Not In The Flesh_ A Wexford Novel Part 5

"Hard as nails. Mr. Jackson, by the way, owns a highly profitable garage and what he calls an on-the-spot repair shop in Sewingbury. Their house is worth a lot more than mine."

"Good for Nancy. So what happened?"

"Rows, I gathered. Darracott trying to persuade Nancy and Nancy telling him to give up the idea, culminating in Darracott telling her he was going as soon as Christine had departed on this holiday to Tenerife."

"Did she know anything about Grimble asking him to help with digging this trench?"

"Oh, yes. He couldn't make up his mind whether to do it or not, and when he did it was too late. Planning permission was refused, something Nancy said cheered Darracott up no end. Everybody seems to have been happy about that except poor old Grimble. Now sometime at the end of May was the last time Nancy saw Darracott. They couldn't go to her place because her mother had an old pal staying. So where d'you think they went? Over to Flagford to the late Mr. Grimble's bungalow. Sunnybank, it's called."

"What, that derelict dump in Grimble's field? Not exactly a love nest, was it?"

"I suppose pa.s.sion will always find a way. I don't know if it was locked up in those days, she didn't say-didn't know, I suppose. Remember Grimble meant to demolish it as soon as he got his permission. Anyway, they went there, she doesn't remember the date, but it was before Grimble started digging, and Darracott told her he'd decided to go to Cardiff and stop with his other sister-sorry, Reg-until he'd got a job and somewhere to live. He'd write to her. He still hoped she'd join him. Nancy says he gave her his sister's address and phone number. She never heard a word."

"The sister'd be another potential DNA donor, only we don't need her," said Wexford. "And that's it?"

"Well, no, not exactly. I'm not going to say this is just like a woman because you'd be down on me like a ton of bricks for being a s.e.xist, but the fact is she didn't want the guy, she'd broken with him, and as it happens she'd met Jackson by then. For all that, she didn't like it that Darracott hadn't written. She couldn't have meant much to him if he forgot her as soon as she was out of his sight. So she phoned the sister, or tried to, but the number was un-obtainable. She wrote to him at that address and got no reply. And that was it."

"Do we have the sister's name?"

"Dilys Hughes. Coleman's traced her to another address in Cardiff. The difficulty is she remembers very little about the summer of 1995. She had been in the hospital having a hysterectomy around that time. She does remember getting a letter from her brother some weeks earlier asking what were his chances of getting a job in Cardiff and accommodation. It was the first time she'd heard from him for years, she told Coleman. She answered his letter, putting him off, and she never heard from him again until some relative or other told her he'd gone missing."

"So did Darracott ever go to Wales? Or did he go, find his sister was in the hospital, and stay with someone else, stay in a bed-and-breakfast or something?"

"He may have been dead."

"It's beginning to look like it," Wexford said cautiously. "We must hope this DNA test won't take too long. But what motive did Grimble have, Mike? Darracott was a postman. He hadn't any money or if he had it wasn't going to come Grimble's way. Don't tell me Grimble had his eye on Nancy Jackson because I won't believe it. One of the extraordinary things about Grimble is that he appears to be happily married to his Kathleen. Oh, he's a bad-tempered b.u.g.g.e.r. I suppose he could have struck Darracott in a rage over there in that field, bashed him over the head with a spade because he wouldn't help him and Runge fill the trench in."

"We don't believe that, do we?" said Burden.

"I don't think we do. I'll tell you what, it might be wise to have a look inside that bungalow of Grimble's."

"He'll never let us. We'd have to get a warrant."

"Then so be it," said Wexford. "We'll get one. I've just got a feeling not taking a look inside might be something we'd regret."

Chapter Seven.

Wexford had picked up The Son of Nun The Son of Nun and was leafing through it, reading bits of it and rereading them in consternation, when Sheila phoned. and was leafing through it, reading bits of it and rereading them in consternation, when Sheila phoned.

"So you've got the lead in this Tredown epic?"

"Isn't it great? I'm to be Jossabi, the G.o.ddess of love and beauty. She was like a sort of Helen of Troy, you know. The wars in heaven all started because of her being stolen away. Of course you've read The First Heaven The First Heaven?"

"No, I haven't," said Wexford. "I've dipped into it but I don't like fantasy. If I read fiction I want to recognize the characters as real people, the kind of people I might know, not immortal G.o.ds and dinosaurs."

"But, Pop, the point with The First Heaven The First Heaven is that the people all seem real. It's a marvelous book, the kind you can't put it down." is that the people all seem real. It's a marvelous book, the kind you can't put it down."

"I could. If it's anything like The Son of Nun The Son of Nun I don't know why anyone wants to make a film of it. So what's all this about female genital mutilation?" I don't know why anyone wants to make a film of it. So what's all this about female genital mutilation?"

"You've such a big group of Somalis in Kingsmarkham I just thought I should target it in my campaign. Sylvia agrees. I've just been talking to her. The view our campaign takes is all the girls in this country between the ages of three months and twenty with origins in the Horn of Africa should be medically examined every year to check that they've not been mutilated. You could start that, get the GPs to agree to it, and when they find a recent case you could get a prosecution going."

"Get an accusation of inst.i.tutional racism in the police going more like," said Wexford. "You can only do that sort of thing if you examine every girl, not just the African ones, and the NHS hasn't the resources. Oh, I hear what you say. I hate the practice as much as you do, but I've got a more realistic att.i.tude to what can and can't be done."

"I'll tell you something," said Sheila, huffy now. "I bet you if these were little white girls there'd be a national outcry."

He called Dora and left Sheila to her mother. By a.s.sociation, the role of a G.o.ddess of love and beauty reminded him of the girl in the restaurant called A Pa.s.sage to India-Matea. Could she be Somali? And if she was . . . ? The idea of some old woman using a sharpened stone and no anaesthetic to shear away her delicate flesh was so abhorrent that he made the effort to banish it from his mind and once more picked up The Son of Nun. The Son of Nun.

It was, he saw, a reissue. The novel had first been published in the mid-eighties and was one of a number Tredown had written on Old Testament themes. There were others based on the story of Samuel, the triumphs of David, and the iniquities of Ahab and Jezebel. The sad story of Jephtha's daughter Tredown had retold under the t.i.tle of The First Living Thing He Saw, The First Living Thing He Saw, and he remembered how Jephtha had foolishly promised G.o.d that, in grat.i.tude for victory in war, he would sacrifice the first creature he encountered when he returned and was in sight of home. The idiot might have calculated it would be his daughter, Wexford thought with contempt. Suggesting to Dora when she came off the phone that this hardly seemed to him likely to be a recipe for literary success, on the grounds that potential readers would a.s.sume they were being preached at, he added, "But what do I know?" and he remembered how Jephtha had foolishly promised G.o.d that, in grat.i.tude for victory in war, he would sacrifice the first creature he encountered when he returned and was in sight of home. The idiot might have calculated it would be his daughter, Wexford thought with contempt. Suggesting to Dora when she came off the phone that this hardly seemed to him likely to be a recipe for literary success, on the grounds that potential readers would a.s.sume they were being preached at, he added, "But what do I know?"

"As much as any other reader, I suppose," she said. "They weren't very successful. That's why he-well, he changed tack and wrote The First Heaven. The First Heaven. It's not like anything else he'd ever done. No Bible stories, more a sort of amalgam of Greek myths and Norse tales and prehistoric animals. That's what Sheila says. I haven't read it. It made him very popular." It's not like anything else he'd ever done. No Bible stories, more a sort of amalgam of Greek myths and Norse tales and prehistoric animals. That's what Sheila says. I haven't read it. It made him very popular."

"And now," said Wexford, unconvinced, "it's going to bore thousands more for four hours on the screen. I can't bear to think of it."

"You'll have to do more than think of it. With your daughter in the lead, you'll have to see it-at least once."

The next day, among the doc.u.ments that landed on his desk, one was that rarity, an old-fashioned handwritten letter sent through the post, the others the postmortem report, compiled by Mavrikian and Laxton, and the report on a lab examination of the purple sheet which had wrapped the body of the man in Grimble's Field. Man begins to decay once life is gone but the man-made may endure for centuries. The eleven years this sheet had lasted-though now threadbare in parts-was like a minute gone in the life history of a sheet, Wexford said with some exaggeration. This one had come from Marks & Spencer. According to that company's records, purple had been a fashionable shade and the color of one of their ranges in the early seventies. It therefore seemed likely that it was more than twenty years old before it was used as a shroud. Possibly it had been used for this purpose because it had a hole or slit at one end about a foot from the hem. The slit was ragged around the edges and stained with a brownish substance that, on a.n.a.lysis, proved to be blood of the same group as that of the dead man.

The postmortem report told him little he didn't know already. He was already aware that one of the ribs was cracked. Neither of the pathologists offered this as the cause of death, as they couldn't tell the cause of death. What they had had in front of them was a skeleton with a simple break in a rib, but it afforded enough DNA to establish whether the corpse was that of Peter Darracott. He would have Christine Darracott in here to see if she could identify the sheet, but that wouldn't be much help either. None of those neighbors seemed the sort of people who would use purple bed linen. They were mostly elderly. They were middle cla.s.s, the men professionals of some sort or another, the women stay-at-home housewives, the kind who would make up their beds in white linen, or daringly, in pale blue or pink. One of them was the writer of the letter he turned to next.

He saw at a glance that its purpose was to provide him with a possible identification. There had been many of these, but all the rest had come by e-mail.

Long ago he had made up his mind that in many respects the Internet was more trouble than it was worth. Half the country, it seemed, sat in front of screens all day, telling the other half their thoughts, hopes, aspirations, giving advice, requesting help, offering things for sale, inviting fraud by demanding and receiving credit card numbers, misleading the frightened and the lonely, and wasting the time of people like himself who had their jobs to do. Of course, it had its uses, like supplying information about every citizen and bringing up registers at the touch of a key. But the time-wasting factor really made itself felt in the screen-fillers that had come to him: those who told him of female relatives who had gone missing in 1981 or 2002, those telling him how interested they were in the investigation and had he a job for them, and others madly requesting meetings, including one from a woman who gave her vital statistics, hair and eye color, age and education and job history, and suggested he and she have their first date next Tuesday.

The letter seemed to belong to a different era from the e-mails. It was addressed "Dear Sir" and signed "Yours truly, Irene McNeil," a usage he had thought utterly gone. She told him she had "remembered something since the visit of the colored boy," was sure he should know about it, and, having no idea how otherwise to communicate with him, was writing. She didn't trust the phone and never had done since childhood when her parents had "the telephone installed" in 1933. The "something" she recalled concerned "old Mr. Grimble's lodger." This was the first Wexford had heard of Arthur Grimble having a lodger, but whether this had any connection with the case seemed unlikely. He read on.

"I could see everything which went on from my front windows," Mrs. McNeil ended unashamedly.

Burden and Damon Coleman had a warrant to search Sunnybank. Grimble had been asked permission for them to enter and had refused, saying he hadn't been in the place himself for eleven years so he didn't see why the police should. This delayed things but not for long. Not usually given to flights of fancy, Burden said afterward to Wexford that going in there made him think of explorers penetrating a jungle to discover some ancient tomb in the depths of a forest.

"I just hope the spirit of the place hasn't put a curse on you," said Wexford.

Damon removed the screws that held in place the sheet of plywood over the front doorway. Underneath they expected to find the front door but there was only a cavity. Inside was semidarkness and a strong smell of dry rot and wet rot, mildew, mold, lichen, putrefaction, and general decay. Not all the windows were boarded up-there seemed no logic as to why some were and some were not-and in the first room they went into, it was light enough to see that the place was still furnished but in the grimmest and most eerie way, the table and chairs coated with gray dust, cobwebs linking lampshade to mantelpiece to pictures, like some primitive electrical system of loosely strung cables. The windowpanes were cracked, and the curtains that hung from a broken rail, ragged and stained. Damp had marked the ceiling with curious patterns, some shaped like parts of the human body, a leg here in a high-heeled shoe, a disembodied head, and others like maps of islands in an archipelago or close-ups of the surface of the moon.

On a dining table, the top of which was scarred with white rings made by hot cups and black channels made by cigarettes left to burn themselves out, stood a gla.s.s vase, its inside sc.u.mmed with a brown deposit that supported the dried-up strawlike stems of flowers that fell into dust when Damon touched them. The smell was stronger here, mostly coming, it seemed, from the mold on the walls where rising damp had erupted in crusts like brown scabs. It was a very strong smell and one almost impossible to ignore. Damon began sneezing.

"Bless you," said Burden automatically.

"What are we looking for, anyway, sir?" Damon asked when the spasm had pa.s.sed.

"Anything," said Burden. "I don't know. Signs of Arthur Grimble's lodger? He had a lodger, the lodger left or didn't leave. It's all a bit vague. When I asked Grimble if we could come in here he said nothing about this lodger. He just refused permission. I'm inclined to think he said it out of cussedness. He couldn't get his permission, so he wasn't going to give us any."

The window in this room was intact but for a diagonal crack across one corner. Damon peered out of it into the greenish gloom and beyond at the grave and the police crime tape surrounding it. He tried a light switch but the power had long been cut off. It was only four in the afternoon, but a kind of premature dusk had come and inside here they needed their flashlights. The light they gave showed the way to the kitchen. At the sight of it Burden made no attempt to suppress his shudder. It was more like a cavern than a place where food had once been prepared-dark, smelly, every surface beaded with condensation as if the furniture had sweated.

Damon's flashlight played on the single counter where lay, in a heap, blue jeans, an orange-colored anorak, a well-worn T-shirt printed with some kind of animal or insect, wool socks, and a pair of black and gray sneakers.

"It looks as if our visit hasn't been in vain," Burden said.

"Could this lot have belonged to X, sir?"

"Who knows? Not to either of the Grimbles, I'd have thought."

Burden felt a tension that was almost a shiver run through him, and he couldn't attribute it to the dampness or the smells. It was something else, something primitive, perhaps a discharge of adrenaline preparing him for fight or flight. He and Coleman went back into the pa.s.sage and from there into the bedrooms, both of which were full of cheap, shabby, worn-out furniture, a single bed in one, a double bed in the other, old-fashioned washstands, one of bamboo, with basins and jugs from another distant age, parchment-shaded hanging lamps, the whole covered in gray shrouds of dust. On the double bed two pillows without pillow-cases still lay, ocher-colored and marked with the stains of saliva, sweat, and other human effluvia Burden didn't want to think about. A gray bedspread had been visited by moths and mice, which had left behind them the usual evidence of their occupation.

"Darracott's love nest," Burden muttered, though it wouldn't have been as bad as this eleven years ago when the missing man had brought Nancy Jackson here.

He opened a wardrobe door to release a new smell, mothb.a.l.l.s and ancient dried sweat, the stench of the old man's clothes still left hanging there, two suits that might have been new in the forties, a sports jacket, coats and trousers. Burden closed the door again and they made their way into the bathroom, where the floor was deep in gray dust, the bath brown from iron stains and the lavatory pan stuffed with newspaper. A sliver of soap, rock-hard and split into blackened cracks, lay above the basin, and on a sagging wooden shelf was an old man's shaving brush, the bristles worn down to stumps.

Damon began sneezing again. "Let's get out of here, sir."

"Wait a minute. There's a cellar."

A flight of steps led down into darkness. Burden went first, switching on his flashlight. He let the beam play on what lay below. There was a small square of floor s.p.a.ce and beyond that a doorway. All the other doors in the house were open but that door was shut. Burden said, with some kind of prevision, with foreboding, "Better not touch that doork.n.o.b."

For 364 days a year he never carried a handkerchief. This was the 365th and for no known reason he had picked up a clean one when he went to put his shirt on. He wrapped it around his right hand, took hold of the door handle, tugged at it, and finally wrenched it open. Inside was a small room perhaps measuring six feet by eight, where everything seemed coated in coal dust. A heap of coal lay in one corner, prompting Burden to ask himself when he had last seen coal-years and years ago. In front of it wood was stacked, pieces of timber and small logs, a pile of it, three feet high.

"Pull out one of those planks, Damon, could you? But go carefully."

Damon went carefully, slowly tugging at the longest piece of timber until it came free, dislodging some of the logs and sending them tumbling. He pulled at another, smaller, board and heard the inspector's indrawn breath.

"There's something under there," Burden said.

The flashlights set down on a shelf, their beams playing on the heap of timber, revealed what might have been a small piece of white rag. They carefully lifted logs one by one until hair came to light, black and coa.r.s.e like the horsehair Burden had once seen stuffing an old sofa, then something that might have been a section of bone. When what was under the logs was half-exposed, Damon took a step backward, grasped his flashlight, and shone the beam directly downward. By its light, he and Burden were looking down at the remains of a man, bones mostly, vestiges of gray flesh clinging to them, still dressed with horrid incongruity in whitish under-shirt and underpants. The black hair, the first thing Burden had seen, longish and s.h.a.ggy, covered the back of the skull. Whoever he was appeared to have been dumped face downward, the arms and legs spread in a starfish shape.

The smell in the house came from elsewhere. Here, only a kind of airlessness combined with a whiff of coal dust remained, for the body they were looking at had been there a long time.

"Is this the chap who didn't leave, sir?"

"Plainly, he didn't," said Burden, "but who he was, G.o.d knows. One thing's for sure. Just as you don't bury yourself, you don't hide yourself in a woodpile after you're dead."

Chapter Eight.

His whole team was there, at the kind of meeting he usually held at nine in the morning. The time was seven in the evening and dark as midnight. They looked tired, even the very young ones. Burden was trim as ever in a stone linen jacket and jeans, his forehead pleated in a frown, his graying hair cut a fraction too short. Weariness makes some people look younger and Hannah was one of them, the color gone from her cheeks, her eyes heavy, while Lyn's and Karen's faces, made up as usual in the morning, were now shiny and pale as nature made them. Damon seemed the exception to the rule that black skins bleach to gray when exhaustion sets in and he still had that alert look, his eyes pitch black and bright, the whites almost blue, which Wexford so liked about him.

He noticed that he alone among the men wore a tie. Barry's shirt under a thin zipper jacket was open almost to the waist, revealing a fleshy roll which, in women, he'd heard called a "m.u.f.fin top." Like Hamlet he had been "too much in the sun" and, from bridge to tip, his nose was burnt red from the long protracted summer, as was his tieless throat. Ties had almost disappeared, at least they had out here in the country, and Wexford wondered what inhibition or diffidence in himself made him need to go on wearing this weathered, worn, and stain-spotted strip of synthetic fabric.

Wondered, but only for a moment, and then he began to address them. "This afternoon," he began, "the body of a man was found in the derelict bungalow on Grimble's Field. Mike Burden and Damon Coleman went in there on a routine search and found the body in the cellar. We don't know who it is, but Carina has seen it and says she'd guess it's been there a shorter time than the unidentified corpse in the trench. Nor can we say yet if there's any connection between these two bodies. We shall know more tomorrow when she's done the postmortem.

"As for Peter Darracott, we are waiting for the result of the DNA test and we should get that tomorrow. Depending on that result, we may have to widen our search. If, for instance, the body in the trench isn't Peter Darracott. There appear to be no more missing or possibly missing males in the Kingsmarkham area who disappeared sometime in the spring of 1995. There is of course the possibility that the body in the cellar is Darracott's. I shall have John Grimble in here in the morning and question him about this second body found on his property. At the moment we have some reason to believe the death was the result of violence because the body was hidden in the cellar under a pile of logs. As yet we don't know what caused death or whether death occurred in the cellar. But the body had been hidden. Someone hid it and we know it's extremely rare to conceal a body that has met a natural death.

"The clothes he seems to have worn were in the kitchen. Two unusual features of this case are that the body was clothed only in a vest and underpants and that a thousand pounds in ten- and twenty-pound notes were in the pocket of a pair of jeans. The jeans were probably his, but that still has to be established. Are there any questions?"

There always were. Hannah was the first to ask. "Why did DI Burden and Damon go in there, guv?"

"A Mrs. McNeil, the woman who used to live in Borodin's house, wrote to me with what looked like an absurd story about old Grimble-Grimble senior, that is-evicting his lodger but no one seeing him actually leave. Then John Grimble wouldn't let us go in there, which seemed a bit dodgy, so we got a warrant."

She nodded, sighed, and pushed back her long black hair behind her ears. Barry Vine asked if the media had yet been told and Wexford said he'd tell them in the morning after his meeting with the chief constable. Then he'd hold a press conference when the postmortem results-and with luck the DNA test result-came through.

Lyn had something to say but not a question. Theodore Borodin had come down for the weekend and she had been to call on him, an interview that yielded nothing of interest beyond his professing a total lack of curiosity about any of his neighbors, none of whom he seemed to know by name.

"When I was coming away and getting into my car one of Tredown's wives came out." This gave rise to laughter, enough to make Lyn modify what she had said. "I mean one of the Mrs. Tredowns. She came up to me and said was it true they'd found a cadaver-that was her word, 'cadaver'-in that house. She could see something had happened, what with all the crime tape around the place and police vehicles coming and going. I asked her what made her think it was a-well, a body, and she said something like, 'I knew it. They don't put that blue and white ribbon round a place because some lout's broken a window.' And she was very happy at the idea, I must say. 'Man or woman?' she said. Of course I didn't tell her. I just said if there was anything any of the people living there needed to know we'd keep them informed and then I drove off."

Wexford laughed. "Well done," he said. "Right, that's that for now. We can't do anymore tonight, so I suggest you all go home and get a good night's rest. We'll start again in the morning." But as Burden lingered when all the rest had gone, he said, "Come and have a drink, Mike. The snug in the Olive, I think."

Rain had fallen for most of the day, but now the clouds had moved away eastward and it was becoming a fine night, mild enough for lights to be on in the Olive's garden. A few drinkers, mostly young, sat at the tables under sunshades that would double as umbrellas if the rain began again.

"I don't like sitting outdoors," said Wexford, squashing any alfresco ideas Burden might have had. "I never have. Nothing depresses me so much on a holiday as the prospect of a picnic. All those flies and wasps. I remember a picnic Dora and I had when the girls were little. The food was all laid out on a red-checked tablecloth-funny how you remember these details-and this puppy, ba.s.set hound or beagle or something, came running up, grabbed a Swiss roll in its mouth, and made off with it. The girls were entranced. Sheila thought we'd actually fixed it." He laughed at the memory. "She thought we'd arranged for the b.l.o.o.d.y thing to come and do that to entertain them. I almost wished we had."

"That," said Burden, ordering their drinks, "is sort of like Christmas in reverse. I mean the way we have fixed Father Christmas. It's probably Dad dressed up, but kids think it really is some old guy from Lapland. Or they do for a while."

Mike could still surprise him with his occasional insights. He smiled. "That must have been quite a shock, finding those-er, remains in Grimble's cellar. I imagine your first thought was that here was the old man's lodger."

"And my second and third thoughts."

"It's a bit much, though, isn't it? This old man-how old was he, by the way? Eighty?-he murders his tenant and stuffs the corpse in the cellar. Or, because he's not strong enough to do that, lures him down into the cellar and there kills him. In six months' time the old man is dead and within weeks of his death the son is murdering another man and burying him in a trench some ten yards from where the other body is lying."

"More than ten yards, Reg. More like twenty."

"Ten or twenty, it doesn't make much difference. Does homicide run in the family? And if it does we have to suppose Grimble senior didn't wait until he was eighty and practically at death's door before he killed. So how many other unsolved killings are there along the way? And what are the motives in all this? Cui bono? Cui bono?"

"We don't know who benefits, do we?" said Burden. "We don't yet know who either of these men are. We're not even near to finding out. The old man may have been dead before either of them died. We don't know what connection there was between them, if any.

"Isn't it rather odd that Mrs. McNeil should have written to you about this lodger? She didn't mention him before when Damon first interviewed her. And when you come to think of it, her story is pretty thin. I can understand she was bored and had nothing better to do than watch her neighbors' houses from morning till night, but why seize on that? Why jump to the conclusion that a man's disappeared-a man she didn't know but thinks was called Chapman, no first name-just because she hasn't actually seen him depart?"

"You think she knows more than she's telling?"

"Well, don't you? Another funny thing is the thousand pounds. The clothes were shabby, those jeans were on their last legs." Burden realized what he had said and laughed. "Yet a thousand pounds was in the pocket?"

"And those notes had been in there for a decade." Wexford shrugged. "I can't say I look forward to another session with John Grimble in the morning, and there'll be no wife there to 'Oh, John' him."