Wexford occupied the time by accompanying Lucy to Rokeby’s flat in Maida Vale. A thin drizzle was falling out of a leaden sky. The flyover looked leaden too, elephantine because of its weight and the heavy uprights which supported it. Someone had chained a bicycle to the railings outside the house where Rokeby’s flat was. Up against the broken steps someone else had parked a pram which looked unfit ever again to transport a baby. Once again, forewarned of their coming, Rokeby was outside his front door.
‘I can’t stop you coming,’ he said, ‘but I’ve nothing more to tell you. I can’t help that. There’s nothing more.’
‘Mr Rokeby,’ Wexford said when they were inside among the fluted columns, ‘people often say what you’ve just said, but the fact often is that they remember more events than they think they do, and those can be awakened if the right questions are asked.’ Wexford glanced around the big room, thinking to himself that no interior can be uglier than that which was designed to be grand and sumptuous but is rendered mean by cheap carpeting and chain-store chairs and tables. ‘Now the right question here my colleague Detective Sergeant Blanch would like to ask you.’
But her first question or inquiry was not that. ‘Do you think we could have a light on, Mr Rokeby? The rain is making it very dark in here.’
A central light, suspended too low down, suddenly blazed, making Wexford blink. ‘Thank you,’ Lucy said. ‘Now Mr Clary – you remember him?’
Rokeby nodded.
‘Mr Clary, the architect of Chilvers Clary, came to see you in the summer of 2006 and a while later he returned, bringing with him a plumber called Rodney Horndon? Is that right?’
‘He was a plumber and Clary said his name was Rod. I don’t know if he was Rodney Horndon.’
‘Apparently he was,’ Wexford said. ‘Now, he came to Orcadia Cottage when Mr Clary came the second time?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Now, it was summer. Did you and your wife’ – Wexford glanced at Anne Rokeby, who turned a stony face to him – ‘go on holiday that year? You did? And would that have been before or after the visit of Mr Clary and Mr Horndon?’
Anne Rokeby spoke in a voice as cold as her face. ‘Of course it must have been after. We could only go in the school holidays and they, as I suppose you know, start at the end of July.’
Undeterred by her manner, Lucy turned to her. ‘How easy would it have been to get into your patio from the mews while you were away?’
‘Very easy, as my husband never bothered to lock the door in the wall. I’d lock it and the very next time my husband went out that way he’d leave it unlocked. As far as I know,’ Anne Rokeby gave her husband a bitter look, ‘the key is lost.’
Rokeby ignored this. He burst out like a child pleading for a promised treat that has been long postponed: ‘Please, when can we go back to Orcadia Cottage? Please don’t make us stay here any longer.’
‘You can go back whenever you like, Mr Rokeby,’ Lucy said, ‘so long as you’ll put up with people standing outside the house and staring in and put up with us poking about the patio from time to time.’
‘Thank God.’
Rokeby came out with them, pulling the door almost closed behind him. ‘Going back will save my marriage. I somehow feel it will save my life.’
‘It’s nice,’ said Lucy on the stairs, ‘to feel we’re pleasing some of the people some of the time.’
*
When Wexford was a child the ‘lady doctor’ had been a formidable woman. It was often only her vast bosom which distinguished her from the male of the species. Her grey hair was clipped short, her reddened face innocent of make-up and her feet splayed in brown leather lace-ups. Of course, he knew very well Francine Hill wouldn’t be like that. He knew that doctors were as likely to be young and beautiful as women in any other profession, but it was only after he had heard her voice on the phone that he pictured her as such. His imagination came far short of the reality.
If he had only seen her in the street he would have placed her as a dancer, a member of some corps de ballet. She was very slim. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, parted in the centre and drawn back into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her mouth was full and red, her eyes large and dark blue and her skin dazzlingly white; like the ‘lady doctor’ of his youth (though different in all other respects) she wore no make-up. She had on a knee-length black skirt and jacket with a dark blue and red scarf, flat pumps instead of high heels, no jewellery.
Rita Debach brought her into the office.
‘Please sit down, Dr Hill,’ Tom said.
Wexford guessed she would be the kind of doctor who asked her patients to call her by her first name.
‘Now my colleague here, Mr Wexford, tells me you were familiar with Orcadia Cottage in 1997. You went there, I think, with a friend of yours?’
‘I was eighteen,’ she began, ‘living with my father and my stepmother in Ealing. I’d just left school. Teddy Brex was my – well, I suppose he was my boyfriend.’ She paused to consider. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course he was.’
‘And he owned a pale yellow Ford Edsel car?’
‘I don’t know if he owned it.’ She spoke diffidently and Wexford could tell she was doing her best to be as accurate as possible. ‘He used it. He drove it. He told me it had been his uncle’s, but his uncle had gone to live somewhere in Hampshire or Sussex, I can’t remember where.’
‘Was it Liphook, Dr Hill?’
‘Oh, yes, it was. Of course it was.’
‘Where did you meet Mr Brex?’
‘It was at a show – an exhibition, I mean. I went with a friend. Teddy was at this college and the art department had a show of students’ degree work. He’d made a mirror and won a prize for it.’ She looked up and her face suddenly glowed with life. ‘It was the most beautiful mirror. It had a frame made of different kinds of wood, inlaid, you know – he was very gifted. He did wonderful work. He gave me the mirror but I couldn’t take it home. There were – well, reasons why I couldn’t. I left it in the house. I don’t know what happened to it.’ I do, thought Wexford, it’s in Anthea Gardner’s house. Francine Hill had been carried away by memories and now she shook herself. ‘But you don’t want to hear this. We got to know each other, Teddy and I, and we started going out. He was twenty-one. I went to his house …’
Tom interrupted, ‘He was twenty-one and he owned a house?’
‘He said it was his,’ Francine Hill said. ‘I know he wasn’t always truthful. It was in Neasden. I don’t remember the address, but I think I could take you there. His parents were dead but he had a grandmother. I never met her. He took me to Orcadia Cottage.’
‘He didn’t own that house as well?’
She looked at Tom steadily. It was a look which said, I am telling you the truth. If you don’t believe me perhaps we should terminate this interview because I am wasting my time. Tom nodded rather uncomfortably.
‘He took me there,’ she went on. ‘Of course he didn’t own the place. It obviously belonged to someone quite rich. He said that a friend he was working for had lent it to him. You have to remember I was only eighteen and I’d led a very sheltered life, exceptionally sheltered, I think, for someone of my age. I’ve thought about it since and I’ve thought he couldn’t have had friends who owned a place like that but I believed it then. I couldn’t have placed people – do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Wexford, earning an interrogatory stare from Tom.
‘It was most beautifully furnished. Lovely old furniture and oriental rugs and very fine porcelain. I looked in one of the wardrobes and it was full of expensive clothes, dresses and suits, women’s clothes, and there were some men’s, too, in another wardrobe. The drawers were full of jewellery, it looked valuable. Is this the kind of thing you want to hear?’