The Vault (21 page)

Lucy said, ‘May we sit down?’ and without waiting for an answer, did so. Politely, Wexford waited for the owner of this house, if she was the owner, to seat herself, which she finally did in a stiff, reluctant kind of way. ‘May we know your name?’

‘Mrs Tawton. Agnes, if you want first names the way all the young do these days.’

‘Thank you. Are you related in some way to Mr Brex?’

‘ “Some way”, is it? I should say so. I’m his only relative. I’m his grandma.’

Only to Wexford perhaps did this come as a dramatic surprise. After so many false leads and so much fruitless speculation, here was incontrovertible fact. It was as if Teddy Brex suddenly became a real person. He not only had a ‘relative’ who might or might not be an uncle, he had a grandmother.

‘But, let me get this straight. You don’t know where Mr Brex is? You haven’t seen him since when?’

Agnes Tawton had begun to look a little shifty. The direct stare with which she had favoured Lucy now fell and she eyed the wrinkled hands in her lap. ‘It’d be a good ten years. No, I tell a lie. More like twelve or thirteen.’

‘Were you living here with him?’

‘Not exactly
here
,’ she said, and paused. ‘My house is in Daisy Road on the other side of the North Circular. I used to sort of come and see him here.’

‘But you’re living here now? Are you the owner of this house?’

She didn’t want to say. That was very apparent. ‘I’ve let my place.’ The words were forced out as if they came from a squeezed tube. She seemed to have forgotten their visit was
to be restricted because she was busy. ‘I’ve got tenants in.’

Wexford could see exactly what she had been up to. He and Lucy needed no further elucidation. She had put her own house up for rent and moved in here when her grandson had disappeared. It was the grandson who owned this minimalist house, the grandson who was Teddy Brex, alias Keith Hill …

She had followed Wexford’s thoughts. ‘It was a crying shame leaving this place empty after all he’d done to it, painting it and all after the wicked mess his uncle left it in. I paid the rates’ – she meant the council tax – ‘and for the electric and gas. If he’d come back I’d have got out. I wouldn’t stop in what wasn’t mine.’

Wexford couldn’t help marvelling, almost admiring her. Here she was, somewhere in her nineties, working a splendid scam that wasn’t really a scam. He couldn’t see that she had done anything illegal. These houses were horrible and no doubt those on the other side of the North Circular Road were equally horrible, but in these days one of them, however mean and cramped and ugly, was near enough to central London to fetch a high rent.

‘You mentioned Mr Brex’s uncle. Who is he? Where is he?’

‘Don’t ask me. Living in Liphook so far as I know. This place belongs to him, not to Teddy, whatever Teddy thinks. It was like this. Teddy’s dad and him was only half brothers on account of Jimmy the eldest one being born before their mum was married. The wrong side of the blanket, you might say.’ Wexford nearly gasped. He had read the phrase, never before heard it uttered. ‘She was Kathleen Briggs,’ Agnes Tawton went on, ‘and Keith was born after she married their dad. Teddy never knew it, it was a shock to him.’

‘Did you say Keith?’

‘That’s right. That’s the uncle. Keith Brex he’s called.’

It was all falling into place. It was from his uncle’s name that Teddy chose a pseudonym for himself, Keith from his
uncle and Hill from his girlfriend. The connection between them being not a straight uncle-nephew relationship accounted for the DNA anomaly. Wexford asked Agnes Tawton if she would give a DNA sample, expecting a flat refusal. But she surprised him. He could tell such an act would make her feel important, something to tell her neighbours – neighbours perhaps in both locations.

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

Lucy asked her, ‘Where do you think your grandson is?’

‘In some foreign place, I reckon. The young these days, they’re off all over the world, aren’t they? God knows why but it’s a fact.’ Agnes Tawton stared at Francine and Francine gave her a small friendly smile. ‘He never told me he was going, but he wouldn’t. Too scared of what I’d do about him not painting my friend’s toilet like he promised.’

Wexford could easily believe in any man being afraid of this old woman. He left it to Lucy to tell her about the arrangement which would be made to take her DNA.

‘I’m not going to get turned out of here, am I?’

‘I can’t see why you would be,’ Wexford said. A picture came before his eyes of those two bodies in the vault, though he had never seen them, the young man and the older man, related but not true uncle and nephew. Keith Brex and Teddy Brex. ‘You say this house belongs to Keith Brex.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Not that you’d know it what with me never hearing a dicky bird out of him. It’s not as if Liphook’s at the other end of the earth, is it?’

So if Keith were dead and Teddy dead but in any case out of the running for ownership and there were no other relatives? If Keith died first would Teddy have inherited the house? Probably. He might not have been Keith’s full nephew, but he had been his half-brother’s son. He was dead, too, and had just one relative, this ancient woman. It wasn’t for Wexford
to tell her she probably was the owner. It was in any case unlikely anyone would attempt to dislodge her.

‘Right,’ said Mrs Tawton briskly, ‘you’ve got what you came for, so now you can go.’

L
ater in the day Wexford retailed the whole thing as he saw it to Tom. ‘The young man’s body in the tomb is almost certainly Teddy Brex’s and the older man’s his uncle Keith Brex. We shall know for sure as to the young man’s identity when we get the results from Agnes Tawton’s DNA test. The older man’s identity remains unsure. Agnes Tawton was no relation of his, though we know he was related in some way to Teddy Brex.’

‘Well done,’ said Tom.

‘But if he’s not Keith Brex, who is he? I think he must be. Agnes Tawton says Teddy had no other relatives but herself. He was an only child, his mother was an only child and his father had just this one half-brother, not properly speaking a Brex at all.’

‘Maybe we should look up this Keith Brex’s birth certificate?’

‘The chances are,’ said Wexford, ‘it will give the mother as Kathleen Briggs and the father as “unknown”.’

‘I think we should try. So what do we think happened to make them both and Harriet Merton end up in a hole under the Orcadia Cottage patio?’

‘I have a theory, Tom, but it’s not much more than a theory. Teddy Brex was the lover – if that’s the word – of Harriet Merton. For some reason I don’t know and can’t know she threatened to tell her husband something about Teddy that would be – well, detrimental to him. Maybe he wanted out and she said she’d tell her husband he raped her or tried to rape her or even that she caught him stealing her jewels.’

‘Well, there was a lot of valuable jewellery on his body and beside it.’

‘There was. They fought, perhaps physically and he pushed her down the stairs which
at that time led down into the cellar
. He left the body there, probably because as we know disposing of a body is the killer’s main problem. Was Keith Brex’s body already there? We aren’t going to know, but we may conclude that Teddy also killed him. Before or after Harriet? We don’t know. We don’t know why he killed him. A possibility is that when he found out the house in Neasden belonged not to his father but to Keith Brex, so hadn’t become his on his father’s death, he murdered him in a rage.’

‘And put the body in the coal hole?’

‘I think so, bringing it to Orcadia Cottage in the boot of the Edsel.’

‘Keith had been in it. We know that now, but dead or alive at the time we don’t know.’

‘When Harriet was dead he bricked up the doorway that led to the stairs, plastered over it so that it looked as if no staircase had ever been there.’

Tom nodded, looking pleased. ‘The question remains, Reg, if he could remove a door and brick up a doorway so that it looked as if no doorway had ever been there, why didn’t he fill up the hole underneath the manhole cover? We’ve asked ourselves this before. He only had to get hold of some paving stone, not much, and cement it into the hole, child’s play to him. Why didn’t he? If he had that would have made the contents of the tomb hidden for ever. No one would have suspected the existence of an underground tomb, let alone two bodies in it, and no fourth body could have been put there ten years later. Why didn’t he?’

‘And why did he end up there himself?’

W
ith the manhole still there and the manhole cover still on it, Wexford thought when he was on his way home. Why? Teddy Brex’s troubles would have been over if he had sealed the tomb at both ends. He imagined himself in Teddy Brex’s shoes, imagined himself young and with a girlfriend like Francine Hill. Teddy had everything to live for. He had secured a house for himself. Not much of a house, true, in not a very desirable place, but a roof over his head and always saleable. He had evidently stolen Harriet Merton’s jewels, which could have been sold for thirty or forty thousand pounds. He had Francine. But here Wexford paused. Did he really have Francine? That lovely clever girl would have seen through him, probably was seeing through him over the matter of
La Punaise
and the credit card. She was the last woman, he thought, to become entangled with a thief and a murderer. Though she was ignorant of all that side of him, young as she was, she had seen or would soon see how unsuitable he was for her, how positively dangerous for her.

Would she have any idea of any of this? Was it worth seeing her again? Still, he was sure Teddy Brex had presented to Francine a sunnier and sweeter aspect of character than that which had led to violence, robbery and murder. He had given her the mirror, the mirror that ended up in Anthea Gardner’s house. How strange people were! The mirror he had given told Wexford that Teddy Brex wasn’t entirely a brutish thug but someone, however corrupted, with an appreciation of beauty and perhaps hope for a future he was never to see gratified.

Wexford stopped. He stood still for a moment. A new thought had come to him with something of a shock. One mystery was: why hadn’t Teddy Brex paved over the manhole? Surely there was a second. Someone put the girl’s body into the vault to join the others. Why hadn’t that someone paved over the hole in his turn?

H
ow many inquests had he attended in Kingsmarkham? Hundreds, maybe a thousand over the years. But this would be the first at which he was present as a witness, a member of the public, and not a policeman.

He came by train, unusual for him who took himself everywhere by car. It was bad enough having to go at all, let alone driving himself through those southern suburbs which always seemed endless, which had surely come to an end once Streatham was passed – but not a bit of it, for Norbury and Croydon and Purley were still to be struggled through. The train from Victoria passed through some of these places but passed through them airily as if they presented it no problems, as indeed they didn’t. If cars ran on prescribed lines like trams, how easy it would be. Almost magically, the train sped out into a sort of near-countryside in the time it would have taken him in a car to get halfway through Brixton.

If there had been a ticket collector at Kingsmarkham Station as in the old days he would have recognised Wexford and asked him how he was, but there was no such friendly official, just a machine with a greedy mouth that ate up his ticket. He walked into town. For the first time in his life he was about to attend an inquest at which he felt a measure of guilt. None of this was his fault, but how much of it was his
daughter’s? Too late to change that now, pointless to speculate how Sylvia, one-time domestic goddess, had transmuted into this earth-motherly, sexually rampant, socially wild still youngish woman.

The coroner was new, someone Wexford had never seen before. Wexford gave his name as the private citizen he now was, and took the oath, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Listening with half an ear to the inquiry put to him – he knew by heart what it would be – he glanced at the people in the public seats to see if he recognised anyone. He didn’t, but one couple particularly caught his eye, a man and a woman in late middle age, sitting close together, holding hands tightly. It struck him that they dressed as no one of their age in London would dress, the woman wearing a felt hat and square scarf, the man a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, check shirt and knitted tie.

He began to tell the court what had happened that day. ‘My daughter had just come home from hospital. Because a set of her house keys was missing it seemed advisable to change the locks …’ The whole truth? The whole truth would be that he and she feared Jason Wardle had them and might use them to enter the house. He felt – he imagined surely – the eyes of the hand-holding couple on him. ‘A locksmith was needed. I went upstairs to look for the telephone directory which had been left in my grandson’s bedroom on the second floor.’ An enormous house, it must sound like, a rich woman’s house. ‘I opened the door. The body of a man was hanging from the light fitting in the ceiling.’ Cool, emotionless – nothing else was possible – he described how he went downstairs again and phoned Kingsmarkham police.

The coroner asked if he had recognised the hanged man and if he had touched the body, to both of which questions
Wexford answered an unhesitating no. That was all. There was nothing more for him to do or say. He was thanked by the coroner and got down to find himself a seat in the back row of the public seats. A doctor he no more knew than he knew the coroner described Jason Wardle’s injuries and the cause of his death, and then there was some evidence from a psychiatrist as to Wardle’s mental state, this man’s opinion being that he was bipolar. A faint strangled cry came from the woman in the felt hat.

There was some discussion between the coroner, the clerk to the court and the doctor and then the verdict came: suicide while the balance of Jason Wardle’s mind was disturbed. It was over. He had been twenty-one years old.