The Vault Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ruth Rendell

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Don’t forget,’ Wexford said, ‘I’ve lived in a world where the improbable happens all the time.’

  However, the impossible has happened. Chief Inspector Reg Wexford has retired. He and his wife, Dora, now divide their time between Kingsmarkham and a coachhouse in Hampstead, belonging to their actress daughter, Sheila.

  Wexford takes great pleasure in his books, but, for all the benefits of a more relaxed lifestyle, he misses being the law.

  But a chance meeting in a London street, with someone he had known briefly as a very young police constable, changes everything. Tom Ede is now a Detective Superintendent, and is very keen to recruit Wexford as an adviser on a difficult case.

  The bodies of two women and a man have been discovered in the old coal hole of an attractive house in St John’s Wood. None carries identification. But the man’s jacket pockets contain a string of pearls, a diamond and a sapphire necklace as well as other jewellery valued in the region of £40,000.

  It is not a hard decision for Wexford. He is intrigued and excited by the challenge, and, in the early stages, not really anticipating that this new investigative role will bring him into physical danger.

  About the Author

  Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in My View; a second Edgar in 1984 from the Mystery Writers of America for the best short story, The New Girl Friend; and a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986. She was also the winner of the 1990 Sunday Times Literary award, as well as the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

  To Paul and Marianne with love

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘A CURIOUS WORLD we live in,’ said Franklin Merton, ‘where one can afford a house but not a picture of a house. That must tell us some profound truth. But what, I wonder?’

  The picture he was talking about was Simon Alpheton’s Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place, later bought by Tate Britain – simply ‘the Tate’ in those days – and the house the one in the picture, Orcadia Cottage. His remark about the curious world was addressed to the Harriet of the picture, for whom he had bought it and whom he intended to marry when his divorce came through. Later on, when passion had cooled and they were husband and wife, ‘I didn’t want to get married,’ he said. ‘I married you because I’m a man of honour and you were my mistress. Some would say my views are out of date but I dispute that. The apparent change is only superficial. I reasoned that no one would want my leavings, so for your sake the decent thing was to make an honest woman of you.’

  His first wife was Anthea. When he deserted her he was also obliged to desert their dog O’Hara and to him that was the most painful thing about it.

  ‘You don’t keep a bitch and bark yourself,’ he said to Harriet when she protested at having to do all the housework.

  ‘Pity I’m not an Irish setter,’ she said and had the satisfaction of seeing him wince.

  They lived together for five years and were married for twenty-three, the whole time in that house, Orcadia Cottage or Number 7a Orcadia Place, London NW8. Owing to Franklin’s sharp tongue, verbal cruelty and indifference, and to Harriet’s propensity for sleeping with young tradesmen in the afternoons, it was not a happy marriage. They took separate holidays, Franklin going away ostensibly on his own but in fact with his first wife, and he came back from the last one only to tell Harriet he was leaving. He returned to Anthea and her present Irish setter De Valera, intending to divorce Harriet as soon as feasible. Anthea, a generous woman, urged him to do his best to search for her, for she couldn’t be found at Orcadia Cottage. The largest suitcase, most of her clothes and the best of the jewellery he had bought her were missing, and it was Franklin’s belief that she had gone off with her latest young man.

  ‘She’ll be in touch as soon as she’s in need,’ said Franklin to Anthea, ‘and that won’t be long delayed.’

  But Harriet never got in touch. Franklin went back to Orcadia Cottage to look for some clue as to where she might have gone but found only that the place was exceptionally neat, tidy and clean.

  ‘One odd thing,’ he said. ‘I lived there for all those years and never went into the cellar. There was no reason to do so. Just the same, I could have sworn there was a staircase going down to it with a door just by the kitchen door. But there isn’t.’

  Anthea was a much cleverer woman than Harriet. ‘When you say you could have sworn, darling, do you mean you would go into court, face a jury and say, “I swear there was a staircase in that house going down to the cellar”?’

  After thinking about it, Franklin said, ‘I don’t think so. Well, no, I wouldn’t.’

  He put it on the market and bought a house for Anthea and himself in South Kensington. In their advertisements the estate agents described Orcadia Cottage as ‘the Georgian home immortalised in the internationally acclaimed artwork of Simon Alpheton’. The purchasers, an American insurance broker and his wife, wanted to move in quickly and when Franklin offered them the report his own surveyors had made thirty years before, they were happy to do without a survey. After all, the house had been there for two hundred years and wasn’t likely to fall down now.

  Clay and Devora Silverman bought the house from Franklin Merton in 1998 and lived there until 2002, before returning to the house they had rented out in Hartford, Connecticut. The first autumn they spent at Orcadia Cottage the leaves on the Virginia creeper, which covered the entire front and much of the back of the house, turned from green to copper and copper to red and then started to fall off. Clay Silverman watched them settle on the front garden and the paving stones in the back. He was appalled by the red sticky sodden mass of leaves on which he and Devora slipped and slid and Devora sprained her ankle. Knowing nothing about natural history and still less about gardening, he was well-informed about art and was familiar with the Alpheton painting. It was one of his reasons for buying Orcadia Cottage. But he had assumed that the green leaves covering the house which formed the background to the lovers’ embrace remained green always and remained on the plant. After all of them had fallen he had the creeper cut down.

  Orcadia Cottage emerged as built of bricks in a pretty pale red colour. Clay had shutters put on the windows and the front door painted a pale greenish-grey. In the paved yard at the back of the house was what he saw as an unsightly drain cover with a crumbling stone pot on top of it. He had a local nursery fill a tub with senecios, heathers and cotoneaster to replace the pot. But four years later he and Devora moved out and returned home. Clay Silverman had g
iven £800,000 for the house and sold it for £1,500,000 to Martin and Anne Rokeby.

  The Rokebys had a son and daughter; there were only two bedrooms in Orcadia Cottage but one was large enough to be divided and this was done. For the first time in nearly half a century the house was home to children. Again there was no survey on the house, for Martin and Anne paid cash and needed no mortgage. They moved into Orcadia Cottage in 2002 and had been living there for four years, their children teenagers by this time, when Martin raised the possibility with his wife of building underground. Excavations to construct an extra room or two – a wine cellar, say, or a ‘family room’, a study or all of those things – were becoming fashionable. You couldn’t build on to your historic house or add an extra storey, but the planning authority might let you build subterraneanly. A similar thing had been done in Hall Road which was near Orcadia Place and Martin had watched the builders at work with interest.

  A big room under Orcadia Cottage would be just the place for their children to have a large-screen television, their computers, their ever-more sophisticated arrangements for making music, and maybe an exercise room, too, for Anne, who was something of a work-out fanatic. In the late summer of 2006 he began by consulting the builders who had divided the large bedroom but they had gone out of business. A company whose board outside the Hall Road house gave their name, phone number and an email address were next. But the men who came round to have a look said it wouldn’t be feasible. A different firm was recommended to him by a neighbour. One who came said he thought it could be done. Another said it was possible if Martin didn’t mind losing all the mature trees in the front garden. Nevertheless, he applied to the planning authority for permission to build underneath the house.

  Martin and Anne and the children all went to Australia for a month. The house was too old, prospective builders said, it would be unwise to disturb the foundations. Others said it could be done, but at a cost twice that which Martin had estimated. They said all this on the phone without even looking at it. The project was put an end to when planning permission was refused, having had a string of protests from all the Rokebys’ neighbours except the one who had recommended the builder.

  All this took about a year. In the autumn of 2007 the Rokebys’ son, who had been the principal family member in favour of the underground room, went off to university. Time went on and the plan was all but forgotten. The house seemed bigger now their daughter was away at boarding school. In the early spring of 2009 Martin and Anne went on holiday to Florence. There, in a shop on the Arno, Anne fell in love with a large amphora displayed in its window. Apparently dredged up from the waters of the Mediterranean, it bore a frieze round its rim of nymphs and satyrs dancing and wreathing each other with flowers.

  ‘I must have that,’ said Anne. ‘Imagine that replacing that hideous old pot.’

  ‘You have it,’ Martin said. ‘Why not? So long as you don’t try getting it on the flight.’

  The shop sent it, carefully packed in a huge crate, and it finally arrived in St John’s Wood in May 2009 by some circuitous route not involving aircraft. A local nursery agreed to plant it with agapanthus and sedum spectabile, but before this was done Martin emptied the plants and soil out of the wooden tub, placed the remains of the tub into a black plastic bag and put it out into the mews for the rubbish collection.

  ‘I’ve often wondered what’s under that lid thing but never bothered to have a look.’

  ‘Now’s your chance,’ said Anne, uninterested.

  ‘It’s probably too heavy to lift.’

  But it wasn’t too heavy. Martin lifted the manhole cover to disclose a large dark cavity. He could see nothing much beyond what appeared to be a plastic bag or sheet of plastic lying in the depths. Better get a torch, he thought, and he did, thus wrecking his life for a long time to come.

  An exaggeration? Perhaps. But not much of one. By shining that torch down into the dark cavity, he gained a place for his wife and himself and his home on the front page of every daily newspaper, put an end to his and his family’s peace for months, attracting mobs of sightseers to the street and the mews, reducing the selling price of his house by about a million pounds and making Orcadia Place as notorious as Christie’s home in Notting Hill and the Wests’ in Gloucester.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD, who was no longer a chief inspector or a policeman or a permanent resident of Kingsmarkham in the county of Sussex, sat in the living room of his second home in Hampstead reading the Booker Prize winner. He was no longer any of those other things, but he was still a reader. And now he had all the time in the world for books.

  Of course, he had many interests besides. He loved music: Bach, Handel, lots of opera. Walking he found a bore when he always walked the same route in Kingsmarkham, but London was different; London walks were a never-ending source of interest and excitement. Galleries he visited, usually with his wife Dora. It was a mild winter and he went on the river with her, took the canal trip with her from Paddington Basin to Camden Lock and back. They went to Kew Gardens and Hampton Court. For all that, for all this richness, he missed what had been his life. He missed being a policeman.

  So the chance encounter with Tom Ede as he was walking down the Finchley Road changed things. They had first met years ago when Tom had been a very young police constable and Wexford staying with his nephew Chief Superintendent Howard Fortune in Chelsea. Wexford had taken an interest in one of Howard’s cases and Tom had come to his attention as exceptionally bright and persevering. That had been more than thirty years ago, but he had recognised Tom at once. He looked older, of course, but it was the same face if overlaid with lines, the same hairline if grey now instead of brown. Must be because he hasn’t gained weight, Wexford had thought at the time, rueful about his own increased girth.

  He’d looked at Tom, hesitated, then said, ‘It’s Thomas Ede, isn’t it? You won’t know me.’

  But Tom did – just – when he had taken a long look. He was Detective Superintendent Ede now, based at the new Metropolitan Police headquarters in Cricklewood. They had exchanged phone numbers. Wexford had gone on his way with an extra spring in his step and now he was hoping Tom would phone. For what? To arrange to meet on some social occasion? No, don’t deceive yourself, he thought. You want the improbable: that he’ll ask for help. He went back to last year’s Booker winner, enjoying it but with maybe a small fraction of his mind thinking about the phone and how Tom had said he would ring ‘around lunchtime’.

  It was six months now since he had retired and been presented with the pretty carriage clock which, on the coachhouse (how appropriate!) living room mantelpiece, told him that the time was well into what he called lunchtime. He had eaten the lunch Dora had left him, the meat and ciabatta and ignoring most of the salad. Still, even now, his mind went back to what might have happened, would have happened, if Sheila hadn’t offered them this place.

  ‘Of course, we don’t want rent, Pop. You and Mother will be doing us a favour, taking on the coachhouse.’

  The real meaning of retirement had come to him the first day. When it didn’t matter what time he got up he could stay in bed all day. He didn’t, of course. Those first days all his interests seemed petty, not worth doing. It seemed to him that he had read all the books he wanted to read, heard all the music he wanted to hear. He thought of closing his eyes and turning his face to the wall. That was on the first days and he put on a show of enjoying having nothing to do for Dora’s sake. He even said he was relishing this slack and idle time. She saw through that; she knew him too well. After about a week of it he said how much he wished they could live in London. Not all the time, he loved their Kingsmarkham house, neither of them would want to give that up.

  ‘You mean have somewhere in London as well?’

  ‘I suppose that’s what I do mean.’

  ‘Could we afford it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  A studio flat, he had thought. That was an elegant term for a be
dsitter with one corner cut off for a kitchen and a cupboard turned into a shower room. Gradually learning how to use the Internet, he found estate agents online and looked at what they had to offer. Dora asked her question again.

  ‘Could we afford it?’

  An unqualified ‘no’ this time.

  They said nothing about it to either of their daughters. Saying you can’t afford something to a rich child is tantamount to asking for financial aid. Their elder, Sylvia, was comfortable but not rich. Sheila, the successful actress on stage and TV, had an equally successful husband. Their large Victorian house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, if it were up for sale, would be one of those that estate agents’ websites offered as ‘in excess of eight million’. So they said nothing to Sheila, even pretended how happily their lives had been transformed by his retirement. But Sheila knew him almost as well as his wife did.

  ‘Have the coachhouse for a second home, Pop.’

  That was what it was called, a kind of garage for a brougham when people possessed such transport, with a stable for the horse and a flat over the top for the coachman. Carefully converted, it was now a small house with two bedrooms and – unheard-of luxury – two bathrooms.

  ‘I still can’t really believe it,’ Dora said on their first evening.

  ‘I can,’ said Wexford. ‘Don’t forget, I’ve lived in a world where the improbable happens all the time. What would you rather do tomorrow, go by train to Kew Gardens or have a boat up the river to the Thames Barrier?’

  ‘Couldn’t we do both?’

  During those months they had twice been back to Kingsmarkham for a week at a time and that, too, had been enjoyable, like coming home from a holiday while still wanting to resume that holiday later. But it was a mixed pleasure; this was his manor, this was where he had been the law incarnate for so long. It brought home to him how much he missed being that law.