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said, ‘I never met her, you know. Franklin went off with her and we were divorced. Well, eventually we were. I made him wait five years. By that time I’d met Roger Gardner, so Franklin and I were divorced and I married Roger. I was with him till he died and then Franklin and I ran into each other by chance in St James’s Park. Then we got together again, but I never met Harriet. There was no reason why I should.’
    ‘Mr Merton tried to find her, I believe you told us?’
    ‘Well, yes and no. Frankly, he thought she’d turn up and try to find him. He went to Orcadia Cottage and found that she’d taken most of her clothes and jewellery. Some neighbour told him she’d gone off with a chap called Keith Hill.’
    ‘But you didn’t go to Orcadia Cottage with him?’ Wexford asked at a nod from Tom.
    ‘No, I never did. I’ve never been near the place. All I know about it is what I’ve seen on the TV and in the newspapers. There’s one funny thing, though, you may be interested in. Franklin came back from there and said to me he could have sworn there was a staircase going down from behind a doorway in the hall into the cellar, only there wasn’t. I said to him, “What do you mean by ‘could have sworn’, would you take your oath on it in court?” and he had to say he wouldn’t.’
    ‘Surely he must have known whether there was a staircase or not. He lived in the house for thirty years.’
    ‘I’m only telling you what he said,’ said Anthea Gardner.
    Wexford’s thoughts went back to the DNA tests. ‘Did you ever hear of any relatives of Harriet’s? Brothers, sisters, even cousins?’
    ‘Her parents are both dead,’ said Tom. ‘Well, that’s not unlikely. Harriet would be sixty or more if she were alive.’
    ‘I don’t think so. I mean, I never heard of anyone. I don’tthink she had any family, but they wouldn’t come near me if she had, would they?’
    Wexford took a last look at the mirror Franklin Merton had been so fond of. Its frame was a delicate medley of inlaid woods, grey, gold, blond, a pale greenish blue. Its glass reflected his admiring gaze. Anthea Gardner shut the dog in the living room and came to let them out. Outside, Lucy was waiting for them in the car. When he was sitting in the back Wexford said, ‘The skeleton – I suppose – of the older woman, was there any hair on it or near it?’ A bracelet of bright hair about the bone …
    There was, but bright it hadn’t been. Tom said, ‘There was some hair, red hair but originally grey and dyed that colour. Which doesn’t tell us much.’
    Women who have had red hair dye it red when it goes grey, Wexford thought. Come to that, grey-haired women dye their head red even if it was once blonde or dark. ‘How about the neighbours in Orcadia Place? Some of them must have known her.’
    ‘This is London,’ Tom said. ‘People don’t know their neighbours. You can live next door to someone for years in London and not know their name. Besides, we have to go back twelve years. Among the neighbours, there aren’t many who were there then, and those who were say they knew Harriet by sight only. There’s one woman in a flat in the mews who seems to have known her. She’s divorced now and she’s in South Africa. I don’t mean she lives there, but she goes there on extended visits. I’ve talked to her on the phone and she’s given me more information about Harriet than anyone else, but that isn’t much. She’s coming home in about a week and I hope to talk to her more – well, in depth.’
    ‘What’s her name?’
    ‘Mildred Jones. You noticed Anthea Gardner mentionedKeith Hill as the man Harriet may have gone off with? Well, Mildred Jones told me she’d met this Keith Hill and it was her told Franklin Merton. A young chap, she said, who drove some sort of vintage car, a big American thing called an Edsel. She saw him park it in the mews once or twice. Twelve or thirteen years ago, she thinks it was.’
    ‘You said “a