Not in the Flesh

5

A phone call to Theodore Borodin at his London home disclosed that Ronald and Irene McNeil had sold him Flagford Hall seven years before. It was a large house, almost a stately home, too much for the aging couple to cope with.

“They were getting on a bit,” Borodin said. “The time was coming when they wouldn't be able to drive. They needed somewhere to live near the shops. The only one in Flagford's hopeless. Old McNeil was eighty and she wasn't much younger, and now I come to think of it, someone told me he'd died.”

“But they must have been there,” Damon Coleman said, “when this murder and the subsequent burial took place.”

“Certainly they must have.” Borodin went on to describe in unnecessary detail what a state Flagford Hall had been in, what enormous sums of money he had been forced to spend on it, how costly was its upkeep, considering he only used it at the weekends, until Damon politely cut him short and thanked him for his help.

The house, largish, detached, perhaps no more than eight years old, wasn't far from Wexford's own home. Damon passed it on his way there. The front door was opened by Irene McNeil herself, a heavy sluggish woman who looked every minute of her eighty-four years. Time had dragged down her features until chin blended in with neck and neck sagged over the collar of an unflattering gray blouse.

While Damon tried not to look at her loglike swollen legs, she stared searchingly at him and remarked in a throaty tone, “I expected them to send someone more senior.”

Damon was certainly not paranoid, not even particularly sensitive, about being a black man in still predominantly white rural England. Still, interpreting as otherwise than racist Mrs. McNeil's gaze, which traveled from his feet to the crown of his head and rested incredulously on the face that several women had found exceptionally handsome, would have been impossible.

Having told him he had “better come in,” she led him through the ground floor, lumbering heavily. The interior was the reverse of what Damon expected, hi-tech and minimalist, built-in cupboards, ice-white walls, black tiles, and pale wood floors. In the living room, Mrs. McNeil's antiques and fifties armchairs sat un-easily against this stark background. Lowering herself onto a floral chintz sofa, she proceeded to list the reasons she and her husband had moved from Flagford Hall, a catalog from which Borodin's explanation was absent. Her voice was the most plummy and upper class Damon had ever heard.

The neighbors were impossible, she said, particularly the Hunters and the Pickfords. She knew for a fact Mr. Pickford senior had poisoned her cat, and his saying (very rudely) that he hadn't laid a finger on it, adding that even a twenty-year-old bird-slaughtering fiend belonging to her couldn't be expected to live forever, was a tissue of lies. She had seen Mr. Hunter watching her house through binoculars and taking photographs of herself and her late husband having tea in their garden. But the worst of all were those Tredowns. She was sure there must be a law against a man living with two wives, or if there wasn't, there ought to be. It was the first Mrs. Tredown coming back to live with him and the second Mrs. Tredown that was the beginning of the end. That was when she and Mr. McNeil started seriously thinking of moving, wrench though it was to leave a house they had occupied since their return from their honeymoon. She told, rather than asked, Damon to pass her the framed photograph from an occasional table with a piecrust edge.

“That was Ronald.”

“Your husband?”

“Yes, of course,” said Mrs. McNeil. “Who else would it be?”

Damon looked at the photograph of an elderly but still handsome man with a mustache, “dressed up,” as he put it to himself, in the requisite gear for going hunting, a kind of cap on his head and a red jacket he thought vaguely he ought to call pink.

“Very nice,” he said

It was evidently an inadequate response. Mrs. McNeil snatched the photograph from him and said, “Ronald was a wonderful man.”

Damon said he was sure of it, though there was something brutal in the pictured face and the hands clenched into fists. “Did you know Mr. Grimble?”

“The old one?” said Mrs. McNeil. “He wasn't the class of person one expected to be living in Pump Lane, but, my goodness, he was an improvement on his son. Stepson, I should say. That one's real name, I mean his true father's name, was Darracott, and we all know what the Darracotts are.” Damon, who didn't, listened patiently to the ensuing stream of invective on the subject of Mr. John Grimble (“I call him Darracott”) culminating in the monstrous behavior of a son digging up his stepfather's garden when that parent was scarcely cold in his grave.

“Tell me about that,” said Damon.

“There's nothing to tell,” said Mrs. McNeil, uttering the sentence most likely to cause exasperation if not despair in a policeman's heart. Fortunately, some people, and Mrs. McNeil was one of them, quickly find they have plenty to tell after all. “He and this friend of his started digging a great-well, a sort of ditch or trench. It was high summer, you know, and they dug in an absolutely wanton fashion, right up through poor old Mr. Grimble's garden, ruining a beautiful Rosa hugonis and a bed of calla lilies-I don't suppose you know what those are but no matter-and the friend finished the job, if he finished it. He only worked in the evenings, if you can call it work. And then, of course, or so young Mr. Pickford told my husband, he failed to get his planning permission and they had to fill it all in again.”

“I expect that pleased you.”

“It certainly did. The last thing I wanted was four houses built opposite me. All the same they would have been, all red brick with those picture windows, so-called. Of course that was before we knew we'd move on account of the disgusting behavior going on at the Tredowns.”

“You saw the trench they'd dug filled in again?”

“Oh, yes. I saw the man fill it in. He had his wireless on all the time, full on. I could hear it from Flagford Hall with all my windows shut. Those kind of people can't do anything without that pop music. Ronald used to say it makes them feel uneasy not having background noise.”

“Did you see anything odd at that time, Mrs. McNeil? Anything, never mind how small, you thought at the time was-well, strange.”

“Not apart from that man's wireless set. But that's not odd these days, that's normal.” She hesitated. “Well, there was one thing, though I don't really know that you could call it odd.”

“Try me,” said Damon.

“It was just the day after that man had finished filling in the trench. The first Mrs. Tredown-she calls herself Claudia Ricardo, but a person like that would call herself anything-she came across Grimble's Field with her dog. She had a little dog in those days, brought it with her. It's dead now and no one shed any tears about that. Well, she walked it across the field and when she came to where the trench was-there was a sort of line of bare earth if you see what I mean-she didn't walk over it, she walked around it, all the way down to the bungalow and up the other side as if she was avoiding that line of earth. I went over after she'd gone and I couldn't see any reason why a person would walk around it.”

“While you were living at Flagford Hall did you hear of anyone going missing? Disappearing?”

“Only that retarded man. What was he called? Cummings? He was simple, you know. Almost the village idiot.”

This phrase gave Damon a worse shock than would a stream of obscenities issuing from Mrs. McNeil's mouth. He even made an involuntary sound, a kind of “ouch” of protest. She spoke more gently than she had throughout the interview. “Are you feeling unwell?”

“No, no, I'm fine.” He tried a smile. “Thank you, Mrs. McNeil, you've been very helpful.”

Walking him to the front door, her legs barely performing their prime function, she turned, peered at him, and said, “You speak very good English. What part of the world do you come from?”

This was a question Damon was quite used to being asked. It still happened all the time. “Bermondsey,” he said.

Number 5 Oswald Road, home of John and Kathleen Grimble, was one of those houses-or its living room was-which are furnished with most of the necessities of life, things to sit on and sit at, things to look at and listen to, to supply warmth or keep out the cold, insulate the walls and cover the floors, but with nothing to refresh the spirit or gladden the heart, compel the eye or turn the soul's eye toward the light. The predominant color was beige. There was a calendar (Industry in Twenty-first Century UK) but no pictures on the walls, no books, not even a magazine, a small pale blue cactus in a beige pot but no flowers or other plants, no cushions on the bleak wooden-armed chairs and settee, a beige carpet but no rugs. The only clock was the digital kind with large, very bright green, quivering figures.

John Grimble was sitting in front of the screen when Wexford and Hannah were brought in by his wife. The film that was showing had reached a torrid love scene, enacted in silence as the sound was off. Kathleen Grimble took her place in the other orthopedic chair as if these positions and this contemplation of the picture had been ordained by some higher power. This time, though, she picked up the knitting that she had left lying on the seat of the chair, and, gazing in total impassivity at the writhing couple, began her mechanical and speedy work with needles and scarlet wool. Madame Defarge, Wexford thought. He could imagine her sitting on the steps of the guillotine, muttering “Oh, John, don't” each time a head rolled.

“I'd appreciate your attention, Mr. Grimble,” he said. “We've something very serious to ask you.”

Grimble turned an irritable face to him. “Give it five minutes, can't you, and I'll be with you.”

“Turn it off, please,” said Wexford, “or I'll do it myself.”

But at that moment the actor on the screen picked up a knife from the bedside table and thrust it into the outstretched neck of his companion, causing Mrs. Grimble to assert herself. “Right, that's enough,” she said calmly. “I'm not watching that sort of thing.” Grabbing the remote, she turned off the set.

Grimble began a low muttered complaining that Hannah interrupted. “Mr. Grimble, you didn't tell us a relative of yours went missing in May 1995. A bit before the time you applied for planning permission to build on your field. I'm talking about Mr. Peter Darracott of Pestle Lane, Kingsmarkham.”

“Is it all right for her to ask me questions?” Grimble said to Wexford. “I mean, has she got the proper qualifications?”

Wexford saw the blood rush to Hannah's cheeks, a sure sign of rage developing. He gave her a very small shake of the head. “Very proper, Mr. Grimble. Better than mine, in fact,” he said, thinking of Hannah's psychology degree.

“I suppose I have to take your word for it. What do you want to know for?” He was still addressing Wexford, but it was Hannah who replied, the color receding from her face.

“We already do know, Mr. Grimble. When we last spoke to you, you didn't mention Mr. Darracott.”

“Because I didn't know him, that's why.”

“But you knew he was your cousin.”

“My second cousin, if you don't mind. Oh, I can see what you're getting at. There was a body found in my field that's been dead eleven years. My second cousin went missing eleven years ago, so they've got to be one and the same. Now I'll tell you something. Everybody knows Peter Darracott had been carrying on with the woman as worked in the chemist on the corner of Pestle Lane, and that's who he went off with. And I for one don't blame him-married to that Christine what had a tongue on her like a razor. Nagged him from morn till night she did till he went spare.”

“Oh, John, don't,” said Kathleen.

“How well did you know him?” Wexford asked in a deceptively mild tone.

“About as well as most folks know their second cousins. Maybe we'd see each other at family funerals and that was about it. As matter of fact the last time I saw him was at my mum's funeral two years before he went missing.”

“It was good of him to come, John,” said Kathleen.

“Yes, well, my dad was his godfather and he thought he might be in the will, didn't he? He was unlucky there.”

“Some itinerant farmworkers camped on that land eleven years ago. Was that with your permission?”

Grimble flared again. The very word “permission” seemed enough to inflame him. “Are you joking? They counted on me living over here what was five miles away. Some busybody must have told them. But I was too many for them. Me and Bill Runge come over to see where we'd dig that trench and there they was, their vans and their muck and litter all over my field. I got them off there pretty damn quick, I can tell you. Me and Bill went in there and got them off. If folks tell you we had guns it's a lie. Sticks we had, and they put up no resistance. They was scared of us and no wonder.”

He must have got that bit about resistance off the TV, Wexford thought. “Can you remember exactly when that was, Mr. Grimble?”

“To the day, I can. It was May thirty-first and the next day me and Bill started digging. Them bloody planners refused me permission on June twelfth, and on the sixteenth Bill started filling up our trench. Nearly broke my heart it did. If you're thinking one of them might be them bones, you can think again. They was gone back to where they come from days before me and Bill ever stuck a spade in the sod.”