Vault

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 Riga, 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.’

Soon after he left her the rain began. He noticed crossly that it hadn’t been forecast. The south-east was due to be dry all day. He had no raincoat and no umbrella and the rain came in torrents. There were no taxis, there never were when you really wanted them, but there were trees to stand under more or less all the way. His feet had got wet through his shoes by the time he reached the coachhouse and water had run down the back of his neck inside his clothes.

He and Dora were spared a further visit to Sylvia, for Sheila took Mary home to her mother on Sunday. The little girl was happy enough to go. Her cousins were mostly at nursery school and her chief regret was at leaving Bettina the cat behind. Wexford thought with the slightly malicious amusement all parents sometimes feel towards a difficult son or daughter, that Sylvia was in for a hard time as her daughter did what she threatened to do and began nagging her mother for a kitten or a puppy.

He took Dora out to lunch and they went to the cinema. The evening was fine and not cold. Dora wanted to watch a favourite programme on television, so Wexford went back to Orcadia Place. Ever since he had left her when the rain started he had been thinking intermittently about the things Mildred Jones had told him. And, more to the point perhaps, the things she hadn’t told him.

This was the first time he had been into the precincts of Orcadia Cottage on his own and this time he opened the door in the rear wall and stepped inside on to the patio. Alone there, with no one in the house and no accompanying police officer, he turned to look at the door for what was really the first time. It was made of vertical wooden boards, painted black and it had a bolt top and bottom. Like Sylvia’s front door which she never bolted unless forced to do so. Was this door also never bolted?

Scarcely a paving stone in the yard was visible. Day after day of rain and high wind had brought down flurries of leaves from Ampelopsis – he had looked up the botanical name for Virginia creeper – from neighbouring walls and roofs and they lay in a thick wet carpet covering the ground. How much worse it must have been before Clay Silverman had his own Virginia creeper cut down. Wexford hardly knew what he was doing there, perhaps only taking yet another look at the place in the hope of deriving some clue from it as to what had happened here twelve years and two years before. It wasn’t only the identity of the young woman in the ‘tomb’ that was important but also that of the killer of the young man they were calling Teddy Brex. Examination of Agnes Tawton’s DNA would establish if it was indeed Brex but get them no nearer to finding who had killed him. Surely he had killed Harriet and killed the man who was almost certainly his uncle but when they were both dead and lying underground, had someone else killed him?

Standing there against the wall in the dying light, Wexford found himself utterly disbelieving this. Teddy Brex had killed Harriet Merton, presumably to stop her telling the police about his theft of her jewellery and her credit card and had killed his uncle for possession of a house and a car, both quite reasonable motives. What motive could someone else have had for killing him?

Wexford decided to take the lid off the manhole (Paulson and Grieve, Ironsmiths of Stoke) and have another look down into the depths. The hole itself, though now quite empty, might suggest something to him. He started forward, his leather-soled shoe slipped on the wet crimson carpet and he fell, slithering on the slippery leaves.

Luckily he was unhurt. He had broken nothing. Thanks to losing that weight, he thought, for he had fallen more lightly than he would once have done and would only have bruises to his knees and maybe his right hand. He struggled to his feet, not easy on that mat of sodden leaves, took a careful step forward and lifted the lid off the hole.

And then he saw. He understood what had happened to Teddy Brex.