Not in the Flesh

20

He took the call in the car. The answer he expected was a negative one, because now he had less faith in the idea that had come to him in the small hours. Things you think of when you wake in the night often look bizarre or stupid in the morning.

Instead she said, “That would mean the piece of paper with his writing on it makes sense. But I don't know. One small thing, though. It's so small I didn't think it worth putting in my book. I remember a magazine-well, a journal, I suppose you'd call it-lying on a table in our house. It was called The Author. Where it came from I don't know but there were some ads in it from people offering to do research for authors. I don't remember any more except Mum saying that would be a nice job for someone.”

He thanked her and unexpectedly she began to talk about how she'd changed her mind about finding her father's killer. Now she agreed with him. This man should be found, but still she was glad capital punishment had gone forever. Later he wondered how much credence he should put on her remembering The Author and her mother's comment. Would anyone's memory be that good? It was more likely, he thought, that Selina had, perhaps unconsciously, invented it in an effort to help him find the perpetrator of a crime.

They followed her car along the short drive and under the dripping trees. Maeve Tredown wasn't a good driver, uncertain and apparently nervous at the wheel. She came close to scraping the side of the old Volvo against the trunk of a towering conifer and pulled up too sharply outside the front door, setting the car juddering. The curious colors of the house, the jarring yellows and reds, looked brighter when washed by teeming rain. She opened the driver's door and leaned out to see who had come to visit.

“Good morning, Mrs. Tredown,” Wexford said. “Perhaps it would be best if we went straight inside.” He expected some irrational argument, but she got quickly out of the car, slamming the door violently, and let them into the house. “How is your husband?” he asked when they were inside.

“They are taking him into a hospice tomorrow,” she said. “There isn't any hope.” She said it in the kind of cheerful tone she might have used to say there wasn't anything to fear. “I thought a hospice was a place monks lived in with Saint Bernard dogs. But apparently not anymore.”

Wexford could smell the vanilla scent she wore as she led them along the dark passage past the haphazardly hung coats and flung footwear, throwing her raincoat onto a peg as she passed. This time they weren't to be received in the gloomy living room. Instead they went into a kind of farmhouse kitchen where, in front of an open fire, Tredown lay in an armchair with his legs up on the seat of another, pipe in mouth. Blankets covered him, though it was insufferably hot. At the other end of the room, the part where cooking was done, Claudia Ricardo stood in front of an Aga, apparently making lemon curd. The whole place smelled of a mixture of lemons and burning sage.

“I believe it's very hot in here,” Tredown said, removing the pipe without lifting his head. “I'm afraid I always feel cold these days. Perhaps you should take these gentlemen into the drawing room, Em.”

“Please don't worry about the heat, Mr. Tredown,” Wexford said. “We'd like to talk to you as well.”

“You'd better sit down, then.” Maeve Tredown was as offhand as her husband was courteous.

“Would you make us some coffee or tea, Cee?” Tredown apparently thought it safer to make this request of his ex-wife than his present one, or perhaps he only did so because Claudia was already engaged in cooking. She waved a wooden spoon in a gesture of acquiescence. “What did you want to ask me, Mr. Wexford?”

“I believe you once employed a man who went by the name of Dusty.”

Tredown put the pipe down on a saucer and turned his cadaverous yellow face toward Wexford while holding out his hands to the flames. “I forget so many things,” he said. “Let me think. Did we, Em?”

Stony-faced, Maeve Tredown said, “He asked you. Why don't you answer? You know very well we did.”

Speaking very slowly, Tredown said, “I don't believe I ever saw him.” He managed a smile, a death's-head grin. There seemed to be no flesh on his face, only skin stretched over the skull. “I was always working, you see. Upstairs working.”

“You mean writing, Owen. Why don't you say ‘writing?’ ”

“Because it is working. It's what I do.” Wexford couldn't tell if the sound he made was a sigh or an indrawn breath. “What I used to do.”

The unidentifiable warm drink that Claudia Ricardo brought to them in thick earthenware cups was very different from that provided by Mrs. McNeil's Greg. Wexford couldn't tell if it was tea or coffee and, catching sight of Burden's face, saw that he meant to abandon his. Claudia drank hers with apparent pleasure, set down her cup with a loud rattle in its saucer, and said, “I remember Dusty perfectly. He was rather attractive. I really quite fancied him. He was frightfully common, I thought, but I've always liked a bit of rough.”

“Oh, Cee, you are awful,” Maeve spluttered into her cup.

Tredown had closed his eyes, whether in weariness or distaste it was impossible to tell.

“You employed him to drive your car?” Wexford persevered.

“Once or twice,” Claudia replied. “Mostly it was to mend the car. Poor old car hadn't been driven for yonks-is that still a cool expression? Em couldn't drive then. It was-oh, a long time ago. When did you pass your test, Em?”

“December '97,” said Maeve.

“I've never learnt. My head is always in the clouds, you know, and it wouldn't have done. Owen used to drive, I mean he can, but he killed someone in an accident. He turned right without looking and hit someone and the person died. It was while he was married to me, which may have had something to do with it.”

Tredown managed to rear himself up. He managed too a voice loud enough to exhaust him. “Be quiet, Claudia. If you can't talk sense, go away.” Speaking to her in this way had cost him emotional effort as well. Utterly spent, he lay back, sweat standing in beads on his face.

Burden said coldly, “Can we return to Dusty? Where did he come from?”

It seemed that Maeve had decided Claudia had gone far enough. “He'd been one of those fruit-pickers that were on Grimble's Field…”

“Just a moment, Mrs. Tredown,” Wexford said. “Are we talking about eight years ago or eleven?”

“Eleven, of course. They weren't on the field eight years ago. This was '95. One day Dusty came through our garden when I was out there and asked if I'd any work for him. I said, was he any good as a mechanic because we'd got this car no one had driven for years and could he put it right and drive it for us. Well, he did and we paid him. There, does that satisfy you?”

“Not entirely, Mrs. Tredown. You say this was eleven years ago. Was it before Mr. Grimble and Mr. Runge turned the pickers off the field or afterward?”

“Afterward, of course, silly.” Claudia answered for her. “He wanted a job because he'd lost the one he'd got strawberry-picking. What else?” She returned to her curd-making, reaching the stage of placing a spoonful of the yellow mixture on a saucer to test if it had gelled. She watched it, sniffed it, nodded, said to Wexford, “Do you like lemon curd?”

“Very much,” he said, adding quickly, “but not now. When he'd fixed the car, he drove for you?”

“He took us shopping a few times and he did a bit of gardening. He put a washer on a tap.” Maeve shrugged. “You can't be interested in all these domestic details. He was only with us two or three weeks.”

“But he came back three years later?”

At last Wexford could see he and Burden had touched a sensitive nerve. Claudia held her spoon in midair for a second or two. Maeve, who had been feeling her husband's forehead in an unusual gesture of care, remained utterly still, her hand resting on the damp ocherish skin. It was the ex-wife who recovered first.

“Dusty came over to say hallo, that's all. He said he was getting married to a woman called Bridget.”

Those were perhaps the first serious sentences Wexford had ever heard uttered by Claudia Ricardo. “Did you give him any money?”

“As a matter of fact, we did.” Maeve took her hand from Tredown's brow. He had fallen asleep. “Things were very prosperous about then. The First Heaven had been a bestseller for a long time. Those were the days.” She glanced at the sleeping man. “He's never been able to write a sequel to come up to it. God knows why not. I gave Dusty a hundred pounds for a wedding present.”

“That was all?”

“I beg your pardon? He was bloody lucky to get that.”

“Where did the rest come from?”

Wexford watched the trickles of rain run down the big window in his office. The moving water distorted the trees outside to a melange of gold and brown. The sky was pale, colorless, all cloud. “She may be lying, Mike, and I wonder why. D'you realize, we don't even know his first name? We conclude from his nickname that he was called Miller and from the T-shirt that his first name was Sam. But that's guesswork. We know he's dead and Ronald McNeil killed him. Or to correct that, Irene McNeil says he killed him. We have to see Bridget Cook. Hannah can do that and pick her brains. She may know about the thousand pounds and she'll certainly know what Dusty's real name was.”

“I've never thought much of the tea we get in here,” Burden said, and with unusual and almost poetical exaggeration, “but compared with that muck Claudia gave us, it's the nectar of the gods.” He lifted the cup to his lips and savored the contents. “Excellent. A bit brutal what Maeve said about the sequels to that book of Tredown's not being very good.”

“She is brutal, but I'm afraid she's right.”

Burden raised his eyebrows.

“Dora fetched me two of his books from the public library, the recent ones, I mean. They're not a patch on The First Heaven. I didn't like The First Heaven, I don't like fantasy, but I could see it was good. I couldn't finish the others. I got halfway through one but couldn't finish it and I only managed one chapter of the other. The First Heaven ends with the coming of man to earth, that is man as we know him, not half an ape. In the first sequel-it's called In His Own Image and that says it all-he's writing about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and God turning them out of the garden, while the point of The First Heaven is that it's about evolution and the death of gods. The man's obsessed with the Bible. That's his trouble.”

The glazed look that usually came over Burden's face when literature was mentioned, masked it now. “Why's that, then? I mean, is that why the others aren't so good?”

“I suppose he couldn't bring himself to leave biblical subjects for long. And biblical subjects don't interest people very much anymore. They don't interest me, but evolution does and classical mythology does too. His mistake was not just in reverting to his old subject but reverting to one which seems to deny his new subject. Do you see what I mean?”

“I suppose so, but it's not something I know anything about. Is it important?”

“I don't know,” Wexford said. “I don't know what's important in this case and what isn't.”

Finding Bridget Cook wasn't difficult, but calling on her in her home was. “She won't want you seeing her at her place,” Michelle Riley said. “Her bloke's there all the time, and if you say a word about any man she was seeing before him he'll go bananas. And when he does he'll beat her up, that's for sure.”

It was a piece of luck for Hannah that Bridget Cook's partner was out-“Down the benefit”-when she phoned. “I can't see you here,” Bridget said. “Not if you want to talk about Samuel.”

“Who?” said Hannah.

“Samuel. That's his name. Samuel Miller. I never called him Dusty, though all the rest of them did.”

They arranged to meet at a café in Norbury, half a mile from the flat where Hannah lived with Bal Bhattacharya. Hannah's mother had a term she used to describe women whose appearance was less than well cared for, which she generally applied to those interviewed on television on what she called sink estates or bog-standard schools. “She looks a bit rough” was the phrase Hannah had grown up with. She had rejected it as unacceptable, but it came into her head when Bridget Cook turned up-fifteen minutes late-at La Capuccella café.

She was a big tall woman, one who, it was easy to believe, could have performed heavier and more demanding farmwork than picking fruit. Her face had once been lovely, the features having a classical stern beauty, but now it was bruised and marked by time and perhaps by human mistreatment. It was the face of a sculpture from ancient Greece, damaged by long exposure to winds and weather. Hannah thought she looked like a Native American, what her mother would once have called a Red Indian, and her politically correct soul had shuddered at that.

Bridget Cook was nearing sixty but, in spite of her fading beauty, looked more. Yet this man she lived with, Hannah marveled, was jealous of a previous lover she hadn't seen for eight years. Rather to Hannah's surprise, she extended her right hand and shook hers, pumping it vigorously. “Hi, how are you? I'm Bridget Cook-or Williams, as my fellow likes me to say.”

Hannah thought she need not pander to this man's vanity. “I'd like to talk about Samuel Miller, Miss Cook, if you're happy about that.”

“Sure. Why not? Him and me, we were going to get married, but he walked out on me. Got cold feet, I guess. I'd been married before, but he never had. Still, it's all water under the bridge now, isn't it?”

Not quite, Hannah thought. “Before we go any further, Miss Cook, I'd better tell you Samuel Miller is dead. I'm sorry. I hope this won't upset you.”

She was silent. Her strong masculine features remained rigid. She passed one hand over her forehead and said, “He wrote poems, you know. He'd written a book too. Sam was no fool.”

Hannah noted the diminutive. “I didn't know.”

“No. People didn't. He wrote a poem for me, but Williams found it and tore it up. D'you want a coffee?”

“I'll get it,” Hannah said.

Looking over her shoulder when she was at the counter, she saw the big woman put her head into her hands. A wedding ring was on the third finger of her left hand and Hannah wondered if the jealous lover was resentful of that too. She took the two cups of coffee back to their table.

“Why did he go to see the Tredowns when you were all in Flagford?”

“I don't know. Did he?”

“He'd worked for them three years before, the last time he came fruit-picking in Flagford. A man called Grimble turned the pickers off his field and Samuel Miller went to see the Tredowns and they gave him a job repairing their car and then driving it.”

“D'you mean Tredown the book writer? The one that did that book called something about heaven? The one they're making a film of?”

“That's the one.”

“He lived in Flagford?”

“Still does,” said Hannah. “Samuel…” The name bothered her, it was inappropriate for what she had supposed Dusty was, not so odd for a writer and a poet. “Samuel-did he know it was that Tredown? I mean, if he was a writer, did he go to see Tredown because he was?”

“Don't ask me. I never knew Tredown lived there. Sam never said.”

“I'm wondering if he brought something he'd written with him to show Tredown.”

Bridget plainly wasn't interested. “If he did I never saw it. How did he die?”

Hannah longed to be able to say this was something Bridget Cook didn't need to know, but she couldn't do that. “I'm afraid he was killed. He was shot.” She said quickly, “The man who shot him is dead.” She let the words register, sink in, then said, “Miss Cook, do you know if Sam carried a knife?”

“It was for his own protection. The folks he hung out with-you needed a knife with that lot. He never used it, that I am sure of.”

“The last time you saw him-can you remember that?”

“That's not something you forget,” Bridget Riley said. “We'd fixed up to get married in three weeks. It wasn't just me, he really wanted it. I'm telling you that because people-well, they used to say things on account of Sam was so much younger than me. Anyway, that day, we'd finished picking for the day. We had a shower in the van but it got broke and Sam was going to mend it but he never did. He come in and said he'd found a place where he could have a bit of a wash. It was an empty house in a field where he'd camped three years earlier. When he got back, he said, we'd go down the pub and then he said, here you are, this is for you, and he give me this ring.”

“The ring you're wearing?”

Bridget nodded. “I'd given him a present too. I'd bought him a T-shirt with his name on.”

At last. Hannah felt the tension in her shoulders relax. She produced the photograph from her bag. “Was it this one?”

The ravaged face went white. Bridget Cook's reaction was more intense than it had been even to news of Miller's death. “Oh, my God.” She touched the glossy surface of the photograph with a callused forefinger.

“I'm sorry if it's been a shock, Miss Cook.”

“No, no. I'm okay. I saw it-the T-shirt with his name on it-in the Oxfam shop in Myringham. Me and Michelle was having a day out. I said to her, ‘Look at that, I've got to have that for Sam,’ and she said, ‘He won't want that thing on it, will he?’ She meant the scorpion, but I said, ‘He's got a scorpion tattoo on his shoulder. He'll like it.’ I was right, he did. He put it on when he went off to have his wash. I never saw him again.” Keeping herself from crying had made her voice hoarse. She looked down at her left hand. “Funny he give me this when he was leaving me.” Revelation came to her. “But he didn't, did he? He got himself killed.” She shook her head. “Williams thinks it's my wedding ring or he'd have had it off me.”

Hannah went home to Bal, wondering how long this woman would stay with a man who beat her up and destroyed the poem another man had written for her. Then, holding Bal in her arms, she caught sight of the two of them, young and good-looking, in the mirror and thought that circumstances alter cases.