He hardly knew what it was about her that made him feel he would want to talk to her again or she would want to talk to him. He had already turned away, was already halfway down the path when, for the second time he went back. ‘In case you need to talk to me,’ he said and gave her his card.
Returning to the car, he noticed that Crowhurst had parked it between two vans, one removal size, the other large enough to carry perhaps eight people. He wondered how well Scott-McGregor’s manner went down with his clients who were having their double beds and refrigerators moved.
Go home before you go to Gayton Road, he told himself. Go home and see Sylvia. Francine has been living there for at least two years and probably much longer. She won’t run away in the next few hours or even by tomorrow morning. There’s nothing to stop me going to find her on a Saturday. Miles drove him as far as Pattison Road and he said he would walk the rest of the way. Here, at this very point, where the Finchley Road runs up towards Golders Green, he had calculated was where Walter Hartright had met the Woman in White for the first time.
That was a novel he had loved since he was a teenager. Do young people ever read it now? Does anyone read it? Asking himself these questions was depressing. Round here was all countryside when Wilkie Collins wrote it, the Heath and pastureland extending nearly all the way down to what was then called the New Road. Tomorrow, after he had seen Francine Jameson, he would walk along the Spaniards Road to Highgate, go down the hill and find where Dick Whittington, as the sun came up, had turned and seen the streets of London paved with gold. When he was at school they had sung the round
Turn again, Whittington,
Thou worthy citizen,
Lord Mayor of London.
He let himself in to the coachhouse and Sylvia, pale-faced and shaky but well, came down the stairs and threw herself into his arms.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THEY PASSED THE evening at Sheila and Paul’s with the three children there. Sylvia had little to say about Jason Wardle’s attack – his name wasn’t mentioned – and her parents were careful to avoid the subject altogether. No doubt the sisters had thrashed it out when they were alone, but Wexford didn’t want to know. If it could never be forgotten perhaps it could be put behind them. When Wardle was found things would, of course, be different; if he was ever found, if he hadn’t disappeared abroad somewhere.
Wexford expected to sleep soundly that night and did so until the small hours. Then, when he awoke, it was to a realisation that was more a nuisance than an anxiety, but trivial things become anxieties at three in the morning. He couldn’t talk to Francine Jameson because he was no longer a policeman. He no longer had a warrant card and he baulked at calling Tom on a Saturday and asking for Lucy or Miles to come with him – correction: ask Lucy or Miles to go to Gayton Road and take him with them. Could he instead present himself as a friend of Sophie Baird enquiring after her old friend? Hardly. She would simply phone.
It took him an absurdly long time, well into daylight, to decide on the simplest solution. Tell the truth. Tell her his name, what he had been and what he now was, adding that if she didn’t want to talk to him or even speak the word ‘no’ to him, all she had to do was shut the door in his face. He got up at five and looked up her number in the phone book. She was there. Later on, at nine, he phoned the number and was asked to leave a message. Instead of that, he would go there, he thought. It was only a short walk away.
Before leaving he called Subearth Structures and asked Kevin Oswin for his brother’s address and phone number. Kevin was strangely cagey about giving Trevor’s address, but was eager enough to provide the phone number. It was no longer as easy as it had once been to discover the district in which someone lived from the three digits of an exchange. Wexford decided it wasn’t important. Mobiles were gradually taking over from landlines and young people he knew relied entirely on their cellphones. He tried Trevor’s number. After a dozen rings a woman answered and sounded as cautious as Kevin. But she gave Wexford Trevor’s mobile number and when he called it the phone was answered at once.
‘Don’t remember much about it,’ he said discouragingly. ‘I only went along with Kev in the Merc because I’d nothing better to do. I never went in the house. The owner – don’t recall his name – he and Kev were talking, arguing the toss; they come outside and went in again. I hung about in the lane and had a fag. Had a couple, they was so long about it.’
Wexford heard the unmistakable click of a cigarette lighter and Trevor’s indrawn breath. He coughed, said, ‘Kev never done the job. The place would have fell down if he had, he said. That was it. Then we went home.’
‘Where’s home, Mr Oswin?’
‘Never you mind. All I’ll say is, somewhere in West Hampstead. An Englishman’s home is his castle – maybe you’ve never heard that. It means that’s my business.’ Trevor was overcome by coughing and the phone went down.
Dora was taking all three children on the London Eye, a downhill walk to Finchley Road, then on the Jubilee Line to Westminster. His own walk was shorter and by the time he reached the house whose number Sophie Baird had given him, he had convinced himself she wouldn’t be in. He rang the bell and rang it again. The sound of footsteps from inside surprised him.
‘Ms Jameson,’ he said, ‘My name is Wexford, Reginald Wexford, and I’m a former detective chief inspector. I’d like to ask you some questions, but before I do have to explain to you that I have no official standing and no right to ask you anything.’
‘Do you have any identification?’
‘Yes, of course I do.’ There on the doorstep he produced his driving licence, senior railcard and, although he had forgotten it was in his pocket, his passport.
She smiled, perhaps because she had seen that the passport still described him as a police officer. ‘Come in. It’s a bit of a mess.’
Almost everyone who invited you in said that. The ones who didn’t were those who were in most need of saying it, the squalor-mongers and the compulsive rubbish hoarders. Francine Jameson’s little house was clean and as tidy as most people’s. In the living room a little boy of about two was sitting on the floor building an elaborate structure from Lego. At sight of Wexford he got up and went to his mother, clutching her round the knees. She picked him up.
‘I’m afraid William is rather shy.’
He said, ‘Hallo, William,’ in that enthusiastic tone he had long ago learnt that children love, and sat down in the chair Francine Jameson indicated. She was a rather tall, slim woman with dark hair tightly drawn back and tied in a ponytail.
‘What did you want to ask me?’
‘You will have heard about the – er, discoveries at Orcadia Cottage in St John’s Wood.’ She looked a little bewildered. ‘The place where’ – he didn’t want to say too much in front of the child – ‘there were some unpleasant discoveries made under a manhole in the patio.’
William said, ‘Patio’, and then, ‘patio, patio, catio, matio’.
‘Yes, darling, you are clever,’ said his mother and to Wexford. ‘I read about it in the paper. What has it to do with me?’
‘Have you ever been to Orcadia Cottage?’ She shook her head, mystified. ‘Do the names Franklin and Harriet Merton mean anything to you?’
‘I’ve never heard of them.’
‘La punaise?’
‘It’s French. It means a pin.’
‘Yes, but it’s quite an unusual word. Would you mind telling me how you come to know what it means?’