Vault

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.

CHAPTER TWENTY- TWO

‘BUT THAT’S ONLY guesswork, isn’t it?’

Wexford had been pretty sure Tom would say that. He felt like quoting Sherlock Holmes and saying that when all else is impossible that which remains must be so. In this case, though, all else wasn’t impossible, only extremely unlikely. The extreme unlikelihood didn’t bother Tom.

‘This Teddy may have had all kinds of unsavoury mates. Birds of a feather flock together, you know. One of them may have been there and pushed him down the hole. Because that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That he slipped on those leaves and fell down the hole?’

‘That’s what I’m saying. If that manhole hadn’t been covered I’d have fallen down the hole myself.’

‘Hmm. Well, we’ll see. We’ve got the DNA results. There’s no doubt now that it was Teddy Brex. There’s very little doubt that the older man was his uncle or half-uncle Keith Brex. His birth certificate is what you said it would be, mother Kathleen Briggs, father unknown. But who was the girl, Reg?’

‘That’s what we have to find out.’

Rodney Horndon lived in a part of London Wexford had never visited before. His street was one of those branching off the Fulham Palace Road where the houses were ranged in terraces, late-Victorian, rather forbidding because they were all the same, their brickwork was a dark red, the small areas in front of them not to be dignified by the name of garden but either paved over or used as a storage space for defunct machinery. Horndon admitted DS Lucy Blanch and Wexford to the house himself. His wife and daughter were at work, he said, though no one had inquired after them.

Once, Wexford thought, and not long ago the television would have been on. Instead the focus was on a large desktop computer where Horndon had evidently been playing a video game involving biker-like characters, bristling with weapons, blasting each other with sub-machine guns. The action had been paused at a point where a giant- breasted redhead in a kind of silver metal bikini and thigh boots filled the screen, her arms raised and her bulbous red mouth open in a scream. Horndon, a shortish man of 50 with a big belly, glanced at it as if to turn it off but evidently thought better of this course. After all, he could return to it after they had gone.

‘I think you know what we want to talk to you about, Mr Horndon,’ Lucy said.

‘That Orcadia business.’ He pronounced it more like Al-Qaeda. ‘Don’t know what I can tell you.’

‘Tell us about the day you went with Mr Clary to Orcadia Cottage. The owners, Mrs and Mrs Rokeby, were away?’

‘Don’t know if they was away. They wasn’t there. They was out, that’s all I know.’

Wexford said, ‘You lifted a plant pot off the manhole cover and Mr Clary suggested you went down there?’

Wexford must have touched a sensitive spot for Horndon reacted indignantly. ‘He thinks a lot of himself, does Clary. Dressed up in a nice suit, white shirt and tie and all. Of course he’d no intention of going down there. That was my job. “Have you got a ladder or a pair of steps in your van?” says Lord Muck, all posh. Of course I had, never go out without them. “I’m just going inside the house for a few minutes,” he says and he disappears.’

‘So you went to your van and fetched the ladder?’

Horndon looked at Lucy and slowly shook his head. ‘I wasn’t taking no orders from him. It was my boss at Underland I was working for, it was him paid me my wages, not Clary. I didn’t know what might be down there, did I? Could have been full of water. I’ve come on that before. A hole where they used to keep coal but don’t no more and when you take a butcher’s it’s full of bloody water.’

Lucy, not acquainted with cockney rhyming slang, caught Wexford’s eye and he mouthed, ‘L-O-O-K, look. A butcher’s hook.’

Evidently still puzzled, she turned back to Horndon. ‘Are you saying you didn’t go into the hole, Mr Horndon?’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’ Horndon was quick to anger and he was growing angry now. ‘Clary, he said to me, “Go down in that hole if you fancy it.” That’s what he said, if you fancy it. Well, I didn’t bloody fancy it, right? I didn’t want to get my things dirty no more than Lord Muck did. All right? So I put the flowerpot thing back where it was supposed to go and I didn’t need no help from him. I sat down on the wall and when he come back I said to him I’d been down there and there was nothing to see. “Was there stairs?” he says and I says there was nothing, it was empty.’ Horndon seemed to recall at this point just what had been down there, what he might have seen. He didn’t shiver. He curled up his nose. ‘I hadn’t no call to tell the truth to him, had I? He wasn’t paying me.’

When the front door had closed on them Lucy said, ‘That “butcher’s hook” business, what does it mean?’