The Vault

by Ruth Rendell

‘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.’

  Later 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?’

  *

  With 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?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  HOW 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.

  Wexford intended to go home – that is, to go to his own house and see whoever might be in. But as he walked down the steps he saw the couple who had earlier caught his eye, waiting at the bottom. Surely waiting for him. He didn’t know them, he meant to pass them by but, as he approached them, the woman called out in a strident, upper-class voice, ‘Where’s your daughter? I suppose she didn’t have the face to come.’

  ‘Vivien,’ the man said. ‘There’s no point …’

  ‘Yes, there is. I want to tell him so that he can tell her. He can tell her that if she were a decent woman and not a whore my son would be alive today. My son would be starting a happy life …’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jason Wardle’s father said wretchedly. ‘It’s not your fault, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ said Wexford. ‘I’m very sorry for you both.’

  ‘And what’s the use of that?’ Vivien Wardle was crying now, the tears running down her face. ‘There may be a bit of use in telling her what I said. You do that. You tell her she’s a disgrace to her sex and to her children. Those poor boys, that poor little girl. What must they think of their mother?’

  Her husband succeeded in taking Vivien away. He almost had to lift her into their car, she was so convulsed with misery and grief. Wexford felt badly shaken. But still he turned in the direction of his house and began to walk up Queen Street. Dora had been right and he had been wrong, he thought. Keeping aloof from all this, taking no stand, avoiding judgement, that was all wrong. A parent should speak out, no matter what age his child was, no matter what reputation he had achieved as a tolerant and never moralistic arbiter. He had been too easy and too kind, too respectful. Perhaps to prove to himself that all that was changing, at least in this instance, he let himself into his house without ringing the bell first, without the prior phone call he would usually have made.

  Sylvia was in the living room, lying on the sofa reading a magazine and drinking coffee. She sat up, said, ‘Dad! You might have let me know you were coming.’

  He looked at the clock. He hadn’t meant to, but noticing she was still in her nightdress, a shawl round her shoulders, her long dark hair loose and in need of a wash, he looked and saw it was twenty minutes to midday.

  ‘There’s some coffee. Do you want some?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m not staying. I’ve been to the inquest on Jason Wardle.’

  ‘Suicide, I suppose,’ she said.

  Something inside his head snapped. But he remained cool, his voice slow and steady. ‘Sylvia, I have passed no judgement on you. I have purposely not taken a side against you. But now I have to speak out. Maybe it will make no difference. Mr and Mrs Wardle were there, Jason’s parents.’

  She said nothing, cast up her eyes.

  ‘Don’t make that face, please. You are a fine example, aren’t you, a fine role model, for Mary?’ Sylvia drew back from him, put one hand up to press against her chest. ‘Mrs Wardle told me what she thinks of you. She holds you responsible for her son’s death. I don’t, but I will say that without your intervention in his life he’d be alive today. Damaged perhaps, mentally unstable, perhaps, but alive.’

  ‘What about him intervening in my life?’

  Wexford said brutally, ‘Jason was twenty-one. You are a middle-aged woman with a son only two years younger. You are a social worker, quite a highly trained one, but you didn’t spot the signs of mental instability in him or if you did you didn’t care. You had what you wanted from him and then you dropped him. Mrs Wardle called you a whore – that wasn’t pleasant for a father to hear.’

  Mrs Wardle had cried and now Sylvia’s defiance slid off her as the shawl slipped from her shoulders, and she too began to cry. He watched her for a moment, then he said, ‘Stop. Crying doesn’t help. Does it? It doesn’t make you feel better, whatever people say,’ and sitting down beside her he took her in his arms.

  Hugging a large damp woman with greasy hair who smells of sweat is not a pleasant experience, even if she is your child. But thinking like that almost made Wexford laugh. That would never do.

  ‘Time you went back to work,’ he said. ‘Time you cleaned my house.’ He had noticed the dust. ‘And had Mary back with you. Your mother or I will bring her back on Monday.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’

  ‘I ought to advise you to go and see the Wardles, tell them you’re sorry, but I’m not into draconian punishments. Besides, they might kill you. Vivien Wardle looks capable of it. Now go and have a bath and get dressed.’

  She looked at him with that little girl face she occasionally put on. It was no longer becoming. ‘If I do will you take me out for lunch?’

  This time he did laugh. ‘Certainly not. What an idea! I’m going straight back to London.’

  And there, looking in on Tom Ede before he went off for the weekend, Wexford heard that Rodney Horndon was back from his holiday in the Caribbean. They would talk to him next week. Although he had spent no more than a few hours at the inquest and after that in admonishing Sylvia, Wexford felt strangely out of touch with the events at Orcadia Cottage. He must go back there, but as he decided to go out again it began to rain, at first lightly and then in torrents, the wind getting up and blowing the rain in sheets. It was the next day, in the late afternoon, that he walked down to St John’s Wood.

  It was only September but already the leaves were starting to fall from the Virginia creepers. A few had dropped on to the pavements in Orcadia Place and they lay more thickly scattered over the cobbles of the mews. Most of the houses and all the walls carried their burden of the spidery tendrils and heart-shaped leaves, now tinted to a clear red or deep blackish crimson. One fluttered down and alighted on Wexford’s shoulder as he wandered about, half-hoping for some inspiration to come to him from these walls and windows and gables and doorways which must have seen so much. As he came by her gate Mildred Jones’s front door opened and she came out of her flat on to the doorstep, preceded by a tall, thin young woman with long fair hair. They spoke, but were too far away for Wexford to hear what was said, and the girl came down the path to the gate, Mrs Jones calling after her, ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday, then. Nine a.m., remember, and don’t be late.’

  Once she was out of earshot, Mildred Jones came to the gate, said to Wexford in a confidential tone, ‘Latvian. At least I know she can’t be an illegal.’

  He looked inquiring. ‘My new cleaner,’ she said. ‘Comes from Ri
ga, she says. I don’t care where she comes from so long as it’s in the EU. But they’re a bit thin on the ground. In the fourteen years I’ve been here I’ve had seven and they were from Georgia – and I don’t mean Georgia USA – and Uzbekistan and Ukraine, to name but a few.’

  ‘You mean they didn’t have a right to remain?’

  ‘That’s what I mean, yes.’ She seemed quite unaware that it was unwise to give these details to a policeman, but he was a policeman no longer and perhaps that was how she thought of him. ‘The first one was actually deported. Then there was the first Georgian. Then there was the Ukrainian with the ridiculous name, the one that disappeared, and soon after that Colin and I split up, so you can see that was a hard time for me. But I will say for these Russians – they’re all Russian to me – they’re good cleaners.’

  Wexford was curious, even though all this wasn’t relevant to the Orcadia Cottage case. ‘How do you find them? I mean, if they’re working illegally in this country they can’t advertise, can they?’

  ‘Oh, some do. But what they mainly do is put a note through your door. Well, they just put notes through the doors in the whole street. They put their name – just their first name – and say they can do cleaning and ironing and shopping and give a mobile number. They never say how much they’re asking, because they know you’ll stick out for paying under the minimum wage.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s nearly six pounds an hour and I couldn’t afford that. That one you’ve just seen, she asked for the minimum wage – it’s amazing what they know about our laws – but I told her four pounds an hour was the most I’d pay and of course she knuckled under.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Wexford.

  Did she notice his dry tone or was there some distaste in his expression? Whatever it was she said suddenly, ‘Oh my God, I forgot, you’re police, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not any more, Mrs Jones, not any more.’

  She began to explain. ‘Just because I live here – I mean, in St John’s Wood – and because I go to South Africa every year, people think I’m rolling in money. Let me tell you, I got this flat under our divorce settlement and that was all I got. Colin got our place in the country and I never had a penny out of him. He sold that house and got enough from it to buy a place on Clapham Common. I have to live on my investments and you’ll know what that means in a recession. It was all I could do to afford the air fare to Cape Town and then I couldn’t go first class.’ She drew breath. ‘It’s not as though Colin’s short of a bob or two. The irons in the fire he’s got you wouldn’t believe. A share in a business in West Hampstead and a share in a betting shop.’