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
‘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
