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
‘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
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
