Free The Vault by Ruth Rendell Page A

have the man’s name, only probabilities. You’ve not found the car, I suppose?’
    Wexford told him. ‘The Edsel is in Balham, in a garage, being looked after by an Edsel fanatic called Mick Bestwood. It’s been so thoroughly cleaned and polished you could eat your dinner off the bonnet.’
    The laugh which greeted this was typical of Tom who (as he put it himself) always gave honour where honour was due. ‘Excellent. Well done. We’ll have Forensics go over it just the same. You know they say it’s impossible to eradicate all that sort of evidence. There’ll be something. We’ve started inquiring at service stations in Liphook, at car parks and at motor repair shops. There aren’t too many of those – Liphook’s not very big. But all that’s pointless now.’ He repeated, ‘You’ve done well, Reg.’
    ‘Still, he may be living in Liphook.’ Tom had evidently forgotten Wexford’s home was in Kingsmarkham, not many miles from Liphook. ‘It’s not much more than a big village.’
    ‘The woman who wrote
Lark Rise to Candleford
used to live there,’ Tom said. ‘Flora Thompson. I saw about it on television when they did the serial.’ He went off into one of his digressions, speculating as to whether Candleford was Liphook and ending with a mini-biography of the author.
    Wexford waited patiently before asking if the inquiries in Liphook had had any results.
    Tom shrugged. ‘Maybe Kenneth Hill used to live there, but if he did he didn’t make much of a mark. Lucy Blanch and DC Garrison have talked to a good many of the residents and no one remembers Hill.’
    ‘Medical centres?’ Wexford queried. ‘What we used to call doctors’ surgeries? Hotels? Pubs.’
    ‘Lucy’s tried all those and there’s nothing. The fact that he’s not there is no evidence for us, it’s another negative. I’m inclined to believe he never lived there. It looks to me as if it’s just something the young man said to your Miracle Motors people because he thought that would be an excuse for the uncle not coming in with the Edsel himself. Liphook was probably the first name that came into his head. He knew someone there or he’d seen the name written down.’
    ‘I’m afraid you’re right.’
    ‘Mildred Jones is home from South Africa,’ said Tom. ‘We’ll go and see her. She’s our only source for the name Keith Hill. Let’s hope she has total recall for a conversation she says she had with him twelve years ago.’

CHAPTER EIGHT
    S he lived in one of the garden flats in the block in Orcadia Mews. Her front door was directly opposite the door in the rear wall of the Orcadia Cottage paved yard. Three of the front doors were painted black but Mildred Jones’s was fuchsia pink. A Virginia creeper, now in new leaf, rambled over the brickwork of the flats, completely concealing some of it, and Wexford thought of the same climber which had figured in Simon Alpheton’s painting and had been cut down by Rokeby. For some reason, he wondered if the climber had any significance in this case, but he was at a loss to think what it could possibly have.
    Tom had forgotten to put his tie on or had deliberately left it off, but fished it out of his pocket and was putting it on as the front door was opened by a short but rather heavy woman in a green trouser suit. She gave Tom and his tie a glance of distaste. She was one of those people whose heads seem too big for their bodies, their features handsome enough but almost overpowering. The heavy gold jewellery she wore seemed to weigh down her neck. Her hair was grey, styled to look like as if sculpted from metal or stone, her face thickly made-up, the eyebrows shaped with excessive care.
    The room she led them into was small, stuffed with chintz-covered furniture, the French window hung with over-ornatebrocade curtains, braided, pleated, fringed, its pelmet adorned at its sides with bunches of tassels. But the garden visible outside was like a rectangle cut out of a hayfield.
    ‘I