The Vault Read Free Page B

becoming universally popular. Wexford sat opposite him in the clients’ seat, the interviewee’s place. This was something new to him, something he had to get resigned to. And he was getting there, it was all right, it was inevitable.
    ‘I’ve read about it,’ he said, ‘but you tell me. That way I’ll get it right.’
    ‘Well, as you know, this all started a month ago. We were first called at the beginning of May. The location is a street in St John’s Wood called Orcadia Place, but that detail wasn’t in the papers, was it? You’re looking as if something’s struck you.’
    ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Wexford said. ‘Go on.’
    ‘The house itself is called Orcadia Cottage. It’s not a cottage as we know it but a sizeable detached house, very pretty if you like that sort of thing. Front garden’s full of flowers and trees, the back is a kind of courtyard or patio. Orcadia Place is one of those streets in St John’s Wood that are more like country lanes, hedges, big trees, cobbled roadway, that kind of thing. Orcadia Cottage belongs to a man called Martin Rokeby. He bought it about seven years ago for one and a half million. It would fetch four now – or would have before what was found in the coal hole. By the way, we call it the “patio-tomb”. Got to call it something, haven’t you?
    ‘The set-up is peculiar to say the least. On the face of it, the area, paved in York stone, is quite large and plain with a border round its edges. The way into the patio from the house is by a door from the kitchen and a pair of French windows. A door in the back wall opens into the mews. More or less in the middle of this patio is the manhole cover, circular, which when closed – and it always was closed – lies flush with the paving. A tub stood on it and entirely covered it up.
    ‘Now Rokeby had never lifted up this manhole cover. Or so he says. He had no survey done when he bought the house as he had no mortgage and distrusted surveys on old houses, reasoning that they were bound to be full of faults but never fell down. It’s a point of view. You can spend a fortune on surveys and most of the time needlessly. Anyway, Rokeby sayshe didn’t even know the manhole cover was there. The tub which stood on it was a half-barrel of wood bound in iron, not particularly attractive, and Mrs Rokeby said she’d like a new one. She’s the gardener. Well, the two of them were on holiday in Italy – they went on a lot of expensive holidays, Australia at the time he was planning the underground room – and in a shop in Florence she saw this, I quote, “amazingly beautiful amphora”, whatever that is, that some boat dredged up from out of the Mediterranean. I don’t know about these things. Maybe you do. Anyway, she had to have it – they’re not short of a penny or two, as you’ll have guessed – couldn’t, needless to say, take it home with them on a flight, so she asked to have it sent. Heaven knows what that cost but it doesn’t matter.’
    Wexford noted that ‘heaven’ where another man would have said ‘God’. He wondered what it meant, if anything, vaguely remembering that Tom Ede, when young, had a connection with some nonconformist church or cult.
    ‘Much to their surprise,’ Ede went on, ‘when they emptied the soil out of the half-barrel and took the thing away, what did they find underneath but this manhole cover. Now Rokeby, quite reasonably, supposed this to be covering a drain or a fuel store that was no longer in use, and at first he intended to leave things as they were and just stick the amphora thing on the top with some lilies planted in it.’
    ‘Why didn’t he?’ said Wexford.
    ‘Curiosity, he says. The manhole cover wasn’t heavy. He lifted it off and instead of the drain or drainpipe he expected, leading away into the mews, he found himself looking down into a black hole. At the bottom was something he couldn’t properly see apart from a kind of shininess that seemed to be a