Not in the Flesh

4

Eighty names were on Peach's list, fifty-seven of them women and girls. To Wexford's pleasure-he had warmly congratulated Peach on his achievement-he had not only included dates, ages, and addresses but descriptions and, to a certain extent, idiosyncrasies.

“It reminds me of the days when you used to have to put ‘distinguishing marks’ in your passport,” Wexford said, a printout in his hand. “There's a chap disappeared he says has a wart on the lobe of his left ear and another one got six toes on one foot.”

“Sounds nauseating.” Burden was in a gloomy mood this morning. “I suppose Peach did all this in what one might call the firm's time.”

“Oh, come on, Mike. It was the firm's business.”

“Maybe, but no one instructed him to do it. For all we know it may not be accurate. And we haven't finished local enquiries yet. Peach's stuff may not be needed.”

Wexford made no reply. They were on their way to Flagford, their destination Athelstan House, home of the Tredowns.

On the previous evening Wexford had reached home to find his wife reading a novel called The Son of Nun.

“Is that one of Tredown's?”

Dora looked up. “It's an early one, published twenty years ago. You said you were going to see him tomorrow, so I got it out when I was in the library.”

“Sounds like unseemly goings-on in a convent. Who was the son of Nun, anyway?”

“Joshua, apparently, though I haven't got to him yet.”

“It's characters like that Joshua who turned me against religion when I was young,” said Wexford. “All he did was fight battles in the name of the Lord and when the Lord told him to slaughter all the inhabitants of a city, he did slaughter them along with their children and babies and their oxen and their asses. If he was around today we'd call him a war criminal.”

“Things were different then,” said Dora vaguely. “Does Tredown always write about biblical subjects?”

“Don't ask me. I only read one. That was about Esther and that despot she married. The only character I liked was his first wife, who he divorced because she defied him. Talking of wives and defiance, is there anything to eat?”

“When have you ever come home, Reg, and found nothing to eat?”

“I only asked,” said Wexford. “D'you want a drink first? I must have my requisite red wine.”

Later on, after she had gone to bed, taking The Son of Nun with her, he looked through his bookcases and found the only book of Tredown's they possessed, The Queen of Babylon. He hoped this case wasn't going to take a turn that would necessitate his reading any more of them. Opposite the title page were listed Tredown's works. The Son of Nun, The People of the Book, The Widow and Her Daughter, The First Heaven. This last, he remembered reading somewhere, was hailed as Tredown's masterpiece for which he had won something called the Fredrik Gartensen Fantasy Prize. Which biblical genocide or monstrous injustice did that chronicle, he wondered, as he shut up the book and went to bed.

Now he was on his way to see its author. There was very little traffic about. Donaldson had chosen to take the back lanes instead of the Kingsmarkham Road. They drove through lush green byways where the leaves were beginning to turn to pale gold and the fuzzy tangle of old man's beard covered the hedgerows. The cattle in the meadows browsed calmly in the mild sunshine, but in a broad paddock a glossy bay horse and a gray raced each other around its perimeter, manes flying.

“It would be nice to walk across there with a dog,” said Wexford, “down into the valley and up the other side on to the Downs.”

Burden looked at him. “You don't like dogs.”

“Not much, but you have to have an excuse for that kind of thing.”

“He's seriously ill, you know.”

“Who is?”

“Tredown. Jenny told me. Liver cancer. I think it is.”

Wexford said nothing. He thought about cancer, the way so many people he and Dora knew had it or had had it but got better. Yet all the other people who hadn't got it still went about talking of cancer as if it was a death sentence, the end of the world, a fate worse than death itself. One day they wouldn't anymore, he supposed. He was aware that Donaldson was getting out of the car to open a pair of gates. They had arrived.

A driveway went up between trees with overhanging branches. Between their trunks, on the left-hand side, Grimble's Field could be seen, very green this morning and, as always, providing exercise for a man and a dog. The decaying bungalow lay among the encroaching trees as if it were dead itself, waiting only to be picked up and removed to a grave of its own.

The Athelstan House drive widened into a broad graveled space. Seen up close, the home was unprepossessing, large, ill-proportioned, mainly of purplish-red brick, roofed in bright blue-gray slates and with Gothic ogee-topped windows of buff-colored stone. The front door might have been a church doorway, dark brown, black-iron-studded, and with a purely ornamental curved handle. Wexford had the curious impression that it was a house of too many colors. And they were colors that clashed, all the ill-suited brown and purple and blue and cream jumbled and jangling together. Its being set against a rich backcloth of dark greens and autumn golds didn't help matters. He thought how much he would have disliked living in it, and then he rang the bell.

A phone call had warned Maeve Tredown of their coming. She still looked surprised as if she had expected very different-looking men, Sherlock Holmes and Watson perhaps, or two uniformed comedy cops.

“You'd better come in,” she said. “Please wipe your feet.” She seemed to realize that outside it was a fine, warm, and above all dry autumn day, and added, “No, I see. It isn't raining, is it?”

The inside confirmed Wexford's opinion that Victorian builders (architects?) had gone out of their way to make their interiors hideous. This must have been what Lewis Carroll had in mind when he used the word “uglification.” The hallway was a passage, not particularly narrow but made to look narrower by the height of its ceiling and the vertical-striped green and yellow wallpaper. A kind of mosaic of black and ocher tiles covered the floor. As if an attempt was being made to conceal as much of the decor as possible, enough coats and capes and raincoats and mackintoshes and cagoules and anoraks and duffels and cardigans hung on ranges of hooks to protect twenty people from the weather, while appropriate footwear-boots and shoes and sneakers and even something Wexford hadn't seen for years, galoshes-stood in pairs on the yellow and black tiles. What room remained against the walls was occupied by suitcases and shopping bags.

“In here,” said Maeve Tredown, opening a door.

It was a large room and, in spite of the warmth outside, very cold. Its window faced north and overlooked a lawn surrounded by trees, predominantly evergreens. The furniture was unnoticeable, nondescript chairs and sofas and tables. The carpet, patterned in reds and browns, reminded him of nothing so much as a dinner plate off which someone had just eaten a meal of fish and chips with tomato ketchup and a good sprinkling of vinegar. What dominated the place were books, hundreds of them, possibly thousands, in unglazed bookshelves that covered three walls from floor to ceiling. The fourth side of the room was mostly a window and one in dire need of cleaning. Looking out, her back to the room, stood a tall thin woman with long black hair.

“You'd better sit down.”

Maeve Tredown spoke as if she begrudged every word she uttered. She was small and round with a face like a pretty piglet's and dyed blond hair, a surely harmless and inoffensive woman. Just the same, Wexford felt that if he had been shown a photograph of her and told she was the matron of a notoriously cruel old people's home or the director of a brutal boot camp, he wouldn't have been surprised. It was all to do with her economical and clipped speech, the iciness in her light blue eyes, and the severe gray flannel suit she wore.

“I don't know what it is you want.” She glanced in the direction of the other woman, seemed to be considering whether there was any point in introducing her, and finally decided that there was no help for it. “Claudia,” she said, “I suppose these men are as likely to want to talk to you as to me.”

In turning round, the black-haired woman caused something of a shock. From the back she might have been twenty-five. When she faced them, even in the shadow that fell across her face, she at once became close on sixty. She was extravagantly thin, with the thinness that is natural and unaffected by dieting or overeating, and her face was deeply lined. She came up to them, held out a long-fingered, rope-veined hand, smiled, and was immediately transformed into a ravaged beauty.

“How do you do? I'm Claudia Ricardo. Well, I was Tredown when I was married to Owen, but I reverted when we were divorced. Ricardo was my maiden name, though I wasn't actually a maiden for very long.”

Burden was less able to deal with this sort of thing than Wexford. He resorted to ignoring it and speaking in the stolid gloomy tone of a copper on the beat. They had, he said, some questions they would like to ask. Wexford would probably have enjoyed himself at Mrs. Tredown's expense and engaged in repartee with Claudia Ricardo, but Burden's technique may have been more effective. “We'd like to speak to Mr. Tredown as well.”

“No can do,” said Maeve in a phrase Wexford hadn't heard for years.

“Yes, I understand he's ill,” Wexford said. “We'll disturb him as little as possible.”

“It's not that he's ill. He is, but that's not the point. He's working.”

Claudia Ricardo gave another of her smiles, a less charming one this time. “My wife-in-law-that's what we call each other-likes to keep his nose to the grindstone. I mean, his books are our bread and butter. She cracks the whip, don't you, Em darling?”

It was Maeve Tredown who smiled this time. She appeared not to be the least offended but fixed Claudia with a conspiratorial smile, accompanied by a companionable wrinkling of the nose, a kind of what-a-one-you-are expression.

Wexford thought he preferred her when she was taciturn. “Very well. It's not necessary to see him today,” he said. “Perhaps you can answer a few questions. No doubt you know a body was discovered in Grimble's Field. We're having some difficulty of identification. Are you aware of anyone going missing in the area about eleven years ago?”

“How would we?” This was Maeve who had seated herself on a slippery black leather sofa with Claudia beside her. “What has that dump to do with us?”

“Probably nothing, but do you know of anyone being missing around here? It would be eleven years ago last May or June.”

Few people are able to utter an unadorned no but Maeve Tredown managed it. “No.”

Claudia aimed at being more helpful. “That would have been soon after I came to live here,” she said. “I married again after the divorce, but that didn't work out either. Maeve asked me if I'd like to come here and live with them. Nice of her, wasn't it? A bit odd, you might say-well, you would say, but very nice. We'd always got on, far better than I did with Owen, though that was a lot better when I wasn't married to him.”

Why tell them all this? Wexford had no idea. Because it amused her? Because she had decided they were both dense plodders? “You must have seen Mr. Grimble and his friend digging a trench across the field.”

“We saw that,” said Maeve, becoming more expansive. “I was delighted when they refused him planning permission.”

“Me too.” Claudia bounced up and down on the leather seat, like a child offered an unexpected treat. “I had a little holiday in my heart. Don't you think that's a nice expression? I almost had an orgasm when I heard.”

Maeve said suddenly, “There was that cousin or brother-in-law or some relative of Grimble's who went missing around then. I've just remembered,” as if someone had asked. “I can't tell you who it was, but everybody knew. I expect that's who it is.”

“That's exactly right,” said Claudia with a merry laugh. “Yes, I expect Grimble killed him and put him in the trench. I'm so sorry you can't see Owen now. Could you come back another time? Actually it's lovely to have some male company, isn't it, Em?”

“How did they know the body was in the trench?” said Burden on the way back.

“We told them.”

“Well, not exactly. You just said Grimble and his friend were digging a trench.”

“Oh, come on, Mike. Whatever you think of them, they're not stupid. Anyone would pick that up. Besides, it said a body was in a trench on the local TV news. I'm more interested in this missing relative Grimble didn't mention.”

“Maybe he's on Peach's list,” said Burden.

He was. He was one of the two men who had gone missing at the relevant time, Peter Darracott and Charlie Cummings. Hannah Goldsmith and Lyn Fancourt had spent the morning tracking down their families and discovered that Peter Darracott, who had disappeared from home in May 1995, was John Grimble's second cousin, his natural father's cousin's son.

His wife had gone away on holiday with her next-door neighbor to Tenerife, a ten-day package. If she wanted foreign holidays, Christine Darracott told Hannah, she'd always had to go with a friend. Her husband was afraid of flying.

“I used to tell people he got airsick,” she said and her face became vindictive. “I used to, but if anyone asks me now I tell the truth. I'm done with shielding him from everything. He was scared shitless, if you want the truth.”

“You came home and found him gone, Mrs. Darracott?” Home was a terraced house in Pestle Lane, parallel to Kingsmarkham High Street. “Hadn't he even left you a note?”

“Nothing. Not a sausage. Mind you, he left me the bed he hadn't made and his dirty dishes and full ashtrays everywhere. But that was normal.”

“He'd taken a lot of his clothes,” Hannah told Wexford, “and things they owned in common, a radio, a little portable TV-oh, and a hair dryer. What does a man want with a hair dryer?”

“Much the same as what a woman does, I suppose. Maybe he'd had long hair. You mustn't be sexist, DS Goldsmith.”

Hannah had the grace to laugh. “The truth is he took it out of spite. Why women get married I never will know.”

“Well, you're going to,” said Burden, “unless that ring's purely for ornament.”

“We shall see,” said Hannah, unfazed. “She told me Peter was Grimble's second cousin, whatever that means. Apparently, there's a huge family, spread out everywhere. She reported Peter as missing but doesn't appear to have taken steps herself to find him. She more or less said it was good riddance. ‘One thing, he wouldn't have left the country,’ she said. ‘Too scared to get on a plane.’ ”

“Did they know each other?” Wexford asked. “I mean, Grimble and this Peter Darracott?” He turned to Burden. “Do you know your second cousins? Do you, Lyn?”

“I wouldn't even know what makes someone your second cousin,” said Burden.

Lyn smiled. “You'd know them if you were like me and hadn't got many relations. Apart from my mum and dad, my second cousin is the only relative I've got.”

“According to Peach's list and comments,” said Wexford, “Christine Darracott never heard from him again. It's always hard to imagine how this can happen, someone disappearing and being gone for good, but it does, all the time. Of course it helps when their nearest and dearest would just as soon they never turned up. How about Charlie Cummings, Lyn?”

He had gone missing from the house in which he lived with his mother in December 1994. Both lived on the benefit, Charlie having some kind of disability, what would now be called, Lyn said, “learning difficulties.” Apparently, both he and his mother were unable to read or write. The details Lyn had came from Mrs. Cummings's neighbor, Mrs. Cummings herself having died in 2000.

“Doris Lomax, that's the woman next door, said she died of a broken heart. There was quite a hunt for Cummings. I mean, you can see there would have been, with him not being normal and never going out much except to the village shop. That's where he went on that day in December. It was in the morning. He went to the shop to get a loaf and a packet of tea bags and he was-well, he was never seen again. Mrs. Cummings went next door to Mrs. Lomax and I gather Mrs. Lomax sort of took charge. She phoned us and then practically the whole village turned out to hunt for him.”

“I remember this case,” Wexford said. “I remember it well, and you must, too, Mike.”

“I got involved in the search. We turned the place over, looking for him. It was like a search for a child.”

“I suppose he was a child,” said Wexford sadly. I just hope, he didn't say aloud, that dreadful thing in Grimble's Field isn't him. I'd like to find he'd turned up, living in Brighton with a kindly woman as childlike as himself. “And now, if you and Hannah and maybe Damon will start tracking down previous owners of houses in Pump Lane and the Kingsmarkham Road, you and I, Mike, will have another session with Grimble.”