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?
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 that now, pointless to speculate how Sylvia, one-time domestic goddess, had transmuted into this earth-motherly, sexually rampant, socially wild still youngish woman.
The coroner was new, someone Wexford had never seen before. Wexford gave his name as the private citizen he now was, and took the oath, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Listening with half an ear to the inquiry put to him – he knew by heart what it would be – he glanced at the people in the public seats to see if he recognised anyone. He didn’t, but one couple particularly caught his eye, a man and a woman in late middle age, sitting close together, holding hands tightly. It struck him that they dressed as no one of their age in London would dress, the woman wearing a felt hat and square scarf, the man a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, check shirt and knitted tie.
He began to tell the court what had happened that day. ‘My daughter had just come home from hospital. Because a set of her house keys was missing it seemed advisable to change the locks …’ The whole truth? The whole truth would be that he and she feared Jason Wardle had them and might use them to enter the house. He felt – he imagined surely – the eyes of the hand-holding couple on him. ‘A locksmith was needed. I went upstairs to look for the telephone directory which had been left in my grandson’s bedroom on the second floor.’ An enormous house, it must sound like, a rich woman’s house. ‘I opened the door. The body of a man was hanging from the light fitting in the ceiling.’ Cool, emotionless – nothing else was possible – he described how he went downstairs again and phoned Kingsmarkham police.
The coroner asked if he had recognised the hanged man and if he had touched the body, to both of which questions Wexford answered an unhesitating no. That was all. There was nothing more for him to do or say. He was thanked by the coroner and got down to find himself a seat in the back row of the public seats. A doctor he no more knew than he knew the coroner described Jason Wardle’s injuries and the cause of his death, and then there was some evidence from a psychiatrist as to Wardle’s mental state, this man’s opinion being that he was bipolar. A faint strangled cry came from the woman in the felt hat.
There was some discussion between the coroner, the clerk to the court and the doctor and then the verdict came: suicide while the balance of Jason Wardle’s mind was disturbed. It was over. He had been twenty-one years old.
Wexford intended to go home – that is, to go to his own house and see whoever might be in. But as he walked down the steps he saw the couple who had earlier caught his eye, waiting at the bottom. Surely waiting for him. He didn’t know them, he meant to pass them by but, as he approached them, the woman called out in a strident, upper-class voice, ‘Where’s your daughter? I suppose she didn’t have the face to come.’
‘Vivien,’ the man said. ‘There’s no point …’
‘Yes, there is. I want to tell him so that he can tell her. He can tell her that if she were a decent woman and not a whore my son would be alive today. My son would be starting a happy life …’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jason Wardle’s father said wretchedly. ‘It’s not your fault, I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too,’ said Wexford. ‘I’m very sorry for you both.’
‘And what’s the use of that?’ Vivien Wardle was crying now, the tears running down her face. ‘There may be a bit of use in telling her what I said. You do that. You tell her she’s a disgrace to her sex and to her children. Those poor boys, that poor little girl. What must they think of their mother?’
Her husband succeeded in taking Vivien away. He almost had to lift her into their car, she was so convulsed with misery and grief. Wexford felt badly shaken. But still he turned in the direction of his house and began to walk up Queen Street. Dora had been right and he had been wrong, he thought. Keeping aloof from all this, taking no stand, avoiding judgement, that was all wrong. A parent should speak out, no matter what age his child was, no matter what reputation he had achieved as a tolerant and never moralistic arbiter. He had been too easy and too kind, too respectful. Perhaps to prove to himself that all that was changing, at least in this instance, he let himself into his house without ringing the bell first, without the prior phone call he would usually have made.