Not in the Flesh

9

It would have been hard for Wexford to get to Forby village hall by seven-thirty, or indeed any time before nine, but his attempts to cancel aroused wails of disappointment from his younger daughter.

Her “Oh, Pop, you promised!” sounded very much the sort of thing she used to say when she was five. It still went straight to his heart. Her follow-up remark was a little more mature. “Having a detective chief inspector there would mean so much to them.”

He tried a ridiculous reproof in Hannah's style, political correctness gone mad, and said, “I question whether you ought to refer to an ethnic minority as ‘them,’ Sheila.”

Her indignant reaction made him laugh. “You know I didn't mean-”

“I'll do my best to be there.”

Barry Vine had gone to Cardiff, Lyn Fancourt driving him, to secure the DNA sample promised by Dilys Hughes, née Darracott. Wexford's own attention had been turned to Douglas Chadwick, his forays into the Internet assisted by Hannah. He couldn't have done it without her. The address Kathleen Grimble had given him was in Nottingham, a street that sounded as if in a poor neighborhood. Hannah frowned when he used those words, fearing worse to come.

“Okay, did you ever hear of a Violet Grove in an upmarket residential area?”

“Well, if you put it like that…”

“Number fifteen Violet Grove. The family name is or was Dixon.”

“ ‘Was’ is right, guv. There's a Marilyn P. Williams and a Robert A. Greville there now.”

Wexford sighed. “I suppose we'll have to go up there or get the Nottingham police in on this. Someone in the street may remember him. Do we know what he was doing in Flagford?”

Hannah had pursued the questioning of Kathleen Grimble with some difficulty. “He was a student at Myringham University, guv. I've been on to them and they said he'd attended the university from 1993 to 1996.”

Wexford thought of the piano playing. “A music student?”

“Mechanical engineering. The degree is a BSc MEng.”

“He'd have been a mature student, over forty. Is there some record somewhere, I mean some register, of people with degrees in that?”

“I can find out, guv.”

While her fingers trawled through the Internet, he thought about the clothes that had been found in the house, the under-clothes on the body, the scorpion T-shirt, orange anorak, jeans and socks, the sneakers, which had been piled up on the kitchen counter. Why had this man, whoever he was, Chadwick or Darracott or Charlie Cummings, taken off his clothes and his shoes in the kitchen and gone barefoot down to the cellar in his underwear? Because he was looking for something? In that case, why not go down there fully clothed?

Hannah said, “The Engineering Council is responsible for regulating the engineering profession.” She was reading from the screen. “They run the National Register of Chartered Engineers. But wait a minute-once you've got your degree you have to go into something called the Monitored Professional Development Scheme and that's another four years. I'd no idea getting to be an engineer took so long, had you, guv?”

“I can't say I've ever thought about it.”

“These MPDS people have got a membership Web page. Bear with me and I'm sure I'll find something.”

“And meanwhile,” said Wexford, “I've got a meeting with Carina Laxton.”

She looked like a child with a prematurely lined face. Her pale hair was worn in two sparse plaits, her face free of makeup, her round glasses the kind that a myopic eight-year-old might wear. The white coat she wore had greenish stains down the front that were somehow more repellent than blood would have been. Not usually particularly sensitive to the squeamishness of policemen, she had for once covered up the remains on the table.

“What did he die of?” Wexford asked.

Carina raised her almost invisible eyebrows. “How d'you know it was a man?”

“The size, the clothes in the kitchen. The body was wearing men's underwear.”

“Okay. Jumping to conclusions a bit, weren't you? Still, it was a man. I don't know what he died of. It's difficult when someone's been dead so long. Quite possibly a natural death. Might have been his heart or a stroke. I can't tell because there's no heart and not much soft tissue in the skull. One thing I can tell you. He was a tall man, exceptionally tall. You're so out-of-date I know you don't care for the metric system, so say between six feet three and six feet five.”

“How old was he?”

“Mid-forties. Maybe forty-five. No more than fifty. As for when he died, it was between seven and ten years ago.”

“Not so long as the other one, then?”

“You said it, not me,” said Carina. “Ask me again when I've done a more thorough job on him. I'll know more, I hope.”

He faced the media, told them most of what he knew about the two bodies without mentioning the error they had made in taking a DNA sample from someone who could not in fact be related to the dead man. He told them about the clothes without producing them. A description, he felt, was enough: a white T-shirt with a black scorpion printed on it, blue jeans, black sneakers diagonally banded in gray, gray socks. He also said the purple sheet needed identifying, the one which had wrapped the body in the trench.

Hannah caught up with him as he was leaving the building at five past seven. He had just reached the automatic doors that had tentatively begun to open and closed again as he turned back.

“Chadwick's not registered as a chartered engineer, guv, and he's not on the MPDS register. But then I realized. We assumed it was a three-year degree course, but it's not, it's four years. He was only at the university till 1996, so it looks as if he dropped out.”

“Or was killed,” said Wexford.

“Or was killed, guv. It makes it more likely it's him, doesn't it?”

It took him a quarter of an hour to drive to Forby. He took the last remaining space in the village hall car park and walked up the steps to the front doors where a notice told him this would be the inaugural meeting of the Kingsmarkham African Women's Health Action Group. He had hoped to slip in unobtrusively and listen to the proceedings from a seat at the back, but he was no sooner inside than he was caught by his daughter Sylvia, who seized him by the arm and hustled him up onto the stage.

A modicum of presence of mind enabled him to say how seriously the police took the problem of female genital mutilation and how much they would rely on the Somali community helping them in their task of prevention rather than prosecution. As he repeated the platitudes, meaningless promises that he had said and heard said a dozen times, he realized how little he really knew about this kind of circumcision. The applause from the audience rang hollowly in his ears as he stepped down from the platform and took the empty seat next to his wife. He had described it to her because she asked him, seen her face grow pale and heard her say, “But, Reg, it can't be! Not millions of women,” and he had to say it was so without knowing more than the bare physiological facts.

Sheila was on the platform now, speaking about the early migrations of young women from the Horn of Africa. When British doctors and midwives had to carry out antenatal examinations, they at first believed that what they saw was congenital malformation and so routinely performed cesarean sections. She then out-lined, to an audience who mostly knew what she was talking about at firsthand, how little girls, sometimes babies, had their labia and clitoris cut away with razors or sharp stones and the skin stitched up over the wound. Wexford had begun to feel slightly sick and looking around the room, wondered how many of these women had suffered in infancy or girlhood what had just been described.

Five or six seats away from him and a row behind sat the young waitress Matea whom Burden had so admired. It made him shudder to think that she might, in all probability, have suffered this. He knew that he shouldn't consider it a worse affront to a beautiful girl than to a plain one and he castigated himself. It was outrageous whoever might be the victim. There were more speakers, one talking about a conference on this subject she had attended in Kenya, another setting out what could be done to stop the practice here. Then the speeches ended and the audience was invited to ask questions. An elderly woman at the back put up her hand. Plainly she was more likely to have been from Sewingbury than Somalia, her hair was whitish-blond and her skin self-tanned. She asked if it wasn't wrong to interfere with a community's ancient traditions, and Wexford was pleased with Sheila's answer.

“Would you have said that about foot-binding in China? Interference with ancient traditions put an end to that. One day perhaps interference will stop the artificial lengthening of women's necks in northern Burma.”

One of the few men in the audience asked what was men's attitude to the practice and was given what sounded to Wexford like anecdotal evidence. After that the question of a title for the new association was considered, and the name Kingsmarkham Association Against Mutilation or KAAM, pronounced “calm,” was decided on. It was time for refreshments, glasses of red and white wine (ignored by the Somalis who were mostly Moslems), orange juice, and fizzy water. For some reason, he had supposed, if he thought about it at all, that all these women would speak English reasonably well, so he was surprised when his neighbor Iman Dirir introduced him to a woman she called “the interpreter.”

“We have no terms in Somali or English for these parts of the body,” she told him with a sad smile. “The people need someone to explain the British laws to them. Most people who come here from Africa don't know there is such a law. They don't know circumcision is forbidden.”

She was tall and statuesque, far from young, but still beautiful in that goddesslike way more usually associated with Native Americans, the aquiline nose, the prominent cheekbones, the long neck and long hands. But as he again looked around him and surveyed all the women present, he saw that without exception all were either good-looking or extremely beautiful, their looks matched by their grace of movement and, in the older ones, by their dignity. He sighed to himself because it sometimes seemed to him that man had only to see beauty in order to wish to ruin it.

He gave Mrs. Dirir a lift home. She wore a long gown and the scarf but no all-enveloping jilbab as some of the women had. Alone with him she was shy, but when he mentioned his daughters she began to talk freely about how much she admired Sheila, whom she had seen in a television serial rerun. They were nearly at her house when she said, in a breathless way as if she had been working up to this for some minutes, “I have two daughters. They are grown up now. I want you to know that we came here, my husband and I, when they were little to save them from mutilation. I was afraid because I thought we would be sent back, but my husband is a scientist from Cairo University, so we were allowed to stay.”

“I'm glad,” he said. “I'm very glad.”

A European woman in a long dress would have gathered up her skirts but Iman Dirir let her gown hang untouched, held her head high, and glided up the path. When she reached the door, she turned once, raised her hand in a gesture that was more graceful than a wave, and let herself into the house.

Dental records are useful only if you have some idea as to whose body you are looking at. These were Carina Laxton's words to Wexford. She told him that she could come a little closer to the death date of the body in the cellar. Between eight and ten years, she now thought. In the case of the body in the trench, she was prepared to fix on eleven years. Wexford was far from taking Burden's and Hannah's view that this was the remains of Douglas Chadwick on the grounds of who else could it be. For one thing, there was no evidence that he had met a violent death at someone else's hands and, for another, no apparent motive for Grimble father or son to have murdered him. The clothes, he thought, were the only clue as to who this was, but so far, three days after a photograph of the T-shirt and the sneakers had appeared in national newspapers and the Kingsmarkham Courier, no one had come forward to acknowledge recognition.

Dilys Hughes had provided a DNA sample to be compared to that of the body in the trench, and this time the comparison would be sound. There was no doubt she and Peter Darracott were sister and brother, without the complications of stepfatherhood or adoption. As to dental records, the difficulty was that, according to Christine Darracott, her husband hadn't been to a dentist since he was at school and, as far as she knew, had had two fillings and one extraction when he was in his teens. The body in the trench had three fillings, and several extractions, but at different points in the dentition from where Christine said Peter's were.

E-mails from well-meaning citizens flooded Wexford's computer. Hannah read them all carefully but had stopped printing them out. It wasn't until now that he had quite realized how many people simply vanished. Of course he was aware of the figures; statistics only begin to have much meaning when they apply to individuals, when the people who have been just numbers acquire names and ages and descriptions. The senders of the e-mails seemed to ignore the cut-off point of spring 1995 and wrote of a relative disappearing twenty years before or five years before. Many contributed stories of missing wives or girlfriends. The hundred and more Hannah read in one day all listed missing people, and then came one from a woman in Maidstone claiming to recognize the scorpion T-shirt. Hannah phoned her, then went to Maidstone to see her.

Janet Mabledon was in her fifties, a bright well-dressed woman who worked as secretary and receptionist at a medical center. She had taken Wexford's e-mail address from a television appeal for witnesses. A phone number had been given as well, but she had decided, she told Hannah, that Kingsmarkham police would be overwhelmed with phone calls while they might seldom receive electronic messages. Hannah smiled but said nothing. She showed her the photograph of the T-shirt, the same picture as had appeared on several television news programs.

“My elder son's name is Samuel,” Janet Mabledon said. “Of course he's always called Sam. I had that T-shirt printed for him. There used to be a shop in Maidstone that printed T-shirts for you, any picture you wanted with a name, and they claimed the ones they did would be unique. Both my sons were very keen on-well, reptiles, I suppose you'd call them, when they were young, snakes and scorpions and alligators, all that sort of thing. Boys are. Sam and Ben were fifteen and thirteen at the time I had the T-shirts done.”

“Ben is your second son, Mrs. Mabledon?”

“That's right. He's a research chemist now,” she said with pride, “and Sam teaches at a university in the United States. It was twelve years ago I had the T-shirts done. Sam's had that scorpion with ‘Sam’ printed underneath and Ben's had a crocodile with ‘Ben’ under it. Ben loved his. I suppose I should have known Sam was too old for that sort of thing. He absolutely refused to wear it, never even tried it on.”

Hannah smiled. “What happened to it?”

“Nothing for a while. Then I had a clear-out. Actually I was amazed to find it, it had never been worn. Ben had a girlfriend with a brother called Sam-it had got to be a very popular name-and we gave it to her for her brother. She lived at Myringham. That's near Kingsmarkham, isn't it?”

“When would that have been, Mrs. Mabledon?”

“Oh, a long time ago. Ten years? I don't know where that ex-girlfriend is now, but I can tell you her name. Her brother was at Myringham University when Ben knew her.”

“Where Douglas Chadwick was doing his engineering course,” Wexford said to Burden that evening. They were back in the snug at the Olive and Dove, and their wives were with them. Some of their most valuable deductions were made over a drink in this quiet little room, but the Kingsmarkham Courier saw these meetings in a different light. The newspaper took every chance to run a spiteful story about police negligence and laziness. Now that it was possible for one of its reporters to blunder into the snug “by mistake” and take a photograph on his mobile, nowhere was private. But they had found, rather strangely, that if Dora and Jenny came with them, the press seemed to regard their visit as normal time-off socializing and took no action. Hannah, of course, believed some monstrous chauvinism was involved here but found it difficult to say quite how.

Burden was drinking his usual lager, Wexford claret. He was uncomfortably aware of his wife's eyes on him as he fetched a second glass. She had already told him that whereas one glass of red wine was good for his heart, four or five were not, and when he said, “Can one have too much of a good thing?” scolded that his health was not, as far as she was concerned, a suitable subject for jokes. She herself was drinking what looked like red wine but was in fact cranberry juice. She and Jenny had pushed their chairs back from the table and were talking about KAAM, the newly formed group.

Wexford had been interrupted and now he repeated what he had said about Myringham University and Douglas Chadwick. “Her name's Sarah Finlay and she's a lecturer there. But in psychology, not mechanical engineering. I don't know whether it's a coincidence, Mike. There are an enormous lot of students at Myringham and she says she didn't know him. I talked to her on the phone.”

“What became of the T-shirt?”

“She gave it to her brother, who didn't want it either. She broke up with Ben Mabledon soon after and she took it to the Oxfam secondhand shop.”

“Which Oxfam shop?”

“The one in Myringham. This was in '98. It's a long time ago and naturally there are different people in the Oxfam shop and no one would remember that far back, anyway. It's not as if they'd keep meticulous records of the old clothes they sold.”

“You don't think it's Douglas Chadwick, do you?”

“No, I don't,” said Wexford. “Why would old Grimble have killed his tenant? Come to that, why would young Grimble have killed him? The old man wanted to be rid of him and he wanted his money, which is exactly what he couldn't accomplish by killing him. As for the money, he had the piano to sell. Presumably that was the arrangement. I'll go, the lodger would have said, you keep as much of my stuff as you want to cover the debt, put the rest out in the front, and my pal will come and pick it up in his van. And that's exactly what old Grimble did. I don't think Chadwick comes into it. I think Chadwick's out there somewhere, in Wales or the north of Scotland or the Scilly Isles, playing the piano in a hotel lounge or working in a garage or taking another mechanical engineering course in a university in Northern Ireland.”

“Did you say Douglas Chadwick?”

Wexford turned slowly to smile at Jenny Burden. “I did,” he said. “Do say you know him, Jenny. Give us some much-needed revelation.”

“Well, if it's the same one, I used to know a Douglas Chadwick whose sister was a teacher in the first school I ever taught at. He was a jazz pianist-amateur, I mean-in a club.”

“It sounds like the same one. When was this?”

“Let's see. My first job was at a school in Lewes. That was before I came to Kingsmarkham, so it'll be fifteen years ago. Helen Chadwick and I used to go to this club and hear Douglas play, and we all had a meal together once, and I think we met in a pub. And then I got my job at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive.”

“Where is he now?” her husband asked.

“Don't know. I know where she is. And so do you. She got married like me and she's Helen Carver now.”

“You mean that woman who came on a visit and called to see us and brought those appalling kids who chopped the heads off all my dahlias?”

“That's who I mean, yes.”

Wexford laughed. “I'm a feminist,” he said. “I don't hold with women changing their names when they marry. It causes needless confusion. What happened to the brother, Jenny?”

“She didn't mention him that time her kids decapitated Mike's dahlias. I could ask her. I could phone her-well, now.”

“Don't issue any invitations,” said Burden.

It was eight-thirty in the evening. Jenny took her mobile out of her handbag and went out into the damp darkness of the Olive's garden. In the snug Wexford, Burden, and Dora began speculating as to the present whereabouts of Douglas Chadwick, and Wexford, because one of his problems would be solved, half hoped Helen Carver would say she hadn't seen her brother since April 1996. He had disappeared from the face of the earth.

Jenny came back, looking very different from the smiling, rather excited woman who had gone optimistically off into the garden. “I spoke to her. I said I'd heard Douglas was playing at some fringe theater at a festival next month and I thought we might go. God, I wish I hadn't. She was nearly in tears. She said he'd died in a road accident two years ago.”