Not in the Flesh

by Ruth Rendell

“My second cousin, if you don't mind. Oh, I can see what you're getting at. There was a body found in my field that's been dead eleven years. My second cousin went missing eleven years ago, so they've got to be one and the same. Now I'll tell you something. Everybody knows Peter Darracott had been carrying on with the woman as worked in the chemist on the corner of Pestle Lane, and that's who he went off with. And I for one don't blame him-married to that Christine what had a tongue on her like a razor. Nagged him from morn till night she did till he went spare.”

  “Oh, John, don't,” said Kathleen.

  “How well did you know him?” Wexford asked in a deceptively mild tone.

  “About as well as most folks know their second cousins. Maybe we'd see each other at family funerals and that was about it. As matter of fact the last time I saw him was at my mum's funeral two years before he went missing.”

  “It was good of him to come, John,” said Kathleen.

  “Yes, well, my dad was his godfather and he thought he might be in the will, didn't he? He was unlucky there.”

  “Some itinerant farmworkers camped on that land eleven years ago. Was that with your permission?”

  Grimble flared again. The very word “permission” seemed enough to inflame him. “Are you joking? They counted on me living over here what was five miles away. Some busybody must have told them. But I was too many for them. Me and Bill Runge come over to see where we'd dig that trench and there they was, their vans and their muck and litter all over my field. I got them off there pretty damn quick, I can tell you. Me and Bill went in there and got them off. If folks tell you we had guns it's a lie. Sticks we had, and they put up no resistance. They was scared of us and no wonder.”

  He must have got that bit about resistance off the TV, Wexford thought. “Can you remember exactly when that was, Mr. Grimble?”

  “To the day, I can. It was May thirty-first and the next day me and Bill started digging. Them bloody planners refused me permission on June twelfth, and on the sixteenth Bill started filling up our trench. Nearly broke my heart it did. If you're thinking one of them might be them bones, you can think again. They was gone back to where they come from days before me and Bill ever stuck a spade in the sod.”

  6

  Sheila was just leaving when Wexford got home. He put his arms around her and kissed her, an embrace that also included the baby Anoushka in a sling on her mother's chest. “Grandad kiss,” said Amy as Wexford picked her up.

  “You don't have to go the moment I get in, do you?”

  “I do. I've got a car picking me up here in two minutes. You're late, anyway, Pop.”

  “I always am. Unpunctuality is the impoliteness of policemen. Not a very good epigram, I'm afraid, but I'm too weary to do better. When are you coming down again?”

  “Next week. I've got a project on. Ma will tell you.”

  The car came, sleek and black. The white-haired driver had the face of the old Italian actor Rossano Brazzi. Wexford waved to his daughter and the children and they waved at him out of a rear window, and he went on watching until they were all out of sight. He turned away, noting that his front garden was still a mass of flowers, awaiting the frost that never came. Fuchsias in tubs, the last of the dahlias and Michaelmas daisies in the borders. Nothing to do with him, he seldom if ever pulled out a weed or planted a seed, but all Dora's work. If he sometimes neglected his wife, and he feared he did, he appreciated her when her work came into flower. There was a graceful yellow thing in a tub called a thunbergia that he'd forced himself to learn the name of, though he'd forget it again by the spring, and another yellow thing that was a shrub with flowers that smelled of oranges, but that was long over now.

  Dora said, when she had received his wife-appreciating kiss, “Did you see Sheila?”

  “Just in time to watch them go. What's this project she was talking about?”

  “Oh, that,” said Dora dismissively. “Her news was that she's got the lead in this film that's based on your friend Tredown's great work.”

  “Not my friend,” said Wexford, fetching himself a glass of red wine and her a glass of white. “I haven't even set eyes on him yet. Do you mean The First Heaven?”

  “I suppose so. It's a wonderful thing for her. She's to be the goddess of love and beauty. Oh, Reg, you should have heard her. You should have heard what she said. ‘And I was the check-in chick in that Runway serial for years and years,’ she said. ‘Haven't I come up in the world?’ ”

  “I wish she had stayed a bit longer. Shall we drink to her success?” They touched glasses, and Wexford, seeing tears in her eyes, said quickly, “So what is this project? I think of our other daughter as having projects, not Sheila.”

  “It's something to do with female circumcision, only she calls it female genital mutilation. It sounds awful. She says it's going on here.”

  Wexford was silent for a moment. Then he said, “It's against the law. There was a law passed a couple of years ago to stop people taking their daughters back to Africa to have it done. I hope there's none of it here. Did Sheila think there was?”

  “She doesn't know. People are so secretive about it. There's quite a large Somali community in Kingsmarkham, as we know, and they supposedly practice it. You know how when everyone around here wants someone to blame for all the social ills, they always pick on the Somalis. I don't really know what female circumcision is. Do you?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Wexford and, thinking he might need a second glass of wine, no matter what Dr. Akande said, he told her.

  Of the names on Peach's list Charlie Cummings and Peter Darracott still remained unaccounted for, and unless more bodies were discovered it seemed likely they would simply remain as missing persons and possible candidates for what had been found in Grimble's Field.

  “We have to consider,” said Wexford, “that the victim may not have lived here at all but have been here only on a visit, staying in the neighborhood.”

  He and Burden were having lunch in the new Indian restaurant. Its name was A Passage to India and they had chosen it mainly because it was next door but one to the police station where a handicrafts shop had once been. No one any longer wanted to work tapestries or buy embroidery frames, and the shop, according to Barry Vine, had “gone bust.” Burden looked up from the menu, an elaborate affair done in scarlet and gold on mock parchment.

  “The first time the itinerant farmworkers came to Flagford was eleven years ago in June, exactly as Grimble says. That was for the soft-fruit picking, and when he'd driven them off, Morella's fruit farm gave them a bit of land to camp on. That's where they were when they came back three years later in September. Whether it was the same lot I don't know. Probably some of the same lot and some new ones. Apparently the farmer-Morella's fruit farm, that is-was providing them with a proper campsite by that time. It's hard to keep tracks on these people. All we can say is that no missing person was reported to us.”

  They gave their order to the waitress, who smiled politely. She had difficulty with English but managed a “Thank you very much.”

  “We're checking on all the hotels,” Burden went on when she had gone. “The difficulty there is that of course they don't keep records that far back. Still, why would anyone who came, say, on holiday, get himself murdered and buried in Flagford? I suppose whoever he was could have come here to blackmail someone who lived here.”

  “Sounds like the Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle forgot to write. Let's say he was in possession of compromising photos of old Mrs. McNeil and her lover old Mr. Pickford and wanted £10,000 to keep them dark. So they asked him around, poisoned him in the Tio Pepe, and at the same time Grimble was very conveniently digging a trench for them to bury the body in. I don't think so.”

  “It was only an example,” said Burden in a huffy tone, and then, very surprisingly, “That girl who served us, she's called Matea, is probably the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.”

  Wexford looked at him, his eyebrows raised. “I don't believe my ears. You
never say things like that.”

  “I'm not being-well, salacious or whatever you call it. I don't fancy her, as you'd say in your crude way. I just think she's beautiful. I'd say it even if my own wife was having lunch here with me.”

  “Really? Women don't generally like it much if you say that sort of thing about other women, however innocent and pure, as in your case, the motivation may be.”

  Matea came out through the red and gold bead curtain at this point, bringing their lamb biryani and chicken korma. She was about eighteen, very tall, very slender, and somehow her slenderness could be seen to be natural and not associated with starving herself. Her skin was the pastel gold of a tea rose, her features softly rounded and perfectly symmetrical, her hair waist-length, glossy and black, and her eyes…

  “I don't think I could describe them,” said Burden, contemplating a dish of yellow chutney.

  “Oh, I could. How about ebony pools of fathomless depths or sloe-black windows of the soul? Come on, Mike, eat your lunch. What is she anyway? Middle Eastern? They don't make them like that in the outskirts of Stowerton.”

  Burden didn't know or said he didn't. His wife's political correctness, though less intense than Hannah Goldsmith's, had affected him with an unease about ever categorizing anyone according to their race.

  The shop on the corner of Pestle Lane and Queen Street still had the name Robinson's Chemists engraved on its window, reminder of ancient days, Burden said gloomily, before “pharmacy” became the in word. Its proprietor was now a tall thin Asian man called Sharma and his shop a model emporium of cleanliness, order, and efficiency. Gone were the tall stoppered vessels filled with dubious cobalt blue and malachite green liquids that used to stand in the window and gone too the trusses and mysteriously labeled “rubber goods” that used to puzzle him as a child. As he remarked to DC Lyn Fancourt, he hadn't been inside the place for thirty-five years. A blond female assistant in a short pink smock over jeans was stacking shelves while another was in the dispensary at the back of the counter.

  Palab Sharma had taken over the shop eleven years before and had taken over Nancy Jackson with it. “She got married and left,” he said to Burden. “It would have been two years after I came here.”

  “Do you know who she married and where she is now?”

  “My wife will know.”

  Summoned by phone from the flat above, Parvati Sharma appeared, neither in a sari nor salwar kameez and veil but smartly dressed in a white shirt, short skirt, and high heels. Though very pretty, she failed to match up to Burden's new standard of female beauty.

  “I went to the wedding,” she said. “I hadn't long been married myself. It was the first English wedding I ever went to and it was very nice.”

  Burden asked her if the couple lived in Kingsmarkham.

  “Sewingbury,” she said. “I'm so sorry, I don't know where. She's Mrs. Jackson now. I saw her in Marks & Spencer. She had her two little boys with her and I had mine. It was very nice. We said we'd have to meet and have a coffee or something, but we never have-well, not yet.”

  Burden thanked her and hustled Lyn away from where she was studying a display of slimming aids. “Do you think those tablets really do suppress appetite, sir?”

  “I doubt it,” said Burden and added, he who had seldom missed a meal in his entire life, “You just have to eat less. Easy-peasy.”

  Nancy Jackson, as Burden put it afterward to Wexford, had done well for herself. If there was no comparison in his eyes with Matea, she was a good-looking young woman, blond, sharp-featured, dressed in the young woman's uniform of skin-tight jeans and short tank top which left a three-inch gap of bare tanned flesh. If not quite the best part of Sewingbury, the home she shared with her husband and two small sons was in a quiet tree-lined road where every house had a double garage attached to it. She was welcoming, frank, and cheerful. For a change, she was a woman who appeared to have nothing to hide and no chips on her shoulder.

  She made Burden and Lyn a pot of tea and sat down with them at the teak table in her handsome kitchen, passing a plate of carrot cake slices and chocolate-chip cookies. Burden took a piece of cake; Lyn miserably succumbed to a cookie but refused milk in her tea.

  “My twins are at school now,” she said. “They're just five and I've got to go and fetch them at half-three, but I can give you half an hour.”

  “I believe you had a relationship with Peter Darracott, Mrs. Jackson,” Burden said.

  He must have spoken in a deliberately discreet way as if lowering his voice would ensure this statement wasn't heard by flies on walls. Nancy Jackson burst into laughter. “You don't have to be careful what you say to me. Everyone knows I've been around the block a few times. Before I was married, I mean. Dave knows-that's my husband-and he says, ‘Well, I wasn't pure as the driven snow myself, darling,’ so you know what they say about the goose and the gander. But Pete Darracott. Of course he was married to that Christine, and as a general rule I gave married men a wide berth, but there was something about Pete. He was a postman, you know, hadn't got two pence to rub together.

  “Me and my mum were living together, but she turned a blind eye to my goings-on. Pete and I used to pop around to our place in the afternoons. He wanted me to go away with him, you know, but I was a bit wary. We could go up to his sister in Wales, he said, Cardiff it was. And do what? I had asked. And he said-”

  “Mrs. Jackson, when was this?”

  “Oh, sure, it'd be a good idea to tell you that, wouldn't it? Have another biscuit,” she said to Lyn. “Yes, well, it'll have been May '95, end of May. He said he'd stop with his sister and find a job and a place to live and write to me. The idea was that I'd join him. Well, he went. We had a last afternoon together first. Mum had a friend stopping at our place so we couldn't go there. So what d'you think we did? We went to old Grimble's place, that bungalow. Grimble was like Pete's cousin. I never saw him, but he'd been around to Pete's house asking him to do him a favor, so we knew that bungalow was empty. It wasn't long after old Mr. Grimble had passed on, so it wasn't bad. The bed was all made up. It was okay for a quickie.” She broke off to giggle. “He just went off after that, said he'd write and tell me when he'd got a place, but he never did. I never heard a word, but to tell you the truth I didn't care that much. I'd met my Dave by then, and I sort of knew he was the one for me. You know, don't you, when that happens?”

  Burden thought how much less offensive this woman's sex talk was than Claudia Ricardo's. “And you never saw him or heard from him again, Mrs. Jackson?”

  “Never. There's just one thing. Grimble had asked Pete to help him dig a trench. I'll tell you about it. I've just got time before I pick up my twinnies.”

  A man was kneeling on the floor at number 5 Oswald Road, examining the Grimbles' television set. Beside him on the floor, occupying the same sort of area as the armchair in which John Grimble habitually sat, was a large cuboid cardboard box. As Wexford and Hannah entered the room, led by Kathleen Grimble, the engineer, with the air of one breaking seriously bad news, remarked that he couldn't carry out repairs on the spot but would have to take the set away.

  “You can't do that. What am I going to do without the telly?”

  “Shouldn't be more than a day or two.”

  “A day or two!” Grimble sat shaking his head in incredulity. “You'll have to give me a lend of one.”

  “I'll have to see,” said the man in a hopeless sort of voice. “Give me a hand to get this into the box, will you? My back's not what it used to be.”

  During the argument that ensued, Kathleen Grimble quietly offered her services and when she and the engineer had got the set into the box, she helped him drag it out to the front door. Grimble shouted after them, “I want a loan of a set, mind, and I want it today. If it's not here by five I'm coming down the shop. And I want one of them as hangs up on the wall.”

  Wexford had been enjoying all this too much to interrupt, but now he did. “You didn't tell us you asked your cousin Peter Darra
cott-I beg your pardon, your second cousin-to help you dig that trench across your late father's garden.”

  “I didn't,” said Grimble, “and why should I? He never done it. All he done was waste my time.”

  “You'd know all about that. You've plenty of practice wasting ours. Tell us what happened. You went to Mr. Darracott's house in May 1995 and then what?”

  “Go on, John,” said Kathleen, “do what the officer says. You've got nothing to hide, you know that.”

  “That's why I don't want to do what he says,” said Grimble sullenly.

  “If you won't, I will.”

  Grimble seemed to be pondering his wife's words, perhaps thinking that if he left things to her, she might say more than was expedient.

  “Come along, Mr. Grimble,” said Wexford. “If you don't want to go into it here we can always talk at the police station.”

  This promise or threat had its usual effect. After staring in a kind of despair at the space that his television set had occupied, Grimble turned abruptly away and said in a rush, “I went around to his place, and his wife was there, Christine, she's called, and I said to Pete, ‘D'you want to come over and give me a hand digging a trench on my property at Flagford what my dad left me?’ And Pete said, ‘Digging it what for?’ And I said, ‘For putting in the main drainage for the new properties I'm building.’ I never said I hadn't got no planning permission. It was no business of his.”

  “Just take it a bit more slowly, would you, Mr. Grimble?” said Hannah.

  At fractionally less fast a pace, Grimble went on, “She said, that Christine that is, ‘He'd want paying,’ and he told her to keep out of it and none too soon if you ask me. There wasn't no call for her to be there in the first place. Pete said, ‘I'd have to go over and see it. I'm not letting myself in for a job like that on spec,’ so I said, ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I'll run you over there tomorrow evening, right?’ ”

  As Wexford said later to Hannah, that was the only instance they had ever heard or were likely to hear of Grimble showing the faintest scrap of altruism, and even then it was more for his own benefit than Peter Darracott's. “And did you?”