The Vault (13 page)

‘Groundhog and Co. have gone out of business, sir. The recession’s been too much for them. Perhaps we ought to talk
to the boss sometime, but don’t you think we could see those that are still operating first?’

‘All right, then.’ Wexford was looking at Lucy’s list. ‘How about K, K and L? They’re in Hendon and that’s not far away, is it?’

Not a builders’ yard this time but a shop in one of those parades that break the monotonous rows of semi-detached houses on arterial roads. In this one was the usual sequence, newsagent, hairdresser, building society, dry cleaner, but instead of the bathroom shop, K, K and L, Below Surface Home Extensions. A rather gloomy-looking young woman in a black trouser suit showed signs of being more helpful than Brian George and Kevin Oswin.

‘Our Mr Keyworth was down to do the survey,’ she said without looking anything up or having recourse to the desktop on the counter. ‘He was due to go over there in August twenty-o-six and he was just leaving in the taxi when Mr Rokeby phoned and said not to come because the planning people refused his application. There’d been a lot of opposition from the neighbours.’

‘And you are?’ Lucy asked.

‘I’m Ms Fortescue.’ Wexford thought her reply quaint for present day usage. Perhaps she read his mind for she added, ‘Louise Fortescue.’

‘Why a taxi? Doesn’t Mr Keyworth drive?’

‘He’d lost his licence.’ She added vindictively, ‘Driving massively over the limit.’ As if she still needed to assert Keyworth’s superior status: ‘It wasn’t a black cab. His next-door neighbour’s got a car-hire company. They only drive Mercedes.’

‘Well, Ms Fortescue, would you mind telling us how you happen to have such a precise memory of something that happened – what? Three years ago?’

‘Three years, yes. That’s easy. Me and Damian – Mr Keyworth that is – we were engaged. I remember everything about that week because we were planning our wedding. I’d even moved in with him to his new home in West Hampstead – he’d only been there a bit over a year – and the day after he was due to go to Orcadia Cottage I broke it off. The way he behaved I couldn’t do otherwise. I moved out that night. Luckily I’d kept my flat. She turned her face away. ‘It was me broke it off, but I’ve never got over it.’ Her voice broke a little. ‘I’m sorry.’

Meeting each other’s eyes as they walked to the car, Wexford and Lucy just overcame the desire to laugh. ‘I was engaged once,’ said Wexford.

‘So was I.’

‘I didn’t marry her. She married someone else and so did I.’

‘And I didn’t marry at all. Poor Miss Fortescue, she’s taken it very hard. What exactly are we looking for, sir?’

‘I wish you’d call me Reg.’

‘I’ll try,’ said Lucy, ‘but it will be difficult. What are we looking for?’

Wexford got into the passenger seat. ‘Well, someone like Ms Fortescue. Someone who knew about the set-up at Orcadia Cottage because she or he had been told about it.’

Lucy turned into the Finchley Road. ‘You mean that the theory is that one of these people who made a survey knew about the coal hole and possibly the cellar, but isn’t going to say so? They discovered it at the time and either went back when they knew no one would be at home or else told someone else about it.’

‘Something like that. We still have J. Peterson and Son to see, and Underland Constructions.’

‘They know we’re coming.’

J. Peterson had a small office over a hardware shop in North
Finchley. The room was tiny, no bigger than the average suburban bathroom. It contained nothing but a desk, two chairs and the ubiquitous laptop. No pictures were on the walls, no maps, no posters, no curtain or even a blind was at the narrow sash window. The atomosphere wasn’t far off that of a prison cell.

‘We do most of our business online,’ said a harassed-looking man who gave no sign that he had expected them. ‘The client gets on to our website and books an appointment and we contract out to a building firm.’

‘You keep a record of that?’

‘The builders have an architect who would do a sort of design and if the client likes it and accepts the estimate it’ll go ahead. We’ll have a record on the computer if this client – what’s he called? Rokeby? – if he accepted the estimate.’

‘He didn’t,’ said Lucy.

‘Then I can’t help you.’ The man sounded pleased.

Underland Constructions might have answered Lucy’s call and agreed to see her and Wexford, but only one man appeared to be in charge of the big sprawling builders’ yard in Willesden. The place looked as if it were being dismantled. Two of the sheds were empty. The office with ‘Reception’ over the door had no one behind the counter.

‘We’re shutting up shop,’ the man said. ‘Been struggling for the past year but in the end it’s been too much for us. I don’t suppose I can help you. What was it you were wanting?’

Lucy told him.

‘You don’t want us. You want our architects. They did all our designs for us. Not any more, of course, but they’re still in business. Doing all right, as far as I know.’

He went into the office and came out again with a much-thumbed card. Lucy read what was on it aloud to Wexford when they were back in the car. ‘Chilvers Clary, Architects, and then there’s a string of degrees or whatever after Robyn
Chilvers and Owen Clary. They have an office in the Finchley Road. Shall we go straight there?’

‘Pity it’s such a long time ago,’ Wexford said. ‘I doubt if Robyn Chilvers will have had her engagement broken on the relevant day. Still, even if they’d forgotten about it and haven’t kept records, reading all this Orcadia Cottage stuff in the papers will perhaps have jogged their memories.’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

‘All the time, though, we come up against this stumbling block. In order to do a survey or make a design, whoever he is would have had to examine the coal hole, probably go down into it. And if he or she did and was honest they would have seen what was in there and gone to the police. And if they’re not honest and did see what was in there they didn’t go to the police and they’re not going to tell us now.’

Some years before Wexford had got out of a tube train at Finchley Road Station and walked up the hill towards West End Lane. Investigation of a Kingsmarkham murder with London connections had brought him there and he had thought the Finchley Road rather a pleasant place to shop and perhaps to live in. It had gone downhill very badly since then. A huge shopping mall, already dilapidated, had spoiled the western side of the street, while opposite shops and restaurants had closed, their windows boarded up. Chilvers Clary was still there and so were a massage parlour and a betting shop. The massage parlour was called Elfland and in its window were photographs of very pretty young women dressed as fairies with feathery wings and holding bows and arrows. It looked respectable and rather dull.

Those adjectives might also have been applied to Chilvers Clary, Architects. It also appeared less than promising. But for Wexford and Lucy a small breakthrough was coming. It was very small, but it let in a chink of light. Lucy said afterwards
that she could have hugged Owen Clary, not a very unlikely impulse, Wexford thought, for Clary was a very handsome man, about thirty-eight with olive skin, black hair and classical features, dressed in an immaculate dark grey suit.

‘My partner is out on a job,’ he said. ‘Incidentally, Robyn is also my wife. But I don’t think she could help you, whereas I can. Well, up to a point. All this newspaper coverage has brought it back to me. I well remember going to Orcadia Cottage in summer 2005 it would have been. I went on my own the first time and the second time with the chap from Underland. Mr Rokeby let us in, but then he and his wife had to go out. I didn’t know but I guessed there was some sort of cellar under the house and it seemed to me that this would be halfway to the underground room Mr Rokeby wanted. Of course I didn’t know then that the planning authority would turn down his application.

‘The Underland chap and I shifted this great tub of plants off the manhole cover in the patio. That was the first we knew of it that there was a manhole cover. Now that was all I wanted to know, that there was a cavity underneath the patio, I wasn’t bothered about going down there or even looking down there at that juncture. In fact, to be honest with you, I was rather dressed up and I didn’t fancy going down into what I knew would be a filthy hole.

‘I asked the Underland chap if he had a pair of steps or a ladder with him in his van and he said he had. “Go down there and take a look if you fancy it,” I said to him and I went back into the house to see if there was a way down from inside into that cavity.’

‘You remember all this very clearly, Mr Clary,’ said Lucy.

‘I’ve a good memory. Anyway, as I say, a lot came back to me when I saw the pictures of Orcadia Cottage on television. Do you want to hear the rest?’

‘If you please,’ said Wexford.

‘I thought there might be a trapdoor in the kitchen floor or in the hallway, but there wasn’t. It seemed to be quite strange that there could be a coal hole in the back for solid fuel to be shot down and no way of getting it up from the inside. I was quite a long while inside there feeling around, tapping the walls and so on, but eventually I went back outside. I thought that if we go ahead with this – I wasn’t going to take any further steps until Rokeby had got his planning permission – I’ll find out from him the answer to this riddle.

‘The Underland chap was outside, sitting on a garden seat on the patio. He’d put the tub back himself on the manhole cover. He’d gone down there, he said, he’d had a look, but there was just a big sort of coal storage space. I said to him I was doing no more until Rokeby had heard about his planning permission and he agreed with me and we left.’

Lucy said quietly, ‘How did he look, Mr Clary?’

‘What do you mean, how did he look?’

‘Was he just the same as before you went into the house?’

‘I didn’t notice.’

‘Can you give us his name?’ Wexford asked.

‘I don’t think I ever knew it,’ Clary said. ‘I called him Rod.’

‘We may want to see you again,’ said Lucy and she made this routine undertaking sound rather menacing. A threat rather than a promise. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ she said to Wexford on the Finchley Road pavement.

He laughed. ‘I know what you mean, but I couldn’t say I don’t believe a word of it. I believe he went there and I believe they jointly shifted the manhole cover. And it’s not incredible that Clary didn’t want to get his nice elegant suit dirty. But that “Rod” went down that hole without finding those bodies or showing any sign that he had had sight of
the most revolting and macabre sight he had ever had – that I don’t believe. That he came up again and walked out on to the patio and waited for Clary to come out, that I don’t believe either. Wouldn’t he, however tough he was, have run into the house and shouted out about what he had found? Wouldn’t he maybe have thrown up? At any rate, it would have shaken him to the core. But it didn’t, or Clary says it didn’t.’

‘What happened then?’

‘On his own showing, Clary was in the house a long time. Long enough, I think, for “Rod” to close up the manhole, put back the tub and drive away.’

‘But you said he’d be shaken to the core.’

‘Not so shaken he couldn’t drive round the corner and sit there to recover. I suggest he lifted up the manhole cover and when he saw what he did see from the top, he didn’t fetch a ladder from his van. He saw, he understood what he saw – nothing like what it would have been had he gone down there – put the manhole cover back and dragged the tub back and drove away. God knows what Clary did next. He wasn’t, or thought he wasn’t, strong enough to lift the tub himself. Besides he was in his nice suit. “Rod” wasn’t a mate of his but just a builder who might or might not be helping with the construction of an underground room. Clary had already made up his mind to do no more until the planning permission did or did not come through. No doubt he went back to Finchley Road and forgot all about it until three years later when those bodies were discovered.’

‘Those bodies and a fourth one, sir – er, Reg.’

‘Yes, the mystery is, why did he do nothing when those bodies came to light six weeks ago?’

W
exford was due up at ‘the big house’ for dinner with Sheila and Paul and the children. He was looking forward to it. Being on his own in the evenings didn’t suit him. When he looked back over his life, he realised how seldom he had been alone at home. He had gone out, been repeatedly called out, kept out most of the night sometimes, and Dora had been on her own, but he hardly ever had. Not since he was young and single, and that was longer ago than he cared to remember. It wasn’t cooking a meal for himself that he minded because ‘cooking’ mostly meant scrambled egg on toast or sausages and chips heated up from frozen, it wasn’t lack of anything to do because reading was always there to do and always done; it was being without company, preferably Dora’s. He, who in his youth had had one girlfriend after another, later on had had to curb his roving eye, had now become entirely monogamous. That was excellent, completely satisfactory, but still he was lonely without her.

As he dawdled about the little house, wishing for a quick passage of the hour which must elapse before the children came to fetch him – they insisted on that – he sat down by the window that looked out over the Vale of Health. It was a still quiet evening of hazy sunshine. He thought about the various men who had come to Orcadia Cottage to build (or not to build) a subterranean room. Kevin Oswin, Damian Keyworth and the Underland architect Owen Clary with his plumber who might or might not be called Rod. Oh, and there was one other that they knew almost nothing about, Oswin’s ‘bruv’, the man called Trevor. He was surely as important as Rod, yet it seemed he wasn’t a builder and as if he had just gone along for the ride.

Although he knew how cautious he must be in constructing scenarios, Wexford nevertheless began imagining one of those men – perhaps because of their superior knowledge of underground
structures – having his attention alerted by that tub which concealed a manhole cover. It was only conjecture. It was true, though, that he might have mentioned it to Oswin or Clary, but it had never registered. And, anyway, which one? Rod or Trevor? Was it possible that one of them had come back later, perhaps when it was known when Rokeby would be out or away on holiday, and looked for himself? It was not only possible, Wexford thought, it had to be. Not necessarily those two, but one of those, Damian Keyworth, Kevin Oswin, Trevor Oswin, Owen Clary or Rod, one out of five men, whatever he might now say, had come back and explored where up till then no one had looked.