In the middle of the paved courtyard, slightly to the left, was a gaping hole, rectangular and uncovered. Incised on its metal cover which lay on the stones beside it were the words: Paulson and Grieve, Ironsmiths of Stoke. The sun was shining and when Wexford knelt down to look into the hole, the flat, slightly irregular paving felt warm to his touch. There was nothing to be seen down there and nothing, any longer, to be smelt. He could just make out the brickwork of the walls and the shape of the door into the cellar.
‘That is where they all were,’ Lucy said. ‘Sort of piled on top of each other.’
They returned to the house, standing in the hallway outside the kitchen door. Wexford looked once more at the blank wall and put out one hand to touch it, as if it might give way and fold inwards to reveal the staircase.
Tom said, ‘You can understand someone removing a door and bricking up the doorway if it serves no useful purpose, but this door – and there must have been a door – did serve a purpose. It was there solely to lead to the steps down into the cellar.’
‘This is conjecture,’ Wexford put in, ‘but it looks to me as if whoever put the bodies of the two men and the older woman into the hole also bricked up the doorway. This would leave only one means of access into the hole, that is by the opening in the patio.’
‘Does that mean he was a builder? A skilled handyman? I couldn’t do it. Could you?’
‘No, Tom. I couldn’t. The idea of me doing it is a joke. But that leads me back to the opening in the patio. If he’s skilled enough to remove a door and brick up and plaster over a doorway, why didn’t he brick up or pave over the manhole opening?’
‘Maybe he meant to,’ said Lucy, ‘but he was interrupted or even couldn’t get hold of the materials.’
‘If he could get hold of bricks and plaster, he could get paving stones. If it was an interruption it must have been a very significant one, because once he had sealed up that opening he would have been safe, not for just eleven or twelve years, but for ever. Those bodies would have been enclosed in an impregnable tomb.’
‘And no one could have gone there two years ago and added a fourth body. It was two years ago, wasn’t it?’
‘It was two years ago that she died. We can’t be certain that she was put there immediately after death but someone put her there,’ said Tom. ‘No doubt about it.’ They moved into the kitchen and sat down on stools. ‘It wasn’t Rokeby. He’d have to be a very dark horse indeed. If he put that fourth body down there the last thing he’d do is call us to tell us what he’d found in the hole.’
‘You mentioned something about DNA,’ Wexford said.
‘Right. I did. The samples that were taken showed that the older man and the young man were related. Not father and son or uncle and nephew but maybe cousins. The women had no connection with them or with each other. The – well, baffling thing is that none of them correspond to the descriptions of any persons reported missing around twelve years ago. And that in itself is very strange. Not so much in respect of the men. Men are less likely to be reported missing than women. These two may have been loners. There is no reason to suppose they lived together.
‘How did they die? We don’t know. There is nothing on the bodies to show how they died. With the women it’s a different matter. Both had severe skull fractures. According to pathology each was capable of causing death.’ Tom looked at his watch. ‘All right. I’ve an appointment to see Mrs Anthea Gardner at eleven-thirty in Bolton Mews. She’s been seen before, but not by me. She’s the one person we know of connected to Orcadia Cottage in the Mertons’ time. So if you’ll drive us to Boltons Grove, Lucy, we’ll leave now.’
‘Who’s Anthea Gardner?’ Wexford asked when they were in the car.
‘The sort of widow of Franklin Merton, who owned Orcadia Cottage from sometime in the Seventies until 1998.’
‘Ah, including the relevant period. What does “sort of” mean?’
‘He was married to her before he married someone called Harriet and who seems to have been the Harriet of the picture. For some reason he never divorced Harriet, but went back to live with Anthea from 1998 until he died last year.’
As Lucy pulled away, Wexford looked back at Orcadia Cottage. There was something serene about it, a stillness and a quiet as if nothing had ever disturbed its peacefulness. No breeze swayed the branches or ruffled the leaves. He told himself he was being fanciful in imagining that the house smiled calmly, and that if it could speak would say, ‘I have been here for two hundred years and seen many foolish human beings come and go, but I shall be here for another two hundred years when those corpses in my foundations are forgotten.’
The car turned into Grove End Road and started on its journey, through congestion and roadworks and capricious traffic lights to South Kensington.
CHAPTER FIVE
HE WOULD NEVER become accustomed to London’s Georgian houses. Not that they were truly Georgian but mid-Victorian, and not just that they were beautiful; they had a diversity about them which amazed him, a multiplicity of bow windows and columns and arches and balconies. He hadn’t seen many yet, but enough to decide they were all different, each one a surprise, ivory stucco all of them, as if carved from vanilla ice cream, their slate tops shallow, no-longer-used multiple chimneys forming crests across their roofs. It seemed to him as they passed into the Old Brompton Road that here they clustered in greater numbers than anywhere else but for Bayswater, and in the Boltons assembled in gleaming ranks, their creamy facades interrupted only by black-painted balcony rails, intricate as lacework.
Anthea Gardner lived in such a one, a small house pretty enough to hold its own with the stately palaces between which it stood. The front door was the same pearly green-grey as that on Orcadia Cottage and Wexford decided that when he next had to have his Kingsmarkham house painted he would choose that colour. Tom fished a rather shabby tie, with red and blue stripes, out of his pocket and put it on. Wexford rang the doorbell and from inside came a steady and placid barking.
‘Oh, please,’ said Tom. ‘Not a beastly dog.’
Wexford noticed that ‘beastly’ just as he had noticed the ‘heaven’ of the day before. Another man would have said ‘bloody’ or worse. It interested him and while he was speculating the door opened and there was the now silent dog with its owner, who grasped it by the collar round its chestnut-coloured neck. Not quite chestnut perhaps, but a rich near-crimson. The incongruous thought came to him that it was exactly the same shade as Harriet Oxenholme’s hair in the picture.
‘Do come in,’ said Anthea Gardner. ‘This is Kildare, by the way. He’s OK, he won’t bite.’
Instead of red, her hair was grey, the elderly woman’s wiry cap, short and trim. She was thickset but not fat, dressed in a pleated skirt and blouse, her face pleasant and intelligent, the kind that has never been good-looking, but which may have been very pleasing to confront across the breakfast table each morning. The house was as beautiful inside as out, furnished with pretty antiques and small charming paintings, including a still life of fruit and Stilton. A mouse in the corner looked daringly and wistfully at the cheese.
Wexford, rather embarrassingly introduced as Tom’s adviser, remarked on it and asked if it was an Alpheton.