Not in the Flesh

2

The thing that had come out of the pit lay exposed for them to see, a bunch of bones that looked more than anything like broom-sticks, a skull to which scraps of decomposed tissue still adhered, all wrapped in purple cotton. They had been digging for two hours, an operation watched by Jim Belbury and his dog.

“Man or woman?” Chief Inspector Wexford asked.

“Hard to say.” The pathologist was a young woman who looked like a fifteen-year-old model, thin, tall, pale, and other-worldly. “I'll tell you when I've taken a closer look.”

“How long has it been there?”

Carina Laxton eyed Wexford and his sergeant, DS Hannah Goldsmith, who had asked the question. “And how long have you two been in the force? Isn't it about time you knew I can't give you an immediate answer when a cadaver's obviously been buried for years?”

“Okay, but is it months or decades?”

“Maybe one decade. What I can tell you is you're wasting your time taking all these measurements and photographs as if someone put it there last week.”

“Maybe Mr. Belbury can help us there,” said Wexford. He had decided not to mention the fact that Jim Belbury was trespassing, had probably been trespassing for years. “Did your dog ever dig here before?”

“Not on this spot, no,” said Jim. “Over there where there's more bigger trees. Can I ask you if you reckon it's what you call foul play?”

Wexford was tempted to say, well, no, you can't, but he relented. “Someone buried him or her, so you have to-” he began but Hannah interrupted him.

“Law-abiding people don't bury bodies they find lying about, you know,” she said sharply. “Perhaps you should be on your way, Mr. Belbury. Thank you, you've been very helpful.”

But Jim wasn't to be dismissed so easily. Finding Wexford sympathetic and everyone else-Hannah, the scene-of-crime officer, the photographers, the pathologist, and various policemen-of no account, he began giving the chief inspector details of all the houses and their occupants in the vicinity. “That's Mr. Tredown's place next door and down there's the Hunters and the Pickfords. Over the other side that's Mr. Borodin. I've lived in Flagford all my life. There's nothing I don't know.”

“Then you can tell me who owns this land.” Wexford extended his arm and waved his hand. “Must be at least an acre.”

His politically correct sergeant murmured something about hectares being a more appropriate measurement “in the present day,” but no one took much notice of her.

“An acre and a half,” said Jim with a glare at Hannah. “We don't have no hectares round here. Them belongs in the Common Market.” Like many people of his age, Jim still referred in this way to the European Union. “Who owns it? Well, Mr. Grimble, innit? This here is Old Grimble's Field.”

Though he might possibly be compounding a felony, seeing that the subterranean fungi in the bag properly belonged to this Grimble, Wexford thanked Jim and offered him a lift home in a police car.

“And my dog?” said Jim.

“And your dog.”

His offer gratefully accepted, he and Hannah moved away, heading for the road where police vehicles were parked along the pavement. It became, within a short distance, Flagford High Street, a somewhat too picturesque village center where stood the thirteenth-century church, a post office and general store, a shop that sold mosaic tabletops, another purveying lime-flower honey and mulberry conserve, and a number of flint-walled cottages, one thatched and another with its own bell tower.

Wexford, in the car, said to Hannah that, for all the times he had been to Flagford, he couldn't remember noticing that piece of land before.

“I don't think I've ever been here before, guv,” said Hannah.

He had grown accustomed to her calling him that and supposed she had originally got it off the television. The Bill, probably. Not that he liked it, while admitting it was current usage, but the trouble was all his officers had learned it from her and now no one kept to the old “sir.” Burden would know who owned that land. He had a relative living in Flagford, his first wife's cousin, Wexford thought it was.

“There's not much to be done,” Hannah was saying, “until we know how long that body's been there.”

“Let's hope Carina will know by later today.”

“Meanwhile I could find out more about this Grimble and if he owns the old house on it.”

“Right, but let me talk to Mr. Burden first.”

Hannah directed one of her looks at him. She was a beautiful young woman, black-haired, white-skinned, with large brown eyes that softened into a quite disproportionate pitying sorrow combined with a desire to reproach him gently whenever he committed the solecism of using terms or styles she thought obsolete. “Mr. Burden, oh, come,” her glance said while the perfect lips stayed closed. Their relative ranks made reproach impossible, but glances were free. As Wexford himself might have said, a cat may look at a king.

It was a gentle sunny day, what weather forecasters were starting to call “quiet” weather, the temperature high for September, all the leaves still on the trees and most of them still green. Summer flowers in pots and urns and window boxes still bloomed on and on, more luxuriantly than in August. Frosts were due, frosts would normally have come by now, but none had. If this was global warming, and Wexford thought it must be, it disguised its awful face under a mask of mild innocence. The sky had become the milky blue of midsummer covered with tiny white puffs of cloud.

He called Burden a moment after he got into the police station, but the inspector's voice mail told him he was occupied in an interview room. That would be his interview with Darrel Fincher, the teenager found with a knife on him. You could predict, without hearing a word of their conversation, what the boy would say: that he carried the knife for protection, that going home from school or going out in the evening he wouldn't feel safe without a knife. It was “all them Somalis,” he would say. They were everywhere and they all had knives. That was what they called dark-skinned people these days, “them Somalis,” as they had once indiscriminately called Asians “them Pakis.” Wexford turned his thoughts to the Flagford corpse. With luck, it wouldn't have been there for more than a year or two and would turn out to be that chap he could remember going missing a while back after a ram raid on a jeweler's or the old woman who lived alone in a Forby cottage. After failing to visit her for three months her daughter had remembered her existence but on going there had found her apparently long gone. One of them it would most likely be. Strange, he thought, that death and subsequent decay wipe away age and sex and every distinguishing feature so that nothing is left but bones and a rag or two. And a hand, unearthed by an enthusiastic mongrel. How comforting it must have been when men and women (or women and men, as Hannah would say) believed that the body is but a sheath for the spirit which, at the point of death, flies away to some afterlife or paradise. It would hardly matter to you then, if your faith were strong enough, that you met your death from the blade of a knife, a bludgeon, or because your heart gave its final beat in the natural course of things.

He came down to earth from these postmortem reflections when his office door opened and Burden walked in. “That bit of land at Flagford where the dog-walker found a body? Of course I know who owns it. Everybody knows.”

“I don't,” said Wexford. “And what d'you mean, everybody knows? It's not the Tower of London, it's not Harrods.”

“I mean this guy it belongs to tells everyone how hard done by he is by the planning people. His name's Grimble, John Grimble. He's even had a piece about himself in the Courier. He's obsessed. His father died-well, his stepfather it was-and left him the bungalow and the land it's on, and ever since he's been trying to get planning permission to build houses on it. He thinks he's been badly treated-that's an understatement-because they'll let him build one but not more.”

“Where does he live?”

“The street next to me, worse luck. The dog-walker must have known.”

“He's not a dog-walker. He's a truffle-hunter.”

Burden's normally impassive face brightened. “A truffle-hunter? How amazing. Tuber aestivum, Tuber gibbosum, Tuber magnatum, or Tuber melanosporum? ”

Wexford stared. “What do you know about truffles, since I suppose that's what you're talking about?”

“I used to hunt for them with my dad and our dog when I was a boy. Found a good many too. My grandfather used a pig-a sow, of course. Truffles smell like the male swine sex attractant, you see, but the trouble is that pigs'll eat anything, so they tend to eat the truffles before you can stop them and that's a bit expensive when you consider-”

“Mike, sit down a minute.”

Burden, one of those restless people who perch rather than sit and fidget instead of relaxing, balanced himself on the edge of Wexford's desk. He had at last, regretfully, discarded his designer jeans and was wearing charcoal trousers with a knife-edge crease and a stone-colored polo neck under a linen jacket. Wexford thought rather wistfully that when he tried to get himself up in casual gear he just looked like someone's dad going to a fancy dress party.

“Never mind truffles. How long has this obsessive owned the land?”

“Must be at least ten years. More like twelve. I don't suppose the people on either side like it much, having a sort of wilderness next door, I mean. Apparently, when old Grimble lived there he kept the place neat and tidy. His garden was quite famous locally. This one-John Grimble-has let the place turn into a wood. He doesn't even mow the grass. And he says things are going to stay as they are until he gets his planning permission. For two houses, that is. He'll never agree to pulling down that old ruin of a bungalow-it's called Sunnybank, by the way-and building one house. Or that's what he says.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Something in the building trade. He's put up a few houses around the place and made a lot of money. If you see a jerry-built eyesore, it'll be Grimble's. He's retired now, though he's only in his fifties.”

“We'll go and see him.”

“Why not? If it turns out he's murdered one of the district planners, our task is going to be easy.”

John and Kathleen Grimble belonged to that category of people who, after about forty, decide consciously or unconsciously to become old. While the cult of youth prevails in society, while to be young is to be beautiful, bright, and lovable, they sink rapidly into middle age and even seem to cultivate the disabilities of the aged. Wexford's theory was that they do this out of laziness and because of the benefits incident to being elderly. The old are not expected to take exercise, lift heavy weights, or do much for themselves. They are pitied but they are also ignored. No one asks them to do anything or, come to that, to stop doing anything they choose to do. Burden had told him John Grimble was just fifty years old, his wife two or three years younger. They looked, each of them, at least ten years older than that, anchored to orthopedic armchairs, the kind that have back supports and adjustable footrests, placed in the best position for perpetual television watching.

He nodded to Burden, his neighbor. In response to Wexford's “Good afternoon, Mr. Grimble,” he merely stared. His wife said she was pleased to meet them in the tones of an old woman waking from her after-lunch siesta. On the way there Burden had explained something of the obsession that contributed to Grimble's reputation, so Wexford wasn't surprised at his first words.

“I mean to say,” Grimble began, “if I tell you something that may put you on the right road to catching a criminal, will you use your influence to get my permission?”

“Oh, John,” said Kathleen Grimble.

“Oh, John, oh, John, you're a parrot, you are. Now, Mr. Burden-it is Mr. Burden, isn't it? You hear what I say-will you?”

“What permission would that be?” Wexford asked.

“Didn't he tell you?” Grimble said in his surly, grudging voice. He cocked a thumb in Burden's direction. “It's not as if everybody don't know. It's common knowledge. All I want is to be told I can build houses on what's my own, my own land that my dear old dad left me in his last will and testament-well, my stepdad he was, but as good as a father to me. So what I'm saying is, if I scratch your back will you scratch mine?”

“We have no influence at all with the planning authority, Mr. Grimble. None at all. But I must tell you that this is a murder case and you are obliged to tell us what you know. Withholding information is a criminal offense.”

A tall thin man, one of a race who is classified as white and would be horrified if otherwise designated, Grimble had skin discolored to a dark brownish-gray, suffused about his nose and chin with crimson. A perpetual frown had creased up his forehead and dug deep furrows across his cheeks. He stuck out his lower lip like a mutinous child and said, “It's a funny thing how everybody's against me getting permission to build on my own land. Everybody. All my old dad's neighbors. All of them objected. Never mind how I know, I do know, that's all. Now it's the police. You wouldn't think the police would care, would you? If they're for law and order, like they're supposed to be, they ought to want four nice houses put up on that land, four houses with nice gardens and people as can afford them living there. Not asylum seekers, mind, not the so-called homeless, not Somalis, but decent people with a bit of money.”

“Oh, John,” said Kathleen.

Wexford got to his feet. He said sternly, “Mr. Grimble, either tell us what you have to tell us now or I shall ask you to accompany us to the police station and tell us there. In an interview room. Do you understand me?”

No apology was forthcoming. Wexford thought Grimble could take a prize for surliness, but it seemed the man hadn't even begun. His features gathered themselves into a bunch composed of the deepest frown a human being could contrive, a wrinkling of his potatolike nose and a baring of the teeth, the result of curling back his top lip. His wife shook her head.

“Your blood pressure will go sky high, John. You know what the doctor said.”

Whatever the doctor had said, reminding Grimble of it caused a very slight reduction in frown and teeth-baring. He spoke suddenly and rapidly. “Me and my pal, we reckoned we'd put in the main drainage. Get started on it. Get rid of the old septic tank. Link the new houses up to the main drain in the road. You get me? We got down to digging a trench-”

“Just a minute,” said Wexford, loath to remind him of his grievance but seeing no way to avoid it. “What new houses? You hadn't got planning permission for any new houses.”

“D'you think I don't know that? I'm talking about eleven years ago. I didn't know then, did I? My pal knew a chap in the planning and he said I was bound to get permission, bound to. He said, you go ahead, do what you want. Your pal-meaning me-he may not get it for four houses but there's no way they'd say no to two, right?”

“Exactly when was this? You said eleven years ago. When did your stepfather die?”

Unexpectedly, Kathleen intervened. “Now, John, you just let me tell them.” Sulkily, Grimble nodded, contemplated the television on which the sound had been turned down fully but the picture remained. “John's dad-his name was Arthur-he died in the January. January '95, that is. He left this will, straightforward it was, no problems. I don't know the ins and outs of it but the up-shot was that it was John's in the May.”

“That piece of land, Mrs. Grimble, and the house on it?”

“That's right. He wanted to pull down the old place and get building, but his pal Bill Runge-that's the pal he's talking about-he said, you can't do that, John, you have to get permission, so John got me to write to the council and ask to put up four houses. You got all that?”

“Yes, I think so, thank you.” Wexford turned back to John Grimble, who was leaning forward, his head on one side, in an attempt to hear the soundless television program. “So without getting the permission,” he said, “you and Mr. Runge started digging a trench for the main drainage? When would that have been?… Mr. Grimble, I'm speaking to you.”

“All right. I hear you. Them busybody neighbors, it was them as put a spoke in my wheel, that fellow Tredown and those Pickfords. Them McNeils what used to live at Flagford Hall. I know what I know. That's why I never pulled down my dad's old house. Leave it there, I thought to myself, leave it there to be an eyesore to that lot. They won't like that and they don't. Leave the weeds there and the bloody nettles. Let the damn trees take over.”

Wexford sighed silently. “I'm right, aren't I, in thinking that you and your friend started digging a trench between where you expected the houses would be sited and the road itself?” A surly nod from Grimble. “But your application for planning permission was refused. You could build one house but no more. So you filled in the trench. And all this was eleven years ago.”

“If you know,” said Grimble, “I don't know why you bother to ask, wasting my time.”

“Oh, John, don't,” said Kathleen Grimble, slightly varying her admonition.

“We dug a trench like I said, and left it open for a day or two and then those bastards at the planning turned me down so we filled the bugger in.”

“I'd like you to think carefully, Mr. Grimble.” Wexford doubted if this was possible, but he tried. “Between the time you dug the trench and the time you filled it in, was it”-he paused-“in any way interfered with?”

“What d'you mean, interfered with?” Grimble asked.

“Had it been touched? Had anything been put in it? Had it been disturbed?”

“How should I know? Bill Runge filled it in. I paid him to do it and he done it. To be honest with you, I was too upset to go near the place. I mean I'd banked on getting that permission, I'd as near as dammit been promised I'd get it. Can you wonder I was fed up to my back teeth? I was ill as a matter of fact. You ask the wife. I was laid up in bed, had to have the doctor, and he said no wonder you're in a bad way, Mr. Grimble, he said, your nerves are shot to pieces and all because of those planning people and I said-”

Wexford almost had to shout to get a word in. “When was permission refused?”

Again it was Kathleen who answered him. “I'll never forget the date, he was in such a state. He started the digging end of May and the second week of June they wrote to him and said he could build one house but not more.”

Out in the little hallway, shaking her head, casting up her eyes, and with a glance at the open door behind them, she whispered, “He's still on the phone to his pal most days. After eleven years! That's all they talk about, those two, that blessed planning permission. It gets you down.”

Wexford smiled noncommittally.

Rather shyly, she peered up into his face. She was a little woman with thinning reddish hair, round wire-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose. “I don't know if I ought to ask, but how did you know there was a dead body in there? It wasn't that truffle man, was it? I thought he'd died.”

Wexford only smiled.

“If John thought that, he'd go mad. He hates that truffle man. He hates trespassers. But if he's dead, that's all right.”

“I've a feeling,” Wexford said when they were back at the police station, “that we've got a mystery person-man or woman, we don't know yet-on our hands. Identification is going to be a problem. I shan't be surprised if we're still asking who this character is in three months' time. It's just a hunch but I do have these hunches and often they're right.”

Burden shrugged. “And just as often they're wrong. His teeth, her teeth, will identify him or her. His or her dentition, I should say. It never, or rather, seldom, fails.”

“I'm not telling the media anything till Carina gets back to me. It's not a good idea, confronting them with a cadaver we can't even say was a man or a woman. We can't say how he or she died or whether foul play, as they always put it, is suspected or not.”

“What is it you always say?” said Burden. “A body illicitly interred is a body unlawfully killed.”

“Pretty well true,” said Wexford, “but not invariably.”

“By the way, the kid with the knife said his mother gave it to him. She's called Leeanne Fincher. She said it made her feel better when he was out of the house knowing he'd got a weapon. I think I'll go see her on my way home.”

Wexford too went home. He walked. Dr. Akande had told him it was time he paid attention to that long-neglected piece of machinery, that once-efficient pump, his heart. Not in the half-hearted (halfhearted!) way he had in the past, dieting in a feeble fashion, forgetting the diet in favor of indulgence in meat and cheese and whiskey, exercising in ever-decreasing spurts, letting Donaldson drive him whenever it rained or the temperature fell below fifteen degrees, running out of statins and not renewing his prescription. Now it was a walk to work and a walk home every day, a double dose of Lipitor, a single glass of red wine every evening, and cultivating a liking for salads. Why did all women love salads and all men hate them? You could almost say that real men don't eat green stuff. He had refused adamantly and rudely to join a gym. Burden went to one, of course, bouncing up and down on cross-trainers and walkways-or was it crossways and walk-trainers?-and pumping metal bars that weighed more than he did.

The walk was downhill in the morning and uphill in the evening. He often wished the reverse was true. He had even tried to find a new way of doing the journey so that, if not downhill, it was flat all the way, surely a possibility if one's route went around the side of a hill. It might be a possibility, but it wasn't discoverable in the terrain of Kingsmarkham. He turned the corner into his own street and approached the house where Mr. and Mrs. Dirir and their son lived. It was called Mogadishu, which Wexford knew he should have found touching, exiles reminding themselves daily of their native land. Only he didn't. He found it irritating, not, he told himself, because it was such a very un-English name for a house, but because it had a name at all. Most, if not all, of the other houses in the street had numbers only. But he wasn't quite sure that this was the real reason. The real reason would be racist, and this bothered him for he sincerely did his best, constantly examining his conscience and his motives, to avoid even a smidgen of race prejudice. If it underlay his feelings about the Dirirs, it could perhaps be attributed to the undoubted bias in the town and no less among the police, against immigrants from Somalia. There was a small colony of them in Kingsmarkham, mostly law-abiding, it seemed, though they seemed as a race to be secretive people, modest, quiet, religious-some Christian, most Moslem-industrious, and reserved. The bias rested on the fact or the suspicion or the unfounded prejudice that their sons went about armed with knives.

When the Dirir's and their son came around for a drink-in their case Dora's latest health fad, pomegranate juice or, as they preferred, fizzy lemonade-they all got on well, even if conversation was a little stilted. They spoke good English, were considerably better educated, he had thought ruefully, than he was, and all of them anxious for the betterment of their community's fortunes. Mrs. Dirir constituted herself a kind of social worker among her fellow immigrants, keeping an eye on their health, their work opportunities, their financial state, and the welfare of their children. Her husband was a civil servant in the local benefit office, her son a student at the University of the South in Myringham.

Wexford had noticed that while he and Dora called everyone else they knew in the neighborhood by their given names, the Somali couple were Mr. and Mrs. Dirir just as they were Mr. and Mrs. Wexford. If Hannah Goldsmith had been aware of this, she would have called it racism of the worst kind, the sort that decrees meting out an extravagant respect to people of a different color from oneself; a respect, she would say, that in the half-baked liberal masks contempt. Wexford was pretty sure he didn't feel contempt for the Dirirs, rather a puzzlement and a failure to find any common ground between them. He thought he might try calling Mr. Dirir Omar next time he met him, and Mrs. Dirir Iman, and as he was wondering how he might achieve this, Mrs. Dirir emerged from her front door for no reason that he could discern but to say, “Good evening, Mr. Wexford.”

There was no time like the present. It still took a bit of nerve to say as he did, “Good evening, Iman. How are you?”

She seemed somewhat taken aback, said in a preoccupied way, “Fine. I am fine, thank you,” and retreated into the house. He worried all the rest of the way home that he had been too precipitate and offended her.

The next day Carina Laxton told him the body found on Grimble's land had once, between ten and twelve years before when it was still alive, been a man. Whoever had killed him had wrapped his body in some kind of purple cloth before burying him. What he had died of she couldn't tell and warned him with a frown that it was possible she might never be able to tell. It was policy now to have two pathologists conduct the autopsy, and Dr. Mavrikian had also been present. Scanning the report, Wexford saw that he also had little faith in ever finding the cause of death. The only clue to that cause was a crack in one of the dead man's ribs.