Not in the Flesh

7

Wexford had picked up The Son of Nun and was leafing through it, reading bits of it and rereading them in consternation, when Sheila phoned.

“So you've got the lead in this Tredown epic?”

“Isn't it great? I'm to be Jossabi, the goddess of love and beauty. She was like a sort of Helen of Troy, you know. The wars in heaven all started because of her being stolen away. Of course you've read The First Heaven?”

“No, I haven't,” said Wexford. “I've dipped into it but I don't like fantasy. If I read fiction I want to recognize the characters as real people, the kind of people I might know, not immortal gods and dinosaurs.”

“But, Pop, the point with The First Heaven is that the people all seem real. It's a marvelous book, the kind you can't put it down.”

“I could. If it's anything like The Son of Nun I don't know why anyone wants to make a film of it. So what's all this about female genital mutilation?”

“You've such a big group of Somalis in Kingsmarkham I just thought I should target it in my campaign. Sylvia agrees. I've just been talking to her. The view our campaign takes is all the girls in this country between the ages of three months and twenty with origins in the Horn of Africa should be medically examined every year to check that they've not been mutilated. You could start that, get the GPs to agree to it, and when they find a recent case you could get a prosecution going.”

“Get an accusation of institutional racism in the police going more like,” said Wexford. “You can only do that sort of thing if you examine every girl, not just the African ones, and the NHS hasn't the resources. Oh, I hear what you say. I hate the practice as much as you do, but I've got a more realistic attitude to what can and can't be done.”

“I'll tell you something,” said Sheila, huffy now. “I bet you if these were little white girls there'd be a national outcry.”

He called Dora and left Sheila to her mother. By association, the role of a goddess of love and beauty reminded him of the girl in the restaurant called A Passage to India-Matea. Could she be Somali? And if she was…? The idea of some old woman using a sharpened stone and no anaesthetic to shear away her delicate flesh was so abhorrent that he made the effort to banish it from his mind and once more picked up The Son of Nun.

It was, he saw, a reissue. The novel had first been published in the mid-eighties and was one of a number Tredown had written on Old Testament themes. There were others based on the story of Samuel, the triumphs of David, and the iniquities of Ahab and Jezebel. The sad story of Jephtha's daughter Tredown had retold under the title of The First Living Thing He Saw, and he remembered how Jephtha had foolishly promised God that, in gratitude for victory in war, he would sacrifice the first creature he encountered when he returned and was in sight of home. The idiot might have calculated it would be his daughter, Wexford thought with contempt. Suggesting to Dora when she came off the phone that this hardly seemed to him likely to be a recipe for literary success, on the grounds that potential readers would assume they were being preached at, he added, “But what do I know?”

“As much as any other reader, I suppose,” she said. “They weren't very successful. That's why he-well, he changed tack and wrote The First Heaven. It's not like anything else he'd ever done. No Bible stories, more a sort of amalgam of Greek myths and Norse tales and prehistoric animals. That's what Sheila says. I haven't read it. It made him very popular.”

“And now,” said Wexford, unconvinced, “it's going to bore thousands more for four hours on the screen. I can't bear to think of it.”

“You'll have to do more than think of it. With your daughter in the lead, you'll have to see it-at least once.”

The next day, among the documents that landed on his desk, one was that rarity, an old-fashioned handwritten letter sent through the post, the others the postmortem report, compiled by Mavrikian and Laxton, and the report on a lab examination of the purple sheet which had wrapped the body of the man in Grimble's Field. Man begins to decay once life is gone but the man-made may endure for centuries. The eleven years this sheet had lasted-though now threadbare in parts-was like a minute gone in the life history of a sheet, Wexford said with some exaggeration. This one had come from Marks & Spencer. According to that company's records, purple had been a fashionable shade and the color of one of their ranges in the early seventies. It therefore seemed likely that it was more than twenty years old before it was used as a shroud. Possibly it had been used for this purpose because it had a hole or slit at one end about a foot from the hem. The slit was ragged around the edges and stained with a brownish substance that, on analysis, proved to be blood of the same group as that of the dead man.

The postmortem report told him little he didn't know already. He was already aware that one of the ribs was cracked. Neither of the pathologists offered this as the cause of death, as they couldn't tell the cause of death. What they had had in front of them was a skeleton with a simple break in a rib, but it afforded enough DNA to establish whether the corpse was that of Peter Darracott. He would have Christine Darracott in here to see if she could identify the sheet, but that wouldn't be much help either. None of those neighbors seemed the sort of people who would use purple bed linen. They were mostly elderly. They were middle class, the men professionals of some sort or another, the women stay-at-home housewives, the kind who would make up their beds in white linen, or daringly, in pale blue or pink. One of them was the writer of the letter he turned to next.

He saw at a glance that its purpose was to provide him with a possible identification. There had been many of these, but all the rest had come by e-mail.

Long ago he had made up his mind that in many respects the Internet was more trouble than it was worth. Half the country, it seemed, sat in front of screens all day, telling the other half their thoughts, hopes, aspirations, giving advice, requesting help, offering things for sale, inviting fraud by demanding and receiving credit card numbers, misleading the frightened and the lonely, and wasting the time of people like himself who had their jobs to do. Of course, it had its uses, like supplying information about every citizen and bringing up registers at the touch of a key. But the time-wasting factor really made itself felt in the screen-fillers that had come to him: those who told him of female relatives who had gone missing in 1981 or 2002, those telling him how interested they were in the investigation and had he a job for them, and others madly requesting meetings, including one from a woman who gave her vital statistics, hair and eye color, age and education and job history, and suggested he and she have their first date next Tuesday.

The letter seemed to belong to a different era from the e-mails. It was addressed “Dear Sir” and signed “Yours truly, Irene McNeil,” a usage he had thought utterly gone. She told him she had “remembered something since the visit of the colored boy,” was sure he should know about it, and, having no idea how otherwise to communicate with him, was writing. She didn't trust the phone and never had done since childhood when her parents had “the telephone installed” in 1933. The “something” she recalled concerned “old Mr. Grimble's lodger.” This was the first Wexford had heard of Arthur Grimble having a lodger, but whether this had any connection with the case seemed unlikely. He read on.

“I could see everything which went on from my front windows,” Mrs. McNeil ended unashamedly.

Burden and Damon Coleman had a warrant to search Sunnybank. Grimble had been asked permission for them to enter and had refused, saying he hadn't been in the place himself for eleven years so he didn't see why the police should. This delayed things but not for long. Not usually given to flights of fancy, Burden said afterward to Wexford that going in there made him think of explorers penetrating a jungle to discover some ancient tomb in the depths of a forest.

“I just hope the spirit of the place hasn't put a curse on you,” said Wexford.

Damon removed the screws that held in place the sheet of plywood over the front doorway. Underneath they expected to find the front door but there was only a cavity. Inside was semidarkness and a strong smell of dry rot and wet rot, mildew, mold, lichen, putrefaction, and general decay. Not all the windows were boarded up-there seemed no logic as to why some were and some were not-and in the first room they went into, it was light enough to see that the place was still furnished but in the grimmest and most eerie way, the table and chairs coated with gray dust, cobwebs linking lampshade to mantelpiece to pictures, like some primitive electrical system of loosely strung cables. The windowpanes were cracked, and the curtains that hung from a broken rail, ragged and stained. Damp had marked the ceiling with curious patterns, some shaped like parts of the human body, a leg here in a high-heeled shoe, a disembodied head, and others like maps of islands in an archipelago or close-ups of the surface of the moon.

On a dining table, the top of which was scarred with white rings made by hot cups and black channels made by cigarettes left to burn themselves out, stood a glass vase, its inside scummed with a brown deposit that supported the dried-up strawlike stems of flowers that fell into dust when Damon touched them. The smell was stronger here, mostly coming, it seemed, from the mold on the walls where rising damp had erupted in crusts like brown scabs. It was a very strong smell and one almost impossible to ignore. Damon began sneezing.

“Bless you,” said Burden automatically.

“What are we looking for, anyway, sir?” Damon asked when the spasm had passed.

“Anything,” said Burden. “I don't know. Signs of Arthur Grimble's lodger? He had a lodger, the lodger left or didn't leave. It's all a bit vague. When I asked Grimble if we could come in here he said nothing about this lodger. He just refused permission. I'm inclined to think he said it out of cussedness. He couldn't get his permission, so he wasn't going to give us any.”

The window in this room was intact but for a diagonal crack across one corner. Damon peered out of it into the greenish gloom and beyond at the grave and the police crime tape surrounding it. He tried a light switch but the power had long been cut off. It was only four in the afternoon, but a kind of premature dusk had come and inside here they needed their flashlights. The light they gave showed the way to the kitchen. At the sight of it Burden made no attempt to suppress his shudder. It was more like a cavern than a place where food had once been prepared-dark, smelly, every surface beaded with condensation as if the furniture had sweated.

Damon's flashlight played on the single counter where lay, in a heap, blue jeans, an orange-colored anorak, a well-worn T-shirt printed with some kind of animal or insect, wool socks, and a pair of black and gray sneakers.

“It looks as if our visit hasn't been in vain,” Burden said.

“Could this lot have belonged to X, sir?”

“Who knows? Not to either of the Grimbles, I'd have thought.”

Burden felt a tension that was almost a shiver run through him, and he couldn't attribute it to the dampness or the smells. It was something else, something primitive, perhaps a discharge of adrenaline preparing him for fight or flight. He and Coleman went back into the passage and from there into the bedrooms, both of which were full of cheap, shabby, worn-out furniture, a single bed in one, a double bed in the other, old-fashioned washstands, one of bamboo, with basins and jugs from another distant age, parchment-shaded hanging lamps, the whole covered in gray shrouds of dust. On the double bed two pillows without pillow-cases still lay, ocher-colored and marked with the stains of saliva, sweat, and other human effluvia Burden didn't want to think about. A gray bedspread had been visited by moths and mice, which had left behind them the usual evidence of their occupation.

“Darracott's love nest,” Burden muttered, though it wouldn't have been as bad as this eleven years ago when the missing man had brought Nancy Jackson here.

He opened a wardrobe door to release a new smell, mothballs and ancient dried sweat, the stench of the old man's clothes still left hanging there, two suits that might have been new in the forties, a sports jacket, coats and trousers. Burden closed the door again and they made their way into the bathroom, where the floor was deep in gray dust, the bath brown from iron stains and the lavatory pan stuffed with newspaper. A sliver of soap, rock-hard and split into blackened cracks, lay above the basin, and on a sagging wooden shelf was an old man's shaving brush, the bristles worn down to stumps.

Damon began sneezing again. “Let's get out of here, sir.”

“Wait a minute. There's a cellar.”

A flight of steps led down into darkness. Burden went first, switching on his flashlight. He let the beam play on what lay below. There was a small square of floor space and beyond that a doorway. All the other doors in the house were open but that door was shut. Burden said, with some kind of prevision, with foreboding, “Better not touch that doorknob.”

For 364 days a year he never carried a handkerchief. This was the 365th and for no known reason he had picked up a clean one when he went to put his shirt on. He wrapped it around his right hand, took hold of the door handle, tugged at it, and finally wrenched it open. Inside was a small room perhaps measuring six feet by eight, where everything seemed coated in coal dust. A heap of coal lay in one corner, prompting Burden to ask himself when he had last seen coal-years and years ago. In front of it wood was stacked, pieces of timber and small logs, a pile of it, three feet high.

“Pull out one of those planks, Damon, could you? But go carefully.”

Damon went carefully, slowly tugging at the longest piece of timber until it came free, dislodging some of the logs and sending them tumbling. He pulled at another, smaller, board and heard the inspector's indrawn breath.

“There's something under there,” Burden said.

The flashlights set down on a shelf, their beams playing on the heap of timber, revealed what might have been a small piece of white rag. They carefully lifted logs one by one until hair came to light, black and coarse like the horsehair Burden had once seen stuffing an old sofa, then something that might have been a section of bone. When what was under the logs was half-exposed, Damon took a step backward, grasped his flashlight, and shone the beam directly downward. By its light, he and Burden were looking down at the remains of a man, bones mostly, vestiges of gray flesh clinging to them, still dressed with horrid incongruity in whitish under-shirt and underpants. The black hair, the first thing Burden had seen, longish and shaggy, covered the back of the skull. Whoever he was appeared to have been dumped face downward, the arms and legs spread in a starfish shape.

The smell in the house came from elsewhere. Here, only a kind of airlessness combined with a whiff of coal dust remained, for the body they were looking at had been there a long time.

“Is this the chap who didn't leave, sir?”

“Plainly, he didn't,” said Burden, “but who he was, God knows. One thing's for sure. Just as you don't bury yourself, you don't hide yourself in a woodpile after you're dead.”