by Ruth Rendell
“He had an electric typewriter. It was outdated even at the time of his-disappearance. I don't know why he didn't use a computer, but it can't be relevant, can it?”
Wexford was beginning to realize he was learning nothing new and very likely there was nothing new to learn. He sat thinking, said, “Which of you would like to provide us with the DNA?”
“Me, please,” said Selina.
“DC Thayer will drive you to the Princess Diana Hospital to have the swab taken.”
When she had gone, escorted by Adam Thayer, who looked as if he couldn't believe his luck, Vivien said, “I've brought Mum's wedding ring. They had identical rings, you know, both with the same message in them.”
It was in a small polythene resealable pack, a gold ring chased with a leaf pattern and “Forever” engraved inside.
“Your father was wearing his, of course?”
“Oh, yes. I don't think they ever took them off, not even to have showers or wash their hands.”
The remains in the trench had worn no ring. It could have fallen off into the soil, he thought, as the flesh decayed from the bones of the third finger of his left hand, but the earth had been sifted very thoroughly when the body was removed. He remembered watching the masked white-coated men working on it with sieves. Vivien seemed to read his thoughts.
“We'd like to see the-the body. Can we?”
He nearly shuddered. “I don't think so, Miss-er, Vivien. If you wish to I can't stop you, but I don't advise it. What remains”-he had to say this-“isn't much more than a skeleton.”
Her face had whitened. “All right. I see.”
She didn't. Of course she didn't. “I think that if you were to see it, the sight might remain with you always, and there would be no point, there would be nothing to help you identify your father. This DNA test will do that but you must remember it may not be him. Please don't go away from here in the belief that your father has been found.”
Vivien got up. “Shall I wait here for my sister?”
“We can give you somewhere more comfortable to wait. At a later date I may need to borrow the ring. Would that be all right?”
“Of course.”
He would have many more questions if the identification was positive.
17
That night he began to read Gone Without Trace. Selina had been correct when she summarized its contents, telling him of interviews she and Vivien had conducted with fellow teachers of Alan Hexham's and with students in his A-levels group, their careful search of everything in his study, their speculations as to the post-graduate degree he might have been studying for. Also in her book were some factual details from the transcript of her recorded interview with Denise Cole, and her investigation into the suggestion that her father had been in debt. As he read on, tired now but far from dropping off to sleep, he began to see that their detective work had been exhaustive. Professionals could hardly have done better, yet what it all amounted to was that they had found nothing.
He finished the book at ten minutes to one but had been too stimulated by it to fall asleep for some time. When he did it was to dream, not that a middle-aged man but a little Somali girl had disappeared, while her family and friends denied she had ever existed. In the morning he found that Alan Hexham and his daughters had receded from the forefront of his mind and Irene McNeil stepped or tottered in to take their place. While he slept he had come to a decision. Old and incapacitated as she was, he was going to have to arrest Irene McNeil, question her at the police station, and charge her with what? Concealing a death, certainly. He reflected that Ronald McNeil, trigger-happy Lord of the Manor, had neatly slipped out of any responsibility by dying.
Kingsmarkham police station had once had a single prison cell in its basement. Now there were two. But serious as the offenses were, expecting Mrs. McNeil to occupy it, for even one night, was unthinkable. She must be arrested and charged and allowed to return home. She came meekly enough to the police station with Wexford in his car, driven by Donaldson. When he interviewed her, her solicitor and Burden also being present, she gave much the same answers as she had in her own home. Apparently, she had expected to see the senior partner in the old-established Kingsmarkham law firm who had represented her and her husband for forty years, but he had retired some time before and the solicitor who arrived was a young woman. Mrs. McNeil refused to take any advice Helen Parker gave her and chose to ignore her when she said her client wasn't obliged to answer this or that.
Wexford asked her insistently about the knife she said the intruder had produced to threaten her husband. “But you weren't there, Mrs. McNeil, were you?” he said, only to be told that Ronald never lied. He asked again and again, which caused Helen Parker to say that her client had already told him she was not. This inflamed Mrs. McNeil, not with anger against Wexford, but against “this presumptuous girl” who had no business, she said, to be there at all. When Wexford questioned her as to how she could account for a man carrying a knife while in his underwear, and Helen Parker told her client not to answer, Mrs. McNeil shouted at her to keep out of it. Helen Parker gathered up her jacket and briefcase and walked out.
In the end Mrs. McNeil collapsed in tears. It was impossible to continue that day, and while Adam Thayer drove her home, Wexford came to a decision. He wouldn't charge her yet. Once he had done so he wouldn't be allowed to go on questioning her. There was talk of the law being changed, but it hadn't been changed yet.
His mind made up, he contemplated the list of missing persons that went back just eight years and Peach's list of the missing that extended much further than that. Ronald McNeil had shot the man in Grimble's house in September 1998, but, according to both lists, although an eighteen-year-old girl had disappeared in that month (and been found two weeks later), no man had gone missing between June 1998 and the following January. There was one group they hadn't yet checked on-the itinerant farmworkers.
They had camped on Grimble's Field in June 1995 but, three years later in September, were on a field set aside for them by the farmer on the other side of Flagford. Such people had once been called “Gypsies” whether they were Romany or not. They possibly had settled homes in the winter months, but in the warmer weather they moved from county to county, camping where they could, offering themselves as unskilled farmworkers where fruit or vegetables were to be harvested. These days things had changed and they had been replaced by asylum seekers or simply by visitors from Eastern Europe who came to work and raise money to take home after the season ended.
When Burden came in he asked him what he made of his theory that the man Ronald McNeil had shot was one of them.
“A thousand pounds is a big sum of money for someone like that to be carrying about with him,” Burden said.
“Yes, he wouldn't accumulate that picking apples at the rates these fruit farmers pay. But when we talked of this before, you said one of the itinerants might have come back for the purposes of blackmail. How about that?”
“You mean he'd been here three years earlier, found out something a Flagford citizen wouldn't want made public, and, when he came back, extracted money from them for his silence? Okay, I can see that. Why take the money into Grimble's house? Why go there at all? Presumably he came in a caravan or mobile home. Why not go back to it?”
“Suppose he no longer intended to pick fruit, now he'd got the money? He went into Grimble's house, where very likely he had been before-it was easy enough to get in. The entire population of Flagford seems to have been in and out. I don't know why he couldn't have washed himself in his mobile home or, come to that, in a shower provided on the site. But the only evidence we have that he was ever in that bathroom comes from Mrs. McNeil. He may have been, he may have thought there would have been plenty of water on tap and he wanted to wash himself properly. The clothes he took off had almost reached the rags stage. I think he planned on taking clothes out of old Grimble's wardrobe.”
Burden seemed taken with this theory. “What, a suit maybe, or more likely trouse
rs and that sports jacket we saw in there?”
“Probably. But before he could do that, before he's even had his wash, in comes Colonel Blimp, aka Ronald McNeil, with a gun.”
“And no one on that campsite missed him?”
“It all depends on what he intended to do. He may have told his fellow workers that he didn't mean to stay there any longer. He'd got some money-he needn't have said how or where from-he'd found a way of acquiring some decent clothes and once he'd got them he'd be off.”
“Wouldn't they notice he'd left his mobile home or maybe his car behind?”
Wexford shook his head. “Not necessarily. These people don't each have a car and some sort of trailer. Sometimes there'll be three or four in each car. They might have noticed he'd left, say, a backpack behind with some probably valueless stuff inside. They wouldn't report someone as missing because most of them don't have any fixed abode. I think it was one of those fruit-pickers, Mike, and we can proceed on that assumption.”
On his way home he called in on Iman Dirir. He knew she was at home because he saw her dimly through the front window. For a moment he had thought she was her own daughter, for the woman he had glimpsed had long black hair hanging over her shoulders to the middle of her back. She took so long answering the door that he was on the point of ringing the bell again when it opened. She was in the uniform that could be Western or Eastern dress, black trousers and a long shirt. They went into her living room, which was exactly as it might have been if she and her husband had been middle-aged professionals born in Tunbridge Wells, even to the white walls, chintz furniture, and well-stocked bookcase. The plasma television would have been the envy of John Grimble.
“Can I offer you anything? A glass of wine? We don't drink, but we have wine for friends.”
He smiled. “Thank you, but I can't stay. I came to tell you that my Child Protection Officer, a woman who's very good at her job, has been to see Matea's parents and cautioned them about taking their five-year-old girl home. She was tactful. She simply told them that to take a child abroad and have her circumcised was an offense punishable by a maximum of fourteen years' imprisonment.”
“I suppose they denied it,” Iman Dirir said.
“They said they were going for a holiday. How well do you know them?”
“Well enough to call and talk to them. Do you want me to do that?”
“I do,” he said. “Very much. And it should be soon. They leave in a few days' time.”
She put out one long pale brown hand, the nails painted dark red, and took his. It wasn't a simple handshake but rather a gesture of promise or undertaking. “I'll do my best,” she said.
A once-white T-shirt with a scorpion printed on it and the name “Sam.” Memorable enough, Damon Coleman thought. Not the kind of thing he would ever consider wearing himself even if he were called Sam and liked scorpions. His taste ran to the colors that suited black skin, those which perhaps only a black man could successfully wear: red, orange, yellow, bright green. Black was a no-no. Apart from all that, as he hawked the T-shirt around Pickfords, Hunters, Louise Axall, and Theodore Borodin, he marveled that none of them gave a sign of recognizing it. “It's a long time ago” was the phrase most often used as they shook their heads. He had little hope and, after enduring abuse from Grimble, nearly gave up on Bill Runge. The man was out, anyway. Was it worth coming back later? He was walking back to the gate from the front door of Runge's cottage when he met the man coming down the road with a carrier bag. From the smell it evidently contained fish and chips, and when Damon asked if he could have a word, Runge said only if he didn't mind talking while he ate his dinner before it got cold.
The fish and chips, when released from their greaseproof paper, looked inviting. Damon, who had a big, tall man's appetite, averted his eyes and wished he could also turn aside his nostrils. One thing was for sure, once he was out of here, he'd go straight to that fish and chip shop on the corner and buy his own lunch.
The T-shirt was produced and, instead of shaking his head and saying it was a long time ago, Bill Runge said with his mouth full that he thought he'd seen it before. “Just let me think,” he said, pouring tomato ketchup over his fillet of cod as if it was a brain food indispensable when memory had to be summoned.
“Eight years ago in September?” Damon tried to prompt him.
“Might have been. I was in Flagford a lot when I was digging that ditch for my pal Grimble, but it wasn't then, it wasn't that long ago. I mean, normally I've no call to go there.”
“Would you ever have gone to the fruit farm? Morella's, that is?”
“That's it! I drove the wife to Morella's shop. She never fancies fruit from them supermarkets. It was a Saturday, must have been. I never go to the shops on weekdays. And you're right about eight years ago. That's when it was. We had our girl with us and she was fifteen then. Funny I remember that, but I do because of her being fussy about her food, like they are when they're in their teens, and going on an apple diet. That's all she'd eat, apples and that stuff they call muesli.
“Them fruit-pickers was on the field. This chap was driving the truck what fetched the boxes off the field and brought them to the shop. He come in carrying a box of apples and he was wearing that T-shirt. My daughter said, ‘Look at what he's wearing, Dad. Look at that picture, that's a scorpion. I wouldn't wear a thing like that,’ she said. ‘It's gross.’ Young chap-well, he was then. My daughter'd seen a program on the telly about scorpions, she'd seen the name.”
“You're a marvel, Mr. Runge,” said Damon. “You've missed your vocation. You ought to be in the force.”
He was almost satisfied. But should they have confirmation? In the shop Runge had just come from, Damon bought cod and chips and a pickled gherkin and ate them in the car. Maybe he should try asking at shops in Flagford where just two remained of the ten that had once been there. At the grocer's that called itself a supermarket and incorporated the post office, he showed the photograph to the man dispensing stamps and the woman at the checkout, but although both of them had been in the same jobs eight years before, no one recognized the scorpion T-shirt. The other shop was one of those where passersby always speculate as to how it can possibly make any sort of living. It sold or tried to sell maternity wear and baby clothes. A very old woman behind the counter smiled hopefully at him but seemed incapable of understanding what he asked her. Repeatedly she said her shop stocked nothing like the garment in his photograph and never had. It was ugly, she said, it wouldn't appeal to customers.
He gave up and turned his attention to the last people on his list, the Tredowns. They were the nearest to Grimble's Field. It would be visible from every upstairs window in Athelstan House on the western side. As he drove back to Flagford, he thought about what Bill Runge had seen and what it meant. The man in the cellar had worn that T-shirt, and therefore it was almost certain that the man in the cellar had been an itinerant farmworker seen in Flagford just a little before that. Only almost? A second sighting was essential. He drove up to Owen Tredown's house and parked outside the front door.
Burden and Lyn Fancourt were in the bungalow called Sunny-bank. They had gone into the bedroom and were contemplating the inside of the wardrobe. Lyn took down one garment after another and laid them on the bed. When she came to the sports jacket, brown tweed with leather patches on the elbows, Burden stopped her. He put a glove on his right hand and, feeling in the pockets, brought out a watch, white metal with a worn leather strap, an equally worn wallet, and two keys on a ring.
“So that's why those McNeils found nothing when they searched his clothes,” said Burden.
“Only a thousand pounds, sir.”
“Yes, in the pocket of his jeans. It looks as if he'd just received it and stuffed it in his jeans pocket. Maybe he thought it was safer there, close to his body, than in the pockets of that anorak, which is where he must have carried the wallet and the keys.”
“But why put all that stuff in someone else's jacket?”
&n
bsp; “He planned to wash himself, didn't he? That's why he took off his watch. This is what I think happened. He stripped down to his underclothes, left his jeans with the thousand pounds-did he temporarily forget it was there?-his anorak, the T-shirt, and his sneakers on the kitchen counter. Then he took his wallet-where perhaps he thought he'd put the money-and his keys into the bedroom, opened the wardrobe, and found the only garment he fancied wearing, the sports jacket, though I suspect everything in here was in better nick than what he'd had on. Maybe he'd have taken a raincoat as well. He took off his watch, put it with the wallet and the keys into one of the sports jacket's pockets in preparation for putting it on after he'd had his wash. Probably he meant to put the T-shirt back on and no doubt the jeans with the money in. Old Grimble's trousers would have been too short for him. Before he could do that along comes the gallant McNeil and shoots him.”
“No knife, sir.”
“No knife,” Burden repeated.
Admitted to the house by Owen Tredown himself, Damon thought he had never seen anyone look as ill as this man did and still be on his feet. He was a wraith, a depleted creature with half his substance gone, skeletally thin, his ribs outlined through the thin shirt he wore and his face the color of old yellowed paper. A bird's-claw hand was put into Damon's.
“I am a sight, aren't I?” Tredown said to this man he had never met before. “If you met me on a dark night you'd run like hell.”
Damon nodded, tried to smile. “You don't seem very well, sir.” Could there be a greater understatement? “Shouldn't you be sitting down?”
“I will in a minute. I don't want to give up before I have to.” They went into a large shabby room where the long brown velvet window curtains had been flung back wildly as if by a frenzied hand. “I've had to stop writing,” Tredown said. “It's the worst thing. If I can't write I might as well be dead.”
Damon didn't know what to say. A voice coming from behind the high back of a sofa made him jump. “How you do exaggerate, Owen,” it said, and a long-fingered beringed hand appeared from where the voice had come from and gave a fluttering wave.