Not in the Flesh

10

If Helen Carver had wept for the loss of her brother, Dilys Hughes seemed indifferent to the negative result of the DNA comparison. She had been reading the Sunday Times when Barry Vine arrived and from the way it lay open on the seat of an armchair, had cast it aside reluctantly when he rang her doorbell. “I've not seen him for fifteen years,” she said, “and when I've heard from him it's always been him wanting something.” She didn't ask Barry to sit down. “To be honest with you, it wouldn't have broken my heart if it had been him in that ditch.”

“You've no idea where he might be now?”

“I told you. Last time I heard was when he wanted to come here and that was eleven years ago. He thought he could bring some woman with him, the cheek of him. He might as well be dead as far as I'm concerned.”

Barry rather regretted coming to Cardiff, especially on a Sunday. A phone call would have done just as well, but he had thought the woman would need the sensitive approach. Wexford was very keen on understanding and empathy, though Barry suspected this was a directive from above rather than his own opinion. But now there seemed nothing more to be said. Peter Darracott's present whereabouts were of no importance if he wasn't the mystery man who had been buried eleven years before.

“Ah, well, that's all then, Mrs. Hughes,” he said. It had taken all of three minutes after a two-and-a-half-hour journey.

She had picked up the Sunday Times and had just enough courtesy to remain standing while she read it. “Bye-bye. Take care.”

Of all meaningless tags that was the most banal, Barry thought as he let himself out. Were you more likely to look to right and left before you crossed a street or drive your car within the speed limit because someone told you to take care? There was a shopping center on the way to the station. He went in, found a music store with, as usual, a pitifully small classical section. Bellini was his favorite composer, though he sometimes made incursions into Donizetti. The kind of people who confused the two he despised. By a piece of luck the shop happened to have La Sonnambula in stock. He knew it well but was quite happy to have it to listen to on the long journey back to Paddington, interrupted though it would be by other passengers rustling crisp bags while their mobiles played pop music. Outside a newsagent's he saw the Sunday Times. On its front page it advertised, in the News Review section, the story Dilys Hughes had been so absorbed in: “Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father” by Selina Hexham. Barry felt tempted to see it for himself and he bought a copy of the paper, realizing as soon as he did so how heavy it was, all those sections, and he would have to carry them home.

Once in the train he riffled through the main section, just to keep himself up to date with the news, discarded all the rest but the News Review, which he kept, folded small in the pocket of the raincoat he had brought with him. He'd read it at home in the evening. The rest of the journey he spent in blissful enjoyment of Bellini.

“We now know that the remains in Grimble's bungalow aren't Douglas Chadwick,” said Wexford, “but whoever he was the scorpion T-shirt was his. It certainly did belong to the man in the cellar. His hairs were on it, traces of his DNA were on it. It was his all right. The same goes for the anorak, the jeans, and the sneakers. Did he buy it from the Myringham Oxfam shop, or did someone buy it for him? And why has no one else come forward to say they've recognized that T-shirt at a later date? Did he take his clothes off before going into the cellar, or did someone else take them off after he was dead? And why take them off?”

“Maybe he was going to have a bath,” said Burden but whether he was serious or being facetious wasn't clear.

“Then you'd have found him in the bathroom, not the cellar. Grimble said that cellar door was never shut. He'd never seen it shut. Why would he lie about that?”

“He might if he killed the chap in the cellar.”

“I don't see that,” said Wexford. “If he'd killed the chap in the cellar, why mention it at all?”

The phone ringing put an end to this exchange of views. It was a Mrs. Tredown to see him, said the desk sergeant's voice, adding rather awkwardly that what he actually meant was that it was two Mrs. Tredowns.

“Have someone bring them up here, will you?” said Wexford, and to Burden, “You stay, Mike.”

Lyn Fancourt brought them in. Claudia Ricardo wore a long coat of asymmetrical patches in red, yellow, green, and black over a badly creased white linen dress that also came to her ankles. On her feet were sandals with high wedge heels and laces cross-gartered. Her hair in a wild dense bush was in marked contrast to Maeve Tredown's smooth blond “set,” lacquered into helmet shape and glossy as new paintwork. Maeve was in a calf-length check skirt and gray jacket, both rather shabby with a charity-shop look about them. But what struck Wexford about them when they began to speak was not the difference between them but the similarity of their speech and intonation. If you closed your eyes you couldn't have said whose voice it was, Claudia's or Maeve's. Only the content of what they said identified them. Although very unlike to look at, in certain ways they seemed to belong to the same type. Was that why Tredown had married first one and then the other? Or having lost or rid himself of Claudia, he had looked for her counterpart in Maeve?

They had come to tell him something Maeve said they had “neglected” to mention before. “When I spoke to that girl who came to see to Mr. Borodin. The one that brought us up here just now.”

“You mean when you asked if it was true we'd found a body in the cellar of Mr. Grimble's house? I believe you asked if it was a man or a woman.”

“Did you really, Cee? You are so awful.” Maeve's tone was that of a teenager.

“We can't always account for what we say,” Claudia said with a giggle. “Naturally, I wanted to know. Who wouldn't? All those bodies next door. I wondered if they might have partaken in some sexy ritual.”

Burden said in the repressive tone Wexford knew signified his extreme displeasure, “What did you come here to tell us?”

Maeve looked at him as if she had just realized a second man was in the room. “Oh, yes, I remember you now. You came to the house with him, didn't you? Is it all right for you to ask me questions?” She pointed one sharp finger at Wexford. “He's the head one, isn't he?”

These inquiries-they resulted in Claudia dissolving into giggles-neither Wexford nor Burden replied to. “If you have something to tell us, please do so. Our time is limited.”

“Oh, is it?” Claudia put on an expression of disbelief. “Well, if you say so. What was it you asked? Oh, yes, what did we come to tell you. Two things really. One is that Mr. Chadwick-I don't know his first name-he was very friendly with Louise Axall, always at her flat he was when her-well, he's not her husband, is he?-her paramour was away.”

“Let me stop you there, Miss Ricardo,” said Wexford. “Miss Axall has only lived in the district for four years and Douglas Chadwick is no longer a subject of our investigations. He died two years ago.”

Maeve Tredown assumed the look of someone granted a revelation of the magnitude sustained on the road to Damascus. “Douglas! That was his name. I'd entirely forgotten.”

“The second piece of information, Miss Ricardo?”

“Yes, now where was I? Where was I, Em?”

“You were going to tell them about seeing that old bat Irene McNeil going into the house after old Grimble died.”

“That's it. She and that retarded boy and Grimble's pals, they were always in and out. Irene must be the nosiest old woman in the United Kingdom. As soon as they'd had the funeral she was in there. She lived across the road then, of course. We used to see her go in there time after time, didn't we, Em?”

“Absolutely, Cee, and bring stuff out with her. Her husband too. That man decimated the wildlife around here. If it moved he shot it. Shame, really.”

In absolute calm, Wexford said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Tredown, Miss Ricardo.” He picked up the phone, said into it, “Have DC Fancourt come up, will you?”

The two “wives-in-law” began chatting to each other in low voices, punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter and little high-pitched screams. From what Wexford could hear of their conversation, he gathered Claudia was telling Maeve a joke involving fellatio and a banana. He sighed, said, “We should like to talk to Mr. Tredown. Will tomorrow morning be convenient? Nine o'clock?”

“It's very early,” said Claudia, giggling as if he had made an improper suggestion. “Very early. I may still be in bed.”

“Oh, we'd better say yes, Cee. He'll only keep on at us if we don't.”

“Thank you,” Wexford said as Lyn Fancourt came in. “See Mrs. Tredown and Miss Ricardo out, will you?” he said.

Both giggling now, they went. Burden said they were like two schoolgirls who have enjoyed themselves but not quite succeeded in goading their teacher into losing his cool.

“I don't know. It's a bit more sinister than that. They're more like a couple of thoroughly nasty participants in a witches' sabbath.”

“Most of it was done to annoy. No doubt, they don't have enough to do. Maybe Tredown sends them out of the house so that he can work in peace. But was it done to distract?”

“Distract from what, Mike?”

“Well, obviously something they don't want us to know about. One thing they did tell us, though. I know you noticed, I could tell by the way you suddenly looked disgusted.”

Wexford nodded. “You mean her reference to ‘that retarded boy,’ as Claudia so charmingly called him? That's obviously Charlie Cummings. Mike, I think that should have occurred to us. Is the body in the cellar Charlie Cummings?”

“He disappeared three years before the man in the cellar died.”

“Even so it's possible,” said Wexford.

Doris Lomax, who had lived next door to Charlie Cummings and his mother, was a very old woman by this time. In the eleven years and more which had passed she had gradually lost her sight and was now registered as blind. Hannah Goldsmith, who could be tough and unrelenting with men and particularly with the young vigorous sort, was understanding with her own sex, reserving a particular tenderness and sympathy for old women whom she judged victims of a hard life and male oppression. She spoke with extreme gentleness to Doris Lomax in a voice Wexford would barely have recognized.

The little stuffy room in which they sat was insufferably hot, for, though the day was mild for the time of year, Mrs. Lomax had her gas fire full on. The windows looked as if they had never been opened and now had seized up through disuse. Hannah gave no sign of discomfort, in spite of the sweat starting in her armpits, a physical manifestation she most disliked.

“Not cold, are you, dear?” were almost the first words Mrs. Lomax uttered.

“Not a bit, Mrs. Lomax, thank you. Now I quite understand you're unable to read the newspaper. Let me say I really don't think you miss much. But it did mean you weren't able to see the picture of the clothes Charlie was wearing, didn't it?”

“I do have a carer comes in a lot, dear, and she's ever so kind. She reads bits of the local paper to me, but she never read that bit. What did you say he was wearing?”

“A T-shirt, Mrs. Lomax.” Hannah could tell she didn't know what this was. “A thing-a garment-something like a sweater, only cotton. It's white and it's got a scorpion printed on it.”

“A what, dear?”

Describing a scorpion is surprisingly difficult. “A black thing,” Hannah began. Was it a reptile? An insect? An arachnid? “A bit like a sort of spider with a long tail-”

Doris Lomax cut her short. “Oh, no dear. I knitted a sweater for him but it was plain blue. Maybe he had a thing like that, but I don't know.” An unwelcome possibility occurred to her. “You don't mean, oh, you can't mean you've found-”

“We're not sure yet, Mrs. Lomax. We really can't tell but it's possible.” She had to say that.

“Oh, poor Charlie, poor Charlie. He wasn't quite right in his head, you know, but such a nice boy. A good boy.” Another unhappy idea occurred to her. “You don't want me to come and look at him, do you? I can see a bit-well, sort of shapes, but I wouldn't-I couldn't…”

“No, of course not,” Hannah said. “Of course not.” She didn't add that there was nothing to see but the basic structure of a man, common to all men. “One more thing-can you tell me what color Charlie's hair was?”

“His mother had fair hair, dear, but all the Cummingses was dark. Charlie was quite dark.” She looked gravely at Hannah. “Not quite as dark as you, dear, but getting on that way.”

Hannah was finding she desperately didn't want the body in Grimble's cellar to be Charlie Cummings. It was very unlike her, she thought, but she didn't want this old woman to suffer further hurt. Inspiration came to her. “How tall was Charlie, Mrs. Lomax?”

“Not very tall for a man, dear. Maybe five feet five or six.”

Hannah's relieved expression wouldn't have been visible, but the little sigh she gave reached Mrs. Lomax. “Thank you, Mrs. Lomax. You've been very helpful. I think you can be sure this isn't Charlie Cummings.”

“Can I, dear? But he's still dead somewhere, isn't he?”

A Passage to India was darkish and cool. A ceiling fan, not too aggressive, blew the air about and faintly agitated the colored streamers, figured in red and blue and gold, which hung against the walls. It was hard to tell if these were Indian decor or early Christmas decorations. Wexford and Burden were shown to what Rao the proprietor was starting to call “their” table.

Burden wore his silk suit. It was very discreet, charcoal gray with knife-edge creases to the trousers and long lapels to the jacket. But still it was silk and Wexford thought it a bit much, though he kept this to himself. Burden's shirt was plain white and his tie light gray with a single slightly off-center vertical stripe in black, as if he was trying to play down the effect of the suit, which he too perhaps knew was over the top. Matea, the beautiful Somali girl, brought menus and asked them in her heavily accented soft voice what they would like to drink. Water, of course, it would have to be water. She seemed to sense their reluctance and she smiled. Wexford asked her if they could have the fan off and she said she'd tell Rao.

When she had disappeared behind the bead curtain, he said to Burden, “If I didn't know you for an uxorious man, I'd suspect all this sartorial elegance being designed to impress or better still attract Matea.”

“Utter nonsense.” Burden never blushed. His face retained its even biscuit color through all embarrassments. “When I got dressed this morning I didn't even know we'd come here. It was your idea, if you remember. Since we're in the long-words department, my attitude to Matea is paternal or maybe avuncular.”

“Really? I hope you don't go telling people that old one about her being your niece. With your coloring no one would ever believe you.”

Burden laughed. “You were wrong about the body in the cellar being Charlie Cummings. He was far too tall.”

“Yes.” Wexford hesitated. “God knows who it is. We know the remains are those of a man and he was between forty and fifty when he died. Carina's now saying he's been dead eight years. We've run out of possible people he might be.”

“Could we try the National DNA Database?”

“Try it with what, Mike? The man in the cellar's DNA won't be on it. He died too long ago.”

Matea came back with a large jug of iced water and took their order. The long black hair that had hung loose when Wexford saw her at the inaugural meeting of KAAM had been wound up onto the top of her head and secured there with long jewel-headed pins. It struck him that she didn't wear the hijab. It would have been a shame if she had, he thought, the scarf covering her crowning glory. Perhaps she was one of those modern progressive Moslems who had broken with the old traditions, or maybe she wasn't a Moslem at all. Some Somalis were Christians, he had heard, some animists. Her hairstyle gave Matea a regal look. With her head held high and her back plumb-line straight, she walked, as Burden remarked, like some African queen.

“Seen many, have you?” Wexford made a face. “All we really know is that the clothes in the kitchen belonged to the man in the cellar. We don't know why he took them off or why, wearing only a vest and pants, he went down into that filthy cellar. Or was he killed elsewhere? There were no keys, no identification. Did his killer take those things?”

Wexford broke off as sweet-scented spicy dishes were brought, a large bowl of fragrant rice, little stone pots of green and scarlet pickles, a basket of naan. Matea asked if everything was all right.

“Excellent, thank you,” said Burden. “Delicious.”

But it was Wexford who she glanced at, did more than glance, let her eyes rest on him for a few seconds, hesitating as if there was something she wanted to say. But she said nothing, half smiled a little shyly, the first sign of awkwardness they had seen her give, and walked quickly away.

“Those Tredown women,” Burden said, “that was all a bit odd. I said it was done to distract us. I think they made two attempts, the first one being when they thought we were still interested in Douglas Chadwick and they tried to make us believe he'd been having an affair with Louise Axall. Very clumsy, that. The woman wasn't even living there then.”

“And then they moved on to Irene McNeil. Again a vague insinuation. Mrs. McNeil went in and out of Grimble's house. When that didn't seem to impress us they said she stole things, removed things from the house. You could tell it was an afterthought. But why, Mike? Why all this?”

“As I said, to distract us from something they don't want looked into.”

“Yes, but what? There is one thing or rather one person they might want to deflect us from, the one person among all the people in that corner of Flagford we haven't questioned, we haven't even seen.”

“Tredown,” said Burden.

“Exactly. The great author. There he is, shut up in his ivory tower, writing for all he's worth to keep those two in comfort, his nose apparently kept to the grindstone by them but protected by them as well. Interesting, don't you think?”

Matea brought the bill, and Wexford gave her his credit card. Burden went off to the men's room and was still there when she came back. She said in her low sweet voice, “Mr. Wexford?”

How did she know his name? From the card, of course, or because she remembered it from the meeting. He smiled at her.

“I want to ask-”

The sentence was cut off by Rao the proprietor coming up to her and asking her to show two more customers to a table. Burden came back and asked what she had said to him. “She wanted to ask me something but didn't say what.”

“Perhaps some question of asylum or immigration or whatever.”

“Perhaps,” said Wexford.

It was Halloween, a celebration he disliked. Every window he passed on his way home, or every window behind which children lived, had a skeleton mobile dancing on strings or a pumpkin with a grinning mouth cut out. Guy Fawkes Night wasn't among his favorite festivals, but it was an improvement on this. Was it on its way out, soon to be superseded by this dumbed-down black magic? At the corner of his own road he passed a group of preteens dressed in black and gathered under a streetlamp, the chemical light showing up their painted cheeks and foreheads, blotched in green and purple but for one whose face was made up to look like a skull. Their demand that he choose trick or treat failed to break his silence and he passed them without another glance.

Dora was out. She had driven herself over to Sylvia's to babysit Mary and the house was empty. He poured himself a glass of claret, stood at one of the front windows eyeing the street until his presence attracted first one group of trick-or-treaters, then two boys, combining Halloween with Guy Fawkes Night and wheeling up his path a homemade skeleton in a stroller. He drew the curtains and retreated as fireworks were set off in one of the neighboring gardens, a series of explosions, then the whistle and scream of a rocket. His next-door neighbors' dog began to howl.

He went into the kitchen, took out of the oven the lasagne Dora had left for him, and sat down to eat it at the kitchen table. The doorbell rang and someone pounded on the knocker. He took no notice. When he had finished his meal, he poured a second glass of wine and went to stand at the small window to the right of the front door. From there, with no lights on, he could watch the street unseen. Dora would be back soon. The moment she turned the car into their own drive she would be mobbed by the trick-or-treat throng if he wasn't there to stop them.

The phone ringing called him away. It was Sheila, wanting to talk about plans for The First Heaven film. Fireworks were deafening, both here and outside her Hampstead home. He was saying, “Sorry, my dear, we'll have to carry on with this conversation another time,” when another machine-gun rattle from firecrackers made further speech impossible. Immediately after the explosions, as he put the phone down, there came another knock at the front door. Repeated knocks, in fact, echoing the fireworks' chatter, as if his caller had previously tried the doorbell in vain.

Of course he wasn't going to answer it. It might be an innocent and harmless Halloweener, surfing the place on his own, someone who didn't know that no householder in his street was imprudent enough to open a front door on October 31, but still he wasn't going to answer it. Very softly he made his way back to the little window in the dark. The doorbell rang but it was a rather timid, diffident summons this time. He hadn't realized that only the side wall of the porch was visible from this point and he was on the point of giving up, was walking away, when he turned his head.

The caller who had knocked and rung had made her final attempt and was just closing his gate behind her. Not a teenage boy or girl but a woman. Her head was covered and she was wrapped in a thick dark coat. Could it be Matea? There was nothing to tell him if it was, only the woman's upright carriage and light step. A fire-work, exploding next door without warning, temporarily blinded him, and when he could see again the woman had disappeared.

It took him a moment to find his keys. He fished them out of his raincoat pocket, shut the door behind him, and ran after her up the street, but she had taken a left or a right turning and there was no sign of her.