises, an equally fat if slightly taller man than his brother, standing by the concrete mixer smoking a cigarette. He wore a suit and tie and appeared to be paying no more than a social visit. ‘Who do we see next?’ he asked Lucy.
‘Groundhog and Co. have gone out of business, sir. The recession’s been too much for them. Perhaps we ought to talk to the boss sometime, but don’t you think we could see those that are still operating first?’
‘All right, then.’ Wexford was looking at Lucy’s list. ‘How about K, K and L ? They’re in Hendon and that’s not far away, is it?’
Not a builders’ yard this time but a shop in one of those parades that break the monotonous rows of semi-detached houses on arterial roads. In this one was the usual sequence, newsagent, hairdresser, building society, dry cleaner, but instead of the bathroom shop, K, K and L, Below Surface Home Extensions. A rather gloomy-looking young woman in a black trouser suit showed signs of being more helpful than Brian George and Kevin Oswin.
‘Our Mr Keyworth was down to do the survey,’ she said without looking anything up or having recourse to the desktop on the counter. ‘He was due to go over there in August twenty-o-six and he was just leaving in the taxi when Mr Rokeby phoned and said not to come because the planning people refused his application. There’d been a lot of opposition from the neighbours.’
‘And you are?’ Lucy asked.
‘I’m Ms Fortescue.’ Wexford thought her reply quaint for present day usage. Perhaps she read his mind for she added, ‘Louise Fortescue.’
‘Why a taxi? Doesn’t Mr Keyworth drive?’
‘He’d lost his licence.’ She added vindictively, ‘Driving massively over the limit.’ As if she still needed to assert Keyworth’s superior status: ‘It wasn’t a black cab. His next-door neighbour’s got a car-hire company. They only drive Mercedes.’
‘Well, Ms Fortescue, would you mind telling us how you happen to have such a precise memory of something that happened – what? Three years ago?’
‘Three years, yes. That’s easy. Me and Damian – Mr Keyworth that is – we were engaged. I remember everything about that week because we were planning our wedding. I’d even moved in with him to his new home in West Hampstead – he’d only been there a bit over a year – and the day after he was due to go to Orcadia Cottage I broke it off. The way he behaved I couldn’t do otherwise. I moved out that night. Luckily I’d kept my flat. She turned her face away. ‘It was me broke it off, but I’ve never got over it.’ Her voice broke a little. ‘I’m sorry.’
Meeting each other’s eyes as they walked to the car, Wexford and Lucy just overcame the desire to laugh. ‘I was engaged once,’ said Wexford.
‘So was I.’
‘I didn’t marry her. She married someone else and so did I.’
‘And I didn’t marry at all. Poor Miss Fortescue, she’s taken it very hard. What exactly are we looking for, sir?’
‘I wish you’d call me Reg.’
‘I’ll try,’ said Lucy, ‘but it will be difficult. What are we looking for?’
Wexford got into the passenger seat. ‘Well, someone like Ms Fortescue. Someone who knew about the set-up at Orcadia Cottage because she or he had been told about it.’
Lucy turned into the Finchley Road. ‘You mean that the theory is that one of these people who made a survey knew about the coal hole and possibly the cellar, but isn’t going to say so? They discovered it at the time and either went back when they knew no one would be at home or else told someone else about it.’
‘Something like that. We still have J. Peterson and Son to see, and Underland Constructions.’
‘They know we’re coming.’
J. Peterson had a small office over a hardware shop in North Finchley. The room was tiny, no bigger than the average suburban bathroom. It contained nothing but a desk, two chairs and the ubiquitous laptop. No pictures were on the walls, no maps, no posters, no curtain or even a blind was at the narrow sash window. The atomosphere wasn’t far off that of a prison cell.
‘We do most of our business online,’ said a harassed-looking man who gave no sign that he had expected them. ‘The client gets on to our website and books an appointment and we contract out to a building firm.’
‘You keep a record of that?’
‘The builders have an architect who would do a sort of design and if the client likes it and accepts the estimate it’ll go ahead. We’ll have a record on the computer if this client – what’s he called? Rokeby? – if he accepted the estimate.’
‘He didn’t,’ said Lucy.
‘Then I can’t help you.’ The man sounded pleased.
Underland Constructions might have answered Lucy’s call and agreed to see her and Wexford, but only one man appeared to be in charge of the big sprawling builders’ yard in Willesden. The place looked as if it were being dismantled. Two of the sheds were empty. The office with ‘Reception’ over the door had no one behind the counter.
‘We’re shutting up shop,’ the man said. ‘Been struggling for the past year but in the end it’s been too much for us. I don’t suppose I can help you. What was it you were wanting?’
Lucy told him.
‘You don’t want us. You want our architects. They did all our designs for us. Not any more, of course, but they’re still in business. Doing all right, as far as I know.’
He went into the office and came out again with a much-thumbed card. Lucy read what was on it aloud to Wexford when they were back in the car. ‘Chilvers Clary, Architects, and then there’s a string of degrees or whatever after Robyn Chilvers and Owen Clary. They have an office in the Finchley Road. Shall we go straight there?’
‘Pity it’s such a long time ago,’ Wexford said. ‘I doubt if Robyn Chilvers will have had her engagement broken on the relevant day. Still, even if they’d forgotten about it and haven’t kept records, reading all this Orcadia Cottage stuff in the papers will perhaps have jogged their memories.’
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘All the time, though, we come up against this stumbling block. In order to do a survey or make a design, whoever he is would have had to examine the coal hole, probably go down into it. And if he or she did and was honest they would have seen what was in there and gone to the police. And if they’re not honest and did see what was in there they didn’t go to the police and they’re not going to tell us now.’
Some years before Wexford had got out of a tube train at Finchley Road Station and walked up the hill towards West End Lane. Investigation of a Kingsmarkham murder with London connections had brought him there and he had thought the Finchley Road rather a pleasant place to shop and perhaps to live in. It had gone downhill very badly since then. A huge shopping mall, already dilapidated, had spoiled the western side of the street, while opposite shops and restaurants had closed, their windows boarded up. Chilvers Clary was still there and so were a massage parlour and a betting shop. The massage parlour was called Elfland and in its window were photographs of very pretty young women dressed as fairies with feathery wings and holding bows and arrows. It looked respectable and rather dull.