The Vault

by Ruth Rendell

  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.

  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 t
he 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?’

  ‘It’s old now and half-forgotten but people still say “porkies” when they mean lies. It’s Cockney rhyming slang.’

  ‘Reg, I really don’t follow.’

  ‘Pork pies for lies. You leave off the second noun, the one that rhymes and use the first one.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lucy. ‘It seems very complicated.’

  Wexford laughed. He got out of the car at Melina Place and walked down towards Orcadia Mews. There was something he needed to ask Mildred Jones, something which by an oversight he had neglected to take her up on before. Orcadia Cottage looked much as before but with two changes. A newspaper had been thrust through its letterbox and on the doorstep was a bunch of flowers, their stems in water inside a plastic container. ‘I wonder what it bodes,’ said Wexford to himself in the words of Hortensio. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell. No one came. The newspaper must be a freeby stuck there on the off-chance, the flowers delivered to the wrong house.

  ‘You’re not going to arrest me, are you?’ were the first words uttered by Mildred Jones when she opened her door to him.

  Wexford wanted to laugh but didn’t. ‘I no longer have the power to do that, Mrs Jones, but if I did why would I?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been so worried, telling you that stuff about what I pay my cleaner – you know. Every time the doorbell rings … You’re sure it’s all right.’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘Come in then.’ She was more affable than she had ever been and in a cream and black dress with pearls looked prettier than he had ever seen her. ‘I’m going out to lunch but not for half an hour.’

  She took him into the over-stuffed living room. ‘No, I was aghast after you had gone. I’d been so tremendously indiscreet. Talking about paying my cleaner less than the minimum wage, talking about employing illegals. At least they hadn’t been trafficked. I might have landed myself in prison, mightn’t I?’

  ‘Hardly, Mrs Jones.’

  ‘Well, a massive fine then. Or would I have to do community service like those hoodies?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You’d like coffee, wouldn’t you? It will have to be Nescafé, the real stuff takes too long, and I have to be out of here at twenty-five past on the dot.’ She went to the door, opened it and shouted, ‘Raisa! Coffee!’

  No ‘please’, Wexford noted. No polite form of request.

  He decided – though it was irrelevant – that he disliked Mildred Jones quite a lot. In his previous life, his previous existence, he had seldom allowed himself likings and dislikings. Now he could. It was an advantage.

  ‘Last time I talked to you,’ he said, ‘you spoke about a cleaner you had had from the Ukraine, I think it was, who had a strange name and who disappeared. What exactly did you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, she left and didn’t come back.’

  ‘What was she called?’

  ‘I don’t know her surname. Her Christian name, if she was a Christian, was Vladlena. I called her Vlad like Vlad the Impaler I saw in a film on TV. I can’t be doing with these fancy names. After all, what are they, these girls, the lowest of the low where they come from.’

  Raisa came in with coffee on a tray. The coffee was in a willow pattern pot, the cups and saucers to match, silver spoons, lumps of brown and white sugar in a silver bowl and milk in a silver jug. Wexford wondered if the tray would have had such a civilised and elegant appearance if Mrs Jones had prepared it herself and decided that like hell it would. Raisa herself, slender, sharp-featured with long blonde hair, was the girl Mildred Jones had been talking to on the doorstep when last he spoke to her. She smiled at him.

  ‘Thank you, Raisa,’ he said.

  She was barely out of the door when Mildred Jones said, ‘It doesn’t do to talk to them like you knew her socially. Do it just the once and they start to take advantage.’

  He wanted to say that he supposed she learnt to talk in that way to servants when she was in South Africa during apartheid. If he did that he’d never get another word out of her. ‘Vladlena, Mrs Jones.’ He was damned if he was going to refer to the girl as Vlad.

  ‘Yes, well it was quite weird. She was here doing the ironing one morning …’

  ‘Just when was this?’

  ‘Three years ago, maybe a bit more. Like I say, she was doing the ironing. In the kitchen she was with the radio on. They always have to have the radio on, can’t function without it. Doesn’t matter what’s on, music, talks, drama, anything, so long as they’ve got background noise. I went into the kitchen and the radio was on and the iron was on, standing in that metal rack thing at the end of the ironing board. And on the board was one of Colin’s shirts with a great iron-shaped burn in the middle of the back.’

  Mrs Jones took a gulp of her coffee. ‘I must go in five minutes. Well, like I say, there was this burn and half the ironing in a pile yet to be done but no sign of her. I called out but she wasn’t in the house. Then I saw her coat was gone. It was plain to see what had happened, she had burnt Colin’s shirt and got frightened – with good cause, I may add – and just fled without saying a word to me.’

  This wasn’t quite what Wexford had hoped for. It was hardly a disappearance. ‘Did you ever hear from her again?’

  ‘It’s funny you should say that because I did. A long time later, months and months, I saw her go into Mr Goldberg’s house. Do you know where that is?’

  Wexford remembered the reclusive man whose food was fetched in for him by the cleaner. ‘In Melina Place.’

  ‘Right. She was going in there as bold as brass with two shopping bags. I went up to her and said I’d seen the shirt with the burn mark and she’d have to pay for it. I wasn’t going to let her get away with it. Well, the next thing I knew was David Goldberg was on the phone to me. He never goes out, he’s not quite all there.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘But pushy like all Jews. And he can use a phone. The rudest person I’ve ever spoken to. Well, I didn’t speak to him. He spoke to me. How dare I accost his cleaner – accost was the word he used – who did I think I was, poking my nose in where I wasn’t wanted, interfering – I won’t say the name he called me – et cetera, et cetera. Vladlena had gone, he said, she’d left that day because she was scared the police would come and get her and put her in a camp for illegals. And that was that. I don’t know how many of these girls I’ve had since then, seven or eight at least.’

  ‘And now you have to go, I think you said, Mrs Jones,’ said Wexford, looking at his watch.

  ‘Yes, I must. Imagine, I’ve got a date with a man! Who knows what will come of it? I’m really excited.’

  ‘I’ll see myself out,’ said Wexford. As he left he heard her screaming to Raisa to be sure and put the burglar alarm on and lock the front door on all three locks before she left.

  It was twelve noon. He needed a little more time before speaking to David Goldberg, time to think. Slowly he walked up into Alma Square, admired some Japanese maple trees, their lacy leaves scarlet, looked at a towering Magnolia grandiflora and turned back towards Orcadia Place. A car was now parked outside Orcadia Cottage and a van had drawn up behind it. The van had a long scratch, deep, wavy and snakelike, along its nearside above the rear wheel. Wexford stood under a laburnum hung with black bean pods and watched. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to see John Scott-McGregor get out of the driver’s seat of the white van, walk round it and open the back. That was what he did, moved client’s property from one place to another. No doubt the neighbours round here all used his services. Scott-McGregor lifted
a box full of books out of the van and on to a trolley and pushed it up the path. The front door was opened to him by Anne Rokeby, still in her outdoor clothes, as her husband came up the path from their car, carrying armfuls of clothes on hangers. More boxes and a large plastic bag full of something was fetched from the van and the front door closed.

  The Rokebys had come home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE sometimes deceptive. Wexford admitted this cliché to himself when he had been inside the house in Melina Place for no more than five minutes. David Goldberg might be reclusive, but he was far from the zombie-like paranoid creature Wexford had set him down as when he had questioned the man before. True, the television was on and it was ten o’clock in the morning, but it was showing a DVD of Shadowlands, one of Wexford’s favourite films. You are always inclined to warm to someone who turns out to share your own tastes.

  ‘In some people’s eyes,’ said Goldberg in his harsh, gravelly voice, ‘watching TV in the daytime is the Eighth Deadly Sin.’

  ‘Not mine,’ said Wexford. ‘I must tell you, Mr Goldberg, that I’ve no right to question you. I’m not a policeman, not any more. And I must also tell you that if you tell me anything that helps in this case I shall be obliged to pass it on to Detective Superintendent Ede.’