CHAPTER TWENTY

THEY PICKED HER up at her home in Muswell Hill, an unpretentious semi-detached house in the street Wexford should have taken when looking for a way back to Shepherds Hill – should have taken and thereby never found Francine Hill and the Crouch End medical centre. A young man with a baby in his arms came to the door with her to see her off. Wexford, already far more involved with her and her concerns than he usually was with a witness, was pleased to see what he took for signs of happiness and fulfilment. They kissed and she kissed the smiling baby.

It took her a long time to find the house. They drove round and round the little streets on the south side behind the North Circular Road. Wexford could understand her difficulty for they all looked the same. ‘It was on a corner,’ she kept saying and then, ‘on a corner but with the turning on the left side of the house.’

Some front gardens were tended, some left to become wilderness, some repositories for bikes, motorbikes and the insides of engines. Some of the little houses, generally in semi-detached pairs, had pebble-dashed facades, some plastered and painted with contrasting colour trims and fake porticos. But most were run-down and all of them, despite being ‘trimmed in jollity’, looked what they were and who they were designed for, homes for the poor.

‘I haven’t been here since Teddy brought me in ’97,’ Francine said. ‘I came two or three times. I didn’t realise then how – well, how dismal it was. Look, that one’ – she pointed – ‘Number 83 on the corner. That’s it. I’m almost sure. Would you drive down the turning? Yes, can you see over the fence? That carport. Teddy kept his Edsel under that.’

The house was occupied. Somehow – and all burglars know this – whether a house is occupied is always apparent from the outside. Not that the owners are at home or out, but that someone lives there permanently. Curtains hung at the windows, the plant in the pot by the front door wasn’t in the best of health, but it was alive and the soil round its stem was damp. Lucy rang the bell. If Francine thought Teddy Brex might answer the door she was the only one of them who did. It was eventually answered by an old woman, a woman who looked as if she 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 here,’ she said, and paused. ‘My house is in Daisy Road on the other side of the North Circular. I used to sort of come and see him here.’

‘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 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?