Not in the Flesh

19

Everyone has a phone, Lyn told herself. Whatever they lack, they have a phone. These days even those who live permanently on camping sites have mobiles. Seated in front of her computer for long hours-absently helping herself to sugar-free sweets from a pack on her lap-Lyn found only two phone numbers among the men on the list. One was for an address in Stockton-on-Tees, the other in Penzance. Not much to her surprise by this time, a woman answered in each case. In the case of the former man, a William Green, the woman, who sounded very old, was his aunt. Of course. These men were permanently on the road. If they gave addresses, they would be those of their relatives and sure to be women, Lyn thought. Men tended to be rovers, wild, not anchored, while women clung to their homes. This wasn't sexist thinking. Lyn had been too thoroughly indoctrinated by Hannah to fall into that trap. It was a good thing, a sane sensible thing, to want to have your own place, your nest, your refuge.

William Green's aunt, his late uncle's widow, also called Green, could tell her very little about her nephew. In her quavering voice she said she hardly ever saw him, she didn't know where “the lad” was now, the last time she had seen him was six years ago. That was enough for Lyn. The man in Grimble's cellar had been dead two years by then. The other man, Frank Maniora, had given the address of a closer relative, his sister. This time she was surprised. Fernanda Maniora spoke with a Caribbean accent. For some reason she couldn't now account for, Lyn had assumed without thinking much about it that everyone on the list was white.

Miss Maniora called her “darling” in every sentence she spoke. She talked at great length about her brother, which was something Lyn could have done without. If the man in the cellar had been black, everyone in Flagford would have noticed and remembered him. She asked, really for something to say, if Fernanda Maniora had seen her brother lately, to be told that he had dropped in only last week, darling, and what a joy it was to see him.

Might he know something about the other men he had worked with at Morella's? She knew for a fact he had been there eight years before. “Where is he now, Miss Maniora?”

“He said he'd made a lot of money, darling. God bless him. He was going to Spain for a holiday. He'll be there now, you know.”

“Have you an address?”

But Frank Maniora's sister hadn't.

Still, talking to these women had given Lyn an idea. It was the women workers at Morella's she should be getting in touch with. For one thing, women noticed men and for another, women were simply more observant. Phone numbers for them were much easier to find. As she had thought, some had given mobile numbers. Eight years ago-would they still be the same? She could only try.

Exactly what he had expected had happened. Reading that book he had anticipated a chore, a bit of a bore, a slog, it was so long, more than five hundred pages. A slog it was and he put it down, never to take it up again, long before page 516 was reached.

The story he could have summarized if he had to. There was no need to read those last five chapters. The First Heaven was about the world before there were people in it. No people, no animals, and no birds, only sea creatures and insects, the whole ruled over by gods and goddesses, some with well-known names, some invented, but all with an Old Testament flavor. These deities behaved like human beings in that they loved and hated, committed crimes and performed heroic deeds, but were apparently immortal and therefore could watch the process of evolution, the gradual change of the tiny swimming things into land creatures and flying creatures. As the millennia passed, the gods foresaw the appearance on earth of man by a process of evolution but were powerless to stop it, though they knew it would mean an end to their immortality. It would mean a Götterdämmerung.

By this time he had forgotten that he had begun to read Owen Tredown's book to please Sheila. She didn't let him forget and was on the phone early the next morning.

“Great, isn't it, Pop?”

“Not in my opinion. I said I wouldn't like it and I didn't. I don't know how many times I've told you I don't care for fantasy.”

“I would never have said you were bigoted. You made up your mind you weren't going to like it, so you didn't. That's my last word on the subject.”

“That's a blessing anyway,” said Wexford, “though I doubt it's true. You know what they say. Good books make bad films and bad books make good films. I expect it will pull millions into the world's cinemas.”

Sheila began listing all the people she knew who had “adored” The First Heaven: Paul, of course, her sister Sylvia, the producer of the forthcoming film, its director. He covered his mouth to silence the sound of his yawn.

When she paused for breath, he said, “This producer, does he use advisers and researchers?”

“Well, of course, Pop.”

So Tredown surely must have. He didn't say this aloud. After she had rung off he fetched The Son of Nun -noting that it was overdue to the public library-and The Queen of Babylon and leafed through them, looking for points of resemblance, while believing he wouldn't find any. There he was wrong. The subject matter was quite different or so it seemed at first. But it was as he had thought. Tredown appeared very interested in strange gods and their worship, in rituals, in sacrifice, in Baal and Dagon and Ashtaroth, the deities he mentioned in The First Heaven. He recognized that, for those who liked this sort of thing, this book was more exciting and suspenseful than either of the biblical epics Wexford had read, but there was a kind of flavor or atmosphere about it that made it recognizable as Tredown's work. Perhaps it was in the sort of phrasing he used, the recurrence of certain favorite words, even the way he chose to describe his leading characters.

“The First Heavenwas published in the mid-nineties,” he said to Dora. “Have you read any of his later ones?”

She hadn't. “I can get one out of the library tomorrow, if you like.”

“I'd just like to know if he reverted to his old favorites or if The First Heaven marked a sort of turning point in his career. Are there any sequels, for instance?”

“I'll get you the lot,” Dora said, eyebrows raised.

Privately, Barry Vine believed putting a name to the body in Grimble's cellar was unimportant. He had been a traveler or gypsy or itinerant, whatever you liked to call him, had trespassed on someone else's property and been shot by some old lunatic. But it was crucial to police work, and Wexford thought it of the first importance, which was why Barry and Lyn were off to see a woman in Maidstone who might know a woman whose boyfriend had left her in September 1998 and just might…

“It's worth giving it a go, isn't it, Sarge?” said Lyn whose researches had found Lily Riley.

“It's my daughter who knew her,” Lily Riley said in the living room of her little house, bringing them cups of tea the color of mulligatawny soup. “Her and this Bridget used to go fruit picking together. Mostly it was up near Colchester, but one year they come down here so Michelle could stop with me. Not Bridget, though. She had her own van.”

Looking at her list, Lyn said, “That would be Bridget Cook and Michelle Riley?”

“That's right, love. Bridget brought her down in her van along with her boyfriend-I mean, Bridget's boyfriend. I only saw him the once. He'd been to Flagford before, Michelle said, three or four years before for the strawberries. This time it was plums they was picking, Victorias.”

“Do you remember his name, Mrs. Riley?”

“Dusty, they called him. Well, not Bridget. She had another name for him, but I disremember what it was. Them two, Dusty and Bridget, they stopped in the van. Michelle was in here with me.”

“You said you saw him, Mrs. Riley. What was he like?”

“Good-looking,” she said. “Well, I reckon you could call him good-looking. Mind you, he always looked dirty to me, but I dare-say I'm fussy. Bridget kept on telling him to wash himself. I'll tell you one thing, he was always knocking his head on the ceiling in that van, he was so tall, you see.”

Mrs. Riley insisted on a second round of tea and went to refill their cups.

“It's him, Sarge,” Lyn said excitedly. “Six feet four, the chap in the cellar was.”

“It looks like it,” said the more cautious Barry, “but let's not jump to conclusions yet.”

The tray once more set down on the table, Lily Riley began getting into her stride. “Him and Bridget was talking of getting married. What I do remember was Bridget saying to Michelle as he was too young for her, really, being only forty and her getting on for fifty. A funny thing was she said he wrote poems to her. It was romantic, she said. Anyway, they stopped a couple of days, and then they went off to this Flagford, all three of them.”

Lyn was suspicious. “How come you remember all this, Mrs. Riley?”

Lily Riley spoke huffily. There had been an imputation in Lyn's tone she hadn't liked. “I'll tell you how come. He left Bridget, this Dusty did. They was going to get married, the date was fixed and all. They said to me, you've got to come to our wedding, Lily, and I said okay, I would.

“Well, they'd been picking plums all day at Morella's, Michelle said, and they come home to the van and Dusty said he had to go out, he'd be gone an hour at the most, and off he went but never come back. That's how I remember it. Michelle was so upset. She's got a soft heart, my girl, and she was in tears. He broke poor Bridget's heart, that man.”

Barry came to the crucial question. “Do you know his other name, Mrs. Riley? Could it have been Sam?”

“Dusty, they called him. I don't know what else. I never heard it. I know he come from somewhere in London. Same with Bridget, somewhere in London.”

“That wasn't much help, Sarge,” Lyn said when they were outside.

“You've done a good job finding that Mrs. Riley, Lyn,” said Barry, “but that's where you're wrong. When they call a man Dusty it's usually because his surname's Miller. Like a man called Grey is Smoky and a man called White is Chalky or Snowy but someone called Miller is always Dusty. So now you know.”

“If you say so, Sarge. I thought it might be because he looked dirty like Mrs. Riley said.”

The Family Records Centre showed a large number of Millers but, because this man had been forty, it was possible to narrow it down to those born in the late fifties and early sixties.

“I suppose I can put each one of these into the Web,” Lyn said, “and get a search engine to track him down. But if he's who we think he is, our man's dead. He's been dead eight years and he won't be on an electoral register anymore. Maybe it would be better to find dead Millers.”

“Are we looking for a connection between these two men?” Burden asked. “I mean, are we working on the premise that the chap in the cellar wasn't the only one Ronald McNeil killed? That he also shot Alan Hexham?”

“That's why I'm going to see Irene McNeil again now that she's home,” said Wexford. “But I don't think so, do you? There's no question of Hexham trespassing anywhere.”

“Adam's talked to all the taxi firms who were here eleven years ago, he's been very thorough, I must say. But it was always a hopeless task. What kind of a miraculous memory would someone have to have to remember that far back?”

“I don't know. I don't see how there can be a connection, yet if there's not it's too much of a coincidence. But I'm sure Hexham came here and came to see Tredown. I think he came to do research for Tredown's book The First Heaven. I've left a message on Selina Hexham's voice mail”-Wexford was proud of himself for knowing the term and bringing it out with such ease-“but she hasn't called me back yet.”

Irene McNeil had spent two days in a private nursing home since what she called her “ordeal” at Kingsmarkham police station. Since her return home, showing she wasn't always the helpless creature she seemed to be, she had engaged a full-time carer. This was a young man of daunting efficiency who had transformed the soulless cupboard-lined house with bowls of flowers and jardinières of houseplants. The place smelled of lemon air freshener. A boy in jeans and T-shirt was the last kind of person Wexford supposed Mrs. McNeil would find to tend on her, but he began to see that his analysis of her character had been wide of the mark. She might be old-fashioned and prudish, a stickler for manners and a snob, but she was very much an upper-middle-class woman of her generation too, one who had always had a man about the house-first her father, then her husband-and who bitterly missed the masculine presence. No doubt, also, whatever she said, she would have liked a son. Greg the carer answered a deeply felt need. Wexford suspected it was he who had painted her fingernails a silvery rose-pink, and it amazed him that Mrs. McNeil let him call her “Reeny.”

She still had her feet up, but now she was reclining on a sofa, her legs discreetly covered with a blanket. Rather to his surprise she made no reference to their previous meetings but instead was fervent on the subject of Greg, his excellences and his charm.

“Of course, having him here wouldn't have done at all when I was young,” she said. “I may be older than he”-as if there was any doubt about it-“but that would have made no difference. If one was a woman alone, one simply could not have a man staying overnight and that was all there was to it. It would have caused talk. Oh, thank you so much, Greg.”

The carer had brought not tea but a glass of what looked like iced coffee and a plate of the kind of biscuits you can only buy in delicatessens. “And what can I get you, sir?”

Wexford thought it might have been the first time in his life-at any rate for a long time-that anyone but the members of his team had called him “sir,” and even they now mostly called him “guv,” thanks to Hannah. “A cup of tea would be good,” he said, thinking Greg would be more likely to understand “good” than “nice.”

“Isn't he perfect?” Like a woman in love, Mrs. McNeil watched Greg depart for the kitchen, closing the door quietly behind him. In more mundane accents she asked Wexford what she could do for him. “Can I update you?” wasn't the kind of question she would have asked before the advent of Greg.

“The man your husband shot-” he began but Irene McNeil interrupted him.

“In self-defense!”

“Yes, well-you must have got a good look at him.”

“After he was dead. I didn't look too closely, I can tell you. He wasn't a pretty sight.”

“Mrs. McNeil, what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean he was dirty or injured in some other way?”

“I don't know. He wasn't old, I can tell you that. Not much older than Greg, probably, only Greg's always so spotlessly clean and neat.”

“If I told you this man's age was forty, would that be about right?”

Before she could reply, Greg came back with Wexford's tea. The biscuits provided were of a slightly lower standard than those on Mrs. McNeil's plate. Greg flashed his employer so dazzling a smile that Wexford found himself wondering in exactly what way he was on the make.

“About forty, Mrs. McNeil?”

“No, no, Greg is just forty-oh, you meant that creature who was trespassing in Mr. Grimble's house? I don't know. Possibly. I suppose he was about that.”

Next he asked her about the knife her husband had said was about to be used to attack him. This prompted Irene McNeil into an angry diatribe against Helen Parker, the young solicitor. He steered her back to the knife.

“There was no knife in the house, Mrs. McNeil, that's the difficulty.”

“John Grimble took things away, you know. You shouldn't believe him when he says he didn't take a thing, just left everything there.”

Wexford gently reminded her that whatever John Grimble had removed from his father's house, he had taken eleven years before, not eight. “Could your husband have brought the knife back home with him?”

A flash of alarm showed in her eyes. “Why would he do that?”

It was hardly for Wexford to find explanations for the behavior of a man like Ronald McNeil. “Your husband might have told you if he disposed of the knife.”

“Or I might have.” She spoke carefully. “I might have given it away. He might have brought it back home. I mean, when we lived at the Hall.”

“Is that what happened, Mrs. McNeil?”

“Will I get into trouble?” She spoke like a little girl who has been disobedient. “It wouldn't be very wrong, would it, to get rid of a knife? It wasn't mine, you see. Would it be stealing? It wasn't mine, it was that man's.”

Wexford was almost at a loss. He seemed to have strayed into the country of the mad. He was seeing what happens to people-women, mostly-who have been sheltered and protected all their lives and suddenly find themselves alone.

“Did you get rid of it, Mrs. McNeil?”

“It was stolen,” she said. “The cleaner I had stole it.” She stared at him. “I'm telling you the absolute truth.”

It was very nearly too much for him. He changed the subject.

“Had you ever seen this man before, Mrs. McNeil? Think carefully before you answer.”

“I know I'd never seen him before.”

“His name may have been Miller. He was called Dusty.”

This time she did ponder on the name. “The Tredowns once had a-well, a handyman they called Dusty. He used to drive their car sometimes too. I never saw him. That Ricardo woman told me.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, my goodness, how you expect me to remember things like this I really don't know.”

“You're doing very well,” he said eagerly.

This seemed to please her. She was susceptible to flattery and she smiled, though this may have been due to the reappearance of Greg with a tray on which was a rolled-up hot towel of the kind they give you in Chinese restaurants, a bottle of violet-scented toilet water, and a tube of hand cream.

“He's so thoughtful,” she said when she had anointed her hands. “I can't imagine now how I got on without him. When was it this Dusty was with them? Oh, at least ten years ago, maybe more like twelve.” She became almost chatty. “Mr. Tredown can drive, but he doesn't. Apparently he once caused an awful accident-someone was killed-and he's never driven since. The Ricardo woman can't and Mrs. Tredown can now, but she hadn't passed her test then. She passed it a year or two before we moved. Ronald said she'd no business being on the road when he heard she'd passed.”

All this was interesting enough, but it seemed of little use to him. The vital contribution Mrs. McNeil had made, perhaps the only contribution of any worth, was that a man called Dusty had worked for the Tredowns. Only they could tell him more now.

“I shall ask you about the knife again,” he said.

She shrugged, made an unusual movement with her hand, an impatient flutter. He was on his way out and Donaldson was waiting when his phone rang. It was Selina Hexham.