The Vault

by Ruth Rendell

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  DONALDSON HAD DRIVEN him everywhere he needed to go. Occasionally he had driven himself. What he had never needed to do was walk or take public transport. No wonder he had gained so much weight, so that even the relentless cutting out of cashew nuts and other delights had made little difference. Now, therefore, he was confronted with a choice he had never before encountered. Should he pick up Vladlena in his own car after a doubtless dreadful battle through south London traffic or go to Clapham on the Northern Line, of which he had no experience but of which he had heard hair-raising tales? All tube users had their individual horrific Northern Line anecdotes. One of Tom’s digressions had concerned his being stuck in a train between Mornington Crescent and Camden Town for three-quarters of an hour, surrounded by panicking passengers.

  Perhaps it was this story which prompted his decision to go by car. That and because he was a man and choosing a car was what men almost always did. Women might not or might choose a taxi if they could afford it. Could that be another of Wexford’s laws, must be the seventeenth or eighteenth by now? One of the difficulties was that he had not much idea of when he should start out, but he was ready to leave at a few minutes after seven-thirty when the landline phone rang. It was Sylvia to say she had had an offer on her house.

  ‘Your mother is still asleep.’

  ‘Yes, maybe, but she’ll want to know about this, Dad. I promise you she will. Couldn’t you wake her up?’

  ‘I could, but I’m not going to. You can phone again in an hour. Congratulations, though. I’m very pleased for you.’ Not as pleased as I am that my own house will soon be my own again, he thought.

  It took him less than the hour and a half he had allowed. He parked on the other side of the road outside her house like the driver of a hire car who makes a point of arriving early. But he was on a yellow line and had to move off when a traffic warden bore down on the car. Round the block then, hooted at by other impatient drivers, back to his chosen spot to see the warden or the back of him just turning the corner into the main road. He parked again, realising that eluding traffic wardens, defying parking rules, was something that had never happened to him before. Donaldson had had to handle these stings and arrows of fortune, or his sergeant had if she was driving him.

  He had forgotten all about Colin Jones and it gave him a small shock to see Vladlena’s husband come out of their house at ten to nine, carrying a briefcase and turn in the direction of Clapham North Station. If he had rung their bell when he first arrived … But he hadn’t and all was well.

  She spotted the car and came out just as he was preparing to cross the road. The first thing he noticed about her was that silver cross. It seemed to flash as it caught the morning sun. She had dressed up in a skirt suit and striped blouse, as if she were going to some significant engagement instead of helping him locate a brothel.

  ‘It is not good to deceive my husband,’ she said as she got into the car. ‘But whatever happen I will tell him of it after. I am not doing anything wrong, am I?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Wexford. ‘Rather the reverse. You are doing a good thing.’

  Another long drive. ‘This house,’ he began, ‘is it old – say a hundred years old – or newly built?’ As he asked he realised she would hardly know. ‘Like that’ – he pointed out of the window – ‘or like that?’

  She selected a late Victorian house that was detached, a fairly big house that had been converted into the offices of a dental practice. ‘Like that. A bit like that. There is more than one.’

  ‘More than one of what?’

  ‘More than one house like that. All together but not joined up. It is down a turning. The next one, now you turn left.’

  So the house was not in West End Lane, a hilly winding street, but in a side turning. He turned left into Churchlands Road. All the way along here stood detached and semidetached Victorian and Edwardian houses, not the ice-cream beauties he so much admired, but solid brick buildings, many of them divided into flats. He had to drive on past the house Vladlena pointed out as he searched for somewhere to leave the car. Every possible space was filled, and passing West Hampstead Station he began to realise how much wiser he would have been to have come by tube. Down this side turning, up that one, back into West End Lane, he understood at last what he must do. You’re no longer a policeman – it was becoming a mantra – he told himself, parking the car on a yellow line. It went terribly against the grain but it was hardly a crime …

  He and Vladlena walked back down the hill and into Churchlands Road. She was silent. He saw that she had clenched her hands – to keep them from trembling? There were three houses, not identical but differing only in that one had a pillared portico, another a bay window in the ground floor, the third a garage on its left-hand side, Numbers 6, 8 and 10.

  ‘That one,’ Vladlena said. ‘The middle one. Number 8. It is the window above the front door I see Alyona.’ She had turned pale, every vestige of colour gone from her face. ‘A blind is down now, but then the blind is up and I am seeing her face.’

  ‘Here, take my arm,’ he said. ‘We’ll find somewhere you can have coffee.’

  She leant on him and he cursed himself for bringing her. She could have described the place to him, had indeed described it quite adequately. In the tiny café a latte brought the colour back into her face.

  ‘I am sorry. I am a fool.’

  ‘No. You won’t have to go there again. I am going to get you a taxi to take you home.’ Book it on the account Dora had opened in a fit of profligacy. He called her first, because he had forgotten the reference number.

  Vladlena said, ‘I can go in the Tube.’

  ‘No, you can’t. I wouldn’t dream of it.’ The number turned out to be the day, month and year of Dora’s birth. ‘They’ll be here within fifteen minutes and they’ll take you home.’

  ‘I sat on a seat opposite those houses. You can just see it from here. People came out of the station and down the street and passed me and a man tried to – well, you know about that. I don’t know if Alyona could see me. Someone pull down the blind at the window. I should stay, but when another man come up to me I was afraid and I went away. I tell you I go back next day and the next, but I think they take her away and hide her somewhere.’

  Wexford saw her into the cab. He gave a thought to his car, parked illegally, a sitting target for the first traffic warden to pass along the street, but it was a fleeting thought, soon gone. Without Vladlena he felt free and strong. Whatever awaited him, he at least wouldn’t have her to protect. A postman, pushing his scarlet trolley, was advancing very slowly up the hill on the opposite side. He went through the gate into the narrow front garden of Number 10, pulled the red elastic band off the handful of post he was carrying, dropped the band on to the paving and pushed an envelope through the letter box. Only it didn’t go through but stuck there halfway. The postman apparently had nothing for Number 8, but a small package for Number 6. This package also stuck halfway through the letterbox.

  Wexford crossed the road. There was only one bell on Number 8. It appeared to be an entryphone, but when he pressed the bell the door made the groaning sound of unlocking and he easily pushed it open. Inside was a hallway, exactly the sort of thing you might expect in a doctor’s premises in Harley Street. No red plush and gilding, no chandelier, but white walls, dark green carpet and a long polished table on which lay a single copy of Country Life and another of Vogue. Stairs, carpeted in dark green, and a lift. He was deciding what to do next, to climb the stairs or ascend – to what? – in the lift, when a small, rotund man came out from a door marked PRIVATE, followed by a very thin woman in a black dress.

  Wexford knew him at once as Trevor Oswin, but the man seemed not to recognise him. Even from two yards’ distance, Trevor reeked of tobacco smoke. ‘It’s a bit early, sir,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if any of the young ladies is free. Had you anyone special in mind?’

  ‘Alyona,’ Wexford said.


  ‘Sorry about that, but it must be quite a while since your last visit. Alyona left us a long time ago.’

  ‘I can see if Tanya is free,’ said the woman.

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll come back later.’

  Had Trevor known who he was? Wexford thought not as he made his way back into West End Lane. The package stuck in the letterbox of the house next door with the bay window, Number 6, indicated that no one was at home, as did the letter in a similar position in the letterbox of Number 10. The latter was very well kept, its yellow brickwork recently repointed, its window frames glossy white and its front door, through whose polished brass mouth the letter protruded like a tongue, painted a soft jade green.

  Just because this place was next door to a brothel, there was no reason to suppose any connection between them. The house looked about as unlike what used to be called a house of ill fame as could be imagined. It, too, had just been painted, it, too, had a polished brass letterbox and a front door, though not green, a recently applied dark blue. But that was the connection, Wexford thought. Not necessarily but the chances were that Number 8 and Number 10 had the same owner. Now he could see by the number of bells by the front door, that the house on the other side, Number 6 with the pillared portico, was let off into single-room apartments, probably bedsits. The tenants, even if they knew, would be unlikely to object to being neighbours to a brothel. He went through the gate of Number 10 and at the front door, looked to his right and to his left. There was no one about, no one passing up the hill on this side and only a man pulling a suitcase on wheels on the other, intent on nothing but getting to the tube station.

  Wexford tried to pull the envelope out. It stuck on something and tore. But not enough to obscure the name and address printed on it. Mr D. Keyworth, he read. Slowly he pushed the letter back into the letterbox. This time it passed through and he heard a light flop as it fell on to the mat.

  Afterwards, when it was all over, he thought that he had done a few things wrong. He had put himself – ridiculously – in danger. He should have gone straight to Tom, asked for Lucy or Miles to come with him to Hendon (or for permission to accompany Lucy or Miles), but he was afraid of the humiliation of a refusal. Uppermost in his mind was old Mildreadful’s complaint about Lucy, and indirectly about him, to the IPCC.

  So he went alone to see Louise Fortescue. First to fetch his car. By some miracle no parking ticket was attached to his windscreen. Nor had worse happened and the horrible yellow metal Denver Boot of the clampers disabled it. Up the Hendon Way and on to the Watford Way. Parking restrictions outside K, K and L Ltd, Below Surface Home Extensions, but the kind easily complied with. You could leave your car for an hour in the little lay-by outside the shops. It was nearly three months since he had seen Louise Fortescue, but he could recognise a changed woman. Her black trouser suit had been replaced by a pencil skirt, a tight white sweater and high-heeled shoes, but what he principally noticed was the engagement ring on the third finger of her left hand.

  ‘I was a bit of a misery when you were last here,’ she said.

  ‘Life treating you better, is it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m getting married on Saturday.’

  Wexford congratulated her. He explained that he was no longer a policeman and that she had no need to answer his questions unless she wanted to.

  ‘If it’s about Damian Keyworth,’ she said, ‘I only went on working for him because I needed the job. This is my last week here and I can’t wait to shake the dust of this place off my feet. Not that he’s often here. Could you tell me what he’s done?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ms Fortescue. Something serious, I think, but I can’t tell you any more than that at this stage.’

  ‘All right. It doesn’t matter. I don’t see him from one week’s end to the next, thank God.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Look, sit down, why don’t you? I’m going to.’

  ‘You said you moved in with Mr Keyworth, but after a week you broke off your engagement and left. Would you mind telling me about that?’

  There were just two chairs in the tiny room. Louise Fortescue sat behind the desk and as she began to talk he noticed how her colour heightened. ‘I wouldn’t mind at all. I’d be glad to. I’ve nothing to hide. It was so – well, it was outrageous. We were getting on very well, or it seemed like that to me. I’d been living there and I’d taken two days off to settle in. It was a Friday and he’d just got home from work. It was maybe six in the evening. Someone rang the front doorbell and knocked as well and rang again as if they were desperate. I went to the door to answer it and Damian came behind me. There was a girl there, a very young girl, blonde, pretty, I suppose, wearing awful clothes – well, I won’t say what she was like, a very short miniskirt and a leather jacket and – well, you can imagine.’

  ‘Mr Keyworth saw her?’

  ‘Oh, yes. And he knew her all right. It was easy to see what had been going on. He didn’t say a word to me. He took her into the lounge and I went upstairs and left them to it. It was getting dark, but not so dark I couldn’t see the two of them leave the house and get into his car. A long time later he came back alone and tried to explain to me. He said she’d been his girlfriend and still was, but he meant to break with her and should have done before I came to live there. I still loved him, but that was more than I could stand and I packed my bags and phoned for a taxi and left. He really tried to make things all right between us, he went on and on, and when he saw it was no use he begged me not to stop working for him. So in the end I said I’d stay – I mean, I needed the job – but everything was over between us. Actually, we hardly ever meet these days. I’ve been running the business, such as it is, and I talk to him on the phone. That’s about it.’

  ‘Mr Keyworth hasn’t much work then?’

  ‘Virtually nothing. I don’t know why he keeps it going unless it’s a front for something else he’s up to. So far as I know – and I would know – he’s got no replacement for me.’ She gave a satisfied nod. ‘Oh, there’s one other thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it’s important, maybe it’s nothing. But that day, it was August first, there was a girl hanging about outside the house next door and she’d been there the day before too. There’s a seat on the pavement opposite and she sat down on that. I watched her, wondering what was going on. She’d gone before that girl came to the door. I don’t suppose it was important, was it?’

  ‘It may have been,’ said Wexford. ‘Thank you very much, Ms Fortescue.’ He glanced at the ring. ‘I hope you’ll be very happy.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  IT WAS A foolhardy thing to do, to go back there. He had simply made several assumptions: that Tom Ede would prefer him to keep out of the way while the investigation went on into Mildred Jones’s complaint; that the men running the brothel in the house with the bay window were not dangerous; that Louise Fortescue would not tell Damian Keyworth about their interview. But why would she not? In a phone conversation, no doubt, she might have told him out of revenge. Wexford could almost hear her – ‘I don’t know what you’ve been up to but you’d better watch it. The police are interested in your activities, whatever they are.’

  Before he left he talked to Dora about the offer made to Sylvia. She had almost decided to accept it, even though it was less than she had asked for.

  ‘I told her that was certain these days,’ Dora said. ‘And she’s inclined to accept it. I did wonder if I should have advised her not to and then she would have been bound to jump at it.’

  Wexford laughed, but he was thinking about the offers of money that were made to youngish well-off middle-class women with British passports and the offers of money that were made to young poor women from the Caucasus with no passports, and the difference between them. ‘I think my business here will soon be over,’ he said. ‘While Sylvia’s moving out and in to her new place shall we go somewhere nice on holiday? Somewhere warm? Think about it.’

  He turned his thoughts to those holidays the Rokebys had taken. The Thailand–Vietn
am–China one was the significant trip, he thought. That was when the door in the rear wall had been bolted for six weeks and then for two weeks more until the window cleaner came and couldn’t get in. This was in the summer of 2008. While the Rokebys were visiting her mother in Wales, Alyona’s body was put into the vault. Intending to do what Teddy Brex had failed to do or been prevented from doing, the perpetrator had come back, bringing with him the materials for paving over the manhole. But by then the door had been shut and bolted.

  Probably he had returned. Maybe several times. But for eight weeks the door had been bolted and once the Rokebys were back and it was open, carrying out construction work even by night on someone else’s property was impossible.

  It was Sunday evening and the weather had turned cold. St Luke’s Little Summer when summer seemed to return and which fell on St Luke’s Day, 16 October, and the days before and beyond, was past and a damp chill was in the air. Blue skies were coated in layers of cloud. Wexford put on the dark brown padded jacket which he admitted was warm, however much he disliked it, decided he had walked enough and took the car, anticipating no parking problems at the weekend when restrictions came off. But it was not as easy as he had thought. Although not much past eight and still British summertime, it was very dark. He was wary about parking on West End Lane itself and began the slog of driving from side street to side street to find a space. Winding hilly streets with shops along some of them, a yellow brick chapel lit-up and labelled The United Free Church, a petrol station, a café with deserted tables outside, every parking space taken. At last he found one, a very long way down a very long street that wound downhill towards Kilburn.