Not in the Flesh

22

He met Iman Dirir by chance in the High Street as she was coming out of Kingsmarkham's only Asian dress shop. She was carrying one of their black and gold bags.

“They're not supposed to be for Africans, but we wear much the same clothes,” she told Wexford. “I've been buying a salwar kameez for my niece's wedding. She's marrying a very handsome Englishman at St. Peter's next Saturday.”

Wexford looked his inquiries.

“She's a Christian, Mr. Wexford. You get all sorts in Somalia, animists too.”

As far as he knew, the latter worshipped stones and trees but he might be wrong, so he left it. “Will the Imrans be there?”

“At the wedding? Oh, no, I doubt it. My sister and her husband hardly know them, and my niece doesn't at all.”

“But they'll be back by then?”

“I think so. I think they're expected back on Thursday.”

He walked back to the police station, passing A Passage to India, where, behind the glass, the shimmering curtains, and the artificial lilies, he glimpsed Matea setting tables. Bridget Cook was expected in his office at two. Williams, the partner apparently without a first name, put up no opposition to her traveling to Kingsmarkham, though Wexford doubted if she had told him the true reason for her journey. As he waited he thought about people who make prisons for themselves where none need exist. This woman had landed herself with a man who was a jealous jailer, simply to avoid being alone. Tredown, who evidently cared very little for either of his two wives, had been put under house arrest by them, who wanted him only as a slave to labor for their keep. Now that The First Heaven was to be a film, for which Tredown had no doubt been liberally paid and from which his widow and ex-wife would enjoy the royalties, they were indifferent to his life or death.

Hannah brought Bridget into the office. An old-fashioned expression came into his mind when he saw her: “raw-boned.” A description everyone understood but which seemed meaningless. She wasn't thin yet the bones seemed to protrude through her skin. Her hands were like a man's and the ring on the left one, with its delicate tracery of leaves, looked incongruous. She sat down heavily but flinched a little when Wexford showed her the knife.

“I don't know,” she said. “I only saw it the once. It was the guys he hung out with, a rough lot, they were. He said he needed it for his own protection. He never used it, though. I'm sure he never did.”

“You said he was a poet. He wrote poetry to you.” Wexford was conscious of how absurd this would sound and look to an unseen observer, the human fly on the wall. This woman and poetry could hardly be set side by side without raising a raucous laugh. Yet love, he knew, is no respector of beauty or grace. Like the wind that blows where it lists, it can strike almost anyone for almost anyone else. People have no need of love potions in order to fall in love with the ass's ears. He noted the serious nod she gave, the acceptance that she was worthy of verses dedicated to her. “Did he write anything else?” he asked. “A play? A piece of fiction?”

“I don't know. Maybe. He wasn't educated, but he told me he'd written a book once. Poems and a sort of diary, he said it was.”

“When did you first meet Samuel Miller, Miss Cook?”

“Sometime in '98, it would have been. He moved in with me like in the winter. We was on a site near Southend then. He'd go away a bit, but he always came back. We went strawberry picking up near Hereford in the June, and he said they wanted pickers at Morella's in Flagford in the September. That was when he said we'd best get married. I said I was years older than him, but he said, So what? He'd always fancied older women.”

Claudia Ricardo, Wexford thought. “He'd been to Flagford three years before?”

“That's right. Morella's had got a proper campsite, not like the field they had to camp on when he was there before and two guys went after them with guns.”

“Guns?”

“That's what he said.”

Adam Thayer brought in the tea. It was scalding hot, but Bridget Cook drank hers greedily. “Go on, Miss Cook.”

“He wanted to look up old pals while he was there, he said. Them was his words, ‘old pals.’ There might be some money in it. They owed him. The day after he'd fixed up our wedding we went picking-it was Victorias-and when we got back he said he was off to see his pals and then have a bit of a wash in a house that was empty on account of our shower going wrong. I waited and waited for him, but when it got to midnight I just knew he wasn't coming back. I just knew, I don't know how. It was a funny thing because I thought he really liked me. Maybe it's just that men are a funny lot-sorry, I didn't mean you.”

Wexford assured her he hadn't taken it personally. That made two women who waited for their men to come back and waited in vain, one eleven years before, the other three years after that. He still couldn't tell if there was any connection between the two men, but nor could he believe in so great a coincidence.

Sheila was with her mother on the following evening. She had left the children at home with their father and the nanny while she attended the second meeting of the African Women's Health Action Group. Wexford thought of telling her about the Imrans taking their five-year-old daughter home to Somalia and his questioning of their motives. He thought of it and dismissed it. She would launch into one of her impassioned speeches, a denunciation of injustice, wanton cruelty, child abuse, and, most telling for him, a catalog of instructions as to what violent action he ought to take, and take within the next couple of hours. Instead he asked her about the film. Had shooting started yet?

“It won't for ages, Pop. Months.”

“I hope they're paying you well, though I don't suppose it's Hollywood sort of money.”

“Well, no,” she said, “but it's not bad. Did you know the author's very ill? He's not expected to live to see the film. Isn't that sad?”

“They must have paid him a lot for the rights.”

“You're untypically interested in money today, Pop.”

He laughed. “I've met him, you know. I could say I know him. I suppose it will all go to his wife.”

“Who else?” said Sheila and she went off to get ready for her meeting.

Dora went with her in the black Mercedes with the handsome driver, but Wexford sat on, watching rain, then hailstones, lash the French windows, waiting for Burden to come and share his red-wine ration. No doubt the inspector would defer leaving his house until the rain, forecast as only a shower, passed away over the horizon. He turned his thoughts toward Tredown in the Pomfret hospice. Lord, let me know mine end and the number of my days. Where did that come from? The funeral service, he thought. It was only those with a terminal illness who knew these things and then not accurately. Tredown could only say, I have sixty days at most and (for example) twenty days at least. Did he look back on his life and think it had been good? A wife he had divorced, a second wife whom it was hard to believe anyone could love, those dull Bible-based novels, that one good enduring book he had written… If he had written it.

The doorbell ringing made Wexford jump. He got up to let Burden in. The inspector was rather wet, his hair plastered down, raindrops on his face like tears except that he was smiling. “I got caught in it, stood under a tree till it stopped. Don't say I might have been struck by lightning, I know that already.”

“There wasn't any lightning, was there?”

“According to my wife, there's always lightning when there are hailstones.”

Wexford poured two large glasses of claret. “I was thinking about Tredown.” He raised his glass, said, “Owen Tredown. May he have a peaceful end, and soon.”

Burden raised his eyebrows. “Tredown by all means,” he said, “but why now?”

“He can't live long. I suppose I pity him. I may be wrong, but I imagine him lying in that place-that very nice place, I'm sure-regretting what he's done, regretting that he stole Samuel Miller's manuscript. Because I think it was Miller's. I think Miller wrote The First Heaven, or at any rate wrote an outline for it or a draft.”

“That roughneck? That knife-carrying lowlife?” Wexford had never seen such a look of distaste mixed with incredulity on his friend's face. “Claudia Ricardo told you he was always getting manuscripts sent him by people he'd taught in creative writing classes. Why not one of them?”

“Look at the facts, Mike. Eleven years ago Tredown and the two women were scraping along on what Tredown was making out of those books of his. That and the little bit he got from teaching. And it would have been a little bit. There aren't that many creative writing courses in this country and the ones there are don't pay generously. Neither of the women worked, remember. Claudia boasted that she'd never worked in her life.

“Then along comes Samuel Miller. A roughneck, a lowlife, as you put it, but have we any reason to believe great artists-for the author of The First Heaven is or was a great popular artist-have we any reason to believe such people are all respectable middle-class law-abiding citizens? Genet spent most of his life in prison, Marlowe died in a tavern brawl, Baudelaire was a syphilitic drug addict-no, that argument doesn't work.”

“You're saying Miller brought this manuscript with him on a couple of weeks of fruit picking in Flagford? Would he have known Tredown lived here?”

“Why not? He may have attended one of Tredown's classes. The fact that Bridget Cook doesn't know it means nothing. This would have been three years before Bridget met him. Even if he hadn't been Tredown's student, pupil, or whatever, the location of Tredown's home if not his actual address appears on the jackets of his books. Can't you imagine him finding out fruit-pickers were wanted in a Sussex village called Flagford and that name resonating with him?” He could see he had awakened Burden's interest-more than that, his enthusiasm. Burden's face wore that narrow-eyed speculative look that commanded his features when he was on the verge of excitement. He had drawn his brows together. “Go on,” Wexford said. “You take it from there.”

Burden nodded. “Okay. So he's written this book or done this plan and draft or whatever they do and he takes it with him to Flagford in the hope he may find a way of seeing Tredown. Probably he doesn't know the field they set up camp on is next door to Tredown's house, but he soon finds out. They haven't been camped there that long when Grimble junior and his pal Bill Runge turn up and drive them off the land with sticks…”

“Or guns.”

“Or guns. The fruit picking's done or at an end anyway, Miller makes his way into Tredown's garden, offers his services as gardener and handyman, and at some point while he's working there tells Tredown he has this manuscript with him and would Tredown take a look at it. How's that?”

“Much what I'd have said myself,” said Wexford.

“It's not so easy after that, though, is it? I mean, does Tredown just say yes, fine, I'd love to, there's nothing I'd like better than wasting a week reading your rubbish? I don't think so.”

Wexford laughed. “I don't think so, either. But remember, I've read The First Heaven. I didn't much fancy reading it, I thought I might manage a chapter or two, but once I'd started I recognized it was good. I didn't enjoy it, it's not the kind of thing I like, but I could see others might, thousands of others might.”

Burden was looking at him in a kind of wonder, with that look on his face a man might wear when he hears that an acquaintance has an obsession for some esoteric pursuit, learning Farsi, for instance, or studying sea anemones. But he tried. He concentrated. “You mean,” he struggled, “Tredown might have sort of glanced at it not to be-well, not to be rude. He's a very courteous man, don't you think? And then he went on, rather like you, he had a job to put it down, and he sort of read to the end and…”

“And wondered how he could get hold of it for himself,” Wexford said. “How he did I can't quite see, but somehow he did. Did he buy it from Miller? Or steal it? I could believe one or both of those women somehow cheated Miller out of it.”

“Then Tredown needed to check accuracy and invited Hexham down. I don't like that much, Reg. Why didn't Hexham tell his wife he was going to call on Tredown after he'd been to that funeral?”

“Come to that,” said Wexford, “why didn't he tell his wife anything about where he was going after the funeral, whether it was to visit Tredown or anything else? He didn't, that's all. But he went somewhere and ended up in that trench in Grimble's Field. Did he somehow find out that Tredown intended to pass off someone else's work as his own? He may have threatened to make what he knew public and was killed for it. We don't know what happened to Miller either, except that he left Tredown and went home, wherever his home was at that time. Three years later he came back.”

“And blackmailed Tredown over that book. Maeve or Claudia gave him a thousand pounds to keep him quiet, not a hundred pounds for a wedding present. If he hadn't gone into Grimble's house and got himself shot by Ronald McNeil, I wonder how long it would have been before one of those women killed him.”

“I think you're right, Mike,” Wexford said as he heard his front door open and close again. Dora came into the room with Sheila and Sylvia behind her.

“Why are you two sitting in the dark?” she said after saying hello to Burden.

“I hadn't noticed we were. How was your meeting?”

Sheila put her arms around him and kissed him. “I can't stay, Pop. It'll take an hour for Clive to drive me home as it is. By the way, Matea Imran was there. She said her parents are back from Somalia and Shamis is all right. Syl will tell you all about it.”

The Imrans had returned home the day before. Of the family, only Matea had been at the meeting. “She made a point of coming up to me,” Sylvia said, “and telling me her sister hadn't been circumcised. She'd been mistaken about that.”

“Really?” Wexford saw Burden out, given a lift home in Sheila's car. “I wouldn't believe a word that girl says,” he said to Sylvia.

She was shocked. “Dad! I thought you liked her.”

“Liking doesn't come into it. In the circumstances I don't trust her. This is her family, Sylvia. Whatever she may have said at first, coming here and telling me what she was afraid of. Now she knows a bit more about it.”

Dora laid her hand on his arm. “I can understand,” she said. “Even if they'd done that awful thing to her sister, she won't want her parents sent to prison. She won't do what she'd think of as betraying them.”

“Quite,” he said. “I couldn't have put it so well myself.”

“Then what are you going to do, Dad?”

“I'm going to bed,” said Wexford, “and tomorrow I shall have a word with Dr. Akande.”