The Vault by Ruth Rendell - review

The Vault

Ruth Rendell's A Sight for Sore Eyes - a sick, sardonic fairy tale originally published in 1998 - ended with three bodies entombed in the coal hole of a very desirable residence in St John's Wood.

Twelve years later Reginald Wexford, no longer a chief inspector, is invited to become an expert adviser to the detective superintendent investigating the discovery of four corpses in the same cellar.

The extra stiff guarantees that The Vault can be enjoyed whether or not you have read A Sight for Sore Eyes. That said, those who have will derive additional pleasure from knowing far more than Wexford, who does not appear in the earlier book.

They will sit back and smile as the former cop, now living in the coach-house of his daughter Sheila's Hampstead mansion, tries to discover the identity of the young man who was seen going into Orcadia Cottage, the crime scene, all those years ago, and also to trace the flashy American car that he drove. It turns out that the smouldering hunk was related to one of the victims. Meanwhile, back in Kingsmarkham, Wexford's old stamping ground, his other daughter Sylvia is stabbed by another sexually obsessed youth.

Only Rendell could get away with such an unusual exercise in self-cannibalisation. It's as if she delights in making things as difficult as possible for herself. In the hands of anyone else the result would have been a disaster. The bulk of The Vault comprises interviews with the same obnoxious people over and over again and descriptions of uneventful bus journeys across north-west London.

Very little happens in the present: it is only when attention is turned to the identity of the fourth body, that of a young woman who died just two years ago, that the pace picks up and the intellectual game of cat and mouse with the reader gives way to the frightening pursuit of ruthless killers.

Wexford, a devoted grandfather who sends his very first email here, is the antithesis of the artistic and autistic Teddy Brex, the creepy student protagonist of A Sight for Sore Eyes. The Vault, as a sort-of-sequel, is a bold attempt to combine Rendell's two chosen specialities: the police procedural and the psychological thriller.

No one hides the clues better than her; no one else creates such a pervasive atmosphere of almost comic disgust and dread. The act of cross-pollination proves most fruitful and triumphantly demonstrates that a vault, in addition to being an underground chamber, can also be a leap of imagination.