‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘My late partner brought it here from that house.’ There was no doubt which house she meant. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Well, he brought most of this furniture from there. Oh, and the mirror. He was very fond of that mirror.’
So that was how she got over the difficulty of referring to the man who had been her husband. Her late partner.
‘That was rather a strange business, Mrs Gardner,’ Wexford said. ‘What do you think became of your – er, partner’s wife, Mrs Harriet Merton, that is.’
Her right hand resting on the setter’s smooth crimson head, Anthea Gardner hesitated and said, ‘I never met her, you know. Franklin went off with her and we were divorced. Well, eventually we were. I made him wait five years. By that time I’d met Roger Gardner, so Franklin and I were divorced and I married Roger. I was with him till he died and then Franklin and I ran into each other by chance in St James’s Park. Then we got together again, but I never met Harriet. There was no reason why I should.’
‘Mr Merton tried to find her, I believe you told us?’
‘Well, yes and no. Frankly, he thought she’d turn up and try to find him. He went to Orcadia Cottage and found that she’d taken most of her clothes and jewellery. Some neighbour told him she’d gone off with a chap called Keith Hill.’
‘But you didn’t go to Orcadia Cottage with him?’ Wexford asked at a nod from Tom.
‘No, I never did. I’ve never been near the place. All I know about it is what I’ve seen on the TV and in the newspapers. There’s one funny thing, though, you may be interested in. Franklin came back from there and said to me he could have sworn there was a staircase going down from behind a doorway in the hall into the cellar, only there wasn’t. I said to him, “What do you mean by ‘could have sworn’, would you take your oath on it in court?” and he had to say he wouldn’t.’
‘Surely he must have known whether there was a staircase or not. He lived in the house for thirty years.’
‘I’m only telling you what he said,’ said Anthea Gardner.
Wexford’s thoughts went back to the DNA tests. ‘Did you ever hear of any relatives of Harriet’s? Brothers, sisters, even cousins?’
‘Her parents are both dead,’ said Tom. ‘Well, that’s not unlikely. Harriet would be sixty or more if she were alive.’
‘I don’t think so. I mean, I never heard of anyone. I don’t think she had any family, but they wouldn’t come near me if she had, would they?’
Wexford took a last look at the mirror Franklin Merton had been so fond of. Its frame was a delicate medley of inlaid woods, grey, gold, blond, a pale greenish blue. Its glass reflected his admiring gaze. Anthea Gardner shut the dog in the living room and came to let them out. Outside, Lucy was waiting for them in the car. When he was sitting in the back Wexford said, ‘The skeleton – I suppose – of the older woman, was there any hair on it or near it?’ A bracelet of bright hair about the bone …
There was, but bright it hadn’t been. Tom said, ‘There was some hair, red hair but originally grey and dyed that colour. Which doesn’t tell us much.’
Women who have had red hair dye it red when it goes grey, Wexford thought. Come to that, grey-haired women dye their head red even if it was once blonde or dark. ‘How about the neighbours in Orcadia Place? Some of them must have known her.’
‘This is London,’ Tom said. ‘People don’t know their neighbours. You can live next door to someone for years in London and not know their name. Besides, we have to go back twelve years. Among the neighbours, there aren’t many who were there then, and those who were say they knew Harriet by sight only. There’s one woman in a flat in the mews who seems to have known her. She’s divorced now and she’s in South Africa. I don’t mean she lives there, but she goes there on extended visits. I’ve talked to her on the phone and she’s given me more information about Harriet than anyone else, but that isn’t much. She’s coming home in about a week and I hope to talk to her more – well, in depth.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Mildred Jones. You noticed Anthea Gardner mentioned Keith Hill as the man Harriet may have gone off with? Well, Mildred Jones told me she’d met this Keith Hill and it was her told Franklin Merton. A young chap, she said, who drove some sort of vintage car, a big American thing called an Edsel. She saw him park it in the mews once or twice. Twelve or thirteen years ago, she thinks it was.’
‘You said “a young chap”. How old would that be?’
Mildred Jones said ‘about twenty’. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, that on the whole men of twenty don’t elope with women of fifty. I really need to talk to Mildred face to face.’
Tom wrenched off his tie and sent for coffee. They sat in his glass office. A few men and women in uniform or plain-clothes passed by. There was something uncanny about seeing them, yet knowing they couldn’t see in.
Tom said suddenly, ‘Are you anywhere near West Hampstead Cemetery?’ Wexford said he didn’t think so. ‘There’s a tomb in there to the Grand Duke Michael of Russia. He was some relation of the last Tsar, but he was exiled after he married a commoner. She was a countess but that wasn’t good enough for the Imperial family, so he had to leave Russia. A piece of luck or good judgement or you could say that God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Michael would have met the same fate as the rest of them when the Revolution came. Instead he lived a peaceful life in Hampstead with the wife he was wise enough to marry and died of natural causes.’
‘I’ll go and have a look at his grave,’ said Wexford. He was to learn that Tom sometimes digressed in this way. Quite abruptly Wexford said, ‘Teeth!’
‘Yes, well, of course. Teeth were almost the first means of identification we thought of. But you know something? Teeth – or I suppose I should say dentition – aren’t the infallible clue to who someone is they used to be. We’ve such a large immigrant community. We have asylum seekers. Trafficked women, too, I’m sorry to say. A lot of these people who come here from Asia or even Eastern Europe have never been to a dentist. Or if they have the dentist may never be found. And with NHS dentists difficult to find, thousands of people who haven’t money to spare economise by not looking after their teeth.’
‘And this applies to the four in the coal hole?’
‘The patio-tomb is what I call it,’ said Tom.
The vault, Wexford thought to himself. He repeated his question.
‘It would seem to apply to three of them. The older man’s teeth were what you might call in ruins. He’d lost a few and the remaining ones must have given him a lot of pain, but it appears he’d never been to a dentist. He’d had no treatment at all. Ever. The younger man also had had no attention to his teeth, but he was young and apart from one molar which needed a filling, his were all right. The younger woman had fairly bad teeth which must have pained her, but she’d had no dental treatment, while the reverse is true of the older woman. She had had a number of implants, crowns and bridges – very expensive dental work, but so far we’ve been unable to trace where this was done. It may even have been in America and we’ll find out, but it takes time.’
‘This again points to her being Harriet Merton.’
Tom nodded abstractedly. He looked at his watch, said, ‘Well, I’m needed at this conference in half an hour’s time, but we’ll be in touch. I’ll ring you. Meanwhile, Lucy will drive you home.’
Wexford told himself not to feel he had been peremptorily dismissed. If Tom had a conference to go to – and Wexford knew only too well how many conferences, seminars, symposia, launches, lectures, meetings and exchange-of-views groups now filled policemen’s lives – so well and good. He couldn’t complain. They had discussed everything that needed to be discussed. Tom would call him. But he refused the offer of a lift home. He would take a bus and walk the nicest part.