‘Can I ask what for?’
‘I want to show you some clothes that may have belonged to Vladlena.’
‘Belonged to a girl whose body has been found’ was what he should have said. But so far he hadn’t told Sophie why he was so interested in Vladlena and she hadn’t asked. Lucy went in the car to fetch Sophie Baird. Wexford was waiting for her when she arrived and showed her the clothes. Sophie herself was dressed much as she usually was in a tweed skirt and jumper with cream-coloured jacket and brown leather court shoes. The garments which had been on the young woman’s body in the vault had become pathetic in Wexford’s eyes; they so objectified their wearer and almost certainly had been worn not because she liked them or chose to wear them but as the uniform of her trade. Sophie Baird’s reaction was very different. She recoiled, she blushed. Wexford had been about to ask her not to touch anything, but any caution of that kind was unnecessary. She actually stepped back from the table on which the boots, the jacket and the fishnet tights lay.
‘I never saw Vladlena wear anything like that,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘How did you – the police – get hold of these?’ A possible solution occurred to her and she shuddered. ‘Were they – were they on a dead body?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘The three times I saw Vladlena she was wearing a summer dress – well, a cotton dress, quite faded and shabby, and once a thick winter coat over it. Her shoes looked very worn and she also wore flip-flops.’
‘But if she was going to do what she suggested to you she would do for the sake of a thousand pounds, she might have worn clothes such as these?’
‘I suppose she might have,’ said Sophie Baird.
‘One more question before I take you in to see Detective Superintendent Ede. Would Vladlena have worn underwear?’
‘Well – I don’t understand. What do you mean, worn underwear? Of course she would. Everyone does.’
‘So you believe she would have?’
‘I assume she would. I don’t know, though. I really don’t know.’
Tom Ede asked her if Vladlena had any jewellery. Sophie Baird said she couldn’t remember; perhaps a ring. The necklaces and rings and bracelets they had concluded had all belonged to Harriet Merton, were shown to her but she had scarcely glanced at them when she shook her head impatiently.
‘You don’t understand. She was poor. She was much poorer than the poor in this country are. She had nothing. She earned enough to pay her rent to Mrs Kataev and buy food and that was all.’
‘You mentioned the possibility of a ring,’ Tom said.
‘Yes, but I’m not sure I’m not imagining it. I seem to remember something silver she wore, a ring, a pendant. I seem to, but that’s all I can say.’
Getting ready to drive himself and Dora back to Kingsmarkham for the weekend, Wexford asked himself what steps Vladlena would have taken to carry out her plan. The driver called Grigor or Gregory seemed the most likely for her to have contacted. But where was he to be found? If the transaction had reached a stage of Vladlena prostituting herself, where would she have done it? Not in a room at Irina Kataev’s. In a hotel room booked for her? He didn’t think so. More likely in a brothel disguised as something else. He had little experience of such places. So far as he knew there had never been in Kingsmarkham what used to be called a disorderly house.
But there he was wrong, as Mike Burden told him on the Saturday evening. The drinks they enjoyed together after work in the old days had come to an end when Wexford retired and Burden was promoted but had been replaced by meeting – often in a new and previously unvisited pub – every weekend Wexford returned home. It was becoming a tradition with a ritualistic quality to it. Many pubs had closed in the surrounding villages, largely due to would-be visitors intimidated by the drink-driving laws, but in Kingsmarkham itself the Olive and Dove still ruled supreme and the Dragon did a brisk trade. This evening they were to meet in the Mermaid, a small snug pub in a narrow lane off York Street.
But before that Wexford and Dora had spent half a day, a night and more than half the next day in their own house. Both their grandsons were at home and Robin had brought a fellow-student home with him. When he was young, though he had not attended one himself, Wexford said universities used to discourage if not expressly forbid undergraduates to go home for the weekend. All that had changed. Ben was there, too, his school having closed for half-term. With a fairly good grace, Sylvia gave up the bedroom she shared with her daughter to her parents, but made them feel guilty by whining miserably about her and Mary having to share a single bed put up in the dining room.
‘How to make one feel one should have booked a room in a hotel,’ said Dora.
‘Why did we come, anyway?’
‘We’d forgotten – if we ever knew – how many people there would be here.’
Matters weren’t helped by an encounter Wexford had on his way to the Mermaid. He was halfway down York Street when a man and a woman came out of one of the houses and the man unlocked a car parked at the kerb with a remote. Wexford recognised them at once as the Wardles, parents of the dead Jason. And they knew him. They looked, stared and ostentatiously turned their heads away.
‘I wonder,’ he said when he saw Burden, ‘what third thing is going to happen to make me feel guilty.’
‘You don’t believe in that stuff about things coming in threes, do you?’
‘I didn’t last week, but all this makes me nervous.’
Burden fetched Wexford a glass of claret and himself a Chardonnay. Nuts, once an enemy yet desired, had become no more or less than a pleasant adjunct to their drinks.
‘You’ve lost a lot of weight. You look quite different.’
‘That may be no bad thing. What were you going to tell me about brothels?’
‘We had one here,’ said Burden. ‘A couple of months ago.’
‘What, you mean a massage place or beauty and tanning and waxing, do you?’
‘This was in a flat over a shop in the High Street. It was a clothes shop, highly respectable and selling dresses and suits for sizes 16 to 28.’
‘If I’d been a transvestite they’d just about have suited me in days gone by.’
Burden laughed. ‘A lot of men had been seen coming to the door at the right side of the shops in the evenings. I sent DC Thompson in there, posing as a punter. The girls he had to choose from were presented to him, but he obeyed my prudish instructions, said no thanks politely and walked out. We raided the place on the following evening.’ He took a swig of his Chardonnay. ‘It was quite exciting.’
‘I can’t remember the rule. It has to be more than one girl to constitute a brothel, doesn’t it?’
‘That’s right. I wasn’t there but Thompson told me one of the men fell on his knees and swore on his mother’s head that if it didn’t come out that he was there he would never do it again.’
‘When I was a young DC in Brighton about a hundred years ago we used to come across them. Brothels, I mean. I suppose if I got someone to find “brothels” on the Internet I’d just get quantities of porn.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ said Burden. ‘Come to me instead. What is it you want to know?’
Wexford told him about Vladlena and the sale she had proposed to make. ‘Where would she go? Who would she have asked? There’s a perfectly respectable-looking massage parlour in Kilburn High Road near the Tricycle Theatre – sorry, you don’t know where that is – but it did occur to me she might have tried there. I shall have to find how long it’s been there, and you know how these outfits come and go. The girl in the vault has been dead at least two years.’
‘You know, Reg,’ Burden said, passing the nuts it was no longer necessary to avoid, ‘as you’ve rightly just pointed out to me, I don’t know London well, but I’ve enough knowledge of the way these things work to say that this girl is most likely to have tried Soho. If those places don’t outright advertise prostitutes everyone knows prostitution is what they offer.’