Vault ciw-23

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘He was a plumber and Clary said his name was Rod. I don’t know if he was Rodney Horndon.’

  ‘Apparently he was,’ Wexford said. ‘Now, he came to Orcadia Cottage when Mr Clary came the second time?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Now, it was summer. Did you and your wife’ – Wexford glanced at Anne Rokeby, who turned a stony face to him – ‘go on holiday that year? You did? And would that have been before or after the visit of Mr Clary and Mr Horndon?’

  Anne Rokeby spoke in a voice as cold as her face. ‘Of course it must have been after. We could only go in the school holidays and they, as I suppose you know, start at the end of July.’

  Undeterred by her manner, Lucy turned to her. ‘How easy would it have been to get into your patio from the mews while you were away?’

  ‘Very easy, as my husband never bothered to lock the door in the wall. I’d lock it and the very next time my husband went out that way he’d leave it unlocked. As far as I know,’ Anne Rokeby gave her husband a bitter look, ‘the key is lost.’

  Rokeby ignored this. He burst out like a child pleading for a promised treat that has been long postponed: ‘Please, when can we go back to Orcadia Cottage? Please don’t make us stay here any longer.’

  ‘You can go back whenever you like, Mr Rokeby,’ Lucy said, ‘so long as you’ll put up with people standing outside the house and staring in and put up with us poking about the patio from time to time.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  Rokeby came out with them, pulling the door almost closed behind him. ‘Going back will save my marriage. I somehow feel it will save my life.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ said Lucy on the stairs, ‘to feel we’re pleasing some of the people some of the time.’

  *

  When Wexford was a child the ‘lady doctor’ had been a formidable woman. It was often only her vast bosom which distinguished her from the male of the species. Her grey hair was clipped short, her reddened face innocent of make-up and her feet splayed in brown leather lace-ups. Of course, he knew very well Francine Hill wouldn’t be like that. He knew that doctors were as likely to be young and beautiful as women in any other profession, but it was only after he had heard her voice on the phone that he pictured her as such. His imagination came far short of the reality.

  If he had only seen her in the street he would have placed her as a dancer, a member of some corps de ballet. She was very slim. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, parted in the centre and drawn back into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her mouth was full and red, her eyes large and dark blue and her skin dazzlingly white; like the ‘lady doctor’ of his youth (though different in all other respects) she wore no make-up. She had on a knee-length black skirt and jacket with a dark blue and red scarf, flat pumps instead of high heels, no jewellery.

  Rita Debach brought her into the office.

  ‘Please sit down, Dr Hill,’ Tom said.

  Wexford guessed she would be the kind of doctor who asked her patients to call her by her first name.

  ‘Now my colleague here, Mr Wexford, tells me you were familiar with Orcadia Cottage in 1997. You went there, I think, with a friend of yours?’

  ‘I was eighteen,’ she began, ‘living with my father and my stepmother in Ealing. I’d just left school. Teddy Brex was my – well, I suppose he was my boyfriend.’ She paused to consider. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course he was.’

  ‘And he owned a pale yellow Ford Edsel car?’

  ‘I don’t know if he owned it.’ She spoke diffidently and Wexford could tell she was doing her best to be as accurate as possible. ‘He used it. He drove it. He told me it had been his uncle’s, but his uncle had gone to live somewhere in Hampshire or Sussex, I can’t remember where.’

  ‘Was it Liphook, Dr Hill?’

  ‘Oh, yes, it was. Of course it was.’

  ‘Where did you meet Mr Brex?’

  ‘It was at a show – an exhibition, I mean. I went with a friend. Teddy was at this college and the art department had a show of students’ degree work. He’d made a mirror and won a prize for it.’ She looked up and her face suddenly glowed with life. ‘It was the most beautiful mirror. It had a frame made of different kinds of wood, inlaid, you know – he was very gifted. He did wonderful work. He gave me the mirror but I couldn’t take it home. There were – well, reasons why I couldn’t. I left it in the house. I don’t know what happened to it.’ I do, thought Wexford, it’s in Anthea Gardner’s house. Francine Hill had been carried away by memories and now she shook herself. ‘But you don’t want to hear this. We got to know each other, Teddy and I, and we started going out. He was twenty-one. I went to his house …’

  Tom interrupted, ‘He was twenty-one and he owned a house?’

  ‘He said it was his,’ Francine Hill said. ‘I know he wasn’t always truthful. It was in Neasden. I don’t remember the address, but I think I could take you there. His parents were dead but he had a grandmother. I never met her. He took me to Orcadia Cottage.’

  ‘He didn’t own that house as well?’

  She looked at Tom steadily. It was a look which said, I am telling you the truth. If you don’t believe me perhaps we should terminate this interview because I am wasting my time. Tom nodded rather uncomfortably.

  ‘He took me there,’ she went on. ‘Of course he didn’t own the place. It obviously belonged to someone quite rich. He said that a friend he was working for had lent it to him. You have to remember I was only eighteen and I’d led a very sheltered life, exceptionally sheltered, I think, for someone of my age. I’ve thought about it since and I’ve thought he couldn’t have had friends who owned a place like that but I believed it then. I couldn’t have placed people – do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wexford, earning an interrogatory stare from Tom.

  ‘It was most beautifully furnished. Lovely old furniture and oriental rugs and very fine porcelain. I looked in one of the wardrobes and it was full of expensive clothes, dresses and suits, women’s clothes, and there were some men’s, too, in another wardrobe. The drawers were full of jewellery, it looked valuable. Is this the kind of thing you want to hear?’

  ‘We want to hear anything you can tell us about Mr Brex,’ said Wexford. ‘Was he employed? What did he live on? Oh, and what time of year was this?’

  ‘It was autumn. The leaves were falling. You ask if Teddy was employed. Well, he was self-employed. He was a joiner.’

  Tom asked – spuriously, Wexford thought, ‘Why did he take you to Orcadia Cottage?’

  Francine Hill looked at him again, another long look but incredulous this time. ‘We were boyfriend and girlfriend. We wanted somewhere we could be alone.’

  ‘You had been learning French at school,’ Tom said. ‘Teddy Brex asked you to translate a French word. La Punaise.’ He pronounced it ‘punish.’

  Francine shrugged slightly, holding out her hands. It was the test, Wexford thought. Tom was putting her to the test. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘We could show Dr Hill the piece of paper on which it was written down.’

  Tom nodded, called Rita Debach to fetch the relevant evidence, as well as the jewellery which had been found in the vault. She took a long time. Meanwhile, Francine talked about her experiences in Orcadia Cottage. No, she had never been into the cellar, she had never been outside at the back, never seen the patio with the manhole. There was no staircase down to a cellar that she saw.

  ‘Do you think,’ Wexford asked, ‘that Teddy Brex would have been capable of bricking up a doorway, plastering over the brickwork and painting the new area of wall?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I don’t know why he would. It wasn’t his house. But if you’re asking me if he could have done it, yes, he could and he would have made a wonderful job of it. He was a perfectionist.’

  The scrap of paper arrived, protected between two sheets of plastic. As soon as she saw it she recognised the writing. ‘Oh, yes. Teddy wrote that. I rememb
er now.’

  ‘Would you have anything in your possession,’ Tom said, reverting to policeman-speak, ‘which might have on it Brex’s fingerprints?’

  ‘After twelve years?’

  ‘What happened to Teddy Brex, Dr Hill? You split up? One of you broke it off?’

  Wexford could tell at once that this was a question she didn’t want to answer. Tom sat stolid, the picture of the unimaginative cop, the kind that has given the sobriquet ‘plod’ to the whole genus. Yet Tom wasn’t really like that. He would hardly have reached the rank he had if he had been. Could it be, Wexford speculated to himself, that he was the kind of man who, if he finds a woman attractive yet knows she must be unattainable, is made brutishly angry by his frustrations?

  ‘Or you just drifted apart?’ This time the sarcasm was barely veiled. ‘It was just one of those things?’

  The blood rushed into her white face, suffusing it with colour. ‘I got ill. I was ill for weeks and couldn’t meet him. I had troubles at home – my stepmother died. After that I never heard from him again.’ Wexford sensed that this was something she didn’t want to tell them. ‘Once I was better I did try to get in touch, but I couldn’t find him.’

  She looked at the jewellery, the two strings of pearls, the diamond and sapphire necklace, the ring, the bracelets and the gold collar. ‘I think this may be some of the jewellery in the drawer, but I can’t really say. I don’t remember.’

  Silence. Tom called for Rita to come and remove the exhibits. Wexford turned to Francine Hill and asked her if she would show them where Teddy Brex’s house was.

  ‘I couldn’t today.’

  ‘Sometime on Thursday?’ Friday was impossible. On Friday he would be in Kingsmarkham, at the inquest on Jason Wardle. ‘Perhaps Thursday afternoon?’

  ‘Would two on Thursday afternoon be all right?’

  It would be fine, Wexford said, and thank you very much, Dr Hill, you’ve been very helpful. Rita Debach showed her out. The door had scarcely closed when Tom said, ‘Snooty little piece, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t know what use you think seeing this fellow’s house is going to be, but you can go with Lucy if you like.’

  And if PC Debach were sent, Wexford would no doubt be going with her. A policeman’s aide’s lot is not a happy one, he paraphrased to himself, which led the increasingly cross Tom to ask what he thought he was laughing at.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Wexford. ‘Sorry.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THEY PICKED HER up at her home in Muswell Hill, an unpretentious semi-detached house in the street Wexford should have taken when looking for a way back to Shepherds Hill – should have taken and thereby never found Francine Hill and the Crouch End medical centre. A young man with a baby in his arms came to the door with her to see her off. Wexford, already far more involved with her and her concerns than he usually was with a witness, was pleased to see what he took for signs of happiness and fulfilment. They kissed and she kissed the smiling baby.

  It took her a long time to find the house. They drove round and round the little streets on the south side behind the North Circular Road. Wexford could understand her difficulty for they all looked the same. ‘It was on a corner,’ she kept saying and then, ‘on a corner but with the turning on the left side of the house.’

  Some front gardens were tended, some left to become wilderness, some repositories for bikes, motorbikes and the insides of engines. Some of the little houses, generally in semi-detached pairs, had pebble-dashed facades, some plastered and painted with contrasting colour trims and fake porticos. But most were run-down and all of them, despite being ‘trimmed in jollity’, looked what they were and who they were designed for, homes for the poor.

  ‘I haven’t been here since Teddy brought me in ’97,’ Francine said. ‘I came two or three times. I didn’t realise then how – well, how dismal it was. Look, that one’ – she pointed – ‘Number 83 on the corner. That’s it. I’m almost sure. Would you drive down the turning? Yes, can you see over the fence? That carport. Teddy kept his Edsel under that.’

  The house was occupied. Somehow – and all burglars know this – whether a house is occupied is always apparent from the outside. Not that the owners are at home or out, but that someone lives there permanently. Curtains hung at the windows, the plant in the pot by the front door wasn’t in the best of health, but it was alive and the soil round its stem was damp. Lucy rang the bell. If Francine thought Teddy Brex might answer the door she was the only one of them who did. It was eventually answered by an old woman, a woman who looked as if she was in her hundredth year. Her face was a relief map, criss-crossed by roads and rivers, her eye sockets moon craters, her mouth a thin slash between escarpments. A wisp of hair floated like a puff of white smoke on her head. She said in a surprisingly strong voice, ‘Who are you and what do you want?’

  Lucy showed her warrant card, introduced Francine Hill and Wexford. ‘We are looking for Mr Teddy Brex. May we come in?’

  ‘He’s not here. You can come in if you want, but only for a minute or two. I’m busy.’

  Old people are expected to live in cluttered dwellings, the accumulations of a long life covering every surface, old faded cushions on the armchairs, antimacassars too, framed photographs in which the pictures have faded to pastel shades, footrests for old feet and among the clutter on a table top, a magnifying glass for old eyes. Number 83 whatever this road was called was very unlike that. The room they went into was almost stark, its walls grey and white, the ceiling a darker grey. Two armchairs, an upright chair and a television set, the uncurtained French window affording a view of nothing much beyond a large carport.

  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 mar
velling, 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.’